Dear friends,
This week, amid all the other goings-on, is a week of action called Rikers is a Death Camp (RIDC). While I find the title problematic — the facility is horribly unsafe and has been the site of far too many deaths, but is not designed for systematic killing — I also feel outrage at the escalating hardships created by Corrections policy.
The main source of contraband inside city jails, though, has been corrections staff, not mail, critics of the policy change said. Instead, the move to scrap physical mail opens the door to private firms to set up surveillance systems against incarcerated people.
As a person who loves to receive a handwritten note that has passed from a loved one’s hands to my own, I cannot accept this policy.
Contact the folks who make the rules — by phone, email, or on Twitter — to let them know that letters matter. Drawings by your kids matter.
With so many mass shootings in the first weeks of this year, you may have found it difficult to find the heart-space to mourn two recent extra-judicial killings by police.
On January 7, Tyre Nichols, age 29, was pulled over by police in Memphis for a traffic stop and brutally beaten. Three days later, he was dead from the injuries.
His parents and their lawyer were shown video footage of Nichols’s deadly encounter with the police.
Nichols’ mother, was unable to get through viewing the first minute of the footage after hearing Nichols ask, “What did I do?” At the end of the footage, Nichols can be heard calling for his mother three times, the attorney said.
Five Memphis PD officers have been fired and there is a federal civil rights investigation underway.
Last week, a 26-year old environmental activist was shot and killed by law enforcement. Known as Tortuguita, the activist was camping in a woodland area on the outskirts of Atlanta, and part of a prolonged protest against Atlanta’s proposed Cop City, a sprawling training compound for police officers and firefighters.
The protests have escalated since Tortuguita was killed.
The forest land in question, Muskogee Creek land, had been a prison farm from the 1920s until around the year of Tortuguita’s birth in Venezuela. The land has been a refuge for unhoused people and there have been calls to turn the land into a public park.
The proposed site for Cop City is adjacent to a predominantly Black, low-income community, which objects to the siting of a massive police facility in its midst as well as the removal of trees that the compound would entail.
According to Atlanta criminal justice reporter, Madeline Thigpen,
public opinion has always really been against the construction, which is not to say that everybody is against it. But when city council voted to lease the land to the Atlanta Police Foundation, over a thousand people called in to speak during public comment. And around 70% of them were against the leasing of the land for the construction of this facility. And that was, like, 17 hours of public comment.
Sign the petition from Color of Change to say NO to Cop City and YES to investments in the community. Include a comment about Tortuguita.
The passionate defense of forested land in Atlanta is of a piece with the environmental struggles elsewhere.
The pipeline would cut through a forested area that is currently inaccessible by road; today, it’s an important habitat adjacent to designated wilderness area where endangered fish and bats live.
[A] federal court of appeals already twice found that the agencies in charge of the process didn’t give enough consideration to the environmental damage the pipeline would cause. In short: This project stinks, and it has no business moving forward.
The Mountain Valley Pipeline would pollute waterways and communities across Appalachia; it is incompatible with the health and well-being of the region.
As is generally the case, the affected communities in Virginia, West Virginia, and North Carolina, have already been hard hit by environmental hazards.
There’s a public comment period for the Mountain Valley Pipeline until February 6.
Urge the US Forest Service to deny a permit to the Mountain Valley Pipeline. Contact the Army Corps of Engineers, too. Both quick actions are from Appalachian Voices.
The plan would require businesses to buy allowances to pollute, gradually reducing the number of allowances — the cap — until emissions are brought down by at least 85 percent, in line with New York’s climate law. To get there, the state would invest revenue from the allowance sales in efforts to cut pollution.
The plan offers the promise of decarbonizing the economy.
NY Renews and other NY climate and environmental justice advocates will have to be deeply engaged in the implementation process to avoid mistakes made by other states when implementing the same system. New York must not allow polluters to continue their harmful behavior by deepening pollution hotspots in ways that exacerbate environmental racism and injustice.
Tell Democratic legislators that the proposed Cap and Invest System must center climate justice. This quick action is from NY Renews.
Election season is never over in the US, it seems. There are special elections in Pennsylvania to fill three empty seats in the statehouse. Democrats won control of the PA statehouse in November and we can keep it blue with a little effort.
Call PA voters or write postcards with the Environmental Voter Project.
Thursdays are for looking back.
On December 27, I mentioned that the back-end of Substack — our host — shows that 60 percent of you seldom take action. I proposed some incremental, manageable change, by way of an action resolution.
In my final post of 2022, on Friday, December 30, I noted that the previous day had been the most active day of the month, with 20 actions. Five more people took action over the New Year holiday weekend.
I promised to check back in about our resolve to do a little more. In the 15 days that I have posted since I exhorted you to do more, we averaged 15 actions a day. On two days, you took more than 30 actions!
That was more than the modest increase I hoped for; the previous 15 posts had averaged 8 or 9 actions daily. I try not to attach to outcomes (blah, blah, blah, ha, ha, ha), and this really cheered me up.
There are some superstars driving the uptick AND almost one-third of readers have clicked a link since the resolution. So, I feel tremendous gratitude for your energy and tenacity, especially since this new year has begun with so much tragedy.
I’m going to take a long weekend to visit my springling in Vermont. Vermont in January. If you knew my springling, you’d understand. I’ve got to top up my heart-space.
I’ll be back on Tuesday with some good news.
with love,
L