 I'm Becky Bartavix. I'm a long-term activist in the Sierra Club main chapter and we are really excited to be doing this program today. It is the 50th anniversary of Earth Day as many of you know and we've come a long way since the 70s and we have gone a long way back in short in the recent past. We are moving forward. Of course it's never been more important for us to be doing this work and I welcome you to this event. We have a number of volunteers who have joined us. Beverly Roxby and John Hink will be doing the first part. Beverly is on the Executive Committee and John Hink is part of our energy team. I believe then we have Tika Douglas, Luke Truman and Alan Armstrong, all of whom are in the Portland Climate Action Team and they'll have plenty to talk about what we've been doing climate-wise in Portland. And then I am going to be talking a little bit about food security and resilience and we were hoping to save questions until the end but if you have questions please feel free to put them in the chat box and we will do our best to answer them. So without much ado I think we should go ahead and let Bev introduce us to Earth Day. Hi everybody can you see me? Can you see me? Okay I'm going to start with a quote from one of my favorite authors when I was an English teacher and before. What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on? Henry David Thoreau. It's estimated that a billion people throughout the world may have mobilized for action on and after Wednesday April 22nd 1970. Earth Day is now known as the most celebrated secular holiday in the world. It appears on wall calendars. Today is its 50th anniversary like with a lot of anniversaries, weddings, bicentennials, etc. Some of us may be wondering what to do now that it's here. Are we ready to change the conversation and think outside ourselves and our immediate needs? For me I'd rather be among thousands of people outside at a rally absorbing the collective energy that encourages hope and commitment. An estimated half a million people attended New York City's climate rally in 2014. We bunched ourselves together and circled all of Central Park. I was near the back and somebody near me said this is a climate crawl not a march because we had to move so slowly. At one point it was asked if we could have a moment of silence for all the victims of environmental injustice and we were silent. It was incredible but except for Al Jazeera the event was barely covered in the news. You all have registered for this event thanks very much. Sitting patiently in your homes you can get up and leave anytime you want who's to know but I hope you'll stay with us for at least part of it and I hope you'll remember some of this day even in these extraordinarily challenging times and I hope that you'll either find or rekindle the resolve it takes to launch an even bigger Earth Day this year. Overcoming our tendencies as human beings is one of our biggest challenges been there done that. Author Barry Lopez says that when Europeans first landed in this country they acted like shoppers in a supermarket. What can I get as easily as possible. It was Black Friday at Walmart and anyone anything that stood in the way was shoved aside so we could grab the bargains. That's what's known as manifest destiny was our duty to do it and why not. Europe was locked up tight but our new government was giving away massive amounts of land to do with whatever we wanted. Old growth forests animals whose fur was treasured and whales whose oil was plentiful vast herds of buffalo were nuisances to be gotten rid of to make way for the railroad. From sea to shining sea abundance went on forever. Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma whom I bizarrely met back in 2007 says that the Almighty made the season summer winter spring and that things will always stay the same and that people are arrogant to say that we can change the climate. Well I guess I'm pretty arrogant because I'm sitting here telling you that I'm pretty sure he's wrong. We could have learned a lot of wisdom from the First Nation people who had lived here for thousands of years before the Europeans showed up but that's a tragic saga that will never be enough time to share and I've only got 15 minutes. Some of our first leaders now faces on our currency spoke powerfully about the need for environmental stewardship. In 1739 Ben Franklin petitioned the government to stop tanneries from polluting the Delaware River. The stoves and street lamps he invented were less polluting and conserved energy. George Washington expressed a keen interest in the health of soil and spurred the effort to create a national arboretum. James Madison said quote protecting the environment is essential for those United for these United States and Jefferson said cultivators of the earth are our most valuable citizens and he also said soil is a gift of God to the living. Jefferson even understood science. Many years later in the 1930s bad farming practices throughout the American Midwest combined with a record drought to create a dust bowl that destroyed the soil and blackened the skies. As high winds and choking dust swept the region from Texas to Nebraska people and livestock were killed and crops failed across the entire region. The dust bowl intensified the crushing economic impacts of the Great Depression and drove many farming families on a desperate migration in search of work and better living conditions. We in what year is it now 2020 we have not migrated yet but this pandemic may cause similar results although ironically our skies appear to be much cleaner. What are the lessons here? In the decades leading up to today many Americans had started to take for granted the pollution from leaded gasoline industry and power plants. It was called the smell of prosperity. Plains sprayed toxic DDT over towns and cities to fight mosquitoes and other insects that we found inconvenient. We often didn't think much about it as kids even played in DDT when it was sprayed from the ground. One day in the mid 1950s I discovered several robins that were clearly dying and one did die while I held it in my hands and desperately tried to feed it. But then in high school I read the book Silent Spring and I figured out what had happened. Robins would be with us forever supposedly of course like ladybugs or monarch butterflies but our national bird. In 1960 the American bald eagle's population had dropped to below 400 nesting pairs and DDT was proven to be the cause. Rachel Carson's magnificent book is a gift to birds and to us. It sold over a half a million copies in 25 countries and I urge you all to read it if you have not yet done so. Oil slicks on the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland had caught fire repeatedly since the late 1800s and were commonplace enough that people were resigned to those fires being the cost of progress. As in many cases it was the poorest residents who could least afford to leave and economically marginalized people tend to have smaller voices. So the fires didn't make the news until June 1969 when a reporter shot a photo that went viral. It was not a big fire like some that had even been deadly but a fire a river catching fire it didn't make sense just as a great as a great lake eerie where in some places you couldn't see the water for the dead fish floating on top. The time was right for paying attention to that photo. Photos are powerful just like the Ansel Adams photos of Yosemite and photos of oil spills. The Santa Barbara oil spill in January 1969 is said to have turned the beaches black and the nation green. Santa Barbara California was then known as the American Riviera. Its beach famously beautiful but also a significant ecological area for all kinds of wildlife. It was also President Nixon's second home. What happened is an oil rig six miles offshore blew up releasing massive amounts of natural gas and for 10 days leaking over 100,000 barrels of crude oil into the Santa Barbara channel. That made the news. Maybe the Vietnam War news was tiresome to people. Every day reports of battles, winds, losses, the days U.S. military fatalities but Santa Barbara added to that national conversation. This incident coincided with Gaylord Nelson's and Dennis Hayes plans for the first Earth Day and it's said to have been a major impetus for some major environmental protection major measures, sorry, later put into place by the Nixon administration. We learn about Ben Franklin in school but probably not about a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin Gaylord Nelson who's been called the founder of Earth Day. He was elected in the early 60s in part because as Wisconsin's governor he had made a name for himself as a champion of conservation. Someone who had launched state programs that later became federal like the Youth Conservation Corps, a program for the unemployed that improved damage land throughout the country. President Kennedy chose as his cabinet members people who were actually qualified like Stuart Udall for the Secretary of the Interior. DDT was finally banned. The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was signed and other events showed that environmental concerns were getting our attention. Lyndon Johnson's commitment to a great society was in line with environmental thinking so when Nixon became president the pump had been primed. Well no pun intended. Santa Barbara had galvanized Gaylord Nelson's efforts to promote a national teach-in at as many colleges and universities as possible. His plan was to have this event take place in spring of the following year. He would call the event Earth Day. Enter Dennis Hayes, a young man from Camus Washington which was then a gritty little lumber mill town with some serious pollution issues. Curious about the environmental state of the world beyond his hometown Hayes left Stanford University halfway through to hitchhike in other countries and figure out what he wanted to do as his life's work. He came back finished up at Stanford and in his first semester at Harvard's Kennedy School he decided he needed to talk to Gaylord Nelson who agreed to meet with him for 15 minutes. Two and a half hours later Hayes walked out of Gaylord Nelson's office with his first environmental job organizing college students in Boston to participate in the upcoming environmental teach-in. He was pretty successful right away and so the senator asked him to organize the entire country. 1969 the end of a very tumultuous decade assassination of the Kennedys and of Martin Luther King and myriad other shocking events including the ramping up of a senseless and brutal war all of which we saw on tv. From civil rights to war to labor Americans already have been protesting and actually being heard. They already were organized. Gaylord Nelson chose April 22nd not so as not to conflict with college students spring breaks or the end of year exams plus it was the day after John Muir's birthday but unfortunately that date also happened to mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Lenin the Russian leader who ushered in communism. Though Gaylord Nelson never intended to celebrate communism to this day Earth Day organizers and participants get labeled as subversive and anti-american and when Joe Biden talks about climate change and other environmental crises this summer you can bet that he'll be ridiculed he'll be called names like socialist again and again. Behind the scenes in the fall of 1969 Dennis Hayes quietly assembled a few young staff members in his tiny D.C. office the environmental groups that have been working in silos which is what we say when we're focusing attention mostly on our own issues like Sierra Club working on things like saving the Glen Canyon saving Glen Canyon or Audubon Society's work to save the ivory billed woodpecker but they came together on Earth Day and Earth Day was a project oops i didn't edit this very well um okay i'm going to skip over that Hayes and his crew had gathered enough momentum both on college campuses in the news and even with a few corporate sponsorships in the end it came together surprisingly quickly in New York City on that Wednesday Republican Mayor John Lindsay shut down all of Fifth Avenue to accommodate a crowd of over 250 people 250,000 people who gathered near Central Park for Earth Day President Nixon watched it on TV Dennis Hayes says a pretty reliable source told him that Nixon who had something of an inferiority complex supposedly saw the tall charismatic John Lindsay exciting this huge crowd of people and Nixon wondered aloud why he couldn't do that supposedly John Ehrlichman one of his staff members said that he could do something to get people's attention that the ground was already set he could strengthen the clean air act he could create an environmental protection agency and an environmental council even to advise him that would take people's attention away from his handling of the vietnam war and maybe even earn him the same kind of enthusiastic response as John Lindsay had gotten this may not be a true story but what is true is this within a couple of years after Earth Day Nixon had approved all those things and more Nixon a Republican has often been called the second most environmental president in American history after another Republican Teddy Roosevelt of course Nixon was impeached and then he resigned from office that's mainly what we learn in social studies classes back to the first Earth Day mainstream news anchor Walder Cronkite began the evening cbs news special report by describing Earth Day activists as quote predominantly young predominantly white but Gaylord Nelson's speech given in Denver said that same day told a different story an environment that also included poverty hunger and blight he did not want the prominence of college students to overshadow the diversity of Earth Day activists and activism while white middle-class activists often spoke of national crises collective guilt and solutions involving changes in individual behavior people of color and working-class participants tended to target local grievances that resulted from systemic inequality like in albuquerque new mexico where mexican-american students united and marched on a sewage treatment plant stinking up a latino neighborhood a working-class mother in southwest Philadelphia arranged a bus tour to bring people to see the refineries that spew smoke down into her community and the st. Louis group black survival formed when civil rights activists sought the help of scientists to combat urban environmental hazards stage scenes depicting the ravages of lead poisoning smog induced asthma and streets overlooked by the street the city's sanitation department by the end of that first Earth Day 12,000 events have taken place throughout the country with 20 million americans in attendance and 35,000 speakers and other presenters the day has said to have been a major catalyst in the creation in the next two years of the environmental protection agency the national environmental policy act the occupational safety and hazards act the clean air act the marine mammal protection act and the establishment of the council of environmental quality by 1973 we had the endangered species act it looked like environmental concerns were finally going to be priorities when deciding about projects going forward or regulating pollution sources and William O. Douglas one of my favorite people sat on the supreme court the photograph of planet earth taken from 18,000 miles out in space by crew members of Apollo 17 that was a reminder of earth's fragility about what was worth fighting for it suddenly struck me said astronaut Neil Armstrong that the tiny pea pretty and blue was the earth i put up my thumb and shut one eye and my thumb blotted out planet earth i didn't feel like a giant i felt very very small those of you who have been patient enough to put up with me up to now realize i've got lots more to say and this may take forever so get up and stretch go outside or make a note that you'll look up some of the rest of this stuff online and please don't go to fake news earth day kept getting noted on calendars but attracted less attention in the years after up to the next milestone anniversary 1990 in the Reagan years in the early 80s a few corporate insiders got chosen for key cabinet positions and the day that president Reagan moved into the white house he ordered the removal of the solar panels that jimmy carter had put up there saying that they conveyed a negative image so much more to say world watch institute issued a state-of-the-world report in 1984 that said if countries didn't work toward greater sustainability a hole in the earth's yes period a hole in the earth's protective ozone layer had been detected there was a huge chemical leak in west virginia chernobyl nuclear power plant in russia had a meltdown and meanwhile live aid happened 24 hour long rock concert to raise money for victims of famine in ethiopia publicity afterwards said optimistically that humanitarian concerns would now be at the center of our foreign policy worldwide the ipcc intergovernmental panel on climate change was established by the un and climate change was finally getting more noticed though thomas jefferson had warned a centuries ago by 1989 the year the exxon valdez oil spell happened george hw bush was president and denise haste was beginning to organize earth day 1990 the 20th anniversary it was hard to for me to to watch tv coverage of the 1989 exxon valdez oil spill in alaska for days on end we watched dead dying birds wales muck that covered a sea that had been nearly pristine before huge tanker had hit a reef in bristol bay and had spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil into the water making it the largest oil spill in history even bigger than santa barbara the next year in 1990 denise haze organized a global earth day in which 200 million people in 141 countries took part and committed themselves to recycle and reduce waste it also resulted in the 1992 earth summit in rio di genero a un sponsored event to bring hundreds of countries together to commit to greater sustainability bill clinton brought al gore with him to the white house in 1992 al gore needs no introduction within a couple of months clinton had eliminated his predecessors council on competitiveness which was an agency created during the bush administration the aims of which were to get around the environmental laws that prevented huge projects like offshore oil drilling and mining from being unduly regulated the first world oceans day was created in 1992 and the first un framework con convention on climate change a precursor to the paris climate accords met for the first time this was also the year that canada closed its eastern seaboard fishing grounds due to insufficient fish stock recovery in 1997 the u.s senate voted 95 to 0 imagine that to oppose signing onto the kiyoto protocol saying that it wasn't putting enough pressure on industrial countries to clean up their acts we were actually acting like environmental leaders by now you're weary of hearing history acronyms names of people you don't know and about environmental incidents that were devastating or could have been i haven't even mentioned the deep water horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico its 10-year anniversary was two days ago and it's now recognized as the largest ever in us waters its economic impacts remain huge not to remain not to mention the ongoing impacts on the louisiana shoreline and the bayou is said to be one of the most polluted areas in the whole country but the majority of voters there still seem to mistrust federal government intervention to help clean it up and prevent more pollution and our current president's plan is to open up both our coasts from sea to shining sea to oil drilling well all right enough already most of you know what has happened since the bushes were in office and obama who in his second term finally put keystone excel on hold you may remember that republicans teddy roosevelt and richard nixon have been called the most environmental of all presidents republicans should be proud of them today um where will this president wind up on that list when i taught middle school language arts years ago one of my colleagues whipped unruly seventh graders into shape for a big concert that he was that he was putting on they practiced until their lips were numb to prepare for the biggest concert of the year he was such an awesome music teacher determined not to get embarrassed or make their fellow band members look bad they took what they knew and worked it into a pretty fine performance that's what we have to do we know where we've been we have the sheet music do we know where we're going some of you are old enough to remember crossby stills nation young who's saying teach your children this day please join the new teach in we're still strong as david crossby said rejoice rejoice you have no choice you've got to carry on sorry for the uh occasional stumbles everyone wonderful babe that was fantastic thank you um do we have time for questions or are we going to move on i think we should could we hold the questions till the end i'm sorry to say but we're a little bit over or can you put a question in the um chat box all right yes i think we should i'm sorry but i think we should do that because we're you're over and we're going to yeah i'm sorry i tried to read really fast no no problem it's great okay so um john hink would you like to go next sure hi friends uh happy earth day thank you bev for um leading that off uh just to explain my background is a uh painting of uh micronesian island called panpei and uh it generally hangs there but i thought it's good for earth day uh i did attend the first earth day my high school was not too caught up in that spirit it was in new jersey bernardsville new jersey more famous for meryl street than anything that the school has ever for earth or earth day but we did plan a tree and had a little ceremony and i went in some ways i hardly know why i i was not that aware of the environment at the time um i have since uh endeavored to do what i can and also to learn about it and uh the thing i was going to talk about um actually came to me uh because of rush lumbar now i'm not suggesting rush is an environmentalist it's the opposite um uh i'd like to connect uh climate change to earth day and even going back to the first earth day and that's a little bit of a task because in the first earth day there was a range of environmental issues being discussed for the most part that didn't include earth day but um perhaps precisely because earth day had so much of an effect uh it has been the mission of those who are anti-environmental to um put down the memory of earth day and so every once in a while rush limbaugh does that and every once in a while i listened to him and he was on the air raving over global cooling i don't know if anyone's ever heard that before but um rush lumbau and some other right-wingers firebrands love the subject uh and uh senator james inhofe who bev mentioned a climate denier still serving in the u.s senate has also talked about global cooling and what rush said that really drove me crazy was these are the same people he meant the environmentalists who once warned us about global cooling and they were all about global cooling and i said gosh i'd been around i don't remember global cooling and i went to look it up and uh see whether or not anyone was talking about global cooling and i uh found the uh environmental handbook of the first earth day this was the official handbook uh sorry it was not published by sierra club it was published by the breakaway group friends of the earth and incredibly enough there was a short article on energy and described the greenhouse effect and the problem the carbon dioxide would end up heating the planet that article in the handbook cited to scientific american so i went and found that got this on ebay and it's an article from um 1959 and uh it goes into great detail on the greenhouse effect and describes exactly the problem that we're now dealing with and that is the buildup of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases allows the earth's rays to come in to the atmosphere but impedes heat radiating out so it had been known about at least since 1959 it turns it turns out it had been longer than that in 1856 and this is significant uh a amateur scientist unis foot in new york state did experiments replacing normal air with other gases including carbon carbon dioxide and oxygen and found in a paper that she published back then that the carbon dioxide concentration resulted in a heating of the air she may be credited with um being one of the first maybe the first to come up with this hypothesis unis foot remember that name because she was completely forgotten until 2010 when somebody came upon uh notes of a talk that was given that she prepared based on her research uh another fellow followed three years later john tendall and he's given more credit he did actually publish detailed work and he may not have known about unis foot uh but uh his work was just three years later and is remembered uh i like to um keep in mind a swede named swanta erinus who in uh 1896 uh published a fairly detailed paper on the greenhouse effect and uh uh war uh acknowledged that it could lead to global warming now rush lumbar in his crowd um they think that uh those of us who are pushing concerns about climate change are um back to the landers uh hippies um uh who knows what other disparaging comments he should respect fanta erinus he was a swede and he didn't warn of global warming he encouraged it he thought that it was going to be good and that i guess living in sweden he was looking forward to the fact that we would have longer growing seasons uh but it was very very clear in 1896 about the greenhouse effect uh you know my point is we've known about this for a long time and it was remembered on the first earth day uh sadly after the first earth day there was a paper or two written with the hypothesis that soot in the atmosphere or the disappearance of um the polar ice caps would actually trigger trigger a cooling effect and that made it into newsweek and was mentioned in time around 1974 75 so rush lumbar and senator inhofe have a basis when they point to this theory of global cooling no one rallied around it nobody pushed it there were no marches over the fear of global cooling um uh and yet we have to deal with that canard uh all of us know what's happened since uh you know i was working in the environmental movement in the early 80s and even worked quite a bit on acid rain and i did not remember early on encountering the theory of global warming uh i ran into it um basically reading the new york times and uh sometime and maybe 1983 84 uh but by that time the scientific community was coalescing around this concern and uh toward the end of that decade we ended up starting to see it in more popular press uh bill mckibbin who i hope all of you um follow uh published perhaps the first uh mass market the uh book uh dealing with it called the end of nature still a great lead uh read today and uh bill mckibbin is a spectacular leader i didn't have his book handy i have it upstairs but uh i'm gonna hold up another bill mckibbin book hope human and wild uh just to promote him but then interestingly enough since we're in main uh another book followed not long afterwards and i'll hold that one up this is world on fire and it was written by george mitchell i think the date was 1991 in any event uh very early george mitchell was a remarkable leader was mentioned i think by beth um i would say this about uh bez um uh history uh a lot of that i looked at but i would not end up giving richard nixon quite as much praise he was really driven by the work that was being done by ed muskie of main and if we want to credit someone from nixon's party howard baker republican senator from tennessee was working with ed muskie and the two of them put together the renewal of the clean water act uh they passed the clean i mean uh the renewal of the clean air act they passed the clean water act the safe drinking water act the endangered species act uh and richard nixon signed most of them perhaps under duress he vetoed the clean water act nixon vetoed the clean water act and they overwrote it in both the house and the senate um ed muskie uh enormous champion of the environment of course he never had the opportunity to be the most environmental president because he never won that another interesting footnote to add to uh to beb's wonderful history is when ronald reagan came in and took the solar panels off the white house a good number of them ended up at unity college in main and i i still think they they have them and they've used them although obviously the technology has moved on since then so i add that little little bit uh today uh at earth day 2020 for better or worse climate change is perhaps our leading issue the other one of great concern to us is plastic in the ocean plus most of the issues that were initially addressed uh still remain concerns however um we should recognize that uh the environmental new movement including people on this call have made great progress on a number of issues on quite a few issues the kaihoga river does not catch on fire today the rivers of america are cleaner than they used to be and in many other places uh we identified the problem with the ozone hole and we had an international treaty that addressed it and there's been a closing of the ozone hole we could go on we actually can succeed it's perhaps the biggest uh secret about the environmental movement is we win and we have to do more thank you sorry thank you john that was wonderful um thank you and uh if anyone has any questions do you mind putting them in the chat and we will try to answer them at the end of the session um and i would like to introduce tika tika um douglas from portland to begin the portland climate action team conversation that will be followed by luke truman and alan armstrong and you're you need to unmute tika thanks becky um hi everybody tika douglas um the portland climate action team as i recall began meeting um in very late 2014 we've been meeting we really sort of be i guess we kind of got launched in january of 2015 what had what precipitated that was i think the reelection of of le page in main uh and at that time the united states congress had been co-opted by the by the tea party and no environmental agenda could move forward and then le page was re-elected and the seara club in main anyway recognized that they could not look to the federal level or the state level of government for any kind of progress or leadership and there had to be a grassroots they had to come from grassroots from the ground up and so hence the uh the seara club of main put out the clarion call throughout the state and various groups began meeting in various towns and in fact including us in portland um and we began uh by trying to sort of sort out what our purpose and mission would be uh conversations occurred uh ideas were tossed about we ended up focusing on we wanted to get the city of portland to reduce its carbon footprint and that was our agenda and that was our mission um and how to how to begin to implement that mission we came up with the idea of uh starting just a very simply a community solar farm um at the time um you know community solar farms were limited to nine members there was a lot of red tape involved but nonetheless we thought that's what we'll do we'll get together a community solar farm and um we began to look for a site for that uh we came upon the um the landfill the capped landfill on ocean avenue in portland we began to talk to um municipal authorities and also to local solar companies to see you know talk about how we could get this thing hooked up to cmp power lines what kind of money would be involved in getting that done uh and in the process of making all those different connections and going in all those different directions solar companies city of portland the landfill things kind of came together in an interesting way in that revision um local solar company and the city of portland began talking directly about maybe using the landfill to do a bigger project that the city would fund um so you know through our initial kind of putting it trying to put it all together that this larger project um kind of came to be into being into fruition or at least it was on the drawing board i'll say and so portland climate action team took it upon ourselves to help that happen uh sounds like it should have been simple but it wasn't it was a pretty um long and tortured path uh numerous setbacks occurred including the it was discovered that the cap on the landfill had become dislodged and uh was leaking um and that it was contaminating water surface water and dogs were drinking it and and the DEP got involved and the city had to haul you know rubble and cap recap the landfill and then there were problems with the budget and the money and how to find you and it took really you know i have to say in the end to do this fairly simple straightforward project took several years uh it finally did happen um and we now have a municipal solar array uh on the ocean avenue landfill i think um it's generate sufficient power to um power marilord auditorium in city hall uh so it you know it's it's something it's you know coming to celebrate i think the more important thing to that happened is that we the Portland climate action team we were in city hall all the time we were meeting with the mayor we were meeting with various city counselors we were lobbying for this and in that process uh well we were really the only voice lobbying in in the city of Portland at the municipal level for for climate for carbon reduction remissions and um we were it but at least we you know we we we served a very important purpose we became a kind of a known and recognized group uh we were you know referenced by city counselors in various discussions we got quite a bit of uh we went to every council meeting we kept standing up and speaking we pushed this ocean avenue landfill uh solar array along and in the process we we learned how to uh you know become a voice um at the municipal level and we continue in in uh to try to lobby um Portland for carbon emission um steps and with that i will turn it over i think probably my time is time is right for me to turn this over now to Luke Truman also a member of the Portland climate action team to talk about other ways that we've tried to you know move forward on our agenda thank you Tika uh so yeah so for us um happy earth day everybody um while the ocean avenue array was in purgatory um we kept moving on other projects um some of which Alan will talk about shortly um but as far as solar specifically we decided to jump into a potential school project and if you want to know more about the dynamics between a school administration uh facilities department staff and students school board city council and mayor then you would ever want to know and the school project is perfect for you the waters are muddy and the fog is um but in all seriousness school solar project is definitely worth the inevitable frustrations to see students excited and empowered asking logical questions being extremely innovative and persistent refusing to say no for an answer is pretty empowering itself um the youth are bitter bitterly aware that excuses won't do any longer and so um on top of kind of figuring out all of the ins and outs of the school system you've also got the ins and outs of solar policy state so solar solar policy national um power purchase agreements a lot of a lot of uh information to figure out and strategy to work out um not to mention building structure ages of rooftops um like i said the waters are muddy and the fog is thick we originally got involved in uh project at king middle school in portland uh in the spring of 2017 and we coined it kids for clean power it was uh driven largely by the technology and structure instructor gust goodwin who's also a member of p cat rallying the students and spearheading the project um and we came up with a a proposal with revision actually um to offset 100 of the school's electrical needs which would have been 228 plus kilowatts um and then would have gone through a power purchase agreement but the politics under the pages administration as well as constant budgetary struggles within the school department sufficiently squashed this project or slowed it to a crawl to the point where the situation um was different every meeting we had with school officials and it was essentially like groundhog day for us wash rinse repeat it got to be pretty frustrating um but fortunately the students of casco bay high school under the leadership of derrick and siri pierce principal and senior father and daughter they fed the embers of the that original project and then they dumped gasoline on the fire and that team and this project developed into a force to be reckoned with which is now known as solarized portland we p cat are have been honored to be part of this and to kind of share our wisdom our help with our leadership and and just help tell them that what they're doing is great and they should keep working on it um and also us working on it with them the campaign became an expansion of the kids for clean power with the goal of installing enough solar power on school roofs to offset 100 of the school district um needs for the entire city um and so pulling out all the stops using marches fundraiser speeches uh really crafty video uh city council meetings school board meetings and the the campaign has been pretty pretty significant and through a fundraiser the solarized put together an rfp um with a consultant to cover or to install an array to cover most of the school systems electrical needs but since then kind of like the uh the project on the landfill the city of Portland basically hijacked the project and and decided to extend it and make it you know more impactful and so the city joined a consortium of to request over 200 megawatts of solar power or renewable power mostly solar um with the with uh bigger group and with the city purchasing 10 of the electricity and we learned recently um planning to retain all of the renew renewable energy credits so based on the economies of scale the plan for the school solar system has taken a back seat to this and the roofs remain empty and wasted though so our work is not complete um you're probably wondering what happens next or what's the plan now and so one thing to be aware of is solarized um plan to host a solarized main school summit on march 17th um since then all of the all the schools got shut down but the plan was to have any any school in the state interested in running a campaign um to come up to Portland and learn about how solarized work learn about solar electricity power purchase agreements and how to approach a project of their own and fortunately we're going to move forward with this um summit on may 12th virtually and in addition um solarizes decided to take the the raised money and instead of putting it toward a much bigger array has decided to put a 12 panel 3.9 kilowatt sample array on the front yard of Gearing High School with the intent of showing informing students how solar works the campaign um what needs to happen going forward and also the plans to have a dashboard in each school to show what the array is doing at any given time um so yeah solar being tangible clean safe and you'll never hear about a solar plant blowing up or poisoning or displacing natives you know the whole idea with Earth Day in general the beginning of it everything you've heard so far as it all ties back to humans being responsible and taking care of each other taking care of the planet and so this is one way we're trying to help and if you have any interest in in pursuing a project like that yourself for or something of the like um please reach out to Sierra Club Main or PCAT and we will help you out in any way possible and I'll turn it over to Alan. Thank you Luke. I'm going to just briefly describe a couple of things we've done in the climate action team to basically change the laws and regulations both in the state and in our city. In the state level the state of Maine has a law that called the Maine uniform building and energy code which specifies what cities can do in terms of requesting energy performance from buildings that are newly built and so before they can get a permit to build they need to comply with the state energy code but the city cannot make any stronger requirement on a building contractor and that's basically because of the state law so Massachusetts has solved this kind of problem for cities that want to have better energy performance from their buildings. Massachusetts solved this problem by passing something called a stretch code and so we got to talking in PCAT about how could we get a stretch code and it just happened that one of our members went to a neighborhood association meeting at which our state senator Ben Chipman was speaking and so there was a question and answer session afterwards and the member asked senator Chipman if he would be willing to sponsor a stretch code bill and he said he'd think about it so we went to our member who had been a state legislator a state senator previously John Hink and said hey John can we come up with a stretch code bill and John said well as it happens I just have one I introduced it when I was a senator and it didn't go anywhere but maybe it will now so we asked senator Chipman if he would sponsor John's bill and he put it in the hopper and it became LD 1543 which after the new legislative process passed last summer and was signed by the governor so Portland now has the ability once the stretch code gets fully defined to have better buildings and we have another way that we affected the municipal regulations which was on the comprehensive plan it turns out that Portland like every city in Maine has to to write a comprehensive plan every so often and so our planning department worked for two years on the new plan that was finished in 2017 they got a lot of citizen input and they let us look at the draft and when we read the draft we realized teeth didn't say much of anything about climate change in fact their vision statement was the following we recognized that climate change will have significant impacts on our city and endeavor to mitigate and adapt that was it and so we said okay it's got to be much better and I don't have enough time to go through what we exactly proposed but we gave them a new vision statement and 10 actions that the city could take to deal with climate change mitigation so the planning board we submitted these suggestions to the planning board and they declined to accept any of them so we went and talked to the mayor and we said hey we got these suggestions that should be in the comprehensive plan can you do anything about it and so at the meeting of the city council at which the plan was to be approved the mayor suggested an amendment which consisted of all of our suggestions and in spite of opposition from the planning department the our amendment was adopted seven to one and so now all municipal decisions in the city of Portland have to incorporate the idea of mitigating climate change that's it that is so wonderful I want to just recognize the Portland Climate Action team as being such an inspiration to other communities around the state because it began in a meeting in the church in Portland and it's gone on to be incredibly valuable as a resource to see how a community group can get together and actually get something done and I'm I'm well aware that it is now one o'clock I was am planning to just do a quick a brief introduction into growing pea shoots which is a leap into another universe compared to what we've been talking about but it's actually the same thing because food security food issues in Maine are significant we have one of the worst if not the worst food security problem for young children in the country and and local food resources are are vast but difficult to get to local folks so I wanted to just mention that I just learned this week that the in fact more than the dollars that leave the state for fossil fuels are the dollars 90 of the food we eat in Maine comes from away and we have the the only state I believe that has a decreasing age of farmers and an increasing number of small farms so there's a disconnect in order to you know really access local foods local foods are important because a carbon footprint of industrial agriculture is enormous and the and in in every way and then transport the transportation of it is an added footprint I'm going to go quickly just so that you have this resource because I don't want to keep people on too long I'm going to start by just in introducing you to pea shoots because pea shoots are something you can grow many many plants you can grow as shoots such as lentils and sunflower seeds and other things but I've been doing pea shoots for a while and so I wanted to give you a sense of what is happening with my pea shoots so for starters I highly recommend fedco seeds as a catalog unfortunately they are sold out of pea shoots right now I have a resource that I will attach and will be available to you that has a whole list of organic seeds that you can buy fedco is a is a is a cooperative so if you become a member then you actually get a percentage of money back at the end of the year and they they do a wonderful work with heritage orchards and many other things besides the reading the catalog is a heck of a lot of fun I don't know who their writers all are but they're they're very funny peas you can use field peas which are much smaller than I don't know if you can I can show this to you these are field peas that are in here how do I get them so you can see them they're they're much smaller than your regular garden pea you can use any kind of pea but they they they take up less space and you get an equal amount of shoots for you know I mean many more shoots for a pot that you're baking it I'm using a lettuce a formerly held lettuce um tray that I washed and cleaned and I've put about an inch and a half or two inches of of soil in and dampen the soil um the peas have been the peas have been soaked for the last seven hours you can soak them anytime for between six and 12 a little bit longer but not 24 hours because I'll start to ferment um and you soak them and then remove them and rinse them just in case they're starting to develop a little bit of fermentation um and then so I just rinse them and then let's see if can you see here I think we'll do this um you lay them out on the soil and in a single layer and press them down just a little bit gently whoops there's an errant one um and then uh that's that's it for planting them uh you can if you have a very dry apartment you can put the seed the lid back on until they just begin to sprout um you want to be careful not to leave it on very too long because it may mold a little bit then I want to introduce you to these these sprouts um are actually um this is a second cutting that's coming along so we've been eating these these were planted March 17th so these are a month old and this is our second a second cutting of them um these were planted on this on the 15th of April so you can see that uh they are coming along um they've sprouted and in 10 days or so we will be able to cut them um cut them close to the close to the very close to the bottom of the plant so right down here like that and um and uh they're delicious you can they're a good um substitute for lettuce uh and the reason for growing these kinds of things actually yourself is that first of all they are so much sweeter than something that has left the farm and gone to the store and sat there for a little while you can cut them and put them in the refrigerator they'll last quite a while um and uh it it's a lot of fun to see them pop up seeds are so magical they're it it's astonishing to me when I really think when you really think about the energy that is embodied in a little seed it's kind of like the world as was mentioned by John I think or Bev that there is so much energy at the center of those seeds and to be um allowing those seeds to come to fruition and then to harvest them is just uh it's really a delight and it really assuages some of the nervousness that we have or the fear we have of what's going on right now and growing them ourselves um is helps with food security uh so I encourage you to think about doing that if you'd like and I'm certainly glad to take questions but I also wanted to share with you I can uh let's see if I can do this actually um oh where did it go um there we go share did it come nope sorry uh it did not here we go can you see that can anybody see that yes okay um so this is I just want to run down these resources fairly quickly the um cooperative extension is is really underutilized in Maine and they are a major resource for pretty much anything um that you want that comes to has to do with food and agriculture and um there's uh MAFCA also is remarkable and there's a lot of training programs the same thing with the resilience hub um which are those first three um I wanted to just talk a little bit about um food availability and local farms there is a young woman um Allison Lakin who has Lakin Creamery in Cushing who when COVID-19 hit realized that all of her markets were going to dry up and so she just one day thought what could she do that was free that she could help get her you know food to the market and decided to start a listing of all of the main farm small farms anybody who wants to go on it Maine farms um and who will find a way of getting their food to you or to anyone who wants it and so that is the next listing food availability the extension service it's a farm product and pickup directory it's supposed to be farm and fish but very few of the fishermen are on it yet but in a matter of three weeks it's gone from 25 people to hundreds of farmers who are listed all over the state who will allow you to pick up food they'll pack the food for you and so it's a a way of supporting local farms um and then I just want to run down a couple of other ones there are of course there's a lot of food insecurity in Maine um food there are food pantries uh all over the state that are looking for volunteers and also for resources um there's a full plates organization that feeds children who are school-aged children and it's an organization that takes food from farmers and delivers it to to children of in need the Good Shepherd Food Bank of course is wonderful there's an alliance to end hunger um that is uh has been started by Preble Street um so those are three organizations that are quite valuable to support um and then I just wanted to mention a couple of others this is far from an exhaustive list but um the Somali Bantu in um in Lewiston have put together have found a couple of farms and they are growing essentially a community farm business um with uh immigrant Somali Bantus in Lewiston and they actually are bringing food to Portland to the to the farmers market in Portland and other places and um I just you know think they're a great example of ingenuity um and getting food to people and then there's an organization called Cooking for Community that is started in Portland um and it is actually um people who have extra resources people who have um do not need their stimulus funds um it's a wonderful idea to um pay this restaurateurs to to keep their restaurants running um so those employees are continuing to be employed while also purchasing food from local farms uh and that food is delivered to food insecure people so it's uh it's a it's a win win at the moment I mean it's you know we do not know what's going to be happening you know in the fall in terms of food of course we've seen on the New York Times recently thousands of onions being you know turned under because the restaurant markets have have dried up and that's one of the problems with industrial agriculture is that they can't be as flexible as small diverse community far or local farms so um I encourage you to think about um going to local farms and to kind of look at how um I think it's somewhere in the range of 20% of our climate um greenhouse gas emissions have to do with agriculture um and uh so that if we can can pivot to much more local diverse agriculture we're going to employ more people people will be eating better food and um and so that anyway this is this is another answer uh I can talk more about farming um at another time are there any questions I'm going to try to get to let me