Deceleration’s Marisol Cortez remembers our friend and neighbor Jack Elder who passed away last month, speaking with friends and comrades George Cisneros, Carlos Nicolas Flores, and Leslie Provence. Elder came to national attention in the 1980s for his work in the Sanctuary Movement, which aimed to assist refugees and asylum-seekers from the US-backed wars in Central America. But he was also a math teacher, a friend, a father of five and grandfather of seven and an all-around good neighbor who was active in San Antonio’s movements for social and environmental justice. For many years he volunteered at Catholic Worker House, washing dishes and tending to the gardens there. He walked and rode his bike everywhere, until Parkinson’s made that too difficult, and until the end of his life he cultivated beautiful xeriscaped
front and backyards. In every way he modeled what it means to live close to the Earth and in service to others, and we’re honored to have known and learned from him.

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