It’s Earth Day 2021, and whether you believe climate change is real or not, there’s no denying the weather is different from what it was even just a couple decades ago. I’m old enough to notice how much hotter summers are now than they were when I was a kid, and way more humid. Back in the 1970s, a 90-degree day during a Minnesota summer was a rarity. That was a “Dang! It’s hot out!” day.
Now, 90-degree days are common, even in northern Minnesota, and in southern Minnesota, they’re getting epic. So is the humidity. I remember when a long-time Twin Cities meteorologist was having kittens because the dewpoint (the measure of humidity) reached 70 degrees that day. Now an oppressive 70-degree dewpoint is pretty routine. We’ve even hit 80-degree dewpoints the last few summers.
There are also the torrential downpours. In the last ten years I have experienced 4-, 5-, 6-, even 9-inch rains in a matter of a few hours. That’s rain that our farm fields can’t absorb, so it goes straight into the rivers, causing flooding and millions of dollars in damage. A U.S. highway between my town and the next town fifteen miles away finally had to be raised because the river that runs alongside it was flooding routinely every year, cutting off a main artery to and from the Twin Cities.
The first summer after the highway reopened, we had another rainfall of biblical proportions, but this time the highway stayed open. Our city manager quipped that the construction more than paid for itself that summer because a billion dollars in economic traffic didn’t have to be diverted or canceled.
But that’s just adapting to the problem. What about actually solving it?
As our world leaders continue to fight over climate change, we get bombarded with messages to Go Green. Be the Change.
There seem to be a lot of people telling us to do something, but not too many people are telling us what to do.
When the state of Minnesota rolled out a new grant program a couple years ago for homeowners to help them pay for making their yards more bee-friendly, the department was inundated with calls, not from people looking for money but people looking for direction. Many of those callers said, “No, that’s fine, I don’t really need the money. I just want to know what to do.”
Like Mark Twain said, “Everyone loves to talk about the weather, but no one wants to do anything about it.”
“How am I going to change the world now?”
The pressure being put on young people to solve the problem of climate change—and every other problem of the world—really hit home the other night in a documentary on the WeWork crash and burn. I watched as one former employee talked though her tears about the day they were all let go and she came to the realization that the grand dreams they had all staked their futures on was only so much dust. Finally, she said, “How am I going to change the world now?”
How am I going to change the world?
That’s a heck of a lot of pressure to put on one person. Not only are you supposed to get a “good” education, you’re supposed take a gap year and travel the world, then jump right into your dream job, preferably in an exciting new startup that will change the world. The only thing better would be to be the inventor of that exciting new startup that will change the world. And it all needs to play out on social media.
To me, that’s a formula for discontent, disillusionment, depression and powerlessness.
So let’s scale those expectations back a little into the realm of reality.
Let’s not expect one person to change the world. Let’s expect all of us to change the world.
How?
I’m glad you asked.
One yard at a time
For one thing, the big problem with making progress in environmentalism and climate change, according to Doug Tallamy, author of Nature’s Best Hope, is that we left it up to the environmentalists.
I wholeheartedly agree. No offense to environmentalists and other advocates working on important causes, but their whole reason for being (and often their income) is based on “raising consciousness”—making people aware of the problem. Not so much on solutions, because once the problem is solved, they’re out of a job.
I’m not saying every environmentalist is like this, but in general, for those being paid to draw attention to someone’s cause, that paycheck can be addictive. So is the attention. And the best way to keep both coming in is to keep presenting the problem as a problem, a problem that is so huge, only Congress or the EU or other leaders of the world can solve it.
And so we wait. We wait for someone to tell us what to do.
The thing is, we all know how fast those entities move. So how about bringing the issue down to a level that’s a little more nimble and creative? Where things can actually get done?
Back in the 1970s, we had a little thing called the OPEC oil crisis. The OPEC nations for a reason I don’t remember decided to cut off the supply of oil to the U.S. Without OPEC oil coming in to American refineries, the supply of gasoline disappeared almost overnight, and the price of gas skyrocketed. The era is recorded in pictures of desperate people sitting in big cars in long gas lines.
It was big and scary at the time, but in the same way restaurant owners last year started selling takeout with a roll of toilet paper on the side, during the oil crisis, people realized that if they put on a sweater and turned down the thermostat, they would save energy. If they bought a more fuel-efficient car, they didn’t need as much gas.
The environmental movement had already been going on for several years, certainly since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring came out in the 1960s, but it was having a hard time getting traction. When the oil crisis hit, though, for the first time everyone was feeling the pain, each individual.
The thing is, a lot of what was good for conserving energy during the oil crisis was also good for the environment. Americans finally started taking seriously the little fuel-efficient cars from Japan, and people did turn down their thermostats.
And what happened from all this individual action? When every individual stopped buying a little less gas, we as a nation stopped needing so much oil. In fact, sales of oil from OPEC dropped so much, several OPEC nations were pushed to the edge of bankruptcy. OPEC turned the oil back on and the price dropped again.
And why was that? Because we as individuals were able to solve a problem of international proportions, all because we knew what to do on a personal level. No one big advocate came forward to lead the people, at least no one that I remember, and we didn’t need to go invade the OPEC nations and take the oil by force. People were just told the small things they could do, and they did them. Their actions were small individually, but the sum of those actions ended up having a massive impact.
You’re my hero.
So where are all our heroes today who are going to fix climate change and lead us forward into a glorious, clean future?
It’s you. Right there in your mirror. You can dig up a few square feet in your yard or even just fill a few containers on your patio and put in plants that feed our bees and butterflies and also sequester a whole lot of carbon in the soil, where it belongs. And if a few million of us do that instead of waiting for the government to fix things, we’ll be moving ahead, doing our part.
“Everyone can do something.”
The day I was watching the documentary on WeWork was also the same day the jury delivered the guilty verdict in the George Floyd case in Minneapolis. Regardless of your opinions on the case, it was a historic moment. But as I listened to the comments and speeches being given that afternoon, there was one sentence that really stuck out for me. It was when Minnesota’s Attorney General Keith Ellison said:
“No one individual can do everything, but everyone can do something.”
It’s probably not a new statement, but it was an important one, and it was a profound contrast to the unfortunate WeWork employee who thought she had failed in changing the world.
You may not be the solution, but you can be part of the solution. There may never be one hero who rises up to save the day—despite the number of candidates fighting for that job—but we can all be heroes. You may not win a Nobel prize or even make a big splash on social media. But if you do the planning and put in the work, you will be able to sit back in a lawn chair sipping your coffee, admiring your beautiful microprairie and the happy bees it attracts, content in a job well done with your own hands. And you’ll know you did your part to change the world, one yard at a time.
And what could be better than that?