The Dash Point Pirate

How strong is a skin-on-frame sea kayak? (Destructive testing)

 

Katya Palladina was given this skin-on-frame kayak by Phoxx Ekcs after he completed his expedition along the north coast of Vancouver Island in 2011. After 7 years of regular use, it's time to replace the skin and do some minor repairs. This gave us an opportunity to conduct some destructive testing.

We tested the strength of a the nylon fabric skin prior to completely removing it in preparation for re-skinning. It resists blunt force very well but can be punctured by a sharp point. Typically when this happens it's because of dragging against oyster shells or large barnacles. The skin comes off easily from the wooden frame after softening the resin with a heat gun.

This kayak was designed by Kiliii Yu of Seawolf Kayak and built by primitive skills expert Phoxx Ekcs.

It doesn't seem right to destroy this kayak without a reference to the amazing journey Phoxx Ekcs took this kayak through. The full story can be found in our interview with Phoxx on YouTube:

TRAILER

PART 1 "Living Primitively"

PART 2 "The North Coast Trail"

PART 3 "No Limits, No Regrets"

PART 4 "My Most Dangerous Day on the Water"

Tacoma’s For-Profit Immigration Prison: The Northwest Detention Center

 

Dindria Barrow, Photo Copyright ©2017 Katya Palladina

This video was shot at Solidarity Day organized by the Northwest Detention Center Resistance on Tacoma on January 7, 2017, with the help of Richard Lovering and photographer Katya Palladina.

I first heard about the Northwest Detention Center during an interview we filmed with Jeannie Darnielle, Washington State Senator for the 27th District. She mentioned the existence of a for-profit prison on the Tacoma Tideflats, an industrial area which includes the Port of Tacoma. Darnielle mentioned that construction of residential buildings on the Tideflats is prohibited, with the exception of the prison. The reason is because Tideflats land is unsuitable for residential construction: it's made of artificial fill, at risk for liquefaction during a major earthquake, and is also in the direct path of lahar (destructive mudflows) that could occur in event that Mt. Rainier erupts.

Historically heavily-contaminated by industries that were once located there, the Tideflats is considered a “sacrifice zone”, a geographic zone that has been permanently impaired by environmental damage. Despite decades and millions of dollars spent on remediation, the city approved plans to build the largest methanol plant in the world at a site not far from the NWDC (the plan was defeated by grassroots opposition) and the construction of a liquified natural gas (LNG) production facility. It makes sense that a for-profit detention facility would be located here, following the "sacrifice zone" principle that some geographic areas and people need to be sacrificed for the smooth operation of capitalism.

The nondescript detention facility is in a low traffic area and out of public view. It could be easily mistaken for a large warehouse except for the high chainlink fence topped with razor wire. The prison is owned and operated by the GEO group, the second largest for-profit prison corporation in the country.

Horizon, Photo Copyright  ©2017 Katya Palladina

The 2014 Hunger Strike

In March 2014, detainees began a hunger strike to protest conditions that Congressman Adam Smith described as “shocking”. According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the hunger strike involved 750 detainees, but activists report that actually 1,200 detainees were at involved in the hunger strike over a period of 56 days. The detainees were protesting inedible meals, inadequate medical care including delays or refusal to treat life-threatening and painful conditions, poor pay for menial labor (inmates were given the opportunity to do custodial work “voluntarily” for $1/day, although threats and intimidation from guards may have been used to coerce inmates to participate), exorbitant prices charged at the commissary ($8.95 for a bottle of shampoo, for example), and a lack of fundamental fairness and justice. Protesters were subjected to rigged hearings under false accusations. Solitary confinement lasting between 2-30 days and prison transfers were used against detainees as retribution for the protest.

In an interview in the Seattle publication The Stranger, detainee Angel Padilla described how he was diagnosed with a cancerous tumor in his left kidney in December 2015. A urologist at St Joseph’s Medical Center recommended urgent surgery for Stage 3 kidney cancer but this was denied for several months. Finally, an immigration court decision allowed him to leave the detention center if he posted bond. After his family raised over $16,000 through crowdfunding, he was able to post bond and have his surgery on May 3, 2016. 

What makes this inhumane and exploitative treatment of immigrant detainees even more outrageous is that immigration violations are a civil, not a criminal, matter. The reason undocumented immigrants are detained is NOT to punish them for crimes, but to ensure that they are present for deportation proceedings before a federal immigration judge. Many immigrants are arrested following minor infractions, such as traffic offenses. A 2009 ICE internal review found that only 11 percent of detainees had been convicted of violent crimes. Nevertheless, in detention they are treated like dangerous criminals, as evidenced by NWDC’s evacuation plan in the event of a tsunami: “In the event of a mass evacuation, all transportation vehicles should arrive equipped with full set of restraints, handcuffs, belly chains and leg irons to appropriately restrain all residents being transported.” In the event of a tsunami or any other major catastrophe, I highly doubt that 1,500 detainees could be evacuated to safety quickly enough while efforts are being made to restrain everyone.

Stina Janssen and Jessica Ramirez, Photo Copyright  ©2017 Katya Palladina

The Bed Mandate

In 2006 a congressional directive known as the Bed Mandate established a quota for the number of people held in immigration detention centers throughout the country. The policy requires ICE to maintain a population of 34,000 detainees per day. The directive was instituted by conservative lawmakers who thought that ICE was not doing enough to deport undocumented immigrants. It has been criticized for creating an incentive to seek out and incarcerate immigrants for minor nonviolent offenses. Since nearly two-thirds of immigrant detention beds are privatized, the policy was a boon for the private prison industry. As part of its contract with ICE, GEO Group is guaranteed payment for 1000 beds at the NWDC.

Last year, the Department of Justice decided to phase out the privatization of federal prisons in the criminal justice system, because studies demonstrated that they were more dangerous than those run by the Bureau of Prisons. This decision does not apply however to the civil immigration detention system which is under the Department of Homeland Security.

In 2015, Congressman Adam Smith introduced the Accountability in Immigration Detention Act, legistlation which would have created enforceable standards and improve conditions at immigration detention centers while encouraging alternatives to detention and the repeal of the detention bed mandate. Community-based alternatives to incarceration such as home detention would be more humane and less expensive than incarceration. Unfortunately, it looks like incarceration followed by deportation will still be the preferred methods of dealing with undocumented immigrants under President Trump. As more attention and resources are allocated toward detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants, the private immigration detention industry is expected to profit handsomely, at a high cost to taxpayers, detainees, and their families. 

 

 

 

Why Are The Citizens of Tacoma Fighting LNG?

Redline, the grassroots Tacoma organization behind the outrageously successful campaign to stop construction of the largest methanol refinery in the world, has a new campaign against Puget Sound Energy’s proposed Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) production plant which will occupy the space at the entrance to the Hylebos Waterway off of Commencement Bay. The facility will convert natural gas to LNG and store it in a tank nearly as tall as the Tacoma Dome. PSE plans to use the facility to sell LNG as marine fuel, and to store LNG when natural gas prices are low, to be sold to customers when prices are high, a practice known as “peak shaving”. The production plant will be supplied by a 4-mile pipeline which will be built in Tacoma and Fife through land owned by the Puyallup Tribe, which is currently attempting to stop the project by appealing the permits granted for the project’s shoreline development aspects.

LNG is being sold to the public as a cleaner, cheaper, transitional fuel that will be used to wean us off coal and oil-based fuels. Ships, trucks, and locomotives will be eventually be retrofitted to run off of natural gas. Although it burns with less greenhouse gas emissions, methane itself is a potent greenhouse gas, and leaks during extraction and pipeline transport can be significant. Puget Sound Energy expects that 50 to 60% of the natural gas supplied to their LNG facility will obtained by fracking, and there is mounting evidence that, when the greenhouse gas emissions related to the fracking process, transmission, liquefaction, storage, and conversion back to natural gas are taken into account, greenhouse gas emissions are actually increased. And when one considers the amount of fresh water used in the hydraulic fracking process, the contamination of ground water by fracking, and inevitable pipeline leaks, it is questionable whether there really is any net environmental benefit to using LNG. Nevertheless, natural gas is poised to capture a larger share of the world’s energy demand, and a huge amount of energy and expense is being invested into building a nationwide LNG infrastructure—a network of pipelines and LNG facilities likely to establish LNG as the preferred fuel for ships, trucks, and trains for decades to come.

Below are transcripts of the interviews we conducted with activists Valerie Peaphon, Julia Minugh, and Richard Lovering, as well as the text of a speech that activist Roxy Murray gave at the “No Fracked Gas In The Port Of Tacoma” rally organized by Tacoma Direct Action in front of the Puget Sound Energy on December 22, 2016. Parts of these interviews are featured in our video “NO LNG: A Christmas Carol”.

Demonstration against LNG and the Dakota Access Pipeline, Tacoma, November 12, 2016. Photo Copyright © 2016 Andrew Elizaga

 

VALERIE PEAPHON interviewed by Richard Lovering

Valerie: I’m out here tonight on a cold and dark Thursday to protest LNG — the LNG facility that Puget Sound Energy wants to build at the Port of Tacoma. I’m one of many, many Tacomans concerned about the effects this project could have on the environment and on our community. There are a number of dangers associated with liquified natural gas. They typically aren’t built in metropolitan areas, and they want to put this one near neighborhoods, schools, hospitals, childcare facilities, and so we think it is dangerous.

But even above and beyond that sort of “Not In My Back Yard” argument, there’s a bigger risk that natural gas poses, and that’s the fact that it’s a false transition. It is going to encourage fracking, which science has already demonstrated is devastating to the earth.

Puget Sound Energy a couple of months ago was actually bragging on their website that they were going to get 50 or 60% of the natural gas from fracking in Colorado, from the Rockies and Canada. And when we started to push back and say, “Whoa, fracking isn’t good! This is a reason for us to oppose it,” they immediately took that off of their website. I have a screenshot of it that I’ve kept.

They’ve just are sort of giving a lot of half truths. They are not sharing information. And when just regular citizens are trying to get information, they have actually filed lawsuits against them. They are claiming federal statutes that don’t apply under FERC [Federal Energy Regulatory Commission] and they don’t currently have all of the permits needed, My understanding is they don’t have the fire permit. They haven’t even applied for it, even though they have already begun to break ground. And so we’re hoping that that is an avenue where we can shut the project down, that the fire department will see that the risks are too great to allow this sort of thing in this sort of metropolitan area.

Richard: Do you think that it’s going to impact real estate values or people’s interest in moving to Tacoma?

Valerie: Sure, so we’ve done a lot of research and we do believe that if this is built, it’s going to negatively impact real estate prices. Homes in the immediate area are going to go down in value. There is going to be an exodus of a lot of the academia, the artistic community—people that don’t want to live near that. And so we think it is going to have a negative economic impact almost immediately. We already know people who have said, “I am going to move”. And there are already people that have put their house up for sale or have moved as a result of the methanol refinery proposal, which actually didn’t go through but did have real consequences, just the fact that they were threatening to put it in Tacoma. So absolutely we think this is going to have real dire economic consequences in Tacoma.

Richard: What do you think the politics of this thing are? In other words, what about the Port and what about the City Council?

Valerie: I think that there has been an awakening in Tacoma, and it’s been one of disappointment and disillusionment, because we have seen that the Port of Tacoma, the City of Tacoma, the City Council, that our elected leaders aren’t necessarily promoting the ideas and beliefs that their citizens, their residents hold. Instead they seem to be very pro-big business, in this case, pro-fossil fuel, which we know is a dead end. And they’re looking to locking us in to a 50-year lease to something that everybody else is moving away from. People should not be investing in these fossil fuels. They should be looking at renewable, green, clean energy. Tacoma is sort of stuck in the past, or looking toward the past to plan out their future.

I think there are going to be consequences. There are a number of seats open in the next year, including on the City Council and on the Port, so hopefully we can get some people in there that are progressively minded and environmentally minded who aren’t going to be swayed by some fancy brochures from a million-billion dollar fossil fuel company, because really we shouldn’t be building new infrastructure. We need to find a way to keep oil, coal, and gas in the ground, not build new plants that are going to perpetuate the use of these fossil fuels that damage the environment locally and the planet globally for years and years to come.

Richard: Where do you suppose those candidates are going to come from?

Valerie: I’m not sure. I don’t have political aspirations, and so I ‘m hoping that it just comes from the grassroots movement and citizens, people who are saying, “I want to be involved. Hey I could do that. I have ideas.” And I think we are starting to hear about some people think about it. I haven’t heard any definitive applicants or volunteers or anything like that yet, but we have a little bit of time, so hopefully some people rise to the occasion.

Demonstration against LNG and the Dakota Access Pipeline, Tacoma, November 12, 2016. Photo Copyright © 2016 Andrew Elizaga

 

JULIA MINUGH interviewed by Richard Lovering

Richard: How did you get involved in this?

Julia: Well, I am a member of the Puyallup Tribe. I’ve always been concerned about how the government has treated the Native American people. And I really got involved in Standing Rock. I didn’t go there, but I was doing everything I could at home to support them. Then this came up, and it’s right off of the reservation boundaries. The tribe has gone to court to fight this, but the court and the other people in the city don’t seem to realize what preserving the habitat is, or preserving the culture of the Native Americans. They just brush it off and come up with their own rules about what to do. They pretty much just say, “OK, we’ll consult with you, but we are going to do what we want.”

The Tribe has been against it. I’m not speaking for the tribe, this is just for me. But it’s just so disturbing that we are not treated like other people because we are native. We’ve been living in Tacoma, in Fife-—that’s all on the reservation. I mean we’ve been living with all these people and yet we are treated differently. So I think my main idea is that people should listen to the tribes. We’ve been taking care of this land since before the colonizers ever got here. You know that’s what we do—we are fish people. So we just want people to listen and honor our culture.

Demonstration against LNG and the Dakota Access Pipeline, Tacoma, November 12, 2016. Photo Copyright © 2016 Andrew Elizaga

A Native American woman burns sage in a purifying ritual at the demonstration against LNG and the Dakota Access Pipeline, Tacoma, November 12, 2016. Photo Copyright © 2016 Andrew Elizaga

 

Statement by ROXY MURRAY

Most of you know me. For those who don’t my name is Roxy, and I am an environmentalist, a photographer, and one pissed off Tacoma resident! What can I say that hasn’t already been said? Puget Sound Energy is threatening our water, our city, our planet, and our livelihood with the facility that would hold 8 million gallons of fracked liquified natural gas. They are breaking the law by already starting construction on the site. They do not have all their permits and they are currently in court with the Puyallup Tribe. This makes them corporate terrorists, and we don’t negotiate with terrorists!

We’ve wasted our precious time away from our families and work and projects to attend city council meetings, port meetings, and court hearings. We’ve spent more time than we care to writing letters to all of the key players. We have done everything right, but the system has failed the citizens of Tacoma and the Puyallup Tribe. And when systems stop working for the people and the planet we must take matters into our own hands. There is a quote by Mahatma Gandhi that I want to share with you: “Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the state becomes lawless or corrupt”. Tacoma will not be a “Sacrifice Zone” for so-called “economic progress”. We’ve heard this statement constantly for a long time, because our brothers and sisters in Standing Rock are fighting, but we must keep saying it: Water is Life! Water is Life! Water is Life!

 

Richard Lovering. Demonstration against LNG and the Dakota Access Pipeline, Tacoma, November 12, 2016. Photo Copyright © 2016 Andrew Elizaga

Statement by RICHARD LOVERING

After methanol (which we managed to drive the folks out of town) in the background there was LNG stealthily making its way across the permitting process. The upshot is that it is almost permitted now. They just lack a fire permit. It’s a disaster! Upstream, there is fracking to get this LNG, and then it gets piped in a gaseous state across many states with the risk of explosions. As a greenhouse gas, of course, methane is very bad. Very bad.,/em> Like 80 times worse than CO2, depending upon whose statistics you quote. And so now all of a sudden Tacoma is faced with an existential threat in the form of an LNG plant—-a huge one. It is essentially going to be a gas station for the ships of the world. And it’s also going to send out its liquified natural gas in trucks and trains to boot. Now clearly at this point we need a supplementary environmental impact statement both because the scope of the project has changed, and also because people need to get involved, which is the very terror of PSE. They do not want to let Tacoma know about this thing or have a voice in objecting to it.

At this point the mayor, due to term limits, is about to step down. There’s going to be an election. What I’m trying to do is recruit candidates for City Council positions and the mayor and Port positions. It isn’t enough to just protest. We’ve got to get people in who will make moral decisions about things like LNG.

Another such decision was, of course, to have the deportees due to immigration infractions, all aggregated on the Tideflats. We have a for-profit prison for immigrants on the Tideflats. Now the LNG plant will be built right next to it. If there’s an incident, it will knock that prison flat. The guards are allowed to escape; the prisoners are not. They are going to take refuge right there, locked in. It could be a horrendous incident if it happened, or when it happens.

We are trying to give LNG a 50 year lease. Now during that time there is probably about a 40% chance that we’ll have an incident, and the incident could be huge and catastrophic. Meanwhile, of course, the LNG plant poses the ideal target for terrorists. It’s a soft target. It’s easy. And as technology gets better with drones and so forth it will be more and more vulnerable from various kinds of places.

This is not the Tacoma we want. Whether we are rich or poor, if we have any feeling at all for Tacoma, this is not the direction we want to go, deportation centers for immigrants and LNG plants beside them. This place is going to become another industrial toilet just as it was long ago. So now is the time to change, and we really need elected officials who will make good decisions, make moral decisions. This is basically immoral what PSE is intending to do. It is for the profit and benefit of some guy in Australia, and we are succumbing to it. We shouldn’t.

 

 

"NO LNG": A Christmas Carol

NO LNG: A Christmas Carol from Andrew Elizaga on Vimeo.

Holidays are the time to reflect on the past and look to the future. The people of Tacoma continue to clean the remnants of an industrial past while wishing for a clean, safe, and sustainable future. This Christmas I want to share a special Christmas carol sung by my good friend Ricardo at the "No Fracked Gas in the Port of Tacoma" rally held in on the steps of the Puget Sound Energy offices in Tacoma, December 22, 2016. If you are at all concerned about climate change, the environmental destruction caused by fracking, the risk of fires and explosions from natural gas pipelines, or industrial pollution in Tacoma, I hope you will share this and spread the word about PSE's proposed LNG plant.

Ricardo wrote the "NO LNG" Christmas carol just minutes before the rally. I arrived at his house to pick him up and he didn't have a printer attached to his computer so he just emailed it to himself. You can see that he is reading it off his phone while he is singing. Only parts of the song appear in the video but I have included all of the lyrics below.

No LNG, no LNG
On Christmas eve this is our plea
We have a town
That your plant pollutes
For profits obscene to white guys in suits
And so, tonight, with efforts choral
We'd like to sing of your efforts immoral

No LNG, no LNG
It's always Tacoma that pays the fee
You've told us that
You need to peak shave
And have holy intentions
Our planet to save
But instead rate payers all will be swindled
For your Cuban cigars with Ben Franklins kindled

No LNG, no LNG
The gas you'll frack as general factota
Kills the folks in Flint and South Dakota
To permit your mess, you've made great haste
So we'll live in a toilet of chemical waste

No LNG, no LNG
And one day soon, there'll be a great blast
Which you cannot outrun no matter how fast
And the undocumenteds on the flats
Will be burned like the Jews and die like rats

No LNG, no LNG For Christ's sake leave Despised PSE

COMING SOON: Our new documentary film, "DANCING WITH HOPE"

 

Dancing with Hope Trailer from Andrew Elizaga on Vimeo.

I am very happy to present the trailer for our new documentary, Dancing with Hope. We expect to be completing this short film and submitting it to film festivals this summer. Dancing with Hope is about Shirts Across America, a Seattle-based nonprofit which sends high school student volunteers to New Orleans to help rebuild homes damaged by Hurricane Katrina. Shirts Across America makes four trips to New Orleans every year, and has been traveling to New Orleans since 2007. We followed them for Spring Break in April 2016.

Katya and I got involved in making this film purely by chance. My daughter had signed up for the Spring Break Shirts Across America trip and asked me to attend one of their mandatory meetings to pick up the orientation material for her, because she was unable to attend herself. At the meeting, Randy Novak, the founder of Shirts Across America, said that they were still looking for parent volunteers to go on the trip. I called him the next day and asked what volunteering as a parent involved. He said that parents usually act as Adult Team Leaders, which means they are assigned a group of about 5 or 6 students and are responsible for transporting them to the worksites every morning, working with them building houses throughout the day, and taking care of activities in the afternoon and evening, which could mean taking them grocery shopping or out to the French Quarter to buy souvenirs and beignets. The Adult Team Leader basically is always at the side of the students. There are also a few parent volunteers who stand by to help out wherever they are needed, in case, for instance, someone gets sick or injured and needs to be transported away from the worksite.

This year Randy said that they were also going to try something different. He needed more promotional material for Shirts Across America, so they planned to organize a Media Team, which would consist of an Adult Team Leader and a few student volunteers. Their job would be to photograph and take video of all the activities that went on throughout the week. I told him that I had some experience in photography and video, and would be very interested in going and organizing the Media Team. Katya also happened to have that week off so I asked her if she would be interested in helping out.

We came up with a plan— a curriculum—for the students. It was focused on teaching basic photography and video techniques. The expectations for us were very vague because this was the first time they had planned for a Media Team. I expected to just make a a short “highlights reel” of the week—eye candy, something the students and parents could want to watch to remember the trip by. But I quickly discovered once we had landed in New Orleans that Randy was more interested in making a serious documentary about Shirts Across America. He was constantly arranging interviews for us and giving us lists of events to cover and people to talk to. All of our students were actually more interested in building houses than taking pictures. Fortunately, this relieved us of any teaching duties for the first few days freed Katya and me up to concentrate on shooting.

Founder of Shirts Across America, Randy Novak, and Maddy Davis, our Media Team assistant, at the St Jude Community Center in the French Quarter, New Orleans. Photo copyright ©2016 Katya Palladina.

Students from Olympia High School and Bellarmine Preparatory School assemble at an orientation meeting for SBP (St. Bernard Project). Photo copyright ©2016 Katya Palladina.

The Trap of the White Savior Narrative

Dancing with Hope attempts to show the uniqueness of New Orleans as a location and also raise awareness of the continued need for adequate housing. It also addresses racism and white privilege. You cannot ignore racism and the long history of social injustice and economic exploitation of African Americans in the South when making a film about the victims of Hurricane Katrina. While the victims of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans were overwhelmingly poor people of color, the majority of the volunteers from Shirts Across America are white kids who attend expensive private Catholic schools in the Seattle area, so it is also a challenge trying to avoid the “White Savior” narrative, the trope in which white characters rescue people of color from their plight. Although popular in Hollywood, the White Savior narrative has been criticized for perpetuating racism by framing people of color as incompetent and unable to solve their own problems. In order to avoid falling into the White Savior trope/trap, it was important for us to show that many Shirts Across America volunteers were also people of color. Some of these volunteers have personal connections to New Orleans, either because they once lived there and survived Hurricane Katrina themselves or have family who currently live there who also suffered through the hurricane.

On the porch with Stanley Myers. Photo copyright ©2016 Katya Palladina.

The Trailer

The trailer begins with a young man tap dancing and a clip from an interview with a man on a porch of an unfinished house. I thought it was important to show these two things for a couple of reasons:

Kids tap dancing on the street for money is a generations-old tradition unique to New Orleans and specifically to the French Quarter.  While the sight of a shirtless black teen dancing for spare change might strike some as a negative representation of African Americans, children from poor families In New Orleans have been tap dancing on Bourbon Street for spare change for over 100 years. Many of today’s well-known performers tap danced as children. The tap dancing supports the “dancing” theme of the film, whose title (just in case you have forgotten already) is DANCING WITH HOPE. In addition, it anchors the location precisely to New Orleans.

African Americans in New Orleans have a rich oral tradition, which involves "front-porch storytelling". We met the man on the porch, Stanley Myers, at one of the homes that SBP (formerly known as the St. Bernard Project) was rebuilding. The house is owned my Edward Lee Sr., a 94 year old World War II veteran who had built the house with his own hands back in 1947. Mr. Myers initially was reluctant to speak to us about Katrina, but Katya eventually persuaded him to tell us his story. Once he got started, the story just poured out of him. He talked nonstop for about 15 minutes about his experience returning to a devastated New Orleans a week after Hurricane Katrina, and the efforts that he and his wife had taken to clean up their property and rebuild. When Mr. Myers tells his story while literally sitting on a porch of an unfinished house, he is following an age-old storytelling tradition.

 

FAQ

What is the name of your movie again?

The film is titled DANCING WITH HOPE. Although there is indeed some real dancing in this film, the term is used here as a metaphor for the complicated series of steps of getting volunteers organized, trained, and transported to their worksites in order to build and rebuild homes, which offer the families who have suffered through Hurricane Katrina hope for a better future. It also refers more generally to imagining what it would take to build a future where all human beings are treated with dignity and compassion without regard to race or ethnicity.

What kind of camera did you use?

We recorded video with three different Canon DSLRs (70D, 7D Mark II, and a 5D Mark III), and occasionally with two iPhone 6 Pluses. The aerials were recorded using a Phantom 3 Professional quadcopter (a.k.a. "drone".)

When will the movie be released?

We expect to release a the final version of the movie on Vimeo for submission to film festivals sometime this summer.

How did Shirts Across America get its name?

Right after Hurricane Katrina, 6 different high school students from the State of Washington were given $500 each plus 60 days to grow that money. Each of them came up with their own way of taking the seed money and growing it. Two of the students pooled their money and made t-shirts, one which had a duck on it that said "Hope Floats". They ended up selling thousands of t-shirts that said "Hope Floats" on them,  and they decided to create an nonprofit entity called Shirts Across America to continue to help out victims of the hurricane.

How can I help?

Please visit the Shirts Across America website if you are interested in making a donation or volunteer. Thank you! 

 

For movie news and updates, follow us on:

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Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/dancingwithhopemovie

email: dancingwithhopemovie@gmail.com

The Tacoma Methanol Plant: Interview with State Senator Jeannie Darneille

The proposed $3.4 billion methanol plant in Tacoma is a hot topic right now. If built, it would be the biggest thing to happen to Tacoma in years. In any case, this is a pivotal moment for the city. The city is presented with the choice between selling out to the fossil fuel industry—using natural gas obtained by fracking to produce methanol for China which will ultimately be turned into plastics, or hopefully a cleaner, greener future. Citizens are upset, not only because the plant threatens turn the clock back to a time when Tacoma was a stinky, polluted industrial town, but also because of the complete lack of transparency in the decision-making processes of the Port of Tacoma and the city government.

This is a fascinating story about an environmental issue that has global as well as local consequences. Richard Lovering approached me with the idea of documenting the events surrounding the Tacoma methanol plant controversy as they unfold. This interview with Washington State Senator Jeannie Darneille, (27th Legislative District, Ruston and Tacoma) is the first formal interview we recorded for this project. This video was made in collaboration with Katya Palladina who was the videographer.

Jeannie is a very knowledgeable articulate speaker, and her passion for this issue really showed. Right afterwards I felt I needed to edit a short video of her talking about the major points of the controversy. I felt it needed to be shared immediately to raise awareness of the issue through social media.

I am presenting the full transcript of the interview here now because Jeannie has a lot more to say than can be covered in a short video, about how the City and Port of Tacoma kept plans for the methanol plant project under wraps for 2 years, our economic relationship with China, fracking, the potential impact the methanol plant would have on water and electricity, the dangers of transporting explosive chemicals through narrow urban waterways, and of storing them on reclaimed land that could liquify in a major earthquake, and much more.

Jeannie Darneille, photo copyright © Katya Palladina

RICHARD: Jeannie, thank you so much for talking with us. So how did you come across this issue of the proposed methanol plant in Tacoma?

JEANNIE: Well, it was kind of interesting. As an elected official I was in the House of Representatives for 12 years, and have now been in the Senate. This is now my 4th year in the Senate, here in the 27th district in Tacoma. I represent about two thirds of Tacoma in this district, so basically all the area surrounding Commencement Bay from Point Defiance around to Browns Point, and then like a sling shot handle going down the east side, but all of Downtown Tacoma, all of the Tideflats. And for most of that time I also represented the City of Fife. During this recent redistricting that was pared off, and I added another section of Southeast Tacoma, but for longest time I had also represented that community.

So when I had a constituent call me from Northeast Tacoma and express concerns about this plant that has the potential to go in our Tideflats region, that piqued my interest because the person outlined concerns about safety. Public health, public safety—these are issues that I’ve worked on for years and years, not necessarily around the environmentalist angle however. I did get interested enough to follow their request, which was to come to a hearing at the Port of Tacoma on May 1st, 2014.

As I mentioned, I’ve never really been much of an environmentalist. By that I mean that I have a 100% voting record supporting environmental causes, but I’ve never taken the lead on ferreting out all the information about environmental conflicts, nor have I taken the lead in sponsoring legislation. I always had great advice and great experts in my caucuses and I followed their lead, just as they follow my lead on half a dozen other kinds of issues. This was new to me, but the issue of public safety and the concerns of a neighborhood were definitely things I had worked on before. And the issues about public health have been pretty much central to my work in the legislature.

So I tried to find out information about the hearing. I went so far as to go to the website for the Port of Tacoma. I did find reference to a meeting taking place. It told me what the agenda was going to be and included this discussion with the Northwest Innovations Works, LLC. It didn’t tell me the place and didn’t tell me the time. And that was my first inkling that this was not an issue that the proponents wanted to have known in the community. I was not deterred by that. I had my staff call their office and find out when the meeting was taking place and where, and to inform them that they didn’t have the information on their website.

I rushed over because it happened to be that afternoon. I arrived there at the very end of a queue of people lining up into a rather small room, the conference room for the Port of Tacoma. I arrived at the meeting and signed in to testify. In the legislature we are used to having hearings on bills and there are some controversial subjects where we might have hundreds and hundreds of people signed up to testify, or at least signing in with either a "pro" or a "con", so I was surprised after almost being late for the meeting that i was actually only number 17 to sign up. I had no idea what I would actually say, because I didn’t know anything about the project, nor who any of the players were, but I sat down in this somewhat small room.

Every wall with the room was lined with members of unions who were dressed in their hazard clothes—bright oranges, bright yellows, bright greens—and I knew then who at least one of the players was that had an interest in this proposed leasing of the old Kaiser plant site in the Port of Tacoma to this LLC.

So I listened to the testimony. It started with 4 or 5 representatives of Northwest Innovation Works, and then there were many representatives from labor unions talking about the construction jobs, and then the jobs that would be for permanent employees that would manage the plant after it went live.

I was bringing up the rear after only a couple of my constituents from Northeast Tacoma spoke, two couples. Their testimony basically was exactly what they told me on the phone. They live in an area very close to where the plant would be established. They drive by—there is one access road up to Northeast Tacoma, and it’s very, very close to where the plant is located. They were very concerned about any potential leakage into the Hylebos waterway. They were concerned about air contamination. And they were mostly concerned about what the plans were in case there is a catastrophic event.

When I actually got up to speak I began with this sentence: “I believe this is a project that everyone would love to love. We’ve heard that it provides good jobs. We’ve heard that it would positively impact the environment—the global warming that we are becoming so much, unfortunately, accustomed to. But there are significant gaps in information. You have done nothing, as far as I can see, to reach out to elected officials. You’ve done nothing to reach out to neighborhoods that would be impacted if such a catastrophic event were to take place. And I can’t see how this can move forward until education, dialogue, and advancement of transparency well above what you’ve demonstrated thus far, were to take place.”

And then the hearing concluded with the four members that were present at the commission meeting voting unanimously to award a 30-year lease to the LLC, this after several of us had made the plea to just wait. What was the urgency of voting on this at that meeting? Well, quite frankly, the urgency was they wanted to do it ahead of any public dialogue, ahead of any transparency and ahead of any kind of education to the community.

So I left there feeling concerned but also recognizing how little I knew about the issue. I needed to self-educate. I needed to reach out and find more information about this whole issue. How do we get liquified natural gas (LNG) into our county? What is this process of transference? And what is ahead for us in terms of the educational process that needs to take place?

One of the challenges in being a legislator is you have to recognize that sometimes a little bit of information makes you dangerous. I didn’t want to come off as being dangerous after a short amount of time. So I took quite a while talking with people.

I had the opportunity to meet with a person who just moved to Tacoma who worked in the LNG field for 30 years and had retired here in Tacoma. I had the opportunity to learn about some of the real catastrophic events that can happen at sea (he was a ship’s captain also as part of his work), coming into ports, and going through narrow waterways. I heard words of caution from him about whether or not a plant like this had any place at all in an urban center. I was piqued by that and did research into how communities had addressed this issue.

Of course, there is very little to know about communities that have worked on this because it’s new. Fewer than 10 years ago the United States was an importing nation. We imported liquid natural gas. It was only through the inauguration of fracking that we found reserves that not only were sufficient, or had been deemed to be sufficient, for our own domestic use, but are very marketable, and we became and exporting nation.

There is lots of controversy obviously about fracking. One of the things I learned about fracking is that it takes requires a very small sand, a very dense sand, that’s used in the actual fracking process to push the gas out towards an area where it can be drained and put in a reservoir. That small sand only comes from 3 areas of the world: two of those mines are in China and one is in Kuwait.

So then I started thinking, let’s follow the bouncing ball here. Who takes the risk? Who pays for it? And what is involved in this whole process of fracking? You follow the sand into the country. It goes to the central part of our country—Oklahoma, Tennessee, wherever they are fracking—and it’s used there in the process of bringing that liquified natural gas to the surface, at great cost potentially to the environment in each of those states. Earthquakes in Oklahoma—not a normal occurrence! So then where does it go? Then we ship it through pipelines and it comes to a town like Tacoma.

There are many pipelines across the country. We’ve had pipelines moving gas and moving liquified natural gas through our community for years and years and years. Most people don’t know that we have a refinery on the Tideflats right now that for over 50 years has pumped gas—jet fuel—out to McChord Air Force Base, across the east side of Tacoma through neighborhoods, along a railway track for 50 years. There is a constant process of making sure that that pipeline is not leaking. Part of it is above ground. Part of it is below ground. That same thing is happening across our country with pipelines now. There is great cost to the maintenance of the pipelines so that they don’t cause a catastrophe.

Then you look at where this natural gas is coming from, and what the process for transforming it to methanol and shipping it to China. The proponents of this plant and this relationship with the Chinese government say that this is an incredible opportunity for the citizens of Tacoma and Pierce County, that it is a $3.4 billion private investment in our community. I have no problem—no problem—confronting that piece of this argument. This is not “private money”. China owns the American debt. This is a situation where we are buying a product from China, bringing it here, fracking our country, taking the gas out, bringing it here, changing it into a product that they want, and shipping it back to them. To their complete profit, and to our complete risk.

So now we are going to look at how do we label that? What does that process look like to you? I am enough of a historian to know that it looks an awful like the British Commonwealth to me. Took over the world—a large part of the world—used local labor at a very low cost for a product that had great import to the British Commonwealth. And whether that was minerals or diamonds or you name it, they took it from those countries without their consent. We are sitting here consenting—consenting—to this process in our country.

RICHARD: Enough that we get 200 jobs.

JEANNIE: Two hundred sixty jobs— let’s be precise. I have been a long supporter of labor causes, but I don’t understand how we look at the level of risk that is associated with this project, how we look a the level of water needed alone to actually do the transformation between liquified natural gas to methanol, and think that 260 jobs is worth that.

This plant is located very close to the city of Fife. Fife is a really interesting city. It sits and is divided by Interstate 5, but there are only 5,000 people that live in the city of Fife, and over 50,000 people come there to work every day. Five thousand people live there and 50,000 come to work there. And it’s an around the clock 24/7 kind of community through warehousing, manufacturing, casinos, gas stations, restaurants—you name it. It’s a small town, but it doesn’t feel like a small town.

This community had not been talked to by the LLC at all. There was no one from the city of Fife at that hearing May 1st, 2014. I raised the issue with members of the City Council of Fife one after the other, and none had heard of the project. Yet the Port of Tacoma commissioners had already granted a 30-year lease to this company.

You know we just had a large public hearing [the January 21st Enviromental Impact Statement Scoping Meeting in Tacoma] the about what the elements of the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) would be. I was in Olympia. The session was already going on, but I was able to leave a committee hearing and barrel up the freeway to get here. It was supposed to start at 6:30 PM. It started at 5:30 because they opened the doors at 5:00 and the rooms were completely full at 5:30 and they felt that they needed to move ahead.

So when I arrived at 6:00 I was told there was no room at the inn—not in the main room (500 seats), and not in the anteroom, which had 200-300 seats, and there were about 200 of us outside waiting for people to leave the hearing after they had spoken so that we could get in. So I got in about 6:35. I didn’t have the opportunity to hear the LLC give their presentation but by that time they had gone through the process of a “pro” speaker and a “con” speaker, a “pro” speaker and a “con” speaker. By 6:30 all they had left to hear from was the “con” speakers. While there was an occasional positive speaker in there, I was there until 10:30 and all that rest of that time there was people expressing concerns.

I went back to the legislature the next day and I asked my colleagues, “Have you ever had 1,000 of your constituents show up at one place? One place?”  No. No one had ever had this experience.

I was so struck that night by the presentations by people from my district, the people who had lived in this community for 3 and 4 generations, and the people that were brand new to this community who moved here because of the hope and the promise that community gave to them—the affordability, the friendliness, the fact that it had had a lousy reputation in the past, and it had a better reputation today. I listened to the people that had participated in building our downtown, not the structures that are there, but the ones that were empty in the 1980s and are full again now because of the the investments that government made and the local community made in rebuilding, reenergizing, and reinvesting in this promise that is Tacoma. From the University of Washington Tacoma, the reboot of our Federal Building, the light rail—I mean I could go on and on about the ways I love my city. And all of that is threatened by this plant. This one thing.

The young people that spoke, the older people that spoke, the Native Americans that spoke all pointed to that one stark reality, which is that we have everything going for us in this community. We have a vibrant museum district. We have a vibrant Port of Tacoma. We have invested in cleaning up waterways, and really making our city strong. And for this plant to undo the progress that has been made in Tacoma, Washington, or even to threaten to do that, should move any policymaker who is still on the fence about whether or not to support this project.

I had already made my decision before I went in that room. The Port Commissioners had asked me not to speak against the project. They wanted me to wait—as they did all of the policy makers in Pierce County—wanted us to wait until all the facts were out. And yet I haven’t received any new facts from their side of the argument since they promised to give new facts to us. The die was cast for me. But I was just so amazed—the eloquence of my constituents was the frosting on that for me.

I will tell you that I am petty much alone right now in terms of actively voicing, and advocating to my constituents that they need to know more about this project, and they need to mobilize.

I have talked to my colleagues in other districts in the state who have undertaken big projects like this before, trying to stop negative programs from coming into their districts. I spoke with Senator Sharon Nelson who is our minority leader in the Senate Democratic Caucus. She lives on Vashon island. She certainly knows a lot about ASARCO and the horrible effects on her community right across the waterway from where the ASARCO plant had existed, and which now quite frankly is a lovely and evolving, amazing walkable community with lots of amenities which once was a slag heap and a disaster zone. I talked with senator Christine Rolfes from Kitap county where the NASCAR industry had decided they wanted to put up a new NASCAR race track in a rural part of Kitsap county. Her project with trying to rebut that offer took a couple, three years. Senator Nelson’s attempts to end a quarry upsetting the environmental and ecological balance on Maury Island took 9 years.

So I think we are in this for the long haul. I don’t think this is going to be a one or two year project for us, to say “No” and mean it, and to be successful in bringing more people to our side and more policymakers to our side, and for the general public to become more aware of this project. It’s certainly going to be an issue that divides our community. I don’t want that to happen, but I think it’s got the kind of magnitude that we are going to see sharp differences from one side to another.

RICHARD: Do you think it will impact on electoral politics?

JEANNIE: Yes, I absolutely do think it could impact on electoral politics.

RICHARD: Specifically where?

JEANNIE: This project is in the 27th district now, whether the public health threats reach outside the 27th district—certainly they do—Fife now, for instance. Right at the border where the plant will be located is in the 25th district. So far, no legislators have come to any meetings nor have they shown much interest in this topic from the 25th district.

But our two representatives from here in the 27th district have met with me and others. They’ve been working with me to write a very long letter to the EIS process so that we could have questions that have been asked of us and make sure those questions are answered in the EIS. I think we are moving together as a delegation on this to some degree. I’m not going to speak for my colleagues until they want to be spoken for, but we’re not in full accord yet, and we certainly have not had a discussion about next steps in terms of how this will proceed for our role in it.

It could play in electoral politics, certainly. Any of us could have candidate run against us this year from the other side of the topic. And I would venture to say I will lose labor support in my re-election bid. But if I were to look just to Facebook and see now literally scores of people from this movement—scores of constituents I didn’t know but who saw me at the hearing, who have seen what I had written on Facebook, who heard me talk about this issue who are trying to friend me and keep up with where I am on this issue, I would say this is a movement that will have its roots and its success in social media.


This is not something that many campaigns have had to grapple with, quite frankly. It’s a whole new world with social media now, and the tweets and the Facebook posts are going to rule in this educational process . We already see how innovations in social media have influenced and energized and mobilized groups around other topics, including race relations and even responding to the weather and threats of the weather. We can see it working to the good, and I think it will be an excellent tool that will be used to educate the community about the threats of this plant going in.

RICHARD: What I’ve heard you say is so many times it was a question of getting the word out. It is to the methanol plant proponents not to get the word out generally, and it is to those who are opposing it to get the word out generally. What do you foresee is the best way to get the word out as generally as possible?

JEANNIE: I think that it’s a continuation of things that have already been done. I’d love to teach an Advocacy 101 class to folks who are just new into this whole field, in trying to mobilize and trying to make a force for good. I think there is a great threat that they will do some things wrong that will negatively impact what they are trying to achieve. So I’d like to caution people that this is a process. We won’t fix it in a day. Be calm. Use some good strategy to move forward, but be persistent in messaging.

Years ago our Caucus in Olympia had hired a consultant to try to figure out what was the message the Democrats wanted to portray. He came to do a strategy session with us and said, “Well I looked at last year’s messaging, and the Republican party had three messages, and the Democratic party had 83 messages.”

So it’s very important for us to know what we want to say, and to repeat that over and over and over again, whether it is spinning an argument, or pivoting it to that message over and again. It wasn’t overnight that people learned that “two-all-beef-patties-special-sauce-lettuce-cheese-pickles-onions-on-a-sesame-seed-bun” was a Big Mac! It won’t be overnight that people learn that this is a project that has potential threats to our community, our air, our water. It has a blast zone that has been drawn to me. The room we are in now is within this blast zone. And that it could take out portions of Marine View Drive which is the one access road into Northeast Tacoma. It could take out Route 509, which was built to provide a parallel road to Interstate 5 so that the locals could move around and let the other folks fight for space on I-5. It could take out portions of I-5 where the state is now going to be investing over a billion dollars in a transportation project to finish Route 167, which will be coming in and hooking into the Port of Tacoma for the transportation of good and services in and out of the Port to improve our economic development. It’s going to have the impact of potentially (and certainly within the blast zone as well) to take out a prison, a federal prison that exists on the Tideflats where 1,500 persons are being detained right now. I can’t imagine what kind of exit plan would be sufficient to continue to have public safety and to provide for personal safety for those 1,500 people, and the hundreds of people that are working at that detention center.

You know, there is a reason why the City of Tacoma has never granted permits to build condos on the other side of the 11th Street bridge. A big reason. They haven’t done it is because it is fill dirt. If you were to look at early photographs of Tacoma, you will see the point just below where we are right now, where Thea Foss used to get in her little boat and began to ferry people across where it’s now Northeast Tacoma. There were no fingers of land that went out along waterways where industry has been planted over these years.

As you know we have fault lines through this area. We have learned from the New York Times that the Big One is coming (of course, we’ve always known that) We’ve seen what a lahar could look like coming down from Mt. Rainier. We know that the Puyallup River, which comes right behind us here, is the passageway for a lahar coming off the mountain. And we know that this kind of fill in an earthquake can simply turn to dust.

We’ve always lived with threats. We have other refineries on the Tideflats, but we’ve never had people living there for a reason. It’s not safe. And yet a former city council passed a resolution accepting an offer from the federal government to place a detention center in that same property where people from Tacoma cannot live.


There are all kinds of deals that happen like that over the years that only later are the people of Tacoma made aware. We have the opportunity because we are aware now before the plant is built, before the plant is operational, before the first drop of liquified natural gas makes its way into the plant and gets blasted with 11 million gallons of water a day, and before the first ship leaves into our Commencement Bay, once one of the biggest EPA Superfund sites. We have cleaned it up to a large degree. We have cleaned up the Foss Waterway. We have cleaned up the Kaiser plant upon which this plant will be located if it’s implemented.

I asked a question last week of our staff in Olympia when we were having a presentation by the Department of Ecology. I asked if any of the cleanup dollars, the millions and millions and millions of dollars that have come out of taxpayers pockets that we have used for cleaning up toxic sites, “Have we ever cleaned up the same site twice?” And the answer of course was “No”. And then there was the, “Why? Are we building something toxic on one of the sites we’ve cleaned up?” And I had to answer “Yes”.

There is so much more that I could talk about. I’ve not really talked about the threats to children and the threats to other investments that we’ve made in the waterway. But I would say I feel very optimistic about the people of Tacoma and Pierce County, and even our neighbors just over the hill in South King County, just to our left on Maury Island and Vashon Island, to rise up with us and have our voices known in this effort.

I’ve talked with the Governor twice about this. I’ve talked with the Governor’s staff twice for about an hour about this project. I believe I’ve opened the Governor’s eyes to something he initially supported, which was a “jobs and environmentally friendly” product.

The goal of the Chinese government is to take the methanol that they will receive from this project, and convert a coal-burning plant that makes olefins (plastics) and convert that to a methanol-burning plant. Much fewer emissions, much better for their air quality in China and overall a good thing, were we able to have access to clean fuel at the place where we are currently using dirty fuel. In this case though, we are asking the United States to take all the risks to provide that clean fuel to this area of China. Unfortunately, they don’t have the materials to do that themselves domestically. But I don’t think Tacoma, Washington is the location. And I think that the people of Tacoma will make that loud and clear.

RICHARD: Given that this plant is going to demand just about as much gas electricity and potable water as the entire rest of Tacoma, couldn’t his mean that utility rates could go up on all of those things for everybody living in Tacoma?

JEANNIE: It is absolutely true, and no doubt that they will have increased utilization of utilities that currently come in to Tacoma. The rates are established based on the old supply and demand kind of analysis. We have got the supply of water we need to create electricity through turbines that are located outside of Tacoma but in our watershed, which includes Lake Cushman, Lake Alder, the Green River. We operate on hydro—that’s the major source for electricity for this whole basin. If we were to have a user come in to our mix that is going to double the utilization of that water. Double. We’ve got well over a million people that live in this catchment area. One plant is going to double utilization. There is no way that that’s not going to increase our rates. We don’t have sufficient water, freshwater, in the watershed for our current needs. Everyone knows that last summer we were asked to reduce our consumption by 10%. That was voluntary. What happens if we face another hot summer, another year of drought? Well during the course of the life of this plant—30, 40, 50 years—we are going to face many years of drought. There is no question in my mind. The citizens of Tacoma will have to ask our utilities to go elsewhere, since the water table will not be sufficient for that kind of utilization. We will have to purchase that energy from another area. We currently have one of the cheapest forms—hydro—but what if we have to purchase something that is more expensive? Yes, our rates could go up.

Do you know that every Friday afternoon there are families lined up today at our utility office asking for, petitioning for keeping their lights on over the weekend, keeping their heat on over the weekend, while they try to muster enough money to pay their bill?

We have a community that is facing economic challenges. It’s not unlike in many ways the communities elsewhere in the country that have been the locations of these kind of plants. We know that this particular company wants to build another plant in southwest Washington on the Columbia River in a community that has been hard pressed by economic disadvantage—Kalama.

We don’t have to look too far for the other plant in their 3-plant proposal, which is in Louisiana, along an area that is called “Cancer Alley” because of the types of plants that have been built there over the years, which is a largely a community of economically disadvantaged individuals living there.

If this bad air quality drifts as the wind is blowing right now to our east side of Tacoma, it blows into our most economically disadvantaged portion of our county.

So there are issues around rates. We have issues around economic security. We have issues around public education and the transparency of this whole project that have created enough concern for me that I have actually proposed legislation that really has—I’ll say right up front—has little chance of being passed. I dropped a bill as soon as I could after I realized that I could actually request that a particular tax be applied to this project.


They, under current structures right now, could quality for a sales tax abatement. In other words they won’t pay sales tax on any kind of manufacturing that they do, any kind of building that they do. This has been largely an economic development tool that the state has used to try to attract companies into coming into Washington. But in this case it could obviously backfire for us. It has brought into our midst not one, but two plants proposed in Washington state by this particular LLC.

So I proposed that the tax abatement not apply to projects relating to liquified natural gas being converted into methanol. That bill was referred to the Trade and Economic Development Committee. I thought because it was a tax bill that it would be referred to the Ways and Means Committee which I serve on, but instead it is going to a committee that has already completed its work for the session. It was a direct decision on the part of the Republicans handling which committee things go to, to not place it in a committee that was still doing its work.

That is a disappointment. But I have raised the interest and the awareness of my colleagues in this fight. And because I know that this will not be taken care of in this year, I presume I will come back next year with something earlier in the session with a greater potential to be passed, and we will see where that takes us.

There is also a bill currently being considered that is a “streamlining” bill, meaning that, for what they call “projects of state significance” (certainly a project of $3.4 billion project has state significance) the bill would take away their requirement to actually receive permits or even have to apply for permits for the plant. I have worked with Republicans on an amendment to their bill. They are going to be accepting the amendment if all works out well this next week and the bill will pass. It is a bill I voted against obviously in the past, and I will probably still vote against it even though I’ve got it amended. It will hopefully go to its death over in the House. Again, what we do with these kinds of things, whether it’s dropping a bill or getting an amendment on a bill, in some ways we are trying to make the pig look better — you know, “putting a bow on the pig”. But we’re going to be able to count on the House to not pass that bill which they have rejected in the past, so we won’t see industries of all types getting out of doing permitting processes that we are relying on right now as we look ahead to how this plant will be implemented. There are shoreline permits. There are air permits. I mean there are all kinds of things ahead of them.

RICHARD: I think they devoted 3 years for the permitting.

JEANNIE: Just to the permitting. I’ve got time as well if I’m re-elected to go back to Olympia and continue to try to figure out what a state role would be, in trying to put sideboards around this project, to eliminate the project, to make so many headaches for the project that it doesn’t pencil out. Whatever I can do.

JF Marleau: Surf's Up in Pedder Bay?

JF Marleau: Surf's Up in Pedder Bay?! from Andrew Elizaga on Vimeo.

Sea kayaking instructor and guide JF Marleau talks about teaching surfing and demonstrates stern rudder and carving on waves in Pedder Bay at the 2015 Pacific Paddling Symposium. JF is a resident of Ucluelet, BC, and is the author of "Kayaking the Broken Group Islands. The Essential Guidebook".

Ginni Callahan: An Introduction to Kayak Sailing

Ginni Callahan: An Introduction to Kayak Sailing from Andrew Elizaga on Vimeo.

Kayak coach, entrepreneur, and writer Ginni Callahan founded and co-owns Columbia River Kayaking, and Sea Kayak Baja Mexico. With Mark Whitaker, she imports Flat Earth Kayak Sails and Sea Kayaking UK (Nigel Dennis Kayaks). With Anna Mallin, she publishes paddling guides to the Loreto National Marine Park.

Filmed at the 2015 Pacific Paddling Symposium

James Manke: This one weird trick will improve your Greenland rolls!

James Manke: This one weird trick will improve your Greenland rolls! from Andrew Elizaga on Vimeo.

Greenland-style paddling instructor James Manke is the founder of the website All Things Qajaq. He teaches at sea kayaking symposiums and events throughout the world, and along with paddler James Roberts, represented Canada to compete in the 2014 National Greenland Kayaking Championships. James Manke won gold in the Greenland rolling competition and 5 silver medals in other traditional kayaking disciplines. He is an active member of West Coast Canadian ocean kayaking group, The Hurricane Riders. We interviewed James at the 2015 Pacific Paddling Symposium.

Paddling out of Pedder Bay, Vancouver Island. Photo © Katya Palladina

Andrew: What was going on today at PPS?

James: Today was Coaches Day. It was all about getting out there, sharing with and inspiring fellow instructors, which I found very rewarding. One of the things I found very interesting was all the different games that some of these coaches are utilizing and playing. They’re quite clever, actually. Some of the other things that I picked up, and one of the things I do often in rolling, is that I talk a lot about a “load-drive concept”. When we implemented that into strokes and all the different techniques that are out there, it was amazing to find out that the load-drive concept is actually used though all the skill sets in kayaking, along with other sports. It’s very valuable to have a Coaches Day like this at the beginning of a symposium, simply because you can bounce ideas off other instructors. It’s just really rewarding as an instructor to have that as an experience.

Andrew: What will you be teaching this weekend?

James: I’ll be focusing on teaching Greenland rolling, primarily in the pool, and a lot of beginner rolling, some intermediate, and a little bit of advanced. Then on Sunday I’ll be teaching out in the actual currents, out in Race Rocks. We’re going to be doing a Greenland rolling clinic out in the currents, which is the next step after learning your roll. It’s kind of exciting because it’s the first time that’s happened here at PPS, so I’m pretty excited about that on Sunday.

Andrew: So how did you first get into Greenland rolling?

James: Interestingly enough, I got into Greenland rolling from a fear of the water. I was afraid of the water, and it all started when I was a young child. I actually got attacked by a loon when I was 11 years old. I was in a belly boat, and I was kicking backwards, coming around this pier and fly fishing. I kicked into a loon’s nest, and that was a big mistake. It was either the mother or the father, and it swarmed me, and came at me, then it decided to go under the water and it attacked me that way. It became quite an experience! I got out of the water, and never went in to the water until my late 20s, and when I did it was pools primarily. I wouldn’t step foot in a lake, because there are loons in a lake. And the ocean? Heck, no! I mean, if there are loons in a lake, what’s in the ocean, right? There was no chance of me even going in the ocean. I was quite terrified of the water.

When I picked up kayaking and discovered rolling I thought, Hey, this could be a great way for me to overcome that fear of the water. So I picked up on that, and it did help. It started to help me overcome that fear. I discovered that the more that I understood it and that the more rolls I learned, the more confident I became. I went from being completely afraid of the water to, all of a sudden, now I’m playing in the biggest water — paddling Skookumchuck rapids, and that sort of thing. I’ve been down the Grand Canyon. It just sort of all exploded from, started from, a fear of the water. Learning to roll really added a whole lot of confidence to my paddling. So that’s basically my story and how I started — a little bizarre, but that’s where I was.

Andrew: Can you comment about the difference between standard kayak paddles and Greenland paddles?

James: I personally use both paddles. I like “Euroblades” as much as I do like Greenland blades, and I’ll try to be as diverse as I can with both paddles. In the future I’d like to grab a wing paddle and start to blend that into the mix. I’m not so much a purist when it comes to Greenland paddling. I’m more about the blending of the skills. I think that there’s a lot of value from traditional kayaking that modern day kayakers can pick up, so that’s more what I promote rather than being the purist of Greenland, or being one-sided about a Greenland paddle. I think there’s value in all blades, all kayaks. The more kayaks and the more paddles you know how to use, the better paddler you are. That’s the bottom line.

Traditional wooden paddles, modern gear. Photo © Katya Palladina

Andrew: About your trip to Greenland with James Roberts to compete in the National Kayaking Championships and to film the movie Greenland Bound — A Paddler’s Pilgrimage: how much do you think that experience changed you?

James: It definitely changed me. It changed me in a big way. Going into a competition, you really expect a competitive sort of feel. And when we got there it became very obvious that this was more of a celebration. It was more about a culture, and about inspiring young kids so that that cycle continues. It was really an inspirational event. It’s not so much about winning so much as it is about being there, and inspiring, and being a part of it. I think more of an American attitude toward something like that is that we are quite competitive. We do a lot of sports and we are competitive by nature. So going to an event like that, I walked in feeling that way, but had to give my head a shake, like, “Oh man, I’m here for the wrong reasons!” I really learned that the reason for being there was about kids, and about inspiring the next generation of paddlers. So there was a big message to learn when I was there.

There were some language barriers, for sure. In Greenland they speak Greenlandic. Their second language is Danish. There are a number of people who are Danish who live there, so you can use a Danish person as sort of a translator. But still, it’s pretty broken language. Someone from Denmark doesn’t really understand Greenlandic that well, but can kind of pick apart what it is.

James Roberts and I went to the judge’s booth, and we had a Danish guy with us to translate. We said, “When is our long distance race?” And from the translation that we got, he said, “Oh, you’ve got lots of time. You can go out for lunch.” So we thought, “Oh great! Thats awesome!” We take off our drysuits and put on all our camera gear, and start hiking up this mountain to go to have lunch. Well, we make it up to the top of the mountain, and it’s a good 15-20 minute haul to get to the top, and there’s nobody there! And we’re like, “No, you gotta be kidding! There’s nobody here!” So we sit around and wait. Nobody shows up for lunch. Ok, this is a little bit odd. So we walk all the way back down to the bottom of the mountain. And we’re like, “Yeah we went all the way up there for lunch but there’s nobody there.” And they’re like, “Oh, you missed your race!” So we ended up missing a race because of the translation that got lost!

It was a little frustrating, but we learned that you can’t really rely on the translations. If you want to be a part of this, you just have to stay in that area and just listen for your name. Because I know when they say, “JAMES MANKE, CANADA!”, I know that’s me. But all the other language is very hard to understand.

The interesting thing about culture and about different languages is that even if you don’t understand what they are saying, you can feel the energy. It’s very powerful. We felt that “welcomeness”. We could tell we were very accepted and welcome. And it took a couple days to warm into that.

 

Greenland Bound - A Paddler's Pilgrimage from Ontario Sea Kayak Centre on Vimeo.

 

Katya: What’s in your super-duper coach kit, as far as gear? Do you have some secret stuff in your PFD, something that you always bring?

James: I do like to hold on to a memento when I go paddling. For a long time it’s been a necklace of some sort. At one point I had a ring from my grandmother that I used to wear, but recently the memento that I’ve been wearing comes from a young guy that I mentored who lives on Salt Spring Island, and he made me a necklace. That’s now what I wear when I travel and teach. I make sure that I always have this necklace on me. He hand made that for me, so it’s just something that’s very special to me. So yeah, I do carry around a little something. I don’t have like a toolbox full of things that I might take out, because I am quite a minimalist when I go out paddling. But I do like to have something that I can sort of hang on to.

Andrew: How did you end up becoming a member of the Hurricane Riders?

James: Basically, how I became a Hurricane Rider is that a number of the Hurricane Riders are local to Victoria or Vancouver Island, and they became my peer paddlers. Since I started paddling I’ve always looked up to the best paddlers out there. I tried to tag along with them so I can learn from the best. I believe that if you want to become really good at something, you’ve got to surround yourself with people that are better than you, so that’s what I did. I hung around those guys, and eventually I just got brought on as a member. I think part of that was they saw some value in me for the skills and abilities that I have in rolling. And in reverse, they have skills and abilities in rough water that are absolutely incredible that that I can gain from. It was just a good partnership to join the team. I’m very happy to be a member and they are absolutely a blast to paddle with. A lot of times when I get out into some of those rougher conditions with other paddlers, they’re very timid and very afraid of the conditions. But when I’m out with those guys, it’s just nothing but fun — pure enjoyment and fun. And inspirational. I mean, we don’t just go out there and surf. It’s all about, OK, today we are going to do THIS! It’s always the next challenge, the next challenge. So that’s what I enjoy about the Hurricane Riders in particular. It’s a great group of paddlers to paddle with.

Andrew: What are your choice of kayaks?

James: I gotta be really careful what I say here because I’m a sponsored paddler, but I like a number of different kayaks. I am sponsored by Tahe Outdoors. One of the kayaks that they made in the past was the Tahe Greenland, and that is probably by far my favorite kayak that’s out there now. It is now made by a different manufacturer, but Zegul still has some Greenlands.

Some of the other kayaks that I really like — and if I was going to say some of the better kayaks that are on the market — are the Sterling Kayaks. Absolutely hands down. The Sterling Reflection is an excellent kayak. It’s very good in rough water, and actually rolls really well too. You can get in it a half-inch cut, and a one-inch cut. And they recently came out with the Progression which is meant for smaller paddlers. It’s cutting edge. It’s very cutting edge. The designer of the kayaks [Sterling Donalson] listens to paddlers, and that’s how the kayaks are made. So he takes all the input that he can from the paddlers and puts that into the build, and as a result makes the best products out there. So thats a little plug for Sterling!

A white Sterling Kayaks "Grand Illusion" at PPS. Photo © Katya Palladina

Andrew: How is the Progression for rolling?

James: Actually, the Progression is awesome of rolling. It’s really, really good — surprisingly good! When I rolled the Reflection, I was impressed with how it’s secondary kinda pops and finishes. With the Progression, when you do forward-finish rolls, all you gotta do is get your head up to the surface and the kayak just lifts. It’s amazing! It’s almost as if it does the roll for you. It’s a very odd feeling, actually, where it just has this incredible secondary stability and it pops. I think that has a lot to do with the rocker profile and its volume. As soon as you turn it over it just wants to lift right back up. Yeah, it rolls excellent. It’s a really good rolling kayak.

Andrew: I was wondering about that, because the conventional wisdom is that you need a really low volume kayak to do those Greenland rolls.

James: Well, you need a really low volume kayak to do some of the harder layback rolls, for example. Because you are looking to get back onto that back deck. Like a straight jacket roll, for example — good luck doing that in a touring kayak! That is something you gotta do in a very, very low volume kayak. So it really depends on the rolls and what your goals are. When we’re doing a lot of sea kayaking, the focus really isn’t on straight jacket rolls. I don’t think anyone is going to go out into the rough, get knocked over and think, “Oh, I don’t need a paddle”, and roll a kayak. We don’t really rely on the back deck that much when it comes to that.

I try to teach more forward finish rolling when it comes to the larger volume kayaks because with some tour kayaks you just can’t lie on the back deck all the way. And they become very difficult to do layback rolls in, so I find that, when that’s the case, I’ll teach the storm roll or some variation of a forward finish roll.

Andrew: Is teaching sea kayaking a full time job for you?

James: Yeah, I’m a professional kayaker. I do travel around the world, and I teach, and it's what I do full time. In the winter I supplement myself a little bit with some programming work, being an ex-programmer, just to bring in a little bit of extra income. But other than that, for about 10 months out of the year I’m a full-on sea kayak instructor. It’s my profession. This will be my third year as a professional instructor. It’s extremely rewarding. It definitely doesn’t feel like a job. And I would say probably, if it was a job, it would be the best job in the world! Hands down!

I’ve been blessed to be able to travel to lots of different spots. Japan I think was probably one of the greatest places I’ve been. Just the way they treat you there — like royalty! It’s so great! They are so kind and so accepting, and they learn incredibly well, even though there was a language barrier there, and I couldn’t speak to a lot of them. It was just a matter of getting in there, and twisting the shoulders, and doing this, and I’m almost like twisting Gumby, and they’re rolling! It was like, “Wow! These guys are really good!” Like they just picked it up really, really quick!

I think one of the reasons I am good as an instructor is because a lot of the rolls that I learned were all self-taught. I learned how to do it wrong just as well as I learned how to do it right. So if I watch someone do it wrong, I know exactly what’s going wrong. And I know exactly how you can fix that problem. It’s just a matter of being visual. I can see how someone is rolling and be able to detect incorrect things. I think a lot of that comes from being self-taught. If you are taught how to do it one way, then how do you know how to do it wrong? You don’t.

Andrew: At some point you must have gotten instruction from other coaches, the gurus of Greenland kayaking?

James: I did. Actually, at one point I hired Cheri [Perry] and Turner [Wilson] when I was learning to do forward finish hand rolls, because I was struggling with that a little bit. I didn’t really get very far with the session, but there were little nuggets of information in there that stuck with me.

Still, a lot of what I teach now with the hardest rolls, I’ve never even seen online. I’ve never been taught it, but when you watch some of the Inuit paddlers do the hardest rolls, it’s pretty obvious — some of the disconnection between the energy in the legs and the upper body, and the load-drive concept. A lot to people are just doing a “hip snap” to roll a kayak, or they are talking about lifting their leg. But they’re not really talking about what is happening to the other leg.

Andrew: What exactly is the load-drive concept?

James: So the load-drive concept is relevant to a lot of sports. It’s relevant to baseball. It’s relevant to golf — a lot of sports. Kayaking is another one. We use our legs often, and the load-drive concept is about the legs. If you are “loading” a kayak, you’re going to lift one leg and drop one leg down, and you’re putting pressure upward and downward on the kayak. So if this is the load position, than this would be the drive position — it would be the opposite.... When I roll the kayak, I’m loading the kayak up. Some of the benefits to loading the kayak is that I can get more power when I drive the kayak.

One way that I like to explain that to students is that it’s like throwing a baseball. If I threw a baseball from my shoulder and I throw it forward, I might get about 10 feet. But if I take that baseball to my shoulder and I load it up, and then I throw it, I’ll probably get about 50 feet. So I gain a tremendous amount of power by adding the load-drive concept to it.

But it can work against you, just like throwing a baseball. When you first learn to throw a baseball and your dad said, “Get it back there and throw it.” And you did this, and it just kind of fell to the ground, or went to the left or the right. It’s very much the same. The timing and the technique has still gotta be there in order to get that accurate throw. So it’s very much the same as in a kayak.

Some of the benefits again to loading the kayak up: when you are loading the kayak you can get your face closer to the surface, therefore you can reach further for leverage. It makes it easier to roll the kayak.

The load-drive concept is something that I never really learned from anybody else. I was always told about a “hip snap", or “lift the leg”, but nobody ever talked about that other leg. What is that other leg doing?

When it comes to the some of the hardest rolls, forward finish brick rolls, for example, you gotta load and drive the kayak. If you don’t, it’s gonna be almost impossible to do that roll. The load drive concept is the trick to the hardest rolls.

So I like to teach that to beginners. If you can teach a beginner the hardest technique, or the theory behind the hardest technique, and they can learn that from the beginning, then their success rate is huge. They’ll continue to roll. It’s not just take a rolling session and never roll a kayak again. They actually continue to roll because they’ve got so much power in their legs once they sort that out. So that’s the load-drive concept.

Katya: What is kayaking for you? Two sentences.

James: Kayaking for me is therapy. That’s one sentence. But it’s powerful!

JAIME SHARP: Encounters with Polar Bears and the Svalbard Expedition

Jaime Sharp: Encounters with Polar Bears from Andrew Elizaga on Vimeo.

Explorer/adventure photographer Jaime Sharp is in arctic Norway right now, attempting the first successful circumnavigation of the Svalbard archipelago by sea kayak with a team of two other kayakers, Tara Mulvany and Per Gustav Porsanger. Three previous attempts have been made, all ending in failure. Among the biggest hazards: polar bears. There are over 3000 polar bears living on the island, which makes it one of the areas with the highest concentration of polar bears in the world. “Polar bears are one of the few animals that are purely predatory,” Jaime said, speaking to the crowd gathered at the Pacific Paddling Symposium on Vancouver Island this past May. “And they are one of the only animals that will actually hunt humans intentionally, not because they are curious but because it’s like, you are moving, so you are food. Polar bears will also hunt the seals that have burrows under the snow. They walk around listening for them and smelling them out. Then they smash through the snow and pull the seal out.”

Jaime says that polar bear attacks were the reason for the failure of two previous attempts at the Svalbard circumnavigation. During the first expedition, a polar bear smashed one of the kayaks, so the team had to back out. In the last expedition, “a polar bear actually attacked them in their sleep in the tent. Dragged them out of the tent, one of the guys by his head. They had to shoot the bear.” As the bear came through the tent it stood on one of their rifles and snapped it in half. Luckily they had two, so they were able to get the other rifle and kill the bear.

To deal with polar bears, Jaime's team plans to have an active watch: “In the high concentration bear areas, one of us will be staying awake at any point. So we will do three-and-a-half hour shifts, staying awake as well as having a perimeter fence. On top of guns, we will also be carrying daggers and flares and stuff like that, doing everything we can before have to shoot a bear.”

Boys Hunting Book 1890

Another hazard is ice. The second expedition was cancelled because pack ice came in and the team had to start dragging their kayaks across the ice. The ice "started drifting away, taking them away from the island. And eventually they fell through the ice so many times they got injured, and they had to abort. So the ice and the polar bears are probably the biggest risk. Then on top of that you have the walrus. They can be territorial on the water and are known to come up to Zodiacs and puncture the Zodiacs with their tusks. Imagine them coming up to a kayak — they’ll rip the the back half of your boat off! The ice is also an issue not just because it might drift and block us off, but it may not actually recede. It may not actually melt completely and we can’t actually get around a quarter of the island route. So those are kind of our biggest challenges that we’re facing.“

You can follow Jaime’s expedition at his website, svalbard.worldwide adventure.com.

Attaque de morses, 1870 

Below is the complete transcript of our interview.

Andrew: Have you personally had encounters with polar bears?

Jaime: Back when I was like 25 I guess, or 26 —not too long ago, I’m only 34 — I worked up in Churchill, Manitoba and I was a dogsled guide up there. We’d actually run clients out on the tundra. Anyone who knows of Churchill, Manitoba, knows it’s the polar bear capital of Canada. So we’d see polar bears pretty much every day. Numbers of them. We’d encounter them on the dog sleds. Our dogs would want to chase them. The bears are scared of dogs, especially when you’ve got 8 of them trying to chase them. So my biggest issue was trying to stop the sled and keep them in position while I got the shotgun off my back and fired off a blank above them just to make sure the polar bear is running.

Then we would have them coming at night. We had a little cabin we lived in. We had 46 dogs that lived around the cabin and an electric fence. And we had all the frozen chicken meal and stuff that we’d use to feed the dogs under the house, but the polar bears could smell it. So they would be coming in at night time to look for this food. They’d hit the electric fence. that would keep them back, but then the dogs would of course be barking. So we’d wake up. Here’s this huge polar bear on the other side of the fence. We’d have to put a spot light on it to see it. It’s not been deterred by all these dogs, so then we’d have to shoot blanks. And that wouldn’t necessarily work. So then we would have an M80 shell that you could shoot. We would shoot a little wad of explosive out, and it would go BOOM. And then sometimes that wouldn’t work. We had to bounce one off of one one time, a big male who was probably 13 ft tall, if he stood on his back legs. That was kind of a regular occurrence on most nights.

And then we had another instance where we were right next to the arctic research center and that was where we’d go have meals. And they had a storage room with the freezers in the back. So they pulled out all the meats and stuff to thaw one night for all the staff, and they had a bunch of tofu sausages and bacon and sausages and stuff out there. And these two young polar bears came in and they broke open the wall. And they took and ate all the food, and they left the tofu sausages!

But then the next day, they had to get out the traps. They had these big trap door barrels, these huge barrels that they could go inside, and then it shuts. They had to trap them, but only one was able to be trapped. That was a very interesting to sit and watch them actually go in and see the trap go down. This trailer that it was on, I think it took like six men to manhandle off the back the back of the truck to get it into position. It was just really solidly built. Suddenly the trap doors comes down. This young polar bear is in there, and this whole thing is lifting up and down on it’s wheels as it’s trying to bash its way out. So you can just see the power of the bear. And that was really interesting because at that point I was able to go up to the grille and be like THIS CLOSE to the polar bear. And he’s in there and he’s just putting his claws down the grille, and he’s taking the paint flecks off the steel grille. You can just see how much power was in those claws, and you just knew that if it was raking human flesh, there would just be no chance. That was really my closest encounter with them.

But then I’ve also had closer, more insecure moments with them, where they’ve been maybe 200-300 meters from me, and all that’s between me and them was the shotgun I had in my hand. So that’s always been a little bit more intimidating. Just walking between our house and where we eat, and there’s a polar bear sitting on the tundra. Just keeping an eye on them, just making sure that they’re there.

But this trip is going to be a totally different barrel of polar bears really, because the ones in Churchill are used to having people around.They are used to being hunted by man. They are used to dogs hunting them with man. So they’ve got more of an intimidation factor against them from man and dogs. So it was easy to use that aspect to sort of stay safe. But where we’re going in Svalbard they have not been historically hunted by man, so man is definitely something that’s on the food chain for them. They are a lot more curious. They are lot more willing to encounter man. But that being said, there’s 3000+ polar bears on the island, but in the last 10 years there have been maybe three polar bear attacks. So the odds are pretty low still. There’s probably still more chance of being run over by a car than anything.

Katya: So the reason you’re going is because you just love polar bears? Honestly. I mean, what are the reasons?

Jaime: Well, I love kayaking. I love the challenge of kayaking. For me it’s an epic opportunity to actually do a kayaking trip that’s a world first. It’s also a trip that pushes everything I’ve known about kayaking and what I’ve been able to do. I started kayaking when I was 12 years old and I’ve just pushed it, and I’ve been an outdoor educator and guide and instructor. This for me is a chance to see what I’m made of, and also to be able see polar bears. You don’t want to see them too close. It’s always amazing to be out there. You see walrus and polar bear and bowhead whales and stuff like that. That’s always pretty magic. To go to a place that no other person has very rarely ever been, especially by kayak, is a very unique kind of experience. That’s something that I’ve always longed to experience.