Good People Fighting Through Bad Times

People vs. Polluters in Cancer Alley; Rev. Billy Welcomes Immigrants to NYC; And MAGA’s Taylor Swift Meltdown

New immigrants to New York City keeping warm and communicating with loved ones in Rev. Billy’s EarthChurch (Courtesy of Rev. Billy)

Our troubled country is fortunate to have good people working hard through tough obstacles to make life just a little better for everyone. I’m sure you know some. Two people who I’ve come to know and admire over the years have made headlines in recent weeks, in different but related realms.

One is an activist and performance artist who started preaching an anti-consumerist gospel on the streets of New York City more than 20 years ago. Along the way, the preacher character he plays transformed into a real spiritual leader, someone now demonstrating a hopeful humanism toward our influx of immigrants that belies the shameful smallness of the city’s mayor.

Another is a teacher from rural Louisiana, a Black woman who watched her family and friends suffer and die from exposure to toxic pollution along a heavily industrialized strip of Mississippi River known as Cancer Alley. She fought back, rallied her community and its allies, elevated the struggle to an international stature, and almost won — only to suffer a major setback at the hands of industry-friendly conservative judges last week.

That’s how things seem to be going as we approach The End. There are powerful forces trying to divide us, deceive us, and drag us down. And there are courageous, good-hearted people striving to improve our country and enlighten its people, fighting through strong downward currents.

Fighting Fossil Fools: Parts of this country are sacrifice zones to the fossil fuel industry, where human suffering and death are ignored to maintain our lifestyle and addiction to oil. On top of that list is Louisiana’s Cancer Alley, a polluted place whose residents I got to know while working for years on a campaign to block construction of yet another polluting plant.

Formosa Plastics seeks to build one of the world’s biggest petrochemical plants, in a poor river valley already choked with too many polluters, to turn our oversupply of fracked gas into mountains of new plastic packaging and products that we don’t want or need.   

Leading the fight is Sharon Lavigne, founder of Rise St. James and later a recipient of the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize for her efforts. Sharon is a sweet but tough woman who has lived in this toxic place her whole life, suffering ill health and watching friends and family suffer and die from cancer, respiratory diseases and other preventable illnesses.

Lavigne features prominently in a just-released report from Human Rights Watch called “We’re Dying Here: The Fight for Life in a Louisiana Fossil Fuel Sacrifice Zone.” It was written by Antonia Juhasz, an outstanding climate and energy investigative reporter who moved from San Francisco to New Orleans to dig deeper on this long marinading tragedy.

“We’re dying from inhaling the industries’ pollution. I feel like it’s a death sentence,” Lavigne told Juhasz.

On the same day Human Rights Watch released its report, Amnesty International released a similar report on people suffering from petrochemical pollution in Texas, called “The Cost of Doing Business? The Petrochemical Industry’s Toxic Pollution in the USA.”

Those two reports — as well as the voluminous evidence compiled by journalists, universities, and advocacy organizations — paint a damning portrait of a growing human and environmental health crisis caused by the fossil fuel and petrochemicals industries that is being ignored by government agencies.

For awhile, it seemed like all that info and the activism might stop the Formosa Plastics project. After our lawsuit, the Army Corps of Engineers suspended the project’s federal permits in 2020. The EPA and Department of Justice launched an investigation into whether the project violated community members civil rights. And in response to another lawsuit, a judge suspended the state’s permits for the project.

But all that has fallen apart in the last couple weeks. A federal judge in Louisiana sided with state officials and blocked the federal civil rights investigation. And in a devastating ruling, U.S. Court of Appeals, 5th District, reinstated the project’s air permits. “Once again the state of Louisiana is putting polluters before people,” Lavigne said in reaction.

I spoke with Sharon — ironically, on her way home from yet another doctor’s visit — and she said, “That was a big setback. It was a hurtful thing.” But somehow, Sharon maintains her strong Christian faith that God is on her side in this struggle, and that she’s going to prevail in the end.

“I am hopeful because I know that plant is not coming in just two miles from my home,” she said of the place that’s been her family home for generations. “I know it, we’re going to stop it. The people need to have a voice.”    

So we don’t just need to reduce fossil fuel dependence to save the planet from catastrophic changes to our climate. We also need to protect poor folks who live near the super-polluting facilities that process those fossil fuels. That’s the real backdrop for the idiotic calls by Trump and other Republicans to drastically ramp up our fossil fuel drilling and dependence.

This isn’t just an environmental and health issue — this is a moral question of whether we willfully inflict more suffering on millions of the most vulnerable people on Earth.

Rev. Billy Welcomes Immigrants: Republican governors have made headlines by sending busloads and planeloads of new immigrants to New York City and other Democrat-run big cities around the country. New York City Mayor Eric Adams has responded with loud complaints, hyperbolic fears it would “destroy New York,” criticism of Biden Administration border policies, and efforts to end his city’s age-old promise to provide shelter and care to immigrants and the unhoused.

Adams created a haphazard, poorly planned system for sheltering the nearly 150,000 migrants who have come to the city over the last two years. Some got stuck in a remote tent city, far from jobs or services, then a move to safer ground triggered a backlash. Many get stuck in the East Village, where they need to check into a processing center.

That’s where Rev. Billy Talen has his EarthChurch, formerly/alternatively known as the Church of Stop Shopping, and his Stop Shopping Choir. You see, Rev. Billy isn’t a real pastor, per se, and his church isn’t a real church, although it certainly feels like one to the hundreds of migrants who have used it as a warming station and support center this winter, one of a few spots in the neighborhood volunteering to help the migrants.

Rev. Billy is a performance artist and activist, but in these troubled end times, he’s become something like a real preacher and pastor. The last time I visited Billy in New York, he showed me around his storefront church, a former bank branch complete with vault and teller windows. It’s ironic given how many times he and his choir have been arrested in bank branches for protesting their funding of fossil fuel projects and other injustices.

Rev. Billy is also a former candidate for mayor in New York City, and these days he’s chiding Mayor Adams for forgetting that New York City has always been a city of immigrants, long its greatest strength.

“Eric Adams sounds like Trump. There’s never been a New York mayor who’s tried to talk people into not being New Yorkers,” Billy told me. Later, he said in a TikTok video, “We know we’re immigrants, and we know the city is great because people want to be here. They had a desire to be here. These people also had their dream of New York, aided and abetted by a 22-story high green woman in the harbor. We’re glad they’re here. They’re good people.”

Certainly the big influx of immigrants these days can overwhelm processing and social support services. It’s a problem, but we should still remember our humanity and treat them with compassion (particularly the big Christian churches more into Trump than Christ these days).

They’ve all endured major hardships on their way to the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, both man-made (borders, police, authoritarian politics back home, exploitation by traffickers) and natural, with climate change making natural disasters, famines and flooding worse. And Billy the climate activist says it will only get worse: “The conditions around the world that brought them here are not changing.”

What does Billy tell his immigrant guests — many of whom are Muslims from around the world, others Christians from Latin America — who wonder what kind of church they’ve stumbled into. “I tell them ‘I’m the pastor of Earthchurch.’ I don’t try to explain that I come from being a performing artist, and after that as a political activist,” Billy told me. “Here, I’m just the pastor.”

Traylor Trailer: In my newsletter two weeks ago, I celebrated superstar celebrity couple Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce and speculated that their positivity and politics could help President Biden win reelection.

This week, in the wake of Kelce’s Kansas City Chiefs earning a return trip to the Super Bowl — and sweetly celebrating with Swift on the field after the game — right-wing politicians and media outlets have started publicly losing their minds over the possibility of Traylor trashing Trump to their legions on fans.

As with many things in the crazed MAGAverse, the Trump faithful started floating wild conspiracy theories about secret plans to weaponize Taylor against the right and the NFL fixing playoff games just so Travis and Taylor are at the Super Bowl together.

Given how many times the Chiefs have made it to the Super Bowl in recent years, and how likely it’s always been that Travis and Taylor will endorse Biden over Trump, this right-wing hyperventilating is pretty funny. But I say to the MAGA world: keep it up because you guys are onto something — namely, showing moderates and independents just what you’re made of these days.