Seattle WTO Protesters Shun Consumption
12/12/99
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Title: Seattle Protesters Shun Consumption
Source: The Associated Press
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: December 12, 1999
Byline: Jeff Barnard
EUGENE, Ore. (AP) - On a quiet street in Eugene's oldest and funkiest
neighborhood, a mural on the side of an art gallery expresses the
idyllic world vision of many of the anarchists who took part in the
Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization.
It is a far cry from the scenes of confrontation and violence that
included black-clad youths jumping through the broken windows of a
Seattle Starbucks.
Instead, the mural reflects a longing for a world where people live
in small villages and grow their own food without global corporations
running their lives, where the sun rises on a village of small huts
and terraced gardens while sunset falls on an abandoned sawmill and a
hillside covered with stumps.
In the foreground, a nude woman reclining in a forest uses a quill
pen to mark a map of radioactive hazard sites. Another woman, one
breast lost to cancer, strings webbing on a snowshoe.
``The goal is a sustainable planet,'' said Tim Ream, a veteran of a
75-day hunger strike to protest logging. ``We have species dying off
at the greatest rate since mammals came on Earth, and it's happening
because of Western consumption.
``What we need is to spread power back to small communities and
individuals.''
The mural shows ``the civilized world being eaten up in a natural
way,'' says anarchist Tim Lewis.
Lewis was in the middle of the Seattle melee, which occurred the week
after Thanksgiving. He videotaped clashes between demonstrators and
police as part of his CopWatch project.
Eugene's anarchists acknowledge that they were in Seattle in force,
but point out that only a few of the hundreds arrested actually had
Eugene addresses and that anarchists from lots of other places took
part.
In fact, the city of 150,000 seems more concerned with the success of
the University of Oregon football team and with being politically
correct.
Still, while anarchism by its nature is not organized, it has enough
of a presence in Eugene to spawn its own institutions in the city's
old Whiteaker neighborhood. The Free School offers classes on
subjects from anarchy to vegetarian cooking. Cafe Anarchista hands
out free coffee and books from a handcart. Food Not Bombs cooks vegan
meals for the homeless.
Eugene's anarchists have been branded rabble-rousers since a June 18
protest march in Eugene turned into a riot.
And even before that, local anarchist John Zerzan's books and
pamphlets calling for a return to the primitive were being compared
to the anti-technology manifesto of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, whom
Zerzan visited in jail.
A quiet unassuming man, Zerzan, 56, lives in a low-income housing co-
op just a short walk from the mural on the side of the Jawbreaker art
gallery. He gets around on an old bicycle rather a car.
Despite a master's degree in history, he makes his living baby-
sitting, so he can have more time to write - with pen on paper at a
desk made from an old door.
``Classical anarchism, 19th century anarchism, concentrated on the
state - abolish the state, smash the state,'' said Zerzan ``I think
there are much more pervasive and deep-seated forms of domination
than just government. We are looking at not only capital and how deep
that relationship is, but technology and even civilization.
``Look at what is going on. Everybody is on antidepressants. The
teen-age suicide rate has tripled in the last 35 years. If things
were going along OK, this wouldn't make any sense to start thinking
there were some deep-seated stuff that needs to be re-examined. Sadly
enough, that isn't it.''
James Johnston, co-director of the Cascadia Wildlands Project, an
environmental group and an organizer for the International Workers of
the World, sees a lot of similarities between the Eugene anarchists
and the Wobblies who rode the rails trying to unionize Northwest
logging camps in the early 1900s.
``People feel angry and alienated, unable to achieve change through
conventional means,'' Johnston said. ``Peaceful protest just doesn't
seem to work. So people are taking the Wild West approach, which is
breaking windows, throwing rocks and sabotage.
``The root cause and solution to it is everything is too big and
everything needs to be smaller.''
At a coffee house called Out of the Fog, an anarchist hangout where
passing trains periodically drown out conversation, Shelley Cater
acknowledges that the world anarchists want is a distant hope.
``I don't know if we can go back to the hunter-gatherer awareness
with the global awareness we have,'' she said. ``It's really hard to
conceive of a world without governments, without corporations.''