In the Company of Rebels. Chellis Glendinning

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СКАЧАТЬ Grandmother Rae’s visit. Here she had trudged hundreds of miles behind a donkey cart in the dead of winter, braved a harrowing trip across the ocean on a crammed steamer replete with fleas, lice, and the vomit of the seasick, and made her heroic way into a New York City burgeoning with immigrants like herself looking for the same bottom-level jobs. Now at last, here was the fruit of her efforts, her grandson who had, by the might of his own intelligence, achieved the American Dream: he had gone to Yale and graduated with a master’s degree! The door swung open. Inside: a sweltering walk-up apartment boasting termite-gnawed window sills, chipped linoleum floor—and a (Sears and Roebuck, not!) living room set of used cartons and screeching orange foam pads!

      Marc’s work made an ingenious pivot in the 1990s. A proponent of Richard Grossman’s work on the legal “personhood” that bestows the freedoms (read: unimpeded license) corporations use to exploit workers and resources, he and his long-time buddy attorney Alan Caplan cooked up a means to stymie offenders. They launched a series of lawsuits: Kasky vs. Jolly Green Giant, Kasky vs. Perrier, and the most infamous, Kasky vs. Nike Corporation. The key to each was false advertising. Jolly Green Giant had advertised that its recipe for frozen vegetable dinners was “California style”—yet the product was actually made in Mexico. Perrier had boasted that its water was naturally carbonated underground and bottled at the source—when in fact the spring had dried up years before and the water came out of a tap. Marc and Alan won both cases.

      Not once did they request personal remuneration in the settlements. Never short on ideas, Marc requested that Jolly Green Giant donate the money to Second Harvest, a non-profit that distributed to food banks. The Perrier settlement occurred during the riots in Los Angeles, and he proposed—and got—Perrier to supply thousands of water bottles to protestors and looters in the streets!

      The Nike case, though—this one thrust him into the limelight of the national financial world, including a five-page feature in Fortune called “Nike Code of Conduct,” plus stories in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, etc. The gist of the suit was that Nike publicized that its workers in Indonesia and Vietnam labored in safe conditions. In reality, according to a report by its own team leaked by a disgruntled worker to the New York Times, abuses abounded. Caplan’s law firm Bushnell, Caplan and Fielding proved to be too small for the case, and Milberg Weiss of Los Angeles joined up. It went to municipal court, then to appeals court, both of which they lost. In these suits Marc was, of all things, listed as “Private Attorney General” of the State of California so that he could not personally benefit from any gains (a title he regarded as a step down from Admiral of the house boats). His team of lawyers appealed to the State Supreme Court and won. Nike appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Amazingly, the decision of Kasky vs. Nike went for the plaintiff—and, as a result, millions of dollars went to groups monitoring sweatshop practices around the world. The anti-corporate-globalization movement, of course, was thrilled. Corporations: 0, Visitors: 3.

      Marc and I broke up in 1987. A few years later, after much deliberation on the pros and cons of the legal institution of marriage, he and his new love, actress Cat Carr, tied the knot to a full house at the Cowell Theater—with all his former lovers there to give him away. When I visited the Bay Area from my then-home in New Mexico, they always invited me to stay at their house. Marc continues his work to challenge corporate personhood, and each summer he and Cat drive their 1974 Chrysler Commander to the Burning Man celebration in Black Rock, Nevada. There the intrepid Admiral/Attorney General sits—dressed in a blue fake-fur jacket and billowing orange dance pants, eager to share the wisdom of experience with young people at a booth he calls Counsel from an Elder.

      Another wild idea …

PONDEROSA PINE: SIDEWALK SOLES

      (1932–2014)

       That’s not a new idea, bro. We knew THAAAA-AAAT like, you know, for-EV-er!

      —P.P., EARTH READ OUT

      Ponderosa Pine was known for the soles of his feet; they had not seen the insides of a pair of shoes since 1968. That year an ecological epiphany struck him as he departed all trappings of the straight life in which his name had been Keith Lampe and morphed into an eco pilgrim named for a tree. Ever since then he had tread the sidewalks of the Haight, the stone paths of Golden Gate Park, and the beaches of Bolinas with neither hide, hair, nor last of footwear.

      I got a glimpse of those soles when, fifteen years later, Marc Kasky introduced me to him at Fort Mason Center. They were thick. They were hard. They were the color of the black hole of the universe. Dear reader, we are talking an inch of freshly tarred epidermis contoured by daily deployment to resemble a Vibram sole.

      Ponderosa’s feet reflected his dedication to the cause. At the other end of his ever-so-lean-from-walking body (he refused to mix his dignity with that of carbon-emitting machines, regularly walking the thirty miles from his home in Bolinas to San Francisco), his mind was devoting its considerable assets to the miserable state of the planet. In her book Whatever Happened to Ecology? Stephanie Mills calls him the “grand-daddy of all the bare-knuckles critics of environmentalism,” clearly a 1980s moniker from when climate change, ozone depletion, rising seas, dying species, contaminated cities, and ruined ecosystems were not as evident as they are today and even the left-wing intellectuals at The Nation thought ecology a bogus concern. Stephanie also calls Ponderosa “a barefoot mendicant chanter and general thorn in the side of people of lesser mettle … a guy destined to make us all deeply uncomfortable in our insufficiency of action.”

      This soleless/soulful pioneer lived so intensely in the Here-and-Now that he seemed a man without a past. But in the world of material existence and calculated linear time, Keith Lampe was born in 1932 to Harriet and William Lampe in Wayne, Pennsylvania, the eldest of three siblings, and he grew up during the Depression. In his early career, he was both an officer in the U.S. Army during the Korean War and a Paris-based reporter for Randolph Hearst’s right-wing International News Service. Upon hearing about the murders of three civil rights workers in 1964 in Mississippi, though, he chucked his formally sanctioned career, headed back to the States, and got himself hired by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee as press agent. Then, in 1966, just as the Vietnam War was being launched, he burned his discharge papers and medals on national TV and awoke from his previous life to find himself on stage in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, shoeless with his unkempt beard waving in the ocean wind, speaking to throngs of stoned hippies about cosmic consciousness, leading group meditations, and performing improvisational music with drums, lutes, synthesizer, and belly-dancing women.

      Pine around 1970 at Marx Meadow in Golden Gate Park. Photo credit and courtesy of James Stark.

      The All Species phenomenon took off! Ceremonialist Chris Wells jumped in and took the event all over the U.S., to Mexico and Sweden. Here, a gathering dedicated to Turtle Island, the name given to North America by many Native peoples. Earth Day 1992, Kansas City, Missouri. Photo credit: Ed Kendrick. Courtesy of Marty Kraft and All Species Project.

      Ponderosa was among the first to articulate the importance of an extremely radical philosophy and politics called bioregionalism. In his weekly mimeographed publication Earth Read Out he spouted its underlying wisdom: for two million years we humans lived in ecological terrains defined by the extent of local watershed and cohesion of flora and fauna, developing cultures as reflections of the natural world around/within us. Take, for instance, the obvious differences between traditional Inuit lifeways and those of the Plains Indians, between the world СКАЧАТЬ