Action in Trump's America: Why I March

The following is a guest post from Elisabeth Hoffman of Howard County Climate Action.
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Turns out the chief benefit from Donald Trump’s election lies in the backlash.  
Progress on immigration, environmental justice, women’s rights, #BlackLivesMatter, and health care are at risk. On climate change, in particular, we have shifted from barely addressing the unfolding catastrophe to baldly denying it even exists.  
Yet Marylanders, after six years of trying and against all odds, just passed a ban on fracking. It passed with bipartisan support, along with the Republican governor’s backing, after a massive showing of grassroots resistance to this destructive drilling process. 
In Trump’s America, more long-shot victories like Maryland’s fracking ban are sure to come. Why? Because around the country, mass protests and local actions have become the norm. State attorneys general are challenging the Trump administration, and state lawmakers are passing local protections – such as funding for Planned Parenthood. Communities are not watching idly as hopes for a better future are threatened with every executive order, regressive piece of legislation, and crack-of-dawn tweet.
This resistance began in the disoriented days after No. 45 was elected. Then, the day after Trump took the oath, millions protested around the world in the Women’s March. In D.C. alone, the crowd was three times the size of that on Inauguration Day. After Trump issued his first immigration ban, thousands showed up at airports, cities and towns in protest. Voters are confronting lawmakers at town halls. So deluded and unhinged is this administration, even scientists have had to leave the lab and take to the streets to call for facts instead of alt-facts.  
The push for Maryland’s fracking ban coincided with Trump’s first flailing missteps. Stunned yet determined, a broad coalition of Maryland homeowners, tourism businesses, students, faith leaders, farmers and civic-minded residents demanded protection from an industry that violates regulations, preys on low-income communities, and buys its way out of every lawsuit. This grassroots movement of residents – from Friendsville to Lusby, Bel Air to Frederick, Baltimore to Columbia – signed petitions, mailed postcards, made calls and paid visits to state legislators. They implored town, city and county councils to endorse a ban. They spoke out in congregations and at public hearings. They marched through the streets of small towns and in Annapolis. 
I was among 13 people, mostly faith leaders and Western Marylanders, arrested on March 16 at the State House in Annapolis to proclaim that our movement would not compromise the safety of our homes, our water and our climate. We would settle for nothing less than a ban. The day after our arrests, the tide shifted: Gov. Larry Hogan threw his support to the fracking ban, and in a matter of weeks the ban was in place.
With that same moral outrage, we head for the People’s Climate March on Saturday, April 29.
People are rising up against a president who has delivered the Environmental Protection Agency to a climate-denier known mostly as a serial plaintiff against the agency. They are standing firm against a president who has handed over foreign policy to the former head of Exxon Mobil, a company being sued for misleading the public and lawmakers for decades about climate change. Virginians will attest to coastal flooding. Baltimore residents will say no to their children’s asthma and choking pollution. From Standing Rock to Lancaster, Pa., from the Gulf Coast to the Potomac, communities will rise to protect their water and land and themselves from oil and gas pipelines, from fracked-gas power plants, from fracked-gas export factories.  
We are in a race against rising seas, soaring temperatures, deadly droughts, fiercer storms, spreading diseases, forced migrations, dying oceans, and widening wealth gaps. Last week, levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere topped 410 parts per million, way beyond the levels that allowed human civilizations to take hold. In 1958, when record-keeping started at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, the level was 280 ppm.  
The hours that I spent in an Anne Arundel County jail cell, with its peeling paint and one small window in the heavy door, seem an apt metaphor for our nation’s limited and tired vision in the face of humanity’s greatest challenge. We must rush toward the world outside the cramped cell of our fossil-fueled world. That the current administration is running equally fast to slam the door spurs us to fight even harder. 
Our uprising must and will be loud and persistent. In Trump’s version of America, the measure of our relief will be the extent of our enduring resistance.  
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The Peoples Climate March is Red, White, and Blue

Guest post by Rick Shingles, member of Preserve Giles County
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On April 29, I plan to travel more than 500 miles to Washington D.C. for the Peoples’ Climate Mobilization. For me, marching is about more than politics, more than ideology.
For me, the issue is deeply personal.
The fossil fuel industry threatens my community in southwest Virginia. The proposed fracked-gas Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) is routed to bisect Newport which sits in the middle of the active Giles County seismic zone in the midst of the Appalachian fold belt. This 42-inch diameter pipeline would carve through steep ridges and karst valleys in some of the most pristine natural habitat and biodiversity in the world.
Our natural heritage, endangered species, aquifers (the primary source of our farm and residential water), safety from catastrophe like the 2010 San Bruno gas pipeline explosion, peace of mind, property values and property rights are all at risk.
Our town is just one casualty of a vast fracked-gas pipelines infrastructure either built or planned. There are 9,000 miles of new oil and gas pipelines proposed in the U.S. with 19 (including the MVP and the Atlantic Coast Pipeline) in Appalachia alone. And tens of thousands of homes and businesses are being sacrificed to supply the product these pipelines transport: fracked methane, an even more lethal greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Multiple perils accompany every stage of hydraulic fracturing: the toxic mix of chemicals used to induce it, the dispersal and storage of waste water which can poison drinkable water and soils, seismic activity, methane leaks at every stage of production and distribution, and the destruction of green economies.
A Roanoke Times editorial presents my county as a model for developing outdoor recreational economies. Yet our economy is imperiled by the MVP. The pipeline would cross tributaries of the New River (some multiple times). It would block access to Mountain Lake and the Cascades during the construction. And the Jefferson National Forest could become split by a 500-foot wide utility corridor.
All of this could upend fifteen years of collaboration by local businesses and county government to build a tourism economy that currently provides $26 million in annual business revenue, 16% of our sales tax, $90,000 in transient occupancy taxes and two percent of total tax revenue. That is a lot for a sparsely settled, rural county. We don’t want it trashed by an interstate pipeline ally.
Why should so many American communities be sacrifice zones to supply this fuel to other nations, a good number of which ban fracking?
That’s why I’m going to march in Washington.
I will support Americans in all communities that are being sacrificed to supply fracked gas.
And for what? For continued reliance on antiquated twentieth century energy sources that are increasingly unnecessary, less plentiful and more expensive than wind, solar, hydraulic, and tidal power?
I am going to fight for greater regulation of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that appears controlled by the very gas and oil industry it is supposed to regulate, approves any and all interstate pipeline applications, grants private companies eminent domain to take our land, and runs roughshod over state and local governments.
I am going for my children and grandchildren – to preserve a natural heritage threatened by our addiction to fossil fuels, to help stave off rising seas and coastal flooding and the fundamental alteration of inland climates that underlie many traditional industries (See Stephen Nash’s Virginia Climate Fever: How Global Warming will Transform Out Cities, Shorelines, and Forests). Climate disruption could well lead to unprecedented mass migrations and economic, social and political instability that could destabilize governments and exacerbate international conflicts.
The dire threats posed by climate disruption should not be partisan issues, red-states versus blue-states, or framed by ideologues of the left or the right.
I will journey to Washington understanding that each of us must look to ourselves first to protect our communities, preserve our natural heritage and safeguard our progeny. If we fail, I will not solely blame any particular individual or political party or politicians in general. Each citizen has the responsibility to reduce his or her own environmental footprint and to fulfill the obligation of democratic citizenship. We must act to hold our leaders accountable. We must take direct action.
I accept this responsibility.
One day, I hope to tell my grandchildren that I – with millions of others – met this singular challenge and became this nation’s greatest generation.

Rick Shingles is associate professor emeritus at Virginia Tech and coordinator of Preserve Giles County.