Marching to Protest Trump

In Amherst, Brattleboro, Greenfield, and Northampton on July 17, there will be protests against Trump. The Brattleboro protest is a march starting at 5:30 p.m. outside 100 Flat Street. The web pages for the other events don't say whether they are marches and/or rallies. The start times and addresses for all the protests are at:

https://GoodTroubleLivesOn.org.

One of the groups that's organizing the protests is Greenpeace. In March 2025, the New York Times reported that Greenpeace could be forced to close down in the USA due to a lawsuit by a fossil fuel pipeline company over the indigenous-led Dakota Access pipeline protests in 2016. Greenpeace, which helped the protesters, is appealing a lower court decision. Extraordinary photos of the protests are at:

https://fstoppers.com/documentary/one-iconic-photo-encompasses-essence-s...

In 1985, the French government sank the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior, killing one person. Greenpeace had been protesting French nuclear bomb testing.

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On July 1, in the Pioneer Valley town of Erving, a New Jersey-based multi-billion dollar corporation presented its mega battery scheme to town officials at a public meeting. Nina Keller represented the all-volunteer Pioneer Valley-based group No Assault & Batteries (NAB) at the meeting. On July 5, she told the Valley Post that the battery plan is a bad idea. The NAB web site says, “Failure to provide adequate manpower, training, and equipment needed to respond effectively to potential emergencies, including the risk of thermal-runaway events involving fire, explosion, and release of harmful chemicals, leaves all of us more vulnerable to avoidable risk.”

A study of the environmental pros and cons of large scale battery facilities discusses “the negative environmental impacts of batteries, particularly during the manufacturing phase, which involves undesirable emissions. Health risks associated with water and metal pollution during battery manufacturing and disposal are also addressed.” The study is at:

www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2772737823000287

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In 2014, the Vermont Yankee nuclear reactor closed permanently because thousands of people marched in Brattleboro, and because hundreds of people were arrested for nonviolent civil disobedience in Brattleboro and outside the reactor three miles from Massachusetts and a stone's throw from New Hampshire. Deb Katz was one of the main organizers of these protests. She lives in the Pioneer Valley and runs a group that has a web site at:

www.NukeBusters.org

On July 9, 2025, Katz told the Valley Post how she felt about an opinion article in that day's Brattleboro Reformer daily newspaper. The article was by the editorial board of the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post, where it first appeared. The article was headlined, “How Trump can lead the world to a nuclear renaissance.”

Katz said, “There are a lot of cheerleaders for nuclear power -- the nuclear industry is desperately trying to reinvent itself as a 'clean' source of energy.... The people you never hear from are the impacted communities, which have suffered the broken promises of the nuclear industry and federal government. These communities were targeted for 'clean' nuclear because they were working poor, rural, people of color and Indigenous. They were forced to choose between short-term economic survival and long term health and safety.  These communities live with the contamination of their waterways, their air, and land. They live with the intimidation found when a corporation controls your resources; they live with the increases in diseases.”

“They live with the radioactive waste trapped at reactor and waste sites throughout America.... Now, before it's solved its waste problem, waste that must be isolated from the environment for 10,000 years, it wants to do it again. Adding insult to injury, state politicians like Healy, Hochul, and Scott (the governors of Massachusetts, New York and Vermont) are drinking the Kool-Aid. They must be stopped.  We have a right to clean water, clean air, clean land, and a safe place to live. We need real solutions, not a radioactive future.”

Nuclear power plants are so dangerous that no insurance company will cover them. Nuclear waste is the most toxic material on earth and stays that way for 1 million years. Sources for this information are at:

https://valleypost.org/node/136

Solutions to environmental problems such as nuclear power and climate change are shown in the Venn diagram at:

www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/population_and_sustainability/climate

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