by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Evidence-based
science
USA climate map
Leave it in the
ground
Crowd at rally
Birds & bees,
oceans & trees
Healthy Earth couple
Jim Miller
Bike, Walk, Take
Transit
Mukhta Kulkankar
& Willow Lark
Make Earth cool again
Not a liberal
conspiracy
Governor Brown, ban
fracking
Sean Bohac (right)
carrying Green Party banner
Denial is not policy
Ann Menasche
Every day is Earth
Day
Go vegan
Science trumps B.S.
Earth Spirit
Clean energy
revolution
Theory … like gravity
I want my Saturdays back
The People’s
March for Climate, which stepped off in various cities across the U.S. on April
29 — the 100th day of the Presidency of Donald John Trump, Jr. — was
the first of the major anti-Trump marches I actually attended. They’ve been
going on since at least January 21, the day after Trump’s inauguration, when
the National Women’s March became the largest single public event in
Washington, D.C.’s history. But I’d been ducking them so far: a combination of
a daunting work schedule and a bizarre health problem kept me away.
But I was
determined to make the one on April 29, partly because the organizers had put
out written flyers advertising it instead of just trusting to social media to
get the word out; partly because the environment is a cause of paramount
importance (let’s face it: the civil-rights struggles of people of color, women
and Queers won’t mean very much if the Earth ceases to be able to support human
life); and partly because Rachel Maddow shamed me into it.
On her April 28
program, she had a guest who’s a major part of the movement to challenge
Vladimir Putin’s dictatorial power in Russia (though he now lives in Britain
because Putin’s opponents have a way of getting jailed or poisoned) and
announced that April 29 was also going to be a day of demonstrations against
Putin all over Russia. So I figured that if there are Russian activists who are
willing to risk being arrested — or even murdered — to stand up to their
country’s dictatorial President, I should be willing to risk much less dire
medical consequences to stand up to mine.
The People’s
March followed what’s become the usual pattern for such actions. Held at what’s
grandly been termed “Waterfront Park” even though it’s only the backyard of the
County Administrative Center downtown, it featured a rally with speakers at 10
a.m. and a subsequent march — a brief one, just to the Broadway Pier downtown
and back. Marchers carried mostly homemade signs, some with a good deal of wit.
One, in black letters on an orange background, read, “Ice doesn’t have an
agenda. It just melts!” Another spoke to the sheer plethora of protests
since Trump took over as President; it read, “Can You Resign Already? I Want My
Saturdays Back.”
There were other
more prosaic signs as well, including several with the slogan “Leave It In the
Ground” — a reference to the argument of climate scientists and activists that
if people continue to extract and burn fossil fuels, the atmosphere will
contain so much carbon dioxide there will be no way to stop extensive climate
changes that will threaten human survival. Other signs referenced Trump’s
statement that human-caused climate change was a hoax cooked up by the Chinese
to get the U.S. to de-industrialize, and the sheer number of climate-change
deniers, including Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) head Scott Pruitt and
Energy Secretary Rick Perry, Trump has appointed to key posts in his
administration.
Indeed, while
other aspects of the Trump agenda have been stymied by Congress or the courts,
his assault on the environment has proceeded full speed ahead. As Jim Miller,
professor at San Diego City College and vice-president of the San Diego chapter
of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), put it at the rally, “The Trump
administration, which has illustrated flaming incompetence in almost every
other area, has proven to be pretty darned good at gearing up to kill the
planet. Indeed, the Trump administration has delayed new energy and fuel
efficiency standards, signaled that it will revoke Obama’s Clean Power Plan,
proposed a budget that guts the Environmental Protection Agency, and threatened
to upend the Paris accord on climate.”
On the eve of
the People’s March for Climate, Trump signed two executive orders vastly
expanding the public land area available for offshore oil drilling, including
the Arctic as well as the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. The order that would
allow oil companies to drill off the California coast was an especially intense
spit-in-your-eye attack on environmentalists, since the modern environmental
movement began largely as a response to the oil spill off the coast of Santa
Barbara in February 1969, which sparked a nationwide movement that held the
first Earth Day celebrations in April 1970 and pushed the Clean Air Act and
Clean Water Act through Congress.
Trump’s bold
assault on environmental regulation stands as a sharp contrast to Richard
Nixon, the Republican President who signed the Clean Air Act and Clean Water
Act into law. On December 31, 1970 Nixon signed a bill to restrict pollution
from automobiles and publicly announced, “I think 1971 will be known as the
year of action, and as we look at action, I would suggest that this bill is an
indication of what action can be. Because if this bill is completely enforced,
within four years it will mean that the emissions from automobiles which pollute
the environment will be reduced by 90 percent.”
But the
tradition of environmental activism within the Republican Party, which had
begun with President Theodore Roosevelt and his Secretary of the Interior,
Gifford Pinchot, in the first decade of the 20th century and
continued through Nixon and his successor, Gerald Ford, was first reversed by
Ronald Reagan. In his 1980 campaign, appearing in Western states, Reagan
publicly endorsed the so-called “Sagebrush Rebellion” of ranchers and hunters
trying to privatize federal land and remove restrictions on its use.
As with so many
other parts of his agenda, Trump on the environment has been Reagan on
steroids. In a lead article in the April 30 Los Angeles Times (http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-climate-20170428-story.html),
reporter Evan Halper quoted California Congressmember Jared Huffman as calling
Trump’s environmental policy “a wrecking ball right out of the gate … We
shouldn’t underestimate the amount of damage that has already been done to the
environment by an administration that can’t seem to get almost anything else
done.”
Halper’s article identified controversial radical-Right
multibillionaire financiers Charles and David Koch as the masterminds of
Trump’s attack on environmental protection. The Koch brothers, whose name has
become a symbol of political control by the super-rich to progressives today
the way the names “Rockefeller” and “Morgan” were in past decades, made their
money in fossil fuels and have set up a network of lobbying organizations and
think tanks to remove government restrictions on fossil-fuel exploitation and
block efforts by the EPA and other federal agencies to protect the environment.
“Some of the
attacks have been high-profile and attention-grabbing: the dismantling of the
Clean Power Plan that promised to put the nation’s dirtiest power plants out of
business; the shelving of aggressive fuel mileage standards that California and
other states are dead-set on implementing; the move to get rid of national
monuments; the hasty approval of contentious, massive oil pipelines,” Halper
wrote in his L. A. Times article. “But
even on days when the announcements don’t make headlines, the tearing-up of
environmental rules marches along. Often the rules involved are obtuse and
escape broad public notice, but the impact of stripping them piles up.”
The Speakers Sound the
Alarm
The speakers at
the San Diego People’s March for Climate rally sounded the alarm over Trump’s
anti-environmentalist actions and called for popular resistance to them. Among
the biggest attacks by Trump on the environment were his approvals for
constructing the Keystone XL and Dakota Access oil pipelines, which environmentalists
had attacked for two reasons: the projects themselves would harm the earth and
underground water supplies where they were built, and they’d facilitate the
burning of more oil-based fuels, increasing the concentration of carbon dioxide
in the atmosphere and thus speeding up global warming. They successfully
lobbied former President Barack Obama to block these projects — but then in
came Trump, who green-lighted both of them.
The Dakota
Access pipeline in North Dakota became a particularly emotional issue not only
for environmentalists but also for Native Americans, who not only linked the
pipeline to the U.S. government’s constant expropriation of their lands but
said it would directly threaten their water sources. The rally’s opening
speaker, Bobby Wallace, was a Native American from San Diego’s Kumeyaay Nation
who talked about his participation in the protests at Standing Rock, site of
the Dakota Access pipeline. He said he personally witnessed military-style
attacks against anti-pipeline protesters by federal and North Dakota state
armed forces.
“We’ve been to
Standing Rock five times,” Wallace said. “We’ve seen the abuse on the whites,
on the Blacks, on the Natives, on everybody. We were there on the front line
when little girls got their arms blown off. … They were dropping chemicals out
of the sky. I had something in my lungs for over a month. I had a headache for
over a month. You know, I think my boots right here, if they’re a little torn
up and shattered, that’s from chemicals, you guys. It’s real. These guys are
coming after us in a big way.”
“It’s our
responsibility to remain hopeful and keep up this fight,” said the next
speaker, Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, California State Assemblymember and former
head of the San Diego-Imperial Counties Central Labor Council. “We’re lucky,
because we live in a state of resistance, a true state of resistance. We live
in the state of California, where we say we’re not going backwards on
immigration. We’re not going backwards on workers, or women, or LGBTQ rights.
And we’re not going backwards on all the gains that we’ve made for the
environment in the last few years. We’re going to continue, persist and push,
and make sure our air is clean.”
But, Gonzalez
Fletcher added, “Everything we do at the state has to be replicated here
locally.” She used the rally to promote AB 805, a bill she wrote to reform
SANDAG, the local consortium of city and county governments and agencies that
sets transit policy for San Diego County. SANDAG — the initials stand for San
Diego Association of Governments but that’s only one of the agencies in the
transportation consortium — put a measure on the November 2016 ballot to raise
the local sales tax to fund transportation needs. But the measure failed, at
least in part because the San Diego County Democratic Party endorsed against it on the ground that it allocated too much of the
money for freeway and road construction and not enough for public transit,
footpaths and bike lanes.
AB 205, whose
text is available online at http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201720180AB805,
is an elaborate and rather wonky piece of legislation that reshuffles the
SANDAG board and changes its personnel and voting rules. It also would require
that, in writing the regional comprehensive plan for transportation in San
Diego County, SANDAG must “address the greenhouse gas emissions reduction
targets set by the State Air Resources Board as required by Section 65080 of
the Government Code and include strategies that provide for mode shift to
public transportation.”
This is
important, Gonzalez Fletcher told the crowd at the People’s March for Climate,
because “50 percent of our greenhouse gas emissions come from transportation. …
It’s time we reduce the numbers of cars on the freeway, increase the number of
walk lanes and bicycles and mass transit, and we can all do it by supporting AB
805. I hope you’ll help me in that effort, because it’s time we reform the way
we do transportation in San Diego County.” Indeed, at one point the rally MC’s
stopped the program to ask everyone there to use their smartphones to call the
office of State Senator Toni Atkins at (619) 645-3133, or tweet her at
@sentoniatkins, to tell her to sponsor AB 805 in the State Senate.
The next speaker
was Dr. Jeff Severinghaus, professor of geosciences at Scripps Institute of
Oceanography, UC San Diego. The rally MC who introduced him read his bio and
stumbled over the phrase that he had studied “whether the addition of carbon
dioxide to the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels could also
produce a rapid change in climate, rather than the slow, steady rise in
temperature that many computer models of global climate now predict.” She read
the word “addition” as “addiction” — and Dr. Severinghaus began his speech by
saying that she was basically right: fossil fuels are an addiction and need to be fought as one.
“When people ask
me, ‘Do you believe in climate change?,’ I say, ‘No,’ because it’s not a matter
of belief,” Dr. Severinghaus said. “It’s a matter of an overwhelming amount of
evidence. Now, if you don’t believe that carbon dioxide causes warming, just
look at our neighbor planet, Venus. Venus has about 100,000 times more carbon
dioxide in its atmosphere than we do, and the surface temperature is 856°F, hot
enough to melt lead. … So we literally are cooking ourselves.”
Dr. Severinghaus
called the continued emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere a form of
theft from our children and grandchildren. “It’s not ethical to take something
away from future generations when they’re not at the negotiating table,” he
said. “They’re not present. And it’s not ethical to cause other species to go
extinct when they don’t have a voice. So we, who do have voices, we have an
obligation to speak for the trees, to speak for the animals, and the plants, to
basically speak for those who are not present at the negotiating table, for
future generations.”
California
Governor Jerry Brown was held up by Dr. Severinghaus as a model of an
environmentally conscious political leader, a counter-example to Trump. “Jerry
Brown is doing great stuff,” Severinghaus said. “The other day, he came to one
of my colleagues at Scripps, Helen Fricker, and he spoke to her for two hours
about the ice sheets in Antarctica. It was so cool. And he really does pay
attention to what’s going on with the science.” Other participants in the march
were less sanguine about Brown: one demonstrator held up a sign criticizing him
for refusing to ban fracking, the environmentally devastating oil and gas
drilling technique that involves pumping toxic chemicals into the ground to
bring fossil fuels to the surface.
Jim Miller, the
next speaker, linked the fight for environmental justice to the fight against
economic inequality. “It is clear that Trump and his anointed wrecking crew of
fossil-fuel industry billionaires will not be denied this opportunity to attack
not just sound environmental policy but also the very idea that such
governmental intervention is even necessary,” he said. “Now, 100 days into
Trump’s Presidency, it’s obvious that he has no agenda, or even a coherent
ideology, perhaps excepting greed. But two qualities that clearly have no place
in his muddled, deconstructive administration are caution and restraint, and as
a result the planet and everything else on it will suffer.”
Inclusive or Exclusive?
The next
speakers, student activists Willow Lark and Mukhta Kulkankar, took the linkage
between environmental protection and other issues even farther than Miller had.
Both are studying various aspects of environmental science — Lark studies
environmental engineering at San Diego State and is active in the Young
Democratic Socialists and Green Love, and Kulkankar is a UCSD student in marine
science and environmental biology. They spoke together, tag-teaming each other
so you really had to look closely to figure out which one was speaking at any
given moment, and they used the term “intersectional” essentially to read out
of the environmental movement anyone who doesn’t subscribe to the entire issue
agenda of the American Left.
“You cannot call
yourself an environmentalist if you’re racist,” Lark said. “You cannot call
yourself an environmentalist if you don’t empower women. You cannot call
yourself an environmentalist if you do not support workers and labor. You
cannot call yourself an environmentalist if you don’t believe in equality, and
you endorse the exploitation of the countries in the global East and the global
South by the capitalist imperialists!”
Lark clearly
intended her remark to link the various social-justice issues and portray the
struggle to preserve the environment as an integral part of the broader
movement for economic equality, civil rights and social justice. But it also
set up a high bar and basically told Americans who aren’t part of the socialist
Left that they’re not welcome in the fight against climate change.
This is
significant because in some local struggles over environmental issues, the
cause has picked up some unexpected and valuable allies whom Lark’s stand would
probably drive away. Hunters, for example, have frequently joined battles in
the Midwest and rural West to protect public lands from oil and gas drillings,
on the ground that game animals can’t live in areas being despoiled by energy
extraction. But a march in which one participant carried a sign saying that the
way to save the planet is to go vegan (the argument being that raising meat
animals requires a lot more energy than growing edible plants) isn’t one where
a hunter is going to feel welcome.
Indeed, much of
the history of progressive organizing in the U.S. consists of coalitions that
made sense at the time but look like awfully strange bedfellows today. Denis
Kearney, who founded the Workingmen’s Party — the first labor political party
in U.S. history — in San Francisco in the 1870’s gave speeches whose attacks on
the political power of corporations and wealthy individuals would have seemed
right at home in the Occupy rallies. But he also railed against immigrants,
especially Chinese, in terms that made him sound like Pat Buchanan or Donald
Trump.
Likewise,
William Jennings Bryan was hailed as a progressive champion when he emerged as
a dark-horse candidate for President in 1896 and advocated controls on the
rampant corporate power of the day. He also supported making silver coins as a
way of increasing the money supply to stimulate the economy. But he’s best
known today for his late-in-life embrace of Fundamentalist Christianity and his
leadership of the attempt to ban the teaching of evolution in the public
schools in the 1920’s. Indeed, in his mind his progressive economic positions
and opposition to evolution were linked: he was so appalled by the so-called
“social Darwinist” theory that the corporate rich were superior people to the
common run of humanity that he decided he was against not only social Darwinism
but biological Darwinism as well.
Ironically, the
site at which the San Diego People’s March for Climate assembled was also one
rife with contradictions. The San Diego County Administrative Center was built
in the 1930’s by the U.S. Works Project Administration (WPA), a program of the
New Deal to put people to work by having them build infrastructure for which the
federal government would pay. But many of the WPA projects were giant dams and
other massive public works that the environmentalists of the time opposed.
Lark’s exclusive
attitude as to who can and can’t be an “environmentalist” also has its echoes
in the different values by which Right and Left American voters judge
candidates. During the 2016 election one aspect that perplexed a lot of
political commentators was the willingness of members of the radical religious
Right to vote for Donald Trump, a man whose lifestyle was in many ways a living
contradiction of their stated ideals. Trump, who’s currently on his third wife
and has publicly boasted of his adulteries and his unwelcome advances to women,
has made much of his money from building gambling casinos, and was so
unfamiliar with the Bible that when he tried to quote it in one speech, instead
of citing the book he was reading from as “Second Corinthians” he said “Two
Corinthians,” nonetheless got an overwhelming 80 percent of the votes of white
evangelicals in November 2016.
That’s an
indication of the extent to which, despite their reputation for hard-nosed
“moralism,” members of the radical religious Right “keep their eyes on the
prize” and vote for candidates not for who they are as people, but for what
they say they will do in office. The only other divorced man ever to be
President, Ronald Reagan, won in 1980 partly by mobilizing the votes of white
evangelicals even though his major-party opponent, Jimmy Carter, was a white
evangelical himself.
Reagan delivered
for the radical-Right constituency via at least some of his U.S. Supreme Court
appointees and through the infamous “gag rule” that bars organizations
receiving U.S. funding for health work abroad even to mention abortion as an alternative. Likewise Trump delivered
for evangelicals by proclaiming a stronger version of the “gag rule” and by
getting Neil Gorsuch on the U.S. Supreme Court. Indeed, Trump has promised that
any future appointees he makes will be from the radical-Right Federalist Society
— thereby making it likely that by the end of Trump’s first term in 2020
there’ll be a solid radical-Right majority on the Court ready to overturn the Roe v. Wade
abortion decision and all the Court’s ruling protecting Queer rights.
Compare the way
the radical Right treated Donald Trump with the way the San Diego Left treated
former Mayor Bob Filner. Rather than cover up or explain away Filner’s
inappropriate treatment of his female staff members, prominent local Democrats
with progressive reputations — including former City Councilmember Donna Frye
and activist attorneys Cory Briggs and Marco Gonzalez (Lorena Gonzalez
Fletcher’s brother) — actually led the charge against him and publicly exposed
his conduct. The result was that Filner was driven from office in disgrace and
replaced by a business-friendly Republican, Kevin Faulconer, who reopened the
Jacobs plan to desecrate Balboa Park, supported a giveaway of public money and
land to keep the Chargers football team in San Diego and refuses to do anything
substantive to help the city’s homeless population.
The
March
The actual march
for climate justice followed the rally and was relatively short — down Harbor
Drive to Broadway, out to the Broadway Pier and then back the way it came — and
uneventful. One interesting aspect was the waves the marchers got from
construction workers on one of the projects lining the waterfront. Evidently
these workers haven’t fallen for the propaganda of Trump and other
anti-environmentalist Republicans that protecting the environment will cost
them their jobs.
The marchers
returned to the great lawn behind the County Administrative Center and there
was a festive atmosphere as the event drew to a close and people either
trickled out or stayed to hang out and party.
