Rising Tide

My latest VPR commentary. You can listen to it here.

Recently, I went to a concert given by some performers from remote Pacific island nations which are being rapidly inundated by rising sea levels - one of the many unfortunate consequences of climate change.

There were dancers, singers, and musicians all decked out in traditional woven costumes made by their families. The program said that the beauty and intricacy of the woven designs was indicative of how much the performers were loved by their families.

The performers themselves were like shimmering coppery earth spirits, dancing and singing a pounding, full-throated love lament for the tight communities and deep, ancient cultures being lost to the inexorably advancing tides.

One of the islands represented, Tuvalu, is less than a mile wide and its highest point is about 6' above sea level. Climate change has progressed so far that their beaches are eroding and their crops are being poisoned by saltwater. Someday, in the not-too-distant future, there won't be a Tuvalu anymore. And they all know it.

Chatting with some of the performers afterwards, one of them told me that a little atoll where his grandfather used to live is already gone. Another young man said, "We are warriors. No matter how high the ocean gets, we will stay. We will die for our country."

I hugged him and made a big point of saying that I knew all about Tuvalu, and so did a lot of my friends, and our small place in the world was thinking about their small place in the world and doing our best to try and address this... But he stopped me and said, "It's not just us. It's everybody."

Of course he was right. And I was a little embarrassed. Because, despite being a die-hard climate activist, I somehow managed to forget, just for a moment, that it's all of us.

Everyone on the planet is being faced with some form of rising tide, and everything we know is going to be affected.

However, grim as the scientific predictions are, things often come along which still give me hope that we'll get our climatic act together. As it happens, I also just went to the annual conference of the Vermont Energy and Climate Action Network. It was attended by a huge cross section of people from all over the state: from conservation educators to town energy committee members. There were activists who'd gotten arrested protesting the Keystone pipeline and business leaders developing solar, wind, and geothermal projects. There were selectboardpeople, state representatives, agency secretaries, and even Bernie Sanders, who gave one of his rip-roaring, no-holds-barred speeches full of commitment, passion, and truth.

They were there to meet, to connect, to share ideas, and to continue the ongoing process of hashing through the nitty-gritty details of how we help our collective community enter a post-carbon age.

I came away reminded that in the face of all the rising tides, I am grateful and honored to live on my own little island of sanity and citizenship. I came away glad to live in Vermont.

Dancing to the Beat of the Great Green Heart

I recently gave the keynote address at the annual conference of the Vermont Energy and Climate Action Network. They brought me in specifically to be inspiring. No pressure!

This has been posted in 4 different clips - they're each about 10 minutes long.

Enjoy...

Happiness Paradigm

My friend Ginny Sassaman is a big Gross National Happiness proponent, and has written a lovely blog this week about how a talk I did inspired her to create something green. A heart.

On my way home, I went straight from the airport to the Unitarian Church of Montpelier for a workshop on “Climate Change and What You Can Do About It.” One of the speakers was Kathy Blume, a particularly bubbly environmental activist who ended her presentation by displaying a green heart decal. The decal, she explained, symbolized a commitment to adopting an approach of love as we face a future with enormous environmental, economic and social challenges.

Gilding’s and Blume’s optimism definitely spoke to me — on some deep level, it seems. I woke up the next morning determined to make green heart pins from recycled paper and leftover glitter, beads and other fun items folks have been donating to me. Wearing these pins can be a very visible declaration of love — love for our beautiful planet, for the plants and animals and for all the wonderful humans who make us happy and also drive us crazy.

It's so nice when people actually let you know you've inspired them!

Read the rest of her post here.

Resilience Revolution

I've been helping out my friend Dan Jones with a project documenting sustainability and resilience efforts in Vermont.

Here's a rough cut for the trailer. Enjoy!

Another Way to Donate

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Support The Bus!

I'm part of a group of Vermonters heading to Washington, D. C. to protest the Keystone XL Pipeline.

It's good and righteous work, but we need money for the bus!

Please chip in here!

Observations From a Day 50 Years From Now

I was asked by the organizers of the Lake Champlain Quadricentennial to write an essay on the theme: Observations From a Day 50 Years From Now. And so I did...

I might be surprised that I made it this far. After all, ninety-one is still considered something of an achievement, especially given what we’ve lived through in the past half-century.

Except for the fact that all the women in my family seem to break the tape at 100 without much effort, and then sail on past the finish line for another couple of years before dying, I think in large part, because they’re ready for a new suit of clothes and another great adventure.

Good thing I’ve been doing yoga all these years. I can still do a headstand, touch my toes to my nose. Things they applaud you for when you’re 5 they’ll oddly applaud you for again a lifetime later.

I think the part which surprises me the most is how glad I am to still be here. Not that I’ve ever wanted to die. I’ve always wanted to live forever (if forever could be a little less wrinkled and creaky).

Except there was a moment – one of those vivid, almost cinematically remembered moments – when I was 20. I was in Seattle, sitting at the table in my boyfriend’s kitchen. An ocean-blue wall on my left. Brad breakfasting across from me – his eyes a perfect cerulean match for that wall. Ooh. Brad. Seventy damn years and a couple dozen men later and still, with a single thought, I can feel him. Moments like that let you know for sure that time is just a made-up thing.

Anyway, I was reading Seattle’s alt-weekly paper… Oh, hell. Now I’ve really just dated myself. I’m talking about a free periodical, printed on a paper called newsprint, which came out once a week and covered the doings in the city from an edgy, artsy, lefty perspective. Like Seven Days – which I believe is the only hard-copy weekly left anywhere in the world. And they’re only around because so are Pamela and Paula. I don’t know how those gals are still alive, but they say when you’re on a weekly deadline, you just don’t have time to die.

So, the Seattle paper’s lead story was about this book that had just come out. It was by an unknown guy named – get this – Bill McKibben! Yup. Years and years before the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Nobel, the knighthood, all the streets and schools named after him, the statues in all the parks. And this book was announcing to the world the reality of a thing called global warming. We’d never heard of it, and it was almost unimaginable. The ice caps melting? Islands and coastlines disappearing like Atlantis? Mass extinctions on an unthinkable scale? Drought? Resource wars? World-wide starvation?

I think that’s probably what’s hardest for you young folks to understand. How fast things changed once the feedback loops really got going. It really wasn’t always like this. Kids sometimes ask me, “Why didn’t you know?” Of course we knew. Intellectually. But we liked our lives as they were and the world seemed a pretty immutable place. It took a lot of what I call “convincing-by-disaster” for people to believe we really could wreck it that much.

But this Seattle paper was trying to talk about it, and they did a little sidebar piece about what Seattle would look like once the ice caps melted and the whole city was under twenty feet of water. They had a drawing of the Space Needle, this 600 foot tower, half-submerged.

And I looked at that picture, and I thought, “I have no desire to see that. None.” That was the first time I didn’t want to live forever.

But you don’t have to live forever to see a lot of things you never hoped to see.

So why am I glad I’m still around? Why am I glad I’ve got at least another 10 years – though I’m determined not to go until Pamela and Paula do. The show-offs.

Because as everything we’d been warned about started to happen, as the world cracked, so did our hearts. And when your heart cracks, you can either die of grief, duct tape it together and solider on, or you can let all those cracks and open spaces get filled up by love. It’s like cracks in cement. Water gets in there, and things start to grow. Life happens in those cracks. The same is true for us, and it’s an amazing thing to see.

Things could have gotten so much worse. But we finally woke up. We finally got startled and scared by the idea that we are just a bunch of critters living on one tiny, miraculous rock in space and we have absolutely nowhere else to go. We finally realized how much we love our little rock, and we finally decided that it was worth being unstintingly selfless and heroic and creative and courageous in order to save it. And ourselves.

And in that moment, we came together as one people. You could feel it in the air. You could see it in the eyes of strangers when you walked down the street. As scared as we were, there was also a kind of marvelous, miraculous determination which settled in. We really and truly changed. We grew up. We adopted, as a global people, that beautiful old Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam – repairing the world. We made it our creed, our manifesto, our purpose.

It’s like some kind of Zen parable – having the thing you want least to see result in the thing you want most to see. I don’t understand why it has to happen this way but that’s Life for you. And we’ve still got such a long way to go. But I’ll keep watching and keep pitching in – bearing witness and bearing the load – until it’s time for my new suit of clothes and another great adventure.