Via Washington Monthly, I was pointed to a NY Times article by Annie Correal on the life and death of David Buckel. He spent much of his life as a lawyer working on civil rights for LGBTQ causes. More recently he had become focused on the issue of Climate Change, and had been instrumental in operating a major composting operation in NYC. From the Times:
...He had grown up around soil and flowers in Batavia, N.Y. His mother worked in her family’s flower shop, Stroh’s Flowers; his father helped local farmers improve their operations. As a child, Mr. Buckel — the second-youngest of five boys — played in the family’s greenhouses and worked on an aunt’s chicken farm.
...After Mr. Buckel left Lambda in late 2008, he was inspired by President Barack Obama’s call to volunteerism and took a composting class at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. He was captivated by the idea of community composting, which involves locals in the process of turning orange rinds and coffee grounds and flower stems into enriched soil, while reducing landfill waste and greenhouse gases.
...In just a few years, Mr. Buckel created one of the largest compost sites in the country operated without heavy machinery — using only solar power, wind power and the labor of volunteers.
He told no one of his plans, but growing concerns and frustrations over the way the Trump administration and Scott Pruitt at the EPA were negating his efforts led him to emulate the example of Buddhist monks who had set themselves on fire as a means of protest. He did it early in the morning on April 14, 2018. Again from the Times:
...Mr. Buckel chose to die not before thousands, but alone. He chose to do it at an early hour, perhaps so the sight of a burning man would be less likely to traumatize children, or be caught on video.
Even the location, that forgettable strip of grass just off the road, seemed intended to disrupt life as little as possible. “I apologize to you for the mess,” he wrote in a note to the police, which was found with his letter in the shopping cart. He had stapled his business card to the letter, and left his identification on a lanyard nearby, to remove any doubt.
...The earth around Mr. Buckel was burned in a nearly perfect circle. The police said the ground was too scorched to tell, but it is possible that when he went to Prospect Park that day, he took some soil with him, hauling it in the cart. It is possible Mr. Buckel’s last moments were spent spreading it out, making a ring around himself, so the flames wouldn’t spread.
From the Washington Monthly article by D.R. Tucker, the questions Tucker asks at the end should be dominating the news — but they don’t. Silence on the part of the media is complicity.
What’s madness—what’s truly insane—is our continued refusal to wake the hell up about the climate crisis. How much more evidence do we need? The nearly 5,000 corpses in Puerto Rico aren’t enough? The devastating flooding in Maryland isn’t enough? Even Trump-appointed NASA head Jim Bridenstine, formerly a Congressman from oil-obsessed Oklahoma, gets it now. What about the rest of us? This month marks the thirtieth anniversary of James Hansen’s plea to Congress to stand up to the perfidy of the fossil-fuel industry and its violence against our democracy. Why didn’t we stand with him? It was one year ago yesterday that Trump made the treacherous and catastrophic decision to walk away from the Paris climate agreement. How many of us simply shrugged our shoulders once we heard about the decision?
David Buckel made the ultimate sacrifice in the name of protecting the only planet we call home; he surrendered his humanity in the name of humanity. Are we really going to call that crazy? Aren’t the folks whose actions prompted his protest the real crazy ones?
There is a certain terrible calculus by which one weighs out the value of living for a cause versus dying for it. If not for Tucker pointing to the article in the Times, Buckel’s sacrifice would have escaped my attention. He gambled that his death might do what it seemed his life could not.
He gambled on the rest of us. Can we cover that bet? Our own lives are riding on it.
If you do nothing more, read the Times article by Correal and the WM article by Tucker.