In Space, No One Can Hear You Protest.

As Seattle neighborhoods go, Greenwood is a sleeping giant.  My friends and colleagues in more “hip” neighborhoods to the south view his huge residential spread of North Seattle as a rather quiet, uneventful, and inconsequential area: great for compost gardens, “U.S. out of Iraq” bumper stickers, and empty churches, but not much else.

Occasionally, Greenwood and its siamese-twinned neighborhood to the south, Phinney Ridge, make it in the news.  Seattle’s new mayor is a Greenwood resident, and rides his bike downtown to city hall each morning.  Last October, a homeless arsonist torched a number of Greenwood businesses (including my favorite Chinese restaurant) before being apprehended.  When a cougar roamed Seattle’s Magnolia neighborhood at the end of last summer, the Greenwood-Phinney Ridge blog dared ask, “Has anyone seen a cougar in the neighborhood?”… a question that led to the most hilarious comment ever left on the PhinneyWood blog: “A few months ago I saw three or four cougars at Oliver’s Twist [a local bar].”

Greenwood’s core is the business and retail corridor at Greenwood Avenue and North 85th Street. On this partly-cloudy and cool Saturday, the sidewalks in the core were lined with residents walking their purebred dogs, wandering into antique shops, and meandering toward coffee shops with their MacBook Pros. The Greenwood core came to a standstill for fifteen minutes, though, as residents gawked at a rare sight: a protest

At 1:02PM, about 17 men, women, and children poured out of the Greenwood Space Travel Supply Company, holding signs and chanting slogans. Their mission: protest Pluto’s loss of planetary status four years ago.

Has it really been four years since the International Astronomical Union (IAU) formally defined what a planet is, and specifically defined it to exclude Pluto, leaving our solar system with only 8 planets? Apparently. And these protesters wanted to remind us of this perceived injustice.

They were a merry group, due in part to the honks of support from passing motorists and the 7 or 8 photographers following them. They made their way north on Greenwood Avenue for about five blocks (past my yoga studio and favorite coffee shop), before crossing the street and heading back south to their starting point. By 1:17PM, they were done, declaring victory (for at least bringing the issue forward) and heading into a local coffee shop to debrief.

But, for those fifteen minutes, Greenwood residents on foot and in cars (this isn’t a very bike-heavy neighborhood) got quite an education. Signs bemoaned Pluto’s demotion to “dwarf planet” status. One of my favorites begged the IAU to keep their “laws off of my icy body.” Chanted slogans included “Hey-hey! Ho-ho! The IAU has got to go!”, “8 is not enough!”, and (my personal favorite) “We’re number 9! We’re number 9!”.

Education and entertainment went hand-in-hand. One couple I stood near giggled, and then promptly began to debate whether the IAU had the right to even touch this issue, since schoolchildren from 1930 to 2006 were taught as Gospel truth that our solar system contains 9 planets. However noble their goals were, did the IAU have a right to sow confusion and resentment among the general public? Three old women in front of the Baranof (Greenwood’s dive diner) looked stunned, and asked me, “When did Pluto stop being a planet?” The IAU’s PR body sure has its work cut out for it.

Tongue-in-cheek though the protest was, I couldn’t help but revisit the controversy hatched 4 years ago by the IAU. Did this august body of scientists really need to obsess over the field’s lack of a definition for a planet? Did they really need to solve it by coming up with a definition? And did they really need to solve this issue by demoting Pluto? I hope to address these issues in a future “Definitions” post. Stay tuned.

As for Greenwood, at 1:18PM it was business-as-usual… except in the coffee shop where the protesters ducked in after wrapping up. That place had about 25 new customers (protesters and photographers). The shop was right across the street from their starting point. It’s name? Neptune Coffee.