Yes, my home state of Vermont is still pretty idyllic in many places. Above, the congregational church and old school in a tiny hill town between Royalton and Brookfield, and below, a typical upland pasture. If you look closely, there's a rope tow (for downhill skiing) running out of that shed and up the hill. J. learned to ski on a tow like that in Woodstock, Vermont, home of the first rope tow in the U.S.

PRESERVING THE ENVIRONMENT, LITERALLY AND FIGURATIVELY

Susurra and Chris have been musing lately, in the comments and elsewhere, about the efficacy of non-violent protest. One of my greatest frustrations during the year prior to the war in Iraq was the lack of public protest. I was out on a streetcorner every Friday for that entire year, but it was like flogging dead horses to get people - in a liberal, university town, no less - to protest with their feet. The excuses read like a second-grade teacher's list: "Oh, I've written to my Senators," "Protesting just isn't my style", "Isn't that a sixties kind of thing?", "It doesn't do any good," "I've never done anything like that, sorry", “I don’t believe in demonstrating,” – this often from young people - to “thanks for being out here for me” – in a timid voice from adults, usually women – and even "wow, you guys are really quaint." Our small band of fuzzy, greying old hippies was undeterred, but what we saw was deeply discouraging. We all knew, from experience, that writing our senators and congressmen was next to useless. In fact, I'd spoken to all their offices on the phone a number of times, and been told, flat out, by the foreign policy aides -- this is in our liberal state of Vermont, where opposition to war would NOT effect re-election - "Privately I can tell you that Senator so-and-so agrees with you, but here in Washington he feels he simply can't speak out at this time."

Standing there in the freezing winter, we spoke often to students who saw us as relics, I think, or curiosities. “We’re doing this for you,” we often told them, and were met with raised eyebrows. “What will you do if there is a draft?” we asked. “Uh, I just don’t think about that,” they’d answer, or, “That’s not going to happen.” To them, everything they saw or heard was theoretical. Academic departments held formal symposia about foreign policy; attendance and participation seemed to expiate any guilt about a possible war – students and faculty had done their bit. But when the swim team’s budget was cut, due to university fiscal concerns, the students turned out by the hundreds at the President’s office. They walked past us after their morning protest, tears streaming down their faces in rage and frustration that such a terrible thing could have happened, making no connection at all between their protest signs and ours.

While it’s true that the huge anti-war, anti-Republican demonstrations that have taken place in the past couple of years in US cities like Washington and New York have been underreported, controlled, and dismissed in the media, those of us who lived through Vietnam and the civil rights era know that public protest does have an effect when it becomes endemic. I have never condoned violent tactics - I can’t – but I understand why people cross that line. And it works both ways: destructive actions can sometimes multiply the attention given to peaceful ones; violent reactions by authorities can undermine their own control and power. Look at what happened after Kent State. On the other hand, reading eyewitness reports of the totally out-of-control police reaction to the recent NYC protests at the convention, where uninvolved people were beaten, jailed, and treated inhumanely just for walking by in a closed area where they lived, or for pulling out a cell phone (“ohmigod, we can’t let any of this be reported!”), it is clear that government control and suppression of the media and the truth have reached unprecedented levels.

What is the most frustrating is that I know that if every person in this country who really believed we’re on the wrong course --whether on foreign policy, environmental policy, health care, you name it; voters and non-voters, establishment and dis-enfranchised alike – got out onto the streets one organized day and said “We have had it” – this government would fall. Policies that oppress and hurt people continue when people feel too helpless and too fearful to act, and to reach that critical mass necessary for change. Governments throughout history have known this, and they are skilled in creating the necessary atmosphere of fear and helplessness. There’s a name for them: dictatorships. Look around.

We are certainly in a different era than during Vietnam, and the powers that be are banking on people’s complacency, their love of money and security over morality that has been nurtured by our consumerist culture throughout the last few decades, the removal of grass-roots control and responsibility from nearly all aspects of daily life, and the successfully-manipulated climate of fear and anxiety. What will it take?

I was interested to read about the research on the history of environmental protest conducted by Jon Agnone, a University of Washington sociology doctoral student, presented on Aug. 17 at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association:

The study compares the number of bills passed by Congress with tactics employed by green groups in the same year. Jon Agnone, a sociologist at the University of Washington, Seattle, found that sit-ins, rallies and boycotts were highly effective at forcing new environmental laws. Each protest raised the number of pro-environment bills passed by 2.2 per cent. Neither effort spent schmoozing politicians nor the state of public opinion made any difference.

But conventional politics does play a part. Environmental legislation is 75 per cent more likely to pass when Democrats control both houses of Congress. And it gets a 200 per cent boost in congressional election years, presumably because politicians see it as a vote winner.

Agnone, who presented his results on 17 August at the American Sociological Association's meeting in San Francisco, says protest groups lose their edge when they become part of the system. Their most effective weapon is disruption. "If you make a big enough disturbance then people have to recognise what you are doing."

(from the New Scientist, vol. 183 and an article by Joel Schwarz of the University of Washington, and a summary by Jon Christensen at Conservation News.

And, by the way – after the student protests, that swim team budget got re-instated.