Things to Do: Walk the Talk and March

Sculpture on the grounds of Scaligero Castle, Malcesine, Lake Garda, Italy.

On March 1, 2014 a group of Climate Activists will leave Santa Monica, California and begin their trek to reach their destination, Washington D.C., nine months later. They are seeking volunteer marchers now for the full journey or part time at their website: The Great March for Climate Action.

This 3,000 mile trip will wind through Phoenix, Des Moines, Chicago and Pittsburgh with the intention to raise awareness of Climate Change.  Ed Fallon, a former Iowa politician, is leading the march and hopes to convince the politicians in Washington of the great need to take action now on this crisis.

Marching on Washington is not a new thing but it is a peculiarly American thing. If other countries gather groups of like-minded people and march and/or travel hundreds of miles in buses to stand together and speak loudly as one voice at the halls where laws are made, I am not aware of it. The demonstrations held in Egypt's Tahrir Square during the Arab Spring were directed at its country's leadership but the organized traveling over a long distance was missing. There was of course Gandhi's March to the Sea to make salt and it was quite well attended, gathering throngs of people as it moved through the countryside. But the Salt March involved a purposeful action taken together at the end of the march and held an indirect though very revolutionary message to the leadership.

Does a march to the capital have social value still? There are some who think it's a tiresome everyday thing now and nothing will match the significance of Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 March on Washington so why do it? What purpose does it fulfill?

Why commit yourself to a cause? Why try to make a difference? Why hope that others will see what you see and work with you toward a better tomorrow for our kids and their kids? Why get up off the couch at all? It is so easy for a journalist to say that even the smallest march has little to no meaning if one is not involved in it. Marching, like all acts of commitment, enrich the marcher and enrich the viewer. The more miles a person commits to walk, the greater effect the act will have on them. The more press the march receives, the more people witnessing this action, the more people will talk about the topic of Climate Change and its possible solutions.

There is an audio of author Jean Shepherd and his story of the March on Washington. You can hear in this great storyteller's voice, from his retelling of it, what this march meant to him personally, what a profound effect it had on him. And he marvels that no journalist reported on the amazing tenor of the crowd, the kindness and support all exhibited toward each other - marchers, policemen, bystanders alike. And then he also notes that no journalists that he knew of or had read of had actually made the journey on a bus, that most had arrived the night before the marchers arrived on the buses so they missed out on this significant emotional undercurrent. It's a great and riveting listen if you have 20 minutes. This had to have changed his life and there is no way of measuring how that effect affected others. For all we know, the ripple he started in his own sphere of influence may still be going on.

The enormous historic impact of  King's I have a Dream speech at the March and Gandhi's Salt Satyagraha, could not have been fully anticipated at the time they were planned. I am sure both men were surprised and pleased that the reception of their actions brought meaning to so many people's lives. These actions still do. Their actions and those who followed them spoke of a very basic human truth. We all want to be free to live our lives in peace. It is that truth that makes these moments in time so very dear to us.

This Great March on Climate Action could be one of those moments in time. Climate Change is this generation's challenge and is the most difficult challenge that any generation has had to face.

People concerned about Climate Change are speaking out today  
despite the extreme social pressure to not talk of it,
despite the extremely negligent and misguided media that, for the most part, is denying that it is happening and despite the fact that it is a very sad thing to contemplate.

Much of what we love about our planet will be lost due to our refusal to act before today.
Much MORE will be lost if we continue this silence.

Please join in The Great March for Climate Action or if you can't walk, please donate to defray their expenses.

Big Idea: Keep Them Doggies Rolling

I ain't no doggie

The Savory Institute makes a compelling argument about management of livestock as part of the answer to slowing Climate Change. Allan Savory suggests we return to herd management the way our ancestors did. He's had success with his Holistic Management method returning soils and grasslands and surface water to lands formerly overgrazed by simply changing the time a herd spends in one location. The hooves break up the soil and their dung adds to the richness of the soil encouraging grass growth.

Our current overgrazing of land is a principal cause of desertification. Given the increasing need for dairy and meat, not changing our methods would prove disastrous. Healthy grasslands and soil health could be the key to turning this around. Healthy grasslands act as carbon sinks. Photosynthesis fixes the carbon in the grass - more grass, more carbon absorption from the atmosphere. If this method was again practiced worldwide, it would have a significant impact on reducing the excessive carbon in our atmosphere.

Using this method on his 'mobile composters' is something a Massachusett's rancher has done to rejuvenate his land. He employs the method of moving the herd every three days as discussed in the video below.

(From my friend and fellow Climate Leader, Glenn Gall: "The resource frame [at the end of the video] doesn't resolve well. It is probably similar to this list: http://planet-tech.com/blog/holistic-management-reading-video-resources. It was prepared by Seth Itzkan, who I believe is the mentor of the filmmakers.")

Great resources can be found at The Savory Institute's website. If you have a herd and would like to learn how this would work for you, they have resources for you. If you would like to read the research, they have that too. Currently, through a LLC here in the United States, Holistic Management techniques are being employed in South Dakota, Montana and Hawaii. 

And it doesn't matter the size of the herd (sorry my vegetarian friends!), the key is moving them from one location to the other allowing the soil and grasses to revive for their next visit. Quite exceptionally simple and doable if enough ranches adopt these techniques.

Champions of the Order Lepidoptera

Earlier this summer I attended a workshop titled 'Finding and Rearing Giant Silk Moths' at the Elgin Public Museum a few miles north of where I live. I had no idea I would be interested in this before I received an email inviting me to attend and grew increasingly fascinated the more I watched these creatures up close. The workshop was led by Jim McGrath of the Nature Discovery Center in Michigan and its primary focus was education but also a hope to reintroduce these once plentiful giants back into our Northern Illinois area. My friends and I each came away from the workshop with printed instructions and three tiny Polyphemus caterpillars chewing on a leaf in a small resealable plastic bag. I spent the next month carrying my three guys around in a jar, bringing them to meetings and sharing the wonder of their beauty with whoever was polite enough to listen. I took one of them in its final instar to our church for a segment called 'For All Ages' to share with the children and was pleasantly surprised to find like-minded moth fanciers in the young boys and dad in the photo above.

They now refer to me as Moth Lady and when we saw each other again this past Sunday, they invited me to come over and visit their collection of caterpillars in various stages of development. They especially like to visit a spot west of town that has several milkweed plants growing unmolested from the weed killing townies. From these plants, they collect monarch butterfly eggs to take home and raise and then release.

At the Climate Reality training I attended earlier this month, I became aware of the current plight of the Monarchs through a fellow trainer, mentor Ina Warren,  and how important it is for these delicate beauties to have waystations throughout North America, such as the one my friends are standing in above. If you would like to be listed as a waystation for the Monarchs as they make they migrate through your area, click through to this Facebook page for more information: Milkweeds for Monarchs Waystations. 

From the Monarch Watch website: 

Why We Are Concerned
Milkweeds and nectar sources are declining due to development and the widespread use of herbicides in croplands, pastures and roadsides. Because 90% of all milkweed/monarch habitats occur within the agricultural landscape, farm practices have the potential to strongly influence monarch populations.

Unfortunately, the remaining milkweed habitats in pastures, hayfields, edges of forests, grasslands, native prairies, and urban areas are not sufficient to sustain the large monarch populations seen in the 1990s. Monarchs need our help.

What You Can Do
To offset the loss of milkweeds and nectar sources we need to create, conserve, and protect milkweed/monarch habitats. We need you to help us and help monarchs by creating "Monarch Waystations" (monarch habitats) in home gardens, at schools, businesses, parks, zoos, nature centers, along roadsides, and on other unused plots of land. Without a major effort to restore milkweeds to as many locations as possible, the monarch population is certain to decline to extremely low levels.

8/24/2013 Clarification: Orlie R. Taylor founded Monarch Watch and originated the idea of Waystations. My friend Ina Warren is an ardent supporter of the program and owner of the Milkweeds for Monarchs Waystations Facebook page promoting the waystations and alerting others to Monarch crisis.

It isn't going to turn out that way

 "It isn't going to turn out that way." is what my sweet husband tells me when something I haven't expected enters my life as invariably I think of what the worst case scenario would look like. Part of this habit stems from being right far too many times when I would have preferred to have been wrong - which isn't a comforting thought when I am in the midst of contemplating an unexpected change.

Received news yesterday that my day job and the team I work with will be phased out over the next few months. We are welcome to find other positions with the firm but our current work will be 'off-shored' to save some money for the company. In addition to that, our bonuses will be cut back after next month. This job is not my ideal and does not require too many of my skills to perform. But it does pay my bills and I would certainly miss that aspect of it if it were to end. It was what I thought initially to be a temporary position that I took on "for a few months only" when I was out of work and the economy started turning bad a few years ago and was grateful for it when it sustained me during the Recession. As the economy has recovered, I find myself increasingly aware that others in my age group are not hot commodities in the job market and many are starting up their own enterprises to compensate for the lack of jobs available. I would love that. I love starting new ventures. Of course I would need to have the wherewithal to start an enterprise but the prospect of that would be an exciting thing to consider if it was real. When first conceived, the 'Green Road' was to be a sustainable coffeehouse to be run with a very good friend. Other 'Green Road' project ideas came and went over the years until I settled on a 'Green Road Blog' for now. Maybe it's time to reconsider that along with the rest.

Given my extreme aversion to Change that I can't control, the irony that I have taken up the task of talking to others about the biggest Change to ever confront humankind is not lost on me at all. I feel so strongly though that this is something we all need to look at, that my needs are not even secondary - they are somewhere back there in the tertiary sector for this problem. I wish I were wrong about Climate Change and that the science was wrong. Very much wish that to be so. At the same time, am very much open to the possibilities that renewables, green technology and other unknown factors will turn this crisis around once we all start working on it together.

What do you do to remain calm in crisis? What do you do to not be so overwhelmed you can't think of your next step? Last night I dined with a good friend and we shared some laughs. I made a list of a few steps to take today as well as a list of what is going right in this situation and may prove useful to remember as I work out a plan. And then, I reread a good Nero Wolfe mystery as nothing distracts me more than a well-written story that makes me laugh.

And waking refreshed today, starting on my list of To-Do's to figure out where I will be employed come October.

Leaked IPCC Draft - "human activity is the cause"

 

 North Pole Becoming Lake webcam Apr 16, 2013 July 24, 2013

The IPCC or the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is due to release their current assessment on climate change in September after it's final review. A current draft of the document was leaked over the weekend by Reuters and the New York Times obtained their own leaked copy. The IPCC does not do research but surveys the collective body of scientific research on the topic of climate change and draws conclusions from that.

Two things stood out for me in the New York Times article.

1. We humans are the cause of climate change - or there is about 90% chance we are responsible.
2. The scientists are not confident they can predict how quickly this will affect us.

The glaciers and ice caps are melting much faster than the scientists had thought they would just a few years ago so the idea that they are far too conservative in their predictions greatly disturbs me.

And then there are those who think we should wait until we are 100% sure this is a crisis.

If you are in the 'maybe we should wait and see' group, please consider the following scenario which I think is very similar.

Imagine you are suffering pains in your left arm that are radiating from your left shoulder to your fingertips. You are sweating profusely at the same time. AND you are lucky enough to be standing in a room with 100 medical doctors. If 90 of those doctors said "OMG! You're having a heart attack! We need to get you to the ER ASAP!" and 10 medical doctors thought perhaps an aspirin would suffice and/or then offered to take you out for burgers and fries... what would you choose to do? 

Please call your representative and ask him or her to address Climate Change as soon as possible. Ask them to support a carbon tax, so that polluters pay until they curb the carbon they spew into our atmosphere. Currently we pay the price with our hospital visits, damage to our homes due to larger storms, and with our children's and grandchildren's future. 

Not sure of your Congressperson's phone or email? Find your representative here.

Pogo said it first.

 

Walt Kelly's Classic Cartoon for Earth Day, 1971

"Yep Son, we have met the enemy and he is us." ~ Pogo

 When Pogo originally said the above quote in Walt Kelly's iconic cartoon,  he was referring to the high levels of pollution tolerated at that time and generally taken as a 'natural' byproduct of progress. It was not long before that, in 1969, when Ohio's Cuyahoga River caught on fire due to all the flammable contaminants floating in it. I grew up in the 60's and 70's and remember the excessive litter in the streets and I also remember the PSAs telling us to put 'litter in it's place'. I learned my lesson so well that I still bristle when I see people throw their non-biodegradable cigarettes out the window of their cars! However, the litter problem now is nowhere near what I remember it being like then. We all learned where the trash cans sit and we have also learned how to recycle to reduce the amount of trash as well. The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) was brought into being at that time by Richard Nixon's Republican administration in late 1970. Something needed to be done to address the toxins in our rivers and the acid rain falling on our people and other growing environmental concerns. Nixon set up a special agency to address all that. And they did.

For the past two years, there are some Republicans who have called for the abolishment of the EPA. Is it because there are no more environmental threats? No. If anything we have even more environmental threats than when the EPA was first established. Water is catching on fire in people's homes in areas where fracking methods have poisoned the wells and honeybees are on the decline possibly due to a multitude of factors related to pesticide use. Those are just two pollution-related issues that are looming at the moment. It is these Republicans 'concern for jobs', they say. 'Regulations are hurting the economy'.

Let's take that as a possibility for a minute as being true. Are we really a country of people who are 'ok' with some fellow Americans suffering or losing their homes so we or one of our family members can have a job for a few years? I don't think that's who we are and I think that is a false argument.

Could it have more to do with who is funding these politicians' next campaign - or who funded their last one? Let's ask them. You can also do a little research here to find out who funded their last campaign. Open Secrets lists who has received what from whom and is an excellent resource for learning more about who your representative may be really representing. Let's ask them to explain where they got their information on climate change? Who's research did they use and can you get a link to that? Is it a research firm or project funded by one of the oil, gas or coal companies?

And while you are talking with your representative, ask them if they have read the New York Times Opinion piece of August 1, 2013 written jointly by all four of the EPA agency heads appointed under Republican administrations of the past 43 years. It is titled A Republican Case for Climate Action and it states the following:

"There is no longer any credible scientific debate about the basic facts: our world continues to warm, with the last decade the hottest in modern records, and the deep ocean warming faster than the earth’s atmosphere. Sea level is rising. Arctic Sea ice is melting years faster than projected."

"The costs of inaction are undeniable. The lines of scientific evidence grow only stronger and more numerous. And the window of time remaining to act is growing smaller: delay could mean that warming becomes “locked in.”  

"... The only uncertainty about our warming world is how bad the changes will get, and how soon. What is most clear is that there is no time to waste."

 Ask your congressional representative, respectively, no matter what their political affiliation is, to reconsider their position on Climate Change for all our sakes.

The majority of all scientists and ALL academies of science throughout the world all concur that ...

Climate Change is happening.
It is happening now.
And we humans are creating this climate crisis.
We must act together. Now.
Because there ARE solutions to this crisis, IF we act together NOW.

We are a brave people – That’s who we are.
Taking action in crises is who we are as a nation.