Being the Change I Wish to See

Tim DeChristopher, a 27-year-old University of Utah student committed a grand act of civil disobedience to help protect some U.S. National Parks in southern Utah from oil and gas drilling. Here’s a video from The Rachel Maddow Show about it:

These National Parks are some of the most beautiful, pristine areas in the entire world. Oil and gas drilling close to these areas and the development that would come with it will destroy these lands forever. It took the Earth 4.5 billion years to build these beautiful places and if we don’t protect them we can’t get them back. The federal oil and gas leases for these lands must be stopped.

I’m very impressed with Mr. DeChristopher’s resolve to do the right thing, even if it means he has to go to prison. If he is convicted and sentenced, I hope President Obama will pardon him, especially if it turns out the lease auction violated the law.

How serious are you about protecting our environment? Are you willing to commit acts of civil disobedience, face federal legal charges and even go to jail if it will protect the Earth?

I’m older and more pragmatic, and would be willing to do a lot of things to protect the Earth. I would be willing to trespass and lie down in construction areas to prevent it from proceeding. I and any others who performed such acts would likely be arrested and released, but those acts would not carry fraud charges and significant federal jail time.

So this begs the question: how serious are we going to have to get to make this huge ship, the USA and developed world, turn around in time to prevent catastrophic environmental changes on our planet?

We already face some changes that will be difficult to deal with, but can be handled with fast action and good technology solutions. But if we don’t make significant changes within the next 10 years, we may face far worse catastrophes that may effect large populations of humans with mass starvation, insufficient clean water, pandemic disease outbreaks, and increased flood and tropical storm activity that could wash entire cities out to sea.

Technorati Tags: Bush-Cheney, civil disobedience, Environment, Lame Duck Actions, National Parks in Utah, Rachel Maddow, Tim DeChristopher

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I have been wracking my brain for weeks trying to figure out why in the world John McCain would choose Sarah Palin as his running mate.

• She’s basically ignorant of most issues, though don’t underestimate her, she’s smart.
• She’s ignorant of a great deal of American history and politics that a lot of us have come to expect most people to know.
• She has practically no experience.
• She’s clearly not ready to step up and be President should, God forbid, something happen to John McCain early in his term of office.

She is a social conservative and she is young, two things McCain had to deal with on his ticket. Some also see Palin as a maverick, something McCain hasn’t been much lately.

So why pick Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska as a running mate?

Thoughts about Palin, the VP debate last Thursday, what Palin said about wanting to emulate current VP Richard Cheney, and John McCain’s very pro-Bush voting record have been buzzing around in my head. I’ve been trying to make sense of all this and it’s been beyond me. I was out working in the yard just now, letting my thoughts flow freely, and it came to me.

Sarah Palin is from one of the states in the Union that has some of America’s biggest untapped oil reserves. I looked it up and Governor Palin has some strong connections to big oil. She is not much of an environmentalist so taking protections away that currently keep big oil from drilling in many parts of Alaska would be something she would work toward.

McCain is another George W. Bush, but to pull it off, who does he get to play the part of Dick Cheney? The governor of a big oil state.

McCain-Palin aren’t just more of the same, they are exactly the same as Bush-Cheney. McCain will continue the policies of the George W. Bush administration and groom a young, healthy version of Dick Cheney for the Presidency in the 2012 election.

Any talk of alternative energy research and development from this proposed administration, I believe, is just that, talk. There will be drilling and nothing else. The big oil companies will have the opportunity to rape the pristine areas of Alaska that have been protected. Big oil will continue to run the country at just the time in American history when we need to stop investing in oil and start working on lots of alternatives to our energy needs. Their profits will skyrocket, and middle-class America will go broke paying higher and higher gas prices.

It would be a second Halliburton administration designed to continue what Bush-Cheney started.

Now I’m really scared…

Technorati Tags: big oil, Bush-Cheney, Halliburton, John McCain, Sarah Palin

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