Glen Clark, Premier of British Columbia, Seattle, Washington, November 30, 1999

Words escape me

To prepare the title for this post (Google SEO be damned), I went searching for synonyms … or rather antonyms — the Janus to Faces of Resistance.

A while ago, I asked Can photojournalism ever be considered impartial? and if photojournalists should attempt to avoid editorializing. It was a rhetorical question because I don’t think it’s possible to be a robot photographer (a sort of flesh and blood CCT device?), nor do I think impartiality is something to be pursued. Certainly, Walker Evans did not document the deprivations and inequities of the Great Depression through the eye of a Wall Street speculator.

Without compassion, a photograph is lifeless, especially when it records suffering. Any photographer without compassion for his subject should stay at home and watch it through the lens of a 24-hour news channel, something we’re doing a lot of right now. Then again, some subjects don’t deserve immediate sympathy, only recording for history’s sake.

So, this morning, casting aside any pretence of disinterest, I consulted my thesaurus.

abettor, accessory, accomplice, adherent, adjunct, aid, aide, ally, assistant, associate, co-conspirator, cooperator, deputy, insider, partner, plant, patron, peon, representative, right-hand person, secretary, subordinate, supporter ….

And so on.

The Battle of Seattle

The photo above was made on November 30, 1999, in Seattle, Washington, on the occasion of the mass protests against the antidemocratic, extralegal incursions of World Trade Organization “rules” affecting everything from the price of ham, to food safety itself, to the rights of countries to protect their own environment. 50,000 engaged citizens from around the world descended on Seattle to make their voices heard.

Hundreds of NGOs took part in preparations. Weeks before the conference date, it became obvious the WTO meeting was going to be a watershed moment in citizen participation. There rabble were demanding a say in what had formerly been secretive meetings between government bureaucrats and corporate lobbyists. I travelled from Vancouver on a bus commissioned by a trade union. So-called progressive political parties made sure to show their faces. It was, after all, a gigantic photo op.

In the meantime, Seattle became the testing ground for a new kind of paramilitary response to public protest that culminated in murder, mayhem and neo-fascist recruitment into police ranks in Genoa, Italy, in 2001. Then came 9/11, suppression of dissent and the surveillance state. The Seattle police chief who developed the militarized model showcased there has since denounced that approach as undemocratic and counterproductive.

The War in the Woods

I was not unaware, looking through my lens as I backed along the Seattle protest route, camera pressed to my eye, that looming over Clark’s shoulder was a depiction of the evil corporate Borg devouring the world. In fact, I elbowed myself into a better position to arrange those compositional elements. Keep in mind contemporary events north of the border, where Clark’s New Democratic Party were following the same rapacious resource extraction policies of their “free market” predecessors.

I’d recently been following protests against old growth logging in BC that led to the showdown in Clayoquat Sound, one of the largest acts of mass civil disobedience in Canadian history. Clark’s NDP forerunner Mike Harcourt, a “social democrat” who launched a war on the poor upon taking office, attempted but failed to defeat the movement. The sacrifice of more than 1,000 protestors willing to be bundled into police paddy wagons preserved examples of Vancouver Island temperate rainforest in places like Carmanah.

After I “got my shot,” I asked Clark a few leading questions. Was his party’s reliance on union money any less corrosive than the former governments’s subservience to corporate patronage?

The more things change

Twenty-one years later, Glen Clark works for the insatiable billionaire Jimmy Pattison, a position he assumed shortly after stepping down as BC premier. The resistance to undemocratic trade deals has shrunk to the odd, mostly ignored, dispatch from NGOs. Political parties have further homogenized our putative electoral democracies into popularity … or the “lesser of two evils” contests, which, after the ballots are tallied, rewards us with the same affliction: corporate rule. British Columbia’s forests are on the brink. If you listen to the resistance and, more importantly, the science that we trust to inform our civilization, so are we.

Governments have failed to act for decades as science has warned we must address climate change. Worse, they have abetted the criminals who have stalled public policy to address the crisis — accessories to the crime of the century. After more than a decade in the wilderness (or the clearcut) the NDP is back, run by the same environmental saboteurs that stepped in after Clark’s exit.

What we are living now, hiding in our homes if we are fortunate, is a direct result of our failure to reign in corporate pirates and accomplices. Epidemiologists have warned that our destruction of earth’s last great wild places comes with the danger of unleashing novel forms of disease. We know that climate change and biological simplification is amplifying zoonotic (animal to human) disease outbreaks.

Our omnivorous destruction and greed is coming back to bite us.

Economists warned decades ago that ignoring global warming would have a far greater impact on economies than investing in alternatives immediately. Vandals like Vancouver’s Fraser Institute, abetted by their American counterparts, created the disinformation campaign designed to divert action and confuse the public. Successive governments and media co-conspirators joined the march of the lemmings, pushing citizens toward the cliff. The economic disaster that is unfolding in the wake of this Covid 19 pandemic is what a world in environmental crisis looks like.

Scientists, health care researchers and front line doctors once content to get on with their jobs, fearing for their own safety and that of their families, are speaking out more openly. I am sad and incensed that some senior scientists I interviewed a quarter century ago went to their graves dispirited and angry that their cautions were being ignored and, worse, blocked by the likes of Fraser Institute sociopaths. If I can put their warnings into a snapshot, it would be this: Welcome to the future.

At the risk of editorializing, we were warned in good time. Again, and again, and again. Yet we allowed the “free market” fraudsters to unleash a scheme designed to hollow out the public institutions and natural systems we depend upon for our very survival.

We trusted elected officials to care for us and they didn’t just fail out of human frailty; they conspired against us. If we agree that democracy and a healthy planet are critical to the survival of civilization and natural beauties that nourish body and spirit, then we must heed the warnings of science and the arts.

Urgently, we must root out the corruption that has us locked into this trajectory.