View from Glastonbury Tor, August 30, 2025. Photo: The author.

Land of miracles

I don’t know how we wound up on Pilgrim’s Way, legendary site of King Arthur and Queen Guenevere’s graves. My wife Harriet and I stopped in Glastonbury last Sunday, intending only to recharge our EV on the way to Stonehenge, but there we were, trudging up Wearyall Hill in the rain. Joseph of Arimathea is supposed to have traveled the same path 500 years before Arthur, planting his staff and seeing it sprout into a “Holy Thorn” tree (crataegus monogyna), incarnation of Jesus’s crown of thorns. This was a land of miracles, and I wanted one. I looked up at the sky and just that second, saw the sun break through the clouds. I quickly checked my phone for news, hoping the Supreme Court gained a conscience or that lightning struck players on a certain, West Palm Beach Florida golf course.

Dialogue in Bristol

We travelled to Glastonbury from Bristol earlier that day after meeting for breakfast with our friend Wade Rathke. Wade is head of ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), founded in 1970 by him and Gary Delgado. At its peak, it had some 1200 local chapters and 500,000 members in more than 100 U.S. cities. ACORN waged successful campaigns in support of minority voter registration, living wage laws, and fair housing, among other things, until a right-wing smear campaign (in addition to some self-goals), nearly destroyed the organization in 2009. Since then, it’s regrouped and re-focused on international work, and is now leading ambitious housing, corporate accountability and environmental health campaigns in Latin America, Eastern Europe and the U.K. It was Wade’s ongoing support for Anthropocene Alliance – the environmental non-profit founded in 2017 by Harriet and me — that led us to meet up in Bristol.

Wade is an energetic man with a sweep of white hair, prominent nose, and attentive blue eyes. He was born in Laramie, raised in New Orleans and gained his organizing chops in Little Rock. His accent reveals his Southern upbringing, and his speech is peppered with expressions like “that dog don’t hunt” and “all sizzle and no steak.” He’s a great talker but his confidence doesn’t get in the way of his ability to listen. After Harriet and I described some of the challenges of grassroots organizing, including the cost of underwriting it, we all fell into silence. After a little while, I broke it with flattery and a few cliches of my own:

“Wade, we’re like the fox and you’re like the hedgehog; we have many wiles, but you have one big one.

Right now, everybody agrees that........

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