What can a community do when the democratic process itself has been outlawed? 

That’s the question facing residents of Ohio. In 2019, the State legislature prohibited communities from enacting “rights of nature” laws after Toledo residents overwhelmingly voted for a law, the Lake Erie Bill of Rights. The budget bill passed on July 17th of that year established that “nature… does not have standing to participate in or bring an action in any court.”

I would swear on the graves of my parents and four grandparents that this is the most common question from white people when a race-related incident occurs or the subject of race comes up. It is often asked with an exasperated tone of voice, accompanied by an oh-here-we-go-again eye roll, and followed by an explanation from the white person about how they cannot possibly be racist because they have a Black son-in-law or frequently go to lunch with a Black co-worker or root for whatever team LeBron James is playing on. (Many years ago a manager in a now defunct women’s store I used to patronize told me “I should be a Black person because I love soul music so much” when a song by a Black recording artist began playing on the Muzak system.) Being thought of as racist is insulting and scary for many white people. It immediately puts them on the defensive.           

Thirty-five years after the start of the nuclear age with the first explosion of an atomic bomb, I visited the expanse of desert known as the Nevada Test Site, an hour’s drive northwest of Las Vegas. A pair of officials from the Department of Energy took me on a tour. They explained that nuclear tests were absolutely necessary. “Nuclear weapons are like automobiles,” one told me. “Ford doesn’t put a new automobile out on the highway until they’ve gone through a lengthy test process, driving hundreds of thousands of miles.”

 By then, in 1980, several hundred underground nuclear blasts had already occurred in Nevada, after the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty required that atomic testing take place below the earth’s surface. Previously, about 100 nuclear warheads had been set off above ground at that test site, sending mushroom clouds aloft and endangering with radiation exposure not just nearby soldiers but downwind civilians as well.