Friends,
Does anyone know how or if it is possible to email all members of Congress at once? I realize I could set up a group email list, but possibly this has already.been done. If I were to do it, it would take me several hours. Let me know if you are emailing the entire Congress or know an organization which does. Thanks.
Kagiso,
Max
Tim DeChristopher Is Going to Jail, Now It's Our Turn
By Bill McKibben, Huffington Post
Posted on July 27, 2011, Printed on July 29, 2011
http: //www.alternet.org/story/151804/tim_dechristopher_is_going_to_jail%2C_now_it%27s_our_turn
"The idea of wilderness needs no defense. It only needs more defenders." --Ed Abbey
"The Eyes of the Future are looking back at us and they are praying for us to see beyond our own time." --Terry Tempest Williams
There's something about the redrock canyons that seems to inspire great writing -- I was lucky enough to know Ed Abbey and to count Terry Tempest Williams as a great friend. Both wrote -- and both fought. They fulfilled the duty they owed that great landscape. They fought to protect great chunks of land.
And they're joined by Tim DeChristopher, sentenced yesterday to 24 months in prison for a creative act of resistance straight out of the Monkey Wrench Gang. He didn't damage anything except the pride of the Bureau of Land Management, when he posed as a bidder and won 14 parcels of land at an oil-and-gas lease auction. They were gorgeous pieces of land that he protected -- but far more, he was acting on behalf of every landscape left on the planet.
Because the oil and gas under that ground needs to stay there. The carbon it contains is, we now know, ruinous -- it's what is heating the atmosphere, setting new temperature records every day. If you sweated through last week's record heat, if your crops are withering in the southwest's epic drought, if you watched the
And it's time for you to take the same kind of responsibility. In a few weeks, those of us at tarsandsaction.org will be gathering in
This action won't be as risky as Tim's. People are signing up to come to DC for three days. On the first they'll attend nonviolence training, and on the second they'll sit down in front of the White House. No one knows for sure how the police will react, but the legal experts say jail time will likely be measured in hours, not years. Still, it's a very real way to say to President Obama (who will make the Keystone decision all by himself) that this is the great moral issue of our time.
DeChristopher acted before he wrote. But he's a writer too -- in court he read an essay before his sentencing, which ended with these words about civil disobedience
At this point of unimaginable threats on the horizon, this is what hope looks like. In these times of a morally bankrupt government that has sold out its principles, this is what patriotism looks like. With countless lives on the line, this is what love looks like, and it will only grow.
I think he's right.
You can read Tim DeChristopher's words to the court here.
Environmentalist and author Bill McKibben is the founder of 350.org, an international climate campaign.
© 2011 Huffington Post All rights reserved.
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"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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