On December 10 in Amherst there was a march and rally for abortion rights, among other issues. Marisol Pierce Bonifaz was one of the organizers. She told the Valley Post that the marchers chanted, “Abortion is a civil right, war on health care, we will fight.” About 40 people were there. The organizers have a web site at:

https://generationratifyam.wixsite.com/website

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In 2014, the Vermont Yankee nuclear reactor closed permanently because
thousands of people marched in Brattleboro, and because hundreds of
people were arrested for nonviolent civil disobedience in Brattleboro
and outside the reactor three miles from Massachusetts and a stone's
throw from New Hampshire. Deb Katz was one of the main organizers of
these protests. She lives in the Pioneer Valley and runs a group that has a web site at www.NukeBusters.org.

On December 12, 2024 Katz told the Valley Post her reaction to an article that was on the front page of the previous day's edition of the Brattleboro Reformer daily newspaper. The headline was, "Two More Years of Demolition Remain at Vermont Yankee." The article is available for free via any public library.

Katz told the Valley Post, “The focus of the article on which corporation's done a better job of cleanup is important, but also misses the point. The colossal failure of nuclear power is seen in decommissioning with the years of shipments of 'Low-Level' waste to Texas. The failures?  For all its claims of 'clean and green,' this small reactor will cost close to $800 million, if not more, to clean up. That's ratepayer money. This does not include the stranded high- level waste trapped at the site with no solution  for the foreseeable future – paid for by taxpayers. Nor does it address the environmental racism  in targeting working poor communities in west Texas for a 'solution.' Basically the industry's solution is to contaminate some other community with no political clout.”

She went on, “Then there's the issue of the dismantling of the highly contaminated reactor building. Of course the corporation maintains that it's 'safe' for the elementary school across the street, but is it? Citizens Awareness Network repeatedly called for the relocation of students at the school during cleanup. It seems  precautionary  as well as reasonable to put the safety of the children ahead of the bottom line of the corporation and, while engaging in this toxic cleanup, to pay for the removal of the children to a safe site for the duration. As they say, 'What could go wrong?'”

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In a bike-ped victory, when a new bridge for cars over the Connecticut river between downtown Brattleboro and New Hampshire opened on December 4, the old bridge remained open -- and will stay open -- only for pedestrians and bicycle riders. The bike-ped bridge starts about 100 feet from the Brattleboro Amtrak station and ends less than one mile from the start of a rail trail that goes to Keene. To avoid mountains, the rail trail also goes near the Massachusetts border. This map shows a short spur of the trail that dead ends a few miles from Massachusetts:

https://www.nhstateparks.org/getattachment/Find-Parks-Trails/Recreationa...

As an example of a rail trail that crosses state lines, on December 12 Christian MilNeil, the editor of https://mass.streetsblog.org, provided the Valley Post with information about a rail trail that runs from Uxbridge, Massachusetts (near Worcester) to Woonsocket, Rhode Island. It's called the Blackstone River Greenway. He said, "The most complete interstate rail rail is probably the Farmington Canal greenway, which runs north-south across all of Connecticut and extends to Westfield, Massachusetts: https://fchtrail.org. Eventually the plan is to extend this a little further through the northern part of Westfield and across Southampton, Massachusetts to connect it to the Manhan and Massachusetts Central Rail Trails in Northampton."