Happy Birthday to Me!

The day that I share this on Facebook is my real birthday. Happy Birthday to me! 

Here is My Birthday Wish:

I want a world full of solar and other renewable energy because:

and I think that windmills are beautiful:

 

Especially when considering the alternative:

Canadian Tar Sands: boreal forests stripped then mined, no life remains, water is irreparably fouled

And lastly, because:

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What I Love

A lot of people still think of climate change as something that will happen in the distant future. Many projections talk about dire consequences by 2100, which can still seem very far away to some. By 2100 my own little children will be ages 88 and 90.

But really, climate change is happening already. Think of Superstorm Sandy in 2012. There was Hurricane Irene in 2011 which devastated much of my home state of Vermont. The Midwest, our nation's breadbasket, has been hit hard by severe drought for several years in a row now. Right now there is the Biblical flooding in Colorado and major storms on both coasts of Mexico. Hong Kong was just narrowly missed by a huge typhoon (Usagi) this week, and in Japan last week 500,000 people were rendered homeless by flooding from typhoon Man-yi. This is just a small sampling of recent extreme weather events. These types of events are growing more frequent and more devastating, thanks to climate change.  

Many of us in the US, are still largely insulated from the impacts of superstorms, floods, droughts, rising sea-level, and ocean acidification. It is easy to be lulled into a reassuring state of thinking yes, climate change is bad, but it's still far away and doesn't personally affect me. 

So, I would like to share a poignant tool (below) that aims to help people understand that the things they love today are already under threat by climate change.

"The real threat of climate change isn’t what it means for polar bears. 

It’s what the crisis means for the things that make us who we are."

Visit WhatILove.org and choose the people, places, and things that define your life … then discover how climate change will directly impact each one.

I chose 8 things that matter to me: kids, cookies, water, wildlife, swimming, gardening, peace and humanity. Then you can click to get a brief summary of how climate change threatens each of those things.

It's a tool designed to inspire you to protect the things you love, and add your voice in the fight against climate change. It affects every aspect of our lives, and if you don't fight for what you love, what will be left?


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CLTD1: Storytelling

Originally written on August 3, 2013

I just returned from the Climate Leadership Training hosted by The Climate Reality Project in Chicago. It was, in short, an amazing experience. There were over 1,400 participants that came from all 50 states and over 70 countries around the globe. During the two and a half day training, we sat in a large ballroom at McCormick Place around 144 tables. The tables were organized by geographical region. I sat with two fellow Vermonters and a recent graduate from Massachusetts. The others were from New Hampshire and included two high school science teachers, a mother and teenage son duo, and a young brother and sister pair (ages 12 and 15) accompanied by their aunt.

The first day of the conference focused on storytelling and how to engage in conversations about climate change with people who are in varying degrees of understanding or acceptance about the science and the climate crisis in general. We were urged to find our own story that we could relate to others to make concerns about climate change resonate from a more personal space. This is not about political parties or ideologies. It is about real people who are already seeing the impacts of climate change on their lives now through superstorms, droughts, fires and floods.

I first learned about climate change when I took a college course on it in 2000. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had just come out with their report with the strongest verbiage to date linking human activities and climate change. It was an eye-opening course and led me to do an independent greenhouse gas emissions inventory of my college campus during my senior year. By 2003, I remember having conversations about climate change with my very concerned sister. At the time I was working on sustainability issues at the UVM Environmental Council and felt generally optimistic that the world see the light and fix things in time. How could they not? The science was there and it was strong. I was a newly minted graduate working on the issues for my job, surely people were getting the message. Life went on, I went to graduate school for urban planning and got immersed in the planning world and all but forgot about greenhouse gases and their global warming potential.

I thought about climate change less and less until 2010 when my son was born. We moved to our new house when he was 6 months old and worries about climate change started keeping me up at night. What kind of world had I brought him into? What kind of future did he have? Would his world resemble the one I grew up in or the one his grandparents knew? Eventually my fears faded a bit again, perhaps out of sheer exhaustion. But in 2012 when my daughter was born the same thing happened. I laid awake each night for several months worrying about climate change, global warming and positive feedback loops such as methane releases from melting permafrost as the Arctic ice reached record lows faster than expected. Globally, weather has gotten weirder and weirder. Here in Vermont we had record spring flooding in 2011. Later that summer we were hit hard by Hurricane Irene. 2012 was incredibly dry with a very mild winter, then this summer we had record rains and flooding again. Last November my son played in our sandbox, surrounded by green grass with beetles roaming around, and a red rose blooming nearby. This was not normal for November in Vermont. Anyone could see that and connect the dots. Couldn't they?

Then I got an email from The Climate Reality Project inviting me to become a Climate Leader. For the first time I felt like there was something I could do other than sign endless petitions and anxiously watch political leaders repeatedly fail on the issue. My story to reach out to the world about climate change centers on my kids. I need to know that I am actively working to protect them and their future from man-made climate change. (And yes, it IS man-made.) I know this is a common thread that many Climate Leaders attending the training shared. There were so many parents and grandparents there who are concerned about their own children and grandchildren's futures, not to mention many youth ages 22 or younger who were there for the sake of their own futures.

What's your story?

Northern New England tables at Climate Leadership Training

Read more about the conference using these links:
Day 1 of Climate Leadership Training
Day 2 of Climate Leadership Training
Day 3 of Climate Leadership Training





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Introduction to Mama of Ma'at

I am a stay at home mom who is passionate about my kids and raising them to be good citizens of the earth and stewards of the natural world. I began this blog out of my concern about global climate change and the negative consequences it will have on my children's futures, especially if the developed world continues to ignore the reality of a warming world.

Ma'at is the Egyptian concept of truth, balance, order, and justice. Early records indicate that Ma'at is the norm for nature and society in this world. Ma'at was also depicted as a goddess, the concept of Ma'at personified. Her primary role was continuously preventing the universe from returning to chaos.

 

I have chosen the name Mama of Ma'at for my blog not because I think of myself as a goddess, or as someone particularly powerful. Rather I uphold the concept of Ma'at as something modern society needs to remember and restore in our governments and other institutions. Earth is out of balance with industrial and consumer desires outstripping the needs of the natural world. Society is out of balance with the desires of the ultra-wealthy few trumping the needs of the masses. This needs to change for our own sakes. We cannot exist apart from the world.

My posts will focus on myself as a stay at home mom, my children as they grow, and what I am doing as a parent to make the world a better place for them by engaging others in a much needed dialogue about climate change and its solutions. I will try to keep it light, but also keep it real. My wish is for people to stop shying away from the climate change discussion. Yes, it is an enormous and daunting problem. However, society needs to begin looking at the climate crisis as an exciting opportunity to make the world a better place overall. Solving the climate crisis requires not only environmental protection and conservation, but also social and economic justice. I think the editorial cartoon by Joel Pett below sums it up nicely:

 

This is what it's all about!

I hope you enjoy my posts.