Danny Kennedy, Project Underground

Danny Kennedy is the director of Project Underground, a Berkeley-based human rights and environmental organization which he helped to found in 1996. He is also a husband and a happy new father of a beautiful, bouncing baby girl.

Tuesday is staff meeting day. Project Underground is a very friendly, almost family-like shop, and so we spend a lot of time together talking through our work and plans. And today is the day when we do much of that talking. At 10:00 we'll have a two-hour gathering, but before and then after that I'll meet with various coworkers to check in about how things are going and what they need to do their work. Normally it is fun, creative, and worthwhile brainstorming so I look forward to it.

But talking takes a lot of time too. And time, while not necessarily money in a non-profit such as Project Underground, is needed for other things. Including fundraising, actually, which I determined yesterday is my priority this week. Time spent on internal talking also means less time spent dealing with the media, allies, and others who want information or want to work with us. At base we are information workers answering a lot of questions, trouble-shooting as we face various campaign choices, and trying to second-guess what will appeal to the public.

A question that has come up for us this week is how best to use the soapbox offered at the Democratic National Convention next month to highlight the problems of the oil industry and the fact that even our environmental vice president is in bed with Big Oil. Al Gore is a major shareholder in Occidental Petroleum. We've been fighting since 1997 to get Occidental to abandon plans to drill for oil on the sacred land of the U'wa people in Colombia.

The U'wa tribe came to fame when they threatened to commit mass suicide if Oxy extracted the "blood of their mother." This is what they call oil, which they have known about for eons. This understanding fits perfectly into the U'wa cosmology, which perceives the earth as mother -- much like other land-based cultures. And apart from the U'wa opposition to drilling because it would be ravaging their own mother, they have a very realpolitik reason to oppose Oxy's plans: Where oil development goes in Colombia, the civil war and violence follows. The leftist guerillas come to blow up the installations of foreign oil companies, the military and right-wing paramilitary come to blow up the guerrillas, and the common folk and indigenous people of Colombia get caught in the middle.

So Project Underground, along with lots of other organizations, has been calling on Al Gore to use his influence to tell Oxy to not desecrate the U'wa territory and destroy these people. After all, the veep not only owns stock, but his daddy was on the Occidental board, his family farm leased a mine to the company, and he borrows the corporate jet every now and then for campaign hops. He could at least call the CEO of Occidental, Ray Irani, and discuss the rights of indigenous peoples, the need to phase out fossil fuels, and other problems he once pointed out in Earth in the Balance.

Instead, the Clinton-Gore administration has done everything it can to back Oxy in Colombia, including last month pushing through over $1.3 billion in military aid. In theory this is for the "War on Drugs," but if the U.S. government were serious about that it wouldn't give guns and money to the Colombian government and military who are much closer to the narco-traffickers than are the leftist guerrillas. The real reason for the U.S. military buildup in Colombia is to protect U.S. interests, of which Occidental is the largest in the country, from the threat of destabilization and opposition from folk like the U'wa. After all, three weeks worth of oil for the U.S. is more important than the survival of this tribe.

So back to my conundrum. It's been pointed out that while Oxy is based in L.A., where the Democrats will convene, one of the major sponsors of the DNC is Chevron. And Project Underground's other major oil campaign is with the people of the Niger Delta, trying to force Chevron to stop pumping and polluting there, as well as to cease and desist from collaborating with the ruthless Nigerian military. A significant leader of the Ijaw, a community of 12 million Nigerians, is coming to the United States in August and would be a great person to put on a DNC platform to explain the problems with Chevron. A convergence of activists like the one in Seattle last November for the WTO is expected for L.A., and it would be great to make this a key issue. But the question we need to answer is how to do this and on which issue?

Making strategic choices like this is one of the hardest parts of my job. In coming weeks we'll have two organizers in L.A., rousing the rabble to protest the influence of petroleum companies on our political parties, both Republican and Democrat. And we'll try to spotlight one of our cases to make the point. Resources will be allocated, actions orchestrated, maybe people will go to jail to underline their commitment to changing this sad status quo. And today, or at least this week, we have to make it happen. Stay tuned to see what we do ... (And if you want background on the issues, check out our website).