Bead 27: For the Birds

I wasn't always a birder.  In the beginning, I just wanted to be one.

It started with an undergrad Ornithology class at the University of Montana.  Every week, my classmates and I would trail a small cadre of teaching assistants through the woods outside of town.  We would strain to hear and see the birds that seemed to flit constantly through their collective awareness.  They were forever pausing, smiling, closing their eyes.  "Golden-crowned kinglet!" one would murmur, pointing up.  "Hear the tsee, tsee, tsee-tsee-tsee-tsee?"

I heard it a little bit, sometimes.  But it was hard.  They all sounded the same.  When it came down to it, they all looked the same, too.  At that point in my life, birds varied only according to color scheme; therefore, an American robin was a black-headed grosbeak was a spotted towhee.

Still, I did well in Ornithology class, and soon afterward bought my first pair of binoculars.  They were Leupolds, and they cost me nearly $400.  With these, I mused, I would become a birder, the intellectual peer of my former TAs, a girl who, wherever she went, could name all that flew.

But I was broke.  For weeks after my Leupold purchase, I thought about the myriad more sensible things I could have done with the money.  I took my new binoculars out a time or two, and they were nice.  But they weren't making me a good birder.  Walking through a Ponderosa pine forest with a coworker, I still turned the white tail flashes of a dark-eyed junco into a vesper sparrow.  The western tanagers singing in the trees overhead were still robins to me.

I exchanged my Leupolds for a $150 pair of Bushnells.  They were more my speed, I reasoned.

And then, I forgot about birding.

Northern mockingbird and greater white-fronted geese.  Photo courtesy of Susanjoy Aronson.

Ten years later, in California, I started a job as a biological consultant.  In field surveys, I was expected to identify, as best I could, all the plants and animals I encountered.  Plant identification overwhelmed and saddened me.  There were just so many species to know.  And at most of our field sites, even when I got something right, it was only to learn that it was never meant to be there in the first place.  On any given day, invasive species dominated the landscape I roamed, and my accompanying plant list. 

But birds.  Birds were something else altogether.  Birds were colorful and airborne, ubiquitous, singing and jazz-handing their way through the even the dreariest of landscapes.  In barren fields, there were horned larks, rising and falling all as a unit, like sixteenth notes on a musical staff.  On construction sites, there were mockingbirds with their noisy medley of car alarms.  In muddy feedlots, there were cattle egrets.  In cities, there were house finches, the males pigmented according to their appetites, mostly red, but sometimes orange or yellow.  Aided by an avian savant coworker, as well as a new $150 pair of Alpen binoculars, I learned my birds.

Male house finch.  Photo courtesy of Susanjoy Aronson.

In addition to inventorying plants and animals, a big part of my job is to educate the people that hire our consulting firm--cities, counties, private developers--about the various environmental regulations their projects must observe.  One of my pet laws has been the federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 (MBTA).  In the past, all I really knew about this law was that it was the reason you weren't supposed to keep eagle feathers.  As a biological consultant, I've fleshed out my understanding a bit.

The MBTA, and its various amendments, codify four treaties to which the United States is party.  These treaties--with Canada, Mexico, Russia, and Japan--responded to a string of human-caused avian extinctions by obligating the signatory nations to impose protections for birds.  In the absence of a valid permit, the MBTA makes it illegal "by any means or in any manner, to pursue, hunt, take, capture, kill... any migratory bird."  The term migratory bird is somewhat vestigial at this point.  Over the years, the MBTA has been expanded to cover almost all native birds, regardless of whether a particular bird actually travels with the seasons.

With a species list now numbering 1,026, the MBTA protects just about any bird you can think of.  For starters, every bird named or pictured in this post.  Beyond that, nearly every bird in your yard--the jays, the crows, the blackbirds.  The mourning doves that nest in the shrub right outside your front door.  The hummingbirds that sip from your feeder.  The owls you hear at night.

And it's a good thing.  According to the Audubon Society, the MBTA has, over its hundred-year history, saved the lives of billions of individual birds, and has prevented the extinction of such iconic species as the snowy egret, wood duck, and sandhill crane.

Sandhill cranes.  Photo courtesy of Susanjoy Aronson.

In the beginning, the MBTA was enforced only against poachers.  But in the 1970s, federal prosecutors began charging oil, gas, timber, mining, and utility companies with unintentionally killing birds during their operational activities.  Although the law has generally only been enforced for repeated such "incidental take" violations, it has for decades served as a powerful incentive for companies to work with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to keep their bird deaths to a minimum.  

For industries that kill a lot of birds, this makes a big difference.  For example, an estimated 64 million birds per year are killed by power lines.  This number would be even higher if it weren't for the MBTA, which prompts electricity companies to adopt bird-friendly design strategies like proper circuit spacing and "perch deterrent" structures on distribution poles.

And when industrial disasters happen, the MBTA may be leveraged to ensure the responsible party cleans up their mess.  Violation of the MBTA was among the charges brought against the Exxon Corporation for the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989, and the BP Corporation for the Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010.  The millions of dollars in criminal fines collected from these companies--in the case of BP, $4 billion--went a long way toward undoing the damage caused by the spills.  Over $2.5 billion of BP's criminal fines went to the National Wildlife Federation for gulf restoration projects.  Other settlements by BP included mandatory contributions to a fund intended to help migratory birds and other wildlife affected by the spill.

Brown pelican.  Photo courtesy of Susanjoy Aronson.

Although interpreting the MBTA's prohibitions to include incidental take of birds has been the federal government's practice for over 40 years, it wasn't formalized by a presidential administration until January 10, 2017.  As one of its last acts, President Obama's Department of the Interior issued a legal opinion that synthesized all of the MBTA's legislative and case history up to that point, and concluded that the "prohibitions of the MBTA apply to take incidentally and proximately caused by any activity."

Enter Trump and his toady-on-horseback, Ryan Zinke.  Just before Christmas, in its new role as principal saboteur of America's longstanding environmental protections, the Department of the Interior permanently withdrew its January 2017 memorandum, and issued an antithetical replacement.  Drawing on the same legislative and case history that had been considered in the Obama-era memo, the new memo relied on a common law definition of "take" to conclude that the MBTA "applies only to direct and affirmative purposeful actions that reduce migratory birds... by killing or capturing, to human control."

And with that, industry breathed a collective sigh of relief.  It was its sixtieth such sigh in 2017.  You'd think they'd be hyperventilating by now.

With the Trump administration refusing to prosecute incidental take under the MBTA, where does that leave the birds?  Up a sludge-filled creek without a paddle.  Measures to reduce bird mortality, or to compensate for mortality that has already happened, can be costly.  If there is one thing big business is trying to avoid, it is cost--of the monetary variety, in any case.  Ecological costs aren't as big of a deal.  They are less immediate, less tangible.  Depending on your media diet, they might even be fake.  At any rate, they are nothing to worry the shareholders over. Nothing to disrupt the Dow.

Turkey vulture.  Photo courtesy of Susanjoy Aronson.

I consider my media diet to be pretty nutritious.  I subscribe to the online edition of the New York Times, and peruse it via a phone app several times a day.  I cross-reference other sources now and then, like the Washington Post and the L.A. Times.  I sometimes check out Fox News, but only for shits and giggles, or to remind myself to stay infuriated, or both.

The procedural gutting of the MBTA came and went without my noticing.  Every day, the New York Times helped me refine my understanding of #MeToo celebrity offenses.  I learned all about every player, every personality, every motive involved in our nation's ephemeral government shutdown.  I stayed up to date on Trump tweets.  I got all the breaking news on our president's past affair with a porn star.  But I did not hear a single word about migratory birds.

To date, to the best of my Googling, the New York Times has yet to produce an article about the December 2017 blow to the MBTA.  The publication's only mention of the incident appears here, in a regularly updated list of the Trump Administration's environmental overhauls.  Overhaul number 30 refers to the administration's having "rolled back an Obama-era policy aimed at protecting migratory birds."  Reducing the prosecution of incidental take under the MBTA to "an Obama-era policy" dangerously oversimplifies the story.  It's almost like they lifted a headline from Fox News.

Wilson's phalaropes.  Photo courtesy of Susanjoy Aronson.

As luck would have it, I am a biological consultant.  That is how I finally came to hear about the Department of the Interior's new anti-bird philosophy.  My boss mentioned it to me on the phone one day, almost in passing.  He probably wasn't prepared for how angry I would get.  He reminded me that in California, all is not lost, because state law also protects native birds.

Currently, though, I am in Kentucky, where the default is no protection for anything.  Every day, I watch birds still new to me, still magical--cardinals, blue jays, Carolina wrens, white-throated sparrows--hop around the yard, unsuspecting.  For these species, and many others, the worst is yet to come.

House finch nest.  Photo courtesy of Susanjoy Aronson.

There are bird lovers on the front lines.  On January 10, 2018, a group of former Department of the Interior officials, hailing from all previous administrations since Richard Nixon, formally decried Interior's about-face on the MBTA, and asked it to reconsider its position.  And environmental advocacy groups are preparing for battle.  Hopefully, with enough pressure on our legislators--and on the corporations we support with our dollars--we can keep Interior's new policy from becoming a death knell for migratory birds.

For Bead 27, I am asking the New York Times why they have failed to cover this important environmental story, and am encouraging them to tell it, even if belatedly.  Should I hear back from their editors, I will update this post to reflect that. 

Bead 26: Halfway There

At one time in my life, I ran marathons.  I hate to say it like that, like it's a door I've closed, and can't reopen.  I can, and I might.  But at this point, it's a small room in the big house of my life, and it's quite a ways back down the hall.

I ran three marathons:  the St. George (2005), the Kentucky Derby Festival (2007), and finally the Boston (2008).  I registered for a fourth, the San Francisco (2013), but nursing a strained piriformis, I elected just to do the first half.  At mile 13, when the road for the runners-of-the-mill diverged from that of the elite, the most masochistic of the bunch, I took the one more traveled by.  My bib identified me as a full marathon runner, and well-meaning race officials tried to steer me back on course.  But I just smiled, shook my head, and headed for the free Bailey's coffee.

Today marks a year since a certain schmuck became President of the United States.  Today was the day I planned to cross the finish line with a whole year's worth of weekly acts of resistance under my belt.  I would be stiff and exhausted, but proud to have stuck it out.  No doubt, after a little Bailey's coffee and a cup of Gatorade, I would be ready for more.

But today, instead of reaching mile 52, I'm only at mile 26.  Halfway there.

My "race," over the past year, is a lot like how the Boston went for me.  I qualified for the Boston unexpectedly, and by the skin of my teeth.  As the daughter of a former Boston runner, I knew I couldn't pass up the opportunity to run the race.  But as a grad student and single mom, I had only so much energy and attention to commit to my training.  Mostly, I just went for runs, and trusted it would all work out.

The morning of Patriots' Day, standing there among all the lean, tight-jawed former track stars of the world, I realized I was an impostor.  I watched them hop around in their expensive Lycra gear while I dumbly raised one knee, and then the other.  I cut the shit and found the coffee tent, where no serious runner would go.  I drank half a cup with a heavyset woman who was running for charity, and didn't have to qualify.

The caffeine helped.  By the time the gun went off, I was excited.  This was it!  What a day!  But then I started my usual routine of downing Gatorade at every station.  I didn't think it through; there was math involved, and under the circumstances, it was over my head.  In most races I've run, fluids are available every two miles.  In the Boston, it's every mile.  You are definitely not supposed to drink that much Gatorade.  Fifteen miles in, I had a colossal cramp and a sloshing belly.  I felt like a washing machine about to give out.

Not only that, but I was hitting my proverbial wall.  With a four-year-old at home, it had been hard to make time for 18-mile training runs.  I had only managed one or two of them before race day.  Now, with Heartbreak Hill looming, I felt like I had nothing left.  

I slowed down.  I walked.  I observed the passing Lycra.

In the end, my belly righted itself, my limbs regained strength, and I finished the race at a jog.  But I felt less than victorious, and certainly didn't re-qualify for the Boston.

This year, I ran hard from January to September.  I organized meetings, placed numerous calls to my Senators and Congressman using numbers programmed into my phone, wrote emails and letters, attended rallies, and of course kept up my blog.

And then, without warning, I was done.  It was like I had a finite amount of juice in my system, and I ran it down.  Or maybe it was like I overindulged, accepting way too many cups of this and that, unaware of the impending slosh.  At any rate, although I pulled off a few more actions in the eleventh hour, it was with a distinct lack of heart.  As I've said previously, I couldn't make myself care anymore.  I was ready for my Bailey's coffee, and a long nap.

To be honest, that's where I still am, to an extent.  But today, in Lexington, Kentucky, I'll be attending a rally to commemorate the first anniversary of the Women's March.  I haven't made any signs.  I don't have a special t-shirt to wear.  I don't have a megaphone, or any particular chants in mind.  I do have a pink pussy hat, which I will don for strength.  And I will gather strength from the women, men, and children around me, and try to return it in kind.

Despite my flagging pace, I'm not giving up my 52 Beads project.  I'll keep plugging away.  Maybe I'll reach my fifty-second action at the end of this year, maybe next.  Maybe there will be an impeachment, and my actions won't be necessary anymore.  Maybe they'll become even more necessary.

Sometimes I'll jog, sometimes I'll walk, and sometimes I'll nap.  But I'm keeping this bib on, and I'm staying the course.

 

Bead 25: Notes from the Road + National Park Price Hikes

On November 3, my son and I drove out of our neighborhood and down the road toward Madera.  That felt normal enough.  Living in the Sierra Nevada foothills, there are myriad reasons to descend to the Valley every now and then—Costco, Trader Joe’s, the airport, jury duty.  What didn’t feel normal that day was that, after a quick errand in Madera, we kept driving.  And driving.  And driving.  

We made it to Truckee that night; to Portland a few days later.  Then came Seattle, Bellingham, Ellensburg, La Grande.  Then Utah, New Mexico.  Still we kept driving. 

Five thousand miles later, I am finally catching my breath.  We aren’t home yet.  Actually, we are just the opposite: homeless.  We gave up our rental in California and have assumed a new, mobile life, stitching our way between friends and family all around the country, camping some, springing for Airbnb’s in the blank spots on the map, regions without loved ones.

Six weeks into our indeterminate journey, we have crossed fifteen states.  We have invaded nine households, lingering for two hours or two days; in one case, ten days.  Now we’re with my sister and her family in Kentucky.  The plan is to stay here for a full month, until after the New Year.  For once, I have fully extracted my clothes from my backpack and arranged them on hangers, in drawers.  I have joined a gym.  It feels good.

But the road feels good, too.  It’s what I chose.  Fall came, and like the Sierran songbirds, I knew it was time to move.  Unlike the songbirds, I had no idea where to go.  So I decided just to go around for a while, until our landing spot came into focus.

One of our temporary homes over the last 6 weeks, Gallo Campground in Chaco Culture National Historical Park, NM

One thing I have not done on the road is be political.  In fact, I’d estimate I fell off the wagon a full month shy of our departure date.  There were so many boxes to pack, logistics to manage, goodbyes to say.  What had earlier in the year felt like end times started to feel more like background noise.  I couldn’t make myself care anymore.  No matter what I did, there would be shitty new news everyday.

I felt a little guilty about letting my Beads lapse.  But just a little.  Wouldn’t it be fun, I thought, to try lighter writing?  I could start a new blog about our travels.  I would call it Roadstead, named for the fact that we are, amid all the visits and sightseeing, searching for our homestead.  Or I could not start a new blog.  I could just suddenly morph 52 Beads into Roadstead.  “And for my next Bead, I will buy a new traveling houseplant!”  That sort of thing.

But now, with time to breathe, I can feel my engine starting up again.  Not my four-cylinder Subaru engine; that’s thankfully cooling in my sister’s front yard.  My resistance engine.  I can’t say I’m feeling especially indignant or emotional about anything.  I’m not burning to pick up the phone or paint a sign, like before.  But I’m aware that, while I’ve been drifting, the world has continued to burn.  And I’m feeling ready to once again do my part. 

Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Culture National Historical Park, NM

 

Just before Thanksgiving, in Chaco Culture National Historical Park, I renewed my “America the Beautiful” pass.  That’s my annual $80 ticket to any National Park, National Monument, National Forest, or National Recreation Area I care to visit, good for me and whoever I can fit in my car.  It felt especially important to renew my pass right then because of the Department of the Interior’s October 24 proposal to more than double the entrance fees at our 17 top-revenue National Parks during peak visitation season.  I naturally expected price hikes for the annual passes, too.

“I have to buy this now, before it goes up to $150,” I said to the interpretative ranger who was running my debit card.

“Yeah, or $500,” he said.

As it turns out, the America the Beautiful pass will hold steady at $80.  But at Yellowstone, Yosemite, Glacier, and Arches, what was once an affordable family outing will become a luxury.  

It’s the latest assault by the Trump Administration on public lands.  It wasn’t enough for them to illegally shrink two of our National Monuments.  It wasn’t enough for them to expedite oil and gas development on BLM land, notwithstanding sluggish markets.  It wasn’t enough for them to tuck into their nearly-enacted tax bill a plan to drill 1.5 million acres of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, bucking majority American opinion after a four-decade fight.  

The new $70-per-car price tag at our most iconic parks will ensure a subtle demographic shift in park use as a whole.  Greater representation by foreign tourists, retired people, upper income earners.  Less representation by American families, millennials, the working class.

And once the demographics change, what sorts of tweets can we expect from our de facto President?

Real Americans say "been there, done that" to Grand Canyon!  Time to end welfare for washed-up National Parks.  LATER, LOSERS!

There's no doubt our National Parks need money.  The Trump Administration has proposed a budget of $2.6 billion for the National Park Service in fiscal year 2018, about 13 percent lower than the previous year.  The cuts mean less money to deal with maintenance backlogs, less money to keep up with current operations--and 1,200 lost jobs.  It's sink or swim for the NPS, and with the proposed entrance fee hikes, they are presumably trying to recoup their losses.

But there are other ways to get the money, other coffers to draw from.  Why do our parks get $2.6 billion per year while fossil fuel production gets subsidized to the tune of $20 billion?  And what about the U.S. military budget of $825 billion for fiscal year 2018? 

We are long overdue for a shakedown of our American values.

The National Park Service is accepting public comments on the entrance fee increases until December 22.  I submitted my comments today.  If I can come back from my two-month political hiatus and long-distance driving binge to do this, I know you can, too.  Check out this fact sheet on the rate increases and the affected parks.  Tell the National Park Service what your National Parks mean to you, and why they should stay in the hands of all Americans. 

Zac exploring an ancient room at Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Culture National Historical Park, NM

Bead 24: Generation Z

I've had a practice, as a mother, of taking my kid to places one doesn't normally see kids.  When he was born, I still had a couple of weeks left in my school semester.  No matter; I nursed him to sleep in physics class.  Just before his second birthday, he joined his dad and me for a long walk on the Appalachian Trail.  Shrouded in mosquito netting, and wearing diapers made of pack towels, he rode on my back for 700 miles.  As a toddler, he came with me to music festivals.  And while I was in graduate school, I once brought him to a keg party.  As I was tucking him into his sleeping bag in the backyard, a perpetually drunk and creepy classmate of mine leaned over us, and promised Zac a trip to a baseball game, along with his "babysitter" (me).  I stayed close to Zac the rest of the night.

Zac in his pack on the Appalachian Trail.

Zac is fourteen now, and gets more of a say on where he goes.  Since Inauguration Day, I've invited him to attend a dozen or so political affairs, including our local Women's March, a town hall, and numerous meetings of my peace group and environmental action team.  For some reason, he keeps turning me down.  It's not that he's not woke--he does fabulous impressions of our 45th president, cringes at the morning news, and relates with everything uttered by John Oliver.  It's just that he's, well, fourteen.  Meetings and marches are boring.

But a couple of weeks ago, I upped the ante.  I turned Congressman Tom McClintock's satellite office hours into a school assignment, and drug my sleepy-eyed ninth grader along.

My intentions were three-fold.  First, as a new homeschool parent, I was eager to round up real-world lessons for my son, experiences to personalize what would otherwise just be words on a page or screen.  Second, I wanted to get him out of the house.  We are, at this point, not affiliated with any homeschool charters or groups, and I am always conscious of the isolation factor.  Finally, I hoped Zac would find the civic engagement empowering.  Although I have no illusions that McClintock will enact any of my "radical leftist" ideas, I believe that what I say at his satellite office hours actually reaches his desk.  And that counts for something.

The day I brought Zac to McClintock's office hours, there were only six people in attendance, and the vibe was familial.  This many months into the new political renaissance, we mostly knew each other, and felt at home with Matt Reed, McClintock's field representative.  Although Matt's Twitter feed is disappointing, he has always been easy to work with and talk to, and today was no exception.

I had told Zac ahead of time that he wouldn't need to participate in the sound-off if he didn't want to.  After the meeting, to complete his assignment, he would need to email the Congressman about an issue of his choice.  But for now, he could just listen and take notes.

I should have known better.  Zac is opinionated, likes to talk, and is famously not-shy.  There was no scenario in which he would sit at a table buzzing with hot-button discourse, and not take part.

Moreover, Matt included him from the start.  He initiated the discussion by asking Zac what he thought of our government.  Zac answered confidently and precisely, as if he'd had time to prepare a response beforehand.  "I think we should do away with the electoral college," he said.  He went on to provide supporting details--the electoral college was established, many years ago, for an uneducated populace who couldn't be trusted to make informed voting decisions.  It had no place in the modern world, where inventions like the Internet supply a wealth of information on any candidate or issue we want to learn about.  In conclusion, it was obsolete, and should be dissolved.

Matt was impressed.  He complimented me on my homeschooling.  I explained that I couldn't take any credit, as I had only been his teacher for about two weeks.  He owed his big brains to--well, himself, and the good people at his K-8 school, from which he'd graduated in June.

After his initial stump speech, Zac made several quippy contributions.  Over the past few weeks, hurricane after hurricane had been ramming into the Caribbean and southeastern United States.  We naturally wanted to talk about climate change.  Matt naturally wanted to point out that McClintock, as a fiscal conservative, wasn't inclined to wreck the economy over something that was, in his world, still up for debate.  We countered with the reality that renewables are a burgeoning economic sector, and we risk getting edged out by China if we don't move forward.  Whereupon Zac said that favoring the development of fossil fuels over renewables, as most of McClintock's party seems to be doing, is as idiotic as Honda introducing a horse and buggy line. 

He got props for his wit.  One of my fellow cage-rattlers, Charlie, told Matt to "write that down and give it to your boss."

Later, we talked about debt.  Charlie was concerned about what he perceived as massive, and largely unwarranted, military spending.  Our wars in the Middle East had cost trillions of dollars to date.  We still had 30,000 troops in South Korea, a nation both economically stable and capable of defending itself.  And then there was the F35 program, which Charlie considered the poster-child of military waste.

He said that while our countrymen across the aisle liked to gripe about the "tax and spend Democrats," we needed to take a closer look at the "borrow and spend Republicans."

Here, Zac delivered another short treatise.  He said that debt was increasingly being treated as an asset.  Banks lend money to people, and benefit from the debts that accrue.  Similarly, corporations give money to politicians, and benefit when the politicians behave as though they are indebted to them.  He said it was like New Rome.  I am no history buff, and I didn't get the reference.  Possibly others didn't either, as there was no particular response from anyone.

After the fact, though, I did a little surfing, and learned that massive personal debt among Roman citizens contributed to the fall of the Empire.  The ruling class held the debts, and had the military at its disposal. Populist uprisings were quashed, and war tributes levied that only compounded the debts of the people.  By the second century A.D., one-quarter of the population was in bondage for unpaid debts.  Three centuries later, the economy collapsed and the Empire was finished.

It always smarts a little when your kid knows more than you do.

As we disbanded that day, Matt asked Zac what his favorite school subject was.  "Social studies," Zac replied, but quickly qualified that he didn't mean boring social studies, the kind with endless packets of photocopied text and busywork.  He meant homeschool social studies, in which you got to research famous assassinations.

Matt didn't act openly alarmed, but I did wonder if Zac's parting words could have landed us on The List.  Son of an obvious radical leftist issues a handful of his own radical leftist statements at a public forum, then reveals a personal obsession with assassination attempts.

Fortunately, assassination was not the theme of Zac's email to Congressman McClintock.  Instead, he reprised, in careful detail, his argument against the electoral college, and urged McClintock to consider introducing a bill to establish direct representation.

Those of us who live in California's 4th Congressional District know that McClintock only really considers what is already entrenched in his mind.  Still, I thought it was important to show Zac, my very own member of Generation Z, how it feels to get involved.  Speaking out for the first time, you may wonder where the words go once they've left your mouth.  Were they heard?  Do they make a difference?  But with more and more of us choosing to be outspoken, I feel it's only a matter of time.  We'll turn this thing around.

Zac on his last day of eighth grade.

Bead 23: Fire, Water, and a Night at the Movies

Here in the Yosemite area, Hurricane Harvey never made landfall.  Not only were our small mountain communities nowhere near the path of the storm, but the news of its destruction was, for the most part, an occasional flicker on our screens.  Not real.  What was real was what was outside:  Dense smoke, falling ash, and the nightly orange glow from the hilltops above our heads. 

In July there was the Detwiler Fire, which led to the evacuation of two entire towns just a short drive up the road from me, and the loss of nearly 60 homes.  In August there were the South Fork and Empire Fires of southern Yosemite, which closed roads and trails, and emptied out the park community of Wawona.  

Then, over the past two weeks, there were four more local flare-ups:  the Peak Fire near Bootjack, the Cathedral Fire near Midpines, the Mission Fire near North Fork, and the Railroad Fire near a slew of small towns:  Fish Camp, Sugar Pine, Oakhurst, and Ahwahnee.  Collectively, these fires displaced hundreds, if not thousands, of my neighbors, and destroyed about a dozen homes.  Two of my coworkers were evacuated for two separate fires.  I worried about evacuation myself; one night there was scanner traffic about a spot fire about a mile away from me, and I packed the car.  The fire was never mentioned again, and it eventually seemed clear that the location had been misreported.  Still, I got out of town.  With my son and my dog, I headed to my grandmother's home in Palo Alto, where the air was safe the breathe.

This photo was taken by Elva Gurule, age 12, as she and her family fled their home during the Mission Fire.

The fires in the southern Sierra are only a sliver of the larger conflagration that is this summer's American West.  In Montana alone, there are currently 45 fires reported as "active" on the federal fire tracker website.  More than 1 million acres, or slightly over an acre per Montana resident, has burned.  The state has long since drained its $32.5 million fire account.

In Oregon and Washington, states people typically think of as wet, federal fire incidents have consumed more than 800,000 acres this year.  The Eagle Creek Fire has the mile-wide Columbia River for a firebreak, and has nevertheless managed to scorch more than 30,000 acres, not to mention drift across the river to the Washington side.  I've hiked in the Eagle Creek area before.  It is all waterfalls and ferns, a thick world of evergreen.  Not fire country.

If it were only the fires, it would be one thing.  But it's not.  First there was Harvey.  Then Irma.  Then Jose.  The devastation bundled into these three back-to-back storms is unprecedented.  A full two weeks after Harvey's passage, more than 50,000 Texas residents remain in temporary housing.  An estimated 126,000 homes in Houston were "severely impacted" by Harvey, many to the point of being uninhabitable.  Irma's march through the Caribbean destroyed ninety-five percent of the structures on the islands of Barbuda and St. Martin.  In Florida, thanks to Irma, as many as 15 million people are without electricity. 

Scene from St. Martin after Irma plowed through.  Photo credit Daily Mail (UK).

To some, this simultaneous scourge of fire and water is mere coincidence.  For as long as there has been nature, there have been natural disasters.  Although it is highly improbable that so many disasters would affect so many parts of North America at once, statistics work in mysterious ways.  Nothing more to look at here.

Or if there is something more to look at--say, in the perspective of Congressman Tom McClintock of California's 4th District--it certainly isn't human-caused climate change.  Technically speaking, McClintock doesn't deny climate change.  In fact, he likes to say that it was he, and not Al Gore, who "discovered" it while on a class field trip to the American Museum of Natural History in 1964.  The dinosaur exhibits made him acutely aware of the earth's fluctuating temperatures.  End of story.  According to McClintock, the earth is up to its usual antics, warming and cooling.  It might be a bit hotter than usual these days, but that is only because the sun is hotter than it used to be.

McClintock's views on climate change are nicely summarized in a speech he delivered to the Heartland Institute in 2009, entitled Inconvenient Questions.  But McClintock's version of climate change is anything but inconvenient.  How handy to have an explanation for what is happening on the planet today without having to actually make any changes.  How handy to be able to retain our age-old allegiance to the bottom line.  McClintock's "theories" grease the cogs of the machine that keeps him in office. 

But as Al Gore and 97 percent of the world's climate scientists have long known, it is not the sun that is driving up global temperatures and increasing the frequency of apocalyptic fires and hurricanes.  It is people.  If we wish to continue inhabiting our planet, then we need to get busy.

This summer, Al Gore released a sequel to An Inconvenient Truth, his 2006 cinematographic wake-up call.  An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power summarizes Gore's work in recent years, and offers reasons to be hopeful.  Compared to its predecessor, the sequel focuses less on climate change itself, and more on the movement that has grown around it.  We see Al Gore roaming the world and recruiting "climate champions" to do the good work.  We see what climate action looks like--who the leaders are, where they come from.  We are taken to Paris in December 2015, when 195 countries came together to adopt a global action plan known as the Paris Accord.  We are shown how the deal was reached, against the odds and with some crafty eleventh-hour assistance from Gore himself.  We are, of course, also shown the rise of Trump and its fallout.  But the resounding moral is:  The people are awake now, and fighting for the planet.

Another Mission Fire photo taken by Elva Gurule, once she and her family were safe at the mill site in North Fork.

We have a movie theater in Oakhurst.  Established in 1986, the Met Cinema has long served as a hub in a town that can otherwise feel like a commercial strip for Yosemite tourists.  In 2013, when the theater was purchased by three local entrepreneurs, it became even more of a community centerpiece.  Operated on a subscription basis, the theater's members, or "Met Heroes," may see as many movies as they want for the equivalent monthly cost of less than two Fandango tickets.  For a small additional cost, members can bring guests--which encourages friends and neighbors to gather at the movies, a la Americana.  The lobbies are set up like living rooms, inviting conversation on either side of showtime.  My son and I have been Met Heroes since the subscription program was launched.  Even though there are months when we don't make it to the Met, my recurring $28 always feels like money well spent.

The Met mostly airs big studio movies, but also has room for an independent film here and there.  Often, these trend Christian and/or politically conservative, as that is the bent of the theater's owners--and frankly, the community at large.  But theater insiders have told me that the management team is always open to suggestions.  In a nutshell, they will play what people want to see.

My local peace group put this to the test recently.  At our August meeting, we circulated a handwritten "petition" asking Matt Sconce, one of the owners, to bring An Inconvenient Sequel to the Met, and pledging to come see it when it aired.  We gathered 28 signatures.  Many were theater members.  A couple days later, I strolled into the theater, intending to deliver the signatures to Matt.  I was told by my buddy Micah, who works there, that the sure-fire way to reach Matt was not at the theater, but on social media.

Bingo.  I messaged Matt, and had a response from him within a couple of hours.  He appreciated knowing there were so many members who wanted to see An Inconvenient Sequel, he wanted to show it, and he would do everything he could to make that happen.

Matt messaged me updates over the next week.  Finally, just six days after our original communication, there was this:  "It is coming in Friday!  Please spread the word.  I am hoping the people who asked for it will help by telling others and showing up."

My group organized two viewings of An Inconvenient Sequel at the Met.  Both times, we made sure Met Heroes were in hefty supply; that way we could bring the others in as our guests.  My son and I went to the second viewing, and filed in with nine guests in tow.  All told, there were probably 30 peace group members there that night.

An Inconvenient Sequel:  Truth to Power wasn't exactly what I thought it would be.  I was expecting a lot more science, a lot more nature gone amok.  I was expecting to be shown what the earth had been up to since the first movie was released.  Instead, I was shown what people concerned about the earth had been up to.  That was disappointing at first.  I'm not sure how hard I would have lobbied for a documentary that was largely about Al Gore.  But by the end of the movie, and certainly in retrospect, I appreciated having learned about the movement.

And I appreciated the positive message.  If nothing else, the film is a rallying cry to people who accept the reality of human-caused climate change to get out there, to be the boots on the ground our planet needs.  According to Gore, we won't be moving to any other celestial bodies any time soon.  The earth is our only home, he says, and we'd best look after it.

  

Bead 22: Coup d' éTom, Part 4

The venue was a bright pink house set low in the oaks flanking Nelder Creek.  The hosts were the lucky ones who recognized the unique value of the house when it went on the market a few years earlier.  Its previous owner had passed away, and the house had essentially been abandoned.  But its previous owner was also its architect, the renowned Allyn E. Morris, once an apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright.  And the architect was a genius.  The house had almost no right angles.  Outside it was all pink swoops.  Inside, curves and triangles of red, blue, and green.

It was civics that brought us to the bright pink house.  We were to be addressed by a candidate for Congress--a good, Democratic candidate, one that suggested far brighter horizons for our district than what we currently faced.  The candidate was Rochelle Wilcox.  She was one of four women vying for the prize against its incumbent, Tom McClintock, a political dinosaur.

Rochelle Wilcox addressing us at the bright pink house, August 5.

We gathered on the patio.  People sat in wrought iron chairs, camp chairs, folding chairs.  I sat on the low concrete bench that separated the patio from the long drop into the backyard.  The house was built on a hill.  Beneath its feet were rock slabs that ran down toward the creek.  Some of the rock had little tiles set in it--quaint, indecipherable messages from Allyn E. Morris.

The message from Rochelle Wilcox was loud and clear.  Tom McClintock had worn out his welcome in California's 4th Congressional District.  He needed to go--and she was the best-equipped to kick him out.  We pressed her on this.  Her three Democratic contenders--Jessica Morse, Regina Bateson, and Roza Calderon--had already come to to our little town to address us.  We liked them all.  What made her, Rochelle, the top pick?

For starters, Rochelle said, there was her electability.  As a media lawyer in a big L.A. law firm, she had high-powered connections.  Her fellow lawyers supported her bid for Congress, and would help her raise a lot of money.  And because she knew how to get through to conservatives, she could sway many of the undecided voters--particularly those dismayed by McClintock's willful neglect of the District.

Moreover, she said, she would be the most successful in the job.  Her two decades in law had prepared her well for lawmaking.  And she had an ability to work across the aisle without compromising the Democratic Party's core principles.

But there was a problem.  Rochelle's audience that evening was the Oakhurst Area for Peace, a group of mountain-dwelling people of conscience who came together last November, when the world suddenly seemed to go dark.  We found each other in the Red Sea that represents much of rural California, and hung on tight.  Since then, we've been pecking away at this strange new order we've been given.  Individually and collectively, we are trying to make a difference.

Although we understand it takes money and connections to get elected, those aren't the things that inspire us.  As one of my fellow peace group members put it at Jessica Morse's talk, "This is a Bernie crowd."  We are idealists.  We are wary of the establishment.  We grow our own food and cut our own firewood.  We support livable wages and healthcare for all, and wish that California would hurry up and become a sanctuary state.

What's more, in the current climate, I think many of us cringe a little when we hear Democrats talk about working across the aisle.  It's not that we want a divided, ineffectual Congress.  It's just that, since the election, there has been an open season on the sacred.  Civil rights, checks and balances, national monuments, public schools, and countless other American birthrights seem always at the brink of being gutted.  It feels like we need to defend our country from the other side of the aisle, not meet them in the middle.

So, when asked Why you?, the assets Rochelle Wilcox named might not have been the ones we OAP members prioritize in our candidates of choice.  But it was clear, throughout the rest of our evening at the pink house, that she was competent, well-informed, and a glowing alternative to Tom.

Raised by a single mom with the help of food stamps and other aid programs, Rochelle was keenly aware of economic inequality in our country, and wanted to do her part to mend it.  Key in this struggle, she said, was education.  Herself an alumnus of public schools and universities, Rochelle believed in public education and had ideas for how to improve it.  In particular, she said, it would be important to strengthen vocational training and early childhood education.

Another crucial step toward leveling the playing field in our country, she said, was health care.  If a person felt bound to their job because of the employer-sponsored health insurance that came with it, they might be missing out on opportunities for growth--say, by improving their education, or even by pursuing a better job.  To Rochelle, health care was a human right.  She was committed to universal health care, and had a plan for how to get us there.

The final piece of the puzzle, Rochelle said, was rural broadband.

Wait--rural broadband?  We scratched our collective heads on this one.  All four of the candidates had mentioned it in their talks, but it wasn't until Rochelle that we asked anyone to flesh it out.  What did rural broadband have to do with solving economic inequality?

Rochelle explained that with rural broadband came business.  New employers wouldn't turn their gaze toward Oakhurst if, like us, they had to contend with spotty, and often sluggish, Internet service.  Rochelle envisioned our mountain communities wooing the tech industry--but to be half-tempted, those companies would need to know they could function here.

Currently, Rochelle said, there is "a pot of money" available for rural broadband development, and Tom McClintock isn't doing anything to bring it to the District.  I looked this up.  Indeed, there appear to be myriad federal programs to bolster rural broadband, originating from offices as seemingly disparate as the Department of Commerce, the Department of Agriculture (USDA), and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

Rochelle Wilcox, like the other three Democratic candidates, lives in the 4th District.  Her L.A.-based firm allows her to work remotely from her home in Roseville.  This is would go without saying were it not for the fact that Tom McClintock doesn't have constituents for neighbors.  He lives down the hill in Elk Grove, away from mountain interests and livelihoods, away from the natural resources he claims to know so much about.  As a 7th District resident, he has never been able to vote for himself.

Also like the other three, Rochelle has an impressive resume.  She has worked at the same firm since she began practicing law in 1998.  Her firm's focus is the first amendment.  She generally works for media companies, pushing for increased government transparency and accountability.  She has represented the ACLU.  She has gone before the California Supreme Court.

In previous blog posts, I have attempted to quantify our congressional candidates' relative levels of qualification, for comparison purposes.  I've drawn some heat for this, as we don't all have the same opinion as to what the "most qualified" candidate looks like.  Is it Jessica Morse, the national security strategist with a decade of civil service under her belt?  Is it Regina Morse, the Ivy League professor of political science?  Is it Roza Calderon, the geoscientist and community organizer?  Or is it Rochelle Wilcox, the first amendment attorney?  I still have my pick.  You might have a different pick.  The bottom line is, any of these powerful women are light-years beyond the current fare. 

Rochelle Wilcox's campaign theme, "Building on Shared Values," seems to reflect her philosophy as a whole.  For most of the politically-charged issues out there, she said, there was a values-oriented way to bring people together.  For example, when it came to Planned Parenthood, she would emphasize the organization's role in providing basic health care.  For climate change, she would show how investing in green energy meant more American jobs.

This made sense to me--and, I assume, most of my fellow Oakhurst Area for Peace members at the pink house.  We might still feel like we're in the thick of the fight.  We might not feel inclined to offer an olive branch to the administration, and the movement, that keeps threatening to dump all the progress we've made as a society.  But when it comes down to it, I think most of us want to find common ground with our neighbors, and our fellow humans in general.

There are four Democrats who, in 2018, hope to go head-to-head with Tom McClintock in the battle for California's 4th Congressional District.  We won't see all their names on the general ballot.  If things go as they should, we won't see all their names on the primary ballot, either.  But in the meantime, Rochelle said, she was happy for the wide field.  Four good candidates roaming the District meant four times the number of bridges that could be built.  And for Rochelle Wilcox, building bridges is everything.

The bright pink house.  Photo courtesy of Lois Clarke.

When the evening's hosts bought the bright pink house, it was occupied by mice.  It hadn't been lived in by humans for four years.  They resuscitated it, redoing the paint and tile work, adding roof supports where necessary.  Today, it shines.  You can find it on architectural websites.  You can find it on Pinterest.  It is again loved, and lived in, and ever improving.

California's 4th District, like the pink house, is a treasure.  Also like the pink house, it has been neglected for some time, left to languish in the weeds.  Our current "representative" doesn't live here.  He has never lived here.  Our current "representative" only listens to those constituents he agrees with, the ones just about as far right as a person can politically swing.  But the 4th District is on the market.  In 2018, with any luck, it will be in capable new hands--those of Jessica, Regina, Roza, or Rochelle.  And the renovations will begin.