Calls for “unity,” forgiveness and “let’s all get along” may seem compassionate and wise, but are they? … with reflections on MLK’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”

This summer, my new young girlfriend was nearly killed by a Trump supporter in a white pickup truck. He careened around police barricades, his license plates duct taped so they could not be read. And he headed straight for her. A black activist, at a legal and peaceful protest — seventeen years old, still in high school, her hair usually bound up in pigtails at the top of her head. …

I live in a seaside town, not too far from San Francisco. As many conservatives will immediately assume, we are known as a “liberal” enclave. We sport a lot of health food stores, organic farms, a Black mayor (our first), a highly active Democratic Socialist chapter (Bernie’s party), an Extinction Rebellion chapter … and we’ve got a lot of hippies living in our woods, running on solar, marijuana and hu-manure. Our city police department helps organize the annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Day march, along with the NAACP.

Given all this, I used to think we were quite “progressive.” These…

I’ve been deeply researching the climate and eco-crises for some time now, as well as experiencing the physical changes, extreme weather events and frightening mass extinction events happening in my own personal world. Alarmed, I even helped found an Extinction Rebellion chapter in my hometown on the California coast.

Sometimes, I have hope. Sometimes, I don’t. A lot of the time, I feel like this …

Well, folks: Here we are on the Titanic! …

The accelerating cascade of news about the frightening, exponential rate of global heating due to human-caused green house gase emissions (GHG’s) — and “feedback loop” systems of GHG’s released from the arctic tundra, seas and elsewhere due to rapid planetary melting of snow and ice has many of us considering our carbon footprints with a bit more gravity than before.

Greta Thunberg, our role model purist and a personal Shero, chose to take a carbon-free sail boat from Europe to New York to speak before the United Nations and generally, does not fly. …

There is no doubt we live in dark, exterior times. For many of us, we never thought things would come to this. Whether we call this “late stage capitalism,” the rotten fruits of “corporatism” or the inevitable products of regressed human consciousness (insecurity, greed, imagined separation), it all looks rather s**t at the moment.

My friends in the UK, post-election, are currently in a bit of shock and despair. “Welcome to the club,” I’ve said.

I have in the last few years despaired at our tacit, universal acceptance of nearly complete electronic surveillance; the crumbling of democracy and truth under…

When I was a little girl, growing up in Eugene, Oregon in the 1970’s, I had two dreams that were so impactful, I remember them clearly to this day.

In one, the mass of people on Earth were starving, and clamoring for basic resources: water, food, supplies, medicine. They were represented by a gray, dusty, teeming mass of desperate people gathered around a rocket ship. The rocket ship was taking all the very wealthy people to another planet where they could somehow live with some resources. The whole scene was, as you can imagine, terribly sad and scary.

In the…

Because when the ship is going down, that should be the main focus of the daily, onboard bulletin

For me, it started in a writing group, in my hometown. A woman, a mother, younger than me — smart, articulate, a crackerjack writer — told us she and her family were moving to New Zealand. “Why?” I asked. It seemed to make no sense. The young family lived in a spacious and comfortable town home, near a university, and adjacent to vast and beautiful open spaces along the California coast. Her husband had a good tech job that helped them maintain…

Global warming has been an unpleasant background buzz in my mind since before Al Gore’s first movie was released. The word was out then from scientists and environmentalists, but most mainstream media were not yet on board the climate change ship.

When “An Inconvenient Truth” came out in 2006, a flood tide — excuse the pun — of media coverage followed, along with the already swiftly advancing and disastrous flood tide of “denial science” fueled by the oil industry, Koch Industries and increasingly “dark” monies, cloaked by donor-advised foundations like Donors Trust and the Donors Capital Fund.

So large scale…