The shadows of thewindmills loom largein the prairie states. They are changing minds and attitudes simply by standing up, by working slowly and gently and steadily toward a goal. They are symbols that the farmers understand, and they are machines that give me hope. To talk about them is my best contribution; to encourage their spread is my greatest goal.
Jennifer Peters Kepka was raised in the center of Kansas but now lives in Eugene, Oregon, where she is completing a master’s degree in creative writing. Her hobbies include yelling at the TV news, forgetting to read the newspaper, and sending postcards.
At the Sign of the Heron, Turn Left
Sarah Wolpow
IF MY HUSBAND COOKED DINNER EVERY NIGHT, I
would be delighted. Should Danish house elves visit in the wee hours and run the laundry, no problem. But offer me a car instead of my bike? Forget it.
I was twenty-three years old when necessity introduced me to my bicycle. No amount of time studying Boston’s public transit maps yielded a solution that would take me between school and home and four different part-time jobs. Having access to a car wouldn’t help, because parking was either nonexistent or so costly as to make working pointless. However, for a bookworm-and-glasses type like me, becoming a Boston bike commuter was a bit of a stretch.
On that first experimental day of my new biking life, I plotted a nervous course through the muggy morning to a path along the Charles River. And there, within minutes, I received a sign that I was on the right track—in more ways than one: a black-crowned night heron sat tucked into a clump of reeds facing the river. I’d never seen one before. As Boston’s traffic sped by in its roller-coaster lanes, this exotic creature sat serenely in another world, looking for breakfast.
Later, heading home, I stopped to watch workers pulling up spent spring tulip bulbs. “Would you like a few?” they asked. A few turned out to be almost thirty, which they stuffed into every available pocket and which bloomed riotously in my garden for years. By the time I carried my bike down the basement stairs that night, I was hooked.
Tens of thousands of miles later, I’m still enchanted. Oh, the sights you can see from your bike that you miss from a car! Oh, the good food you can eat after all that exercise! Oh, the ease with which you can park! Oh, the money you can save! Oh, the flocks of turkeys you can scatter as you coast down hills in the fall!
But putting aside the boundless passion of the converted, I recall myself to the theme of this book: the climate crisis. Transportation is responsible for more than a quarter of the greenhouse gas emissions in this country. To solve global warming, we must solve transportation. A Canadian task force on sustainability summed it up like this: our transportation system must meet people’s needs, allow future generations to meet their needs, support a high quality of life, and be affordable, nonpolluting, technically possible, and powered by renewable energy.
The bicycle, the amazing bicycle, is all these things. A person on a bicycle is more efficient (in calories expended per pound and per mile) than any machine ever built and any creature that flies, walks, or swims. Can the bicycle meet people’s needs? In the United States, less than one in a hundred trips is taken by bike, even though almost half of all trips are shorter than three miles. In the Netherlands, nearly one third of all trips are taken by bike. Go figure.
Sarah Wolpow is a writer living in Brunswick, Maine, with her husband and two children. She worked previously as an environmental researcher and a statistics teacher.
Reverse Migration
Dale Elizabeth Walker
IN THE NATION’S HEARTLAND, WATCHING THE SEASONS shift their timing and the wildlife alter their migration patterns, I began to question whether I had made enough of a commitment to environmental stewardship. Photographs comparing a week’s supply of food for families around the world vividly demonstrate the massive size of the average American carbon footprint—not to mention our preference for suburban living, with stores, workplaces, and essential services just a drive away.
As a proponent of zero population growth, I brought only one child into this world. And with the example of a mother who crocheted plastic bread bags into functional doormats in the 1950s and ’60s, I worked hard to recycle before it was trendy. My cellar would fill with bottles and jars until the semiannual trip to a local bottling plant yielded a few pennies per pound for the glass I would deliver. I also spent a few years sorting recyclables at a collection center, while most surrounding communities were slowly adding recycling to their trash service.
But with unimaginably vast sections of the polar icecap splintering off and melting into the ocean, I knew I had to do more. Even before the price of gasoline topped four dollars a gallon, I began to realize that my idyllic home at the rural edge of suburbia was a luxury the earth could no longer afford. Though I have spent many pleasurable hours in the park across the road, holding my breath as great blue herons soared over the ponds and deer fed in the meadows, I resolved to move within walking distance of my job so I would no longer face a forty-four-mile commute each day. The housing market is shaky, and I’m not sure I will be able to sell my beautiful home anytime soon, but within the week I am closing on a loft less than a mile from my office.
I have never been an urban dweller, although it is in my blood—my mother and father both spent their earliest years in large eastern cities. Now I look forward to a life on foot with a city to explore. A library, museums, entertainment venues, restaurants, shops, a farmers’ market, and urban parks are just outside my new door. A large grocery will be opening six blocks away. Public transportation is also nearby.
It was the right time for me to reverse the historical American migration to wide-open spaces, to leave suburbia, with its miles of asphalt and traffic congestion, for the city lights. I will continue to recycle, although it will not be as convenient. My groceries will come home with me in cloth bags, and I will wear out a lot of shoe leather as I do one person’s part to shrink what has become an unsustainable impact on the earth.
Dale Elizabeth Walker is a mom and grandmother who has worked for nearly twenty-five years in the field of law, primarily as a law clerk. She lives in Kansas City, Missouri.
Oracle
Russell Brutsche
I see the health of our biosphere as the ultimate social-justice issue. I paint and create music to evoke feelings and affect behavior in ways that words cannot. When I show my work in art galleries, most viewers agree with the messages I try to convey, but some do not. I may not be able to change their minds, but I hope that the images I’ve created will stay with them.
Russell Brutsche is an artist and songwriter living in Santa Cruz, California. His paintings have been featured in numerous shows in the United States and Japan.
“Oracle,” acrylic on canvas by Russell Brutsche.
The Heat Is
Always On
Michael Gold
THE HEAT COMES UP THROUGH THE RADIATOR,
filling my New York City apartment with warmth it doesn’t need. It’s mid-November and 60 degrees. The pipes are banging as the hot air, fired by oil, comes up from the boiler in the basement.
The building managers think thatNovember is supposed to be cold (and who could blame them?), so the heat comes up as scheduled. I open all the windows to bleed off the heat and welcome the cool breeze blowing in.
I hate the waste of it all. If the management could turn off the unneeded heat, we wouldn’t have to burn so much oil, which will only make us all warmer in coming years.
The place where I work operates on an even more unnatural heating schedule, sometimes starting in October. The room I work in feels like a blast furnace, and I open as many windows as I can to cool off. Doesn’t anyone realize that with our new warmer weather we don’t have to turn on the heat so early?
My daughter, who is two years old, runs to me for a hug whenever she hears the pipes banging in our apartment.
“Scared,” she says.
I ask her what’s scaring her.
“Heat.”
She thinks it’s a monster. I think she’s right.
Michael Gold works and lives in Queens, New York. He and his wife, Frieda, have a two-year-old daughter, Miriam.
Apathy in the
Inner City
Sarah Flanders
AS A PSYCHIATRIST IN AN INNER-CITY CLINIC, I SEE
firsthand why some people remain apathetic about the destruction of the natural world. Modern urban life for poor and working-class Americans means limited education, constant media messages to buy manufactured goods, and few connections to the natural world. Outdoor recreation and city park facilities have declined along with health care, work opportunities, and social safety nets for disadvantaged city dwellers. It is hardly surprising that so many feel no reason to join the fight against global warming.
In the urban world, climate change is difficult to graspthrough direct experience. At one time
Pittsburghers flocked to the city’s parks on summer days and nights, drawn to a racetrack, boating pavilions, an outdoor ball park, and even car-camping spots. But these attractions are gone, and the green spaces of our city often stand empty. Manufacturing has largely left Pittsburgh, so the dusty, gritty industrial neighborhoods are cleaner now, but for many residents the concrete infrastructure is the only world they know. They spend much of their leisure time indoors, watching television or playing electronic games. With vastly less time outdoors, many people cannot see how their world is affected by climate change.
Grappling with poverty, not to mention trying to avoid dying from inadequate health care, is a full-time job for many of the patients I see. If you can’t scrape together the bus fare to get to your doctor’s office, how can you feel energized by the immense challenge of stopping the destruction of the natural environment? Many of my patients have little security in their lives; they see no reason to quit smoking, let alone try to curb global warming. Poor people in this country aren’t ready to stop taking plastic bags from the store—why refuse what little you get that’s free?
Pittsburgh is surrounded by miles of open land and forest, and people here imagine that the earth will continue forever just as it is; no one has yet built a memorial to everything that has already been lost. If the movement to stop global warming is to succeed, it will have to educate all Americans, not just those who live in beautiful places, about nature and the history of environmental damage. To draw people back outside into the natural world, we need to make fundamental changes, starting with improved health care and living conditions for those who live in our cities. Only then will it be possible to dispel their apathy and ask them to join the effort.
Sarah Flanders, a psychiatrist, practices in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she lives with her family. She enjoys biking and gardening, and she volunteers as an urban ecosteward in Pittsburgh’s parks.
Above Portland
Gary Braasch
The tram, one of the latest elements in my hometown’s innovative transport system, allows medical personnel, patients, and students to avoid an estimated 2 million vehicle miles a year in traveling to the medical school. The tram carries more than 100,000 passengers a month along 3,300 feet of cables at about 20 mph. It connects with a trolley and light rail system that extends to many suburbs and the airport.
Gary Braasch is an award-winning conservation photographer living in Portland, Oregon. He is the author and photographer of Earth Under Fire: How Global Warming Is Changing the World.
Above Portland. View from the top of the aerial tram at the Oregon Health and Science University. Photo by Gary Braasch.
The Big Uneasy
Randall Curren
A NATIVE OF NEW ORLEANS, I LIVED THERE UNTIL I
was twenty-two, and I continued to visit until not long before Hurricane Katrina struck. In the first days after Katrina, I worried about displaced family members and friends unaccounted for. I remembered my mother carrying me home when a summer rain made the streets impassable, the water too deep for me to walk through. My neighborhood, Gentilly, was where the deepest flooding from Katrina occurred, but as a child I had no idea we lived in the lowest and most vulnerable part of town. When I was ten, I scavenged firewood for cooking in the days after Hurricane Betsy, which left us without power for many days.
When boats began rescuing Katrina victims in earnest after days of incomprehensible delays, I remembered riding out Hurricane Camille in a dormitory at the University of New Orleans,
a few yards from Lake Pontchartrain and the London Avenue Canal, breached by Katrina. Camille had headed straight toward New Orleans and deflected to the east as it made landfall, sending a thirty-foot surge of water across Biloxi, Mississippi, much as Katrina did.
After Katrina, I began to feel that I would never be able to go home again. “Come and stay with us and I’ll drive you around,” my brother said a year after the storm. “But it’s mile after mile of devastation, and I can’t look at it myself without tears streaming down my face.”
Once dubbed the “City That Care Forgot,” the Big Easy is not so easy or carefree anymore. Before Katrina, no one on the Gulf Coast imagined they would ever see a hurricane as bad as Camille again. Water in the streets and narrow escapes during hurricanes were normal, and no predictions of Katrina’s possible devastation could persuade New Orleanians that they would not be able to return home in a few days. My brother’s family evacuated with little more than a checkbook and a change of clothes; it was eight months before they could reoccupy their home.
The human truth that Katrina made vivid for me is that our experience of what is normal leads us to discount objective evidence that something out of the ordinary is happening. The truth of climate disruption is that a major American city could be lost to the sea much sooner than people realize. In the thirty years between Camille and Katrina, the delta between New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico lost 1,500 square miles of land mass, and the surface waters of the gulf warmed to a peak summer temperature of 90 degrees F. As oceans rise and warm, I fear that New Orleans will not be the only city more vulnerable to the bigger storms we can expect.
Randall Curren is a professor of philosophy and department chair at the University of Rochester, where he holds a secondary professorship in education. Growing up in New Orleans, he divided his time between the library and the marshy woods near his home.
Canceling Catalogs:
A Gift Whose Time Has Come
Jennifer B. Freeman
JUST BEFORE THANKSGIVING, MY FAMILY GAVE A
holiday present to our New York apartment building. It started with a box in the lobby and a sign offering to cancel any catalogs that were put inside. Our plan was to encourage our neighbors to think a little and help save some trees.
To make a difference in the fight against global warming, you have to work on many levels: change your light bulbs, write to your senator, talk to your neighbor, and walk in the woods to remember what it’s all for.
The next day the box began to fill up. Four inches of catalogs, then eight inches. Buried in the stacks we found Post-its bearing notes of gratitude.
At first the calling part was all me. My kids decorated the box, wrote the sign with colored markers, and carried the catalogs upstairs. But making phone calls seemed at first to be a grownup job. By the second week the volume was overwhelming. Catalogs come in an astonishing variety: children’s clothing, smoked hams, toys, diamond jewelry, hiking gear.
On a day off from school, one of my sons dared to make a catalog-canceling call, to feel the prankish thrill of phoning a grownup and pretending to be someone else. Leo learned a lot that day: that it’s better to talk to a live person, that you can ask for a live person even if the robo-prompt tries to steer you to an automated system, that you don’t have to give your phone number just because a grownup asks you to.
That afternoon my older son joined in. The apartment sounded like a call center. “I’d like to be taken off the mailing list please?” “You mean the number i
n the yellow box?” “The first name is Caroline, C-a-r-o-l-i …”
That day the members of our household canceled eighty-five catalogs on behalf of the neighbors. The project cost time and effort; each of us sacrificed. In short, it brought the true spirit of giving into our home. A slippery heap of canceled catalogs on the floor was tribute to our labors.
Every year, 19 billion catalogs are mailed in America. Catalogs use 3.6 million tons of paper, for which 53 million trees are cut down. Producing catalogs causes the release of 5.2 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere (equal to about 2 million cars on the road) and uses 53 billion gallons of water. People should be able to receive the catalogs they want, but they should cancel the ones they don’t want. According to industry statistics, about 98 percent of catalogs go straight into the recycling bin or the landfill.
Doingfavors for the planetis good for your soul. Perhaps that’s why our family continued to get notes like this one, from a friend for whom we canceled fifty-nine catalogs in a week. She said “I feel clean, purged, and righteous.”
Jennifer B. Freeman is a freelance science writer living in New York City. In her free time she enjoys taking nature vacations with her kids.
I Love Muscle Cars,
but I Hate My Own Hypocrisy More
Robert N. Shorin
YES! I LOVE THE SO-CALLED MUSCLE CARS, A CARRY-OVER from my youth in the 1950s, when hot rods and loud mufflers made me and my friends feel strong and cool and oh-so-grown-up. Of course I’m a grownup now, but I still like the sound of a hot V-8 engine revving up and gears smoothly hand-shifting from first into second, the aroma of exhaust, even the screech of rubber on the road as some fool peels off in a fast start to get to the next red light before anyone else. That may seem contradictory, I know, but that’s who I am.
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