What drove him to set himself on fire?
Friends, family at a loss over what appeared to be protest over fossil fuels
“My early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves.” DAVID BUCKEL IN HIS EMAIL TO THE NEWS MEDIA
NEW YORK— Sometime before dawn on April 14, David Buckel left his small brick house on the edge of Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Instead of walking to work, as he usually did on Saturdays, however, he went into the park.
He turned onto the road that loops around the meadows and ball fields, and then veered onto the grass. The place he chose would surprise people later: It wasn’t a plaza or a spot where crowds gathered — just a stretch of patchy lawn on the shoulder of the road.
It’s not clear how long Buckel stood there, or when he doused himself with gas, but at 5:55 a.m., he sent an email to the news media explaining what he was about to do. The first 911call came at 6:08 a.m.: man on fire.
When responders arrived, the flames were going out. Buckel, a prominent civil rights lawyer turned environmental advocate, was dead. He was 60.
It is impossible to know all the reasons a person takes his life. Buckel suggested one: He was trying to call attention to pollution and global warming. “My early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves,” he wrote in his email.
His suicide is one of the few known cases of political selfimmolation in the United States since the 1960s and perhaps the first one anywhere in the name of climate change.
But his political message still left Buckel’s friends and family at a loss: Why would someone in his position resort to such a drastic measure to make his message heard? Why would someone who was committed to the quiet, daily work of making change — and who was notoriously private — stage a dramatic public suicide? He told no one of his plan, not his husband and partner of 34 years, Terry Kaelber, nor the lesbian couple with whom they raised their college-age daughter. He did not say goodbye to them.
In the days after he died, Buckel was remembered for his work at Lambda Legal, a national organization that defends the civil rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. From about 1995 to 2008 he argued cases for LGBT youth and was a director of the marriage project, strategizing cases in Iowa and New Jersey.
He brought an intense commitment to all he did that could border on obsession. “David’s personality was such that anything he wanted to do, he would work really hard to understand it, more so than the average person,” Kaelber said.
Evan Wolfson worked with Buckel at Lambda Legal. “He was very passionate, very idealistic,” he said. Then he paused, searching for the right word. “But he could be absolute. He could be absolutist. He might sometimes take a position that I would challenge as not being realistic or strategic.”
After Buckel left Lambda in late 2008, he was inspired by then-president Barack Obama’s call to volunteerism and took a composting class at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. He was captivated by the idea of community composting, which involves locals in the process of turning orange rinds and coffee grounds and flower stems into enriched soil, while reducing landfill waste and greenhouse gases.
At the time, a composter named Charlie Bayrer and an ad hoc group of volunteers were collecting food scraps and composting on some old baseball diamonds in Red Hook that had been turned into an urban farm. Buckel apprenticed himself to Bayrer after doing some grant-writing for the farm, “and he really latched on to it quick- ly,” Bayrer recalled.
In just a few years, Buckel created one of the largest compost sites in the country operated without heavy machinery — using only solar power, wind power and the labour of volunteers.
Once the city’s Department of Sanitation started delivering food scraps from Greenmarkets to composting sites as part of the NYC Compost Project, Buckel’s site was processing more than 200 tonnes of organic waste a year.
He met his husband in Rochester in the mid-1980s, and after he earned his law degree from Cornell University in 1987, the two moved to New York. Eventually, they found the house off Prospect Park, in Windsor Terrace, where they moved with the two women with whom they raised their daughter, and Buckel grew his garden.
Wolfson befriended Buckel not long after he arrived in New York, when they were both Lambda Legal volunteers. “He was serious, in a thoughtful sense,” Wolfson said. “He was not grim or morose — we could laugh together and joke.”
Buckel resigned from Lambda Legal just as the movement for marriage equality was gaining momentum nationwide. Former colleagues remembered there being disagreements over direction and strategy at the time, and some said he may have left sooner than he would have wished.
Buckel was perhaps most devoted to the volunteers who came from low-income backgrounds and were training for jobs. “I interview a lot of people for entry-level jobs in composting and I’m not exaggerating when I say I’ve heard the sentence, ‘David Buckel changed my life’ dozens of times,” said Emily Bachman, manager of the compost program for GrowNYC, an organization that provides sustainability services.
For the past three years, the person who worked most closely with Buckel was one of those volunteers, Domingo Morales, who first came to Red Hook as part of a program for public housing youth, and eventually became his assistant and righthand man. Until Buckel’s death, they worked together five days a week, Tuesday through Saturday.
“He was my mentor, my father figure,” Morales said.
Buckel used to end every day with a routine: thanking volunteers for doing something good for the Earth. But around February, that ritual changed. When volunteers circled, he shared grim news. “More than 90 per cent of the world’s population breathes polluted air,” Morales recalled him saying. “The Arctic Circle is experiencing record-breaking temperatures.”
Two weeks before he died, Buckel seemed particularly agitated when he came to work one day. “I asked if he was stressed,” Morales said. “He dismissed it.” Then Buckel started sending him emails — lists of contacts, instructions for how to complete annual reports, forms to be turned over to officials. He began labelling everything on the site, every switch and key, and showed him how to work the solar panels, the lights.
“‘What, you going to retire on me?’ ” Morales remembered saying. “’Naw, you’re stuck with me forever.’ ”
In those days, the news had broke that Scott Pruitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency under U.S. President Donald Trump, wanted to end Obama-era standards on vehicle emissions, a devastating blow to anyone fighting climate change.
If the agency rolled back the rules on emissions, it would wipe out all the efforts made by people such as Buckel — walking to work, processing hundreds of tonnes of food waste without a drop of gas.
Buckel’s husband and the women with whom they lived said he had been increasingly distressed over the environment and the state of the national debate, but he had not been ill or shown signs of depression. To honour his wishes, they said in brief telephone interviews that they wanted to focus on the message he left behind.
Buckel’s suicide letter was a few pages long and touched on many subjects, revealing a man who had grown deeply despondent. But it made his cause clear: “Pollution ravages our planet,” he wrote. “Most humans on the planet now breathe air made unhealthy by fossil fuels, and many die early deaths as a result.”
He concluded: “Here is a hope that giving a life might bring some attention to the need for expanded action.”
The last time Morales saw him, Buckel looked exhausted. The next morning, he said nothing to his family before leaving home. Later, when Kaelber was asked what had precipitated his husband’s suicide, he said, “I think a lot of it, unfortunately, was all that’s going on with the Trump administration and the rollback by Pruitt.”
The day Buckel died, Morales received a text from him at 5:25 a.m. saying he wouldn’t be at work. At 5:55 a.m., he got the letter Buckel emailed to several news organizations. He dismissed it at first, taking it for one of the news stories they’d exchange.
“I sent him a text at 6:40 saying, ‘Please tell me that email is just a joke.’ ”
Above Buckel’s letter, there was a note. “I apologize for leaving this world early and leaving you with some big challenges to tackle,” it said. “You are ready. I am so proud of you and what you have accomplished, both in your professional and your personal life. It was an honor and a pleasure to serve the Earth with you.”
Morales, not wanting to believe what he had read, showed it to a few other workers that morning. He did a Google search for “self-immolation.”
“It popped up — Prospect Park,” he said. “We just dropped to the ground.”