500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
What are you looking for? People are searching Google for “oil spill in gulf of mexico.” St. Louis, MO is the world’s epicenter for people typing in “how to find a boyfriend.” The number one city searching for “sex” is Delhi, India. The number one city searching for “peace” – Edmonton, Canada.
I’m going to follow the high (Canadian) road and try some Google searches before hoisting a cold drink and paddling a kayak into the Labor Day sunset. Here are my results, not all of them real.
Normally this Google search returns an administration that is wrongheadedly driven to job generation by building more roads, more airports and increasing our dependency on fossil fuels. That’s my read on Laura Tyson’s recent New York Times op-ed piece.
But when I did this Google search, I got something that didn’t suck. My search returned a president who delivers on his promise to build a green infrastructure for America, with solar and wind power. His administration helps move us away from oil, cars and bad mortgages and into something smarter – new online technologies and training and a green economy.
This returns yoga studios that offer classes by donation, like YogaCo and Yogis Anonymous, in Santa Monica. You simply pay what you think the class is worth. Your class is not some recurring charge on your credit card, or a health-club membership, or some other obligation like changing the oil in your car. The health club, credit card model of yoga doesn’t teach us as much about ourselves. As Max Strom writes in A Life Worth Breathing, we can’t use the methods we commonly employ in business and commerce to learn about ourselves. It’s like using a hammer to brush your teeth. Money needs to change hands for yoga classes, but just in a different way.
This search returns links about Bruce Lipton, a biologist who is leading a re-examination of Darwinian evolutionary theory. He spoke at a great event that I attended this week. Bruce says that Darwin’s concept of evolution, the “survival of the fittest,” has led humanity into competition and war. He thinks evolution is really about “survival of the fittingest” – successful species are those that adapt, fit in with nature and play well with other species. If we understand this in time, and stop killing the planet, Mother Nature might not need to cast us out of her garden.
This returns a link to this video, which is coffee porn for the overcaffinated engineer mind. The search does not return any links to Starbucks, which has a good health plan for its employees but teaches them to make an indifferent espresso, a great tragedy for dopamine delivery.
My dream Google search returns news of Architecture for Humanity’s efforts to rebuild in Haiti, Black Entertainment Television’s financing of local housing materials manufacturing in Haiti, and World Shelters’ work here and abroad to put a roof over everyone’s head.
Eastern Nebraska. Huh. Always wanted to know that.
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500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
What’s small group activism? A writer and a yoga teacher head down to the Gulf to save sea turtles. That’s small group activism. Really small. Just two guys on a mission. They want to charter a boat, haul slimed turtles from the sea, clean them up and transfer them to the right facility.
Here are their qualifications:
Brock Cahill teaches yoga at Yogis Anonymous. He has a passion for the sea and especially sea turtles.
Peter Lawrence also cares deeply about the sea and is an accomplished novelist and screenwriter.
That’s it. Nothing else on their resumes, except that they are tapping into what they believe to be a huge movement of those who are turning away from bureaucracies because they don’t trust them anymore, and are turning instead to small, focused, local action by individuals.
Will you believe BP when it announces that the spill is capped and the bad days are done?
The news folks will gobble that up as fact. Not so, however, with small groups on the ground. Recovery in the Gulf is years away. The crime scene is being run by the criminal – BP – so the crime reports are suspect. BP is using a chemical called Corexit to disperse the oil. It is likely harming the Gulf and causing cleanup crews to report respiratory distress, dizziness and headaches. As Peter wrote in his email, “Of that chemical, it’s enough to say that BP owns its manufacturer and its use is banned in the UK. Lucky the Brits can use up their stockpiles in their one-time colony.” Brock reported that another small group of activists led by documentary director Josh Tickell experienced burning eyes and skin rashes after exposure to Corexit. 
Corexit is “effectively sinking the oil down into the water table where it will be much harder to clean up, and honestly, much harder on all the life in the sea. But it will look better from a satellite picture! Oh man. Shortcuts suck.” – Brock Cahill
I know Brock Cahill because I’ve taken his yoga class. I know Peter because long ago and far away I worked for him when I wrote scripts for a superhero cartoon called ThunderCats. They are both superheroes to me now, and not just because Brock can do yoga poses that I cannot pronounce and Peter is a great writer. They are superheroes because they both recognize that large media organizations have lost sight of their mission to investigate and report, fearlessly. Now the yoga teacher and the writer need to get the job done. Fearlessly.
As I write this, they are on site in the Gulf, figuring out exactly what can and can’t be done, how to circumvent the bureaucracy of the clean up and achieve Brock’s mission – direct action to save sea turtles. They’re raising money for a boat and assembling a volunteer crew. “We’ll have a marine biologist on board,” Peter wrote. “We’ll be properly equipped…” to save as many turtles as possible.
“We’re independent and determined. This is our world just as much as it is BP’s, Big Oil’s or the government’s which, last time we looked, was financed and elected by us. That is, by individuals exercising democracy. We will not take no for an answer,” Peter wrote.
You can follow Brock Cahill on Twitter for updates. He posts to his blog and Facebook page often.
Photos courtesy Brock Cahill
