First Steps

Back in February, I helped organize a day of climate action at the Vermont Statehouse. I also wrote a VPR commentary about it, which I forgot to post. So here it is! You can listen to it here, or read below...

First Steps

In spite of having lived in Vermont for almost 20 years (with a little time off for good behavior), I’d never visited the Statehouse in Montpelier until just recently. The occasion was a gathering of activists rallying for bold, aggressive climate legislation.

While I didn’t know what to expect from a day in the hallowed halls of power, what I certainly didn’t anticipate was that it would be so much fun.

For one thing, it was easy. In New York City, you have to flash ID, sign in, and go through a metal detector just to get into most large office buildings. But here, in what they call “The People’s House,” you simply walk in the side door - just like you would at home. Of course, at home, you walk through the side door into your mud room, not into what looks like an episode of The West Wing, but still, you just walk in. Nobody questions your right to be there, because they all believe that it IS your right to be there.

Another surprise was discovering how many people I knew. From a Senator I first met in yoga class to a Representative I always run into in my local coffee shop to a lobbyist who’s also a subscriber at Vermont Stage Company, it really did feel just like a concentrated version of my community - which I think, again, is the whole point.

Like Town Meeting Day, it’s part of what distinguishes Vermont as a very human place. Even the most power-brokery power brokers are still your friends and neighbors, and if you bother to show up, you, too, can be part of the process of running the state.

Or, I might add, entertaining the state.

I have a one-woman show I do called The Boycott about the First Lady of the US launching a sex strike to combat global warming. The theme song for the show is a saucy little power ballad which demands, with rather Anglo-Saxonesque urgency, that we all cease and desist our planet-dismantling behavior. At lunch in the statehouse cafeteria (which is just like your high school cafeteria - you’re always looking for where the cool people sit), a couple legislators I didn’t even know came up to ask if I’d be singing this R-rated ditty in the House Chamber that afternoon.

I hadn’t been planning on it, as it wasn’t on my calendar to get arrested that day. But we climate activists did accidentally get into a little trouble anyway. Representative Sarah Edwards from Brattleboro had a climate resolution being read on the floor of the House, and a whole bunch of us sat in to support her and see if it would get passed.

Indeed it was passed, and the climate crew in the back of the room burst into cheers and applause. Turns out, this is NOT an acceptable part of House protocol, and Speaker Shap Smith had to whackety-whack his gavel and tell us to settle down and behave ourselves. Sorry, Speaker Smith. We really didn’t know.

Now, admittedly, this was a light day in the world of citizen participation. We were introducing ourselves to our legislators - and to each other. We weren’t wrangling for specific legislation, battling industry lobbyists, or going toe to toe with climate deniers.

Still, as a first step in building relationships, in learning whom to talk to and how to talk to them, in learning that each of us have a place in the governance of the state, it was a great first step.

We all know addressing climate change and building a sustainable, resilient, carbon-free Vermont won’t be easy. But in an era of widespread political apathy, cynicism, and divisiveness, the fact that we all left Montpelier feeling energized, hopeful, and looking forward to going back is, to my mind, a huge victory in itself.

The Picture Of Enough

Vermont Public Radio has an annual fundraising event called the Commentator's Brunch. About 30 commentators do 3-minute essays on a particular theme. This year's theme was Picture This. My submission was called The Picture of Enough.

My favorite comment afterwards was someone who said, "Who are you? You actually made me think."

Arlo's Daughter

Vermont Public Radio solicited commentaries about family Thanksgiving traditions as part of the National Day of Listening. Mine has to do with the ritual playing of Alice's Restaurant. You can listen to the commentary here.

For the readers among you, the text is posted below.

Have a family and fun-filled weekend!

Arlo's Daughter

I don't really have a long family history to recount. As far as I know, my Jewish ancestors got kicked around Europe for a few hundred years, landed at Ellis Island at the beginning of the 20th century, and promptly dismissed their grim past as not worthy of remembering.

My parents were no exception. While good at telling jokes, they weren't much for personal narrative. However, they did have a couple classic passions of their generation - folk music and liberal politics. They also loved Thanksgiving - a uniquely secular celebration which appealed to my father's die-hard atheism and his great love of a good dinner party.

One small bit of family lore I do know is that my maternal grandfather, Jack Soifer, was an OBGYN in Brooklyn. Grampa Jack specialized in delivering babies for lefty Jewish intellectuals, and his most famous catch was Arlo Guthrie.

My Mom and Grandmother have always considered Arlo an honorary member of the family.

So, of course, a big part of Thanksgiving in my house was the ritual of playing Alice's Restaurant. I heard it so many times that I know the whole thing by heart. Not just the words, but every cadence, every inflection, every little quirk of Arlo's delivery:

"Yes, sir, Officer Obie, I cannot tell a lie, I put that envelope under that garbage."

The odd thing, though, is that my lefty-politico parents never actually explained what Arlo was talking about in the second half of the song - the whole business about him trying to avoid the draft and not get sent to Vietnam.

So while that part didn't make a whole lot of sense to my young, impressionable self, I did get the distinct idea that it's good to be a smart-mouthed trouble-maker if there's something out there you object to.

More than that, I completely absorbed the concept of using the arts as a legitimate form of protest. Arlo says it himself: "If you wanna end war and stuff, you gotta sing loud." And I believed him.

I also believed him when he said, "Can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day walkin' in, singin' a bar of Alice's Restaurant, and walkin' out. Friends they may think it's a movement. And that's what it is."

I believe that with all my heart. This is how we change the world. It doesn't take much. Fifty dedicated people, a bar of a good song, four part harmony, and feeling.

Happy Thanksgiving.

The We of Us

Image by Seon-Jeong Kim

Vermont Public Radio asked me to write a commentary about the challenges of the electoral season, and if I had any ideas or insights which might make the whole process a little easier for their listeners. Me? Have ideas?

And so I do.

You can listen here, or read the text below:

The We of Us

I tend to turn my head away during election season. It’s just so...tacky. I mean, who decided that the best way to select our leaders was through platitudes, lying, finger-pointing, issuing oversimplified, overinflated promises, and littering our roadsides with ten thousand mini-billboards - none of which (I might add) have any sense of aesthetics or graphic design?

I do feel guilty about ignoring it. I’ve always believed that if I’m going to live in this world, then I need to step up and participate. And politics are an inescapable part of that. But still, something’s just always felt wrong.

Then, the other day, I was poking around on line and found, back to back, photos of tea party rallies around the country, and an article about sustainability initiatives in Portland, Oregon. Turns out many of the projects were started by neighborhood community groups, who then reached out to partner with local government to help develop things further.

I had a thought that part of the anger of the Tea Party movement is in people not feeling like they have the capacity or resources to solve their own problems. And the mistaken assumption that those problems can only get solved by elected leadership.

Conversely, the folks in Portland have taken the responsibility of addressing their needs and realizing their visions upon themselves. They've done it by working together as a community, and then inviting elected leaders into the process.

I think a lot of political campaigns are based on promises of what I, the candidate, am going to do for you, the voter.

But, once elected, we've had this tendency to hope our leaders will "save" us. And when things remain challenging, when the big problems are still big and life doesn't seem better immediately, it's as if the hero has fallen. But more than that, it's like the powerful parent figure has failed us, the powerless child.

The irony of our current electoral climate is that when Obama ran for President, his message was Yes we can. We. Everyone. But maybe there was a secret hope that this guy would swoop in and save us. The truth is, though, our problems took a long time to create, and will take a long time to solve. No one person is going to "save" us. And that savior idea ultimately makes us feel powerless - then scared - then angry. And often angry at the wrong people.

Perhaps the trick is in shifting our expectations away from what we want our leaders to do for us, and towards who we think can work best with us.

Maybe a good leader is someone who creates an environment which supports people in realizing their own capacities to the fullest extent.

We need to answer for ourselves the question of what kind of a world we want to live in, and then assume the responsibility for working to realize that vision. Elected leadership is just a piece of the puzzle.

The Vermont Guide to Global Living

I was asked to give the keynote address at a recent meeting of the Vermont Climate Collaborative. They're a partnership between the University of Vermont and the Agency of Natural Resources designed to help Vermont make the transition to a post-carbon world.

The charge from the organizers: Do Something Inspiring. Oh, well, all right...

For you literary types, you can read it here.

Willing and Able

I just had this essay published on the Coalitions of the Willing's blog. Feels good to finally get my opinion aired in public. Now on to Cop16!

If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse.

- Paul Hawken

I have been meaning to come out of the closet for a while now, and confess that I took a very different view of what happened during the UN climate talks in Copenhagen than what has become the oft-repeated mainstream story of unmitigated failure.

I spent the bulk of my time in Copenhagen not watching the UN negotiations at the Bella Center (though giant kudos to all the activists – in particular the folks from Climate Justice Fast – who permanently lodged themselves there), but at Klimaforum.

For those of you who missed it, Klimaforum was a gathering of over 7000 people from global civil society – activists, artists, educators, farmers, freelance journalists – all coming together to talk about climate change, peak oil, and environmental justice.

It felt as if the whole world was there. I met Kenyan tree-planters and Ecuadoran Indians and Navajo social workers and Lapland Elk herders and Tibetan liberation activists. I met a Swiss shaman with a 20-foot alphorn, a Brazilian tour guide in body paint and a leopard print bikini, a handful of Danish Hare Krishnas, and not one, but two Santa Clauses.

Klimaforum had over 300 scheduled events including talks on topics ranging from preventing rainforest destruction to dismantling industrial agriculture. There were workshops on permaculture, canceling Third World debt, and Transition Towns. There were youth activist trainings, spiritual rituals honoring the climate crisis, networking rooms. There was art, music, and theater. Many of the folks who couldn’t get into the overcrowded Bella Center ended up at Klimaforum and I eavesdropped on several discussions about how “this is what COP15 should have been.”

Concurrent to COP15 and Klimaforum were two other convergences: a conference of world mayors sharing cutting edge urban planning techniques and technologies for reducing CO2 and increasing sustainability, and a gathering in Christiania of indigenous leaders (cheekily called the Climate Bottoms) working on their own tactics and solutions.

On my daily travels through Copenhagen, I was blown away by all the public art, youth activism, bloggers by the truckload at the extremely well organized TckTckTck media center, hundreds of thousands of people marching through the streets, and the endless how-do-we-fix-it conversations in all the restaurants and cafes.

In spite of the fact that for weeks beforehand the official word was that there wasn’t going to be an agreement coming out of COP15, we all still wanted a miracle. Of course we did. Climatically speaking, the hour is very, very late indeed. And thanks to people like Ian Fry, Chief Negotiator from Tuvalu, and President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives, there were at least a few dramatic mini-miracles out there.

But honestly, the real miracle for me was watching global civil society say: “While the people at the Bella Center are leaders, they are not the only leaders. Our capacity to address the climate crisis does not rest solely in their hands. We have passion and vision and immense creativity. We have profound love for the planet, and for each other. We have a vision of universal justice and the ability to collaborate across cultural lines, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do.”

I came away feeling – and still feel – the strength and power of the movement in which we’re all engaged. To echo Transition Town Maestro Rob Hopkins, I feel an intense sense of both humility and gratitude for being present at this remarkable, charismatic (and yes, sometimes terrifying) moment in human history. And I bow my head to the remarkable global community working like hell to weave us all a future we can anticipate with joy.

March In

I just did a keynote address at a benefit for the Vermont Women's Fund. The occasion of a 30th birthday, an 80th birthday, and the 90th anniversary of women's suffrage. Enjoy!