"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.

Awhile back I watched the documentary, Planet of the Humans, written and directed by Jeff Gibbs and executive produced by Michael Moore, that darling of the left who has explored issues such as gun violence (Bowling for Columbine), U.S. America’s sad and deadly for-profit health care system (Sicko) and looking at what works in other countries (Where to Invade Next), among many others, with facts and humor.

Planet of the Humans (streaming free online) looks at humans’ energy and climate footprint. Virtually all of my comrades in the climate movement who watched it, trashed it for playing fast and loose with facts and history and for an egregious attack on Bill McKibben, who many say is one of the hardest working and most inspiring leaders of the climate movement, from his publication in 1989 of The End of Nature, the first book on climate change for a popular audience, to his co-founding of  the global climate organization 350.org with half a dozen of his students at Middlebury College, to his co-organizing of the fossil fuel divestment movement with Naomi Klein. Of course, we haven’t won the climate war yet, but McKibben has contributed more than most toward that goal.

So, I had pretty much decided not to waste 100 minutes of my time on the documentary, but then I changed my mind. I wanted to decide for myself if Michael Moore really had flipped to the other side (I would say “to the dark side,” but I’m sick of all the references to “dark” as bad.)

I was offended by the film’s scorching McKibben for promoting biofuels years ago as renewable energy, because he had come around to rejecting it before Gibbs made his film. (Gibbs responds to McKibben’s critique of the film, saying Bill is sending mixed messages.) Gibbs also uses outdated and very inaccurate data to make it look like solar energy is so inefficient as to be useless, when he had to have known that solar power has leapfrogged in efficiency while plummeting in price.

But a few months after watching it, I’m left with the useful conclusion that there is no free lunch where energy is concerned, and I agree with Gibbs’s conclusion that environmentalists talk as if there’s no downside to developing any kind of power, including solar, wind and hydro.

I have two examples I’ve become aware of in the past few months that illustrate this.
One is a proposal to build three dams on a tributary of the Colorado River just east of the Grand Canyon. The proposed dams would be part of a pumped hydro- storage project to store electricity when it’s in surplus to be used when renewable energy is not available. Sounds good, right?

But the project poses a danger to endangered species, the cultural heritage of indigenous nations, and the scarce regional water supply that will be even more stressed by the planet’s accelerating climate crisis.

I interviewed Roger Clark, Grand Canyon program director with the Grand Canyon Trust, and learned the project itself would store about 44,000 acre feet – equivalent to 44,000 football fields with water a foot deep.

He said, “The water would come from groundwater, and the developer is proposing to put three wells in the bottom of the canyon floor, and then pump all that ground water into the biggest storage reservoir in the bottom. And they would have to replenish that reservoir, because every time you pump it up to the upper reservoirs, it sits for awhile; it evaporates.” It’s impossible to overstate the importance of water in this arid region and the threat this project poses.

There are 11 affiliated tribes in the Grand Canyon, including Navajo, Hopi and Zuni, and that stretch of river is very important culturally. And there’s also an endangered fish, the humpback chub, that is only found in that part of the Little Colorado River.

So, even though it would be part of a renewable energy project, I can see why this project should not move forward.

Closer to home, folks involved in the Hamden Alliance for Trees, of which I’m a member, have come out in opposition to a proposal to build a solar array in the northern end of town to help power some buildings on a college campus. Again, sounds good. Why are we, town officials and many others opposed to this project? Because it would destroy 15 acres of trees (pictured above), and trees are our best natural defense against climate catastrophe. We are supporting the neighbors there, who oppose the project for that reason and also because of concerns about flooding if all the trees are cut down.

All forms of energy -- even solar and wind -- require raw materials, including rare earths and other materials that must be mined; they create climate emissions during construction. There are downsides to all of them. Energy conservation (not using energy) and energy efficiency (getting more bang for the energy consumed) are the best ways to reduce our climate footprint, and to reduce attendant ground-level pollution that affects people of color and low income folks disproportionately.

The movie also weighs in on human population as a driver of climate catastrophe, but I'll save that for another post.

I’ve been correcting my mis-education on several fronts lately, and Trump’s announcement in mid-September that he was creating The 1776 Commission to “restore patriotic education to the nation” to counteract The 1619 Project, which sheds light on the ongoing impact of slavery in the U.S., dating from the first importation of enslaved Africans, motivated me to start typing.

Trump’s claims that U.S. students have been brainwashed is totally true – just not in the way he meant. Rather than being brainwashed “to hate our country,” we’ve been brainwashed to learn only the positives about our history, or in the rare cases where negatives are widely known, such as the racist internment of Japanese citizens during World War II, they are presented as “mistakes” that were eventually made right (with a 1988 apology and $20,000 to each surviving internee).

An incident in one of my first classes at the University of Wisconsin in 1967 left an indelible mark on my brain, and perhaps contributed to my decision to major in history. The professor was talking about the early days of the new U.S. government when there were only four cabinet positions: Secretary of State, Secretary of War, Secretary of the Treasury and the Attorney General. He said State dealt with relations with other sovereign nations, except for indigenous tribes, which were handled under the War Department. I asked (with some trepidation about speaking up in class) why the native nations were under the War Department and not the State Department. I don’t remember his answer; I just remember how defensive his reaction was.

Since then I have supplemented any official readings with my own explorations – and yes, those have often been much more critical of the U.S. Trump specifically called out Howard Zinn and his “People’s History of the United States,” published in 1980, which tells many of these little-known stories. Interviewed by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, Zinn said it was important to tell young people the truth. The reasons so many of these books and podcasts sound so negative is that they are countering the rosy picture most of us have been indoctrinated with.

I’ve read a lot of women’s history, but I learned more in this centennial year of the Nineteenth Amendment, which is usually described as “granting women the right to vote.” That doesn’t quite capture the more than 70-year battle women (and sometimes their male supporters) waged to win that right, especially toward the end when women were beaten, arrested and force-fed in jail. This year I also learned more about the role of black women suffragists, who were most often excluded or put at the equivalent of the back of the bus in white-led suffrage demonstrations.

I just finished reading “Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America,” by Ibram X. Kendi, the National Book Award winner published in 2016. Broken into five parts, headlined by Puritan leader Cotton Mather, slaveholder Thomas Jefferson, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, African American scholar and political activist W.E.B. Dubois, and radical Black activist Angela Davis, Kendi interprets the various epochs by their adherence to the concepts of Segregationist (Blacks are sub-human), Assimilationist (Blacks can aspire to be as good as whites) and Anti-Racist (Blacks are already equal to whites).

I never read Jeremy Brecher’s “Strike!” when it was first published in 1972, but I’m making my way through the 506-page, updated 50th anniversary edition of U.S. labor history, published this year. I already knew the high points, like the Haymarket massacre, and the fights to organize in the coal fields, the steel mills and the railroads. But I learned a lot about more recent history, like the wave of strikes during the Vietnam War era, when I was busy protesting on campus. The fact that I was alive in this period, and fairly conscious of social struggles, yet knew nothing about this, is another indication of my mis-education.

The other key element in my re-education, besides just learning these facts, is that I read/hear/see these fighters for a more inclusive, still far from perfect democracy in their own words. Kendi is an African American historian, and Brecher gives us long excerpts of everyday workers describing their desperate living situations that pushed them into action, as well as riveting stories of the strikes they engaged in to improve their lot. Some excellent documentaries about the struggle for women’s enfranchisement this year included recitations of their public writings and personal journals.
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The “great man” (read white, powerful, and, of course, male) theory of history has filled our textbooks for centuries. It’s time to turn to the stories of “regular people” and the oppressed and exploited for a fuller picture. 

Back in 1988, when James Hansen testified in Congress that human-caused climate change was already happening, and in 1989 when I read Bill McKibben’s book, The End of Nature, about climate change, I thought it would be nice if the world could take action to protect our planet and all the creatures who depend on her. Then, in 1992, the first Earth Summit brought world leaders together to make such a pledge, including the U.S. president, George H.W. Bush. Nothing seemed to change, and global warming gases in the atmosphere kept climbing. But I hoped that when the apocalyptic events scientists were predicting began to actually happen, then the people would demand action and the politicians would deliver. There was even that cute scene on the couch in 2009 with Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich, the then-current and former leaders in the House, agreeing that climate change was real and pledging a response.

Fast forward to 2016 and the election of Donald J. Trump – the climate change denier-in-chief and the fossil fuels promoter-in-chief. And, not coincidentally, the ever-stronger hurricanes hitting the Gulf Coast, Florida, the Carolinas and Puerto Rico – dumping unimaginable amounts of rain due to the warming seas and warmer atmosphere (warm air holds more moisture than cooler air) as they stall over hapless cities like Houston, where Harvey dumped 50 inches of rain in five days. The strengthening of hurricanes was predicted in the modeling of climate scientists, and the increased frequency of stalling is also likely due to climate change.

Meanwhile, out West nothing could be more apocalyptic than the wildfires that have devastated California and other states in the past few years. Due largely to the drier, hotter weather caused by changes in the climate – also predicted by the science – fire season is now year-round, with much greater loss of life and property since more people live in the so-called “wildlands-urban interface.” But fires have roared right into cities as well.

Now it gets personal. I’ve always felt sorry for the parts of the country that have to suffer through disasters like hurricanes and wildfires and have felt more or less immune here in Connecticut. But since 2011 we’ve endured six major storms with local or statewide impact, resulting in the loss of thousands of trees and power outages lasting as long as two weeks. Three of those six have occurred in just the past two years. We just had a one-two punch of a storm more damaging than Super Storm Sandy followed a few weeks later by another tornado. The lights were barely back on and the CEO of our biggest utility had just finished justifying the terrible job his company did in restoring service when power was knocked out again. It’s scary getting a blaring “TORNADO WARNING” message on your phone to take shelter immediately.
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We must underground the wires, which is expensive but I’d bet no more expensive than multiple per year power outages that will only get worse as the climate crisis escalates.
(The sign in the photo above says, "Danger: downed wire. Keep away.")
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Climate science has progressed to the point where we can learn what percent more likely or more powerful a given storm is, due to the warming of the planet. But Trump and other politicians are blaring that this is all fake news and way too many people are willing to believe them and not what their eyes are showing them. This is the biggest threat of all to our survival.

(This op-ed appeared in the CT Mirror on July 22.)

​It feels like the bloom is off the rose of our country’s love affair with fossil fuels. Connecticut should join in and jilt its gassy lover – and soon, before a Trump administration executive order goes into effect to deny us the chance.

In two days, three major decisions – two in the courts, and one in the business world – have terrified the fossil fuel industry and caused rejoicing among the indigenous, people of color, low-income and environmental/climate communities. I believe it’s part of the sea change that’s been ushered in by the response to the murder of George Floyd, as millions of people of all races, ages, genders, and gender identities, following the leadership of the Movement for Black Lives, have come together to call for the restructuring of our society with equity and justice as guiding principles.

These decisions pulled the plug on the partially built, 600-mile long Atlantic Coast fracked gas pipeline, the already running Dakota Access pipeline (literally pulled the plug in that case, when a judge required the company to drain the oil in the pipeline and conduct a thorough Environmental Impact Statement), and blocked an important environmental permit for the almost 1,200-mile Keystone XL pipeline, which would bring oil sands, the dirtiest of all fossil fuels, across the U.S. from Canada. All these projects were ferociously opposed by coalitions largely led by indigenous people and people of color, including landowners, farmers, ranchers, religious groups and environmental/climate activists.

David Brower, long-time director of the Sierra Club, once said, “Our victories are temporary, but our defeats are permanent.” The powers that be will labor mightily to find ways to resurrect their toxic projects, and in fact many companies were helped in that effort when in the same decision that the Supreme Court issued keeping a halt for now on the Keystone XL pipeline, they released a national hold on water crossings for all other pipeline projects. But for now, this 1-2-3 punch is a balm to our souls. (I’ve been involved in fighting all three pipelines.)

Which brings me to Connecticut. Despite an executive order and a state law committing us to 45% net zero carbon on the energy grid by 2030 and 100% by 2050, we are going the wrong way by building fracked gas power plants and the pipelines to feed them. Two major plants went on line in the past few years, in Oxford and Bridgeport, and the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) continues to grant permits for building a third one in Killingly, to be built by NTE. It needs a 2.4-mile pipeline from Pomfret to Killingly to connect the plant to an existing gas pipeline.

Gov. Ned Lamont is on the record saying he doesn’t want the plant, but seems unwilling to stop it. He should take a page from our neighbor, New York, where Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration killed two proposed fracked gas pipelines in the past few years by declining to issue required permits.

Opponents in Killingly and around Connecticut are using lawsuits, community organizing and mobilizing across the state to stop the plant. Last month the CT Climate Crisis Mobilization held a Car Caravan & Virtual Rally to Stop Racial Injustice and Fracked Gas with dozens of cars sporting banners and signs that passed DEEP headquarters, while others stood with banners out front and hosted the Zoom rally.

There is a public hearing on September 24 regarding a wastewater permit NTE needs to build the Killingly plant. People will be testifying against construction, calling for putting people to work in green jobs. We are asking Gov. Lamont and DEEP Commissioner Katie Dykes to pull the plug on this unneeded fracked gas plant and focus instead on building out more renewable energy projects and promoting energy efficiency and energy conservation (the cheapest energy is the energy you don’t use).

People will be testifying against construction, calling for putting people to work in green jobs. We are asking Gov. Lamont and DEEP Commissioner Katie Dykes to pull the plug on this unneeded fracked gas plant and focus instead on building out more renewable energy projects and promoting energy efficiency and energy conservation (the cheapest energy is the energy you don’t use).

I lived through the 1960s and this is the first time since then that I’ve felt the incredible passion and commitment to make sweeping changes in our society. It’s time for bold action, and not a moment too soon; in fact, it’s almost too late. But much better late than never.

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What Bryan Stevenson has done to shine a light on lynching in this country, perhaps Ta-Nehisi Coates and Frederick Douglass can do to expose the horrendous practice of family separation under slavery (and really, since then under other institutions like welfare and prisons and a health care system that kills many more Black women in childbirth than those of any other race).

Sure, most Americans knew that lynching of black people took place, but we thought it was just in the South; we didn’t know the extent of it; we didn’t know the unbelievable depravity of it. And we also thought it was in the distant past. Now, thanks to Stevenson’s Memorial to Peace and Justice, if we want to, we can learn that these extra-judicial killings took place in 39 states; that the project has documented 4,084 African-Americans lynched between 1877 and 1950 in the South (other databases run to the mid-60s); and that black men (and sometimes women) were not just killed using the traditional noose, but were burned or buried alive, vivisected and otherwise tortured with vicious inhumanity. We can learn that some of the lynchings were advertised and drew hundreds of families, and postcards of the victims were sold like baseball cards. Thanks to my friend Dottie for this link to anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells Barnett's compilation of atrocities: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/14977/14977-h/14977-h.htm

Now Coates’ novel – his first – The Water Dancer, is a paeon to the mother the main character lost as a small child, when she was sold away from the plantation where he remained. He envisions her appearing out of the water, moving gracefully. She is the inspiration for the daring actions he takes later in his life. I won’t spoil the story; I will just encourage you to read it yourself. It is one of the most beautiful novels I’ve ever read.

In David Blight’s biography, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, he quotes Douglass himself talking about his mother, who was sold away from him when he was 6 years old. Douglass wrote that he carried “a wounded soul” that “affected me so deeply.” He – the most prolific and poetic writer and speaker against slavery – wrote that he could “give no adequate expression” to the catastrophe. Slavery “had made my brothers and sisters strangers to me; it converted the mother that bore me into a myth; it shrouded my father in mystery, and left me without an intelligible beginning in the world.” (Sounds like Coates has read Frederick Douglass.)

I just happen to be reading these two books during lockdown, which since May 25 has been punctuated by daily demonstrations throughout the country that Black Lives Matter.

I’m also reminded of the anguished cry of freedom fighter Sojourner Truth, who said she had “borne 13 children and seen most all sold into slavery. And when I cried out with a mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?” Let's all of us mothers try to imagine this. 

Which brings me to the anguished cry of a son calling out for his dead mother.

So, I’m thinking more about the role of white supremacy and white privilege in this country and why white people need to step up to confront it and eliminate it. For Black people, reading these books can affirm their genius, passion and commitment. For white people, reading them can be part of our anti-racist education.

(I write Black Lives Matter in chalk on my driveway -- above -- and do it over when the rain washes it away or it fades from wear. It is like a meditation for me.)

I’ve been working mostly from home for the past 18 years, but during the past nine-week lockdown, I’ve been home even more. I’ve also taken daily walks around the neighborhood instead of zooming to downtown New Haven on my bike most afternoons, as I did pre-Covid. As my former minister used to recommend, I’ve been “noticin'.”

I notice little things, like the window boxes full of flowers on a neighbor’s house, or the small triangular garden in front of another’s, with beautiful standing stones separating the colorful native plants.  I noticed the tree growing on the side of the road through a park, with the indentations of a now-gone vine winding around the trunk like a Maypole ribbon, or another tree with a thick vine still clinging to it that looks for all the world like a boa constrictor.

I noticed the emergence, after transplanting last year, of my giant yellow irises, which are indescribably intricate and beautiful (pictured above). Since I’m a mediocre gardener, the fact that they’re blooming at all is a small miracle.

The great blue herons are hard to miss, perched on their nests in the tops of the pine trees above a lake nearby. More subtle but just as beautiful are the red-winged blackbirds that flit around us and the unidentified bird we can see perched on her nest in the crotch of a tree along the road at eye level. Will be fun to see the babies emerge.

And fox sightings have become so common that I’m disappointed if I don’t see one every day.

I noticed that traffic on the main road through my neighborhood – full of academics and office workers – has been almost non-existent, while traffic across town, where more essential workers live, seems almost the same as always. I noticed that our air is much cleaner, but over there it’s not. I noticed that those neighborhoods are lower income and more people of color.

Last week I attended a nine-hour tribunal by Zoom on the efforts of a small, non-federally recognized tribe on the Tex-Mex border that is trying to stop a plethora of fracked gas infrastructure assaults and I noticed a different way of conducting meetings, a way that includes prayer and singing and enough time for speakers to tell their stories. It includes a holistic perception of animals, plants, rocks, and two-leggeds. I like that way.

I noticed that pipeline companies tend to name their life-destroying creations after indigenous nations: Iroquois, Algonquin, Dakota. As someone’s sign at a recent rally proclaimed: “Nothing Algonquin about it.”

I also noticed that the assault on black lives has continued apace. Here’s a link to a piece I wrote about my local connection to the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, which has been superseded by the police killing of George Floyd, videotaped by frantic bystanders and released immediately for all to see. Visit SURJ on Facebook for actions you can take. 
https://www.facebook.com/ShowingUpForRacialJustice/
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The NY Times published data showing that about 1,100 people are killed every year in the U.S. by law enforcement officers, but we only hear about a tiny fraction of them. Alas, some of the cops are people of color themselves, who have decided they are blue before anything else.  

Happy Earth Day! Or not so much.
For my blog this month I'm posting the homily I gave at my Unitarian Universalist Zoom Earth Day service on April 19. I hope you enjoy it.

Covid and Climate and Justice
Good morning. I’m going to share some thoughts today about Covid and climate and justice. The novel coronavirus pandemic has laid bare some of the more glaring problems in our society that climate activists have been talking about for years, and the issues of justice and injustice have jumped out in sharp relief. There are even direct connections between Covid and climate, like the fact that the melting permafrost is releasing giant viruses as much as 30,000 years old. Needless to say humans have never been in contact with them before.

Experiencing the spring – the incredibly early spring we’ve had this year – is different in the age of Covid. We can still take walks, we can work in our gardens, but group activities are out.

What kind of a cosmic joke is it that we are marking the 50th anniversary of Earth Day during a global lock-down? Now, all the youth-led rallies full of love, hope, anger, near-despair and incredible energy have all been funneled on-line, where we know in the age of Zoom that we can do a lot, but we can’t be outside feeling the sun or rain or breeze on our faces, hugging our friends and standing together for a brighter tomorrow. That’s one thing that our strange new world has encouraged – lots of creativity and thinking outside the box. If you can’t march to the insurance companies in Hartford that are underwriting fossil fuel production, organize an on-line march and call-in, with music and graphics. If you can’t hold a sing-a-long for the climate in person, put everyone in front of their computers and combine your voices virtually.

Spoofs in the age of Covid and YouTube have led to a contagion of humor, and let’s face it, we desperately need to laugh. One of my favorites is a reworking of the beautiful we’re all in this together anthem – From a Distance – that gives it a whole new meaning. Another is a beloved Fiddler on the Roof tune, parodied as Mask Maker. “Mask Maker, Mask Maker, make me a mask, any design, please sew it fast…”

The pandemic has allowed many of us to slow down and really see our world more clearly – limited though our frame might be. While lying on the floor of my study doing some exercises trying to stay in shape with the gym closed, I observed, upside down, our wacky pear trees in full bloom. I say wacky because they’d lost so many limbs in past storms and they were so Ichabod Crane-looking that I’d actually suggested cutting them down and planting something else. My husband disagreed and he was right, as I marveled at their delicate beauty. You can see them behind me.

I’ve also heard people say that they sometimes resented having to take their dog for a walk, but now it’s the highlight of their day, as they pass others at the required physical distance and exchange the greetings that were often non-existent before the pandemic cast human interaction in a new light.

Seeing groups of people move individually or in pairs along a street reminds me of the choreography – although spread out – of that beloved move in contra dancing – the hay for 4, in which two couples switch places through an elaborate set of moves to the right, the left, the right.

I have a friend who sends me funny or moving photos, videos or poems every day. The most amazing was a collection of two dozen photos of trees growing in challenging circumstances to say the least – through rocks, on tiny outcroppings in the ocean, on a nurse log that birthed many more of its own kind, and more.

Trees might put us in touch with nature better than any other living thing. I know that’s true for me, and these days we don’t call them things anymore, but living beings who co-exist in supportive communities, communicate with each other and support each other when times are tough.

Sometimes that’s true of humans, too, though often, alas, it’s not.

The pandemic has revealed both the best and worst of humanity, as many others have already pointed out. It’s also revealed the terrible divisions in our societies, where low income folks and people of color are suffering disproportionately from Covid-19, in terms of illness and especially in the death counts. For example, several weeks into the pandemic, while ten percent of Nutmeggers are African American, they were 16 percent of the fatalities. And the situation was even worse in some other parts of the country.  It’s like they have two strikes against them already.

And guess what?! You could say the exact same thing about the climate crisis. We know that the people who did the least to create the crisis are suffering first and worst from its impacts. That’s people in low-lying countries and island nations, and poor people generally.

And the generational crime is even more stark. I am so privileged to work on climate with young people, mostly college-age and 20-somethings, but high schoolers are passionately involved, too, and climate leaders have even emerged in the under-10 set. That’s one lesson for us older folks – don’t underestimate the youth. Climate scientists say we have until 2030 to reduce the emission of global warming gases by half -- enough to prevent irreversible climate chaos. Until this pandemic stopped the global economy cold, emissions were still going up. The young ones know they are facing a changed, diminished and very scary world. But they face it with a fierce resolve.

I love these young people with all my heart. I love their commitment, their love for each other, their welcoming elders like me into their bold, creative actions. But try as I might, being in my seventies, I can’t truly feel the terror they feel at what the future – the near future and then the extended future – will bring.

Sena Wazer is Connecticut’s own Greta Thunberg, the Swedish girl who kick-started the global youth movement. Both speak truth to power. In a speech last December in Hartford, Sena told political leaders, “I spend every day panicking about climate change, doing whatever I can to help combat it, but yet in your position of power, you continue to sit by and do nothing. But we're not waiting any longer: Stand up or step aside.” I can still hear hundreds of children and teenagers at the Capitol echoing that phrase, yelling “Stand up or step aside! Stand up or step aside!”

There’s a good lesson for our climate future in our current conditions, where we off-handedly say that we are “locked down.” Even though most of us have access to food, entertainment, communication with friends, family and co-workers, and even the outdoors, many of us are chafing at our confinement. Imagine how people feel who are truly locked down – in prisons and immigration detention centers around the country. I’ve been spending some time at honkathons lately – Covid-safe protests in our cars outside those facilities, or at the site of decision-makers’ homes or workplaces, such as the ICE office -- Immigration and Customs Enforcement – or the governor’s mansion. Protesters are calling for the release of almost all detainees, so that their confinement doesn’t become a death sentence. So many immigrants who have come or tried to come to the U.S. are climate refugees, and their numbers are pretty much guaranteed to balloon as we encounter climactic tipping points that will increase desertification, sea level rise and other disasters. How we treat the least among us now is a good indication of how we might treat our fellow humans in even more dire straits.

In Todd Miller’s book, Storming the Wall, he writes about the hundreds of millions of climate refugees this century will see, and he talks about the two main responses to the climate emergency. One is climate security – that is, security for the wealthy and well-connected, who will arm themselves with weapons and technology and build walls to keep out the hordes of desperate earth-dwellers seeking survival. The other response is climate justice, where humans do believe and act that we’re all in this together and take steps to protect us all. One person who exemplifies this is Scott Warren, a member of No More Deaths, who was arrested for providing aid to two desperate migrants in Arizona near the Mexican border and faced 20 years in prison. After a second trial, he was acquitted, which provided a glimmer of hope and joy in a very dark time. I was part of a group of ten women from Connecticut who spent time with a similar group, the Samaritans, providing aid to migrants in the Sonoran desert.

We’ve seen both of these responses to the pandemic. On the security side, people hoarding supplies, authorities cracking down on certain groups and politicians playing the blame game. And on the justice side, mutual aid groups have popped up all over the country, including in New Haven and several other CT cities. Volunteers are gathering and disbursing food, cleaning supplies and cloth masks made by the hundreds at dining room tables like mine, across the region. Supporters are sending cash to immigrant rights groups because their undocumented members are not eligible for unemployment or for any federal money in the stimulus package. California is the exception, where state and private funds totaling $125 million will provide cash grants to immigrant individuals and families in need. Gov. Gavin Newsom explained the rationale, saying, “We feel a deep sense of gratitude for people that are in fear of deportation but are still addressing the essential needs of tens of millions of Californians” in food production and other tasks. That’s an example of climate justice.

It’s hard not to notice another benefit of the pandemic: a 95% drop in air travel and a huge drop in earthbound vehicle traffic means the skies are the clearest they’ve been since 9.11, almost 20 years ago. And I can bike down Whitney Avenue any time of day and have the road practically to myself.

There’s a potential political benefit as well. Young people in the Sunrise Movement calling for a Green New Deal over the past year were told there’s no money to provide health care for all and good jobs in the green economy. These young activists always said we could do it – it’s just a matter of calling forth the political will. Now we see that playing out – trillions of dollars made available in just a month, so far, to address this pandemic. Why can’t we spend the trillions of dollars needed to address climate change? Now that we’ve seen what’s possible, we can fight with even more clarity for what we need. Some politicians are calling for just that, but others – the most powerful – have found ways to tuck in hundreds of billions of dollars in slush money for fossil fuel CEOs from the stimulus package, making a joke out of our previous attempts to cut off the comparatively puny subsidies to the industry.

These same powerful misleaders are demanding we go back to business as usual before health experts say we can do so safely. We have to be in this for the long haul, just like the fight for climate sanity and climate justice is ongoing.

Many of you know that Greta Thunberg became so depressed about the so-called leaders of the world not taking immediate and powerful action to address climate change that she stopped eating, putting her life at risk and likely permanently stunting her growth. She came out of it when she realized there was something she could do about it, and she began her solitary School Strike for Climate in 2018 outside the parliament building in Stockholm, Sweden, which has since spread to millions around the world.

Things sometimes seem so bleak that I could picture myself giving up, though I can’t picture myself giving up eating 😊. But here’s the thing: tilting at windmills may seem like a useless thing to do, but working for a sacred cause together with many other committed people with heart and mind and soul, isn’t a bad way to go. I think it’s definitely better than the alternative.
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Our seventh UU principle is "Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part." That’s a spiritual take on climate writer and activist Naomi Klein’s famous dictum: To change everything, we need everyone. We need the trees, the frogs, the insects, and all the humans. Because even though some humans ignore this fact – and pursue climate security, not climate justice – we really are all in this together.  Amen. 

This should be the scariest time for me personally in my 72 years. As an older person, I am at higher risk for contracting a serious or fatal case of Covid-19, although I don’t feel at risk, and I don’t feel old. But I will not be celebrating my birthday on March 19 with friends or family except my hubby – which for the first time in memory is also the first day of Spring – because we are one step away from lockdown.

We are in a recession, with millions of people in the U.S. out of work and millions of students and pre-schoolers home from school and day care. And half to two-thirds of the entire population could be infected with the virus, and at the high end, millions could die. Things I did just a week ago – like drive with other elders to a cross-country ski weekend in New Hampshire (Mt. Washington pictured above) and sleep in a small dorm room with three other women, and go to my gym classes – now seem unthinkable. Everything is shutting down, except grocery stores and pharmacies. Stop & Shop just announced a special seniors-only shopping time from 6-7:30 a.m.

The roll-out of testing (or lack thereof) is a huge debacle, which has set the pandemic on its course. Mayors and governors are providing leadership, and Trump has finally seemed to have gotten religion about the seriousness of the virus after dismissing it for weeks.

But here are some good things about this weird time:

Much lower traffic is reducing air pollution and the amount of greenhouse gases produced, and making it much more pleasant to bike;

Using Zoom for meetings will probably carry over to some degree when the crisis passes, saving time and more pollution from those who normally drive to meetings;

Having more exclusive family time could strengthen bonds (if it doesn’t drive everyone crazy);

Since being outside alone or with others while maintaining social distance (6 feet) is one of the safest things we can do, more people are doing it (bike ridership has spiked in New York City as people avoid riding the subway); the parks are open (so far) and you can always just walk around the block. I saw way more people in my neighborhood than usual as I did my daily walking meditation today;

And finally, while these disasters bring out the worst in some people, they definitely bring out the best in more. Folks are checking in on neighbors, running errands, signing up for pop-up mutual aid list-serves, and more.

Cancelling in-person events – like the four planned in Connecticut April 22-25 for Earth Week – is pushing us to think outside the box to come up with on-line and phone-in events to create the kind of buzz we need to move forward on the climate crisis.

Although there’s no proof that Covid-19 is tied to climate change (since it’s been traced to bats in a wild animal market in China, since closed down), there is research showing there may be a connection of climate change to future pandemics, as the warming planet has pushed some animal species into closer contact with humans, as both have to navigate an Earth that has become less habitable, and a growing number of diseases are caused by an animal-human connection.

Here’s a story about more possible connections, summed up:

“The parallels between the coronavirus outbreak and climate change, and our collective global and U.S. handling of it, are striking. There are four ways these two threats resemble one another frighteningly closely.  And these similarities ought to give us all pause and motivate us to redouble our efforts to address the urgency of the looming climate crisis.

First, both COVID-19 and the effects of climate change will impact not only our health but also our economic prosperity and our way of life — everywhere.  And the people who will suffer the most are the ones who are already vulnerable and who need our help the most.

Second, the signs are all bad and getting worse — fast.

Third, the longer we wait to take action the worse the threat will become and the less we can do to stop it.

Fourth, only global collective action will suffice. And we are all in this together — everyone on the planet.”
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I’m hoping some of these sudden and extreme behavior changes will outlast – in some form – the pandemic, and set us on the road to a healthier planet and healthier people.