Thread by @jglarusso

🧵 #mapoli

Who will speak for the bees, for the bees have no tongues?

🌸🌾🍃💐🌸 🌺 🌷🌼🌹🌿
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At the south end of town where the Grickle-grass grows between tracks, & the wind smells sour after trains disgorge commuters & belch the stench of diesel-kvetch, and no birds…

…ever sing excepting pustulating pigeons...is the Street of the Ex Parte’d Non-Parties.

And deep in the Grickle-grass, some people say, if you look deep enough you can see, today, where the Non-Parties once stood just as long as they could before somebody Ex Parte’d them away.

Who were the Non-Parties? And why were they there? And why were they Ex Parte’d and booted from there at the south end of town where the Grickle-grass grows? The DPU-ler live there.

Ask them, they know.

The DPU-ler won’t see you. Don't knock at their door. They stay in…

…their Lerkim above the 4th floor. They stay in their Lerkim, cold under the roof, and make up whole cloth out of miff-muffered moof. But peek in their File Room and there it is writ, in moof that’s aloof yet plain as day, how the Non-Parties were Ex Parte’d away.

We’ll tell you, it says, in prose sounding gray, how the Non Parties got Ex Parte’d and taken away... It all started way back... such a long, long time back...
Way back in the days when the grass was still green and the pond was still wet and the clouds were still clean, and …

…the bees buzzed bobously in many an unbobulous bower. From flower to flower they’d gently flit, drowsy with pollen on petals they’d sit, in that glorious long-ago place.

Busy they were, those bobulous bees, so busy their hives bulged right down to the garbiest garboard.

But then like a plague it hit—Colony Collapse Disorder—and seldom bees, or none, or few, did flit among the flowers, their hives bare, ruined choirs where once they gently buzzed.

You like to eat, I know you do, so do we all, but without the bees we wouldn’t know where our…

…our next meal was coming from.

Then someone spoke—spoke for the bees. @MassDOER spoke its regulatory speak and created a Pollinator Adder for solar builders to seek, to plant bowers of flowers untrammeled beneath channels of panels. It was SMART, they did say, …

…and most did agree, but not, alas, the DPU-ler. And so from their Lerkim, cold under the roof, the DPU-ler said “No” in terse miff-muffered moof to the Pollinator Adder, suggesting DOER had goofed.

DOER merely whimpered.

But then others spoke up, spoke up for the bees.

Those others were @SEIA who asked in politely framed moof exactly where the DPU-ler got off saying “No” to the adder—saying it was not DOER who’d been bad, and that the DPU-ler’d been badder. The adder’d never’d been challenged, SEIA observed, so why all moof? That took…

…quite some nerve. There was no evidence in the record, SEIA continued—the “No” had been summarily & moofily issued. Reconsider your “No” SEIA did urge, and there was a sudden surge of words in service to bees, from @CapeLightEnergy, @CityofNewtonMA, and @MassAGO who urged …

… the DPU-ler to un-no its “No.”

But who were the Non-Parties? And why were *they* there? And why were they Ex Parte’d and booted from there—that spot at the south end of town where the Grickle-grass grows?

The Non-Parties were people, like you and like me, plain …

…honest folk with nothing better to do than to speak for the bees. So they wrote to the DPU-ler in support of the bees, and in plainest prose, and without a trace of moof, they too, every one, asked the DPU-ler to un-no its “No.” That’s the unvarnished truth.

But the DPU-ler covered its ears and said “No,” “No,” “No,” “No,” “No,” “No,” “No.” It said “No” to every last one of the plain honest folk, “Your communications are ex parte and not written in moof, so they’re struck from the record abry-ca-dabry and *poof*.”

Now you may…

…not have suspected, but the DPU-ler’s tantrum was quite unexpected. You see, the DPU-ler had promised to be nice to just plain folk once upon a day, and on that day it once onced upon this is what it did say, in a direct & unmoofy way…

“Consistent with the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs’ 2017 Environmental Justice Policy and Chapter 8 of the Acts of 2021, An Act Creating a Next‑Generation Roadmap for Massachusetts Climate Policy, the DPU-ler is in the process of developing an…”

“…agency‑specific environmental justice strategy to enhance meaningful involvement of all people and communities with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies, including climate change policies, and the…”

“…equitable distributions of energy and environmental benefits and burdens.”

Now the just plain folk, the ones like you and like me, who’d nothing better to do than to speak for the bees because the bees have no tongues, wanted nothing more than to be….

…”meaningfully involved,” but found themselves untongued by the DPU-ler.

So what is to be done?

Now the book from which I’ve borrowed throughout this thread you’ve dutifully followed ends with “UNLESS…”

“UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not.”

So those of us who’ve not yet been untongued, & who wish to speak for the bees, or more generally “with respect to the development, implementation, & enforcement of environmental laws,…

…regulations, and policies, including climate change policies…” may do so in DPU-ler docket 21-50. bit.ly/2X0zpZW Perhaps by asking why nothing but cobwebs have accumulated in that docket over the last two months? Or perhaps by asking…

…how the Ex Parte-ing of those plain folk like you and me in docket 20-145 is consistent with the spirit of cobweb-collecting docket 21-50? But most important, you can tell the DPU-ler that you care— that you care a whole awful lot, and that you’re determined to make things…

…better, DPU-ler or not!

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Thank you, Good Doctor!