Postcards from the Rogue Valley

Image from NASA’s Worldview software of actively burning fires. 

“Reports of our inadequate response to the climate emergency roll in as regularly as the tides,” David Remnick writes in this week’s New Yorker. The latest came from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), telling us that the crisis is getting worse even faster than we’d imagined. It’s hard to envision a louder alarm, and yet we seem able to sleep through it.

The original goal set in the historic Paris Agreement, limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial temperatures, is quickly fading into the rearview mirror, the IPCC says, and nothing less than drastic changes across all sectors of human life—and exchanging fossil fuels for renewable energy—can avert the unthinkable. The emissions of gases such as carbon dioxide and methane must peak as soon as possible, in 2025 at the latest hundreds of the world’s scientists warn, then plummet to half their current levels by 2030, and drop to zero by 2050.  

As you no doubt know, we are headed in the wrong direction. 2020 was the second-warmest year on record based on NOAA’s temperature data. The warmest seven years have all been since 2015.

Last week, I graduated from my ten-week course with Southern Oregon Climate Action Now and earned a “Certified Master Climate Protector” badge. My assignment going forward: to spread my new knowledge about climate change to others, believers and deniers alike. “Climate change,” like “urban sprawl” or “gun violence,” has become such a familiar term that we tend to read past it. I must help change that.

The astonishing Greta Thunberg shouts:

Adults keep saying: ‘We owe it to the young people to give them hope.’ But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.” – Greta Thunberg, No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference

Yes, Greta, our house is on fire.

What follows are small pieces from my own idiosyncratic climate journey. 

Reducing my carbon footprint

A carbon footprint is the total amount of greenhouse gases (including carbon dioxide and methane) that are generated by our actions. The average carbon footprint for a person in the United States is 16 tons, one of the highest rates in the world. Globally, the average carbon footprint is closer to 4 tons. To have the best chance of avoiding a 2℃ rise in global temperatures, the average global carbon footprint per year needs to drop to under 2 tons by 2050.

Before I knew about sizing my carbon footprint, “conservation” had been my mantra, albeit modest. And when you share a home, reducing one person’s carbon footprint merges with another’s. In our household, my spouse Tony has led the way.

Having grown up in southern Italy with no running water or electricity, Tony has always kept showering to a minimum, worn the same clothes for days, patrolled our lights, railed against watering lawns and washing cars, flushed toilets sparingly, and generally kept his head down when it came to consumption. (Of course, it could have gone the other way, with his making up for what he had missed.) Step-by-step, I’ve moved towards Tony’s side. Long gone are my daily showers.

Indeed, as an immigrant, Tony viewed “uber” consumption as an American trait, a trait he did not value. When he sees people lined up outside a popular restaurant or jostling for a bargain on large screen tv’s or chasing the latest iPhones, he invariably says, “Ah, the can’t get enough crowd.”

Food, too, is an area where Tony has set the table, where his southern Italian roots have crossed the Atlantic Ocean, including the custom of shopping sparingly but often. Compared to our friend’s refrigerators, ours is largely bare, except after a trip to Costco to stock up on yogurt and Impossible Burgers. Fresh fruit and vegetables are our staples, to be consumed quickly and not stored. We buy food on an as-needed basis and rarely throw food away. With Tony’s dedication to cooking—and exquisite skills—we eat out infrequently and avoid take out. 

On the other hand, Tony and I don’t own an electric vehicle (but aspire to), an induction stove, a grey water system or solar tank water heater, and other items I cannot name—purchases doubling as actions that promise to reduce one’s carbon footprint. Electric vehicles withstanding, I keep thinking that perhaps the best way to cut America’s energy usage is to shrink the size of our houses, our cars, our food servings, our wardrobes, our belongings. Size matters.

Air travel, however, is where Tony’s and my carbon footprint grows large. Rather than sequestering carbon, we have squirreled our personal finances, allowing us to travel at the drop of a hat—to visit our children and grandchildren spread across the country and Tony’s family in Italy, to immerse ourselves in East Africa where our older son worked for ten years, to explore Central America, East Asia, and Europe for pleasure. We’ve accumulated road miles, too, driving cross country twice in the past five years. 

For Tony and me, travel connects us, expands us, makes us feel alive. Sadly, old age, not CO2 emissions, will eventually clip our wings. My donations to small nonprofits you’ve never heard of, doing their part to reduce carbon emissions, barely balances this debt. (See, e.g., United Nations Carbon Offset Platform, Gold Standard) 

Knock-knock, who’s there? Climate change

In Southern Oregon, indeed across much of the West, the knock of global warming keeps growing louder. In the four years since we moved to this wide open landscape, wildfires, smoke, sizzling summers, and drought have closed in. The pace of change is astonishing. Last year, Oregon wildfires burned over a million more acres than they had  the year before.

I wrote in an earlier blog about the toll climate change is taking locally, here in the Rogue Valley.  I noted that Jackson County, where I live, ended 2021 as it began: desperately dry. The three reservoirs critical to irrigation here remain at historically low levels. The Talent Irrigation District, whose canals supply water to farmers and adjacent home owners, usually starts pumping water in early April and shuts at the end of September. In 2021, it closed four weeks after it opened. The growing season was likely the shortest on record. This year, the irrigation ditches may never open.

We are learning, too, that drought, like its progenitor climate change, is a threat multiplier. The catastrophic September 2020 fires in the towns of Talent and Phoenix, which left nearly 3,000 families homeless—disproportionately Hispanic and poor—continue to displace almost every aspect of life in these communities. When the local pear harvest, a major employer of farmworkers, ended a month early this fall, workers who are used to having another month of income didn’t. Weeks of wildfire smoke—months in the summer of 2020—permeate everything from breathing to economic activity, small and large. When heavy smoke descends, Ashland becomes a ghost town; locals disappear along with the tourists.

Talk of a “new normal” sounds far too benign. “Adapting to climate change”—which the UN suggests requires consensual implementation plans involving “multiple levels” and “multiple means”—sounds as daunting as it is necessary.

A view from Sub Saharan Africa

We already know that the world’s poorest and most vulnerable will pay the highest price when it comes to climate change, although their contribution to global warming, if one excludes China (today’s largest emitter), hovers around 10 percent. 

I will state it flatly: most folks in the developing world—the 80 countries and territories classified as “high-income economies”—have barely a clue about the harsh realities of daily life in the developing world—the 152 countries so identified by the International Monetary Fund. There, a flush toilet of any description and a solar lantern would be a blessing, thank you.

What I know about the developing world comes from a decade of small, village projects Tony and I carried out in East Africa, notably Tanzania. 

Pardon me if I now go on too long.

Our connection began in 2003 when our son Carl, then an environmental science major, spent six months living and working in a remote village in Tanzania, near Mt. Kilimanjaro. It was an unlikely mission: helping this agropastoral community of 5,000 (no roads, no electricity, water fetched from pumps, mostly sloped) combat soil erosion. Carl organized village meetings (he had learned Swahili) to address grazing practices, a root cause of the soil erosion that left fields bare. But what villagers most wanted to do was plant trees to “save the planet,” as they put it. At a town meeting, they voted to start a tree nursery and plant 2,000 trees. Carl helped kick it off. 

After graduation, Carl moved to Tanzania to continue this and other projects in the village. When we visited him that first Xmas, heavy rains had destroyed all of the young trees, planted the year before. This had become the cycle here: alternating drought and deluging rain. Persistent famine was the end result.

We returned the following summer, and I spent three weeks creating a photo essay book with secondary students on daily life in their village. The day I left, the school headmaster presented me with one hundred essays students had (hand)written about the impacts of climate change in Kambi ya Simba, and how greenhouse gases were warming the earth. I’d seen on dusty blackboards in the school (where students studied three to a desk with no books) diagrams of the greenhouse effect. The headmaster asked me to deliver the students’ letters to President Bush. I did. Bush never responded. The year: 2005.

The final part of this story involves my husband. He quit his job as a manufacturing executive (in Providence, Rhode Island) after our first trip to Kambi ya Simba and threw himself into devising small solar-powered lamps, contained in recycled plastic bottles, that could replace the kerosene lanterns that were the only source of light in this and other villages. (The leading cause of death was not malaria or typhoid but upper respiratory illnesses from breathing kerosene fumes). Tony trained two dozen farmers how to build these lamps and they set up a micro solar-light factory in the village. The idea spread to nearby villages. Over the next three years, Tony set up comparable, locally managed micro factories (always using recycled plastic bottles to contain wires and batteries) in Liberia, Bosnia, and Haiti. This was 2006-2010.

For fifteen years, I’ve kept in regular contact with several of the secondary school students, now in their early 30’s, who were part of our writing and photography team in the summer of 2005. All became the first in the village to go onto higher education, with profits from the book we wrote together paying some of their fees. 

Reggie, now 31, teaches social studies in a secondary school on a Maasai reservation near the famous Ngorongoro Crater. I recently asked him whether he teaches about global warming and climate change. His answer: Absolutely. Indeed it is a required part of the curriculum in secondary schools across Tanzania, he told me.  Reggie said that it’s also the way he teaches geography, through a climate change lens. I asked how his students reacted. He said they reacted with huge anger at the big emitters—not fear, but fury.

Supporting the next generation of climate activists

In the dedication to her 2020 book, Vote. Voice. Use Your Feet., Jane Fonda writes:

When I was young, I thought activism was a sprint, and I worked around the clock, hoping for quick change. When I was older, I learned activism is a marathon, and I learned to pace myself. At eight-two, I realize it is neither sprint nor marathon: it is a relay race. The most important thing we adults can do now is join and support the next generation of climate activists ready to lead the movement.“

I couldn’t agree more.

In the summer of 2020, in the run-up to the 2020 Presidential Election, I created a website to chronicle the work of our nation’s youth activists. I had championed the voices and vision of young people for decades, and the unprecedented surge of activism by diverse Gen Zers beginning around 2018—around voting, climate action, racial justice, immigration and gender equality—made my head spin.

Last summer, I largely retired the website, but continue to post articles every day to a Facebook page called youthvoicesforchange, providing a running chronicle of youth activism around climate action. One day, the story may be about the hundreds of thousands students who skipped school and marched through the streets of more than 75 cities and towns across the globe to call for decisive action on climate change. Another day, it might be about Maine youth climate activists descending on the state capitol to push a climate change agenda. A third day, it may be about Utah youth suing the state over climate and health concerns.

Unlike Jane Fonda who still takes to the streets, my contributions to this fight come from my checkbook. I donate as much and as often as I can to a handful of organizations that win my admiration. My favorite is Our Children’s Trust, the world’s only non-profit public interest law firm dedicated exclusively to securing the legal rights of youth to a healthy atmosphere and safe climate, based on the best available science. Perhaps the best known is the Sunrise Movement, tied to organizing and pushing for The New Green Deal.

A recent article in The Atlantic offered “A New Estimate of the ‘Most Effective’ Way to Fight Climate Change.” In response to the question, on a dollar-for-dollar basis, where will your money do the most to fight climate change, the economist Daniel Stein answered give to groups that lobby for aggressive climate policies. His picks: the Evergreen Collaborative, Carbon180, and the Clean Air Task Force.

Choosing hope

I began my climate course with what I thought was a passable understanding of global warming and the climate science behind it. The first two classes left me on the verge of tears. I truly hadn’t realized how much of our climate catastrophe is already baked in. Half-way through the course, I vowed to choose what I think of as rational hope.

Two websites have helped. Regeneration is a response to the urgency of the climate crisis, a determined what-to-do manual for all levels of society, from individuals to national governments and everything and everyone in between. It describes a system of interlocking initiatives that can stem the climate crisis in one generation. Project Drawdown offers concrete climate solutions by sector: from electricity, industry and transportation to food and agriculture, land sinks, and health and education. The solutions described in both are innovative and promising. Scale and the time needed to get to scale are, of course, critical.

I am cheered by the growth of renewables. The price of solar PV has dropped 81 percent since 2009. By 2017, the majority of new power-generating capacity added worldwide came from renewables.

And I’ve learned that one of the most important things you can do to fight climate change is to talk about it. If you need inspiration, watch Katharine Hayhoe’s stunning TED Talk.

We can’t change the world by ourselves, Hayhoe, chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy, reminds us. It requires us to connect, to talk about why climate change matters and how it affects us personally, about what we are doing ourselves and what others are doing. Too often, Hayhoe says,

We picture this problem as a giant boulder sitting at the bottom of a hill, with only a few hands on it trying to roll it up the hill. But in reality, that boulder is already at the top of the hill. And it’s got hundreds of millions of hands, maybe even billions, on it, pushing it down. It just isn’t going fast enough.

So how do we speed up that giant boulder so we can fix climate change in time? The number one way is by talking about it….We have to go out and actively look for the hope that we need that will inspire us to act.”

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