Walking Unafraid in a Frightening Time

The saying holds that people who keep their heads while everyone else loses theirs don't understand the situation. My experiences this summer taught me that the people who don't lose their heads might just understand the situation as fully as possible.

I spent the summer amid the sound of First Aid Kit, a Swedish folk band with a flair for Americana, and the fury of a Pacific Northwest burning in the face of global warming. We typically overcome the kind of sadness and fear associated with watching a beloved place shrivel up and incinerate by turning away from the most terrifying details. As much as I might have liked to do that at the beginning of the summer, by the end, I realized that this time (and from now on), I would, as First Aid Kit's song says, "Walk unafraid."



I bought the song, which comes from the soundtrack of Wild, along with the band's Stay Gold album in early May before I returned home for summer vacation. The music became the soundtrack of a summer that contained equal parts devastation and empowerment. I listened to very little else, but the songs never faded. They played in my head through adventures that filled my heart and events that broke it.

I saw Mount Rainier, Mount St. Helens, and Olympic National Park with lyrics like those from My Silver Lining echoing in the vastness of the extraordinary scenery. I watched the overwhelming heat of July bring a usually vibrant ecosystem to its knees and August's wildfires and their accompanying smoke finish the job with merciless suffocation. By that time, Fleeting One, the eighth track on Stay Gold seemed all too appropriate.

Still, I never turned away or tuned out. I took it all in. I reached a point where I knew and could feel everything that was happening. I could tell how close the land and plants were to breaking. Several times, I just had to cry. Then, a strange thing happened: Out of the chaos came the confidence of clarity. I'd played Walk Unafraid so many times in those three months, but suddenly, I was doing what the song said. I understood the situation fully, and I met it head on.

Trees had already started dying on my parents' property by August 2 when I turned on the sprinkler for the first time. We haven't watered our yard for years, but we still have a good sprinkler and some long hoses. During the next two weeks, I used them to get water to the native trees and plants on the property. At first, I wasn't sure if I was having any positive effect or merely tilting at windmills. I didn't even know how to feel when I read that Olympic National Park was also using sprinklers on its forests. Suddenly and unexpectedly though, the weather shifted in the slightest of ways. A bit of rain fell, and the temperatures cooled a little. Combined with my efforts, these changes helped the local plants revive. I felt the satisfaction of knowing a situation, responding to it, and making a contribution.

Although the last images I saw of the Pacific Northwest as I drove east for the school year were shrouded in smoke, I looked upon them without flinching. Those scenes would have torn me apart before. This time, they hurt, but I also knew nothing could break my connection to that place or my commitment to helping it as we face global warming together.

It's the same effect that occurs when music puts people in sync, and it's only possible when everything (joy, sadness, fear) is fully experienced.

Cat's Cradle

The cat has my tongue, but it also has a safe place to live.

Eight years ago, my family adopted a rescue cat. It had gone through some traumatic experiences, so it didn't really like people. We tried everything to help it feel safe and allow it to adjust. Nothing worked. In fact, the more we tried to help, the more negatively the cat responded, and introducing anything new was an instant and total disaster.

Meanwhile, I had been talking with my parents about building a catio, which is an enclosed, outside area (often connected to the house) for cats. We'd had some issues with coyotes, and the cats were killing birds, lizards, snakes, and other wild animals. The rescue cat was one of the main concerns about having a catio though. He hated being inside, and about the only thing he seemed to enjoy was roaming around. Finally, my mom decided to build a catio (it wasn't actually connected to the house, so it was more like a kennel for cats).

When the catio reached completion, we all cringed to think about the rescue cat's reaction. We figured it would be a daily fight to keep him there, but he stunned us all. He loves it and feels safe there. For the first time, he doesn't run for cover when people are around. He's so comfortable there that even when the door of the catio is left open, he doesn't think about leaving. It's his special place.

The catio provides everything our cats need. It is sheltered, they get food and water, and it has wire runs for them to explore and use for exercise. Above all, they are safe, and having them there keeps the wildlife safe as well. We have seen so many more animals around the house, and it has been nice just to appreciate the beautiful birds instead of worrying about the cats killing them.

I can't say enough about the benefits of the catio, but when it comes to how it has helped our rescue cat, I am almost speechless.

Cause and Possibility

We're told to think big. We have a lot of practice thinking about now. However, we need to work on thinking long--as in long-term. DamNation, a documentary about dams, shows us how and gives us a sense of what is possible when we do. Check out the trailer for the film below:



Many people who study communication or engage in communication as a profession are interested in effects. They want to know what effect a piece of communication has caused or will cause. Such an approach to communication yields a lot of great information, particularly about the now and the short-term. The problem is that it tends to miss some of the bigger, long-term picture. Environmental advocates often despair over a campaign not generating immediate results, yet failing to produce an immediate effect does not mean an act of communication cannot have an impact. That's because not all reactions are produced right away. Sometimes, communication is about opening up possibilities for the future.

Rhetoric provides an opportunity to probe beyond direct and immediate effects. As DamNation, which is presented by clothing manufacturer Patagonia, beautifully demonstrates, the apparent initial failure of some communication isn't the end of the story. Rhetorical symbols like cracks painted on dams were seen as radical, fringe ideas in the 1990s. However, that symbolic act created a foothold for an idea (removing dams) that is becoming more mainstream--to the point that people are embracing and putting their own stamp on the activist art. Now, it's the dams and their environmental impacts that are questioned.

DamNation also reminds us that environmental issues are big and require long-term thinking as well. We created dams to address immediate needs but failed to consider the larger repercussions. That failure led to major problems. Clearly, we can't address the environment only in the short-term, and we shouldn't look at communication that way either.

Thinking big got us dams. Thinking now makes us miss so much. And thinking long has major possibilities.

Farewell Tour

Recession of the Nisqually Glacier at Mount Rainier

When I came home to Washington state this summer, I said goodbye.

Early in the spring semester while working at the University of South Dakota, I started making plans for my summer in Washington. I wanted to go back to Olympic National Park and Mount St. Helens. Also, I wanted to visit Mount Rainier for the first time. That mountain had watched over so much of my life, but I had never been up to it.

Accompanied by my family, I was able to keep all my plans, and I had a great time doing it. Still, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was losing old friends and the state where I grew up.

Global warming is tearing apart my home state this summer with drought and heat. Two weeks after I visited Olympic National Park, one of the wettest places in the world, a massive fire started there. Days before I visited Mount St. Helens, the state Department of Ecology declared that Washington's snowpack was at zero percent of normal levels. Sure enough, the only snow I saw on that trip was at the top of St. Helens and in the volcano's shaded crater. Then, days before I went to Mount Rainier, a news story ran about the mountain's disappearing Nisqually Glacier. I was sure to take pictures of the glacier and its recession on my trip because I wasn't sure how many more chances I'll get to see it.

I was glad about my choice to visit these icons of Washington this summer. Global warming is changing them, and I needed something of the way they were to keep as a last memory. That's what we must do when we say goodbye.

Rain, moderate temperatures, snow: The band has broken up in Washington, and in the words of singer Michelle Branch, "Goodbye to you. Goodbye to everything that I knew. You were the one I loved, the one thing I tried to hold onto."

The Party's Over

Global warming has turned out the lights on a family tradition, another sign the place I love more than any other has changed drastically.

For as long as I can remember, my family has hosted an Independence Day party, and for just as long, the party has ended with a fireworks display. Each year, the children in the family bring their fireworks and light them off after dark, a practice I once lived for and which I now supervise. We always save the biggest firework for last so that the family can howl at it in memory of my dog, a rare animal who loved the colorful explosions.

This year, the family will get together as usual, but we won't have any fireworks. With the entire state of Washington in drought and a record heat wave strangling the area for more than two weeks, we made the sad decision to eliminate fireworks from our party.

Losing the fireworks themselves isn't what makes me saddest--it's what the loss symbolizes: the break in a shared family experience and a major shift in Washington's climate. The lack of snowpack, which triggered the drought and which I blogged about last month, and the record temperatures relate to a Pacific Ocean that is two degrees warmer than normal, and the result is an early-July Washington I don't recognize. Everything is brown and withered--a sight more typical of August than this time of year.

When everyone leaves our party on Saturday without a climactic fireworks display, I won't recognize that either. The event brought people together just before they went their separate ways for the nearly six months until the holidays. Now, a simple goodbye will have to suffice.

Above all, to me, the canceled fireworks suggest that until we address global warming, we'll lose more than we celebrate.

Make No Mistake

I didn't have to see it to believe it, but seeing it was profound.

Yesterday, on my flight back to Washington state from a conference on environmental communication, I saw a much different home state than I am used to seeing.

Global warming has already made huge impacts around the world. Washington has certainly seen some changes as well. For example, larch trees in the mountains have expanded their range up the slopes, last year's wildfire season was one of the worst yet, and oyster farmers have had to face ocean acidification. However, for the most part, the impacts of global warming in Washington have been gradual.

All that changed last winter when the state's snowpack failed to develop as usual. In January, unseasonably warm weather wiped out much of the early snowfall, and those same temperatures prevented more snow from accumulating. For much of the winter, the snowpack was less than 25 percent of normal. It is now at zero percent (that's not a misprint) of the usual level. As the state's Department of Ecology says, "It's gone." And that's what I saw yesterday.

As the snowpack failed throughout the winter, I knew something major was happening. This wasn't one of those gradual changes. It was quick, big, and monumental. I sensed the loss of the Washington I grew up in. Yesterday's flight merely provided the disheartening visual confirmation of my intuition. At the same time, what I saw yesterday reinforced the need to address global warming immediately and fully.

We've made a lot of mistakes on our way to this warming planet we currently live on, and the effects of those mistakes are unmistakeable. The margin of error is gone, and it's time to do it right.

Still ARFing

Two of the things I remember from my childhood are loving animals and rooting for the Oakland Athletics baseball team. The two might not appear related, but they are.

At the time, the manager of the A's was Tony La Russa, an animal advocate I previously blogged about when he retired from managing in 2011. Two weeks ago, La Russa and his Animal Rescue Foundation (ARF) celebrated the 25th anniversary of the event that sparked this baseball man to action on behalf of animals.

During a game on May 7, 1990, a stray cat found its way onto the field at the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum. La Russa helped secure it, and after the game, he worked to find it a home. In searching out a home for the cat, which was named Evie, he discovered the lack of no-kill shelters in the Oakland area. As a result, he and his wife went to work starting ARF.

La Russa left Oakland to manage the St. Louis Cardinals following the 1995 season, but his organization and his work for animals continue today. Since 1991, ARF has found homes for more than 30,000 dogs and cats. For more information about ARF, click here.

La Russa managed a lot of successful teams, but rooting for them was even more fun because I knew he loved animals.

Taking the Initiative on Carbon

Sometimes, you just have to take the planet into your own hands.

With conservatives in the state legislature repaying their energy-industry supporters by blocking Governor Jay Inslee's bold cap-and-trade plan, residents of Washington have launched an initiative to institute a state carbon tax. Carbon Washington, the group that created the initiative, is currently collecting signatures to put their plan on the ballot.

The proposed carbon initiative, which would place a $25-per-ton tax on carbon pollution while lowering existing state taxes (including a one-percent drop in the sales tax), isn't as elaborate as Inslee's cap-and-trade system. However, the results from British Columbia, which has a nearly identical carbon tax, show that carbon taxes are still very effective at reducing carbon pollution and help maintain a strong economy.

Washingtonians know it's time to put a price on carbon. Carbon Washington's plan does this and places pressure on legislators currently obstructing the proposed cap-and-trade system. When the initiative has enough signatures, it asks the legislature to pass the carbon tax. If the legislature fails to do that by the end of the 2016 legislative session, the initiative goes to the ballot for a public vote in November 2016. For more information about the carbon tax, click here.

Be on the lookout for Carbon Washington's signature gatherers, and let's put the planet in good hands.

Our Worst Idea

In documenting how our national parks represent America's best idea, filmmaker Ken Burns also gave us a glimpse of what our thinking looks like at its worst, and another example of this poor thinking has arisen at Olympic National Park in Washington state.

The United States Navy seeks to turn the park into a venue for its war games. This plan threatens the park's ecosystem, wildlife, and human visitors with noise and electromagnetic weapons (click here for a more detailed news story about it). It also puts at risk the cherished idea that our national parks represent.

Six years ago, in The National Parks: America's Best Idea, Burns demonstrated how the creation of the parks brought to the world a new combination of democracy, environmental protection, and civic duty. The parks came from public land, helped protect species and ecosystems, and gave generations of Americans something to pass down to those that followed them.

Burns' documentary also captured the constant threat facing the parks. From the start, people have looked for ways to exploit the national parks for personal gain. This self-centered approach to a social institution and an environmental cornerstone has placed several of the parks, including the Grand Canyon, on the verge of destruction at various times in the past. Through a simple application of logic, it is our worst idea, and the Navy's war-games plan is the latest incarnation of it.

One of the biggest lessons from the Burns documentary is that the idea of the national parks as well as the parks themselves must constantly be defended. In this spirit, a petition has been created to challenge the Navy's proposal for using Olympic National Park. To sign it, click here.

When it comes to our national parks, we deserve the best.

This Bear is Just Right

Something's been missing from the North Cascades in Washington state, and here it is: the grizzly bear.

Although grizzlies aren't associated with the Pacific Northwest the way species like the orca and salmon are, the North Cascades represent an important habitat for the bears, a native species that hasn't been recorded in the area for several years. Because of this, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife, and the United States National Park Service are working together on a plan to recover the population in the North Cascades. A public comment period for the plan runs through March 26.

Conservation Northwest, a region environmental organization, supports the proposed plan and encourages the public to comment in favor of it. The organization provides information that can help individuals put together and submit their comments. That information can be accessed here. Conservation Northwest also has a video about the recovery plan. View it below:



As the video demonstrates, despite not receiving a lot of attention as a species of the Pacific Northwest, the grizzly occupies a key part in the North Cascades ecosystem and in the identity of the region. Allowing this PNW native to disappear forever from Washington certainly wouldn't be right.

Use the link on Conservation Northwest's Web site to make a comment in support of grizzly recovery and let them again sleep in their beds in the North Cascades.