100th Blog Post

I started longitudes to try to sell copies of my book (“Bluejackets in the Blubber Room”). Well, the blubber book sales tanked, but the blabbering blog has taken a life of its own.

Someone said that blogs… (the word “blog” is short for “web-log”)… have an average lifespan of 2 1/2 years. Longitudes is now over 4 years young. So I’m actually beating the odds, which is rare for me.

To recognize the insignificant occasion of my 100^th post, I’m attaching links to six of my older essays. These essays either got a lot of response, or are special to me… or both.

Since I’m honoring myself, I’d like to thank everyone who’s “liked” my stuff or offered comments: Tad, Mary K, Brian, Neil, Frank, Phil, Rich, Leah, Thom, Dennis, Cindy, Dean, and everyone else who drops in for coffee.

Nobody likes writing in a vacuum, so it’s a huge thrill to know someone has read and been affected by something I’ve written. Some of my thoughts may have struck a nerve on occasion. While I think it’s important to express opinion, and while I may not respect certain views, I nevertheless try to respect the reader (it’s an alien concept in these days of instant communication, but it is possible). Anyway, I hope I’ve never offended anyone. If I have, I apologize.

So here are six blasts from the past… just click the titles. Thanks again, everyone!

It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Leaving (Touring Bob Dylan’s Hometown)

I wrote this travelogue after visiting Bob Dylan’s hometown of Hibbing, Minnesota. I used the present tense because I wanted the reader to feel like he or she was on the journey.

The underlying theme is how one person’s hero can have little or no impact on someone else. Also, that it’s difficult or impossible to identify genius or from where it arises.

A Best Friend’s Unconditional Love

I sent this essay to a National Public Radio (NPR) show hoping they’d publish it. Too much competition, I guess. So I submitted it to longitudes, and it was accepted! It’s about our family dog, Brownie, a rambunctious Australian Shepherd who didn’t exactly endear himself to outsiders, but was totally devoted to the family. His sudden death brought a lot of tears, but he gave us many good memories. The top photo was taken just before he died.

America and Guns

The Sandy Hook tragedy hit me hard, as it did most everyone else. How can something so horrifying happen? The answers are very complex. But to deny that one of the factors is firearms, and America’s refusal to address why it leads the world in per capita gun violence is, to me, ridiculous.

Remembering Biff

After I write something I usually forget about it. But I keep returning to this essay. It’s a tribute to a friend from childhood that I’d lost track of for many years. Then I suddenly learned about him. He’d taken Horace Greeley’s advice and gone West, doing things I’d always wanted to do (“living the dream,” as the cliché goes), but for which I never had the courage or ability. Then his life was tragically cut short.

Visiting the past has opened a few doors for me. Such is the case with learning about Biff. He reminds me that life is momentary, and we need to (try to) live it to the max while we have it… as Biff evidently did.

A Week in the Woods: My Appalachian Trail 101 – Through the Looking Glass

This is about an Appalachian Trail hike I took, and it got more feedback than probably any other post (which isn’t saying much!). I guess it’s because people enjoy reading about adventure and unusual experiences. This hike wasn’t all that adventurous or unusual, but maybe folks found a certain vicarious thrill. A lot of the “likes” and “follows” came from people who have their own travel-related blogs. After writing this, I realized that there are many vibrant people around the globe who are in constant motion, immersing themselves in the outdoors and different cultures, places, and experiences.

The Rain, the Trees, and Other Things

I created a sub-category called “50 Years” to highlight people or events on their 50^th anniversary (and also because the decade of the 1960s fascinates me). I’m also real big on conservation issues, and these things came together with this Earth Day essay recognizing 50 years since the signing of America’s Wilderness Act. The title is a pun on an old Cowsills song, “The Rain, the Park, and Other Things.”

At one time, there was a lot of wilderness but only a few people. Now, it’s just the opposite, and this paradigm is too often taken for granted. I believe it’s crucial to protect as many wild places as possible, for our spiritual well-being in addition to the well-being of other species.

This essay didn’t get a lot of views (I have an annoying tendency to sound like I’m preaching – see above). But that’s okay. Maybe Henry Thoreau and John Muir gave it a nod of approval, which is reward enough.

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Tribal and Environmental Justice at Standing Rock

Once again, it’s happening. The United States military – in this case, the National Guard, in concert with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the oil industry – is waging war against the American Indians.

And once again, it’s a war involving land and minerals. The land is the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North and South Dakota, which partly pushes against the mighty Missouri River. Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux Chief Sitting Bull, murdered by Indian agency police on this very reservation in 1890, is buried close by.

This time, however, the mineral isn’t gold or silver.

It’s oil.

Last week, 141 people were arrested after clashes with the Guard and police. The protesters had occupied private land to oppose construction of the $3.8 billion Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) by Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners, a pipe which will tunnel under the Missouri. There were reports of Molotov cocktails being thrown by protesters, pepper spraying and brutality by police, and gunshots by unknown individuals.

Big Oil and its supporters say the pipeline offers a more cost-effective and safer way of transporting shale oil from North Dakota to refineries on the Gulf Coast than it does by road or rail. They also claim it will create 8,000 to 12,000 local jobs.

They shifted the original route further away from Bismarck, and closer to the reservation, because they said its construction would be “easier.” (See map)

Map of Standing Rock Reservation and DAPL (courtesy Paul Horn/Inside Climate News)

But many in the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, who have been camping out near the proposed pipeline for months (and have been joined by other tribes and some non-natives sympathetic to their plight), argue that an oil spill in the Missouri will prove disastrous, since the people rely on the river for much of their water. Also, that the pipeline will desecrate ancestral land, basing their claim on a 19th-century treaty.

And environmentalists are dead-set against the pipeline for obvious reasons: the potential of a catastrophic oil spill, and the reality of a monstrous carbon footprint.

“The Native Americans are the only people who have inhabited this continent in harmony with nature for centuries,” conservationist, author, and 350.org founder Bill McKibben says. “Their traditional wisdom now chimes perfectly with the latest climate science.”

The Army Corps of Engineers fast-tracked construction of the pipeline last July, but it still needs to grant final permits. Due to the glaring spotlight on this most recent clash, the White House has granted a temporary postponement of the project.

Over 300 tribal nations have come out against the pipeline. The total number of protesters at the site has grown to over 800.

Some Questions

North Dakota Governor Jack Dalrymple (R) criticized the protesters for staging their protest on private land. A valid criticism for most of us. But… here are some questions:

When and how did the land become “private?” Who occupied the land before it became “private?”

Other entities, notably Big Oil and its backers, have charged that a number of protesters are “outsiders” who are unaffiliated with the tribe. Here are some more questions:

Why is this a negative? Aren’t we “our brothers’ keepers?” How noble are the motives of a corporate giant next to those of poor people struggling, not for monetary profits, but for clean water and tribal rights? If there’s an oil spill, will the Standing Rock Reservation be the only thing impacted? And when 800,000 gallons of oil per day are pounding through this pipeline to eventually be burned as fuel, ballooning the atmosphere’s carbon concentration even more, are there truly any “outsiders” in this scenario?

___________

After Sitting Bull’s murder, 350 Lakota Sioux under Chief Spotted Elk walked away from reservations at Standing Rock and Cheyenne River (land which they’d been exiled to). They were upset at being denied their Ghost Dance, prohibited by U.S. officials, who referred to it as a “Messiah craze.” As at Standing Rock recently, the U.S. military was sent in. The troops, armed with rapid-fire Hotchkiss mountain guns, surrounded the Lakota near Wounded Knee Creek. Nobody knows who fired the first shots. But when the bullets stopped flying, 150-300 Indian men, women, and children lay dead in snow that was dyed red.

Wounded Knee was the last major confrontation of the Plains Indian wars. After this, the Sioux and most other tribes were a defeated people, their leaders killed, their land fenced off and privatized, their traditional food sources depleted, their cultural and spiritual practices ridiculed, their children forced to attend distant schools, dress like whites, and abandon their language. Most reservation Indians today live in abject poverty.

Nobody has yet died at Standing Rock, fortunately. But here’s one final question:

When money, land rights, and race are intertwined… has all that much changed in America in 126 years?

Sources:

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2016/10/28/us/28reuters-usa-pipeline-regulations.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/29/opinion/why-dakota-is-the-new-keystone.html

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-standing-rock-numbers-20161101-story.html