On Being Nice

I received a note today from a friend, a nice note, that said among other things that I am kind, serious, gentle, and generous.

Those are wonderful traits to be seen to carry.

But tonight, at the end of a long day, towards the end of a long year, I am beginning to wonder if gentle and kind haven't taken me about as far as they can on their own?

As the foundations of my childrens' world crumble – last Friday the World Meteorologic Organization reported that CO2 levels hit a record high this year – I am starting to search for other parts of myself, beyond gentle and kind.

I like my gentle, kind self, and all the gentle souls around me, good people with high hopes.

But in the midst of a social and economic system that creates unquenchable thirsts – for stuff, for possession, for power – maybe I (maybe you, too?) need to expand my identity to become gentle, kind, and generous, but also strong and unafraid of being thought 'not nice.' Still kind, still gentle, but using the voice mothers everywhere use to say, "enough is enough."

Sunday Morning Read Aloud

We came home from our Thanksgiving travels to find a new issue of Ranger Rick in the mailbox, and this morning our younger daughter and I snuggled up on the couch in the Sunday morning sun to read it.

We read about harp seals, threatened by melting sea ice, and China's golden monkeys, threatened by deforestation. The articles didn't exaggerate the dangers and they made it clear that scientists are busy studying the situation and conservationists are trying to help. But this seven-year-old missed the nuances:

"It's not only the polar bears going extinct, there's a harp seal named Haley and the golden monkeys," she announced as her older sister wandered by, hairbrush in hand.

And so here I am again, fourteen hours after debating our family's choices in gasoline purchasing with the older daughter, wondering what to say to the younger one about the world she's been given.

I refuse to accept that it has to be this way. Our children don't have to grow up hearing that their world is falling apart with the only antidote to despair the flimsy reassurance that scientists are studying the problem and conservationists are trying to help.

I don't want my children to grow hearing about fixes around the edges, I want our entire global economy to be oriented toward their future. I want every article I read aloud to them about every endangered plant and animal, culture, village, child, estuary, or ecosystem to say, truthfully, honestly:

This is a serious problem. All life is interconnected; so what hurts the harp seals (the island children, the soil organisms) hurts us too. Thankfully people everywhere understand this now, even if we didn't always in the past.

That's why everyone - your parents, your government, every business in your country – is re-orienting towards what really matters: you and your generation and future generations. That's why it costs so much to pollute or overfish or clear cut and why the most proftable business are the ones that are working to restore the ecosystems, produce clean energy, feed people, and build the soils. That's why people are choosing quality over quantity, buying only what they need.

These are big changes, and they are taking what must seem to you like a long time. We know that everything that matters cannot be saved, but you, and the harp seal and everything else, are worth our best effort and that is what we are giving you.

The Power of the Powerless

As I do the dinner dishes our older daughter asks, "what kind of job do you think I'd be good at when I grow up?"

"Well, start by thinking about what you are good at and what you enjoy."

"Like what?"

"Well, you're a quick thinker, and you have a good intuition, and you're persistent."

"So, I'd be a good President?"

"We'll..... no I don't think so, because you don't like other people telling you what to do, and to become President, you have to do a lot of what other people, especially people who fund your campaigns, want you to do."

"We'll I wouldn't. I'd only listen to the people. And I'd put a limit on how much money the oil companies could earn!"

A short pause, then the kind of twist I never see coming: "Anyway, doesn't Mike's sell the bad kind of gasoline? The kind from the company that is trying to convince people global warming isn't real? "

(Perhaps your town has a Mike's, a gas station/convenience store that is owned by a local family, always supports local good causes, from the pre-school to the softball team, and lets everyone post flyers for lost cats and bake sales on the front door. Maybe your Mike's-equivalent is, like ours, the most convenient place to buy your gas. If it is, and if you happen to be discussing its brand of gasoline with a verbally undefeated ten-year old who has picked up a lot about climate change around the dinner table, you will likely find yourself choosing your next words carefully.)

"Well, yes...Mike's is a Mobil Station.... and Exxon Mobil doesn't have the best record of all the oil companies on climate change."

"So why do we buy our gas there?"

"We'll it's convenient. And Mike's is a local business. And the most important thing is that we try to drive as little as possible, not where we get our gas. I'm not sure how much difference it makes where we buy it from."

I get off lightly. She doesn't repeat any of the things I've told her and her sister over the years. [You know, Mom, even the little things make a difference; you don't drop your values just when they stop being convenient.] She is more concrete:

"If we give fifteen dollars to somebody it shouldn't be them. In my opinion. Anyway, maybe I should be a representative. Are there women representatives?"

"Oh yes, and senators too."

I know a conversational life-raft when I see one.

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She's in bed now, the dinner dishes are done, and I'm trying to imagine what it must be like to be ten years old and know what we haven't been able to keep from our daughter – that climate change is real and serious, that lots of grown-ups are working really hard to fix it but that even if they succeed the Earth will keeping on warming for a long time.

If we who can vote, we who make decisions for household and business, feel powerless, imagine what it must be like, on this warming world, to be ten years old.

If you want to investigate the record on climate change for various oil and gas companies you might be interested in these compilations of information from the Sierra Club, and the Better World Handbook.

One Of Our Biggest Challenges Remains Our Growth

In a recent report on their progress incorporating sustainability into their business practices leaders at Wal-Mart could have been speaking for the entire global economic system:

"In working to reduce our carbon footprint, one of our biggest challenges remains our growth. As we continue to grow, so does our carbon footprint -- even if it grows at a much slower rate. However, we see our expansion as an opportunity to have a positive effect on absolute carbon because being a growth company enables us to explore and invest in new technologies that may lead to carbon reduction."

I have been trying to think of an analogy for the challenge of working towards sustainability while continuing to grow. What's the equivalent from every day life?

Trying to climb out of debt by clipping coupons while moving into a more expensive house every year?

Trying to lose weight by eating lower calorie foods while increasing the number of meals you eat each day?

I understand the logic (the hope?) of the second excerpted sentence: that profits (resulting from growth) could fund the discovery and scale-up of ways to generate energy without generating greenhouse gas pollution. This is the best we can hope for within the paradigm of the industrial growth society, which tells us that a business or an economy can never afford to stop growing.

Even if it works, even if Wal-Mart's growth-powered investments provide the the world with zero-carbon energy sources in time to avert the worst of climate change, we know that there will be another limit - mercury, or toxins, or biodiversity loss, or something else – waiting just behind the limit of greenhouse gas pollution. And another limit behind that one. We know - deep in our hearts we have to know, by now – that this is a game that, in the end, cannot be won.

Waiting just beyond that realization is a universe of possibility. Wal-Mart could lead the world by changing its business model, saying it is big enough, turning from growth to development.

Maybe a vision of a 'big enough' Wal-Mart sounds impossible to you.

But I'm certain that it is more possible than the idea of future generations living good lives on this finite planet with an economy that cannot stop growing.

With Wal-Mart openly talking about the interplay of growth and sustainability, maybe that day isn't as far off as we might think.

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.

Calmly but Insistently

One of the most beautiful things I found in the people who gathered to study with Joanna Macy at Seeds for the Future II was their bravery, and their willingness to speak the truth of their own experience.

These people and people like them, who are willing to witness the agony of the wounded in Iraq, the sick children of Chernobyl, the dwindling salmon of the Northwest help me find, in my own reactions to their stories, my solidarity, my ability to care about and connect with a wider world. The people who share stories of reconciliation and progress, like a woman I just met who lived through the end of apartheid in South Africa, do the same.

In honor of these truth-tellers and for the truth-teller in all of us, the quote of the week is from a column Donella Meadows published in 1992.

SPEAK THE TRUTH. Speak it out loud and often, calmly but insistently, and speak it, as the Quakers say, to power. Material accumulation is not the purpose of human existence. All growth is not good. The environment is a necessity, not a luxury. There is such a thing as "enough." Human progress must be assessed not by quantity but by quality. Our consumption-crazed society has lost its its direction and its soul.

I can assure you that saying these things will not make you popular. But if they are not said, over and over, so often that they begin to supersede the contrary messages that now dominate our airwaves and our lives, we will lose not only our souls, but also the natural systems that might someday support more enlightened souls.

One Graph

My colleague Diana Wright has many talents: gardener, farmer, maple syrup maker, mother, and more. She is also one of the best people I know at finding data and making that data accessible and meaningful to people.

I thought of her when I saw this graph, because she has long had the idea of a news service that would send, at regular intervals, a graph about the state of the world, a city, a river, or an economy. In honor of Diana (and in hopes that I can entice her into partnership in searching out one powerful graph each week) here's the climate change graph of the week for me. It shows, as Hansen says, why "coal will determine whether we continue to increase climate change or slow the human impact."

These graphs can be downloaded here along with a wealth of clear and helpful information on Dr. Hansen's website.