I have been reflecting for some time on Greta. Her Anger. Her blunt, pointed, understated -and to my ears — partly hopeful effort to hold people accountable. She is angry. She wants people to listen. To get angry with her. And to act.
Yes. She is 16. This does not diminish her message. This may increase her belief people will listen. Greta is calling for a survivable world for all creatures, born and unborn. Good. I have been listening to her.
“Our house is on fire.” She says. Yes it is. It has been for several decades, and some of us have been saying so. For decades.
“You should panic.” She says. Yes you should. Some of us have been fighting this panic for decades.
“We are on the brink of a global extinction.” She says. Well, on this Greta, I must disagree. Data indicates we crossed over that brink 20 or more years ago. Perhaps we can agree we are still accelerating the effects of Anthropocine Extinction, and we should stop doing that.
“We have to act.” She says. Yes. We have to. We already should have. A few have. Many more have to. Not many are.
And I keep contemplating how to be blunt about what we can hope to accomplish with any action at this point. I am afraid Greta there are very few options left.
I contemplate all this as a member of GenX who has, since my pre-teen days tried to act. Repeatedly. Who has acted. Repeatedly. Who has panicked. Who became angry for a while. And then stopped being angry. I have seen some some positive actions with positive effects. I have seen positive intentions with halted results. Sometimes I have seen things with broad support. More often with wide by shallow support, and faced with deep institutional opposition.
A few weeks past I participated in the Penn State Drawdown Conference. A large number of truly amazing and useful talks are online. Drawdown PSU Web Site with Agenda and Talks. It was a rather large international conference in which business and academia met to look at areas of study, and areas of success in the science of reducing our carbon footprint. I participated in multiple sessions and presented on reducing power consumption in wireless transmission systems and server farms. This is a non-trivial area in which global saving of Terrawatts are possible by use of efficient management and hardware systems.
I enjoyed the conference. Attending several sessions in related areas where I hope to contribute including e-waste reduction. And over meals I spoke with others doing the work.
Over one lunch after a panel I had a thoughtful conversation with a group of college undergraduates. We started with technical information, but eventually got on to the subject of Greta’s angry denunciation of the UN. And society. Some of them seemed worried she was too angry. Others were just slightly concerned. I said I loved her for her anger. Her anger is the difference which may make the new environmental movement work. It surprised them.
I shared that unlike efforts from the past, Greta as a leader and spokesperson is not talking moderation or compromise. She is talking absolutes and anger. I didn’t see any path forward left, but for some anger about the global betrayal which has gone on before them. Which is going on around them. Which many just accept will continue to go on, because it can not be stopped. My lunch companions seemed equally passionate, but also resigned that they would be stopped because they are up against too many established forces. I told them they should ignore those forces. Be angry. Be part of a leaderless global movement, or part of a movement with a leader like Greta. They seemed confused by this.
I nodded. I noted that I always hoped the movement would becomes both broad and deep. I said I always hoped leaders would set examples, I also long ago set resigned myself to live as sustainably as I could in a leaderless way. As no leaders ever seemed to emerge. And the leaders who once emerged become absorbed, or lost, or forgotten.
I also tried to probe them on what they knew about the hundreds of efforts, leader-led and leader-less which had come before. A general silence befell them. One noted that Al Gore had been a spokesperson they all knew. Another said, more or less: “I think the hippies actually tried to make Earth Day a national holiday, but that didn’t work out.”
No. I said. Earth Day was created to sell the idea of the EPA and the Clean Water Act by Nixon. They did not believe me. I shared a short history of the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, both Republican led initiatives, and how Earth Day was a suggestion by President Nixon’s staff Attorney Bill Ruckleshaus (who later the first leader of the EPA), who then was tasked to recruit a bi-partison group which included Democratic Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin. They jointly organized the first Earth Day in 1970. It is a bit hard to get your head around the fact Earth Day was Nixon’s bi-partisan effort to sell America on the passing the Clean Water Act and establishing the EPA. But it was. I told them to look it up.
Smart phones went aglow at the table. The looks of disbelief spread. They all seemed in part surprised I was telling them the truth and in part surprised the truth was so, not in line with what they see today.
Not knowing the history of our nations environmental regulatory history does not change the fierce urgency of now, but it does inform it
I then explained to the table, that while I like Greta’s Anger, I do not like the lack of understanding where we are. We are decades past the time we could stop warming at 1.5C. 2C would have been the historical long term warming if carbon dioxide had peaked around 320ppm c.1980/82. Today we have locked in 450+ppm if we undertake radical reform now. We won’t. �The models at 5C+ are most likely. Hothouse Earth is a possible outcome. That would be super bad. And that should used to make everyone angry.
Sea levels are rising. Quickly. They will rise 10M very shortly. Certainly in less than 200 years. Perhaps less than 50.
It is interesting to contemplate this uncertainty because our climate models lack calculations for a vast numbers of feedback loops now coming on as we roar past 425ppm. Feedback loops are always terrifying. Software errors that create feedback loops blow up servers, literally melting them down from overheating in some cases. It happens. Beware of feedback loops.
Greta can not change the feedback loops. Nor can her followers. They will just do what they do. But perhaps her Anger will give us a better chance to slow them down. The heat of her anger may put some slowing on the forces which have mostly just sped them up.
Or so I think. And I said so. To my lunch companions.
The lunch was thoughtful. Respectful. A GenXer and a group of Millineals contemplating Drawdown and the urgency of response demanded. And the GenXer the most certain of the group that Anger is necessary and helps. I don’t know what that means. It may just be what it is.
One of the students suggested I should write an article, but wasn’t sure on what. “Everyone should have this conversation” they said. Perhaps I thought. But I am pretty busy. Not sure when I could do that, or where to even put such a thing.
But I kept thinking about that suggestion, and contemplating Greta. And thinking about Environmental Anger. And then I contemplated how I started thinking about Co2 and environmental balances.
I was already obsessed with energy consumption. One of my Junior High teachers, Mr. Chip Wall, gave me a copy of the Club of Rome’s “Limit’s of Growth”. I was a pre-teen. It rocked me. It still does. If you have not read it. Do so. The world’s greatest minds knew how bad Co2 and global pollution was going to get back in the 70s. I was agitated. I joined the Committee to Save the Earth while in Junior High. I became a very active member of a very active environmental club. Speaking out about Co2. Global Warming. Recycling. Advocating for Solar.
Greta wasn’t born. Greta’s mother and father are my age, they hadn’t met yet.
At my Jr. High and my High School, our club ran city wide recycling programs, advocated for bike-routes and sustainability programs. It was literally called The Committee to the Save the Earth. The group had been founded by Junior High and High School Students in the early 1970s in response to Earth Day. I was part of the 80s’ era leadership.
We tried, passionately to get people to act. We advocated. We worked.
We unloaded carloads and truckloads and dumpster loads of recycling. Eventually we built a permanent recycling center. I was 12 and helped pour the concrete. I became the Chair of the Committee in 1980. The picture taken above is our team chanting “SAVE THE EARTH! SAVE THE EARTH!” In 1981. We set a record for recycling tonnage that year. We cleaned up waterfronts. We monitored sewage outfalls. My focus was getting better bike lanes built to the High School. We eventually did. We worked on electrical use reduction programs. We advocated for clean water and clean air policy. Erik Nordstrom, one of the heirs to the Nordstrom Stores chain was in the group. He advocated all sorts of recycling and waste reduction at “his family stores”. I saw him from time to time for decades, he kept on advocating at his family stores.
As chair of the CSE I wrote an annual report about how bad things would get if humanity let CO2 rise above 350ppm fossil carbon into the atmosphere. The report called on everyone to act now to SAVE THE EARTH!!. I also started to celebrate an annual event akin to what we now call “Overshoot Day.” We held an end of the year party in which we noted we were using up more resources than the world made that year. Overshoot day has since p�ut rather advanced metrics on it.
My obsession with bicycle commuting and bike paths commissions has been lifelong. It led to an obsession with living in places with public transit. It led to my build and owning electric cars and solar systems on my homes and businesses. It led to a life-long obsession with food waste and living the “eat your yard” / locavore way. I sometimes make my wife insane that I feel morally compelled to use a piece of bread, or if need be my finger to wipe up all sauce on every plate, or when acceptable I support licking a plate spotlessly clean. Do the math. Over your life it will reduce your carbon footprint, literally, by tons.
What I started at Committee to Save the Earth inspired a decade of writing plays about life, and death, on an overheated earth. The plays got done. People all said it was important. It led to working with RiverKeeper. Sundance. R2T. TA and other groups. But eventually I stopped being joyful. I stopped chanting Save The Earth, for a while in the late 80s and 1990s the direction everything was going with the environment just made me very very angry. I also watched with some understanding of how the tools put in place to make policy better, were co-opted. Defanged. And often, dismantled.
I stopped saying “SAVE THE EARTH” and to minimize getting angry. I eventually stopped trying advocate. I continued to act. Leaderless action. But I mostly stopped participating. If I did participate it was with some degree of resignation and cynicism.
And so now I contemplate Greta. And her anger. And I admire it. She is angry without cynicism.
I have been contemplating if I could have done better with Anger stripped of cynicism.
I am not sure.
I try to recall this picture. Clearly there was joy many works of public good, I also remember some joy doing public theatre about global warming. But mostly I remember becoming cynical. I look at the picture above of my friends chanting Save the Earth, and I want in some way to encourage others to do the same, but looking back, Greta’s way is better.
The peak of joy was probably the picture above. The anger was clearly dominant by 1994. I had been writing scripts about environmental ethics, and building energy saving computer switching systems. I was often filled with dread about the direction global warming was headed. I left tech. and took a job as the executive director of the Poko-MacCready environmental education center. Every week I taught another 100 kids about the living earth, and trying to get their food waste to zero. I gave talks. I kept writing. I was on a panel with Bill McKibben. I got some awards. I wrote newspaper editorials about the 20th Earth Day and how it was more important now, than ever.
I became at least a bit tedious, because all I could think about, or talk about was that our planet was on fire and no one would do anything about it. What seemed even stranger to me, everyone agreed. They knew it was true. They nodded about how important it was. But the question they found more important was whether they liked the new Lexus, or … fill in the blank.
By 1996, I perhaps was a 20 year enviro-fanatic, and was resigned to the fact nothing was being done which would change the path of the Anthropocene, I spent the summer of 1996 cycling and climbing mountains. I biked over 3000 miles. I climbed 100 peaks. Adventures galore. All the while contemplating the math and science of the 375ppm atmospheric CO2. I kept a journal. “My Summer at the Tipping Point: 375ppm CO2”
I thought hard about global population of 4 billion. I wondered how I should react that every year onward we would overshoot our Earth’s resource production. Overshoot day was Nov. 28th back in 1996. It was July 29th this year.
It has a lot of notes about power, population dynamics, money and politics. It has thoughts about my own anger at the situation. And notes about how useless that anger is. And notes about what to do next.
Aug. 10, 1996: “My life will be lived in the context of the Anthropocene ... I may get to experience 400ppm (2016?) and by then the icecaps will be obviously melting year to year, we will see super-storms emerging … I wonder if people may wish to do something in the ‘too little too late’ category then. … [will there be] religious orders emerging to worship god(s) they hope/promise will restore a stable earth? … who will be the leaders who capitalize on our collapse, and how will they do it… How can anyone stop global warming, when I can’t even stop city planners from putting in too many streetlights and no bike lane?”
I have an entry about Overshoot Day being Oct 31st for 1996. In the journal I am dismissive of that date, since it does not consider feedback effects in the future and our need to save more resources now. Or what was then. now.
At the end of 1996 I decided to write a last set of plays about the environmental end times, while going forward working to be a technologist full time. I knew I could work to make technology maximally efficient and decided that at least on the margins that could be a source for sustainability. But I was aware it would, at best, it would be on the margins of impact.
And here we are. We have proved we can build systems which are briefly going to be able to support a population of 8 billion. I wasn’t sure in 1996. And the seas are rising. And we have super storms.
And at least so far we don't seem to have any emerging religions based on sustainability worship. But we do have Greta.
Greta’s efforts, and my conversations at the Drawdown Conference got me to pull out my journal from 1996. The year I thought I stopped being angry. It seems reading it now I was still pretty angry. And cynical.
In 1996 I clearly did not think the Anthropocene could change directions. I wrote:
“The arrow is shot. It is in flight. I see nothing which will change it’s flight.”
Since then I have helped build better technology. Some of the world’s most energy efficient. I still bike. I have served on multiple bike-path commissions. I still waste no food. I still celebrate Overshoot day. No longer in October. Now July.
I look back at my TeenAge GenXer Gang Chanting “Save The Earth” in 1981 and read the journal of my angry 1996 self and it makes me wonder what I can tell Greta, and her colleagues, which can be helpful. Definitely celebrate Overshoot Day. It always creates perspective and useful ideas.
I realized in looking at my 1996 journal, I also had the outlines of a business plan in it about how to take wasteful analog transmission systems and convert them to emerging digital systems to save power. I am still doing that work. For the last 25 years I have been guiding tech companies. And bearing witness to the flight of the Arrow which is the Anthropocene. It is all interesting.
Greta fascinates me. Reactions to her fascinate me. I think her anger is great. I also note the growing panic and in some cases deep despair among those who truly study the Science of the Anthropocene, and the reaction they have to Greta is also interesting. I even have recently enjoyed sitting in corporate meetings where early shades of “deep concern” but not yet panic, are starting to ripple through corporate planning events and I have brought up Greta. You can get the same look when you answer the phone and hand it to your dog. “It’s for you.”
All of this somehow feels right on time. 2016 +/- 400ppm Co2 +/-. Full lock in of 5C+with feedback loops. Panic should set in soon. It will not be pretty.
But meanwhile Greta is here. Yes. Everyone credible knows what is happening, and this delightful, blunt and adventurous young woman is calling everyone on it.
Yes Greta, we have “Known” for 50 years. But no Greta, not everyone was silent. And I guess I should add, Thanks Greta for giving us all cover to talk about it.
When Greta stood up at the UN and dressed them all down...I smiled. “How Dare You” “Drew the Line.” Etc. All Good. For some it was a shock. Or a something to push back against. For me it was a chance to look back and say. “Finally.”
I have thought a lot about the 13, 14, 15 and 16 year olds who were my friends at the Committee to Save the Earth. The gang who chanted: “Save the Earth!”. I checked when I started this diary to make sure the Committee was still going. It is. Still recycling. Still communicating. They organized a climate March a few weeks ago. They are holding Friday Climate School Strikes.
Good for them. I might show up some Friday and sit with them. I am after all a former Chair of the Committee.
That also led me find a mid-90s documentary on YouTube about the early days of the Committee. I appear in the documentary several times. I had been told about it. I had never seen it. Black and White pictures of 70s and 80s teens working on environmental issues, in a video made by 1990s teen activist with a VHS camcorder, and reposted by 2010’s teen activists reposted on Youtube for today.
Seeing myself and friends confirmed for me how deeply positive, happy, and downright Polly-anne-ish we were chanting: SAVE THE EARTH!! And believing we would.
A VHS Era Documentary about the Committee to Save the Earth.
Returning to a final consideration of my lunch partners at the Drawdown conference. They had all seemed rather surprised, even a bit alarmed, when I said I was very glad to see Greta’s anger being made so public. And told them to be more Angry. They seemed concerned I would say this. I told them all not to be polly-anne-ish. The forces that profit by the Arrow of the Anthropocene are relentless. I tried joy. It led to cynicism. I wished I had been Angry sooner. It took me 20 years to finally get angry. Greta has it down to start. It hope all the movement’s new leaders are starting an angrier path.
And I think focussing on any televised activity that knowingly causes brain damage is a great place to show your anger. The Yale-Harvard Football shutdown was brilliant on multiple levels.
I hope folks can read this essay as a contemplation from someone who believed in an earlier environmental activism era that joyful chanting, teaching and better technology would help us, and learned clearly it would not. No measurable change.
So I say, be Greta Angry. Get your followers angry. Act on your Anger.
I am encouraged to see so much environmental anger. Anger is the last and only realistic response to the time we have left in the fast-moving arrow of the Anthropocene. Anger is good. Anger is useful. I hope Anger begets action. And the action begets results.
We can certainly measure results more easily now. Maybe action from anger can move Overshoot Day OUTWARD on the calendar. That has never happened in my lifetime. Nor in the lifetime of anyone reading this.
Whether if moves outward or not. I will keep bearing witness.
In honor of OPOL.
Peace.
Or as I prefer to say.
Onward.
