From Maggie Zhou, MA delegate to GPUS, to the peace contingent gathering for the 10/2/10 One Nation Working Together march in Washington, D.C.

Brothers and Sisters,

We are here today because we are angry at the multitude of problems that our government is responsible for, the many ways the system has failed us, and we recognize the root causes of all these problems are the same, and therefore they require common solutions.

Many of us here are peace activists.  For nine years, we have been trying to stop the ongoing US wars for oil and for the expansion of the military-industrial complex.  In fact, the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan are epicenters of the larger war we’re waging against Mother Earth & her children.  It is where our death-dealing empire bombs the planet, drill her, bleed her for her oil, poison her with radioactivity, and rape her out of the life she had, the innocent lives of men, women and children, and the fertile soils that once was the food basket of the Middle East.

But, there are many other epicenters in this larger war against Mother Earth.  A massive hemorrhage was just inflicted in the Gulf of Mexico by one of the worst perpetrators in this war.  Mountain Top Removal coal mining has been denuding, defacing & poisoning the beautiful mountain ranges and streams of Appalachia and the entire coal country.  Hydraulic fracturing, or hydrofracking, for “natural gas” extraction, has been poisoning our groundwater, and consequently food production, anywhere it touched, and it’s taking over America with a vengeance.  Looking around the globe, the gazillion mines where we humans extract the insides of Mother Earth & poison her outside with it, the many shopping malls and pavements and parking lots we built in place of her life-giving forests and grasslands, the many dams we built that chokes the life out of her ecosystems, the diversion of her rivers & streams & precious groundwater reservoirs for monoculture, chemical-laiden farming operations, and now devastatingly, the crazed worldwide expansion of “energy crops” for biofuel, biomass & biochar production…