Spirit in Action

Power to the Pedal People - Bikes, Buses & Climate Change

Jeremy Gragert tackles the climate/environment crisis at home by working on the ways we travel, including his activism with the Chippewa Valley Transit Alliance, Eau Claire Climate Action Now, and the Bicycle Federation of Wisconsin (WisconsinBikeFed.org).

Broadcast on:: 14 Jul 2013
Audio Format:: other

[music] Let us sing this song for the healing of the world That we may hear as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along And our lives will feel the echo of our healing [music] Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpes Me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world That we may dream as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along The great trinity of subjects that we cover for Spirit in Action is peace, justice, and environment And today's guest, Jeremy Gragert, has been involved in all three of these Those efforts are generally focused now in terms of environment, specifically in the area of transportation The way we move from one place to another has so many effects on the well-being of this planet Energy sources like oil have led us into war And the carbon emissions caused by most forms of travel that we use Have been adding to the heating of the globe With all the impacts that will have upon us, especially upon the poor Jeremy Gragert chooses to travel primarily by either public transit or bicycle Something that can be challenging when the public transit system is spotty When riding bike in Wisconsin winters and in a city where the car almost completely controls the road So Jeremy has put his heart, hands, and feet into fixing the world where he lives As a community activist working through the Chippewa Valley Transit Alliance Eau Claire Climate Action now Clear Vision Eau Claire and the Bicycle Federation of Wisconsin We're going to talk to Jeremy at the Cooperative Community Home in which he lives But first, let's get into a Jeremy compatible biking frame of mind with the song The song is "The Pushbike Song" And this version of it is by Mungo Jerry And right after this, we'll talk with Jeremy Gragert "The Pushbike Song" ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Jeremy, it's great to have you here today for "Spirit in Action" Thank you, Mark. It's good to be here on the show. I've known about you and your activism work in the Chippewa Valley for quite a while. How did you originally get into activism? I got into basically community involvement in all sorts of different small ways over time. It was just part of it was linked back to just living in the center of my town and basically actually being connected to my neighborhood and grew up in Stillwater, Minnesota, really close to the downtown of that city. It was a relatively connected place. Like when you lived there, you actually felt connected to your neighbors. We had a pretty engaged community. Although a lot of people commuted to the Twin Cities, our neighborhood had a ravine in the backyard. And I started to link things back to this in terms of answering these types of questions because I've gotten them over the years. The ravine was actually used as a garbage dump for a century before we moved there. So I got used to garbage being in the place that I played, in the place that I got connected with nature. And people in the neighborhood got together to clean it up. Clean up all the appliances and as much of the smaller broken bottles and stuff that they could. But it was this idea that you kind of need to come together and make stuff happen. And so that was kind of an early taste of environmental issues as well as what people need to do in their own neighborhood to get together and make stuff happen. And so how old were you when you were doing this? Was your family into this? Was this a family package type activism? Well, my dad was involved in the ravine with us as kids because he would go down there with us. But my brother and I were around seven or eight years old when we started going down there on our own. And we had just moved there a few years before that and there was some conflict in the ravine among the youths of the neighborhood. Because everyone wanted to have their own piece of it or control the whole thing. So there was some interesting conflict that had to be worked out too. But the community kind of ignored it for many years and just a place that they dumped garbage because they didn't want to pay for garbage service or this or that. Those are the capital of the territory of Minnesota for a long time. So I kind of got this sense of basically my dad kind of was a big influence on like, we need to like connecting with nature as well as connecting with other people to make stuff happen. And he was involved with the cleanup of the ravine. So part of it is a community sense of involvement. Part of it is familial. Was this specifically environmental connection with nature or is it maybe does it extend other areas like key, sort, equality, all those kind of things? Or was it specifically ecology was the big deal? I think it was everything connected together because there were a lot of low income folks that lived around that ravine and we were as well. You know, still water is often known as a very wealthy community and there are parts of it that are not just as there are with every community. And then there are also places that change in terms of their economics and people's outlook and things like that over time. And our neighborhood was being revitalized and a lot of historic homes were being bought up and revitalized and we had, you know, we had movie stars like Jessica Lang moving to the neighborhood and fixing up these old Victorian houses. So it was kind of an interesting time to be there. It was like the late 80s and I graduated from high school there in 2000. So there was a convergence of issues, I think, and it's kind of a place that taught me independence too because I could get away from my parents down there in the ravine. And I could also go to downtown Stillwater, which was only a few blocks away down the hill and be independent too. Also see what history has to offer for a good urban design and architecture and how you actually design a neighborhood for children to enjoy life instead of be stuck in the suburbs somewhere. Which is so different than what most communities are like these days or a car centric environment. Except that I know that you happen to be predominantly a two wheeled traveler. You're involved here in Eau Claire in several different approaches to getting our environment maybe more environmentally focused and maybe more pedestrian focused. Lay out a little bit of the range of your involvement. You've graduated high school in 2000. You've been in Eau Claire. I guess I've known you of you at least for 10 years. And I think growing up in Stillwater where the neighborhood I lived in was built around the 1870s and 1880s. So it was very much oriented toward people without cars. And I was able to, from a young age, I just plugged into that and my family was a one car family my entire time I lived there. So it was just something you did to get around and so I had a bicycle at a young age and everything and I just kept getting new bicycles as I got older. And so my parents are really supportive in that way when making sure I had access to transportation. We had no public transit system in Stillwater other than a connection over to the Twin Cities as part of Metro Transit. And I never really took that. And there were bike trails developing during this time and Stillwater is really at the leading edge of developing bicycle trails along lakes and other kind of recreationally focused trails. And there was a trail actually going all the way into St. Paul in Minneapolis. It's called the Gateway Trail. And I actually rode my bike down that trail when I was probably about 10 or 11 years old and started visiting the Como Zoo and places like that at a really young age because I had all day to go. So I got into transportation because of it was just like it was a personal necessity. And I noticed a lot of inequalities within the transportation and the way that infrastructure is built for automobiles instead of for people to walk and bike and have so much money is spent in that area that's diverted toward highway development instead of public transportation instead of bicycle trails. So when I moved to Eau Claire in 2000 to attend UW Eau Claire, I got to know the city by running around town at about, I don't know, 10 miles an hour or whatever because I was on the cross country team for the UW Eau Claire. So that's all I got to know the city at first. And it was this crazy hodgepodge of, because you're kind of running around fast. You know, you go down through some parts of Putnam Park and along the Eau Claire River and you get turned around a little direction you're really facing. And then you also go by places like Claremont Avenue that are just like a total mass and dangerous to try to cross. And so I kind of get introduced kind of quickly into Eau Claire and then I had my bicycle with me. I was able to, I started exploring the city. And my mentality was like, well, it's kind of fun to be lost sometimes. And I'm just going to go ride and have that feeling of not knowing where I am. This thought popped into my head. It was a, well, the last time I was here at this intersection, I couldn't find my way home. Like, at least not very quickly. And then here I am again in the same situation I don't remember how. So there's kind of, there was this exploratory phase and that's kind of how I was introduced to the city after running around it. I started biking around it too. And it was years later after just getting familiar with the city that I ran into a guy named Brad Henderson who was on the East Side Hill. He has a family and he was, I believe he was living car free at the time with three kids. He was passing out this flyer down in Owen Park. He saw me on a bicycle or something. He was like, hey, like, you should check this out. And I was on the trail. There was going to be a trail closure and how the trail was going to be closed for like a whole summer because of their redoing the bridge project and he was trying to make sure it stayed open and had people still had that access. And I was like, and then I had this number I could call the Department of Transportation to make sure that that stayed open. And so I made that call and then I published it in this newspaper that I just started as a student. This was 2003. And there was a free speech newspaper. I was involved with it. So he published the whole flyer in the newspaper. And that kind of got me into the activism around transportation. It just kind of snowballed. Well, I know you Jeremy as being involved with the Wisconsin Bike Federation, Chippewa Valley Transit Alliance. I think your principal behind the Eau Claire Climate Action now, the Climate Action Network here in Eau Claire. So that's some further steps along the way. Hopefully, if you started in 2000, you're not in college anymore. Probably some point you had to graduate. They probably made you leave. How much of your activism was nurtured within the university and how much of it is post-university? For many people, there's a night and day thing. They leave college and all of a sudden they're a serious person and so therefore they don't have time for this frivolity of activism. The time period was interesting because I was actually a sophomore my first few weeks as a sophomore at Eau Claire when 9/11 happened. It wasn't exactly a wake-up call for me, but it was for a lot of people around me. I knew that there were these international issues around the way the United States had been flexing its power on the world and how that was going to have consequences in the form of domestic terrorism within the United States. So it wasn't particularly shocking to me. However, it awakened enough discussion in the public arena that new types of involvement seemed more possible and viable in the university. It led to the Iraq war as well. It wasn't really very disconnected, but the president was really in favor of finding any excuse to go into Iraq in 2003. But before that in 2002, we were already starting to be some rallies on campus. There was one October 1st of 2002 where I met some folks from the community who had set up a rally on campus on the campus mall. That's where I met Aaron L. Ringer who was involved with that rally. He was a student for much of the 1990s at Eau Claire. So I kind of got connected with some of the folks involved with resisting the war in Iraq and we formed the Progressive Student Association at Eau Claire. No longer exists today, but it was really a great organization to organize against the war in Iraq. So that took us into 2003 in the spring and we occupied the campus mall with a makeshift encampment which was meant to resemble a refugee camp for all the refugees that would be associated with that war. If it were to occur and it did end up, of course, the invasion was in March of 2003. Sort of timed suspiciously around spring break when a lot of students weren't around. So that was kind of a big moment and that war really almost never ended. It sort of has ended now, but not really. So that resistance continued for years and we always had anniversary rallies on campus. I was also introduced on October 1st of 2002 to the concept of there was also a speaker that happened to be on campus that day. It was talking about independent politics, the idea that you don't have to be associated with a political party to be an active participant in politics, including as a candidate. Talking about electoral reform and campaign finance reform and all these issues. We ended up getting really involved with that through a group where we formed college independence sort of a way to create an alternative to college republicans and college democrats. And there was even a campus greens chapter at the time. So kind of look at politics from a different perspective, look at democracy issue from a nonpartisan or post-partisan perspective. And actually I wasn't involved with environmental or transportation advocacy really until after all of this. They kind of emerged most seriously after I graduated in 2005 when there was a coal plant proposed at least vaguely by exile energy down at the Tyrone site on the Lower Chippewa River. And it was a land that exile energy had owned back when it was called Northern States Power NSP. They had gotten the land in the 70s to build a nuclear power plant. And through the people I met resisting that coal plant, a lot of people from Northern Thunder, which of course Northern Thunder is responsible in many ways for helping to start wise radio. Northern Thunder was the big environmental advocacy organization back in the 70s and 80s and 90s here in Eau Claire and actually Western Wisconsin and Northern Wisconsin in general. And I met a lot of those folks through this resistance to this coal plant, which really didn't take us long to organize enough to get them to take that off the table. But Northern Thunder had resisted the nuclear power plant that had been proposed back in the late 70s, early 80s down there. And it was really eye-opening to meet all of these people right around the time I was graduating, right around the time I was deciding if I was going to stay in Eau Claire, meet all these people that were seasoned activists who maybe some of them had sort of kind of came out of the woodwork during that time period. Fascinating folks and big cast of characters, the people really got me interested in the passion that they had in environmental issues or the amount of expertise that they had was really exciting. And there were some faculty at the university that were really who I knew sort of through classes but most of them not and how active they were and interested they were in their own community was kind of how bridged me off campus. You bring up a point that's central to the way I think about these things. I think community is really important in terms of nurturing and supporting and allowing to persist activism. Without community, it's much harder uphill stretch to do that. So when you mention the people that you meet and how they affect you, I'm quite sure that my activism has been long-lived as it has. I mean, it was what, 35 years ago, I was in the Peace Corps and that's kind of a community but also part of the Quaker meeting or involved with the war tax resistance. All of these communities have nurtured and supported me. What do you identify as your primary community, maybe the house in which we're doing this interviews, maybe that's your community, I don't know. Yeah, I mean, it changes over time. People come and go and people's priorities change collectively and my priorities have changed personally as well. And I certainly don't tell the people that mean a lot to me in the way I think about the world, how important they are to me. Sometimes I don't always acknowledge that and I don't always think about these people I've known for 10 years. You know, like you mentioned, we've been each other for 10 years and it's just like, it's interesting how sometimes we don't always make that connection to how important the community is to why we actually care and why we actually are able to keep doing this work. Some people end up, you know, isolating themselves and just getting angry on the Internet all day and just don't go out into public and actually say what they think. You know, Claire, there's sometimes a little bit of fear of actually being an activist because it's kind of like a, we're kind of very polite and we're kind of a swing part of a swing state that can actually blow up and be somewhat volatile if an issue really strikes people. So, but I think it's been a very supportive place for me. I would say that where I live right now, this house on Lincoln Avenue, we call ourselves the Progressive Valley Cooperative and we're not, we're forming a cooperative arrangement in terms of how we live in a residential house. We have seven people living here and we have sustainability as one of our values and we have, you know, social justice as one of our values and we have a focus on being a part of the neighborhood and being involved in service and activism. So, you know, we're working on how we can share as much food as we can and do bulk purchases and we're working on how we can grow some food here and make collective decisions and use consensus and have a safe space for people. For a wide diversity of people who are either visitors or people that live here to all feel safe and comfortable. So, this is a very new project and a very new living arrangement for me and it's kind of a progression of, you know, we had to create this ourselves because there wasn't really a cooperative, like a housing cooperative in Eau Claire. And we don't own the house collectively, but our landlord is really cool. So, we're able to do a lot of great stuff here. You know, I do want to get into the nuts and bolts of the work that you do with biking or with the transit in Eau Claire and all that, but one more question. One of the things I become aware of and I think maybe it's a difference between I came of age, I turned 18 in 1972. So, that's pretty close to the 60s, it's a little bit post 60s, right? But I think cynicism was not so common of a feature on the landscape as it has been sometimes in between. You, Jeremy, do not appear to me to be a cynical person. I haven't noticed your cynical bones at all showing through. So, how is it that you seem to have escaped? Something that is, I think, maybe more common than it was when I was coming of age. And I may be mistaken about that, but cynicism as part of your generation, the generation before you following, what have you observed? I think the amount of time that people have and they feel that they have is a really important aspect of it. Because I feel if I put some time into making the world a better place, right? And I take the time to say what I think needs to be said, whether it's to my legislators or to the editor of the newspaper or to my friends. If I take the time to do that, it takes away any amount of guilt or any amount of cynicism, I guess. Because I think some cynicism comes down to people feeling like they're not doing what they need to do or what they can do because they don't have the time. Or because they just decided, you can kind of get into this hopeless mentality and if you're not doing anything about it, if you're just complaining. Or you're just kind of posting stuff on Facebook or something like that. So I think doing as many concrete things as possible keeps me very positive. Not that I necessarily think that what I do makes a difference all the time. It's just that I know that I'm doing what I can and that's the important thing. That's really important from my point of view and I want to commend you for it, Jeremy. If you just tuned in, you're listening to a Northern Spirit radio production called Spirit in Action. On the web, you find us at NorthernSpiritRadio.org. On that website, you'll find about eight years of programs for listening and download. You can post comments on any of the programs or on the shows in general. Also, there's a place to leave donations and we are supported by your donations. There's no big business supporting us and there's no big grants that are underwriting us. We live by your support. I also want to remind you, and maybe you have to do this donation before you donate to Northern Spirit Radio. Remember to support your local community radio station. They're in valuable alternative source of both music and news that you just don't get anywhere else. It's less watered down. It reaches further into the American experience and our world experience than any other place. So please do support your local community radio station and if you can, Northern Spirit Radio. Again, we're speaking with Jeremy Gregert. He's a resident of Eau Claire since the year 2000. Been very active in a number of fields. There's been peace as you've heard in the first part of this hour. You've heard peace activism and you've heard environmental activism. Right now, Jeremy, I want to get into some talk about bikes and about transportation in Eau Claire. And maybe I'll leave it to you. What do you think is the cutting edge for you right now? The thing that you feel most hopeful or engaged with in terms of making a difference in Eau Claire? One of the issues that we all struggle with is trying to figure out what we can do. Perhaps that we really feel is our responsibility because maybe we're one of the only people that can pull it off because we have certain expertise or a certain passion. And so that's why I've progressed through so many different issues over the years. And I've sort of settled on transportation as one of my big issues. And it's partly because I have a self-interested in it. I'm a bicyclist and a public transit rider and quite often a pedestrian, especially in the winter time. And one of the issues that has really emerged that I think could be helpful for other people to understand us and other people have identified as an issue is, you know, while there is a lot of talk about what we can do to improve bicycling as a way of getting around Eau Claire whether that's through improving infrastructure or doing more education. There is not a great knowledge of what is currently on the ground right now in Eau Claire in terms of infrastructure, good bicycle trails, good bicycles, routes on the streets. And so one of the things that emerged through the Empowerment Summit, which is a clear vision initiative in the fall of this last year in 2012, but it will be occurring again this fall is a priority setting event for the community to decide what projects need to be done. And one of the things that emerged was a big theme around bicycle and pedestrian issues. And the one project we identified to really tackle the awareness issue of the good, actually we do have decent bike routes if you really know what you're doing. And the experienced bike riders in this town really know some great routes. What there isn't is a map showing where all these routes are. There's no map that's available to the public and there's nothing online really. So we're actually working on, we've formed a team of people that's been working for about six months and actually creating a bicycle map for the city of Eau Claire, as well as for Altuna and the surrounding area, which will also include Chippewa Falls. So we're working on a bicycle map for the city of Eau Claire, Altuna, Village of Lake Hallie, Chippewa Falls, that will connect everything together on street for the best routes and as well as show the trails. And so that's something I think will revolutionize the way people get around on their bicycles, as well as maybe encourage new people to try bisoning because they can see, well that actually is a good route to get to work. And there is a good route to go shopping or get downtown from my house. And hopefully we can push the city to sign those routes. All the municipalities have to work together to do that, of course, and popularize those routes. And the more bicycles we have, the safer those routes will be. It typically is not necessarily the infrastructure that makes it safe. It's the amount of other bicycles that makes drivers aware of bicycles and more used to getting around them and sharing the road with them. Shh! Shh! Shh! Shh! Shh! Putting us in as I try to catch you up with you a bit longer too. Running long like an hurricane, honey. Spinning out of you, you look so pretty. And she run the long, you look so pretty. And she was singing this song. Sing this song! How many bicyclists are we talking about? I know there's you and I know there's Crispin. And there's probably a few more people in that. Are the numbers significant? Is it really a small drop in the bucket? Has it been growing? Well during Bike to Work Week we tried to, that was in mid-May this year. We did it for the first time as a Bicycle Federation of Wisconsin Initiative. We did some bicycle accounts at certain intersections, but of course it was probably a little bit more than usual because we were really promoting. People biking to work, but I mean we had hundreds of people going through certain intersections. I really can't give you solid numbers because we've never done something that we should probably do this year in September. And that's a bicycle count of the city where you actually place people in intersections and count bicycles. And you can average out how many bicycles per hour typically go through an intersection in which way they're going and turning and all that stuff. And there's great data that you can get to really show how many bicycles there are out there. There really are thousands of people that bike for various reasons within the city limits of Eau Claire every week. So it's, some people are just going to school or work, which really makes up a lot of the bicycle. But then there's, most of it is probably recreational at this point. I tend to focus a little more on advocacy for people that are doing it for transportation because they often can't necessarily afford a car or they're doing it for environmental reasons. Or it's basically a way of supporting your community more as to ride your bicycle because you're actually more a part of your community. Like you can say hi to people, you can stop and you can be more connected with your neighborhood and things like that. So there's, there's a lot of reasons why people bike and, but we don't have good numbers. We really do need good data as to like how many bicyclists there are. It'd be great to get a baseline data set. I was living in La Crosse for two years from 2008 to 2010 and while I was in graduate school down there. And we did a bicycle count in the city of La Crosse and I specifically was in charge of the bicycle counts around the university. And we were finding over 100 bicyclists an hour crossing certain intersections or crossing certain streets to get to the university, mostly students commuting to class. But I think if the city of Eau Claire and people within Eau Claire were decided to do bicycle counts they would be surprised at how many bicycles they see. You've already mentioned the Bicycle Federation of Wisconsin on the web at wisconsinbikefed.org. So you can follow up with more information there listeners, wisconsinbikefed.org. You mentioned Clear Vision, which is an ongoing concern that's helping shape what our community looks like. What are they doing with respect to transportation? Well that's changed over time. The original Clear Vision process started in 2007 where they invited hundreds of people to come together from the community. And it settled out at a little over 100 people that were involved with this year-long visioning process. Transportation is one of six themes that came out of that. And I co-chaired the working group on transportation, which came out with a report along with the other five themes of the entire Clear Vision Report on kind of a vision for the community. In 2008, it was setting a lot of transportation priorities related to bicycling and the bus system and all of this. And some of those things have been accomplished. One of the most important things that happened was that it helped to spur on the creation of a nonprofit organization that is specifically focused on advocacy for bicycling, for public transit, for pedestrians, and for passenger rail. There had been a group called the West Central Wisconsin Rail Coalition, which is still very active today, that it started in the late 1990s that's focused on passenger rail. But there was never anything focused on buses or bicycling or pedestrian issues. So we formed the Chippewa Valley Transit Alliance officially in 2011. There were a lot of people active to try to form it earlier and it never actually formed as an official group, but people were meeting. The regional transit authority, which was a piece of enabling legislation by our state legislature, was allowed briefly for Eau Claire and Chippewa counties to form a regional transit authority would have its own taxing power. That would be able to expand public transit to both counties and connect everything together. It was something that came up briefly in 2010 as a Clear Vision Working Group to kind of figure out how we were actually going to form that regional transit authority. But that was then canceled by our current governor. So the idea of regional transit authority kind of went away. The idea of passenger rail really coming to Eau Claire any time soon went away at that same time in 2011, because the governor also canceled that. So there have been some setbacks too, obviously, but Clear Vision has kind of kept it as a priority. But really the important thing now is that the Chippewa Valley Transit Alliance exists, and now a local presence for the Bicycle Federation of Wisconsin now exists. And all the while we've also had, since 2006, and Brad Henderson was instrumental in starting this, I mentioned him earlier, the city of Eau Claire's Bicycle Pedestrian Advisory Commission. So there are multiple entities now, ten years ago, there was hardly any real public organizations that you could really plug into to be involved with transportation advocacy. And now being on the board for the Chippewa Valley Transit Alliance, I can write a letter with a letterhead representing an organization, have all the board members sign on to it, and write about big issues and small issues related to bicycling and public transit and pedestrian access. And it has more weight now, and we meet every month so we can keep track of our progress and we have a treasure. And so sometimes we have money and sometimes we don't, but we can actually send out real letters and, you know, we can afford a banner and we can be at events. And we can be involved with in partnership with other entities like the Bike Pedestrian Advisory Commission or the Wisconsin Bike Fed to create a bicycle map to take on big projects that are maybe going to cost $10,000 in the end. We don't know how many maps we're going to print, but it could end up costing us that much for that project. So Clear Vision has helped set some priorities, and being involved with that has helped me meet some new people that wanted to be involved with those priorities too. So, for our listeners sake, I want to mention Chippewa Valley Transit Alliance.com. One site you'll track down some of the work that Jeremy's involved with. On Facebook there is Eau Claire Climate Action Now, C-A-N, that is Climate Action Network, right? Eau Claire Climate Action Now, C-A-N. You'll find the links to them, in any case, on NortonSpiritRadio.org. Just come to the site and listen to the interview or follow the links connected with Jeremy Gragert. So, we've talked about a number of things, and actually the thing that first spurred me to contact you, Jeremy, in the not too ancient past, was some of the activism about climate change that you've been involved with. Tell me about that. What are you doing? What's happening? What are you trying to achieve? Climate change is a big elephant in the room, I guess. The issue that kind of sits there in the back, that has sat in the back of my mind for many years, and it always seemed so big and so daunting. So, there are times, of course, that I get cynical about things, being able to do anything about certain issues, at least at the certain point in my life that I'm in. Obviously, transportation makes up a big percentage of our carbon emissions as a planet, somewhere around 25 to 30%, depending on how you measure it, depending on whether you include industry or all that into it. So, that's one of my motivations around transportation, is protecting the global climate. And I would say that a lot of social justice and peace issues and economic justice issues are related to climate change, especially in other countries where it has a bigger impact on people. We aren't seeing as many climate change impacts here, as other countries are, that just happen to be in places that have more volatile rainfall or things like that. But, ultimately, this last year in 2012, I was like, "Well, I have some time I was working at UW Stout in 2011, and I was very busy focusing on my job and stuff, and I was finished at Stout, and I was ready to move back to Eau Claire again after being a way and monomony for a bit." Like, I sort of have this new start that I can have, and I can start focusing on the biggest issue of our time, which really, 10 years ago, I probably didn't think it was. But now I definitely do, and just decided to form an organization that really hasn't necessarily become an organization yet. It has become a more of a network, I guess. Climate Action now could almost be called Climate Action Network. It has the same acronym, and it has the acronym of CAN, because it's meant to be very hopeful. We can do something about climate change as the basic message, but we have to do it. We have to take responsibility to do something about it, and we need to start locally in terms of actually taking responsibility on the local level, realizing that we don't have to be in Boulder, Colorado, or New York City, or on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., to have an impact on this issue. So Climate Action now is meant basically an email list that people can get on at this point to hear about energy, you know, the national energy policy is a big part of climate change, of course, and to hear about films that are happening, about the impacts of climate change, like the film Chasing Ice was really popular, that the students at the Student Office of Sustainability put on at UW-Eau-Claire. We had over 500 people attend to showings of that. You know, promoting the things that are already happening around here related to climate change activism or education. It's mostly been education. There was a climate change discussion and presentation series that's fall at the public library. The university has been pretty active at bringing in speakers, whether that's through the forum series or through academic departments or through student clubs. Just sharing what's already happening, because a lot of these things haven't necessarily had huge attendance until we really started promoting them. I have 400 people on this email list now, and those people are becoming more and more engaged, and I keep seeing them showing up in more and more events. Now we're at this stage where we have a lot of people that are pretty educated and passionate about climate change and about energy policy and what needs to be done about it, and are feeling more and more hopeful that there's other people around them that can collectively make a difference with them on this issue. Climate Action now helped to, well, we brought someone from Madison to come up and speak about an organization called Citizens Climate Lobby back in July, July of 2012 to talk about an organization called Citizens Climate Lobby and bring in this idea, this organization that is involved with federal policy on carbon fee and dividend legislation, which is a way of putting a fee on carbon emissions based on the type of fossil fuel and how much carbon would be emitted if it were to be burned, that it's basically like a carbon tax, we call it a fee because it technically doesn't go to the government as a tax, it doesn't go to the coffers of the government. It actually would come back to the citizens in the form of a dividend, so it's collected when fossil fuel is imported into the country or extracted within the country, and the money would go back to the citizens to make it more to make the rising energy cost, which would happen because of the extra fee, something that is not necessarily something that burdens individuals as much as they would if they didn't get this dividend check pack that would make up for the increase in energy costs. So low income people would actually probably get more money than they spent in energy costs increases because everyone would get the same amount of money regardless of how much energy they used. And that's a revenue neutral thing for the government, so it should have the support of conservatives as well, and there are some conservatives that support it because it doesn't grow government and it doesn't bring more money into the tax base. That's an example of something that climate action now is working on bringing awareness of is that there are these federal policy initiatives. Citizens Climate Lobby is a great example where they have the carbon fee and dividend, and there is now a local team of people that come together every month to work on the carbon fee and dividend issue, and they've met with Congressman Kind. I've been a part of those meetings and met with his staff next week with Congressman Kind in Washington, D.C. during the National Conference. So there's local people getting really involved with climate change advocacy a lot more than there was a year and a half. And I feel like by building some of this infrastructure, building some of this email list and getting more people out to events and getting more events here and more speakers here, we can really start to build for the future. And we do have to move fast, but at the same time, I think it's important to put the necessary infrastructure in place so that we can actually move fast when we need to, because, you know, if we're not ready for a thousand people to suddenly want to volunteer, then it doesn't matter that a thousand people want to volunteer. You need the infrastructure to be effective, of course. Unfortunately, we have to end up here pretty quickly. I did want to ask you one more thing, Jeremy, and that is you look back on your years of activism, particularly around Eau Claire. Are there things out there in public, a bike path or, you know, just somebody else's life who's changed? What is to date your crowning achievement that you can look out in the world and say, I made a difference, because, again, the thing we mentioned earlier with cynicism, people need to feel like they are having some kind of effect. What do you look at and say, yeah, I did that. Well, that's often a very difficult thing, but luckily some of the things that have been involved with are, you know, because people don't necessarily have to be involved with things that amount to actual infrastructure changes or some product or something like a bike map that comes out. Not everybody has that luxury of being able to have these things that they can point to because they've been working on things that are more intangible or are not like physically in front of everybody for all to see. And I have had a balance of things, some things you don't see and some things you do. And there's certainly nothing that I can really point to that's that went absolutely perfectly either so. I guess I will think of an example. This is a transportation example. The 53 bypass when that was built, that was all decided before I got really involved at all with transportation advocacy work. And that would have been an interesting issue to be involved because it was, it had positives and negatives and it kind of expanded the automobile arena to a degree that was just pretty expensive. And like, like had some environmental impacts and kind of creates turns out clear into a bypass community even more so than already was turns us into about having a bypass economy to where all we're doing is building fast food places on the outskirts of town. But luckily, of course, you know, our downtown is also expanding right now. But one of the consequences of that bypass was that Hastings Way was going to be redone, like the business 53. So that roadway, which really didn't have any, had a very few sidewalks and had a little bit on the northeast of the northeast end of that south Hastings Way corridor just south of the Eau Claire River. And so I decided like, you know, they're going to, this section of roadway between Claremont and the Eau Claire River is 10 lanes wide in some places. I was walking around out there like at least trying to without getting killed and taking pictures and around 2006. So this bypass is done, all this traffic is going to, a lot of this traffic is going to go away and maybe we can narrow this road down and open it up to bicycles and pedestrians too and make it a place that. You know, it's not less, are they going to beautify it like perfectly, but we're going to get some trees out there and we're going to get bike trails and we might even get, might even get bike lanes on it. We didn't end up getting those, but we got pretty wide bike trails on most of it. But I did this presentation around town to the Sierra Club and to some business owners up there on Hastings Way about what the road could be like back in 2006. And it wasn't until 2008 or 2009 that the planning process was to begin. So I was trying to be really proactive about it and really get the, and really lead the conversation to be for, for making that a multimodal corridor. And I ended up being in lacrosse in graduate school during the, the planning process, but enough of, but the city staff who I engaged in who was coming around to a lot of bicycle and pedestrian issues. The public works director and the traffic engineer, they were very supportive of actually taking a car lane away in each direction so that we could fit bike trails and we could fit trees and things like that to really change that corridor and make it more viable for, for all users. As you can see today that we were somewhat successful, we were able to create at least a sidewalk on both sides of the, of the corridor the entire length. And we also got an underpass in there at, we managed to make a lot safer corridor and we managed to, and we do see bicycles out there and we do see a lot of pedestrians out there now. And hopefully the businesses recover more fully after the crazy construction season, and after losing all that traffic to the bypass. Hopefully those businesses recover because now the people who live nearby and people are traveling to the city on bicycles and on foot can access those businesses more easily. And people using public transit can actually walk from the bus and get to their destination safely. So, so that I would say that reconstruction of South Hastings Way was, was it overall a success that, that I feel some role in helping to shape and frame and even though I wasn't even in town during the planning process that you kind of got out ahead of that one. Yeah, you've been sending out good ripples and eventually sometimes they achieve what we hope they will achieve. Thank you so much for the work. I mean, I think that you have left an imprint on Eau Claire, not only on South Hastings Way, but in the culture of the place. So maybe with your folks here in the progressive alley cooperative and in so many other ways in this city, we'll see more of this coming to fruition. I thank you so much for doing that work and for joining me for spirit in action. Thank you, Mark. This is a tremendous program. Of course, community radios is the way we get the word out to each other and, and how we really push the envelope. So thanks very much. You'll find links to Jeremy Gregert and the various organizations he's active with the Chippewa Valley Transit Alliance Wisconsin bike fed.org, clear visual Claire and Eau Claire climate action now. There are links to all of these on northern spirit radio.org. Thanks to Jeremy for all the work he does, and also to Cassie Cassius and Zon Moy for production assistance for this program. In coming weeks for spirit in action, we'll speak with guests involved in cooperative and local business, a guest who served as a Florida judge discovering the complexities of sitting on the bench. Other guests who are exploring the spiritual callings and leadings of care for our planet, and a couple who've dedicated half a century to concerns like war tax resistance, the Middle East, and much more. There's a lot to look forward to in spirit in action. With Jeremy Gregert's work with the Eau Claire climate action now in mind, we'll close this edition of spirit in action with some reggae music by Niora. The song is global warming. See you next week for spirit in action. Global warming, the cry is out, the earth is getting hotter without a doubt, the glaciers are melting in the north and south, our lives are about to change. There is only one way to survive this, you've got to purify your body, get rid of toxins, pray unto the father who lives within the ego you have to tame. Survival is definitely for the fittest. It's nothing you get the money or the fame the quickest, just according to your actions and the way you live it. That is all the most I gotta give it. The sea level is rising, wash the table at turn, plus the ring of fire on the coastal regions will burn, check the kind of food you eat and type of drinks you can't zoom, listen up to the lyrics in a little tune. Microorganisms are getting replaced, from the mountain to the sea it is a leaf or a itch, it's a time of revelation prophesied by the sea, the sergea is the reason why you are mean. The heat beneath the ocean, it's a ring or rickion, attitude inside of people out of context and limb, it's the signs of the times of what's surprising news, things are occurring in sets of tools. Global warming the cries out, the earth is getting hotter without a doubt, the glaciers are melting in the north and south, our lives are about to change. There is only one way to survive this, you've got to purify your body, get rid of toxins, pray unto the philosophy I will live within, the ego you have to tame. The hotter the earth, the more bacteria spread, many more will have to suffer plenty more, I'll go dead, another present on the future, no dramatic event, perfect here, shuntime is so intense. Trucks will not be able to get supplies to you, it's so obvious my people, you must go your own food, don't depend upon the system, you'll end up getting screwed. This a one, you're for sure it is for true, people must experience a radical shift, so they know living in lubities that evenly give, in climatic history of damn things written in it. Oh, the dirt, consciousness, we are digging, yo, amazing to the people is the words of the king, once you disobey in principle, you're neckagoring, love your neighbor as yourself, I love the natural living. So it was in the beginning, global warming, the cries out, the earth is getting hotter without a doubt, the glaciers are melting in the north and south, our lives are about to change. There is only one way to survive this, you've got to purify your body, get rid of toxins, pray unto the father who lives within, the ego you have to tame. From a long time, we're wondering if we stop the pollution, now they must crumble for solution. Our climate has been true to much alteration, with government misinformiation. The greenhouse gases like EHFC, under greenhouse gases like PFC, are so eyelid generated in variety, brought about by this industrial society. So tap into the liquid diet, just try it, experiment the raw food life, it's so nice, ingest organic, don't panic, touch unwanted. The trees produce the energy, food the bar types, tap into the fine art of fasting, everlasting, experiment the life of clean air and sunshine, ingest what's better, do better for your structure, the earth produce the foods and the grains with enzymes, global warming, the cries out, the earth is getting hotter without a doubt. The theme music for this program is "Turning of the World", performed by Sarah Thompson. This spirit in action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will know this world alone. With every voice, with every song, we will know this world alone, and our lives will feel the echo of our healing. You