Lily Point… the heart of the Salish Sea, and the jewel of pre-industrialized lands, is calling out to the people of the Salish Sea; to join together in reverence for the land and to raise awareness of natural rights, to respect all wildlife and the pristine web of life that Lily Point represents. – Alex Stratford

The following interview explores the Lily Point Calling Campaign, its origins, and how it ties into todays state of the environment. The song Lily Point Calling is available on iTunes.

Q: How did the Lily Point Calling campaign get started?

ALEX: I started this blog back in July to somehow try to relate the long journey and transformation that Lily Point has gone through over the last 155 years. It’s a journey that is as complex and difficult to relate to as it is to understand in just a quick explanation, so this interview was conducted to try and lay out the talking points.

Lily Point is both a crossroad and an intersection of time, culture, nature, colonialism, exploitation, industrialization, western history, and indigenous subjugation. What makes Lily Point different from most of the region is that it has been exposed to all of these things, and yet somehow has managed to retain a semblance of its natural state and has slowly moved towards recovery from the ravages of capitalism.

I needed something to get the campaign started so I wrote new lyrics to the Clash’s hit song London Calling, written by Joe Strummer. The title came from the BBC World Service’s radio station identification: “This is London calling.” So I got the idea to reverse the message and the dynamics of our media, from the media center to the “far away towns,” and instead have a far away, isolated, little known place like Lily Point call out to the world.

Q: London Calling came out of the end of the disco era and was seen as a return to the socially conscious songs that dominated the 60’s?

ALEX: The lyrics to London Calling dealt with environmental, unemployment, racial, and drug related issues that really railed against the status quo forces that created and perpetuated them at the time. So now it’s an isolated geographical place calling out to the world for help.

Q: How did you approach writing Lily Point Calling?

ALEX: I had no experience writing songs or marketing them… I didn’t know how to start, so I thought to just throw it out there and see what grows. To write about the things that seem to be important, but at the same time are not always compatible with money interests.

Q: So you were inspired by Lily Point?

Alex: Yeah, I mean, when I realized what Lily Point used to be, and how the eagles have come back after being gone for decades, it was uplifting.  When you get inspired by something, you want to take what is inside and speak out.  I just decided to put myself out there, knowing I would take my hits, but keeping my passion alive, and trying to live up to the idea of finding a way to reconnect to what we’ve lost. We need to find a new way forward, but can’t really go there until we come to terms with where we’ve been. We once lived on this earth in harmony. Most people don’t even know what that means. I didn’t even know that eagles lived there until they came back, and so I had to find out where they went and why, and so that opened my eyes to the true history of the land, and I was inspired by what it used to be, and so now Lily Point is the source of inspiration for me, the inspiration I found inside myself that was unlocked through learning about the eagles that came back to live there. If the eagles could find the inspiration in me, then perhaps I can help others find the inspiration inside themselves.

Q: Why is London Calling still relevant?

Alex: London Calling is an apocalyptic song, detailing the many ways the world could end, including the coming of the ice age, starvation, and war. It was the song that best defined The Clash, who were known for lashing out against injustice and rebelling against the establishment. Clash singer Joe Strummer was a news junkie, and many of the images of doom in the lyrics came from news reports he read. So today we’ve come out of the Reagan/Bush era, where all those warnings from the 70’s were deep-sixed, to now when we’re starting to realize that our problems have resurfaced  and have come back bigger and more dire then ever before. So here I was reading about all this every day on the internet and slowly realizing that most of us are not seeing the true costs of industrialization and when we do, we’re back to rebelling against the established trends.

Q: In your version of the song, you say “phony credit mania has bitten the dust”, how does that parallel the phony Beatle mania that Strummer wrote about?

Alex: As for “phony Beatle mania,” the line before it is “don’t look to us,” which is saying don’t put the Clash on a pedestal in the way that the Beatles had been. The Clash were being treated as some kind of “spokesmen for a generation”, like the record industry tries to do to keep sales going. So Strummer was trying to say you can’t put us on that same pedestal anymore because it no longer exists. The housing market was also put on a pedestal and it became the focal point of our economy.  The cost of a home just kept going up and up, and the only way to keep new houses being built was to ease the credit restrictions for buying a home. Coupled with the rise of Home Depot and Lowes, etc., and the marketing of  model homes, a mentality developed that started all kinds of trends in upgrading your homes with 20,000 dollar bathrooms and 50,000 dollar kitchens, and on and on. Everyone was using their homes like cash machines through the Refi craze, and so now I’m trying to say that all those things don’t exist anymore, and in effect, have been replaced with the reality of defaults and foreclosures. It’s a fact that we are only 5% of the world’s population but use 20% of the energy. So we should worry more about emissions from our homes, instead of trends and styles.

Q: Strummer also says “Now war is declared, and battle come down.” How have you taken this battle to mean against nature?

Alex: When Strummer says “London Calling to the far away towns” it is because Germany was constantly bombing London, and Britain had to call on “far away towns” for help. Well, again, things are reversed as the environment is in effect being bombed in far away towns, and the benefactors of the destruction of the environment are in the big cities, and so Lily Point Calling is asking the urban world to come out of denial about the effects of supporting the big cities.

Q: So who is the underground you are talking about?

Alex: When Strummer says “London Calling to the underworld, come out of the cupboards, you boys and girls” he is talking about the people of London who went underground in the subway to get away from the bombings, and people would put their little “boys and girls” in the subway. But today we’re not hiding in subways, the truth is being edited and often obscured by the advertiser controlled media, and spinning it to fool the boys and girls as to what is really going on. So again, things are reversed and it’s the underground media that comes out on the internet that is bringing us “out of the cupboards.”

Q: “London Calling, at the top of the dial, and after all this, won’t you give me a smile?” is saying that doomsday is all over the news, that you can’t escape it, You seem to counter that?

Alex: Well, when I say “Harmony with nature, an innocent child”, I’m trying to point out that even though the news is bad and things look desperate, that we can still heal the damage we’ve done. We can still return to a more harmonious lifestyle. We can learn to listen to the call of the wild and respect its right to exist. I wanted to convey that we can still take children to experience the innocence of nature. Q: What do you mean when you say “our Ancestors speak and all of it is true.”? Alex: Native American elders talked about these times many generations ago. They foresaw us fighting over the last drop of water and drowning in our own sewage. It didn’t take any great visionary to see the way we lived and what it would lead too. There have been many voices talking about our population growth and how it needs to be addressed. Yet nothing changes in the political debate; instead we get Octomom.

Q: So is that what you are talking about when you say “with no voice it seems, except for the one that the ancients sing.”?

Alex: That has more to do with nature itself having no voice, that we are quickly willing to destroy nature for profits without really understanding that we disabled the ecosystem from functioning and supporting future generations of life. So all we have left is native wisdom, which is rooted in understanding nature and how to respect all life. Natives understand that a forest is a community of plants and animals. When a forest is clear cut, it removes all the trees and all the plants and animals that live in and around the trees. We go back in and just plant the big trees for future timber sales, and don’t restore the community of life that existed there. We built damns that totally cut off the salmon from reaching their spawning grounds. Now we’re starting to remove damns to enable the fish to spawn again. So nature having no voice is simply us not caring about the ends not justifying the means.

Q: The chorus ends with “Lily Point’s drowning, and I’ll live there forever.” how did you come up with this line?

Alex: Lily Point is drowning from the effects of 155 years of development since the U.S. government took over the territory. The water is polluted, the salmon runs are at less then 10% of historic levels, and the forest has been cut back to just a few hundred acres, but there still remains a spirit there, and even though I don’t live there, there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about it. I’m spiritually connected to Lily Point mainly because I’ve gone there every year of my life and it has always been special to me. There are many special places and everyone has their own, so Lily Point Calling is about everyone standing up and making sure that we leave special places in their natural state to be experienced for generations to come

Q: Lily Point Calling ends with, “its all about the land, the land, the land.”

ALEX: Lily Point is calling for help from the rest of the world, because of aforesaid apocalypse. 80% of the land is privately owned in the Salish Sea, and with 2,500 miles of coastline, protecting the land that is undeveloped, and restoring the land that has been over developed is really the only way to have a future that will sustain the coming generations.

The entire thing gets swallowed up in politics and jobs and money. London Calling’s had “ring of the truncheon thing.” A truncheon is an old-fashioned term for a billy club, a weapon carried by police officers in London. Well, we have seen a lot of demonstrations and a lot of use of billy clubs and riot police to try to silence those who are tired of everything being about money and profits.

Point Roberts and Lily Point are historic symbols of the very exploitation that has defined the Industrial Revolution. Alaska Packers came into Point Roberts and built fish traps in 1894 that at first prevented the Native nets from receiving any fish, and then in less then 20 years wiped out one of the biggest salmon runs on the planet. There were canneries built for the salmon, and a pier was built to transport the fish in and out. Then it wasn’t enough for Alaska Packers to take all the fish; they also ran the natives off at gunpoint. So the natives went to the courts to fight for the fishing rights they were granted in the Elliot Bay Treaty of 1855, and the judge ruled in the Alaska Packers’ favor.

So by 1917 Alaska Packers left Point Roberts after taking all the fish, and for the last century the salmon economy, and the farms that supported it, were done in by WWII and has never recovered from the carnage. The 60’s saw the last of the big fleets of fishing boats, mostly from Bellingham, that fished out the remaining salmon again, which had been slowly recovering from the fish traps. So the resources of Lily Point and Point Roberts were taken by outside forces until the resources were gone, and the whole community died, never to return.

This type of thing happens in many communities, so Lily Point is symbolic of the fatal flaw in our pursuit of the American Dream at all costs.

End of Alex Stratford’s interview – Part I