c3 March 17, 2005 - March 27, 2005


Driving home from Seattle last weekend, traffic bogged me down until I was uplifted by clean views of three of our local cascade volcanoes - all from the same vantage point, no less. For a girl from the Sacramento Valley, this is still a breathtaking, primordial sight. The individual characters of the mountains impressed me: Hood, with its Fuji-like perfectionism, Rainier, with its weighty, masculine dome, and the battle-scarred St. Helens, her great wound gaping north. She keeps us on our toes.

Last week, St. Helen's 5-mile-high hiccup of steam brought back memories of 1980 -- a much more monumental and dangerous blast. As I craned my head out the window to see the white scalloped cloud rise across the Washington border, I felt connected to the region's history much farther back than a couple of decades, or even a couple of millennia. To witness the work of mountain building is to witness an ancient process that operates on a scale of time and space we can hardly fathom. If you stretch out the timeline long enough, hiccups and even blasts become just a breath, a shift, part of a flow as constant as a river, sure enough to amass our greatest peaks (and shape their unique characters). Still, these erratic events are impressive. The mountain grabs us by the shirt collar to remind us that, though humans are comparatively new additions to the Northwest's natural history, we are still very much a part of that history, including processes that have remained constant for thousands of years. Moreover, this region is still *making* history, not only in the front-page-news sense, but in the scope of geologic time. What an amazing thing to have been offered a glimpse of this process. Enjoy this week's dirt (and volcanic ash hiccoughs :).

Jenny
& the rest of us at Spreading Roots, Spring Forth

FAX YOUR SENATORS TO PREVENT DRILLING IN ARTIC NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE (4-26-05)

4-26-05 KEEP UP THE PRESSURE, PASS THE WORD ALONG TO FAX ALL SENATORS
Read the comment below for a recent alert from Defenders of Wildlife.

4-21-05 CALL YOUR SENATOR TO PREVENT DRILLING IN ANWR

See comment below for more details.
phone: Senator Gordon Smith 202-224-3121

3-17-05 VOTE AGAINST DRILLING IN ARTIC NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE

phone: Senator Gordon Smith 202-224-3121 OSPIRG's website: http://savethearctic.com/arctic.asp?id=42&id4=ES John Kerry's website: http://www.johnkerry.com/RollCall
  • Basically, a Senate spending bill has a provision attached to allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. This is one of the last protected arctic areas in the world, home to the Gwich'in people and the world's largest remaining caribou herd whose calving grounds are ready to be sacrificed for six month's oil supply that will take a decade to reach market. Over 2 million Americans have repeatedly indicated their opposition to these repeated efforts to devastate this natural wonder, by guys who never set foot upon these areas but choose to assess exploitive potential so they can slop the intoxicating elixir of power from the public trough.
  • It's not too late to save the precious wildlife species that have relied on the Refuge for centuries: 135 bird species from four continents, muskoxen, wolverines, grizzly and polar bears...and the famous Porcupine caribou herd that relies on the area for its essential calving grounds.
  • In the last 24 hours we have seen an amazing display of our johnkerry.com community's ability to quickly mobilize - and a passionate outpouring of commitment to the Arctic Refuge. So far, a quarter of a million citizens - more than 260,000 people, have signed our Citizens' Roll Call in support of the Cantwell-Kerry Amendment to prevent the oil drills from invading one of our greatest natural treasures. And you got the attention of the Republicans too. In fact late last night Republican leaders came to the floor of the Senate to complain directly about our Citizens' Roll Call to stop this special interest giveaway. A vote is expected around 1:00 PM EST and floor debate begins at 10:15 AM EST. Call, sign the online petition, tune in and watch live on C-SPAN2.