Today I thought it would be fun to juxtapose the looming architecture of San Francisco’s Financial District with an extraordinary building I visited in Berkeley.

Here is a sampling of banks, consumer palaces, office towers and other oppressively imposing structures.

Even the reflections echoed the massiveness.

And here, in contrast, is the 10 year-old David Brower Center, a beautiful green building that is home to the environmental movement and its allies.

It was named in honor of David Brower, an extraordinary rock climber and pioneer of the environmental movement – he founded Friends of the Earth and later the League of Conservation Voters – who was the first executive director of the Sierra Club. Many different organizations share the space.

The lobby branches into the light-filled Hazel Wolf Gallery devoted to art of advocacy, which currently shows The National Geographic Photo Ark led by photographer Joel Sartore.

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The Necessity team was there to interview two lawyers from the Climate Defense Project who represent climate activists and also work as legal observers during demonstrations and other actions. Executive director Kelsey Skaggs and co-founder Alice Cherry are both Harvard alumnae and the 2018 Echoing Green Fellows of Harvard’s Public Service Venture Funds (PSVF) which provides seed funding for emerging leaders who are tackling the world’s most pressing issues.

Among other things, the attorneys focus on the necessity defense, a legal argument used by people accused of acts of civil disobedience. It states that when all legal and political means are exhausted it might be necessary to engage in non-violent illegal action to prevent irreversible harm. You need to offer proof that harm was imminent, that the harm you inflicted does not exceed the harm that is potentially prevented, and you have to be able to show that all other attempts to stop the harm within our legal framework were futile.

Here is a more knowledgeable and detailed description of the argument written by Kelsey Skaggs.

Given the threats that resource extraction entails for our climate, and the continuing inability to address industrial assaults on the environment within the usual frameworks of our law, this is the true vision, alluded to in today’s title.

Music today by John Prine, you can read about him here.