A ball python in Fry’s Spring took a liking to an area outside Chris Bailey’s basement door.
Chris Bailey
Chris Bailey was a little unnerved to see a snake she thought might be a copperhead hanging around her basement door in Fry’s Spring three times over a three-week period.
After checking the Virginia Herpetological Society website, “I figured it wasn’t a copperhead,” she says. “My husband said, this isn’t a Virginia snake.” With a little Googling, they deduced it was a ball python.
She asked on the Nextdoor website whether anyone had lost a python, and learned that another one had been spotted in the neighborhood—and killed.
Bailey didn’t want to go that route. So she called the Wildlife Center in Waynesboro, which doesn’t keep non-native species, but it referred her to the Blue Ridge Reptile Rescue in Fairfield, near Lexington.
Virginia Military Institute biology professor Emily Lilly founded the reptile rescue about three years ago, when her daughter’s bearded dragon needed a bigger tank. Lilly saw an ad for someone selling one, and when she went to pick up the tank, she noticed a scrawny bearded dragon in the sand, which the seller said she could have.
“That was our first rescue,” says Lilly.
The ball python is one of the least aggressive snakes, says Lilly, and it got its name because it curls up in a ball when threatened.
She instructed Bailey on how to nab the creature, which was moving slowly because of the cold. (Had it actually been a copperhead, Lilly’s advice would have been, “Just let it be.”)
Bailey threw a towel over the python, which she guesses is about three feet long. She deposited it into a non-airtight Rubbermaid tote storage box, and drove it over to Waynesboro to meet Lilly.
The next step is to get the snake healthy, says Lilly. “She had some scratches—maybe she was attacked by a cat.” And then she’ll look for an adoptive family. “We’re run just like any other animal shelter.”
If Bailey had not recognized the animal was not a threat and needed rescue, says Lilly, “it would have frozen. It could have been a disposed pet. It was definitely born in captivity.”
Most of the rescue reptiles are left in apartments or surrendered by owners, says Lilly. “It’s bad for the environment to dump a pet,” she says. “The last thing I want anyone to do is dump them.”
And Bailey, although not a snake lover, didn’t want the python to die. She has a message for would-be ball python owners: “People, take care of your snakes. A ball python can live 30 years in captivity. It’s a long-term commitment.”
The Rivanna River flooded in May and edged near homes in Woolen Mills.
Skyclad ap
But wait, there’s more on the ballot
While congressional candidates are getting all the attention, they’re not the only choices that need to be made at the polls November 6. Virginia likes to ask voters to weigh in on additions to its constitution, such as the now-unconstitutional marriage-is-between-a-man-and-a-woman amendment. A repeal of that will not appear on the ballot, but there are two other constitutional amendments for voters to consider on Tuesday.
One expands a property-tax exemption to spouses of service members who were killed or totally disabled in action to allow the spouse—as long as he or she does not remarry—to relocate and still claim the exemption. A “yes” on this amendment means approving the exemption.
The second, more controversial amendment, allows localities to offer property tax breaks to owners who make improvements to flood-prone properties. That means people who put money into protecting their property against rising waters can get a real estate tax break.
Critics say such breaks mean people who don’t live on the water are subsidizing the cost of waterfront living for others, and that they encourage building on flood-prone land. Supporters say the tax relief provides an incentive for owners to make expensive fixes to protect their properties.
A “yes” vote on this amendment means you support allowing localities to offer the property tax break.
Earlier this year, Delegate Steve Landes, who represents western Albemarle, voted against the flood amendment in the House because of concerns about the increasing number of constitutional amendments providing “more and more exemptions from property taxes.” But he says he supports both amendments now, and notes that while the flood amendment allows localities to provide this exemption, “it does not require them to do so.”
Quote of the week
“I don’t need thoughts and prayers—I need change.”—Jordan Bridges, a UVA third-year and president of Jewish Voice for Peace, at an October 27 candlelight vigil for the 11 people shot to death in a Pittsburgh synagogue earlier that day, according to the Cavalier Daily.
In brief
Unite the Right organizer Richard Spencer will not be welcome at his alma mater the next four years. Eze Amos
Banned from UVA
Ten people associated with last year’s August 11 march through Grounds are banned from university property for four years. The list includes alum Richard Spencer, whose wife filed for divorce last week, alleging assault; Elliott Kline, aka Eli Mosley, former Identity Evropa leader in charge of Unite the Right security; former Marine Vasillios Pistolis; the Daily Stormer’s Robert “Azzmador” Ray, and four members of California-based Rise Above Movement arrested in early October.
Fields files charge
James Fields, the man charged with driving his car into a crowd on August 12, 2017, killing one person and injuring many others, was allegedly attacked by another inmate at the local jail earlier this month. Fields filed an assault charge against Timothy Ray Brown Jr, but he showed no physical signs of being beaten up at his October 29 motions hearing,
Too young to drink—and buy handguns
Two UVA students filed a lawsuit challenging a federal ban on the sale of handguns to those under 21 (18-year-olds can legally buy rifles and shotguns, but not handguns). Tanner Hirschfeld, 20, and Natalia Marshall, 18, are suing the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, its acting director, Thomas Brandon, and U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, claiming the age limit is unconstitutional.
George Allen’s old house on the block
staff photo
Social Hall, the circa 1814 house once owned by the former Virginia governor and U.S. senator on East Jefferson Street, is for sale for nearly $4 million. Janice Aron bought it in 2006 for $1.1 million, and extensively renovated the 6,500-square-foot manse, which features five bedrooms, a lap pool, and an unparalleled view of Market Street Park and the statue of General Robert E. Lee.
Menace II Society (starring Tyrin Turner and Larenz Tate, above), was directed by twin brothers Allen and Albert Hughes. It premiered at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival when the brothers were only 20 years old. Photo courtesy of VAFF
By A.D. Carson
arts@c-ville.com
I remember, now, waking up the night my aunt came to tell our mother about Tony. My brother and I were asleep in the bedroom of our small apartment. I thought it was a dream, a subconscious thought making its way to the fore, as these things do, taking away our heroes, our security, and exploiting what our minds know to be a better truth about us all: that we’re scared. And not just of death, but, in a certain way, of life as we know it.
Whatever happened to him on that night, for whatever reason, no movie would ever portray Tony as heroic as he was to us. He was an artist; he wrote beautiful poetry; he drew sketches for our grandmother that made her beam with pride. He played sports and made fun of us. He sometimes tickled us too hard. He wrote rhymes and rapped, too. He was 23 years old. I wanted to be just like him.
Menace II Society was released the year our cousin was murdered: ’93. Reports said at around 11pm he was with a group of friends playing cards that September evening when gunmen walked up and fired into the living room. We never needed a movie to tell us what our life was like, but Menace, and similar films, gave us a way to see us and, to an extent, be seen. The Hughes brothers were two years and six days younger than Tony when their film was released.
Allen Hughes will appear at three film screenings over the weekend. Photo courtesy of VAFF
I call my brother between my two conversations with the film’s co-writer and co-director, Allen Hughes. My brother probably still knows all the words to the movie. I imagine it might have been a much scarier prospect years ago, but he is as good at being O-Dog as Larenz Tate. Presently, he is at our mother’s house waiting to pick up my nephew from basketball practice. I tell him about the conversation and this piece I’m working on, and that Hughes says he sees the film as “pseudo-documentary.” A product of “reporting” a reality that contained excessive violence and “a lot of toxic masculinity, in and out,” Hughes says. “The magic of Menace was…it had the immediacy of a documentary because 50 percent of it was improv and 50 percent of the actors never acted before.”
My brother and I talk about our memories of Menace and the time after it was released. (We never saw it in a theater.) I tell him that I plan to write something about the influence of the film on hip-hop. From there we go on an oft-traveled tangent about growing up in central and southern Illinois, and the under-appreciation of the artists of that moment—acts like MC Breed and Top Authority from Flint, Michigan, 8ball & MJG from Memphis, and 2Pac, Spice 1, DJ Quik, and MC Eiht from California. They are the people who seemed more representative of what we thought we knew to be home. It’s far more likely they are the artists the people we looked up to liked.
When we rapped, it was their art we were imitating on our way to creating our own styles. We discuss how different our lives are from our parents’, what responsibilities we have to do things differently, and what, if anything, we currently see of ourselves in the film, until it’s time for him to go, and then I scribble more notes on the back of an envelope in preparation for my call.
“Menace II Society was a film that came out about a group of kids that were influenced,” Hughes tells me. “Like what was happening in Los Angeles at the time was life started imitating art…you know, as far as that gangster-ism shit.” If he were making Menace today, he says, “it would, technically, be more proficient, and I think the writing would be, the narrative…everything would be better in that regard.” (Hughes’ 2017 miniseries for HBO, “The Defiant Ones,” definitely demonstrated this technical proficiency in sight, sound, and storytelling.)
“What wouldn’t be better is the energy of it, the urgency of it,” says Hughes. “The visceral nature that it has is coasting through it. That was made by kids that were the same age as kids that were in the film.”
His remark about Menace as “pseudo-documentary” is part of a larger point, that the film is bookended by “The Defiant Ones,” an actual documentary that, in many ways, culminates in what we might see as hip-hop’s afterlife, after the deaths of Tupac and Biggie, after Death Row, as hip-hop approaches its 50th year. In the series this is marked by the opening of the Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young Academy for Arts, Technology and the Business of Innovation at the University of Southern California, and Dr. Dre donating $10 million for Compton High School’s performing arts center.
“Yeah, that’s why we all gotta stay alive long enough to make some change, you know,” says Hughes.
I wonder what Tony would be doing today if he were still here, if we would talk regularly about music and art. I wonder if he ever got to see Menace. It was out three months before he was killed. I wonder if it would’ve made the same kind of impression on him as it did on me and my brother. I wonder if he would see any of himself in the film. I wonder if, when he was writing raps or sketching in his notebook, he ever thought about making movies or music.
If “hip-hop peaked in the ’90s,” as Hughes says (he clarifies, “Creatively. Not the industry of hip-hop”), then I can’t help but imagine the space people like me and my brother occupy, as creators and consumers, as somewhere between nostalgic for what influenced us and trying to use what we’ve learned, living since then, to make some change. Clearly, we’re no more O-Dog and Caine than we are Hughes or Dr. Dre, but we’re similarly motivated, nonetheless, and perhaps haunted by memories of what we lost, for whatever reasons.
A.D. Carson, Ph.D., is assistant professor of Hip-Hop and the Global South at the University of Virginia.
Allen Hughes will appear at three film screenings this weekend:
Menace II Society Friday, November 2 at 8:30pm, Vinegar Hill Theatre
F for Fake Friday, November 2 at 3:15pm, Vinegar Hill Theatre
“The Defiant Ones” Saturday, November 3 at 7pm, Alamo Drafthouse Cinema
Mountain View Street will be a little darker this holiday season because Jeff Norford will not be putting up his 60,000 lights and 350 inflatables that 15,000 people visited last year.
Martyn Kyle
For more than 20 years, Jeff Norford has staged the brightest holiday light display in town, a must-see on any light tour that’s been visited by thousands of Charlottesvillians. Which is why a collective “oh no” arose when he announced he would not be putting up lights this year.
“I’m tired,” he says. “I don’t ever go anywhere on Christmas and the kids are grown.” Every night from Thanksgiving to New Year’s, Norford would be in front of his Belmont home-turned-holiday-wonderland, welcoming visitors—15,000 last year—who strolled through his collection of Christmas inflatables.
At the news that he was ceasing the holiday tradition, more than 100 people posted their dismay—and their thanks—on his Santa on Mountainview Street Facebook page.
“There’s so much to do and I just don’t have the time and energy,” says Norford, who delivers C-VILLE Weekly and other publications. “People have offered to put it up, but I’d still have to be here.”
“Putting it up” involves 350 inflatables and around 60,000 lights, a chore that takes Norford, who does most of it himself, all of October and November. And then there’s the takedown in January, to put everything into 70 Rubbermaid tubs.
Norford says he spent around $5,000 last year buying new and replacement decorations. “I’m still paying that off,” he says. And his holiday electric bill runs around $2,000 for the season.
JoAnn Robertson has been going to see Norford’s display every Christmas since her 16-year-old daughter was four. “He was always there to greet us,” she says. “He always did it with joy.”
Robertson—and others—want to show their appreciation to Norford. “He has given so much to us.”
“I just need a break,” says Norford, who would like to go to New York for the holidays—or just be able to go see the lights around Charlottesville. But the outpouring of gratitude has touched him.
“I could only read so many posts at a time,” he says, “because they make me cry.”
15,000 people visited Norford’s fantastic display of Christmas lights and inflatables last year.
Larry Sabato’s Center for Politics produced the documentary "Charlottesville," a real-life horror story that took place in August 2017. The movie screens at the Virginia Film Fest on Saturday, November 3, at the Paramount Theater.
Courtesy UVA
The most frightening movie on this year’s Virginia Film Festival schedule doesn’t feature supernatural ghouls, but it had Larry Sabato shaken. Charlottesville is the real-life horror story that took place on UVA’s Grounds and in city streets when white supremacists and neo-Nazis came to town in August 2017.
“We have people and film footage no one else has,” says Sabato, whose Center for Politics produced the documentary. While racism is obviously a theme, “We also focus on the deep-seated anti-Semitism in the white nationalist movement.”
Sabato notes that he didn’t hear any anti-African American chants as the Unite the Righters marched through Grounds.
“It was all about Jews,” he says. The marchers are “obsessed with Nazis. And who would ever believe that in 2018, they would seize on Adolf Hitler as a hero?”
Most shocking for Sabato were the chants: “Jews will not replace us.” “Blood and soil.” And even, “Into the ovens.”
“People were stunned,” says Sabato.
He warns that some of the footage is shocking. And some of it came from Sabato’s cellphone, which he used to film the tiki-torch march through the Lawn, where he lives.
Sabato says he had about 20 minutes notice that the march was not going up University Avenue as Unite the Right organizers had said. August 11 was move-in day on the Lawn. “I was very fearful for the students,” he says—particularly the Jewish and African American students.
He quickly rounded up whomever he could find and hid them in the basement of his Lawn pavilion.
Later that night, he wrote then-president Teresa Sullivan and her husband. “Of my 47 years here,” he recounts, “it was the worst night ever on the Lawn.”
People will find the film disturbing, predicts Sabato. “We didn’t want to put a happy face on it.”
He adds, “You don’t make it go away by ignoring it.”
Charlottesville screens on Saturday, November 3, at 4pm at the Paramount. It was made with the Community Idea Stations and will air on PBS affiliates across the country in early 2019.
The CHS cafeteria was packed October 23 with community members eager to talk about longstanding racial disparities that became a national news story.
Dede Smith
Charlottesville City Schools has opened up a dialogue on racial disparities in its schools, with a survey to parents and a series of community forums, the first of which was held on October 23.
Though data on the black/white gap in city schools—in everything from suspension rates to participation in gifted programs—has existed for decades, the outreach is in response to an October 16 ProPublica/New York Times story spotlighting the district as having one of the biggest racial achievement gaps in the country.
At the forum, hundreds of community members filled Charlottesville High School’s cafeteria, where Charlene Green, manager of the city’s Office of Human Rights, told the crowd: “This is not about holding hands and singing ‘We Are the World,’ because it’s not going to happen. We need to figure out how we’re going to have these difficult conversations and listen to each other.”
In breakout groups, attendees discussed issues like gifted identification and hiring and supporting teachers of color.
Valarie Walker, who grew up in city schools, was in attendance along with her daughter, Trinity Hughes, who was one of the two African American students featured in the Times article.
Walker talked about her own experience as a child at Greenbrier Elementary School, which she enjoyed. “I still talk to my fifth grade teacher to this day,” she says. “We give each other hugs.”
But she also brought up her struggle to get her older daughter enrolled in an advanced course at Charlottesville High School, where she eventually thrived. Trinity, too, is now doing well in Algebra II, the class she could not get into her junior year because she struggled in math as a freshman. “I think it’s just trying to make sure that all kids have opportunities,” Walker says of the changes that need happen. “I think a lot of the kids just get pushed to the back.”
She’s glad the city is offering the forums (a second is scheduled for November 27). “You have to have the community’s input,” she says. And like many attendees, she was encouraged by the conversations happening that night. “When everybody gets together and everybody feels the same way, it makes you feel better.”
John Santoski, a former school board member whose two daughters attended city schools (one is now a teacher at CHS), says it was “good to see so many people come out,” but he’s withholding judgment on the city’s response.
“We’re really good here in Charlottesville at getting together and talking about things,” he says, noting that he was involved in many of these same conversations 25 years ago, when he was on the school board. “Whether there’s really going to be action…the jury’s still out.”
SURVEY SAYS
Initial results from a Charlottesville City Schools survey sent to all parents in the district revealed a glaring gap between the way white parents and black parents experience city schools.
For instance, in response to the statement: “My school values cultural similarities and differences,” 82 percent of white parents, but only 47 percent of black parents, agreed that the schools were moving in the right direction. On all questions, a greater proportion of white respondents rated the schools as moving in the right direction.
At the forum, city schools spokeswoman Beth Cheuk also noted that only 14 percent of respondents identified as black (in a district that’s roughly a third black), a red flag that the schools need to do a better job of reaching out to parents of color.
The Atlantic Coast Pipeline is only one approval away from reality. Construction has already started on its tail ends in West Virginia and North Carolina, and Dominion has applied for permission to start building in Virginia.
Earlier this month, the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality issued the final state approval needed to begin construction on the $6 billion, 600-mile, 42-inch diameter Atlantic Coast Pipeline planned to slice through Nelson County on its way from West Virginia to North Carolina, leaving only one more federal hurdle.
Massive opposition to Dominion Energy’s pipeline has made headlines since the project was proposed in 2014.
So when Governor Ralph Northam held his 2018 Governor’s Summit on Rural Prosperity in Staunton, just two days after the October 19 pipeline permit approval, activists were there to meet him. They say he’s touting “rural prosperity” while “greenwashing” his complicity in environmental destruction.
When Northam was serving as lieutenant governor under Terry McAuliffe in 2014, he sent a letter to DEQ stating that he wanted to make sure all environmental regulations and complaints were thoroughly evaluated, reviewed, and enforced.
“That indicated to a lot of people that he was serious about environmental regulations and making sure DEQ did the job correctly,” says Kirk Bowers, who’s with the Virginia Chapter of the Sierra Club. “Since then, he’s really not followed through on what he said he would do.”
Bowers had been waiting since last spring to know if DEQ would approve the final erosion, sediment control, and stormwater management plans for the pipeline—the permits were granted a few weeks ago.
“It was a bad decision by DEQ based upon what we’re seeing with the Mountain Valley Pipeline,” says Bowers. The MVP is a similar 42-inch natural gas pipeline that’s currently being built from northwestern West Virginia to the southern part of Virginia.
On October 19, the Army Corps of Engineers suspended an MVP permit to build through waterways in two West Virginia counties. It had previously suspended a permit in Virginia, and now the MVP can’t go through any wetland in its path.
More than 500 incidents have been reported during MVP construction, Bowers says, including numerous erosion violations through mountainous areas and steep terrains very similar to those found in Nelson County.
“I strongly contend that the plans [for the ACP] just aren’t going to work and we’re going to have similar problems like we’re seeing in southwest Virginia,” he says.
Among the activists who paid Northam a visit last weekend was Jill Averitt, who has lived on more than 100 acres in Nelson County with her husband and extended family since 2005. Dominion plans to run its pipeline through their Nellysford property, slicing across a large wooded area just yards from her back porch.
She’s invited Northam, who has received $200,000 in donations from Dominion, and Matt Strickler, his secretary of natural resources, “countless times,” to come hear the concerns of landowners. He shook her husband’s hand when running for the Democratic nomination against Tom Perriello—a known ACP opponent who banned campaign contributions from Dominion—and Northam promised to be in touch for a meeting to discuss the pipeline.
“He never followed through with that,” Averitt says. “We have yet to hear from anyone.”
For the first three weekends of October, the Averitts and other activists who oppose the ACP invited the public to their property to camp or visit for a few days of what they call “camptivism,” to learn why Nelson residents are so vehemently fighting to prevent the pipeline’s construction. Approximately 150 attendees heard from environmental experts, impacted landowners, and local historians.
“Northam’s supposed to represent all of us and he couldn’t even give us the courtesy of an hour?” Averitt asks. “He is allowing and participating in this negligent act of allowing these pipelines to be built in the face of every credible source that says they aren’t needed and [are] ill-advised.”
The governor’s own Advisory Council on Environmental Justice has recommended that the pipeline not be built.
At his summit in Staunton, when asked about the ACP, Northam said Virginia is moving in the direction of wind and solar energy, but in the meantime, he approves the usage of traditional energy sources, reports local news station WHSV. His office did not respond to a request for comment.
The pipeline will benefit the environment because it replaces the need for coal with cleaner-burning natural gas, says Aaron Ruby, a spokesperson for Dominion. With the final state approval, he says Dominion is requesting an okay to proceed with full construction in Virginia from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The company has already received a go-ahead in West Virginia and North Carolina, where it’s been building the ACP for months. Dominion expects it to be fully built by the end of next year.
“This project is all about building a better economic and environmental future for our region,” says Ruby. “Public utilities are depending on it to meet the growing energy needs of consumers and businesses.”
Says Averitt, “If these pipelines are developed, we would create a 600-mile development dead zone around them and jeopardize thousands of rural homeowners’ water along the route. I’d like Northam to explain to me how that is good for rural economies.”
Mt. Zion First African Baptist Church performed a mortgage burning October 28 for its Lankford Avenue facility.
Martyn Kyle
A mortgage burning is a 20th-century ritual that doesn’t occur much anymore, partly because few Americans stay in their homes long enough to pay off a mortgage. That’s not the case for Mt. Zion First African Baptist Church, which has been around since 1867 and torched its deed of trust October 28.
When the historic church moved from its Ridge Street location—now the Music Resource Center—to a new facility on Lankford Avenue in 2003, it had a $1.2 million, 25-year mortgage. “We paid it off early,” says the Reverend Alvin Edwards. “Our members have been really good about giving.” That was cause for celebration for the 390-member congregation. And fire extinguishers were handy, assures Edwards.
Patrick Clancy (right), pictured with his brother and mother, is suing the Monticello High athletic director and a former soccer coach for allegedly not heeding guidelines that could have prevented him from suffering exertional heat illness.
Eze Amos
“The rules were in place that day, and they were not followed,” says Emily Clancy, Patrick’s mother.
The 8am practice July 21, 2017, was on a National Weather Service heat advisory day. By the time Patrick finished practice at 10am on a synthetic turf field, which can up the heat index 35 to 55 degrees, according to the Virginia High School League, he had stopped sweating, had a headache, and could barely talk.
His brother Ryan, who also was at the practice and felt ill, drove Patrick home. His mother knew immediately that Patrick was in trouble because he couldn’t stand, he was throwing up, and his fingers turned blue. When a shower and cold bath failed to cool him down, she took him to the emergency room.
Emily Clancy is convinced that if she hadn’t been home, Patrick would have died.
And the response she says she got from Pierson, who no longer coaches, was to blame Patrick for not bringing enough water.
The suit alleges negligence and gross negligence, contending the defendants had a duty to Patrick to conduct the practice safely, and “they failed to do so.”
Pierson and Pearman did not respond to phone calls from C-VILLE.
Among the guidelines the suit claims the defendants violated were having no trainer present, no cold water, no shade, no rest breaks, and not taking into account how the synthetic turf would jack up the heat index.
Earlier this year, Albemarle County schools developed heat management guidelines for outdoor activities in hot weather, which include training for coaches, players, and parents, and measuring heat and humidity on playing surfaces during hot days.
However, Emily Clancy says Virginia High School League guidelines already were in place on July 21, but weren’t heeded.
Patrick and Ryan suffered permanent physical and mental scars from that day, exacerbated by the bullying they experienced at Monticello High, says their mother. “No one from the county ever apologized or even asked [Patrick] if he was okay.”
Ryan graduated and Patrick is now at a different school.
Both teens are “100 percent” behind the lawsuit, says Clancy. “Patrick said, ‘Mom, we have to do this because if we don’t, someone is going to die.’”
Deaths from the effects of heat are uncommon but they do occur. In June, University of Maryland offensive lineman Jordan McNair, 19, died of heatstroke.
And in 2005, Albemarle High graduate Kelly Watt, a cross country runner, suffered heatstroke after running on a sweltering July day, and died shortly afterward. A race is held every year in his memory. This year’s is Saturday, November 17, at Panorama Farms.
Says attorney Lloyd Snook, “We hope, through this lawsuit, to make everyone in the central Virginia athletic community understand what our athletic departments must do to prevent these deaths.”
Correction October 30: The lawsuit is for $2 million total, not $1 million as earlier reported.
Correction November 13: Jordan McNair died June 13.
Albemarle School Board . member Jason Buyaki has some doubts about climate change.
file photo
Science class was in session at the October 25 Albemarle County School Board meeting, when board member Jason Buyaki paused to question not only the existence of climate change but also the nature of fossil fuels themselves.
Buyaki, who represents the Rivanna district, recently wore a tie bearing pictures of Confederate flags to a meeting to consider banning Confederate imagery from county schools. He later told the Daily Progress he chose his neckwear as a historical lesson about “various flags flown over the U.S.”
His latest lessons, this time in geology and climatology, came as the board discussed a proposal for county schools to commit to using renewable energy sources and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Buyaki’s ire focused on the proposed resolution’s second paragraph, which said, “there is scientific consensus regarding the reality of climate change and the recognition that human activity, especially the combustion of fossil fuels that create greenhouse gases, is an important driver of climate change.”
“When I read this thing, there’s a lot of hot buzzwords in here and phrases that are questionable, and we should question it,” he said, according to a video of the meeting. “One of the first ones that strikes me, in the second paragraph, says there is scientific consensus regarding the reality of climate change. No, there is not—There is scientific consensus among the scientists who believe that there is climate change, but it’s a pretty broad field out there with diverse opinions. So that’s my first red flag warning on this.”
A United Nations panel of the world’s leading climate scientists warned in early October that climate change will cause catastrophic damage within decades unless humanity takes drastic action, including sharply decreasing carbon emissions from fossil fuels.
First, though, Buyaki wanted to define some terms.
“I also question the idea that petroleum products come from fossils,” he said. “I think that’s a fair thing to ask.”
He continued: “That was something that was taught to me in school, that oil comes from fossils. And I find that really strange as a concept, that fossils are buried so deep in the earth, and we can pump ’em out. And some of these oil fields run dry, and then 30, 40 years later they can pump out more.”
According to the U.S. Department of Energy, so-called fossil fuels, including oil, coal and natural gas, formed over millions of years when prehistoric plants and animals died and were gradually buried by layers of rock.
After the meeting, three school board members contacted by C-VILLE did not respond to inquiries about whether the board shares Buyaki’s skepticism about climate change. Buyaki did not respond to an email request for comment.
County resident Matthew Christensen, with Hate-Free Schools Coalition of Albemarle, says Buyaki’s remarks are part of a “disturbing” trend that government officials can decide they “don’t believe in science.”
If the school board member is going to deny science, says Christensen, “I don’t think Jason Buyaki has any business being in charge of our children’s education.”
He adds that Buyaki’s Confederate-flag tie was “a signal to people what he stands for.”
The school board will take action on the clean-energy proposal at its November 8 meeting.
Updated November 2 at 2:30pm with comments from Matthew Christensen.
