Twenty years ago my parents took their nest egg (attained back when nest eggs were attainable) and retired to a condo a half block from the ocean, in a well-heeled south Florida town. It’s the type of place ("fantasyland", our unimpressed 15-year-old calls it) where ladies lunch and men wear Bermuda shorts and supple Italian loafers with no socks; where the local politicians talk of “preserving our way of life”; and where the visiting children and grandchildren mostly hail from Westchester or the upper East Side.
My dad passed on a while back, but mom remains, 80-something and tottering but with critical faculties intact. Each winter break we pack up the minivan and depart out liberal southern college town – yes, there is such a thing – for a spell in fantasyland as soon as school lets out.
I spend a lot of time keeping up with goings-on in the world of clean energy and green jobs, and with the latest Congressional anti-EPA shenanigans. Lately, though, I’ve also been reading a lot about the bigger picture outlook for the coming decades: peak oil, resource depletion, food insecurity, and the looming spectre of climate change.
Lounging by the beach on our most recent foray to the edge of the continent (as our 13-year-old likes to put it), my husband and I chatted about the likelihood that the entire town all around us will be underwater in something like 50 years, despite (and in part because of) the obliviousness of the privileged residents and their descendants to that fact. Apres moi le deluge I guess, as hard as it is to imagine while surveying the picturesque vacation scene. (“You’re not going to keep my apartment after I’m gone, are you” Mom has asked wistfully more than once. Well…no.)
The fact that the deluge is an ungraspable reality is keeping us, as a society, from taking the drastic action that’s needed, and that fact has been weighing on me lately. Somewhat lamely I’ve been trying to use my Facebook page to nudge awake at least my friends and family, but gently so as not to become crazy Aunt SolarMom, ranting at the tides. I’m not one of those constant FB updaters; I don’t need to know that you made a pilaf for dinner or that your kid got straight A’s or that you’re going to bed now, and I sure as hell don’t think you want to hear that crap from me. So I’m judicious with my posts, occasionally putting up vacation pictures, a noteworthy kid photo (the relatives and old friends enjoy that), or a particularly pithy current political cartoon/short article on politics or the economy. All of these things engender lots of comments and likes. Sometimes my friend Mike the libertarian goes on a tear in the comments and we duke it out. All this is ok.
But here’s the thing – recently I posted this. Go ahead, it’s short and sweet, read it while I wait….just promise you’ll come back so I can try to give you a little hope. (If you’re of a wonkier bent, you’ve probably already read this one, but go ahead right now if you missed it.)
Finished now? What did you think? Scary as hell, no? So disconcerting that it’s off-putting. As far as I can tell, none of my FB friends may have really read it (except for Ellinorianne, who already knows.) And how could they, really? How are they supposed to leap from the unquestioned presumption that, inexorably, normal life will continue, to the idea that civilization might – no really, will - collapse in their kids’ or grandkids’ lifetimes? Who even gets what that means? And how can anyone hope to take the idea seriously, when no one around them, and no one in authority, seems remotely concerned?
So now what? What do we do?
My son (the 13-year-old), who does get it, because he’s mine, complained that in school they learned about climate change and watched An Inconvenient Truth but were put off because they were never told how it would directly affect them as individuals. Also, what they were told they could do about it was glaringly inadequate to the task. Hey kids, civilization’s in trouble unless we change drastically, so go recycle and remember to turn out the lights! Seriously? That’s going to solve it? I mean, Al Gore ended his movie that way. The kids saw through it, and most reacted by deciding not to care.
And that’s a big part of the problem. People need to know. We need them to know. But then we need them to DO stuff.
We have to inspire them. Light a fire under their butts. We can’t afford to turn them off. We have to connect the dots, but then show them a path to systemic change.
How?
Part of the inspiration problem – which is a big part of getting past the fatalism - is that the change that needs to happen is not simple. For one thing, we need a whole bunch of different changes to where our energy comes from. (Read more about those changes here.)
Then we need a bunch of boring (to most people) federal, state, and local policies to push us there, like the production and investment tax credits, a clean energy standard that includes efficiency, a carbon tax, an updated "smart grid", and feed-in tariffs. For example, Germany is getting 20 percent of its power from renewables, including lots and lots of small rooftop solar dotting the country. Germany – which doesn’t even get any sun. All the result of feed-in tariffs.
We also need walkable towns and cities, weatherized public buildings, public transit, and high speed rail. (Who else hates flying? Raise your hand..)
We need demonstrators at the White House to kill the Keystone XL pipeline, and at state houses to kill fracking.
We need more support for Occupy Wall Street and for getting rid of the Republican chokehold on the House, so we can to change the national conversation and open a space for this stuff.
And we need local change too. Groups like Transition, preparing communities to be self-reliant. Or like this one, in my home area, helping people weatherize their homes, neighborhood by neighborhood.
We even need those individual actions (just not ONLY those). Follow beach babe in fl's example and stop eating meat. Buy local food. Weatherize your house. Get out of your car more.
Now, I can talk all day about the policies, but Bill McKibben I’m not. I’m a bureaucrat. I SUCK at inspiring. (I’m pretty enamored of green jobs happy talk, but I tend to geek out when I get on the subject, and I bore the crap out of people).
So can any of you guys help with that? Any creative people reading this? How do you grab the attention of the people that don’t like activists, that reject stuff that sounds extreme even if it’s not, that see you and me as Chicken Little? That glaze over when you start talking?
And then, how do you inspire them?
I mean, it’s 20-effing-12! There’s important work to be done, kids, and we need that fire under all our butts. How do we get it?
Because, you know, we need to, like, save civilization and all that.
5:26 PM PT: Wow, I leave for a few hours for family stuff, and come back to the rec list -I never expected that. And such thoughtful comments too. Thanks everybody!