Getting from Here to There

Do you ever feel like sustainability-minded folks are just singing the Talking Heads song, "Road to Nowhere"? I do. Derrick Jensen maybe says it best in an article at Orion: "The most common words I hear spoken by any environmentalists anywhere are, We’re f***ed." We hear it all the time. But as Jensen also says, we can step out of this defeat and actually do something. In doing, there is hope.

Today's show is all about hope in action. Our three guests are journeying to change our collective journey. First, Jon Brockopp will join us to talk about his pending bike ride to Washington, D.C. - 200 miles in 4 days. Along with two other men, he will be stopping at congregations, colleges and CSAs along the way to spread the word about Pennsylvania Interfaith Power and Light and our moral responsibility to respond to climate change.

Then we will be joined by Eileen Flanagan who is part of the Earth Quaker Action Team, who is part of the Green Walk for Jobs and Justice. They are walking 200 miles across Pennsylvania from Philadelphia to the PNC Bank headquarters in Pittsburgh to call on PNC to end its financing of mountain top removal of coal. George Lakey of EQAT says, "We can green our money." How?

Finally, Jason Bell will come on the show. Jason has initiatiated the Tour de Frack, "an action oriented way to explore rural communities and the effects unconventional gas drilling from the saddle of your bike." It is a two week bike tour from July 14-July 28, 2012 from Butler, Pennsylvania to Washington DC along the Great Allegheny Passage and C&O towpath.

Given my own ride last year from Pine Grove Mills to Harrisburg to accomplish a similar goal, I had to have these people on the show. They are people putting the rubber to the road. Step by step and pedal stroke by pedal stroke they are walking or riding on a road to a better future. As Michael Bagdes-Canning of Tour de Frack says, "We have a democracy problem." One way to better our democracy is to help the conversation and call on others to be accountable and do the right thing.

In honor of all three of our guests today, I leave you with a Wendell Berry poem Badges-Canning quotes in this video.

"The Peace of Wild Things"

When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at
the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light.
For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
— Wendell Berry

There is great hope in such people.

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