I’ve been working with a great group of people at the Sierra Club in Oregon on various environmental issues and campaigns. We often work in conjunction with other groups, such as 350PDX, Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility, Oregon Conservancy, Columbia Riverkeeper, Divest Oregon, and Just Crossing Alliance, to name a few.
But it always seems to be a slog. Every victory is tentative, provisional, hard-won, incremental.
The bad guys—big fossil fuel companies, Big Banks, the GOP, gun makers, et al — have huge budgets, huge teams of lawyers, PR people, lobbyists. And forget Republicans. Many Democrats seem to require tremendous pressure to vote the right way, even on things that any sensible person living through this era of Climate Change and environmental degradation should jump at the chance to support.
Case in point: New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat and theoretically a liberal. Yes, she relented, after massive pressure “from scientists, environmentalists and lawmakers,” says the New York Times. But, really? WTF.
A state legislator in California, a true environmentalist, told a group I was working with in the Bay Area a couple of years ago that she had to struggle to get virtually any green bill out of committee—in a committee and a legislature dominated by Democrats, ostensibly (for the most part) “green” ones.
And yet…
So, yeah. Every battle is a slog, a nasty bit of trench warfare, yet another reminder of how broken this world can be.