Ted Hamilton is a climate movement attorney, writer, and literary scholar. After law school, he co-founded Climate Defense Project, which provides legal assistance to climate justice activists. He lives in Worcester, Massachusetts.

From the Introduction

In the fall of 2016, a group of climate activists from the Pacific Northwest sent a letter to President Obama urging action on the global warming crisis. This was the autumn of the Indigenous mobilization against the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock, of the Trump ascendancy, of the lowest sea ice ever recorded in the Arctic. Climate emergency met mostly with official inertia and prevarication. The activists wrote that the lack of action to address warming “raises the practical question of what a concerned citizen should do when our governments and economic systems are committed to a course of global suicide and are willing and able to bend the political system and civic discourse to their will.”

The members of the letter-writing group—Michael Foster, Leonard Higgins, Emily Johnston, Annette Klapstein, and Ken Ward—had been involved in environmental organizing for years. Their study of climate science and political change led them to believe that it was possible for society to transition away from fossil fuels and the ecological damage they cause. “It is not that we lack the traditions and values from which a practical and moral course of action might spring,” they wrote to the president. “We need only to act with thought for generations to come, respect the earth which nourishes us, cherish wild things and wild places, and value people over things, happiness over wealth, and other people over one’s self.”

The activists posted their letter online on the morning of October 11. Shortly afterward, they traveled separately to remote locations in Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, and Washington. They had come prepared with bolt cutters and flowers, and they carried a message of support for the Water Protectors at Standing Rock.

“We have tried every avenue by which engaged citizens might advance such concerns—in this case, ecological—in public policy, and nothing has worked,” they wrote. “There is no plausible means or mechanism by which the extraction and burning of coal and tar sands oil from existing mines and fields can be halted on the timeline now required by any ordinary, legal means.”

After their friends placed warning calls to oil companies, the five activists cut padlocks and entered pipeline control sites that lay in the middle of empty fields and alongside deserted county roads. They approached valves controlling pipelines that stretched hundreds of miles in either direction. As their actions were livestreamed to the world, they turned the valves and shut the pipelines down.

Ted Hamilton is a climate movement attorney, writer, and literary scholar. After law school, he co-founded Climate Defense Project, which provides legal assistance to climate justice activists. He lives in Worcester, Massachusetts.

From the Introduction

In the fall of 2016, a group of climate activists from the Pacific Northwest sent a letter to President Obama urging action on the global warming crisis. This was the autumn of the Indigenous mobilization against the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock, of the Trump ascendancy, of the lowest sea ice ever recorded in the Arctic. Climate emergency met mostly with official inertia and prevarication. The activists wrote that the lack of action to address warming “raises the practical question of what a concerned citizen should do when our governments and economic systems are committed to a course of global suicide and are willing and able to bend the political system and civic discourse to their will.”

The members of the letter-writing group—Michael Foster, Leonard Higgins, Emily Johnston, Annette Klapstein, and Ken Ward—had been involved in environmental organizing for years. Their study of climate science and political change led them to believe that it was possible for society to transition away from fossil fuels and the ecological damage they cause. “It is not that we lack the traditions and values from which a practical and moral course of action might spring,” they wrote to the president. “We need only to act with thought for generations to come, respect the earth which nourishes us, cherish wild things and wild places, and value people over things, happiness over wealth, and other people over one’s self.”

The activists posted their letter online on the morning of October 11. Shortly afterward, they traveled separately to remote locations in Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, and Washington. They had come prepared with bolt cutters and flowers, and they carried a message of support for the Water Protectors at Standing Rock.

“We have tried every avenue by which engaged citizens might advance such concerns—in this case, ecological—in public policy, and nothing has worked,” they wrote. “There is no plausible means or mechanism by which the extraction and burning of coal and tar sands oil from existing mines and fields can be halted on the timeline now required by any ordinary, legal means.”

After their friends placed warning calls to oil companies, the five activists cut padlocks and entered pipeline control sites that lay in the middle of empty fields and alongside deserted county roads. They approached valves controlling pipelines that stretched hundreds of miles in either direction. As their actions were livestreamed to the world, they turned the valves and shut the pipelines down.