|
Table of Contents |
|
|
|
|
Soft-spoken Maria Gilardin has become a sort of peripetetic radio producer. Banned in 1993 from Pacifica Radio, where she had become Development Director after many years as a volunteer, she set up her own studio in a closet in her San Francisco home. There she has been producing two tapes a week and distributing them free of charge to more than 50 progressive stations across the country, and via the Internet. After many years in the city, Maria moved last spring into a tiny cottage on 5300-acre Greenfield Ranch in Mendocino County, where I interviewed her last August. Driving two and a half miles down a dirt road to her place, I was reminded of the visit I made to Starhawk last year. The scenery was similar, but what a difference a year makes! In one year, we have crossed over the Millennium, leaving behind a tremendous load of apprehension. And while many of the same issues are before us, a tidal wave of reaction to global corporatization has been sweeping across the planet. Energy that was mortally stuck has begun to move. It was a beautiful, warm late-summer day in Mendocino County, a perfect day for this excursion. Maria and I sat outside at a small table, drinking tea and watching the breezes sweep across the tops of tall grasses, which shimmered in the afternoon sun. We were well away from traffic, off the PG&E grid, beyond the reach of television -- revisiting the space which was settled twenty or thirty years ago by hippies who left the Haight Ashbury and similar enclaves to plant potatoes in the dirt and be free. "I've seen many of my friends leaving for the land in the 70s and I've always felt part envious and part, how could you relinquish all the issues and the culture of the city, for the land?" Maria has a soft clear voice embellished with just a hint of an accent that reflects her Swiss origins. She was raised in the Alps by her grandmother whilst her parents travelled around Europe, collecting paintings and antiques for their business. "My grandmother made her own starch, canned, raised some chickens and pigs, sharpened her knives with a cork in the sand and did all her own sewing. "I'm having the most curious flashbacks living here…" She is living extremely simply, in accord with her convictions that we are but guests on the land. Greenfield Ranch, once a sheep ranch, has been a community of like-minded renegades for twenty-five years. "As I meet my old friends who have been here for 20 years, I say, You were following your dream, and I really am escaping from a nightmare, because that's what the cities have become, especially San Francisco, a city that I love, which is really becoming a corporate town. "Current Mayor Willie Brown has supported it all. I was there one day when he had to listen to this grand old poet Ferlinghetti read him the riot act, that the city has become unliveable for people who work, and for artists. "The megalopolis San-San -- San Francisco to San Diego -- has grown, similar to Bos-Wash and Chic-Pitt. Those are just horrendous creatures that have taken over pretty much all the agricultural land in between and have become dense settlement zones." She talked about the restoration work that the people of Greenfield Ranch are undertaking to restore the land to its natural condition when, 150 years ago, the Pomo Indians were still living here. Archaeological studies have shown that they had been in this place for at least 5000 years. "I feel a responsibility of taking care of this land for the privilege of being a guest here. I want my garden to be tiny, to see if the dry farming techniques I saw in Hopi land will work, because there isn't much water here, this is a forest. "There are so many things wrong with our environment. I can see a movement of restoration that is just created largely by love and creates love for the people who participate. It reminds me of a tape I did with Catherine Sneed who runs an organic gardening program in the San Francisco County Jail. She said, 'Digging in the dirt and taking care of plants is all you need to make somebody a better person. I don't tell people what to do with their lives, I'm just teaching them to take care of plants and that does it!'"
Gilardin was the first person to call attention to Pacifica Radio's move toward corporatization, years before recent protests aroused so much concern in the Bay Area. It all began when she discovered an internal Pacifica document titled "Strategy for National Programming," which she said was a plan for shifting Pacifica away from community-based radio towards a more centralized national radio network. "Nobody knew yet that KPFA was on this terrible course that led last year to the occupation of the station by police and thousands of people in the streets. These are the same people who banned me, but it seemed like an isolated event and I didn't have a lot of support then." Maria had begun as a volunteer at KPFA in 1982, after the meltdown at Three Mile Island. "KPFA did an amazing job, suspending all regular programming for three days." She got to know the station and noticed there was no woman's department. With Joan Marler and a dozen other women, she co-founded a new department. "Women's issues are not just a section of something else! There needs to be a place for women to talk with each other -- a woman's room, a room of our own!" KPFA created a half-time staff position to run the program. "We would have liked a full time position but women work for half the wages, so that was not surprising!" She would have liked to take that job, but felt that it was inappropriate for her to apply for it. The women's department produced news show called "Majority Report" and had a midnight slot on Monday and Wednesday nights. "I was part of the Monday slot, "Midnight Becomes Eclectic". The Wednesday slot was called "The Witching Hour." But ten years later, "I realized things were going wrong. So many people loved Pacifica. So how do I argue this, that they are really changing the direction, changing the values of Pacifica? Follow the money is always a good idea. The budget reflected the move toward corporate sponsorship. $140,000 was spent for fundraising &endash;- that did not include any salaries -- and that is an enormous amount of money for a station like that. So I brought all these questions up and they said we will get you answers from Los Angeles at the next meeting." At the time, she was caretaking another ranch property in Mendocino County, exploring the possibility of moving to the land. "I went down to Los Angeles from the ranch. I was a little late, and they adjourned the meeting before I was able to speak. The Board chair came down to me. He felt I had been wronged and said he would bring this up before the board. But they convinced him I was a nuisance and banned me. A few days later I learned that I was banned from all Pacifica stations. "Being banned from Pacifica was great, although I was very sad and angry about it at the time. . . I had to rescue my life as a radio producer from this debacle. I developed a tremendous burst of energy to see how I could do without them! I found out I could afford to buy a computer to edit sound. I got involved with the micropower radio movement, small unlicensed stations. I'm doing illegal broadcasts on a demonstration project, taking it around mostly to Native American groups to show them it will only cost $3000 to set up a full fledged radio station." Maria's friend Govinda showed me the portable stations. All that's required is encased in a metal box about a foot long and almost as tall, which broadcasts ten or twenty miles with less than 100 watts of power. The FCC has not begun to grant licenses to these stations, although this year a judge ruled that they are not illegal. Maria chose the name TUC for her new endeavor when she came across this acronym in a pilot's handbook. TUC stands for Time of Useful Consciousness. "First of all I love those three words. Time is very magical to me -- how things unfold in time; and Useful, my grandmother always used to say, Do something useful with your life! And consciousness, I still don't know what that is, but if it's awakened it can move us to make a huge difference in our lives. "TUC means the time between oxygen deficiency and losing consciousness. I thought since I was going to fly, this aeronautical term was perfect! It's really a metaphor for our time. If you awaken in time, you can help. Somebody found a Lakota proverb that also seemed appropriate. 'If we're not careful, we'll end up where we're headed.'" For the last seven years Gilardin has focused on global trade, economics, and democracy with programs showcasing thinkers such as Michael Parenti, Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader, and Jeremy Rifkin. It was Helen Caldicott who called her attention to the significance of the GATT and NAFTA treaties in one of her famous asides. "You better watch that, she told me. Corporations are going to have more power than governments!" The first four tapes about the GATT were produced on the ranch. "I had to wait until the jays and the squirrels were asleep! I sent out the first to 120 stations with a bay leaf on each one and a note saying that if you want the second tape, please send $9. Sixty-two stations wrote back! That was the beginning of TUC -- coming onto the radio scene with a topic no one had heard of. "I tend to be very faithful to people and issues so I haven't abandoned this topic. I did some environmental programming as well, because it was so clear that the impact of the WTO was that the environment would get trashed in the process and it needed a voice. "I wrote a grant for an RV to travel in. I asked environmental friends to give me locations of environmental decisions outside the city. I was given a list and as it turns out the most terrible environmental disasters are on or near Indian land. "My friend Govinda and I carried the micropower radio station. We went about this very slowly because we were strangers. "On Buckthorn Mountain there was a coalition of native people, hippies, and others trying to prevent gold mining. On Fort Belknapp Reservation, there was mine drainage that poisoned the waterways. On Spokane Reservation, a uranium mill named Newmont created a shell, Dawn Mill and Mine, so that they could claim they are not responsible for the clean up. This is a disaster site of epic proportions, where the third richest gold company in the world is refusing to pay for clean up! They are planning to bring more toxic waste into an already leaking mill site and create a dump there, which by the way would make them another $100 million because they would get paid for storing it. "On Big Mountain, where the Dineh live, it's about coal. Peabody Coal has divided the Hopi and the Dine and claimed that if there were a fence between them, there would be peace. Anybody looking at the area can tell that the wars that supposedly took place here never really happened because there are only a few people, not enough for a war… The Dineh who remain on the wrong side of the fence are now being forcibly evicted to the "New Lands" &endash; the site of a uranium spill. The Hopi Tribal Council are very interwoven with the board of Peabody Coal and they are willing to sell as much coal as Peabody wants, deriving a small revenue from it. "The Dineh don't speak English because they are mostly elders. It was like moving back in time. They live in hogans that have been carbon dated back three several thousand years. They live off sheep herding. They live a life nobody here would even dream of living, without telephone, without electricity or running water. "The underground aquifer is being drawn down to make the coal slurry, at a mind-boggling rate, so their wells go dry, they have to use expensive gasoline to go to bring in water. It's the hardest possible life. People think, wouldn't anybody that gets offered a nice apartment in Flagstaff, wouldn't they love to do that? "They don't. "They are so deeply rooted to that land. I've never seen that anywhere. I was present when they sent a UN rapporteur to investigate whether the practice of their religion in another place would be a violation of their rights. "They had to disclose their deepest feelings. I taped this. What you feel when you hear it is that every juniper tree, every rock, every kernel of sand, the wind that blows over those plains, the views of the sacred mountains, everything that's imagined to be inside the earth, is sacred, and for them, life without that would be no life. "The rapporteur left after three hours because he was on a schedule. We kept taking their testimony. They understood that if they weren't able to convince anybody they would be relocated. "So that was a heavy day. And I thought, here we're reading books about such peoples, who have this kind of connection, who have long become extinct, or we're making journeys across the world to Africa or Bali, and here we have it within our reach, and we are silent witnesses to their relocation. How can this still be, after what we've done to the Indians? "And what an opportunity for us to really learn something. We helped them gather wood. There are a group of supporters who come every year on Thanksgiving as an apology. We helped them to gather the wood. Since the fences are now up, you have to travel far. They gave us instructions. You never take a living tree and you never take a tree that's been hit by lightning. "Can you imagine being freezing cold in winter and having no tree that is dead, and freezing, rather than take a living tree? What an incredible message for all of us."
Maria Gilardin has been covering the GATT Treaty since its inception. Read her observations on the GATT, the WTO and what effect they are having on global democracy. Micro radio stations are threatened! Read about pending legislation.
You may visit the TUC
website at www.tucradio.org. Some of Maria's tapes
may be downloaded free or downstreamed at
www.radio4all.org. For a copy of the TUC catalog and a schedule of upcoming TUC broadcasts, write to TUC Radio, Box 410009, San Francisco, 94141, call (415) 861-6962, or E-mail tuc@tucradio.org. |
