After Trump was elected and especially after he was inaugurated, I spent several months working madly on a range of issues, focusing on refugees, immigrants, health care and pipelines (indigenous rights and climate). I felt super motivated and like I was part of a rising tidal wave of opposition to his anti-human (except for the 1%) and anti-all other living things agenda. Some of my friends and just folks I know in the progressive community were shell-shocked, depressed and didn’t know what to do. I told them I didn’t know how long I could keep it up (we were just three months into what’s supposed to be a four-year term), but for the time being I was good.

Then sometime in May I hit a wall. I felt very tired and needed to sleep more than usual. I wasn’t exactly depressed; it was more a feeling of being at loose ends and seeing the enormity of the task at hand and feeling lost in it all.

At the same time, I started noticing the life around me more – or rather, the life around me got in my face. On a hike, a scarlet tanager sat on a branch a few feet away and serenaded us (pictured above, not a photo I took because I preferred just looking with my eyes). Then on two bird hikes in a row, many beautiful and not that common (at least to me) birds flew all around me or perched for minutes at a time on branches where we got a perfect view of them: orioles, indigo buntings, bluebirds, green herons, black and white warblers, rose-breasted grosbeaks and many more. Then while on my bike yesterday I saw a great blue heron fly overhead, its neck extended and its legs? And two weeks in a row, I spotted a big, orangey-eared coyote, once crossing a road and the other time in a field five miles away. I’d never seen one in Connecticut before.

But I didn’t just observe these creatures – I felt like I was part of nature, just one species among many. I wasn’t out to kill them or deprive them of food or habitat. I was just sharing Earth with them. It was a very peaceful and even hopeful feeling.

I hope I can hold onto it to keep me going forward in the work ahead.

Click here for the interview I did with the lead plaintiff in the Juliana v Trump case of 21 children and youth suing the U.S. government over climate change.

And click here for the latest nonviolent direct action by Beyond Extreme Energy as five people disrupted the Senate hearing on the nominations of two Trumpistas to join the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which currently lacks a quorum. We want to keep it that way as long as possible, in order to minimize the destruction to communities and climate that FERC enables.

The photo above shows the corporate moneybags manipulating the commissioners of FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, who almost 100 percent of the time do the bidding of the companies they are supposed to “regulate.” Beyond Extreme Energy (BXE) carried this in the People’s Climate March in D.C. on April 29 on a sweltering day that was more like mid-August than late April. It helped drive home the point of the march – that we are headed off a climate cliff double-time since Trump took office, and we have to stand up and resist. An estimated 200,000 folks attended, along with many more at 250 sister marches around the globe. Our visual was very popular, as hundreds of marchers took photos of it.

The day was the exclamation point to three earlier days of activity that included leafleting on Capitol Hill about our campaign to convince senators not to approve any nominations Trump may make to FERC, which has been operating since early March with just two out of five commissioners and thus doesn’t have a quorum to approve any gas infrastructure projects. We want to keep it that way for as long as possible. Our asks are that Congress conduct an investigation into corruption at FERC and make necessary changes in how the agency operates before confirming any new commissioners. Trump is under a lot of pressure from both Democrats and Republicans to fill the vacancies, but he hasn’t even nominated anyone yet.

Later that day we lobbied a dozen senators, some in person, about our campaign, or met with their staffers.

We also went to the Supreme Court, where 14 of the 21 youth plaintiffs in a lawsuit by Our Children’s Trust against the federal government for not taking action on climate change announced that they have changed the name of the defendant from Obama to Trump. The fossil fuel industry has successfully petitioned to join the suit on the side of the federal government. It’s very exciting that two federal judges in Oregon have ruled that the lawsuit can proceed, which the plaintiffs hope will happen by the end of this year. Whoever loses will appeal to the Ninth Circuit (which Oregon is part of), and whoever loses there will appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. In addition to several short speeches by some of the youth and by their two attorneys, each of the plaintiffs read some of the most compelling statements from the Judge Ann Aiken’s ruling. You can listen to them, plus an interview with the lead plaintiff, in my next post.

On Friday morning about 60 of us went to FERC to hand out bags of sweet potatoes from eastern North Carolina and slices of sweet potato pie to illustrate the dangers to agriculture in the state if the fracked gas Atlantic Coast pipeline is allowed to run through it. I was afraid people wouldn’t take the sweet potatoes from perfect strangers, but many of them did, along with a flyer explaining the situation. We gave away almost half of the half-ton of sweet potatoes we brought to D.C. (We gave the rest away to a soup kitchen and to the fabulous Seeds of Peace cooking collective, who were cooking for us while we were in D.C., and who made the fabulous pies.) People from impacted communities from New York, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Wyoming, Maryland as well as North Carolina spoke. Click here for a short video montage of the action.