Americans Dancing in the Streets: Part II

A minister, a poet, and a rancher marked Ash Wednesday this past week, the Christian day of repentance, by chaining themselves to the White House gates and getting arrested. 

Rev. Jim Antal“Ash Wednesday is a good day to be arrested,” said the minister, Rev. Jim Antal, Conference Minister of the Massachusetts Conference of the United Church of Christ,  “because civil disobedience is a form of repentance…Our generation must now repent of the sin of wrecking God’s creation.  Our decades of science denial have now been exchanged for widespread recognition of the community-crushing effects of climate disruption, whether by way of wildfires, droughts or superstorms.”

Four days later the environmental protests continued with “Forward on Climate” rallies across the nation.   40,000 folks in the streets of Washington, DC, thousands more in San Francisco and Los Angeles, even a 100 faithful in my own town Monterey, California;  Americans took to the streets Sunday to express their concerns and demand action on climate change.

Reading my column last week, faithful reader Kathy Lique reminded me that it wasn’t just Mardi Gras drunks, Chinese American dragon dancers and Valentine’s Day protesters against violence on women who took to the streets this week.

Those street dancing environmental activists across the nation sought to encourage President Obama to keep his dramatic and somewhat unexpected inauguration and State of the Union Address promises to act boldly against climate change.  In particular they demanded he reject the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that would carry oil from land locked Canadian oilfields across US heartland rivers and wilderness and aquifers, 1400 miles to Texas refineries and then overseas for export.

Billed as the largest environmental protest in US history, the rallies are the work of a broad coalition of hundreds of organizations from the Sierra Club to Interfaith Power and Light to Canada’s First Nations to Nebraska ranchers groups, and led by Bill McKibbon’s 350.org.  Together they insist,  “We are not your parents’ environmental movement.”

Rev. Lennox Yearwood of the Hip Hop Caucus said to the D.C. crowd that they were like those who marched on Washington with Martin Luther King in 1963 except, “They were fighting for equality.  We are fighting for existence.”

The 48 environmental activists arrested Wednesday in anticipation of the big Sunday rallies also included Michael Brune, Executive Director of the Sierra Club.  For the first time in its 120 year history the Sierra Club lifted its ban on law breaking protest.

Brune told the radio program Democracy Now: 

“This last year we had record droughts and record wildfires and temperatures a full degree above the previous record in the lower 48, and thousand-mile storm that hit the Eastern Seaboard.  And the first big test for the president of his commitment to fight climate change is whether or not we’re going to build a pipeline that would take almost a million barrels of oil every day, the dirtiest oil on the plant, ship it through the U.S and have most of it be exported.  So what we’re trying to do is convince President Obama that he needs to put his full muscle and his full ambition to match the scale of this challenge.”

Also arrested were Julian Bond, civil rights activist and former president of the NAACP, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., President of the Waterkeepers Alliance and lawyer for the National Resource Defense Council, and Robert Haas, former US Poet Laureate.

Susan LuebbeAnd a Nebraska cow girl.  Susan Luebbe, a Nebraska rancher suing her state for approving the pipeline, said:

“As a third generation cowgirl from the Sand Hills of Nebraska I have worked hard with other to get XL off our ranch.  I want to take this risk of arrest with many other landowners, and indigenous tribal members from Canada through the U.S to end this fight…TransCanada’s project cuts right through the heart of environmentally sensitive land and cultural history.  I want the future generations to see what it take to fight for something so precious that our ancestors worked so hard to build for all of us.”

This wasn’t Rev. Antal’s first arrest in protest of the pipeline.  He was one of over 1200 people arrested in the same place in August 2011, again, as a leadup to a bigger demonstration.  Later that fall 15,000 people protested by holding hands in a giant circle around the White House.  Weeks afterwards Obama ordered the pipeline stopped until further environmental review was done.  Antal said, “The last time we did this it was the largest act of civil disobedience since the Civil Rights Movement, and I believe it was a direct consequence of bringing the Keystone pipeline to the attention of national press to cause President Obama to put a halt on it.”

Two years later, Antal is hoping his former senator, John Kerry, now the new Secretary of State, succeeding Hillary Clinton, will help convince Obama to be bold.  Kerry has long been an active advocate in the Senate for reducing human actions that contribute to climate change.  Because the pipeline crosses an international border, it is the State Department, and ultimately the President, who approves this project.  But Canada is banking (literally) strongly on the money it will gain from being able to sell its oil overseas.  Its conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper is no environmentalist.

Many of us wanted Obama to be bolder in this second term.  So far he has been, in his inauguration and State of the Union speeches.  He knows the Republicans will try to stop him in Congress any way they can.  But he promises executive action on both climate change and gun control.  He knows he can only get much done in his first year of this his last term.  Now’s the time.

Copyright © 2013 Deborah Streeter