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Photo by Terril Shorb
The Global Climate Changer Who Lives on My Street
by Terril Shorb
My fortunate childhood included years on a ranch in Montana where my grandfather taught me the lesson of my life: take care of the land and the land will take care of you. I was shocked, then, when as a young adult in the early 1970s I realized that the very processes and products of America’s prosperity were poisoning our lands, our air, waters, and wildlife.
The last straw was a visit in 1973 to a friend's ranch in southeastern Montana where this man's family had been faithful stewards of the land for four generations. One summer day we made our way to a sandstone outcrop stippled with Bull Pines and blooms of Indian paintbrush. At the edge I peered down on a scene that could have been the land of Mordor in Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings, a place so defiled it was "diseased beyond all healing." This was a vast coal strip mine, where the wildflower-jeweled prairie was torn away to pluck out black guts of coal seams. Electric shovels the size of two-car garages gouged fossil fuel from the ravaged landscape and hundred-car trains hauled it to a plant that converted it to electricity. I got home late that night and when I flicked on the lights, I had a nightmarish vision of giant shovels tearing another wound in the living prairie. I batted the switch off and sat in the dark, contemplating a future now entirely changed for me.
I became part of a rag-tag grassroots movement to heal the rift between humans and nature—the life-support system for us all. While braver souls directly challenged the utility companies, I wrote stories in a small, regional newspaper I edited, pleading for people to turn away from dark deeds of fossil fuel extraction to the bright light of a solar future. I helped create the Alternative Energy Resources Organization (AERO), a citizens group dedicated to nudging our society to more sustainable habits. In the 1980s in my little northern California town, yet another suburban development threatened wildlife-filled uplands of rare freshwater wetlands, so we formed a citizens group that fought to conserve those precious and beautiful acres.
Through all those efforts as a working "environmentalist," however, I was painfully aware of what the scientific community knew: cumulative effects of our daily human activities, including driving to meetings to "save the Earth," were degrading the very living systems on which we and all life on Earth depend. I sat one evening with lights out, listening to thousands of frogs sing their ancestral love songs from the whispering waters of nearby wetlands. A revelation came, an echo of the famous Pogo cartoon character's line, "We have met the enemy and he is us." In this version, however, it was, "I have met the global climate changer who lives on our street, and he is me." What the beloved Earth needs me to do, I decided, was to become a culture changer, starting with myself.
I live now in the high desert of Central Arizona amid collared peccaries, tarantulas, and prickly pear cacti tall as men. I am a sustainability educator for a small, private college, and I am an experiment-of-one in changing the micro-culture climate of my local chapter of Homo sapiens. One of the best ways to be a true friend of the Earth, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), is to reduce personal contributions to greenhouse gas emissions which wreak havoc on delicate dynamics of our planet's atmosphere, causing extremes of weather. Two ways my wife and I addressed this was, first, to purchase a home plenty big enough for us at 1144 square feet, yet less than half the average sized home today. This means fewer greenhouse gasses were emitted to make the home and fewer gasses are produced to heat and cool it. Cumulatively, more than 30 percent of greenhouse gasses spewed into our blue sky come from making and operating our homes. Second, we chose a home less than two miles from work, within walking distance, and helping us to cut driving mileage by half from our California commuter days. This is especially significant because the UCS reports 27 percent of climate-changing gasses come from tailpipes of our vehicles. A side benefit of less wheeling and more hoofing is healthier bodies.
Finally, a tragic consequence of climate change is to sicken habitats and compromise the health of all creatures great and small (including humans). At home, we pulled up smothering plastic and raked away gravel from the former owner's "no-tend" yard and restored native bunchgrasses, turbinella oak, and pinyon pines to those dead zones. The trees add oxygen and sequester carbon and native plants provide food and shelter for wildlife. The more wildlife in our neighborhood, the less we feel the need to drive to some form of manufactured entertainment. Flitting birds, romping foxes, and scampering chipmunks signal a healthier ecosytem.
In the 1970s, we were reminded to "think globally and act locally." That holds true for today, and by acknowledging and acting on the fact that 'evil' corporations and petro-politicians aren’t the only culprits, that among the global climate changers is the man who lives on my street—me—I can do less harm and more active good.