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More than 1,300 local rallies were held on Saturday April 14 by StepItUp2007.org, a citizen’s group based in Burlington, VT that is pushing for an 80 percent global reduction in carbon emissions by 2050. Bill McKibben, who introduced the topic of global warming to the world in his 1989 book The End of Nature, is the chief spokesman for the group. He went around the country for several weeks whipping up support for the rallies while he also promoted his new book, Deep Economy. The book questions the “more is better” approach to economic growth and instead argues for solar energy, farmer’s markets, and other ways to rely more on neighborliness and less on fossil fuels.

Most of this is familiar stuff – the big bad oil companies, the plucky grassroots activists – but McKibben is a more searching thinker than is your average organic farm enthusiast, so he takes it further. Yesterday I heard him say something that made me both thoughtful and hopeful. He was explaining why the rally organizers decided to promote local events instead of a huge single march on Washington DC. First, he said, they did not have the organizational skill to pull off a big march. Second, they also did not want thousands of people burning tons of fuel to go to Washington. And third, he said, “we also wanted people to make their voices heard in the places that mattered to them.”

The creativity of local responses has been astonishing, he says. On April 14, scuba divers held an underwater rally in the Florida Keys to draw attention to vanishing coral reefs. Skiers schussed down glaciers in formation. People wearing blue t-shirts linked arms in Lower Manhattan to show where the new shoreline will be if Greenland’s ice cap melts. There was a big contra dance in tiny little Hamilton, Montana. And at the end of the day, all 1300-plus rallies sent photos to the web site, so the politicians and the press in Washington knew that hundreds of thousands of people got together to call for “dramatic radical ambitious action on climate change now.”

“We are in a very lucky position today when we think about localness,” said McKibben. “Before, the choice had been between a local life and a larger life. People left their local place to go out into the larger world. One of the things that has gone with localness has been parochialism – a stifling inability to get rid of old prejudices and old ideas. But now we live in a moment when this very interesting new technology represented by the Web allows us to contemplate the best of both worlds. We can strengthen local economies and really start depending on our neighbors, and at the same time we can keep an open window to the larger world around us.

“I used to think about now nice it is to be able to use the Internet to trade recipes instead of shipping ingredients around the world. Now, all these rallies are showing me that people can have it both ways. They can be in their own place with the people they love, in the landscapes they love, and make a witness to their local media and politicians. And at the same time, thanks to these new technologies, they can participate in the life of the nation and the world.

“That new ability should allow us to think more creatively about the world we live in than we have in the past. And we’d better think fast. The problems we have are coming up on us faster than we can imagine. The window of opportunity is still there, but it is narrow and it is closing. It is our job to try to jimmy it open and try to give the rest of creation, and the people who come after us a little bit of breathing space and a little bit of possibility.”
McKibben’s talk is available from Alternative Radio. To see the rallies, visit StepItup2007.

Easter is over but they will be skiing for several more weeks on Tug Hill, the part of New York just east of Lake Ontario. The reason is “lake effect,” a local phenomenon that occurs when prevailing Arctic winds from the north and west sweep over the comparatively warm surface of the water. The wind carries the moisture into the air, freezes it, and drops the snow just downwind, sometimes with spectacular results. Lake effect forms in narrow bands that move back and forth, spraying snow over the land like a high-pressure hose. It isn’t unusual for it to accumulate at five inches per hour. Osceola, NY got nearly twelve feet between February 3 and 10 this year, a new state record.

February 3 was also the day of the 27th Tug Hill Tourathon, a citizen’s ski race that winds 50 kilometers through the Winona State Forest east of Sandy Creek. This isn’t an Olympics kind of race. It is more like a grand day out for the skiers combined with an annual party for a diehard band of local volunteers. Only a few of the skiers want to win. Most of us just want to finish, or maybe beat our time from last year. We glide through pine plantations and stands of mature hardwood, the trail mostly level but undulating just enough to stave off boredom. Stark winter silences sharpen a landscape of white, black and gray. The snow is the cleanest and most reliable in the East. But the lake effect bands were going to be cranking away on race day, and if they happened to be over the course at just the right time, the party would have to be cancelled due to too much of a good thing.

Tourathon Contestant 

A foot of new snow did fall the night before, but the race started with just a one-hour delay. About 150 skiers showed up, a light turnout because of the dicey conditions, but many at the finish line said it had been the best race in years. This meant a lot to Dr. Jay Chapman, who has a family practice in nearby Pulaski. Jay is the Tourathon’s chief promoter and spokesman. “Half of the kids in our local schools weigh more than they should,” he says. “I see the effects of obesity in my patients every day. We need to attract the next generation to the outdoors. We need to go to war against video games.”

Jay Chapman

Cross-country skiing does great things for your body, but so far most kids aren’t listening. Chapman says that the average age of racers who finish the 50 kilometers – that’s about 31.5 miles — is 53. Still, all kinds of people were out there. We wore everything from Lycra to Levi’s, and I am living proof that we weren’t all in great shape. The winning time for the 50K race was three and a half hours, which was considered slow. The final finisher took six hours. But everyone who finished 25K or 50K got a medal.
New technology made the 2007 Tourathon possible, says Chapman. He decided to go ahead with the race at 4:30 that morning after exchanging e-mails with the meteorologists at a Syracuse TV station. They told him they expected the snow bands to move north of Sandy Creek around 9 am and stay north until late afternoon – a window just long enough to pull off the race. And it worked. The skiers got fresh snow swirling off the trees, bright sunlight, and a perfectly groomed track.

Hand-held radios also make the race safer and smoother than it was back in the 1980s. Dozens of local volunteers turn out every year to staff the race, and a few of them told me it is the highlight of the year. They stand out in the snow to hand out warm Gatorade and cookies at food stations, drive skiers around in borrowed school buses, and stand at road crossings to check people off the master list as they glide by. If anyone needs help, it arrives quickly – you are never more than a kilometer or two from a road, and snowmobiles run back and forth all day. You stay warm because you keep moving, and after the first few miles your sense of time gets lost in the rhythmic kick-and-glide of the skis. It does take a bit of preparation and practice to stay outdoors all day in the middle of a Tug Hill Winter, but the feeling is incomparable.

“If I didn’t like winter, I wouldn’t live here,” says Tom Towne. He is standing next to his big yellow Arctic Cat at one of the road crossings. Tom lives in Tug Hill, and two minutes into our conversation he tells me that he subscribes to Accuweather.com’s professional edition, which is marketed to “weather enthusiasts.” A lot of people around here do, he says. Tom is a traveling salesman for a tool & die company. He says he likes nothing better than to spend the day this way, going way out into the Winona and turning the machine off so he can soak in the silence. Maintaining a Tug Hill address has always required a person to be tough and clever – not college clever, but a deeper kind of quickness that comes from regularly having to meet a challenge. I guess it isn’t surprising to find people way out in these unforgiving woods who are masters of e-mail and wireless communication and the interpretation of satellite images. These tools give them a better chance.

Tom Towne

People waiting to get on the bus after the race are sweat-soaked, tired, and generally happy. While steam rises off my sweater, I eavesdrop on a man talking to a young woman. At first he bores her with a long discussion of gear and wax, which is the romantic downfall of many X-C ski geeks. But then she asks him something about the snow and he becomes lyrical. He was skiing in Tug Hill once early in the morning after a snow like the one that fell this morning, he says. He was moving through a tunnel of trees that were loaded down with fresh snow, getting cold and wet, and he asked himself why he was going to all the trouble. Then the sun reached just the right angle and lit up the path before him, and the snow crystals swirled from the trees like a million fireflies in front of him, and he found himself skiing along into an enchanted forest, he says, and he got his answer.