Hattie introduced herself to me in the courtroom pew. “I’m from Athol,” she said. “Nothing ever happens here.” Then Lawyer Luke gave his opening statement and I thought, “Whoa, this feels history-making!”

A cameraman from the local Channel 22 News (WWLP) was set up in the Orange District Court on February 4, 2020, livestreaming the event for defendants who conducted nonviolent civil disobedience to protect a biodynamically significant section of the Wendell State Forest (Massachusetts).

For the journalistic account by David McLellan, see Wendell Forest protesters in court for summertime arrests. …

First of all, just to establish context: we don’t know if unionizing would be good, and if so, in what ways.

There are some basic questions to explore:

1. Historically, what is the experience of Deaf people in Unions? Were they discriminated against due to audism and pathological perspectives or did Unions protect large amounts of the Deaf working classes? Can we learn from that history and do better?
2. In the present day, does it serve the big social justice issues of our times for interpreters to ignore the powerful leverage of our role in intercultural communication or is it time that we became serious players in the world unfolding all around us? …

Engaging white people around whiteness is a challenge. Claudia Rankine, Eula Biss, and Krista Tippett suggest white people may need to do work among ourselves before we’re fit to be successful doing interracial work that tears down the institutional structures of white savagery.

I’d like to learn, in collaboration with engineers, climate scientists, and interpreters with varied language profiles how we can host the quality of conversation required to disentangle webs of politics and social policy from the evolutionary imperative to change the fuel economy. Changing the fuel economy means changing the economy, full stop. …

Think about where you live. Is it a city? A rural town?

What’s the closest forest to you? Have you ever been in a forest?

Many Americans have not. I happen to live in a town where 77% of the landscape is “open space,” meaning that the land is covered mostly in trees with some farmland (Footnote 1). It’s quite amazing, actually. In a city, a tree here and a tree there is wonderful because trees bring ease to the eyes and a breath of fresh air — literally! But what a forest does is so much more.

The challenge is that in New England, where we have such significant forest, it is easy to take trees for granted. Not only has logging occurred for generations, but vast swaths of forest that were cleared in Massachusetts during the first 4oo years of colonialism grew back over the last century and a half (a rarity in the industrial age). Based on this evidence, the resilience of forest to bounce back is robust. …

This is a Facebook post from Rose Sampley, originally posted on August 17, 2017. It’s been shared over 36,000 times in less than a week.

I am a proud Southern woman. I drink sweet tea like nobody’s business, know the difference between a Western and English saddle, and can make a pecan pie from scratch. Believe me when I say I love my heritage and my culture.

I grew up one block down from the Chickamauga Battlefield in Georgia. I had picnics in that park, went hiking on those trails with my girl scout troop. …

This piece was written by Patty Nourse Culbertson, who was in Charlottesville as a nonviolent resistor to Unite The Right. It is powerful. The only amendments to what she wrote are some added subheadings and paragraph breaks, and minor edits for the sake of clarity.

Patty says, “I posted this in response to some criticism of our town on a wonderful post that Dan Rather wrote” on Facebook. She then posted her response to her FB page, and a mutual friend shared it this morning. In less than 9 hours it had been shared 117 times. …

The ending of Beatriz at Dinner is disturbing because throughout the film, we/white people witness our own whiteness: normalized, privileged, comfortable.

And then we are confronted with the stark reality of existential choice.

There are only three ways the film can end:

1. White people heal ourselves and change.
2. White individuals are killed.
3. Healers die.

The first option is decidedly unappealing. The Trump-like character of Doug Strutt (John Lithgow) reeks of white fatalism, and his supporting cast stinks of white fragility. What can one do but ignore the damage and keep doing whatever provides pleasure?

The second option does not solve the problems whiteness has created for all other living beings and the planet. …

I’ve been thinking for a couple days about a tweet asking how people of color can respond to well-meaning white people who apologize for Trump’s election.

Maybe it isn’t obvious, but any version of “I’m sorry” is the wrong thing for a white person to say. “I’m so sorry” is a reflection of [your own] white grief, not an expression of solidarity with people of color. There’s been an outpouring of white grief this week, following the emotional shock of losing a race that white privilege had lead so many to believe was impossible to lose. …