In the Company of Rebels. Chellis Glendinning
thought. What about this new phenomenon of multiculturalism? What would happen to U.S. society if it truly took hold? How would established religion need to change if it were to embrace ecology? How might one talk to religious leaders to make that happen?
Several years after our time together in Los Angeles, upon flying into the airport in Albuquerque he called to see if he might visit me. And so it was: on the afternoon of Christmas Eve, 2005, Tom drove from Jane Fonda’s ranch south of Santa Fe north to Chimayó. We sat for a spell in the Santuario and ate lunch at Rancho de Chimayó, where sopapillas con miel reign supreme. My jaw just about spilled the half-chewed delight when he invited me to come to Bolivia—in four weeks. I resisted. It sounded like a preposterous thing to do: the trip was too soon, Bolivia was too far away, it would be too expensive. But Tom gazed at me through those saltand-pepper eyes. “You have to come. After all the dictatorships, they have elected their first indigenous president, a campesino named Evo Morales,” he insisted, and then revealing his ever-present awareness that we would not last forever: “Such a thing will never happen again in our lifetimes.”
He was right. Bolivia was literally dancing upon its boulevards and dirt paths, people were either crying or singing for joy on street corners, in buses and cafés everyone was feverishly talking politics. Tom stayed for four days to gather information for an article in The Nation and then launched off to do interviews in Venezuela, to be followed by his annual jaunt to the L.A. Dodgers fantasy baseball camp in Arizona.
I, on the other hand, was so taken by the spirit of the Bolivian people that I returned—and stayed for the rest of my life.
At a certain point a wrinkle in Tom’s and my differing political styles surfaced. Political focus, I believe, is shaped by the Zeitgeist into which we are born, the particular injustice in our midst, and the education that we receive. The wrinkles and labyrinths of our personalities also contribute a great deal to the themes and means of our politics as well—and appear to explain the different paths Tom and I followed.
Tom is the kind of visionary who enacts his ideals for making a better world through concrete acts in society as it exists right now. In the 1970s he and Jane Fonda organized the Campaign for Economic Democracy that, in cahoots with California Governor Jerry Brown, promoted such issues as renters rights and solar energy, and whose most astounding claim to fame was participating in the closure of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in San Luis Obispo, California, via referendum. Despite serving the state legislature under Republican governors for sixteen of his eighteen years in office (twice surviving expulsion hearings propelled by conservatives), he managed to get over 100 progressive measures passed—including achieving equal access to state universities for the disabled, funding for tutors in after-school programs, monies to restore Native sacred springs, requirements for trigger locks on guns, funding for gang-intervention programs, and the largest state park and environmental restoration bond in U.S. history. He also ran as the Democratic candidate for mayor as well as for U.S. Senate.
I cheer such accomplishments, but I am made from a different mold: my work stems from a systemic view of the dysfunction of civilization as a whole and, against the constant onslaught, seeks to preserve the archetypal in the human experience, so rapidly being shredded in this age of capitalist techno-globalization. Too, my sensibility leans more toward the hyper-creative, anarchistic, pre-institutional phase of a social movement; writing/passing legislation and negotiating with government have never been my fortes.
Despite Tom’s unsuccessful attempts to convince me that I should join him in a campaign to legalize Bolivia’s coca plant for medical use in the U.S., he displayed the wisdom of his long experience in politics: he didn’t let disappointment get in the way of our connection. I watched him move like Baryshnikov past the chasm widening between us—and I, with so much more maturity than the flailing tentacles of a mad crush, truly loved him for it.
And the man just kept keepin’ on with his commitment. In 2015, at the height of Bernie Sanders’ campaign for the Democratic nomination for president, he penned a controversial essay for progressives revealing his support of Hillary Clinton—with hopes that Sanders’ effort would swing her to the left. That same year he suffered a mild stroke, but nonetheless showed up at the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia as a delegate in support of Clinton’s nomination. The Convention was his undoing. He came home to Los Angeles a very ill man.
The morning of October 24th I sleepily padded down to my office in Sucre, Bolivia and opened my email. There I found four red-flagged messages shrieking urgency—from Native American activist Suzan Harjo in D.C., administrator/ecologist Marc Kasky in San Francisco, editor/musician Whitney Smith in Toronto, and non-profit director Lee Cridland in Cochabamba—each passing along a link to an article posted on one media venue or another. Tom had died. Shock gripped my bones, just as the eulogies and accolades poured in. My Goddess! They came from Huffington Post, New York Times, Scotland Herald, Organized Rage, Aljazeera, The Guardian, Cuba Net, and on. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti wrote, “Tom Hayden fought harder for what he believed than just about anyone I have known.” Writer/Columbia University professor Trey Ellis said, “As a lifelong believer in the collective, he didn’t take credit. He shared. He dedicated his life to good cause after good cause, relentlessly seeking out justice wherever it was lacking.”
How lucky we had all been to count him one of our own—and how we, and our movements for justice, miss him.
V. “I’D LIKE TO SAY A FEW WORDS ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT. AFTER ALL, WHERE WOULD WE BE WITHOUT IT?”
ECOLOGY IN SAN FRANCISCO
If you don’t like the news, go out and make some of your own!
—WES “SCOOP” NISKER, “THE LAST NEWS SHOW,” KSAN-FM
BY THE 1970S THE San Francisco Bay Area had given New York City a run for its money as the political, cultural, and consciousness Place to Be. Surrounded by ocean and bay, covered in Eucalyptus and Manzanita, burgeoning with tropical and temperate plant life, and just down the foothills from Yosemite National Park and the Sierra Nevada mountains—it was natural that, among the other flowerings going on, the ecology movement would find its most avid escorts in the urban areas cupping both inlet and sea.
The ghosts of John Muir and Ishi haunted the woods of Mount Tamalpais, after all. David Brower was a Berkeley man, lighting a fire under what essentially had been a hiking organization to become the forceful environmental fighting Sierra Club. Under his leadership as president, the San Francisco chapter of the club came to boast one of the national organization’s largest and most active memberships. Also, under his guidance, Friends of the Earth, the League of Conservation Voters, and Earth Island Institute were birthed into existence. Meanwhile, architect Zach Stewart launched the River Terminus Expeditions up the Sacramento River so that wannabe and veritable activists could learn firsthand about the watershed of the northern California bioregion, while Marc Kasky took on the then-hippie Ecology Center in North Beach and turned it into a vital hub of environmental awareness and organic muffins.
In 1969 the September issue of Ramparts had put out its startling “The Death of the Oceans” essay, by conservation biologist Paul Ehrlich, predicting their demise via pollution and acidification by the year 1979. And there were all those colorful back-to-the-landers with their teepees, Mendocino County communes, organic gardens, compost piles, and Chief Seattle posters …
MARC KASKY: THE MADCAP ECOLOGIST
(1944–)
I’d like to say a few words about the environment.
After all, where would we be without it?
—M.K., IMPROVISATIONAL SKIT PERFORMED AT HOTEL WAWONA, YOSEMITE. HALLOWEEN