WILLAMETTE RIVER ADVOCACY

  
We MUST tend to our individual flames and seek out things that stoke our optimism.

What is the alternative?  

For many, including myself, 2017, and continuing into 2018, has felt like a pile on.  Did we take the eight magical years with Obama for granted?  Did Obama make it look too easy?  Did we become complacent and expect progress would continue to happen without active public participation?  Did we forget how hard and long it takes to build things and how quickly a wrecking ball can take down a temple if not protected?

All I know is this.  
Surrendering hope and optimism is surrendering the fight.  Now more then ever we all need to preserve, cultivate and stoke the flames of our own inner hope and optimism - and share it!  What is that fuel?  What is the kindling of your optimism?  Only you know, and if your separated from it - I challenge you to dream and find it.

Now more than ever is the time to dream and envision solutions.  It is very unusual for progress to be a slow, steady and even trajectory.  There are big gains, hopefully smaller losses, sometimes large losses.  But in the end, over some period of time, you step back, and take a look, and hope, the net, over a period of time, is a gain.  

But here is the hard fast truth.  It is never over.  It's never easy.  There is never a finish line for protecting things that we value.  As Pete Seegar said so well, we are all links in a chain.  We will pass our values on to the next generation of humans who will hopefully do even better than we did and continue to fight.  It is the part of the responsibility we have as humans to take care of the place we live and to shape our society in a positive way.

Human Access Project is not looking to change the world.  We are looking to change one very small, solvable problem in a hyper liberal community that has a deep love of nature.  If we cannot get OUR community to collectively love and take care of our urban river, god help us all with the much harder, larger, problems we collectively need to look to solve. This is something we can fix.

But who knows, small wins lead to larger wins.  The success we have in our community has the potential to provide ripples and sparks of optimism to other communities.  

Thanks for everyone for hanging with Human Access Project through our battles, rooting us on and being a part of the fight.  HAP's secret sauce is our optimism and ability to dream.  Thanks for dreaming, with us, and being a part of bringing positive change to our community. 

Swim on y'all!

Willie