Stop the train, you're leaving

This afternoon I met with a staff member from the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, CCAN. I first really heard of CCAN at a free screening of an inspiring climate change movie that came out this past spring. That's also when I first learned about bomb trains and the work that CCAN was doing to stop them.

Bomb trains, or simply oil trains, are trains that transport crude oil from fracking fields and tar sands to ports where the oil can be refined and/or exported to the world market. These trains go through populated areas, and it's estimated that 25 million people in the U.S. live within one mile of tracks traveled by the trains (check out this interactive map, search by zip code and zoom out a bit, then check out Houston too...).

When I went to the film screening in downtown Baltimore, I parked next to an elementary school in a residential district. On the other side of the school were railroad tracks that oil trains travel on a regular basis.

This oil is considered extreme because it is particularly volatile. As Sierra Club director, Michael Brune, explains clearly in this article:

Two factors are responsible [for the danger of these trains]. One is the extreme volatility of fracked oil and tar sands oil. Both are extremely combustible, making them challenging to refine and dangerous to transport. 

The other factor is the aging and inadequate infrastructure of a rail system that was never designed to carry such hazardous cargo. As a result, the U.S. had a total of 144 oil train incidents last year [2015]. In 2009 there was only one.

CCAN has so far been effective in preventing at least one Baltimore crude port from being developed, they're working to educate the public and lobby politicians, and they hold monthly meetings/trainings for those interested in fighting this and other unequal dangers that many of Maryland's citizens face. (Check out CCAN's overview of their Baltimore oil train fight here.)

CCAN is also doing work to ban fracking in Maryland, expand Maryland's renewable energy standard, and provide access to community solar power. Their next meeting is Wednesday August 31 from 6-8 (always the last Wednesday of each month).

I am glad to continue to learn about issues that impact so many people and for which solutions exist. I feel blessed to have met Jam from CCAN today, to grow my tribe with one more inspired, passionate, and caring human.

Our words will be elemental

This morning we sat on the dock here in Maine, and through the filters of my sunglasses I watched the sun reflected a thousand times in little waves that danced at the lake's inlet. Now, sitting in front of a stone fireplace, looking over my shoulder at a rising, nearly full moon reflected in the waves at that same inlet, I get the added bonus of the chorus of a hundred crickets, Beethoven on my laptop speaker, and our neighbors wrapping up conversations as they say their goodbyes. And this is after stepping from a magical, little, wooden restaurant/bar with an old dude playing his 12-string and singing a complement to the camaraderie among strangers. Topping it off was the look in my son's eyes and the creativity of his sentences as we played cards waiting for dinner to come out.

I'm pretty moved right now thinking about these moments from today, all fairly short and wholly wonderful. So it's partly with reluctance and partly in defense of those moments that I now turn again to The Dithering:

"Despite 50 years of growing scientific consensus, the warming of the earth continues unabated. Well-funded lobby groups have sowed doubt among the public and successfully downplayed the urgency of the threat. Meanwhile, geopolitics has impeded the development of an effective global response."

- Stefan Rahmstorf, Professor of Physics of the Oceans

For a month or so now I've written that I think the most important step that we can take for the future of life is to talk about climate change. I've also mentioned a couple times that the source of the issue is our exploitative, extractivist, consumerist culture.

With a concern for seeming to over-simplify large and challenging issues, I want to express three things:

1. Our ecological and social problems result from our exploitative consumerism. 
2. Avoiding dealing with present problems carries them into the future.
3. We could solve all our problems by building our individual and collective integrity to a level of impeccability.

A plan of action: talk about climate change and other social and ecological issues as being results of industrial capitalism (it's inherently exploitative); vote for candidates who will build momentum in the right ecological direction (like Clinton) while knowing that extremely little gets accomplished on election day. 

"We will not lose ourselves in the elaboration of theories or ideologies. Our words will be elemental."

- Uncivilization, the Dark Mountain Manifesto 

The intrusion of freedom

"It is the intrusion of human freedom and responsibility that makes economics metaphysically different from physics and makes human affairs largely unpredictable."

- E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful

I think that one of the appealing aspects of science is that it predicts the future. Here we have a situation with known present conditions, and with documented principles and mathematical relationships we can reliably predict the future conditions of the situation.

It's enjoyable, it's seductive, and it's satisfying. For me at least. Usually.

However, as simple as it is for many of us (scientists and engineers, really) to find hope in reducing existence to physical and biological principles and mathematical relationships, in doing so we neglect the value of human volition in making our future quite unpredictable.

Unfortunately, "most people, most of the time, make no use of their freedom and act purely mechanically," Schumacher writes.

What's important to get, though, is that to Schumacher predictability isn't necessarily the absence of freedom. Predictability in human action is "when we or others are acting according to a plan." 

When we look to the future and see rising seas, climatic changes in food production and pests, less clean water, more pollution, etc., we see the results of mechanically following the plan laid out for us by an exploitative, consumerist economy. To create a (predictably) better future for more human and non-human life than this vision suggests, we need to follow a new plan.

"A plan is the result of an exercise in the freedom of choice," he writes. It just happens that we tend to predictably choose "the behaviour pattern of very large numbers of people doing 'normal' things."

"The problem comes when we begin responding to social proof in such a mindless and reflexive fashion that we can be fooled by partial or fake evidence."

- Robert Cialdini, Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion

There may be large-scale devastation in our lifetimes, there may not be. There will at least be small-scale devastation during our lives and large-scale devastation over the long-haul for our species and others. Why not move in a healthier direction now in support of life?

What to do (any order works):

• Educate yourself
• Talk about it with anybody: “The most cost-effective way to reduce CO2 emissions is to reduce the use of coal first and most sharply.” Oh, and natural gas is a bad substitute.
• Join the movement

Thanks for reading!

"The task is formidable indeed, but the resources that are waiting to be mobilised are also formidable."

 - E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful