On your left

Posted on 24 September 2022

“On your left!”
“Thank you!”
“Thank you!”

“On your left!”
“Get it, girl!”
“I’m trying!”

And so on.

A couple weeks later, back home, while passing a couple of other cyclists with a wide berth:

“Hey, coming up on your left!”
Silence.
I was a little put out.

They call the community at AIDS/Lifecycle “the Love Bubble”, which is cheesy and something I typically have trouble embracing for that; such things are, all too often, a façade, an untruth. But the reality is, people on the ride were so damn friendly. I was there, unexpectedly, on my own, and yet as I rode among hundreds of other groups of people, I found friends.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how it’s hard to be a good person in a bad society. Not everyone has the strength, even though it is morally necessary, and so atrocities proceed. How are good societies built, encouraging people to be the best version of themselves? I don’t know, but there was something on this ride, where everyone reached out to help, to do favors, to give a grin, that made me feel as though being a bad person here would be much harder than being good.

We started in a mist of a cool rain, which was funny in its atypicality. Two days later, we had ridden so far that we were sweating it out in 96 degrees Fahrenheit. And so we continued down California, 545 miles by bicycle from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

It took time to figure the routine of everything out, but I slowly became more efficient. When I reached camp, I downed the chocolate milk offered to me and then set about my tasks: finding the luggage trucks, getting my luggage and my tent, finding my space in the tent grid, setting up my tent, walking to the shower trucks and cleaning up, attempting chores like phone charging or laundry, dinner, and the evening programming if I was quick enough, water bottle refill and brushing my teeth. By the time I was back in my tent it was dark, and in the morning I rose before 5am.

Use the porta potty, change into riding clothes and put on sunscreen, pack the tent, back to the luggage truck, then to breakfast to cram in some calories, then to the bike corral, find my bike, mix my electrolyte drink. Hit the road before the mist burns off. Freewheels spinning, calls of “on your left”, the sun rising.

Rest stops, sanitizing protocol, food and drinks. Then the medical tent, where the cream needs built up: sun screen, lip cream, chamois cream, cream for a bee sting. Find new friends, hit the road again. The landscape changed from coast to farmland, to hills to coast again.

Each day had its pattern. Time stretched and compressed. And there were moments. Helping a Sister of Perpetual Indulgence find their dropped eyelashes on the floor of their tent the morning of red dress day. Coming up on the wheel of a new friend, “I caught you!” Rolling into Pismo Beach, ready for those much-hyped cinnamon rolls. Nearly rolling past a photo op set up on the side of the road with a drag alien. Lined up to leave the halfway point in waves, chatting with a man who told me about his famous mentor—and that he had been living with HIV since the late 1980s. The talent show, with singers who were real pros. The candlelight vigil on the beach in Ventura, honoring those who died from AIDS. Finding someone else in a Ukraine kit. Playing red light/green light Squid Game-style, but with water guns. Reaching the top of Quadbuster hill to cheers and snapping fans. Paradise Pit, with ice cream better than I had hoped for. The dance party rest stop, with bibs pulled halfway off and booty shaking in cycling cleats. Getting mac and cheese for dinner. Catching the sunset settling over the field of tents. And of course, riding through the finish line, flanked by a tunnel of cheers.

Despite the mounting exhaustion, the pattern pulled everyone toward goodness.

At one of the evening programs, a man joked that when he moved to San Francisco, he was told that in the gay community, he had three options for socializing: joining the gay men’s chorus, playing softball, or becoming “one of those crazy motherfuckers who rides their bike to L.A.” I’m merely adjacent to the community, but I have become one of those crazy motherfuckers in solidarity.

Butt pained, legs tired, heart happy. I would go back.

AIDS/Lifecycle is a week-long event where cyclists ride 545 miles from San Francisco to Los Angeles with the help of volunteers called “roadies” who help with food, logistics, camp set-up, and more. This event is a fundraiser for two organizations, the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and the Los Angeles LGBT Center.

Categories: Life

Tagged: aids/lifcycle, bicycles, california, cycling, gay rights, lgbtq, los angeles, san francisco

Fueling Destruction

Posted on 30 March 2022

Kharkiv. Photo by Yurii Kochubey.

This post was originally published by Climate Solutions.

For years, I have watched as friends of mine in Ukraine and Russia have pleaded with Western governments to stop supporting Russian dictator Putin–not just politically, but financially, through the purchase of fossil fuels. Even “climate-friendly” politicians ignored them. Unfortunately, Western environmentalists generally did not take up their cause either, not making the connection specifically between purchasing fossil fuels and funding an incredibly repressive, brutal dictator: Putin. And so, here we are. It is time to finally listen.

Russia’s brutal attack on Ukraine was and is funded by the continuous purchase of Russian oil and gas—despite warnings from opponents of the Putin regime. These petrodollars make up over a third of the Russian state budget, and oil and gas accounted for 60% of Russian exports in 2019. I have many friends in and from Ukraine and Russia who have borne the consequences. Friends in Ukraine have had to leave their homes to escape the worst of the attacks. Ukrainian friends living elsewhere anxiously await updates from family members sleeping in metros that have been converted to bomb shelters, and from others that have joined territorial defense units. Russian friends, already forced into exile years ago, who are now scrambling to protect their activist colleagues still in Russia, or who are currently fleeing, as well as assisting refugees from Ukraine.

The large-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine began in the early hours of February 24th as the Russian military began to rain missiles down on cities and troops crossed the border. Russia’s war on Ukraine actually began eight years prior to this escalation, with the annexation of Crimea and Russian military operations in eastern Ukraine. Russian military aggression in these areas has caused over 13,000 deaths and created over 2.5 million refugees, most of whom were internally displaced within Ukraine. Now, in just the past month, nearly 4 million people have fled Ukraine, while 6.5 million—including a friend of mine—have been forced from their homes but remain in the country.

The destruction that Russia has visited upon Ukrainian cities—bombing residences, hospitals, schools—is staggering. The city of Mariupol, population 400,000, has turned into “ashes of a dead land” according to its city council. Kharkiv, normally home to over 1.4 million, has been pummeled with cluster bombs; most of the city no longer has heat. The leveling of these cities is reminiscent of Russia’s bombing campaigns of Aleppo and Grozny. These are just a few examples from Ukraine today.

Mariupol. Photo by Darvik Photography.

Every one of these numbers—of refugees, of casualties—represents a whole life. Ukrainian journalist Nadezhda Sukhorukova describes her time in besieged Mariupol in diary entries: “I’m not going to be buried if I die while hostilities are still going on. That’s what the police told us: we stopped them in the street and asked what to do with the dead grandmother of our friend. They advised us to move her to the balcony. I wonder how many dead bodies are lying on people’s balconies?” My Ukrainian friend, who helped translate these words, said upon finishing “I passed out, my body shut down, the life in it refusing to comprehend the unspeakable horror.”

Putin’s military adventures have occurred alongside brutal repression within Russia. This January, a close friend of mine, Evgenia Chirikova, posted a photo of herself at a 2012 Moscow protest with the caption, “This photo is from a past life, and in it you can track the three main fates for active citizens of Russia. Alas, our Motherland is not especially kind to her children. She kills, expels, or throws in prison those who really try to change something.” In Russia, even standing alone, holding a sign, can lead to arrest.

Three prominent Russian opposition activists experienced different fates after this photo was taken in 2012. Evgenia Chirikova (center) continues her activism from exile. Boris Nemstov (left) was assassinated in front of the Kremlin in 2015. Alexei Navalny (right) nearly died after being poisoned by Putin’s “security” services; he now sits in prison. Photo courtesy Evgenia Chirikova.

Russia’s colonial warmongering and brutal domestic oppression are funded by the sale of fossil fuels. It’s worth noting that in Russia’s kleptocracy, the largest fossil fuel companies are majority state-owned, while others are managed by oligarchs friendly to Putin. This is no secret, but human rights and climate be damned, the money kept flowing. Europe spends as much as $1 billion per day on Russian fossil fuels. The United States, a net petroleum exporter, relies less on Russian oil and gas, with the bulk of petroleum imports coming from Canada; nonetheless, about 7% of imports are from Russia (we import a similar amount from Saudi Arabia, itself no paragon of human rights).

Russian activists have been asking other countries to swear off Russian fossil fuel imports for years—unfortunately to no avail until the past month. A demonstrative example is the Nord Stream 2 project: a gas pipeline from Russia to Germany. Nord Stream 2 AG’s CEO is Matthias Warnig, a former Stasi member who befriended Putin during his KGB days; that company is owned by fossil fuel giant Gazprom, itself primarily owned by the Russian state. The three neighboring Baltic nations lodged objections to the project, along with Poland, and, of course, Ukraine (all five countries have been subject to Russian and Soviet colonialism). However, Germany went along with this project for “business reasons,” as if decision-making could happen in a moral vacuum. As Evgenia Chirikova wrote in 2017 for The Guardian, this project proceeded “after the annexation of Crimea by Putin’s Russia, the war against Ukraine, and the shooting down over Ukraine of the MH17 passenger plane. European consumers will pay for the gas, and the money will go to the Putin regime, strengthening it. There is a high probability that, as usual, the Kremlin will spend the proceeds on propaganda, repression, new wars, and annexations – and Europe will be paying for it.” And here we are.

Unfortunately, pleas for Western nations to stop purchasing Russian oil and gas were not heard until February 24th. Following the invasion of Ukraine, BP, Exxon, and Shell have pulled back from Russian investments (though Shell did purchase 100,000 metric tons of Russian crude in early March). The U.S. banned the import of Russian oil, liquified natural gas, and coal. Europe has discussed weaning itself off Russian fossil fuels—a harder task given the net it has entangled itself in—but continues to bankroll Putin’s regime. As of this writing, the European Union has paid Russia more than $21.9 billion for fossil fuels since February 24th.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Kuleba was clear in expressing his country’s freshly urgent objection: “We insist on a full embargo for Russian oil and gas. Buying them now means paying for the murder of Ukrainian men, women and children.”

It is shameful that petrodollars continue to flow to Putin’s pockets. We must demand of our governments: no fossil fuels from Russia! This is only the first step: for climate and human rights reasons, we must move away from fossil fuels no matter where they come from. We need to fund and increase heat pump installations, electrifying our buildings and saving energy. We must rapidly move our transportation system to clean fuels, such as electricity. We need to build out better transit service and other options for getting around. We need to make polluters pay and reinvest those dollars in equitable climate solutions. Drilling more at home or buying from elsewhere only addresses short-term political or economic demands, but does nothing at all to alleviate the horrible burdens of our dependence on fossil fuels.

Now, we also need to support Ukraine. Please consider donating to this fundraiser, organized by a friend of a friend, to purchase and supply medications and defense equipment for Ukrainians protecting their country. For a larger, more established initiative, consider Razom. Finally, here is a list of organizations that are providing direct assistance in intersectional ways—see what resonates with you. All could use support, so sharing also helps!

Stand with Ukraine and demand an end to fossil fuel purchases from Russia—supported by a clean energy transition.

Categories: Environment

Tagged: climate change, environment, fossil fuels, human rights, putin, Russia, ukraine, war

Stuck

Posted on 23 December 2021

This is about where I didn’t go as much as where I did go. Landscapes shifted drastically over space but comprehension remained steady. I knew how to interact. I understood everything. I threw myself into a vast land, I hauled myself into higher altitudes, I walked between rocks that reached up to the sky and, still, there was always a sense of familiarity. A part of me reaches for the total unknown. I want to be submerged in that which I do not recognize or understand. I want to be overwhelmed, bombarded with novelty.

I miss different languages, different cultures, different buildings streets rules stores food almost everything. As much as we, humans, fuck each other and much else over, I suppose sometimes I still revel in what we have made in all its multifariousness.

My country is known to me, even when I visit someplace I’ve never been. The familiarity I hold is in part awareness of destruction because though it may not seem so, I know what I’m looking at is damaged.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be so harsh. After all, I can go anywhere on this planet and it will probably be beautiful and also sad. That stays the same.

Sawtooth Lake, Idaho

Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming

Devil’s Tower, Wyoming

Badlands, South Dakota

Bighorn sheep babies, Badlands, South Dakota

Natural Bridges National Monument, Utah

Alabama Hills, California

Bristlecone Pine, Inyo National Forest, California

Kelso Dunes, Mojave National Preserve, California

Coconino National Forest, Arizona

Categories: Environment, Photography, Travel

Tagged: arizona, california, camping, environment, idaho, national parks, photography, south dakota, travel, utah, wyoming

Human History is Always Dying

Posted on 31 December 2020

A traveling band of robbers fell upon our household one night. They were as senseless and villainous as robbers are in fairy tales.

Father stood in the door with a pitchfork and shouted to the older children. “Run! Escape! Fly!”

The robbers overpowered my father and knocked out his front teeth. They hit my mother, and she fell to the floor unconscious, and they picked up the baby she had held in her arms and swung her against the floor so that she was killed instantly.

…

The band of robbers carried away all of our belongings worth anything, and partially razed our house.

…

“We must leave a country where such things can happen,” said my father, and with that I agreed entirely.

—Written by Sarah (Mandelbaum) Sidis, my third great-aunt, or the sister of my great-great grandfather, about the pogrom that led her family to emigrate from land that is now Ukraine, then part of the Russian empire, to the United States.

I look back in time and see some pieces of what befell my ancestors, tragedies that mar a life. And whether those lives were also bolstered by joys, I cannot say with any certainty. There was war, there were childhood deaths of siblings, sudden deaths of spouses and parents. There was more, I’m sure; looking back through time reiterates that humans hurt one another and many things hurt humans.

It’s almost certainly a good thing that my great-great grandfather’s family left the Russian empire when they did. At that time, the end of the nineteenth century, more than half of the town they lived in was Jewish. On the eve of World War II, a third was. After the war, less than one percent. The Jewish history of that town is faded, dispersed, dead. What, who, where else has died, been killed off?

In the present day, I live in a narrow slice of the world that has mostly known a relative peace during my lifetime—at least on this patch of soil. I can vote and have at least some voice in the functioning of our system. I can say what I want. I have had food and clean water, even an education, and a stellar one at that. On swaths of this earth, this isn’t the case. I have been in those places, with the power to drop in and then leave.

I am the offspring of a generation that extracted more and more from the earth and burned it, temporarily benefitting while choking off my future and the present of even more people across the world who played next to no role in heating the air, spurring the storms, raising the seas. I am a member of a group with power to continue to pollute while enjoying a high standard of living, at least for now. Some of us contribute more to suffering than others; some suffer more than others.

But overreach can hurt more than those without power. The evidence is scattered across the past: the Anasazi, the Tiwanaku, the Akkadians, the Mayan, and others, many others. In graduate school, I took a class with a professor whose research revolved around modeling societal collapse. Unfortunately, as we layered economic and ecological models, extraction won and ecosystems lost. Yet even the powerful themselves rarely survived. In the end, at the root, we are a part of the ecosystem ourselves.

I was brought up to expect peace and prosperity. But I suspect this is abnormal relative to space and time, and perhaps the fact cannot be escaped: human history is always dying. We are battered, we batter, we eke out survival, we snatch it from others, we die. The wealth and peace I have enjoyed, that a slice of my parents’ generation enjoyed, was based on maintaining “progress”, economic growth, while ignoring the rising pollution, the consequences to the biosphere, to us. Short-term benefits for some, in the grand scheme of things, are perhaps only long-term pain.

My confidence in this posited better future did begin to waver early; whether it was a natural pessimism or the result of delving into environmental studies, I don’t know. An Inconvenient Truth came out right when I began college. The next academic year, I recall being overwhelmed with the thought we can’t escape this as I sat behind a desk in a lecture room, listening to my Global Environmental Politics professor. As I walked out of the class at its end, the professor pulled me aside: are you all right? Four years later, I had similar reactions in my graduate classes on energy and environmental economics: can we stop this or is it too late? But by then, I had spent a bit of time working in Eastern Africa and uncomfortably had to swallow the fact that it wasn’t even my slice of the world that was near the brink. Tropical diseases may spread? Droughts will make it even more difficult to access potable water? Old news.

Is looking at a world of climate collapse different than the futures our predecessors imagined? It’s a question that may be irrelevant when framed against realities of mass ethnic persecution, famines spurred by both men in power and natural chance, daily existence shadowed by these possibilities hovering just ahead. How far into the future did my predecessors look? Over their lifetimes did horizons expand or shrink?

But from their lives, here I am now, thinking, speaking. A comfortable life is more unusual than trying to survive. Democracy is more unusual than its backslide or its absence. But here I am.

Here I am, but the expectations with which I was raised are being snatched away. Or—not snatched, but tugged, ever further from reach as tragedies drift in. Personal tragedies are expected, but what of summers choked by hazardous smoke? A pandemic that grinds everything down and reframes nearly every way we associate with “the outside”? Hurricanes slamming one coast, and then another, more frequent than ever? I know that these events, inevitably now, will continue. Was it good to have some anticipation of peace and joy, at least for awhile, or does that just make reality all the more crushing?

Is it harder to be aware of the magnitude of it all, the suffering that will lay its hand on billions? To see the images from around the globe coalescing into one big mess of horrors? Or does it matter, if your scope of awareness and access is bombarded regardless, does it matter how large the suffering is? Is it even possible to compare anyway?

These questions are bleak, I know. And frankly, a look across our past is too. At any point in human history, you’ll find mass tragedy. In nearly every life you’ll find personal tragedies too. At the same time, though, I know, joy is eked out, remarkable things happen. There are even heroes.

So, also: human history is strewn with individuals and stories that floor you. One person can prolong or improve the lives of many. One person can bring into existence an object or knowledge that reverberates through the years after their death, causing wellness or awe or joy. Everyone will die, but there are degrees of dying. And well, one person can at least temporarily act against death: saving lives. I recently read a biography of Raoul Wallenberg, a Swede credited with saving the lives of thousands of Hungarian Jews during the end of World War II. He created protection documents for them. He sheltered them in designated Swedish buildings in Budapest. He snatched some from death marches and trains en route to death camps. He stayed in Budapest at risk to his own life. He almost certainly died in a Soviet prison. He died, and there were many he couldn’t save, but the thousands he did went on and had families who had families, people who hopefully experienced some joy and did some good. Furthermore, Wallenberg wasn’t alone in his mission: he had help. There were also others elsewhere, attempting similar, quiet acts of heroism.

Of course, many people do quite the opposite. Wallenberg wouldn’t have been saving people if they weren’t being persecuted. There are the masterminds of campaigns of hate and destruction, but there are also those who aid and abet. Witness: turning in your neighbor, out of fear or spite or for gain, knowing they’re off to prison, camps, mines, GULAG, killing fields… Witness: laughing at a sexist or a racist joke to fit in… Witness: the banality of evil. And yes, witness: passivity amidst a dangerously changing climate. Knowing, but not caring. Or caring, but not caring enough to act in ways that are difficult or even dangerous.

We are powerful and powerless, and it’s not quite clear how these elements will combine to shape our present and the future that we will never know. Human history is always dying, but there have been people who continue to push it along, even as others gather power or comfort for themselves to the detriment of many. Which one am I? Who are you?

You are history.
You are history.
You are history.

Categories: Environment, Life, Society

Tagged: Africa, budapest, climate change, genocide, history, hungary, life, politics, Russia, world war ii

Intersections

Posted on 16 February 2020

Sometimes the world seems as if it is made up of different planes of being that may overlap, or crash into each other, or may simply stay parallel, not touching. It sometimes jars me to think that my life in Seattle exists in tandem on the same earth as that of a child growing up in the remote Andes or of a yacht-owner in Monaco. These planes of existence sometimes intersect, but geography mostly holds them apart. There are places, though, where the edges bleed and blend, and one of these places is Po Toi.

Po Toi is the southernmost island in Hong Kong. And though the Hong Kong you’re likely thinking of is full of towering skyscrapers and crowded with people, this part of Hong Kong is home to 200 people at the absolute most (this is according to the internet, but I suspect far fewer people live there). At some point in history, it capped out at 1,000 residents, fishing, farming, and gathering seaweed. Today, the island’s school is abandoned and far more visitors than residents traverse the trails.

Kai-to ferries plow the waters between Hong Kong Island and Po Toi, coming and going just a few times a week from Stanley and Aberdeen harbors. The ride, which takes just under an hour, gives you a clear view of enormous ships, nearly uncountable on the horizon, moving goods and crap around the globe.

Aberdeen harbor.

Container ships along the horizon.

The kai-to pulls up alongside Po Toi’s jetty and empties itself of people who mostly, like us, appear to be there for day hikes, though some are geared up for camping, too. We disembark onto a path that will take us around the island, first winding through areas that contain graves, and then along the shore where the boulders bear carvings from the Bronze Age. At first the walk is a bit crowded before people space out at their own paces. A cool wind is blowing but we’re moving uphill so I’m fine in my t-shirt. A woman touches my bare arm, comments, “so strong!” and rubs her own jacket-clad body to indicate I must be cold. Different acclimatizations. I grin at her. Some people set up their tents out in the exposed, windy hills and the fabric flaps loudly. Despite the well-made path, complete with concrete stairs and handrails (which were being painted as we walked), the camping area contains no toilet or trash bins and some litter flutters in the wind.

We continue past the lighthouse on the point, odd-shaped rocks, and a pagoda which seems quite new to the top of the island, before descending back to the harbor. We walk past abandoned buildings, some strewn with seaweed drying on their roofs. As we approach the village, dogs begin to check us out. The beach is dominated by a seafood restaurant, where we decide to eat. Another, smaller restaurant sits next door. A generator is powering everything.

Our food is good, and plentiful, but relatively expensive. A few yachts have anchored in the harbor now and groups of obviously wealthy people sit around large tables, eating and drinking, and leaving quite a bit of food on their plates. They’ve just come for the lunch, it seems. The village dogs keep pestering their groomed dog, who isn’t too pleased with the attention.

We head out again to walk the trail looping the other side of the island. A few houses line the path that leads us to a temple that looks recently renovated, a stark contrast to the homes. We notice the outhouses empty straight into the ocean. This trail is unlike the paved path we walked to the lighthouse; it is dirt and we ascend through scrub and rocks to the top of the island from the other direction. We can see the harbor below, and the skyscrapers of Hong Kong looming in the distance, fading in a haze. Then we descend again, back to the pier, back to the ferry, back to the city.

Generators, outhouses, and abandoned buildings. Paved paths and new pagodas. Container ships. Skyscrapers of a technology-saturated city. All within eyesight, intersecting.

Getting to Po Toi

Kai-to ferries run just a few days a week from Aberdeen and Stanley. You can see the timetables here. Make sure you plan ahead so you don’t miss your ferry, especially on the return! Since the island is quite exposed, bring layers and sunscreen.

Note: Since my visit at the end of 2018, a lot has changed in Hong Kong. I want to acknowledge the courage of those who risk their safety for a better present and future.

Categories: Life, Travel

Tagged: china, hiking, hong kong, life, modernity, po toi, travel