I'm a Climate Activist Facing Criminal Charges for Protesting Private Jets at Hanscom Field
Haley McB
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In April 2024, I was arrested alongside 20 others at Hanscom Field, an airport in Bedford, Massachusetts that primarily serves private and corporate aircraft. We sang as the police arrived, confiscated our fabric signs (including this gorgeous twist on Britney Spears's 'Toxic'), and rounded us up. The song on our lips was a fervent rejection of the airport's planned expansion of 17 private jet hangars that, if completed, would effectively cancel out over half, if not more, of Massachusetts' carbon emissions reductions from solar power, according to an estimate from local nonprofit Save Our Heritage. Starting this May, some of my friends who were arrested are slated to go on trial for trespassing and disorderly conduct, while billionaires are free to trespass on the rights of our planet and our people and conduct climate chaos. (The Massachusetts Port Authority (Massport) told Teen Vogue to direct all questions about the expansion to the project developers. A representative for the developers did not return our request for comment.)
So many lives have already been lost to climate disasters fueled by a concentration of largely wealthy man-made pollutants in our atmosphere. My fellow arrestees and I were infuriated that the people whose wealth far exceeds whatever wealth the majority of the population can scrape together in their lifetimes would seek to expand the use of their private jets, irrespective of the increases their jets' excess carbon emissions would contribute to asthma rates, air and noise pollution, biodiversity and habitat loss, and the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events. As British climate scientist Kevin Anderson suggested in 2018, if the richest 10% reduced their emissions to the average carbon footprint of an individual in the European Union, that reduction alone could cut global emissions by a third. Luxury emissions from ultrarich lifestyles violate our common right to a livable climate.
Sitting on the sidewalk in the rain, hands cuffed behind our backs, cheeks flushed with the invigorating gratitude one feels when taking a stand alongside loved ones to resist injustice, my friends and I called upon Massport (which operates the airport and backs the expansion project) to do the right thing and halt the airport expansion. We gathered in the downpour to be arrested merely a town away from where Henry David Thoreau resided, who himself was arrested in 1846 for refusing to pay his poll tax to a government that enslaved people. Like Thoreau, we were arrested for disrupting business as usual. In the spirit of Thoreau, we could not sit idly by and watch as private jets take off with our future.
I decided to risk arrest at Hanscom Field because I don't have a retirement plan. Thousands of climate scientists predict that 'untold suffering' will wreak havoc on the planet if fossil fuel expansion, among other actions worldwide, does not come to a screeching halt. In fact, in many ways, the havoc is already here. Even the privileged people whose homes have yet to be lost to flames, floods, or brutal bombings, those who have not yet been reached by the ripple effects of crop failures, or whose organs have not yet failed during a heat wave still cannot lay claim to a livable future. A lot of the concerns that white, middle-class climate activists like myself have about our future are already the current reality for a majority of the world's population. I don't have a retirement plan because I wonder whether someday I will join the legions of people whose everyday survival is already under threat as a consequence of the very systems upon which my middle-class American comforts depend.
Nearly a year after my arrest at Hanscom Field, tragedies and disasters stack up, but legislators, like our Massachusetts governor Maura Healey, drag their feet (or simply shirk responsibility) in enacting policy that would relieve Americans of the issues ailing our daily lives. For example, defending women, as a recent Trump executive order claims to do, means addressing issues that affect women. A more effective way to defend women than legislating word choice would be ending the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels, which is only rising. As I have elaborated on elsewhere, the same harassment, degradation, and assault that women face daily go hand in hand with the practices sucking the life out of this Earth and, as research suggests, limiting our life expectancy. Stopping private jet expansion halts an egregious source of emissions that accumulate, making our lives more vulnerable to tragedy and disaster.
There is already precedent that points to the legality of our actions: On this same airfield in 1971, more than 150 peace activists were arrested protesting the Vietnam War and the lack of a record of their arraignments suggest that they never faced charges. If you're reading this, please start a volunteer organization in your community or join your nearest chapter of Extinction Rebellion to resist the systems driving the destruction of our world.
In the words of Uruguayan journalist Raúl Zibechi, 'It is impossible to change the world without first changing ourselves, because change, like movement itself, is singular and it is multiple, and we cannot afford to not be involved.' To truly defend ourselves from harm, we must not sit idly by, but continue to speak out, loudly and visibly against those legislators and executives who set our future on fire and are content to feed the flames.
Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue
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