Deceleration’s Greg Harman speaks with Dave Cortez, Executive Director of the Lone Star Sierra Club, as part of Preparing to Protect, a series of interviews with those most targeted by the eliminationist engine of MAGA on how they are organizing to bash back to keep our communities safe. Topics in this podcast include right-wing organizing and rising autocracy in the United States, failures of organizing in Texas environmental movements, strategies to mobilize people around pocketbook concerns, and why we need to take the time for basic self-care in a world on fire. Dave also shares what’s percolating inside the state Sierra Club—including campaigns around energy and water justice—and how people can tap into those efforts.

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It’s the hottest year ever…again. Heat-related deaths have been spiking year over year. As Deceleration wrote recently, there were nearly 600 heat-related deaths in Texas last year. In Bexar County, 12 local residents died from the heat that same year, according to data released to the Texas Tribune. Border counties have seen hundreds die from the heat since 2010, according to data released to Deceleration. So how are cities responding? What emergency hearings have been convened, let’s say, in San Antonio, Texas? Here we’re building a baseball field downtown and throwing possibly thousands of people from their homes to do it. Aside from the deep injustice of such measures, displacement is particularly cruel as we know (thanks to communities that track heat deaths, such as in Maricopa County, Arizona) that it is those without homes who are most at risk of dying from heat exposure. Among the nearly 650 Maricopa County deaths that were logged in 2023, 75 percent of them occurred outdoors. And 45 percent were unsheltered individuals with limited access to cooling. Research by now Deceleration Executive Editor Marisol Cortez from several years ago shows that, even with $2,500 relocation assistance, forced evictions can be deadly. Evictions often force multiple moves, as Cortez explains, costing far more than that meager moving allowance. Currently, residents of nearly 400 units at the Soap Factory in downtown San Antonio are fighting a slide toward displacement and demolition of their units. Meanwhile, a few blocks away, residents of roughly 70 units at the Robert E. Lee Apartments are likewise being targeted. For this new Deceleration Podcast, Episode 33, we make room for the residents of the Robert E. Lee Apartments to describe their experiences of downtown living and gathering efforts to head off forced dislocation. There are lessons here for working-class residents everywhere who have ever been targeted for the Next Big Thing, even as the current big thing actually requiring our full attention—that is, our climate unraveling—goes largely unaddressed in local communities.

What Displacement Does:
Vecinos de Mission Trails Report: Making Displacement Visible: A Case Study Analysis of the 'Mission Trail of Tears'

Understanding Who Heat Kills
Maricopa County 2023 Heat Deaths Report
…

San Antonio Specific Resources
Coalition for Tenant Justice
Texas Organizing Project
Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid
Pueblo Over Profit
Oppressed Revolutionaries for Worker Power

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Boca Chica, the “little mouth” of the Rio Grande/ Rio Bravo is increasingly the epicenter of NewSpace new colonizing impulses bridged by an explosion of billion-dollar LNG projects seeking to feed Texas-fracked methane to the world market. It’s here in the lower Texas coast that has so far avoided much of the spoilage of the upper and middle coasts, themselves awash with petrochemical and fossil fuel facilities and all the risk and damages they pose to the land and peoples of the region. Next week the community of greater Boca Chica, let’s call it the Rio Grande Valley, or, as our guest reminds us this week: the sacred birthplace of the emergence of the Carrizo/Comecrudo peoples, is being challenged on two fronts.

October 15: In spite of an August rejection by a DC Circuit Court of a trio of LNG-related projects, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is putting the Texas LNG project back in motion and inviting public comments concerning the potential environmental threats of the project. Comments needed before 5:00 pm EST on October 15, 2024.

October 17: Two days later, Brownsville will host a public hearing on a state wastewater permit being sought by SpaceX, Elon Musk's colonizing mission to Mars now colonizing South Texas, that increasingly dominates the land and lives of this area. As the South Texas Environmental Justice Network writes, the wastewater permit with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) will permit polluted waters "on Boca Chica Beach and lands sacred to the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe of Texas." TCEQ will host a public hearing about SpaceX’s plans in Brownsville on October 17, 2024. Here’s a link to the TCEQ permit notice.

Our guest this week to discuss both of these matters in deep context is Christopher Basaldú, PhD, a member of the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe of Texas and co-founder of the South Texas Environmental Justice Network. Basaldú organizes in opposition to SpaceX, LNG, and border militarization in the state and for the recovery of Indigenous lifeways and values. Basaldú earned his undergraduate degree at Harvard University and later a masters in American Indian Studies and doctor of philosophy in anthropology from the University of Arizona.

Guest: Christopher Basaldú, PhD, Carrizo Comecrudo Tribe of Texas

More on Oct. 17 from the Regeneration calendar.
More from the STEJN.

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Deceleration.news: 'For the Earth. And all Her families.'