This April, in honor of Earth Day and Springtime, EdgeWise will focus on the environment.
Last week, Bard College at Simon’s Rock senior Marjorie Cort shared her perspective as a young adult facing an uncertain future in the age of climate change. This week, I want to speak from my perspective as the mother of two sons, as well as the teacher of numerous young people like Marjorie who are just taking their first steps out into the adult world.
In my forthcoming memoir, What I Forgot…And Why I Remembered, I recount how I, as a young twenty-something, stepped out into the social landscape that my parents and their parents had created. I was a 1980s Yuppie (Young Urban Professional) in New York City, living a fast and somewhat glamorous life completely divorced from any memory of the natural world that had been so important to me as a youngster. I worked in media for a while and then took a turn into graduate school, taking 10 years of my life to study comparative literature at a time when it was all about “the death of the author” and textual analysis that was like a hall of mirrors, entirely removed from any connection to the actual physical world.
Thirty years later, I look back on this time in my life with something akin to horror. I stepped into the rushing cultural stream of mainstream America without questioning the dominant values, without stopping to ask myself where it was all leading or what my role might be in building a world I’d want to live in, or leave proudly for my children.
I trusted that those in authority knew where we were going and had our best interests at heart.
Now I know that my trust was misplaced. In my lifetime, I have witnessed endless wars, the spread of exploitation masked as triumphal globalization, relentless destruction of forests, oceans, air and soils; the rapid extinction of other living beings — animals, birds, reptiles, insects, flora of all types; and the inexorable rise in global temperatures spawned by our Western-style, high-consumption lifestyle, supported by the unsustainable extraction and burning of fossil fuels.
Back in the 1980s, we Yuppies thought dismissively of environmentalists as crunchy tree-hugger granola types. It took me many years and much soul-searching to remember the tree-hugger in me — the girl who loved animals more than people, who wanted nothing more than to spend time high up in a tree, listening to the birds and the wind, who was shocked and horrified to read in National Wildlife about the plight of wild animals and their habitats.
Now here we are, in the 21st century, in a time of genuine crisis. Can anyone doubt that climate change is real and upon us, already melting the glaciers, acidifying the oceans, and setting off droughts, floods and storms of Biblical proportions? The question is, now that we are aware, what are we to do?
I appreciate Marjorie’s suggestion to start with small, accessible changes. Great Barrington did just that when our forward-thinking Select Board banned plastic bags from our town’s businesses. It may be increasingly necessary to act on the local level, in a time when our national politics is so gridlocked and dysfunctional.
The local opposition to gas fracking has demonstrated, in places like New York and Maryland, that, to paraphrase Margaret Mead, “a small group of determined citizens can change the world.” For example, in western Massachusetts, a well-organized resistance movement has begun to oppose the major gas pipeline that the fossil fuel giant Kinder Morgan intends to build across our mountains, forests and farmland. You can learn more about this issue and find ways to get involved at the No Fracked Gas in Mass. website.
As adults, many of us loving parents and grandparents, we have a special responsibility to safeguard the future for the coming generations. It always astounds me that parents — the same parents who take such pains to make sure that their children are as well-cared-for as they can possibly be — can turn a blind eye to environmental health and climate stabilization.
The truth is that if we allow climate change to get totally out of control, it won’t matter if we’ve fed our kids organic fruits and vegetables, sent them to the best schools and made sure they did their homework and tried out for sports. Their future, like ours, depends on our individual and collective actions now, to transition rapidly to renewable energy, reduce consumption, and re-localize agriculture and commerce.
Bill McKibben wrote a book about climate change that he titled Eaarth, the extra A signifying that we are no longer living on the same planet we adults were born on. The sooner we accept this and begin to develop a sustainable lifestyle on our new Eaarth, the better the chances that our children and grandchildren will be able to prosper in the future.
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The weekly EDGE WISE column is curated by Jennifer Browdy, Ph.D., associate professor of comparative literature, gender studies and media studies at Bard College at Simon’s Rock and the Founding Director of the Berkshire Festival of Women Writers. Women writers interested in publishing in EDGE WISE can find writers’ guidelines on the Festival website, or may submit queries or columns to Jennifer@berkshirewomenwriters.org.
