Hello, friends!

It's been a year or more since I sent out one of these email newsletters. Unless you signed up yesterday, you subscribed to this newsletter with the understanding that they would be sporadic, though perhaps not exactly as sporadic as they have been.

As you may have noticed, things have changed since I sent the last one of these out. With the Trump ascendancy, a lot of environmentally minded people are terrified about the impact on our planet, and wondering how we can possibly counter the all-out assault on the environment that seems inevitable after January 20.

I feel like I no longer have the luxury of letting tools go unused. So I will be sending out these newsletters a LOT more often, a couple times a week or more, to share concrete actions people can take in a short amount of time that offer the promise of making an actual difference.

I recognize that many of you likely feel you already get way too much email, and that you signed up for a newsletter that would appear in your inbox at most every other week. So I'm sending this note to give you a heads up that our terms and conditions have changed, and to remind you that if you don't feel completely on board with these changes, there is a handy unsubscribe link at the bottom of this email. I promise I won't take it personally if you sign off, and you're welcome back any time.

I'll send out the first missive from Letters From The Desert 2.0 on Monday, December 19. I'll be shooting for a couple messages a week. I doubt that most weeks will have more than three, which I will try to space out to M-W-F. There's always a chance that some emergency will come up that prompts an extra message outside of that schedule. Resisting a coup d'etat-installed corporate junta sometimes requires tactical flexibility.

Please feel free to share any of these messages, via email or social media, with friends and colleagues you think may be interested. Don't spam people, obviously. But also please don't hold back if you think friends may value what we're sharing here.

Also: Send me stuff. Because the best campaigns always come from communities, I do not expect this to be a one-way street with regard to information flow. I'm not sure what form that exchange will take, because that is, in part, up to you. But as we figure that out in more detail, by all means alert me to actions you think I should share by simply sending a reply email to any Letter From The Desert. If it checks out, I may well include it in a subsequent Letter.

So we'll see you Monday. In the meantime, here's something I wrote a couple weeks back that may be useful and/or reassuring to you. Think of it as the guiding spirit of Letters From The Desert from now on. The money quote:

Take heart: astonishing change can happen in the world if people act to bring it about. The actions you take don’t always have to be huge. But you do have to act. That’s what “optimism of the will” really means: taking action because you know that’s the only way things change.

Until Monday, with love and admiration for you all;

Chris