Keeping with my vow to limit my political junky tendencies, I find myself reading more and more non-political stories these days, watching more helpful youtube videos and really diving into Climate Change Solutions these days. I’m going to try and post more on Climate Solutions as time permits.
Meanwhile, here are a couple of stories I read this morning I thought I would share before I dive into my day.
The kids are all right:
A Portland high school student has Oregon governor’s ear on environmental justice
At 6 a.m. on a Tuesday last July, Danny Cage was packing for a camping trip with friends when his cellphone rang. The caller ID flashed “Salem.”
He picked up: The governor’s office was on the line. A staffer for Gov. Kate Brown told Cage, 17 at the time, that he had been nominated to serve on a state board, the just-revamped Environmental Justice Council.
Cage had never heard of the council. The Grant High School student had never even been to Salem.
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Cage, now a senior at Grant, became the state’s youngest environmental justice commissioner – and a fresh voice on a group that advises the governor and the state’s natural resource agencies how to identify and help communities around the state that experience disproportionate environmental harms from such things as wildfires, diesel pollution and nitrate-laced drinking water.
“I was sitting in a room with people who have been the directors of an agency or of a nonprofit, who have their master’s or doctorate degrees, when I’m an 18-year-old high school student who has none of that professional experience,” said Cage. “But I also knew that my voice matters, just as much, if not more, because of my personal experience.”
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His awakening to the climate crisis came gradually. Since he was a child, Cage had heard talk of a warming planet but initially dismissed climate activists as “vegans and hippies,” he said.
That impression changed during his freshman year when he watched Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg’s short film, which began: “This is not a drill … We are living in the beginning of a mass extinction. Our climate is breaking down. Children like me are giving up their education to protest. But we can still fix this. You can still fix this.”
I live in a place where finding fossils is…well if not commonplace, frequent. The big news for us a few years ago was when they found a torosaurus near my old neighborhood. That was fun to drive by and watch them excavate it.
Turns out there are rules for these things and former Florida man did the right thing:
What do you do if you stumble across a significant dinosaur fossil in the woods? Ask this guy.
Colorado Springs rock hunter went out looking for geodes but found a dinosaur’s tibia insteadKate Johnson, a volunteer with the Western Interior Paleontological Society, cleans mud from a tibia bone of a sauropod dinosaur on Jan. 27 in Cañon City. (Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for America)His quest for a geode took Chad McCarty into the hills of Fremont County a mere five months after he moved to Colorado.
He was drawn to the state from his native Florida because the geological diversity would allow him to better pursue his passion of rockhounding.
But on this October day something else caught his attention — something that looked like bone. He dug around it a bit, enough to determine that it was a bone. And a large one at that.
“Then I covered it up and continued to look for geodes, because that’s what I was focused on that day,” said McCarty, a 31-year-old Colorado Springs bartender who is working toward pursuing his metal sculpture art full time.
He returned three times to dig around the bone.
“It was a bonding experience,” he said with a wide smile. “Part of me wanted to keep it. It would look great on my mantle. But my conscience wouldn’t let me do that.”
He called the Bureau of Land Management and reported his discovery.
They worked to keep the dino bones in the county where they were found and it’s been a boon for the small museum and the area:
Acouple dozen children crowded along the roping that held the public about 3 feet from the new lab bench, their eyes laser focused as the technicians cut through the plaster to reveal the bones.
McCarty had been introduced to a loud round of applause, and he was assisting Broussard with the fibula. WIPS volunteers worked on the tibia. When the plaster came off, the wide-eyed youngsters grinned and applauded — along with the hundreds of adults in the room.
For the next few hours the crowd filed between the roping and table, taking photos and asking questions. More people arrived at the museum to take a look. No one rushed and the volunteers were eager to talk about how dinosaur bones are prepared. How to tell the dirt from bone. How to harden the cracks to keep the bone from falling apart.
Read the entire story about the full find and the reveal here, again worth your time.
Good News: Finding Fossils and Climate ActivismPost + Comments (36)