ecospirit

Before the election, Mahan Siler wrote an op-ed for the Asheville Citizen-Times, inviting readers to join his passionate work for social and ecological justice. One person responded. I previously blogged about Mahan, who was the oldest member of the week-long March for Our Grandchildren in 2013, quoting his inspiring words at Lexington Park at the end of the march. Since  the election, dozens have joined Mahan and Steve Kagan, the founding pair of Elders Fierce for Justice, now deep into strategizing a series of actions joining elders and millenials. Some of these actions will involve civil disobedience. After taking my cues from 350.org for many years, I now plan to join this vibrant regional group as they move from planning into action.

I know of several women in both the Asheville area and from our local community in the South Toe Valley who went to the Women's March in DC. Most of them were marching for the first time, and they were thrilled and energized. Similarly, the surge of activism that I observe all around me contains more newbies than veterans.

Here in South Toe, many collaborative, overlapping groups have sprung up. I am a co-sponsor of Surviving Climate Change, one of the largest. We focus on making a strong, highly-networked community even more resilient. But as one person said at our first meeting, we still need to work on ways to mitigate the problem (which means getting rid of Trump and his anti-environmental agenda as quickly as possible). In this winter's semester of Cabin Fever University, many of the events have focused on community organizing (Dinner and Democracy; Forming a 350.org Chapter, Higher Ed and its Discontents, Progressive Educators Unite, Advocating for Children, etc.). We are noting the many points of overlap, and weaving our network more thickly.

But the most focused response to the Trump Coup has come from Yancey-Mitchell Indivisible, with groups in Burnsville, South Toe, and Spruce Pine. On the Indivisible site map, I note 8-10 Indivisible pods across Western NC. Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda LINK, is a sophisticated, highly organized plan for emulating the Tea Party strategy that emerged after the 2008 election out of revulsion to Barack Obama. Congressional staffers who understand how things work in Washington wrote it, with the whole strategy focused upon pressuring MOC's in every possible congressional district as relentlessly as possible, especially at publicized events like town halls and ribbon-cuttings. Though I have been a climate lobbyist for years, I learned quite a lot from reading through the site, and look forward to working with my progressive neighbors in implementing Indivisible's strategy in my rural conservative district.

Many of Trump's executive orders have questionable legality. Democratic attorneys general of several states have already lined up to file suits against his most unconstitutional act to date, banning visitation and immigration from a host of Muslim countries.

Our biggest legal avenue will be to push the limits of freedom of assembly, crossing the line into trespass and blockage of egress to provoke arrest and a day in court to publicize our cause. Many people I have talked to in this new year, rent by its disruptive politics, have said that they expect they will be going to jail before the year is out. I expect to be among them. Potential targets of these actions are manifold, increasing with every new round from DT's Gatling pen: federal lands on the giveaway list, DAPL and Keystone pipelines, the Marcellus terminus pipeline heading down the Atlantic Coast, not to mention immigrant detention centers, abortion clinics, banks who fund Big Fossil – name your cause. We need to quickly train a non-violent militia to be deployed in several places, ready to stand up to what could devolve into a police state.

As events are moving swiftly, panic beckons. But we each need to take the necessary time to discern our priorities, our role in what could become a confused patchwork of actions, rather than a coordinated campaign. These are indeed trying times, but perhaps we are made for these times.

Like most of you, I am absolutely stunned by Donald Trump's shock and awe campaign. He wields the executive pen like a kid in a candy shop. Not only is he delivering on his abominable campaign promises, he's added nasty surprises like proposing to sell off public lands. Congress has already changed the rules to make it easier for him to do so. These lands are the foundation of the modest beginning for EO Wilson's audacious, noble proposal to set aside half the earth for wildlife to recover from the ravages of human-driven extinction. One quickly realizes that it's not only the efforts to combat climate change that his actions put at risk, but the protection of habitat against the assault on wildlife. And he includes the National Parks, our national treasures, in his inventory of real estate on the block. Park Rangers (my son Jesse is one at Yosemite) have courageously resisted his gag order, and the NPS chief has issued a magnificent rejoinder to our demagogue president.

It is hard to imagine a worse set of cabinet picks, and the Senate is not showing the backbone on either side of the aisle to stand up to him. He bullied and lied his way – and worse – to election, and now he's using the same tactics as President, relentlessly tweeting his “alternative facts.” More subtle tactics are being employed by the true masters of propaganda, the Russians, to convince the majority of it's citizens to acquiesce to a totally false narrative about the historical and current realities in their country, but Trump's moves in the same direction are chilling. We must resist, and never tire of it.

Trump's narcissistic lying means that nobody, friend or foe,can trust his word. This has potentially catastrophic consequences. By continuing to belittle NATO, he threatens the future of peace in Europe, with NATO members Latvia and Lithuania looking like easy pickings for an emboldened Vladimir Putin. If NATO does not resist their takeover, it is not only obsolete, but dead. Meanwhile, Trump and Rex Tillerson are rattling sabers over China's claims in the South China Sea, risking war between major nuclear powers. John F Kennedy, a seasoned politician with diplomatic skills, similarly risked nuclear war with the Soviet Union over their Cuban missiles. But Kennedy was reasserting the longstanding policy of control of our neighboring waters declared in the Monroe Doctrine. Can our leaders not see that China, as an established world power, has similar interests in their own backyard pond? It is important that the World Court in the Hague has ruled against their claim, but the Philippines, whose territorial waters have been violated, has absolved China. We cannot afford to police the world indefinitely. Are the South China atolls and fortified reefs in our “core interests,” as China claims for itself?

But can we count on President Trump even knowing what the Monroe Doctrine is? Perhaps, since he has delegated national security briefings to his vice-president, he can have Pence do the research for him on our own geopolitical history. After all, we shouldn't expect knowledge of political science or policy matters from a real estate mogul and reality tv host with the emotional intelligence of a six year-old (by his own admission ).

From my perspective as a climate journalist and activist, the ascension of an outright climate denialist, with cabinet choices of a half-dozen more, completes the campaign of disinformation mounted by the fossil fuel industry, aided and abetted by virtually the entire Republican Party. The rest of the world stands in absolute disbelief that the world's leading power, with a strong postwar history of helping the recovery of defeated nations and development of the Third World, has turned its back on the future of civilized order on this planet. The tragic irony is that this is occurring after a reluctant US finally was party to a successful climate accord in Paris in December 2015, the culmination of decades of agonizing diplomacy, attempting to reconcile the competing interests of 197 signatory countries.

Trump appears to be preparing the way for pulling out of the Paris Accord. Legal experts point out that doing so formally would require almost an entire presidential term. But prominent in the executive orders from his Gatling-pen are a wholesale attack on government scientists, with gag orders issued for all agencies. His leaked memo about dismantling the EPA may simply be rumination, but he has fulfilled virtually every promise, a feat even the best of politicians could not match. The US has the best tools for data collection and analysis in the world (NOAA, NASA, DOE, EPA), and these tools are being mothballed by executive order. As one government scientist put it with respect to climate data, “We are flying blind.”

So what can we do? The purpose of shock and awe is to make such a gargantuan show of force that the opposition is overwhelmed and collapses. That has not happened, and I don't think it will. The women's march was one of the largest marches ever, with simultaneous marches all over the country, in Canada and abroad. From the women I have talked to, they were so crammed that marching was not possible, everyone was smushed together, inching along, or marching in place. This means the usual guidelines for crowd estimates did not apply. The estimate of 500,000 seems low, lower than the 750,000 estimated in LA. Nevertheless, the overall estimate of 3 to 4 million marchers across the country definitely sends a message. But the Trump Resistance involves much more than a one-off day of marching, as I will explore in my next post. Courage!