THERE IS NO PLANET B

      I recall the time in 2019 when 15-year-old Greta Thunberg spoke at the United Nations and lambasted the “adults in the room” for their failures.  At the time, I found Greta’s bluntness off-putting.  I preferred a more mature and polished presentation of the need for action.  Al Gore, for instance.  I’ve since concluded: “Greta is right.”  In a couple of weeks, our nation will reenter a fantasy world of denial and obfuscation.  So sad.

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      My personal introduction to environmental concern arose in 8th grade (1970) when my school commenced a recycling program.  Actually, to call it a “program” overstates reality.  A box marked “paper” was placed near a dumpster in a distant corner of the faculty parking lot.  If a person were motivated to gather newspapers, and able to motivate their carpool-driving parent(s) to detour to the box, a tiny contribution to the world’s salvation could be achieved.  

     I diligently collected the newspapers, and my parents cooperated.  The activity satisfied my desire to “do something” but didn’t go further.  My only other environmental impulse from that era was to object to my mother’s tendency to drive thirty minutes to take a walk. The concept bothered me as vaguely “defeating the purpose.”  However, it wasn’t clear what “purpose” I was supporting.  Concepts like wasting gas or creating emissions hadn’t occurred to me.  Unlike many teens, I just didn’t enjoy driving.

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     For most of the intervening years until 2000, environmental destruction remained, for me, vaguely disturbing.  Of course, I supported “conservation” and even made the occasional contribution to the Sierra Club or World Wildlife Fund. They sent me t-shirts and calendars in return.  But I certainly didn’t expect climate changes to occur in my lifetime.

       Now, I look at the world differently.  I not only concern myself with the several decades I might experience but the six or eight or ten my grandchildren can anticipate.  Yet, even in my own lifespan, there are shocking changes taking place.  Without recounting their now-famous names, it’s common to see “500-year hurricanes” or “1,000-year floods” on an annual basis.  Twenty of the twenty-three warmest years on record have occurred since 2000.  

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     As recently as 1999 I mindlessly bought a car that got 19 MPG.    As the new millennium proceeded, I began to question my daily lifestyle a little more.  Tricked by industry propaganda to believe waste was my fault as much as theirs my recycling efforts were increased.  To the dismay of my children I became fanatical about “turning off the lights.” Admittedly, my motivation was partially economic, but I also turned off unnecessary lights at work, where I didn’t pay the electric bill. 

     “An Inconvenient Truth” struck a chord in 2007, right around the time I also saw “March of the Penguins.”  Between the two documentaries, I recognized mankind is blithely ruining the earth not only for our selves, and future generations, but also for every other creature.  Most infuriating, a huge segment of society, including one of our two political parties and their media shills, actively discourage progress in this regard.  They seek to undermine long-established clean air and clean water policies that were originally signed by President Nixon!  Doesn’t everyone breathe air and drink water?  Don’t people throughout the political spectrum have children and grandchildren?

     I took my first concrete action in 2008 when I traded my gas guzzler for an early hybrid.  It wasn’t easy, however.  The salesman didn’t know how to turn on the silent car and, in his embarrassment, tried to sell me something more conventional, something cheaper.   

     I found it immensely satisfying to leap from 19 MPG to 40 MPG and wondered what else I could do.  In 2011, I added solar panels to the roof, thus creating our own electricity.  Every day, in the beginning, I raced to the computer to see how much the sun had produced.  A dozen years later, I don’t check production every day, but it’s still satisfying.  

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     These days, with Katie’s agreement, my efforts have moved towards the obvious (refusing straws and plastic bottles) and the slightly less obvious, such as:  bringing our own reuseable takeout containers to restaurants and our own utensils if we know they only offer plastic.  We’re fanatical about using our own bags at stores and even our HANDS when we buy just a few items.  It’s amazing how confused and even offended some cashiers appear when we refuse their plastic bag.  We’ve nearly cut out red meat, which is another win-win; less meat consumption leads to less earth and animal abuse and is almost certainly healthier. We compost our leftover food, a staggering (to me) half a ton a year.

     Friends have reacted to our behavior in a variety of ways.  Some appear not to notice.  A few congratulate us for our efforts and say they’re willing to change, too.  The majority, however, fall somewhere in between.  They vaguely “do a few things” and “help out” but say things like: “It’s just so hard to remember to bring my own bags.  I can’t be bothered.”  With some exceptions, none have purchased a more efficient car with the environment in mind or purchased solar panels.

     Until recently, my response to: “it’s too much trouble,” or “it’s too difficult to remember” emanated from the (relatively small) empathetic part of my brain.  I nodded and said: “I understand.”  But now my thoughts (if not yet my spoken response) well up from somewhere more primitive.  “Come on.  It’s not so difficult.  You’re not stupid.  You can put a few reuseable bags in your car and remember to use them.  DO SOMETHING!”

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     I read the foregoing with full awareness it’s self-righteous.  That exemplar of moral clarity, Dick Cheney, once dismissed energy saving efforts as matters of “personal virtue,” an unnecessary indulgence.  To that, I can only ask: “What is wrong with a little virtue?”  It’s available to everyone.  For free.  

     Greta feels the situation is urgent.  I agree with her, practically and morally.  That same Dick Cheney, in fraudulently pushing our nation into the Iraq war, once argued: “If there’s just a one percent chance Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, we have to do something and do it soon.”   Regarding the changes mankind is wreaking upon the earth and its climate, does anyone doubt there is more than a one percent chance it will end in catastrophe?