Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything and journalist extraordinaire, came to Los Angeles last week. She spoke at Loyola Marymount University on Monday; USC on Tuesday; and Wednesday evening, she was my special guest at a house party for Climate Hawks Vote, to discuss our field plan to elect Democrats who are fierce on climate change. But when she showed up, she’d lost her voice. What happened? We think it was the toxic oil fields near USC.
Oil fields dot Los Angeles. The Porter Ranch methane leak has gotten media attention lately, but equally concerning to residents are all the sites scattered through the city, especially in neighborhoods of color. Monday, I drove Naomi to meet with the Save Porter Ranch folk, where she listened attentively to the “accidental activists” who founded a group to fight fracking but found a methane bomb under their backyards and now want to shut down the giant gas storage field. Tuesday, she made time in her very complicated schedule to tour a frontline community near USC. Then Wednesday, she woke up without a voice.
Because she didn’t have much of a voice, I asked residents Monic Uriarte and Nalleli Cobo to describe what they experience every day since Allenco Energy began drilling in a low income community with day care centers nearby. Fourteen year old Nalleli has heart palpitations — yes, heart problems in a fourteen year old girl! along with nosebleeds, stomach pain, and headaches.
Then Naomi asked Atossa Soltani, founder of AmazonWatch — the original “keep it in the ground” group — to speak on the impacts of oil drilling in Ecuador on indigenous people.
David Atkins also described Climate Hawks Vote’s field plan in multiple races, with a focus on Nanette Barragan in California’s 44th Congressional District. Nanette grew up in Carson as the eleventh child of immigrants, spent time in the Clinton White House, and returned to Los Angeles to organize opposition to offshore oil drilling in Hermosa Beach. She’s running against a Big-Oil-funded state legislator with ethical issues in the working class neighborhoods of Los Angeles where toxic oil has permeated the community — and she was the first candidate endorsed by Climate Hawks Vote in 2016.
And I realized that the accidental activists of Save Porter Ranch and the indigenous women of the Amazon River and the Spanish-speaking women of Los Angeles and Nanette Barragan are sisters at heart. They’re all fighting for the same reason I founded Climate Hawks Vote: to keep fossil fuel in the ground, to move toward a democratically owned system of energy, and to strive for a better world.
Near the end of the evening, Naomi told us that Climate Hawks Vote is one of the reasons she is beginning to find hope in American politics.
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