Climate Change: Opening the Window of Opportunity
August 1, 2007

by Elizabeth R. Sawin		print version
		print version (graphics)

In the political maneuvering leading up to the release of the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, the Bush administration was lobbying for the report to include an endorsement of the concept of building giant reflective mirrors up in space, to lessen the amount of solar radiation reaching the planet.

Giant floating mirrors do seem like just the sort of engineering challenge that some of the largest defense and aerospace corporations, who supported Bush’s two campaigns for President, could bid for and profit from. And, if such a project could compensate for the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere by shading the planet, we could keep on digging fossil carbon from the Earth’s crust and using it to power our society. By virtue of our engineering skill and technology we could take a limit of the Earth, push it off a ways, and not have to deal with it.

You might feel some skepticism that we have the skill and understanding to pull off such a project and do it just right. Certainly there’s plenty to worry about in meddling with solar radiation, the basic force that enlivens the planet. But even putting those doubts aside, there’s another important issue.

Our excessive CO2 pollution isn’t only warming the planet, it is also acidifying the oceans, with potentially huge consequences for the base of the ocean food chain, and thus for fisheries, and for all the atmospheric processes that the ocean regulates.

A giant sun-shield up in space wouldn’t do anything to lessen the impact of CO2 on ocean chemistry. Setting - and enforcing - limits on the amount of CO2 coming out of industries, homes, and tail-pipes, on the other hand, would help ameliorate both the warming of the planet and the acidification of the oceans.

Acting closer to the heart of the problem recognizes the interconnection of problems and increases the odds that the effort applied solves multiple problems simultaneously.

Excessive CO2 production may be closer to the heart of things, but it’s not THE heart, of course. There are deeper reasons, the reasons that cause us to produce so much greenhouse gas pollution in the first place.

If moving one step closer to the heart of things - moving from the symptom of rising temperature to its cause, CO2 pollution - produces the ability to solve multiple problems with a single solution, then what might be the power of reaching even deeper - into consumerism, into our sense that the Earth is ours to dominate, into the assumptions of the of the industrial growth society?

Go deep enough, find ways to act that are deep enough, and we might find ourselves solving not just warming and ocean acidification, but also mercury pollution and toxics build-up and topsoil loss. We might find choices that could begin to heal both the wounds of the Earth and the wounds we impose on each other - wounds like poverty, oppression, violence, and despair.

Getting to such depths, acknowledging what we find there, and figuring out what to do about what we find won’t be easy. But I believe that this is the direction that climate change and all the other tangled challenges of this moment in time are pointing us towards.

There are already pioneers, showing us the way, offering living examples of what is possible when the threads of social justice, worldview, and ecology are gathered up together, and addressed as a whole.

A few of them I’m lucky enough to know personally, like my friends Nonette Royo and Chip Fay in Indonesia, and Amalia Souza in Brazil who all work on village based resource management, knowing that indigenous rights, transparent self-government, and economic solutions are not separate from ecological practices. All fit together and reinforce each other.

And in the US there are projects aimed at simultaneously addressing the ecological and social symptoms that are created by a system that grinds away not only a nature but also at whole communities of people. One example is the Oakland Apollo Alliance, which is creating jobs for low income people and people of color in the emerging fields of clean energy and sustainability, making sure that more people are able to participate in and benefit from the work of healing the Earth.

Creative, inspired projects like these help us begin to imagine what it might look like to meet the challenge of climate change by acting at its roots.

What One Person Can Do

Climate change, fisheries crashes, toxic pollution, endangered species. Sometimes it’s enough to make you throw up your hands in despair. “I’m just one person, what difference can I make? What could I do?”

Well, actually one person – one ordinary person – can do quite a lot if she sets her mind to it.  If you want proof, just ask my friend Karen Harwell, or better yet, visit her Dana Meadows Children’s Garden. Once it was an ordinary house and yard on an ordinary street in a small California city, but today it is a humming, buzzing, quacking swirl of life and fragrance and color, and a haven for the neighborhood children.

“It’s not much land – just one sixth of an acre -- and I know it’s not going to solve everything, but I figure I live here, on this particular piece of the Earth. It nurtured my family while my sons were growing up, and now I’m experimenting with nurturing it.”

One sixth of an acre – with a four-bedroom house sitting in the center of it – is not a lot of land, but every square inch of exposed soil is part of Karen’s experiment.  Every inch is alive with complexity and interconnection. Duck manure fertilizes lemon trees. Honeybees pollinate the avocado blossoms. Mint plants grow in the shade of a wisteria. And all of it is one answer to: “what can one person do?”

Herb Garden at Satya Center in Hudson, New York Photo by Jane Sherry

One person can:

Plant 18 semi-dwarf fruit trees - avocados, grapefruits, cherries, pears, lemons, apples, figs. (“So that there will be something ripe every month of the year.”)

Build a pen and fill it with four ducks. (“I’m thinking four is too many, they seem a little bit crowded; I’m thinking we will settle out at just a pair.”)

Build a tiny pond, for the ducks to swim in.

Every week (with the help of neighborhood kids) empty the pond and poor its rich waters on the fruit trees.

Re-roof the garage with photovoltaic shingles, and then sell electricity back to the grid.

Notice the neighborhood fathers’ fascination with the way the electricity meter spins backwards on sunny days.

On Easter Sunday, join in when the kids invent an “Easter-snail” hunt (with all snails devoted to the feeding of ducks).

Invite the kids over to build wooden flats for seeds when spring arrives.

The next weekend have them back to plant seeds in the flats that they built.

As the season progresses, transplant the children’s seedlings and water and weed and harvest. Do it alone or, if one wanders by, with a child.

Laugh at herself when she harvests the corn too early one year, and too late the next. Savor it and share it when, the third year, she gets it right.

Install a hive of honey-bees behind the duck pond.

Stand at the sink before the open window and listen to the kids as they pass through the garden on their way home from school, fresh picked cherries in their hands. (You mean you can come here whenever you want? Without asking?)

Invite the neighbors to a grapefruit tasting session. Smile when one boy says he didn’t even know he liked grapefruit.

Compost kitchen scraps with straw from the duck pen, and sprinkle the finished compost across the herb garden.

Come home to find a note from an eight-year-old neighbor stuck to the door (I think the cantaloupe is ready to pick).

Come home to find a message on the answering machine (I ate the last two plums from the tree. They were soooo good. There must be something to this organic business.)

Welcome the local newspaper when they want to write a story and take some pictures of the gardens and the children and the ducks.

Become a stop on the “solar home tour.”

Show the world that moving towards sustainability isn’t a chore or a sacrifice or deprivation but a dance of delight, a chance to connect, a way to come to life.

That’s what one person can do (at least for now; she is not finished yet.) One person can create something beautiful, something life-giving.

Picture thousands of us, like Karen, answering “what can one person do” with whatever beauty is wanting to come out of us. Not only duck pens and orange blossoms, but also well-tended forests and clear running streams and restaurants serving delicious food from local farms.  Imagine also fuel cells and windmills and energy-efficient buses because each of these represents a kind of beauty, too.

Now, picture ten-thousand people…

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Elizabeth R. Sawin is the Director of Sustainability Institute’s Our Climate Ourselves program. Other climate change columns are available in the OCO archive.  Follow this link for a collection of all SI opinion columns.