"So it's just a great joy to be passing this guitar made from the wood of an 800-year-old tree around to musicians and asking them to play a song of resistance or celebration. And that's what we're going to do at Climate Aid: The Voice of the Forest. We're going to have it be an annual event like Farm Aid. And we want it to be big. We want it to be Woodstock in its pivot point. The way the Children's Trust court case was pivotal, the way this Black Ram court case we had and won was pivotal.

We want Climate Aid to be a celebration. And this one guitar exploring the question: Can one tree save a forest? Can one song save a forest? And we think the answer is yes. We believe it will be. What we want to do with the forest that the guitar came from is establish it as a climate refuge, a place dedicated to storing as much carbon and long-term safekeeping as possible.

We want the climate refuge to be really big. We want it to store a ton of carbon. We want it to be a focal point for increased scientific and artistic inquiry. We've brought in the world's leading climate scientists, and they've analyzed it, and they're proposing studies that should happen there. We've brought in our country's leading artists and they have experienced it and responded to it in their own way. We've had performance artists come and play music in the forest. So we want to establish the nation's first climate refuge. There is no such designation. We want it to be in Black Ram. This forest that almost got erased, a forest that was a thousand years old and almost went away. But we're getting a second chance. We saved it. Now we want to preserve it for another thousand years to study it, but we don't want to stop there. We want the government to establish a series of climate refuges all along the northern tier of the United States. What we think of as a necklace of green, a curtain of green. And from there to go around the globe, across northern Europe and northern Asia, and back around to Alaska. The amount of carbon that can be kept safely sequestered there is extraordinary. The numbers are almost unbelievable."

Rick Bass, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for his memoir Why I Came West, was born and raised in Texas, worked as a petroleum geologist in Mississippi, and has lived in Montana's Yaak Valley for almost three decades. His short fiction, which has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Esquire, and The Paris Review, as well as numerous times in Best American Short Stories, has earned him The Story Prize, multiple O. Henry Awards and Pushcart Prizes in addition to NEA and Guggenheim fellowships.

He’s an organizer and speaker at Climate Aid: The Voice of the Forest, a fundraiser event to benefit the grassroots environmental movement of Protect Ancient Forests & The Montana Project. Featuring Maggie Rogers and more great performers and speakers. The evening will advance the efforts to protect the Black Ram forest by designating the region as the nation’s first Climate Refuge. Portland, Maine, on Sunday, Oct. 15 at 7 p.m. ET, at the Merrill Auditorium. Tickets available at the Merrill’s box office and online at PortTIX.com.

www.rickbass.net
www.protectancientforests.org
www.montanaproject.org
www.PortTIX.com

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