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And of course many people opposed to the war in Iraq show up, since Chevron is one of the major beneficiaries of the access to the worldвЂ™s second-largest oil reserves opened up by that invasion and ongoing occupation. There are allies of the indigenous people of Ecuador, such as Rainforest Action Network, since Chevron has a broad and filthy toxic legacy there. There are the Burmese activists, coordinated by Nyunt Than of the local Burmese American Democratic Alliance, since Chevron is one of the major backers of the vicious dictatorship there. ThereвЂ™s the local environmental justice community, often headed by the great Henry Clark of the West County Toxics Coalition, fighting on behalf of ChevronвЂ™s mostly poor and mostly nonwhite neighbors, who face toxins and respiratory problems as well as political domination. As with the WTO, the breadth of ChevronвЂ™s malfeasance is oddly conducive to coalition. Some activists had long perceived that there was a common thread in what all these groups were working for: dispersing power to the many and the small from its consolidation in the hands of nation-states and corporations, a shared stand against the violence that is sometimes as quick as a gun but sometimes as slow as poison and as subtle as impoverishment. Part of what made the demonstrations against the World Trade Organization in Seattle nearly nine years ago such a watershed is that people articulated and acted on the common ground for labor rights, human rights, indigenous rights, small farmersвЂ™ rights, health, and environmental issues around the world. These protests draw together a remarkable panoply of players.

Demonstrators show up there regularly, though the companyвЂ™s Richmond oil refinery - where about a quarter million barrels of oil, including Iraqi crude, are refined daily and toxic leaks are common - is the more frequent site for protest now. This seventh-largest corporation in the world was for decades headquartered in downtown San Francisco, but a few years ago, perhaps because of the constant protests, it moved to San Ramon in the East Bay.

Free jurassic park free#

If I described to you the rise of a corporation on whose behalf wars were fought on at least three continents, that did everything from stack the audience and city council in the hometown of one of its toxic manufactories to paying soldiers to fire on unarmed Nigerian villagers from helicopters, a corporation that propped up the worst governments in this world and corroded our own, it would sound like dystopian science fiction - a Jurassic Park of the free market - were it not for the fact that IвЂ™m describing Chevron, the oil giant based in my own backyard. And the oil companies! The war has coincided with an era of record profits, even if the fantasy of turning Iraq into a free-market free-for-all didnвЂ™t work quite as planned. The United States may be losing the war, but the corporations are still in many ways winning it - Bechtel has flourished, Lockheed MartinвЂ™s stock has nearly tripled in value, and HalliburtonвЂ™s profits keep ballooning, despite the numerous scandals. Corporations are the top predators, and they have domesticated us - or at least many of us - to serve them.ДЇor example, if you view George Bush as the president of a nation made up of some 300 million human beings, his interminable war in Iraq is a disaster, but if you think of him as point man for a handful of large corporations, he is doing an excellent job. But even cars are not the dominant species here. After all, most of us inhabit a landscape that has been streamlined and smoothed down and emptied out for a faster but clumsier species that needs parking lots everywhere, a species that claims the lives of fifty thousand or so Americans a year, a species that has enabled our communities to grow beyond the size that human beings, which travel at about three miles an hour, can traverse without assistance. When you look at a typical autoscape in the United States, a similar thought arises: the people who live in this asphalt and petroleum expanse are not so much masters as servants of the car. The nomads may herd and milk and eat the reindeer but they also protect them from wolves and tend to them in countless other ways.

In PIERS VITEBSKYвЂ™S wonderful book The Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia, he speculates that perhaps these nomads did not domesticate reindeer thousands of years ago rather, reindeer domesticated them.