Salt City Sinner

posted on 5/7/2013 by the Salt City Sinner   “Excuse me, but did you drive a car here today?” a man asked, his voice loaded with the combination of theatrically weary sarcasm and belligerence that I’ve come to think of as The Talk Radio Voice. “Call ‘em out, Paul!” a man crowed on from the crowd. “You’re just a hypocrite!” Paul continued. “A hypocrite !” It was a little after one in the afternoon on a beautiful Tuesday, and the view from the sixth floor of Rice-Eccles Stadium’s press and VIP tower was exquisite – a sweeping vista of Salt Lake City that is in my experience unrivaled (in one of my many previous incarnations, I booked a gala event for a nonprofit I was working for in this very room for that very view). Against the light streaming in from the floor-to-ceiling windows, framed against that view, were a band of   brave souls  who had come to interrupt Juan Palma, the Bureau of Land Management's Utah State Director, as he delivered an address ti...

posted 3/8/2013 by the Salt City Sinner The fact that the earth’s atmosphere cannot safely absorb the amount of carbon we are pumping into it is a symptom of a much larger crisis, one born of the central fiction on which our economic model is based: that nature is limitless, that we will always be able to find more of what we need, and that if something runs out it can be seamlessly replaced by another resource that we can endlessly extract. But it is not just the atmosphere that we have exploited beyond its capacity to recover—we are doing the same to the oceans, to freshwater, to topsoil and to biodiversity. The expansionist, extractive mindset, which has so long governed our relationship to nature, is what the climate crisis calls into question so fundamentally. The abundance of scientific research showing we have pushed nature beyond its limits does not just demand green products and market-based solutions; it demands a new civilizational paradigm, one grounded not in domin...

Posted by ViewFinder on 5/16/2012 At 9:00 am I entered the Public Space containing a hearing- knowing that this Evidentiary hearing on Living Rivers appeal of the groundwater discharge permit to U.S. Oil Sands for a Tar Sands mine at PR Springs in the Book Cliffs of Utah, was actually a CLOSED hearing.   I approached the receptionist and requested entry to the hearing and was immediately declined when my name was not showing on the "list".  After requesting to speak with a Manager I was required to wait... eventually a lovely woman came out of a secure area of the first floor and gave me the same explanation that this was not a "public hearing" and if my name was not on the list as a participant in the hearing there would be no entry permitted.  We were however provided a second room in which we could convene and watch the hearing via a live video feed projected onto two large screens at the front of the room.  I requested to speak with the person...