(Note to readers: The writer of this blog is temporarily incapacitated due to jet lag and a long red-eye flight without any sleep. So for today's post, he's sharing some of his thoughts made during the 5 hour trip down to San Francicso yesterday.)
As I type this, I’m heading south on an Amtrak train to San Francisco, where I’ll be catching a flight out east to visit family for Thanksgiving. I can see the San Francisco Bay passing by me on the right. The train tracks are so close to the bay, that it literally feels like you’re skimming across the surface of the water. You can see skinny white cranes lurking around along the banks, looking for food. Curious rock formations poke out from hidden beaches, and occasionally you’ll pass over a jetty of water, meandering all twisted like a snake into the bay. I feel quite privileged to be getting this unobstructed view of nature. I think if more people realized the type of scenery you can get from riding Amtrak, a hell of a lot less people would be driving.
The San Francisco Bay is such an amazing thing to behold. Yet, it bothers me to think that in 20 to 30 years time, a lot of what I’m seeing may be totally wiped out by rising waters. After going to all these conferences lately on sustainability, I can’t help but feel frustrated with the current state of environmental affairs. I find it hard to understand how people in politics aren’t grasping the severity of the situation we’re all in and doing more to solve it. After reading Elizabeth Kolbert’s book Field Notes from a Catastrophe, which shows undeniable proof that climate change is actually occurring... and occurring at a much faster rate than we realize, I think that it’s going to take a whole lot more than just upping the MPG on cars to change things. We’ve got to be doing more than that... we’ve got to be changing our lifestyles.
I think the big frustration that any environmentalist faces is how to go about bringing mass change to this world when the people who can bring about change—the politicians—don’t seem to care. The scientists have been presenting their data to Congress for decades now, only to fall upon deaf ears. Protesting doesn’t seem to accomplish anything anymore like it used to. And you can pretty much expect any letter you send to your Congressperson to end up in the shredder. So what do we do? If our nation’s leaders aren’t passing the legislation necessary to mandate change, then what’s left for us to do to fix our situation?
At both the conferences I attended, this question kept coming up. And the response given by all the experts was this: you can’t wait for Congress to fix things. You’ve got to take it into your own hands and do it yourself. Or, as David Orr suggested, "Suck it up." I personally didn’t care for this answer, and I don’t think many other people at the conferences cared for it, either. If you don’t have your own government backing you, then what hope do you have of changing things on a mass scale?
But then I started looking back to my state of California, who’s running into the same opposition from our government, and they’re still plowing ahead anyway. On both the state and local levels, people ARE doing things to change our situation. Look at San Francisco: they banned plastic bags from all stores, and just months ago banned all styrofoam containers. And now the city is providing free compost containers and compost pickup service for all residents. The people of San Francisco didn’t wait around for Congress to mandate changes to their lifestyle —they did it themselves.
One of the speakers I saw at the Green Festival, Paul Hawken, has stated that there are now over 2 million organizations around the world that are fighting for social change. Over 2 million! And most of these are grass roots efforts that no one ever hears about. They work to make our world a better place, and they do it by being role models for others to follow. It’s a silent revolution going on, where people are using their actions, not their words, to affect change. And it’s working.
So even though we would like our political leaders to hurry up and pass necessary legislation, we can do a lot locally within our communities to help make that change happen. It might seem like an uphill battle at times, but our work locally with others does make a difference. It is like what Margaret Mead once said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
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