Thoreau's Legacy (17 page)

Peddling Solutions to Climate Change

David Kroodsma

My colleague Bill and I
pedaled five thousand miles
across the country, peddling solutions to climate change. We made fifty presentations at schools, businesses, and community centers and gave dozens of radio, TV, and newspaper interviews. One student we talked to led a fight against a coal-fired power plant in her community. Others found ways to become more energy efficient, such as by changing their light bulbs or bicycling to work.

David Kroodsma,
an expert on the carbon cycle, has worked at the Carnegie Institution for Science. The founder of Ride for Climate, a bicycle-based climate education project, he lives in Oakland, California.

David Kroodsma at a wind farm in South Dakota. Photo by Bill Bradlee.

Counting Cranes

John F. Wasik

EVERY APRIL I COUNT CRANES—SANDHILL CRANES,
to be precise, which have red heads, elegant necks, and majestic wingspans. They were once endangered because their wetland habitats were drained and they were hunted for their plumes. They are my personal indicator species for the health of the environment. As the birds return to their local wetlands in ever-greater numbers in the spring, I try to transform my personal habitat into a more environmentally friendly place.

My family of four and I have always been conscious about environmentally sound living. Since I work mostly at home and live in a conservation-minded community, my local-transportation carbon footprint is almost nil. Yet there’s so much more we need to do as we become increasingly alarmed about melting icecaps and polar bears struggling to survive.

Making pledges and listing action items keeps us on the path of climate-change awareness, but as an amateur naturalist, I wanted to measure how our family was doing. When I ran our basic lifestyle through the EarthLab carbon calculator, I found that while we were pouring somewhat less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than the average Illinois or U.S. resident, we were still producing 13.4 tons annually! I didn’t feel good about that, and I suspect the lion’s share was generated by the tens of thousands of miles I spent in an airplane last year.

The little steps we were taking were certainly helpful but not dramatic in the bigger scheme of carbon-dioxide release: turning off lights, eating locally, taking shorter showers, using cloth napkins (and washing them for reuse), composting kitchen waste, using leftover plastic shopping bags for garbage (and bringing our own bags to the grocery store), buying biodegradable cleaning products, washing clothes in cold or warm water, and taking public transportation.

I’m pledging to grow more food in my back yard and buy more locally grown meat and produce. I can use my own compost and mulch on the gardens and freeze what we don’t eat, as I usually do with our tomato crop. I’m adding to our winter stores by growing potatoes, Swiss chard, and Brussels sprouts. I’m going to monitor our energy use and try to do low-tech things like hanging clothes outside to dry and getting old-fashioned window shades for the south windows in our family room. We are replacing the 65-watt can lights in the basement with 16-watt dimmable compact fluorescent bulbs. Nothing my family does, though, will amount to much unless all vehicles, homes, factories, and offices are built or rehabbed to be energy efficient. So I will urge my elected representatives to extend and increase tax credits for energy-efficient and energy-producing buildings and transportation. We must have mandatory national energy standards.

Lobbying may be the
most effective way
to help the earth.
It’s virtually carbon neutral and will get our industrious nation to come up with a comprehensive plan. Before you can fly, you need to flap your wings a lot.

John F. Wasik
is an author, journalist, speaker, teacher, and activist. His neighborhood in Prairie Crossing, Illinois, has open space, an organic farm, restored wetlands, prairies, and trails.

View from the
Yakama Nation

Moses D. Squeochs, as told to Rebecca Hawk

I AM A FULL-BLOODED YAKAMA INDIAN, AND I PRACTICE the traditional ways of our people: fishing, hunting, and gathering roots and berries. The Almighty placed our people in the Pacific Northwest region of this continent, along with everything else that is here to sustain us—the flora, fauna, aquatic life, waterways, and land. Our rights to inhabit our reservation lands and ceded territory—a mere remnant of our original homelands—and utilize the resources within it are based in a fundamental, solemn treaty agreement with the United States.

Since time immemorial we have survived on this continent, but in the last four hundred years we have suffered greatly from the influx of immigrants who have a different relationship to the earth. They brought our people to our knees through wars, disease, and dislocation, and in my own generation, they sent us, as young men, away to boarding schools. The goal was to “kill the Indian but save the man.” As they attempted to kill the
Indianness
in us and make us more like them, they taught us the Manifest Destiny doctrine: a God-given right to do what one wants with the land for one’s own benefit, with little or no regard to the sustainability of anything or anybody, even oneself. For a time, some of us contributed to the living out of this doctrine and the careless misuse of resources. But
our elders taught us to
honor the land
and water,
so we were not completely converted to the way of thinking that was imposed upon us.

Today most of our people live in stick houses. We drive vehicles and use cell phones. We live within and enjoy the benefits of a modern society, but we also suffer from new threats to our health and well-being. Our people are dying of cancers and other diseases at rates higher than those of the general population because we still live close to the land and water, which are now polluted.

The rapidly warming climate is putting stress on our fish, animals, plants, and berries, and these resources are all diminishing. As we lose our healthy food supply, we have nowhere to go to sustain ourselves. But we now see in our young people a determination to honor our traditional cultural and spiritual ways of life and to stay connected to the land. As elders, we are trying to carry ourselves in such a manner that the young people of the next generation will live with respect for this place.

Moses Dick Squeochs
is the general council chairman of the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation.

Rebecca Hawk
is the regional air-quality coordinator for the Yakama Nation.

Stewards of
the Earth

Ray Trimble

MY MOTHER WAS A DEEPLY RELIGIOUS WOMAN
with an intense social consciousness. She spent her life helping people less fortunate than herself, while also maintaining an abiding concern for those yet to be born. She often emphasized the biblical injunction that we must be stewards of our God-given earth.

When she died, my mother left a modest inheritance that my wife and I decided to invest in the future of our planet. We replaced our two cars with hybrids and purchased forty-five solar electric panels for the roof of our home.

It is with some embarrassment that I confess we use far more electricity than we should. We are a large extended family living under one roof, and we use our electric dryer heavily. We have an electric range in the kitchen and an air conditioner that runs for long hours during our hot summers. Before installing the panels in late 2006, we were purchasing about 50 kilowatt hours (kWh) a day, averaged over the year, from our utility. Our total usage increased slightly in 2007, but more than 60 percent of that was free, from our own roof. Our utility had to generate less than 23 kWh/day for us. In 2008 we did even better, buying an average of less than 16 kWh/day.

I have no idea how long it will take for the investment to pay off on an accrued-interest basis or whatever it is the accountants like to talk about. That is not the point as far as I am concerned.
The point is that we have
significantly reduced
our carbon footprint.
To put it in my mother’s terminology, we are now better stewards of the earth, doing at least a small part to provide a more livable planet for generations to come.

Ray Trimble
spent most of his career as a computer programmer at IBM. Now retired, he lives in Morgan Hill, California, with his family.