When you endorse the Call, you will see a "thank you" screen and receive an email. If that doesn't happen you have skipped a required field -- check your entry one more time and hit the big green bar!

Please don't make the mistake of thinking one can be "on our side" because of holding a privately-supportive opinion. While we have and very much welcome anonymous donors, holding a private opinion merely isn't really much solidarity. As I think we all know, individual opinions are meaningless and have no political effect at all.

Organized groups of people, like the Study Group, are quite another story!

Politics occurs in the public domain, which stays open only because, and to the extent, we speak and act in it. Politics is not a private activity. It requires "showing up" in a self-disclosing capacity. Hannah Arendt spoke of this appearance as "a second birth." ("With word and deed we insert ourselves into the human world, and this insertion is like a second birth, in which we confirm and take upon ourselves the naked fact of our original physical appearance...") (This and much more great stuff is to be had in The Human Condition, available on-line [pdf].)

We need to beware of "progressive" politics -- and religion -- which doesn't speak out to limit and defund our OWN LOCAL hyperviolent institutions, in favor of investing in real human needs in a world now in crisis. Wouldn't you think doing so would be an inherent, essential part of any realistic package of democratic, social justice, and environmental reforms? We certainly do. The reforms many of us want will take money, money now going to the military (and nuclear weapons), and they will take more humane political values, which the nuclear-military complex exists to prevent.

Here in New Mexico we have a highly militarized state, which is also far and away the most nuclear-weapons-oriented state in the U.S. This gives us special responsibilities -- and an unusual degree of political power, if we choose to bring it forth. It's right here, mostly latent, waiting for us.

So please speak up, first in this tiniest and most convenient of ways, and then others! Let's not support, through our silence, a brutal global empire and the associated production of new weapons of mass destruction, poisoning our hearts, minds, politics, economy, and environment, in New Mexico at least as much as anywhere.

Spread the word please, however you think best!

3. Useful developments and resources

• "Los Alamos County Councilor[s] Slam[s] DOE/NNSA For Denial Of Land Transfer Request" (Los Alamos Reporter, July 30, 2020). Three Los Alamos County Council members are angry with DOE and NNSA for callously using and abusing the County.

“I’d like to say this is a [land transfer] request that we were urged to make by LANL, and let’s remember why we both pursued it as a county and were encourage to pursue this request – it’s for our favorite catch-all phrase, ‘economic development and housing’,” Maggiore said. “Why?  – To aid in recruitment efforts at LANL and to support their ongoing operations. So, at LANL’s urging, we pursued this land transfer only to be told after quite some time that they had no land available.”

He said before he said that before he got a talking down to” by any of my fellow counselors with regard to colorful language that may follow, he would like to add that the charge of incivility is only ever deployed to silence dissent.
“LANL, DOE and NNSA must do better if they want to be viewed as a trustworthy institution or as a sincere regional partner. LANL consistently wants and takes from this community. Not only do they take, they expect us to give. We give up our downtown as they take our retail spaces and subject our few surviving businesses to ever-increasing rents and increased burdens – all the while complaining that this town doesn’t offer enough for them to recruit the minds they so desperately want,” Maggiore said.

He said it is increasingly clear that LANL and NNSA have no interest in being real partners with Los Alamos County or any of its surrounding communities.

“It is clear they don’t have our best interest at heart – it’s highly questionable that they even have their own long-term interests at heart. Scratch that – it’s not even that they don’t have their own best interests at heart – they don’t even have them in mind,” Maggiore said. “Their proposed solution to our housing shortage is to build a $1 billion, if not more, bridge across the Rio (Grande) so their employees who live in Albuquerque can have shorter commutes – local environment and existing residents be damned.”

He said that’s not partnership, that in fact it’s the exact opposite.
...

“I’m giving notice that anything that comes before us to benefit LANL without directly benefitting us or our surrounding communities at least twice as much as it benefits them, is a non-starter for me. Their bad faith dealings have gone on long enough,” Maggiore said. “It’s increasingly clear in all their actions that they don’t care for us, our environment or our neighbors. I find it incomprehensible and utterly unnerving that an institution made a whole branch of government devoted to nuclear weapons and stockpile stewardship can be so shortsighted and selfish. It makes me question any decisions that come out of an organization so inadequately morally compassed.”
...

“Why should we or any of our neighboring communities consider a partnership with an entity that when they actually do hand land over to us to use, is still contaminated, making us on Council look like fools for believing they actually cleaned the land. Now we, and previous councils, made the whole County look like not only suckers, but entitled insensitive even bigoted a–hats who chose to put affordable housing on polluted ground. Why? Simply because we believed them,” Maggiore said. “LANL, DOE, (Environmental Management), everyone, must make immediate steps to improve not only their image but their support of regional health especially in these trying times.”

He went on to mention that LANL both [sic] testing abilities as well as “a fleet of RVs whose sole purpose is literally to drive around and test people”.

“Why not use these vans to drive around and test people all over the region? Why should it take me or anyone else in the community who goes to the Public Health Office more than four days to get their test results when LANL employees get theirs within 36 hours max?,” he asked. “We talk about addressing implicit bias and preferential treatment by our police. Let’s make no mistake, the recent and ongoing behavior of LANL is just as blatant and egregious and dismissive of communities of color. Triad, LANL, EM, DOE can and must do better to regain and keep the trust and goodwill of both their own and surrounding communities.”

There is more at the link and I am sure in the recorded video. The full speech was longer and more er, "colorful." Councilors James Robinson and Pete Sheehey agreed with the substance of Maggiore's comment, despite what Sheehey described as the "rather pithy" language.

I put that long quote here because I cannot recall ever seeing this sense of betrayal and level of anger at DOE from elected officials in Los Alamos.

In our view the County is beginning to grasp, just barely, the magnitude of the impacts associated with the industrial pit mission.

I wonder if conservative Los Alamos County will beat out liberal Santa Fe in being the first to request a SWEIS?

• Yesterday there was an earthquake near Capulin, NM. We put out a press backgrounder with some useful references, not just for the press but for others new to the issue, some of whom are in decisive positions. You can use it as an (incomplete) primer on LANL seismicity. For governments to become conscious of this and other site-specific realities we are going to need a SWEIS. You can help make that happen (see 2. above).

You may have figured out that in the event of a major earthquake most if not all roads into and out of Los Alamos and White Rock will be blocked to a greater or lesser degree, and grid power may be lost from falling trees. If such an earthquake were to occur when timber is dry, the likelihood of forest fire is high. The results of multi-event emergency operations drills that deal with such scenarios are unfortunately classified -- which is another reason for a SWEIS.

• Lydia Clark has penned a useful guest editorial for the Los Alamos audience ("Site-Wide Environmental Impact Statement Is A Mountain Of Protection, Los Alamos Reporter, Jul 30, 2020). LAR is now being read by national reporters for news and insights.
  

• We have not sent you Lydia's other recent guest editorial, "Santa Fe shouldn’t become a nuclear sacrifice zone," Albuquerque Journal, Jul 19, 2020. Op-eds such as this are usually picked up by national news aggregators and circulated to interested parties across the country, as this one was. Don't think that the audience for that letter to the editor about pit production you may be thinking of writing would remain "merely" local. It won't. Your letter will go to Capitol Hill.
  

• Another big story, told here in reverse chronological order:
• Nuclear oversight agency seeks to lease New Mexico property for offices, warehouses, Santa Fe New Mexican, Jul 25, 202
  
• NNSA seeks to lease office, light lab, and warehouse space within 50 miles of LANL on urgent basis, letter to congressional colleagues, Jul 23, 2020
• DOE/NNSA Seeks Office And Warehouse Space To Lease Within 50-Mile Radius Of LANL, Los Alamos Reporter, Jul 23, 2020
• Warhead agency seeks to lease office and warehouse space within a 50-mile radius of LANL, Jul 21, 2020

As the letter to congressional colleagues says, LANL and the Pajarito Plateau are basically "full." LANL is spreading. Further development, especially for plutonium mission, is going to have beyond-linear environmental and social impacts. The City and County of Santa Fe have little idea of what is coming and are passive. A SWEIS is badly needed to connect the many dots in this picture. Local governments and tribes across the region need to hear this from constituents and members.

There is much more, but that is more than enough for today. The long and short of it is that public awareness is growing. Please use these materials however you think best to further that.

Forward this email. Write public letters to editors and op eds. Write and call local officials. Write and call local organizations, churches, businesses, and your friends, asking them to endorse the Call for Sanity, not Nuclear Production!

Stay safe, be encouraged.

Greg, Trish, and Lydia, for the Los Alamos Study Group