The Peril of Inequality: Biking from Birmingham to Jacksonville
Writing by Michael Chase, Drawings by Jenny Hershey
We saw Linda sitting outside her home in Blakely, Georgia, as we rode by. Jenny complimented her beautiful flower garden. Linda replied, “It’s a mess, really. Just can’t seem to do much after my husband died a couple years ago.” Not one to miss out on a conversation, Jenny stopped her bike and asked Linda about her life, learning that, like so many others in the deep South, Linda has lived in Blakely her entire life. She first worked in a sewing factory, adding, “Not many white folk worked there.” Then, a few years later Linda got a job as a peanut inspector at the Blakely Golden Peanut Factory. She loved that job and worked there for over 28 years. Linda told Jenny that she had no problems living in Blakely, and then she cupped her hand over her mouth like she was going to share a secret, and whispered, “Except for some of the black folks on the other side by Washington Street—they drink a lot and shoot guns. They’re in gangs!” “Gangs?” Jenny replied. Linda dropped her hand, and added, “Now don’t get me wrong. My neighbor’s black and I don’t hear a peep out of her. And the preacherman who lives behind me is black, and he’s a decent man.” When Jenny asked Linda if she was going to vote, she perked up, “Yup, I wouldn’t miss it for nothin!” … and said nothing more. Jenny decided not to ask…
“We pretty much own rural and small town America.”
Mitch McConnell
We biked from Birmingham to Jacksonville this trip. Although we enjoyed all of it, the highlights were the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, and the Okefenokee Swamp Park in southeast Georgia.
At a dinner party in New York City the week before we left for this trip, I was asked where we were going. When I replied, “We’re going to ride our bikes from Birmingham to Jacksonville,” the response was immediate. “Oh my God! Well, say hi to that idiotic judge in Alabama who thinks that unfertilized embryos are living humans, and that whiny Senator who tried to backpedal that judge’s crap on television from her fake kitchen.” As much as I sympathized with the content of both comments, the vitriol of the subtext took me aback: it was as if I was really being asked, “Why are you going there, of all places?”
I remember feeling slightly irritated by the insinuation. After all, Jenny and I are both life-long Democrats who grew up in Democratic households. We live in New York, and both had successful careers in the theatre. So it’s a fair guess that Jenny and I don’t choose to bike in the Southeast because we connect to the political culture.
But we do like how easy it is to get to some of the major cities in the South and back home to New York City by train. We are drawn to the warmer weather during the winter months, and the promise of vast stretches of roads unburdened by traffic that allow us to take in landscapes and wildlife as we reflect on the cultural, economic and political tapestries of the people we encounter. The South, in particular, offers up rolling hills, tranquil forests, scenic countryside roads, abundant bird life, and the same tragic and weirdly interesting industrial degradation one can find anywhere in America. For the most part, the inhabitants are folksy and sometimes surprisingly diverse. We also enjoy the affordable motels (especially during the off-seasons) and the overt friendliness, of most, although not all, of the locals we encounter.
Yet, there is something deeper that motivates us to return to the American South over and over again. Jenny and I are both affable and curious, and we are always interested in trying to understand why people see things the way they do. Although Jenny has lived her entire life on the East Coast, I was born in Iowa and raised in Galesburg, Illinois, a mid-sized farming town north of Peoria in the 1960’s. Predictably, Galesburg fit the era: I was a white kid, and we didn’t easily mix with the black kids, although there was a significant black community on the other side of town. Racism was insidious and implicit, and the civil rights victories in the South seemed far away because in Illinois, white folks had deluded themselves into thinking that they weren’t racist. Dislike of migrants, unless they were European born, was the norm. Homophobia was accepted and encouraged, while gayness was viewed as a perverse illness. Transgender? Forget about it; that was too weird for anybody (or so we thought, although in retrospect I’m sure I interacted with quietly suffering, closeted people). Because my Dad was a New England born professor at the local college our family never really fit in, although my Mom softened the suspicion of locals because she was approachable and talkative, even though she came from Denver. And just like now, most of the higher achieving students chose to leave. Although we weren’t particularly stellar students at the time, my two brothers and I took it for granted we would leave Galesburg at the soonest opportunity.
So it's not such a big leap for me to connect to a nostalgic affinity with my childhood years while biking in the rural south. And Jenny, who was raised in New Haven, Connecticut, during the 1960’s and was bused across town as a middle school student during some of the first desegregation experiments, also had a live-in black nanny who was the daughter of sharecroppers from Camden, North Carolina. And now, Jenny often says she feels more at home in communities of people of color in the rural south (small towns in the South tend to be either largely black or largely white) than she does in less diverse white middle-class suburban areas.
Cory delightedly shows off his catch, a “Sweet Crappie” he caught near Fort Gaines, Georgia. Cory had just moved to this town from nearby Edison. He works hard mowing the fields under a solar panel farm in Bluffton, a new job created by expanding renewable energy installations. Cory’s love of fishing came from his Grannie, but he will share this lucky haul with his Mama for Sunday dinner. Cory lives alone, and he’s glad for the connection. Jenny asked Cory if he planned on voting in the coming election. “Oh no, I don’t believe in that. I’m just gonna pray—and pray hard. God made us all free men. And that’s all I need. Don’t need nothing else.”
The slow, steady decline of so much of the rural south is a decades-old story that, with some exceptions, mirrors what has happened everywhere in rural America. We were a highly agricultural country at the time of our founding; more than 90% of our country lived in rural areas in 1790. The landscape, economy and cultural life were dominated by agriculture, and most Americans were farmers or lived in small towns closely tied to farming communities. By 1920, the number of Americans living on farms had dwindled to under 50%. However, people in small towns, who could no longer find work in agriculture, were still able to secure jobs in rapidly expanding extraction industries - such as mining and logging.
Today, the picture is vastly different. Urbanization has swept across the country, and over 80% of all Americans now reside in urban areas. The steady flow of people from rural areas has created a slow-motion train wreck for rural areas as technological advancements have steadily eroded labor needs in the countryside. In addition, corporate consolidation has shifted ownership of family farms, grocery stores, gas stations, feed lots, and even local medical care from individual owners and families to rapaciously capitalistic corporations located primarily in cities.
An abandoned laundromat in Damascus, Georgia.
Everywhere in rural America, the story is similar. Small family farms are bought out and vast tracks of land are consolidated into large industrial agricultural corporations. Mom and Pop stores, if they haven’t already closed, are eclipsed by Dollar Generals, Family Dollars and Dollar Trees, although residents in smaller towns now must drive a town or two away to get to the most local Dollar store, depending on marketing realities. And then those stores sometimes close based solely on market calculations; Family Dollar just announced they are closing multiple stores in rural Ohio, putting almost 300 people out of work. Larger towns are lucky to get Walmarts, which offer an abundance of food choices at reasonably low prices, while they virtually guarantee the closure of locally owned grocery stores. As populations dwindle, country doctors shut their doors and seek employment in larger towns with private medical facilities. At the same time, small health clinics get bought out by corporate chains and the median distances rural folks need to travel for health care continues to increase.
We met a very proud Van Averhart standing next to an historical marker in Happy Hollow, the oldest African-American neighborhood in Prattville, Alabama. When we asked him where he grew up, Van gestured toward a field behind him, “That’s where my family home was. Almost every home here was knocked down. The oldest thing in this here neighborhood now is that pear tree.” Van seemed to know every person who drove by. He said, “I’m an Averhart! It’s a big name in these parts!” Van was the town’s first African American firefighter EMT level 2. He did three tours of duty in a 25-year-long military career. Raised with 4 brothers and 3 sisters, he was taught to have a strong work ethic. Van is a die-hard Democrat and very attentive to politics. Jenny asked, “What do I need to know as a liberal Jew from NYC about the people of Prattville? “We’re friendly, we care, we like diversity”, Van replied. He paused, and then said, “But many black folks in town don’t want conflict with white people so they either don’t vote or they just vote with them.”
As much as politicians in municipal, state, and federal governments have fought these trends over the decades, very little has been accomplished by either party to mitigate technological advances and economic consolidation or to reinvent rural America as prosperous and healthy places to live. Yet, although Republicans haven’t helped rural communities any more effectively than Democrats, the Republican Party remains the preferred party of rural folks by far. The party’s dominance is probably much more grounded in cultural identity regarding beliefs around religion, gun rights, and family structures than in substantial policy disagreements among politicians from either party.
MAGA voters are overwhelmingly white and rural, and it's a fair guess that most don’t care much about policy. Fueling anger against Democrats is easier than discussing real solutions to difficult problems. In pursuit of votes, campaign contributions, media attention, and re-election, these politicians willfully exacerbate rural resentments. However, as you can tell from some of our stories, not everyone takes the bait. Yet, it seems that more often than not, if people aren't prone to MAGA-baiting politicians, and they aren't older black folks who lived through the civil rights era, then they don't connect to voting at all.
We met Officer Jason B at the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park in Montgomery. Although the park wasn’t going to open for another week, it honors the lives and memories of the 10 million people who were enslaved in America. Jason’s job was to explain to visitors at the front gate that they couldn’t go in. When Jenny asked Jason, “How does it feel to work at such an important park?,” Jason answered, “Oh, I don’t do the whole African-American history thing. I’m just not into it.” Behind Jason, we could see slave quarters that had beds from actual plantations. We could also see many large sculptures by black artists depicting slave life. We were puzzled by Jason’s indifference to his surroundings. When we asked him if he was going to vote, he replied, “Nah, wouldn’t do any good.” I said, “If you don’t vote, then older white people like me will be making decisions for you. You really want that?” To that he raised an eyebrow - food for thought, perhaps. Or maybe he was thinking, that’s how it will always be anyway.
When MAGA inspired manipulative behaviors do work, they exempt politicians from developing and implementing policies that will help rural communities. It’s much easier and far more effective for these politicians to frighten and anger their rural constituents into supporting them, than to earn their votes and trust by improving their everyday lives. But it doesn’t matter. Most of the time, rural communities reflexively support Republican candidates anyway.
After all, if neither party offers up any real solutions, why not vote for the party that most aligns with your values? And if that’s not enough to get you excited, the candidate who sticks it to your enemies - those elites on either coast who look down on you with such contempt… well, that’s worth supporting because it feels so good to get even. This is a form of blood sport for MAGA voters and politicians alike.
A home demolished by the 2023 tornado in Selma, Alabama, sits empty. We saw many more houses nearby in a similar state of disarray because of the tornado. Home of the famous Selma to Montgomery civil rights marches that began at the historic Edmund Pettus Bridge, Selma remains one of Alabama's poorest cities.
Selma is home to the National Voting Rights Museum. A fascinating museum, I was struck by George Wallace’s Presidential Campaign material, which reminds me of MAGA merchandise.
Many Americans would be surprised to learn what Mitch McConnell or Donald Trump will never tell you: beginning in 2008, the year Obama was elected President, per capita federal income assistance grew larger in rural areas than in cities, suggesting America’s “welfare class” is both whiter and more rural than the GOP wants you to think.
Initially driven by the first stimulus bill in response to the subprime mortgage meltdown, the Federal Government focused on higher poverty rates in rural areas and more extensive infrastructure and services over larger geographic areas. For example, income security programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and other forms of federal income support, including the SNAP program, now comprise a larger share of federal spending in rural areas than they do in suburban or urban areas. In addition, prosperity in cities effectively subsidize rural areas, most notably in states with higher per capita rates of federal taxes.
As we headed east toward the Okefenokee Swamp, we biked through Boston, Georgia (pop. 1223). Ron was sitting at an abandoned gas station that had most recently been a shuttered lawn mower service center. We stopped to chat and learned that 74-year-old Ron had spent his life working in cotton and peanut fields nearby as a laborer. He also raised five kids. His youngest boy works in the only food market in Boston, and his oldest is a mortician in the next town over. His daughters moved to bigger cities. Finally retired, Ron spends his day watching whatever passes by. He was so friendly that we felt ok asking him if he watched the news. He said, “I’m a lifelong Democrat, and I watch CNN every day.” A bit surprised, Jenny asked Ron his thoughts about the upcoming election. Ron said, “I don’t understand why folks say such bad stuff about Biden. He old, but lots of people are old. That don’t mean nothin’… give him time. He’s only been at this four years.”
Rural America still contributes significantly in its nostalgic salute to our nation’s political history and its cultural character. Politicians sing the praises of small and rural places, assuring voters that their communities are where the people are good, character is forged, and folks are self-reliant. Many in both parties tend to leave out the part about how they left to achieve their own ambitions. To demonstrate their authenticity, they’ll claim to be small-town folk, no matter where life took them, even putting a little extra drawl in their accents. But Republicans, in particular, know that when they really need the votes, the best way to get them is to amp up the culture war, telling voters that the next election—indeed, the fate of the country—is all about winning the war between unfairly treated, misunderstood, tax-burdened country folk against socialist democrat elitists who live in failing cities, want to take away your guns, and are bankrupting the government. It’s gonna be a bloodbath out there!
Ruby was born and raised in Fargo, Georgia (pop 250), in a “trailer” park. She pointed, “over there,” where her mother currently lives. She has five jobs cleaning properties on the edge of the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge and also cleans the local church. Her mother did the same job, but now her Mom and Ruby’s brothers work for local beekeepers making honey. At 34, Ruby is raising three teenage girls with her husband Jonathan. Jonathan helps with the girls when he isn’t driving a tractor. They met in kindergarten and were crowned “Mr. and Mrs. Fargo” by the local newspaper when they got married. Ruby’s oldest daughter, Ariel, wants to be a vet. Her middle daughter, Skyler, is an A student and works hard at the local diner. Her baby, 14-year-old Carlie, wants to be a country singer. Ruby saved up for a guitar and bought one “on the internet” and Carlie is slowly teaching herself to play. Jenny asked Ruby if she planned on voting in the upcoming election. “That Biden is not gonna have any money left for us. He’s giving too much to people that don’t belong here.” “Oh, you mean immigrants?” Jenny asked. “Yup. And the other guy… I don't know. …I don’t have time to vote. I gotta work”.
Rural politicians have very significant leverage for their arguments because: rural America is privileged with exceptional voting power. Both the Senate and the Electoral College were established during a time when America was predominantly rural. The Senate was designed to represent states equally, with each state, regardless of population, having only two senators. Known as the Great Compromise, this was how our founders tried to balance the interests of smaller states with larger, more populated states, and it was a reasonably equitable solution for most of the 18th and 19th century. But that is no longer the case.
Created as a compromise between electing the President by Congress and by a popular vote, the “Electoral College” gave smaller states more influence in presidential elections than their population would suggest they actually deserve. Every state gets a number of electors equal to its total number of Senators and Representatives, which means all states have a bare minimum of 3 electoral votes, regardless of population. Over time, as the nation has urbanized and population densities have shifted, the relative power of rural areas in both the Senate and the Electoral College has increased because the minimum representation of two Senators and one Representative remains constant.
Rural voting privilege is apparent once one understands how the math works. Consider the following: Wyoming has a population of about 600,000 people, with 2 senators. This means that each senator represents one half of their population, about 300,000 people. California, on the other hand, has a population of about 39 million people, so each California senator represents about 19.5 million people. That means a California voter in the Senate has about .015% of the power of a Wyoming voter when it comes to representative influence in the Senate. Of course, apart from inequalities produced by gerrymandering by either party, the House of Representatives lives up to its nickname the “People’s House,” because it is our one elected body in the federal government that adheres to the “one vote, one person” principle that underpins most all other western democracies.
The math for the electoral college works a little differently: Every state gets an electoral vote for each Representative and each Senator. So, Wyoming, with one Representative, gets 3 electoral votes for its 600,000 people. California has 54 electoral votes with 52 Representatives and 2 senators for its 39 million people. The math works out to a ratio of 200,000 Wyoming voters per electoral vote and 722,000 voters for each California electoral vote, which means that a voter in California has only 27% of the power of a Wyoming voter in the upcoming Presidential election. That math is especially astonishing, given that landowners in the Slave States were able to count their slaves as 3/5 (or 60%) of a person in elections prior to the passage of the 13th Amendment, which was another way that southern rural areas buttressed their electoral power over northern urban Free States.
Atticus is a kind, gentle 17-year-old boy who waited on us at the White Oak Pasture Farm in Bluffton, Georgia, a family-run farm focusing on regenerative land management. Atticus (his mother named him after Atticus Finch) is a high school senior. He’s very reticent about leaving home to go to Georgia Southwestern State College in Americus. His brother left for an elite college in New England two years ago, but Atticus has no desire to follow in his footsteps. Atticus timidly confessed, “I don’t wanna grow up.” Jenny asked, “Like Peter Pan?”. He didn’t miss a beat. “Yeh, and pay taxes, have to do grown-up things and all kinds of other stuff,” Atticus muttered. “I don’t wanna leave this town. I’m gonna come back here.” Later, we learned that he had a rough time during the Covid pandemic. Atticus is not into social media, and his life in Bluffton (pop 113) is isolated. He did cultivate a friendship with a kid from Great Britain through a video game. When Jenny asked Atticus if he will vote in November (he turns 18 in May), he said he wasn’t interested. “No? Really? Do you have any curiosity?” Jenny asked. Atticus responded, “Nope. I just don’t care.”
The looming threat of a MAGA-inspired Presidential victory reveals apparent weaknesses in our electoral system. Trump and the Republican Party he now owns (which, as Mitch McConnell indicates, has far more rural supporters than urban) could never become President in a “one person, one vote” democracy. But, given the privileged electoral college status of rural states, America may be entering a period of authoritarian minority rule that may become more extreme. In some ways, the disconnect between the Supreme Court ruling on Dobbs v Jackson and the opinions of the majority of Americans on abortion rights is a “canary in the coal mine” event for how authoritarian rule begins.
A recent poll by the Pew Research Center found that about 62% of U.S. adults believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while 36% think it should be illegal in all or most cases. Additionally, the poll indicated that 61% of respondents strongly oppose and 13% somewhat oppose their states prohibiting all abortions with no exceptions. Even more surprising are results of a new Axios-Ipsos poll, which found that 81% of Americans agree that “abortion issues should be managed between a woman and her doctor, not the government.” That number includes 65% of Republicans, as well as 82% of Independents and 97% of Democrats. The idea that abortion should be between a woman and her doctor was the language of the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, overturned in 2022 with the help of the three extremist justices appointed by Trump. These polls suggest that a significant majority of Americans are against a federal abortion ban without exceptions.
The coming Presidential election may be a perfect storm wrought by our dangerously outdated election system. White and rural MAGA voters have an electoral edge, and Trump is their guy. He understands better than any other politician how they’ve been taught to believe they are unfairly treated.
Throughout its history, the Klu Klux Klan (KKK) has been recognized as a symbol of hate, racism, and terrorism. Efforts by law enforcement and civil rights organizations have reduced its power, but the Klan still has active members, and its legacy continues to impact American society. Photos taken at the National Voting Rights Museum in Selma.
Unfortunately, Trump’s incendiary rhetoric against migrants and his political opponents is often quickly retweeted and shared with millions of others, leading Trump’s authoritarian impulses to inspire his followers. Consider the following quote from the book, “White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy” by Tom Schiller and Paul Waldman: “Authoritarian populism is distinct from other variants of populism because it not only focuses on a conflict between “the people” and the elite but also rejects democracy, as democracy might enable those who are not like “us” to win and hold power. Wherever one of these rightist movements emerges, chances are it will have its most fervent support in rural areas. And not just rural areas, but the places that have been left behind by economic transitions.”
The Legacy Museum from the outside. Deeply affecting, we recommend you plan for an all day visit. The exhibits are detailed and thorough. There is even a new wing devoted to art inspired by the legacy of slavery.
The Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, is a compelling testament to the history of racial injustice in the United States. Unfortunately for us (but for understandable reasons), photography is not allowed at the museum. Through thought-provoking exhibits and immersive displays, the museum illuminates the painful truths of slavery, lynching, segregation, and mass incarceration of people of color that have shaped our nation's narrative. Not for the faint of heart, visitors are confronted with the harsh realities of America's past and inspired by stories of resilience, courage, and activism.
The Museum was founded by Bryan Stevenson, a public interest lawyer, the bestselling author of “Just Mercy,” and the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI). The EJI provides legal representation to people who have been wrongly convicted, unfairly sentenced, or abused in state jails and prisons. In 2018, EJI opened both the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery.
Commemorative hanging tombstones honoring each of the 4,400 known victims of lynchings across the United States at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. It's impossible to describe how moving and unsettling this memorial is.
Security at the museum rivals what one would find at an airport in a large city. At first, I thought it was overkill, but as my experience in the museum gradually deepened, I began to understand its importance. Racial violence is so deeply embedded in the cultural history of the American South that the museum creators, the Equal Justice Institute, are simply being realistic about protecting the thousands of people who visit every day.
It's impossible not to think about Florida’s recently passed Stop WOKE Act while visiting this museum. Ron DeSantis would not like this place, nor would others who share his views. If you are white, and your identity is tied to your whiteness, you will cringe as you learn how cruel some people who share your racial group have been to others of a different race. And if you are a white child, you may feel personally responsible until a thoughtful adult makes it clear that it was only some members of your racial group who were cruel; others looked the other way, and some were openly and heroically resistant. As a white parent, you will have an opportunity to teach your child about the difference between cruelty, complacency, and the peril of inequality. The information can also be seen in another way. If you see all racial groups as equal members of humanity, you will see the exhibits as examples of how we harm ourselves, and how we can be healed by deepening our understanding of what we are capable of, both the good and the bad.
Jenny and I spent a day canoeing inside the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, about 18 miles north of Fargo, Georgia. It was a stunning day, and an opportunity we will never forget.
A Southern Dream
One day not long ago, in a land where the echoes of unity had started to ring clear after a tumultuous struggle for civil rights, a shadow crept silently back into our national politics, feeding on forgotten fears and whispered doubts. It began as a murmur among ambitious and powerful people who realized they could inspire rural white folk to join with them to fight their enemies, then spread that fight to small towns, suburbs and cities. Known as a political movement that promised a return to “simpler times,” its roots were hard to discern at first, but over time it became clear they were laced with the poison of racism and xenophobia. The movement grew, and its tendrils reached straight into the heart of a major political party, gripping it with an iron hold. It spoke in a language of division, painting the world in stark contrasts of “us” and “them,” reigniting flames of intolerance that many believed had been extinguished.
But within this beleaguered party that had once stood strong in the belief that “united we stand, divided we fall,” there were those who remembered the true meaning of their creed. Disaffected and dismayed, they watched as the values they held dear were twisted. At first in secret, and then finally in public, they reached out to the opposition, and to peers who still believed in plurality, diversity, and civil rights. Together, they formed a coalition, a beacon of hope against the encroaching darkness. They worked tirelessly, their efforts a tapestry of countless acts of bravery and kindness. They reminded their fellow citizens of strength found in diversity, of the beauty in every voice being heard. The coalition grew, a testament to the enduring spirit of the people. They marched, they spoke, they voted. And one by one, the walls of fear began to crumble. This major political party, now free from the grip of the divisive movement, was once again able to join hands with the opposition and govern the land fairly and effectively.
The public sphere, once clouded by the specters of racism and xenophobia, was illuminated once more by the light of understanding, acceptance, and compassion for all. The movement that sought to divide was remembered as a cautionary tale, a reminder of the vigilance needed to guard the sacred halls of democracy. And so the land returned to a path of progress, its people united by the shared belief that all voices are equal, and all hearts deserve to be heard. The death of division gave birth to a new era, one where every individual could stand tall, proud of their heritage, and confident in their right to self-determination.
And we all lived happily ever after.
Stay vigilant! Thanks for reading. If you haven’t done so, please subscribe to this blog to follow our next biking trip.
Blog writing by Michael Chase. Drawings by Jenny Hershey. Unless credited or otherwise noted, all material is the copyrighted property of the blog post authors, except for “Southern Dream,” which is a collaboration between Michael and Copilot AI.
Jennifer Hershey’s drawings can be enjoyed on Instagram @deeofo.
Postscript
The night before we left on this trip, Jenny was phoned by a close friend who was a bit intoxicated. He lashed into Jenny for planning yet another trip to the southeast. “How can you go there?” He asked, incredulously. “You know they hate you! You’re Jewish! Why don’t you go somewhere you are wanted?” Jenny was nonplussed. She loves her friend, and she also felt attacked and misunderstood.
The next day Jenny received a text from her friend with a sincere apology, and the following note: “Jennifer, the injustices endured by people of color has been on my mind, in my heart, living inside my body for the better part of a decade now. I think this shift in my consciousness is because my nephew is half African-American. I’ve always had a certain amount of fear and loathing of the south, and I think with good reason. The history bears out that fear. And continues to. It’s like I said – the politicians they promote and try to hoist onto the public, coupled with the bills they try to pass from anti-abortion to gerrymandering - the hits just keep on coming. And just like Netanyahu is trying to sell the idea that 85% of Palestinians support Hamas, I have to wonder what percentage of white southerners in their hearts think of black people as lesser inferior beings? So much of this is just baked into a culture sometimes.”
A few days later, we saw the sign above at the Legacy Museum in Montgomery. Because photography is not allowed there, we found the same sign later on Google Images with the parental advisory attached.
Sign in a restaurant in Fargo, Georgia.
Deep Adaptation; Biking from Los Angeles to Tucson
Reading to my grandson Emery as he nods off. Like most grandparents, I wonder what the world will be like when my grandkids are older. It will be 2089 when Emery is the age I am now. The world seems so precarious now; what will it be like then? Will life be better or worse? Will we even be here? Drawing by Jenny Hershey. Follow her on Instagram @deeofo.
Any way you slice it, keeping warming below 2°C requires an immediate, massive, and global mitigation effort. With each passing day, it’s less likely that we’ll succeed. Indeed, over 90% of Earth scientists believe we’ll surpass this threshold.
Here’s an idea that’s simple and beautiful but goes against both the myths of the mainstream culture and our deepest mental habits. It’s this: don’t be afraid, and spread love every chance you get.
Peter Kalmus, climate scientist at NASA, from his book Being the Change
Cows wander through a date tree orchard in the Imperial Valley near Brawley, California. Photo by Michael Chase. Follow him on Instagram @mjohnsonchase.
When I set out on my first solo-biking adventure in 2015, I had no idea I would remain enthusiastically committed to long distance biking seven years later. Nor did I imagine I would have the good fortune to share many trips with an enthusiastic and equally curious biking partner who is also an excellent illustrator. Jenny and I both hope our occasional blog posts enrich your life (as they do ours) in some small way. Traveling at the speed of a bicycle is great exercise, and it’s an in-your-face way to experience how a place actually feels. It also provides a very intimate experience of the natural world, which is especially important in an age where most of us (at least in the Global North) are mostly protected - even isolated - from our rapidly changing climate and increasingly degrading environment.
After trips to Wisconsin to see my kids and grandkids over the Christmas holidays, we drove Jenny’s car to El Paso (stopping for a few days to bike in Big Bend National Park), and then took Amtrak to Los Angeles with our bikes to visit my brothers Chris and Steve for a few days. Our plan was to ride our bikes from Anaheim back to El Paso. We only made it to Tucson.
We rode by a Cattle Manure Power Plant south of Brawley in California’s famed Imperial Valley. The plant is now abandoned, after opening twice over the last 30 years to great fanfare under two different private companies - one of whom claimed they would help local cattle ranchers dispose of manure by turning it into electricity under a contract with Southern Californian Edison, and another who was going to also process King Grass for the biofuel market. Unfortunately, the first project was plagued by a massive rainstorm that made manure retrieval and processing impossible, and the second was closed after an earthquake in 2010 damaged the processing plant. Photo by Michael Chase. Follow him on Instagram @mjohnsonchase.
After some very long rides (over 85 miles), mixed with several brutal days riding into intense and unremitting easterly winds while climbing several thousands of feet in elevation, Jenny and I decided that it would be best for us to rest up in Tucson, and then take the train back to El Paso from Tucson for a more leisurely return to our car, where we would car/bike our way back home to New York City (I had been hoping to ride Highway 9 along the New Mexico border through historic Columbus, NM into El Paso, but that will wait for another trip).
Lizzie is a takeout restaurant hostess in Canyon City, California, with a complex story about the many people for whom she is responsible. She patiently listened to Jenny express frustration over the lack of regard drivers demonstrated toward us on Gilman Springs Road on the way to the Palm Springs desert. We were unavoidably placed in a very dangerous situation (having been directed there by a bicycle mapping program I don’t think we’ll continue to use). We found ourselves several miles up a canyon when the shoulder disappeared on a narrow two-lane road, with high winds and cars passing feet away at 75 miles an hour showing no intention or interest in our situation or safety. We were forced to walk our bikes over a rumble strip trying to avoid traffic on our left and thorny bushes on the right. Nobody stopped or slowed down. The indifference of drivers to our situation was stupefying. After listening to Jenny’s story, Lizzie said “That’s so sad. What’s going on in people’s heads? We’ve lost our humanity with traffic. It’s as if it’s no longer human beings driving those cars”. Then, she offered to bag up extra chips and guacamole (which turned out to be excellent) for our ride into Palm Springs the next day. Drawing by Jenny Hershey. Follow her on Instagram @deeofo.
Deciding to change our plans wasn’t easy. Jenny and I have different strengths and limitations. We both felt challenged and each reacted differently. But like all collective human endeavors, we had to accept our limits as we confronted our own personal challenges and devise a bail-out strategy that worked for both of us. In the meantime, we rode through many diverse industrial and agricultural environments and basked in 650 miles of extraordinary natural landscapes during our ride from Anaheim to Tucson.
“!Hay zanahorias. Muchas zanahorias!” Workers near the road express their pleasure over the harvest to Jenny. Drawing by Jenny Hershey. Follow her on Instagram @deeofo.
It’s easy to love the sheer rawness and massive scale of the American southwest, especially as seen from a bike. Where there is water for irrigation (delivered through a system of canals from the Colorado and Gila Rivers) green fields of lettuces, cabbages, broccoli, sugar beets, carrots, alfalfa, wheat, king grass and countless other plants stretch into the horizon on endlessly flat terrain. In every direction lie mountains - craggy and massive, brown, apricot, and hazelnut in full sunlight, gray, impersonal and barren under cloudy skies. Where there is no water, barrel-cactus covered flatlands fall into the horizon, ubiquitous washes create carved out ridge-lines that delight the eye and ominously warn of floods to come, and Joshua trees and Saguaro cacti stand like regal gifts from Diego Rivera. The sun can be unrelenting (thank God it is January), and the wind can be deafening. The rare absence of wind results in a silence more peaceful than a Buddhist retreat. These physical polarities get under one’s skin like dirt under one’s fingernails. And it’s impossible to get enough of the warm afternoons, especially when the sun slants lower in the sky and casts a golden glow on all it shines upon, even trash.
Field workers in the Imperial Valley. Photo by Michael Chase. Follow him on Instagram @mjohnsonchase.
Manuel, a hard working date farmer from Calexico, CA, tends to a date palm orchard about 20 miles from his home. After telling us what the trees behind him were, he explained to us that dates are harvested once a year in August. Manuel also does agricultural work in the adjoining border town of Mexicali, Mexico, and has traveled back and forth between California and Mexico for years. He worries about the heat and extended drought in his region, and how it will impact crops in both countries. Drawing by Jenny Hershey. Follow her work on Instagram @deeofo.
During the recent months American environmentalists have been hyper-focused on the passage of the climate provisions in the “Build Back Better” act. Hoping to finally address climate change at a policy level that approaches the scale scientists tell us is required, climate activists were seriously disappointed by recent setbacks to the bill’s passage. Other occurrences haven’t added comfort: in mid-January the news broke that the hottest eight years ever recorded have occurred in the last eight years, and US emissions jumped in 2021 over 2020 levels, making our national goal of a 50% reduction in 2005 CO2 levels by 2030 further out of reach. Yet, these troublesome headlines are only part of discouraging news. Bloomberg just published an article about the potential of Kuwait becoming too hot for people or wildlife in a few decades, and NPR just published an article and video about how a climate change-induced drought in Kenya and nearby Uganda is parching landscapes, killing livestock and creating a humanitarian crisis. And only a few days ago, Weekend Edition published a story and video footage about a crippling drought now underway in Iraq. It’s sad to say there is little that is surprising in such reports, and it is easy to cite so much other alarming news (such as unprecedented high temperatures and decline of sea ice in the Arctic, and the rapid melting of the Thwaite Glacier in Antartica).
We met David on a dirt road near Eloy, Arizona. A road safety and maintenance manager for 35 years, David helped us avoid some dangerous paved roads without shoulders by directing us down some safer dirt roads. He pointed to one area and said teasingly, “Oh don’t go down there—the locals will shoot at you just to mess with you.” He suggested a course for us that he would confidently cycle with his wife. We deeply appreciated his kindness as we made our way to safer terrain.
It isn’t my intention to be depressing, but rather to lay a foundation for what I’ve been thinking about on this trip. Now that meaningful action on climate change appears stalled once again in America, it might be time to think more deeply about the potential consequences of climate chaos. In January of 2020, I wrote the following in a blog post titled Getting Real About Global CO2 Emissions: ….current science tells us that global carbon emissions MUST be cut in half over the next ten years for us to maintain a climate anywhere close to what we humans have enjoyed in our comparatively short time on earth. In that post I worked through the most recent science on the carbon budget climate scientists tell us we shouldn’t exceed to stay below a 2°C rise in global temperatures. However, global emissions have not decreased in the past two years; instead they have increased, making what we have to achieve in the coming years even more challenging. This has happened even though we achieved a slight aggregate reduction of GHG emissions in the US (a 10% drop in 2020 versus a 6% rise in 2021), and the successful enactment of a few nationally determined contributions (NDC’s), as outlined in the Paris Accords, most particularly by the European Union.
Current CO2 levels today are at the historically high figure of 417 ppm, which is 50% higher than at the beginning of the industrial revolution. In other words, in spite of lots of incredible efforts by millions of activists and sustainability professionals, hundreds of corporations, countless NGO’s and other agencies, and many national governments and world government organizations, we aren’t yet moving the needle downward on GHG emissions. Not yet, anyway.
Hope is an extraordinary thing, and there are new reasons to be hopeful every day (such as the recent creation of the Clean Energy Corp by the US Department of Energy). Still, I often hear others say that while they aren’t optimistic we will deal with climate change successfully, they are hopeful regardless. I feel the same way, and savor living each day with the future in mind far more than I despair over what we may have already wrought.
Yet, a persistent thought nags at me from the back of my mind, a thought that until now, I have only expressed to my closest friends. What happens if we fail? What happens if the world doesn’t get it together to stop our use of fossil fuels soon enough to avert catastrophe? What happens if we unwittingly set in motion one or a few climate tipping points (if we haven’t done so already), and climate chaos arrives suddenly and violently? What might that look like, and when might that happen? How will civilization respond? Will it be game over? Or might we rebuild something of value out of the rubble of a wounded, mangled or even collapsed civilization?
Jenny met Derek in Tucson outside a Walmart store. Recently released from prison, he is currently homeless. Jenny needed someone to watch her bike while she shopped for dinner, and he needed someone to keep an eye on his cellphone as it charged while he shopped. They negotiated an exchange: Jenny watched Derek’s phone while he shopped and Derek watched Jenny’s bike while she did. This unlikely exchange resulted in a long conversation with common ground on many subjects. As Jenny began to leave, she told Derek he was a good man, and to stay strong no matter what others said about him. He had served 2.5 years in jail for possessing narcotics. He believes he has paid his dues, and he dreams of moving home to Atlanta to be close to his daughter and opening up a car detailing shop. Drawing by Jenny Hershey. Follow her on Instagram @deepfo.
I’m not alone in wondering about such outcomes. I suspect many readers of this blog have had similar fleeting thoughts. As it happens, there is a growing body of literature and activist thinking by writers (especially scholars) who are wondering (out-loud) if civilization will indeed collapse as climate change gets worse. The most well-known version of this literature is based on a paper published in 2018, and a subsequent book published in 2021 called Deep Adaptation: Navigating the Realities of Climate Chaos, edited by Jem Bendell and Rupert Read.
Some of the leading scholars of this approach are already convinced civilizational collapse is inevitable, and believe climate chaos will arrive in the next few decades. Others aren’t as certain the collapse of civilization is imminent, but strongly believe we should consider it a potential outcome for which we should make preparations. These perspectives are not intended to be nihilistic, and no scholar is suggesting we should refrain from doing all we can as quickly as we can to mitigate climate change. But Deep Adaptation does argue for a deeper accounting of adaptive processes. It is simultaneously a concept, agenda, and an international social movement. It assumes that extreme weather events and other related climate stressors will increasingly disrupt power, food, water, shelter, and social and governmental systems. The word deep in this context indicates that strong measures are required to adapt to an unraveling of western industrial lifestyles. That agenda includes values of nonviolence, compassion, curiosity, and respect, and a framework for constructive action. This agenda was recently featured in an article in Inside Climate News.
Seen near Fort Hancock, Texas. Photo by Jenny Hershey. Follow her on Instagram @deeofo.
The term deep adaptation follows a logical naming sequence. A few decades ago, activists and scientists talked about mitigating the negative impacts of GHG in our atmosphere by finding alternatives to carbon-based fuels and increasing ways to draw down carbon through natural processes and technological fixes. However, over the years the realization that we also need to adapt to irretrievable changes already baked into our atmosphere and oceans are driving public conversation about changing where to locate human communities (and where not to), and how to prepare communities for more extreme weather. As a result, scientists and activists began to speak about helping communities to develop greater resilience as an attribute of adaptation. Now we have a term that describes the kind of adaptation we will need if climate chaos causes civilizations to collapse. Deep adaptation can be thought of as a re-adaptation of the structures of societies to create new ways for humans to survive and prosper.
There’s a related scientific field called collapsology that studies how civilizations have collapsed in the past, and how environmental overshoot might cause them to collapse in the future. Collapse in this context doesn’t necessarily mean that societal disruption will be sudden and complete, but does imply a form of breakdown in systems that is comprehensive and cannot be reversed. Deep Adaptation describes personal and collective responses to the anticipation or experience of societal collapse. And, as already stated, it suggests that by getting out in front of the possibility, we may have time to create new structures and/or institutions that will allow human life to flourish.
Seen on Texas State Highway 20, east of El Paso. Photo by Michael Chase. Following him on Instagram @mjohnsonchase.
Thus far, deep adaptation has been met with a great deal of resistance, and with only a few exceptions, it hasn’t caught the attention of media. After all, it is unthinkable. Anticipating societal collapse - whether from a range of environmental, economic, political or technological factors - has been attacked as pessimism, alarmism, doomism, fatalism or defeatism. Yet, proponents consider it would be defeatist to not even begin exploring what we can do to help in the face of massive societal disruption, and that any call for public engagement with the unthinkable is especially germane in this moment of a global pandemic. Not very long ago, it was unthinkable that a virus would shut down nations. It may have been this obvious global lack of preparation and resilience in the face of the COVID pandemic that inspired more than five hundred international scholars to sign and publicize a Scholar’s Warning Letter in March of 2021. The letter publicly addresses the equally unthinkable topics of societal disruption and potential collapse.
We met Raul east of El Paso as we were heading home. He was tending the field in front of his ranch, preparing to turn the hay under as green manure. He joked he was doing it for the exercise, since he had no access to water for planting anyway. Turns out much of the Rio Grande valley is in the 7th year of a drought; this one being the most serious one Raul has seen in the 50 years he’s lived in this valley. If farmers don’t have wells (the use of which, ironically lowers the water table), they have to rely on a water allotment from the local canal system. The canals are fed by Rio Grande river water, whose headwaters are the Weminuche Wilderness in southwestern Colorado, some 575 miles away. The wilderness is three quarters the size of Rhode Island, and has fed the Rio Grande for centuries. Now, between the competing problems of a reduced snowpack in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, and increased use of water upstream as New Mexico also grapples with drought, Raul’s usual allotment of 3 acre feet has been reduced to a few inches. Since Raul doesn’t have a well, he basically can’t grow anything now. He even said it would be risky to grow a vegetable garden because, “you never know if you’ll have the water”. Raul also told us that it used to be a lot colder, with some snow on the ground and more wind than now. We were enjoying the weather, but it was a placid day with full sunshine and about 65 degrees Fahrenheit. I asked Raul if he thought rain would come. He replied, “I hope so”. And I replied, “ I read a lot of climate science, and I think that although you might get occasional relief, what you’re going through now is likely to be the trend for a long time”. And I added, “I hope I’m wrong”. Raul gestured with open palms as if to say, what will come, will come. The Rio Grande is about a mile behind Raul’s ranch and the mountains in the distance are the Chihuahua Mountains of Mexico. Raul used to visit Mexico a lot but now the area behind his ranch is controlled by the cartel, so it’s no longer fun to go there. Photo by Michael Chase. Follow his work on Instagram @mjohnsonchase.
It can take a while for new perspectives to establish themselves in academic communities, much less among citizens and policymakers. Think about how long it has taken to get consensus on even the most conservative scientific warnings about climate change. It was well over 30 years ago that Congress held its first hearing on the subject of a warming climate, long before we had a vocabulary for what is now everyday news: extreme weather, droughts, floods, sea level rise, ocean acidification, rapid biodiversity loss, crop loss and famine, human migration and resource wars over water and arable land.
Similar to many of the citizens, politicians, and media outlets represented in the movie Don’t Look Up, some of of us don’t want to face information that challenges our closely held assumptions of security. However, some people will find dignity no matter what is coming. The final scene in the movie is a window into that possibility. A small group of people (who fought hard to avoid what they are about to experience) share a simple and final meal accepting their fate and fortifying themselves through prayer and conversation over their good fortune to know and love one another. In that moment, as in all moments: acceptance and love, recognition and kindness, staring into the abyss and knowing humanity means something, even though like all things, it was just another blink of life in the everlasting expansion and contraction of universal consciousness.
We met Erik at Catalina State Park just outside of Tucson. A park ranger, he is also a licensed falconer, and was leading a seminar with Virgil, a Harris Hawk. Erik became falconer to Virgil a couple of years ago and is devoted to him. Yet, Erik seemed quite realistic about the limitations of the relationship. When Jenny asked him if he loved the bird, he blushed and said, “Well, it’s not reciprocal because Virgil has no emotion”. Jenny's (sotto voce) response to me was, “Call me crazy, but that bird is attached to Erik. You can see it in his eyes”. In any case, we were enchanted by the extraordinary relationship between this man and a hawk, and found it a great inspiration for how different species can harmonize in such a profound way. Perhaps on the other side of “Deep Adaptation,” we can cultivate more sacred and symbiotic relationships with other species on this fragile world. Drawing by Jenny Hershey. Follow her on Instagram @deeofo.
Jenny’s sister, Terry Hershey, sent the following poem to start the new year in 2022. We both believe it says much about what the world needs right now.
Kindness
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.
Naomi Shihab Nye, from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems
Stay vigilant! Thanks for reading. More to come. If you haven’t done so already, please subscribe to this blog, so you can follow our next biking trip later in the spring of 2022.
All material, unless credited or otherwise noted, are copyrighted property of the blog post authors.
Hauling Bees, Growing Soil; Biking the Dakotas
Gabe Brown shows us a map of his farm. Drawing by Jennifer Hershey. Follow her work on Instagram at deeofo.
If you want to make small changes, change how you do things. If you want to make major changes, change how you SEE things.
Don Campbell (as quoted by Gabe Brown in his book Dirt to Soil)
When I began long-distance bike touring six years ago I was enthralled by the sense of freedom it offered; I learned how to carry very little to meet essential needs, I relished the sensuality of riding as fast as I dared down a hill with the wind to my back, I experienced deep satisfaction in conquering long uphill slopes, even while riding directly into a headwind. Those very simple experiences - the rush of freedom, the pride of accomplishment - made touring on a bicycle worthwhile. Beauty, however, was a generalized experience. Mountains, lakes, rivers, clouds, rain and rainbows caught my eye, while most small things went unnoticed. A small town boy turned long ago into a city slicker, I was a “big picture” observer. If it was dramatic, I was likely to appreciate it. Most small things went unnoticed, and my curiosity was limited. I was content to not know the particulars of a landscape or what was growing in a field unless I could recognize what I was looking at without much effort. Yet, my experiential palette broadened as I continued to cycle, and my observations began to sharpen. So did my curiosity.
Horses in a field near Lake Oahu (the Missouri River) north of Mobridge, SD. Photo by Michael Chase.
At about the same time, Jenny Hershey started joining me on biking adventures, and it wasn’t long before we began to recognize how many different things we each see in the same landscapes. Jenny - as a visual artist - is drawn to detail, and her observations fueled my curiosity even more. I began to appreciate that no matter where I am, there is more to observe in any landscape than I can ever fully digest. I am not discouraged by that perception; rather it is an incentive to stay with it, to see (and potentially understand) all I possibly can before that day arrives when I am no longer able to lift my leg over a bike seat. And there is continual progress; I see and learn more every day. My skill as an observer is growing. I think Jenny would say the same about herself.
The Missouri River from Standing Rock Reservation. We cycled the entire length of the Reservation on Highway 1806 and were deeply impressed with the beauty of the environment. At one point near Fort Yates, a woman waved Jenny over to point out the Sitting Bull Sacred Horses on a hill. An omen of good luck for those who see them, these wild horses are regarded as descendants of Sitting Bull’s horses. Photo by Michael Chase.
Climate change is both the biggest conundrum humans have ever faced, and simultaneously the ultimate challenge to our observational capacities. It is the result of millions and millions of small things that humans do. Most of those things can be seen in small measure by observant people, yet many human actions are at a scale beyond that which is perceptible to individuals. One housing development becomes many and hundreds of acres are lost to food cultivation, an oil derrick becomes thousands strewn across a vast region, a tanker truck becomes hundreds of miles of pipelines, a bare field in the wind becomes tons of lost topsoil, an application of synthetic fertilizer on crops becomes ruined waterways and destroyed municipal water systems, an application of pesticide on crops kills insect pests and simultaneously their beneficial predators - including the honeybees the same crops rely on for pollination.
Wind erosion on a conventionally tilled field in South Dakota. Photo by Michael Chase.
Small things become big things. All these things happen right in front of us, day after day after day, and many of us fail to notice them or their consequences until it’s too late. Some people do notice, however. Proverbial canaries in a coal mine, some are well known and in the news a lot, such as climate scientists Michael Mann or Katherine Heyhoe, or environmental activists Greta Thunberg, Bill McKibbon or the Standing Rock Water Protectors.
An inflow into Lake Oahe just south of the Cannonball River in South Dakota, where the Standing Rock protests of 2016 took place. Water Protectors have tried to protect groundwater sources from the probability of pollution, which in turn protects soil that nurtures healthy plants that feed bees and other pollinating insects. Although they were successful in getting the Obama administration to cancel the DAPL pipeline, Trump immediately approved it. Oil now flows under Lake Oahe and the pristine nature of this region is still under threat, yet, there is hope among Standing Rock residents that the Biden Administration will reverse Trump’s action and halt the flow of oil. Photo by Michael Chase.
Others don’t seek attention but attract it anyway by virtue of what they do, or how they see. John Miller is one of those people, as is Gabe Brown. While these two men (who are the primary subjects of this blog post) may be unlikely allies, they share a deep concern for the future, a love for the land, and a deep faith in nature as the greatest role model and teacher for agricultural practices.
We met Mylene, the town historian of Enderlin, North Dakota, about 70 miles west of Fargo, the day before we got to Gackle. She greeted us in her bright green pant suit and shared with us the history of why this town was more diverse (in its European ancestry) than most other North Dakota towns. This says something about diversity in North Dakota, since the 2010 census indicates Enderlin is 98.6% White, 2.4% Hispanic, 0.2% African American, 0.8% Native American, 0.1% Asian, and 0.2% from two or more races. When asked, she said the population was exactly 884 - unless someone she didn’t know about had died the night before. Drawing by Jennifer Hershey. Follow her work on Instagram at deeofo.
This post is a story of our interactions with these remarkable people as we cycled west from St Cloud, MN, to Bismarck, ND, down the Missouri River (aka, Lake Oahe) to Pierre, SD, and back east to St Cloud, MN, in May 2021.
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Gackle, ND, is the only stop along the 110 miles between Enderlin and Napoleon, ND, on the Adventure Cycling Association “Northern Tier” route through North Dakota. Although Gackle has a bar and a Tasteefreeze, there are no motels. However, we weren’t worried. We had learned from the ACA map there is a wonderful place for cyclists to stay called the Honey Hub. Located in the back of a split-level ranch house that sits empty for 9 months each year, the makeshift bedroom and bathroom also features a hot plate and refrigerator stuffed with drinks. The guestbook revealed no one had stayed there since late summer of 2020 (apparently, only the most intrepid of touring fanatics biked the iconic Northern Tier during the pandemic).
Jenny and I were greeted in the front yard of the Honey Hub by John Miller, the father of Jason Miller. Jason owns the house (and now, with a partner, the Miller Honey Farm) but lives in California most of the time. John is the colorful protagonist of The Beekeepers Lament by Hanna Nordhaus. We had no idea who we were talking to as we unpacked our gear, although it didn’t take us long to figure out John Miller is an unusual man. There were clues all around us: a stack of Hanna’s books for sale, a large display of honeystinger cycling treats and other forms of honey swag. “It is called the Honey Hub after all,” I told myself.
Miller Honey Farm created a winter home for their bees in a climate-controlled warehouse lit with infrared lighting that helps keep the bees dormant. Drawing by Jennifer Hershey. Follow her work on Instagram at deeofo.
I grabbed a copy of The Beekeepers Lament before we ambled over to the nearby Tasteefreeze for dinner, and read the book out loud to Jenny while we waited for some astonishingly good cod sandwiches. Our education was rapid, and we were transfixed. Turns out we had a complete misconception about how modern commercial beekeeping works. (It’s funny how something that seems so obvious after the fact, isn’t so obvious beforehand.)
As we thought, most beekeepers own just a few hives, and typically raise bees as a hobby. Some make extra money by selling honey, pollen, and beeswax. Commercial beekeepers, on the other hand, are responsible for thousands of hives and millions of bees. These colonies produce large amounts of honey and related products for profit, and are the primary means of large-scale agricultural pollination. Commercial beekeepers are distinct to the developed world; globally only about 5% of beekeepers run commercial operations, mainly in northern latitudes and Australia where industrial agriculture flourishes, and where (sadly) very few bees remain in the wild. Beekeepers elsewhere keep a much small number of hives in countries where farms are smaller and more diverse. That said, commercial beekeepers are responsible for as much as 60% of the world’s honey crop. Interestingly, the production, importing and packing of honey generates 22,000 jobs in the US, about half the amount of the total jobs created by the US coal industry.
Extra beehive pallets line the wall in the Miller Honey winter storage facility in Gackle, ND. Photo by Michael Chase.
As we had expected, the Miller Honey Farm sells the honey their bees make. They normally ship their honey to a major supplier in Lancaster, PA. But honey and beeswax-related products aren’t their most important activities. Like the 1200 other commercial beekeepers across the United States, John (now in charge of the Modesto pollination region) and Miller Honey Farm essentially “rents” their bees out to different growers over the season for pollination services. And also like many other US beekeepers, their year begins in the almond groves of the California Central Valley.
Every year in January and February the world’s greatest pollination event takes place in the valley. Over 2 million hives from around the US are put on flatbeds (at least 2,600 truckloads of those bees come from outside California) to pollinate more than 1 million acres of almond orchards. That includes Miller Honey Farm hives. Before John retired and took a back seat in the company he owned, he used to transport his hives from Newcastle, California, where he once owned a ranch. Now the farm winters their entire colony in their climate-controlled warehouse in Gackle over 1500 miles from California’s Central Valley.
Barrels for transporting honey line a wall at the Miller Honey plant in Gackle, ND. Photo by Michael Chase.
John’s hives stay in the California almond orchards until the growers no longer need them - usually mid to late March, when he takes them away to pollinate another crop. Pollination is a critical part of growing almonds, so removing hives too early can result in reduced yields. Keeping them too long can delay Miller Honey’s commitments to other growers, resulting in risks for honey bees to find alternative food sources when the almond bloom is over - or worse yet - subjecting the bees to pesticides when the almond growers start spraying. Some beekeepers believe that pesticides are responsible for Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), while others blame an invasive mite known as Varroa destructor. We got the impression that John Miller is agnostic about the subject of CCD as a persistent issue. …He once told Hanna Nordhaus the primary reason for massive bee collapse is PPM (piss poor management) by beekeepers.
Miller Honey bees placed in a field near Napoleon, ND. Photo by Michael Chase.
That may be true for some. But while modern industrial agriculture is the hand that feeds him, John is not the greatest fan. He works closely with the Honeybee Health Coalition, and is on the Board of Bee Informed. More than once he mentioned to us that regenerative agricultural practices would considerably help his bees. He even gave us bumper stickers that say: Farmers Feed Bees. For bees, greater diversity in available plant life makes for healthier bees and richer honey. Monoculture - a primary feature of modern conventional industrial agriculture - is a definite buzzkill for bees and their honey. Pun intended.
John Miller and Jenny Hershey in the Miller Honey winter bee storage facility in Gecko, ND. The light is infrared and won’t disturb resting bees. Photo by Michael Chase.
Besides, trucking bees around is no fun. I can’t imagine a beekeeper who wouldn’t be excited by placing bees in an environment so plant-rich he or she would never need to move them. The payoff would be considerable. One could even say that bees feed farmers.
As Hanna Nordhaus writes in The Beekeepers Lament: Farmers depend on honey bees to pollinate ninety different fruits and vegetables, from almonds to lettuce to cranberries to blueberries to canola—nearly $15 billion worth of crops a year. Although wind and wild insects pollinate some plants on a small scale, only bees promise the levels of production needed to meet the needs of the nation’s grocery shoppers. Like every aspect of American agriculture, beekeeping has, by necessity, joined the global economy of scale. Bees are pollination machines, and many of America’s farmers need them just as much as they need their tractors, threshers, and combines. For problems with water, labor, pest control, and soil quality, there are irrigation systems, big machines, pesticides, and synthetic fertilizers. Today the biggest factor limiting the amount of produce grown is, for many crops, the number of bees available.
We saw this placard outside of Pierre, SD, at the Oahe Downstream State Recreation Area. Photo by Michael Chase.
Indeed, more pollinators (in the form of bees) are required if ever greater yields are the goal - especially if the type of agriculture practiced is fundamentally antithetical to the well-being of bees. And that is the conventional agricultural model. An unrelenting focus on yields has been the primary driver of industrial agriculture for decades, without regard to the health of the resources required to produce it. What if the predominant paradigm were to shift from chasing ever-higher yields to profits based on lower inputs based on increased soil health? Might we have happier farmers, cleaner water, richer soil, healthier consumers, less carbon in our atmosphere, and an abundance of bees? That, in essence, is the primary focus of regenerative agriculture.
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We organized this entire biking trip around a visit to Gabe Brown’s farm near Bismarck, ND. Our curiosity about regenerative agriculture had been heightened by our last bike trip through the Carolinas and our subsequent blog post on land trusts, where we learned about the potential importance of carbon sequestration through land use practices. So the opportunity to meet a successful farmer who is recognized as a leading practitioner of regenerative agriculture was a big lure. We weren’t disappointed. Nonetheless, much that happens on a biking adventure is based on serendipity, and our encounters with both John Miller and Gabe Brown were about as serendipitous as could be. Before we met him, we didn’t know John Miller existed, and although we intended to visit Gabe Brown’s Ranch, we really didn’t expect we’d get to meet the man himself. I don’t know if being able to spend precious time with each of these men was intervention by the gods or simply good luck. Gabe Brown told us he thinks people make their own luck; whatever the case, things definitely worked out for us.
The entrance to Gabe Brown’s Ranch, about 11 miles northeast of downtown Bismarck. Photo by Jenny Hershey.
As we rode up the long gravel driveway to the Brown Ranch, it looked empty. I wasn’t surprised. It was mid-May after all, and I expected every available hand to be out in the fields. Yet, I had made a bet with Jenny that someone would be there, selling many of the remarkable products Gabe and his son had figured out how to direct market over the years, and describes so well in his book Dirt to Soil. Obviously, I was naive about how the Brown Ranch markets its products. Roadside stands are not common on the plains, and it’s much easier to market through the internet. Gabe Brown’s outlet is called Nourished by Nature.
Gabe Brown’s farm looking west. Notice the perennial grassland and the size of the herd. Photo by Michael Chase
We arrived at a small ranch home, next to a barn and an equipment shed, and a few more buildings I didn’t recognize. In the distance near the shed, we saw a man get into a small off-road vehicle, and start driving toward us. Gabe Brown is a bit of a rock star because of his formidable presence in the movie Kiss the Ground (watchable on Netflix), and his ubiquitous presence on YouTube. We recognized him immediately. He was the only person around; we couldn’t believe our luck. Gabe seemed equally surprised. His first comment when he got close enough was, “That’s a first - I’ve never seen anyone arrive here on a bicycle before, much less a couple of older folks!” He was easygoing, but we were worried he might be really busy, so we quickly explained to him why we were there, and said we’d be happy looking around on our own. He replied, “I have a few minutes, so why not get out of the wind?” We went into a small building on the opposite side of the road - which, it turns out, is where Gabe Brown holds “soil health” seminars.
Perennial rangeland on Gabe Brown’s farm. Gabe is very thoughtful about where and how long he pastures his cattle so he can optimize the nutrient density and carbon content of his soil. Photo by Jenny Hershey.
Our conversation was quick and to the point. Gabe was a panelist on a Zoom call in about 20 minutes, so we covered a lot of territory quickly. My biggest takeaway was that while Gabe thinks the potential for sequestering carbon in soil through the use of cover crops, no-till seeding, and effective grazing of ruminating animals (his most profitable products), the science is still not clear on how to effectively measure the storage capacity of carbon from the atmosphere into soil. What is clear is that there are many other benefits of regenerative farming. As Gabe explains on his website: Our belief is that if we have healthy soil it will provide for clean air, clean water, healthy plants, healthy animals, and healthy people. Our soils are much more resilient than they once were. They now harbor billions of life forms that in fact “feed the food” we raise. Soils that are biologically active produce foods that are higher in vitamin and mineral content and when we eat these foods, these vitamins and minerals are passed on to us. These soils are also able to store more carbon and water which has a positive impact on the environment.
After a short while, Gabe handed over the keys to his off-road vehicle (apparently he thought if we were crazy enough to bike to his farm, we could certainly be able to drive his Polaris) and sent us off to see his pasturing chickens and his son’s iconic eggmobiles (described in Gabe’s book), where the Browns raise eggs and chickens, and integrate both into their soil development and management routine.
Chickens grazing in a section of field on Gabe’s land. When all the chickens are laying there is no need for fencing; the eggmobiles (where the chickens go to lay their eggs) are simply moved to another part of the field. The chickens don’t need to be fed, eggs are collected and sold, and the soil is naturally fertilized. Photo by Jenny Hershey.
A half hour later, he returned in a truck. Although Gabe had another Zoom call in an hour (we later learned it was with a major American retailer who is interested in supporting regenerative farmers by marketing their products), he wanted to show us more of his farm. We spent the next hour touring his remarkably beautiful perennial pastures and checking on his cows with him. We shared his delight as we saw some of the 11 new calves that had been born overnight. It was a wonderful way to spend an hour.
As a concept, regenerative agriculture aims to be more all-encompassing than or other types of agricultural practices, including organic. A recent article in Sustainable America lists five main principles that regenerative farmers agree upon: improving soil health, increasing biodiversity, aiding in carbon sequestration, incorporating humane treatment of livestock and farmworkers, and improving the overall larger ecosystem as a whole. These practices include:
Incorporating crop rotation and cover cropping
Increasing plant and crop diversity
Practicing minimal or no-till seeding to prevent erosion and increase soil health
Integrating managed grazing and pasturing of animals
One of the biggest potential benefits of regenerative agriculture is that it can help combat climate change. The hope is that regenerative agriculture’s strong focus on soil health and reduced tilling efforts will lead to more carbon being sequestered into healthy soil instead of being released into the atmosphere. However, many experts in addition to Gabe Brown agree: the science isn’t quite there to support the claims yet. Yet, whether regenerative agriculture ends up being a scientifically proven way to fight climate change or not, its methods still offer many benefits to the ecosystem, producers and consumers.
Gabe Brown relaxes on his no-till planter after explaining how it plants seed with minimal disruption to soil. Drawing by Jennifer Hershey. Follow her work on Instagram at deeofo.
Gabe Brown agrees, and it’s hard to imagine John Miller would disagree. The people at Understanding Ag, the Natural Resources Conservation Service (the NRCS is part of the USDA), and the Soil Health Academy also agree, as well as many more organizations that advocate for sustainable practices in modern agriculture. But the most stunning approval right now is bipartisan support coming from the federal government through the Growing Climate Solutions Act. This proposed legislation was reintroduced this April in the U.S. Senate by a large bipartisan group of senators, led by members of the Senate Agriculture Committee. Senators who are sponsoring the bill include 17 Democrats and 17 Republicans.
The bipartisanship toward this bill is almost stunning in our divided politics, and its potential should not be underestimated. In addition, more than 60 agriculture groups and many environmental organizations back the bill (but not all; some have a bad taste in their mouths because of previous problems with other voluntary carbon markets). As it is currently written, this bill will create a certification program at USDA to provide technical assistance for farmers and forest owners to enroll in a carbon-credit market. The USDA will provide guidelines to farmers on how to qualify for carbon-credit programs, and the carbon-credit program will then become "USDA certified." The legislation comes as an array of companies have started enrolling farmers in carbon sequestration programs to quantify and pay for farming practices that minimize tillage and increase organic matter in the soil.
Clearly, we have a lot more to learn about how to most effectively incentivize the agricultural sector to manage soil better, and policymakers must get this right. Yet, there is no time to waste and the potential for doing good is enormous. Let’s not forget: If you want to make small changes, change how you do things. If you want to make major changes, change how you SEE things.
In closing, I would like to add that Resources for the Future is one of my favorite go-to organizations for current information on large-scale climate solutions. Here’s what they have to say about carbon sequestration and storage in the land. Time will tell what we can accomplish. In the meantime, keep noticing the small stuff. It adds up.
Walter, a retired railroad engineer, is the Enderlin, ND, Friendly Tavern’’s Wheel of Fortune champion. Drawing by Jennifer Hershey. Follow her work on Instagram at deeofo.
Stay vigilant! Thanks for reading. More to come. Follow our next biking trip this July (while places are still under consideration, land use and carbon sequestration will be likely subjects).
All material, unless credited or otherwise noted, are copyrighted property of the blog post author.
Jenny Hershey took this photo in South Dakota, and she really wanted me to add it to this post because she likes it so much. I do too.
A Journey into Land Use; Biking the Carolinas
Calvin is from from Bennettsville SC. A forklift operator for Marley Engineered Products, he was given incentives and a bonus to work through the Covid pandemic. He has two kids and somehow managed to never miss a day of work, although his wife was furloughed. We met him on his way to his mailbox. He teasingly joked he was hoping for a stimulus check. …and then he said he’d been watching for it in his checking account…
Drawing by Jennifer Hershey. Follow her work on Instagram at deeofo.
To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time.
Leonard Bernstein
We started our latest cycling trip in Chapel Hill, where Jenny’s son Sam lives with his family. Our plan was simple enough: we would bike to Savannah and back, and then drive back to New York City in time for our second Covid vaccination shot in late March. This was our first tour since the onset of the pandemic without a car, and like many of the “best laid plans of mice and men,” it didn’t go quite as we had expected. Who would have thought that a jumble of discarded wire could work its way into a derailer and rip off a speed sensor? Yet, that’s what happened to Jenny as we turned off a rather bucolic South Carolina road onto the notorious Highway 17. Because of aging infrastructure and an abundance of coastal marshland, this is essentially the only road that connects Savannah and Charleston with the sandhills to the north. To complicate matters, route 17 is recklessly identified as a cycling route on the East Coast Greenway.
Marshland near Charleston, SC
It is also the most dangerous highway that Jenny and I have ever biked on. Where there is a shoulder (which is rare), this highly trafficked four lane highway offers cyclists lots of fast moving traffic, a customary South Carolina rumble strip, lots of loose gravel and stunningly challenging detritus. We saw the bundle of wire too late to avoid it. I went over it first, and my bike tossed the bundle into the air. Jenny swerved, but alas, it caught her rear wheel on its way down. Her bike seized immediately. Not good, but thankfully she didn’t crash.
Our “fully loaded” Trek Crossrip e-bikes parked on a boardwalk near the beach on Sullivan Island in Charleston.
We both ride Trek Crossrip pedal assist e-bikes that increase our hourly touring speed by 3-5 miles/hour. This makes riding 70 miles a day on average a bit easier and faster, yet still physically challenging. But these extraordinary machines also have their downsides. After carefully disentangling and cutting out multiple strands of wire wound around the cassette, derailer, rear wheel and frame of Jenny's bike, imagine our disappointment when we discovered the wire had somehow managed to tear off the speed sensor for the small motor in her crankcase. It wasn’t the end of our trip altogether. Although we doubted we’d find a Trek dealer with such a rare part in stock, Jenny was able to nurse her bike along even though the motor would cease to work from time to time when the torque increased. This made for painful uphill cycling. We were about 400 miles from our car. Getting home on the bike would be possible, but it was going to take some fortitude.
The Francis Marion National Forest on a mellow stretch of road off Route 41 north of Charleston. Formally established in the 1930’s, this forest covers approximately 259,000 acres. In 1989, the forest was nearly destroyed by Hurricane Hugo; only the young growth survived the storm and its aftermath. Today, most trees in the forest do not predate this hurricane.
A Great Egret flying over coastal marshland on the Isle of Palm Connector near Mount Pleasant, SC, southwest of the Francis Marion National Forest.
Jenny rose to the occasion, although it took us three days to reroute ourselves through Charleston and Mount Pleasant (where we found a bike shop that, predictably, didn’t have the part we needed). Please be forewarned; if you ever visit Charleston by bike, getting into or out of that extraordinarily charming and historic city is not fun. On the upside, there is talk by state and local officials of making both Savannah and Charleston more accessible to cyclists at some point in the not too distant future through “smart growth” planning.
Charleston is a spectacularly attractive town, and it seemed to be gently waking from a Covid induced slumber when we passed through. There were lots of tourists wandering the streets, horse drawn carriages carrying passengers, and numerous guides talking to small groups of masked up people. We ate outside at a well known local fish restaurant, Eli Hyman’s, run by a 4th generation Jewish businessman who told us that just a few blocks away we’d find the oldest continuously used temple in the United States,
Temple Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim in Charleston, SC. Founded in 1750, this temple is the cradle of reformed Judaism.
“Dumb growth” planning has irritated me for years. There are many roads in America where poor design fragments communities, destroys land unnecessarily, and makes walking or biking impossible. Humans have walked everywhere for thousands of years, yet in recent decades transportation planners have built many roads that can be navigated only in a functioning motorized vehicle. It's as if planners have acquired dementia about our capacity to ambulate. Where are the sidewalks or shoulders? God forbid that someone’s car should break down, and they would have to walk to the nearest gas station for help. Try ambulating by foot, in a wheelchair, or on a bike to the nearest mall next to a freeway in your community, and you’ll know what I mean. You're likely to be surprised at how terrorizing such a trip can be.
A typical road in South Carolina. While North Carolina has skinny or nonexistent shoulders, South Carolina has a terrible practice of adding rumble strips to their very narrow or nonexistent shoulders (at extra cost to taxpayers)! This might be helpful to the occasional driver, but it also forces cyclists onto very busy roads. I’d wager that for every sleepy or drunk driver whose life is saved, several cyclists are killed. This is so dangerous that the Adventure Cycling Association (ACA) runs an entire advocacy program focused solely on redesigning and/or eradicating rumble strips. You can read about it here.
Mr Patel has owned the Colonial Inn in Andrews, SC, since he immigrated from India 41 years ago. He survived Hurricane Hugo in 1989, which devastated his town and blew off his motel sign. Mercifully, his motel was spared but his parking lot was filled with debris, including a few roofs from neighboring homes. Temporary power was restored after 4 days, and the motel prospered as it filled up with utility workers from all over the state. Currently Mr. Patel benefits when the nearby paper mill at Georgetown shuts down annually for maintenance because he houses all the workers.
Drawing by Jennifer Hershey. Follow her work on Instagram at deeofo.
In much of America, where clumps of population are mixed with cropland, pastureland and forests, it can be difficult to grasp the identity of a given “place.” That’s what Jenny and I experienced as we cycled south from Chapel Hill. After we passed a lovely (man made) reservoir on a narrow, shoulder-less, highly trafficked road and some seemingly affluent horse farms, much of the landscape became chaotic - a house here and there, a recently tilled dirt-exposed field, junked cars, abandoned appliances, a decaying shed and house, a few acres of lumpy clear-cut timber with trunks and branches strewn every which-way, a field of sod, a thin stand of trees, a gravel field of unused septic tanks, a half acre of forest, a driveway to nowhere, a parking lot, an abandoned industrial shed, a pile of tires, a Dollar General, enormous stacks of pipelines, a Family Dollar, a quaint house with a yard full of tchotchkes, a few trees, a large field revealing last year’s cotton crop.
It was dizzying to take it all in, and even harder to know if there was anything at all sustainable about what we were looking at. Most likely not, we thought. And I mused on one of my obsessions - the persistent degradation of our treasured American landscape. It all seemed so ….disorganized. I really couldn’t get my mind around all that I was noticing. It was a crazy landscape, a random piecemeal (de)construction with no regard for itself. It reminded me of a frog in a slowly boiling pot who fails to notice the water is slowly heating up until it’s too late to do anything about it. There was persistent decay all around us, and no one seemed to care. But then, what do I know? As a small-city Midwesterner I can probably identify five to seven agricultural crops, and Jenny as an urbanite, even fewer. I am only now recognizing the difference between timberlands and forest. The sad fact is I know very little about rural landscapes beyond what I have come to appreciate in our magnificent national parks. But protected public land is very different from the vast stores of private land that occupies most of our landscape. And this was private land in a gentle rural landscape that had once been vast forests of Longleaf Pines nestled among swamp, marsh, bayou, streams, rivers and lakes. It is now small patches of forest, timberland, cropland and pasture, random houses and housing tracts, abandoned lots, industrial products, and an abundance of intentional and uninspired human detritus.
After explaining the value of winter wheat as a harvestable cover crop, the 6th generation farmer Keith Williamson tells us about the Pee Dee Land Trust (PDLT) which has partnered with private landowners throughout the Pee Dee River watershed (second in size on the eastern seaboard to the Delaware River watershed) to permanently protect over 32,000 acres of land. Over 80% of conservation easements held by PDLT are working farms and forests clustered mainly along waterways.
Did you know there are approximately 5 times more farmers over 65 years of age than there are farmers under 35?
Drawing by Jennifer Hershey. Follow her work on Instagram at deeofo.
Talking to Keith made our day. We saw him standing next to his car looking over a field that we had just been wondering about, so we pulled off on the grass (because there was no shoulder on the road) on the opposite side of the road, and yelled in our nasalized New York City and Midwest accents to get his attention. Keith didn’t seem the least bit phased by the bikes, or our car dodging as we crossed the busy road on foot all the while peppering him with questions. He patiently answered us in his gentle South Carolina drawl that we were looking at winter wheat, a cover crop on a field that would be soybeans in a few months. “It’s a complimentary process. The wheat takes up the nitrogen the soy puts down,” he explained. Legumes add nitrous oxide to the soil, which then enters the atmosphere through erosion or when the field is tilled. We learned later that nitrogen is a potent greenhouse gas, so using cover a crop like winter wheat to reduce nitrogen levels has a beneficial impact on climate change, as well as helping soil health. As we talked more, we learned about the Pee Dee Land Trust, which helped Keith and other members of his family to protect 3,000 acres of family land.
At one time most of the southeast was covered in Longleaf Pine forest. Naturally fire resistant, these superb trees would grow quite tall and create savanna-like conditions underneath, which would be routinely burned off, either by natural causes or intentionally by indigenous people. Now burning is almost always intentional. This relatively young forest was recently burned off.
Land trusts are an important tool for protecting land from development, preserving it for valuable forests, timberland and agricultural uses that encourages smart rural growth, improves water quality and ensures natural carbon storage and sequestration. For example, forests alone in the US store 59 billion metric tons of carbon in trees, roots, soils and forest products, and sequester 14% of the country's CO2 emissions. Agricultural crops are not quite as storage intensive due to their shorter life cycles, but their carbon storage and sequestration properties can be significant.
Land is typically conserved by outright purchase into a trust, or less expensively, by “conservation easement,” a deeded agreement with a Land Trust by the owner to protect a property. Conservation easements are irrevocable and apply to the present and all future owners of the land. As with other real property interests, a conservation easement is recorded in local land records and becomes a part of the chain of title for the property, permanently protecting the land from development.
An intentional burn off seen at a distance.
Because approximately 9000 acres a day of farmland and forests in the US are lost to commercial and residential developers, land trust programs provide enormous public benefits. Conservation easements alone already protect an estimated 50 million acres of natural habitat in this country, and each year another 2 million acres are added to that total. Since 1982, the US has lost over 25 million acres of agricultural land to development, while global population and carbon emission levels have almost doubled. I couldn’t find a figure for how much farmland we have left in the US (I’m sure the USDA knows), but I did learn we currently have about 450 million acres of forestland in the US under threat of development, which is about 60% of our remaining forests. According to a study cited by the American Farmland Trust, land that is converted to other uses from its natural habitat (including agricultural land) emits greenhouse gas emissions at rates 50-70 times greater than had it remained undeveloped. Preserving our land is essential if we are going to reach net zero by 2050.
Flood damage on a road near McColl, SC
This protection doesn't come without a price tag, however. Easements are incentivized through tax credits or property tax reductions, so taxpayers effectively pay private citizens not to sell their land to developers at a higher price in order to benefit the greater good. (Frankly, that strikes me as analogous to the failure of capitalism to externalize the social costs of carbon pollution, but that’s a subject for another blog post.)
Yet, the effort is essential. Soil stores two to three times more carbon than the atmosphere and up to four times the amount of carbon stored in the vegetation on land. Since the advent of modern agriculture (till and fertilize; wash, rinse and repeat) soil health has degraded considerably and we have lost much of our topsoil to erosion, including more than half of the organic carbon originally stored in US soils. With nearly 400 million acres of cropland alone, we have an enormous opportunity to use “regenerative” farming methods to rebuild organic carbon in our soil, sequester atmospheric carbon and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, soils need healthy plant life on them to be able to accomplish this. How we manage carbon stocks on our land - whether it’s forest, timberland, cropland or pastureland - will have a significant impact on climate change over the coming decades. Climate activists, policy makers, and most importantly farmers, need to understand that how we use our land (and in particular, how we grow our food), are every bit as important to our collective efforts to decarbonize as transforming our energy system.
A field of turnip, another popular cover crop in regenerative agriculture.
Rural communities face a host of challenges - including changing demographics, lack of economic growth, community health and preservation, and a strong need for environmental protection. In addition, rural communities need workforce development, access to broadband, and effective transportation in their planning efforts. Smart growth strategies can help communities guide development while protecting working lands and preserving rural character. There are an increasing number of great organizations and online mapping tools for learning more about these topics. I list some of them below, especially those that I used to prepare this blog.
Lucky, a 74 year old ex jockey from Virginia, runs a 16 acre horse boarding farm in North Carolina. He believes everyone can find a job doing something even if they don't like it, and he doesn’t like the Covid stimulus package. He earned his way up “galloping” horses (Secretariat was his most famous) when he was young. He got paid $3.00 a run. He laughed as we biked away, just after we encouraged him to get a Covid vaccine. We gathered he wasn't interested.
Drawing by Jennifer Hershey. Follow her work on Instagram at deeofo.
And finally, the Biden administration’s recently-announced plan to address climate change, which includes provisions to conserve 30 percent of U.S. land and waters by the year 2030, is definitely worth attention.
Stay vigilant! Thanks for reading. More to come. Follow our next biking trip from central Wisconsin into the Dakotas this coming May, 2021.
All photos, unless credited or otherwise noted, are copyrighted property of the blog post author.
The Renewal Blues; Biking the Mississippi River Trail, Post 2
Dwight is 11 years old, and quite a drummer. We met him at the Pleasant Chapel M.B. Church just north of Memphis, TN. He was really proud to be part of the church gospel band.
Drawing by Jennifer Hershey. Follow her work on Instagram at deeofo.
What a great trip we’ve had during this time of change in America! Jenny and I have spent three weeks biking along two routes: the Mississippi River Trail (MRT), a fabulous Open Cycle Map bike trail that runs along or near the Mississippi River from north of Minneapolis to south of New Orleans; and the iconic “Southern Tier” route mapped out by the Adventure Cycling Association (ACA) that runs from San Diego to St Augustine, Florida. We biked along the MRT south from Ste. Genevieve, Missouri through Memphis, Tennessee and south through the Delta country of Arkansas and Mississippi to Vicksburg, then down to Natchez, Mississippi, where we turned east on the ACA’s “Southern Tier” and made our way along the Gulf coast through Mobile, Alabama to Orange Beach, Florida on the panhandle coastline.
An armadillo seen in the St Francis National Forest near West Helena, AR.
The American South didn’t disappoint us. Although it’s been unusually cold and intermittently rainy in the southeastern United States this winter, we were glad to avoid the harsher weather to the north in our hometown of New York. We biked through areas rich with wildlife, occasionally stopping to admire the countryside or take in the extraordinary cacophony of countless birds and frogs. We also biked through both dull and very interesting human environments in the form of villages and small to medium-sized cities.
The Pearl River forms the far eastern border of Louisiana and the southwestern border of Mississippi.
Experiencing the social vibe just after the recent presidential inauguration has been both heartening and sobering. Today, in southern Alabama we passed two abandoned semitrailers with “stop the steal,” “the election was stolen”, and “Trump is our President” graffiti painted across them. They were too far away, and we were moving too quickly to be able to photograph them, yet they definitely echoed the spirit of insurrection at the Capital. We have also seen signs that both puzzled and amused us.
Seen near Perryville, MO.
It’s interesting to speculate how long Trump 2020 signs will remain up. We've seen a few Biden/Harris signs as well, but - in these parts at least - the folks who voted for Biden aren’t as overt about their preference as those who voted for Trump. But whatever their beliefs, I’d wager most Americans are wondering how the coming weeks and months will play out.
A sign in Natchez, Mississippi. Apparently vote selling has happened there in the past, and the local Democratic Party wanted to make sure that was not a problem in the recent election, as per the following quote from an October, 2020 article in apnews.com by Tim Sullivan: By at least one measure, it’s harder to vote in Mississippi than any other state. And despite Mississippi having the largest percentage of Black people of any state in the nation, a Jim Crow-era election law has ensured that a Black person hasn’t been elected to statewide office in 130 years. After years of being shut out of state races, Democrats hope mobilizing Black voters and recruiting Black candidates can eventually give them a path back to relevance in one of the reddest of red states. But sometimes, it can seem that voting rights in Mississippi are like its small towns and dirt roads, which can appear frozen in the past.
When an African-American from Mississippi is finally elected to Congress (as almost happened last November) it won’t be for the first time. That happened in the late 19th century when Hiram Revel was the first African-American ever elected to the US Senate. You can read about that here.
As much as we enjoyed occasional sunny warmth on the Gulf coastline, we found the Delta country of Arkansas and Mississippi the most interesting part of our trip. We followed the famous Mississippi Blues Trail as we progressed downriver on the MRT in the Delta country, taking in the birthplaces of blues legends such as Conway Twitty, Eddy Taylor, and Ike Turner.
A shot of our rig in Friar’s Point, Mississippi. We haul our food in a car because we chose to minimize our exposure to Covid by not eating in restaurants. Our conversations with locals usually take place outside when we are riding our bikes. We drive an average of 100 miles a day and bike an average of 50. We call this method of travel carbiking. It’s almost as satisfying as touring exclusively on our bikes, although we can’t wait for Covid to be neutralized enough to leave the car behind…
But as rich as the history of the blues and religion is in those parts, I found myself more intrigued about the local economies reflected through their physical environments.
A decaying mansion returns to the earth in Mayersville, Mississippi.
I’m used to seeing one or a few shuttered buildings in most small towns all across the Midwest and West. Since my childhood in the farming town of Galesburg, Illinois, I’ve been witness to the decline of rural America. But what Jenny and I saw in the Mississippi Delta country is on another level altogether. Every town we passed through, from Helena - West Helena, Arkansas to Friars Point, Mississippi to Gunnison to Rosedale to Greenville, Mississippi has a surprising (and distressing) number of abandoned buildings. It looks like 50 to 60% of commercial buildings are shuttered and maybe 20% are in disrepair with broken windows, damaged walls and collapsed ceilings. What is even more startling are the considerable number of boarded up and destroyed residential buildings. In many of these towns there are entire blocks full of abandoned homes. It seems like people have been leaving these towns for years, and no one is claiming their property. Apparently, the cost of demolishing a home or commercial property often isn't worth the land it sits on.
The welcoming sign on the way into Gunnison, Mississippi.
Just past the welcoming sign in Gunnison, Mississippi.
Our first encounter with "lost" cities on this trip was Cairo, Illinois, which has lost about two-thirds of its population since the late 1960's. That trend is playing out all along large sections of the Mississippi River south of Cairo, all the way down to Baton Rouge.
Helena, Arkansas, is home to the longest running daily radio program in the US, King Biscuit Time. This photo was taken on Main Street near the recording studio. Most of the buildings on the four block-long Main Street are shuttered.
The abandoned Delta Oil Mill outside of Helena, Arkansas. Losing a local industry was particularly harsh for Helena after mechanization beginning in the 1950’s reduced the need for farm workers. The city also lost the Mohawk Rubber Company, a subsidiary of Yokohama Rubber Company, in the 1970s. Unemployment surged shortly after, starting a long economic decline that has lasted for decades.
Much of the Delta country sits on the remarkable Mississippi alluvial plain, which boasts some of best crop land in the country. Alluvial soil has many functions, the greatest of which is serving as the earth’s kidneys. Alluvial soil removes sediments and captures nutrients flowing in adjacent water, so it is very fertile and makes excellent crop land. As a result, the Delta region has been a prime contributor to our country’s agricultural based economy throughout most of the past two centuries.
A harvested cotton field near Alligator, Mississippi.
Before the Civil War, farm products comprised up to 82% of all exports, and cotton was especially important on the international market. Agriculture remained the most important activity in the Delta region’s economy for nearly 200 years, and cotton was king. But farming in the Delta was harsh. Between 1910 and 1970, 6.5 million African-Americans went North, leaving the South, the cotton fields, and sharecropping behind. Five million more African-Americans left after 1940, creating the second great migration to the North. By the end of World War II, much of cotton farming had been mechanized, and most of the remaining sharecroppers were forced from the land.
We met Clyde in Mayersville, Mississippi. Although he was on his way to a haircut, he stopped his truck after passing us navigating our bikes down a rugged gravel road, and waited for us to catch up. He told us he was a Vietnam Vet, and when he came home from the war he wanted to be the biggest cotton farmer in the state. He said he now wants to be the smallest. He explained that with the latest machinery two men can farm 2000 acres of cotton, but that level of production is no longer of interest to him. Unfortunately, he was late for his haircut, so we were unable to learn why…..
Clyde lives in Issaquena County. He told us he knew every family there. We checked Wikipedia and sure enough, “As of the 2010 census, the population was 1,406, making it the least populous county in the United States east of the Mississippi River”.
Drawing by Jennifer Hershey. Follow her work on Instagram at deeofo.
I understand how the mechanization of farming would displace thousands of workers. I can also understand how related factories like cottonseed oil mills will close down when agribusiness can cheaply truck goods to larger cities, or even ship raw cotton overseas for cheaper processing. But it’s hard to imagine such distressing trends playing out for over 100 to 150 years. But that’s the reality of the Delta region in Arkansas and Mississippi. Technological unemployment may be thought of more often as an urban problem, but it has been happening in Delta country for decades. And nothing has replaced what has been lost.
A John Deere cotton harvester. Photo from Wikipedia.
We were deeply impressed by the beauty of the land, the bird life, and most especially the friendliness and soulfulness of the locals we met in the Delta country. We had some really touching conversations with local folks. And our hearts are heavy. What can be done to help people there? Or will most everyone be forced out eventually as homes, commercial buildings and abandoned factories are gradually reclaimed by the earth? Will the Delta become a no-mans land visited by solitary individuals driving massive agricultural planters and harvesters, plus a few intrepid motorists, rugged cyclists or passionate birding enthusiasts? It would be so sad to see the tapestry of such a rich human past die out. Clearly, a major reset is needed, although there are many small attempts at resetting. One example of positive change we came across is the green technical training program in Ocean Springs on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi.
We met this remarkable woman named Tammy in Friars Point in the delta country of northern Mississippi. The park nearby has a walk named after her father, who was a pastor at a local church. Quite a churchgoer herself, Tammy told us she had learned how to “’pay no mind” to the locals who displayed confederate flags. Her church had taught her to forgive others and let them be. She and both her kids had caught Covid, but fortunately for all the cases were mild.
Drawing by Jennifer Hershey. Follow her work on Instagram at deeofo.
This brings me to the end of this blog post, and the beginning of whatever is next for the Mississippi Delta region and beyond. I believe we can already visualize the next great global economic transition and the primary features of its potential success. Three major accomplishments are necessary: 1) our energy system must transform from fossil fuels to renewable form of energy, 2) we must switch from till-based, high-fertilizer, carbon-intensive forms of farming to no-till, low-fertilizer, carbon-mitigating forms of farming that replace dirt-with-soil, and 3) we must set aside one-third of our world’s land and oceans to restore the rapidly vanishing wildlife and biodiversity our species depends on for our own survival.
We are finally making some headway, at least on the national level. President Biden’s first few weeks have bern dynamic and productive. For those who worry about how our rapidly changing climate will continue to wear down our already vulnerable economy, many of his climate-related executive orders are very welcome.
Also, you may have read about the lackluster oil lease sale in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in the final days of the Trump administration. Even as the Trump administration failed to acknowledge climate change, many corporations are finally recognizing our changing climate as a true threat. Finally there's a visible mainstream momentum toward a healthier, more reliable renewable energy supply. Jobs may not be that far behind, nor will be agricultural and wildlife restoration. In the meantime, the Mississippi Delta region will continue to languish for its inhabitants while delighting many of its visitors.
Stay vigilant! Thanks for reading. More to come. Follow our next trip this coming March, 2021.
An Episcopal Church in Lorman, Mississippi.
All photos, unless credited or otherwise noted, are copyrighted property of the blog post author.
Louisiana/Texas, Post 3
“My wife and I take turns praying at our altar. We are Hindus. But we love this motel. It’s all ours”. This drawing of a proprietor of a mid-century motel in Freeport, Texas was done by Jennifer Hershey. You can follow her work in Instagram at deeofo.
Welcome from Port Aransas, Texas, just slightly southeast of Corpus Christi, Texas.
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“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”
-from a A Tale of a Two Cities by Charles Dickens.
Such are the times we live in.
On the way to Freeport, Texas. We learned later the smoke in the background is from a Dow Chemical plant that removes magnesium from sea water.
Our trip continues to be an extraordinary exploration of exquisite natural landscapes, occasional encounters with wildlife (dead and alive), great conversations with diverse and friendly people, navigating delightful and terrifying roads, dealing with sublime and challenging weather, and periodic confrontations with seedy and startlingly ugly industrial landscapes.
Texas is definitely big sky country, and southeastern Texas is as flat as a pancake on a hot griddle.
Perhaps we can borrow from Dickens, and instead of symbolic cities substitute citadels, or communities of people who live inside of self-imposed walls. Like any citadel that is protected from others, we can only see what’s inside, and have no idea of what’s on the outside.
The Dow Chemical Plant near Freeport is situated just above the Intercoastal Waterway on a vast marsh.
In a way, Fox News and CNN are the storytellers for two distinct narratives that reflect two separate citadels: urban and rural America. Our cities are the center of our intellectual, artistic, entertainment and media capitals. Our rural areas - especially evident down here in southeastern Texas - provide access to our natural environments, produce our food (and also increasingly produce electricity through wind-power on the same land), and also extract and move our oil and gas providing our cities with both food and energy. Consequently, they also are the sites for some of our most polluting, dangerous and economically critical industries.
A close up shot of the Dow Chemical plant in Freeport. Locals say this is one of the largest chemical plants in the world.
As I mull over what we are encountering, I find myself thinking the challenges on the Louisiana and Texas coastlines result in a mixed landscape not unlike our home town of New York City. There’s an abundance of both beauty and squalor, and avoiding either one gives visitors an incomplete understanding.
View from the San Luis Pass-Vacek Toll Bridge, which spans San Luis Pass into Brazoria County, Texas.
Clearly, I love the natural beauty of this coastline and its inland marshes, farms, and woodlands. But the story told through the industrialization of the Gulf Coast sticks in my craw. As a northerner, I’m struck by my own complicity in a type of NIMBY (Not in my Backyard) reality. I enjoy living in a city that has (with some exceptions in poorer neighborhoods in the outer boroughs) enjoyed increasingly cleaner air and water over the past several decades through stricter environmental regulations and a shift in focus from industrial production to digital technology.
Temporary oil derricks next to the Corpus Christi shipping channel. The local community was told they would be there for six months, but are still there after almost 3 years. And it’s a big bone of contention in this community. Picture taken from the Port Aransas Ferry.
Yet, the nasty stuff used in so many of our industrial processes, plastics and household products has to be made somewhere (at least in our current economy), and some of those places are along the Louisiana and Texas coasts. And like all poor and moderately poor neighborhoods, when jobs are at stake the nature and consequences of those industries matter less than the jobs they bring.
“Well I’ll tell you what—they got the best seafood right on that Seawall”. Drawing by Jennifer Hershey. Follow her on Instagram at deeofo.
Occasionally locals will resist. We met a local at a great Mexican restaurant in Freeport who had worked in most of the nearby plants over his decades long career (he was probably in his 60’s). He did a short stint at the nearby Dow Chemical plant, but didn’t stay long. The plant officials said it was safe, but he told us that it sure didn’t seem safe to him, so he moved on.
Jenny and I standing in front of the Hotel Blessing.
The downstairs interior of the Hotel Blessing in Blessing, Texas, population 861. Blessing was named in the early 1900’s out of the gratitude for local agriculture, railroad and coastal development.
Yet, lots of folks down here are glad for all that Texas has to offer. I’ve heard more than one person boast about being “Texas born and bred”. And even one town has named itself after its good fortune. By sheer coincidence, we found ourselves needing to stop at the one hotel about the right distance between Freeport and the Corpus Christi area (we couldn't stay on the coast because the old coast road was washed out by Hurricane Ike). It’s called Hotel Blessing, named after the town of Blessing.
“Oh I’ve been doing this for years. If they keep coming....I’ll be here”. Drawing of Helen Feldhousen by Jennifer Hershey. Follow her on Instagram at deeofo.
We didn’t know what we were in for at the time, but after a restless night at the Hotel (we could hear everything - yep, everything - going on during a busy Valentines Day evening) we went to breakfast at the Hotel Blessing Coffee Shop. We were greeted by the intrepid Helen Feldhousen and a cast of other folks - some of whom who show up in the Texas “Bucket List” broadcast below.
I am thinking quite a bit about the concept of “the tragedy of the commons”. This is a situation where individual users, acting independently according to their own self-interest, behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting or spoiling the shared resource through their collective action. “Not in my Backyard” (NIMBY) actions are related conceptually. For example, my own life is made better by situating so many large petroleum chemical and oil and gas plants so far away from large cities on either the west or the east coasts. At the same time, the people of southeastern Texas gain through employment opportunities where the only other options would be tourism or agriculture. Yet, their very livelihoods are put at risk by the significant carbon pollution of the industrial activity here, because it contributes to the extreme weather that may ultimately destroy those plants, along with their jobs.
A very mellow Pelican stares us down on the beach at Port Aransas.
Additionally, citizens around the world gain nothing by the carbon these plants and their related industries have added to our atmosphere. It’s worth contemplating that although America contains 5% of the worlds population, we are responsible for 25% of the carbon put into the atmosphere since the dawn of the industrial revolution. And although China is now the world’s greatest carbon polluter, we remain the world’s greatest carbon emitter on a per capita and country basis combined. That fact alone suggests that our way of life is a big part of the tragedy of the commons that climate change is extracting. It's clear that staying with the status quo is the worst thing we can do. It’s time to step up to a different plate.
Our bikes in fog at the beach on Port Aransas Beach, Texas.
A few of you told me you missed the links to the Garmin maps showing our journey day by day, so I include links below to our entire trip to date. If you don’t have a Garmin account you will have to create one to see them (it's worth it if you're a biking geek or map lover).
1) New Orleans Road Cycling, 2) New Orleans Road Cycling, 3) Donaldsonville Road Cycling, 4) Morgan City Road Cycling, 5) St Mary Parish Road Cycling, 6) Abbeville Road Cycling, 7) Lake Arthur Road Cycling, 8) Cameron Parish Road Cycling, 9) Port Arthur Road Cycling, 10) Galveston Road Cycling, 11) Freeport Road Cycling, 12) Matagorda County Road Cycling, 13) Refugio Road Cycling, 14) Today we are in Port Aransas, Texas, just slightly southeast of Corpus Christi, Texas.
Thanks for reading! More to come…
All photos, unless credited or otherwise noted, are copyrighted property of the blog post author.
Illinois to New York City, Post 3
This short blog post features photos from the Greater Allegheny Passage (GAP) Cycling Trail in the final leg of a cycling trip from Galesburg, IL to New York City.
One of many views Youghiogheny River along the GAP Trail. Youghiogheny is a Lenape word meaning "a stream flowing in a contrary direction". The Yough provides the gradual ascent to the eastern Continental Divide known as the Great Allegheny Passage. It drains an area on the west side of the Allegheny Mountains northward into Pennsylvania, providing a small watershed in extreme western Maryland into the tributaries of the Mississippi River. And it's sensationally beautiful, although that wasn’t always the case.
A freight train of coal (we counted 102 cars) passes by on a track that follows the Monongahela to the Ohio River. In 1990, coal-fired power plants accounted for about 52% of total electricity generation nationally. By the end of 2018, coal's share of electricity generating capacity decreased to 27% of total electricity generation.
The GAP Trail is always sensational, and fall colors make it superlative.
Another of many views Youghiogheny River along the GAP Trail.
The big savage tunnel is the longest of three on the GAP Trail.
I rode the GAP Trail in 2015, and I don't remember seeing wind turbines before. I assume these have been installed recently. Because they use only a small portion of land and create no pollution and minimal noise, I find them far more attractive than oil wells or fracking pads.
The C&O Canal is full of water with algae that contains organisms that can severely lower oxygen levels in natural waters, killing marine life. Blooms can last from a few days to many months, and some are associated with toxins.
The tunnel at Pawpaw Mountain has a trail on one side and the canal on the other. It’s quite a spooky environment.
A lonely tree sits in the Conestoga Valley east of Lansing, PA. This valley is populated by Amish farmers, and is a stunning place to cycle.
York, PA, has a current population of about 40,000, making it slightly larger than my home town of Galesburg, IL. It was obviously a wealthy and bustling town at one time; the 19th and early 20th century downtown architecture is both sensational and stately.
Illinois to New York City, Post 2
Remains of a home in Brookfield, Ohio, in a populated suburb after a tornado touched down in June of 2019. When we saw it, nearby homes were fine and people were going about their business.
This house is on Main Street in Cambridge City, Indiana. It was intact until July of this year, when it collapsed. A local resident we talked to didn’t know why.
Hello from South Pittsburgh on the historic GAP (Greater Allegheny Passage) Trail. We biked here yesterday from Steubenville, Ohio, an old steel and coal town about 25 miles north of historic Wheeling, West Virginia. The night before we were near Morristown, Ohio, in the rolling western foothills of the Alleghenys.
Both yesterday and today we encountered numerous hills, a few with grades as steep as 15 degrees. But what goes up also comes down, so we enjoyed some great downhill runs. Although it’s grey and rainy today, the past few days have been sunny and warm, and the hill country has been spectacular.
The Cardinal Operating Company, a plant north of Wheeling where coal is made into coke for steel manufacturing. In the 1990’s there were over 100,000 jobs in the steel industry in this valley; now there are about 10,000 jobs.
Fall colors on the way.
After some reflection, Jenny and I decided to take the historic GAP bike trail from Pittsburgh, PA to Cumberland, MD, and then a portion of the C&O (Chesapeake and Ohio) Trail before heading up to Lancaster, PA, on our way back to New York City. Today we are resting and waiting out a rainstorm near the western end of the trail. We chose this alternate route instead of the northern ACA Route to NYC because it is less climbing (by about 20,000 cumulative feet)! I’ve done this route before, and remember it very fondly, so I'm looking forward to sharing it with Jenny. We have currently traveled over 800 miles total, and tomorrow we will start the 150 miles that make up the GAP trail.
This memorial is for 16-year -old Olivia Starrwallace, who ran off the road and into a tree in eastern Indiana while driving near the National High School (which she attended).
Jenny’s drawing of our bartender Dennis at the Pike 40 Bar and Grill in Morristown , Ohio. You can see more of Jennifer Hershey's work on Instagram at “deeofo”.
While such a distance is not new for me, I must compliment my biking partner Jenny. She’s never biked this far, and she has done so with great joy and resolve. She’s tackled intense hills, aggressive and threatening traffic, poor road surfaces, lousy and non-existent shoulders, cold and rain - all without losing her cool or diminishing her spirit.
A tired cyclist rests after lunch.
Locals tell us we’re in Trump country, and we’ve definitely seen a few 2020 campaign signs. The TV is on in our motel. It’s hard to imagine the nation isn’t focused entirely on the impeachment investigation and the Turkish invasion of Syria. But frankly, those issues are not the topic of conversation in most of the places we’ve visited. The Americans we are encountering seem more focused on the basic logistics of making their daily lives work.
Earlier today I found myself wondering what the connection to the outside world was like in small midwestern communities during WWII? Was our nation so focused on winning the war and supporting our troops that you could feel history being made even in the smallest of towns? Did the overwhelming majority of citizens feel like their daily actions were contributing to the creation of a better world?
Some new driving jobs have been created in the Ohio River Valley in the last decade as fracking has expanded. That said, isn’t all traffic (except for electric vehicles powered by renewables) essentially “oil and gas traffic”?
Or did life in rural America then seem more like now, when the unrelenting noise of the outside world seems so far away? Perhaps those who had a close relative involved in the war effort felt involved, much like farm families further to the west might feel more concerned about climate change now, after experiencing several very tough years of extreme weather. Yet, I don’t know how to reconcile the sense of urgent hopefulness I felt last month in New York City as I participated in the Youth Climate March, attended numerous panels at the ever busier annual Climate Week, and followed the extraordinary appearances of Greta Thunberg at the United Nations Climate Summit. It all seemed so significant, and a signal of shifting perspectives.
But in the Ohio River Valley, there’s still plenty of pain (and anger) over decades of economic losses. Worrying about climate change almost seems like a luxury… until one thinks soberingly about an even harsher future. So, as always, lets keep our resolve to change our trajectory. The future is waiting to be invented.
A bridge to another bike path near OSU in Columbus, Ohio.
Speaking of a bright side, we have encountered many long, beautiful and very well maintained cycling trails. About 20 miles west of Dayton, Ohio, we picked up a rural “Rail to Trail” cycling trail, and with a few exceptions of unfinished sections, followed the trail until we left Columbus, about 90 miles later.
The Olentangy River Trail makes its way through much of Columbus, including this lovely park.
This was a remarkable and incredibly pleasant run. We encountered another long section of cycling trail later the same day from Granville past Newark, Ohio, making our total run on trails well over 120 miles. Then, we enjoyed another 20 miles of trail along the scenic Ohio River out of Wheeling, West Virginia, as we headed north to Steubenville, Ohio.
Finally, we rode the Panhandle Trail most of the way into Pittsburgh, capping off a series of great trails through much of central and eastern Ohio.
So we are happy and content, and looking forward to another stretch of dry weather once the current storm passes over. The GAP trail awaits!
Thanks for reading! More to come…
All photos, unless credited or otherwise noted, are copyrighted property of the blog post author.
Illinois to New York City, Post 1
Soybeans wait for harvesting in Greenfield, Indiana.
Back in the Saddle Again
Greetings from my bicycle! My last blog post was in May, and I apologize to readers who may be curious about my disappearance in rough weather somewhere near Westgate, NV, on a cycling trip from Palo Alto to Salt Lake City.
If you’ve been wondering, you might be pleased to know that I did get back home to New York City. In fact, I spent a great summer there. While there, I wrote a blog about how I got home: backtracking to Reno, skipping my plans for Salt Lake, shipping my bike and flying back to New York City. But alas, I got distracted and never posted it. So much for the best laid plans of mice and men (and me).
Even so, I took a few more photographs in Nevada in May that I think are still worth sharing, even if the trip back to New York no longer seems relevant. I include these because I am fascinated by extreme weather events. They are increasingly part of our lives, and I think there is value in bearing witness to what we see around us. You may remember from my last blog that I was fighting my way through a very unusual rain and snow storm in a part of Nevada that is usually hot and dry in May. Along with many other folks I was surprised and challenged by the inclement weather I encountered. Below are a few more shots from that trip that I’m particularly proud of…
Water in the Westgate Bar parking lot on the day I left in late May, 2019.
Flooded salt flats east of Reno.
Rain clouds above the salt flats.
As the summer progressed, I made plans for future cycling with my friend Jenny Hershey, who had just retired from a 31-year career running building operations for Jujamcyn Theaters on Broadway. A founder of the Broadway Green Alliance, Jenny is both an environmentalist and an avid cyclist. To get our feet wet, we took a car camping/cycling starter trip to New Brunswick, the fabulous Cabot Trail in Cape Breton in Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island (PEI), and explored traveling together on bikes for multiple days at a time. If you’ve never been there, I strongly recommend cycling in PEI. There are numerous rail to trail conversions that allow cyclists to get everywhere one could want to go. The shoreline is vast and beaches are beautiful. The islanders take great pride in their environment, and they enjoy rich local culture. Prices are reasonable, and the pace of life is remarkably comfortable. At the same time, internet services and other modern amenities are easy to come by. Don’t miss it!
Jenny by the roadside in PEI. She is wearing a mourners ribbon signifying the period of shiva after the death of her mother Merle Weisman.
Michael gesturing toward the Northumberland Straight in Cape Breton.
Near our campground in Chetticamp, Nova Scotia.
The coast near Chetticamp, Nova Scotia.
Moving On
In addition to being busy, last summer was emotionally eventful. In June and July, as my brothers and I recovered from my Dad’s recent death, we helped our Mom move from an assisted living facility to a nursing home in Galesburg, IL. She didn’t like losing her independence, but is gradually getting used to both the irritation and value of full-time long- term care. Like most older people, my Mom has good days and bad days. A good day occurred recently when Jenny and I arrived via train to meet up with my daughter Saren and her family from Wausau, Wisconsin. My Mom was able to meet her new great grandson Landon.
My Mom Sue Chase and her great grandson Landon Spire.
As I joyfully watched my Mom, my daughter and her son, I realized there were four generations of us in the same room sharing our love. And of course, I found myself wondering what life will be like for Landon when he is my Mom’s age (it will be 2106). Will civilization as we presently know it even exist? Will animal species other than humans and their pets and feedstock still exist? Or will our species be gone as well?
There is increasing scientific evidence that we are quickly running out of time, and we must significantly turn the tide on greenhouse gas emissions over the next decade. I am so pleased that all the Democratic candidates for President are acknowledging climate change as an existential threat, and are developing policy proposals for meaningful change. Personally, I cannot think of a more important way to address our climate emergency right now than to back whatever Democratic candidate is nominated, and to work my heart out for his or her election. And if we are lucky enough to have an administration that understands climate science, then we must put our shoulders to the wheel for national policy that supports carbon pricing and returns dividends to citizens to help bear the increased costs of fossil fuels. We will also need policies to help build the next great economic expansion in renewable energy, carbon sequestration through changing agriculture practices, and carbon technologies to include air-based and flu-based greenhouse gas capture and carbon recycling through manufacturing of inert products such as polymers, fuel and even food. These nascent, yet promising technologies are very hopeful. We only need the will to make them happen. For more information check out the Circular Carbon Network.
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Today I'm writing from a motel in Richmond, Indiana. Jenny and I began this cycling trip about a week ago from Galesburg, Illinois. As I’m sure you are aware, the fall has been unusually hot in the Midwest and the northeast. That changed suddenly last Friday, just as we left Bloomington, Illinois, for Gibson City (with the help of a local Samaritan who drove us 37 miles in his pickup to avoid rain as the temperature plunged to the high 30’s). The next day was even more inclement. By Saturday evening, after Jenny and I had biked 72 miles to Attica, Indiana, we were very cold, wet, miserable and tired.
But the joy of biking is often in the recovery phase. The last two days have been lovely, and today was exceptional. Our trip has become glorious again. Galesburg is about 400 miles west of us at this point. We’re tired and windblown, and enjoying the pleasant and peaceful endorphin rush that comes after several days of hard cycling. It’s nice to feel used up.
The rainy view outside our motel in Gibson City, IL.
Fossil fuels are like this as well! We enjoy now, our grandchildren pay later….
Thanks for reading! More to come…
All photos, unless credited or otherwise noted, are copyrighted property of the blog post author.
Phoenix to El Paso, ...no, Tucson, Post 3
Twilight behind a sugaro cactus in Tucson.
After a one day layover in Portal, AZ, where I hiked near Cave Creek Canyon, I woke to a very cold day. The wind was clocking about 24 miles an hour out of the southeast, so I decided to head northeast to Silver City, NM, thinking that I would then zag southeast the next day to Columbus NM, and then make my way eastward into El Paso.
The Chiricahua Mountains on the way to Lordsburg.
Life has a funny way of making us change our plans. The wind shifted to the east. Rain clouds gathered. The temperature dropped. After a very difficult slog of a ride directly into a punishing wind, I arrived in Lordsburg about 45 miles away from Silver City. I wasn't sure what the weather was up to, but I was worried. I found an inexpensive motel and downloaded another wind app for my cell phone, hoping it would give me better capacity to analyze and predict what the next few days were going to be like. I knew there was a raging storm in the Midwest (the Nebraska bomb cyclone) and I assumed its outer edges were the cause of the wind and cold weather coming out of Texas. So I sat in my motel room, finally warm again, thinking about what to do. Near as I could determine the winds were going to remain out of the east/southeast at approximately 15 mph for the next 4-5 days. Additionally, rain and some snow were forecast for the entire region for the next few days. I knew I could make it to El Paso one way or the other as planned, and I also knew the trip was likely to be difficult and miserable.
The wind stirs up dust on the way to Lordsburg.
I called my Dad in California, and my Mom in Illinois. I also called my kids. That might seem like a strange comment coming from a grown man in his 60's, But for those of you tracking older parents and grandkids, you'll recognize the behavior. I wanted to be certain my eastward direction under such conditions didn't make it difficult to get to either parent should the need arise. And I wanted to know if changing my itinerary and visiting my kids and grandkids a month or so later than previously planned would be ok.
I was improvising based on weather, just as humans have done for thousands of years. That is, before we insulated ourselves from it through our technology. Yet, our very attempts to tame it have only made it more foreboding. As the recent bomb cyclone in Nebraska - and the even more devastating cyclone in southeastern Africa - remind us, the weather will always humble us. We can't defy physics.
After discussions with various family members, I decided to return to Tucson where the weather was milder, and catch a train up to San Jose to my Dad's place. Right now I'm sitting in a lovely Landmarked train station in Tucson. I travel tonight on the Sunset Limited and will arrive into LA the morning in time to catch the Coast Starlight up to San Jose tomorrow. As usual, I will roll my bike up to the baggage car. For only $20 more a ticket there's no better way to get a bicycle somewhere (other than riding it, of course).
One of my intentions, for now, is to avoid an effigy in my honor. I came across this one on "A" Mountain east of Tucson.
Seen in western NM.
Seen in eastern Arizona.
Seen near Douglas, AZ
The new plan made me breathe easier, and sleep a bit more deeply. That said, I'm sorry to have missed exploring route 9 and the towns of Columbus, NM, where Pancho Via "invaded" the US at the battle of Columbus in 1917, and Antelope Wells, NM - which I am told is a hot spot for Border Patrol action. I'll be back.
The border near Nogales, AZ. Photo credited to USA Today.
I can't say that I've seen much near the border that suggests we have a crisis of "invasion". Where I've been it seems quiet, "normal" and only subtly militarized. As per the pictures I've already posted, the fences are ugly and the concertina wire is threatening. I've been reading an interesting book titled "Storming the Wall; Climate Change, Migration and Homeland Security" by Todd Martin. If the numbers of illegal immigrants on our southern border are actually increasing (recent reports suggest that is true) they are mostly immigrants from Guatemala, El Salvadore and Honduras. And, according to Todd Martin, these countries are experiencing devastating drought, and are climate refugee "canaries in the mine" for what lies ahead.
Apparently, migrants from these countries turn themselves into Border Patrol at their soonest opportunity with the intention of applying for asylum. Most are farmers who are no longer able to survive on their land. If they flee to nearby cities, they and their families are subject to horrific gang violence. So they come north, hoping they can gain asylum in the United States. If there is a crisis, it's a humanitarian one, and one that a wall might even exacerbate. Here's an article in "Scientific American" that explains the underlying issue more deeply.
One of hundreds of checkpoints on a north/south road just south of Interstate 10. They are intended to keep migrants from gaining access to our interstate system. I've passed through several. Each time I've asked the agents if it was busy that day, and each time the answer was no.
Fields of daisies are common here this time of year.
A view to the south about 50 miles east of Tucson.
A rattlesnake seen on a bike trail near Tucson. As it gets hotter, they get more active.
Next week I fly back to New York. It will be another month or so before I start my next cycling adventure, so you'll notice a lag in my blog posts. But, as always, there's more to come.
All photos, unless credited or otherwise noted, are copyrighted property of the blog post author.
Phoenix to El Paso, Post 2
The Chiricahua Mountains near Rodeo, NM.
I spent several days in Douglas, AZ. The first day was sunny, and my friend Dave and I went across the border into Agua Prieta. It was like many other border towns I have visited -- cheerful, dusty and enterprising.
The main square in Agua Prieta.
The Mexican side of the border fence.
A Periodoncista office in Agua Prieta.
It's no secret that there are many thriving dentistry businessness in the border towns that cater to Americans looking for affordable dentistry. I'm told that lots of Mexicans come to the US to study, get their board certifications in California, Arizona, New Mexico or Texas, and then set up business across the border where they can count on a ready supply of American patients happy to travel across the border to pay lower prices. Cleanings, fillings, crowns, etc, are all hundreds of dollars cheaper than what similar treatments cost in the US.
It rained heavily the next day, and was also cold, windy and occasionally snowy, all very unusual for this far south. During a break in the rain, Dave and I drove the gravel road that follows the American side of the border to Naco.
The US side of the wall looking west.
This will make intruders cower!
A reengineered wash.
US fencing currently seems to be a hodgepodge of different construction phases over the years, from a simple barbed wire fence that spanned much of the border for decades, to various high slat based versions that were built consecutively by the Bush and Obama administrations. Trump has primarily brought us concertina wire (see Post 1 of this series) that will slice up anyone attempting to rope-climb down the US side of the fence.
Someone's view of US trade policy.
The next day I left Douglas and biked (with a 27 mile an hour backwind) northeast along the Chiricahua Mountain Range over a mild pass to the east, and then downhill to the north with the Chiricahuas to my left. With the back wind, I could go 10-15 miles an hour simply by sitting on my bike and using my back as a sail. Thank God I didn't have to go the other way.
Just north of Douglas on the way out of town.
I had this view for about 20 miles as I headed northeast.
The Chiricahuas are stunning, as is the Animus Valley to the east. I really can't express the (almost painful) beauty I find in such uncompromising and imposing environments. I was enthralled every fleeting moment the sun made an appearance.
The view from cave Creek Canyon near Portal west of Rodeo.
Another view at Cave Creek looking west.
In closing, I'd like to include a link from an article from Inside Climate News that refelects on two different (but potentially complimentary) legislative proposals in Congress right now that address climate change. We may be nearing that seminal moment when the shoe falls on climate science denial, and our normal public narrative becomes that it's soberingly real, and must be addressed thoughtfully and urgently. That outcome is inevitable, but will it happen soon enough?
I, for one, would like it to be characteristically warm in the southwest when I leave the northeast to cycle here. Two days ago I sat in a bar in Bisbee, AZ watching snow fall. It was March 12, and I was about 15 miles north of the Mexican border. I hear it's been a whacky year for our jet stream and polar vortex to the north.
Sure looks like climate change to me.
More to come, of course.
For those of you missing my Garmin posts, here is yesterday's ride.
All photos, unless credited or otherwise noted, are copyrighted property of the blog post author.
Phoenix to El Paso, Post 1
The Border Fence in Doulgas, AZ
My last post was January 19.
I've heard it said that "time flies like an arrow, and fruit flies like bananas." I do not doubt the veracity of either concept.
I did get to Phoenix (after my last post), where I put my bike in storage and returned to NYC to take care of personal business, attend some Citizen Climate Lobby meetings, and reconnect with friends. Then in late February, I returned to Arizona for another cycling adventure.
I'm trying out a new structure for cycling this year: a month or so on my bike, and a month or so with friends in NYC, or visiting my kids and grandkids in Wisconsin (my daughter Saren just gave birth to a boy), or in Illinois (where my Mom lives) or California (where my Dad lives). The upside of this way of life is that I can remain engaged in both love and work. The downside is that although cycling generates no carbon, I must still find ways to travel on something other than a bicycle to get long distances (especially in the winter months). There are few good options, and although I would prefer to use trains on a regular basis, I fly more than I feel good about. Recently, I started purchasing carbon offsets to mitigate the carbon load that flying generates. But it's important to recognize that there's a difference between neutralizing a carbon load and actually reducing one.
We all live in an imperfect world, so almost every way we travel generates carbon (bicycles may be the only exception). Think of how most of us get food or go to work. Think of solar installers or wind technicians who must drive trucks loaded with equipment to create renewable energy projects. Think of the several thousand Climate Citizen Lobbyists who gather in DC twice annually. Think of world leaders who travel internationally to annual COP meetings. Think of annual meetings for the American Geophysical Union (AGU), probably the largest annual conference of climate scientists in the world. The carbon load for every event - productive or unproductive, useful or useless - is part of the extraordinary two and one half million tons of carbon we dump into our atmosphere every second.
Our detractors aren't worried. I deeply wish they were right. Life would be so much easier if physics didn't cause air temperature to rise as CO2 levels rise. But that basic principle of physics has been understood for over 100 years, and it's not going to change. It's we who must change. And one outcome is certain - if we don't change, physics will change us.
I am writing this (12 days after arriving back in Phoenix) from a motor coach in an RV Park in Douglas, AZ, owned by my friend Dave Henderson (a fellow cyclist, I met Dave several years ago near Asheville, NC, when I cycled the Blue Ridge Parkway).
Dave in his RV offering me a beer after a very windy ride.
I have been pretty busy breaking in, outfitting and test riding a new bike. It's a Trek CrossFit, part of a class of athletic electric bikes that uses a Bosch electric motor powered by a 500 watt lithium ion battty to increase speed, climbing and wind endurance capacities in graduated intervals. It is only pedal assist and has no throttle. The mileage capacity is about 60 miles on a charge, but with tweaking and careful use, it's range can be extended to 80-100 miles.
The bike is marketed for long commutes, so I'm pushing its boundaries a bit. So far, so good. And if you're wondering, my beloved Surly Long Haul Trucker is being shipped back to NYC. And yes, that's another way I am adding carbon to the atmosphere. How do we make good decisions in this life?
Bisbee, AZ, is an old copper mining town just west of Douglas. At one time it was the largest community in Arizona. No longer a minIng town, it is now a wonderfully funky tourist town, with early twentieth century architecture and featuring lots of festivals to attract tourists.
I happened upon a parade celebrating "The Return of the Turkey Vultures." I didn't know turkey vultures migrated, but apparently they do.
And who says everyone in Arizona is a Republican? Someone still drives this car around.
Just outside of Douglas.
Douglas is on the US/Mexico border and is the sister city to Agua Prieta in Sonora. After arriving at Dave's RV home, we headed down to the border, where I took photos of the imposing steel slat fence that cuts through the town.
On the US side of the border.
We were able to speak with a border patrol agent. He told us the barbed wire is only several months old. Illegal crossings have never been very common in Douglas and since the wire was put up, things are even quieter. The steel slat fence was built 7 years ago, and replaced a solid wall about six feet high. I asked if the steel fence (it's about 20 feet high) was built under Bush. The agent said no, it was built under Obama. I asked him if there was a border crisis. He said it wasn't his job to say.
The window guards are intended to protect agents from flying rocks.
More to come.
All photos, unless credited or otherwise noted, are copyrighted property of the blog post author.