Healthy You • Healthy Earth • Healthy You

Why does the climate matter to me?

Even though I was not able to have any children — so I will never have grandchildren, or great-grand children, or great-great grandchildren — I feel a huge sadness because of the burden we have left to our young people. Greed and ignorance have made a global mess and left it for them to clean up. The injustice I feel from that fact alone pains me.

Because of all of the privileges I have had in my life, I have traveled to all seven continents. The places that I have seen are breathtakingly beautiful. I vividly see in nature all that can be lost.

And then there’s the health aspects of it all. I am a cancer survivor and lost my brother to cancer. His daughter, my 26-year old niece, is suffering from severe Crohn’s disease, which I believe has been caused by the systems of greed and lies perpetuated by big food, big ag, big pharma, and big oil. Can you tell I’m not only in sad and in pain, I feel pretty darn angry about it all.

What steps have I taken to address the climate crisis?

The call to leave the world better than I found it has been ingrained in me from my early teenage years when I experienced the first Earth Day and read The Population Bomb. My response up until a couple of years ago was to take personal action, doing all the things they brainwash you to do: recycle, buy a fuel-efficient car, switch to LED lightbulbs. I was in tears sometimes during the Trump Administration because the most pressing problem facing us was climate pollution and no one in government seemed to be doing anything about it. I was not only feeling sadness, pain, and anger — I felt immense frustration and I didn’t know what to do.

But that all changed, ironically due to covid. Citizens’ Climate Lobby, a non-partisan group, typically has an annual conference in Washington, DC to educate on climate solutions and talk in-person with congressional representatives. A friend in Connecticut, knowing how angry I was about lack of government action, invited me to attend that year’s Citizens’ Climate Lobby convention. I never would have made the trek to DC, but in 2020 there was covid and the conference was on Zoom, naturally! Attending this conference changed my life completely.

During the event, there were the typical keynote speakers and breakout sessions. Only one state had their own breakout session: New Hampshire. I signed in and learned about NH’s Carbon Cash-back Coalition. The Coalition was supporting Town Champions to pass resolutions to fight climate pollution by petitioned warrant articles. After the breakout, I emailed the leader and asked “Who is the Town Champion for Nelson?,” thinking that surely such a forward-thinking town as Nelson was working on this problem. The response to my email was pretty much “Tag! You’re It!”

At that time, I didn’t know if putting a price on carbon at the source and returning the fees collected to American citizens was a viable idea. I started digging and asking questions. And the more I looked, the more I learned that it not only was viable, but was one of the best ideas for solving the climate crisis. So I became Nelson’s Town Champion, and our warrant article passed at Town Meeting 2021.

In the meantime, while trying to figure out if carbon-cashback was worthwhile, I stumbled upon a newly forming group, the New Hampshire Network for Environment, Energy, and Climate. I kept showing up at their Zoom meetings, lead by smart people who know a great deal about climate and energy issues, particularly in New Hampshire. I figured out that the best way I could help was to join their Website Team. Now I take care of most of their website.

The NH Network has several working groups and I became involved with the start-up of the NH Network Plastics Working Group. The people in this group are absolutely amazing activists! We decided to do a campaign called Ten Towns • Ten Actions, a grassroots effort to help people rethink plastics. Working with people who had already designed and carried out successful actions to work on the problem of plastics, we took their ideas and I designed the website for this effort called the Ten Towns • Ten Actions Toolkit. 

At about the same time I was working on the Toolkit and the Carbon Cash-back resolution in Nelson passed, my town’s Select Board Chair asked me “What do you want to do next?” I remembered in the back of my mind something that someone from Peterborough had said to me at a NH Network meeting, “I would love to come to Nelson to talk about Community Power!” So I brought her forward to my Select Board. The next thing I knew I was chairing the Nelson Community Power Committee. I was also asked to serve on the Town Building Committee, which has become the Town energy committee, Nelson Citizens for Clean Energy. And not that I’m busy enough, I’m on the Board of Trustees for the Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music. This organization is amazing in many ways, including being extremely conscious of their footprint on the Earth. One thing I resurrected for Apple Hill was investigating rooftop solar and I hope we can move forward with such a project this year.

I will take a momentary breath to add one more thing. I couldn’t say “no” to becoming a member of the New Hampshire Healthcare Workers for Climate Action. I’m part of their Communication and Education Committee, which has an LTE writing team, and I’ve had some LTEs published in the Keene Sentinel and a blog entry posted on the NH HWCA’s website about rethinking solid waste, plastics, and recycling. 

What’s at the center of my Climate Venn Diagram?

Writing seems to be the intersection in my Climate Action Venn Diagram of What are you good at?, What is the work that needs doing?, and What brings you joy and satisfaction? I’ve learned about the legislative process in our State and find myself writing to legislators and writing testimonials for bills. I maintain three websites, which suits my introverted personality perfectly. I’m the Secretary for Apple Hill. I enjoy putting my thoughts together for short Letters to the Editor. Writing puts me “in the zone” and brings me joy and satisfaction. I just have to push myself sometimes to leave my keyboard and head outside.

What gives me hope?

There’s more work and writing than I can keep up with — naturally I’m worried about burn out. I could spend every hour of everyday reading and writing and learning about climate issues. It would be easy to get discouraged, and I have to admit that some days I am. 

However, there’s a lot that gives me hope. First, as I attend meetings I meet smart, engaged, hard-working young people in this epic fight against time. Second, I have met the most incredible, intelligent, hard-working retired folks like me who are fighting, too. And third, I see that there is an enormous array of ways to get involved, which means there is an enormous number of people who are putting all their sadness, pain, anger, and frustration to work and I’m happy and grateful to join them. That gives me hope.

This piece was written for a course through the Keene State College CALL program in the Winter of 2023.