WORLDFIRE - Chapter 17

Taking It Slow On the C&O

“I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.” Thomas Jefferson (to John Adams, August 1, 1816)

Happy to have the haunted-feeling YMCA grounds behind me, I rolled into downtown Cumberland for breakfast. After topping off my tank, I visited the Chesapeake & Ohio (C&O) Canal Cumberland Visitor Center to pick up a trail map, where I learned that the towpath I was hoping to traverse was once part of a canal system used to transport canal boats loaded with coal, lumber, grains, and other goods between where I stood in Cumberland, Maryland and 600 feet below me in Washington, DC. A corridor of the country steeped in history, the C&O Canal National Historic Park bears traces of the Civil War, the abolitionist movement, two American presidents, a Supreme Court Justice, and more.

I was fascinated to learn that in the 1950s Congress almost turned the historic canal system into a corridor for cars until the aforementioned ardent conservationist and U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas saved the day by challenging the media to join him on an 8-day hike along the towpath to stop the highway project. Thousands of newspapers across the country wrote stories about Justice Douglas’ famous trek through what he called “a long stretch of quiet and peace.” As described by the National Park Service: “The hiking group grew to 58 by the time it left Cumberland... The group included… experts on geology, geography, ecology, history, ornithology, and mammalogy. Each night the group was treated to lectures on what it had seen and would see the next day. Sporting clubs along the route hosted the group in the evenings, various organizations prepared and served meals, and a trail club transported the gear so the hikers wouldn't have to carry it. Although these additions made the trip more enjoyable, it was still a difficult hike. The hikers averaged 23 miles a day, and Justice Douglas set a brisk four mile per hour pace. They even had to contend with a driving snow storm on the second day of the eight day hike. In fact, only nine men, including the 55 year old justice, completed the entire hike.” Because of all the publicity the hike generated, Congress backed off and permanently protected the canal as part of the national park system. But if we had left things to the “free” market, the park I was preparing to enter would not even exist. By doing something so unusual to draw attention to his just cause, Justice Douglas showed how one person can make a huge difference.

From the national park headquarters, I pedaled across the brick plaza to a bike shop to pick up some supplies when something familiar-looking caught my eye. It was a weathervane in the shape of a red, white, and blue top hat-wearing Uncle Sam riding a bike. The wind was blowing and the wheels were spinning away, with Uncle Sam swinging first this way, then that. Seeing it caused me to laugh out loud. You see, before he found my trike, my friend, Paul, had jokingly suggested that I wear such an outfit–complete with the top hat–to draw attention to my ride, while pedaling one of those mini bikes clowns ride in the circus. He told me that “this would make you unique if you did it this way. I strongly urge you to do it otherwise don’t waste your time taking this trip. It may be uncomfortable for the first 1,000 miles but you will get used to it.” Chuckling, I took a video of the whirligig and dedicated the YouTube post to Paul.

Inside the Cumberland Trail Connection bike shop, I shared with the proprietor my concern over whether the trike with its widely spaced front wheels and low clearance could successfully negotiate the rutted towpath. He reassured me it would make it and even volunteered to rescue me if I found myself stranded with a breakdown along the way, handing me his business card on my way out the door. It was comforting knowing he had my back. Minutes later, I found myself sitting in the trike at the trailhead with some 2,300 miles behind me and about 200 left to go.

As if to remind me that I wasn’t in Kansas anymore, the second I got on the trail, a smattering of snowflakes descended from the heavens. December was right around the corner and winter was closing in. As I embarked on this final leg of the journey, I pondered a piece of advice a friend had emailed me. It was a modern interpretation of an old Japanese maxim: “When in the face of victory, tighten your helmet strap.” In light of the previous day’s weirdness, the advice felt timely. Fortunately, warnings about the trike not being able to navigate the towpath proved unfounded. The deeper ruts slowed me down, but they didn’t stop me. Whenever they got too deep, I simply negotiated them at an angle, with one front wheel down in the rut and the other one high up on the grass.

Highs in the mid 30s made for a brisk yet beautiful day for cycling. Intoxicated by my surroundings and invigorated by the crisp, clean air, my merry mood was tempered only by the wistfulness of watching the mile markers tick down (184, 183, 182…). Despite the lateness of the season and my excitement over what my arrival in DC might portend, I felt an urge to slow down. I was not ready for the adventure to end. So I didn’t mind the deep mud puddles I had to gingerly negotiate, or the tree limbs downed by the Thanksgiving ice storm that blocked my way and forced me to get out and lift the trike over them. I didn’t mind them at all.

Apart from a lone camping cyclist, the only people I encountered all day were a local couple, Bob and Sue Steine, who flagged me down as I approached their campsite further down the trail. After hearing my story, the Steines told me if I hadn’t passed Lockhouse 49 by the time they got home, I might be able to stay there for a night or two. They were the quartermasters of the historic building. I doubted I would need it, but I thanked them for the offer and logged it away as a possibility.

The day’s wildlife sightings included nine deer, one wild turkey, and lots of evidence of beaver. But I was surprised to see any wildlife at all, given all the noise the rattling trike made rolling down the bumpy trail. 35 miles later, around dusk, I chose one of the numerous designated campsites that dot the northern bank of the Potomac River as my home for the night. Sites for tent camping, with old-fashioned water pumps (closed for the winter) and port-a-potties (still open), were conveniently spaced at roughly five-mile intervals along the trail. After pitching my tent, I built a small campfire to ward off the cold. Stoking the fire with an armful of small branches I had collected, I gazed into the flames until only embers remained, then retired to my tent for some blogging and sleep.

I awoke the next morning feeling refreshed and eager to experience the Paw Paw Tunnel. 3,118 feet long, it is even longer than the Big Savage Tunnel. Built with roughly six million bricks, workers used black powder, picks, and shovels to bore through the mountain at the glacial pace of 10-12 feet a week, hauling out the rubble with horse carts. More than a decade after construction began, the tunnel was completed in 1850 at great human and financial cost. Originally estimated to take just two years and $33,500 to excavate, it actually took 14 years and $600,000, with poor living conditions, disease, ethnic violence, wage disputes, and labor strife all taking their toll.

All told, the C&O canal system boasts a total of 74 lift locks. Constructed out of finely carved stone, the standard lift lock is 100 feet long, 15 feet wide, and 16 feet deep. A tight fit, the standard canal boat measured 92 feet long and 14.5 feet wide. Along with a mule house and a hay house where food for the animals was stored, each boat had cargo holds and a cabin. As described in C&O Canal Maps: “In 120 square feet, a relatively small place, the family or crew would sleep and eat for about nine months a year. The cabin contained a small stateroom for the captain and his wife and bunks for the children or crew. Most cabins had a coal-burning stove for cooking and heating, and a small table and some chairs.” Teams of mules would pull canal boats with 150-foot hemp tow ropes through the Paw Paw Tunnel’s waterway. A National Park Service (NPS) brochure describes this lively scene from the tunnel’s heyday: “As daylight dwindled to a pinpoint at either end of the tunnel, the steady beat of mule hoofs and the slap of displaced water marked a canal boat’s progress. Sometimes music filled the chamber as boat crews sang to hear the echoes of their voices or to calm children afraid of the dark.” Here is more colorful NPS history on the tunnel: “The channel through the tunnel was narrow, providing no room for passing or turning. The first boat to arrive at either end had the right of way. Sometimes stubborn captains refused to yield. One standoff lasted several days until a company official threw green cornstalks onto a roaring fire at the upwind end and forced the offenders out with smoke.”

When I rolled up to the tunnel opening, I was greeted by an unwelcome surprise. For some reason, a plywood doorframe had been added to the original entranceway, greatly shrinking its size. For a few brief seconds, I wondered if the trike would make it through the gap, but whoever constructed it had used standard doorway dimensions and I was just able to squeeze it through. Inside it was pitch black, so I turned on my headlights and slowly advanced, thankful for a wooden rail that keeps you from falling into the dark, water-filled canal below. I stopped for a moment to listen to the steady drip, drip, drip of water seeping down through the mountain into the canal, and breathed in deep the tunnel’s damp, earthy smell. Midway through, I encountered a group of young hikers coming the other way. Because it was hard to make out in the dark and had a similar shape, one of the hikers mistook what I was riding for a snowmobile, until I corrected him by informing him it was a rocket trike. It took me about 13 minutes to slowly pedal from one end of the tunnel to the other.

A short while later, I pulled off the trail to buy some food staples in the tiny town of Little Orleans. I bellied up to the bar at Bill’s Place, a rustic bar/diner/general store, where one of the locals treated me to a beer after hearing about my mission. If you were willing to part with a dollar (I was), the bar’s owner, Mr. Bill, let you autograph it, where it later joined all the other one-dollar bills affixed to the ceiling. If you ever find yourself at Bill’s Place, and look hard enough, you just might find a Renewable Rider $1 bill up there, along with maybe a thousand others. Further down the trail, I came across a woman on the grass, sitting by herself in a canoe, waiting for her ride. Seeing her there in her canoe, with no water around, just struck me as funny, so I pulled over to say hello. We talked for a few minutes about renewable energy and politics, long enough for me to ascertain that she, too, had pretty much lost faith in the political establishment.

As the ruts in the trail deepened, my pace slackened, with only 27 miles advanced on the day. Despite the rattling of the trike, the day’s life sightings of the wild kind included two deer, a flock of geese, a flock of wild turkeys, and the fleeting back end of a fox. Toward the end of the day, I set up my home away from home, happy to have another campsite to myself. Nestled under the trees on the banks of the Potomac, I warmed myself with another blazing fire before retiring to my tent for my nightly ritual of office work.

I woke up the next morning to frost-covered gear and frozen water bladders, which meant no drinking water until the next town, Hancock, which was seven miles down the trail. The good news is the town had a bakery that locals had raved to me about. With my hunger for pie motivating me more than my thirst for water, it didn’t take me long to pack up. Along the way, I passed the remains of historic lime kilns, resembling giant wood-fired pizza ovens, where pulverized limestone was once heated before being turned into cement used in the construction of the canal system. As it turns out, cement production is one of the tougher nuts to crack in making the transition to zero emissions. Thanks to the Biden administration investing more than $6 billion into projects to help cement, steel, and other industries decarbonize their production processes, some progress is being made, but more American ingenuity needs to be devoted to decarbonizing this sector of the economy. Technology is advancing to where we can potentially eliminate carbon intensive cement production by harnessing algae to produce biologically grown limestone to create carbon-neutral, if not carbon-negative, cement. All of this is hopeful news, considering that the production of cement, which is literally the foundation of modern society, contributes 7-8% of carbon dioxide emissions globally.

As I rolled up to Weaver’s Restaurant & Bakery, the promising aroma of home cooking filled the air, but the front door was locked. I must have looked pretty sad standing there because the owner, Penny Pittman, took pity on me and unlocked the door. Informing me that they weren’t open for another 30 minutes, she nevertheless invited me in to warm up over a cup of coffee. After hearing my story, she even dialed up a local reporter to let her know I was in town. So that is how I came to find myself sitting in a cozy restaurant hydrated, caffeinated, eating pie, and doing an interview with The Hancock News. The food and the company were so good (my server was just as friendly as the owner), I parked myself in my booth all morning, using the opportunity to charge up my laptop, catch up on emails, refill my water bladder, empty my own bladder, and brush my teeth. As a post-Thanksgiving treat to myself, I ordered a hot turkey sandwich smothered in gravy with mashed potatoes for lunch, along with another slice of homemade fruit pie for dessert. To top it all off, when I went to pay my bill, Penny just smiled at me and said it was “on the house.”

Feeling ever so grateful and recharged, I raced down the trail toward Lock 49. Having heard that heavy, steady rains were forecast for the next couple of days, I dialed up the Steines to ask about the possibility of staying at the lockhouse they managed. To my delight, Bob told me it was available for the next several nights if I needed it. Better yet, when he told the property managers at the C&O Canal Trust about my mission, they generously waived the lodging fees. I took it as one more sign of just how popular the idea of a green energy moon shot was proving to be.

When I pulled up to Lockhouse 49 with 25 more miles in my rearview mirror, I couldn’t believe my luck. Standing before me was a historic brick home with furnishings reflecting a bygone era. It lacked running water, but it had heat and electricity, making it a great base for riding out the storm. Bob met me there to unlock the place, before kindly inviting me back to his home in nearby Clear Spring to break bread with his family, where I was treated to a wonderful spaghetti dinner, a badly needed shower, and a chance to wash my clothes. The Steines’ curious sons rode back out with us after dinner to see the rocket trike for themselves.

Lying in Lockhouse 49’s comfortable bed that night, I read some fascinating history about working and living on the C&O Canal locks until my eyes grew too heavy to read any more. I woke up to a falling rain. Cozily holed up in my 1839 home, I responded to emails and drafted my ride finale press release. During a lull in the rain, I explored some of the historic buildings and structures at Four Locks, which in its heyday had been a thriving little community buzzing with activity. Four Locks was big enough to support a post office, two warehouses, two stores, and a one-room schoolhouse. 

Around dinnertime, Bob picked me up again, this time taking me by Fort Frederick from the French and Indian War, a historic site where Union troops were stationed to guard the C&O Canal during the Civil War. We were later joined at dinner by two other lockhouse quartermasters. After so many days of traveling solo, I was grateful for the company and the conversation, which ranged from their time on the C&O to the promise of a green industrial revolution.

I woke up the next morning to a driving downpour, which later turned to sleet, making me even happier to be inside, where it was warm and dry. With flash flood watches and warnings in effect, I decided to hunker down in my historic home for another day. I spent the morning updating my blog and website before getting a call from a local NBC affiliate requesting a television interview. They ended up running a nice story that would later spark a heartwarming encounter a little further down the trail. As the day wore on, the skies cleared up, portending my last night at Four Locks. I was getting attached to the place and would miss it. Overnighting in these restored lockhouses gives through-travelers a unique chance to step back in time. It’s an experience I can’t recommend highly enough. During my final night there, Bob and Sue outdid themselves by delivering a home-cooked meal to my door. Knowing I would soon be back to freeze-dried dinners and sleeping on the cold, hard ground, I indulged myself after dinner with several glasses of Bob’s homemade blueberry wine before savoring every second of sleeping in the lockhouse’s big soft bed.

Waking up to a crystal blue sky cleansed by two straight days of rain, I soon found myself back on the towpath happily pedaling away. But my morning reverie of breathing in all that clean, sweet air was brought short by the sight of a coal plant smokestack towering over the trail in the Maryland town of Williamsport. I left the trail to pedal over to the town’s Main Street to see if others shared my sentiments about the need to move beyond coal. There, in a local bike shop, my question was quickly answered through a chance encounter with City Council Member Larry Jessop, who told me that, yes, he was eager to see that “eyesore” of a coal plant go away (two years later, he would get his wish when the plant shut down). After inviting me for coffee across the street, Larry and I talked about the economic promise of a renewable energy revolution for small towns like his.

Back on the trail, my biggest challenge proved to be keeping myself from getting impaled by all the downed branches lying on the path, which seemed positively magnetized to the large floor vents. One big branch jumped up and nearly speared me in the groin, which could have brought the Ride for Renewables to an ignominious end. Toward the end of the day, I met a woman on the towpath who told me there was a special cave down the trail and to keep an eye out for it. Had she not told me, I probably would have ridden right past it. But I spotted it in the woods to my left, a dark hole in the side of the hill. She said it was part of the Underground Railroad, once used as a hideout for freedom-seeking slaves, which seems likely, given that the Underground Railroad ran through this part of the country. Walking up to the cave on a lightly trodden path, the first thing I noticed was how the entrance was more square than round, making it more likely an old mine than a natural cave. But it was still cave-like, dark and cool, when you got inside. Using my headlamp to explore, I discovered the cave wasn’t deep, but it looked like some large rocks may have been placed over a hole in the back to block further access. I wondered if that might have been where former slaves were hidden. I can’t even begin to imagine the terror of what it must have felt like to be hunted down like that. I later learned that it is called Killiansburg Cave and that it likely served another purpose as well. The book, Discovering the C&O Canal and Adjacent Potomac River, describes how on “September 16-18, 1862, hundreds of Sharpsburg citizens came here to seek refuge under these cliffs from the Battle of Antietam.” That is a part of Civil War history we don’t hear much about: the lengths to which noncombatants had to go to keep out of the line of fire. Imagine what that must have been like, sitting in that cave, waiting and wondering while the bloodiest battle of the Civil War raged outside. If either of these things happened in that cave, there really should be a trailside plaque commemorating it at mile marker 75.7.

With 58 more miles behind me, I pitched my tent in the enveloping dusk next to the fast-flowing Potomac a few miles from the hallowed grounds of the Antietam National Battlefield, site of not only the first major battle in the American Civil War, but also the bloodiest one-day battle in American history. On September 17, 1862, approximately 23,000 soldiers were killed, wounded or missing after 12 hours of fighting. While the battle itself proved tactically inconclusive, it was enough of a victory to give President Lincoln the confidence he needed to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Thinking about that, and about how many people have died from climate disasters, made me wonder what might give a president today the fortitude to courageously fight for the future of humanity.

You may recall my mentioning a heartwarming encounter sparked by a TV story that ran while I was at Lockhouse 49. It unfolded the next morning as I was striking camp. A local couple from nearby Dargan, Maryland, Bill Moore and Patti Miller, were out walking their dog when they strolled up and introduced themselves, saying they had seen me on the news. As we chatted, I found myself quite taken with Bill’s insightful analysis of what ails our political system. It made me laugh out loud when he said this about Congress: "If they built a house and we walked into it and sneezed... the thing would fall in on us." He spoke for me when he called on the two dysfunctional political parties in Washington to stop their “bickering” and get down to the “serious business” of doing the people’s work.

To Bill’s point, a 2019 Rasmussen poll found 47% of Americans feel neither political party represents them, with a 2018 Rasmussen poll finding a majority (53%) of Americans feel they are being governed without their consent. It wasn’t always this way. In a 2015 commentary called “The Revolt Against the Ruling Class,” former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich shared this jaw-dropping shift in public sentiment: “In 1964, Americans agreed by 64% to 29% that government was run for the benefit of all the people. By 2012, the response had reversed, with voters saying by 79% to 19% that government was ‘run by a few big interests looking after themselves.’” I am old enough to have witnessed this sea change in public opinion, for it happened during my lifetime. Political goodwill and good governance have mostly devolved into partisan warfare and government gridlock.

For the past 40 some years, the great democratic experiment called the United States of America has been slowly unraveling. In the decades since the Reagan Revolution, the gulf between the haves and the have-nots has grown as wide as the Grand Canyon. The riches that showered society’s upper crust somehow never managed to trickle down to everyday Americans. As more and more working families struggle just to survive, the privileged few amass ever more wealth and power. It is not a state secret that the political establishment answers first and foremost to Wall Street, serving the corporations at the expense of the citizenry. The resulting distrust in government is what paves the way for dangerous demagogues. Their normalization of propaganda alien to the spirit of democracy poses a clear and present danger to the Republic. Patriots (like the patriots in blue who heroically protected the U.S. Capitol on January 6) defend democracy. Our centuries long march toward a more perfect Union is being routed by the corrupting forces of greed, with our despair at this wretched state of affairs cynically exploited to divide us. Democracies are fragile things. It is easy to forget just how young America is as a nation and that the future of our democratic experiment is anything but assured. It is up to each of us to assure it.

It is no big mystery why officeholders from the president on down have refused to take on the special interests blocking climate progress: money in politics. Because they are able to shower politicians with campaign contributions, the 1% gets their needs met in Washington, DC in ways that everyday Americans do not. One need look no further than the 2008 $700 billion Wall Street bailout for proof of this fact. How is it there was all these taxpayer dollars to bail out wealthy CEOs and investment firms that precipitated the market crash, yet no relief for the millions of honest, hard-working Americans who lost their jobs, their homes, and their life savings? Why was not a single high-level Wall Street bankster who committed bank fraud sent to prison? Instead, many of the crooks got bonuses. It’s time for Wall Street to stop receiving and start paying, for their largess is larger than we have been led to believe. As reported by the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College: “Estimates of the total amount of [2007-2009] bailout funding provided by the Fed have ranged from its own lowball claim of $1.2 trillion to Bloomberg’s estimate of $7.7 trillion (just for the biggest banks) to the GAO tally of $16 trillion. But new research… finds that the Fed’s commitments–in the form of loans and asset purchases to prop up the global financial system–far exceeded even the highest estimates,” reaching $29 trillion. If we had $29 trillion to treat Wall Street’s self-inflicted crisis of greed, we have money to provide for legitimate public need.

In Hot, Flat, and Crowded, Thomas Friedman makes a point similar to Bill’s about the paralyzing effect of government gridlock. Using a space analogy, Friedman paints the picture of “a space shuttle taking off. That’s what America looks like to me. We still have all this tremendous thrust coming from below, from a society that is still enormously idealistic, experimental, and full of energy. But the booster rocket of our space shuttle (the political system we have now) is leaking fuel, and in the cockpit (Washington, D.C.) the pilots are fighting over the flight plan. As a result, we cannot generate the escape velocity–the direction and focus we need to reach the next frontier, fully seize the opportunities there, and fully meet the challenges of the Energy-Climate Era.” To extend the space analogy a little further, the shuttle nearly crashed and burned after an attempted hijacking on January 6, 2021. Friedman’s analogy, and Bill’s, depicts well America’s current challenge.

Before we parted ways, Bill and Patti expressed their support for my mission by handing me some “lunch money” for the road, a lunch I would enjoy a few hours later in historic Harpers Ferry, mid-point of the popular Appalachian Trail. After locking up the trike on the Maryland side of the river, I walked across the Harpers Ferry Railroad Bridge into West Virginia and hiked up the hill to Jefferson Rock, where Thomas Jefferson stood on October 25, 1783, praising the view as “worth a voyage across the Atlantic.” There I shot a short video calling on us to get back to the pursuit of the ideals that originally birthed our nation.

Notwithstanding his paradoxical history as a slave owner, I have always admired our third president for his inspired drafting of the Declaration of Independence and for having the courage, along with the rest of the founders, to defy King George III–under threat of death–to realize the daring dream of America. All 56 men who signed their name to that venerated document did so knowing if the revolution failed, they would hang. Rarely has history bore witness to such daring bravery. This does not erase, or excuse, the ugly fact that Jefferson owned slaves, but America was founded on higher ideals than his generation was able to represent. In her eye-opening book, How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them, political scientist Barbara F. Walter offers her take on these complex men: “America was created to serve white men with property. The founders themselves were slave owners and did not believe that slaves deserved rights and freedoms. In fact, they did not even consider the enslaved to be full human beings. They also did not believe that white workers who didn’t own land could hold public office. And they did not believe women had any say in any of these matters. They were broad-minded, but only by the standards of their era.”

America’s founders had a similarly complicated relationship with the first Americans. We know from his writings that Jefferson, for instance, admired Native People and viewed them as equal “in body and mind” to the white man. Inconsistent with this was his insistence that Native People adopt the white man’s ways and his advocation of policies that eroded tribal homelands and set the stage for the forced removal of Native Americans from those homelands. The more I learn about the injustices of that era, the less rosy my view of American history becomes. In later years, another greatly revered president, Abraham Lincoln, would display similar contradictions. President Lincoln is rightly honored for the heroic conviction he displayed in freeing millions of African Americans from the inhuman horrors of bondage, a courageous act that laid the foundation for a multiracial democracy. Yet Lincoln also signed laws that stole hundreds of millions of acres of tribal lands, had officers serving under him who brutally massacred Native Peoples, and approved the hanging of 38 Dakota Sioux warriors for war crimes (after commuting the death sentences of hundreds more who were convicted in the sham trial). History is not conveniently black and white. It is as complex as the humans who make it.

It is possible to celebrate the brightest chapters in our nation’s history while also acknowledging the darkest. When I visited Mount Rushmore as a child, I saw it simply as a shrine to democracy. For much of my adult life, I continued to see it that way. Then I woke up. I have long known that the Black Hills are central to the origin story of the Lakota people. What I didn’t know was that the Oglala Lakota medicine man Black Elk was inspired by a great vision to name the granite mountain the Six Grandfathers (representing the four cardinal directions and the Earth and the Sky). A photograph of the Six Grandfathers helped me understand why the original inhabitants of the Black Hills view Mount Rushmore as the desecration of a sacred mountain. They see it as a symbol of colonization. To them, the sculpture is an insult. To others, it is an inspiration. One can marvel at the grandeur of the giant visages sculpted into stone while also seeing the national memorial through the eyes of a people whose sacred mountain and Black Hills were violently stolen from them. For that mountain was not ours to dynamite. In hindsight, it is easy to see that “manifest destiny” was a convenient tool wielded by those with money and power to justify the naked aggression of colonialism. Colonialism, cloaked in the guise of manifest destiny, is how the West was truly won.

Let us never forget who was here first. For too long has the dominant culture’s version of history–steeped in the religious myth of manifest destiny–held sway over too many. The U.S. government has a well-documented history of breaking treaties with the original inhabitants of this land. It not only ripped them away from their homes; it tried to strip them of their culture, history, and way of life. An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States recounts that trail of treachery in a book that should be required reading for every student of U.S. history. None of us are responsible for the acts of our ancestors, but as a non-Native American, I am responsible for acknowledging that I live on the traditional unceded territory of the Ute, Arapaho, and Cheyenne peoples. By speaking honestly about where we live, and speaking up for Native American treaty rights–we can begin by transferring stewardship of the Black Hills from the federal government to the Great Sioux Nation–we can help bring some long overdue justice to an unjustly treated people and maybe, just maybe, find our way home as a human family. For in the end, we are all indigenous to Mother Earth.

I am a patriot. I love my country enough to want to see her blossom into her full potential. Growing into a more perfect Union begins with honestly owning up to our past. For all its many virtues, there is no denying that America was colonized through the physical and cultural genocide of the first Americans from whom this land was stolen, with millions of Native Americans killed and forcibly relocated. For America to heal, we have to come clean about the shocking numbers of Native American women who were forcibly sterilized, and how Native American children were abducted and horrifically abused in federal boarding schools, and how this forced sterilization and indoctrination was a second form of genocide designed to destroy a beautiful culture. Nor is there any denying that this nation was built on the backs of kidnapped Africans brought here in chains. Millions were enslaved, brutalized, and murdered. Recognizing these brutal truths does not change the fact that our founders bravely birthed a democracy, but it does put the onus on current generations to embody the ideals of freedom, equality, and justice for all that earlier generations were unable to manifest.

Closing the gap between the loftiness of our ideals and the realization of those ideals is some of the most important work we have yet to do as a people. Maturing into a more enlightened nation requires wrestling with our unenlightened past. We have the Holocaust Museum where people can learn about the horrors of the Holocaust. Where are our national Slavery and Genocide Museums? Central to our unfinished work is leveling an unlevel playing field created by generations of systemic racism and institutional discrimination that put African Americans and Native Americans at an extreme social and economic disadvantage, a racial bias that persists to this day. Thankfully, a national conversation acknowledging the persistent plague of white dominance and white supremacy has at least begun, but we must dedicate ourselves as a nation to healing these intergenerational traumas. Some sort of truth and justice commission might help heal some of these wounds and stem the violent rise of hatred in our country. Healing can happen when hearts are exposed to the truth. It is heartening to see Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation Commissions being formed in communities across the nation, but we need a national reckoning.

This brings to mind one of the most profound climate commentaries I have ever read, written by MSNBC political commentator Chris Hayes. Early in the piece, “The New Abolitionism,” Hayes makes the disclaimer that “before anyone misunderstands my point, let me be clear and state the obvious: there is absolutely no conceivable moral comparison between the enslavement of Africans and African-Americans and the burning of carbon to power our devices. Humans are humans; molecules are molecules. The comparison I’m making is a comparison between the political economy of slavery and the political economy of fossil fuel.”

Hayes then goes somewhere I have never seen anyone go before, writing that “the parallel I want to highlight is between the opponents of slavery and the opponents of fossil fuels. Because the abolitionists were ultimately successful, it’s all too easy to lose sight of just how radical their demand was at the time: that some of the wealthiest people in the country would have to give up their wealth. That liquidation of private wealth is the only precedent for what today’s climate justice movement is rightly demanding: that trillions of dollars of fossil fuel stay in the ground. It is an audacious demand, and those making it should be clear-eyed about just what they’re asking. They should also recognize that, like the abolitionists of yore, their task may be as much instigation and disruption as it is persuasion. There is no way around conflict with this much money on the line, no available solution that makes everyone happy. No use trying to persuade people otherwise… And yet, fossil fuel companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars looking for new reserves—reserves that would be sold and emitted only in some distant postapocalyptic future in which we’ve already burned enough fossil fuel to warm the planet past even the most horrific projections. This means that fossil fuel companies are taking their investors’ money and spending it on this extremely expensive suicide mission... What the climate justice movement is demanding is the ultimate abolition of fossil fuels. And our fates all depend on whether they succeed.” We are talking about total carbon reserves worth roughly $27 trillion, controlled by the biggest, baddest, meanest industry in the history of the world. While a far cry from achieving the audacious demand of keeping all those fossil fuels in the ground, unrelenting public pressure from climate groups like 350.org has convinced more than 1,500 private and public institutions–including major players like New York City and the nation of Ireland–to divest from their fossil fuel investments. Their divestment campaign is an important first step in the longer march to abolish fossil fuels.

Some who are paying close attention have foreseen the end of oil. As far back as 2000, the former oil minister of Saudi Arabia, Sheikh Yamani, told The Telegraph: “Thirty years from now there will be a huge amount of oil - and no buyers. Oil will be left in the ground. The Stone Age came to an end, not because we had a lack of stones, and the oil age will come to an end not because we have a lack of oil.” You read that right; a former Saudi oil minister in the year 2000 predicted the oil age ending by 2030.

Just as America needs an honest national reckoning on race, so does the world need an honest global reckoning on the reality of climate breakdown. The time for polite talk is over. Decades of milquetoast UN-sponsored climate negotiations and cowardly procrastination by politicians have allowed the climate beast to slip its leash, with the beast now stalking the land and threatening to destroy us all. The hour is too late for passive political half measures. Appeasement will not work. We have to stand up and fight.

Only one historic precedent exists for what we are now being called to do: our fearless response to fascism during World War II. America must mount a response to the climate emergency on the scope and scale of the Second World War. For as high as the stakes were then, the stakes are higher today. In the 1940s, America was fighting for our freedom. Today, we are fighting for our survival.

NOTE: The written form of WORLDFIRE is the authoritative version. Any inadvertent errors in transcribing the recordings are mine and mine alone.