63 bar steep rise 29.90 0mph NNE dew-point 40 Beltane, sunny
Up at 6AM. It’s light! Out the door at 6:30 AM. Drive fast to Hwy. 252. Stop, edge forward. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. All this fossil fuel going up in exhausts of vehicles barely accomplishing anything.
It took me an hour, as I thought it would, to get to the Sierra Club office on Franklin Avenue for a meeting with Cathy Duvall, the national Sierra Club’s director of political activity. It was worth it. Cathy is a political insider, in this case, too, a Beltway insider. That means she takes politics for what it is, not for what it could be in the best of all possible worlds, but as a place where competing forces drive against each other for power and resources.
The non-profit world, including the church, often works much like the traffic jam going into the city this morning. Every body gets revved up, drives fast, then gets stuck in the resolutionary lane, confusing action with intention. And a lot of political energy goes up in the exhaust, barely accomplishing anything.
Not for Cathy and the Sierra Club. She understands the numbers, the people, the zeitgeist and still believes this could be a transformative year for the environmental agenda. Could be. Could be if we put the effort into a ground level campaign to educate the public. Could be if we identify voters sensitive to our issues and see they could get to the polls. Could be if we identify those races where a bit of extra oomph, in allies or dollars or both, could make a difference and deploy our resources wisely. Could be.
I got jazzed up by the meeting, ready to rock. The political committee, it turns out, has not yet formed and I may have a chance of getting involved. This kind of energy is so different from the MIA, fiction creating and scholarly work. It’s also different from, but closely related to the gardening energy. This energy has an edge, a buzz. It makes my finger tips tingle. Old neuronal paths, long abandoned, have begun to fire. We’ll see where it goes, if anywhere.
That said, there’s still plants to get in the ground, weeds to kill and dig up and trees to cut down, land to level. All things in their time.
