Climate Teacher

Reducing Energy Demand: It’s Not Only About Technology And It Doesn’t Always Require Experts

2011-07-19T08:27:00.000-05:00

In transforming our world to reduce greenhouse gas emissions there’s room for the creativity of all of us.

In our simulation modeling of the transition to a low-carbon economy, we find plenty of policies and actions with huge potential for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Carbon prices, investment in renewable energy, and investment in a new energy infrastructure all have a part to play. But most of the successful scenarios we find in our simulation runs also have another element – reductions in energy demand.

Technology, from more efficient appliances to highly fuel efficient vehicles, has a lot to contribute to reducing energy demand.

But that is only part of the story.

People are also, without any new technologies or inventions, coming together to create systems that accomplish the same goals with less use of energy.

One of my favorite examples from recent months was reported in the Washington Post.
A class of second-graders, concerned about climate change, looked at the line of cars picking up children in front of their school each afternoon. If only we could make the pick-ups go more quickly, they reasoned, there’d be less idling, less waste of gas, and less greenhouse gas pollution.

Thinking and learning together, the kids came up with a system where pick-up times were staggered, every few minutes, based on the first letter of a family’s last name. Not only did the amount of idling decrease, but parents reported less hassle and less stress from waiting in long, slow-moving lines of traffic!

There are similar examples in most communities, if we’d just take the time to stop and look. In my neighborhood, for instance, we use an email listserve, which often has requests for “anyone going grocery shopping who could pick up one thing”, cutting done the number of trips by car we all need to make.

Urban design that makes cities more walkable. Bike sharing systems that make it easier to get around without a car. Ideas like these don’t need scientific breakthroughs (although we could use a few of those too). Thinking smarter about our energy use mostly requires imagination and a willingness to experiment.

And, if the quotes from the second-graders are any indication, we might just discover that coming up with new ideas is very fun and satisfying too!

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

2011-07-13T15:09:00.013-05:00

“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.

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
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.
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?

In place of certainty - learning

2011-02-25T20:53:00.005-05:00

I've spent the past weeks deep in data and competing theories on the transition to clean energy. So many people are so certain they know what is needed, but the more I learn, the more humble I feel.

Depending on which report you read, we need everything from technical brilliance and breakthroughs to new definitions of happiness. We need political reform and the removal of money from politics. We need behavioral change or a massive build-out of a 'smart grid'. We need to redesign cities, cut the price of renewable energy, or charge the full costs of polluting energy sources. Or maybe we need to electrify transportation, redesign the electric grid, change our habits, invest in clean energy R&D.

Some of the proposals make more sense to me than others, especially those that influence the core structures of systems - internalizing the price of greenhouse gas pollution for example or restoring health to democracies in order to produce better decisions for the long-term and the common good. But I find myself with less and less faith in any proposal or plan. For better or worse, in this interconnected world it begins to feel impossible to predict what will happen next, let alone try to direct events toward a specific end result. Technical breakthroughs in China ripple through to mix with political factors in the US, to combine with attitudes about mountaintop removal, to mix with revolution in the Middle East and the changing price of oil, to combine with falling costs of renewable energy, to mix with rising evidence of climate change to produce conditions never seen before in the world. Who, really, knows whats coming next?

In uncertain times it is so tempting to try to discern the right course of action and to denounce all the other possibilities. But, because of the very uncertainty of these times, I suspect we need to cultivate the opposite response. We need to pursue our piece of the puzzle with focus and determination,while remaining aware of and grateful for all the other paths. When the activists change the political landscape the engineers need to stand ready with the clean technology. Or maybe its the other way around, when the engineers have their breakthrough, the activists need to be organized to take it to scale.

We also need, it seems to me, openness to possibility, willingness to experiment, willingness to be wrong, and wilingness to share what we are learning. We need tools to track how we are doing, tools that help us see the collective impact of all the little local changes that are happening, tools that play out the trends into future, illuminating not specific predictions but a general sense of direction.

I'm biased of course, because those are exactly the sort of tools our team has been producing for years, but, still, I feel grateful that my day's work doesn't ask me to pronounce what we should do, but rather asks me to help people look forward into all the futures that could emerge from this moment and connect those futures to the choices we have before us today. Step by step, if we take the next hundred years on that way, looking far forward and doing what we can with what we have at hand today, perhaps we will learn our way into a sustainable future and something that might even come close to wisdom.

Lessons From Climate Change - One

2011-01-16T16:16:00.004-05:00

When I started this blog, I decided to call it "Climate Teacher" largely to remind myself of my belief that as much as it is a problem to solve, climate change is also a teacher for humanity, reflecting back to us important lessons about our own nature and the nature of our home, the Earth.

Yesterday, snowshoeing through our woods in the midst of snow flurries and wind, I decided that, with the start of the new year, it would be a good time to reflect on and try to articulate some of those lessons, at least as I see them.

Here's the first one:

Climate change teaches us that the destinies of all people and all nations are tied together.

When Brazil cuts is deforestation rate we all benefit by the additional carbon dioxide that Brazil's forests can sequester. When the US misses the opportunity to adopt climate legislation that could have catalyzed the beginnings of a clean energy revolution, the whole world suffers from the additional greenhouse gasses that will be emitted in the coming years and decades as a result.

One thing that people always discover when they test emissions reductions scenarios with our climate model, C-ROADS, is that without every region of the world participating, its not possible to limit emissions enough to keep future temperatures within safe bounds.

In the old world, the world before climate change, it might have been better if nations worked together, but they didn't HAVE TO. In the old world, nations expected to solve their own problems. Climate change is a challenge that solve together or not at all.

In the process, our attitudes and our institutions will need to slowly (or not so slowly!) shift until they come to reflect the physical truth that our single atmosphere, for better or worse, ties us all together.

Visions, Part Two

2011-01-04T07:47:00.002-05:00

Photo credit:Wikipedia

Here's what can happen with visions:

In a previous post, I wrote about time spent thinking and sketching about a flower garden in need of rejuvenation and a new goal of making space for more medicinal plants, including the European black elderberry, whose flowers and berries can be used to make a tincture which really helps fight off colds and flu. Right now we buy our elderflower extract from Israel, and I've been thinking that it would be another step towards meeting our own family's needs more locally to grow our own. Plus elderberry bushes are beautiful, and attract pollinators and butterflies.

So, there on my little map of the north garden sits a single circle where the elderberry, once we find it, will someday grow. Some years ago when we tried to start a black elderberry bush, seedlings were very hard to find. The more common Canadian elderberry was easy to find, but not the black variety, which is another species.

But, just one day after my sketching and dreaming, Phil tells me he has some news. He decided to go looking online for black elderberry and found a source right away. And, you can't plant just one black elderberry, it turns out. First of all, every plant needs a companion for pollination if you want to harvest any berries. And then, there are varieties to try, with interesting foliage and different growth habits. So we need at least three. And, did I realize, they grow to be 10 feet high?

So now we will have elderberries in the spring! But not just one, and not in the spot I imagined, which is much too small for a full grown bush. I'm not sure we have room for three, but maybe a neighbor will want to experiment with one of them. Now there are conversations to have and sketches to redraw.

That's how it goes with visioning, at least in my experience. The simple act of stating what I would like to see happen opens possibilities and and quickly presents new questions. It works that way with little visions, for bushes and gardens, and with bigger ones, for revitalized economies and cooperation on global challenges. One needs to be willing to work with whatever comes our way, be it three ten-foot shrubs, or three new partners from across the world.

Looking for Hope? A Book Recomendation

2011-01-03T20:59:00.003-05:00

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.

Visions, for gardens and for the world

2011-01-02T20:52:00.004-05:00

My sister-in-law and brother gave me a journal for Christmas. They know that this is one of my favorite things, all those blank pages, waiting to be filled in with notes, or observations, or new ideas. A blank journal, to me at least, is ripe with possibilities.

Today, I initiated my new journal. On the first page is now a (long) list of 2011 projects. They range from the very practical and urgent (paint the house, fix the rotting board by the basement door) to the more optional and fun (build a wood fired oven for baking bread). Following the list are sketches of gardens and plans for changing and improving them (fewer perennial flowers in the north garden, more berries and medicinal herbs, more cooking herbs, closer to the house).

The list is, without doubt, much more ambitious than one family could accomplish in one year. Based on past growing seasons and past lists, we'll take care of some items, do some things that never made it onto the list, and carry some things forward to 2012. The vision of fewer flowers and more berries and herbs will be a gradual transformation that will unfold over several years. But having the ideas in my head and the sketches in my journal helps me work with the gardens and see the possibilities. The iris that have spread out of control are really in the cranberry bed, I see that now from my afternoon's sketching, and when the snow melts and the ground thaws, I'll know what to do. And I now know to keep my eyes open for a black elderberry seedling, which is hard to come by, and I know where I will plant it when I find it.

My friend and teacher, Donella Meadows, said that she never started a project, whether it was a sweater to knit, a book to write, or a garden to plant, without first envisioning the finished project in her mind. Her devotion to the practice of visioning influenced me, and I try to hang on to that practice, not just for gardens, but for the projects we undertake at Climate Interactive, and for the world that those projects are aiming to contribute to.

For me, visioning is easiest for gardens, and still pretty easy for grant reports or model sectors (though neither the gardens nor the models ever come out looking exactly like my vision for them; both gardens and computer models are not, it turns out, precisely controllable).

I have to work harder and look deeper to imagine a sustainable world, to envision the world that I and so many others are working to create. But it's not actually that hard. The seeds of the future are, after all, around us all of the time. Out of the actions of the young people I met in Cancun I can see the wave of grassroots organizing that could produce the political will for change. Watching my neighbor Stephen drive the horses across new snow I see the revitalized agro-economy of our region. Warmed by wood heat, my computer powered by electricity made from cow-manure, I see and sense the renewable energy revolution.

I've never yet pictured perfectly the finished garden from the depths of winter, and I don't believe I or anyone else can really see how a sustainable world will look and work. But even in dark times, one doesn't have to look that far to see seeds of possibility, calling for our energy and attention. And those are good starting points, for choosing next steps, for little garden plots, and for big wishes for the future, too.

Making Things

2010-12-27T12:14:00.006-05:00

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.

Borrowing and Sharing

2010-12-20T09:45:00.009-05:00

In yesterday's post I wrote about studies of happiness that show people tend to define what they need to be happy in relation to what they see around them and discussed how this can lead to escalating consumption and escalating environmental impacts. The more stuff in a community, the more people feel the need for more stuff, or so the logic of this feedback loop goes.

But in real systems no feedback loop exists in isolation. Today scanning through my Cobb Hill community emails, I was struck by the evidence for the exact opposite process, at least in our little community of 23 families, where borrowing, lending, and sharing often saves us from needing more stuff of our own.

Here, from the emails over the weekend is a sampling of the evidence:

I’m looking for a small piece of wire mesh, about 5x5” – could be a scrap of window screen or something heavier.
Does anyone at Cobb Hill have a soldering iron suitable for electronics, that I could borrow for a few days?A short length of flux-cored solder would also be helpful.
Does anyone at Cobb Hill have a socket set with 1/4-inch drive or similar, with sockets going from about 3/16 to 7/16 inch, and from 4 to 10 mm, that I could borrow for a few days? It doesn't have to have a rachet, a driver will do just as well.
Anyone have a bulb for a mudroom florescent light they would lend us until we can get a new one? 2 tubes, four prongs. Your neighbors in the dark.

On top of the borrowing and lending there are four or five emails about activities this week that require no (or hardly any) consumption, from gingerbread house building for kids, to a weekly photography class for teenagers, to Christmas morning waffles in the common house.

All sorts of new habits are needed to move from a world where more abundance around us leads us to us want more and more material goods of our own to a world where more abundance around us means we can be happy with less of our own.

From learning to ask for help to remembering to return things in cleaner, better shape than we received them, none of this seems to be second nature for folks raised in modern industrialized societies. But, ten years into the experiment of Cobb Hill, informal trades and sharing seem to work much more often than they fail. And from simple community email lists to websites specializing in car sharing or barter, new twists on the kind of sharing our grandparents took for granted offer one of the lowest cost, most efficient solutions to the sustainability challenge.

The Radical Act of Defining Enough For Yourself

2010-12-19T22:24:00.002-05:00

Not long ago, a colleague sent around some results from studies of human happiness which show that despite strong increases in the amount of stuff in people's lives in the developed world in recent decades, self-reporting of happiness hasn't increased all that much. The research shows that people tend to base their sense of what they need to be happy not on some absolute internal sense of well being, but instead on a sort of mental comparison between themselves and others. With such mental calculus, the feeling of "enough" is never constant, but instead is ever-rising. In systems terms, this way of searching for happiness has the same dynamics that drove the Cold War search for security through assembling ever larger stores of weapons.

System dynamics teaches that there is one way out of any arms race, be it the race to obtain security by stockpiling more weapons than your enemy or happiness by acquiring more stuff than your neighbor. Arms races loose their fuel as soon as one party stops participating. The enoughness race, and its relentless impact on the Earth, would slow if more and more people found a way to set their own definition of enough and live by it.

Easier said than done, as seems always to be the case for true leverage points.

But, after a weekend of simple pleasures, from cheering for 8th grade basketball players, to walking in quiet woods, from listening to Christmas music, to cooking good food, it seems to me that defining enough may not be as hard as we sometimes think. And, not long home from the most recent UN climate conference, a simple fundamental solution, like defining what is enough, seems like it just might accomplish what geo-engineering, carbon markets, and new technologies might not. It might help us create societies that recognize and embrace the reality that our beautiful planet is also finite.

It's Not Our Planet, It's Yours

2010-12-13T17:54:00.002-05:00

A slow cold rain is falling, I've spent the day catching up on paperwork and emails with one eye on the headlines as the world analyzes and reacts to the 'Cancun Agreements'. The rush of travel and analysis is behind me for now, the press release analyzing the Cancun Agreements is posted on the Climate Interactive website, and, finally, there is a little time to reflect.

No one expected tremendous progress in Cancun, to say the least. But still, when a journalist asked me today if I found it 'worrisome' that the Cancun talks didn't make progress to close the gap between the level of effort countries are willing to commit to and the level of effort that science tells us is needed, it was all I could do not to snap at her. Worrisome? Of course its worrisome. I've got young children who need us to do better than this. They need us to hand the planet over to them in better shape than we are on track to do so far.

I hung up the phone and watched again a video someone pointed me towards in Cancun. In it, the UNFCCC Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres answers a group of young activists who ask her what inspires her to do the work that she does. "It's you," she says, fighting back tears.

Look: We’re doing this but this has nothing to do with us. It’s all about you. It’s all about you. We’re the ones that have caused the problem but you’re the ones that are going to have to pay for it, right? The fact is, I’m the mother of two women about your age, and I realized many years ago that I had inherited a planet that was a diminished planet. And that if I didn’t do something about it, my daughters would grow up in a planet that had been severely diminished by what we’re doing. And I just can’t look at my daughters in the eyes and not do whatever I can.

So, it’s you. It’s about the kind of planet that you’re going to have. It’s honestly not my planet. It’s yours, okay? We borrowed it from you for a few minutes. But you will take it over very soon, because it’s yours. And you’re going to have to give it over to your children.

Honestly, there’s no perfect job here, okay? Nothing that we are going to do in Cancun is going to be perfect. Don’t expect perfection. Nothing is going to be highly ambitious. Nothing. Everything here is going to be one step, and everything is going to be insufficient. But it is the best that this group of people in these circumstances, with these political constraints, in this economic environment, can do for the time being. And as soon as this finishes we have to start pushing for the next step. And so it goes. But each one of us that is here has the moral responsibility to do the absolute best that we can at that moment under those circumstances. So what inspires me? It’s you.

Many people are finding reasons for hope in the outcomes of the Cancun Agreements. I'm not sure, that Christiana's words make me hopeful exactly, but the fact that our world has chosen someone to lead the global climate treaty process who is in touch with her heart and grounded in current reality is, at the very least, a reason to keep on going. Like Christiana, how can we not do whatever we can?

Please, take a moment, and take in the UNFCCC leader's words and spirit.

At COP-16: Some Progress, Further to Go

2010-12-12T17:30:00.003-05:00

Last year in Copenhagen, our team's message was "we've made some progress and have further to go."

Whenever we were interviewed by the press or had a chance to brief a policy-maker about our analysis of the pledges for emissions reductions, we stressed that if the pledges were implemented, future generations would experience somewhat less warming than under "business as usual" but that current pledges were not sufficient to avoid dangerous climate change within the century.

Now, one year later, back home after the conclusion of the Cancun round of UNFCCC negotiations, the message of our analysis is still the same.

No countries increased the ambition of their pledges, and the body as a whole did not set forth targets for emissions reductions beyond 2020. The end of the conference had some steps that most observers consider progress, and the Mexican hosts are widely recognized for their skilled diplomacy and consensus-building. The negotiators agreed to keep on talking, and to take up, in 2011, the challenges of increasing the strength of 2020 pledges and making commitments for longer-term reductions. They reaffirmed the goal of limiting global temperature increase to 2°C and agreed to revist the goal in a few years to decide if an even lower target might be appropriate.

With many speculating that the whole process might become deadlocked in tensions between rich an poor nations, the fact that the Cancun Agreements emerged at all signifies that commitment to global cooperation on climate change is still strong. The rounds of standing ovation for the Mexican Minister of Foreign Affairs during the final sessions were more about celebrating the ability and willingness of countries to keep on talking rather than any decisive actions on behalf of the climate.

One oft quoted Greenpeace campaigner summed up the results well when he said that the talks represent "a victory for the process more than a victory for the climate".

And so, as in the days after Copenhagen, the message still seems to be: "We've made some progress, and have further to go."

The glass is half empty, and also half full.

It's not so surprising that this is the case, much as we may wish things were different.

We are living through some of first moments in human history when people are trying to come together as inhabitants of a single planet to anticipate a problem that has not yet occurred, trying to work out a solution together. There are moments especially in the plenary with hundreds of delegates and observers speaking many languages, wearing many traditional dresses, that I marvel that we are, as a species, doing this at all. With our agriculture revolution only 10,000 years behind us, with an ugly past 500 years of colonization and injustice, it is a marvel that we can even imagine stewarding our shared planet together. It is a wonder that, from satellite imaging to sophisticated monitoring we can see and understand our planet as a whole, and that our wired world is connecting us together in new and powerful ways. The glass is half full.

And yet, the process is flawed, unfair, short-sighted, bogged down by local politics and narrow interests. It hasn't managed yet to even agree to the magnitude of effort that the climate demands, let alone achieve the massive mobilization that will be needed to implement any agreement. The glass seems, at times, to be almost totally empty.

With time so short, with emissions needing to peak in under 10 years, progress seems painfully, worryingly, heart-breakingly slow. The halls of the conference were filled with talk of other solutions, outside of a global treaty. Everyone seemed to have hopes for cities, or businesses, or local initiatives leading the way. But a global problem calls out for global solutions. The businesses and cities and initiatives need the lift of a global cap on emissions or a global price on carbon.

Only time will tell, I guess, whether our species is up to the challenge of bringing itself below the limits of the planet, whether we can come together fast enough, and whether we can recognize our common interests and act on them in time. I do know that thousands of passionate, intelligent, creative folks, and millions more behind them at home around the world, were, over the past two weeks, giving it their best shot. I have no doubt that most of them are now headed home to regroup, reflect, and re-engage, marking the progress that has been made and getting organized to build upon it.

We've made some progress.

We have further to go.

Time to get to work.

Chosing to Feel Hopeful About the UN Climate Conference

2010-11-30T21:23:00.001-05:00

I'm sitting tonight in an airport hotel, preparing for an early morning flight to Mexico to attend COP-16, the follow-on international negotiation to last year's Copenhagen conference.

For weeks the commentary in the press has been gloomy on prospects for progress in Cancun. With the changes in the make up of the legislature in the US, prospects for the negotiations overall are widely viewed as dismal.

It's hard to leave home and family for a giant conference center in a resort city for a meeting that seems already been written off by many. There may not be a global treaty at the end of Cancun but, based on the other UN climate conferences I've attended in the past few years, I think there will be progress on several fronts, no matter what the negotiators themselves accomplish.

Deeper ties will be woven, between individuals and groups, especially civil society organizations who send representatives to share and learn. People from different countries, different sectors, and different age groups will be thrown together for these two weeks, based on their shared search for fair and lasting solutions to climate change. The momentum that these groups continue to build and the network they continue to weave is changing the world, in subtle and not always predictable ways.

Scientific and technical exchange will continue. At the edges of the conferences are dozens of 'side events' where groups talk about the research and policy experiments. What's working in Africa to help farmers adapt to changing weather? What does the latest science say about needed reductions in greenhouse gas emissions? What are the latest ideas about how to finance those emissions reductions? Whether the negotiators find any points of a agreement or not, the exchange of ideas will go on, and will lead to new ideas, new collaborations, new experiments.

In the end we do need a global agreement to reduce emissions and the sooner the better. But getting to that agreement is not only a matter of the immediate politics of an agreement. It is also a matter of creating the right conditions, in each country, to allow leaders to lead toward sound climate policy and to allow negotiators to seal a deal to implement it.

Perhaps the negotiations will surprise all of us with a stronger than expected outcome, but if they don't, it makes the rest of the work of Cancun – the learning, the relationship building, the exchange – that much more important. That is the work that prepares the ground for the kind of global agreement we need.

Measuring the gap is an essential (but only a first) step toward steering a system

2010-11-23T17:58:00.001-05:00

This morning, a new report was released by the United Nations Environment Program. It represents about half a year of work by dozens of scientists, including me, who were asked by UNEP to assess the expected global greenhouse gas emissions in 2020 if countries fulfill the pledges they made last year in Copenhagen.

It was a challenging task for reasons ranging from lack of clarity about what exactly some pledges meant, to differing historical data sources, to differing projections of future emissions in different parts of the world, and, of course, due to the uncertainties inherent in our imperfect understanding of the climate itself. But given all of the challenges, I think the report does a good job of giving us a snapshot in time of the best scientific answer to a complex question: if we desire to limit temperature increase to 2°C over pre-industrial temperatures, do the Copenhagen Accord pledges go far enough? You can read the report here, if you want all the details, but the bottom line answer is: no, there's a gap between where we are headed and where we need to head. We filled about 60% of the gap, and have another 40% of the way to go.

As someone who has made a career of studying systems, I know that registering a gap is an essential step in self-regulating feedback. Whether it is the drop in blood sugar that sends an animal in search of food, or the increase in body temperature that leads to sweating, all self-regulating systems keep themselves in balance by measuring the gap between where some parameter is and where it needs to be, and reacting to the difference with corrective action.

It could be that the Emissions Gap report is, like the gap detected by a thermostat that turns on a furnace, a signal that spurs self-correcting, balancing action, in this case global resolve to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

But, not every gap that can be detected by a system triggers self-corrective feedback. My mentor, the systems analyst, Donella Meadows, once said jokingly about the increase in standardized testing in schools: "trying to improve learning by increasing testing, is like trying to cure a fever by taking your temperature." Measuring a gap, without the determination to act on it, is unlikely to change a system.

The Emissions Gap report is, like a test, or a thermometer, an effort to measure the size of a gap, the amount of deviation of a system from healthy conditions. But the assessment of the gap alone can't bring the system into balance any more than a thermostat can warm a room if it is disconnected from the furnace.

A gap is an essential part of any self-corrective feedback loop, but only a part, a trigger. To create change, there must be something to act on the news of the gap.

So where might we find the rest of the self-corrective feedback loop that seems to be struggling to emerge as humanity grapples with it's overshoot of the planet's limits?

There's nowhere for it to lie, really, except in us. Individual human beings, from environment ministers to ordinary citizens. In the everyday personal choices we make, and more importantly, in our coming together to change the prices of energy, the rewards for efficiency, the design of cities, and the vision of a good life for an individual or a whole society.

The good news of the emissions gap report is that the gap could be closed, brought to zero, given reasonable assumptions about technological progress and investment and the pace of change.

The hours of thinking, analysis and editing will seem well worth it, if the news of the Emissions Gap helps, in small ways or large ones, to trigger the the systemic self-corrective action we know is needed to keep the climate with in safe bounds.

Seeing with new eyes thanks to the space station and twitter

2010-11-22T14:36:00.000-05:00

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.

A Good, Low-Carbon Day

2010-11-20T19:48:00.001-05:00

A satisfying simple November day today.

It started with community workday, the one day per month we set aside for those jobs that need - or are just more fun - with a group of people. I helped move wood up to the shed and caught up with some of the news in some of my neighbors lives at the same time. When we couldn't cram another log into the shed, I wandered down the hill and started preparing the herb garden for winter, pulling a few late weeds, and cutting the dead growth off the oregano, thyme, tansy, and yarrow. A fragrant, pungent job.

Then, a pause for a fine warm lunch, set up by a neighbor and some of the kids, a little more conversation about grandchildren and politics and the rest of the workday list, and back to the garden to finish it off in the good company of a neighbor armed with pruning shears and some news of old friends.

A walk in the woods, a simple supper of roasted root vegetables, green beans from the garden, and a sampling of chocolate and strawberry frozen yogurt, the result of the newest business venture of some Cobb Hill neighbors.

Now, I'm warm and cozy in our house, with a cup of tea and a moment to think.

It's not the only 'low-carbon' way to live, and it certainly isn't as low carbon as it will need to become as we navigate the challenges our changing climate is thrusting upon us, but, with my warm cup of tea at my side I just can't shake a certain sense of confidence. When we, as a nation, as a world, turn to renewable energy (all those loads of logs), local food (the herbs, the roasted vegetables, the chocolate frozen yogurt), and finding pleasure and relaxation without fossil fuels to transport us around quite so much (the walk in the woods, the watching as the light changes over the hills during the course of one day on the land), we might just find ways of living that, far from being a sacrifice, bring unexpected richness and warmth and the honest satisfaction of tired muscles to our lives.

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

2010-11-19T19:27:00.004-05:00

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.

Time Affluence

2010-08-30T20:44:00.003-05:00

School starts tomorrow, and so the girls and I and two friends of theirs had a final summer fling this afternoon.

Following the directions of a friend – "turn right after the General Store, then turn down a narrow road that looks like a driveway and park at the edge of a path that leads through a patch of brambles" – we came to the most lovely hidden stream with deep pools, gigantic boulders, and slippery water slides that the girls were soon shooting down like little otters.

We had a picnic, laid on the rocks until we got too hot, then plunged into the water until we got too cold. There was a rope to swing on, cliffs to climb, and rocks to leap between.

I, without doubt the most sedentary of our little group, tended to favor sitting in the shade with my feet dangling in the water and, as I did, a phrase I read in a computer modeling paper earlier in the day came to life in my mind: 'time affluence'.

The paper, from the Tellus Institute, was about the dynamics of the transition to a sustainable world, which the paper argues will require a values shift on at least three dimensions: human solidarity, ecological resilience, and quality of life. And quality of life, the authors argued, is deeply tied to time affluence, to the amount of time one has to spend in leisure, with family, or in community. Policies that improve our affluence with regard to time tend to make us happier and healthier, while reducing consumption and pressure on the Earth's systems. Like organic farming that builds the soil and feeds people or renewable energy that improves air quality and provides good jobs, time affluence is at once a solution to the sustainability crisis and its own reward.

I can't think of a better example of affluence than spending the last hot afternoon of school vacation in cool water, not far from home, surrounded by laughter and splashes and fun. Real affluence lives not far out of our reach, so much of the time.

Shifting Consciousness, Starting With My Own

2010-08-25T19:47:00.003-05:00

Sitting in my post-vacation inbox was a very tantalyzing email inviting me to join a distinguished group of sustainability thinkers and doers, including some old friends I'd dearly love to see and some folks I've always wanted to meet.The agenda looked inspiring, all expenses were paid, and I've spent the past few days badly wanting to reply with an enthusiastic "count-me-in" while simultaneously thinking how crazy that would be, having already committed to workshops and conferences in Burlington, Boston, Geneva and San Fransisco between now and November.

The allure of the invitation is a strong combination I'm somehow deeply susceptible to – a mix of intellectual curiosity, gratitude for being recognized and included, and the hope that somehow maybe this group could make a big difference, change the world, halt the damage, open the way to new possibilities. If you tell me I could do something to accelerate the shift toward sustainable human communities on this Earth, I will be putty in your hands.

But, this time, I haven't sent that enthusiastic reply, at least not yet.

Instead I left the computer long enough to walk a little in the wet late summer day, breathe the moist air, and think about all the not-so-glamorous things I need to do this fall, from finishing some scientific writing projects, to planting the winter greenhouse, to helping a ten year old adjust to a new school, to helping a new team at a new organization find its stride.

None of that is likely to be the unitary key to a global shift in consciousness, but some of it might be a small part in a greater shift that is already underway. The scientific paper, if done well and met with receptive conditions, could help expand the time horizon of climate decision makers. The growing team, with the right mixture of hard work and good luck, has a chance to help people understand the urgency and the possibility of the shift to a low carbon economy.

I still I haven't hit 'reply' but I think the answer is arising for me, in me. I think I'll be staying home that week in September, a week that is among the most beautiful of all the weeks of the year on a farm in Vermont.

I can't say for sure whether the faint voice I am hearing is the voice of wisdom or the voice of exhaustion, but one principle of complex systems is coming to mind, finally after all the soul-searching: systems work because of the diversity of their parts. Each part has to do its part, but no part has to do the whole job. The heart cell just has to do the work of the heart cell, the aster in the meadow just has to be an aster, not a milkweed, not a grass.

There's something restful in that idea, and something that leaves me grateful to know that such a fine group will be meeting in California, without being desperate to be there myself. And that's a new kind of acceptance for me, one that just might qualify as a shift in consciousness.

A Celebration of Agriculture

2010-08-24T20:16:00.008-05:00

Thanks to our younger daughter, we had a welcome respite from computers, emails, conference calls, and weighty decisions in general last week.

Instead, from Thursday through Sunday the four of us more or less lived in a 10 foot by 10 foot corner of one of the cow barns at the Cornish Fair.

Our kids have been helping take care of Cedar Mountain Farm's Jersey cows since they were 5 and 8. And this year our younger daughter went so far as to become a member of 4-H and bring a young calf and a year-old heifer to the fair. Over the course of four days she showed her animals six different times, being judged variously on the quality of the cows and the quality of her care and handling of them. She won a few ribbons, made a few friends, learned a lot, and declared the whole event one of the best things to ever happen in her life. The rest of us played supporting parts, ate a year's worth of french fries and ice cream, and cheered her on.

A few impressions stand out in my mind as memories of the whole experience:

Watching a toddler in a stroller connect the dots between the udder of a giant Holstein cow and the milk in his sippy cup with a 'you've got to be kidding' look on his face.
Noticing the wistfulness on the face of an older Hartland neighbor of ours, whose family sold their last cows some years ago, as he sat at ringside and watched the judging.
Watching the wild soccer game under the judging tent late at night when the showing was over, the chores were done, the fair visitors were off in the other world of the midway, and the kids who had been so focused and disciplined all day were suddenly just kids again.
Seeing again and again the toughness, sweetness, confidence and full-out strength of teenage girl after teenage girl muscling, coaxing, and cajoling giant animals who outweighed them many times over. The boys were great too, but I was very happy to have our two girls looking around in awe at strong, smart young women who were definitely in charge of their destinies.
Noticing the links between farm families, and figuring out that some of the littlest kids leading calves around the ring had grandparents who had shown cows in the very same ring, and realizing that, though struggles abound, we are blessed to live in a region where family farms continue not only to exist but to thrive.

We are back to the world of emails and deadlines again, but I think we are going to remember the fair for a long time to come. And I know for sure that those who say that the world is forever addicted to easy entertainment and conspicuous consumption and that people will never sign up for the challenge of more sustainable ways of living have never spent a long weekend in cow barn at a fair.

If they had, they would have to agree that some families have never stopped being rooted in the land and in the care of animals and that those families are, in fact, having a pretty good time in the process of keeping those traditions alive.

Cheap Gas - Even With a Voluntary Tax

2010-08-16T15:47:00.003-05:00

I wrote yesterday about the experimental voluntary 'carbon tax' at Cobb Hill - where many of my neighbors have agreed to pool $1/per gallon of gasoline that we use during August and September.

In Bonn a few weeks ago I picked up a flyer with the picture shown above in it (from GTZ (German Technical Cooperation) on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Coperation and Development). It shows international gasoline prices for 2009.

The figure shows, from the lowest price at the top to the highest at the bottom, the average price citizens pay for a liter of gasoline in each country.

I added the big yellow arrows for the US average (just between Angola and Jordan) at 56 cents per liter, and the US average plus the Cobb Hill voluntary tax (which moves us up to the company of the Republic of Congo and Pakistan), but still in the bottom half of the price distribution.

If you follow the link to the actual data, you'll see that the countries with the most expensive gasoline are not monolithic. You'll find some of the wealthiest countries that have excellent public transportation and walkable cities, like Denmark or the Netherlands, and some of the poorest countries, like Burundi and Eritrea. What I don't think you will find are countries whose cities have reputations for excellent public transportation or biking or walking amongst those countries in the top fourth of the graph, where the US currently sits.

You get what you pay for, as my grandmother always said. Somehow our $1 tax isn't seeming so steep anymore.

Carbon Tax Passes, At Least A Voluntary One in My Community

2010-08-15T09:59:00.006-05:00

I love the experimental attitude of Cobb Hill, something that I think traces directly back to Cobb Hill co-founder, Donella Meadows, who wrote and spoke often of her belief that no one knows how to create a sustainable world and that therefore we must commit ourselves to experimentation, be willing to make mistakes, and share what we learn along the way.

This experimental spirit showed up in my email box the other day, in the form of a note from my neighbor, Tom, with recommendations for a two-month experiment with a voluntary carbon tax within our community.

The idea was simple. Any family who wanted to participate would keep track of the number of gallons of gasoline consumed for two months, and commit to paying a 'tax' of $1 per gallon, the proceeds of which would be collected and invested in yet-to-be-determined ways that would enhance the sustainability or fossil-fuel independence of the community.

I signed up (though I gulped when I saw the recommendation that air-miles be 'taxed' as well, knowing that my fall schedule of flights to climate meetings is quite high; the irony of this which is a topic for another post someday!)

There are all sorts of questions about our voluntary tax, pretty much the same ones that play out on the national and international scale.

Fairness:
How do we ensure that the tax is not an unfair burden on those with the lowest incomes?

Priorities;
How to invest the revenues towards our long-term goals?

Specifics:
What about other fuels, like propane for cooking?

If the past ten years at Cobb Hill are any guide we will talk about all these questions and more. We will try things out. The plan will change. It might even be abandoned in the end, and that would be OK with me. The plan itself is not the point. What is important is, as Dana Meadows said, the willingness to admit that we don't know exactly what to do and then get down to the work of trying things out.

So, stay tuned for the debate, the lessons, and, of course, the answer you might be most interested in: how big will the Sawin/Rice August/September voluntary carbon tax bill be?

And, who knows, maybe your family or your neighborhood will get sick of waiting for the Senate and decide to try something similar, yourselves.

Low Carbon Peaches

2010-08-14T20:52:00.000-05:00

Every morning at the breakfast table for the whole summer, we have been watching peaches ripen on the tree outside. First they were little green oblongs, then they grew and took on some color, and then one day the tree was bent over with its burden of fruit. The harvest was, for backyard orchard scale, huge:

We had already begun feasting on peaches, eating our way through a case of "Amish" peaches shipped up from Pennsylvania, and they were really, really good.

But these peaches, which traveled straight from the tree to the kitchen table in a one-hundred foot journey are almost another fruit. It is as though you started with the Pennsylvania peaches and then added a little taste of mango, a dash of something limey, and maybe a bit of coconut flavor. There's a complexity, a mixture of tastes that must not survive the shipping process.

I was eating one of our 'low carbon' peaches today, letting the juice drip down my chin, and thinking about a conversation over a dry and tasteless sandwich in the Maritim conference center in Bonn during one of the recent UN climate negotiation sessions. My lunch partner insisted that all we can count on in the effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are 'proven technologies'. Lifestyle change and behavior change were, in his view, highly unlikely and not to be depended on.

I know many people who share this perspective, and I realize that they are just trying to be realistic, trying not to count on changes that might not happen.

But, from the midst of the best eating month in the year if you live on a Vermont farm, I have to say that I think there are all sorts of factors yet to be taken into account in the calculus of what people can be counted on to do.

There is no doubt in my mind: the peaches and a whole lot else are going to be better in a low carbon world, and I'll take a juicy mangoey-lime-coconut peach over a tasteless sandwich any day.

Balance: On the farm and in the atmosphere

2010-08-12T09:15:00.004-05:00

Hazel, resting after her eighth calving.

Doing chores in the barn yesterday morning, my younger daughter and I paused for a moment to enjoy the sight of an hours-old calf.

Leaning over his pen, watching the little guy work on his first bottle, I chatted with Kerry, owner and manager of the herd of Jersey cows here, about the health of his mother Hazel following his birth.

I noticed how often Kerry used the word balance in our short conversation. The health of Hazel today was related to the balance of calcium in her blood, bones and milk, which in turn depended upon the balance of nutrients in the pasture, the hay, and the grain she ate in weeks and months past. Managing a cow's health – in fact managing the whole of a farm – is structured around attending to balance, and acting swiftly to keep an imbalance from growing into a crisis.

Of course, balance is a critical concept in the climate arena as well: it has long been true that emissions of greenhouse gasses are far out of balance with their removals to oceans and forests. On a farm an imbalance in the metabolism of a single animal can lead to sudden crisis and even death of the animal. The time between imbalance and disaster is a matter of hours, or maybe even minutes. Even in the slower metabolism of the soil, imbalance leads to poor yields in season or two.

Unfortunately for all of us, in the climate system, the delay between an imbalance in the metabolism of the planet and the arrival of serious consequences is measured in decades, maybe even centuries.

Kerry is smart, hardworking, observant and dedicated. But so are most of the people I've meet who work in the world of international climate policy. Acting swiftly and effectively to restore balance is easier when the consequences of imbalance are strong and direct, and harder when the feedback is slow and initially weak.

That's a classic finding of system dynamics and at least one reason that explains why human beings, if they put their minds and hearts to it, can do a very good job at maintaining the many balances within a farm ecosystem, and why as a global species, we aren't doing such a good job attending to planetary imbalances.

From computer simulations to sophisticated policy instruments, there are all sorts of tools that could help climate policy makers do a better job, but today, with the conversation in the barn fresh in my mind, I'm wishing for an even simpler shift, one that would help us see the Earth and its climate as alive and dynamic, just like an animal in our care or the body of a loved one - capable of beauty and productivity and longevity, but only when the conditions are right and only when life-giving balance has been maintained.

Big World, Little World

2010-08-11T10:06:00.013-05:00

I had an interesting conversation with my older daughter last night. After months of work our Climate Interactive Project has left Sustainability Institute, where it was born and grew, to become a project of the Washington DC-based New Venture Fund. With that milestone (and the hours of legal and other decisions) behind us, she was expecting more time and attention from her mother in these last weeks of summer.

I, just back from a week at the UN climate talks in Germany, and on a fast learning curve about setting up all the organizational provisions to take care of a team of six, feel more pressed for time than ever.

We had a good talk, but no resolution.

All in all, I think I do OK as a mom. In the past day or two, I drove her to her pet-sitting job, which is well within walking/biking distance, left the computer to play "Moose In the House" with the little boy she was babysitting downstairs, and took a walk with her in the misty pre-dark to help take care of her chickens. All on top of the usual services of cooking and laundry.

But I do work a lot. And it is not easy to stop thinking about deadlines, strategy, or the ticking clock of rising CO2 levels. There are a lot of times when my kids have to repeat themselves because my mind is not in the room with them, but off somewhere else, racing through lists or worries or possibilities.

One of the big fears I carry through this life is that someday when I am an old woman my kids will ask me why I didn't do more to prevent climate change.

Last night's conversation reminded me that there is another extreme which I fear just as much. When I am an old woman they might say, why were you gone so much when I was growing up? Why did you sometimes put everything you had into your work without reserving enough for me?

I haven't found any easy answers to this constant pull between the big world and my little one. Doing my best seems to mean doing the work as well as possible, looking up from it as much as possible, and remembering to be grateful for everything, especially the chance to try to weave a life that serves my family and something bigger, too. It's not a perfect weaving, not a flawless tapestry, but more of a patchwork quilt. That's good enough for now, and maybe some of the more visible ragged edges and loose threads of the quilt of my life will even leave my girls feeling free to create their own messy and complicated patchwork lives, stitching together some of this and some of that, feeding their souls and hopefully the world.

Wherever we are now

2010-06-19T09:03:00.003-05:00

This house is cool and quiet.

with swallows under the eves

and a soft green garden outside each window.

Somewhere else

oil slides onto the shore

creeping into the tiny secret spaces

between feather barbs,

between grains of sand.

Somewhere else

Daddy will never come home from the coal mine,

Daddy will never come home from Iraq,

Daddy will never fish those waters again.

Somewhere else the deluge washed the house away.

That place wasn’t a flood zone, the people said,

but everywhere is a flood zone if it rains enough, and

they were happy to save the baby pictures.

Somewhere else,

somewhere in Africa,

five year old children

have never seen rain.

The sea road washes out,

the fish swim north,

and old farmers stand baffled in an unknown season called change.

Everywhere,

even here outside this cool and quiet house,

the air is changed.

This is not is not far in the future.

This is not somewhere else.

This is you and me.

Wherever we are now.

Climate Scoreboard

2009-11-30T16:45:00.001-05:00

Upward Spirals

2008-10-15T15:01:00.014-05:00

Teaching about climate change – whether its the science behind the target of 350 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere or watching as people play the "350-challenge" (using the Pangaea simulator developed by our team from SI, Ventana Systems and MIT to discover what level of emissions reductions will be needed to bring C02 levels down to safety within the century) – means watching the expressions that cross people's faces as they begin to take in exactly where 'business as usual' is carrying us and how much emissions must be reduced to bring the climate system back to something near balance.

I saw it on the faces of Dartmouth students where I was a guest teacher recently. I heard it in the words of new staff members at SI who had their first chance to explore Pangaea the other day.

Reduce emissions by 6 or 7 percent per year around the world? Starting as soon as possible?

If that's what its going to take to stabilize the climate you must be kidding, the faces say.

And then the words begin. Look out the window - where I used to live in New Jersey, in the dorm where nobody seems to care, over in China with one new coal fired power plant following the next.

This feels impossible, the faces say. Please, tell me that it's not.

In these moments, the impulse to making everything all right, to explain how a combination of technology and hard work and co-operation can turn the trends, is close to overwhelming, especially when the faces looking out at me are young ones, the faces of people who will live the longest with the consequences of a changing climate.

What do you say in these moments? I asked my colleague Drew the other day. As he shares Pangaea with groups around the country and around the world he sees the kinds of faces I'm talking about on a regular basis.

His response: I show them pictures of my house. I show them graphs of our energy use. I show them what happened when we insulated, and when we installed the solar water heater. It's my own personal vision of 80% reductions by 2050.

I think Drew's answer is a brilliant one. Whether we think about our challenge as 80% by 2050 or 6% per year, the only place to start is where we are, using what we have at hand.

The real hope and possibility lies in the cascade of change those first steps can ignite - the economies of scale, the waves of innovation, the new ways of thinking and relating that can be unleashed when your neighbor (or your competitor, or a neighboring nation) takes a risk and tries things another way.

The other day I stumbled across some notes SI's founder and my teacher, Dana Meadows, left behind. Even as rough notes, meant for a later expansion that she never had the time to complete, they convey something very important about where our small first steps can lead:

"Greater energy efficiency makes better the greenhouse problem, urban air pollution, and acid rain. At the same time it reduces military and defense expenditures for the Persian Gulf. Enormous amounts of capital are released both from defense and from further construction of energy generators.

In the Third World that capital can be invested in human services, health and education, which brings down the birth rate. In the industrialized world it can be invested in research and development of renewable energy sources -- which further bring down pollution –- and in materials recycling- which saves still more energy and pollution by reducing the demand for primary materials. The mindset of materials cycling takes hold, creating new designs, new markets, and new jobs in materials handling and re-preparation. The careful re-use of wood and paper allow the restoration of forests, which conserve water flows, build soils, and provide habitats for wild species. The improved water regimes improves agriculture, as does the recycling of organic wastes into soil-amending compost.

As agriculture becomes both higher yielding and less dependent on imported chemicals the balance of trade of the Third World improves, debts become payable, incomes rise, further reducing birthrates, further raising income. As capital stops flowing out of those countries for debt repayment, it can invested in education and in new productive activities, energy efficient, material efficient, and with proper pollution controls. As physical constraints and economic problems ease, more and more people could have the freedom to explore who we could be and what we could do if we didn't have to grow."

Imagine that. The tiny steps of my tiny household, or Drew's, or yours, linked to global spirals of solutions. It's not just our problems that are interconnected, but also our potential to solve them.

Beyond Business As Usual

2008-10-14T13:34:00.011-05:00

In late September, the Global Carbon Project released new statistics on the 'carbon budget' including updated figures for the rate of increase in global carbon dioxide emissions from human sources during the period from 2000-2007. They report that while carbon dioxide emissions worldwide grew at an average rate of 0.9% per year in the 1990's the average rate of growth this decade has been an incredible 3.5% percent per year.

Is this a difference that makes a difference?

It might not sound like a lot at first glance. But, for anything that grows exponentially - from a bank account to the human impact on the planet – a small change in the rate of growth translates into a big difference in the growing entity. Here's a comparison in the form of two outputs from Pangaea - the global climate change simulation tool our team has been using and sharing. The red line shows future emissions in our "business as usual" scenario, at an average rate of growth for global emissions of about 1.5% per year. And the blue line show emissions growing at 3.5% per year, the rate we've just learned more closely fits our current situation.

The baseline run of Pangaea projects future growth rates in emissions based upon estimates provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. These projected rates of growth vary depending upon the region of the world contributing the emissions. They range from 1% to 2% per year for the three regions that Pangaea simulates.

Since global emissions already exceed the rate at which CO2 is removed from the atmosphere that baseline run is not optimistic. It shows a world one-hundred years from now with CO2 levels of almost 900 parts per million - far above the level where several dangerous runaway warming loops could potentially be triggered.

The recent data from the Global Carbon Project mean that what we've been calling 'business as usual' - the scenario when the world doesn't respond to climate change by reducing emissions - is actually conservative. Growth in emissions is happening even faster than expected. The figure below shows the impact on CO2 levels in the atmosphere, if that growth rate holds steady throughout the simulation.

So, is this a difference that makes a difference?

Knowing that a 900 ppm world must be avoided at all costs, does it really mater that business as usual might be taking us there quicker than many had expected?

Isn't the old 'business as usual' trajectory so sobering that it already provides the motivation for individuals and nations to act strongly and decisively?

No one wants a 900 ppm world, so the likely results of what we've been calling 'business as usual' should be enough to motivate the kind of hard work and cooperation need to get emissions onto a downward trajectory. The IPCC scenario has been around, and is familiar, and credible.

On the other hand, an important goal of Pangaea is to allow all of us to ask what if questions.

And the runs I've shown here do ask an important 'what if' question: what if 3.5% per year is the new business as usual? Even if a 900ppm world is bad enough, this faster growth rate means that the degree of emissions reductions need to stabilize the climate might be even bigger than we think. We are racing a faster train than we thought.

It seems to me that all of us, ordinary people, parents, and decision makers, need to look this new reality straight in the face.

For now, I'll keep showing people 'business as usual'.

But I'm also going to start asking people if they'd like to try a 'beyond business as usual' too.

I Wish Dana Meadows Could See This

2008-09-20T14:26:00.018-05:00

Of all the people I have met in my work in sustainability over the years none of them have believed in the fundamental goodness of human beings more than Dana Meadows, my first and in many ways, most important teacher in this field.

We don't have climate change and polluted waterways and eroding topsoil and declining fisheries because people are fundamentally bad, stupid, greedy, or lazy, she said, but because we find ourselves in complex systems that defy our intuitions and whose rules don't promote or reward the kind of care for each other and our world that most of us feel, most of the time.

That was her conclusion after decades of study, including participating in the creation of a computer simulation that explored the dynamics as our global human civilization approached and then overshot the carrying capacity of the Earth.

Her years of computer modeling left her deeply aware of how the dynamics of exponential growth, long delays, and distorted signals characterize most, maybe even all, of our major sustainability challenges and how these same dynamics fool even the most well-meaning of us into a false sense of security, a feeling we have more time to solve these problems than we really do, and a confusion about their underlying cause.

We don't need to be better people, Dana said, but we do need to challenge our intuitions, and learn to feel – deeply and without illusion – the dynamics of these complex systems.

I think Dana would be thrilled to see the recent work of some of the people she mentored in this field, Tom Fidaman and Drew Jones, especially.

With the help of others, they have created a computer simulation of the world's climate, called Pangaea. And, these last few weeks, as I have begun to help in their efforts, I've seen its potential to bring the climate system to life.

The oceans and atmosphere don't talk to us directly, at least not in ways we modern, 'sophisticated' people have been taught to trust, but Pangaea is, in many ways, the next best thing to this. While its output agrees closely with much more complex scientific models of the climate, Pangaea runs much more quickly, and on a desktop computer. With it, one can asks all sorts of questions about our options, as individual nations and a collective global society, to reach the goal of a stable climate.

What if the US froze emissions? What if the developed world started reducing emissions by 3% per year? What if all nations did so?

The answers to these questions are startling to most of the people I've watched experiment with Pangaea, even those with years of dedication to various aspects of sustainability. The simulator supports what some of the people on the planet with the best intuition about the climate - climatologists – have been saying more and more vehemently - we need to act, now, and strongly, all of us, in all the parts of the world. But there is something about discovering this for yourself through testing scenarios that is more powerful than reading the words of even the most alarmed climatologist.

Pangaea doesn't tell us what do in response to the climate crisis, or how to rise to the challenge, or what kind of people we need to be to help our societies move through it, but it does help us to begin to see which choices might be sufficient to give future generations a stable climate.

And, I think Dana Meadows would agree, we need that level of unflinching understanding in order to participate fully and whole-heartedly in the millions of efforts, large and small, that it will take to bring our Earth's climate back into balance.

Indigenous Voices: The market oriented model is the main cause for climate change

2008-07-08T09:46:00.016-05:00

In Japan yesterday a group of indigenous leaders from around the world urged the leaders of the world's richest nations to allow them to participate in the G8 discussions on climate change. There are no indication that any of the 26 leaders had their voices heard in the closed door discussions of the G8, discussions which produced a tepid commitment to halve CO2 emissions by 2050.

By refusing to open their doors (or their ears) to the indigenous perspective, the G8 leaders missed the opportunity to move the discussion from symptomatic solutions to fundamental ones.

In the view of these indigenous leaders "the market-oriented economic model of the G8 nations is the main cause for climate change, the global food crisis, and rising oil prices."

"We believe the economic growth model and modernization promoted by the G8, which suggests that we can control and dominate nature, is flawed," reads the group's statement.

The best ecological economics supports their case. Markets uninformed by the limits of the planet or the needs of communities will ultimately undermine the very conditions they depend upon.

There is an ethical reason why indigenous people should have a voice in the world's climate negotiations: They represent communities that have done little to create climate change but are already disproportionately impacted by it.

There is also a survival reason: If ever there was a time for wisdom, a time to let go of the illusions and myths of our economic system so that we can take the kind of action required for survival of our species, now is that time.

Indigenous leaders, coming out of their own worldviews and traditions, are clearly seeing through these myths. Their words hold out no illusions that we can find a way out of climate change without re-thinking the relative importance of markets, communities, and nature. They remind us that this crisis is primarily about repairing our relationships with nature and each other. These voices, so far excluded from official discussion have essential widsom to contribute to a path forward toward a livable world.

In Copenhagen at the end of 2009 the next round of international climate change negotiations will conclude. Calls are rising around the world for those negotiations to be informed by the best science - with a target for CO2 in the atmosphere of no more than 350 ppm, the highest level consistent with avoiding the most disastrous consequences of climate change.

The voice of science needs to be loud and clear in Copenhagen. So do the voices of the world's indigenous leaders.

You don't have to be a scientist or an indigenous leader to use your voice as a citizen to demand that both perspectives – science and indigenous wisdom – and not flawed markets, provided the underpinnings of climate policy and the route back to a safe planet for all of us.

Pacing

2008-06-22T21:36:00.008-05:00

Today I did something I've never done before.

I said that I had done enough, this week, for people and the planet.

Not enough in the sense we all hope for, not enough in the sense of the ONE CRITICAL THING that changes the world and makes everything OK again, but enough in the sense of having done all that my body and my family could tolerate, for now.

After accepting on Tuesday the chance to give part of a keynote address at a sustainable energy conference, writing the speech on Thursday, and giving it on Friday, and then co-leading two workshops at the same conference on Saturday, today I had meant to act on my new found determination to bring my concern about climate change before the media and decision makers.

I learned on Thursday - during a pause in the speech-writing – that Laura Bush will be arriving Monday in the town next door to ours, to make a speech of her own about the importance of protecting our national parks.

And so on Sunday I was going to plan HOW TO MAKE A STATEMENT about the urgency of climate change.

I got a lot of coaching from one of my neighbors, now a mostly mild mannered mother and consultant, but veteran of protests from Rocky Flats to New York City.

I learned her opinion that the odds of asking a Laura Bush a question were slim at best – "why would they want to open themselves up to potentially embarrassing questions when they don't have to?"

Which is too bad, because I had a good question in mind:

"Mrs. Bush, you have spoken here and in other places about your love for your daughters, your love of the national parks, and your concern for the well being of children. I share your same loves and concerns. They have lead me to pledge to do what I can to convince national leaders to enact climate policy consistent with what the latest science tells us is needed to avoid the worst consequences of climate change. Would your family join me in that pledge?"

In my neighbor's opinion standing anywhere near her motorcade with a sign of any sort I'd likely be asked to set my sign down.

Which was also too bad because I had such a good one in mind.

"Mrs. Bush, Loving our National Parks Means Loving the Climate. 350ppm!"

The strategy with the best chance of success made sense once my friend educated me a little bit more. I should gather a group together, and find a place to stand somewhere in the town, but not in the way of the official route. We should bring our signs, and make them big. We should let the press know that thirty minutes before Mrs. Bush's remarks, "local activists will urge Mrs. Bush to act out of her commitment to our national parks by encouraging the administration to take specific actions to avoid the worst consequences of climate change."

It all made sense and was possible in theory.

But when I found myself being short with our seven-year old (who we'd left with friends during all the speech-making and workshop leading) for the second and then for the third time as I sat at the computer and tried to draft a press release and figure out where to fax it, it suddenly became just too much.

Laura Bush won't face my questions or signs tomorrow, though I imagine some of my fellow Vermonters will make their voices heard.

Giving up, slowing down, taking Sunday as a day of rest, didn't come easily. But in this strain that I feel everyday, between living life at a pace that seems to be fast enough to, maybe, get in front of the march to disaster, and living life at a pace that is in itself an answer to that march to disaster, I feel pretty sure that today, for me, and my family, I made the right choice.

I weeded the beans and planted some basil. I helped clean the bunny's cage and played a board game. It took a few hours of turmoil and regret, and (I'll admit it) a little resentment about the obligations of parenthood, but by the end of the afternoon, when the sun came out and the soil was moist with an inch of badly needed rain, I could remember again that doing this work is important, but that it is a job for the long-haul, and that, no matter how urgent it all feels, we need to pace ourselves.

$4.00 Per Gallon Gasoline

2008-06-12T07:08:00.004-05:00

I just had an article posted on the progressive news website Common Dreams. Here's the start, click here for the full article....

$4.00 per Gallon Gasoline and Climate Change Both Call for the Same Solution: Collective Investment in Clean Energy

“What do you have to say about global warming to the whole segment of Americans who are just waking up to energy issues with $4.00 per gallon gasoline?”

That question came from the audience during a workshop on climate change I led recently.

There is an assumption behind this question, one that seemed to be everywhere I turned last week — in the press, on talk radio, and even on the floor of the US Senate. The assumption goes like this: now that energy prices are rising we can’t afford to charge the costs of greenhouse gas pollution because that would place an unacceptable burden on people already struggling to meet high energy costs.

On Climate Change, Our Reasoning Should Be The Exact Opposite of the US Senate

2008-06-08T06:05:00.011-05:00

"What do you have to say about global warming to the whole segment of Americans who are just waking up to energy issues with $4.00 per gallon gasoline?"

That question came from an audience member at a workshop on climate change Phil and I presented at last week, and it's the same question that comes up again and again in the news coverage of the blockage last week of the Climate Security Act in the US Senate.

Any economist will tell you that markets only serve us when they include all the costs of a good or service. We find ourselves so close to the edge of climate catastrophe because, for several hundred years, our energy markets have failed us by not charging the costs of preventing climate change or repairing the damage it causes. That may have been understandable in the days before the scientific consensus that climate change is happening and that human greenhouse gas production is its cause. But today, with the world's leading climate scientists telling us that we have already exceeded safe levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, allowing the distorted signals of the energy market to persist is like knowing that tobacco causes lung cancer and dithering about putting warnings on cigarette packages, charging a tax to support public health and education, or banning second-hand smoke.

The CSA act, while not going far enough in its targets to provide safety against the most dangerous impacts of climate change, was a step towards rectifying the distortions of energy prices, because it introduced a cost for the production of climate pollution, and made plans for using some of revenues for supporting the transition to a cleaner energy system. It would have also used some of the revenues to help consumers switch to cleaner energy alternatives.

This cost for greenhouse gas pollution was framed by many Senators – aided by the news media and fueled by a campaign by the oil and coal lobbies – as a tax that would place an added burden on working people already struggling to cope with rising gas and food prices.

According to Senator Mitch McConnell (from the coal producing state of Kentucky): "At a time when the economy is struggling, when the price of gas, food and power bills are skyrocketing, this giant tax would be an unbearable new burden for Americans.”

At its most stark, this way of thinking says: "We've gotten used to the lie our energy markets have being telling us, we've gotten used to the mistaken impression that energy use has little cost, and, frankly, even though we now can see that this has never been true, we can't imagine how we will go on if that distortion is removed."

If we accept this framing without thinking about it, then trying to correct our energy markets to protect ourselves our communities, the ecosystems we depended upon, the agriculture that feeds us, the mountain snow pack that provides irrigation and drinking water starts to feel like a politically impossible task.

The good news is we don't have to accept this framing. If we stop to think about it, stop to push on it, even a little bit, we see that it has deep flaws.

Americans don't need cheap gas and electricity from coal. We need what cheap gas and electricity from coal have come to provide - affordable convenient ways to get to work in the morning, ways to get around our communities, access to food we can afford that is good for our bodies and our children, homes that are comfortable, activities that interest us, use our minds, muscles, and hearts and make a difference.

Americans are burdened by the rising cost of fossil energy not because of some immutable human need for fossil energy, but because we haven't yet created the shared infrastructure that will allow us to meet our primary needs without fossil fuels. We are burdened not so much by a gasoline price crisis as by a forethought crisis. The only way to make up for this lack of planning in the past is to do what could have been gradually over decades much more quickly now.

Oil supplies are dwindling, but reserves of coal, tar sands, and oil shale are vast. There is more than enough carbon dioxide locked up within these reserves to send our Earth into a period of irreversible warming, should we, in our race to meet our 'needs' dig up and burn those reserves. With so much at stake, we can't allow the voice of the oil and coal lobbies to tell us what our needs our.

Yes we need to get to work and put food on the table. AND, to have jobs to get to and a farming system to grow that food we need a stable climate.

These needs intersect in one place: the creation of a shared, clean, renewable energy infrastructure.

At this intersection advocates for climate protection and people hurting from $4.00 gas are, in fact allies, not the opponents McConnell and the coal lobby would have them be. By calling for affordable ways for people to get to work without depleting their bank accounts or the resiliency of the climate, by staying oriented to the common cause that can be found when we orient towards our true needs, perhaps we can find the power to repair the disorted incentives of our energy system while there is still time.

To Lead, Politicians Need the People

2008-06-06T20:33:00.013-05:00

Yesterday morning, Phil and I spoke about some of the latest signs and symptoms of climate change before a group of Massachusetts legislators and their staff.

We did our absolute best to share clear, accurate information. We told them:

-- Climate change is already dangerous, for people around the world, including those suffering in 12 out of the 13 regions where the UN operated major humanitarian relief operations in 2007 - because 12 out of 13 of 2007's major disasters were 'climate-related'.

-- Current levels of greenhouse gas (at 385 ppm) haven't yet had their full impact on temperature and will take hundreds of years to do so.

-- Prolonged exposure of the planet to current levels of CO2 increases the likelihood of runaway warming, where warming feeds upon itself.

We told them we were convinced by the analysis of James Hansen and his colleagues that CO2 levels should be brought as quickly as possibly to 350 ppm or below, and that this would require dramatic action, on the order of phasing out coal use worldwide by 2030 and ending deforestation by 2015, and avoiding the temptation to tap tar sands or oil shale.

Such changes are ambitious, we said, but feasible, given the collective will to act.

It is, for me, always a strange feeling to share this information. We stood there speaking in ordinary tones, as people sat in chairs, took notes, sipped coffee. Did any of us believe what we were saying, what we were hearing? Twenty-two years to phase out coal, on a planet with billions hungry, in need of better shelter, schools, and health care? Seven years to end deforestation? There were no gasps of shock (except when we showed the graph of Arctic ice melt last summer), no muttering about the magnitude of the challenge being laid out.

But no one disagreed, or quibbled with our facts. No one said the danger was less grave than we suggested.

In fact, the representative who addressed his colleagues after we had finished said he agreed with everything we had said.

But then his remarks took a, for me, unexpected turn:

You can't expect to pass legislation to protect the climate on its own merits, not without showing other benefits.

And anyway, some crops might grow better with higher CO2.

And they are building so many coal plants in China it might not matter what we do here.

And we have to be careful, to not take steps that might harm the economy.

I don't know why it played out this way, why he didn't feel free to urge his colleagues to take bold and decisive action by supporting the climate legislation currently under consideration. I don't have the background to understand the subtleties of this particular moment in Massachusetts' political landscape.

But it did not look like a lack of understanding of the science or a lack of caring about this issue.

It looked like an elected leader unable to go farther without the people urging him forward or protecting his back.

I know how easy it is for us ordinary citizens to think of politicians as the ones with power, and us as the ones without. I fall into that belief easily myself.

But, coming home from our brief foray into the world of political decision making to the news that, in Washington, Senate Republicans succeeded in blocking the global warming legislation under consideration by that body (after Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky required that all 492 pages be read into the record - a move that took 8 1/2 hours) it is clear to me that - on the issue of global warming - it is going to have to be the people who make it possible for the politicians to lead.

Science Gives Us The Numbers, We Make the Meaning

2008-05-31T16:05:00.010-05:00

800,000 - the number of years for which CO2 levels in the Earth's recent past have been measured in a new analysis of ice core data.

180-280 – the range of CO2 levels (in parts per million) during all but the last 100 of those 800,000 years.

385 – the current level of CO2 in the atmosphere.

60 - the percentage of 1,598 species examined in a new study who have already been affected by climate change.

These are just numbers, the products of science and careful measurement. The most they can do is tell us what is happening. They can't tell us what to think about it. Or what to feel. Or what to do.

We all have to do that for ourselves in the ways that are right for us - in silence in the woods, in noisy debate around the kitchen table, in prayer in our faith communities, at the ballot box, and, maybe, in public when we raise our voices to say loudly, fully, clearly, exactly what we think about these numbers, what we feel, and what, exactly what, it is the elected leaders who hold the public trust need to do.

Numbers are only numbers. Data is only data. Numbers alone, without our response, don't shape the future.

Falling in Love with a Piece of the World

2008-05-30T21:42:00.010-05:00

We picked up our older daughter from a week at camp this afternoon.

In the backseat she pummeled her younger sister for news of home. How are Tango and Ishult (horses)? How are Nikky and Ave (parakeets)? How's Dusky (hen) and Chickadee (rooster)?

And then one that surprised me - How's the maple?

How's the maple? Before asking about friends or community news?

But it shouldn't have surprised me that a tree - that particular tree – figured so prominently in her questions of home. Ever since their Dad helped them hang a rope swing in the maple at the bottom of the hill, our girls and most of their friends have been busy falling in love with that maple.

They've invented games with complicated rules played in its branches (going down has the right of way over going up). They've given it a nickname (Mape). Our younger daughter notices every maple of the same species on our drives around town and points each one out with the breathless excitement of one who has discovered treasure. They both notice how the tree changes from week to week (a rotten spot at the bottom; some bright pink leaves that don't seem 'quite right') and both speculate about its past (did the last children who played in it, when it was a much smaller tree, the ones who built a platform high in its branches, discover the same route to the top?)

The neighborhood kids who go to school have taken to swinging in it while they wait for the bus. The kids who do their learning at home have taken (when they can negotiate it) to carrying their books down to work underneath its shade.

Younger sister's report was highly detailed and focused mostly on the fact that a branch had broken (not anybody's fault) but that the rope swing and the games were mostly unaffected by the change in architecture. It makes me sad, though, she said.

There was silence in the back seat for a while, and then: Yeah, me too, it makes me sad too.

E. O. Wilson has said that we will only save what we love.

Luckily for all of us, this love lives close to surface. Twelve feet of rope and sufficient unscheduled time to touch, clamber, and explore is more than enough to call it forth.

In this time of ecological crisis, giving ourselves – child and adult alike – that time might be the most important action we can take.

We might not even need the rope.

We are not helpless...

2007-12-20T14:41:00.000-05:00

Events this week left me remembering the column my mentor Dana Meadows wrote about the depressing signs from the Arctic. (This from 2001, when the forecasts were that it might take fifty years before the Arctic was free of sea ice in the summer, a prediction that some reports are now saying was too optimistic.) The way Dana ended the column then rings true for me today.

"Is there any way to end this column other than in gloom? Can I give my friend, you, myself any honest hope that our world will not fall apart? Does our only possible future consist of watching the disappearance of the polar bear, the whale, the tiger, the elephant, the redwood tree, the coral reef, while fearing for the three-year-old?

Heck, I don't know. There's only one thing I do know. If we believe that it's effectively over, that we are fatally flawed, that the most greedy and short-sighted among us will always be permitted to rule, that we can never constrain our consumption and destruction, that each of us is too small and helpless to do anything, that we should just give up and enjoy our SUVs while they last, well, then yes, it's over. That's the one way of believing and behaving that gives us a guaranteed outcome.

Personally I don't believe that stuff at all. I don't see myself or the people around me as fatally flawed. Everyone I know wants polar bears and three-year-olds in our world. We are not helpless and there is nothing wrong with us except the strange belief that we are helpless and there's something wrong with us. All we need to do, for the bear and ourselves, is to stop letting that belief paralyze our minds, hearts, and souls."

Re-reading this, I have decided, again, six years later, to believe that these words are true. There is nothing wrong with me. I have decided (again) to believe that the way I feel is the way any sane person would on a rapidly sickening planet. I have decided (again) to believe that millions of people feel the same way, even if they don't wear those feelings on their public faces.

And I see the possibility -available to us as soon as we stop assuming there is something wrong with us – that we could decide together that we are not helpless, either. That, too, would be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Everyday People

2007-12-17T15:45:00.001-05:00

In the course of sharing my reactions to the latest snapshot of the Arctic I've been having some interesting conversations. In one a friend and fellow Vermonter asked: 'help me learn how to convey what everyday people ... and their local governments .. can do [in response to climate change.]

I took her question with me out into the fading afternoon light while I shoveled snow and did chores.

What can ordinary citizens do, both to lessen the extent of climate change and to prepare their communities to withstand the climate change that is already inevitable?

Shovelful by shovelful I came up with quite a list.

1. Don't leave the thinking about how to respond to climate change to the 'experts.' Ordinary people have all the authority they need on this issue simply by virtue of common sense and a stake in the future. Ordinary people are technically qualified to say that it makes no sense to produce more pollution than the Earth can absorb and that exponential growth cannot continue on a finite planet. Ordinary people are morally qualified to say that we shouldn't expect others in distant lands or future generations to bear the consequences of our actions. Ordinary people have the authority to raise questions about the viability of ideas like sun shields in the upper atmosphere or iron fertilization of the oceans.

If you must, find some resources that explain climate science in clear non-technical terms (you might try the Our Climate Ourselves resources page or this climate change simulator), but above all trust yourself. We need the logic ordinary people on the climate change question. We need the logic of grandfathers and teen-agers and home-makers and farmers and workers, the logic of stewardship and the instinct to care for future generations.

2. Trust and speak out of your own authority, but find ways to do so in the company of others. This is a collective problem that began before our births and will not be fully solved until well after our deaths. It is a problem that cuts across all the lines that divide us, a problem for anyone who eats, drinks, loves a child, cares about a community, or a river, or a tree on a city street corner. All sorts of inspiring organizations are emerging to facilitate collective action. Find the one that suits you (or start your own at whatever scale is right for you) and find solace in the way that the tiny drop of your one lifetime joins into the rising ocean of people who are ready for this problem to end. (A few vehicles for collective action on climate change in the US that I am aware of include: Step It Up, 1Sky, and Focus the Nation.)

3. Don't let a new coal plant be built in your community. See this graph if you wonder why. While supplies of oil are declining around the world, reserves of coal are massive. Because the odds of avoiding dangerous climate change if we allow electricity-generating coal plants to transfer the carbon in the coal from below the Earth's crust to the atmosphere are very low one of the most powerful places a citizen can act is at hearings in their region about any plans to build new coal plants.

4. Be creative about what is possible in your own community. Look especially for the opportunities that simultaneously reduce carbon emissions, build community, and buffer your community against instabilities of all sorts that could be triggered in a warming world. Organize your community to insulate the homes of anyone in your community who can't afford or isn't able to do so for themselves. This would decrease carbon emissions from wasted fuel consumption, bring your community together (with everything from pot-lucks and tool sharing to friendships built on the tops of roofs and ladders), and help create the kind of social network that will serve your community in the face of any of the likely threats of climate change, from droughts, to dangerous storms, to heat waves and public health crises. From community to community the opportunities will be different, but I'm willing to bet that all communities will have opportunities to cut carbon emissions while becoming healthier, safer, and more resilient.

I shoveled a long path, and so my list goes on, but I'll stop here for now, with more to come another day.

Voices of the Future

2007-12-16T21:16:00.000-05:00

The other night at dinner I played a game with my younger daughter. If you were an animal what would you be? (Owl) If you could live in one other country which one would you choose? (Australia) If you could live in any point in history what would you choose? (Anytime before global warming).

There it is again. Climate change is on my kids minds a lot these days. And on the minds of their friends and the minds of children of my friends.

If we adults feel frustrated and powerless, imagine how the kids feel.

I know that it is well beyond my power to fix climate change for my kids, but I do wish I could give them some sort of voice, a place where they could speak and grown-ups would listen. A place where they could say what it is they wish those of us with the power to vote and drive cars and fly in airplanes would do.

I'm open for ideas about practical ways to that. You-tube video's shared on a web-page? Art, posters? Other suggestions?

Tears For a Graph

2007-12-13T15:25:00.000-05:00

My friend Diana told me a story once about the woman who was a teacher to both of us, Donella Meadows. Dana, as we called her, was working on a book chapter about food and hunger, and Diana, her research assistant, had just provided her with a stack of graphs about food and population growth from different regions of the world.

Dana looked through the stack one by one.... and burst into tears at the sight of the graph from Africa, where the increase in yield per acre had, in the most recent year on the graph, been overtaken by an increase in population. Africa was producing more food, but not at a rate that was keeping up with the numbers of new mouths to feed.

In the trajectory of those lines she read the story of hunger and suffering to come and wept for it. At least that is the story I have told myself. Not knowing the story until after Dana's death, I never had a chance to ask her what she felt or why she cried.

Until yesterday I had never cried myself in response to a graph.

Now I have. After skimming an AP article that you may have seen this week (Ominous Arctic Melt Worries Scientists) which explained that the already steady melting of the Arctic was increased dramatically this summer, I dug a little deeper into the recently updated data sets of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, found the graph you see at the top of the page, and burst into tears. This is the biggest one year decrease of ice cover in the entire data-set, which records a period of time nearly as long as my life.

I know all the caveats. After years working in laboratories and creating graphs of my own, I know that one data point doesn't define a trend. I know that the climate system is messy and noisy and not fully understood.

But I also know that the Arctic is a sensitive indicator of climate change, a place where changes in the Earth system show up first and more dramatically than elsewhere on our planet. As one person interviewed in the articles on this new result said, "Now as a sign of climate warming, the canary [in the coal mine] has died."

I was staring at the graph on our home computer when our ten-year old daughter walked past and asked what it was. I explained. Her eyes became wide, and tear-filled. "That's scary," she said. And then, after a pause, "Will Vermont be under water?"

What does a mother say to a question like this? Are data sets from the National Snow and Ice Data Center, like pornography, something to be kept out of sight of children? And what do you do with anger like this, the deep and rising anger, that the state of your child's world is so sad, and ugly and desperate?

-------

Now that I know a little more about crying over graphs, I am no longer so sure that the tears in the story about Dana were as simple as tears of compassion for suffering to come. They might have been, but I think they might also have been more complex.

I think they might have been tears of rage and frustration and impotence, tears that came out of knowing that it doesn't have to be this way. The trend-line of a graph isn't the result of an act of God or a meteor from outer space. It is the result of human choices. That people make those choices not just in ignorance, but also, as the US climate negotiators are doing right now in Indonesia, while information about the trends is on the front pages of major newspapers, is enough, easily enough, to make one cry.

Tomorrow, I want to ask Diana, what happens next in the story, after the news from Africa, after Dana's tears, whatever their source. Diana will know the specifics. But I already know the general outline. She dried her tears and took out her pen, answered the phone, wrote another essay, taught another class.

What else do you do, when you heart is breaking, but keep on going, saying over and over, as beautifully as you can: this hell is of our own creation and can be ended, as it began, by the power of our choices?

Parsley, Leeks and A Share of Responsibility

2007-12-08T20:38:00.000-05:00

In a press release yesterday from the UN climate change conference in Indonesia the Global Justice Ecology Project writes:

Indigenous peoples are here in Bali to denounce the false solutions to climate change proposed by the United Nations such as carbon trading, agrofuels and so-called "avoided deforestation" that devastate their lands and cause human rights violations. "This process has become nothing but developed countries avoiding their responsibilities to cut emissions and pushing the responsibility onto developing countries," stated Fiu Mata'ese Elisara-Laula, of the O Le Siosiomaga Society of Samoa. "Projects like REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation in Developing countries) sound very nice but they are trashing our indigenous lands. People are being relocated and even killed; my own people will soon be under water. That's why I call the money from the projects blood money," he added.

These strong words have stayed with me today, as I walked the snowy hills behind my house and stopped in our greenhouse to pick vegetables for lunch and dinner. They stayed with me as I chopped and fried and baked the afternoon away while kids and neighbors wandered in and out of the kitchen and flurries of snow fell outside the windows.

These words challenge what I thought I knew - that channeling funds from the rich word to the developing world to preserve forests is generally good thing, for all concerned. But of course it matters for this, as for all sustainable development, how it is done, and by whom, and whether the local indigenous people are in control or 'in the way."

I feel certain that the world - and my own country - could address climate change in ways that produce fairness, share wealth, and bring healing. I can imagine dozens of ways to back off our pressure on the biosphere while giving stewardship of land and opportunities for innovation to people from communities who haven't had much of either for a long time

Such schemes couldn't happen without a lot of listening, to people like Fiu Mata'ese Elisara-Laula and to those denied power within our own society. They probably couldn't happen – or be sustained – without facing the parallels between the way the industrial growth society has treated the Earth and the way it has treated whole communities of people.

I can't prove that it won't be hard for us in the materially rich world to, as the indigenous people at the climate conference ask, shoulder our own responsibility for addressing climate change. But I do know that many of the steps that are open to us today, from buying less to using the power of our own muscles to get around, grow our food, and amuse ourselves, bring satisfaction in and of themselves.

I had the evidence for that in my own hands all afternoon, chopping vegetables grown by someone I love, to feed people I love, smelling the sharpness of leeks and the pungency of parsley. I know we can take on a fair share of this responsibility to protect the climate, and find things to enjoy in the process.

It is easy for me to say this about growing and eating local food as a way of taking responsibility for addressing climate change, and harder to imagine taking full responsibility for how many miles my family drives our car, or for those many winter nights when my community's wood-heating system can't match the cold temperatures and part of our heat comes from fossil fuel.

With access to land and experience gardening, the act of growing my own food requires only my decision to do so. Joint heating systems or a regional transportation network require not individual but collective action.

To get my kids to doctor's appointments and myself to a shopping district – both fifteen or twenty miles from where I live – without a car, is not something I have been able to figure out on my own. It will require a new train line or a bus system, something that could be created only by thousands of us pooling our resources and shifting our priorities together.

That makes it hard to live with the words of the indigenous people at the climate conference. It is hard to live knowing that my actions to take care of my family today put someone else's family in danger now or in the future. It is hard to feel powerless, on my own, to change the system I live within so that I don't violate my own values many times over each week.

In the grips of this kind of powerlessness, it is tempting to block out the information that makes the powerlessness so apparent, tempting to skim over the pleas of the indigenous people, for example, and go back to my busy life.

That's the reflex of course, that leaves the shape of our transportation and energy system in the hands of the mindless reinforcing cycles that concentrate money and power in a few hands and leave the wishes, values, and empathy of millions of ordinary people out of decision making, time after time.

Most of us in the rich world aren't being evicted from our homelands by carbon trading schemes or rising sea levels. But, until we find collective ways to create an infrastructure that allows us to take care of our families without hurting others, the habits and patterns of the industrial growth society take a toll on us as well, a toll measured in compromises with our own sense of ethics and self-respect.

Good News

2007-12-06T21:03:00.001-05:00

A fact for today from a report by the Worldwatch Institute:

Wealth in the US has doubled since 1957, yet the number of people who say they are very happy has remained the same.

More isn't making us happier, any more.

That's extremely good news on a planet with billions of people whose basic needs are not met and whose life support systems are faltering. It means that we in the rich world can afford to share. We could use our wealth to restore ecosystems, help vulnerable communities adapt to climate change, invest in clean energy, all without 'giving away' something essential to our happiness.

All the statistics can do is point to the potential - that plowing some of our wealth into the communities of our brothers and sisters (human and non-human) wouldn't make us unhappy, and might in fact lift our spirits.

From Global Green Grants to Heifer International to Oxfam and American Friends Service Committee there are all sorts of ways to test this hypothesis, both near and far from home.

Beings Without Borders

2007-12-05T10:10:00.000-05:00

Think about your left hand, feel it, move it, wiggle it. This hand that has been a part of your for as long as you have been a 'you.'

Think about the atmosphere. Colorless odorless air. Important, but not you. Air, out there, separated from you by the membrane that lines your lungs. Right?

Imagine life without your hand: hard, unpleasant painful, frustrating, it might be all of these. But, even hand-less, so many possibilities would remain before you – years and years of silly jokes and passionate embraces. Decades of walking in the wind and leaning backwards to see the tops of tall trees.

Now try to imagine life cut off from the atmosphere. Imagine your airway blocked, your body sucked under water or buried under deep snow. Without rescue your being would contract into a few last minutes of awareness. No more jokes, no more passion, the end of the feeling of wind in your hair.

So which is more a part of who you are, your limbs or the sky?

And why, against all the evidence, do we insistent that we are so small?

Another Reason to Cultivate Vision

2007-12-04T21:35:00.000-05:00

If you need one good reason to discover your own vision of a future in which we have addressed climate change you should spend half a minute watching this video, produced by the US Chamber of Commerce as part of a campaign to rally voters against the Lieberman-Werner climate change legislation. In it you'll see a suburban family start their day, wearing hats and scarves indoors and cooking their breakfast over a candle flame before jogging off to work along an expressway empty of vehicles. A voice-over proclaims:

Climate legislation being consider by Congress could make it too expensive to heat our homes, power our lives and drive our cars.....Washington politicians should not demand what technology cannot deliver.

There is so much that could be said about this video, how it uses no facts about what technology can and cannot deliver, how it plays on fears of scarcity, how it neglects to mention the ways suburban families' lives might change if we don't cut carbon emissions.

But what I really want to say is: this isn't the future I see, when I close my eyes and imagine a society that has addressed climate change. I see city blocks filled with gardens and fruit trees, and local shops selling local goods. I see a renewal of manufacturing jobs providing honest important work and producing the infrastructure of a clean energy society. I see people who have considered the question 'what really matters' and oriented their lives around whatever answer they have found.

Even without the threat of climate change I'd choose that future over business as usual. I'm guessing, that, if they really felt they had a choice, most of my fellow citizens would choose it too. And, if they felt they had a choice, I don't think the fear of cooking eggs over candle flames is something that would keep them from their vision.

Barn Chores and Climate Change

2007-12-03T10:06:00.000-05:00

Nora and I tromped down the hill together this morning, kicking through a deep layer of new white snow on our way to chores in the barn. We filled water buckets, cleaned out wheelbarrows-full of manure, refilled mangers with hay, fed a bottle of warm milk to the youngest calf. Outside the world was white and hushed, inside it was alive with the chatter of a seven year old, the munching of horses, the occasional bleat of a sheep.

We were cold by the the time we came home to our cups of tea and hot chocolate, but already, at the beginning of our day, we had done something together that was essential at least to the ten or so animals we cared for, and we had done it well and carefully. We had chatted with our neighbor who was milking cows and noticed the feel of snow on our eyelashes. By eight in the morning one child had done real work, tending, feeding and caring for the source of part of her own sustenance.

I would do this with her anyway, whether I held this huge responsibility to the future, or not. Whether I felt the need to find ways to live that contributed less to climate change or not. But, knowing that local organic food uses less fossil energy means that our wintery chores this morning gives my family, in a small way, an answer to "what should we do about climate change?"

In the world of policy makers and engineers that question is usually answered with ideas about technology and markets, both of which should, by all means, be applied to the challenges before us.

But I know, from my own experience, that the universe of possibility for responding to climate change stretches far, far beyond cap-and-trade policy and carbons sequestration technology. Not always, but much of the time, this universe stretches in directions that are also beautiful, healthy, and full of meaning. This universe of possibility stretches, also in ways that could help build the kind of resilient communities that will have the best chances of riding smoothly through the instabilities of a changing climate.

For me and my family many of the possibilities are centered around taking care of our needs through our own work on our community's land. That's what makes sense to us here, in our rural river valley.

Elsewhere the intersections of what reduces greenhouse gas pollution, builds resiliency, and is fun and satisfying may look very different. Elsewhere this may look like watershed restoration or community theater or a rebirth of local manufacturing.

To know what is possible, to begin to imagine and create it, we need to ask not just the experts, but ordinary people in ordinary places. What are those intersections for the heart of Detroit, for the plains of Kansas, for the small towns of Mississippi?

Northeast Temperatures

2007-11-29T10:59:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago, University of Vermont extension agent Vern Grubinger gave a talk here about climate change and agriculture. He showed this graph which contains data from 56 weather stations in Northeast that have been operating since 1900.

It and many other useful slide-sets and fact sheets are available at the website Climate Change and Northeast Farming.

The Planet. The Population. The Big Hug.

2007-11-27T14:39:00.000-05:00

I'm just back from a fast paced walk. In the sleet.

These words leaping onto my computer screen via an advertisement from Ford Motor Company are the ones that sent me out into the gray afternoon, arms pumping, angry thoughts churning:

People really like the Earth. And for the most part, the Earth really likes people too. Actually, it could be the longest-term relationship ever. At Ford, we are doing everything we can to keep that relationship beautiful. So we are constantly creating technology that shows the Earth lots of love. The Ford Escape Hybrid, ever increasing MPG, ever-decreasing emissions. People and Earth. Exchanging gifts. No receipt necessary.

For a mile or so, my mind took these few sentences and ran with them.

"I love you, my dear Earth", I saw people saying, zipping about town in their Ford Escape Hybrids. "An ounce of CO2, a token of love, the perfect thank you for the longest-term relationship ever."

Ever increasing MPG, ever decreasing emissions? Perfect. We'll just ever-increase MPG to to infinity, ever-decrease emissions to below zero until one day driving a Ford Escape Hybrid will be an act of public service, sucking carbon right out of the atmosphere! No need for pricey complicated research into carbon sequestration after all, just a fleet of Fords.

As for people and Earth exchanging gifts, haven't we all known people like that, artists of the one-way exchange? All take, no gift. Thanks for dinner and here's the check.

So my thoughts unfolded as I walked, but I couldn't keep it up.

I started noticing all the little miracles of this ordinary day – the tingle on my cheeks of the cold rain, the dark branches of bare maples against the clouds.

We all know that advertising plays upon our deepest hopes - to have love, to be enough, to not be lonely, to be thought worthy. Is it so surprising that a team at Ford Motor Company thinks that being in a relationship, a beautiful relationship, with the Earth is one of those deepest desires?

Actually, how could it be otherwise, for we who evolved at the edge of forests, digging in soil, bending down at stream-sides to drink cool, clear water?

And there it is, the beautiful opportunity, right in plain sight: there are so many better, easier, more beautiful ways to fill our longing to reconnect than the unlovely and expensive Ford Escape Hybrid.

Maybe not everyone would agree that walking in the November sleet is beautiful or their heart's desire, but eating a fresh picked apple might do it, for a moment, or biking to work, or planting box gardens at the senior citizens' center. There are so many opportunities, many of them free, many of them cheap, all of them truly exchanges with the Earth, all of them sealing the bond of the longest relationship ever. These pursuits don't give the gift of a little less harm, the give the gift of no harm. Sometimes they even five the gift of restoration.

By the time my route came round again to home, the sun had come out.

A perfect rainbow, bright and unbroken, stretched the full expanse of the north sky.

Hold on Tight

2007-11-26T13:22:00.002-05:00

"Hold on tight, firmly in touch with reality, unshakably committed to your highest dreams. Feel the pain. Summon your strength over and over to endure it........Your anguish, sometimes so unbearable, is in fact the force through which you can help the world come a little closer to being all that it can be."

It is from the column, A Letter, Anguish, and a Rubber Band, by Donella Meadows.

On Being Nice

2007-11-25T21:08:00.000-05:00

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

2007-11-25T10:44:00.001-05:00

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

2007-11-24T20:11:00.000-05:00

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.

-------

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

2007-11-18T22:05:00.000-05:00

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

2007-11-16T17:32:00.000-05:00

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

2007-11-15T14:35:00.000-05:00

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

2007-11-15T12:43:00.000-05:00

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.

Burning Bright

2007-11-15T11:31:00.000-05:00

On the journey home from the West Coast last month I met an interesting fellow traveler and we struck up conversation about sustainability and the future. In the course of conversation I gave him an article Dana Meadows had written that I had carried in my bag all the way from Vermont to California and then to Oregon. I wasn't sure I'd ever hear from him again, but recently, I received this email:

I just finished my first read through of Dana Meadows article. It was great. What can one say – “she gets it” and has a simple and powerful way of communicating. This led me to your website which is also inspiring and the discovery that she died at 59. Sounds like a soul that had burned very bright.

I agree, about the soul burning bright, and imagine that those of you reading these words who knew Dana Meadows would agree as well.

But we are all burning, aren't we? Literally. We are flames, our cells burning oxygen with every breath. We take the world into ourselves with every mouthful of food and every sip of water, transforming carrot sticks and peanut butter into movement and sound, into violence or poetry.

I wish we taught our children this truth, that they are moving flowing rivers, never, not even for an instant, stagnant, and never, ever separate from the ocean or from the clouds, or from the dark and secret life of the soil.

I wish our leaders knew it. I wish they all knew and acted as though they knew that, as Buckminster Fuller once said, we are not nouns, but verbs. (" I live on Earth at present, and I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process — an integral function of the universe.")

That is my image for the day - people as flames. The delegates at the United Nations, my seven-year old at her math assignment, the people – soldiers, insurgents, mothers, babies – on the ground in Iraq.

All of us, burning bright.

Second Chances

2007-11-15T09:01:00.000-05:00

There is one very good thing, I find, in this intention to pay attention to sky, to earth, to neighbors and partners and children and wind: you keep getting second (and third, fourth, and fifth) chances.

Last night I remembered to go outside at dusk to say hello to the new moon.

Remember, Part Two

2007-11-13T19:53:00.000-05:00

Tucking my 10 year old daughter into bed, I realized (once again) that paying attention to the beauty of the world requires more than simply vowing to do so.

Daughter: Did you see the moon tonight, Mom?

Mother: Moon?

Daughter: Yeah, as you walked home from work. It was a little sliver, a sixth or maybe an eighth. It was sooo beautiful. You could see the dark part. That's the reflected light (said with authority.) That part was dull gray. And the bright part was glowing yellow! You didn't see it? It was right there.

There was nothing for it but to go outside (she, barefoot, wearing pajamas) into the freezing night to look for the moon.

But new moons set early, and this one was gone. My daughter was simultaneously disappointed at the absent moon and gleeful to be out past bed-time, barefoot on frosty grass.

As for me, the best that can be said is that I had enough sense to stand quietly for a moment in appreciation of the shinning stars above my head and the wide-awake child at my side.

Remember

2007-11-13T15:59:00.000-05:00

I write this note to myself as much as to you. Remember this (even when there is work to do):

Go outside. Notice the sky. Feel the rocks and the soil and the crackling leaves beneath your feet.

In going to Seeds For The Future I traveled 3000 miles and spent thirty-days, in part to help myself remember to pay attention to the world I am so desperate to protect for my children.

One morning I sat perfectly still for as long as a fish-stalking heron did, which was a long, long time (during which my nose itched and my mind wandered). I don't know about the heron's mind, but she was so still she could have been a stump or a rock in the early morning mist. She struck, she swallowed, she went still again.

Another day, I sat where the river meets the sea for as long as it took for the tide to go out and come back in again, and I didn't do anything else but sit. I made no plans, not one refinement to project strategy or fund-raising plan.

It felt sweet. And rare. I realized how little of my time in this beautiful world do I spend tasting its sweetness. I vowed, on the airplane coming home, to change that.

There have been a few moments. One walk in the maples. One afternoon sifting compost onto the cleared beds of the garden. One wide-awake, eye-widening look at the full-moon rising over the hay-field (a glimpse I would have missed forever, had my ten-year not dragged me by the hand, away from the computer to the porch and the cold night air and the glowing orange disc in the sky).

Most days, I feel the opposite of that heron - motion punctuated by little bits of stillness rather than the other way around.

I don't long to spend my life in retreat, in silence and quiet. I don't want to spend these coming years of influence on the climate of my children's future on a mountaintop or a monastery. I want to be in motion, in motion that matters. But I'm trying to be a little more heron-like, trying to find the stillness before the swift motion.

Today - when a paragraph just wouldn't come out right, when there didn't seem to be any clear, honest words, just extremes of sentimentality and dullness, I turned off the computer, put on my sweater, and walked up the hill.

The pasture-edge smelled of hickory nuts; I heard a distant raven; I saw one golden apple tree,
on fire in the late afternoon sun.

Why I left my children (and my husband (and my job)) for a month

2007-11-12T13:30:00.001-05:00

Leave home? For a month? In September?

If you are someone who puts down roots in a place, and particularly if those roots involve a garden in northern New England, you'll know that the words "leave home" and the word "September" don't fit well into the same sentence.

September is the culmination of seven months of planning and working that starts with seed ordering and the sowing of flats in March and April.

Not to mention that September is the month of the HARVEST - when tomatoes need to be canned, dry beans picked, soybeans frozen, pickles made.

The gardening mother of school-aged children who leaves town in September automatically consigns her spouse to mid-night sessions with the pressure canner. If those same school aged children happen to attend "school" at home then the same mother is also consigning her husband to steering through everything from the multiplication tables to spelling words and violin recitals under the burden of sleep deprivation.

If such a mother were also to have major work obligations in October (say a workshop or two and a large grant proposal) then should she leave town for all of September and the beginning of October, she would also be consigning her colleagues to extra work, or at the very least, more than the usual amount of last minute rushing around. (And, if her husband also happened to be one of her work colleagues, well then, what she is asking really would be extraordinary.)

So why did I do it? What I was I hoping to find in thirty-days on the other side of the continent that I didn't already have? What did I think I would find in Joanna Macy's teaching – from meditation to systems theory to the way that our despair for the world opens us up to our love of it – that would be worth asking so much of so many.

Well first there was clarity. Day in and day out I write and teach about the preciousness of the next ten years, the years when the odds are still good that dedicated action can keep the climate from dangerous runaway warming. But it is one thing to be clear about a window of opportunity and quite another to know what to do with it. I went to Oregon hoping to come home someone who was ready to live in a way she'd be proud to have future generations know about it. Someone who was awake to the plight of the world and doing something about it.

And then there was courage. Courage to break away from old patterns that weren't serving me or the world. Courage to say to my kids, 'we aren't going spend money on that even though everyone else you know has one, because plastic junk is part of the problem that is ruining your beautiful world". Courage to ask, in my community that is struggling just to keep up with barn repairs and committee reports, what more can we do? How can we be ready for the rough ride that seems so likely to be coming? Courage to turn away from all those seductive distractions - from trivial conflicts, from emailing while Rome burns.

Clarity and courage are what I went looking for. I can't say that I found them in large measure - though I found little glimpses of the nooks and corners of myself where they might be hiding.

What I found instead is the certaintity that what I need to do - and maybe you too – is exactly whatever it is that someone who did have clarity and courage would do, even (especially) while feeling unsure and afraid. No more than this, and no less.

So I guess it's good-bye retreat - welcome home real world.

Where Have I Been?

2007-11-08T14:28:00.000-05:00

It's been a while since I've been able to add new thoughts and experiences here. Not because there haven't been new thoughts and experiences, but because there have been too many, coming too fast, and leaving too little time to synthesize, write, and integrate.

Since the last posting on this blog in June there's been an Our Climate Ourselves Roadshow, on the West Coast of the US, which was followed by an amazing, and still not fully digested, 30-day retreat on the Oregon Coast with Fran and Joanna Macy and 60-odd other activists and educators, Seeds For the Future II. That was followed by a week with the new class of Donella Meadows Leadership Fellows - who where here at Cobb Hill at the end of October. Now, as the days shorten and darken in Vermont I have a little more spaciousness, and more time for reflection.
Many of you, family, friends, and colleagues have asked me: what was it like? how have you changed? what did you learn?

I haven't answered you all very well yet; in some cases I haven't answered at all. But as the experiences and lessons churn, percolate, and digest words are starting to rise to the surface again.

Stay tuned.

The Climate Bathtub

2007-06-07T07:30:00.000-05:00

My first serious push into education about climate change came when I heard MIT's John Sterman share his research (with Linda Booth Sweeney) showing that many people harbor fundamental misunderstandings about the dynamics of the climate system. One of the most common misunderstandings they found was the expectation that CO2 levels in the atmosphere would stabilize if emissions were 'frozen' at current levels. This intuitive belief neglects the crucial information that CO2 is now being added to the atmosphere at more than twice the rate at which is is being removed. In other words, freezing emissions at current levels would mean that global society would continue to add twice as much CO2 each year as the planet was able to assimilate.

As the G8 leaders meet this week, unable to agree on even modest concerted action on climate change, this is a critical understanding every citizen deserves to have.

Now, inspired by Sterman and Booth Sweeney's research and via a project advised by them, climate change educators have a new tool at their disposal - a web-based simulator that shows the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere projected into the future under three different scenarios: business as usual, emissions freeze, and emissions reductions of more than 50% by 2070. The simulator uses the metaphor of a bathtub which is filled by CO2 emissions and drained by net removals.

I'd urge all of you climate change educators out there to give the tool a try in your presentations and trainings. If a picture is worth a thousands words, a simulation must be worth even more.

When I've heard John Sterman talk about the prevelance of this misunderstanding he frames it in terms of the education system not helping people comprehend rates (emissions and removals) that control the level of an accumulation. He may be right.

But I've been wondering lately if the misunderstanding isn't even deeper. We all know that over the long term you cannot fill a bath-tub twice as fast as it drains without the tub overflowing. Which leaves me wondering if the misunderstanding is not so much a problem with rates and accumulations as it is a problem with how we think about the atmosphere, something that appears to a casual observer as both static (we can't see the inflows and outflows) and endless (not finite, like a bathtub.)

Another possibility is that most people still do not know the simple fact that the climate bathtub is filling at more than twice the rate that it is draining; it maybe that this simple fact is lost in the complex way the climate story is reported.

The great thing about this simulator is that whatever the cause of the misunderstanding allowing people to experiment with this simple tool should help them sharpen their understanding of how the climate works and why we cannot wait to act.

Practical Visionaries

2007-05-25T13:55:00.000-05:00

I just posted the newest essay in the Our Climate Ourselves Essay Series. Here's an excerpt.

This year my nine-year-old daughter has been studying inventions and inventors, and I’ve been learning about them through her. She particularly likes the stories about accidental inventors who were trying to do one thing, made a mistake, and recognized, sometimes years later, the usefulness of what they had done. She finds something very satisfying in these stories. With the unlimited opportunities a child has to make mistakes – fractions, spelling words, and irregular verbs – it must be thrilling to read about grown-ups who made mistakes and became famous and (sometimes) rich in the process.

She is drawn to the mistakes, but I, from the vantage point of middle age, am drawn to the aspiration. How did Bell dare to believe in the telephone or Edison in electric light? Or the Wright brothers – what made them crazy enough to try to fly?
One of her books is a photographic history of the Wright brothers. As we looked through the book together, I first noticed the airplanes, fragile-looking creations of canvas and wood. Then I noticed the pilots, strapped in place with nothing but ordinary clothing between their tiny, vulnerable human bodies and the ground hundreds of feet below. With each flight they must have risked death; the book shows one photograph of splintered wood and torn canvas, all that was left of a crash that badly hurt Orville and killed his co-pilot.

We looked through this book on a day when the news was full of reports of melting polar ice and ocean dead zones and slower than expected recovery of the ozone hole, and there was something in these photographs that raised my spirits. Without doubt many of the products of our inventive spirit – from the atomic bomb to the internal combustion engines that fill our atmosphere with more pollution than it can tolerate – are causing grief all around the world, but these old photographs renewed my hope that our species may find its way through these dangerous times of our own creation.

It was the yearning visible in almost every photograph that raised my spirits.....

Find the rest of the essay here.

What Can We Learn?

2007-05-22T08:10:00.000-05:00

(This post continues the series of questions that I've found useful once the science of climate change begins to sink in. Click here for Questions #1 and #2 and #3.)

Climate change has a lot to teach us about how to live well and decently within the capacity of the Earth to support us. But we will only learn those lessons if we look for them, if we keep our sights not only on changing light-bulbs but also on changing ourselves and our communities.

What does climate change tell us about our economics, an economics where fossil fuel can still be cheap even when we know that greenhouse gas levels are close to the tipping point where climate change could begin to feed upon itself?

What does climate change tell us about nationalism, when there are no boundaries in the atmosphere and when the lives and livelihoods of people who’ve never owned a car are threatened by choices made by those who own several?

What does climate change tell us about happiness and security when our headlong pursuit of both have carried us beyond the climate’s ability to support us?

What does climate change tell us about our democracy, when the resistance of special interest groups is able to keep an entire country from moving forward to address the problem?

And so on.

The only thing I can think of that will make the inevitable climate change losses bearable is the possibility that through facing these losses and acknowledging our role in causing them, we may come to understand our place on the planet and learn how to live in that place.

But if we don’t stop to look for lessons in the climate crisis, if we just try to manage, accept, and adapt, we loose our chance to become wiser and stronger. We loose our chance to figure out how to fit into the rest of biosphere. Of all the important conversations to have about climate change I believe that this one - what can we learn – is the most important of all.

What Can You Do, Where You Already Are, With What You Already Know?

2007-05-18T15:51:00.000-05:00

(This post continues the series of questions that I've found useful once the science of climate change begins to sink in. Click here for Questions #1 and #2.)

As the reality of the need for massive and immediate cuts in carbon emissions sinks in, for some people only one thing seems to feel right: starting tomorrow, they must change everything about their lives, and devote everything they have to this survival crisis.

But pretty quickly, other realities come back to mind. Mortgages, debts, college tuitions, health insurance. Nothing is as simple as it first sounds, and the next stop in this thought progression seems often to be: if I can't devote all of myself to this crisis then there is nothing for me to do. It is hard to look at addressing the potential extinction of one's species as a part-time avocation.

Many other people have great ideas for tackling climate change, if only they were president of a massive environmental group, or a car manufacturer, or a Senator. Too bad they are 'only' a student, a mother, a preschool teacher, an editor.

That's why another question I often ask groups who are working out their response to climate change is:

What Can You Do, With What You Already Know and the Relationships You Already Have?

We don’t know how to live as a planet of over six billion people. We don’t know how to cut our carbon dioxide emissions by more than half while providing a better life for all the people, all the children, who don’t have a sufficient food, shelter, and security today. We don’t know (or remember) how to share like that. We don’t have all of the technology that we will need. We don’t know (or remember) how to live happy purposeful, satisfied lives while being frugal with our use of energy and materials.

Not knowing how to do this, we must learn. And it won't be good enough if that learning is just embarked upon by people who get paid for it, or people who can afford to quit their jobs. And it won't be good enough for the only learners to be the "leaders" at the "top."

Who's going to figure out how to expand the local food network in your city? Who's going to get the bike paths built and the train routes re-established? Who's going to write the new songs that make meaning and purpose and some kind of beauty out of the terror and change that we are living through? Who's going to talk to children about it, and who's going to insulate the water pipes for your frail, elderly neighbor?

There is a paradox here: this massive global problem is the result of small decisions by ordinary people, and it's eventual, miraculous solution, if it comes, will likewise be the result of small decisions, made with courage, by you and me, ordinary people alive in an extraordinary time.

So ask each other, push each other, admit that we can't, most of us, drop everything, that we aren't, most of us, leaders of national stature, and start from there. What needs doing that we know (or can learn) how to do?

John Seed's Climate Change Roadshow

2007-05-14T15:11:00.000-05:00

I'm just back from an inspiring two days at Earthlands in central Massachusetts, where John Seed, an astonishingly powerful teacher and guide lead a group of folks from around the region from the heights of imagining and describing the world we really want to see to the depths of looking at and sharing our individual and collective sorrow, fear and anger at climate change and all the other tragedies of this time. I'll offer more reflections on these two days soon. For now, I simply urge any of you who have the opportunity to learn at John Seeds feet to seize it. He'll be in the Northeast for about one more week, before he returns to his home in Australia.

John's schedule takes him through New York and New Jersey next. Details can be found here. And the workshop itself is described in John's own words here.

The First Step Towards Addressing Climate Change Is Facing Its Reality

2007-05-04T12:36:00.000-05:00

(A new addition to the Our Climate Ourselves Essay Series, first published in Common Dreams.)

In a past column I have written about a narrow window of opportunity, a period of perhaps as few as ten years within which humanity must make dramatic reductions in worldwide CO2 emissions or run the risk of unleashing dangerous cascades of “runaway” warming. In this scenario, warming would begin to feed upon itself and outgrow the human power to slow it, leading to shifts in temperature, sea level, ocean currents, rainfall patterns, and ecology with the potential to disrupt coastal cities, agriculture, and ecosystems.

Minimizing this risk calls for massive improvements in energy efficiency, decreases in consumption, and a rapid shift to clean energy. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that all of this is possible if we were to get serious about public investment and incentives for a life-serving energy system, but ten years is a short window for going about such large scale change, especially in a nation that has not yet gathered itself to rise to the challenge.

A few hours and a little research will provide all of the information you need to come to your own conclusion about the above assessment. But then what? If you find yourself agreeing that we have ten years to address a problem of human survival and that addressing it will require very deep changes in much that we take for granted, how do you find the response that is right for you, whoever you are? What’s a fifth grade teacher to do? Or a grandmother? An artist? A carpenter? A student?

.....click here for the full essay and here to receive email notification when the next essay is added to the series.

What Do You Want?

2007-05-03T12:32:00.000-05:00

(This week, I'm offering four sets of questions that seem helpful in inspiring and empowering action on climate change. Click here for Question #1.)

Question #2 What Do You Want in a World Beyond Climate Change?

Our emotions help us pay attention and take action, and they give us energy for making change, but they don’t tell us what that change should be. It’s not enough to want global warming end, to want greenhouse gas pollution to stop and everything to be OK. Everything isn’t OK, and it won’t be until we create ways of meeting our needs that don’t dump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. How do we want to get to work in the morning? What kind of work do we want to do, for that matter? Until we can imagine and create more sustainable ways of living and making a living, we can’t have the safety and peace that we crave.

What do we want our world to look like once we have left fossil fuels behind and entered the age of renewable energy? How will people be living? Where will they live? What will they be doing? Whenever I’ve created time and space in a workshop to allow people to really explore this question for themselves, the images and ideas they describe make one point very clearly: a society that has addressed climate change has the potential to be much more beautiful, much more fair, and much more life-affirming than the society we have today.

When I ask people what they want out of a future that has responded to climate change, I don’t hear only of rooftop solar panels and windmills – although there are plenty of both in the visions people share – but also of the rich world sharing with the less rich, of thriving farms in every community, of healthy, delicious local food, of cities full of gardens and bike paths and canals full of clean water, and of a human society so wise, so clear in its purpose, that it has surrounded itself with wilderness, allowing the rest of the life of the planet to go on about its work in peace.

A person who knows what it is she wants for the future has taken the first step towards discovering where to act today, because a vision tells you what to feed and what to let wither. Only by knowing the future you want, with such clarity that you can see it, taste it, almost feel it, can you recognize all the parts of what you want that already exist, from the biodynamic farm in the neighboring town, to the car sharing collective down the block, to the courageous political champion of greenhouse gas controls. The seeds of the future are all around us, but they are only easy to spot once you've imagined the wonders that they could give rise to.

Such visions seem to be very individual and personal. You may see rivers full of salmon, I see parks in the middle of every city and people with time for playing games with children and walking along winding paths. Someone else will see a smooth-running, highly efficient transportation system, and a distributed network of energy generation. Together, we have a good chance of seeing enough complexity and possibility to describe something worth working very, very hard for.

And so, whenever you invite another person, or a roomful of them, to share what they would really like to see in the future of their wildest dreams, you help that future ease its way into existence.

After the Science, How Are You Feeling?

2007-05-01T14:52:00.000-05:00

One side of empowering people to respond to climate change is to offer insights and understanding about how the climate system works. This is necessary, even critical, as much an art as a science, and often the subject of this blog.

But, when it comes to helping people find their strength and power for responding to climate change, the facts and figures can only carry you so far.

Effective conversations about climate change, in my experience, depend upon a willingness to pose questions, as much as they do on having answers.

And so, this week, I offer four questions that I've found helpful in climate change conversations. Use them as I've posed them, or create your own variations. Ask them of yourself, or at the dinner table, or after you show An Inconvenient Truth to your church group, or in whatever way seems right to you.

Question # 1: How Are You Feeling About Climate Change?

This is a question that is easy to gloss over, especially if you are feeling compelled to lead a group away from the bad news about the climate situation and straight to all the wonderful possibilities for addressing it.

But to rush past acknowledging the reality of how climate change make us feel is to loose valuable information. These feelings may be difficult, or strong, or uncomfortable, but they also serve us, inform us, and strengthen us, as long as we don’t deny them.

When the facts about climate change sink in with the groups I've lead, fear is a common reaction. People fear for the people they love who are going to have live through the coming decades, and also for the delicate natural places they love, and often for the world's poor and powerless who will have the fewest resources for coping with climate change. Will there be more terrible storms? Droughts? Extinctions? Your impulse, whether you are a leader of a group or talking to your children, may not be to acknowledge these fears, but they do have a purpose. Fear reminds us to us pay attention. Just as fear helped our ancestors pay closer attention to their surroundings after a glimpse of a predator crouched behind a tree, our fear of what might happen if we don't address climate change can keep us focused and energized.

Where some feel fear, others fear anger. Anger tells us that there is something that needs our protection. The integrity of the atmosphere and the future prospects of our children are at risk, and our leaders can’t – or won’t – respond to that risk. Under the circumstances anger is a healthy, survival-promoting response.

Sadness allows us to recognize what is. Already there are losses as a result of climate change. We’ve seen the images of New Orleans, we know the coral reefs are dying. We know that priceless, unique, irreplaceable elements Earth’s life have already been lost forever. And we know that there will be more losses, as the decades of carbon dioxide pollution we have already released continue to impact ecosystems and weather patterns. Our sadness allows us to recognize these changes, and our own contributions to them.

Our culture doesn’t approve of the emotions most likely to triggered by an understanding of climate change: anger, sadness, and fear. We are raised to be hopeful, optimistic go-getters. But our life support system is crumbling and we don’t have a clear plan for restoring it, or even easing off some of the pressure on it. Under the circumstances, anger, sadness, and fear are normal, healthy emotions. Suppressing them requires energy that could be better spent on bringing ourselves into balance with the Earth.

Expect to hear about fear, sadness, and anger, when you ask people how they are felling about climate change, but make room for happiness and excitement, too. In my living room talks, excitement and a sense of hopeful expectation aren’t as rare as you might think. In the words of one woman, in one audience, “This is the chance we finally have to find out what kind of people we can be. If it weren’t for this I might have gone through my whole life as an ordinary person, but now, in figuring out how to respond to this challenge, I must expand what I am capable of.”

It takes some bravery to ask another person, or a roomful of them, how climate change makes them feel. But if you are willing to bring forward the topic, you offer people the chance to discover that they are not alone in the intensity of their feeling, but are in fact normal people in a dangerous situation, passionate about the future of their world.

Global Warming and Democracy

2007-04-27T14:27:00.000-05:00

"Our founding fathers warned us that democracy can't last unless we are willing to fight for it in every generation. Wars are not the only kinds of fights, and foreign dictators -- or foreign campaign contributors -- are not the only threats to government of, by, and for the people. If we want our democracy back, our battle has to be, as was that of our founding fathers, against the corrupt power structure that rules us."

That's a line from a newspaper column my mentor and teacher Donella Meadows wrote in in 1997.

I remembered it this week when I read the transcript of a a talk delivered to the National Press Club on February 26, 2007 NASA climate expert James Hansen.

Hansen's talk presented five recommendations he believes could solve the problem of climate change (or at least the US contribution to it).

(Pay attention to the word solve. In this time of rising worry about climate change we can't lose sight of the fact that to scientists like Hansen this is still a solvable problem.)

Three of his five recommendations have to do – not surprisingly – with limiting carbon emissions. These steps include placing a moratorium on the building of more coal-fired power plants until carbon dioxide sequestering technology is fully developed, charging for carbon pollution, and putting energy performance standards on buildings and vehicles.

The fourth involves increased study of the behavior of ice-sheets, so that we can better anticipate their reaction to a warming world.

These proposals are large and sweeping, and the sort of thing we've come to expect from clear thinking climate scientists like Hansen. Could we accomplish them, the US would be doing its part to make sure that carbon dioxide levels don't rise into the danger zone.

But it was Hansen's fifth recommendation that really caught my attention, and reminded me of Donella Meadow's writing, because his fifth recommendation had nothing to do with climatology and everything to do with democracy.

Hansen says, "The global warming problem has brought into focus an overall problem: the pervasive influence of special interests on the functioning of our government and on communications with the public. It seems to me that it will be difficult to solve the global warming problem until we have effective campaign finance reform, so that special interests no longer have such a big influence on policy makers."

In systems terms, democracy is a feedback loop that connects the people with the ability to sense a problem – from scientists to residents of New Orleans' low lying neighborhoods – with those with the ability to take steps to solve it, including Congress and the Federal government. When special interests overwhelm those voices then the feedback loop of democracy is delayed and weakened.

And now, when there is no time to loose, that is something we really cannot afford.

To save ourselves, we just may need to save our democracy, as well. But it means that we need to stop thinking of climate change as an "environmental" problem. We can only live on this planet if we organize ourselves to be open to the signals it sends to us. A government that can listen to scientists, to farmers, to Alaskan natives and coastal fishermen, would be a government much better poised to receive the signals of the planet in time to respond to them.

Joanna Macy: Thoughts on Gratitude

2007-04-24T15:21:00.000-05:00

A few posts back I wrote about some of the challenges I ran into in a recent climate change presentation/discussion as I invited a people to look for and share their sense of gratitude for the Earth and all it provides.

I also shared this experience with Joanna Macy, someone I consider a great teacher and guide in the work of creating a sustainable world. Her response was so helpful I wanted to share it so that it might benefit others as well.

Joanna wrote:

If we are serious in our desire to play a positive role in a dangerous and scary time, then gratitude provides us with firm grounding. It allies us with the larger forces of life itself, and its longer story. Gladness is a stronger place to come from than fear and guilt. In relationship to climate change, it helps us avoid the pitfall of demonizing nature.

On Earth Day, in a large gathering, we did Gratitude Open Sentences in pairs, right after all singing together "Gracia a la Vida." The particular, ordinary things celebrated in that song primed the pump, inspiring all to do the same--for it's particular things, not abstractions, that charge us with energy.

The four sentences were:

Some things I love about being alive in Earth are...

A place that was magical to me as a child...

An Earth-other (animal, plant, stream, etc.) that for me was a teacher of the heart is/was...

(Touching my face, I touch Gaia and I am grateful for this part of Gaia.) Some things I appreciate about myself as a living part of Gaia are...

If you want to learn more about Joanna Macy and her work visit her website or find one of her several excellent books, perhaps Coming Back To Life.

Where Does The Atmosphere End; Where Do Our Bodies Begin?

2007-04-24T13:42:00.000-05:00

Last night, I walked out onto our porch to shake out a dusty rug and the wind blew a gust of warm spring air across my face.

It has been a while since we’ve felt warm breezes in this valley where snow is still piled in shady places and the first spring wildflowers are only now beginning to bloom, and the sensation kept me on the porch long enough to look up at the night sky.

This is what I talk about and write about every day, I realized, rug in hand. This warm air. Those moving clouds. This is the atmosphere I talk about with terms like 'parts per million’ and ‘gigatons per year’. Colorless, odorless, invisible, it envelops all of us, all of our lives. The atmosphere is what moved through the tree-tops the first night I slept outside by myself. It blew up river from the ocean as I walked to the University each day of all of those years in graduate school. It ruffled my baby’s hair the first time I carried her outside. Now at this moment, as I write these words, it enters my body as I breathe in. What was, moments ago, 'the atmosphere' is now alive in somebody’s daughter, somebody’s mother. And what was moments ago, the solid substance of my body is now, 'the atmosphere.'

This sounds like poetry and metaphor, and I suppose in a way it is. It is also simple biochemistry and physiology.

We should stop polluting the atmosphere with greenhouse gases because our survival depends upon it. And as we work to stop that pollution we might draw strength and inspiration from the realization that the atmosphere is also our deepest swiftest link with the rest of the planet, the flux that connects us to the oceans and forests and meadows of an entire world. We might stop and notice our breathing, and realize that between us and the atmosphere there is no boundary at all.

The Vulnerability Of Gratitude

2007-04-19T10:34:00.000-05:00

In my last post, I wrote about how fun it was to participate in Step It Up gatherings last weekend. But I didn't say too much about how I actually used the opportunity to talk with a group of kids and parents about climate change.

I assumed that since all the gathered people were dedicating their Saturday morning to a rally, they were already convinced that climate change is real and serious and needs dramatic action; so I didn't say much at all about how the climate system works, the signs of climate change we are already seeing, or the technical solutions that we could draw upon to address it.

The organizers had also urged me to not thrust too much gloom and doom on all the children in the audience; a need I was feeling with enhanced sensitivity since my own two daughters were in the audience. I also knew that other speakers were going to talk about everything from the political moment to compact fluorescent light-bulbs.I knew that most of the crowd was going to walk to the nearby Dartmouth College Green to hear more speakers and visit informational tables and booths. In other words, they were going to have plenty to listen to and learn from.

With all this in mind, I arrived with the goal of giving them time to talk to each other rather than listen to me, and I focused on two themes that I felt pretty sure wouldn't be repeated by others in the day's program.

The first one was gratitude. I talked about how climate change is making us aware of services the Earth has always been providing us, but that we are becoming conscious of those services only as we so overtax them that they begin to falter. This was the first time I talked about gratitude in a climate talk so explicitly, and it was more than a little unnerving to start right out with it, while kids were fidgeting and people were coming in and out of the room. But driven by my sense that one of the most important things I have to learn from climate change is how to be a grateful recipient of the Earth's gifts and how to talk openly about those gifts with others, I launched in anyway, not all that gracefully or articulately, but with determination.

I was rewarded with one of those moments that graces groups from time to time. As I started to talk about gratitude all the fidgeting and whispering suddenly stopped. There was a stillness and collective intentness that I wish I had been better prepared to use. What seemed to bring this stillness forward were these words:

"I imagine that all of you have had something that was very precious to you that you lost, or that you almost lost, and the losing or the almost losing was what made you realize how much you loved and appreciated whatever it was. Climate change is something like this, an experience that can help us realize how much we love and care for our home the Earth."

The moment passed pretty quickly, and when I asked people to think about and then share what they were grateful for from the Earth there was another one of those moments that graces groups from time to time: a moment of awkward silence. I hadn't done what was needed to make the group safe enough for people to share what they were grateful for. We hadn't introduced ourselves (too many people, not enough time) and hadn't developed a feeling as a group. Five minutes into my presentation (the first of the morning) we were still a bunch of people coming to an event, not a group. In retrospect I think it would have been much better if I had asked people to turn to their neighbor and share their thoughts rather than asking for people to speak them to a group of close to one-hundred people.

I learned something important from this awkward silence: to share their gratefulness for life and the Earth is an act that makes people vulnerable.

This is something I've known for a long time about vision - that in this culture it is scary to speak up for what you really want for fear of being laughed at or called naive or unrealistic or a dreamer. But until this moment of awkward silence I hadn't thought about expressing gratitude as an act that could make people vulnerable. It makes sense to me though, in this culture where we are so conditioned to feel as though we don't have what we need (that sweater, that car, that pair of shoes) we don't have much practice at expressing gratitude for what we already have been given. We don't have much practice seeing our gifts, feeling our appreciation, and certainly not talking about those gifts and feelings publicly.

I find a few theories forming in my mind:

1. Connecting gratitude to climate change is important and has the potential to touch people.

2. Cultivating the practice of speaking one's gratitude publicly is an act of courage and an possibly an act of social change. Like speaking a vision, speaking gratefully is rare and is a gentle push against the assumption of the industrial growth society.

3. Building people's capacity to speak about gratitude takes more planning and intentionality than simply asking the question: what are you grateful for? And it requires the facilitator/leader to have done her own work at being uninhibitedly grateful.

I'm eager for the next chance to weave gratitude and climate change together, and also eager to learn from the experience of others with more experience at drawing out people's expressions of gratitude. What are the key pre-conditions that allow it?

I'll end these thoughts with those questions, and save my observations about the second theme of my presentation - vision – for another time.

Inspiring

2007-04-17T07:02:00.000-05:00

Like tens of thousands of Americans this past Saturday I participated in rallies calling on Congress to pass legislation to enable the US to reduce carbon emissions by 80% by 2050. The Step It Up website now has a very moving slide show of images of some of the more spectacular of these events. If you went to one of these events in your own hometown, I hope you left feeling as inspired as I did. And if you didn't attend a rally (or even if you did), you really ought to view the organizers' slide show to get a sense of just how many people are demanding national action on climate change and to enjoy the creativity and good spirit they are employing to demand it.

Highlights for me of the day:

1. Speaking to a large group of elementary school children and their parents and neighbors in Norwich, Vermont, just north of here. I've never spoken to a crowd containing people wearing large polar bear suits, or one in which quite so many helium balloons escaped to slowly drift to the very high ceiling. (What do you imagine is more interesting to a small pod of third grade boys - a middle aged lady talking about appreciating the Earth or the giggle-producing vision of a flock of escaping balloons (even if the balloons are imprinted with the image of the Earth?) Actually I am proud to say that I held my own versus the balloons and against the pull of the extremely well-laden cookie table. Even the adorable two-year old with her belly showing who really wanted to share the stage with me didn't completely steal the show.

2.Sitting with my girls leaning on me from either side hearing our senator Bernie Sanders describe the legislation he's sponsoring along with Senator Barbara Boxer. After answering endless questions from a nine-year-old along the lines of "why did President Bush say that" it was a tremendous pleasure to watch them listen to such an articulate and passionate politician in a room of a hundred or so people. I keep telling them that while global warming is a serious issue, there are adults who care, who are acting, both ordinary people and political leaders. This time the caring and the leading were obvious and I didn't have to say a thing.

3. Coming home from the rally in Norwich to harvest greens for a salad from our greenhouse and to plant a second crop of spinach. Little things – like stepping into that greenhouse from cold, gray, snow-covered April into something that felt more like early June – are what convince me that all sorts of pleasures and luxuries await us in the post-fossil fuel world. We may not receive so many plastic wrapped packages of lettuce from California here in Vermont. On the other hand, we'll get to walk down to the greenhouse and harvest the fresh beautiful heads ourselves, or buy them from a neighbor and support our local economies.

4. Later that day, walking a mile or so with my kids and our Hartland neighbors, their assorted signs and excited dogs, catching up on local news and people's lives, meeting the man who just moved into the house across the road, and realizing that every one of these fifty-five people had set aside Saturday chores and commitments because they care and believe they can make a difference.

Two final reflections about Step It Up Day:

Senator Sanders told the Norwich crowd that our job was to keep up the pressure, to continue finding ways to tell Congress they need to make passing strong climate change legislation a top priority. This was a fun and powerful day, and it also raises a question: what's next?

And, as I look back on the day's events I'm moved by the way that a small group of organizers, by providing an outlet for people to act on what they feel and know, were able to release a tremendous and powerful wave of activity. And I'm grateful that the organizers worked so hard to enable that wave and grateful that so many thousands of people leaped into the opportunity they created.

Climate Change: So New in Our Human History

2007-04-06T21:59:00.000-05:00

One thing that we try hard to convey in our trainings is just how recent the explosion in CO2 levels is, in the context of planetary history or even human history. We believe it's worth focusing on this for several reasons:

- it helps people comprehend our context more accurately - the speed and magnitude of change

- it helps diffuse feelings of wrongness or blame - part of the reason we are struggling to respond to this problem is its very speed relative to our evolution and our past

- it seems to help people absorb that these are not ordinary times, that we, by virtue of when we happened to be born, are called to respond to a unique moment in history.

Over the years we've experimented with a few different ways to convey this time dimension. We show a simple animation of human CO2 emissions for the past 10,000 years (since the beginning of human agriculture) with every second representing 100 years. The animation runs for about a minute and a half, with, of course, nothing happening for the first 87 seconds and then an explosive swing upward of the curve in the final few seconds (final few hundred years). The animation says it better than words can - we live in an unprecedented time.

Next week I'm giving a presentation before a climate change rally, and for technical reasons it won't work to use the animation, so I've been thinking about other ways to convey the time dimension of human-induced climate change.

Here's what I'm thinking of trying:

Imagine the journey of our species from its first emergence in Africa to the current moment as a walk across North America - from San Francisco to New York City. On this journey, San Francisco represents the point of departure, our origins, and New York City represents arriving at our current moment.

I plan to ask the audience to picture where it is in that journey that they would guess we humans begin to burn fossil fuels and disrupt the climate?

Where would you guess? Salt Lake City? Indianapolis?

Even though I know all the numbers I found myself surprised at what my calculations showed:

If the lifetime of Homo sapiens is represented by a 3000 mile journey, the burning of fossil fuels begins about 4 miles from the journey's end. In other words, the long walk from San Francisco, across the Rocky Mountains, the Plains, across the Mississippi, across Appalachia, and into New York State itself, all of that distance represents a period where we were creating culture and art and languages and stories, believing in things and acting in ways that did not disrupt the climate. Only the last four miles of that journey, through the streets of New York City itself represent the period of our experimentation with fossil fuels.

And, to carry the metaphor forward: the next ten years, the years scientists tell us are our window of opportunity for addressing climate change, are represented by just seventy-seven feet. On this long journey our ancestors met the challenges they faced for the metaphorical equivalent of three thousand miles. The next seventy-seven feet are up to us.

Gratitude

2007-04-05T16:46:00.000-05:00

One post back, I wrote about the work that keeps everything going, and about how - in this society at least - it is so easy to be blind to that work. But we don't have to be, of course. We can learn to see the cycles and the lives that make our own possible.

A lot of cultures are smarter than ours about ways to remember to see what it is that supports us. Ceremony, ritual, art, and prayer are all ways to do this. I've been thinking about this all week, but thinking about it is not the same as doing it; thinking about the importance of noticing and being grateful is not the same as noticing and being grateful.

So here: one tiny drop of gratitude in a day of meetings, emails, and deadlines.

Little Bird Business

Yesterday the high hill where I walk
belonged to the little birds
who were going about their little bird business
in the pine tops and on the fence posts.
I believe there is nothing more black than chickadee-black,
nothing more white than chickadee-white.
Half an ounce of feathers and flesh can move, can sing, can call the world to attention.
.
.
.
.

It Really Is One Planet

2007-03-29T15:20:00.000-05:00

"Earth's climate is agnostic about the location and type of CO2 emissions and is sensitive only to the total burden of CO2."

That sentence has been ringing in my head all day, after it jumped out at me from the text of an otherwise fairly dry article about carbon policy (Carbon Trading Over Taxes).

That sentence is an academic way of saying what any schoolchild could tell you - the atmosphere is one seamless whole. No matter how willing we are to believe that we can divide up the solid parts of the Earth into my acre and your acre, my nation and your nation, the atmosphere defeats this logic. Fluid, invisible, essential, the atmosphere won't allow us the same illusion we have with farm fields and city lots and forests, the illusion of possession.

There's no way to keep "our" part of the atmosphere healthy and let the rest of it take its chances. Either it's all healthy or it's all not.

There is an ethics to this wholeness of the atmosphere, because it sets up the possibility we are living out today, that people who don't benefit from fossil fuel use still pay the price for it.

You know all of this, you've seen those beautiful photographs of our Earth from space, you've walked across a boundary line in the forest and known that the boundary means nothing to the forest, nothing to the Earth.

Climate change is telling us to trust that knowledge. Forget the fifth grade geography lessons, the outlines of nations on the map. Tell the politicians to look up beyond those lines of national interest and acknowledge physical reality. It's only one atmosphere. It always has been. It always will be.

Just ask the wombat.

A Biosphere's Work Is Never Done

2007-03-24T09:24:00.000-05:00

A friend with a PhD from Harvard and a toddler on her hip told me recently that she struggles, these days, to be 'productive.'

What she meant, I think, was that she struggles to make headway on the kinds of work that can be finished, the work that sits there on its own and needs no tending once it is complete, like the contract signed, the book published, the problem solved. The kind of work you don't have to do all over again the next day or the next season.

Anyone who has ever cared for another person, or for a farm, or a household knows that such tasks are clearly work. They take real time and burn real energy, but they are never really 'done.' The empty sink fills again with dirty dishes, the weeds invade the tended row. Even the milestones of this sort of work, the child's first word, or the first ripe tomato, aren't really end points, just places along the way, part of the beat, the rhythm of the work.

Real work it may be, but it is also, in this culture, often invisible work. The people who do it by choice or because they have no choice often earn less money, and have lower status.

Still for most of the Earth's history, all there has been is the kind of work that is never done, the work of keeping things going. That's the work of every organ and every cell of your body, after all. Your liver never finishes its work of detoxifying your blood; the work of your heart is undone eighty times each minute.

Whole assemblages of beings do this kind of work as well – flocks of tiny algae, floating in the sea absorbing carbon dioxide, hillsides of stately trees breathing out oxygen.

I think the blindness of our culture to this whole universe of maintenance work, the blindness that leads us to discount the work of cleaning ladies and bus drivers and and even our own care-giving, helps explain how we could have pushed the Earth's climate regulating systems so far past their limits.

It is as though we've been living in a house where for years and years our dirty dishes have always been whisked away to be washed by someone we've never really noticed. We never really had to notice, the system functioned so smoothly. But now we find dirty dishes are accumulating in the sink, and we realize it has something to do with our very fun and crowded party which is now generating more dishes than whoever it is who has been washing them can keep up with.

The hidden blessing in the sinkfull of dirty dishes is that they have the potential to get our attention, they might cause us to look up from the party and notice the tired looking woman with the apron on. They might make us gulp, amazed to discover that she's been here all along, working away. They might inspire us to try to help her; they might inspire us to get to know her.

If rising carbon dioxide levels really get our attention, that's what they have the potential to do, to connect us with the life pulse of the planet, the life pulse that has been cradling us all along. They give us a chance to offer our gratitude and begin to know the debt we owe.

Climate As Teacher - Or Climate As Mirror?

2007-02-22T17:00:00.000-05:00

I was telling my friend Nancy some of the ideas I've been writing about here - that climate change may be a teacher for us all – and she put into words an idea I've been peering around the edges of all week, unable to shape it into words.

Climate change might not be so much a teacher that shows us something new, she said, as it is an experience that helps us trust what we already DO know.

That sounds exactly right to me.

Isn't there a part of us that knows that the Earth is alive, as we are; that we are connected to one another and the rest of the Earth; that we need to share with each other and take care of one another if we are to survive; that we can find peace and happiness and joy while co-existing with that which supports us?

Saints and scientists and prophets and writers and teachers have been telling us about this terrain for generations.

Little children seem to know much of it intuitively.

But there are so many ways that we are taught to distrust the part of ourselves that believes these things. Advertising teaches us to distrust our sense that we could be happy just being, in nature, hard at work, with friends and lovers and family. Economics teaches us that we are separate and must follow our own narrow interests, that our interests are different than those of the people who make the things we need and the Earth that provides those things and receives them when we are finished with them. Our maps, which divide up the single unitary Earth into cities and states and nations, teach us to distrust our sense that we live within one complete and indivisible whole.

No wonder we feel a little stressed and strained and bewildered. There is so much of our own knowing, so much that our senses are telling us, that we've been taught to distrust.

I think the Earth, stressed by the burdens we are placing on her, is offering to us something solid to cling to in this confusion, a point of reference in the conflict between what we know in our hearts and what we learn in our culture.

Look, she says, look where the advertising and the economic theory, and the idea of nation-states and disposable plastic everything has led you to - right to the very edge of disaster. Those theories and ideas don't fit with the Earth's realities of chemistry and flows of sunlight. They ignore most of what goes on in the dark layers of forest soil, in the microbial mats of swamps, in the quiet secret roots of trees, in the hearts of the poor and the dispossessed.

There she is, our Earth, huge, ponderous, slow, reporting out the consequences of 500 years of a certain way of thinking, showing us that a lot of that thinking is misguided or counterproductive.

If she were to ask us a question, perhaps it might be this: what is the risk of trusting in what you already know, in the most treasured and deepest parts of yourself?

Restoration

2007-02-20T17:36:00.000-05:00

I spoke with a friend today who told me of a small struggle. She's longed to see the Grand Canyon, and now she has a chance, to go there, to travel it, down river, with friends. I want to go, I've always wanted to see it, she said, but I'd have to fly to get there. Knowing what I know about climate change, she said, I'm not sure that going is right.

She wasn't asking for advice, which was good, since I didn't have any to give, beyond noting the paradox -- that love of beauty and nature and this wondrous Earth leads those of us who can afford it to weaken the very thing we love, as we drive and fly to take in that beauty and be restored by it.

There's so much loss, my friend said. So much we are accustomed to that we are coming to understand cannot go on.

I agreed, thinking of all that I do that I know works against the future, thinking of all the habbits I'm trying to break.

What we might have to give up in response to climate change is one side of the coin, but there's another. On good days I can sense it, and today, was a good day. After my friend left, I walked, on the hillside above my home. The hemlocks were dark against the clear grey sky and the hills rolled out in blue waves beyond them. I stood still at the top of the hill, a quarter mile from home. Two ravens flew up the valley below me, calling deeply. In the birches a woodpecker cried, a few quiet flakes of snow drifted downwards.

That hillside is always there, above my house, and is never the same, from one day to the next. But days go by, weeks, without my dipping into the peace and beauty that are there, waiting.

I know that hemlocks against snow, and the black of ravens arcing across the sky are a different sort of beauty than the Grand Canyon, and not the same as the sands of Florida or the waters off Belize either.

But I also know that this one hillside has enough to notice - if one is prepared to notice – for a lifetime of walking. If changing to meet the demands of the climate means staying home more, seeking restoration by foot, and not by airplane, I know that assured restoration is there, on this simple, nearby hilltop, where it always has been.

Like Gravity

2007-02-20T16:06:00.000-05:00

I remember my two girls learning to walk. I remember their struggle to stand, to find balance. I remember the clumsy shifting of weight from foot to foot. And finally, one, day they had it - forward motion, a few steps, then more, and now, years later, grace - running, skipping, pirouetting, ice skating, speed.

All of it, impossible if not for the falling that taught them about walking, about gravity. Falling taught them that it isn’t wise to lift both feet off the ground at once. It taught them not lean too far forward no matter how bright and shiny, how nearly in reach, the toy on floor might be. Falling taught them that there is a center, a place of balance. To walk they had to find that center, and learn to stay in it. There is not a single person who knows how to walk who didn't find that balance, and we all found it by losing it.

And this is how I can make sense of climate change, as a species-wide stumbling, a stumbling through which we might – still, now – learn. It doesn’t change much, to see it this way. CO2 levels are still rising, too fast. Emissions cuts – as deep as we can make – are still needed, as soon as we can manage. New policies and new technologies and new ways of seeing ourselves are still so deeply needed.

But, doesn’t the work of doing these all seem lighter, if we look at it as something like the work of learning to walk? Babies aren’t stupid, mean spirited or short sighted. They are just struggling to fit into the constraints of their world. Bump-by-bump and tumble-by-tumble is the only way they learn to do it.

Learning how to live as a viable part of a huge species on a complex planet is a lot harder than learning to walk, of course, because the feedback is so much weaker. When we here in the modern industrial economies overbalance or over-pollute it is almost always someone else, somewhere else, sometime in the future, who will have to ride out the stronger hurricane, hoe the dusty ground, live through the heat wave. The teaching done by the climate is so slow, so convoluted, that we can live right through the lesson and hardly notice it.

Which must mean that if we are to turn to climate change as a teacher, part of our work must be to learn to take in the all the pain, the suffering, and the loss of our neighbors as though it is our own.

Looking To Climate Change

2007-02-16T16:43:00.000-05:00

So I’ve said that I am looking for lessons in climate change, and maybe you are wondering what I mean by that.

I’m not looking for ‘lessons’ in the way this word is sometimes meant. I’m not looking for a list of what we did wrong, or were we could do better. Without doubt climate change has plenty of those, and, thankfully, many hardworking, smart people are searching them out. We should be more efficient. Waste less. Design our cities and our agriculture differently. More and more lessons like those are coming, which is good, which is welcome, but I think there must be something more, something else to find.

Here we sit, so far beyond the limits of the planet to support us that the climatologists say we may have as little as ten years to prevent runaway climate change. How could billions of people, each wanting to live, each wanting a good future, have gotten into this situation, how could we have walked together into such danger?

There must be things we’ve learned and taught that are not true, and things that are true that we’ve yet to learn.

We can’t be who we thought we were. Or the Earth can’t be what we’ve been taught it is. A people who understood themselves and their place wouldn't have so overstepped it.

And so, I have been holding this one small hope about climate change. Could it be that all the pain and loss and waste that climate change has already brought, and all the more that is yet to come, might carry along with it also a small set of gifts? Insights. Lessons about how the Earth works, about how we fit into it. Lessons about how we can make our way through our lives with out doing so much harm, and perhaps even insights that show us to live in a way that gives back to that which gives us life.

I believe we’ve stumbled into climate change by not knowing – or not believing – who we are and what we are a part of. And so I wonder: can we look climate change straight in the face, without flinching, can we see what it is that we’ve misunderstood, or forgotten, or been blind to? Can we find some bits of meaning out the fact that in trying to be happy and prosperous and make a future for ourselves we’ve stressed and strained the very things that future depends upon?

I don’t have much hope for solutions – from corporate responsibility to high-speed rail – that don’t include some element of this sort self-reflection.

So, how does one find the lessons that climate change has to teach?

Humbly I am sure of that. With the clear understanding that this is the work of all, and that we can each only find climate change’s lessons for ourselves. With the realization that climate change is one way into these lessons, but not the only way, realizing that these lessons have been known for millennia, by mystics, by thinkers, by anyone able to open themselves to them.

I would guess that the same lessons could be found by asking what we had misunderstood that we allowed Hiroshima and Nagasaki to happen, or by asking how it is that slavery happened or that poverty continues. All of these unacceptable things that persist, don’t they each point the way to something untrue, something we believe or cling to, that is not right?

And so there is the hope I have, this wild, almost unexplainable hope.

It is that that Earth, our reality, may finally be speaking to us with such strength and vigor that we won’t be able to ignore Her. And in her actions, floods, storms, extinctions, and also in her resiliency, and bounty, we will find a way to see ourselves that makes more sense and leads to wiser choices than the way we’ve traveled so far along.

Climate Change, a Teacher?

2007-02-10T16:04:00.000-05:00

Well, what did you learn?

As long as I've been a mother of children old enough to converse with, it seems I've been asking that question.

What did you just learn about running barefoot over sharp rocks?
What did you just learn about teasing your friends?
You played all day and didn't get to your math assignment and now it is 8:30 at night and you are crying tears of exhausted frustration. What did you just learn?

My kids don't always greet these questions with deep appreciation. But I still keep at it. No matter how awful something turns out there's usually something to learn from the experience. People say that about coping with illness, divorce, financial ruin, injury. We know that the most effective business and organizations are those that reflect on what worked well and what didn't and try to learn from both.

But when I look around at this world that is beginning to wake up to climate change, this world that is rising slowly to face that tremendous question - what should we do – I don't see many places where this other question - what can we learn - is being asked.

I understand that now feels like a moment of crisis, a moment for action. How can we sit around and think and learn, you may ask, in this moment of deepening danger? But how else are we going to navigate the changes that are coming if we haven't learned how we got here, if our understanding of our planet and our place on it hasn't been sharpened by this experience of climate change? I can't see any other way.

People are already suggesting solutions to climate change - from giant mirrors out in space, to biofuels, to a return to a simple life, to a new high-tech super-efficient society. How do we know which choices to leap for, and which might just make things worse, if we don't take some time, right now, to try to figure out what we might learn from the reality of climate change? What does it show us about how the Earth really works and about how we fit into that Earth? What does it show us about what really matters, and what is a mere distraction? What does it shows us about how to live good, fair and ethical lives?

My goal over the coming months is to open myself to as many lessons from climate change as I can find. I'm creating this place to record what I find, and share it with others, so that it may be refined, sharpened, improved and shared.