AMY GOODMAN: Oscar-nominated actor James Cromwell
is reporting to jail at 4:00 p.m. Eastern
time today in upstate New York, after he was
sentenced to a week behind bars for taking
part in a nonviolent protest against a natural
gas-fired power plant.
Cromwell says he’ll also launch a hunger
strike.
He’s one of six activists arrested for blocking
traffic at the sit-in outside the construction
site of the 650-megawatt plant in Wawayanda,
New York, upstate, December 2015.
The activists say the plant would promote
natural gas fracking in neighboring states
and contribute to climate change.
James Cromwell is well known for his roles
in some 50 Hollywood films, nominated for
an Oscar in Babe, as well as a number of TV
series, including Six Feet Under.
I spoke to him Thursday along with one of
his co-defendants who’s going to jail today,
as well, Pramilla Malick, founder of Protect
Orange County, a community group leading the
opposition to the fracked gas power plant.
She ran in 2016 for New York state Senate.
I began by asking James Cromwell about why
he’s going to jail today.
JAMES CROMWELL: We are, all of us, engaged
in a struggle, not to protect a way of life,
but to protect life itself.
Our institutions are bankrupt.
Our leaders are complicit.
And the public is basically disillusioned
and disenchanted with the entire process.
There is a direct connection between the plant
in Minisink—
AMY GOODMAN: Where is Minisink?
JAMES CROMWELL: In Wawayanda.
It’s in upstate New York.
They call it upstate.
It’s not too far above the New Jersey border.
Between that plant and the Middle East.
We’re at war not only with Iraq and Syria
and Afghanistan and Yemen.
We’re at war with Dimock, Pennsylvania,
where the gas comes from, with Wawayanda,
that uses the gas, with Seneca Lake, where
it was to be stored, and with Standing Rock.
And it is time, actually, to name the disease.
Most people can’t put their finger on the
cause of it, but everybody perceives the threat.
Capitalism is a cancer.
And the only way to defeat this cancer is
to completely, radically transform our way
of living and our way of thinking about ourselves.
And I call that radical transformation revolutionary.
So this is the revolution.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, explain what the link
is.
Capitalism, you say, is the cause of what’s
happening, the U.S. is doing, in the Middle
East, and what is happening in upstate New
York and Standing Rock and so on.
JAMES CROMWELL: This plant is built by a company
whose only interest is to create profit.
There is no need for the electricity, and
the way the energy is produced is inimicable
to life in the community.
And now, that is a far-reaching community,
because it will have an effect even on the
people of New York.
All the ultrafine particulate matter that
comes out of these smokestacks ultimately
winds up in New York City.
So everybody is affected.
Now, that is done because we are trying to
have energy independence.
That energy we’re trying to be independent
from was the gas and oil that came from the
Middle East.
When the Middle East began to move towards
more democratic governments, the United states
government and other governments, Britain,
France, all the colonial powers, said, "No,
no, no.
You’re not moving toward democracy, because
if you move towards democracy, you threaten
our access to your energy."
And so, they corrupted, in their own nefarious
ways.
And ultimately, that led to the—we created
ISIS.
We, the Americans, created ISIS, in order
to battle something else—the same mistake
we made with the mujahideen in Afghanistan.
And that is to protect our vested interests.
If you look at Mr. Tillerson, Mr. Tillerson
is sitting on half a trillion dollars’ worth
of deals with the Russians.
And so, he has—
AMY GOODMAN: When he was CEO of ExxonMobil.
JAMES CROMWELL: When he was CEO, which is
still pending.
It can still affect his company.
He can affect his company, as soon as the
ban is lifted.
So, I’m saying there is connection, when
you talk about energy.
Energy is needed all over the world and is
produced in only certain places.
We now produce energy by blowing up the earth
and getting trapped methane gas, which is
inimicable to health.
And we ship that through pipes.
The main purpose of it, however, is not to
power the power plant.
It is to send to Canada to liquefy, where
they can make six times more profit from the
sale of that gas than they can in the United
States.
AMY GOODMAN: So, let me ask you what happened
almost exactly two years ago.
I mean, you’re going to jail now, but the
action you engaged in was June 2015.
Tell us where you went and what you did.
JAMES CROMWELL: We have been having a protest
to picket in front of this plant that has
been—is being built for the last two-and-a-half
years.
And it got to the point—a lot of people
who pass honk their horns in support, but
nothing happened.
We tried—
AMY GOODMAN: And this is a plant—
JAMES CROMWELL: It is a plant, a fracked gas-powered
power plant, which means they import the gas
from Pennsylvania.
AMY GOODMAN: And they are?
JAMES CROMWELL: Well, that’s—this is the—
AMY GOODMAN: The company is?
JAMES CROMWELL: Competitive Power Ventures
is building the plant.
AMY GOODMAN: CPV.
JAMES CROMWELL: But there is Millennium Pipeline,
which Pramilla knows a great deal more about,
who owns this.
It is actually owned by three large corporations:
Mitsubishi, GE and Credit Suisse.
Now, what would those three large multinationals
be interested in this plant, medium-sized
plant, although devastating?
What they’re basically interested, it is
the precursor of 300 similar plants.
If this plant is built and gets online, there
is no justification for not building more
of these plants.
We believe this one needs to be stopped, if
you want to stop the entire the buildout of
the hydrofracking infrastructure and its effect
on our environment.
AMY GOODMAN: So what did you do?
JAMES CROMWELL: We basically came up with
an idea to chain ourselves together.
We chained ourselves together with bicycle
locks, and we blocked the entrance to the
plant for about—according to the prosecution,
about 27 minutes.
And the judge and the prosecution seemed to
imply that it made absolutely no difference
to what happened with this plant.
But it does make a difference.
What we’re trying to get out is the message
that this is one instance, but it is happening
all around this country and all around the
world.
They’re fighting it in England.
They’re fighting it all over the world.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Pramilla, can you talk
about what this plant is, how you were involved
in the protests, what this plant is designed
to do and what you think the public health
impacts would be, if it is built?
PRAMILLA MALICK: So, this is a 650-megawatt
fracked gas power plant.
It will depend on a hundred to 150 fracking
wells per year.
So we know that, in Pennsylvania, there’s—infant
mortality rates are increasing.
Cancer rates are increasing.
Aquifers are getting contaminated.
But along with that, the health impacts travel
all along the infrastructure network.
So I live near a compressor station, and we
have already documented health impacts in
my community, in Minisink, of nosebleeds,
headaches, rashes, neurological symptoms.
AMY GOODMAN: And this is as a result of?
PRAMILLA MALICK: Exposure to a fracked gas
compressor station, the Minisink compressor
station.
And this was documented by a team of scientists.
So, you know, the technology is relatively
new, and people are just beginning—scientists
are racing to try to understand what’s happening.
But front-line communities, like ours, we
feel it.
We see it.
We know that there’s a health impact.
And—
AMY GOODMAN: And so, how did you get involved
with this June 2015 protest, and what exactly
did you do?
PRAMILLA MALICK: Well, I also locked myself
down, with James Cromwell and with Madeline
Shaw.
AMY GOODMAN: And Madeline Shaw is?
PRAMILLA MALICK: She is an elderly person
who lives in the community.
She’s very worried because she feels she’s
going to have to leave the home that she lived
in since 1949, if this plant is built.
AMY GOODMAN: James mentioned Seneca Lake.
Now, wasn’t there a recent victory of environmentalists
who stopped the storage facility there?
PRAMILLA MALICK: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: And how does this relate to what
you’re trying to stop?
PRAMILLA MALICK: Well, they were in a very
similar position as we were, in the sense
that they engaged the regulatory process,
lobbied, litigated, appealed to all of their
elected officials, and they didn’t get anywhere.
And so they began engaging in civil disobedience.
And I think that created enough pressure on
the company that the company eventually withdrew
their application for that storage facility.
But when you approve a 650-megawatt fracked
gas power plant—and I remind people that
this is—this was approved by the state of
New York, by our own Governor Cuomo, who banned
fracking, citing adverse health impacts, yet
approved this plant that will induce and depend
on thousands of new fracking wells over its
lifetime.
We do not need this power plant at all.
But it’s being built anyway.
And, you know, it’s a billion-dollar project.
But it will cost us, according to the scientists—and
this is why we engaged in civil disobedience,
and we had a trial in which we were able to
bring scientists to testify.
It will cost society $940 million per year
in healthcare costs and infrastructure costs
and other economic costs.
And it will increase our state’s greenhouse
gas emissions by in excess of 10 percent for
the entire power sector of the state of New
York.
AMY GOODMAN: James Cromwell, you could have
just paid a fine, but you’re choosing to
go to jail.
How long will you go to jail for?
And why are you doing this?
JAMES CROMWELL: We were sentenced for seven
days.
It’s up to the discretion of the facility
as to how long we serve.
Sometimes you get off for good behavior.
I have no idea.
I’m preparing for seven days.
The reason I did it was, I can’t justify
the injustice of what I think was a completely
wrongheaded and simplistic judgment.
And so, I think going to jail is a statement
about how we have to lift our game.
It’s no more good enough just to picket
and to petition, because nobody is listening.
The way people get the message out is you
do an act of civil disobedience.
It’s what Tim DeChristopher did, many—all
the people in Standing Rock.
That was the purpose of Standing Rock.
The clarity of Standing Rock was the elders—because
I was there—the elders saying, "This is
a prayer camp."
In other words, it comes from our inner spirit.
We have to change this inner spirit.
We have to change our relationship both to
the planet and to the people who live on this
planet, including the people who are opposing
us.
So, I believe that, in our small way, that’s
the statement that we are making.
This is the time to up the game.
This is the time to address the basic cause
of our disease.
AMY GOODMAN: I also wanted to ask you about
your comment about people having trouble naming
capitalism as a cancer.
JAMES CROMWELL: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: It sounds like an Edward Abbey
quote: "Growth for the sake of growth is the
ideology of a cancer cell."
JAMES CROMWELL: Correct.
AMY GOODMAN: Through your environmentalism,
you’re taking on capitalism.
JAMES CROMWELL: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: Not all environmentalists do.
Can you comment on that?
JAMES CROMWELL: I can’t speak for all environmentalists.
I think all issues—all the things that bedevil
us basically start it.
We are a death-oriented culture, by "death"
meaning that what is put—what is primary—what
is the language with which we speak is the
language of the market.
Everything is for sale.
Everything is commodified.
And what that does is—and then, of course,
you have to create the greatest amount of
profit, which means you have to suppress labor.
You have to suppress the cost of your natural
materials.
You have to control your areas of influence,
so that China doesn’t wind up with all Iran’s
or Iraq’s oil.
And so, right away, this kind of thinking
leads to the kind of confrontations that we
experience everywhere.
If we look at a more—if we accept that we
are—our addiction to this energy, our addiction
to our way of life, what we take for granted
in this country, is in some way—we are responsible.
If we accept that responsibility, which is
not the same as blame—if we accept that
responsibility, then we can change this by
recognizing what we have to change is the
way we relate to the natural world, to other
sentient beings, to the planet.
We look at it now as a trough that we can—we
can rape and accumulate.
And it is not so.
There is a balance to nature, and we have
violated that balance.
And that’s what shows in Antarctica today.
It shows all over the world.
The planet is re-establishing the balance
at our cost.
AMY GOODMAN: You talk about commodification.
You come from an industry, from Hollywood—
JAMES CROMWELL: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: —that certainly specializes
in that.
JAMES CROMWELL: Correct.
AMY GOODMAN: And I was wondering, as I’m
sure while you’re in jail you’ll be reflecting
on your life, if you could reflect on your
career here.
When I asked you about Babe, which you were
nominated for an Oscar for, you said it was
much more than just about a pig.
You say that about a lot of things: It’s
much more than just about this particular
thing.
So, talk about what you’ve learned through
your craft, through your artistry, acting,
what you regret, what you’re proud of.
JAMES CROMWELL: I’ve been very fortunate
to be a middle-class character actor, sort
of ungainly.
I came into the game of Hollywood fairly late
in my career.
I had worked in the theater.
I had my own theater.
I always wanted to direct.
I sort of became an actor by default, because
I couldn’t get jobs as a director.
I went to Hollywood.
I luckily got the first television show I
auditioned for, which was All in the Family.
I got the first movie I auditioned for, which
was Neil Simon’s Murder by Death.
I got my first commercial, and almost my last
commercial, because I can’t sell product
very well.
I seem to always flub the line.
So I’m the guy who goes, "Huh?"
And that’s it.
That’s all I basically can do.
But I have been very fortunate also in the
material that has come my way.
I don’t get to pick and choose.
I’m not an A-lister.
So, the fact that I have gotten to do L.A.
Confidential and Babe and The Artist and The
Queen and little films like, well, Education
of Little Tree and Still Mine, which I think
are really important films—what we do as
artists is hold the mirror up to nature—that’s
what Shakespeare said—"to show virtue her
own feature, scorn her own image, and the
very age and body of the time his form and
pressure."
Now, it has been corrupted by a market sensibility,
which does not look at innovation, only looks
at repeating what has been successful before,
and lowering the purpose of what they’re
doing to appeal to 10-year-olds, who will
bring their parents and come back repeatedly.
And so, what you have, fewer and fewer picture
addressing the issues that bedevil us.
I think we need to change that.
There need to be more independent films.
I hope to be part of that.
And I have no regrets.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: OK, I want to go back to what
we were speaking of earlier and what you mentioned—the
environment and climate change—to ask you
about President Trump’s position on this.
Here, he’s announcing that he will withdraw
the U.S. from the landmark Paris climate accord
that was signed by nearly 200 nations in 2015.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: As of today, the United
States will cease all implementation of the
nonbinding Paris accord and the draconian
financial and economic burdens the agreement
imposes on our country.
This includes ending the implementation of
the nationally determined contribution and,
very importantly, the Green Climate Fund,
which is costing the United States a vast
fortune.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So that’s Donald Trump announcing
that he intends to withdraw the U.S. from
the Paris climate accord.
So, James, could you comment on that?
And also, earlier, you spoke of the U.S.,
and, no doubt, now other nations, too, having
to change their way of life or relationship
to the environment in order to reverse the
trends of the last several decades.
In 1992, in the—at the Rio Summit, Earth
Summit, at that time, President George Bush
Sr. had said in negotiations that the American
way of life is not up for negotiation.
So, your comments?
JAMES CROMWELL: Gee, that’s a big one.
First of all, to me, the importance of the
Paris accords were that they were nonbinding.
So, basically, you had—you had an agreement
between nations—now, many of those nations’,
hundreds of those nations’ survival depend
on the industrial nations, the G20, actually
living up to their commitment try to reduce
greenhouse gases and try to address what is
happening to our climate.
But they—the idea of keeping it below 1.5
is completely voluntary.
And I don’t believe that those countries
are doing very much.
Now, some are.
Germany is.
Now Canada.
But I think, for the—we are—we have a
behemoth, which has a certain amount of inertia,
movement.
And that is to develop these resources and
to extract as much money until, obviously,
they hit it, come up against the wall of survival,
and then we’ll just throw up our hands and
come up with another technology.
I don’t think this is workable.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to you on a week
of—well, in the cable networks, it’s all
breaking news, breaking news, flashes across
the screen, every few minutes.
Well, this week is another kind of breaking
news.
It’s ice-breaking news.
And it’s the time of Antarctica, an iceberg
breaking off the size of the state of Delaware.
At the same time, in California, there are
scores of fires that are leading to thousands
of residents having to leave their homes.
Record-breaking temperatures in Arizona—in
Phoenix, it’s like 110 degrees.
Planes are being stopped from going because
of the heat.
Pramilla, I was wondering if you could talk
about what motivated you to get involved with
this action that leads to you going to jail.
PRAMILLA MALICK: Well, ultimately, I’m a
mom.
And so, I’m concerned about my children,
their health and safety.
But when you become a mom, there’s a kind
of maternal mandate that makes you really
concerned about all children everywhere.
And so, I don’t believe—I think our children
deserve better.
They don’t deserve this type of cataclysmic
future of misery and hardship and food scarcity
and, you know, flooding and ecosystems collapsing.
And that’s what we have happening.
It’s manifesting on the bodies of our children
right now in Minisink.
It is manifesting on the body of Earth.
And, you know, global methane concentrations
have increased 60 percent just in the last
decade.
Scientists believe that half of that is coming
from North America entirely due to fracking.
This is what the scientists who came to our
trial testified to.
And he also—Dr. Robert Howarth also testified
that we are expected to cross 2 degrees in
six to eight years.
There’s a new article in Nature—
AMY GOODMAN: Two degrees Celsius.
PRAMILLA MALICK: Yes, warming.
And there’s a new article in Nature that
says, actually, it might be three years.
And so, we’re accelerating beyond what climate
scientists are predicting and modeling.
And this is anthropogenic.
This is because of human behavior.
There’s no mystery about it.
So the harm is imminent.
The harm is more than imminent: It’s present.
And the judge who ruled against us ruled that
we did not prove imminence, which is absurd
when you’re talking about 10,000 years of
irreversible climate events.
Two years is nothing.
I mean, I think he was basically saying, "Well,
you should have blocked the entranceway, you
know, when it’s about to—you know, when
they’re about to switch the light on that
facility."
AMY GOODMAN: Because it hasn’t opened yet.
PRAMILLA MALICK: It hasn’t opened.
And this is the whole thing.
We actually can stop this.
There’s one permit left.
The company put the cart before the horse.
They don’t have the permit for the lateral
pipeline.
And we are calling on everybody to demand
of our governor, Governor Cuomo, to be a real
climate leader and reject the permit for that
last pipeline, the lateral pipeline, and to
pull the plug on this plant.
We want him to halt construction.
And certainly, because of the corruption charges,
there’s enough reason to halt construction
immediately.
You know, pick a reason: corruption, climate
change, health impacts.
There are hundreds of reasons.
But he needs to step up.
It’s the obligation of public officials
to protect public health and safety and to
safeguard our children’s future.
It’s the public trust.
And we believe that the policies right now
are violating that public trust.
And, you know, this project is really a failure,
colossal failure, of public policy.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: James, I want to go back to
what you were saying earlier, the question
of what the U.S. position was in 1992, what
I’d mentioned, the—George Bush Sr. saying
that the American way of life is not up for
negotiation.
And then, more than 20 years later, almost
30 years later, Obama’s administration signing
on to this Paris climate accord, which, as
you said, is nonbinding, but nevertheless.
Do you think that that marks a shift in American
policy, in U.S. government policy, on the
issue of climate change?
JAMES CROMWELL: I think what Trump has done
represents the furthest advance of our intransigence
to deal with the issue of changing our lifestyle.
We are in a—we have this addiction to fossil
fuels and to the extraction industry and to
the profit to be made from those industries.
And I believe that what Trump has done, actually,
is gotten the majority of people now to realize
that if they want to address this, everybody
around this country and around the world is
going to have to do the same thing that we
did.
Trump has awoken in us a sense of the empowerment
of the public, where the power resides.
It resides in we, the people.
So it doesn’t matter what Mr. Bush says
is non-negotiable.
It is what we determine, as people, the kind
of life we want to lead and the policies that
have to be put into effect to protect and
guarantee that way of life for our children
and our children’s children, for the seventh
generation.
All the things that we know to be true, they
now—so we’re now at loggerheads.
We’re right at the tipping point between
this destructive, death-oriented culture and
the awakening in all of us of a sense of empowerment
and enlightenment.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both for
being with us.
Oscar-nominated actor James Cromwell and Pramilla
Malick head to jail on Friday, after they
were sentenced to a week behind bars for taking
part in a nonviolent protest against a natural
gas-fired power plant.
Six people were arrested for blocking traffic
at a sit-in outside the construction site
of the 650-megawatt plant in Wawayanda, New
York, in December of 2015.
The activists say the plant will promote natural
gas fracking.
It is the largest fracked gas power plant
in New York state, if in fact it goes online.
I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.
