I remember very distinctly what woke me up to the climate change crisis. It was in 2011, and I was reading somewhat dispassionately through a pile of environmental books, in preparation for a class I wanted to develop on media advocacy for social and environmental justice.
Only one writer in the pile grabbed my attention and gave me a big kick in the pants: Mark Hertzgaard, who ends his book Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years On Earth with a letter to his young daughter, apologizing for how his generation had destroyed her future. As the mother of two sons, and the teacher of many young people, that stark admission of failure and culpability got my attention, forcing me out of my comfort zone into a new awareness of the high stakes we humans are playing with in these early years of the 21st century.
Out of that moment of shocked awareness came my forthcoming memoir, What I Forgot and Why I Remembered: A Purposeful Memoir of Personal and Planetary Transformation, which uses my own story of waking up to the slow-motion environmental disaster as a commentary on my whole generation of sleep-walking Americans.
Until very recently, I felt as though I was still in the minority, in terms of being awake and aware of the looming perils of climate change. Very few people I knew showed any interest in talking about it; it was rarely reported in the mainstream media; and everywhere I looked it seemed to be business as usual in America.
But now things have changed. It’s almost as though someone threw a switch that lit up new circuits in our collective human consciousness. Suddenly, climate change is in the news daily. Hundreds of thousands of people are marching for climate justice. Billionaires are vowing to devote vast sums of money to research and development of renewable energy. Corporations are actively including climate change in their strategic planning, and working to reduce emissions (in the process often discovering that they are also cutting costs). Investment groups from foundations to universities to cities and unions are divesting from fossil fuel producers. Offshore drilling is giving way to offshore wind farms and tidal turbines, and there is serious talk of carbon caps and taxes to be levied.
I’m not saying everything is rosy, or that there is no longer a crisis. The crisis is very real and this is not a disaster movie where we all know everything will be OK in the end, at least for the heroes. No, this slo-mo catastrophe — including deforestation, acidification of the oceans, chemical contamination, species extinction, biodiversity loss, steadily rising temperatures and sea levels — is all too real and no one can predict where it will end. We are already seeing the beginning of resource wars and climate refugees, as fresh water sources melt away and arable land becomes desert.
But nevertheless, I am more hopeful now than I have been in the five years since I first woke up to climate change. Having gone through grief, anger, and depression, I now find myself in a period of acceptance in which I know that whatever happens, I want to spend the rest of my life working with others to ensure the best possible future for the generations to come — and not just for humans, but for all life on our beleaguered planet.
Climate change has made it quite clear that we Earthlings are all in it together. We are profoundly interconnected, all formed from the same elements: water, earth, air and the fiery sunlight that brings us all to life. The trees breathe us as we breathe them. The waters outside us soon find their way into our very cells. It is now obvious that our individual and social health is intimately connected to the health of our environmental surroundings. And we have choices: we do not have to choose the dystopian future of cement wastelands and chemical food packets. We can choose a vibrant, leafy, healthy future. We can choose it, and work for it. Starting right now, where we are.
What would that look like, here in my own little corner of the world: Berkshire County, Massachusetts?
Those of us fortunate enough to live in Berkshire County know how lucky we are to enjoy a beautiful, unspoiled landscape and charming small towns. We should be grateful for the conservation work of organizations like the Berkshire Natural Resources Council and the Trustees of Reservations, as well as the hardworking town boards and commissions that keep an eye on preserving the historic beauty and character of our towns.
Against that backdrop, what else should we be focusing on in order to prepare ourselves for the climate changes on the horizon?
- It almost goes without saying that we should be working to shift from fossil fuel dependency to renewable energy. It is great to see the new solar array going up in Housatonic, and the windmills lining the mountain on Jiminy Peak. Yes, these are ugly. But not as ugly as oil rigs and gas wells. We have been privileged, here in the Northeast, to benefit from the oil and gas mined in other people’s backyards. Now it’s time to enter into a new model of local energy generation, powered by the sun and wind that are equally accessible to all.
- We need to decisively shut down the plans for a giant gas pipeline running through Berkshire County, on its way from Pennsylvania to New Brunswick. The gas boom, which has been definitively linked to health hazards from earthquakes to poisoned water tables to methane leaks, needs to be brought under control. Yes, there will always be the need for some gas drilling. But this is an industry — like oil drilling, coal mining and nuclear generation — that must be tightly regulated and restrained, with the health and wellbeing of humans and the natural world placed before profits.
- We should be burying our electric power lines. Assuming that grid generation is still going to be supplying many of our homes and businesses with power, it is crazy to leave the lines vulnerable to the more severe weather that is inevitably going to be coming our way. This is an investment that will provide employment now, and pay off in power outages avoided in the future.
- We should insist that our towns invest in renewable energy and lower energy emissions wherever possible. We can follow states like California in using hybrid or even electric vehicles for local fleets, place solar panels on streetlights and the roofs of town-owned buildings. We should have electric vehicle charging stations throughout the county. My own particular beef is with school buses, which seem not to have changed in form or engineering since 1945. It’s way past time for safe, modern school buses to be designed, with seat belts, hybrid and/or electric engines, and all-wheel-drive. If school boards began to demand this, I am sure it could be delivered. Maybe Elon Musk of Tesla would like the contract! We would undoubtedly recoup the costs of the new vehicles with vastly reduced fuel usage.
- We should also be doing more planning for local food production. Here in the Berkshires we have a leg up, with many local farms and organizations like Berkshire Grown already bringing together local food producers with consumers. Would it be possible to scale up local agriculture to meet a target percentage of local need? It would certainly be preferable to play around with possible plans and scenarios now, while food shortages are only hypothetical, and be prepared for climate-change-related disruptions down the road.
- As an educator, I know that our most important asset is our young people, and we must prepare them well for the challenging times they’ll be living through. In this Internet age, they need to learn how to make discerning use of all the information constantly bombarding them. They need to learn how to think for themselves, and how to communicate strongly in writing and public speaking. They need to learn the skills and tools of the digital media age, and how to collaborate in teams dedicated to project-based learning. This shift is already beginning to happen in some schools; we need to enthusiastically and energetically make sure that all our young people have access to the best teachers, facilities and pedagogical strategies we can provide.
This week at the climate talks in Paris, unlike at similar meetings in the past, it was not just bureaucrats and mid-level diplomats gathering to stall and split hairs, but the most powerful heads of state in the world coming together to push for real, measurable goals and agreements. While this top-brass attention indicates the severity and immediacy of the unfolding climate-change crisis, it is also a hopeful sign that human beings around the planet, including our political and business leaders, are finally awake, aware and rolling up their collective sleeves to find solutions, both global and local.
I want to be able to write a letter to future generations that tells proudly how in my time, we stood up in the face of impending disaster and made the changes in lifestyle, industry and economy that were necessary to guarantee a safe and sustainable legacy for our children and grandchildren.
This is our time. What will we do with it?
