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Hands Across The Sand: In Opposition to Offshore Drilling, This Saturday Activists Nationwide Join Hands
On February 13, 2010, thousands of people synchronously gathered on numerous Florida beaches in order to join hands. The reason for this unification of 10,000 Floridians from over 60 towns and cities was a message: “No to offshore drilling. Yes to clean energy.” This Saturday, June 26, there will be another hand joining session, only this one will be national.
"People in love hold hands," says Rauschkolb. "People who want to change the world join hands.” If you want to get involved, check for participating beaches near you at the organization’s website www.handsacrossthesand.com. The man behind the event is Dave Rauschkolb. A year ago Rauschkolb
was a restaurant owner, surfer, and for the most part a pacifist from
Seaside, Florida. But after the Florida House of Representatives began
working to pass a bill permitting the ban on off shore drilling to be
lifted, just three miles off the coast of Seaside, Rauschkolb became a
galvanized environmental activist. The February 13th demonstration,
which he dubbed “Hands Across The Sand,” was his creation. And now Hands
Across the Sand is coming to a beach near you.
With the help of environmental groups such as Audubon, the Sierra Club, and Greenpeace, which has dispatched 500 volunteers to numerous states, people will be joining hands on America’s shores.
What will a demonstration such as this actually accomplish? Shortly after activists joined hands last February, Republican Dean Cannon, who wrote the bill that outraged Rauschkolb, abandoned the effort saying, “It’s not the right time to vote on this issue.” Perhaps if enough people literally hold hands, the show of support for clean energy and for a moratorium on offshore drilling will provoke some amount of governmental action. It would certainly be timely.
This week, Martin Feldman, a federal judge in New Orleans, granted a preliminary injunction, effectively halting President Obama’s moratorium on offshore drilling. Feldman wrote in his decision that, “The court is unable to divine or fathom a relationship between the findings and the immense scope of the moratorium.” Furthermore, many political analysts are predicting that President Barrack Obama will not be able to pass a clean energy bill through the Senate that has both a comprehensive limit on carbon emissions and significant fuel economy standards.
The instructions for participants of Hands Across America are as follows: Step 1, “Go to your beach on June 26 at 11 am in your time zone;” Step 2, “Form lines in the sand and at 12:00 join hands.” Here in New York City, the demonstrations will be held at Coney Island and Brighton Beach in Brooklyn, and High Line Park in Manhattan.
"People in love hold hands," says Rauschkolb. "People who want to change the world join hands.” If you want to get involved, check for participating beaches near you at the organization’s website www.handsacrossthesand.com.
31 Comments so far
Show AllVery well said.
I live in a remote county of Western New York and I got from the Sierra Club the number of people who are actual members-- it is exactly 26 people for our county of 50,000.
I just wrote a letter to each of the 26 and invited them to meet each other at a coffee and tea event at a local community center were - we will bring our own baked goods.
Sierra Club has 32,000 members in New York state and it carries some clout. They did show up at a local environmental hearing of the state regarding the spacing o gas wells. We were very happy to see them showing up here. Of course every large organization has it pitfalls and its Achilles heal but I am looking forward to meet the 26 souls who live amongst me and who have a yearning for a better environment.
Yes I think that showing up at a beach is a wonderful idea for this coming Saturday!!! If I go, I am taking a pair of gloves and a pair of boots and pick up tar balls.
If bacteria can get rid of oil, maybe little people as bp likes to define them just picking up tar balls can get ahead too.
This old Indian is going to stay home in Turtle Island and enjoy Creator's woods, and critters scampering about the woods. Going to enjoy the birds flying, singing, and calling.
Who knows maybe tomorrow you will have the earth saved but I wouldn't lay any bets in Vegas on such a thing happening.
Life is good. What an experience! It's always best to forgive.
"The hands across the sands" movement, stirred my friends to do something. We have started our own website and will be selling Tee-shirts to raise money and awareness. Our proceeds will be donated to The Seabird Sanctuary of Florida, and the Surfrider Foundation of Florida (save our beaches and estuaries) we will all be at Passagrille Beach near Tampa Sat. at 11 am. Visit our site at www.thegulfshame.com for information about the "spill", known locally as the volcano from hell, and news around the gulf. "Never doubt that a small group of thoughful, committed citizens,can change the world. In deed, it's the only thing that ever has." Margaret Mead
After participating in non-violent protests for over thirty years, I'm through with this shit. I'll be there when the lynch-mobs form. Meet you at Hayward's mansion.
That would be a Houston address, correcto?
On the efficacy of nonviolent direct action. Joining hands and getting ordinary people involved is not useless. It you get media attention, then other people will ask, what is going on? why are they doing this? It is not any one action but a series of actions that make up a movement. The forces that be will always tell you and people who have become cynical, that these actions have no effect, but remember your history. They said the same thing about the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement and every other social activist, grass roots movement. Read the works of Gene Sharp(The Politics of Nonviolent Action)William Moyer(not the PBS guy) Doing Democracy: The MAP Model of Nonviolent Direct Action Campaigns and Movements for some history and strategic organizing skills and tactics. Then go out and organize. Remember your history, the Sons of Liberty, the Committees of Correspondence and the MinuteMen during the American Revolution. They defeated the largest and most powerful army and navy on Earth, the British Miltary of King George the III. They did it with only about 5% of the general public supporting them and by guerilla tactics. They didn't fight on the British's terms and defied conventional wisdom. Nonviolence is more powerful then guns and bombs. No government or company or nation can be oppressive without the consent of the will of the people
Are you saying that the Sons of Liberty and Minutemen ejected the English with marches and subversion of the dominant paradigm? We have your own flag because insurrectionists fought and died, using French money as a tool, in order to establish the corrupt republic that we have today.
Aggressive corporate capitalists have the media, government, courts, military, and much of the populace on their side. For the hundredth time, you're not going to displace them with wishful thinking and raised consciousness. By all means, teach and learn and organize, and you'll know when you're effective because the power of the state will start a tap dance on your noggin.
You're welcome.
Nonviolent action, demonstrations and civil disobedience do not produce instant results. But it has not only been successful in the Civil Rights movement, labor union movement but also led to India's Independence, the end of Apartheid in South Africa, and most amazing of all to me, the Berlin Wall falling.
I was just at another Clearwater Music Festival ( http://www.clearwater.org ) which
is always an inspiration to how people CAN change this world.
When Pete Seeger and a small group started sailing the sloop Clearwater in 1969,
the Hudson and rivers all over this country were open sewers. The air was polluted
with smog suffocating breath and even disintegrating buildings.
Clearwater has always led the way forward with triple-cans for recycling almost since inception. A few years ago all stages went to solar power. A number of vehicles have
been bio-diesel with left-over french fry oil (NOT ethanol!)
Clearwater has always had buses from the Croton train station to support public transit.
This year the recycling was so incredible that 90% was either compostable plates, spoons, cups, napkins etc OR recyclable bottles and cans.
The Star-Ledger today had an article that the 100% Republican Morris County Freeholders from one of the richest Republican bastions in the US have just funded solar energy for all high schools and county buildings.
In 1996 when I first began taking the train to Summit to take a shuttle bus to
Bell Labs it was about the only shuttle bus in the Summit train station.
Today the Summit Train station has so many shuttle buses and vans that there is almost no room for them to even park!
Last year New Jersey Transit after 20 years finally launched a train to the Meadowlands for NY Giants and Jets football games. concerts and other events.
The first concert with train service had over 20,000 people and swamped NJ Transit's
logistics which anticipated 1/3rd that number.
In May, 2008 NJ Transit reduced my town's train service by 40%.
So many people called that NJ Transit restored 3 trains in a week, and then 6 more
train stops to my town including one afternoon train for private school students
across Morris County.
Is this enough to save the planet yet?
No!
But does it take us where we want to go?
Absolutely!!
The pessimists and the powers that be WANT you to give up, to just be a total cynic
and drop out and give up..
do NOT do it!
Do whatever you can to raise people's awareness, to educate them.
Tell all those people holding hands that the US Pentagon is the world's largest
institutional oil consumer using for example 3.5 BILLION gallons of jet fuel annually for one example published on this remarkable Website.
Tell them about peak oil...
They are open to it or they would not be at the beach holding hands...
Person by person we WILL change the world!
If you do not participate the World cannot be changed...
You're joking...right? Really, you don't believe that shit in 2010 do you?
Hands Across the Sand is global – just like the oceans!
http://handsacrossthesand.com/international.php
Probably a large segment of the protesters will conitinue to vote for Republican oil and war industry advocates.....because they are Christian.
I remember president Bush agreed to off shore drilling also, but think it was more Chaney's idea. Although everyone has jumped on the band wagon against BP, I firmly believe Chaney's Halliburton was the one responsible. Revenge against Britain, and wanting Halliburton to be number one.
Sad what greed does to people.
Symbolic actions fall in with petitions. Alot of talk and a lot less action. Four years ago, our northern Minnesota grassroots group started a action designed to ultimately hit the oil company bottom line. We borrowed the orange slow moving vehicle symbol and greened it. On the edges of the triangle are the words "DRIVE EASY...CONSERVE". In the center is our Pine County pine tree and we then
began to grow from the grassroot's. The mission is to encourage motorists to slow down and drive more efficiently, thereby saving oil...lot's of oil. Four years latter and we have 30,000 global supporter's, without the recognition of any big time environmental groups. We simply went to events and presented driving easy. Well here is our call in response to the Gulf calamity. We have redirected our membership towards a global driving slowdown as a reaction to the total Gulf blow out. The magic number for profitability in deep water drilling and extraction of oil from tar and shale is $65/barrel for crude. If we can seriously appeal to concerned people to work with personal behavior and slow down a little, perhaps we can reduce demand and drive up oil surplus. Leaving the speculator's out of the equation and the price of crude would begin to drop. Boycott oil not just BP. Quite simply; drive easy, park-it, bike, bus, or walk. Let's do something that will have lasting impact from the grassroot's and by our action's, maybe the pol's will follow. We have all the physics and science on our web site along with all the many other great reasons to drive easy.
FSTV talks with Govinda Dalton of earthcycles.net on being the indigenous voice, uranium mining, strip mining, deforestation and corporate exploitation of natural resources.
http://www.livestream.com/freespeechtv/video?clipId=flv_bc2109db-eb51-44f9-97bb-88204b9a1aaf
I tired of peaceful protest, letters, faxes, phone calls
peace organizations, environmental groups,,,,,I guess they
won.
Like someone else said, when the lynch mobs form , I ....
Just signed up - what a great Organization.
Will be at Nye Beach - Newport, Oregon @11:00 AM June 26, 2010 - See Ya There.
While you're all there on the beach in Newport, I hope one of the discussions is about the success of people coming together to stop the proposed shipbreaking in Yaquina Bay several years ago.
I worked behind the scenes and I was astounded - and happily surprised - that so many in the community could come together like that to halt a future destruction of our waters and environment.
For a boost to those not aware of this very positive outcome, see http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2006/01/332578.shtml
I hope to be in Taft (Lincoln City) on the beach at Siletz Bay near Mo's on Saturday at 11 am. (Prolly go early for the low tide and look for agates first.) Yay, Central Oregon Coast!
BP SILVER LINING
Sadly, it requires calamities such as the BP gusher, and 9/11, to force measures that were so obviously needed beforehand.
This event underscores the crucial need, not only to enforce drilling safety, but to reduce our dangerous fossil fuel dependence through conservation and renewable energy development--which industry has obstructed through decades of lobbying, misinformation, & fabricated science, with help from cooperative administrations, defaulting legislators, and an apathetic populace.
This environmental disaster provides our president with special opportunities to detooth the energy cartels, and forge ahead with these vital reform measures.
If he eludes this mandate, history will judge him harshly.
Then what?
Strength in humility is a myth. Passive denial of the enormity of the problems that confront us and the radical solutions needed to address these, while understandable in light of all the devastation being visited upon the Earth by developers, corporate greed heads and a largely acquiescent populace, is still an indefensible and repugnant position.
As long as women and African-Americans were nice humble and passive what did they get? Nothing. Unless you count subjugation and servitude as something. Would those in power one day have awakened one day in a particularly genial and loving mood having experienced some psycho-spiritual transformation and said, "You are so nice and humble I'm going to allow you to vote, own property and while we're at it let's throw in equal pay?"
Dream on.
It took suffragettes and civil rights activists being insistent, unpleasantly arrogant, unrelenting and a willingness to risk what little they did have to attain the few freedoms that are "allowed" today. This meant laying their bodies on the line.
Those who are destroying our earth and our communities at breakneck speed are as humble and caring as barracudas, with all apologies to the more gentle piscine creatures, and will not easily or at all relinquish their stranglehold on the gasping planet or your neck.
What it will take is nothing short of large scale purposeful sustained direct actions that bring the system to a halt. This means tremendous sacrifice. This means discomfort. In this there is the inevitably of tremendous risk.
The only remedy will be when people begin to get interested in taking back active control of the processes that rule their lives.
Just to be clear - the FIRST and most important thing to
save oil AND greenhouse emissions is to RUN PUBLIC TRANSIT!
Tell your Representatives and Senators to support the
"Public Transportation Preservation Act" to provide an initial $2 Billion to operate public transit all over the USA.
As with so many other issues, until Reagan, public transit operations had been funded. Now more than 150 built and functioning public transit systems face service cuts, fare hikes and strangulation. (see http://t4america.org )
These do not require huge capital investments - the rails, railcars, buses, vans etc already exist.
What they need is people to run them (i.e. JOBS) and some
minimal fuel/electricity expense.
We do NOT need to subsidize cars in any form.
We need to subsidize rail and public transit which is 10x more
energy efficient than cars.
70% of US oil usage is for transportation of which the great
majority is cars and trucks. We need to get people OUT of cars by running public transit wherever possible.
Japan cut their cars by 3/8ths and now has bullet trains without a single accident running every 20 minutes.
Jobs running public transit can NOT be offshored!
You kindof have to live here to run a train here :-)
Europe uses 50% the energy per capita of the US.
Why? Europe HAS public transit!
GM and US automakers need to be building electric shuttles, buses, railcars NOT electric private cars to insure our future.
"People in love hold hands," says Rauschkolb. "People who want to change the world join hands."
This sounds cute, but it's really a stupid comparison. People in love do a hell of a lot more than just hold hands to express and confirm their love for each other.
But go ahead and hold hands behind the support of big brother environmental groups. It probably can't hurt, and maybe some awareness will be created. But please remember: if you really want to change the world, you'll have to do much much MUCH MORE than just hold hands!
I hope people know that nothing will begin to change until the ruling class is made very uncomfortable. That's when you know you have a movement and that's when things start happening.
Before reading any of the comments, my first reaction was "where's the risk?" Will these people be willing to march through water cannons to occupy corporate offices? People always use the civil rights struggle as an example. It was rough. People were murdered and crippled for life. There was a moral toughness and strength derived from a clear vision that is hard to locate in the kind of actions spoken of in this article.
mcoyote is right as is Visiting Professor. How serious is this when it is sponsored by organizations with big corporate partnerships? How serious would have been a march in the Vietnam era sponsored by Dow or a "partner" of Dow? Or a civil rights action supported by the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce?
Perhaps I'm overstating the case, but it's worth thinking about when airily comparing the current actions with the great social movements of the past.
Rather than holding hands I see as a start a massive ring of folks, torches in hand, encircling Wall Street.
It seems "a day late and a dollar short" as my dad used to say. My mama used to hold my hand when I was scared, maybe it is a good thing for these people to hold hands. Nothing else to do while the the sea dies.
Yes.
If all we can do is mourn then let us mourn together, in nature.
I have an old cartoon, maybe from the New Yorker. A man is sitting by an empty canvas on an easel, posed sort of like the Thinker, only he is dressed, more compressed, thicker and older than Rodin's model. He has a slightly pained, frustrated look on his face. The caption says "Repressionism". Those of you who don't think protest is useful: What will you be doing Saturday that accomplishes more?
On the 12th of this month I decided to take my folks up on going back to the Gulf coast. With my two daughters we arrived in New Orleans and made our way to my Aunt's house, an old dairy farm located in the Louisiana country side. Now most of my relatives on my mother's side work in the oil industry, some of them have great insight into the current disaster. But what strikes me the most is the undying commitment to drilling. According to my Uncle who has been one of the top oil folks in the Gulf, it is clearly BP's fault for the actual failure of the Deepwater Horizon. Stating that BP most likely pulled the pipe long before the cement plug was ready, and if they had left it in the hands of the workers on the rig and not the company men, then this never would of happened. As I traveled along these shores, from Mississippi, to Alabama, to Pensacola Florida and back to Louisiana it is becoming clear that the majority of born and bred consumers along this coast have absolutely no clue as to the extent of the destruction. In fact what I see are a people out of touch with what really matters. As long as Walmart and Target and McDee's and television and Coke are still operating and able to sell then product in the familiar plastic bottles and pack em in the plastic bags, all is ok with their world. Last weekend I took my girls to my brother's beach house in Pensacola. The Gulf was beautiful, the water as clear and as full of life as it was when I was a child. But unlike the few who were splashing in the warm Gulf waters, I could not find the joy and peace that once existed. You see, I have an idea of the destruction that is now taking place. I knew that even though just a few days ago when everyone around me in Pensacola was saying "the beaches are still clean", it wasn't going to last, and in fact oil did indeed wash ashore yesterday, along with a turtle and a dolphin and various other marine creatures. The once white beaches of the Gulf coast are now covered in death, and it will only get worse. The hurricane season is looking rather robust and isn't willing to wait for politicians or BP. I wonder what it will take for these tanned white consumers to wake up? I wonder if it is even possible? I tend to doubt it, not because I am a death and destruction kind of person, but because I don't foget things like the already existing dead zone covering 5000 square miles of the Gulf, or the fact that 95 percent of Great White sharks are gone and that many other species of sharks are in decline, or that there are only two places on Earth where the Blue Fin Tuna spawn (Gulf of Mexico and the Med Sea), or that all the Gulf's coastal birds are now nesting...more than that I know that a majority of the consumers down here have none of these facts in their heads, and I know they most likely will never have that path of thinking. As I left the grocery store in Pensacola I asked for paper bags. The girl behind the counter looked at me like I was crazy and my Dad asked me "why would I want paper bags?" I told him it was a small important step, one that, if done by all could make a difference. He, and the girl scoffed and my Dad said that's just stupid! Perhaps when the hurricanes carry the oil and toxins inland and people start getting sick after cleaning tarballs off their well groomed lawns, maybe then they will wake up, I doubt it.
They could use those thousands of hands to help clean up the coasts already hit by the oil geyser. Ain't Amerika grate? Thousands of people hold hands and sing 'Kumbaya' on nice clean (for the moment) beaches while the coast of Louisiana drowns in toxic waste. Then, by the time the oil gets to the other beaches, they'll have hopped into their cars or planes and gone back to their lives of petrol consumption. Why don't those thousands of citizens confront BP on the front lines of the disaster? They really need help there, as this woman testifies: http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/877.html BP is in charge of the clean up, and has hired private security goons to keep even the media out. America is a big fat joke on itself. Too bad its actions affect so many, so dramatically, inside and outside its borders.
yes, doris,
by all means let's get in the circular firing squad and half of us face out, to take shots at everyone who isn't doing it perfectly according to our own particular pet project.
Symbolic action by those who live thousands of miles from the site of any particular disaster takes a few hours instead of the days, weeks or months it would take to travel to louisiana and do volunteer work there (assuming they could afford it), so those people can continue to do the other work they're engaged in, like helping to reduce coal or oil use, promote renewables or raise awareness of climate cataclysm.
Did you go to help people after the latest coal mine disaster? the coal sludge lake dam breaks? the nuclear tritium leaks? the Pennsylvania and other gas well blowouts? You can put your finger in one of the many holes in the dike or you can try to stop what's punching holes in dikes. We need people to do both. It would be a good idea to flood the area a la the Wobblies, and one of the best ways to be able to do that is to get more people on our side. Symbolic actions all over the country seem like an excellent way to do that.