My Latest: Fighting Fossil Capital in New England

What does climate direct action have in common with the Russian peace protests?

Dear friends,

I have a new piece for The Nation up this morning. It starts like this…

The coal trains are rolling through New England again. You can see them as you stand on a street corner in Worcester, Mass., or any number of towns along their route, headed to the last coal-fired power plant in the region—Merrimack Station, on the banks of the Merrimack River in Bow, N.H.

Yes, coal trains are rolling through New England, in the year 2022, three decades after the first scientific reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—and in a region that no longer has any use for the stuff—even as the world’s climate scientists issue ever more definitive and alarming evidence of accelerating climate catastrophe.

Coal is still rolling for no better reason than that there is profit in it. . . .

I go on to reflect on the trial last week in Concord, NH, of five friends of mine who blockaded a coal train in Hooksett on its way to that power plant on December 8, 2019—the third blockade of that one train. (As you may recall, because I’ve written about it multiple times, I was involved in the second blockade, in Ayer, MA, in the wee hours that morning.) On Friday, four of the five were convicted by a jury of criminal trespassing, and will be sentenced in May. Four peaceful and compassionate people, acting for the safety of us all, now have criminal records.

Please read the piece if you want to know why that doesn’t cause me to despair.

And thank you, as always, for your interest in my work.

Peace,

Wen

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"Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that." 

-Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.