In 2014, I co-organized a Memorial Day protest against former Governor Tom Corbett’s opening of state parks to the natural gas industry. I wrote this piece for a conference I attended the following fall as a reflection on environmental protest as a form of public moral education. It’s wonky at points, but heartfelt nonetheless. Given the Trump administration’s open championing of the natural gas industry and Tom Wolf’s insultingly poor record on limiting the fracking industry despite expert scientific advice and harmed people’s entreaties, it feels important to share it.
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On Memorial Day 2014, I organized a risky protest in Boalsburg, Pennsylvania. Boalsburg is one of three places in the United States claiming to be the birthplace of Memorial Day. If you don’t know, Memorial Day is a day on which U.S. Americans pay tribute and give thanks to the soldiers who have fought and fallen in our wars. In Boalsburg three ladies wanted to honor Union soldiers who died in combat fighting in our Civil War. Pennsylvania’s governor Tom Corbett, a veteran of Pennsylvania’s guard, was slated to speak that day to honor the service of Pennsylvanians.
Before the long weekend, Corbett had rescinded a moratorium that prevented shale gas drilling in state parks. If you don’t know, Pennsylvania has become one of two epicenters for shale gas development, an extractive enterprise that turns our forests and farms into a patchwork of polluting industrial operations. When I learned that he was going to speak in Boalsburg, I had a couple of days to organize a group of people to join me in protesting his presence and speech at the Memorial Day festivities.
Fifteen or so people came out and stood quietly holding signs connecting “fracking” – shorthand for “hydraulic fracturing” which has become the shorthand for the whole extractive practice of getting natural gas or oil from deep shale beds – to the sacrifice of our veterans for our land and our freedom. We stood solemnly off to the side, still conspicuously present but not in the center of things. During the 21-gun salute, we knelt to revere and respect the day’s solemnity. As my friend Gary cautioned me, we needed to be sure not to act the way the Westboro Baptists do, castigating and jeering and diminishing our own values and character because of our own displeasure. When Corbett spoke, we held our signs higher. It was a curious thing to hear him speak of sacrifice, honor, and freedom in the context of his policy actions that I and my allies experience as sacrificing–no desecrating–the unwilling, dishonoring our fallen and our land, and enslaving us more to polluting energy.
Corbett tried to hide the policy shift behind some moral values – patriotism and decorum which are themselves tied to loyalty and respect for authority – to prevent the public from encountering a challenge to their moral impulses for fairness, harm/care, and purity. By trying to bury the rescinded moratorium under the long weekend and its patriotism, he used his position to hamper our consideration. Limiting the public’s access and recognition of the facts would limit our opportunities to experience a moral impulse one way or the other and therefore our ability to reason or reflect on the impulse and his action on our own. Perhaps most importantly he tried to hamstring the essence of democracy, what Dewey would call a mode of associated living in which people must engage in deliberations, especially morally contentious issues. My assumption is that Corbett and his staff wanted to prevent me or anyone else from feeling a sense of revulsion or anger, to reflecting on that impulse, and then discussing it with others. And even if we were to find it, he tried to shield himself in the reverence of the day and in the authority of his position.
I am convinced of three things: First, growing human civilization built on industry, progressed technology, and economic development today undermines the physical, chemical, and biological operations of the planet. Every major report – the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change AR5 from 2013/14, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the World Watch Institute’s annual reports, the reports of the International Programme on the State of the Oceans – shows in simultaneously vivid and disorienting figures that we are a force of extinction comparable to the great cataclysms that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, caused the Permian extinction hundreds of millions prior to that, and a handful of others. Second, I am convinced that human morality is not rooted in first principles, but in moral impulses akin to what David Hume called “sentiment,” that can be shaped and guided by individual experience, through social instruction and manipulation, and reflection. Third, I contend that ecological activism – in particular direct action – may be our best tool for eliciting people’s moral impulses on what most of us usually call “the environmentIn this regard, I regard environmental activism as ecopedagogy, a means of deepening people’s moral connections and impulses toward what Ivan Illich called conviviality conceived as “individual freedom realized in ecological dependence.” And while I am now an elected official constrained by position to serve in a new way, I still believe fully in civil disobedience, non-violent disruption, bird-dogging, and confrontation. As Frederick Douglass said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
Since childhood, I have been a nature lover. We went camping in Yellowstone when I was three. I played in the woods, tree lines, creeks, and cornfields near my childhood house in Pine Grove Mills, Pennsylvania. As an adult I returned to camping, became a hiker and mountain biker, and have worked on an organic farm. For years I have spent time in forests where I have found myself. In a sense, my self is in the forest and it is in me…thus the title of this blog, Peter is in the Forest. My family and best friends are in the forest and it is in them.
My morality has been shaped by years of identifying with people, stands of old growth hemlock trees and rhodedendron, black bears, assassin bugs, orb weaver spiders, does and bucks bounding through mountain laurel on Bald Knob Ridge, Barred Owls taking silent flight along the banks of the cold water mountain gap streams, fens, barrens, sharp basalt coated in mussels, fallen fir trees, and my friends and family frolicking on leaf litter and ridge lines. The sum of those interactions force me to incorporate the biosphere into my moral universe. As Peter Singer, Bentham, or Erickson would say, my moral circle has expanded well beyond myself.
I’ve developed a land ethic a la Aldo Leopold that places “the environment” or “the land (water, air, etc)” inside of those things of moral concern. That environment is under threat in a way few of us are prompted to feel in a moral way. And since most of us don’t see it, I have sometimes been an activist. I have been compelled by my impulses and reflective practices to shove people into the uncomfortable position of confronting their moral impulses regarding our civilization’s rape of the Earth. The activism I have engaged in, then, is a form of moral and ecological education.
I can hardly think of a better time to engage in ecological and moral education than this event. It is rife with conflicting values, affording us the possibility of real awakening. Recall what Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in Letter from a Birmingham Jail, “Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks to so dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored” (1963). While vastly smaller in scale than the protests in Birmingham, Selma, or the March on Washington, or the direct actions today by people like Bill McKibben, Tim DeChristopher (Peaceful Uprising 2014) or the pair of Jay O’Hara and Ken Ward, or the massive climate change protests in fall 2014 in New York City or the Women’s March that followed Donald Trump’s election, the possibility for moral development is large. It is also less risky than the powerful protests indigenous and harmed people are taking against the Keystone XL or Mariner East 2 pipelines. But those protests don’t reach people who are revering on Memorial Day. We intended the people who were present to confront the notion that Corbett’s actions were, at the least, morally questionable and at most a violation and dishonor of his sacred duty as an executive of the Commonwealth and a former member of the Air National Guard himself.
If we could elicit a moral impulse from the gathered, then they at least had the opportunity to reflect. I understand fully well that some might find our presence offensive. They would become more entrenched in their positions – that we were anti-American pinkos or something. We could cause what Lewandowsky and Cook (2012) call a “backfire effect.” It did happen. A couple of people became very angry with us, yelled at us to move. When we quietly refused, they moved and ceded us the ground. But it did not happen for everyone, and for those whose worldviews didn’t instantly cause a backfire, we could invite them to wonder, “Why are these people upset? Should I be upset?” From that simple wondering about us, they were open to other experiences and questions, questions about natural gas development and human well-being.
Today, May 28, 2018, I hope that you can join me in reflecting on what our soldiers fight and die for. If this land is your land and this land is my land, then it is—by definition—our land, land that men and women have fought and died for. To desecrate it for the wealth of a few and the harm of so many runs contrary to what is good in us and good for us.
Peter Walks for Democracy 