NEWS

Artwork depicting Pachamama, the Incan earth/time mother who is an ever-present and independent deity and who has her own creative power to sustain life on this earth. The Law of Mother Earth was written into the new Bolivian Constitution in 2009. Thank you to the unknown artist for this wonderful image.

By Nancy Price
Co-chair, Earth Democracy Issue Committee

October 2020

While massive wildfires burned in northern California, on Tuesday, September 29, my Yolo County Board of Supervisors passed a Climate Emergency Resolution spearheaded by the Yolo County Climate Emergency Coalition. The coalition spent months drafting the resolution, and it was endorsed by over 100 grassroots groups and individuals in the community including local farms, businesses, faith-based alliances, educational institutions, and various advocacy campaigns, as reported in Common Dreams. This resolution declared a climate emergency and committed to mobilization to achieve a just transition to zero carbon emissions by 2030.  

Significantly, in their 4-1 vote the supervisors committed the county to enacting a plan “to achieve a just economic recovery and transition to a countywide carbon-negative (climate positive) footprint by 2030.” They agreed to fund a climate advisory committee tasked with helping the county achieve this just transition with equitable outcomes for marginalized communities and to retool livelihoods. 

Adelita Serena, a Woodland-based organizer for Mothers Out Front, a grassroots climate action organization and a key supporter of the resolution, explained, “As a mother and Indigenous woman, what we are currently seeing is a very clear and loud alarm from our mother earth and ancestors. We must change course off fossil fuels before it’s too late. I have two sons and I want them to have a future. We must act now with great urgency.” Supervisor Don Saylor said, “The goal of carbon neutrality might not be fast enough. I’d like to make sure we as a county have done our part and have made measurable progress by 2025.” 

After the resolution passed, Juliette Beck, an organizer with the Yolo County Climate Emergency Coalition, emphasized: “Being on the front lines of the fires and suffering from heatwaves and days of hazardous, smoke-filled air this summer has definitely created a new sense of urgency…Yolo County's action today of declaring a climate emergency in our predominantly rural agricultural county of 220,000 residents is a testament to the social movement power demanding both transformative climate action and concrete steps to remedy the legacy of systemic racism.”

In Yolo County during this time of COVID-19 and the climate impacts, the Hispanic farmworkers have been especially vulnerable due to a lack of adequate masks and gloves and long hours in the sun picking the fruits and vegetables for our tables. A farmworker, who preferred to remain anonymous and continued to work when the smoke from recent fires blanketed the county, spoke at the hearing, saying, “My lungs are still irritated from breathing contaminated air, all the smoke, dust, and ash I inhaled while working in the fields. I’m still working every day even though I can’t stop coughing because I know the work will end soon and I need to…help take care of my family… What other choice do I have?” 

With this action, Yolo County joins over 110 local governments within 24 U.S. states that have passed a declaration, representing just over 37 million people or 11.3% in this country. Worldwide, 1,783 declarations have passed within 30 countries plus the EU for a population of 835 million now under Climate Emergency Declaration. This is a project of The Climate Mobilization, a decentralized global campaign that is engaging local communities in policymaking. (Learn more about the movement and its impact here). 

The number of declarations passed has greatly increased just in the past two years, and no wonder – massive forest fires, droughts and crop failures,  extreme weather, an Artic warmer than in the past 3 million years, and melting glaciers are clear evidence of this emergency and that we are teetering at the tipping point. Global warming no longer adequately describes this crisis.   

Can we recover or are we doomed? No matter who wins the election, it’s time for us to organize in our communities to pass a Climate Emergency Declaration or Resolution to both change local policy and to build a bold, massive grassroots Climate Emergency mobilization to demand our representatives take action now and set the deadline for 2030 – not 2045 or 2050, dates still cited, when it will be way too late.

As the Earth Democracy Issue Committee develops our program for the next 6-18-24 months, let’s remember that one of our framing principles is “Guardianship of Present and Future Generations.”  Being part of an all-hands-on-deck, emergency-speed mobilization to protect humanity might just save the day. After the election, we’ll develop a Toolkit for members and branches.

Join with us! Let’s be part of this emergency-speed, whole society Climate Mobilization. If you would like to help with developing materials, please write nancytprice39[at]gmail.com or call 530-758-0726 Pacific Time.

October 2020

By Dorothy Van Soest
WILPF US Liaison to the Poor People’s Campaign

A month before the election, our nation mourns 200,000 plus COVID-19 deaths, disproportionately concentrated among low-wage essential workers and people of color. Conflagration on our streets burns down centuries of willful ignorance and silence about the racism pandemic, far deadlier and longer lasting than COVID-19. We reel from multiple tribulations: attacks on voting rights and democracy, failure to pass a fair and just relief package, refusal to charge anyone for murdering Breonna Taylor, stacking the Supreme Court. 

But this is not the time for despair. This is the time for greater than ever voter turnout and it is a moment ripe for socioeconomic transformation. This is the time to unleash the power that 140 million poor and low-income people in our country have to change the political landscape. And that is exactly what the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival is doing. Its mass, multicolored initiative called We Must Do M.O.R.E. has been mobilizing, organizing, registering, and educating people who will vote for a moral agenda that will transform our nation.  

“In the midst of exacerbated pain,” says Rev. William Barber, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, “poor and low-income people are preparing to vote in massive numbers.” 

And they are a force to be reckoned with. A study released by the M.O.R.E. project in conjunction with Columbia University provides evidence that a small uptick in the number of poor and low-income voters in fifteen states could have changed the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, if just 1% more had voted in Michigan or up to 19% more in North Carolina. (See "Unleashing the Power of Poor and Low-Income Americans".) 

The M.O.R.E. project is pushing on several fronts: Challenging voter suppression nationwide. Increasing voter participation, particularly in strategically important communities. Conducting trainings of M.O.R.E. organizers. Recruiting poll watchers. Recruiting 1,000 organizations to get 1,000 people to vote. Holding online Senate Town Halls and Moral Monday events. Over one million people participated in the “Voting is Power Unleashed” special mass assembly on September 14. More than 150,000 people participated in a recent Moral Monday March on all six offices and the D.C. residence of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in circling caravans, flooding his phone lines to fill up his voicemail, and tuning in online for live reports. 

“This is how we must cry power, this is how we unleash our power,” says Rev. Liz Theoharis, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign. 

M.O.R.E work is not just about getting out the vote in November. It’s about building power for the long haul among all of us who see the urgent need for health and economic well-being, the protection of participatory democracy, and an informed electorate. A perfect fit for WILPFers!

WILPF, an organizing partner of the Poor People’s Campaign, enthusiastically endorses and encourages participation in the M.O.R.E. initiative. For information and to sign up, go to www.poorpeoplescampaign.org/ then click on M.O.R.E. at the top. On the M.O.R.E. page you can choose among various options:

1. Become a Poll Monitor
2. Take the M.O.R.E. Prophetic Pledge
3. Sign Up for Election Reminders & Register to Vote
4. Fill Out the 2020 Census

If you belong to a WILPF Branch or other community organization, encourage your group to “Take the M.O.R.E. Prophetic Pledge.” By doing so, your group is “signing on to help build a movement that votes with the power we need to hold our elected officials accountable to the policy agenda that we are demanding.”

WILPF Fresno Branch members celebrating Women’s Equality Day on August 26, 2020. Back row, from left: Nancy Hatcher, Joan Poss, Bev Fitzpatrick, Teresa Castillo. Front row, from left: Ann Carruthers, Evonne Waldo, Jacinda Potikian, Jean Hays. Photo by Bev Greene.

By Nancy Hatcher
Member, Fresno Branch 

October 2020

Neither the extreme heat of the San Joaquin Valley, the air thick with smoke from California’s tragic wildfires, nor the COVID-19 pandemic could keep Fresno WILPF members from celebrating National Women’s Equality Day, and urging the community as a whole to VOTE. With several months of detailed planning and preparation, under the leadership of our Fresno Branch Membership Chair, Evonne Waldo, we celebrated Women’s Equality Day 2020 in a very special way. 

On August 26, we gathered in the parking lot of the Fresno Center for Nonviolence, to put the finishing touches on our decorated cars before enthusiastically embarking on a car caravan. Traveling on Fresno’s main thoroughfares, passing through a popular shopping center, and crossing major intersections, we rallied The Vote. Our cars decorated with banners, buntings, printed posters, streamers, and handmade signs promoting The Vote and Equality Day, we passed other drivers, pedestrians, shoppers, and those out for a morning walk who waved and cheered us on.

View a slideshow of photos from the day here ».

As our caravan completed its well-planned 45-minute route, we lined our cars up and gathered for group photos. In addition to our cars being decorated, Evonne and I dressed as suffragettes, while others wore their Jane Addams “dangerous women” T-shirts, and Evonne made us all custom-made WILPF Fresno face masks. I also wore a 100+ year old hat my grandmother wore when the Connecticut Women’s Suffragette Association came together to urge the ratification of the 19th Amendment.  

After pictures, our day continued as we split up to go on individual assignments. Wanting to honor our longest and strongest members as well as inspire new Fresno WILPF members, and urging all of our members to VOTE, we departed with handmade totes off to the homes of 40 members who were ‘sheltering in place.’ Evonne and her team filled the totes with Women’s Equality Day, suffragette, and 19th Amendment memorabilia recognizing WILPF’s long-standing commitment to speaking up for peace and social justice, following the trailblazing work of WILPF founder Jane Addams.

With this caravan, Fresno WILPF honored and paid tribute to those brave and tireless suffragettes who fought so long and so hard to assure women had the right to vote, and we also recognized the continued struggle women of color faced in gaining the right to vote. As the posters and banners proclaimed, “Suffragists were protesters too, they won the vote for me and you!” The caravaners and members of Fresno WILPF stand strong together in recognizing that suffrage is yet unfinished business, until true equality exists for all people! We will continue the fight for justice.

By Alycia (Longriver) Davis
Cape Cod WILPF Branch

Cape Cod Branch member Alycia Longriver Davis, 71, has written a thank you letter to all WILPF members and has also shared two books she has created about peaceful living and respecting the earth. Her letter begins:

“I’m Stage 4 cancer, hospice, spiritually at peace 
with last months upon Mother Earth, but certainly 
not with political and judicial events unsettled. 
During 71 years here I’ve been active, as a 
voice for earth and the family of people.”

You can read her letter in its entirety here.

Alycia Davis created this painting for the back cover of a 2017 International Women’s Day program, and donated it as a raffle prize for the event.

Alycia has also created two books that she would like to share for anyone who is interested:

1. A story and activity book, Open Our Hearts: Stories of People Respect, Earth Respect.

2. Seeds of Peace: Writings of peaceful living for sharing with all.