Three Reasons To Keep On Working on Climate Education and Energy Policy

“Wow.  I just want to cry.  Please tell me we are making a difference.”’

Those were the words of a colleague today after she watched a  video illustrating a recent Bill McKibben essay about a rising tide of climate change symptoms around the world.

Many months have passed since the disappointments of Copenhagen and the failure to pass climate legislation in the United States.

Facing urgency from the planetary physics and gridlock in the political process, it is probably natural to feel discouragement at times.

But there are good reasons to believe we are making a difference, and good reasons to keep on going.

Here are three that keep me going: 
While it may feel like time is running out, time is also on our side.

1. Climate symptoms will become stronger and more convincing with the passage of time, and so will the lessons from those trail-blazing communities that have already leaped into the transition to clean energy and begun to reap the benefits in cleaner air and better jobs. If we keep moving ahead and doing our best, the dynamics of the system are destined to provide us with lift and support. Keeping going means that we are planting our seeds, strengthening our networks and building our capacity to seize the moments that a changing climate and cutting edge energy experimenters will offer as time passes
2. No one can predict the evolution of attitudes and beliefs.
   Just like the climate system, human systems of attitudes and beliefs are complex and non-linear, with tipping points where change becomes unstoppable. If you made a graph of these patterns there would be a long, flat ‘tail’ rising suddenly and steeply when a critical threshold is passed. We can’t know where those thresholds are until we’ve crossed them, but they are one reason to keep on writing, speaking, teaching, analyzing, organizing, voting, lobbying, and doing whatever we can. Keeping going means adding, little by little,  to the cumulative total of small actions that could someday carry us over a critical threshold.
3.  There isn’t a point where it makes sense to stop trying, saying ‘all is lost.’
   Every tenth of a degree of temperature increase prevented means better odds of survival for some species somewhere, or some community sometime in the future. When it comes to climate change, making a difference isn’t so much a matter of solving the problem once and for all as it is tilting the odds and keeping more options open.

So there you are, three ideas that keep me going, convinced we are making a difference. Without doubt there are more than these three.

What are some more? Why do you keep going?

Looking for Hope? A Book Recomendation

In a time of environmental crisis, how can we live right now?

That's the question posed by editor Martin Keogh in a new collection of essays, Hope Beneath Our Feet, that I've been reading, bit by bit, since I unwrapped it Christmas morning.

The book is full of beautiful, short, often meditative essays, by well known writers like Barry Lopez, Bill McKibben, Barbara Kingslover, Michael Pollan, and Vandana Shiva, and others who aren't quite household names, but have an important message to share, like my friend Kaylynn Sullivan TwoTrees, or fellow Vermonter (and recent candidate for governor) Susan Bartlett.

As I make my way through the essays in this book each one so far has spoken to me, offered me a little gift, an insight  or a reminder of something important..

One of the themes of the essays gathered here is acceptance. The Earth is changing, by virtue of human activities. We can accept the changes, see the resilient ways in which the earth rebalances itself, and do our best to work along with that power. Opeyemi Parham puts it well in the closing words of her essay, Waking Up From Despair: "I choose to feel power in the earth as it responds and reacts to humanity's actions. I choose to take my fear and breathe it into excitement. The earth, older than I can even imagine, is reshaping itself."

Another theme is the clarity that can emerge for us in facing up to the extent of our current crisis. We are being forced to choose to recognize our interconnection and interdependence. In her essay, Do the Will of God, Come What May, Alice Walker writes that "our suffering on this small planet is about learning enjoyment. Choosing peace over pain and destruction. Growing into a
comfortable universality. Letting go of pettiness. Dissolving tribalism, nationality, speciesism."

And several of the essays remind us that nothing, including dire predictions of our failure to meet the current challenges, is certain. Historian Howard Zinn puts it particularly well in The Optimism of Uncertainty, "We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible."

I'm going to keep this book handy this year, as the kind of antidote to discouragement and cynicism and as a reminder that it's not over until it's over and that none of us are really alone in these challenging times.

                                                                                        

Making Things

There are deep snowdrifts outside and fierce, blowing winds. Inside the family is busy with projects. Phil is braiding a piece of wool fabric to patch the  rug that sits in the middle of our living room, a giant ten or more feet in diameter that my grandmother made thirty years ago. The girls are busy with projects they started over Christmas weekend - a lacy turquoise scarf and a warm earth-toned striped one, each perfectly matched to the personalities of the knitters.

Our Christmas was rich with hand-made gifts, too, My parents worked together to make beautiful wooden boxes for each of the grandchildren: sturdy tool chests with wrought iron hinges for the boys, delicate angled boxes for the girls. Phil's knitting needles were flying through socks and hats that weren't quite finished in time for wrapping. Spread across the kitchen table are the parts of a secret present for grandparents, aimed to be finished by New Year's when we'll see them next.

The pure satisfaction around here when the last stitch is knitted and the scarf is draped around a neck or the hat is pulled onto a head is a thing to behold. From the four year-old weaving pot-holders with his new loom under the Christmas tree, to his grandpa unveiling his beautiful wooden boxes, the desire to create things that are beautiful and useful runs strong and deep in most of us, maybe all of us. The products of this desire are as varied as the individuals with the compulsion to create:  well crafted sentences, paintings, patchwork quilts, six-layer cakes, or well-executed computer code. When I look at the people around me, it's the act of creation that brings the pleasure, as much as the finished product.

In the transition to sustainability we are going to need to call upon and depend upon all sorts of new 'high-tech" inventions, from smart-grids to super-efficient materials, but we are also going to need to shift to a world focused on quality rather than quantity, on designing things to be patched and fixed and re-used, rather than tossed away when a plastic part snaps or a circuit burns out.  In the world we need to be moving towards,  making thing will be not just a pleasure but, it seems to me, an integral part of life. Therein lies a blessing:  the forces pushing us to more sustainable ways of living seem to be pushing us towards more satisfying ways of living, at the same time.

Our younger daughter and her friend just came up the stairs to the room next door to my office. "I'm in a project mood" announces the friend.  While I write these few paragraphs, yarn and needles are coming out, the ideas are taking shape, and I keep overhearing snatches of conversation:  a serious disagreement about the definition of knit and purl and finally agreement:('the swirling things are knit and the things that look like braids are purl.' There's some sort of struggle with the 'darned slip knot', a quick lesson in casting on ('you point a gun and then go up with the yarn') and then the needles are clicking in earnest, and the two are chatting away like grandmothers on a front porch.

I worry about these children and their generation a lot of the time. But, along with the messes they are inheriting, they are, in the changed world they will inherit, going to  discover gifts, as well. If they dig deep enough into themselves, they will find, they obviously already are finding, aptitudes and attitudes that will carry them well through turbulent times. Or so I hope.

Seeing with new eyes thanks to the space station and twitter

The most remarkable feature of this historical moment on Earth is not that we are on the way to destroying the world — we've actually been on the way for quite a while. It is that we are beginning to wake up, as from a millennia-long sleep, to a whole new relationship to our world, to ourselves and each other. --- Joanna Macy

I'm as likely as the next mother to tell my kids to get off the computer and go outside, but I have to admit that one source of hope for me is the way that new developments in global communications seem poised to bring the people of our planet closer together than ever before.

I notice this in my work all the time. Tomorrow, for example,  I'll be offering a 'webinar' briefing on a climate study that will have me, in my home office in Vermont, connected to people not only in the US, but Europe, Asia, and South America. For 30 minutes, aided by GoToMeeting technology and the internet I'll be able to share important results about the implications of the Copenhagen Accord with concerned, knowledgeable people from around the world, people who will be able to do something with the information. And none of us will have spent a dollar on a plane ticket or burned any jet fuel to come together.

I've also recently begun to follow the 'tweets' of Astro_Wheels, an astronaut on the international space station who has been taking photos of the Earth from his vantage point and sharing them via "twitpic" (Did you know there is internet access on the space station, somehow?)

The photographs are breathtaking, but even more moving to me are the mixture of languages (and alphabets!) in the dozens  of comments beneath each picture. Seeing our shared home seems to elicit the same expressions of wonder and appreciation across cultures, nations, and languages.

Here are few of the comments in response to the photo above, of Japan at night:

wow coooooooooooll! im on this planet.

Thank you! Astro_Wheels! キャ～！！待ってましたよ。日本！綺麗ですね。海岸線が光のラインではっきりわかります。私の住んでる名古屋も輝いてます☆

que bella foto! gracias! increible saber que estoy en Güemes,Salta,Argentina y poder disfrutar

うわー！北海道から山陽山陰四国まで見えますね！I live 2cm point from the top of this photo!!ThanQ so much♡♡♡

huau muy buenas fotos¡¡¡ espero alguna de argentina

wow!!! very pretty!

maravilloso y sin igual esta imagen te deja sin palabras ....gracias

amazing

"It's my home country! I'm glad! I am hoping for safety of your voyage! Thank you! :-)"…From:One of these light."

These responses show who we are as a species, just as much as the needless wars, the painfully slow march to a global climate treaty, the unacceptable gap between rich and poor.

So yes, cooooool!! amazing, gracias,  Astro_Wheels. Keep the glimpses of our wholeness coming.

--from another one of these lights.

If you want people to believe that climate change is real, talk about solutions

There have been press reports this week about an interesting new study on people's attitudes towards climate change.

In the experiment participants were given one of two factual articles about climate change. Half the participants received articles that ended with "warnings about the apocalyptic consequences of global warming." The other half read articles that ended with "positive messages focused on potential solutions to global warming, such as technological innovations that could reduce carbon emissions"

Here's the interesting part:

"Those who read the positive messages were more open to believing in the existence of global warming."

At first that sounds counter-intuitive -- people become more convinced of a problem when they have evidence that it can be solved? But it does make a certain kind of sense. If a problem is devastating and unsolvable there are all sorts of self-protective mechanisms that help us block the problem out.

I think this study has some interesting implications:

Cynicism is a self-fulfilling prophecy.  If we  act as though there are no solutions to climate change, our fellow citizens will be more likely to ignore the problem all together, making solutions even less likely to emerge.

And, more importantly, daring to envision solutions and talk about them and implement them, at whatever scale we can, is a self-fulfilling prophecy as well. Helping people see solutions helps them bear the truth of what is unfolding during their lifetimes and opens the way for them to help build solutions, which maybe opens the way for some one far removed from you to accept the problem and create solutions, and so on, and so on.

I'll Have My Milk Without the Greenhouse Gases, Please

So many of the actions that would protect and heal the climate bring other benefits along with them.

Last night, in a talk on climate change and agriculture in the Northeast (by Vern Grubinger University of Vermont Extension Agent), I learned of another example for this long and growing list.

One of the biggest sources of greenhouse gas pollution in the production of milk is the nitrogen fertilizer applied to the fields that grow the grain fed to cows. It takes fossil fuel to produce this fertilizer, and and excess nitrogen in the soil, under certain conditions, gives rise to nitrous oxide, an extremely potent greenhouse gas.

The cows that make the milk my family drinks, cows owned and cared for by my neighbors, eat mostly grass, and, when they do eat grain, they eat organic grain. And so there it is, a kindness to the atmosphere, on top of all the other blessings - the water that is kept free of nitrogen pollution, the good taste of fresh milk, the peace in a mother's mind that comes from knowing exactly what it is her children pour onto their breakfast cereal.

Nobody is claiming that milk production is a major contributor to climate change, but still, in this story, is a glimmer of a much bigger hope – when we really take on climate change we can do it in smart and beautiful ways, ways that heal the water, and the soil, and the pain in mother's hearts all at the same time.