Unto the breach

Today I dodged a battle on social media, and I honestly don't know if it makes me a coward or just someone who tries to be prudent about which battles are even winnable.

The person in question, an acquaintance I only know through a mutual friend but who connected to me a couple of years ago for reasons unknown, has thrown out some questionable stuff before, but nothing as bad as this.  "There aren't many genders," she posted.  "There are TWO genders and many mental disorders."

After I stopped seeing red enough that I could tell what was on my computer screen, I pondered a variety of responses I could have made.  Among the top contenders:

• "Wow, that's some weapons-grade stupidity, right there."
• "Do you realize what a narrow-minded bigot this makes you sound like?"
• "Get off your fucking high horse and do some research."

Then I calmed down a little more, and considered other, potentially less obnoxious responses:

• "Maybe before you post stuff like this, you should talk to someone who is trans and get actual information on what it's like."
• "I believe the Bible you claim to be so fond of has a lot more to say about charity, kindness, and passing judgment than it does about the biology of gender.  You should reread those verses."
• "I hope like hell your grandchildren don't turn out to be LGBTQ.  For their sake, not for yours."

But finally I said nothing, and unfriended her.

I know it's the duty of every responsible person to confront racism, homophobia, bigotry, narrow-mindedness, and general idiocy.  Not doing so, leaving this kind of thing unchallenged, gives it tacit permission to continue.  I never would have let something like this go in my classroom; the few times I ever got really, truly angry at students during my 32 year career were over issues like this.

But lord have mercy, I am tired.  I'm tired of seeing this kind of bullshit trumpeted as if it was a proclamation of an eternal truth.  I'm tired of trying to convince the anti-vaxxers and climate change deniers, the nitwits who claim the election was stolen and that Trump is the Second Coming of Jesus, the people who believe that the January 6 insurrectionists were Antifa and liberals in disguise.

Plus, there's the question of what good it would have done if I had confronted her on her nasty, sneering post.  She barely knows me; I think we've maybe talked in person once.  Since then I've had zero interactions with her, online or anywhere else.  Why would she listen to me?  More likely she'd write me off as another godless liberal, getting all bent out of shape because she dropped a Truth Bomb on me.  What is the chance that anything I could have said, polite or rude, would have changed her attitude one iota?

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Blaine A. White, The Argument 01, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Still, I can't help but feel that I took the coward's way out.  If I'm not going to challenge stupidity and bigotry, it kind of gives lie to the entire raison d'être of this blog I've written so diligently on for the last ten years.  Every time we let someone like her get away with something like this unchallenged, it does double damage -- it further convinces any LGBTQ people who read it that they don't have (or aren't deserving of) unequivocal support, and it gives any other bigots in the studio audience free license to perpetuate their own hateful views.

So I dodged my responsibility, and I'm still feeling a little sick about it.  I'm not going to go back and re-friend her just to have an opportunity to say, "Oh, and about that post...!", and I guess there's an outside (probably minuscule) chance that when she sees she's lost friends over it, she might reconsider.

But I still think I made the wrong decision.

Right now, I'm taking a deep breath and recommitting myself to fight like hell against this sort of thing.  I can't let bigotry slide, excuse it by saying "it's just their religion/politics/age," give it a pass because I'm afraid of what they might say in response or who else I might piss off.  Okay, I'm tired, but it's still a battle worth fighting -- and one that can be won, but only if we refuse to accept prejudice and hatred every damn time we see it.

Shakespeare put it far more eloquently, in Henry V:

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Let pry through the portage of the head
Like the brass cannon; let the brow o'erwhelm it
As fearfully as doth a galled rock
O'erhang and jutty his confounded base,
Swill'd with the wild and wasteful ocean.

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One of the most devastating psychological diagnoses is schizophrenia.  United by the common characteristic of "loss of touch with reality," this phrase belies how horrible the various kinds of schizophrenia are, both for the sufferers and their families.  Immersed in a pseudo-reality where the voices, hallucinations, and perceptions created by their minds seem as vivid as the actual reality around them, schizophrenics live in a terrifying world where they literally can't tell their own imaginings from what they're really seeing and hearing.

The origins of schizophrenia are still poorly understood, and largely because of a lack of knowledge of its causes, treatment and prognosis are iffy at best.  But much of what we know about this horrible disorder comes from families where it seems to be common -- where, apparently, there is a genetic predisposition for the psychosis that is schizophrenia's most frightening characteristic.

One of the first studies of this kind was of the Galvin family of Colorado, who had ten children born between 1945 and 1965 of whom six eventually were diagnosed as schizophrenic.  This tragic situation is the subject of the riveting book Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family, by Robert Kolker.  Kolker looks at the study done by the National Institute of Health of the Galvin family, which provided the first insight into the genetic basis of schizophrenia, but along the way gives us a touching and compassionate view of a family devastated by this mysterious disease.  It's brilliant reading, and leaves you with a greater understanding of the impact of psychiatric illness -- and hope for a future where this diagnosis has better options for treatment.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

 

Greta of the Yukon

If you needed more evidence of how little it takes to get the woo-woos leaping about making excited squeaking noises, look no further than this photograph, which they're saying proves that Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg is a time traveler.

Okay, I'll admit there's a resemblance.  For reference, here's a photograph of the real Greta Thunberg:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons European Parliament, Greta Thunberg urges MEPs to show climate leadership (49618310531) (cropped), CC BY 2.0]

The first image is real enough; it's not a clever fake.  It's a photograph of children working at a Canadian placer gold mine, and was taken in 1898.  The original photograph resides in the archives of the University of Washington, and carries the description, "three children operating rocker at a gold mine on Dominion Creek, Yukon Territory."

This is not the first time this sort of thing has happened.  Previous iterations include an 1870 photograph proving that Nicolas Cage is an undead vampire, and a self-portrait by nineteenth-century French painter Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel showing that he's the same person as Keanu Reeves.  What's simultaneously hilarious and maddening about this last claim is that okay, the painting looks a little like Reeves, but later photographs of Boutet de Monvel (which you can see at the link provided) look nothing like him at all.  Which you'd think would make the woo-woos laugh sheepishly and say, "Okay, I guess we were wrong.  What a bunch of goobers we are."  But that never happens.  I'll bet some of them think Reeves realized people were catching on to his undead-ness and arranged for pics to be taken of some other guy that then were labeled with Boutet de Monvel's name.

Because there's no claim so ridiculous that you can't change it so as to make it even more ridiculous.

Lest you think I'm exaggerating how loony these claims get, back to the non-Thunberg photo, which has generated two explanations, if I can dignify them by that term:

1. Thunberg was a child in late nineteenth-century northern Canada, was forced to work in a gold mine, and was so appalled by the environmental destruction caused by mining that she either time-traveled into the future or else figured out how to achieve immortality and eternal youth (sources differ on which), and is now bringing that first-hand knowledge to us so we can potentially do something about it.
2. Thunberg actually is a twenty-first-century Swedish person, but has figured out how to travel in time so she can go back and sabotage mining operations and save the present from the devastation done by industry in the past.  She got caught at her game by a photographer back in 1898.

What strikes me about both of these, besides the fact that to believe either one you'd have to have a pound and a half of lukewarm cream-of-wheat where most of us have a brain, is that if either of these is Thunberg's strategy, it's not working.  If she's a poor mining kid from 1898 and has come into the future to warn us, mostly what's happening is that government leaders and corporate CEOs are sticking their fingers in their ears and saying "la la la la la la la not listening," while they proceed to continue doing every damnfool destructive thing they've always done, only harder.  If, on the other hand, today's Thunberg is going back into the past to throw a spanner into the works of the mining corporations, it had zero effect, because if you'll look carefully at the history of mining for the last 120 years, you will not find lines like, "Between 1900 and 1950, thirty-seven different mining operations all over North America were shut down permanently, because a mysterious teenage girl with a long braid snuck in and dynamited the entrance to the mining shafts, then disappeared without trace."  

So okay, the girl looks a little like Thunberg.  I'll grant you that.  But the claim that she is Thunberg makes me want to weep softly while banging my forehead on my desk.  It seems like the woo-woos have espoused some kind of anti-Ockham's-Razor; given a variety of explanations for the same phenomenon, let's pick the one that is the most ridiculous and requires a metric fuckton of ad hoc assumptions.  

I'll just end by stating that if I'm wrong, and Thunberg is an immortal time-traveler, I wish she'd stop wasting her time in the hopeless task of trying to convince the money-grubbing anti-science world leaders we need to stop burning fossil fuels, and go back in time with blueprints for high-efficiency solar cell technology.  Give 'em to Nikola Tesla.  I bet he'd know what to do with them.

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I have often been amazed and appalled at how the same evidence, the same occurrences, or the same situation can lead two equally-intelligent people to entirely different conclusions.  How often have you heard about people committing similar crimes and getting wildly different sentences, or identical symptoms in two different patients resulting in completely different diagnoses or treatments?

In Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, authors Daniel Kahneman (whose wonderful book Thinking, Fast and Slow was a previous Skeptophilia book-of-the-week), Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein analyze the cause of this "noise" in human decision-making, and -- more importantly -- discuss how we can avoid its pitfalls.  Anything we can to to detect and expunge biases is a step in the right direction; even if the majority of us aren't judges or doctors, most of us are voters, and our decisions can make an enormous difference.  Those choices are critical, and it's incumbent upon us all to make them in the most clear-headed, evidence-based fashion we can manage.

Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein have written a book that should be required reading for anyone entering a voting booth -- and should also be a part of every high school curriculum in the world.  Read it.  It'll open your eyes to the obstacles we have to logical clarity, and show you the path to avoiding them.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The mad clockwork

I am fundamentally an optimistic person.

I know that might be surprising, given that I frequently write here at Skeptophilia about the absolute mind-bending stupidity humans sometimes come up with.  Even so, I'm firmly of the opinion that most people are decent and kind, and just want what everyone wants -- stability, the basic necessities of life, friendship and family, acceptance, support.  Traveling as much as I have reinforced that; everywhere I've gone, even to places where the culture is entirely different from the one in which I was raised, I've found that friendliness is reciprocated and most people I meet are basically good at heart.

But if there's one thing that I can identify as a pervasive flaw in the human psyche, it's our determination to keep doing things the way we've always done even after it's been demonstrated beyond any doubt that it's not working, or is causing actual problems, sometimes worse ones than the ones we're solving.  Two obvious examples come to mind, and are probably the same ones you'd come up with.  Climate change -- after all, Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius told the world about the greenhouse effect in the 1890s, and theorized that burning fossil fuels would boost the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere and raise temperatures.  So it's not exactly a new idea.  Scientists have been recommending a severe cutback on fossil fuel use since the 1970s.

And yet here we are.

The other one is of more recent vintage, and is the recommendation by medical professionals to wear masks and avoid gatherings to curb the COVID-19 pandemic.  The sense of this should be obvious when you look at success stories like New Zealand, which effectively eradicated the disease entirely.  But no -- to score political points, even if it's at the expense of thousands of lives, idiots like Jim Jordan and Sean Hannity talk about how "the left" (for that, read "people who would like their friends and family to stay alive") wants to cancel Christmas, and that the suggestion we have virtual get-togethers this year is the equivalent of carpet-bombing Whoville.

The reason the topic of continuing to repeat our mistakes ad infinitum comes up is that I just re-read the novel A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller.  

The first edition cover, from 1959

The book takes place after the "Flame Deluge" (the nuclear war that we came so close to back in the 1960s and 1970s) effectively destroyed civilization, sending us back into the Dark Ages.  It's divided into three sections: Fiat Homo ("Let there be man"), Fiat Lux ("Let there be light"), and Fiat Voluntuas Tua ("Let thy will be done").  There is about an eight-hundred-year gap between the sections, and each one has as its main character a monk of the Abbey of Saint Leibowitz in the deserts of New Mexico; first the meek, earnest Brother Francis Gerard, then the brilliant but conflicted Dom Paulo, and finally the staunch, deeply courageous Abbot Jethrah Zerchi.  And through the course of the book we watch civilization rebuild, to the point that they're on the verge of doing it all again, despite knowing what will happen, despite seeing all around them the effects of the first global nuclear war.

[The image is an Amazon link if you'd like to order a copy]

Near the end of the book is a passage, spoken by Abbot Zerchi, which would be in strong contention for the most poignant lines ever written:

Listen, are we helpless?  Are we doomed to do it again and again and again?  Have we no choice but to play the Phoenix in an endless cycle of rise and fall?  Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Carthage, Rome, the Empires of Charlemagne and the Turk.  Ground to dust and plowed with salt.  Spain, France, Britain, America -- burned into the oblivion of the centuries.  And again and again and again.

Are we doomed to it, Lord, chained to the pendulum of our own mad clockwork, helpless to halt its swing?

I first read this brilliant, beautiful, and devastating novel when I was an undergraduate, and although I kept my copy of it, I never re-read it until I was casting about for something to read a couple of weeks ago and stumbled across it.  And it's still as spot-on as it was when it was written in 1959, back during the Cold War, when kids did nuclear bomb drills by hiding under their desks, and we all pretended that this was somehow preparing for the results of an all-out war.

The threat of nuclear war has fortunately faded, but that tendency to repeat our mistakes hasn't gone away.  We only listen to the scientists when what they say is convenient and won't disrupt our comfortable lives.  We don't even considering changing our course until things have gotten so bad that a course correction is unlikely to have any effect.

And we still tolerate elected officials who don't deserve the title of "leaders," who choose to play politics when the health, safety, and lives of tens or hundreds of thousands of people are at risk.

I wish I could find some positive way to end this post, but like the last Abbot of the Abbey of Saint Leibowitz, instead I'm afraid all I can do is stand there in dumb amazement at our determination not to learn from history.  Sure, some of us act; there are those few who are truly willing to walk their talk regardless of the risk, people like Dr. Sandra Steingraber whose fight against the disinformation campaign from the fossil fuels industry has landed her in jail.  People like author, journalist, and dedicated environmental advocate Bill McKibben.  People like the late Wangari Maathai, who virtually single-handedly improved the lot of Kenyan women through her tireless efforts to break the patriarchy's stranglehold on business.  People like Malala Yousafzai and Greta Thunberg and Cameron Kasky and Emma González and Jamie Margolin, who have refused to take no as an answer despite the difficulties and personal risks involved.

Activists like them are absolutely critical, and give me hope, but we need more of them.  A lot more.  My intuition is that we're at a crossroads; a point where we're faced with a choice between doing things as we've always done despite knowing, knowing with absolute assurance, that the old ways don't work, and changing what we do even if it's hard.

Let's all dedicate ourselves, today, to making the right choice.

*************************************

I've always had a fascination with how our brains work, part of which comes from the fact that we've only begun to understand it.  My dear friend and mentor, Dr. Rita Calvo, professor emeritus of human genetics at Cornell University, put it this way.  "If I were going into biology now, I'd study neuroscience.  We're at the point in neuroscience now that we were in genetics in 1900 -- we know it works, we can see some of how it works, but we know very little in detail and almost nothing about the underlying mechanisms involved.  The twentieth century was the century of the gene; the twenty-first will be the century of the brain."

We've made some progress in recent years toward comprehending the inner workings of the organ that allows us to comprehend anything at all.  And if, like me, you are captivated by the idea, you have to read this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation: neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett's brilliant Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain.

In laypersons' terms, Barrett explains what we currently know about how we think, feel, remember, learn, and experience the world.  It's a wonderful, surprising, and sometimes funny exploration of our own inner workings, and is sure to interest anyone who would like to know more about the mysterious, wonderful blob between our ears.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

A game of "Not It"

I don't have a lot of patience for the cynical, pessimistic attitude I hear from people who otherwise I generally agree with, that often takes the form of "humans are garbage" or "I hate people."

Usually, these comments come from righteous outrage at the capacity of some people for committing horrifying acts.  Abuse of children and animals, violence motivated by racism, religion, and homophobia, victim-blaming or outright dismissal in cases of rape and spousal violence -- we're right to be disgusted by these.

But concluding that all humans are worthless is tantamount to giving up.  And that's unacceptable.  There's too much at stake, especially now.

I understand that it seems like an uphill battle, and that the moral people of the world -- who, I maintain, are the majority, regardless of how it may seem at times -- get exhausted by what seems like an endless fight that never makes any serious headway.

In fact, I have to admit to having a moment like this yesterday morning, when I read that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled to dismiss the lawsuit Juliana vs. United States, nicknamed the "Children's Climate Lawsuit."  Filed by a group called Our Children's Trust, this lawsuit aimed to hold the government of the United States responsible for their inaction on climate change, thereby endangering children's chances of living to adulthood in a world that is environmentally stable.

Most of us -- although admittedly not legal scholars -- looked at this and said, "Well, yeah."  The Declaration of Independence calls life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness "inalienable rights," which would seem to me that this makes it incumbent upon our government not to render the place uninhabitable.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Takver, Climate Rally flows down Swanston street, CC BY-SA 2.0]

The Ninth Circuit Court disagreed.  In the majority opinion, Judge Andrew Hurwitz wrote, "The central issue before us is whether, even assuming such a broad constitutional right exists, an Article III court can provide the plaintiffs the redress they seek—an order requiring the government to develop a plan to 'phase out fossil fuel emissions and draw down excess atmospheric CO2.  Reluctantly, we conclude that such relief is beyond our constitutional power. Rather, the plaintiffs’ impressive case for redress must be presented to the political branches of government."

The "reluctance" Hurwitz feels evidently wasn't enough to stop him from saying "Not It" when it came to drawing a line in the sand with regards to our wanton environmental destruction, something that has gotten significantly worse under Trump's administration.  No environmental legislation has been safe -- from water and air quality, to protections for endangered species, to the shielding of public land from damage from mining, logging, and oil drilling.  The motto of our government is "Use it all up and fuck the consequences," with the attitude being "Oh, well, we'll all be dead by the time bad stuff happens, may as well cut loose and party hard now."

So I'm inclined to look at Hurwitz's reluctance as a little like Maine Senator Susan Collins's approach to standing up to Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell.  "Yes, I'll give it serious consideration," she says, then proceeds to rubberstamp everything Trump and McConnell want.

But she always makes a sad frowny face while she's doing it to show how reluctant she is, and that makes it all okay.

In the dissenting opinion, Judge Josephine Staton couldn't have said it clearer.  "Plaintiffs bring suit to enforce the most basic structural principle embedded in our system of ordered liberty: that the Constitution does not condone the Nation’s willful destruction."

So that's another avenue closed by someone's desire not to be the one to make a stand.  Like I said, it's not that I don't get how hard that is.  Facing down a fierce and relentless opposition, and continuing to fight despite setback after setback, is mentally and physically exhausting.  It's why I have nothing but admiration for people like my dear friend Sandra Steingraber, who has been fighting for the environment and the global climate literally for decades, and somehow manages the wherewithal to keep going despite what sometimes seem monstrous odds.

"Fortunately, there are people who will not be deterred from the work of civilization," journalist Bill Moyers said, "who will even from time to time go up against authority in peaceful disobedience, taking a nonviolent stand for a greater good.  Such a person is Sandra Steingraber."

Or as Sandra herself wrote in 2014 from the Chemung County (New York) Jail, where she was serving a sentence for her civil disobedience, "Five days without clouds, sky, stars, leaves, birdsong, wind, sunlight, and fresh food has left me homesick to the point of grief.  I now inhabit an ugly, diminished place devoid of life and beauty – and this is exactly the kind of harsh, ravaged world I do not want my children to inhabit."

So after the defeat dealt to us all by the Ninth Circuit Court's decision, we stand up, dust ourselves off, and keep going.  I'm not going to fall back into the "humans are horrible and deserve everything we get" attitude, which seems to me to be nothing more than an excuse for inaction.  I know too many moral, kind, compassionate, and loving humans for me to accept that and give up.  We're going through a difficult time right now -- a world teetering on the edge of climate chaos, an environment slipping back into the pre-regulation ravages of pollution and overuse, and a government made of lying grifters who believe in power and personal profit über alles.

But I am buoyed up by realizing that we can only continue to do what we've done, fighting the daily battles with what spirit we can, and not despairing because of the size of the task ahead -- or its gravity.  I'm reminded of the wonderful quote from J. R. R. Tolkien's Return of the King: "It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.  What weather they shall have is not ours to rule."

And, perhaps even more hopefully, the poignant line from Stephen King's The Stand, spoken by Nadine Cross to Randall Flagg himself (talk about speaking truth to power!):  "The effective half-life of evil is always relatively short."

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I don't often recommend historical books here at Skeptophilia, not because of a lack of interest but a lack of expertise in identifying what's good research and what's wild speculation.  My background in history simply isn't enough to be a fair judge.  But last week I read a book so brilliantly and comprehensively researched that I feel confident in recommending it -- and it's not only thorough, detailed, and accurate, it's absolutely gripping.

On May 7, 1915, the passenger ship Lusitania was sunk as it neared its destination of Liverpool by a German U-boat, an action that was instrumental in leading to the United States joining the war effort a year later.  The events leading up to that incident -- some due to planning, other to unfortunate chance -- are chronicled in Erik Larson's book Dead Wake, in which we find out about the cast of characters involved, and how they ended up in the midst of a disaster that took 1,198 lives.

Larson's prose is crystal-clear, giving information in such a straightforward way that it doesn't devolve into the "history textbook" feeling that so many true-history books have.  It's fascinating and horrifying -- and absolutely un-put-downable.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Ethical lawbreaking

One of the topics we discuss in my Critical Thinking class is when taking a stand on an ethical issue trumps law.

Civil disobedience, in other words, crossing the line into potential arrest and prosecution.

I ask this question because two days ago, I was arrested for being part of a blockade of Crestwood Midstream's natural gas and (proposed) liquefied petroleum gas storage facility alongside Seneca Lake.  As I have described in previous posts, the facility uses geologically unstable salt caverns for this storage, risking catastrophic failure that would result in environmental devastation of the region and almost certainly loss of life.  The plan is, to put it simply, reckless and dangerous, driven by the profit motive of an out-of-state corporation that could simply up stakes and move back to Texas if the unthinkable happens.

We, on the other hand, live here and would have to deal with the consequences.

Yours truly being loaded into the police van after arrest [image courtesy of photographer Carol Bloomgarden]

The fact that Crestwood's plan is wildly irresponsible is not just fanciful or alarmist.  Dr. Robert Howarth, professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University, had the following cautionary words:

The stakes are high.  Industry and government march blithely ahead, ignoring the growing risks of extreme energy development: deep offshore oil and gas, Arctic oil and gas, tar sands, shale gas… and the risky storage of methane and propane proposed for the salt caverns below us here.  We hit 400 ppm carbon dioxide this winter, for the first time in the past few million years; and another greenhouse gas -- methane -- is also at its highest level in the last several million years.  We are near the point of no return, where a much warmer Earth will be with us for the next several thousand years.

Schneising et al. showed in 2011 that the methane in the atmosphere is largely from shale gas and shale oil drilling.  The methane signature they found from this human activity is so large that it was visible from data obtained from satellites.  And methane has a hundred-fold higher impact on global temperature than carbon dioxide does -- making this enterprise even more foolhardy. 

So the impact of what Crestwood is doing here goes far beyond the local damage that a catastrophic mishap would cause.  Simply put, the fossil fuels need to stay in the ground.

And it's not as if there aren't solutions, solutions that could be put in place now if there was the will and the farsightedness to do so.  Howarth writes:

We already have the ability to make the switch to electric vehicles, and electric heat pumps for heating and cooling.  Their efficiencies are far greater than gasoline and diesel driven vehicles, or furnaces and water heaters than run on natural gas or fuel oil.  This would result in a 30% reduction in total use of energy, just from this transformation.  And that electricity should come from renewable sources.  Crestwood is placing our lives and our homes at risk, and moving us closer to global ecological disaster, because of a determination to keep using an energy source that should have been phased out decades ago. 

Switching to energy primarily from wind and from solar has a lower cost today than using fossil fuels, if the health costs of fossil fuels are considered.  In NY, there are 4,000 deaths each year from air pollution caused by fossil fuels, at a cost of $33 billion per year.

Making entire state free of fossil fuels costs $570 Billion. The cost savings from reduced illness and death from fossil fuels over the next fifteen years is enough to pay for the entire cost of the transition to renewables.

The "natural gas is about jobs" argument is equally specious.  Crestwood's projection of the number of jobs created for locals is outweighed fivefold by the jobs available in renewable energy in our region.  Joe Sliker, president of Renovus Solar Energy, said:

The solar industry complements the existing, thriving, and growing winery and tourism industries.  Solar is cleaner, safer, and a more prosperous path forth for families and even for all of the Crestwood employees. 

So, I'm here today for all of the good men and women who risk their lives every single day for their jobs.  I'm here for the welders, the pipe fitters, the electricians, the truckers, and all of the hard working people who go to work every day to provide for their families.  I'm here for those people who lay their lives on the line every morning when they wake up, for those people whose hands bleed while they work, and for the families that love and worry about them. 

I'm here to offer them a choice.  I'm here to tell them that we don't have to support a dangerous facility and risk our lives and the lives of our loved ones in order to have good paying jobs. 

I'm here to offer all of those people a better job.  Today.  Right now.  Our Renovus HR manager is here with a stack of applications.  Come talk to us. 

Solar is rapidly expanding and Renovus is a thriving regional business. In contrast to the eight to ten permanent jobs promised by the gas storage facility, Renovus has added over 50 new permanent jobs just in the past year.

Add it all up.  Crestwood Midstream, and other companies like them, put the lives and livelihood of ordinary people at risk for one reason; to boost their profits and pay their stockholders.  The alternatives are real and affordable and viable.  What is being proposed amounts to reckless endangerment, yet our local and state governments refuse to step in and stop it.

So it was time for me to act.

I know that my arrest, by itself, will have little effect.  I'll appear at court, and likely face a fine, and that will be that.  But the symbolism of people who are willing to risk prosecution for a worthy cause has a far greater reach than that; it is the actions of individuals that make the difference.  And that means all of us who know enough to care about what is happening.  As the amazing Australian singer/songwriter Judy Small put it in her song about social activism, "One Voice in the Crowd," "In the end it's all the same; the buck stops where you are."  (Listen to the whole song at the link below.)

So it's not about the futility of a few people standing up to the actions of a huge corporation.  It's about doing the right thing, and as Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai put it, "Keeping our feeling of empowerment ahead of our feeling of despair."  It's about being willing to put yourself at risk, because the alternative is to accept blindly a far worse risk, one whose consequences may still be felt a thousand years from now.

We all need to act, and the time is now.

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To support what is happening here, please "like" the We Are Seneca Lake Facebook page, write your congressperson and/or Governor Andrew Cuomo (here's his contact information), and share this post around.  This message needs to move, and quickly.