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?
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| 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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