A walk in Sapsucker Woods

Today I went to school and did that whole thing. For some strange reason both yesterday and today at lunch I didn’t eat anything. It wasn’t anorexia or anything, it was more just forgetting about it. Maybe it was because the weather was so nice (85-90 degrees and sunny!).

In Global I had a test that I finished really fast and then listened to some Shpongle. While I was listening to it I got incredibly into it and started rocking back and fourth to the beat (or at least what I thought the beat was, me and rhythm are kind of opposites unfortunately). Someone in the class noticed I was doing it and they started to make fun of me by doing it to. It was incredibly funny. Shpongle has an ability to transport me to an entirely different world while I listen to it with headphones on.

After school I walked downtown with Christa and we watched the birds in Dewitt Park and I supported the evil institution of capitalism and free market economy by buying with my gift certificate a Alkaline Trio CD at Volume Records. On the upside I was supporting the local economy so I guess it really isn’t that bad.

I got picked up by my mom and driven home. It was such a nice day out that I decided to take JiWon’s bike back to her house and go for a walk. As I biked over there I listened to Eight Episodes, a science fiction short story and Hugo nominee, on my science fiction podcast Escape Pod.

The story was about a small TV show in the future about an Alien invasion that gets cancelled. But after it is cancelled many of the things that were shown in the TV show as science fiction turn out to be factual. This leads people to the realization that the TV show is actually a communication from Aliens to planet earth. The episode was very escapist and provoked some thoughts. I would be sure to check it out either on iTunes or at the bottom of this page in the little flash player I stole from the Escape Pod Website.

As I listened to the story I walked through an area by JiWon’s house that is the part of sapsucker woods that will be cut down if Briarwood II goes in. It surprised me how expansive it was and at one point I almost got lost. Being in woods makes me incredibly happy and makes me want to fight for them even more.

To get rid of them would be one of the biggest mistakes Ithaca could make. It is part of the woods that are famous for ornithology and the drainage problems created by destroying the woods would be an expense to the town that wont go away. Also, Ithaca is a leftist town, we pass resolutions that say we will save the environment. If we don’t act on what we say we are the biggest hypocrites. I believe that Ithaca will roll over to the big developer Lucentee instead of listening to the people who elected them. There is however a group of people who are trying to Save Sapsucker Woods.

After I left the woods I walked home listening to Shpongle very loudly. I laid on my bridge listening to them for a while and then came in and started this post.

Goodnight to both of you who read this far and be sure to listen to the story Eight Episodes by Robert Reed from Escape Pod below.

An attempt at somewhat intellegent writing

Today, after entering first period, I was assaulted by a sizeable number of readers of this blog. (Consisting of my two friends Jeremy and JT) Between Ms. Loomis bitching at us and the whole senior class, they explained to me that I would be more productive if I wrote a good half page instead of a long drawn out full page. I decided to meet them in the middle, from now on I will attempt no to have eco apocalypse rants that go on for half a page, or me basically repeating how tired I am for pages and pages. I will write one page a day still but it will be good.
With that said I should get back to the post. I am going to try to avoid in all my posts a long boring drawn out description of my day.
Today when I got the mail (after coming home from being downtown with Christa) I found my membership to the Sierra Club. The Sierra Club, for those of you who don’t know, is a grassroots environmental organization. John Muir, a man who was influential in saving trees by making national parks in the late 1900’s, founded it. John Muir also played an early part in trying to save the redwood trees in the book I am reading right now, A good forest for dying (or something like that).
It had a section about the Sierra Student Coalition, which is basically a student organization. It seems like something that I should look into. It might not be nearly as extreme or effective as a more radical group but I think it could reach more students and serve as a launching board for a more radical student group.
After that I sat down and did a very dedicated session of homework listening to Evan Greer, who I think greatly shocked even my left wing parents. I think partly due to his music they all left the house and almost forgot to take me to Tae Kwon Do. When I got there the class was incredibly easy for the most part until the end when we did pushups. After 99 pushups (15,14 to 6) my arms went all weak and I was barely able to get up. This of course got the notice of my Teacher. He stood over me and counted as I did them and by the end I was to weak to go back up.
I got home and went on YouTube to find out that Trevor was the guest editor. YouTube Home Page He has some incredibly cool videos featured and I would be sure to check them out before they all vanish tomorrow or whenever videos vanish.
While on YouTube I looked up some videos of treesits and found the ones that are talked about in my book (okay, this post did turn into an eco-rant, sorry). There was one disturbing one that showed non-deputized climbers working for Pacific lumber doing what amounts to torture to peaceful, nonviolent protestors.
It is really disturbing to think that in a country where freedom of speech and expression is so protected on one would do anything when people are being put through this. I think it shows that Americans really aren’t equal or, like George Orwell would say, some are more equal than others. I think Americans think what human rights do a dirty, pot smoking, tree hugging hippie need. What they don’t remember is that revolutionaries founded our country. They love to say that the founding fathers would believe in this or that. But one thing they did do is fight for a cause.
This means that even if we disagree with a cause we should at least be civil and peaceful while removing people who are peaceful in return.
Goodnight and good luck-
Sam

A typical friday

Today im not feeling as militantly environmental but I will try to keep the militant feeling around. My day went by in a haze like all Fridays. I was inviting my friends to a “social gathering of responsible peers and Trevor in celebration of the 15th anniversary of my birth” for tomorrow but I worry that I invited to many people (like 15 off the top of my head and that is relying on the fact that no one invites anyone else). I can kind of imagine a bunch of cars showing up tomorrow and ending up having everyone in Ithaca and the surrounding area arrive. The book a good forest to die in was initially really exciting but as far as I can tell it became slightly overly historical and explaining the situations leading up to the Protestor getting killed (although there isn’t anything wrong with this). Right now im kind of pissed off at my mom (a regular occurrence) because when I told her that I invited a bunch of people she flipped out and immediately asked me if I had invited a certain kid. This kid in question I didn’t invite but he is a nice kid even if he walks the line in regards to the law and is always getting in trouble for drugs. I think she is a massive hypocrite because when she was younger she obviously did drugs and unless I am very much mistaken inviting her to a party wouldn’t have been the worst thing that could happen. My English teacher was really annoying today. He has very good intentions and does cool stuff with us (like take us to the falls or invite Rising tide to come visit our class) but he still manages to do some really annoying things. Today he started the class reading from this book about Cambodian history because we are about to read a book about the Cambodian genocide. In it the book defiantly said something along the lines of “Cambodia is so fucked up because westerners can’t see the difference between Cambodia and other countries”. But near the end of the class my teacher mentioned how a character in the book showed the Confucian value of filial piety. To me this seemed like comparing Celtic ideas to Christianity because they are both in the same relative area. If you have read this far you get a gold star. Also if you have read this far you may be wondering why I have no form at all of formatting. This is because I have completely given up on trying to format my ramblings. I am hoping that my writing will improve just by me writing a page a day.
My dad has is kindof amusing today. He has bought me the Gimme! Barista guide for my birthday (or something from gimme!) and has been really sneaky about it. This would have worked except I heard the people at gimme talking about and he got it from them infront of me.
Just as I have been writing I have been hit by a wave of tiredness. I point this on “coming down” from my mini caffeine buzz from the mocha loving supreme I got at gimme today. I think I spend about 30 dollars there a week and its kindof depressing when I think about it.
This morning I meet Christa before school at College town bagels and then we walked to school, which was very nice. There is this one guy at CTB who seems really talkative and always jokes with me. I cant decide whether it is creepy or nice.
My mom is insisting that I get a job this summer. This bothers me because I would like to do something but I would like it to be meaningful. In the perfect world I would have a hippie socialist social action protest group I could join and work with this summer but unfortunately we don’t have that even in Ithaca (actually it wouldn’t be a perfect world if there were groups trying to solve problems). This summer I will probably just end up playing wow and hanging out with friends but im sure that it will beat school. Goodbye until tomorrow.

Environment ramblings

Hello, my name is Sam. I am writing this blog for a multitude of seemingly unconnected reasons. First of all I feel a need to get good at writing. This is one of the several career ideas I am thinking about (along with Ethno botany , Ecological Preservation stuff, and psycochemistry type stuff). It is also related somehow to the fact that I want to become an environmental activist and I figured through some astounding leap of logic that having a blog would help this. Yet another reason is because I figure writing a page a day cant hurt anybody. I am writing this for myself and don’t expect to have any readers. Im not sure whether readers would be awesome or really creepy.
You (being nobody) may be wondering why I have such an interest in the environment and saving it. My reasons are generic hippie reasons. I love nature and love this world and cant stand watching it get destroyed. I live in Ithaca that is a crazy environmental, intellectual hippie college town. I really got my start in activism in 7th grade where I was involved in a tree sit to save a 14-acre forest from becoming a parking lot. All I did was sit around and think about how cool all these college students who were they’re doing it were. But anyways, it gave me an opportunity to meet some people and to really hear people actively trying to save the environment.
At this tree sit were several hardcore earth first types and they were really inspiring even though they might not have been as intellectual as the college students there. One of them (whose forest name was muddy) had been doing treesits for years and had taken part in the treesits in the redwoods where a logger had killed an activist. This whole experience was amazing and even though it eventually failed (police arrested all the protesters at 1 in the morning, typical pussy move) it opened my eyes and showed me that there were ways of resisting that were more effective than writing a letter or sending a yearly check to some organization that spends more money on fundraising than it does on actual saving of the environment.
For the next few years I stayed politically interested attending the occasional protest and following the news (both mainstream and not). I attended grassroots and really enjoyed myself when I was around hippies. In the fall of this year I watched fight club which had a strong nihilistic anti-materialistic message. That movie inspired me to try to reduce my impact on the world but like all attempts it was short-lived (hopefully this attempt wont be). The only truly solid thing that came of it was a decision to only buy clothes at the Salvation Army but that didn’t go perfectly although I still try to shop only there.
This all brings me to yesterday when a group called rising tide came and visited our class. One of the members was from redbud woods and they all were pretty seasoned activists. The goal of their group was to confront the root causes of climate chaos (aka global warming or whatever other happy euphemisms we have). Their visit awakened the dormant activist in me and was really inspiring. I am hoping to start a student chapter of Rising Tide. Ideally this would be a STUDENT run group that would meet without a faculty advisor to hinder us. I talked to Evan Greer who was one of the members of rising tide who came and visited us and he mentioned that someone was as inspired as I was, was starting a chapter in Ithaca. Hopefully I will be able to contact this person and get that started over the summer and into next year. I have been playing around with the idea of a group of students who got together and were actively activists and I believe that this provides the best format. Anyways, that is a short piece about how I am interested in the environment and what I am doing now. Right now I am reading A Good Forest to Die In that is about the Activist who got killed by the logger who I mentioned earlier and I am also rereading The Botany of Desire. (okay you caught me I am really only reading the cannabis section) So long for now and peace and love and all that good stuff.