Two “i’s” in climate is just the tip of the iceberg.

This is a blog about what it’s like to be a 48-year old woman waking up to the reality of climate change in 2019. It’s about trying to enter the name for this blog without first enlarging the type by 200% and therefore typing it as www.goingthroughthecliimatechange.blogspot.com. Apparently, even though my thighs and belly and brain are softening daily, there’s some vital component of my eye that’s hardening at an astonishing rate according to my new friend, the eye doctor, who has reassured me that this is normal and has kindly provided me with three pairs of glasses, none of which I ever seem to have on hand during important URL-typing moments like these.

This blog is about waking up to the clanging, terrifying alarm that is climate change and learning that the worst of it has happened during the last thirty years – the years you were busy being a carefree teen, polluting the roads in your Honda Prelude and then a college kid who decided to dedicate her life’s work to something at least honest like advertising and then a new parent who trolled the aisles at Costco and set records for consumption of plastic snack baggies and disposable diapers and then an old parent who no longer had time to troll aisles and therefore ordered everything on Amazon Prime same day shipping because we need a green report folder and a white posterboard and three felt squares by tomorrow, Mom.

This blog is about figuring out what to do when you finally realize that the manner in which you have built your life – a good life spent working hard to create a career and a family and a home – has helped drive the planet to a place that is now endangering all that you love, all you have created and all that those you love may ever hope to build?

(And if you don’t believe that that is the precipice where climate change has brought us, stop here and read this   and this and this and come back to me. )

You get it now, right?

When the enormity of climate change finally hit me over the head a few months ago, I could not stop thinking about it. My culpability. My blindness. Humanity’s inability to comprehend the incomprehensible. Overwhelmed, I grasped at straws – or actually stopped grasping at them. I stopped ordering on Amazon – what did I need to have delivered that badly - green felt squares notwithstanding? I began shopping at the natural foods co-op. The enormity of the plastic in my home taunted me: you did this, they called out, the colorful bottles of hand soap and non-biodegradable detergent containers that will be on this planet longer than I. I couldn’t stop seeing it all. The packaging. The disposable water bottles. The food waste. The everything waste. I could hear my SUV, those luxuriously heated, carbon producing seats, mocking me: You’re comfy now, aren’t you? Wait a few years and you’ll really be feeling the heat.

I had to do something. So I did what any self-respecting, forty-something mom just terrifyingly awakened to an uncomfortable truth would do: I started a Facebook group. Moms for Climate Action. There are 85 of us and we are bound by terror and good intentions. But at least we are awake, terrified together and committed to being truthful. We’re still figuring out the action part.

I do know that 85 of us – or a million of us – rethinking our consumption and beginning to invest in electric cars and compost bins is just the beginning. The scale of this climate nightmare is one that requires business and governments to make serious and lasting changes to their reliance on fossil fuels: transitioning to 100% renewable energy must be the top priority. And we must rely on science. We must believe scientists and not only that: we must help fund them as they devise solutions to absorb the carbon that is poisoning us all, while the heat bears down on their backs.

So today, I take my first real action, with this blog. I am sharing this new chapter of my life with the world in the hopes that someone else will see themselves in it. That someone else – maybe who is also perhaps softening into middle age and is busy and tired - will realize that none of that matters. That we have to find the fight within us to make change, to vote for reform with our ballot and our wallet. We can no longer afford to be unaware; the cost of ignorance is simply too much. My hope is that you will shoulder this burden with me – the guilt of creating the mess we find ourselves in, the fear for our children’s future and the absolute certainty that we must now demand bold action from ourselves, from one another, from business and from the world. 

Humanity has rocketed to the moon, wired the world, built skyscrapers and spliced genes - and got ourselves into this mess in the first place. So we are more than qualified to dig ourselves out – especially if we do it together. So tell me, are you in?