Letters: A trek to fight climate change; Human infrastructure in crisis

A trek to fight climate change

I’m trekking 105 miles from Harrisburg to D.C. because I love Pennsylvania. As a kid, I remember playing in the woods around my home in Eastern PA. Now, I go to college in central PA. When I first started making this drive to and from school, I drove past luscious forests filled with wildlife. Now, Pennsylvanian forests are cut down to make room for fracking, pipelines, and lumber. The forests that used to stretch out for miles are now barren. This doesn’t mean I’ve lost hope in regaining Pennsylvania’s beauty, though. I have hope because I know a better world is possible, where the workers who rely on fossil fuel and lumber industry jobs can transition into clean energy jobs that pay dignified wages doing meaningful work to combat the climate crisis. I’m fighting for a world where no one has to choose between doing a job that destroys our planet and paying their bills.

That’s why I’m leading dozens of young people from the Sunrise Movement on a trek from Harrisburg to D.C. to demand that our representatives pass a robust Civilian Climate Corps as part of the American Jobs Plan to put millions of people to work fighting climate change. Pennsylvania needs a federal CCC because we need to close our orphaned mine wells, replant our trees, and transition our energy and transportation infrastructures. The CCC will transform millions of lives and transform our country’s infrastructure and landscape to ensure a livable future for generations to come.

Human infrastructure in crisis

Human infrastructure (health, housing, education, nutrition) is in crisis. Preventive health care in the U.S. is oxymoronic. Many deaths result from unchecked corporate greed and sinister lobbying. We witness egregious greed in for-profit prisons, federal/local legislative collusion with BigPharma, Agribusiness, Petro-culture, millionaire/billionaire tax loopholes — contributing to pernicious roots of institutionalized poverty. Unlike many countries offering universal preventive health care, day care and education, many U.S. laws ignore basic well-being of working-class people.

Stephen Hawking reminded us that “all we need to know is already within us just waiting to be realized.” Environmental exposure to endocrine disrupting chemicals caused global populations to drop for decades, as egg abnormalities and sperm counts drop by 59% in Western countries, and genital abnormalities have increased dramatically “imperiling the future of the human race.”

Petro/plastic/pesticide/pollution and ubiquitous endocrine disruptors/pthalates poison our soil, air, and water, making our bodies sick and pharmaceutical CEOs very rich. Toxic building materials, ATM receipts, canned foods, shampoos/cosmetics, toys, clothing, nutritionally depleted foods, PFAFs, cadmium, lead poisoning in water, landfills cause deadly illnesses especially in low-income communities where housing and schools are intentionally targeted as toxic waste dump sites. Environmental racism is a crime against humanity. Ecocide is a crime against humanity.

When capitalism no longer serves humanity and becomes a strategy to inflict hardship on the 99% as the wealth gap skyrockets, it’s time to practice Hawking’s wisdom by protecting our human infrastructure, fight voter suppression, and secure what remains of our Democratic experiment.

Our many freedoms

The coming Fourth of July will bring countless homages to freedom in American history and life. As we celebrate these ideals, however, we might want to take a moment to consider what these freedoms really mean – and for whom.

While we often proudly proclaim the importance of our individual freedom from such things as government, regulations, or taxes, we frequently do so without recognizing that ensuring those freedoms impacts our ability to secure other, equally important, freedoms.

Because each of us is both a member of a society and an individual, our ideals of individual freedom often undermine our efforts to ensure our collective freedoms. Our desire for individual freedoms from regulations or taxes, for instance, directly affects our ability to secure our collective freedoms to clean air, water, safe food, health care, a good job, or raise children in a safe environment.

Since our founding, all our freedoms have been negotiated freedoms – the result of compromises we make with one another through our democratic institutions. As we celebrate this uniquely American holiday it might serve us well to remember our freedoms are neither guaranteed nor absolute – nor without costs in terms of those that fought to secure them in the past as well as the compromises required from all of us in the present to ensure them for as many as possible, for as long as possible. Let’s hope we have the maturity, and humility – indeed patriotism – to meet the challenge.