Category: Bay area, Calif.

Lorraine forwarded an article from a local newspaper about the Silicon Valley Youth Climate Strike, which is organizing a march on Friday, September 20. Lorraine and I are co-directors of Ecojustice Camp, an annual week-long ecology camp run from the UU Church of Palo Alto, and Lorraine noticed that Peri Platenberg, one of the co-organizers of the march, is a junior counselor at Ecojustice Camp. Peri is also a member of the UU Fellowship of Sunnyvale. Here’s one of my favorite quotes from the article:

“One of our main goals is to make sure that we combat environmental racism,” Plantenberg said. “It’s traditionally a very whitewashed movement. We make it a priority to take a look at who is around us and make sure that we are including different ethnicities and different types of people.”

Read the full article here.

In Isaac Asimov’s memoir, I. Asimov, published in 1994, he explained why he was a political liberal:

“I wanted to see the United States changed and made more civilized, more humane, truer to its own proclaimed traditions I wanted to see all Americans judged as individuals and not as stereotypes. I wanted to see all with reasonable opportunities. I wanted society to feel a reasonable concern for the poor, the unemployed, the sick, the aged, the hopeless.”

Then, Asimov surveyed the political landscape over his lifetime:

“I was only thirteen when Franklin Delano Roosevelt became president and introduced the ‘New Deal,’ but I was not too young to get an idea of what he was trying to do. … I disapproved of Roosevelt only when he wasn’t liberal enough, as when, for political reasons, he ignored the plight of African Americans….

“Liberalism began to fade after World War II. Times became prosperous, and many blue collar people … turned conservative. They had theirs and weren’t willing to discommode themselves for those who were still down at the bottom….

“And eventually we came to the Reagan era, when it became de rigeur not to tax but to borrow; to spend money not on social services but on armaments. … Rich Americans grew richer in an atmosphere of deregulation and greed, and poor Americans — But who worries about poor Americans except people branded with the L-word that no one dared mention any more?

“It makes me think of Oliver Goldsmith’s lines:
Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.

“As a loyal American, I grow heartsick.”

Asimov wrote that a quarter of a century ago, and things have mostly gotten worse since then. Perhaps there have been modest gains in people being judged as individuals and not stereotypes, most notably in the legaization of same sex marriage; but we have also learned from Black Lives Matter and #MeToo that far too many persons are victimized because of their race or sex. But when it comes to “a reasonable concern for the poor, the unemployed, the sick, the aged, the hopeless,” we have arguably regressed since 1994: Bill Clinton eviscerated aid to poor people, George W. Bush spent hundreds of billions of dollars in Iraq while cutting social service spending at home, Barack Obama put more effort into bailing out banks during the Great Recession than helping the poor, and Donald Trump now promotes open contempt of anyone who is not wealthy.

I continue to be a deeply patriotic American, but we are growing less civilized and less humane, and we are departing wildly from our proclaimed traditions. As a loyal American, I grow heartsick.

Happy Independence Day.

Geographer Richard A. Walker, in his 2018 book “Portrait of a Gone City: Tech and the Dark Side of Prosperity in the San Francisco Bay Area,” writes:

“The Great Recession has been calamitous. The official U.S. government designation of a two-year lapse in growth 2008-2010 minimizes the reality….things are worse than that. The Great Recession won’t go away — regardless of the soaring stock market and falling unemployment. By any measure, recovery from the Great Recession was the slowest from any crisis on record, including the Great Depression of the 1930s [emphasis mine]. U.S. productivity remains poor overall, aggregate demand is weak because wages have barely budged, and corporations are not investing with any gusto. Loose talk of full employment by mid-decade ignores the fact that so many Americans have dropped out of the labor force entirely.” (pp. 64-65).

Two conclusions for congregations: (1) Expect fundraising to be an ongoing challenge, since many households have not recovered from the Great Recession. (2) Expect the need for congregationally-based social services such as food pantries and supporting homeless shelters will continue to be robust. In other words, we will have to continue to do more with fewer resources.

People are starting to pay increasing attention to the dangers of plastic waste in the environment. I think children and teens are ahead of many adults in their awareness of the dangers of plastic waste — a six year old of my acquaintance asked for her sixth birthday party to be a plastics clean up on the beach. Now admittedly most of the children and teens that I know are from Unitarian Universalist families, so perhaps they are slightly more aware of plastic waste; but I think while many adults have gotten locked into a narrow focus on stopping further global warming, the children and teens I know seem more aware of the many interlocking aspects of looming global environmental disaster: global warming, plastic waste, toxics in the environment, habitat destruction, etc. And the kids I know quickly make the connection between all these problems and human overpopulation.

On the last day of our church’s Ecojustice Camp, we did a clean-up of the campsite where we spent the last night of camp. This was a well-maintained and relatively clean campsite, yet we found quite a bit of plastic waste:

The campers and counselors found on the order of 200 pieces of plastic waste, along with some degradable trash such as paper and metal. That’s a lot of plastic….