Standing Together: Secularists and the Religious

 

By Gary Berg-Cross

Although it wasn’t much covered in the national, corporate media thousands, perhaps 40,000 or more  people gathered in Washington, D.C. on a cold Sunday in February as part of the Forward on Climate Rally. Sponsored by 350.org and the Sierra Club and other environmental organizations it was a step to build an integrated movement. The immediate objective was to urge President Barack Obama to reject the 1,179-mile Keystone XL pipeline TransCanada application, to introduce measures to regulate carbon and take steps to mitigate the effects of climate change.

It was all there in the protest signs and their sighs of concern, anger and determination.

“We are unstoppable, another world is possible.”

Some held placards saying, "Read my lips: no new carbons," or as repeated by Bill McKibben "We're in a climate hole: stop digging."  An angry, in-your -face one read, "Don't be frackin' crazy." But most were more directly, focused and home grown,  “Act Now — Before It’s Too Late.”

 

The Huffington Post noted among the protesters were senior citizens in wheelchairs, a dad from Indiana carrying a toddler, women from a Unitarian church in Corvallis, Ore., and college students, including Florida's Molly Kampmann who was holding a picture of a pipeline with the caption: "This is why I'm hot."
Others dressed a protesting polar bears and listened to speakers who spoke of this in urgent terms that brings us together in the last seconds of the last quarter of a great and very human struggle.

There were all kinds of folk in DC to urge us to reduce dependence on fossil fuels and the first group I ran smack into were by the Metro stop on the mall. They were a happy, busy group from Christian social justice organization Sojourners ( 3333 14th St. NW, Suite 200 DC) and they were out in force.
Washington Sojourners support various progressive activities including the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, the Free South Africa movement, as well as opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sojourners CEO Jim Wallis spoke in 2010 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland about moral recovery for economic recovery in a talk “Rethinking Values in the Post-Crisis World.” – See the transcript which includes:

 ‘The bonuses are only a symptom of a deeper erosion of societal values.’ There are new maxims, which have overtaken us, like ‘greed is good’, ‘it’s all about me’, and ‘I want it now’. Those maxims wreak havoc with economies, cultures, families and our very souls.

From held signs my first impression of the rally is that it was a but reunion of  Unitarian Universalist Church chapters. South Church Unitarian Universalist was one of dozens of chapters who had organizing buses for members who wished to attend. The First Unitarian Society of Westchester in Hastings-on-Hudson there along with allies -  Thomas Berry Forum for Ecological Dialogue at Iona College in New Rochelle. 35 people, mostly students, had signed up at the college.

“There’s a very real concern and a very real eagerness for this generation to learn how to do citizen advocacy,” a Sister Kathleen Deignan said. “As the students say, this is the issue for their generation. It was indeed a millennial filled scene and full of youth. Our Task was handing out brochures about its July workshop for a Youth Plan B at GMU.  I enjoyed this mix as well as the secular-religious one They brought impassioned curiosity. It was a group of ad hoc freethinkers, bucking a naïve trend to follow a dumb consensus of inaction.  Nice birds to flock together with for obvious ideas that seem outrageous to the mislead many.

 The Interfaith Moral Action on Climate group was there and had urged members to:

 “ bring a group from your congregation to join religious communities from around our area and across the country in speaking out for creation at the Forward on Climate Rally on Presidents' Day weekend. Bring congregational banners and wear congregational T-shirts. Buddhists were there and, oh yes several of us from WASH.

I felt quite at home with good spirited folk of all kinds.  Some were from my generation and veterans of protest.  At the sight of one another we fell into easy conversation like old friends.  Some were from low-lying areas of the country bearing scared memories of Superstorm Sandy. "We're right in the path of sea level rise," said Mark Geduldig-Yactrosky of Portsmouth, Va., explaining his concern about climate change. "We're a low-lying area. We have rising oceans and subsiding lands. So that personalizes it for us."

The weather was cold but their stories were bright entertainment of the serious kind.  This wind? This is what climate change feels like, a New Yorker explained to me with charm and thoughtful cadence.

Burlington, Vt., resident Michael Ware, holding a "Stop Vermont Yankee" banner, said last year's extreme weather convinced many Americans that climate change is serious. "What will Vermont, what will any state, look like in 20 years?" he asked.

This is, as was said the most fateful battle that mankind will wage. And we do not stand fully alone as Linda Britt, who came from Ann Arbor, Michigan explained. Linda could stand others secular or religious who are grandparents like me.  We stand powerfully together when we understand what is important.

"I have six grandchildren, and I want them to have a habitable planet," Linda said.

Yes, Linda, it’s why I was there.  I was there for my/our grandkids.

Images

Chief Jacqueline Thomas, Saik’uz First Nation, speaks at the rally in Washington, DC, February 17, 2013 (Photo by Stephen Malagodi)

Children Attendees at the Feb. 17 Forward on Climate Rally. Photo by Jim Hall / Dayspring Earth Ministry

Rally photos: provide on Google Images

For my grandkids:  Collage by Gary Berg-Cross

Doing CO2 Math

By Gary Berg-Cross

The Do the Math Tour and Rally organized by 350.org blew into DC for a post-election  protest on Sunday Nov. 18, 2012. The Washington Post didn’t seem to cover it on a normal weather day.  The rally chanting "Forward to Clean Energy" included 3 thousand or so people and a symbolically inflated, plastic pipeline (for the Keystone pipeline that if approved would carry tar sans oil to a port).  The pipeline, lofted by protestors, was carried from Freedom plaza, across the ellipse and in front of the White House where the chants included "Hey Obama, we don't want no climate drama," and "Michelle Obama, tell your man, stop that dirty pipeline plan!." There people called on President Obama to reject the Keystone XL pipeline once and for all because it would open a vast new reservoir of carbon-based energy at a time when we need to be moving in the opposite direction - closing strip mines, offshore oil wells, and coal-fired power plants. This and other points were made by post-march speakers including Bill McKibben, Sierra Club President Allison Chin, Indigenous Environmental Network organizer Marty Cobenais, Gulf Coast activist Cherri Foytlin, and others.

The 21-city tour is yet another creative move from the mind and heart of environmental writer and activist Bill McKibben and worthy of note, so here are a few of the points it makes.

McKibben and his 350.org organization hopes the rallies and marches will ignite  groundswell of nationwide protest movement which in turn can be focused to pressure more traditional institutions to divest funds in the fossil-fuel industry and in the immediate stop the XL pipeline.

The challenge is great as past efforts since environmentalists and regular folk are:

“ up against the most profitable, powerful, and dangerous industry in history. But we have our own currency: creativity, courage and, if needed, our bodies." (McKibben quoted from his rally speeches)

Bill Clinton was able to make quite a point about arithmetic and things not adding up at the Democratice convention and environment Bill McKibben  used arithmetic to equal effect in Rolling Stone to discuss the  Global Warming's Terrifying New Math:

June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.

Now he adds year end stat that to this point 2012 has been the warmest year on record and points to a series of disasters (fires, floods, Sandy etc.) including “we melted the arctic this summer!” Former UN  Secretary General Kofi Annan has his own list:

 “Global warming is causing more than 300,000 deaths and about $125 billion in economic losses each year.” http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/science/earth/29climate.html

What to do and where to start?  The big new statistics  concerns CO2, fossil fuel use and what it will do to the climate:

Rally at Freedom Plaza

Rally Stage

There's more fossil fuels (nearly 2,230 gigatons more) that corporations want consumers to buy and burn than climate scientists says is safe to do if people want to live on a planet the climate-wise resembles the one we live on now.  Even the most conservative governments in the world, he argues, have agreed that global warming should be limited to no more than 2°C. And climate scientists say to meet that target we can only emit an additional 565 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2)  into the atmosphere. But how much fossil fuel is in the ground? The fossil fuel industry itself says there is about enough reserves of fuel to produce  2795 gigatonnes of CO2. It’s simple math.  There is about  nearly five times what will produce a dire atmosphere.  Do we have the wisdom and confidence to leave some 4/5ths of the reserves where it is?  The fuel industry & funded  friends have a business model that externalizes damages.  They want to burn it all as spend their profits looking for more. As Bill says, our grandchildren  looking back 50 or more from now won’t be asking what we thought of the fiscal slope or sex scandals.  They will be asking about our moral wisdom. They will want to know what were thinking, doing and planning when the climate was changing around us.

Oh,  and with this in mind there will be another rally in February on President's day weekend.  This will be organized by front-line groups like the Sierra Club, the oldest, largest and most influential grassroots environmental organization with 755,000 members, who will be driving the nation-wide efforts as a way of keeping pressure on Big Oil.

350.org is building a global movement to solve the climate crisis. You can connect with them on Facebook and Twitter, and sign up for email alerts.  

Images

Tour Logo: http://ecowatch.org/2012/350-org-launches-do-the-math-tour/

Bill McKibben speaking at NTC rally: http://www.flickr.com/photos/350org/8195858617/

Occupy Sandy: http://www.facebook.com/greenpeaceusa/posts/432317803489817

DC rally: picture taken by Gary Berg-Cross

New, but biologically Poorer ,World A-Coming?

by Gary Berg-Cross

We're heard bits and pieces of this before. Bill McKibben wrote on it in 1989 The End of Nature. More recently in Eaarth he asked us to:

" Imagine we live on a planet. Not our cozy, taken-for-granted earth, but a planet, a real one, with dark poles and belching volcanoes and a heaving, corrosive sea, raked by winds, strafed by storms, scorched by heat. An inhospitable place. It’s a different place. A different planet. It needs a new name."
There have been noted declines in some species which has evoked imagines of past mass extinctions, some of which seem to have been climate related. Anthony Barnosky, professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, was one of the voices on this topic earlier including his 2009 book, “Heatstroke. ” Well Barnosky and the hard science on the issue has moved along. Anthony Barnosky is now lead author of a review paper appearing in the June 7 issue of the journal Nature adds to the dark tipping point image of what we are facing in a few generations with both climate change and increased human population. The rate of species loss is faster than it ever has been over evolutionary history, especially if the species currently listed as “threatened” aren’t rescued.

ANTHONY D. BARNOSKY, source: University of California, Berkely

Mass extinctions for amphibians could take as little as 240 years, 540 years for birds, and 330 years for mammals.
"It really will be a new world, biologically, at that point. The data suggests that there will be a reduction in biodiversity and severe impacts on much of what we depend on to sustain our quality of life, including, for example, fisheries, agriculture, forest products and clean water. This could happen within just a few generations."
Mass extinctions seem especially likely for larger animals like tiger, elephants & bears, who are icons for us. There is also the problem of “shifting baselines”, where it depends on what we are comparing present conditions to. We may consider species richness to be quite normal now, when it is in fact very low, compared to pre-human times, based on the fossil record. So we start from a deficit.
One can't dismiss this paper authored by 22 internationally known scientists who describes an urgent need for better predictive models. Their detailed understanding is based on an empirical look back to how our biosphere reacted in the distant past to rapidly changing conditions. This includes a look at how climate affects human population growth.In the Nature paper they compared the biological impact of past incidences of global change with processes under way today and assess evidence for what the future holds. It's timely and will appear in an issue devoted to the environment just in advance of the June 20-22 United Nations Rio+20 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Of course the result of such a major shift in the biosphere would be mixed, with some plant and animal species disappearing, new mixes of remaining species, and major disruptions in terms of which agricultural crops can grow where. NASA-built Landsat missions confirm that more than 20 years of warming temperatures in northern Quebec, Canada, have resulted in an increase in the amount and extent of shrubs and grasses. It's good for the weeds too.