To Give Testimony

Early Friends talked about giving testimony to the Truth.  This meant speaking publicly one’s full passion for the Divine.  Speaking even when it was not welcome.  Carrying such messages as:  "I will not take my hat off to recognize your social status", or "I will not swear on a Bible because my commitment to the Truth is always."

I testified on Thursday, but it was not in this way that early Friends spoke of.  I was with the rest of my 350 Group attending a hearing by The Army Corp of Engineers to hear public comment on the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the second dock at Cherry Point, WA.  BP built this pier illegally in 2010; illegally because they never did the environmental impact statement required by the law.  Illegally because Warren Magnuson, the very powerful former Senator of WA, added an amendment to a bill that he intended to protect the fragile ecosystem of Puget Sound (or the Salish Seas as the Native people call it), to protect it forever.  The amendment said it would be illegal to export oil through those waters.  The oil industry has already stretched that for decades by receiving oil from Alaska and shipping it to other parts of the US which is not “exporting” technically.

So the Army Corp which allowed them to build without an EIS was sued for not doing the EIS, lost in court and 8 years later produced one.  The public was coming to comment on the study and request that the Corp impose some sort of regulatory limits on them…all the way from tearing down the pier, to restricting to them to pre-1996 levels of shipping, to basically doing nothing.

Putting on my political activist mindset, not my centered is the spirit mindset, I prepared and gave the following testimony about half way through the 35 people who all testified against the dock.

     “My name is Lynn Fitz-Hugh Coordinator of 350 Seattle with over 900 members.  I have come here today to talk about a run away train, although paradoxically there is also an exploding train in this story.  

     Typically when we think of a run away train we think of one with no intelligent life in charge of it, that is dangerous and headed for disaster.  That run-away train I submit to you is BP.

Over 10 years ago they built this dock without environmental review which they knew was required and they did so because they wanted to.  And even though it took months and months to build no one stopped them and so they got what they wanted.   

     About two years ago the whole petroleum industry decided they wanted to start shipping Bakken Shale on trains after having added highly flammable additives to make the shale more manageable.  The result is we have had exploding trains all over this country.  Again they did not ask anyone because they knew there was no regulation against this because no one had ever thought of such a thing.  So they just did it because it was what they wanted to do.  Now the Petroleum industry wants to do away with the Magnuson Amendment and start shipping export oil out of Puget Sound, from the Second Pier.  

       From my point of view, they have a dock, and they have a refinery and they have a supply of oil, and I am afraid that regardless of the law they will just ship it.  Because that is what they do – they do what they want, what suits them, what makes them profit.  So I am asking you to use all of the regulatory tools at your disposal, all of the things people have asked of you today, to stop this run away train that is BP and to protect life.

     We have become confused in this country about profit.  We have put in on an alter and treat it as if is sacred, as if it is an idol.  We tell regulators not to mess with profit.  But we have forgotten that profit and business were created to serve life, not for life to serve profit.   So I am asking you to act for life and to stop this runaway train.”

It was good testimony; it drew the first applause of the night.  The only bigger applause was for a colleague of mine who got up and said he was awed at how the other good people who came out to testify had been able to be polite and keep their emotions in check…because he said raising his voice:  “I am outraged.  I am outraged that this was clearly illegal then and now and that we are even discussing this.”  He went on yelling and at first I was fine with the moral indignation.  Jesus after all entered the temple of the money changers and turned the tables over in anger and outrage.  Sometimes outrage is the only appropriate response.  But then he turned to attacking them personally (and I watched their faces harden and defend.)  He said that they did not care, that they were not doing their jobs, that they were bad.  The Quaker in me said no to this; no to the denial of that of God in them.  I had from a Quaker mindset carefully tried to appeal to their consciences, seeing them as people with that of God in them that could be reached.

Another colleague of mine took a more nuanced approach to this.  He began by saying:  “Boy hard night to sleep!"   He talked about what a difficult decision they had to make, and how later history would look back and judge us in this period of time for not having done enough and celebrate those who did.  He said how tragic it would be to poison the Sound in the last years of our desperate gasp for oil.  He said "we have to give oil up; it is the only way to survive.  All of us in this room".   He asked them to come down on the right side of history.  And then threw in “and if you cannot find a way to do the right thing in your job then time to quit your job.”   It was admirably true Gandhian  Satyagraha  (Truth force).   A third colleague claimed he would talk for the non-human creatures.  But then really just said his own opinion.

So here several days later I sit in the Silence of Meeting and I realize that I did not center down before hand, I did not ask for the Truth to come through me, to use me.  And that I regret.  I am learning, slowly that I will have to have an anchor committee from my Meeting for this work that I do, or it will not be possible for me to stay “low” as early Friends called it.   Now in this silence I see that was waiting to be said (which I had a small bead on) was:

     "Senator Magnuson, Chief Selth, DeCarte and any other number of our ancestors are turning in their graves right now.  Why?

     Several thousand years ago we made a mistake in our scientific paradigm.  We saw ourselves, as part of that already existing and mistaken paradigm as separate from the earth, and as superior, as ones who could observe, understand and control the natural world around us.   The mess we have all around us is pretty much testimony to the falseness of this idea.  In fact, quantum physics now tells us that the very act of observing something changes it and that we are inextricably bound to all of life; there is no separate us and that.   So the problem we have with these EIS’s are they expect you to study the environmental impact to a site.  But the problem with that is how do we define site when any site is part of an ecosystem?   And an ecosystem is part of a food chain that goes beyond its boundaries and etc etc.

     It is commonly objected that when activists request for climate change to be included in an EIS that the request is “too big” and beyond the scope of the study.   But everyone in this room knows that the truth is that this whole Globe is bound by one atmosphere.  

     So I point all this out to you to point out that beyond this dock which you are asked to examine is ecological damage being done to extract this Bakken Shale and also future Tar Sands, then it is shipped on trains with flammable additives’ extremely prone to explosion and more ecological damage and then it is brought to this illegally built dock, where the owners wish to thwart a 40 year old law put in place as one of the last acts of Senator Magnsuon to protect the fragile Puget Sound forever.   And you are asked to study the environmental impact!  Which impact?  Oh yes the extraction site, the destructive path here is all outside your scope of study and the leak into the Sound isn’t suppose to happen!  Well, I would argue all of life is inextricably bound.  You cannot ignore this damage that is all around it.  Nor can you ignore that in making it possible to ship you unleash the carbon to the atmosphere of this WHOLE joined ecosystem.

     If this ecosystem could speak would the oysters cry out to you and say: ‘We already are failing and dying under the acidification of the ocean; we can bear no more.”  Would the Salmon call to you and say:  “We are already endangered because of the damns on our rivers and the pollution within them; do not make it any harder for us. ”  Would the Cherry Point herring chime in: "We are only 10% of the population we were 30 years ago and a should a spill happen during our laying time our entire future generations would be obliterated."   Would the Plankton at the bottom of the Sound say to you “Kill us friends and you have set your own time clock.  We are the bottom of your food chain.  How will you survive without your food chain?”  Would the birds flying over head say we do not want to be coated in oil."  Would the Sound itself speak saying:  “The ocean breaths for the entire planet taking in c02 and returning oxygen.  Kill us and you will kill yourselves.”  Chief Selth is said to have warned us over 200 years ago of this very greed for money and disregard of the land as leading to our own end.

     Oh I know you are only poor regulators expected by your superiors to keep to very narrow parameters.  You exist in a societal framework that has elevated the right to make profit to the Holy and has said that it is bad to interfere with that.  We have gotten to this hearing because the oil companies are so powerful that they did what they wanted and operate outside the law.  But we are also in a moment of history where we can no longer afford to operate in side that old paradigm which pretends that we are separate from the earth or get to make decisions over it.   We can no longer survive and ignore our connection to it.   So just as the Nuremberg tribunal  judges told the former Nazi officers brought before them, there are some evils so great that even if legal we must not obey them, but must act for higher truths.

     So I am asking you to step away from normal expectations, or typical definitions of an ESI, I am asking you to not focus narrowly but to look at this whole big picture and this moment in history and I am asking you to decide what is really TRUE, to listen to the ecosystem of which you are a part of, to do what really needs to happen here.  I am asking you to tear the pier down or forbid it any export!