Hurricane Helene strikes, Country Creek unites

People frequently ask Bill McKibben where they should move to survive climate change.  He tells them to live anywhere that they have neighbors that they can count on.  


I said that my evil plan was to retreat from South Florida to my folks' house in Western North Carolina during the peak of hurricane season—and then Hurricane Helene walloped Western North Carolina!  Our neighborhood, which is populated mostly by senior citizens, was lucky.  The high winds knocked over many trees, which took out lots of power-lines, yet no injuries occurred, and only one house and zero vehicles received damage.  The waters of Country Creek rose to levels residents had never seen before, but the houses stayed dry up on the ridge.  Between washouts and fallen trees, our neighborhood woods trails (which were volunteer passion projects led by my mom), will be impassable until they get some professional attention.  Before the storm, I was in our woods tethering benches (handcrafted by some of our crafty neighbors) to prevent them from washing away.   I didn't get any photos or videos of the hurricane in action because when I awoke at 3:00 AM on Friday, September 27, to swirling winds and trees swaying like breakdancers, I rushed to fill containers with the last remaining trickle of water from the pipes; by 3:30, running water and electricity were out.  Three miles away, the French Broad River overflowed much more dramatically than our Country Creek.  

 

Post-hurricane, neighbors came together for a spontaneous work party to clear fallen trees from the roadway, using any hand or battery-powered tools we had.  My brother Carl (who was visiting from Boston) and I rushed to join, armed with sawzall, pruning shears, and baseball bat (which he likes to use to break dead limbs).  Throughout the hurricane aftermath, residents of our street have helped each other find drinking water, matches, non-perishable foods, and other essentials.  A  neighbor with a generator kindly offered my family and I the opportunity to charge our electronic devices, and he ran an electrical line to the home of another neighbor who sleeps with a CPAP machine.  On Monday morning, I had my first bucket bath since this situation began, and getting clean was a huge morale booster (despite my aversion to cold water).  Another morale booster was gathering around a laptop computer at night to watch a video (we had some saved on hard drives, jump drives, and DVDs); Surivorman was relevant to our situation.

My folks' three rain barrels proved to be worth more than their weight in gold, and I also got a lot of exercise hauling buckets of water from the neighborhood swimming pool.  (Up the road in Weaverville, large numbers of people filled water containers from Lake Louise.)  Our refrigerator was well-stocked, and we ate well by candle-light post-storm.  We regained the ability to text and call after a few days of near-total cell phone blackout in North Carolina.  On Sunday, we connected to the web for the first time since the hurricane by accessing a temporary cell tower near the Pack Library downtown (at a neighbor's suggestion).  By mid-week, after more trucks with bottled water and other supplies had gotten through and more retailers had reopened, post-hurricane life felt less like survival and more like camping (although camping is still a lot of work).  I returned to Florida two nights ago feeling that things are stable out by Country Creek.  Many communities of Western North Carolina had it many times worse than we did, and their road to recovery is long.

Nowhere is safe from extreme weather, and future events will be worse.  Get to know your neighbors if you want to survive.

Photographer Credits: #1: Susan Studlar.  #3-4, #7: Carlton Studlar. #9: Donley Studlar. #2, #5-6, #8: Ross Studlar.

For the Love of Woman, Man, and Especially Child, Turn Down the Heat

“Many more people are beginning to grasp that the fight is not for some abstraction called “the earth.”  We are fighting for our lives.  And we don't have twelve years anymore; now we have only eleven.  And soon it will be just ten.”  —Naomi  Klein, On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal, 2019

I made this drawing for a friend in California.  She regularly has nightmares about climate change and awakens in a sweat to visions of raging wildfires.  She cries about climate change, in despair about  protecting her 3-year-old daughter from its consequences.

The dizzying pace of climate catastrophe has made it difficult for me to write a piece to accompany my illustration.  The inferno California wildfire season in 2019 provided much of the impetus for my image.  Then I learned that California has already had at least 1,506 wildfires in 2020.  I had planned to write about the bushfires of Australia in the summer of 2019, when the world gasped at the heart-wrenching scenes of kangaroos fleeing the flames in successive bounds and koalas wrapped in bandages after getting torched.  Then a quick web search revealed that the bushfires had continued into January 2020 (March in some locales).  There was so much smoke in Sydney in December 2019 that their air quality was 12 times the “hazardous” level.  Now, as the world's attention is focused on the Coronavirus pandemic, 2020 is on pace to be the warmest year in history and the western U.S. faces megadrought, quite possibly the worst in 1200 years.  Much of Africa deals with its worst swarms of desert locusts in 70 years.  The locusts devour crops like wildfires do trees.  They thrive in a warmer world.  So do mosquitoes—the deadliest animals on Earth, for their power to spread malaria, yellow fever, and other diseases.

And if we don't take drastic action, this dizzying pace will dramatically accelerate.  According to some models, the Earth’s climate will warm by 4.3 degrees Celsius by 2100 under a business-as-usual scenario.  Journalist David Wallace-Wells summarized predictions by climate scientists for this overheated future in his book The Uninhabitable Earth.  He said, “In a four-degree warmer world, the earth's ecosystem will boil with so many natural disasters that we will just start calling them “weather”: out-of-control typhoons and tornadoes and floods and droughts, the planet assaulted regularly with climate events that not so long ago destroyed whole civilizations.”  Among Wallace-Wells's most frightening passages are those about heat waves: “Since 1980, the planet has experienced a fiftyfold increase in the number of dangerous heat waves; a bigger increase is to come.”  In a four-degree warmer world, “the deadly European heat wave of 2003, which killed as many as 2,000 people a day, will be a normal summer.”  Due to physical limits to the human body’s tolerance to heat and humidity, parts of South Asia and the Middle East are on course to becoming unlivable by the time a child born today turns about 55.

I stayed home for the fiftieth Earth Day on April 22, 2020, showing due diligence to the social distancing order from the governor of New Mexico.  It was hard to miss taking part in mass gatherings for this historic and momentous day.  Nonetheless, the legacy of the first Earth Day in 1970—when 20 million people (including my mother) partook in rallies and marches—lives on.  Earth Day co-founder Senator Gaylord Nelson's words still ring true: “Our goal is not just an environment of clean air and water and scenic beauty.  The objective is an environment of decency, quality and mutual respect for all other human beings and all other living creatures.”

My lofty hope is that the lessons of the Pandemic will prompt us to passionately strive for such an environment.  Our response to the Pandemic and the resultant Great Depression 2.0 has been mixed.  There have been plenty of insanely rich individuals using this disaster to enhance their wealth at the expense of everyone else, following the disaster capitalism model articulated by Naomi Klein.  And yet, national and state governments have made proposals and taken actions for the common good, many unthinkable in the pre-Covid-19 world. 

The slowing of the world's economy due to Covid-19 has caused an estimated 5% drop in carbon emissions for 2020.  This is nowhere even remotely close to the drop needed to stave off the worst effects of climate change, and we obviously do not want to attempt to save the climate by wrecking people's lives and livelihoods.  Generally, the Covid-19 lockdown has not had a major impact on humankind’s long-term ecological footprint.  This indicates the magnitude of the task ahead of us.  We need an ambitious Green New Deal to remake our infrastructure and agriculture to work in harmony with the Earth.  The law professor Jedediah Britton-Purdy explains:

“Why a politics of infrastructure?  Because the world makes hypocrites of us all. There are at least 2,000 tons of infrastructure for every human being—things like roads, buildings, pipelines, and cables. We tap into it for everything we do: getting to work, being with family, finding food, staying warm. As a species, we would hardly exist without this technological exoskeleton. It determines our ecological impact much more than individual choices can. I can choose my route through the city, but the city itself determines my carbon emissions.” 

Luckily, we have the opportunity to refashion our infrastructure for sustainability.  For example, on the energy front, a study by Finnish and German researchers concluded that the world can transition to 100% renewable power by 2050 and create 36 million jobs in the process.  We have the technological knowhow.  The question is whether we have the political will to implement it on a massive scale.

Given the combined crises of Great Depression 2.0 and the climate emergency, a Green New Deal which includes a just transition should be the issue that unites the American left.  In the past few years, the left has begun to unite to face climate change.  Much has changed in between the televised Democratic primary debates for the 2016 election and those for the 2020 election.  For 2016, when asked by a debate moderator about the greatest threat facing humanity, Senator Bernie Sanders was the only candidate who answered with climate change.  When the same question was posed for 2020, many of the other candidates agreed with Sanders.  For 2016, climate change received fewer than six minutes of air time.  For 2020, the candidates participated in a seven-hour climate town hall, a two-day climate forum hosted by MSNBC, and a Weather Channel special.  The international environmental group Greenpeace analyzed the climate action plans of the 2020 candidates and awarded letter grades.  Senator Sanders scored highest with an A, but even Vice President Joe Biden eventually earned a B+.  (Greenpeace awarded a D- to the climate plan that Biden had in April 2019.  After popular news media trumpeted this low score, Biden quickly replaced his initial plan with a more ambitious one.)

Throughout all this, the Republican party led by President Donald Trump continues to deny that anthropogenic climate change is real—an unscientific position on par with saying that the Earth is flat or that viruses don't exist.  The general election is on November 2, 2020.  If we want to prevent the horrific predictions of climate science from coming true, we must vote the Republicans out.  Then use every tool in the toolbox to pressure Democrats to deliver a massive Green New Deal.  When I volunteer to get out the vote, I will be thinking of my friend's daughter, and all the children I know.

Guest author Raven fights for a habitable earth for her daughter

The Sea is Rising and So Are We

A parent finding hope in a time of climate crisis

by Raven Shade Brookner

Ever since I became a mother, I have been deeply troubled by the horrors of the world in a way I never was before. Before I had my daughter I could easily avoid the news, avoid processing the ills that are often too much for a sensitive person to bear.

When I was in college, majoring in Environmental Studies, I found out about climate change. I can’t forget the way I found out. It’s one thing to hear about it in an abstract way, to read about far away sea level rise, melting icebergs you have never seen or cared about, and imagine this danger will happen after your lifetime. But one particularly descriptive textbook captured the predictions of famine, drought, plague, extreme natural disasters, inescapable heat waves, and pestilence in raw detail. The timeline for extreme damage to begin (2050) was not something I could rationalize away. In response to this information, my eyes went wide, I was scared, shocked, and then… at some point I just kind of shut it away. I let it go, compartmentalized it to an area of my brain reserved for wars, mass shootings, and other disturbing information, so I could move on with my day to day.

Once I had my daughter, those timelines came rushing back. I knew I was bringing a child into a world that wasn’t safe, wasn’t guaranteed—and yes, those are facts for any new parent at any point in history. What makes this different is the scope. We can’t guarantee any life will be fully lived; people die all the time, and all we can do is enjoy our time, be our best selves, and try to minimize suffering by loving each other as best as we are able along the way. But, the now very realistic possibility that our entire species may become extinct in the course of my daughter’s lifetime—the heavy burden on our collective psyches as we head toward the collapse of the ecosystem that allows us to survive—is almost unbearable. It is now highly likely that if this isn’t addressed, we may literally not have enough oxygen to breathe, let alone food and water, by the end of my daughter’s life. I have awoken to nightmares of raging wildfires. I feel like the canary in the coal mine; as life continues on as normal for most people, I struggle to find a sense of calm.

It isn’t my style to proselytize. It’s generally ineffective and counterproductive. I also respect that people are wherever they happen to be upon their own paths, and I don’t like the conflict of political debates. However, I am choosing to make myself vulnerable at this point, about something I feel is worth it. I am doing this because I feel I have to do something and that what I’m doing, while significant, isn’t enough.

I am choosing to reject that fatalist attitude that is so prevalent surrounding climate change. Everywhere I look online, in the comments section, what I hear from people around me is that we’re doomed. It’s too little, too late. You can’t convince them all. Even if we change, they won’t, so why bother? But it is my belief that we shouldn’t go down without a fight, and that however small of a chance we have to mitigate the damage we have already incurred, it is still a chance, it is still possible. We stopped slavery. We pulled away from the tobacco industry. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring stopped pesticide use that was killing insects and birds en masse. We have so many problems; we have so much corruption, but we also have a history of making change. These are small victories compared to what we now face, but the point stands that when people come together, when we say we’re done and demonstrate that with our actions, as a group we can change our fate. We need a radical Green New Deal yesterday. We need a new president with an aggressive plan to combat climate change, in spite of the filibuster that blocks progress in the Senate. We have to stop using fossil fuels. While we do need politicians, lawyers and new infrastructure, I am not content to do nothing while we wait around for other people to solve our problems and clean up our mess. Parents, children and families need to stop it, without waiting for permission. We need to demand change, and risk everything—in order to avoid losing everything. It is the greatest existential threat humanity has ever or will ever face and there is no later, there is only now.

There is so much we can do. My family drives a fully electric vehicle. We shop locally at farmers' markets and in the bulk section. We live in a very small, beautiful home. We plan to keep our family size small. We have gone zero waste, and reject all plastic products unless there really is no acceptable alternative. We eat a plant based diet. We buy non-toxic products made from sustainable materials. We buy less and make more. We started a garden and a compost pile. We offset our carbon use online. We are starting to be more vocal. It hasn’t been easy to change, but it has been rewarding and gratifying to do something. There have been so many unexpected benefits to a lifestyle built around less consumption, like more quality time together, better health, more beauty and more meaning in our lives. Before dismissing these tasks as something you can’t do, consider we were equally convinced we couldn’t do it before we started, and now it’s just what we do. We did one thing at a time, in a positive feedback loop, encouraged by our successes. Lastly, we all have to be activists. I am inspired to see young activists like Greta Thunberg leading acts of civil disobedience. We have to use our unique talents to reach as many people as possible; we have to vote; we have to march; we have to sound the alarm; we have to have hope.




Ross comments: In addition to Raven's suggestions for fighting climate change, I will add: divest from fossil fuels. This means choosing financial institutions, credit cards, and stocks that will not invest your money in fossil fuels. There is no way to completely avoid using fossil fuels in the civilization of 2019. However, investing in fossil fuels is another matter. Investments in fossil fuels are bets that our civilization continues to be powered by fossil fuels far into the future. Such investments work against a rapid transition to renewable energy. Banks like Wells Fargo, J. P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, and Citigroup invest billions in companies that are aggressively expanding fossil fuel infrastructure. From the Dakota Access Pipeline to fracking to mountaintop removal coal mining, these banks have oil and methane and coal and blood on their hands. Luckily, alternatives to these climate-wrecking giants do exist! Many local banks and credit unions do not invest in fossil fuels. Several years ago, after attending some divestment rallies in Asheville, North Carolina, I got rid of my checking account at Chase Bank and replaced it with one at HomeTrust Bank, a local company which does not fund new fossil fuel infrastructure projects. I obtained a Sierra Club Visa and made it my primary credit card. The Sierra Club Visa is one of several types of earth-friendly credit cards available through Beneficial State Bank; these cards fund environmental causes instead of climate-disrupting energy sources. I still have more work to do to fully divest from fossil fuels, but these were important steps, and they were surprisingly easy. Beyond divesting your own money, the next step is to pressure cities, universities, and financial institutions to do the same. In recent years, many institutions—including Georgetown University, the City of Seattle, and the European Union Investment Bank—have committed to divest from fossil fuels, in response to public pressure.

When I attended the Forward on Climate Rally in Washington D.C. in 2013, featured speaker Bill McKibben told the crowd, “you are the antibodies kicking in as the planet tries to fight its fever.” Although the fever is ferocious, the antibodies are stronger and more numerous than ever. The stakes are daunting, but the battle is not over. 

Essay, comment, and illustration copyrighted to their respective authors.

To learn more about saving the climate, 350.org is a good place to start.
#climatestrike, #climateaction, #climatechange, #globalwarming, #science, #nature, #environment, #action, #carbon, #GND, #climatestrike2019 #grettathunberg #sunrisemovement #loveyourmother #fridaysforfuture

New EPA Administrator

Inauguration of the Resistance

I was in Washington DC on the historic dates of January 20 and 21, 2017. I attended various events, including the Women’s March and the Festival of Resistance.

At 12 noon on January 20, a cold rain began to fall.

In the afternoon, at McPherson Park, Michael Moore led the crowd in a chant of “Welcome to the shit show!” while the BOOM of flash bang grenades erupted from nearby streets. Haze from teargas filled the air. Confrontations were happening, between cops armed with weapons and protestors armed with the dream of a brighter future. The protestors engaged in civil disobedience to call out and resist the agenda of President Donald Trump. Their bravery earned them injuries from both cops and Trump supporters, who don’t share their commitment to non-violence. It also earned them time in kennels and jail cells, and bogus charges of felony riot, to be fought in court. Moore cheered on the resistance, and called for more.

At The Women's March, I found myself in an ocean of humanity. A crowd so dense that one was sure to lose their group unless they all held hands, and so expansive that only an aerial photo could hope to depict it. My pictures only show small fractions of the crowd, and yet it's still a sea of pink hats. Powerful women from Gloria Steinem to Mother Earth were present; and men who believe in equal rights were well-represented too. After I drove from West Virginia, rode a bus from Pittsburgh, slept on a church floor in DC, and walked and ran across DC (and once managed to ride a sardine-packed subway--public transit was limited and difficult to use in the chaotic weekend of protest), I thought that I had a good story about the challenges I underwent to attend this march. Then I met people who had come from New Mexico. A far longer journey! Three times as many people attended the Women's March as the Inauguration. Sister marches, similarly packed and overflowing, happened all over the United States and all over world. Marches happened in all seven continents (yes, Antarctica included.)

 

 

 

Welcome to the resistance. January 20 may have marked the beginning of the end of American democracy, and perhaps the end of civilization, whether by means of war or environmental degradation. However, one thing is clear: millions of Americans have committed to defending our values and our planet, and won’t go down quietly. In the courts and in the streets, the fight is on.

The funniest sign I saw all weekend was at the Women’s March. It said: “Trump approval rating: 32%. Paul Bart, Mall Cop: 33% - Rottentomatoes.com.”

Slingshot!

To any who dwell in the San Fransisco Bay Area of California, be advised to pick up issue #112 of Slingshot!  The famed and free radical newspaper can be found at the Long Haul in Berkeley, or in various cafes and street corners across the bay area. This latest edition contains an illustration by yours truly--and one by my friend the artist and nature interpreter extraordinaire Lesley McClintock. 

The editors of Slingshot gladly accepted my drawing of a battle between a cougar and a wolverine.... and embedded it within an essay by Steph Turner about "Narrative Sharing" as a means of rethinking communication and transcending political differences.  Evidently, my battling beasts have not mastered this skill.  Or perhaps they have, with narratives of "This caribou carcass is mine!" "No, it's mine!"  Or perhaps the meanings of the wolverine's snarl and cougar's hiss are lost in translation.

Lesley, meanwhile, took it upon herself to illustrate a drama of epic proportions.... As oil pipelines slash through the United States and Canada, they wreck forests, farmlands, and the traditional homes and territories of indigenous peoples.  In British Columbia, 66 kilometers south of the colonial town of Houston, a brave team of Native Canadians--the Wet'suwet'en--have chosen to resist.  Their territories are due to be ravaged by the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway and Pacific Trails Pipelines (PTP).  In response, they have built a permanent encampment, directly in the pathway of said pipelines. The Unist'ot'en Camp includes a cabin, smokehouse, root cellar, outhouse and sauna; and is permanently occupied by members of the Unist'ot'en and Likhts'amisyu (both clans of the Wet'su'wet'en.)  They grow berries and crops in traditional farming practices (effectively permaculture.)  They also practice traditional governance and claim sovereignty, noting that their lands were never ceded to the Canadian government.  The Wet'suwet'en anticipate a total victory in their fight against the "carbon corridor."  I hope that they succeed. 

Generally, I have been feeling the burn and the freeze of the climate crisis and fossil fuels, as my recent string of blog posts might indicate.  I agree with the words of wisdom by the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson: “Aliens might be surprised to learn that in a cosmos with limitless starlight, humans kill for energy sources buried in the sand”.

Pipeline illustration by © Lesley McClintock, accompanying an article in Slingshot by © the Unist'ot'en Camp Collective. Said article was the source of information for my paragraph on the Unist'ot'en Camp.

United against the Midgard Pipeline

More than a few comic book villains have attempted to destroy the world by weather. The Mighty Thor #327 (Marvel, January 1983) gives a classic example. Thor's mythological arch-nemesis, The Midgard Serpent, coils his body in around the Earth, and gives the planet the python squeeze. The result: “all earth is ravaged by one disaster after another—typhoons and monsoons, quakes and mudslides, floods and fires.”[1] Thor rides a magical sailing ship into outer space, and hooks the giant snake with a giant fishing line. And then the thunder god performs his most iconic feat of superlative strength.

[Click here for enlarged image.]

Today, we know that the power to cause planet-wrecking extreme weather is not the sole prerogative of fantasy monsters or mad scientists. By our relentless burning of fossil fuels, we humans have caused a radical shift in the earth's climate. And now, we face the droughts, floods, hurricanes, and forest fires that result.

In real life, there are no superheroes to fly in and save us. We must be the change. That is why, at 6:30 AM on the frigid morning of February 18^th, 2013, I left my home in Morgantown, West Virginia, to meet a pair of buses. Their passengers: the local branch of the Sierra Club. Their destination: Washington, DC. I boarded one of the buses, found a seat, and made myself comfortable, for a long day awaited.

We were headed for a rally, called Forward On Climate. Its purpose: to demand that President Obama take action to solve the climate crisis, beginning with a rejection of the Keystone XL Pipeline. The proposed 1700-mile pipeline would transport dirty tar sands oil from Canada to refineries in Texas, and have catastrophic effects on the global climate. If the pipeline is the Midgard Serpent, the protestors seek to muster the power of Thor.

On the night of February 17^th, I made sure to pack a full water bottle, a full lunch, a camera with full batteries; and to lay out well-insulated long underwear and outerwear, to don in the morning. And then I set to work on a painted sign. I chose a pika as the star. After four rounds of seasonal work as a Park Ranger at Crater Lake National Park, I am fond of these adorable rabbit-relatives, and aware that global warming threatens to exterminate them. I puzzled over how to illustrate the link between a pipeline and a species dying from overheating; family members lent ideas. And so, after three hours with pencils and acrylics, I had a totem to be proud of, and to take marching.

I found some new friends onboard the bus, from among the diverse crew of students, professionals, and retirees. While I talked to Steve the philosopher, an older gentleman walked down the aisle, and offered bottles of water to his fellow activists.  I had my own water and tea; I also gulped down a few handfuls of trail mix as the bus approached DC, but forgot to eat lunch, being full of anticipation for the rally.

As the bus arrived on the National Mall, we saw a long stream of people, en route to Forward on Climate, with signs and flags in hand, and the Washington Monument behind them. “It is a good day for the first amendment,” said Steve. Indeed, and a good day for democracy. We joined the stream. Our stream fed into a great lake of people, in the field by the Washington Monument. Many people together held up a giant model pipeline, with the words “Separate Oil and State” blazoned across it. The familiar thump of AC/DC's “Back in Black” played through speakers, to give the crowd some preliminary vigor.

My cell phone rang; it was Mike, my friend from The Homestead. It was hard to talk over the boom of the music, but I told him to find me by my pika sign. And so we met up. And so we turned our attention to Reverend Lennox Yearwood, on stage. By turns, he prompted the crowd to shout, pump, jump, and hug each other. By turns, he introduced leaders from diverse movements, who had united against Keystone XL. Each gave their address to the crowd. We heard the provocative words of the environmental activist Bill McKibben, the Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune, the green jobs guru Van Jones, and the Chief of the Saik’uz First Nation Jacqueline Thomas, who traveled from British Columbia, Canada, to speak against the pipeline. She warned us of the devastation the pipeline would wreakupon her community, neighboring communities, animals and plants. Van Jones warned that all the good President Obama has done or will do will be wiped out by floods, fires, and superstorms if he fails to act now to address the climate crisis. He warned that an approval of the pipeline would be like “lighting a fuse on a carbon bomb,” and that before the Pipeline runs over farmland and small towns, it will first run over “the credibility of the President of the United States of America.” Bill McKibben hailed the crowd of demonstrators for their work on behalf of the Earth. He said: “you are the antibodies kicking in as the planet tries to fight its fever.”[2]  Senator Sheldon Whitehouse from Rhode Island also spoke to the crowd, and assured us that the President is on our side concerning the climate crisis, but avoided a direct mention of the looming threat of Keystone XL.

I held my pika poster high, and pumped it vigorously when the speakers made key points. Simultaneously, other demonstrators waved their signs, clapped, tooted on whistles, and shouted in approval. Frequently, the winter wind gusted through. It caught my sign like a sail. I struggled to keep it in the air, and braced it variously with either arm, both arms, my shoulder, or my head. From training in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, I learned to rely on body positioning and leverage, not brute strength, and to brace weight against any of my four limbs, my torso or my head, as the situation called for it. Even so, my arms grew tired.

Despite multiple layers of clothes, the winter cold fond its way to my flesh by the end of the speeches. I was ready and raring to march. And our lake of people became a river, which flowed to the white house.  Quickly, I felt warm and energized.

I couldn't keep track of my team from West Virginia for long. And so I marched among people Wisconsin, Minnesota, Virginia, and Vermont. I marched behind a group of college students from Massachusetts, who brandished a banner that said “We must rise faster than the seas.” I marched alongside a reporter from The Progressive Magazine, and the editor of the Hur Herald. I met a young woman who was thrilled to see the Pika on my sign; she had spent the summer in the mountains of New Mexico, conducting scientific research on the pika populations. I met a father-daughter team. She rode on his shoulders, and displayed a sign reading “For my future, stop the pipeline.” There were people dressed as polar bears, and people dressed as caribou. There was a puppet of a sandhill crane. There was a giant puppet of the statue of liberty. Her sign read “It's not easy being green, but we must.” Musicians beat their drums. We chanted “Hey, Obama, we don't want no climate trauma!”

Over 130 buses came from 28 states. Over 100 different organizations joined forces to make the rally happen. Over 40,000 people made the march to the White House, to tell President Obama to say No to dirty tar sands oil, and Yes to a clean energy future. In San Francisco, California, another 5,000 marched with the same message.  Thousands more rallied in at least 23 other cities; and thousands have written or called the President.  I am unsure of the exact total number of people in this movement, but it is big.

Opponents of Keystone XL include 18 of the nation's top climate scientists, who voiced their opposition in an open letter to President Obama in January 2012. NASA scientist James Hansen signed the letter, and went further. On February 13^th, 2013 he joined 47 other activists outside the White House, to demand that the President “Lead on Climate, Reject KXL Pipeline.” Among them were the aforementioned Bill McKibben and Michael Brune, the lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the actress Daryl Hannah, and the Sierra Club Board President Allison Chin. Brune and others strapped their wrists to the fence. The police arrested the group for failure to disperse and obey lawful orders. Brune and Chin became the first-ever leaders of the Sierra Club to engage in civil disobedience, and the first-ever to be arrested for said actions. Hansen, McKibben, and others were arrested previously, in a similar protest in August 2012.

Thousands have poured their heart and passion, fire and love into stopping this Pipeline. But ultimately, the decision is up to President Obama. We hope that he stands up to the promises of his recent speeches, and rules in favor of the world's children and future generations (not to mention present generations! The climate crisis is already upon us, and will get much worse if we don't act now.) With a stroke of his pen, he can lift the Midgard Serpent.

Epilogue: It was a dark and snowy bus ride back to West Virginia. The fellow who had given water in the morning now offered pepperoni rolls. There can be no doubt that he was a longtime West Virginian. Few other states know of the greasy slabs of cured pig-meat surrounded by seasoned bread. I declined, being content with the humus sandwich and peach that I had forgotten about earlier.  Other people (including Steve) devoured my home state's signature food.  When we crossed the border of West Virginia, the giver of pepperoni rolls took out a harmonica and played John Denver's “Country Roads.” Every activist has a unique home to protect from global climate disruption.  For at least one, it is the mountain state, land of processed meat and folk music.

Footnotes:

1. Comic pages/ quote from Thor #327, written by Doug Moench, penciled by Alan Kupperberg, inked by Jim Mooney, colored by George Roussos, lettered by Janice Chiang; copyrighted to Marvel comics. Low-resolution reproduction used here for educational purposes only.

2. For recordings of the speeches, see the Democracy Now! episode from February 18th, 2013.
3. Photos: Rev. Yearwood photo by © Shadia Fayne Wood of Project Survival Media. Photo of Ross by a skillful bystander. Other photos by Ross.