Illustration by Maren Slobody.

You’ve probably heard about the Keystone XL pipeline by now, but you might be a little bit fuzzy on the details.

Maybe you’ve heard that environmentalists have repeatedly called on Pres. Obama to can the 1,700 mile-long pipeline, which would pump roughly 510,000 barrels of oil a day from the tar-sand oil fields in northwestern Canada to refineries in the Gulf of Mexico, due to concerns over oil leaks and the fact that the tar-sands are one of the dirtiest sources of petroleum on the planet.

But maybe you haven’t heard that the only reason Obama even has a say in the matter is because the project would cross the U.S./Canada border, or that the XL’s sister pipeline, which is even longer and runs from Alberta to Illinois, already exists and has had oil flowing through it for three years.

There are plenty of other details I could bore you with, but here’s the thing: the details don’t matter.

What does matter is what the pipeline — and Obama’s decision to either approve or deny it — represents.

Which brings me to another thing you may not have heard about. On Feb. 18, protests were held around the nation denouncing the Keystone XL, in cities from Chicago to San Francisco. Although it didn’t receive much in the way of national media attention, the main event was in Washington D.C., where 40,000 protesters rallied at what’s now being called the “largest ever climate protest in U.S. history.”

The way this protest was covered by conservative media outlets helps to highlight just why the decision over the pipeline is so important. With headlines like “Idiots Converge on Freezing D.C. to Protest Global Warming” and “Bitter Cold Greets Global Warming Protesters,” most of these articles played up the supposed irony inherent in protesting global warming during cold weather.

And they’re far from the only ones using day-to-day weather patterns as the basis of their belief, or lack thereof, in global warming.

A study released earlier this month found American’s attitudes towards global warming change with the weather — with more people identifying as believers and more media outlets publishing stories on global warming in months with very hot or cold weather, and less in gentler months.

But this just helps to illustrate a key fact about climate change and one major reason why it’s so hard to make believers out of skeptics: “Climate change is not a breaking story,” said Simon Donner, a climate scientist and the study’s author.

In fact, global temperatures haven’t increased at all in the last 10 years, a fact that has led many skeptics of global warming to claim that there’s nothing to worry about.

But in doing so they completely miss the point: Climate change and global warming are only understandable in the context of the long term.

They take place over decades and their effects are an intricate and interlocking series of events that at times can seem outright contradictory — like the Midwest experiencing one of the most severe droughts on record followed immediately by one of the most extreme snowstorms on record, as is happening right now.

Plus, if you go back a hundred years there has in fact been a clear and relatively steady rise in global temperature. It’s only when you zoom in and look at it in terms of days, months or handfuls of years that the picture seems haphazard or open to interpretation.

And this is exactly why Obama’s decision on the Keystone XL is so important. If he denies the pipeline it will send the most tangible and unequivocal message to date that the United States is taking climate change seriously and not changing its mind on a day-to-day basis.

It will send the message that, in the long-term, even projects as large and expensive as this one are not worth sacrificing the well-being of our planet.

Obama has been talking a lot about climate change in the last few months. By moving from rhetoric to action he’ll be demonstrating to Americans and to the rest of the world that the thousands upon thousands of reports and statistics released thus far on global warming demand solutions as well as our undivided attention — both now and in the future.

And before I go any further, a quick word about some of those statistics.

While it’s true that global temperatures haven’t increased since 2000, it’s also true that last May marked “the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10^99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe,” said Bill McKibben, a prominent climate change spokesman, journalist and environmentalist, in a Rolling Stone article.

It’s also true that last July was the hottest month ever recorded in the United States, that last summer saw the lowest level of ice ever recorded in the Arctic and that superstorm Sandy was the largest hurricane ever recorded to form over the Atlantic.

Which is why it’s besides the point that it still got cold this winter, or that global temperatures haven’t risen in 10 years, or that we’ll most likely have some pretty mild months in between the extreme ones.

The point is climate change is happening, humans are causing it and unless we can learn to engage with it on a long-term basis and factor it into our short-term decisions, by the time we’re ready to act it will be too late.

The specifics of the Keystone XL Pipeline don’t matter much in the grand scheme of things, but the message Obama’s decision will send absolutely does.

By saying no, Obama will be taking the all-important first step towards putting the big picture into perspective and finally acknowledging that climate change trumps any narrow, short-term understanding of what’s best for ourselves, our nation and our planet.

Students voiced their support for UC Santa Cruz service workers outside of the Cowell/Stevenson and College Nine/Ten dining halls on Feb. 27. Photo Courtesy of Victoria Salgado.

As negotiations continued for a new UC service worker contract, UC Santa Cruz workers rallied in front of the Cowell/Stevenson and College Nine/Ten dining halls. Held on Feb. 27, the actions were two of many organized by the UC service worker’s union, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME 3299), across the 10-campus system.

“We take care of you — UC take care of us!” picket signs read as UCSC dining hall workers and students united to demand greater respect as UC employees.

A critical component of the discussion at the bargaining table, hosted at UC Davis, is the issue of pension plans and retiree health benefits.

The UC recently proposed a two-tier pension and retiree health benefit plan, which would increase all service worker persion contributions by 1-2 percent of wages, and raise the minimum age of retirement from 50 to 55 for employees hired after July 1 of this year.

As part of ongoing discontent with worker treatment, AFSCME 3299 organizer for UCSC Rebecca Gilpas also spoke about larger issues at hand.

“UC is the third largest employer in California, so they have the power to increase or decrease the standard of life,” Gilpas said. “But you’re told that if you don’t like it,  there’s another person in line — get out. Shame!”

Dining hall worker and longtime AFSCME activist Maria Padilla spoke of environmental working conditions at the dining halls that students can see.

“Every year, it seems like more and more students come to the dining halls and we have just the same amount of workers,” Padilla said.

Photo Courtesy of Victoria Salgado.

Director of housing services David Keller and two assistant managers of employee and labor relations watched the rally from a short space away. Keller said they had no control over the contract negotiations themselves and that they were in attendance as part of their job.

The rally also focused on students’ connection to dining hall workers. Of the roughly 40 individuals present at both rallies, about half were students. Similar to the Jan. 31 action, in which scores of students and employees came out, a Facebook event was organized by the Student Labor Action Project.

Organizing director of the Student Union Assembly and former student dining hall worker Kevin Huang led chants at the rally and criticized dining hall hiring practices in a later interview with City on a Hill Press.

“The administration is definitely overcompensating [the need] to hire new full-time staff by hiring part-time student workers,” Huang said. “We’re not as trained — we don’t have the time to fully commit to a full-time job like a service worker from AFSCME.”

Huang added that it was heartening to see so many workers in attendance.

“It was really powerful to see the workers themselves step out and show some courage in urging their employer [to grant] respect and dignity in the workplace,” Huang said.

Photo courtesy of Irene O’Connell.

Often great art comes from outrage — at least it does for Irene O’Connell, a fourth-year art and Latin American and Latino studies major at Cowell college.

O’Connell was a main organizer for a project to repaint the Upper Campus water tanks along with Brandon Hayward, a creative writing and poetry major at Kresge, and other UCSC students. The repainted tanks show a series of murals designed by O’Connell that criticize the university’s proposed Long Range Development Plan (LRDP).

According to the website, voteondesalsc.org, the plan would construct three million square feet of new buildings, including two new colleges, on 240 acres of what is currently a natural reserve for the campus.

O’Connell is particularly worried that the plan, which intends to accommodate up to 19,500 students by 2020, will jeopardize UCSC’s commitment to promoting sustainable development of several vital natural resources.

“When you think about bringing in all those students, you have to think about water and energy,” O’Connell said. “We’re in a water crisis.”

The repainting project was inspired by the Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCO) future hearing on Dec. 5, where a decision will most likely be reached on whether or not the city’s water services should be extended into UCSC’s Upper Campus for its proposed expansion under the LRDP.

O’Connell wanted to have the repainting completed before the LAFCO hearing on Dec. 5 to call attention to the future of Upper Campus because if the LAFCO approves this water service extension, construction will start.

Photo courtesy of Irene O’Connell.

“I had been thinking a lot about some of the incongruencies in official campus language and action, and I wanted to make sure people were at least talking about it,” O’Connell said.

After the LAFCO hearing on Dec. 5, the group of artists plans to modify the mural in order to include their opinions on the outcome of the decision.

The current mural art responds to several themes: “desalination, respect for nature, and the UC’s commitment to ‘sustainability,’” O’Connell said.

O’Connell sees her role in the repainting not just as an artist, but also as an activist who wants to spark new discussion and debate.

“I found this as an opportunity to realize visual art as a vehicle for raising awareness around an important issue that affects everyone,” O’Connell said.

Illustration by Christine Hipp

The University of California announced on Sept. 26 it would agree to pay roughly $1 million for the settlement of a lawsuit filed over a UC Davis campus demonstration gone awry last November.

The 21 plaintiffs are expected to receive $30,000 each as compensation, as well as a written apology from UC Davis Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi, according to a document released by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The ACLU represented the plaintiffs in the settlement.

The university agreed to pay an additional $250,000 in legal fees, and set aside another $100,000 for any individual involved who can prove they were subjected to unlawful arrest and/or excessive force, according to the ACLU website.

The settlement comes roughly 10 months after the release of a viral video depicting Lt. John Pike, a former UC Davis Police Department officer, pepper-spraying students protesting against tuition hikes, university privatization and the treatment of University of California, Berkeley demonstrators on Nov. 18, 2011.

Lt. Pike, who was ultimately fired, acted in response to the students’ refusal to disperse following the declaration of the protest as unlawful assembly.

“What we hope to do with this settlement is cause structural changes to the university, so that it will not just tolerate but encourage free speech on campus,” said ACLU lawyer Michael Risher to the ABC News.

That’s Ken Foster. The soft-spoken son of two Quaker parents, he has lived in Santa Cruz his whole life and in 1985 completed an apprenticeship with the UC Santa Cruz Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems (CASFS). Now in his 50s, Foster runs Terra Nova Ecological Landscaping, which specializes in creating “beautiful, ecologically-based living environments for public and private lands using permaculture techniques.”

When he bought his Westside home in 1999, Foster wanted to create a space that would serve as a living, breathing example of those techniques in action. For the last three years, however, he has been fighting to keep it.

“Picture this: The economy goes south and your business is flat-lined. I had to start making some tough decisions,” Foster said. “I had to make the choice of either keeping the business alive or making payments on my mortgage.”

On the advice of several friends, Foster decided to stop paying his mortgage until he could get a loan modification to keep his business afloat. Foster thought it sounded like a reasonable idea at the time, but over the past three years, he became so disillusioned with the process that he decided to take action.

Foster is a member of the Occupy Santa Cruz (OSC) Foreclosure Working Group (FWG). Formed shortly after the OSC camp at the courthouse was taken down, the Santa Cruz FWG is one of a number of similar groups cropping up in cities across the nation — from Tucson, Ariz. to Louisville, Ky. — all working to address and bring attention to fraudulent foreclosure practices.

Sitting in his bedroom and looking out over the backyard he has spent the last 13 years cultivating, Foster recounts a speech he gave in front of a Chase bank on March 11 during a rally organized by the FWG.

“So now, picture this: You start applying for a loan modification, and applying and reapplying, and applying and reapplying, over and over, for two years,” Foster said. “And then, November of last year, the house was foreclosed on and a trustee sale date was set for later that month. So I called them and said, ‘What’s up? You guys just set a date to sell my house five days from now.’”

Foster’s mortgage had been securitized, bundled up in a package with thousands of other mortgages and sold to an unknown investor. Chase no longer owned the mortgage it had issued to him, and as result it was no longer their call on whether or not to accept his petition for a loan modification. However, this last bit of information was only revealed to Foster after he had spent two years in negotiation with Chase, trying to get the loan modification.

“For 24 months, I talked to them,” Foster said. “They’d say, ‘Talk to this guy, get this form, we lost this, send us another,’ and then when it’s all over they say, ‘Well, your investor doesn’t do modifications.’”

Foster is not alone. Since 2007, there have been over 6,000 foreclosures in Santa Cruz County and over 8 million nationwide. A recent article by the Huffington Post found that the length of the foreclosure process nationwide has nearly tripled since 2007, going from an average of 253 days then to an average of 653 days now.

As these foreclosures make their way through the courts, they’ve ignited a series of legal battles at both the local and statewide levels, culminating in a $26 billion settlement last year among the five largest banks in the country and the attorney generals of 49 states.

Most of these foreclosures have their origin in mortgage-backed bonds, which lay at the heart of the recent financial crisis. In order to create these bonds, tens of millions of individual mortgages like Foster’s were packaged into groups, or “pools,” and then sold as investments.

This was made possible by the creation of the Mortgage Electronic Registration System (MERS) in 1995, “an innovative process that simplifies the way mortgage ownership and servicing rights are originated, sold and tracked,” according to its website. Until MERS, it was necessary to record on paper each time the deed to a house and its accompanying mortgage was sold, and to pay a fee to the county in which the sale occurred, a slow and potentially costly process when dealing with millions of mortgages.

To achieve its trademarked slogan of “Process Loans, Not Paperwork,” MERS allowed parties trading in mortgage-backed bonds to do all of the necessary record-keeping instantly and electronically. When the housing bubble burst in late 2006 and homeowners started going into foreclosure en masse, however, it became apparent that there were problems with tracking down who actually owned the titles of the mortgages that had gone through MERS. In addition, the MERS system greatly reduced judicial oversight of the foreclosure process.

“Given the numerous problems I see in nearly every non-judicial foreclosure case I preside over,” wrote Owen Panner, a federal judge in Oregon, in a ruling last year, “a procedure relying on a bank or trustee to self-assess its own authority to foreclose is deeply troubling to me,” he wrote.

Due to these legal and technical problems, delays and a lack of communication between banks and frustrated homeowners have become commonplace. Furthermore, a series of recent audits and lawsuits have thrown into question the legality of many of the loans processed by MERS, and by extension the foreclosures associated with them.

An audit last month by San Francisco Assessor-Recorder Phil Ting found that out of 400 recent foreclosures, 84 percent contained what appeared to be clear violations of the law, according to an article by the Associated Press.

Following last year’s $26 billion settlement with the banks, California attorney general Kamala Harris recently proposed a set of legislation, titled the “Homeowner’s Bill of Rights,” which would give greater protection to homeowners facing foreclosure. One of the proposed laws would put an end to “dual-track foreclosures,” referring to the practice of banks saying they are negotiating a loan modification while simultaneously moving forward on a foreclosure, much like what happened to Ken Foster.

Given the scale of the issue in Santa Cruz and across the nation, several members of OSC decided to get together and see what they could do about it.

“When the OSC camp was taken down and the dome was taken out and all of that, it became clear that we were going to have to approach things in a different way,” said Joy Hinz, a founding member of the FWG. “And so foreclosures seemed like the thing that was the most egregious and the most obvious to me, the thing that needed immediate work. So we formed the [Foreclosure] Working Group and started thinking about what we could do and how we could make a difference.”

Starting with a handful of OSC members, the FWG now has about 20 regulars who meet weekly to discuss foreclosures and plan ways of addressing the issue at the county level. Hinz sees moving forward on foreclosures as an essential part of Occupy’s overall goal.

“Many Occupy groups have done the same thing, so it’s actually a national thing, starting a foreclosure working group,” Hinz said. “And [they’re] moving forward on having foreclosures be a very significant part of what they’re doing, perhaps even the tip of the spear.”

Their first course of action was to start gathering signatures for a petition to Santa Cruz County Sheriff Wowak, asking that he abstain from carrying out evictions until the foreclosures he’s enforcing can be shown to be legal. The FWG is currently planning to meet with Wowak within the next week to discuss this.

Another plan has been to address the County Board of Supervisors and ask them to impose a moratorium on foreclosures in Santa Cruz until they have been subjected to the type of audit performed by Ting in San Francisco.

While the supervisors haven’t gone so far as to impose a moratorium, they have pledged their support of the issue. On March 6, John Leopold, First District Supervisor, announced that he would direct the Santa Cruz County District Attorney and the Santa Cruz County Administrator’s Officer to look into what could be done by the County to fight fraudulent foreclosures. They are due to report back to the Board of Supervisors on April 10.

Leopold also pledged his support of the proposed “Homeowners Bill of Rights,” and has asked the county’s legislative delegation to draft a letter supporting the bill, while also urging that the state laws “not prevent further action by local governments interested in enacting additional programs of support for vulnerable homeowners.”

“We have a crisis on our hands,” Leopold said. “I’ve been looking into it, and it’s a very difficult issue to address at the county level, but we need to do something.”

Ernesto Munoz, another member of the FWG, is well versed in those difficulties. A graduate of Cuyo University in Argentina with a degree in accounting and a doctorate in economics, he’s talked with Leopold at length about measures it might be feasible for the county to take, but has seen several ideas that appear promising be scuttled by complicated bureaucracy. This has led him to focus his efforts on more immediate concerns.

“When the crisis came, I started by giving some conferences explaining the economics of the financial crisis,” Munoz said. “But then I decided to do something practical. I had heard that there were a lot of people in Watsonville losing homes; I am a Spanish speaker, so I found my way there. I went to a meeting at a church, and there were like 40 or 50 families there. They were desperate, disoriented, the banks were turning them down, they were being abused by people who charged them money and didn’t help them, so I decided to start helping.”

Munoz said that many families in Watsonville were fighting a war on two fronts. In addition to dealing with the complicated process of getting a loan modification, many residents were being sold faulty legal advice by unscrupulous lawyers and realtors, who charged upfront fees and then either did nothing or quickly disappeared.

“For many people, especially in Watsonville, trying to seek help is like walking through a minefield,” Munoz said.

After becoming a Certified Foreclosure Counselor, Munoz began providing free assistance to families facing foreclosure in Watsonville. Working with Communities Organized for Relational Power in Action (COPA), Munoz has helped over 50 families receive loan modifications since then, mostly by guiding them through the process of filling out Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) forms.

HAMP is a federal program designed to help homeowners who are behind on their mortgages reach an agreement with their bank that allows them to keep their house and renegotiate their mortgage. Still, Munoz said, the program isn’t quite what it’s cracked up to be.

“Technically, [the process] shouldn’t take more than three weeks. In reality, it takes on average about a year,” Munoz said. “The banks, I would say, drag their feet. In my opinion, they are basically only doing the loan modifications because of pressure from the Treasury Department and the media. But the program was supposed to help 4.5 million people and so far they have given loan modifications to 900,000. So they have set up this system where things go very slowly.”

Mark Reed, a member of Occupy Monterey who has been working closely with the FWG in Santa Cruz, said he can attest to that.

“It’s very frustrating. Because you actually get all the paperwork together, and you know, we had it kind of planned out, we had the whole package,” Reed said. “And then they keep on losing paperwork and sometimes I think it’s on purpose, because it’s odd that they’d lose one piece out of all the other stuff that you sent. And then they need more paperwork and this and that, it’s always constant delaying action on the bank’s part.”

Reed went into foreclosure in 2010, after the construction company he’d been working at for 22 years made the decision to close its doors. After nearly a year of back and forth phone calls and faxing of paperwork between Reed and his bank, he was granted a three-month trial period, after which he would receive his loan modification.

“I made all my payments the first three months,” Reed said. “Then they said it was going to be a six-month trial period. I made all those payments. Then they said it was going to be a nine-month trial period.”

Reed said his experience, like Foster’s, has inspired him to speak out and try to do something about the state of the foreclosure process.

Reed participated in the same FWG organized march as Foster on March 11, and told his story to the crowd assembled outside of Bank of America that day. Numbering about 200, the marchers made their way through downtown Santa Cruz carrying signs and banners, and stopped in front of banks to put “foreclosure notices” on them.

The outcome of this and the other measures that the FWG is working on remain uncertain for now, like the petition to Sheriff Wowak and the county’s ongoing investigation into foreclosures. Reed and Foster’s situations are in a similar place.

Reed is still waiting for his trial period to end and his loan modification to go through. Foster is trying to arrange a sale of his house while he continues to negotiate with Chase, in the hopes that his investor might change its mind.

Munoz is confident that progress is being made.

“First of all, whether Occupy accomplishes any one specific strategy, is not that important. What is important is the pressure,” Munoz said. “The office manager here, Bank of America in Santa Cruz, he has no real power, but he can bring it to the central offices and say ‘Hey, I am having this pressure here.’ See, and if there is Occupy in Denver and Occupy in New York and Occupy in Reno, that are asking for the same, then the pressure starts building up.”