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.

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.