At the Frontlines of the Global Transition
President Trump links with Vladimir Putin
I was a very young cat, just turned 14 years old, when 20 million Americans celebrated the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970. Schools closed where I was raised in White Plains, N.Y. to give students like me freedom to take part in all manner of eco-sustaining activities. I gathered a few friends to join me downtown to paint the White Plains train station and drag tires and old appliances from the dark, heavily …
BENZONIA — America, the resistance is us! All of us. We experienced that here in the far northwestern corner of Michigan when more than 500 people gathered with signs displaying all manner of messages of resistance. Then we marched along US 31 to a sound track of excited voices and honking horns in a historic “Hands Off!” protest of President Trump’s MAGA recklessness. Nobody in that crowd ever experienced a political demonstration of that size …
Say this much, President Trump’s vow to “go as far as we have to” to control Greenland is pernicious, consistent, and ironic. Though he’s obscured his reasons for bringing the world’s largest island under American management, Trump’s aides and geopolitical experts offer three justifications. The first: gaining access to critical minerals, even those for batteries to power the electric vehicles that Trump purportedly dislikes. The second: securing a larger military perch at the top of …
One of the signature moments in contemporary American environmentalism occurred on October 6, 1967, in Suffolk County, New York, when nine scientists and a lawyer formally launched the Environmental Defense Fund. Now a $314-million-a-year global organization with 750 employees, EDF went on to influence pivotal environmental achievements, among them the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, and then helping the agency ban DDT and close the ozone hole. In January, Suffolk County bobbed …
Among the maddening features of Donald Trump’s presidency is this: His instinct for identifying structural weaknesses is keen. His capacity to decide and execute solutions is generally terrible. How else to explain that, for Trump, stopping the killing in Ukraine means siding with the dictator who started the conflict. Or that Trump identified the deep resentment of working people who supported him, but proposes stark changes in health, food, job, childcare, and retirement programs that …
Attacking the virtue and validity of research science is nothing new in certain corners of American culture. A century ago, in the famous Scopes trial, a high school teacher in Tennessee was prosecuted for teaching evolutionary biology in violation of state law and religious doctrine. In the 21st century, Christian conservatives are at it again. They’ve united with fossil fuel industry executives to attack the scientific research that projects with astonishing accuracy the pace and damaging …
The memories and the message are everywhere inside the Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville, Kentucky. That’s the point of a museum dedicated to honor the life and achievements of the greatest American athlete of the 20th century, and the courage of an activist who influenced the two most significant social and political movements of the post-World War Two era – civil rights and opposition to the Vietnam war. I had the chance to visit the …
In mid-December 2020, a month before he left office, President Donald Trump quietly signed the Save Our Seas Act to put the federal government’s shoulder to the work of developing alternatives to disposable plastic products, encouraging recycling, and limiting plastic debris in the world’s oceans. It took years of civic activism about the harm plastic causes to human health and the marine environment to convince Trump to sign the law, which helped prompt leaders of …
In this era of the anti-American president and his psychotic “law and order” campaign, it is easy to move past the import of what happened just six days ago. The F.B.I. infiltrated a cell of domestic terrorists and arrested 13 white men connected to the Wolverine Watchmen. The men were charged with plotting to attack the Michigan capital in Lansing and kidnap two United States governors — Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan and Ralph Northam of …
BENZONIA — With less than a month from Election Day, we’ve come to the Greg Fogle moment of the 2020 presidential election campaign. Fogle was a big, bullying energy industry executive who unwittingly served as an ally in a grassroots campaign I helped organize in Michigan in the mid-1990s. Donald Trump is now playing the same role in the 2020 campaign. Let me explain. Back in the mid-1990s, when the natural gas industry was clearing …
