April 22nd is Earth Day.  Communities all over the world will celebrate our beautiful Mother Earth while also protesting destructive government policies, greedy corporations, and misleading false solutions.  We will be with them, demanding profound systemic change and asserting that the just transition vision has a good map with which to chart that new path forward.

May 1st is International Workers’ Day.  Unionized and non-unionized workers everywhere will rally and march and stand up for each other together in solidarity.  Even in the United States, where the radical labor history of “May Day” has been suppressed for generations, nowadays we hear lots more talk about reclaiming this celebration of working class resistance (at time of writing, we do not have specific calls to action to share with you all, but we encourage you to keep your eyes open for announcements of local events; there’s a good chance that something exciting is happening near you!).

At this time of year, we always share a call to make “Earth Day to May Day” a 10-day festival of our grassroots vision of a better world, a season of rebellion that demonstrates our inherent power and dignity.  Sometimes we remember the historical legacies of the vital movements which birthed these holidays, sometimes we decry the ways in which their potency has been neutered by the corporate cooptation of every corner of our lives.  Last year, we encouraged you all to engage in a “Summer of Struggle” as we noticed many holidays that memorialize the uprisings and victories of movements for workers’ rights, environmental justice, and peace.  We make that call again, and strongly encourage you to read the essay.

This year we are a little too busy to write another long piece, because we are getting ready to go to the “First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels” in Santa Marta, Colombia.  It takes place precisely between Earth Day and May Day, and we are very optimistic that it will be a historic moment to bring together exactly the “green/red/brown” collaborative energy that JTA has been building for decades.  We are hopeful that great progress will be made toward the real solutions that can flourish only within grassroots-led just transition, and we will be pushing hard to ensure that such progress does happen.  We look forward to reporting back to all of our friends and allies after we return.

In the meantime, please know that our hearts go out to all of you who are struggling and building in each of your localities.  This is a hard time, with many setbacks and stresses.  But crisis really does contain seeds of opportunity.  Now more than ever, we must take care of each other, stand up for each other, and engage in the hard work of trusting each other; it is tenacious, long-haul, foundational solidarity work above all else.  Fortunately, in our movements we have already learned many lessons about how to do that.  We will stay the course and stick together, even as the storms of empires self-destructing are raging around us… there is another new sunrise beyond this horizon, and the just transition vision is exactly what will be needed to reimagine and regenerate.