Greening Leadership

Electoral politics history

In 1984, I was sent by Caucus to the Maine State Democratic Convention as a Mondale delegate with the understanding that if there were a second ballot I would return to my support of Jesse Jackson.  

In the 1990s I was active in Democratic politics in Hawaii, again attending a State Convention.

I also held elective office as Treasurer of the University of Hawaii Graduate Student Organization.

In the 2000 presidential primary, having had experience with the Bush family in High School, I volunteered for the McCain campaign in Virginia. The phone banking I did clued me into the whisper campaign against McCain that culminated in South Carolina. It is sad that even today, he is bad mouthed, apparently mostly because not all of his family is white.

Moving to Maryland, I registered Green and slowly became active with the Party through the Southern Maryland Greens local. I supported Lorna Saltzman for President at our 2004 State Assembly after working with her on the Green Party EcoAction committee.

Activism

While my dips into electoral politics have been occasional, my activism has been fairly steady. As a youth, I organized litter pickups in my neighborhood inspired by Ranger Rick Magazine.

I organized against Draft Registration in High School gaining a large number of petition signatures to present to then Vice President Elect Bush when he came to speak at our school. Despite making arrangements with his advance team, he ducked the meeting and since that time I’ve understood there is something wrong with him when it comes to American Politics; one reason I supported McCain in 2000 since the whole family seems tainted perhaps stemming from a history of fascist sympathies before WWII.

The  Nietzschean will to power seemed to have infected US politics when Bush became Vice President in a very dangerous manner and I worked with community groups in Maine and student groups in New Hampshire and Arizona to bring about a nuclear freeze to stymie the most self-destructive aspects of the power frenzy at that time.

This was also a time of working for social justice. I was an organizer in the effort to persuade the Trustees of Dartmouth College to divest the College endowment from US corporations doing business with South Africa in order to end Apartheid there. This effort ran into violent opposition from the likes of the convict Dinesh D’souza and white supremacist Laura Ingraham.  Fighting the good fight non-violently!

I lived under a fully totalitarian regime in Taiwan for four years after college and witnessed the flowering of democracy there, though I took no part in that, it not being my Country. However, I think I can say that the weeping we all did together over the Tiananmen Square Massacre probably made Taiwan look at its own self more closely. Today, I try to be encouraging to the FaLun Gong protesters on the National Mall who deplore totalitarian aspects of their movement’s treatment on the Mainland.  

Because my academic training is in Physics and Astronomy including graduate level study in Planetary Science, I am able to read with detailed understanding the professional literature of climate science. Thus, I am not susceptible to misinformation directed against the results of that science promoted by fossil fuel interests. I have a clear view of both the threat of climate change and of the forces arrayed against taking action to avoid it, forces that have roots in the fascist sympathies in the US preceding WWII, the reverberations of which made my interactions with the Bush family so sour^[*].

Thus, I have been an early activist in fighting climate change, working to make it a focus of Green Party policy in the US and working with groups organized by Bill McKibben and the Sierra Club and League of Conservation Voters to counteract the fossil fuel interests.

Within Charles County, I have also worked for the preservation of forests largely in connection with preserving water quality though there is a climate aspect there as well.  I’ve supported Light Rail Transit and have encouraged the good repair of electric vehicle charging stations. I’ve also pushed for highway and road safety by getting missing signs replaced and seeking turn lanes where needed. I have also joined the fight against the proposed Fracked Gas Compressor Station in Charles County and have tried to bring coordinated action on this issue from the climate activist community.