Tag: Citizen Action

Do we have a right to a stable climate?

Today on the Sam Matey-Coste Substack account – The Weekly Anthropocene – news and a record of how countries voted to uphold the right of people across the world to a stable environment is presented. The vote responded to a ruling by the International Court of Justice. Note below, the U.S. now joins Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Israel, Liberia, and others, to deny that right.

A U.S.A. nonprofit supporting youth is working in state and federal courts toward a declaration of the rights of children and youth to a healthy, sustainable climate. Our Children’s Trust is a nonprofit worth following.

Listening to youth speak to their futures requires all of us to understand our inaction acts to decrease their life’s potential. No one would deny that to children, right? The children and youth are given top notch legal education and representation at no cost. Explore the website by state to learn where youth are applying pressure to achieve a sustainable environment for their generation.

I highly recommend the book, The Ecology of Childhood, How Our Changing World Threatens Children published in 2020. Barbara Bennett Woodhouse devoted her law career to the rights of children. (See Google Scholar for her published works.) Bennett demonstrates how the U.S. ranks low compared to other developed nations in the social safety net provided for our children. We talk a good game about how we love our children in the U.S. but, when studied, that proves to be false. Now, we deny them a stable climate as well?

Readers, it is my firm belief that Americans are misrepresented by the current administration which denies climate change and has turned our country back to increasing fossil fuel production and use. The momentum toward clean energy that just got started in the Biden administration has slowed as a result.

In Sam Matey-Coste’s Substack account you can learn about advancement in clean energy and environmental victories in countries around the world. I highly recommend him to all of you who need a daily dose of climate hope.

In the U.S. there is progress in clean energy development such as in Texas and California, but it is much slower than it could be – especially in the automobile industry where sales of electric cars have plummeted. And now that Trump has illustrated how vulnerable the fossil fuel industry can be, the U.S. is losing out and our children’s futures are even more imperiled as the Earth warms. Emissions from fossil fuels are the primary driver of climate anomalies and storms like we’ve recently experienced — fires like we’ve never seen, droughts across whole regions of the continent.

But, it is not just our children whom we imperil. We imperil the world’s children. Emissions do not stay in place but circulate around the globe. We are all responsible and must get back to representatives in government who are responsible, serious adults. The window of opportunity for Americans to gain access to free or cheap clean energy is attenuating.

How can this be true? We have historically been a nation of innovators. But here, oligarchs in tech have taken away our agency and made us prisoners of their outsized influence over our politics and thus our government. Data centers to support AI development are being shoved down communities throats. Who profits? Oligarchs.

Step Up!

Step into this path we are on to take back our country and get back on a path to innovation, clean cheap energy for All, and working alongside our allies across the world to obtain for youth and coming generations a safe, stable environment, a world of innovators and well cared for people. War is obsolete, and our people must have a say through our representatives as to whether we go on defense of liberty. DEFENSE. The Speaker of the House refused to bring a vote to the floor of the House of Representatives to end the Iran War.

This administration must be held accountable. We must stand for truth and for our children’s future.

This time in U.S. history will either be recorded as our undoing and defeat, or our finest hour. Which will history record?

Update: A Related Post – New Book for Hotter Times

New World Order

Witness: from America’s ashes a global reorganization without US…

Mark Carney is the wise leadership America lacks. Americans at home are under attack from a vicious police force created by a rogue regime purportedly of the Republican Party. THIS cabal of small minded, unelected ideologues, has nothing to do with our Republic’s governance or American history. The man in the seat behind the Resolution Desk is a despot, a tyrant, and an ignorant and psychologically damaged man.

Kudos to Mark Carney and all the men and women who lead democratic governments across the world and who live in reality.

Americans enter a new world where we are a danger to the world and a minor player in world affairs. We can thank the MAGA party and the cowardly republican reps supporting and in lock step with a fascist movement tearing up our democracy in plain sight.

Americans, we must recover what we can, and then elect sober, intelligent leadership which can recover our values and come to terms with how this tragedy has happened to us. I suggest we study how Germany recovered after they, too, tried to destroy other nations and create a white male hegemony.

As an American, as daughter of a decorated WWII veteran, my heart is on the ground. In spite of that, I am actively working with my fellow Americans to recover the guardrails of our democracy, and then work to repair the damage to our collective belief in our country’s ethos.

Photo by Susan Feathers

The Courage of Our Convictions

History and Justice

America and Americans are riding a rising wave, a tsunami caused by tyrants in our body politic. The winds of ill will call us to ride the powerful wave to its resolution in the renewal of this Republic in its 250th year.

Truth bubbles up whenever forces seek to push it down, down from our sight and the light of facts. Our founder reminds us, “Facts are stubborn things.”[1]

Therefore, we take the courage of our convictions and we go out. Out we go to the streets with friends; we pick up a pen, and we write from experience and the assurance of our laws; we write from our shared wisdom; we text and email our Representatives, and we stand above the fray and call upon our fellow Americans to stop the madness:

  • A powerful Executive is not synonymous with abuse of power;
  • The powerful and lasting alliances through NATO and the United Nations have kept the world from worldwide war for 80 years; wholesale destruction of those alliances imperil American lives and those of our allies for coming generations;
  • Hatred of immigrants affronts the entire history of this Republic which has stood as a refuge for the repressed and made up our population over its entire history; no nation and its people are “garbage”;
  • Oil is a bygone energy source; nations around the world are converting to clean, renewable, cheap energy and should the tyrant stay in office, America will decline.
  • No intelligent leadership declares climate change a hoax.
  • The current president is not fit for office:  mental and physical incapacity; vicious, revengeful and dangerous to our Republic, citizens and nations worldwide.
  • The cabal of unqualified ideologues who surround the president are re-writing American history in their image and imaginations. Hundreds of years and millions of citizens’ labor to faithfully and accurately record our history and culture is being defaced, altered or all together destroyed.
  • Declaration of the United States of America as a Christian country defies the Constitution’s basic tenet of separation of church and state. We honor citizens’ personal choice of faith including the right to choose none.

History and Justice are watching, and they are recording on their stone tablets the ugly record of your assaults against humanity, your sloppy footprints on the Capitol. If it is Sorcery that abides now, watch out for falling catapults and hurling marble thrown by the straight aim of monuments surrounding your little stick and mud manifestations.

Now we see you, then, we don’t.

History and Justice are watching.

[1] John Adams

State of the Climate Report

The annual climate assessment from the American Meteorological Society

SotC in 2024 Press HighlightsDownload

Below is the full report.

SotC2024Download

See Link Here for the World Meteorological Organization maps, stats, and key messages.

Clearly, the captain of the American ship needs to read the stars.

Poster for State of the Climate 2024

State of the Climate 2024_PosterDownload

A formula for national chaos…

At the White House 2 + 2 = 0. ~ Anonymous

Republicans justifying cuts to programs through the One Big Beautiful Bill (Rescissions Act of 2025) assert that the States and private sector will make up for cuts to federal funding in the Congressional budget.

Alice Ruhnke, President of GrantStation, lists the ways the bill is disabling the Nonprofit Sector which provides a big swath of the Social Safety Net in America.

Read her work here. Interesting to see the progression month by month. Pay attention to proposed changes to the Johnson Amendment (1954). If passed, it would drag churches and charitable organizations into the maelstrom of partisanship politics.

Bill Moyers: An American for Our Times

The recent passing away of Bill Moyers brought tears to my eyes and then a long remembrance of his work in our culture and politics. One of his most important gifts to American Life was his curiosity and study of our people. Before he left us, Bill identified the corrupting influence of concentrated wealth in our politics. As usual, he put his finger on the most serious threat to democracy in our history: the corrupting power of greed on human character.

The Will to Save Democracy

First, we must recognize the danger of this moment in history of the United States of America. I can think of no one better than Timothy Snyder, a Yale Professor recognized as one of our most effective voices on how democracies can die and how citizens can act to prevent it, to guide us in this moment. Dr. Snyder wrote On Tyranny and On Freedom – two small, powerful books with razor sharp vision of how democracy should act and how to spot its demise. Please check out his audio address from Ukraine on his “Thinking About” Substack account, linked below.

Crossing a Line.

Read my recent Letter to U.S. Representative Jen A Kiggans. Hope you will write your representatives as well and call out all that we citizens see and know and remind them that the People run the government.

Ltr to Congresswoman Jen A. Kiggans_2-19-25Download
Photo by Susan Feathers

AMID DESTRUCTION, TRUTH EMERGES UNDAUNTED

We can thank the destructive forces let into the heart of Democracy for showing us the truth of our founding principles among which are consent of the governed and the rule of law.

We witness an attempt to overthrow our government by a despot and the foolish people who follow in his path. Mostly, it is a party of grievances against the restraints imposed by principles established at our founding. These establish how we treat each other and live together.

Individuals who throw off the restraining standards of behavior toward one another and detest those principles of decency, respect and caring for each other are tyrants.

Further, neglect of the Earth from devouring forces that eat at her heartwood, not only rob our children of a future but imperil all life on the planet.

Our collective culpability is grave.

Unbridled capitalism is on display in the highest offices of the land, elected by unknowing citizens concerned with the costs of living while forgetting our responsibility to elect leaders who are grounded in the virtues that our founders asserted as a restraint on the forces of tyranny.

Let us join the choir of truth tellers emerging everywhere as our nation awakens to what we have done: we let a fox into the henhouse. This is not political but our individual responsibility to conduct ourselves with respect for each other.

The preservation of our republic is of vital importance today for another reason: the mounting threat to life on Earth. We are a nation that has forgotten that we live here only by the grace of Earth’s living, breathing body and spirit. For too long we have plundered the Earth for coin.

And now we have put a despot at the helm when the Earth is teetering on massive changes which may not include life as we know it. The entire planet is in flux. Even when we watch our fellow Americans fleeing raging fires, epic floods and death, and temperatures that render  farmlands barren, this despot denies even his own body and thus imperils all of us.

The first step out of this dilemma is to admit the truth of our present reality. From there, we must resist every attempt of the now unrestrained actions of a man filled with anger and hair-brained ideas detached from the truth.

We may at a time not too far from now have to make bold decisions and risk all to stop him and the hoard who follow hoping for power, money, or at least to duck his vicious nature. If we don’t, we’ll not appear in any history book as standing up for a nation of free people but for the fact that no one will be around to write that history.

Emerging Resources for Citizens Searching for Truth and Community:

The Contrarian

Civil Discourse

Letters from an American

Public Citizen

Emergence Magazine

Capitol Building Rotunda, Photo by Susan Feathers

Democracy Will Not Die in America.

Undaunted: courageously resolute especially in the face of danger or difficulty: not discouraged. Merriam Webster.com

History and Justice. Photo by Susan Feathers

A Golden Resource for Americans Who Cherish “Little d” Democracy –

The National Constitution Center Town Halls and Podcast

On the website above scroll down to the Founders Library. The Center has all the key writings by the Founders to understand how this country is founded in wisdom and scholarship about how to govern so that we can pursue our dreams.

A great book, is Our Ancient Faith, Lincoln, Democracy, and The American Experiment by Allen C. Guelzo, Historian.

According to our ancient faith, Lincoln said in 1854, “the just powers of the governments are derived from the consent of the governed…. Lincoln translated…to mean “that no man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent. I say that is the leading principle—the sheet anchor of American republicanism.” From Our Ancient Faith by Allen C. Guelzo, Chapter 1: The Cause of Human Liberty, p. 26.

Freedom, Nation’s Capitol. Photo by Susan L Feathers, 2013

Citizens, those who love and cherish the ideals of our democracy, make it a weekly practice to write to your Senators and Representatives and to members of Key Committees. Here is mine today to Senator Elissa Slotkin who is a member of the U. S. Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee.

Ltr to Senator Elissa Slotkin_AG CommDownload

We can never know whether what actions we take are heard but I have faith that if millions of freedom loving American write, call, email or visit their Congresspersons, the flame of democracy will never die in America. She may flicker now and then when despots blown in on hot air and untruths, or when we are temporarily fooled, but freedom has its way, always. We must remain undaunted!