Saying NO! is not enough

You may already have heard that the Walz administration has approved permits needed for Enbridge's Line 3 to begin construction. The environmental community is understandably perturbed. Our email inbox is full of protestations and requests to provide funds. Meanwhile, legislation establishing a Minnesota Green New Deal sits in the House, with a companion bill in the Senate, calling for a moratorium on fossil fuel facilities construction and a number of reports. Where are the sections creating infrastructure jobs comparable to those Line 3 would provide? Where are the sections addressing the role of agriculture in helping adapt to and minimize climate change? Where is the Democratic leadership on Clean Air, Clean Water, Climate Change and helping working people? We'd be much less troubled by the Walz administration action in favor of Line 3 if its members had been much more active restructuring the MNGND to effectively minimize the need for a replacement tar sands pipeline for Canada's crude. Where is the Responsible, Restorative Development caucus of the Democratic Party?

we need cows, hay, and wind turbines and...

Photo by J. Harrington

Someone this morning sent us a link to a thought-provoking Bill McKibben piece: Learning How to Talk: What Climate Activists Must Do in the Biden Era. We concur with much of what he writes. In fact, today's posting was prompted largely by McKibben's observation that

Any plan needs to focus on making sure that workers currently building oil pipelines have something else to build instead.

Our friends in the Democratic party and the environmental movement too often seem focused on what they're against and not often enough on what needs to get done. 

Poem

By Thomas McGrath

I don’t belong in this century—who does?

In my time, summer came someplace in June—

The cutbanks blazing with roses, the birds brazen, and the astonished

Pastures frisking with young calves . . .

                                                          That was in the country—

I don’t mean another country, I mean in the country:

And the country is lost. I don’t mean just lost to me,

Nor in the way of metaphorical loss—it’s lost that way too—

No; nor in no sort of special case: I mean

Lost.

Now, down below, in the fire and stench, the city

Is building its shell: elaborate levels of emptiness

Like some sea-animal building toward its extinction.

And the citizens, unserious and full of virtue,

Are hunting for bread, or money, or a prayer,

And I behold them, and this season of man, without love.

If it were not a joke, it would be proper to laugh.

—Curious how that rat’s nest holds together—

Distracting . . .

                      Without it there might be, still,

The gold wheel and the silver, the sun and the moon,

The season’s ancient assurance under the unstable stars

Our fiery companions . . .

                                     And trees, perhaps, and the sound

Of the wild and living water hurrying out of the hills.

Without these, I have you for my talisman:

Sun, moon, the four seasons,

The true voice of the mountains. Now be

(The city revolving in its empty shell,

The night moving in from the East)

—Be thou these things.

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