The Solutions Revolution Crew at the Lincoln Memorial - (from left to right) - Paul Thompson, Malkolm Boothroyd, Don "Peace Rider" Ross, Katherine Ball, and Alec Neal

Malkolm and Katherine biking around an oil derrick in Montana - photo credit Malkolm Boothroyd

Katherine, Alec and Malkolm biking in Eastern Montana - photo credit Malkolm Boothroyd

Malkolm biking over Logan Pass in Glacier National Park, Montana - Photo Credit Malkolm Boothroyd

Which way to Washington D.C.?

Alec and Katherine in Washington D.C. - photo credit Malkolm Boothroyd

Grayland, Washington - Starting at the Pacific Ocean

Jumping for joy at the top of Washington Pass

Katherine at the top of Washington Pass

Lake Pend Oreille, Idaho

Missoula, Montana - Free Cycles Boneyard

Missoula, Montana - PEAS Farm

Missoula, Montana - PEAS Farm harvest

Alec in Glacier National Park, Montana

Mountain Goat in Glacier National Park

Glacier National Park - Malkom joins the ride

Minneapolis, Minnesota - Paul Thompson joins the ride

Minneapolis, Minnesota - The Participation Pedal starting at the Walker Sculpture Garden. A huge thanks to our many supporters that helped with this event!

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Madison, Wisconsin - Sustainability Cruise - Photo Credit Hugh Schmidt

Chicago, Illinois - Don Ross joins the Ride - (from left to right) Alec, Paul, Don and Malkolm

Detroit, Michigan - Interviewing Paul Weertz at the Catherine Ferguson Academy Farm

Detroit, Michigan - Photo Credit: Kevin Bauman

Detroit, Michigan - Paul interviews Jacob Corvidae of WARM Training Center

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania - Alec and Katherine interview Bob Bingham about green roofs and eco art at Carnegie Mellon University

photo credit: Malkolm Boothroyd

Washington, DC - Interviewing Representative Kucinich - photo credit: Malkolm Boothroyd

GTECH
www.gtechstrategies.org

photo credit: GTECH

Sunrise ceremony at Klimforum10 - led by indigenous Mayan, Bolivian, Chiapas, Northern Native American, and Taiwanese grandparents

Preparing for the sunrise ceremony - photo credit: Jason Pan

The crew at Klimaforum10 - the People's Climate Summit happening in parallel to COP16

Setting up the tents at Kilmaforum10

Sunrise yoga at Klimaforum10

Baking cakes in the handmade oven in the outdoor kitchen at Klimaforum10

Karmakanonen's Bicycle Powered Sound System

Alec Neal entering Cancunmesse - one of the COP16 conference centers

World Bank President Robert Zoelick and other REDD+ supporters touting false market based solutions at the high level side event Advancing REDD+: New Pathways and Partnerships - (from left to right) Robert Zoellick - World Bank President, Achim Steiner - United Nations Environment Programme Executive Director, Kuntoro Mangkusubroto - Head of Indonesian President's Delivery Unit for REDD, George Soros - Open Society Foundations Founder, Peter Seligmann - Conservation International CEO, Bharrat Jagdeo - President of Guyana. The event also featured Walmart Chairman Rob Walton, Wangari Maatha, Jane Goodall, and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon

Painting Banners for the Via Campesina march

Fixing a flat with a piece of scaffolding ~ on the the way to La Via Campesina's encampment

Soul Fire at the Via Campesina march to the Moon Palace, COP16's political negotiation center

Hector Rodriguez protests REDD - Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation - in front of a line of riot cops

Anti-CAPCOP at the Via Campesina march

Artwork at the march - by Santiago Armengod

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – Creative Tactics
Heading downhill to Carnegie Mellon University, we rendezvous with Professor Bob Bingham to learn about his ecoart work, which has created green roofs all over campus. Overlooking a forested hill in the heart of campus, Bob tells us about his and his students’ intervention into the university’s plans to cut down 200 black locust trees in the name of development. The trees are 90 to 100 years old and hold together soil on steep slopes, eliminating the need to build concrete retaining walls. In opposition, the students declared the woods a “Carnegie Nature Reserve” claiming a dwarf Orangutan was spotted in the woods. They put up placards about the Orangutan, other fantasy creatures, and the reserve’s real inhabitants: birds, squirrels, feral cats, and bunnies. In reaction, the school shifted the chopping date from November, when school was in session, to January 5th when the students were out of school. Bingham came to videotape the cutting on January 5th, but no chainsaws were to be seen. “I came the next day and sure enough here they are, they already had half the trees down, six guys with chainsaws, the biggest mulching tool I’ve ever seen, they’re feeding whole trees into this mulching machine, and I got my video camera an started walking in and of course everyone is screaming, ‘Hey get out of here you’ve got to have a hard hat.’ So I went in to the sculpture building to get my hard hat. As I was walking out, I wasn’t planning on doing this, I took of my clothes, everything except for my hard hat. I walked out to the biggest tree on the slope and hugged it and shimmied up and I just held on as long as I could. The chainsaw guys backed off out of embarrassment.” As a result, 100 trees were left standing and the school replanted another 100.

Bob Bingham
www.artscool.cfa.cmu.edu:16080/~bingham

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Climate Carolers and Homeland Security

Cleveland’s roads are blanketed in snow as we begin biking 133 miles southeast through the Rust Belt to the Steel City. We follow the Ohio River into downtown and pedal uphill to a well worn college neighborhood to interview two college students in the Pittsburgh Student Environmental Coalition (PSEC) who were listed on a terrorist watch list for handing out hot chocolate and singing songs about climate change. In 2009, the Pennsylvania Department of Homeland Security hired a third party company, the Institute of Terrorism Research and Response (ITRR), to research potential terrorist threats. ITRR collected information on protests, rallies, actions against the natural gas industry. PSEC is opposed to the natural gas industry’s practice of hydrofracking, which injects chemical-laced water into bedrock to fracture the rock and release natural gas. In some parts of Pennsylvania, residents’ drinking water is so contaminated they can light their tap water on fire. In 2009, the students put together a series of spoofs on Christmas Carols, changing the words to talk about the US government’s inaction at COP15 in Copenhagen and sang them out in the streets to Christmas shoppers. In 2010, the ITRR released their reports not just to the government but also to industry. One of the reports was leaked to an activist who brought it to the media. After public outcry, the State of Pennsylvania released all of the reports, including the one citing PSEC as a potential terrorist threat for their caroling.

Pittsburgh Student Environmental Coalition
www.pittsburghsec.wordpress.com
Do Environmental Extremists Pose Crimal Threat to Gas Drilling – Article in ProPublica
www.propublica.org/article/do-environmental-extremists-pose-criminal-threat-to-gas-drilling
Anti-drilling activists: you are being watched - Article in Pittsburgh City Paper
www.pittsburghcitypaper.ws/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A85038
Gasland – A documentary film about natural gas drilling in the United States
www.gaslandthemovie.com

PSEC members meet with Sen. Specter and Sen. Casey

Hydrofracking

Climate Bells

Dashing through the snow
In a Carbon Neutral sleigh
How far will Obama go
Let’s hope all the way

Alarm bells we should ring
And sign with all our might
The US should be leading
In the climate fight

Chorus:
Ohhh!
Climate change, climate change,
Change is on the way
Oh whatfun it is to shout!
While the icecaps melt away

We’ve still got time to act
So join us in our cause
And make to me this pact
To help out Santa Clause
It’s clear what must be done
We can all arrange
To show our views are one
On the march for Climate Change

Chorus

George Bush the redneck Texan
Likes to power SUVs
But we have to stop our driving
The climate to catastrophy!

All the ice caps are melting
Polar bears are dying out
If you want to stop this slaughter
Use your voice and have a shout!
OIOI!

Chorus

All of our politicians
Tell us that they’re going green
But why is when we ask them
Their efforts are never seen?

If we unite this Christmas
With a dream of being carbon-free
We can kick global warming
And leave it to be history

Chorus

Detroit, Michigan – Urban Farm Run by Pregnant Teens

In 1950, Detroit was the fourth largest city in the country with almost 2 million residents, now it is less than 1 million. A third of all residential lots in Detroit are either vacant or contain abandoned homes. Detroit’s bulldozing initiative has rendered the landscape of the city a patchwork of tall-grassed vacant lots, abandoned houses caving in, and inhabited houses. In downtown Detroit, we visited the Catherine Ferguson Academy, a public school for pregnant teens and preteens. A few years ago, science teacher Paul Weertz brought to the principal’s attention that formaldehyde in dissection animals is harmful to pregnant women. She told him he needed to find another way for students to receive an equal educational experience without the toxins. So Weertz and the students started a farm in the vacant lots behind the school—complete with a red barn, chickens, geese, goats, orchards, vegetable plots, bees, and even a horse. The teens’ science experiments use the farm as their laboratory, scientifically sleuthing, “Will goats increase or decrease milk production in the winter?” Whenever an animal dies, the whole school gathers to help dissect it to discover the cause of death. When it was brought to Weertz’s attention that someone is stealing compost he replied, “So what? It’s not cocaine. What do you think they are doing they are doing with it? They are growing stuff with it and that is what we want.” The teens sell some of the produce from the farm at the farmer’s market, increasing food security in Detroit’s food desert.

Catherine Ferguson Academy
www.detroitk12.org/schools/school/742
www.detroitk12.org/inside_dps/2008/09/25/nancy-boykin-continuing-education-center-and-catherine-ferguson-academy/

Grown in Detroit – Film
www.grownindetroit.filmmij.nl

Chicago, Illinois – Grasstops & Grassroots Green Development

Biking south along the shoreline of Lake Michigan for 97 miles, we weave our way through the north suburbs and into the heart of the Windy City. Commissioner of the Environment Suzanne Malec-McKenna walks us through Chicago’s Climate Action Plan, which follows the UNFCCC’s recommendations to cut emissions by 25-40% by 2020 and 80% by 2050. The plan’s key goals are to retrofit 50% of commercial, industrial, and residential buildings to achieve a 30% reduction in CO2 emissions, upgrade or repower 21 Illinois power plants, and promote alternative transportation. Unfortunately “alternative transportation” also includes compressed natural gas cars.

After meeting with the grasstops, we bike to The Plant in South Chicago to meet with grassroots developer John Adel. Adel is transforming an abandoned meat packing plant in into a vertical farm and local food production center. Small food producers will be able to grow, process and pack food under (and on top of) one roof, cutting costs and minimizing the carbon burned through food transportation. This project could help bring healthy jobs back to a part of the city that lost jobs when the meat industry left.

Chicago Climate Action Plan
www.chicagoclimateaction.org
Plant Chicago
www.plantchicago.com
www.flickr.com/photos/plantchicago

Chicago City Hall Greenroof

The Plant - Building the Aquaponics Bed, photo credit - The Plant

Working on the Smokers at the Plant, photo credit- The Plant

The Plant - Old Bacon Cooler Room, photo credit: The Plant

Location of The Plant, photo credit: The Plant

Cover of the Chicago Reader

Town of Dunn, Wisconsin – Purchase of Development Rights

Up and over 274 miles of glacial drumlins in northwest Wisconsin, we roll through the cookie-cutter suburbs of Madison and into the rural Town of Dunn (pop. 5,270, 34.5 square miles). Here, we listen to former Chairman Cal DeWitt tell the town’s story: In 1986, the rural land was preserved when Dunn’s residents gathered at the town hall and voted unanimously to raise their own taxes to pay for the purchase of development rights from their farmers. Otherwise, the land would have been developed because many farmers needed to sell their land to pay for retirement. Developing the land would increase the Town’s taxes, since they would have to build new roads, sewer systems, street lights, schools, etc. In a way, residents had to, “raise their taxes to lower their taxes. The Purchase of Development Rights Program allows the farmers to receive the money they would have gotten for development and also to keep their farms.” A portion of the taxes also goes into a trust fund to pay an attorney to sue the Town of Dunn if they ever try to develop the land. Since people who live in suburbs often work in cities and drive daily thirty minutes to two hours to work, suburbs are one of the reasons why the transportation sector is the second largest source of CO2 emissions in the US. Conventional suburbs often displace farmlands and consequently require food to be trucked from farther and farther distances. When DeWitt first moved to his house bordering a wetland in the Town of Dunn in the 1970s, he learned that his neighbor had plans to sell the wetland for development. Since the wetland sequesters immense amounts of carbon, provides valuable habitat for migratory birds, and cleans polluted water, DeWitt visited his neighbor every Saturday for two years, each time asking him to not develop the wetland. After two years, his neighbor agreed to cancel the development plan and preserve the wetland.

Town of Dunn
www.town.dunn.wi.us

Cal Dewitt’s Blog about COP16
www.nelson.wisc.edu/news/news-details.php?e=1073

Bozeman, Montana – Carbon Neutral Biofuel Brewed from Fungi

211 miles southeast of Missoula—including 50 miles on the I-90 freeway—we crossed over Bozeman Pass and headed to Montana State University to meet with mycologist Gary Strobel about his recent discovery of Glicocladium roseum, an endophytic fungus that produces biofuel, called myco-diesel. Strobel is testing the fungus to see if it will digest cellulose and emit biofuel. Since cellulose can come from any plant matter including agricultural waste (like corn husks), this could be the first carbon neutral biofuel. If successful, the myco-diesel could be produced with a similar method to brewing beer.

A major problem with present day biofuels, such as ethanol, is they necessitate growing a food crop (like corn)—and emitting lots of carbon in the process—for the specific purpose of fermenting the crop’s sugar into fuel.

.

Montana University Profile for Gary Strobel
www.plantsciences.montana.edu/facultyorstaff/faculty/strobel
Microbiology Journal – “The production of myco-diesel hydrocarbons and their derivatives by the endophytic fungus Gliocladium roseum”
www.mic.sgmjournals.org/cgi/content/short/154/11/3319
Cosmos Magazine – “Rainforest fungus gives off biodiesel”
www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/2286/rainforest-fungus-gives-biodiesel
Jewels of the Jungle – Documentary featuring Gary Strobel
www.jewelsofthejungleweb.com

Glacier National Park, Montana – Citizen Science

During our interview with the US Geological Survey, we learned the unfortunate news that the park’s glaciers will be gone by 2020, an update from their 2003 prediction that the glaciers would be gone by 2030. In 1850, there were over 150 glaciers in the park, now there are 25. A glacier is defined as perennial ice and snow that is over 25 acres and moving. As the “water towers of the world,” glaciers provide a slow release of nutrient poor waters to downstream communities and ecosystems. A decrease in snow and increase in rain will cause more floods and droughts. The USGS has put together a time-lapse photographic exhibit to demonstrate the glaciers’ melting.

A block away, we interviewed Jami Belt of the Crown of the Continent Research Learning Center about their “Citizen Science” program in which everyday people can help monitor the populations of mountain goats and pikas. Data collection began in 2005 with the intention of using it to demonstrate how the climate crisis is effecting these species, which are akin to canaries in the coal mine. Without citizens collecting this scientific data, the research center would not be able to collect enough data to make an accurate assessment.

Crown of the Continent Research Learning Center
www.nps.gov/glac/naturescience/ccrlc-citizen-science.htm

USGS Climate Change in Mountain Ecosystems Research Center
www.nrmsc.usgs.gov/research/global.htm

USGS Photographs of Glacier Recession
www.nrmsc.usgs.gov/repeatphoto
www.nrmsc.usgs.gov/files/norock/repeatphoto/Gallery_guide_general.pdf

USGS Glacier Recession Animation
www.nrmsc.usgs.gov/files/norock/research/glacier_animation.gif