Surviving Capitalism (Not) : How Photographing Pollution Became Illegal In Wyoming

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Sunday, May 17, 2015

How Photographing Pollution Became Illegal In Wyoming

Click here to access article by Claire Bernish from The Anti Media.

A key element of the Clean Water Act is reliance on public citizens to spot violations, but this trespass law, and similar legislation in other states including Idaho and Utah, renders citizen science helpless, even in the event of imminent threat to public health. What these laws essentially accomplish is putting rights of their state agricultural industries above the rights of citizens not to have our shared land fouled with pollutants. Rather than addressing the root of the issue, the law shows a preference for sweeping the problem under the rug.

The law came into being after activists with the Western Watersheds Project heavily sampled waterways under the control of the Bureau of Land Management and found the water tainted with E.coli bacteria, which is extremely dangerous to humans. Cattle ranchers, whose livestock is likely responsible for the contamination....