S3E35: Reimagine, Rebuild, Resist: Creating the World We Want Together

UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT

0:00:00 - (Chris Clarke): This podcast is made possible by financial support from our listeners. If you're not supporting us yet, check out nine zero miles from needles.com donate or text the word needles to 53555 think the deserts are barren wastelands. Time for 90 miles from needles, the Desert Protection Podcast. Thank you, Joe, and welcome to another episode of 90 Miles from the Desert Protection Podcast. I'm your host, Chris Clark, and in this episode we're going to be talking about how the hell we respond to the events of last Election Day, in which we found out that we were essentially going to be enduring the 13th term of the Reagan administration.

0:01:02 - (Chris Clarke): And I have some thoughts about how we might usefully react to this without pitting us, one against the other in as productive and creative and positive a way as possible, while failing to burn ourselves out as a result. This is something I've thought a lot about over the last 40 years or so. You know, we have amazing, wonderful, smart, caring people working on the side of human rights and women's rights and education and worker safety and indigenous dignity and environmental protection, environmental restoration, more peaceful foreign policy, humane border policy.

0:01:37 - (Chris Clarke): A lot of people working on all those things. And we're just learning, in fact, that as more votes get counted from the elections, that Donald Trump did not win the popular vote. Which means, again, that at least among voters, there are more of us that are opposed to the kind of extreme conservative shenanigans that we're facing for the next four years, then support it. And that's counting even the tepid level of support that's required to do the very small act of pulling a voting lever for one person over another.

0:02:08 - (Chris Clarke): That's the majority of Trump's vote. So, given that we outnumber them, why are we in this predicament? I have some thoughts about that and what we can do to address the situation. But first, it's really important, especially this time of year, to remind you that this podcast only only operates because of listeners who've decided to provide financial support. And that financial support's going to become even more crucial in the next year than it has been since January 2022, when we launched.

0:02:38 - (Chris Clarke): The election has changed a lot in our planning. In fact, we've launched a reporting fund to step up our efforts, which have already been pretty substantial. We've been bringing people together across the desert from Texas to California to Utah to Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, in ways that no one has before, so that we can at least compare notes, talk to each other, coordinate campaigns, compare strategies, avoid undercutting each other's campaigns without knowing that we're doing it all that kind of stuff that talking to each other can promote.

0:03:11 - (Chris Clarke): So we've done some work here that we're really proud of. But current events require that we step up our game, and that's going to require that we step up our fundraising, even though it probably seems to some of you. Certainly seems to me like I'm always talking about our need for donations, much rather be talking about issues. But this is one of the issues that we need to talk about. We've launched our special stop 47 fund.

0:03:37 - (Chris Clarke): Our goal is to reach 24k in donations to that stop 47 fund by sometime early next year. You can check out the appeal by going to 90miles fromnatals.com stop 47 it'll take you to a givebutter campaign page where you will see that I seeded the fund with 50 bucks of my own cash. It's sitting there. Feel free to share that around even if you can't or don't want to give. But don't let my donation of 50 bucks to a nonprofit that I started make you feel hemmed in. We're happy to take a donation of a dollar, which I think is the minimum we can accept, all the way on up to, you know, if you wanted to donate 23,950 bucks to bring us right up to our goal, or even more than that, we'll take it.

0:04:22 - (Chris Clarke): But I think the future is in a lot, a lot of $5 donations. That's really what well, we'll get into that later in the episode. We really need to step up our fundraising, at any rate, and this is going to help us do just that. It's going to help us hire freelance reporters to expand our coverage. It's going to help us get out into the public and do public events, talks, presentations, that kind of thing, bringing people together, big meetings. There are a lot of ways that having this fund will help us, and 24k is not quite twice our annual budget. So far, we've been pulling all this off for 14 or 15k a year, and we're very proud of the fact that we've been able to do that.

0:05:03 - (Chris Clarke): But given what threats the Trump administration poses to the economy, and in particular, to be frank, the economic underpinnings of our household, since my spouse is a federal employee, don't know that we're going to be able to pull off a 14 or 15k a year podcast for very much longer. So please consider giving either at 90 miles from needles.com stop 47 or through one of our regular donation portals, if that's easier, which you can reach at 90 miles from needles.com

0:05:40 - (Chris Clarke): donate we really appreciate you listening. We really appreciate you donating, sharing episodes, sharing our newsletters. There's just a whole lot of you out there that have already helped us and we are eternally grateful. We just need to increase your numbers by a factor of 10 or thereabouts. So let's take a deep breath and dive into a little bit of thinking about how do we react to this news that most of my listeners, I think, are gonna feel like was a bad piece of news on election day, election night, day after election day, election, Boxing day, whatever you wanna call it.

0:06:24 - (Chris Clarke): Because that bad news has felt kind of overwhelming and it doesn't need to be. It's big and it's bad. But there are lots of things that we can do to address this and to permanently sideline, in a political sense, the minority of people in the United States who actually don't like environmental protection laws, who don't like civil rights laws. Let's get into it. Okay, first off, I want to say that I am not interested in what a lot of people have been doing online to process the election.

0:07:37 - (Chris Clarke): Not criticizing them for doing it. We all process this kind of stuff in our own way. But I really don't think that the instant hot takes on why this election went the way it did are at all helpful. I mean, we had them within minutes of the election being called, actually well before that, truth be told. And we had people saying that Kamala Harris lost because she didn't say enough mean things about trans people, or she didn't say enough mean things about migrants, or because she didn't come out more strongly in support of a ceasefire.

0:08:07 - (Chris Clarke): She didn't criticize Israel enough over their hideous actions in Gaza. The Democratic Party didn't spend enough time thinking about the economic well being of working class white people. Far too often, the hot takes that people offer up in the wake of the election have basically been people repeating what their hot button issues are. People have been approaching these hot takes with certainty, without any apparent curiosity, without any apparent recognition that this did not go the way we thought. And there's got to be reasons why, and they're not going to be simple.

0:08:38 - (Chris Clarke): It's been a frustrating and futile pastime that substitutes for actual analysis of where we went wrong. And I get it. I get why people go that way. Because the simplistic, alleged reasons why this election went this way, they give you a feeling like you at least understand a very complicated and disappointing situation. But the fact is, these hot takes don't help us. They don't get us any closer to a strategy for restoring rights, for building the world that we want to see, for protecting the most vulnerable.

0:09:12 - (Chris Clarke): And if you wanted proof that those hot takes are not going to help, look at the last dozen presidential elections. When Clinton lost, when John Kerry lost, when Gore lost, when Dukakis lost, there was always some hot take about some set of magic words that the candidate should have said or some optic event that they shouldn't have done, some perfunctory whistle stop in a state that went the other way when election day came.

0:09:42 - (Chris Clarke): We've heard this all before, and we've heard it all before for years, for decades. This whole situation has deep historical roots. It's been evolving since, well, for centuries, but really since the New Deal. FDR's policies in the 1930s and 1940s that redistributed wealth, that promoted unions, that started the first tentative steps toward civil rights movement accomplishments. The powers that be didn't like these moves. They didn't like the additions to them in the 1950s and the 1960s.

0:10:23 - (Chris Clarke): And that opposition gained steam with the election of Reagan. What we're looking at over the last 80 years is a massive coordinated corporate reaction to the gains made in civil rights, women's rights, LGBT rights, environment and worker safety, and all kinds of other realms. From the 1940s to the 1970s, we were making real progress. Now, this period was not idyllic. Don't get me wrong. We really only need to look at the treatment of Native people in the 1960s and the 1970s for counter examples.

0:11:01 - (Chris Clarke): Leonard Peltier is still in prison. And in the 1970s, there was plenty to yell about. As far as civil rights and human rights and justice and environmental issues go, I was there. I remember I became an activist around 1974 during the Attica prison riot defendant trials in Buffalo, New York. I was getting my head busted in at 14 years old by campus security. I remember what we were upset about back then, and there was a lot, and it was bad.

0:11:32 - (Chris Clarke): But the overall social trend was toward more freedom, more liberality, more inclusion of different kinds of people in the concept of what humanity is, of what an American is. It seemed pretty clear that if we stayed on the track we were on in the early 1970s, where we were forcing Republican presidents to resign and all that kind of stuff, it seemed like a better world was on the horizon. And we were working toward that better world.

0:12:02 - (Chris Clarke): And we got to the Carter administration, and Carter even declined to take the traditional American response to a publicly supported revolution in one of our client states in Nicaragua. Now, the Sandinistas have gone bad. They're thoroughly rotten at this point. But when they first took power as part of an authentic popular revolution, American tradition would have been to arm the opponents of that revolution. That's what we did in Chile in 1973.

0:12:31 - (Chris Clarke): It's what we did in Iran and Guatemala in 1954. And you know, it's not even worthwhile to list all the countries that we intervened in like that right now. It was just. It was what we did. And yet Jimmy Carter, who I have significant bones to pick with, he reinstituted draft registration, and that set my life on a very different course than it would have had. But he declined to get involved on the side of the counter revolutionaries in Nicaragua.

0:12:59 - (Chris Clarke): And it seemed like things were improving and improving and improving. And then November 1980 came and Reagan won the election. And I remember my group of friends thought that was incomprehensible. Why would anybody do that? Why would anybody vote for a right wing buffoon like Reagan? But he got in. And with his cabinet and his allies in the Congress and the agencies, Reagan set about dismantling many of the gains that we had achieved over the course of decades.

0:13:36 - (Chris Clarke): Firing every air traffic controller in the country all at once because they had the temerity to join a union, sending the union movement into a 30 year downward spiral. Air traffic controllers were insisting on working conditions that were not only good for the air traffic controllers, but reducing the amount of workplace stress they had and increasing the amount of confidence that they would make good decisions in a hurry when they had to.

0:14:00 - (Chris Clarke): Which was much better for all the people that are flying on planes that rely on those air traffic controllers to keep us all safe. But that just didn't matter to Reagan or his friends. And since the Reagan administration, we have oscillated back and forth between Republican and Democratic administrations in the White House, between Republican and Democratic control of either of the houses in Congress.

0:14:22 - (Chris Clarke): And if I might be permitted a generalization, what has happened in that 44 years is that America's policy moves considerably to the right when the conservatives are in power, and they mostly don't move a similar degree to the left when the liberals are in power. It's not a pendulum, it's more like a ratcheted wrench where you push in one direction and it tightens things up and you pull in the other direction and nothing happens.

0:14:51 - (Chris Clarke): But it allows you to push in the first direction again and tighten things even more. Now, why is this the case? Why do conservatives carry out their agendas when they're in power and liberals keep the status quo? In part, I think it's because a lot of people who tend to vote for liberal candidates think that voting is the sum total of their responsibility to the political process. They vote and then they go home.

0:15:17 - (Chris Clarke): And if people they don't like win, then they'll get active and oppose them. But if people they voted for win, they think about other stuff for four years. No judgment. Personal lives are important. I used to have one myself. I miss it. But the conservative movement in this country doesn't take that time off. If they get their preferred candidate, they spend the next years pushing that candidate hard. If someone they don't like wins an election, they work even harder. Now, there are lots of reasons for the differences between the way the conservative hardcore and the liberal mass of people in this country act so differently from each other.

0:15:53 - (Chris Clarke): And in describing some of the reasons why I think they act so differently, I do run the risk of coming up with those same hot takes that I just spent some time dismissing because I've been thinking about this for a while. My take on things that I have had since before Bush v. Gore, to be honest, is that the conservative base has a vision of the world they want. And they have organized, starting at the grassroots level and always returning to that grassroots, not ignoring them for the last more than half a century to get people fired up about that world that they want and keep them active in pushing for it.

0:16:30 - (Chris Clarke): Meanwhile, the broad coalition of people that are opposed to the Christian fundamentalist takeover of our secular society, who see that imagined world that the hardcore right proposes and react to it in horror and disgust, or opposed to corporate infiltration of every aspect of modern life. We don't spend a lot of time articulating a vision of the kind of world we want. We define what vision we do have as opposition to the other folks vision. That's really important.

0:17:00 - (Chris Clarke): The other folks vision needs to be opposed. But we have to do more than that. We have to have a vision of the society that we want and the world we want that is so compelling, that is so central to our ideas of who we are, that we live it every day, that we talk about it to our friends, our neighbors every day. The conservative base has, at least part of the conservative base has churches where they go once a week.

0:17:26 - (Chris Clarke): Everybody goes and listens to an authority figure talk about how higher powers have smiled on Their model of the world being exhorted to go and live a lifestyle that fits with that worldview, with that dream of how society should be. As toxic as that dream may seem to us, and that dream is toxic and terrifying. That dream involves the subjugation of women, the torture and abuse of children. That dream involves the extraction of natural resources like it's going out of style.

0:17:53 - (Chris Clarke): And I include human labor as a natural resource in that. That dream of the world, as conservatives would like it to be, needs to be opposed. It needs to be eradicated. But you know, we've got to be about more than just opposing our opponents. We have to have a vision of how we want the world to be. Some of that's gonna sound a lot like describing the opposite of the world that our opponents want, and that's inescapable.

0:18:23 - (Chris Clarke): When we talk about not wanting trans people to be targeted for abuse or oppression, we can say, stop anti trans violence, Stop anti trans hatred. And we need to say that. And we also need to say all people, regardless of gender identity, ethnicity, personality, upbringing, income, whatever you want to talk about, have a right to self expression, to full inclusion in life, full inclusion in society.

0:18:54 - (Chris Clarke): All people, regardless of any of those things, have the right to make the life for themselves that they dream of making, just like everybody else. There's a difference in how those two approaches to the topic are cast. Do we want to slow salts on endangered species? Yes, and we have to phrase that a lot of the time as we oppose this attack on endangered species. And that does come out of a nascent vision, a gut sense that undermining the entire global population of teams buckwheat for lithium and boron mine is morally wrong, or at least not a good idea.

0:19:34 - (Chris Clarke): We have to pose specific threats and we have to talk about them specifically. But I think we also need to state that vision in a positive, affirmative way where all species have a right to exist. And we can quibble about, you know, typhus and smallpox and things like that, but all species have a right to exist. I firmly believe that those of us who are opposed to this incoming administration, especially those of us in the environmental realm, need to articulate a vision of the world we want to see. And we need to do it on a person to person basis.

0:20:17 - (Chris Clarke): This leads me to one of the biggest problems with the environmental movement in particular, which is of course, the context that I live in. That's the water I swim in, even in the desert. There will be exceptions to this problem and I'll talk about them. That said, I'm going to state this baldly. The environmental movement writ large does not know how to work with people. I have an example. I'm not going to identify the person involved or the campaign involved because the person that said this thing that I'm going to quote to you is a wonderful person and was just recounting their experience in organizing campaigns. Wasn't saying it's the way it should be, wasn't saying there's a good reason for this, but just talking about establishing a coalition to protect a piece of land.

0:21:03 - (Chris Clarke): I was involved in this in my last job. We had representatives of a bunch of different groups, some of them local to the area that we wanted to protect, some of them national or based in Sacramento, the state capitol or otherwise, you know, headquartered far away from the neighborhood. And there was some tension there, there was some competing objectives and things like that, but we were mostly all in accord on what we wanted to protect this piece of land. And we were working with occasional hitches and awkward moments and cultural misunderstandings, but all that said, working pretty well together, considering that we're all human beings and that human beings are notoriously difficult.

0:21:43 - (Chris Clarke): We were setting up a decision making process for the coalition working on protecting this piece of land. And we had come up with the idea of having every organization that's a member of the coalition having a vote within the group on controversial matters. And that made some sense. It put the small environmental justice oriented local groups on an equal footing with the very well funded and abundantly staffed national and regional orgs.

0:22:08 - (Chris Clarke): But there was this one meeting where I asked what happens if someone who's a member of the public, not affiliated with any organization, maybe other than like a rank and file member of a union or a parishioner of a local church, but they're not representing those groups. Person is there because they are interested in what we're doing and they want to help. How do they plug into the structure? And one of my colleagues who'd been involved in a lot of very similar campaigns throughout the state of California for decades, said thoughtfully, you know, I don't think I've ever been in a coalition like this that had any membership that wasn't part of an organization. I don't think I've ever worked with an individual in one of these coalitions who didn't represent an organization.

0:22:56 - (Chris Clarke): And that is a problem. That is a big problem. Now, that's not the only time I've run into this. My last job, I was basically instructed by my higher ups not to recruit local activists to speak at hearings about desert issues because they wouldn't stick to talking points that they had been handed that were written by someone who didn't live in the desert. Desert people are kind of hard to corral that way. Now, I mentioned that there is a big exception to this, and there's probably more than just this one. I know there's more than just this one, in fact, but this is the one I know well.

0:23:26 - (Chris Clarke): The environmental justice movement, which is basically tasked with making sure that industrial processes, from resource extraction to manufacturing to waste disposal, do not unfairly sicken communities of color, communities of people that are not affluent tribes in rural areas. People working on environmental justice issues have to work with locals. If they're working on a campaign against a lead smelter, for instance, and they don't go to the neighborhood downwind from the lead smelter to talk to people who might be suffering health problems or having their property values depressed or whatever the effect might be.

0:24:04 - (Chris Clarke): You don't have a campaign if you don't talk to the locals, if you don't work with the locals, if you don't take your lead from the locals. The locals know what they want. They may not know quite how to get it. They sometimes need help articulating it, especially given unequal access to things like higher education in this society. The environmental justice movement more often than not takes its cues from the people it works within those local communities. But elsewhere in the environmental movement, we have gotten so used to being able to do things top down that generally we don't think about organizing mass movements.

0:24:43 - (Chris Clarke): We don't think about mobilizing groups of ordinary people. Our activism takes place in the halls of power, at least for the big established groups. And we only think about rank and file people out in the world for two reasons. One is to show sheer numbers in support of an idea like a petition or a letter writing campaign, or commenting on a environmental assessment, whatever that might be. And the other is hitting people up for that $20 donation.

0:25:12 - (Chris Clarke): And both of those things are really important. I've done both of them here. But they can't be all the relationship that we have with people who are not staff of elected officials or non profit organizations or agencies, people who drive forklifts for a living and struggle to pay their bills and try to game the system so that they can get their kids into the better school on the other side of the line.

0:25:37 - (Chris Clarke): People like that are the future of the environmental movement, of the progressive movement, of the feminist movement, of the LGBT movement, the union movement, and Again, this is a broadside against the environmental movement. It's a huge generalization. Different people have done different things across the country. The environmental movement is large. There are lots of different groups doing work. Some of them are intensely local. Friends of the local park, the Small Town Recycling Committee, the smaller chapters of Audubon or the Sierra Club or other organizations that mostly focus on local stuff.

0:26:12 - (Chris Clarke): It's not a uniform problem, but it is pervasive and it is counterproductive because we rely so heavily on presidential proclamations protecting a piece of land or on lawsuits under legislation that was enacted in the early 1970s under the Nixon administration, before most of the people in this country were born. The Endangered Species act, the National Environmental Policy Act. In states like California, we have our state versions of those. In California it's the California Environmental Quality Act. The list goes on. Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, Marine Mammal Protection Act. These are really powerful tools and we've had to use them. We've been forced to use them. We would have been stupid not to use them. But there's a blank spot in the picture. These are Nixon era laws.

0:26:56 - (Chris Clarke): We in the environmental movement were handed these really important tools before we really even got going as a movement. The Endangered Species act and the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency and the signing of the National Environmental Policy act all happened under Nixon. He was a president who signed most of the large pieces of federal legislation that we now rely on to protect our environment.

0:27:21 - (Chris Clarke): It's like if you had a 16 year old kid who's just learning how to drive and you hand her a fleet of performance cars, of course she's going to drive them. Might not always be the best way of getting from one place to another. That's the environmental movement. With the ESA and NEPA and the Clean Water act and all the other federal legislation of about 50 year old vintage. We have these amazing and really powerful tools and we focused on using them because they were the most efficient way of getting from point A to point B.

0:27:50 - (Chris Clarke): Environmental groups are perpetually short staffed. We don't have the bandwidth or the funds to engage in large grassroots campaigns. A lot of the time a team of attorneys is cheaper than a national campaign most of the time. And so we use the tools that are available and we're not wrong for having done so. But it's put us in this position where unlike the base that got Donald Trump back in office, we do not have active public support.

0:28:19 - (Chris Clarke): We have public support and it's strong. The majority of people in this country have environmental sensibilities but it's not active public support. And what I mean by that is, over and over I get asked by people that are starting to pay attention because something has attracted their attention, gotten them upset, gotten them riled up. People will say, what can I do about this? How can I help? Who can I call? What meetings can I go to? And in large part, we have not created those avenues for those people to get involved, other than to send us money, maybe write a letter.

0:28:52 - (Chris Clarke): When most of the environmental advancement that we're responsible for is done in the halls of power or in smoke filled rooms or in courtrooms, it leaves out the people that we rely on for our support and we have to do better. And I'll add, in defense of the environmental movement, or at least that part of it that doesn't engage the public, the broad spectrum of rank and file people that support it, some of that broad spectrum expects people in the environmental movement to do their work for them as well.

0:29:22 - (Chris Clarke): You see this, for instance, in the insistence that voting for a third party presidential candidate means something. It does in other countries, in places where other kinds of voting systems, parliamentary systems, ranked choice votings, all the different potential kinds of variations on how you do the math of democracy can make third parties actually viable in this country. Third parties are potentially viable on the local and regional levels, but not at the top because of the electoral college.

0:29:54 - (Chris Clarke): Third parties that only aim at presidential elections or similarly high office, despite their best intentions, can only function as spoilers. There's room for a third party in this country, or a fourth or a fifth if they start by running people for town council for the local water board, the board of education, make inroads across the country at those local levels. After a few decades of that, the more successful of those third parties could actually replace one of the two dominant parties.

0:30:22 - (Chris Clarke): And then there would be two parties, but one of them would be different. That's what it would take. You don't organize a political party or any other kind of political campaign or social campaign by showing up to vote once every four years. Whether you vote third party or not, this all depends on local work. So there's some good news in all this, which is that that local work that we need to do to build a movement that can actually defeat the rise of corporate conservatism in this country is pretty much the same work we're going to have to do to keep ourselves and the people we care about alive and as healthy as possible during the next four years.

0:31:04 - (Chris Clarke): Federal lawsuits will happen, national demonstrations will happen, big Social media campaigns are going to happen, but the important work is going to be defending the gay, lesbian, trans people in our neighborhoods, defending the local clinics that provide reproductive health care, protecting individual pieces of landscape from ill thought out or malevolent projects, profit driven projects. This is all going to be mostly local work, hell, even just feeding neighbors that are having a tough time contending with the super inflation that the tariffs generate. This is the work that we're going to need to do to keep ourselves alive and functioning. Functioning or functioning as well as possible during a Trump administration.

0:31:46 - (Chris Clarke): It's going to involve actually talking to your neighbors in real time, either face to face or on the phone or zoom or whatever. Social media is important. It's an important tool. We shouldn't and can't give it up. If the other side uses it, we can do the same. But social media is only one very specialized tool. It's a really good way of preaching to the choir, and the choir does need to be preached to.

0:32:14 - (Chris Clarke): But if we're going to be using our time to actually motivate people to take action to work with us, we have to escape the algorithmically poisoned atmosphere of social media. Because posting on social media is essentially talking to ourselves and we need to do that, but it can't be all we do. So, you know, I'm talking like I know what I'm talking about and these are really preliminary thoughts on my part.

0:32:42 - (Chris Clarke): I said I've been thinking about this kind of stuff for 40 years, but I'm still learning. None of us can afford to be so fossilized, calcified in our outlook that we don't respond to new information that undermines our worldview. So I'm suggesting these things to y'all fully aware that the next several months could force me to make major changes in my philosophy of action, in my theory of change. But it seems pretty straightforward to me that we are going to be forced to do the local work that we really should have been doing for the last 40 years, following the example of our comrades, our sisters and brothers in the environmental justice movement, that we need to stop relying on the top down approach in the environmental movement when we do so to the exclusion of working with the public.

0:33:28 - (Chris Clarke): And we need to do so with a vision of the world we want. For me, I imagine a desert that is inhabited by people, native and the descendants of settlers that revere the place, that look at the creosotes and the yuccas and the reptiles and the insects and the birds and the every living thing and some non living things that make up this home of ours. But look at all these beings as relatives, as parts of our lives that we cherish.

0:34:02 - (Chris Clarke): Whether we live in Terlingua, Texas, or Joshua Tree, California, or suburbs of Las Vegas, I imagine a desert whose people speak for it with reverence and who come together frequently and not always in the presence of threats that need to be addressed to discuss how we can live glorious lives in and with this beautiful desert, to have people so tied in with the landscape that they live in that it becomes almost unthinkable to threaten or attack any part of that landscape.

0:34:38 - (Chris Clarke): Now, I'm not a Pollyanna type person. I am not the kind of person that goes around and insists on finding silver linings in the worst of the dark clouds. If you put me in a room that's got six feet of horseshit in it, I don't generally grab a shovel and start looking for the pony. But I do think that we are going to be forced to do what we needed to do all along. And if there is a ray of hope to be found in a desert that's going to come under extraordinary threat in the next four years along with the rest of the planet, then that's a pretty good ray of hope.

0:35:16 - (Chris Clarke): And I'm going to stick around and work toward that vision. And I welcome your help, your thoughts, your support. Whether or not you represent a mainstream environmental organization, we can have the world we want. The first step is deciding what that world and that wraps up this episode of 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast. Don't forget as you navigate the barrage of really important, crucial requests from very worthy causes on giving Tuesday, December 3rd, that we're here too, and we could use your pocket change.

0:36:22 - (Chris Clarke): Go to 90miles from needles.com stop47 if you want to contribute to our $24,000 fundraising goal for the Trump Opposition Reporting Fund. Otherwise, just go to 90miles from needles.com donate where you can make a recurring donation or a one time donation of a size that makes sense to you. And along those lines, we want to thank our newest donors, Marilyn Woodruff, Sarah Bliss Hey Sarah, nice to see your name pop up there.

0:36:50 - (Chris Clarke): And Greta Anderson, who we are grateful to not only for her recent joining the ranks of our donors, but also for the wonderful interview she did on the previous episode about Hope the Mexican Wolf, Greta's deputy director of the Western Watersheds Project. And I hasten to point out that you are not required to donate if we interview you. As a revered philosopher once said, no quid pro quo, but donations from any quarters are welcome and we do thank Greta very much for the donation and for all of her fine work at Western Watersheds and previously, as well as for her friendship over the years.

0:37:26 - (Chris Clarke): I also want to thank Joe Jeffrey, our voiceover guy, and Martine Mancha, our wonderful podcast artist. Our theme song, Moody Western is by Bright side Studio. Other music in this episode is by alex bird via envato.com now my beautiful wife and I are getting ready to jump on a plane and go to the Pacific Northwest for a family get together celebration of life for my late and lamented brother in law.

0:37:55 - (Chris Clarke): Your thoughts while we do that are very welcome and it's not too late as I record this for you to make plans to go to Shoshone, California on the 30th of November a few days from now to meet me at the Shoshone Museum at 10am where we will be talking about the future of desert conservation and what that means. Really looking forward to that. Shoshone is one of my favorite places. Got a couple of really good friends that live there.

0:38:20 - (Chris Clarke): It's a good place. Come on up. We will grab lunch at the Crowbar afterwards. Best hamburgers in 50 miles. Keep your heads up even as you have to keep your heads down during the holidays. Shoulder to the wheel, nose to the grindstone. All those horrible worker injury type idioms after the beginning of November. This desert needs you more than it ever has and so do we. Please take care of yourselves.

0:38:47 - (Chris Clarke): We're right here with you and I will see you at the next watering hole. Bye now. 90 miles from Needles is a production of the Desert Advocacy Media Network.