Pacing the Planet is back on the road
as a leaner, swifter version of itself, with an evermore urgent message to share. We resumed from where we left off in southern
Minnesota, and are racing for Duluth, hoping to beat the return of
cold weather with its predominant north wind. In the last week, we
have traveled more than 100 miles and arrived at the Twin Cities of
Minneapolis and St. Paul.
We will be spending the next week in
this metropolitan area, the most populated on our entire route to
northern Ontario. Minneapolis is the only locale on our route to host
a local chapter of the international organization, “350.org,”
which seeks to put pressure on government and institutions to divest
financially from fossil fuel companies. “350.org” also advocates
civil disobedience as an important tool and citizen responsibility to
confront collusion between government and fossil fuel corporations.
In local climate change news, the
Flanagan South Pipeline, under construction by Enbridge Inc., a
Canadian company, is designed to carry bitumen oil from the Tar Sands
of Alberta through our home area. The Flanagan Pipeline would carry
Tar Sands oil from Illinois, through northeast Missouri, including
Shelby County, to Oklahoma City. From there, the oil would continue
down to Gulf Coast refineries. The project is being covertly
fast-tracked.
Before we departed for this second
phase of our walk, we attended a presentation by a collective of
people who are organizing communities to resist construction of the
Flanagan South Pipeline. These people have even blocked use of heavy
machinery at the construction sites with their own bodies. They
described how landowners along the proposed route of the Flanagan are
being bullied into accepting fire sales of their properties, under
threat of having their land seized through eminent domain action.
Owners have been later surprised to learn that eminent domain claims
can be contested. Furthermore, such pipelines are liable to leak
toxic fuel onto the land and in the water, as residents in Mayflower,
Arkansas found out this spring. We are available to provide
information to Missouri residents who want to join the coalition to
halt the pipeline.
As for Pacing the Planet: our
speediness, this time around, is due to our traveling with one cart
(with the all-terrain wheels), one child (our youngest daughter, aged
2), and with a new form of locomotion for our project: roller
skates. In fact, of the last 100 miles we've traveled, most of them
have been covered while skating with the cart in tow. Our presence on
the road is now more visually striking, in addition to being faster.
Our daily routine involves strapping on our knee and elbow pads,
wrist guards, helmets, and adapting ourselves to the variable
conditions of the shoulder of the road. With the hazards of pebbles,
broken bits of car, frequent dead frogs, turtles, and racoons, and in
one memorable spot, a box of nails, we find skating gives us
something to focus on mentally during the hours of travel, and
develops a different set of muscles than walking does. At its best,
coasting down the highway on skates maybe comes close to the freedom
of the personal jet pack that so many have sought.
We were interviewed by the Mankato Free
Press, a newspaper serving that city and surrounding communities that
has a circulation of somewhere near 40,000. We were featured on the
front page of the local section with a large color photo, and the
accompanying article is the best yet on Pacing the Planet.
At the same time, a lot of critically
important news about the climate situation has emerged in the last
month. The 2014 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change is about to be released any day, and its findings are stark.
The report is expected to declare with 95% certainty that human
activity is driving the majority of global warming, and that the
consequences within this century will be catastrophic if action is
not taken immediately.
Researchers may now have the answer to
one of this past decade's climate questions, namely, “Why has the
increase in global average surface temperature in the last ten years
not kept pace with the amount we have increased the Greenhouse
Effect?” The reason appears to be that the deep ocean is
temporarily storing most of that heat. Another study finds that an
ongoing, natural cycle in the sea surface temperature has probably
been masking most of the warming signal. Both of these studies
anticipate that the absorbed heat can and will reappear, creating a
spike in global surface temperatures in the near future. Beware of
people spouting arguments which try to discredit the scientific
consensus on global warming on the basis of temperatures this past
decade.
As it is, a group of researchers
looking at the extreme weather events of 2012 across the planet,
through computer modeling, were able to conclusively tie half of the
events to climate change from global warming, either in the causes of
the event, or in the severity and reach of the consequences. The
researchers note that the remaining events may well be influenced by
global warming, but they were not able to draw that conclusion from
the computer modeling used.
(You know, scientists are strictly precise with their wording. They say “maybe” when a bias-funded news caster would say “absolutely.” Scientists say “seems to indicate” when a commercial radio personality would say “clearly shows.” As we each do our best to discern fact from fiction in the world of abundant information, we must recognize this linguistic distinction, and resist the temptation to believe the argument which is most-vehemently expressed. The ones who are standing in the spotlight, gesticulating, calling their opponents names like idiot and moron, tend to be the ones who have the weakest argument on paper.)
Once we have a broad social
understanding that extreme weather is being triggered and made worse
by global warming, then there will also be a clear recognition of the
necessity of moving quickly to limit the forcing of the climate
through carbon emissions. We all have people and causes which we care
about, above all else. It is time to stand up in defense of
everything that we love.
This is the conversation we will be
having with people in the Twin Cities, as we meet our largest
audience yet.
