Robert Redford has come under fire from the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). In what seems like a bizarre veering off-mandate for a movie star and the civil rights group who once coordinated the Washington march led by Martin Luther King Jr, they’ve come to verbal blows over oil and gas drilling.
Roy Innis, national chairman of CORE said, “If Robert Redford succeeds in blocking natural gas production in Utah, it’s going to hurt a lot of people on the other end of the pipeline—especially low-income families who are struggling to pay their heating bills.” And apparently, the organisation is planning to protest against Redford at his own Sundance Festival.
Has CORE sold out to gas and oil?
Some critics say that CORE has moved away from its key activity because it is funded by the oil and gas industry: Exxon has provided over $250,000 to the group, but CORE says this is part of their role – or as their website says, “Under the banner of TRUTH! LOGIC! & COURAGE!, CORE continues to promote harmony and healing in all aspects of society; calling the shots straight—even when it hurts—and confronting the haters, race-baiters and racial racketeers bent on keeping us apart”
Redford is equally outspoken. Having objected to the ‘fire sale’ of gas and oil permits in Utah, he said that drilling on the outskirts of national parks was wrong because “One rig one day is too much for that beautiful country” and not content with that, he went on to characterise the lease auction by the Bush government as “morally criminal”.
What do the poor need: campaigns or solar power?
While CORE claims that allowing the drilling will help damp down spiralling energy prices for the poorest in America, it’s a short-sighted appeal to the pocketbook. Continuing to subsidise high-cost, high-polluting, potentially exhaustible domestic energy doesn’t seem like a good way to help vulnerable groups in society to establish a better life. Even if, as CORE claims, some families are spending half their income on energy, the answer seems more likely to be found in providing alternative forms of cheap energy, not alternative stores of an already expensive one.
Utah canyon image courtesy of Alaskan Dude at Flickr under a creative commons licence
Yes, CORE has sold out. It is not the civil rights organization that we came to expect leading creative change in the 1960s, any more. CORE is not taken seriously by other, more active civil rights organizations. CORE sponsored the astonishingly inaccurate book, “Eco Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death,” which alleges (falsely) that the U.S. ban on spraying DDT on cotton crops somehow caused an increase in malaria in Africa, thereby making Rachel Carson a mass murderer (actually, malaria deaths have declined, but don’t confuse them with the facts).
I have no small experience being on the opposite side of the table from Robert Redford over the years, and I must say that if Redford proposes it, he’s probably right; and if the current CORE opposes Redford, he’s right and CORE is wrong.
The descent of CORE into irrelevancy and pseudo-science is truly a tragedy.