Dear friends,
The US does not have a voice in the new biodiversity framework because the US Senate still refuses to ratify the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, a treaty with a great acronym (CBD).
The US has failed to ratify the CBD because of
lobbying by the biopharmaceutical industry, which object[s] to intellectual-property provisions and want[s] to maintain its ability to extract natural resources from developing countries.
The US Fish and Wildlife Service recently removed more than 20 species, including the Bachman’s warbler (below) and ivory-billed woodpecker, from their endangered list because they are believed to be extinct. This little friend also has no voice in the biodiversity framework:
It may seem fruitless to ask anything of the US Senate, but so much of our work requires imagination and vision.
Call on your senators to ratify the Convention on Biological Diversity. Here’s a ready-made message. Pass this on to friends in every state!
Another front in the battle against fossil fuel projects is to stop the folks who fund them. I was not the only one who forgot to call Citibank’s CEO last week.
Call Citibank’s CEO and tell her to Defund Climate Chaos. There’s a script!
New York activists went to DC last week to join the People vs. Fossil Fuels demonstrations. Laura Shindell, an organizer with Food & Water Watch and a very near neighbor to the site of the proposed power plant in Astoria, is among those
working hard to make sure that Hochul makes the right call and puts public health and our climate ahead of private profit. We’re hopeful Hochul will walk the talk, but she has not been tested yet.
Sometimes, you can’t pass the test without a little extra coaching. We’ll be coaching Kathy when she arrives to a fundraising event in Williamsburg this evening.
Come out to greet the governor; let her know we’re depending on her to stop the Astoria power plant.
Of course, there were protesters in DC last week from all over the country.
Indigenous leaders handed over a million petitions demanding that the Biden administration shut down the new [Line 3] pipeline pending a serious environmental review.
Bill McKibben notes that unless we halt new fossil fuel projects, the industry will succeed in “lock[ing] in its business model for decades to come.”
So, that’s why we sign petitions. They are powerful tools when enough of us act.
Tell Governor Hochul & DEC to Stop National Grid’s Greenpoint Liquefied Fracked Gas (LNG) Expansion. This takes 30 seconds.
Mondays have been hitting me hard lately. I spent time this weekend planning a lesson for middle schoolers about the origin stories of movements. I want to illustrate the grassroots nature of the climate movement — that it began with ordinary people in many places at once.
Greta Thunberg is a household name now, but a few short years ago, she was just a stubborn Swedish girl. At 16, she met up with another stubborn teenager, Tokata Iron Eyes, a member of the Standing Rock Sioux. Iron Eyes had been a climate activist for longer than Thunberg. These young people were and are terrified for their future; they are working to get adults to act responsibly. How infuriating.
Contact the president and let him know that we demand meaningful climate action and respect for Indigenous peoples and the land they belong to.
School board meetings have become legendary of late for scenes of our social disintegration. Sometimes, it helps to see the humor in it. But it is actually a dire situation when the people who are making important decisions about education are confronted with members of the public who simply reject facts. Worse still, is when the decision-makers themselves are delusional.
You may be as dumbfounded by this as I am. Is it that they cannot agree that there is racial inequality? Is it that they agree that it exists AND they are not sure it’s a problem? Apparently, it is the latter. (Note that the state AG determined that the resolution was beyond his authority.)
Likewise, the folks in Texas don’t seem to recognize that vigilantism is wrong. For a moment, it appeared that reason had prevailed; a US District judge blocked enforcement of Texas SB8, which allows private citizens “to bring civil cases against abortion providers, along with anyone believed to have aided a person in accessing an abortion.” Two days later, however, a conservative Circuit Court judge sided with Texas on appeal.
If the courts will not provide relief, the Department of Justice has other moves it can make, according to legal scholars.
For example, the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 was passed to protect the civil rights of previously enslaved Americans who were targeted by white supremacist vigilantes; the same law could apply to would-be bounty hunters in Texas.
“The attorney general should announce, as swiftly as possible, that he will use federal law to the extent possible to deter and prevent bounty hunters from employing the Texas law,” wrote Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe. “If Texas wants to empower private vigilantes to intimidate abortion providers from serving women, why not make bounty hunters think twice before engaging in that intimidation?”
Contact US Attorney General Merrick Garland and urge him to prosecute Texas vigilantes under the 1871 KKK Act. This is a ready-made action!
The tragedy on Rikers Island continues to unfold. Yet another person died at one of the jails on the island on Friday. Victor Mercado died of COVID, which he contracted while awaiting trial on a weapons charge. He was unable to post bail and was, effectively, sentenced to death at Rikers.
Nearly 70 women detained at the Rose M. Singer Center signed a petition to object to their transfer to a state prison. The decision to move them to a prison when they have not yet been convicted of the crimes they are charged with violates due process and makes family visits and contact with their lawyers even more difficult.
Tell the mayor and the governor (again!) to take immediate action to release people from Rikers. The messages have been updated (again!) to reflect new developments.
In a democracy, our collective voice is our power. Yesterday, I stood with a few hundred folks at a protest where one of the organizers got Chuck Schumer on the phone. Schumer took the call, because he knows that he cannot simply ignore us.
Maurice, from the Working Families Party, who got Senator Schumer on the phone
More than six months ago, I heard Tokata Iron Eyes speak and I have been thinking about something she said. She said that there was nothing scarier than knowing that something is wrong and not being able or knowing how to advocate for yourself and your community.
Tokata, who is now in college, said that her decade of activism has convinced her that
[Justice is] not a lost cause. It’s not hopeless. We have solutions. We have the numbers.
Her final point was that there are enough of us to effect change. We just have to act.
with love,
L