Just back from the trial-that-wasn’t in Wilmington, Delaware. We found out late Monday that our trial scheduled for Wednesday was moved to November 12. But almost all of us who were arrested there in late June outside the Chase Bank credit card headquarters for partially blocking the street in our rocking chairs came to Wilmington anyway, because we had things to do.

Around the original date of the trial we had planned a 6-mile walk from the bank to Pres. Biden’s house to deliver a box of letters and drawings from children asking him to protect their future, plus a rally at the end, plus a People’s Climate Tribunal the next day.
There were so many highlights it’s hard to mention them all, but here are a few:

One of the best things about the march was that Karen and John, the local members of our group, had organized youth at several high schools to join us as we passed by on the route specifically designed to include them, so at every stop our little band grew larger and more enthusiastic. It was thrilling.

Individuals joined along the way, too, who either knew about it beforehand or who just saw us and wanted to be part of our action, which called on President Biden to stop fossil fuel construction through executive action (to the extent possible) and to declare a Climate Emergency. One demand was that he cancel the cross-border permit from Canada to the U.S. for Enbridge’s Line 3 tar sands pipeline across indigenous treaty lands in Minnesota – the same permit he canceled for the Keystone XL pipeline on his first day in office. Tar sands is the dirtiest energy on the planet.

Throughout the day, our indefatigable Maury Johnson drove through the streets pulling a trailer festooned with the signs you can see in the photos below, greatly increasing our visibility.

When we arrived at the rally site, young people at the front paid rapt attention to the speakers (pictured in photo at top), who included Zulene Mayfield, who has been fighting the biggest trash incinerator in the country in her low-income, majority African American town outside Philadelphia for 30 years. She emphasized that “We are one,” not in a kumbaya kind of way, but in a realistic and practical way we must act on if we hope to save ourselves from the worst ravages of air pollution and climate chaos. Charito Calvachi-Mateyko, co-chair of the Delaware Civil Rights Commission, emphasized the terrible conditions in which many Latino workers in the U.S., especially farmworkers, must toil in an increasingly hot and polluted world.

Then four high school students spoke, the first one starting with the fact that in a year or two or three they will all be voters, and they will vote out any politician who doesn’t take the climate crisis seriously, and act on it.

You can hear their speeches here, here, here.

A Secret Service agent came to the start of the walk to talk to us, so we were on their radar. As we expected, the Secret Service outside Biden’s house declined to accept our beautiful box full of letters and drawings, so we will try to mail it to him. The young people who attempted the delivery spoke movingly of how the march, rally, and thwarted attempt had affected them.

Next day we held our People’s Climate Tribunal in front of the courthouse, “indicting” Chase Bank for being the largest funder, by far, of fossil fuel development. I took testimony on Zoom from climate scientist Tony Ingraffea, in which he explained that he started his career working for the oil and gas industry, then did a 180 when the use of horizontal gas fracking became widespread and produced leaks and venting that made it worse for the climate than coal. He publicly tied the climate crisis to funding by the big banks. You can listen to the 10-minute recording here.

Dr. Walter Tsou, with Physicians for Social Responsibility, spoke movingly of the public health impacts of burning fossil fuels. Others highlighted the local impacts of stronger storms and some remarkable successes for climate legislation in Delaware.

And one of the young people who spoke at the rally the day before spoke again, just before hustling to class for a test. Jack Thompson is 16 years old and full of righteous fury he directed at Chase Bank. “I would like to start,” he said, “by talking about how it feels to be a young person watching the people in positions of power completely betray your interests…You have the nerve to sit in your office down the street and talk down to me and my generation about how we’re too young to understand the economic factors that result in you refusing to stop funding fossil fuel projects and companies. I am sick of it. We are sick of it. You are single-handedly killing a generation…[If you don’t change] My generation will never forgive you.”

One low-light was that we tried to deliver a letter to Delaware’s senior senator, Tom Carper, calling for Congress – and him specifically – to take emergency action on the climate crisis. Through the security guard at the door, Carper’s office declined to accept the letter. Despite my lack of faith in most elected officials, I was still shocked that an elected official would so brazenly ignore a letter from his own constituents. Further on, Sen. Coon’s office accepted the letter.

The two days strengthened the bonds we have for each other even more, and built new bonds with dozens of young people, and we are looking forward to returning to Wilmington on November 12 – which, as our chief organizer Steve Norris noted, is the last day of the COP 26 climate conference in Glasgow. So we have a new slogan: If you can’t go to Glasgow, come to Wilmington!
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Our two days on the climate fighting trail were bittersweet, as they included announcements of both the final cancellation of the PennEast fracked gas pipeline and the completion of Line 3 and its start-up on October 1, sending 650,000 barrels of bitumen (diluted tar sands oil) a day from northern Alberta to Lake Superior. Oh, and the announcement that 23 species have been removed from the Endangered Species List not because they have recovered, but because they are extinct. The struggle continues.

I am 73 years old, and I’ve been focusing on the climate crisis for the past 16 years, first as a journalist when I went to New Orleans post-Katrina, now as an activist. I’ve said many times that as bad as things are, I can’t imagine how many of the young people feel whom I work with –- high school and college students –-knowing their future is at such risk. I’ve always said, “I’ll be gone before it gets too bad.”

Now I must revise my statement, and my emotions. While the climate-related disasters have been piling up for a long time, this year has been, as they say, off the charts.

To have temperatures 30 degrees above normal in the Pacific Northwest -– resulting in hundreds of deaths of humans and billions of deaths of non-humans, mostly sea creatures – is off the charts.

To have the second-biggest wildfire in California history – and only 30 percent contained as I write, heading for the record books – is off the charts.

To have deadly flooding on several continents, some in places for the first time – is off the charts.

Now comes the sixth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC) to tell us in scientific terms what we see all around us, and to present four scenarios that are increasingly terrifying – the worst of which will come to pass if we don’t act boldly, immediately.

It garnered fewer headlines, but another important document was just released: the annual report tallying up the 60 largest global banks’ investment in the fossil fuel industry. Last year’s was called “Banking on Climate Change.” This year’s is called “Banking on Climate Chaos.” Even while starting to invest more in renewable energy, many of the banks have also invested more in coal, oil and gas in all their forms than the year before, and JP Morgan Chase is leading the pack, as it has for the past four years.

Chase invested $317 billion between 2016 and 2020, 35 percent more than its closest competitor, Citi Bank. (Last year, Wells Fargo was second.) Chase and the other big banks invest a lot in Enbridge, the biggest pipeline company in the world. Enbridge, a Canadian company, is building Line 3, an oil pipeline originating in the tar sands of Alberta, across northern Minnesota, despite passionate opposition from the indigenous communities whose land and water – and sacred wild rice – it’s crossing. That includes two crossings near the headwaters of the Mississippi River. There have already been spills of drilling mud into water bodies, and other Enbridge pipeline spills, such as in the Kalamazoo River, have caused tremendous long-term damage.

In the spring a consortium of banks gave Enbridge a ludicrously named $800 million “sustainability loan” to enable it to keep building the pipeline. That’s to reward the company for being “green,” e.g., powering some of their equipment with renewable energy. Yet the end result would be sending 760,000 barrels per day of the dirtiest energy on the planet through the pipeline – the equivalent of building and operating 50 coal-fired power plants. Opponents liken it to giving a health award to tobacco companies.

I was arrested in May with a group of elders and young people protesting Line 3 (pictured above). I met and took leadership from the tough, smart, passionate indigenous women leaders there, who are suffering ever more brutal treatment as the company is annoyed that it can’t finish its project undisturbed. I visited the headwaters of the Mississippi as it flows out of Lake Itaska – a site that is normally full of tourists, but was only us when we visited at sunset. I felt the power in the place.

So, yes, I have shifted my perspective to see that so much of what I love about this Earth has already been lost, and I stand to lose much more in what’s left of my life. The IPCC report says climate change is escalating. The future looks bleak.
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One response is to “eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” Another response is to band together with others and continue fighting to make it “less worse.” There is a lot of joy down that road.

Unlike some of my fellow participants on the Walk for Our Grandchildren and Mother Earth for climate justice, from June 20-28, I did not keep a journal, although I did write a press release for each day’s event as we walked through communities fighting projects like landfills storing radioactive fracking waste, gas pipelines, LNG (liquefied “natural” gas) export terminals and the largest garbage incinerator in the country. So I will write what comes to mind, now that I’m back home.

We walked (and sometimes traveled in vans) from Scranton, PA, President Joe Biden’s birthplace, to Wilmington, DE, the city he’s called home for decades, in the state he represented in the U.S. Senate for six terms. Delaware is known as The First State, but it’s also known as the Corporate State, where big businesses like Dupont and JP Morgan Chase Bank make the rules, and where Biden has backed that system in Congress.

We were a band of about 20 elders on the through walk, joined on different days by many other folks of all ages for our public rallies. The weather varied from the 90s and humid to soaking downpours to some perfect summer days. We walked along city streets clogged with garbage trucks and along the Delaware Canal, adjacent to the beautiful Delaware River, with trees shading us and lots and lots of milkweed for the monarchs along the path.

One of the most sobering parts of the walk was meeting local people in Chester, PA – a low-income, mostly African American town – that is home to a 30-year-old “trash to energy plant” (what the industry calls it) that is in reality an incinerator, burning garbage from places as close as Philadelphia and as far away as Puerto Rico. You can hear my brief interview with the leader of the local group here.

We also spent some time at a summer camp for children in a low-income African American neighborhood in Philadelphia, which had been the site of the largest oil refinery east of the Mississippi. 

Some of the walkers are old friends, a few going back almost 50 years. Others were new acquaintances from up and down the Eastern seaboard, and what treasures they all were! One of the great things about these walks-with-a-purpose is that you get to have wonderful, revelatory, one-on-one conversations as you count out the miles. Someone I didn’t get to walk with, because he was always driving his car, pulling the porta-potty, was Maury, who was our go-to guy for everything we needed. It became a running joke, that he was like our fairy godfather. One of the best things he came up with was five rocking chairs, when we decided that our final action of the walk would be sitting in at the Chase Bank credit card headquarters in Wilmington – elders in rockers, get it?  Maury is from southern West Virginia, a region near and dear to my heart because of all my trips there to report on mountaintop removal coal mining. Now the biggest threat is from gas fracking and pipelines to transport the gas. He is a fierce opponent of the Mountain Valley pipeline, and took every opportunity to use social media with us holding signs and banners against the MVP, to spread the word.

Our routemeister Mike did an amazing job of figuring out where we would walk, where we'd travel by vans, where we'd sleep and where we'd stop along the way to meet some of the most dedicated people trying to save their communities from the ravages of industrial late-stage capitalism. There was a bit of a contradiction inherent in the Walk, since we were outsiders coming to support local struggles and they were people totally grounded in their local fights. But they all appreciated us coming to learn and we promised to spread the word about their struggles.

Another great new friend is Karen, a Wilmington resident, small business owner and local point person for the action. She is not an elder, but enthusiastically joined us in the planning and the action. She got us another five rocking chairs, so that by Monday morning, June 28, ten elders were able to completely block the entrance to the bank headquarters. My oldest friend, Steve (the initiator of the Walk), and a new friend, John – with the help of Karen’s 6-foot ladder – climbed up to the huge eagle perched, wings outstretched, in front of the building (see photo), and displayed a very large banner.

One day Ted came up with our themesong: Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World.” We amended it to “Rockin’ in the fossil-free world” and one of my favorite memories is of Ted, 71, jitterbugging to the song with his wife, Jane, who is 80. Who said elder climate activists don’t know how to have fun?!

We had amazing support and hospitality along the way, from Rabbi Daniel who welcomed us to his synagogue in Scranton with a beautiful multi-faith service, and gifted us an amazing amount of ice cream from the local dairy for a dinner treat, then gave us the run of the building for sleeping (allowing me to snag my own private room). Two women – Nancy in Easton, PA, and Dee outside of Wilmington – provided beautiful indoor and outdoor spaces, and both had swimming pools – hurrah!

Chase is by far the biggest investor in fossil fuel extraction of any U.S. bank (and in many cases it is the global leader), according to the 2020 Banking on Climate Change report, so that’s why Chase was our target. The Wilmington police refused to arrest us (no doubt following the wishes of Chase, for whom the arrest of a dozen elders on their doorstep for its climate crimes would not have been good publicity), so eventually we took our rocking chairs into the street and blocked an intersection. The police kept one turning lane open, so motorists could actually get where they needed to go, but it slowed them down. We refused to leave, so finally they arrested us.

We spent a couple of hours in jail. My cellmate, Padma, a beautiful soul and retired nurse, and I had some good conversation about our own lives and the state of our country and world. The steel bunk bed had no mattresses, so we enjoyed reading some of the things former inmates had scratched into the metal. The two biggest were “ACT UP” and “Stop AIDS,” but we also found “hope” and “om” with a smiley face in the o. Also “Dupont = greed.” Dupont is one of the largest corporations based in Delaware, and its family members have had inordinate influence over the state. We clearly weren’t the only political activists held in that little cell!

We were charged with disorderly conduct and have our next court appearances in August. We have a wonderful pro bono attorney, who we hope will be able to consolidate our cases. If we have to appear in person (instead of  Zoom), it will be a great reunion!
 

On a family visit to southern California – the first since before Covid – we tacked on a five-day trip to Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. It was almost a full day’s drive each way, through Los Angeles, past miles of brown hills and into the Central Valley, one of the most productive agricultural areas in the world, thanks to irrigation, without which it would pretty much be a desert. We drove past millions of almond trees on the way there, and thousands of acres of orange groves on the way back. About 80% of the water use in California is agricultural.

I already knew that almonds are the thirstiest of the tree nuts, which is why I pretty much stopped eating them years ago and switched to peanuts for my morning cereal, in my evening salads and for snacks. No more almond milk either, though all non-dairy milks have their issues. But seeing the trees growing in such a naturally inhospitable climate reinforced my understanding that almonds are unsustainable grown in those conditions.

Same with oranges, which are much harder to give up. Same with all the other fruits grown in the Valley. (Two-thirds of the fruits and nuts consumed in the U.S. are grown in California, mostly in the Central Valley.) On my first shopping trip upon our return, I didn’t buy any of that, trying to hold out until fruits like nectarines, peaches and apples are available locally (we kind of missed the local strawberry season). Not sure how long I can hold out.

On another sustainability front, the reason I wanted to go to the national parks was to see the giant sequoias before they were all gone, thanks to the ravages of climate change. We saw many, many burned trees – not those like in the past had sustained damage from fire but were able to withstand it – but trees that were burned to death due to the hotter wildfires that have been occurring due to the drier, hotter climate. Right after returning home in early June, we heard a story on NPR about whole groves of sequoias that had burned, comprising 10,000 trees, which is 10 percent of the total.

But luckily there were still beautiful groves to visit. Sequoia N.P. was much more crowded than King’s Canyon, which was at higher elevation. My favorite was the John Muir Grove in King’s Canyon, which was normally an easy two-mile hike from a parking lot in a campground, but when we were there the campground was closed, making it a 6-mile roundtrip hike. For that or some other reason, there was only one other person in the grove when we arrived. The trees were huge and beautiful, and they were surrounded by acres of lupine, which unfortunately had yet to bloom.

My very favorite was a circle of trees that looked like they had been planted – and perhaps they had been, millennia before, by the indigenous residents of the area. In any case, sitting inside the circle was exactly what I had come for. I could have stayed there for hours, but instead stayed for a relative few minutes, as we had to get back (or thought we had to get back) to the gift shop before it closed to get a present for our granddaughter. I breathed in and out, and lay back and took a photo of the tops of the trees as they came together above me.
I kind of doubt I will make it back there, as it was the trip of a lifetime, but very glad I made it once.

I’ve been telling friends that on a scale of 1 to 10, my trip to northern Minnesota to stand with indigenous folks fighting the Line 3 tar sands pipeline was a 20. That was for many reasons: the compatible group of elders with whom I traveled for 26 hours from MA and CT to the resistance camps; the indigenous women, 2-spirits (gender-fluid, gay and trans) and youth in the camps who are creating a new world even as they fight passionately against the extractive mentality and reality of the old world; our visit to the headwaters of the Mississippi River, which for me was a very powerful spiritual experience; our non-violent direct action for which we were arrested, spent a night in jail, and face three misdemeanors we will pursue in zoom court; and even the weather, which was cool, sunny and calm every day we were there. (If you don’t want to read the whole post, skip to the bottom for suggested actions you can take.)

We stayed at a VRBO near the Giniw Collective camp and on the first day there was a decolonizing workshop, led by several of the indigenous folks from several countries/nations. One of them defined “decolonizing” as “realizing what we actually need.” And living in harmony with nature, not “taming” and exploiting it.

The action was blocking both entrances to a man camp – the temporary housing where pipeline workers who are not local (which is most of them) stay while building the pipeline. Eleven of us locked down in three different ways, blocking the two access roads and stopping work for the day. The action was part of Awareness Week for Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women, Girls and 2-Spirits, as studies and anecdotal evidence show that violence skyrockets when these man camps are set up very near indigenous communities. According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, in cases of reported rape or sexual assault of indigenous individuals, 82% of the perpetrators were white. Other studies looked specifically at the rise in crime around man camps. Overall, indigenous people experience per capita rates of violence that are more than twice those of the U.S. population as a whole.

I was locked down with four other women elders from our affinity group, the Mayflies. Due to our concerns about hip, knee and shoulder issues, we sat in chairs, three of us locked down together through PVC pipes covered with tar and stones, yarn and duct tape, and all of us chained together with heavy gauge chain and padlocks. One of the funnest parts was when supporters began the chant, “What do we do when we’re under attack? Stand up, fight back!” and we chanted, “Sit down, fight back!”

The cops came and efficiently deconstructed our gear, but it still took them awhile. Two other groups of three people each were locked down inside much bigger things (like concrete-filled barrels), which took several hours to break apart.

The big mercy was that – for the first time in my past several arrests – we were handcuffed in front, not in back. I had worried about the cuffing because of my frozen right shoulder, and as we sat in the police van for at least 90 minutes, I was even more relieved that we were cuffed in front.

We were given orange socks, pants, t-shirt, overshirt and sweatshirt and sent to a room to strip, overseen by a woman cop. We were treated by the book, though humanely, and definitely benefited from our white (and probably elder) privilege, so who better to take action than us?

When we were told we’d all be in separate cells I was dreading the boredom to come, until they offered each of us a book from the jail library. Hallelujah! I found a novel written by a Minnesota author that looked, and was, pretty interesting: Peace Like a River. Too bad I didn’t get to finish it.

My 6’x12’ cell was clean and comfortable, which was another surprise, as usually jails are freezing. I had two long, narrow (a few inches wide) windows that looked out on a pocket park with some tall evergreens and benches. I thought about how I would feel in that cell if it didn’t have a window, and it wasn’t good.

We were arraigned the next morning and have Zoom court dates in June and are being represented by a great movement lawyer. A few dozen folks from camp greeted us upon our release, with food, coffee and hugs all around. We were really pleased that the young people not only considered our frailties, but by the end they also appreciated the decades of experience we brought with us.

Later that day our affinity group drove about an hour to the headwaters of the Mississippi, flowing out of Lake Itasca. We got there at sunset and were the only people there. You could feel the power in the spot, and the beauty was transcendant. Then we saw several places just a few miles from the headwaters where Enbridge has done preliminary work to drill under the river, posting signs that read “Sensitive wetland/water body.” Which seems like a good reason not to drill.

The next day we headed to the Welcome Water Protectors camp about two hours east, across Great River Road from the river. I interviewed several women, indigenous and non-indigenous, about their experiences fighting Line 3. On Sunday we canoed in a Mother’s Day/May Day action on the river. One of the Anishinaabe women described her vision of creating a space for folks to be in recovery from addiction to fossil fuels, and when we paddled down the river, they had hung 12 banners that drew on the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and other self-help recovery programs.

We bid farewell to Anishinaabe territory Monday morning and did nothing but drive for the next two days (with a hotel stop at midnight). Now we’re trying to adjust to the “real world,” back home, when I really think the world folks are building in the camps, in sync with nature, defined by commitment to each other and to their goals of indigenous sovereignty and ending fossil fuel extraction, is the “real world,” or could be. The indigenous leaders of the Line 3 fight called us to come and stand with them, and I am very grateful and honored that we did.
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Photos are of  me crossing the headwaters, with Lake Itasca on the left, cnstruction by Enbridge a few miles away, and me and my fellow arrestees. More info about why we took action, and what you can do, is at Giniw Collective on Facebook (scroll down a bit). One thing is to go there in early June for a mass gathering, or later for smaller actions; another is to donate much-needed funds; another is to amplify the struggle. We have to create the kind of visibility the ten-year fight against KXL generated. It’s the same filthy bitumen from Alberta and the same destruction of indigenous lands, the health and culture of the people who are impacted, and the climate. We expect to do some presentations in CT and MA, and I would love to talk to any of you one on one if you’re thinking of going to MN or just want more information. Click on "Contact" and I'll send you the link to a webinar about it on Tuesday, May 18 (likely recorded).

In mid-winter, I prepared for a snowstorm by filling both the tubular seed feeder and the suet feeder with fresh seeds and fresh suet. And waited for the birds to flock to them, since most other sources of food were unavailable, under the snow. I didn’t see a single bird for a month, at the feeders or in my yard, the food inside untouched.

I was devastated. Could it be that all the birds who lived in my yard had died in the storm? I checked the feeders several times a day. Nobody there. I felt like the world had died.

A month or more passed, and eventually the birds came back. Cardinals, chickadees, tufted titmice, goldfinches in their drab winter feathers, tiny downy woodpeckers, and lots of LBBs (little brown birds). I felt rejuvenated, and like these other creatures and I share a lot in common on this beautiful Earth. I felt in my bones that I need other life forms to survive.

During this time, I was working with a wonderful community of people to get a bill passed in the CT General Assembly (SB 1059) that would ban almost all solitary confinement (except for short periods in emergency situations). It would also provide training and support for corrections staff, get rid of in-cell restraints, guarantee communication with loved ones, and create an oversight board to make sure these changes are put in place and followed. You can sign a petition supporting the bill at www.stopsolitaryCT.org

I heard many testimonies from survivors of solitary that it’s like being buried alive. To me I think the worst thing would be not being able to go outside (which is true for most prisoners most of the time, in solitary or not), to not even be able to see outside. The separation from fellow humans and from the natural world can and does make people crazy. It’s a form of torture, the U.N. says, if continued for more than 15 days. I think I’d crack after one. 
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So, now that the birds have returned – and the spring peepers are peeping from every vernal pool, and the squirrels are scurrying around digging up nuts – I hope the spring will bring relief for our brothers and sisters held in inhumane conditions that make all of us less human.
 

You know when you hear, “It’s too good to be true,” it usually is too good to be true.

​I don’t remember if I was skeptical before my almost 40-year career as a journalist, but I’m definitely skeptical now. So when I hear normally rational environmentalists and climate activists claim that “regenerative agriculture” is going to save our planet from climate catastrophe, I feel the hairs rise on my neck.

I just watched “Kiss the Ground,” a documentary on Netflix that explains how carbon-rich soil – not depleted, exhausted, dusty dirt – can reverse climate change. It incorporates the four elements shown in the photo above: planting cover crops that enrich the soil, perennials and trees that suck carbon out of the air and store it underground, no-till farming that creates the least disturbance possible to the soil, and animals that rotate through different paddocks of a farm/ranch and deposit their poop, which acts as a natural fertilizer to further enrich the soil.

You know the adage that says the first thing you do when you’re trying to get out of a hole is to stop digging. But there was no mention in the 84-minute film of the need to stop burning fossil fuels. Don’t get me wrong. Many of the components of regenerative ag are admirable, though I do question all the animal inputs. I see that they are essential to make this system work, but they – especially cattle – emit an awful lot of methane in their burps, and methane per molecule is 100 times worse for the climate than carbon dioxide over a ten-year period, and as I’ve said a million times, the immediate future is what we need to worry most about if we have any hope of avoiding disastrous climate tipping points – like the melting of the ice caps and the permafrost under the Arctic Ocean alone that holds 60 billion tons of methane and 560 billion tons of organic carbon.  Some scientists think it’s already too late.

Regenerative agriculture pretty much eliminates manufactured inputs like chemical fertilizers and weed killers and relies on an ecosystem’s natural defenses to be strengthened enough to combat enemies like weeds and droughts. That means farmers/ranchers’ costs are greatly reduced and their profits increased, which is one of the main themes of the film as two promoters of the system try to convince often skeptical farmers and ranchers. One even bets his ranch that he can produce the same results on anyone else’s property. Regenerative ag is also healthier for the humans practicing it.

As a strict vegetarian for the past 30 years and mostly a vegetarian for 20 years before that, I think about the reasons I don’t eat animals, and there are so many. One is their impact on the earth under our mostly industrial farming methods, where almost all the grain grown goes to feed them so they can feed us. It destroys ecosystems and is incredibly polluting. The industrial system is also unbelievably cruel to animals, which is a main reason I don’t want to support that system. Under regen ag, neither of those is true – until it comes time for slaughter. But, to mangle Shakespeare, isn’t it better to have lived and lost than never to have lived at all? (And yes, I know animal rights activists say the pretty picture of cows happily grazing on grass in the fresh air is not the whole picture.)
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Anyway, I encourage you to watch the film with an open but reasonably skeptical mind.
 
  

Perspective is important. A friend’s photo (above) of The Narrows in Zion National Park hangs in my living room. There’s no way to tell how high the walls are until you spot his tiny wife in the distance (along the left side a little way before the opening). Another example: blue jays that come around the mostly much smaller songbirds at my feeder look gigantic, but clutched in the talons of a giant hawk in my backyard this week, a blue jay looks more like a thin blue ribbon.

Perspective is important in politics, too.

Once Trump was out of office, I literally breathed easier. I know it’s not over; we have the impeachment to get through, and the army of loyalists who descended on D.C. January 6 are not going away. See this opinion piece in the NYT if you want to get really depressed.

But I’m encouraged by the dozens of executive orders President Joe Biden signed in his first week in office, with more to come. Some are symbolic and some have real teeth. He cancelled – hopefully for good – the Keystone XL pipeline that would have brought filthy tar sands oil into the U.S. and to oil refineries on the Gulf Coast, destroying indigenous lands in northern Alberta, Canada, in the process. However, through powerful coalition-building, led by indigenous groups and courageous indigenous youth and including ranchers, farmers and environmental activists, and through brilliant legal work resulting in several key court decisions, the pipeline was moribund already. What we need Biden to do is cancel Line 3, another cross-border tar sands pipeline that has begun construction across indigenous lands in northern Minnesota. Click here for an interview I did with Winona LaDuke, an indigenous leader of the opposition.

Biden also rejoined the Paris climate accord, put a pause on oil and gas leasing on public lands, and set up a National Climate Task Force, among other things.

One thing is for sure: activists have learned a lot since Obama was first elected in 2008, when too many of us and our organizations just assumed he would take care of business. In the ensuing dozen years, our steely determination has been forged in the fights against deportations, police brutality and the prison industrial complex, the fast-escalating climate crisis and more. We have begun putting the idea of intersectionality into practice – getting out of our silos and realizing we and our most dearly held concerns rise and fall together. We know that the organizing by Black, indigenous, people of color, women (shout out to Black women especially!) and youth put Biden in the White House.

Should President Biden get a honeymoon from the Left? We can thank him for the steps he’s already taken, and they are significant. Perhaps most important is the way he has positioned addressing his four priorities: Covid, climate change, racial equity and the economy, throughout his administration – an intersectional approach that gets departmental heads out of their silos, as was illustrated when the confirmed or designated heads of the Treasury, Transportation, National Security and others related how they plan to address the climate crisis, not leaving it just to the EPA, which will again earn its name: Environmental Protection Agency.

I started this post talking about perspective. Comparing Biden to Trump makes the former look like the people’s champion. But we have to keep our new leader in perspective: especially on foreign policy, he is just re-establishing the old order, which is much less chaotic than Trump’s disorder, but leaves much to be desired in terms of justice. (Update: on Feb. 5 he announced he's pulling U.S. support for the war in Yemen, a very good move.) As for the climate, Biden just reiterated his support for fracking, but without keeping at least 80% of all remaining fossil fuels in the ground there is no hope of meeting his lofty climate goals.

After some leaders on the left criticized Biden for not moving fast enough, Sen. Bernie Sanders replied, “He’s been in office three days.” In other words, give him a little breathing room. After holding my breath for four years, I can agree with that. And, we have to keep pushing.
 

"If you don't know where you are, you don't know who you are." Wendell Berry

My children are the third generation of our family to live apart from all the rest of their relations. We are used to leaving home and making our way across the country. I’m not recommending it. I so envy my friends – mostly not middle class white folks – who have their family members close by, and have ongoing relationships and even daily encounters and support.

I’ve moved not only away from my family of origin, but have moved many times over, pursuing jobs or just a change of scenery, and in more recent years, my spouse.

But for those tied to the land it’s a much more traumatic experience to move away from your home – and your ancestors’ home. And it’s been egregious how indigenous people  have been uprooted from their traditional homes and killed outright or relocated, often to barren lands that have nothing in common with where they came from, like the native Americans from the verdant southeast US who were forced west to what became Oklahoma.

A modern day disaster is the project an Australian company, Rio Tinto, is proposing that would dig a huge pit to mine copper -- the Resolution Copper mine -- on land traditionally belonging to the San Carlos Apaches, but now considered federal land. The federal government has engineered a swap of land sacred to the Apaches – Oak Flat – for some other land nearby. Hey guys – it’s not the same!

I covered a rally back in 2015 that was the culmination of a caravan from Arizona to Washington, D.C., where members of the San Carlos tribe and many others demanded that their land not be taken and the copper mine not be built. I interviewed the former tribal chairman, Wendsler Nosie, Sr., who is now camping out on the sacred ground to try to stop the land swap. (He is on the left in the photo above, with tribal leader Naelyn Pike and Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), who introduced a bill to try to reverse the swap.) There was a heartbreaking article in The New York Times about several projects the Trump administration is pushing through during the lame duck session, including this one. Things look grim. For more info or to help fight the project, visit www.apache-stronghold.com.

Another project, this one by a Canadian company, is a proposed uranium mine near the Black Hills, traditional and sacred land of the Oglala Lakota Nation, whose reservation abuts the proposed project. The Times article describes the terrible contamination that would accompany the mining across almost 13,000 acres, and it’s not clear there would even be a market for the amount of uranium the mine would produce. As the article says, “The project would inject a chemical called lixiviant into more than 1,461 wells, sending the chemical into an underground water supply.” Mni Wiconi, Water is Life, was the cry of the thousands of indigenous people and their allies who gathered to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016-17 on Lakota land. (The pipeline was built and began operating in 2017, but a judge this year ruled it had to stop until the company reapplies for a critical environmental permit. Legal challenges are ongoing.) For more info or to help fight the project, visit www.bhcleanwateralliance.org.

This project can’t be approved before Trump leaves office, so there is a good chance it will be stopped when President Biden takes over. One of his most exciting appointments is Congresswoman Deb Haaland as head of the Interior Department, which oversees millions of acres of “federal” land and also houses the Bureau of Indian Affairs. She would run a very different ship. As this annus horribilus 2020 draws to a close, I hope for brighter, and more equitable, days ahead.

It’s Thanksgiving Day, which I have been commemorating for the past several years as the Day of Mourning, in person in Plymouth, Mass., in a ceremony organized by the United American Indians of New England. Only indigenous folks speak, and an elder always reads a letter from indigenous political prisoner Leonard Peltier. It’s happening this year with mandatory mask-wearing, but I know it will be impossible to maintain physical distance, so I watched it online.

The crowd was smaller, but still substantial, and the weather was probably the warmest Day of Mourning on record, at around 60 degrees. The program on Cole's Hill was also shorter, with a woman doing a beautiful welcome ceremony to the four directions, blowing a conch shell each time she pivoted, and just three speakers, all women.

One was Kisha James, granddaughter of the man who started it all, Wamsutta Frank James, a member of the Aquinnah tribe of Gay Head. He was invited by the Massachusetts governor to give a speech in 1970 in honor of the 350th anniversary of the arrival of the Pilgrims. His speech told it like it was -- atrocities, broken treaties and land stolen by the settlers --  so he wasn't able to deliver that speech at the celebration. Organizers said since the theme was "brotherhood," it would be out of place. So he gave it to a different group on Thanksgiving. That became the first National Day of Mourning.
Kisha James read her grandfather's speech in honor of the day being the 51st anniversary of consecutive commemorations, no matter the weather. I've been there when it's been very cold, very windy, rainy or pleasant like it was this year.

After the speeches everyone marched to significant sites around town, including Plymouth Rock (which is very small). That's usually followed by a big communal dinner, but organizers cancelled that due to Covid.

It was unfortunate that the event was scaled back, because the indigenous people of the U.S. scored some important victories that would have been wonderful to celebrate together, such as the removal of many Columbus statues and the rising awareness among non-native peoples of the struggles they are confronting. They are three times more likely than whites to die of Covid, and while tribal nations in both North and South Dakota set up checkpoints on highways going through their reservations to try to control the spread, the white settler governments in those two states have been just about the least restrictive of any states, and the virus is rampant there. It’s also very bad on the huge Navajo nation. Poverty plays a big role; many families don’t have running water, making it very hard to follow the key precaution of washing hands often. Click here to read or listen to an interview I did with the chairman of the Cheyenne River Sioux tribe on this issue.

In an email, Krystal Two Bulls of the NDN Collective writes, “We must not forget that germ warfare has been used against Indigenous Peoples throughout history and it is imperative that our non-native allies consider this history. Take flattening the curve very seriously, and be very cautious and sensitive when traveling through or near Indigenous lands and territories.”

Another focus of indigenous activism is #LANDBACK. (Krystal is the Landback organizer with NDN.) It calls for the return of stolen lands, like the Black Hills in South Dakota, sacred to the Lakota, which was guaranteed to them by a treaty that was violated as soon as gold was discovered there. There is also talk of getting back the lands that are now national parks, from many of which indigenous tribes were ejected when the federal government took possession.

And the oil pipeline fights continue. If delay means defeat, there’s a good chance the Keystone XL pipeline will never get built, since it ran into more judicial roadblocks this year. But another pipeline – Line 3 – that would also bring filthy tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada, to the US across 300 miles of Minnesota just received several important permits from state regulators and the company, Enbridge, is ready to start construction. Opposition has been widespread and intense, and one of the leaders is Winona La Duke, founder of Honor the Earth, who’s fighting to keep Line 3 from crossing her territory, the Ojibwe White Earth reservation. Click here to read or listen to my interview with her.