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.

I have just put the baby down for a nap and it is 11:30 so I am late with my contribution to Grist. This is my "day off," when I get to be home with the baby, Aiko Unita. It is by far my hardest work day of the week -- it's a constant challenge trying to keep her happy, fed, hydrated, clean, and silly like little girls should be. I do not know how my wife, Miya, does it the other days of the work week. Not that I don't like it, but it is tough.

And yet it is what life is about, after all. I am not just referring to our evolutionary or biblical purpose. But my work, which is about creating social change toward a more just and sustainable future, has definitely been driven further, faster, higher, and harder since we had a baby. I still haven't quite worked out how to balance my passion for a political life with the needs of my new family, but, hey, I figure we've still got some time.

Aiko means child of love, which is appropriate enough for a baby born in Berkeley, to two people working in nonprofit human rights and environmental organizations. Her middle name is Unita, not after the CIA-backed rebels of Jonas Savimbi in Angola, but after a dear departed friend, Terry Freitas, who worked with Project Underground on the U'wa campaign. He was murdered in Colombia last March just as Aiko was conceived.

Terry's middle name was Unity, which his parents had given him just 24 years before in a statement of incredible prescience. Terry was an amazing young man who had great personal skills, charm, and intelligence. (He also was one of those sickeningly fit guys, with a black belt in some martial art and a great sense of grace.) He walked into our office in 1997 concerned about the U'wa who he had visited in Colombia and wanting to know what we were going to do about their plight. It wasn't long till we had to hire him.

Terry had enormous talent for bridging the traditional leadership of the U'wa with groups like us, campaigning to support them in the U.S. After a year of doing this difficult work and writing up a report on the U'wa and their struggle with Occidental Petroleum, Terry moved on. He was going to live in New York, to be with the newfound love of his life, and planned to do more proactive work in finding solutions for the U'wa people.

He went to Colombia in February 1999 with two native women from the United States, to look into ways to do cultural conservation work in the face of all the changes the U'wa were dealing with. After a week of working with the community, and on the way to a rural airport to leave, they were picked up by a brigade of guerrillas and kidnapped. We thought this would become an extortion ordeal, but they were executed a week later.

There is no rhyme or reason to these tragic murders, and Project Underground and other survivors of these three are yet to find peace with their loss. But it underscored the position of the U'wa that the oil development proposed for their land would attract violence, death, and destruction. With Terry gone and Aiko here, we have all the more reason to support people like these, resisting oil and mining exploitation and fighting for a full phaseout of fossil fuels, for the good of us all.

As the U'wa put it: "We are seeking an explanation for this 'progress' that goes against life. We are demanding that this kind of progress stop, that oil exploitation in the heart of the Earth is halted, that the deliberate bleeding of the Earth stop." (Statement from the U'wa Traditional Authority, August 8, 1998.)

That's what my work at Project Underground is all about, and I am glad to share it. I hope people reading this can join us and other groups working with people like the U'wa till we win. Thank you.