By Victoria Brandon
Chair, Redwood Chapter
It’s now fall, and our long national nightmare keeps evolving. Covid-19 continues to devastate our communities in ways unparalleled anywhere else in the world, while the Trump administration responds by lying, broadcasting crackpot theories and pandering to his base rather than providing the leadership we so desperately need.
Meanwhile, the economic tsunami whirls on unchecked, with the worst burdens falling on poor communities of color, as they always do, and the violence directed against those same communities becoming so egregious that complacency or ignorance has become no longer possible.
Throughout California, wildfires rage on, with an astounding record of more than 2 million acres blackened so far this year, thousands of residents evacuated and air quality again worse than Beijing’s.
Elsewhere, hurricanes and floods wreak havoc, and climate disruption makes even worse catastrophes likely in the future. To paraphrase Carl Sagan, it’s hard to get good things done if you can’t drink the water or breathe the air.
And yet, through all this chaos, we have what has been termed the most important election of our lifetime on Nov. 3.
We have the civic and moral duty to vote out an administration in Washington that has not only brought out the worst of our society, but has also desecrated environmental protections including for air, water, land, endangered species and clean energy that affects the whole country, incuding our Redwood Chapter region, and ripples out to affect the whole world.
It’s not enough to make sure you vote. We live in California, and our Electoral College votes are safe. We have relatively good representation at local and national levels of government from our districts within Redwood Chapter. We know you, Sierra Club members and supporters, care about what is happening in the world. We know you will partake in your civic duty to cast your ballot. But what is it we are voting for? Or against?
Let’s take a quick and partial glance at the record: In less than four years, the Trump administration with the allowance of the Republican Party in Congress has rolled back offshore drilling safety measures and sage grouse protections, approved the Keystone pipeline (fortunately the courts did not agree!), dismantled national monuments, stepped up the pace of logging on public lands, appointed a series of incompetent, environmentally-hostile individuals to high office, disbanded the EPA air pollution review panel, weakened fuel economy rules and emissions standards, approved offshore oil wells in the arctic, and sapped the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act and Endangered Species Act. Right now—in the middle of a pandemic— Trump is threatening millions of Americans with loss of their health coverage as part of his war on Obamacare, and attempting to gut the U.S. Postal Service right before an election when mail-in ballots will be more decisive than ever before!
Fortunately help is on the way, and the Sierra Club is working hard to make sure it arrives before it’s too late.
To avert climate catastrophe, the Sierra Club has launched the largest political mobilization in the organization’s history, to meet a crisis unlike any we have faced before. The 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report concluded that if we continue on our current path and temperatures rise 4°C or more, droughts, famine, fires, floods, refugee crises, and political instability is certain to follow. We have just 10 years left to radically shift our energy production, business models, land management, and policies in order to avoid that scenario.
In response, we have recruited thousands of volunteers, from every chapter, to participate in a massive Get-Out-The-Vote campaign, which started last February and will continue to gain momentum right up to Nov. 3. They are sending texts, writing letters, and making phone calls to a key group of known climate-conscious voters in four battleground states (Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Arizona), all aimed at getting them to the polls (literally and figuratively). As of Sept. 1 we had sent 13 million texts, made almost 1.5 million calls, and hand-written more than 350,000 letters. As originally conceived, this program was going to climax with two weeks of intense in-person canvassing, but of course those plans had to be abandoned—making the more distanced outreach all the more intense for that reason. We’ll need all the help we can get in the last weeks before the election—to sign up, visit https://www.sierraclubindependentaction.org/#takeaction
As part of our 2020 election activities, the Sierra Club has also set up an “Election Center,” where voters can check their own registration status and polling place, find a list of federal endorsements all over the country and also generate customized “slate cards” by entering their zip codes to obtain a listing of all Sierra Club-endorsed candidates and ballot measure positions that will appear on their own ballots.
Check it out at www.sierraclubindependentaction.org/endorsements
Our political activists have been busy locally too, sending out questionnaires and conducting interviews in all six of Redwood Chapter’s groups and finalizing endorsements in most of our nine counties. Please check out the list at www.sierraclub.org/redwood/endorsements
And please, please, please be sure to VOTE! Of course voting is always important but especially so this year, with a president who is apparently intent on undermining the legitimacy of the electoral process. Back before the 1960 election, presidential paterfamilias Joe Kennedy is said to have said “I don’t mind buying the election but damned if I’ll pay for a landslide!” This year, we need a landslide.
In the meantime, our local conservation work continues here in Redwood Chapter, and we’re winning. Here are just a few of the things we’ve been up to lately:
• We’re ramping up our longstanding commitment to protect and restore San Francisco Bay, starting with making the reconstruction of State Route 37 an opportunity to enhance surrounding wetlands and wildlife habitat, encourage transit, and manage traffic to avoid increased greenhouse gas emissions.
• We’re expanding Sonoma Group’s Climate Protectors program throughout the region. The objective is to give our members and supporters the tools needed to make a difference in the battle against climate disruption: visit www.climateprotectors.net to find out all about it.
• Working with partners like the California Native Plant Society and Defenders of Wildlife, we’re exploring ways to extend permanent protection to fragile critical habitat on BLM-owned Walker Ridge, just north of Highway 20 on the Lake/Colusa County border
• With strong Chapter support, Congressman Jared Huffman’s landmark “Mountains and Rivers” legislation designating 260,000 acres of Wilderness and 379 miles of federal Wild and Scenic Rivers passed the House and, along with several other public lands bills, has been attached to the must-pass National Defense Authorization Act.
• We’re fighting for parks in Solano, oak trees in Napa, and the California coast everywhere.
Looking ahead, we’re getting ready to rejoice at the dramatic changes that will follow when Joe Biden occupies the Oval Office, with California’s own Kamala Harris at his side.
On day one —actually, within an hour of assuming office — he has promised to reverse more than a thousand of the environmental outrages that the current president has perpetrated. What can be done by the stroke of a pen can be undone the same way. Nominations of qualified, dedicated public servants to key positions in the new administration will soon follow, and with a supportive Congress we can even hope to achieve new initiatives to strengthen environmental protections, and maybe even a Green New Deal. And that’s a lot to look forward to.
The idea of another four years of Donald Trump is too dismal even to contemplate, so let’s all do everything we can to make sure it doesn’t happen.