Today is my sassy-sweet daughter’s 8th birthday! I really can’t think of a better opening into today’s idea: Climate Change is personal. I’ve always been sensitive to our collective impact on our environment, but the mix of Climate Change plus little Nolan and baby Natalie’s future was very potent for me. The year after Natalie’s birthday was when I decided I needed to leave my job—and more importantly, a career I loved—to give more time to my family (the here and now), and to give more of my non-family time more directly to the problem of Climate Change (the future). That was a critical period of change for me, and I will tell the whole story in gory detail when I get to “The Story of Me.” But to summarize for today, maybe the best way of saying it is this: this blog, this work I am doing, it is my daily birthday present to Natalie, and her brother, and to the other things in life that I hold dear.
That's a glimpse of the side of Climate Change that can bring you fulfillment.
Yesterday I examined Climate Change from the perspective of “Climate Change…More Than a Changing Climate,” which could equally have been titled, “Climate Change…A Historically Unprecedented Modern Event.” As sweeping and catch-all as the idea of Climate Change is outlined in this way, I would argue, as most of us conceive of it, there is yet more bundled into the term. Think about it; those of us who “want in” to solutions to Climate Change can’t enter very effectively at the level of high concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. That doesn’t mean we can’t get in there. We need to drill down yet deeper. Also, the definitions of Climate Change almost never includes reference to the very important downstream effects of climate change. The rising seas, the bleaching coral, desertification, etc. When most of us think about Climate Change—mitigating it—we are thinking about that.
>Hey! Let me step out of this post a minute to talk about my decision-making around the rest of this post.
I drafted this post over 2 months ago when I was first trying to see if I could maintain a productive daily writing habit. Returning to it now, I am a little hesitant about the following wonky metaphor, and at first I was tempted to not even reread it, but instead to start again and find a different way to say the same thing. But I did read it through again, and I think, yes, it is a bit cheesy/obvious and I do feel a bit self-conscious about that, but about half way through I feel like it really starts working. By the end it really captures the important idea I want convey. On the balance, I like it. I have decided to keep this in. Give it a try, let me know if in the end it works for you or not…(login and comment or shoot me an email).
Let’s explore a metaphor. Imagine you have a village at the base of a very large tree. Like a very very large, giant mother tree, like the one in Avatar. And imagine too that your village has been chopping wood from one side of the tree for as long as anyone can remember. The village seems dwarfed by this giant tree, and there is a complete mine of caverns where wood is being extracted and excavated. Plus, the village is really thriving in recent years, so there are more people around, and a greater need for wood for fuel and for building, and thus there has been even more chopping of wood from this mother tree.
Now imagine that someone notices that the top of the tree has moved. It has shifted, maybe only a little bit, but branches in the canopy used to line up with one landmark on the horizon, but now they line up with different ones. And let’s also say, the direction the tree has moved is so that it has leaned just a little bit more over the village. And imagine a couple of people go back to look at historical records, maybe artwork of the tree, and sees that actually, the tree seems to have been moving, shifting over the village, for years and years.
First, this set of people who’ve convinced themselves the change is real has to convince other people the tree has moved. Then they have to figure out if it is still moving. That’s a whole job and set of heroic stories in and of itself (like “The Sky is Falling”). But let’s say the villagers come to realize, not only has the tree shifted, but it actually seems to be actively shifting. Slowly, so slowly, but it is clearly happening. Let’s say that the village starts to suspect their chopping is what has caused the tree to weaken and lean. They’ve chopped down small trees and watched them fall, they just didn’t think any amount of chopping would ever make this mother tree fall. (In fact, there were probably legends about how the mother tree was specifically there for them to use). Out of concern, maybe they slow their cutting, or stop cutting wood altogether for a bit. Maybe they observe the tipping of the tree slows, but doesn’t stop. Let say after looking and thinking and testing the village decides the chopping they are doing is actually causing the tree to tip. And while the tree hasn’t fallen down yet, it has become weakened, such that everyday it seems to lean just a little bit more over the village.
Hopefully, the first action the villagers would take is to stop cutting wood from the base of the tree. They would also hopefully realize, because the tree is continuing to tip from previous cuttings, that there are questions about the future that no one can answer: How far will the tree tip before it stops? Or, alternatively, how far will it lean before it falls? And if it falls, will there be enough warning to get out of the way? And in the meantime, how are we going to live without this wood?
But the tribe also has immediate needs to take care of. After all, the tree has apparently been falling for a while already. It’s rate of falling seems to be pretty trivial. And everyone needs to gather food and raise their kids and survive and thrive on a day to day basis. So, it’s a problem, but no need to evacuate today.
Would the more concerned members of the tribe be holding meetings called “Tree Change,” because other members think “Tree Falling” is too radical? Or too fear mongering? Would “Tree Instabilty” start to feed into people’s dreams? Would people start moving further away from the base of the tree. Would they really stop taking wood?
Or would it be the case that maybe not everyone is on board that this chopping of the wood is actually causing the problem. Some people aren’t sure the tree is moving. Or that if it is moving, that it is actually falling, or that it has anything to do with the cutting the wood at the base of the tree.
Now, since I made up this story, I get to play “God”: I am not hypothesizing the tree might be falling as a result of the chopping, but rather that it is. That is how I have built this story. I was describing cause = chop and effect = lean -> fall, such that we can take it as given that the people’s actions—the chopping—is the primary problem that threatens their existence. But with this scenario what I also want to examine are the children problems that can crop up with the parent problem: the people who are living in denial of the problem truly are creating a new problem for these villagers to overcome, the problem of the lack of consensus over whether there even is a problem. And another problem has bubbled up, uncertainty about what to do with a problem this big that none of them as individuals can solve. And yet another problem about what the timeline of action should be? And another problem about how to shift from one way of living (getting wood from Mama Tree), to another way (finding new energy sources and new building materials).
One problem, the cutting and falling, is harder to prove and easy to argue about, but simple and real. The other problems are social and messy and can completely spin everyone off the main issue.
When I am thinking about what we all need to do to maximally mitigate Climate Change, I think about the children problems. I feel like these secondary problems need to be worked out in order for us to be maximally activated and effective to work on the parent problem. For me, that’s embedded in the problem of Climate Change just as much as the CO21.
Carbon Dioxide ↩︎
Happy Birthday Natalie!