Harriet Tubman And Johanna Dominguez

I'll probably get back to the real posting soon, but just two things for today to pass along to my readers:

1. Harriet Tubman is getting a shout out today on Google's front page.  She is extremely important not only for persons of color in this country (or the world in general) but also for women who long struggled for enfranchisement.  Like many other fine Black people of the 19th century, she also contributed to the development and enrichment of cultural and intellectual life in central New York, namely in Auburn.  She is honored in statues and memorials in many places, and at two National Park sites, one being Women's Rights National Historical Park in nearby Seneca Falls, NY, and the other in the newly created Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument in Church Creek, MD.  In nearby Cambridge, MA is a dedicated museum to Harriet run by the Harriet Tubman Organization.

The two areas offer the visitor a major contrast between the sides of the abolition struggle.  Safe, tranquil central New York is and was largely agrarian, domestically serene and proper, and somewhat removed from the rest of the major stress areas on the Underground Railroad.  It was close to the safety of Upper Canada in either Niagara or Kingston, and by and large the reception given to liberated Black people was much warmer than elsewhere in the North.  The eastern shore of Maryland, however, is and was still relatively wild and swampy, as well as deep enough into the Slave States to make this perhaps one of the most stressful parts of an escape to freedom further north.  I'll let such distinctions speak for themselves, with the mention that swamps are pretty amazing places when one is not running in terror.

2. A friend of mine has recently started diving into a blog project regarding human-induced climate change.  While I often teeter carefully on the political abyss here on American Voyages, I have not been shy to present blatantly obvious evidence, admittedly at face value, that something is going on with our planet.  I present her post and take on what is happening in the Albertan Boreal forest and Boreal-Prairie Interface because it is very scary.  Factually speaking, the Boreal forest is perhaps the last great wilderness remaining on the planet, doing all the wonderful things that forests do in a very vast scale.  In North America, the Boreal world connects the east and the west by means of the all-encompassing north in a series of ecosystems and biomes that bear similarities enough that one cannot otherwise tell the difference in some landscapes if they were standing in Alaska or Labrador.  I roughly consider the Boreal world here to be found wherever the shaggy but noble Black Spruce (Picea Mariana) can be found in the wild:

Yes, even down in the Poconos or in rare remnants in southern Michigan or nearby Southern Ontario.  Where one finds Black Spruce, one finds cool, damp conditions that even the hardiest temperate species can't tolerate.

That said, I do confess to another bias, notably that I am pretty much from this world of spruce, bogs, granite, sand, Ericaceae of extraordinary abundance, the Aurora Borealis, a lot of Cree, Moose, and tons of other amazing things.

Near Deux-Riviers, Ontario.  This is a more southerly example of the Boreal world.

Passions and home spirit aside, the boreal world is notable for not only still being generally unbroken by the hand of humans, but also packs in a ton of carbon and pretty much serves as one of the biggest positive storage spaces in the planetary carbon cycle.  Start digging up fossil fuel from and burning or otherwise destroying any part of the Boreal landscape and there are going to be very consequences for the rest of the world.  Natural consequences aside, the Cree are also fighting an uphill battle over the poisoning of their Albertan homelands.  While this would not be the first time a treaty has been broken or bended between the First and Second Born, uh, come on, we can surely do better by this stage in the game?

Anyway, I could go on for days about this subject, and I probably will as things get worse.  I consider the Tar Sands issue to be something to go to legitimate war over.  In the meantime, I'm passing a long Johanna's article because anything that exposes this travesty for what it is worth is definitely getting shared:

Click here for the blog!

I'm excited to see what she can do actually.  While I tend to try and link to other blogs with North American significance, and Johanna is definitely more of a citizen of the world, this piece is not only covering continental news but news with a global impact and is definitely worth broadening the horizons of our coverage here.