 Welcome, everyone, to the webcast on the necessity defense and climate disobedience. We're so happy to have you all here and our speakers. I'm Ann. I'm from Standout Earth. Facilitating our webcast today is my colleague at Standout Earth, Matt Krogh. Matt is our Extreme Oil Campaign Director, and he joined Stand in August of 2013 to direct a new campaign targeting Tarsans on the West Coast of North America called Tarsans SOS. Matt was the North Sound Baykeeper at Resources for Sustainable Communities in Bellingham, Washington, where he fought against Gateway Pacific and other proposed coal terminals on the West Coast. And Matt, thank you so much for facilitating today, and I'm going to let you take it away. Thanks so much, Ann. Can you hear me okay? Yeah, thanks. Again, my name is Matt Krogh. I direct our Extreme Oil Campaign here at Stand. We do a bit of work on pipelines, oil trains, offloading facilities, and other sort of climate-related work. But I'm going to introduce our full panel, panelists, excuse me, in the order in which they're going to speak. And then we're going to do Q&A after that. But before I introduce them, I just want to note that we did extend invitations to a few leaders. You couldn't join us today, including Chase Irner, a Standing Rock Sioux tribal member, an attorney and water protector, who's also pursuing the necessity to defend and the face of charges of setting a riot and criminal trespass for his activism against the Dakota Access Pipeline. The necessity to defend is also being consumed, by other indigenous water protectors at Standing Rock. And we want to note that these people's cases are other important examples to track and learn from. And especially as we acknowledge inequities in our legal system, our law enforcement, our court systems, such experience by people who are indigenous, people of color, and other marginalized groups. So I want to start with that. And then to launch into introductions first, Kelsey Skye, an attorney and co-founder and executive director of the Climate Defense Project, that's a legal nonprofit that serves climate activists. Born and raised in Alaska, she's in the impact of climate change firsthand and it's working areas of environmental law, freedom of expression, family law, international human rights law, and all that in the United States, the UK, and Switzerland, it's a lot. Kelsey, thank you so much for being with us. Marla Margon, co-founder of the Climate Submediate Center and the United Methodist, who's committed to supporting people of all faiths, or no particular faith, to act fully for justice. Marla has supported, organized, and participated in many direct access and civil disobedience efforts, including in the last year of blockade. And the campaign is in non-violent resistance to sector energies, West Roxbury lateral pipeline project with resist the pipeline. So welcome Marla. And Jay, also co-founder of the Climate Submediate Center and a Quaker from Cape Town, called the Boulder Act in 2013, along with Ken Moore, he blockaded 40,000 tons of coal, that's a lot of coal, by the way, destined for the Brayton Point Power Plant with their small white lobster boat named the Henry David Tee. And that's also the lobster boat blockade. The Institute of Legal Persistence started national attention and the plant, the coal plant, ended up closing its doors in 2017. In 2016, he supported the Tarzan valve turners, their actions across the first six and continues to support the valve turners, valve turners in their trial period. And then finally, Ben Zoldersnup, a climate activist with 350 CL, the sophomore engineer, Ben is facing two. Is there two family charges? Yeah, for his role supporting valve turners, Emily Johnson and Annette Papsney, and I'm in a soda action. So welcome, Ben. So thank you all again so much for being here. Again, we'll go on the order of those introductions. And so, Kelsey is starting with you. How else is that necessary, Ben? What do we need to know? Okay, thanks, Ann, and Ann for having me. Can everyone hear me okay, Thumbs Up? Thank you. So first of all, I'm gonna tell you some legal stuff, but none of this is legal advice. If you or your organization or campaign has specific questions about using the climate necessity defense, please contact my organization, Climate Defense Project. We'll put my email address in the chat or something. I would definitely encourage folks to seek individualized advice, which this is not. So the necessity defense, it's part of criminal law and a successful defense of necessity exonerates a defendant who has committed a crime in order to avoid a greater harm. So you plead not guilty, but you don't focus on a technical argument like, I didn't actually trespass on this pipeline company's land. Instead, you say, this is what I did, and this is why it was justified. And on that basis, a judge or jury can find you not guilty by reason of necessity. So to understand the argument, imagine that you are walking down the street and you come upon a house that's on fire and you hear a baby crying inside. Now you don't have permission to go in the house, but you go in anyway and you rescue the child. You just trespassed, but you probably wouldn't be found guilty by a jury. Even if you tell the jury, yeah, I did go in the house. There were other things that you could have done like calling the fire department, but if the house is already in flames, that realistically might not have saved the child. So you did what was necessary. The necessity defense is old law. It's part of the common law that came over to the US from England. Common law is judge made law that develops through cases. And so the old examples include things like a ship captain who was caught in a storm and through his cargo overboard to avoid sinking. He was prosecuted for throwing away that valuable cargo, but he was found not guilty because it was necessary. And today the necessity defense has also been codified as a statute in many different jurisdictions. Most states have a written statutory law as well as the common law that addresses the necessity defense. And it has been used by activists in the past, including in various US social movements. For example, in the 1980s, there was a group including Amy Carter, the former president's daughter, who were arrested for protesting CIA activities in Central America. And they argued the necessity defense and were found not guilty. It's also been used by anti-nuclear activists in the US and even in a case involving a protest against air pollution, it was used successfully. Now, in climate change cases, we use the defense to argue that civil disobedience is morally and legally justified because other means of affecting change have failed to bring about realistic, livable climate change policy. And because this has catastrophic ramifications. Okay, this is the actual law part. So you have to prove several elements. You can't just go in and say, I was justified because I know that climate change is really bad or because I feel like it. The elements vary slightly depending on the jurisdiction, but in general, you have to show four things. First, that the defendant faced a serious danger. In some jurisdictions, it has to be an imminent danger. Second, that the defendant took action to prevent that danger through less harmful means. So less of two evils is another name for this defense. Third, that the defendant reasonably expected that the action would prevent the danger, had a reason to think that it would be effective what they were doing. And fourth, that they had no reasonable lawful alternative. So when applied to climate change cases, the imminent danger requirement is or it should be pretty easy. Climate change is already happening. There's clearly an overwhelming catastrophic harm that activists are trying to prevent. But we do get prosecutors and sometimes judges saying, this isn't really imminent, it's still in the future. And that drives our climate scientists up the wall because of course climate change is beyond imminent. It's happening now. In terms of the second element, the less harmful means, that's fairly straightforward because trespassing or even shutting down a pipeline is clearly not nearly as bad as climate change. In terms of the efficacy requirement, we argue that civil disobedience is clearly an effective way to promote policy change. There are plenty of examples about that throughout US and world history. And then finally the fourth element, that there is no reasonable lawful alternative available to the defendant. Now, a lawful alternative is something that you would do to effect change short of breaking the law. But the start problem is that our government is responsive to industry interests as we know not to people. So regular citizens can't out lobby the fossil fuel industry and the legal means have all been tried probably by lots of people on this webinar. And so far haven't been successful in getting the climate policy that we need. But this is usually the trickiest element for the defense and that's for a couple of reasons. First, prosecutors and judges sometimes interpret reasonable alternative to mean any alternative. But a reasonable alternative is one that has an actual logical chance of being effective. So if none of the lawful things that you can do have a reasonable chance of success, then they don't count. But we do get judges saying things like this defendant should have just written to the representatives again or run an ad campaign to raise awareness about climate change. And second, there is a pretty common misconception that the defendant has to have herself exhausted all of the lawful alternatives. That's not the legal standard. Sometimes we do explain that the defendant or the campaign that they're part of has tried many different tactics before turning to civil disobedience because it bolsters our argument to show that none of those things worked. And it helps the jury understand how this person got to the point of breaking the law. But there is no requirement that the defendant personally try everything else first. So those are the elements of the necessity defense in brief and I'm happy to talk later about how exactly we prove those elements if people have questions. But in general, it's a good fit in climate cases because there's clearly an overwhelming harm that climate activists are trying to prevent. And it's equally clear that our government isn't going to solve it on their own and the other means of bringing about change aren't working. And it's also a good fit because climate change and the government and industry actions that further it are moral issues. And the necessity defense is part of criminal law but it's also a moral argument. And it asks the jury to make assessments about individual responsibility, about governmental obligation and about the good of society. So it can really change the focus of the trial from the prosecution of an individual for for example, trespass to a trial about the real issues of climate change and what we should be doing about it. In terms of the history of climate necessity defense, in 2008, six climate activists in the UK were acquitted on the basis of the climate necessity defense. In the US, we've attempted to present the defense in a variety of cases since then and mostly in the last five years. So it's still very early in the development of this area of law. We have not yet had a case in which a US judge fully allowed the jury to consider all of the necessity evidence that we wanted to present but we've gotten pretty close in a number of different ways and have had good outcome short of that. And we have some exciting cases coming up. So I'm happy to talk about any of those specific cases but I think I'll let my co-presenters start us off. Awesome, thanks so much Keltie, that was super great. So let's move, just remind folks that, one second please, just remind folks that we are gonna have each of the presenters go through. We've got four total presenters and at the end of the presentations, we will take questions or questions and discussion and answer and whatnot. If you're on Facebook live, you can put those questions in the comment section in Facebook or if you're on Zoom, you might need to expand your screen but you'll see that there's a folder that says Q&A at the bottom and you can type your questions into the Q&A and again we'll gather those together and go through them all at the end. And also when you do ask a question if you have a particular presenter you wanna hear from, make sure that you name them. So thanks so much Keltie and let's move on to Marlon Markham from the Climate Disobedience Center. Take it away. Hi friends, thanks Matt. It's good to be with you all. There's so many things I suppose that we could talk about if we're gonna talk about the efforts in West Roxbury that led to a climate trial but I think I wanna highlight just a few really important things that I think we focused on that helped us sustain our campaign and get all the way to trial. So the first thing is just to say that we were finding a really short lateral pipeline that's part of a larger project in the West Roxbury neighborhood of Boston. And as I talk I'm gonna share some of the photos of some of the stuff so you can get a feel of what it was like. And so we didn't have a long time to fight it once it began because the segments were short. And so we, and we also decided because all of the construction except for a very short segment that went across the soccer field was happening in busy city streets. We decided that, we knew we couldn't have any kind of encampment but we wanted to have a sustained presence so we decided to see if we could have a sustained campaign of just action after action after action over a long time for the entire extent of the construction and we ended up being able to do that. So one thing that we did is decide that we wanted to, from the beginning if we could try to get a necessity defense case at the end of this, that'd be great. We were mostly trying to stop this pipeline but we did a lot of work to try to build sort of community among folks and to help people understand the process sort of start to finish that might happen if we engaged in necessity defense and helps people really do a lot of good work around jail support and court support because people were in court for a long, long time. In total, we had 198 arrests over the course of about eight months of active actions and in the end, we had 13 people who were still, who still had open cases and were headed towards trial. One thing that I think it's important to know is if you're gonna try to get to trial, to jury trial one of the things that's gonna happen along the way is that you're gonna go through a process called discovery where you can ask a judge to order the pipeline company maybe, maybe the contractors who are building it, maybe the police to produce documents that can help you defend yourself. And one thing that was really important for us is that we figured out that the pipeline company had been claiming for years that they had a safety plan for this particular pipeline and by the time that we got to trial the pipeline had actually been in service for a year and a half and the city of Boston was still fighting it in federal court trying to get a ruling for FERC to reconsider their permit of the project and the city of Boston police and fire commissioners were both on record publicly as being very upset about not having access to any sort of safety plan. And so we were able to convince a judge to order spectra energy, which is now in bridge to produce that safety plan for an affidavit signed by an officer of the company declaring that they didn't have one and but it literally took us almost a year and a half to get that from the judge. And so that was just something to know about that you could be going back to court once a month for a long time and if it's really important for you to receive some of that information even if it's not just important for your own defense but it could possibly be important for your campaign or for your organizing efforts. So sometimes we can get in discovery documents that we couldn't otherwise get perhaps. And so that's an important thing to think about as you head toward a necessity defense case or really any kind of court case. And so in the end it took people committing acts of civil disobedience and being in court for a year and a half in order for the city of Boston to find out that there was no safety plan on this pipeline. It was also really important. It ended up being really important for us to have been we think in court once a month for that long because we really developed a kind of relationship with the judge. It helped her to see that we weren't just pulling a stunt we were back every month, month after month. And of course, as long as we were in discovery Specter Energy's lawyer was there in addition to the prosecutor. And this ended up being a good strategy as well because this attorney is used to arguing in federal court and is not used to having to show up in a municipal courtroom and is very irritated about it and really kind of sending a nasty to the judge. And I don't think that hurt us at all. And so not too long into our process she started, I mean she realized because we were asking for evidence that clearly you would only ask for if you were gonna mount a necessity defense. She realized that that's what we were working on and she ended up announcing to the Specter Energy attorney who tried to instruct her that we weren't entitled to one that she was sure that that was her call and that she had actually had conversations with one of her colleagues who served in another city in Massachusetts. And that colleague had not very many years ago granted a necessity defense for some protesters at Raytheon. And so she knew that it was her call and she seems very clear all along that that was her plan. And so as we approach our court date and when one really amazing thing happened when we decided to set a court date, this judge combined, we had 15 at that time, two people ended up not being able to make our timeline. So two people dropped out and took a plea deal because they couldn't be there at the dates that we set for trial. But she ended up combining 15 cases which represented either four or five. I can't remember different action dates. So different action scenarios. And which we had been wanting to combine some of them and our lawyers kept telling us there's no way you can combine, you can have more than six or maybe eight at once. And the judges insisted that we combine them all. And so I think one thing that I was part of the group that supported the Delta five when they went to trial, I've done a lot of support work on some of the valve turners trials. I was on the support team for the lobster boat effort. And every time we work with the necessity demands case, we recognize that even when we don't get the whole to the goal, I think Kelsey just mentioned we keep getting good outcomes even when we don't say get, even we aren't allowed to present expert witnesses with them when we are and we don't get the jury instruction, we continue to get excellent outcomes. And the very strange and excellent outcome we got in West Roxbury was that so when two weeks in advance of the trial date we submitted our list of expert witnesses and a week before trial, the prosecution decided that they were gonna drop the charges. And so in response we asked them if we could have civil infractions instead, which is like a parking ticket so that we could actually have a timing court. And I wanted us to do that as an organizing tool because part of the work of going to trial for a necessity defense in my mind, you best use that opportunity if we're using it for organizing it for building our base. Sometimes people will come into the movement or the work only at this moment when people are facing legal jeopardy for ex-appontions. And sometimes those people who wouldn't have ever shown up to cheer for you on the sidewalk while you were in pipeline trench will show up to support you when you're in court. And so we had been attempting to like build a movement and get stronger so that we could keep fighting other pipelines even though this one had gone into service. And so we wanted to see each other's faces because people were coming from lots of places around Boston and even a little further one last time and be all together. And so, but then when we showed up on that day like at a parking ticket hearing, we did have our same judge and the defendants asked her if they could speak each telling her for two minutes why they did what they did. And she said, yes. And then they asked her to find them not responsible by reason of necessity, which is the civil equivalent, the civil penalty equivalent of not guilty. And she did. And so there's a way in which they were acquitted with like a parking ticket on the basis of necessity by a judge which is really exciting. And it's sort of a morale booster. It certainly doesn't have any legal precedent value but I think for us we learned a lot about the fact that when a judge actually allows herself to listen herself to a lot of the evidence and to understand what's happening in her own community, there's a chance that she's gonna see that your actions were necessary. And she said very clearly, you can listen to the audio. I believe these people believe their actions were necessary and I'm not gonna, she said, I don't argue with it. So I'll close with that. There's a lot of other things to talk about but I'll wait for the question period. That's awesome Marvel. Thank you so much. And it's super interesting hearing about the intersection between organizing and legal. Looking forward to hearing more about that or maybe we'll just say it for the Q&A. Just reminded that we are doing Q&A at the end but you can put your questions in the Q&A window and resume interface. You might need to expand your screen or your Zoom window for the Q&A folder or you can put questions in the Facebook chat window and we'll get them from there. So thanks again, Marla. And let's move on to Jay O'Hara from the Climate Disobedience Center. Jay, you ready to go? I am, yes. Marla, thank you so much for having me. Matt, thanks and Anne, thanks so much for having me. Also wanna tip my hat. I see Leonard Higgins is on the line, Ralph Turner from Montana and wanna thank him for doing what you do as well, Leonard. And I know Abby Brockway from the Delta V wanted to be here too. So just a note for those of you who do follow or are following these cases, the Delta V just yesterday submitted their appeal of their denial of the necessity defense. I believe to the Washington State Supreme Court. So it could have some interesting fingers crossed, good precedence, at least in the US, some state law around the necessity defense coming soon. I'll share some screen here for a couple pretty photos. Just wanna let you know, if you don't know the short story about the lobster book in 2013, friend Ken Ward and I piled this cute little white lobster boat which we renamed the Henry David T up to the biggest power plant, biggest source of climate emissions in the Northeast, the Brayton Point power station in southeastern Massachusetts. Marla was our lead support person who was on the shore dealing with confused neighbors and the press dropped our anchor in front of the pier where that coal was supposed to be unloaded and had timed ourselves pretty well to be a couple of hours ahead of a 400 foot long ship coming up from Norfolk, Virginia, full with West Virginia's finest coal. They were able to safely kind of half dock the ship on the dock, so there was no safety issues but they were not in a place that they could unload it. We spent all day there in front of that ship, staring it down and then we're under a threat of massive fines which we had not anticipated. We were expecting to get arrested but under the threat of massive fines and order from the Coast Guard around 6 p.m. We, well, I'll just keep it this. We got rid of our anchor and departed under our own power to be charged later by the state, by the District Attorney of Bristol County in Massachusetts. Couple of things I wanna say about leading up to that trial I think for a lot of folks, I suspect it certainly was true for me who take an act of conscience. You don't do a lot of thinking beforehand of like, well, what are my legal options once I've done this thing? You're focused on the moral clarity of the act. You're focused on telling the story. You're focused on doing the right thing. And it wasn't until several months after we got the charges that it really hit me of like, wow, there was a bunch of different options here that we could choose from about how to respond to these charges. Charges we got were a couple of misdemeanors and a felony, so they were semi-serious. They're pretty serious, but they weren't actually, they weren't anything like we had anticipated. We were imagining that we could get federal, Patriot Act charges for interfering with a national energy facility. We could talk more about the strategy of trying to get some of those charges, maybe in the Q and A. But that's kind of a moral quandary. Well, how do you respond? Well, I don't feel that I'm guilty. I feel that I'm pretty not guilty because I feel like I did the right thing. There's also this history in civil disobedience history particularly the Gandhian strain of non-violence that says you go in and you plead guilty. I did the thing. This is me. If you think it's wrong, sentence me to the highest sentence possible. And if you think what I did was right, then find me not guilty. And then dismiss the law essentially. That didn't feel right either because we were breaking a law that we actually thought was pretty, I think laws governing navigation on the seas are important and I don't dispute those laws. So we ended up stumbling upon this thing about the necessity of defense. And first thing I wanna note is that the necessity of defense as Kelsey said is not a strategy to get out of the charges. You are going to face a higher risk. You're going to be more vulnerable. This of course, the idea of vulnerability flies in the face of everything that most lawyers are trained to think about. But that vulnerability opens up some of the amazing things that can happen from political trials using a necessity of defense. In our case, in Kenema's case, one of the things that we were able to do was mobilize constituencies that weren't previously mobilized around climate and to create more of an intense focus on this particular power plant. We brought in actually a lot of people of faith and clergy in particular. I was able to mobilize my Quaker community in a way that I hadn't been able to before. And that had some juice for us and life for people because I and Ken were taking a vulnerable stand. There's this elicited empathetic response for people who want to support you that provides new opportunities for organizing. The close out the quick story for those who don't know it. We had gone into, we had gotten permission to use a necessity of defense. We had gone into court, however, expecting that the charges were going to be dropped. We'd gotten some hint of that the week before and some pretrial motions. But as far as we knew, we were going to put on a necessity of defense case when we went into court that Monday. However, instead of just the prosecutor from the district attorney's office showing up, the district, the elected district attorney himself, Sam Sutter was there and essentially said that he couldn't in good conscience argue in court that what we did wasn't necessary, which was kind of an interesting about face and interesting turn of events. That change both elicited this big press conference that you can see that we did. We got some good media out of it. We made it a, we put climate change above as the front top story on the Boston Globe, front page of the Boston Globe, the next day, which was actually an election day, which is a pretty remarkable way to get climate change in the news. And the way that happened is that said district attorney, Sam Sutter, while waiving one of Bill McKibben's Rolling Stone articles over his head, said that climate change is one of the biggest challenges humanity has ever faced, that politicians had been derelict in their duty and that he would join us all in three weeks at the People's Climate March in New York City, which he in fact did. A couple of things that I wanna bring out just to kind of close this story is beyond, well, I think one of the reasons that we got that sort of media attention, not only that we had a man bites dog sort of story of the district attorney, the prosecutor who came out on the side of the defendants. There was, there's something about being able to tell a story in the context of a court of law that makes it a sort of privileged sort of information. People pay special attention to things and the media in particular pay more attention to things that happen in a courtroom. That gives us as climate campaigners the opportunity, particularly if we're able to present a full necessity to defense with our expert witnesses to tell the full climate story with a longer attention span from those who are listening with the facts, the figures and the reality of flesh and blood witnesses and experts being able to testify to what's happening. My hope is, and I think one of the strategies for this, yes, we would love to the media spectacle about climate change that would come from a full-throated sort of scopes monkey trial of climate. But ultimately, as Kelsey was saying, we wanna win one of these. And my hope is that we can win one, get an acquittal, and that leads to a further opening of the floodgates of civil disobedience around climate change. And lastly, I'll just say, as Marla was alluding to as well, it's strange how these seem to all have some sort of special sauce, something happens. There's some transformative juice that comes out of these cases. And that was certainly the case with Sam Sutter. Looking forward to talking with you all a little bit more. Thanks for having me. Awesome, thank you so much, Jay. That's really great. And the detailed stories are fun. So now let's move to Ben. Again, Billersnup from Seattle 350. And then I expect you to talk about this, but just in case you're not, we've heard from Jay about the valve turners and we know that you were there supporting Emily and Annette. You get to find out how much of an attorney action was, just so people know about it, about who's on the call right now. It would be great to have, make sure we have the basics of that, and what it was all about. So Ben, go for it. Yeah, thank you very much, Matt. So my name is Ben Joldersma, and I'm with 350 Seattle. And I was involved in 2016 in a climate action that has kind of become known as the valve turners action, I think is sort of the shut it down. And it was an action that was designed to sort of shut down the flow of Tarzan's oil from Alberta into the U.S., pretty much like all of it for about a day. So it was an action that consisted of shutting down five pipelines across four states. And there were five valve turners. I'm sort of a valve turner support person. And so Emily and Annette shut down lines 60, sorry, line 63 and line three I think in Minnesota. Michael Foster shut down the Keystone Pipeline in North Dakota. Ken Ward shut down the Trans Mountain Pipeline in Washington State and Leonard Higgins shut down the, is it a specter line in Montana? Basically accounted for about 2.2 million barrels of crude oil from Canada for about 24 hours. Yeah, so that's the action. My role was kind of in support of Emily and Annette. And I'm just trying to think where to go with the necessity. That actually was sort of an element which maybe is a little bit different than Jay and Ken's. Maybe, I mean, Ken being involved in both that, both the Lobster Boat and valve turner action, kind of necessity was something that was discussed in advance and was sort of an element of the planning as far as like having an across multiple states. And there was potentially some interest with the Obama presidency and having a federal case there in the Ninth Circuit. But the federal government opted not to get involved and the states sort of took it over. So yeah, there's been three of the four tribes have been held and necessity was not allowed at any of the previous trials, which is interesting. Speaking again to the idea that, you know, as Jay mentioned that the lawyers really don't, some of the lawyers, especially the more traditional ones are very hesitant to be associated with necessity because it does increase the risk. And so, particularly with Michael Foster in North Dakota, his lawyer was really focused on just criminal defense. And so, in that case, you know, especially we were, I think the most limited presentation of why we felt that this action was necessary. Emily, Johnston, who, you know, kind of whereas really has been a really big influence in my career as a climate activist, I'm very relatively new in climate action. I mean, I want to make that clear that like I have so much respect in the appreciation and gratitude to Marla and Jay and people at Stand and Ken Ward and, you know, everyone else I've had the pleasure of sort of getting to know who have spent just so much their lives. And for me, this is a world that we knew I, you know, being a parent really kind of like brought out that sense of urgency around what we can do or what I need to be able to do. And, you know, when am I gonna, when I'm gonna look at my children in the eye in 20 years or 30 years and they're gonna, and they ask me like, what were you doing when all this was happening? And, you know, when we could have made a difference. And so for me, it really is like about a, you know, last three years or so of really kind of getting involved and still working at a job and trying to raise a family in Seattle. But Emily, Johnston, you know, we were on the Arctic sunrise, the Greenpeace boat. She was giving a talk about, you know, the necessity this week. And one of the things she talks about is, you know, putting herself into this kind of risk where, you know, her and Annette are facing 10 years in prison. I'm facing five years in prison for my felony charges. People have kind of, they kind of look at her differently. And it even without having had a trial yet, you know, people understand that Emily and Annette and myself and everybody have done these actions because we do believe that they are necessary. And just, you know, in the court of public opinion, so to speak, in the court of our communities, that really makes a big impact. And Emily, you know, people kind of like consider her words in a different way in a more thoughtful way when they understand that she's like willing to put more of so much risk and so much for herself on the line for the cause. So that I think, you know, irrespective of the trial outcomes, you know, it's just a very important, I think, outcome or effect. And for me, just in helping myself recognize how necessary and important this is. I mean, you know, doing that action and standing there in the fields of Minnesota, you know, watching these pipelines get shut off in real time is like the helicopters from security companies are like swooshing around and just, you know, that really like crystallizes and kind of puts things into a much more real perspective which is so valuable. So we, the prosecutor obviously does not want us to go to present necessity. The judge in the case asked us to come out. So we all went out there last summer and he presented. So the four defendants, Steve Lipte, who is our videographer, he was also charged, you know, for trespassing as a documentarian. And the judge wanted to hear from us why we felt, we, you know, because we had filed a motion to present the necessity defense for the trial. And so before that could proceed, you know, the judge actually had an all-comin person and sit down and we just basically gave testimony to why, you know, why we felt it was necessary. And that was a really powerful moment for the trial judge in a county in Northwest Minnesota. It's very rural. You know, Enbridge is the number one property tax payer in the county. I think it's something like 12 out of the $18 million that they get in revenue come from the pipeline company. So if you think about, you know, the relationship of and the dependencies of, you know, of these oil companies and these pipeline companies and these energy infrastructure companies with like the local governments, it's kind of remarkable that the judge, you know, was willing as long as he has been to kind of consider this. So we just all testified to our own personal experiences and our concerns. And again, to what Kelsey said, I personally have not done every possible thing for 25 or 30 years, you know, unlike Ken, perhaps a more LRJ, you know, to try and prevent climate change through legal means. I mean, I've done some phone calls. I've gone to some conferences. I've gone to some, you know, hearings about, you know, pipelines or whatever in the area I've written to my legislators, you know, done a couple of the basic things. But really, I mean, for me, what I told the judge was after seeing the sort of very tepid response from the Paris Climate Accords, that was a very much of a, you know, a signal to me that like we've kind of, we've sort of exhausted legal means, you know, existing means that, you know, it's like, if the world's politicians meeting together are unable to come up with a set of guidelines that would prevent kind of start the climate change. And then after that, I subsequently can't even meet those on their own. What possible chance could, you know, could I have using legal methods? So I spoke to that and we spoke to some of our experiences of the science and the judge I think was listening and learning about that. And I spoke and I actually kind of, I teared up, I was crying, talking about my children. And, you know, I think that that mattered. I think the judge, when he listened to me and saw me talking about like, this is something that will just, it's just heartbreaking to think about like, what kind of world I'm living for my kids and there's just nothing that I can do and it feels so helpless and, you know, I don't know what part or, you know, what all the factors, you know, that went into the judge's decision, but it did feel very empowering to be able to share that in that kind of a legal context. The judge made the decision to allow the necessity defense. And of course, the prosecutor immediately appealed it. We, and Kelsey can speak to some of this, I think she can agree, I think, you know, an important part of this team. But we have an excellent lawyer in Minnesota, Tim Phillips, who's just been really, really, I mean, just incredible, incredible person, you know, doing this work pro bono. And then we also, so he filed our response to the appeal or to the motion to appeal. And we had an amicus brief filed on our behalf from I think several hundred law professors and lawyers. So very much like there's a lot of attention around the case. And so that I think is an example of like one of the, I think positive outcomes that we didn't necessarily expect. You know, what is to see these lawyers and law professors, you know, see this as such an important opportunity to kind of put climate on trial. And just all just get through the timeline here. And then I'll speak a little bit about why, you know, Emily and Annette and myself, you know, feel this is, and Steve, feel this is so important. So the appeal, the appellate court in Minnesota came back and basically sided with trial judge, which was in our favor, which was very good, you know, very good news. You were very pleased to hear that. Then of course the prosecutor immediately went and decided to spend even more taxpayer money by doing an appeal to the Minnesota State Supreme Court. So that's kind of where we are right now is that we're waiting, I think July 23rd, I believe is the timeline for the minute the state Supreme Court to decide whether or not they want to hear the case. We hope they don't, we hope that they, you know, just send it back to the lower courts. And in that case, then we can hopefully get this to trial because, you know, as we all know, climate change is happening, it's urgent. We want to get trials as quickly as possible. So hopefully we can do a trial and, you know, end of summer or in the fall, but if the Supreme Court does choose to hear the case, then it probably will be sometime next year. Why is this important necessity defense? You know, why do we do it? I think, you know, there is no question that climate change is happening when it's real and when it's imminent. And we feel it felt it was necessary and the tar sands is some of the worst oil that's being extracted and it has some of the largest carbon emissions footprints not to mention the devastation that it causes to the indigenous communities of Canada and to the wildlife there. And this is a chance to take a trial and turn it from like a criminal defense trial about us to really about like this larger question of what is this civilized, the very fundamental way that we power our civilization acceptable. And that I think is just, you know, to the extent that we can have that discussion in court and to the extent that I've been able to be a part of that and that we can get, you know, Bill McKibbin and Jim Hanson, Dr. Jim Hanson, you know, to come up and other experts and physicists climate climatologists and, you know, professors of social change to come out and speak and, you know, in an expert way, present their evidence and their testimony that, you know, this is necessary. This is happening. This is urgent, you know, that this is a viable way, you know, through civil disobedience to respond to it. That to me, I think, you know, is something that when I do, you know, 20 years from now or 30 years from now when my kids are asking me what did I do? I feel like, you know, this and among other things there's so much always more to do, but I will feel, you know, proud to be able to look them in the eye and just to say that I was a part of this. And I think that, like Jay said, having this in the courts really helps to clarify that and to add a sense of legitimacy to it. So thank you. Thanks much, Bennett. All four of y'all are super inspiring. We do have some questions, folks. Just a reminder, in the Zoom screen, if you're in Zoom, there's a Q and A folded down at the bottom. You can put your picture there. And you can also put, I'm sorry, picture, you can put your question there. And on Facebook Live, you can put a question in the comment section. I have a bunch of questions on my own. We are gonna try to bring out Susan Redlich, but in the meantime, one of the things that Ben just alluded to and that we started hearing back from various trials, is this idea that you're supposed to have exhausted every possible means. And I'm looking at a Kelsey's list of four tests, you know, the series of imminent danger, trying to put a harm, but taking action through less harmful means. And the others, and Kelsey, can you talk a little bit about what standard you're actually being held to, about what you have to demonstrate you've tried to do? Do you have to have done everything? No. The person on trial does not have to have done everything. I talked a little bit about this, but it definitely bears repeating, because this is something that a lot of people get hung up on. And I think sometimes when we talk about it, it can kind of get obscured. Because sometimes we have defendants who have 30 year resumes of working on this issue. And we do wanna explain to the jury, you know, that they got to the point of breaking the law after they had done all these other lawful things, because that's relatable and it helps people understand how you decided that you had to do something different, and kind of legitimizes it. But that is not the legal standard. It's a misconception that the defendant has to have done everything or that they were part of a campaign that did everything. And we're talking about stuff, you know, like writing to your representatives or doing petitions or doing protests and marches, kind of short of breaking a lot, anything like that. And the actual legal standard is that there is no lawful, reasonable, lawful alternative. And that is kind of objective. It doesn't depend at all on what the defendant has done. And this could be the very first thing that the defendant has tried. And if we can prove that it wasn't reasonable for that person to think anything else would work, then we've met the standard and that's completely fine. So this is something that, as I mentioned, it can be kind of a sticking point with prosecutors or judges, the fact that what has the person done is a sticking point and also the definition of what a reasonable alternative is. It's one that could realistically work, not just one that exists out there. So when we had a judge say, oh, well, this defendant had lawful alternatives because they could have just run a campaign on TV telling people about the dangers of climate change. You know, clearly people have tried that, right? And even if they hadn't, at this point, we know that it's not gonna work. We can't outlaw the fossil fuel industry. And so in terms of what we kind of combat that to persuade a judge what reasonableness is, we define it properly. So you have to have done your kind of legal research and show case law regarding visafulness to show that reasonable alternative is meaningfully different from alternative. And then we also bring in expert testimony to focus the judge and the jury on the actual question. So we have an expert, for example, from Princeton to testify that the entities that have power over U.S. government decision-making are not regular citizens. They're corporations and they're very wealthy and this person has studied those things. So it's actually not reasonable to think that all these lawful alternatives will be effective in this situation. That's super interesting. Thank you. Susan Redlich, are you available? Can we get you on video and microphone? Oh, we can start to hear you now. There you are. Go for it. Just once. Oh. Hey, Susan. Susan. Hang on. Hang on a second. I think, you know, there's some awful things. Is there anybody else getting that? Yeah. Okay, Susan, I saw your question. I'm gonna try to ask it. And if you go back on mute, it was very, very tricky to know what was happening. Sorry about that. I don't know what's on, but I'll try to get your question right. And so the question, as I heard it, or as I read it, was how do you start your planning process in this type of work, recognizing that necessity defense might be coming forward later? When you actually integrate the idea that's happening, is it getting out of time that you're thinking about being charged as Jay was talking about stumbling on it? Or are you structuring actions now so that you have a clear spot and you say, okay, we're gonna be making this action in order to use necessity defense? And so maybe Jay and Marla, both of you have been working on this lately. Do y'all wanna chip in? I have thoughts. And also Susan, great to see you. Hope you're doing well. You know, the thing about the necessity defense, what I love about it is it's actually a useful strategic analysis tool to ask whether we're doing a good action. You know, when the standard is, is this literally going to be effective? One of the measures I think is about, is are we doing direct enough action? Are we actually blocking something that matters? Or is this symbolic, it's nearly symbolic, and I don't wanna dissymbolism. Symbolism is critical, but are we doing something that is merely symbolic? Or are we actually doing something that is actually gonna keep it in the ground, literally? So that I think is, all of these are useful lenses. It's like, have I done my homework? You know, that's kind of the test around having exhausted or not found a reasonable alternative. Kind of similar to Dr. Martin Luther King's first step in nonviolence, number one, assess whether, or second step, number one, assess whether there's an instance of injustice going on. Number two, negotiate, and if the negotiations fail, then you move to nonviolence. So I think they're useful questions to have a sieve of filter through to think about any action, whether or not you are considering using defense. And I would just add some like practical examples of how, so one example that was sort of accidental, like planning that really helped, and then another example of deliberate planning. So I don't know if this is an assessment of defense, even as much as it is like thinking about the fact that if you get a jury trial, the jurors get to see lots of evidence. And so one of the things that, so just thinking about what sort of evidence might be collected or available for use in your trial. Abby Brockway in the Delta V trial had a lockbox with her in her tripod that she could use if she decided to stay in the tripod for longer to keep walking an oil train for longer. And it turns out that it was covered with like a letter from her daughter put on there with like clear tape and like a letter from her pastor. And then into that sitting on the jury table during jury deliberations, right? Cause it was an evidence. And so the jurors who came out and talked to us after that trial was over, who decided that they wanted to talk to the defendants were very clear that they spent a lot of time with that piece of evidence reading those like those important people in her life and a pastor. You know, like those people saying, this is important, this is necessary. The other thing that I will say is that I worked with someone who was going to do a climbing action who I just encouraged him to, he was going to put his instructions for how to set something up while he was in a tarnist. And so he didn't fall, he was going to eliminate those and clip them to his belt. And you know, I encouraged him and I would encourage anybody to think about, is there anything that you want to have on you that you want to make sure that the jurors might get to see? Whether that's a letter from your kids or from your pastor or your partner, I carry just in case I need it, a letter from my partner that says to me how important he thinks the work that I'm doing is. And so I think those are the kinds of things you can ask yourself in addition to Jay's point about the sifting, but also if you're going to get to bring some evidence to trial, is there any kind of evidence that you think you would want the jurors in the jurisdiction where you're going to be to see? One thing that Ken Ward had some success with, I think in his bout Turner trial was the fact that he was allowed to introduce himself to speak to his own state of mind, a sea level rights projection map for the county he was in, wherein the oil refineries end up looking like islands and the tulip fields that cover the county that are really the pride of the county, that's that they have a month long tulip festival every year, those are underwater. And so that was an important visual for him to be able to introduce. So anything that you think might tug at the heartstrings of the people who might be deciding the case, I think it's important to think about whether you're going for necessity, defense or not. Awesome, thank you. Kelsey, just a quick question there before I actually have two questions for you. First one is sort of a follow up to that. Marla has talked about the benefits of going to discovery. What are the risks to activists of going to discovery? This is my first question. And the second one, which is from Arlene on Facebook Live, would like to know where else are we seeing the necessity defense being used internationally? Cool, great questions. First, I'm just gonna chime in kind of on what Marla and Jay said in response to the last question. I think we are seeing people just thinking about using necessity defense earlier. And like them, I think that that's good because a lot of things that you can do to set yourself up for it, a good case, are things that you can do early. Like you can know the law and the jurisdiction where you're at and at climatedefenseproject.org. We actually have a guide to all the 50 States necessity law. And you can start putting together your legal team early, like before you get charged, which is really key. As people have talked about, this is not a traditional defense so it can take time to find lawyers who are on board with it at all. CDP might be able to help, but we like to partner with local attorneys and the different jurisdictions we work. So yes, for all those reasons, start thinking about it before you do the action. In terms of discovery, I think the things that Marla talked about, about being positive, like how you can get stuff into evidence is the flip side of that is that it is very personal and it can be kind of emotionally exhausting to go through that process, both in terms of content that prosecutors might be trying to get. Although I don't think we've so far come across prosecutors really trying to kind of get anything embarrassing or dig up dirt on people. It's more that it's a long process. And that's why it's so important as Marla and others were talking about to really have a supportive community around the case. And actually that's another benefit of starting to think about this early because these cases take so much work and so much time. It's critical to have people around who can support the defendants, get the word out, build on the interest that these cases draw. So I think maybe that addresses your first question. And then, well actually another good thing about discovery is that we get through that too, right? So like Marla was talking about with the evidence that there was no safety plan that they were lying about it. I'd say that so far we've been getting more information in discovery and that's very helpful a lot of the time. So in terms of international, we, like I mentioned the UK case that was in 2008, Climate Defense Project has been working on cases in Canada, the UK now, also Australia, things are kind of at different phases but we've been everything from kind of consulting to working on stuff going to court in those places. And it's pretty, those places are easy for us because they're all common law countries. So have this common law necessity defense. I feel like there may be analogs in other legal system but I'm not experienced with them. And so those are the places that I know about. There may be others, if anybody knows, let me know because I'm very, very interested in kind of the international angle on this. Cool, thanks so much for that. Anybody else on the international, have you seen other stuff happening other than what Kelsey just mentioned? No? Okay, so I have a question that I don't want to get too far away from the legal, I'm not aware of myself but I do a lot of lawyer adjacent work on my near lawyer's flat and I'm pretty sure everybody else here as well. And when you look at law from the outside it seems like there's this process of arguing on very specific legal points and whatnot. But I can't help but you all are talking a lot about your faith in the legal system. When I say your faith, at least two of you identified as Quaker and Methodist and in your bios. And I'm really curious about the actual, how you feel about it? Because it seems like you're engaging with the system that is, I don't want to call it amoral but it's an antagonistic legal system. And you are bringing with you faith and heart. Ben talked about his very emotional response to test science trial of his children. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Like what does it really mean to actually try to bring your sense of morality and perhaps faith into the legal system? Anything else? So I'll start, I'm sure Jay's gonna have something about this too. So first of all, like it's obviously important to recognize that not everybody in this country receives the same sort of treatment even if they do the exact same thing and they're in the exact same courtroom, right? And so you should just go ahead and acknowledge that. And, but the next thing I'll say is that if you can get yourself all the way to a jury trial. So like the criminal justice system is not, it's not, there's not a lot of justice there. But I do think that there's something about a jury trial that is one of the sort of like last possible vestiges of like real direct kind of democracy and opportunities for individuals in this country to like decide what justice looks like and what it means. And there was a question in the chat earlier about jury nullification, which I don't think we should go into very far. I said I would make sure that we got an email to that person. But jurors have the right to make whatever decision that they think is the right one to make they get really specific instructions from judges. But once they make their decision as a jury, they don't have to justify why they chose to rule as they chose to rule. And so one of the things that Suji mentioned earlier that the fact that if you're going for this kind of trial, you're going for to be in a vulnerable place because you're going to show up in court and say, hey, I did this thing. And in fact, they're probably gonna like play the live stream video that you recorded while you were doing the thing. And so, so the point at like at that point, you're trying to make sort of a moral and emotional connection with the people in the room. And you're trying to make them feel powerful. And so one of the challenges that people often have with their attorneys in these situations, even if they really want to be good movement attorney, is that their instinct is to really just minimize the harm to their clients or the potential, the risk potential. And they want to make jury skills small and argue these individual points or like argue technically to the judge. And what we want to do when we're mounting a necessity defense is make it really feel large and powerful and I feel like when just the jurors that we've talked to after the cases, like they're prepared to and have made decisions on the basis of, oh, we understand why this is so important. And so I think there's something really valuable about the direct nature of being able to talk to a jury, people who aren't specialists in the law about why something matters. So that's why I think it's interesting and powerful. And, but I don't think it's worth doing if you're not willing to be vulnerable and trying to make that connection with people you might not normally connect with. Hi, anybody else, Jake? Yeah, I'll just say quickly, I think for me, the reason that I was able to go into that situation was because I was a person of faith in that I didn't have to have any faith in the so-called criminal justice system. It was placed somewhere else. And I felt clear that I was acting in the right and my faith works in such a way occasionally that these moments come where I know that they could lock me up, they could haul me away and they could not capture my aliveness, my soul, my spirit. And I'm convinced that that's part, the transmission of that through vulnerability, the transmission to both our movement, the people, our movement in the courtroom, the people in the courtroom, the jury in the courtroom and our broader movement in the public outside the courtroom. The transmission of that unbowedness, that's a word, is part of unbowedness, is part of our work in going to trial because it shows and demonstrates viscerally what it means to be committed, what it means to act reasonably and commensurate with the scope and scale of the urgent cataclysmic crisis we're confronting. And so that sense that I am in the right place, I am exactly where I'm supposed to be and my faith is strong to the point that they can't touch me. Yeah. That's awesome. Hey, I'm looking at the time. I see we have one more question in the chat that I'd like to put out there and then ask each of you for closing remarks. So the question is, have you found international achievement rights law to be useful in any manner in this larger work? She rather is very broad and just curious to know whether any or all of the various treaties have been constructed for this type of work? Perhaps, Kelsey? Sure. So we are actually working right now on ways to kind of incorporate that into defensive clients in the US. I think that it's definitely useful from an organizing perspective in terms of kind of framing different rights. And then when you have people resisting and getting arrested, that can potentially be a hook to bring in conversations about international law. But I don't have concrete ways so far that has really played out in the case we've been working on. But I think there's potential. Awesome. Thank you. And so I know that we have a lawyer and organizers and people take action. And it's really interesting looking at this intersection. So as we've got to close remarks, I'd love to hear about any other thoughts from folks. So Ben, why don't you go ahead and start with some closing remarks and we'll move on through. Yeah, I think that I would just say in regards to the question about human rights law and international law, I think it's important to remember that climate justice is sort of like this component or this piece of like social justice and what's happening at the border and what happens with immigrants and with people of color in our country and with women's rights. All these issues I think have like interconnections and communities of color tend to be impacted worse by climate change and are also negatively impacted more severely by like imperfections in our legal system. So, I feel like that Naomi Klein kind of perspective about like everything has to change. I think absolutely we can kind of like use the indigenous like First Nations treaties in Canada and the US to like as important tools to kind of like shift the overall dynamic of oppression in our society as a whole and I think that that can help the climate along with everything else. But yeah, that's all I wanted to say and just thanks for the time and I appreciate all the people from calling in and want to learn more about this. I would say the emotional toll, the years I've tried all these are definitely factors like be prepared for if you are gonna do an action be prepared for what could be several years of your life of like sort of like a sort of uncertainty definitely can impact you along those kinds of lines. And I think that deciding, in terms of like whether or not necessity is an appropriate defense, I think it's important to think that like that might be a good litmus test for yourself to decide like what kind of action you're getting yourself involved in and it's something that you want to commit to. Yeah, that's all. Thank you. Jay? Thank you guys again for hosting us. This has been a great conversation and I just want to give a shout out to Abby Brockwood who just sent me a little note. You were amazing. I think fundamentally civil disobedience, climate disobedience is about bringing the legal system, the law as countries and nations understand it in line with moral law. So the extent to which you can ground yourself in the clarity of rightness and the clarity of your own reality that this is where you are supposed to be, you are 100% here, then you are a great candidate to go take that into the public sphere and to put it on trial to talk to a jury. And I think it's completely, I just want to say like it's completely legitimate and okay if the necessity defense is not your path. I think there's a lot of rhetoric that flies around as people go to trial or people contemplate going to trial of well, if you're gonna go to trial, you don't know what's gonna happen. Why don't you just take the plea deal so you can get back on the field. And there's pros and cons to both of those things. And so deciding which is right for you as an individual is a critical thing. The advantages to going to trial are the things we're talking about today, the public ability to tell a climate story in a way that doesn't happen in other circumstances. The negatives are, hey, like Ben was saying, people get really wrapped up. The anxiety of the criminal system isn't necessarily about your trial. It's about all the stupid hoops and court dates and bullshit that you're forced to jump through to get there. And that's really in many ways the most trying part of being on trial. So if you're ready, leap for it. If you're not, there ain't no shame. I wanna jump in on what Jay said there because I just wanna make it really clear that as hard as it's been, I would not change a thing. And this has been one of the most gratifying and rewarding experiences of my life. But it is also emotionally exhausting. Awesome. Well, Marl do you wanna follow up the most trying part of that thing on trial because that's what you did? Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things that I'll say is that I know that Ben's life and the lives of the voucher folks are easier than they could have been because Ben's partner, Mickey, has been helping to hold everything together and do some organizing. And so one thing that I didn't talk a lot about on this call that it is really important is if you are gonna choose some kind of political trial, there is a lot of kind, there are a lot of kinds of organizing behind the scene that might not be obvious. They're not just like every other kind of organizing. And even managing your own folks at a trial, I've made a whole lot of mistakes over a lot of, I've already learned a lot of things the hard way. And at the Climate Disobedient Center, one of the things that we like to offer to people if they wanna work on it is to say, hey, we wanna help you learn what we've already learned about organizing for a trial and how to maximize it. And like, here's some things that, here's some mistakes that you don't need to make. And if you make some, let us know so we can learn it to our pile of learning. So we're excited to work with people who are planning to go to trial. The thing that I'll say about this is if you know you're planning to go to trial, it is almost impossible for defendants to be the people who are driving the organizing that doesn't have anything to do with lawyers. And so it's really, really important early on for you to find somebody who loves you more than they care about this trial. And for those people to, whether they're organizers now or not, help them learn how to do that organizing work for you because the defendants really should not be doing it. They have a lot of other work to do to prepare for trial. And Jay and I and others at the Climate Disobedience Center are excited to help you learn how to do that if you want our help, but really put that to best use for organizing. And the one final thing that I'll say is that if we're gonna build a community of resistance, then we have to continue this journey that I think everybody here has already been on of understanding that we're not trying to build a culture of heroes, right? Like there have been times in the past when people have been held up as heroes. So the ones who got arrested maybe, they did take the biggest risk perhaps, but then also has charges and he didn't necessarily take that valve turning action. He was there in support. And I think it's really important for us to understand that the people who take the actions couldn't do it as well as they did without people doing the support work. And because the consequences are different for different folks and because we all have lives that are different at different points, it's really important for us to understand that the people, like in West Rock Story, we always said the people on the sidewalk cheering for the people in the trench are just as important as the people in the trench because they help the people who drive by understand what's happening in the trenches is normative. It's important and we have to, it's necessary. And so my greatest joy would be to see us all embracing the entire group of people who are doing the action and supporting the action as equal and important parts of the work. Thank you. Thanks Mark. And Kelsey, you wanna take us home? Sure, well, I second what Ben said about situating this climate work in the context of social justice, I think that's really an important way to think about it. And then I think another takeaway is that legal work, if attorneys do their job properly, what if we all work together properly? Legal work can be part of the larger project of activism, it can result in changed laws, it can legitimize protests, it can make our protests better, it can connect with people, all of these things. So I really encourage people to not think of law as something separate from what we normally do as activists and to embrace it as a possibility for your campaigns and to embrace the concept of climate legal activism. And I think that's especially important now given that the other branches of government are clearly not responsive and there is really no kind of inside game there, we have protests and we have the courts and we need to combine them in order to be most effective. And finally, I'll just say that if you want more info, there are a lot of tools available on the resources page at climatedefenseproject.org. So feel free to check that out or yeah, to get in touch with all of us. All right, well thank you all so much. I know Marlis said it's not about heroes but it's heroic action and I know everybody on this call and all of us who got to hear you are inspired. So thank you all so much for being with us today. We really appreciate it. Thanks so much Matt and Anne. Great day.