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
Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema.
Yogaworks has opened a new studio in New York, at the corner of Broadway and Grand Street. It’s got bamboo floors, showers with impressive pressure, electronically-locking lockers and walls painted in restful Ralph Lauren colors. The only thing missing? People. On the two days we went there there were few students. What’s wrong with this yoga picture?
Disclosure: I’m not going to rag on Yogaworks too badly. They gave us two free classes. But I think the empty studios are symptomatic of a pricing and marketing approach that is not working. For you non-yogis, bear with me, because this will become a metaphor for monetizing the web, particularly web journalism. (Metaphors, like yoga positions, can be bent a lot.) Ready? Ok, take a deep breath and let it out slowly.
The new Yogaworks in New York is built on a gym membership pricing plan. They want you to pay a monthly fee plus initiation, just like Crunch Gym or Spectrum. It’s a common model in NY and I suppose the Yogaworks brain trust figures they’ll grab some gym rats seeking to convert their sweat into salvation. But it’s old school.
They don’t want walk-ins – they just want your money. Up front. I’m supposed to be hearing “Om” when I walk into a studio, but at Yogaworks Soho I hear “pay me now.”
In Santa Monica, several new studios have opened within blocks of each other. YogaCo, Bhakti Yoga Shala and Yogis Anonymous work on a different pricing plan. You pay what you want. No membership, no set fee. Walk-ins are ok. You may not get a fancy shower (actually at YogaCo, you do) but you get a sense of connection with the teacher because you are paying him or her directly. They’re not working for a corporation; it’s a collective. Donation-based yoga is an old model from India, and truth be told, the teachers don’t profit unless they get bodies on the mats. That’s because they rent the space from the studio owner, and the students are reimbursing the teacher for that rental. More students, you profit. Less, you’re in the hole. It’s a problem similar to that faced by online journalists and other content providers. Hey, what’s that sound you’re hearing? It’s the creaky gears of my metaphor turning.
Think about all that’s free to the user on the web: Google, Twitter, Facebook. Successful? Google had $21.9 billion in revenue last year. Facebook, with 300 million users, just turned profitable. Twitter? Get back to you on that. Point is, free access works on the web and it can be monetized. Free services like Pandora and last.fm have ads, but you can pay to get rid of them.
Walter Isaacson, a smart fellow, has advocated the subscription model for online newspaper content. But you lock off access, you lock out users and you get the empty studio syndrome.
My metaphor is flawed, of course. Netflix is a successful subscription model with a low price point, and yoga teachers don’t make enough money unless their classes are packed. Imagine, however, if they tried some of the web’s dumber ideas to generate cash? How about pop up ads projected on the wall during class? Or the teacher who casually mentions that she loves Manduka brand mats? Weaving ads into content is even happening on Twitter. The next Tweet you read may be a plug, which is beyond irritating. Just thinking about it, I might have to do a yoga class to calm down.
All the same, I’d rather buy my yoga salvation like music on iTunes – pay as I go, no subliminal ads, no subscriptions.
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