Spring is Maybe Here?

I stepped outside yesterday and caught two squirrels shagging on the back porch. At least, I think they were shagging - I've never seen squirrels do that before. Their act confused me because they swapped roles with some regularity, freezing for a moment mid-swap to catch me staring out of their side eye. Ah, spring.

As Colorado weather fluctuates between mid-80's / sunny and mid-30's/snow, I'm trying to clean up the yard and help our newbie plants along, watering on the hot days and protecting on the freezing days in between. It's odd to me that the weather fluctuations are behaving exactly like scientists predicted in my Environmental Studies textbooks. I took ENVS from 1999-2001 and lo and behold, predictions become truth on the daily. 

My hairdresser and I were conversing about current hot topics and activism, and I confessed to being a climate change radical in the early 2000's, dragging my young-at-the-time children to Green Team meetings and 350.org rallies. Aden referred to this experience in her honors thesis, when she traced her environmental interest (green spaces in cities) back to those early exposures. 

I started Earth Day activities at the elementary school and hosted newspaper reporters at our Green Team meetings. My efforts trickled off a bit when three kids in school with daily activities caught me in their wake - like a tiger by the tail. But some community efforts outlived my presence; Earth Day approaches now and the signs for creek clean-ups and the school drive to recycle electronics dot the neighborhood.

Life has worn down my sharp edges in the decades since I graduated, so though we use solar panels, xeriscaping and look to buy an electric car, I still fly on planes, my composting is shoddy and I don't always remember a clean re-usable cup at Starbucks. Now that my children are adults, I hope that perhaps their emerging activism will re-energize me and help me find new solutions to old problems, including what to do about randy squirrels.

Befuddlement

 It's 46 degrees and raining, an abrupt and welcome change from the 97-99 degree highs we suffered all week. Like many other residents of the West, we hid in air conditioned houses and offices until the sun went down, blessedly earlier than it had in June and July. As someone who worries about climate change, I both appreciate and hate the AC. We have solar panels which produce much of the electricity needed for the house, but over the past summer our usage exceeded our production significantly. We have to figure out how to do better while staying cool, not an easy task in this day and age.

Life blooms with surprisingly difficult tasks these days. Trying to cancel my son's dentist appointment is just one example: I called to cancel, only to realize they were closed on Friday afternoons. I hit a text message to cancel, only to unwittingly auto-confirm it. Now I don't know if I'm committed (and on the hook to pay) or if I successfully withdrew.

Another shocker is sitting down to a dinner table absent of any children. Rob and I hold hands to say grace, filling a little silly and certainly bereft of other bodies. Sometimes we can't even get the words out as our eyes meet and then sweep away, self-conscious at hearing only our two voices in the room.

My brain is mixed up and full of three or four different jobs, trying to balance the calendar and respond to the right emails with the right information (and mindset). Fix the pitch deck for the screenplay and then switch to curriculum for swim schools, then run out the door with a workout for the Masters team... I haven't sent the wrong document yet, but the prospect looms and makes me anxious.

Which reminds me of a story my sister recounted earlier this week. She's a teacher in an elementary school and has noticed that many of the younger students appear wide-eyed and shocked at the need to navigate a large building with four classrooms per grade. In-person school may be a first for them, or they have had minimal exposure. She saw one youngster pulling a roller bag almost larger than his body down the wrong corridor, tears starting to roll down his cheeks. When she knelt and asked him what was wrong, he said, "I've lost my school! I've lost my school!"  Valiantly choking back chuckles, Karen helped him find his second-grade classroom.

I'm trying to avoid losing my school (and my mind) these days, but grateful at least for the cool weather today and a quiet day inside to pull my life together.

A Climate Cafe

 My friend, Susan, and I hosted our first official Climate Cafe over Zoom last night. We "gathered" via laptop screen to facilitate a sharing about attendees' emotions around climate change. The sharing was honest, moving, enlightening and powerful. There was often a deep silence after one attendee finished, as people processed and sat with the difficult feelings that arose, but sometimes one person's story would inspire another and the thoughts tumbled out furiously, as individuals wrestled with grief, despair, hope or a combination of multiple emotions.

Susan approached me about co-facilitating this meeting several months ago, when I was deep into high school swimming and couldn't afford to add another activity, but when I went to a training and digested the idea that people around the world are struggling with eco-anxiety, I couldn't turn down the opportunity to offer a climate cafe here in the Denver area. 

The climate cafe concept came out of Scotland in 2015 and is based on death cafes, where people gather to talk about another taboo subject. Climate cafes have taken off in the UK and were offered in person before the pandemic, though now are largely relegated to online. Working with mental health professionals in the UK, the North America Climate Psychology Alliance is now working to popularize the cafes in this country and to train facilitators to meet what they perceive to be a deep need.

Both facilitating and participating in a meeting about feelings are difficult to me, a person who prefers action to thought, to - do lists and righteous angers to the heavy weight of grief and occasional despair. I fought within myself to allow the long silences, to hear the words of people struggling and not rush in to console or counter with my own story. The ultimate take-away from last night, as I found with my training, is a sense of relief that other people feel the way that I do, that I am not alone in my eco-anxiety and that together, we can help each other to express lament as well as hope, and help increase our resiliency in difficult times.

Mother Nature Left the Freezer Door Open

 "Global warming is the long-term heating of Earth's climate system observed since the pre-industrial period (1850-1900) due to human activities, primarily fossil fuel burning." 

"Climate change is a long-term change in the average weather patterns that have come to define Earth's local regional and global climates." - NASA Climate, 2/13/21

"Climate change is no longer considered to accurately reflect the seriousness of the overall situation; use climate emergency or climate crisis instead." - The Guardian, 2/13/21, referring to changing terms in its style guide

It took a while to convince my Masters swimmers and co-coach to cancel Friday morning's 6am practice, despite the fact the temperature was predicted to be 10 degrees F. When I woke up on Friday  the thermometer on my watch said 3 degrees, and I was particularly glad that we had canceled. Did I mention that we swim outside year-round? On the coldest days, water splashed on-deck freezes instantly and people's bare hands freeze to the ladder rails when they climb out. Sliding across a sheet of ice to the building can be precarious even with copious amounts of salt thrown down by coaches in wool socks and boots.

Today the mercury has dropped further, registering a negative 2 degrees at 7am (I sleep in on weekends). My brother in Chicago has similar temps and my mom, in northern Montana, is even colder, at negative 6. The outrageous mood swings of the polar vortex brought freezing temperatures to much of the country, further confusing people who still call the monumental issue of our time "global warming." 

Though the atmosphere is steadily warming due to the emission of greenhouse gases, the changes we see are not always "warm." The current harsh winter conditions are actually caused by increasing temps in the Arctic. "Rising temperatures in the North Pole are causing parts of the polar vortex to split off and move southward, leading to the possibility of a particularly harsh winter in the US, Europe and Asia." (The Hill, 2/13/21.) So while it seems counterintuitive that we're freezing our bottoms off in the lower 48 due to a warming atmosphere, it's true. It's as if God - or Mother Nature - left the freezer door open.

The Guardian also evolved their language in reporting on climate issues because "climate change" is no longer an adequate way to address the seriousness of the situation we're in. They have instituted "climate crisis" or "climate emergency" instead. We should all try to use these terms; it's the only way to raise our collective consciousness. There's no do-over on protecting our livable climate or our planet. When we call something by it's true name, we're more likely to respond with action.  If your child was locked in a car that was rapidly overheating, you would certainly break a window to get her out. That's what people do in emergencies, they call "fire" and they take every available measure to save the situation.

Post Script, 2/19/21 - The situation in Texas has horrified the nation this week as power outages robbed millions of light and heat, and ruptured pipes required additional millions to boil water (or snow) for drinking. The electric grid in Texas fell prey to inadequate preparation and the hazardous weather generated by the climate emergency. Natural gas, particularly, was likely to freeze and remain ineffective for days.  As a nation we must update our power generation and our power grids so that more people aren't caught in suffering. Our thoughts and prayers are with the people of Texas as things hopefully return to normal this weekend.

Laughter and climate change

"Be joyful though you have considered all the facts." - Wendell Berry

On Saturday, October 24th, events will take place around the world to convince business and political leaders to DO SOMETHING in Copenhagen in December, when they meet to draft a Climate Treaty to succeed Kyoto. The events are organized under the auspices of 350.org, an organization named for the scientific belief that Earth's carbon dioxide levels need to be stabilized at 350 parts per million to maintain life as we know it. Currently our CO2 levels are at 388 ppm and many changes are occurring. (See http://www.350.org/) Melting Arctic ice, destabilizing permafrost in Alaska, severe drought in Australia and the Sahel region of Africa. . . .not a lot of happy thoughts in that list. How then, to be joyful?

Over the past 11 years, the duration of my self-conscripted time in the "green" movement, I have learned many things about the state of our biosphere, few of which elicited a laughing response. My main motivating force is not laughter but my children. The thought of their future fuels me to educate other people and to try to build a movement for positive change - change in energy consumption, buying habits, eating habits, and policies that could encourage such changes. I want all of the cute kiddos on the playground to have clean air, (enough) clean water, myriad plant and animal species to view with awe, and a stable world both climatically and politically. When I read that "without drastic action, by the time our kids reach their 40s. the Southwest will have become a dust bowl" (Mother Jones, Nov/Dec issue p4) I tend to react. Yet in the next paragraph the Mother Jones editors admit, "no one enjoys dread and guilt," and suppose that this negativity is responsible for Americans' listing climate change at Number 20 on their list of problem issues.

How then, to educate people and encourage action around climate change? The answer must surely be as diverse as there are people in the world, and I have recently seen a few unique attempts. The Maldives' Cabinet members put on scuba gear and held an underwater meeting last Saturday, attempting to highlight the threat of climate change and rising sea levels to their country, the lowest-lying nation on Earth (http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2009/10/17/maldives-climate-change.html).

The accompanying photo really was quite humorous, as they had a complete table with name cards and official looking documents to sign. Definitely smile-worthy.

Religious leaders may exhort their church members to follow the moral imperative of living simply so that others may simply live, Denver urges its residents to do just five simple tasks to live greener, artists create giant sculptures of people or fabric, or make fantastic images to show the plethora of bottles, newspapers, electronics and other objects that we discard. Artists and rhetoricians use their voices powerfully, but they are lost in the shuffle of information that bombards our lives.

I have heard that people learn better when they are laughing; if that is true the climate change issue lacks educating heft. Punch lines are hard to come by in a shifting world where climate refugees already exist and where their numbers could increase exponentially. Yet again, one must pull away from statistics, realize the gifts we Americans have of clean air, water, bird songs, autumn leaves and ocean swims. . . and be joyful though we have all the facts. Thanks to Mr. Berry for reminding us that our joy is a powerful force by itself; let us take joy in our earth and then act to preserve its wonders for future generations.

This Saturday, if you are near a 350.org event, please take part.