A Woman in STEM

Lately, I think one of my purposes here is to be a voice of uncertainty. I need to be willing to say that I have struggles, and that there are no perfect solutions to the complex problems we deal with. 

A couple of months ago, I made a presentation to a dozen engineering and food industry professionals. When I left, I removed the gathering’s only woman. 

As I drove home, I thought about why I became an engineer to begin with, when on many days, I encounter almost exclusively white men who interrogate me. This is true even in my new home of Vermont, which the rest of the country believes to be either a blue-tinted utopia or an enemy leftist stronghold. 

A therapist helped me excavate my motivations for pursuing engineering. I was surprised to hear, from my own mouth, that I wasn’t driven by passion or fascination, but by anxiety. In college science and math courses, even the most punishing ones, I knew I could make my way to the correct answer. Subjective evaluations in art and writing classes terrified me. I wanted control and perfect grades, and I found them by becoming an engineer.  

I’ve known creative people in science, technology, engineering, and math – STEM artists. They embrace inspiration, unknown outcomes, and collaboration to amazing results. I was never one of them. I picked a STEM career because it felt safe. 

As soon as I became pregnant, though, I learned that an engineering career was still only safe for men. I struggled for years to make any kind of progress.

Last week, I was asked to participate in a university event for women and non-binary people in STEM. The organizers want their students to have some climate-focused mentors.

We need these students to flood into all kinds of climate work, including in STEM. How can I tell them to do that, knowing they’ll have to fight to be heard, let alone paid and safe?

I love my work, despite my frustration. For years, I was so overwhelmed by the magnitude of our global climate predicament that I gave up. Now, working for a climate-focused non-profit, I get to find specific things to improve, then go help improve them. I also have colleagues I can talk to about my feelings, then listen to theirs. I’ve never had all of that in a job before. It feels good.

However, even here, the engineering side of climate work is neatly sliced away from emotions and “soft” issues. The men I work with in tech, as kind as many of them are, seem to want to step into a separate kingdom where they can feel good about their analyses, their salaries, and themselves. They direct their tenderness toward the environment or childrens’ futures, then set it aside to crunch numbers.

Sometimes I wonder if these male-dominated technology spaces serve the same purpose for the privileged that my engineering courses did for me – a chance to skip past tricky questions to an A+ score. Some people see climate tech as hard evidence of righteousness. Certainty is alluring.

I can relate. I was forged as a weapon of certainty in white evangelical Christian religion, and when I left in my twenties, I clung to scientific certainty instead. However, as Rebecca Solnit recently wrote in The New Statesman, certainty is the opposite of hope, and it led me straight to despair. As Solnit also wrote in the same essay:

For those of us whose lives are already easy, giving up means making life even easier, at least in terms of effort.

Rebecca Solnit, Why Climate Despair is a Luxury

I eventually accepted that it’s impossible to know exactly what will happen, and this led me to look for a new way to be in the world. The loss of certainty moved me to make an effort, and that led me, among other things, to my current job.

Lately, I think one of my purposes here is to be a voice of uncertainty. I need to be willing to say that I have struggles, and that there are no perfect solutions to the complex problems we deal with. 

Uncertainty isn’t popular, and so my work experiences sometimes send me back into cynicism. The evidence of progress is so clear, though, that I can’t stay there for long. So much is still broken, but there’s also good to be found. 

Before that all-male food industry meeting, I was advised to lower my expectations for its climate outcomes. A well-meaning younger man told me that price was always the bottom line, in the end. 

However, the leader of the meeting listened carefully to my presentation then looked at his staff, and I watched them all nod in agreement. An expensive choice was made. When I drove away, I was angry that I’d been put in an unfair position to make my case, but I was proud that I’d made it. Good had been done, defying the most cynical predictions.

It can be difficult to notice and remember, but my expectations are shattered all the time. 

This week, on the podcast We Can Do Hard Things, Kaitlin Curtice asked how it might affect our climate if we thought of Earth as a mother worthy of relationship and gratitude. I nodded as I listened, but didn’t believe these wise Indigenous ideas would translate into my professional world.

Then I visited a wastewater treatment plant, where I once again felt out of place among the men who worked there. After our tour of the facility, a technician leaned against a tree and told me that when he tends his machines he thinks of his kayak, where he thanks the river and the sky for all they give him. He said he sees his work as caring for them in return.

Another time, I wrote in my journal that I needed to accept that the industrial customers I work with will never treat me as an automatic expert. I’ll try to change things for those who follow me, I scribbled furiously, but I’ll stop wasting energy hoping for better for myself.

That same day, a grocery store executive met my eyes and thanked me for my help. Later in the conversation, he talked about climate engineers he’d worked with before. I was startled to realize he was listing womens’ names.

Sometimes I look back at my career a decade ago and marvel at how much better it is now. There’s more to do, more to fight for, but I know change can happen. I’ve seen it.

So that’s what I’ll tell those university students when I meet them. I can’t promise them an easy path, but I can tell them the truth:  I hope they chase their dreams for a better future, wherever they lead, and I’ll be here to help.

The Soul of Climate Tech

If I don’t tend to my soul, my body will break down. If climate tech keeps pretending there are no bodies or souls, it’ll fail. 

This year, I blew up my family’s life, moved across the country, and started work as a climate engineer.

(That’s not what my job is actually called, by the way, but it describes what I’m doing. The professional sustainability world is full of titles with varying degrees of practical meaning.) 

I’ve never before been able to say with confidence that my daily work is helping the world alongside wonderful people. It’s a dream.

It’s also exhausting. My mind has to be oriented a certain way to focus on, say, a single grocery store’s request for help changing the refrigerants in their complicated system. Constant worry about our global predicaments destroys that focus, it turns out.  

On a bad recent day, I stared at tough math until my eyes crossed. As part of this hybrid work environment we’re all figuring out, I was alone. I ended up in tears on the floor, wondering if I’d made a mistake taking this job, if I wasn’t smart enough to help with stuff like this, if it even mattered whether I figured this one equation out. I could barely think the whole next day. 

The day after that, I got to hang out with a mentor. He told me stories from his decades of experience and ate a good lunch with me in the sunshine. When I sat down to work, the fog in my head was gone.

I’ve always thought of mindfulness practices as tools to manage my anxiety in personal life, but I’m finding I’ll need them for work as well. Each day, I’m laying a minuscule tile in a planet-sized mosaic. I’ll need to be OK with that.

I’ll sit down later today to look at a project in industrial electrification. As Internet know-it-alls love to remind me, this is an intractable problem. Helpful technology exists, in theory. In real life, it’s extremely hard to make it work.

I’ll have to do my best to improve things at this particular factory on its one spot on Earth. I’ll also have to reach out to colleagues to ask for help, give myself breaks, and stop when there’s no more I can do today. I’ll have to decide that perfect isn’t possible.

This feels wrong because climate technology, along with every business or nonprofit built on top of it, is beset by patriarchal hustle culture. After all, if a start-up CEO doesn’t believe he can save the whole entire world with his magical app, who will invest? Who has time for justice or mental health? Not the planet, that’s for sure. If you aren’t killing yourself to make a difference, what are you even doing? Nothing that matters, that’s for sure. 

That culture lies, though. Sustainability can mean a lot of things, but it has to include you and me. I don’t want to live in a future that hurts people, even if it’s efficiently powered by renewables. As Mary Heglar says, who are we trying to save the planet for? 

So I need to learn to go both gently and together with others. If I don’t tend to my soul, my body will break down. If climate tech keeps pretending there are no bodies or souls, it’ll shape the future but not for the better. 

When I began this job, I wanted to talk to technical experts. Now, I want to learn from people who lay other kinds of tiny tiles, like hospice caregivers, justice activists, artists, and social workers. I need advice from those who wake up to look straight at the abyss and then choose a specific task to handle first. 

In the meantime, I’ve got work to do and breaks to take. Tonight, I’ll turn off my phone and play with my kids in the yard. And tomorrow, I hope, I’ll start again.

So I Moved.

I’ve read about the Great Resignation. I don’t know if I’m part of it, just that priorities I used to have evaporated.

I moved in December, far from anywhere I’ve ever lived before. I drove across marshes and Appalachian mountains to get here. 

There was a job offer. The virtual interviews were at the beginning of October, after a phone call as surprising as a lightning bolt.

On a mid-October Alabama evening, I walked in shorts with a friend, talking about why I couldn’t blow up my family’s life and leave everything I knew. She asked me what I felt inside my body.

When the offer came a few weeks later, my husband took my hands in his and asked me to say what I wanted out loud. Then we moved across the country in the second winter of the pandemic.

I began challenging engineering work with kind, smart people. The projects have a clearly-stated mission to make a better future in the face of climate change. My organization is made of human beings, so it’s not perfect, but when has perfection ever been the goal? I’m doing useful things with my hands, my spreadsheets, and my time. 

My new job made the move possible and exciting, but I also came for my sisters. They’re Southern transplants too, but for different reasons they pushed down roots in the far Northeast. 

Over the last two years, I learned that I need to be where I can reach my sisters with my arms and food. My husband and I decided we’d take whatever hits were necessary to make that happen if the chance ever came.

Then it did. So I live in Vermont now.

I’ve read about the Great Resignation. I don’t know if I’m part of it, just that priorities I used to have evaporated, such as having nicer stuff someday or knowing what comes next.

A colleague asked me whether I moved because of climate change. I laughed because I did, but not in the way he meant. 

I moved because this pandemic, magnified by climate change, changed me forever. I moved because I want to be of use during my working days, even if the good I do amounts to a fleck chipped from a mountain. I moved because I want my nieces to snuggle into my lap next to my daughters. 

I don’t believe that Vermont is “safe” from climate change, by the way. The weather is shifting here too, and systems are straining like they are everywhere. Home prices are jaw-dropping. I won’t miss Southern tornadoes, but the -30 F windchill yesterday wasn’t what my elderly neighbors remember from their childhoods any more than the hot summers are. 

I don’t know if moving was the right thing to do, or if it would’ve been right not to. It felt like a calling from outside myself, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t privileged or selfish.  I accept my own uncertainty, and that’s the best I can manage. 

What I’m sure of is that I’m grateful for my big sister’s grin and my baby sister’s advice, for new neighbors who cluck at my tires and shovel my driveway.

This is my path for now, a thousand miles away from where I thought I’d be. Wish me joy on my way, as I wish you on yours.

We’re Also Saving Each Other

On the day I was fully vaccinated, I wanted to do something audacious – to scream from a rooftop or jump out of a plane. Instead I planned a solo trip with an extra day to write. 

This isn’t typical behavior for me. I tend toward codependency on my partner and avoidance of unfamiliar situations, and it feels selfish to take time for my creative side projects. In a burst of elation, I did it anyway: I booked a little house, planned an itinerary, and coordinated child care. 

Then it occurred to me that a new climate activist friend might like to join me. I didn’t want to cause one second of stress, so I surrounded the invitation with a lot of “it’s extremely totally fine if you say no” language, and I meant it. Still, I felt a shock of nerves. What if she said yes?

Adult friendship feels like a riddle that everybody else knows the answer to. I’m not from my city, so I don’t have a slow-growth network of connections. I’m also a former Southern Baptist who, until about 9 years ago, could walk into a church and find automatic social support in every town I lived in. I tried other faiths and learned I can’t build relationships around a church and keep my mental health. I’ve got to learn another way.

I tried to solve this problem by diving into an environmental organization. I overcommitted and tried to use it to fix myself in ways it wasn’t built to do. I’m still a member, but I have a job and two young kids. I don’t have the kind of time required to fully embed with local retirees and college kids. I found good work to do with that group. However, it wasn’t a ready-made circle of friends.

Everyone’s afraid of rejection, but when I left my childhood religion, I immediately lost people I thought were my friends. I also traded a close bond to some family members for ever-cooling distance. After that, it felt treacherous to expose my real self to new people. In 2021, it felt like jumping off a cliff.

Sometime last summer, I began to pull inward. As Covid-19 wreaked its havoc, relationships I thought I’d worked through found new ways to hurt me. People broke my trust over and over again, and I wrapped myself in books, TV, podcasts, food, and my children’s never-ending needs. Before then I’d considered myself an extrovert; now I wasn’t sure. I tunneled deep into isolation. 

My belief in climate justice was one of my only constants, and I found relief with a small, warm online community that embraced the same values. I probably spent too much time in virtual spaces, although who’s to say what was too much when I was just trying to survive, launching flares across the chasm of my loneliness? 

I shield parts of myself on the Internet, though, and no one has only two dimensions. Many people here know hard truths about me, but there’s no way for them to find out that if you spend a weekend with me, I may follow you around the house talking. 

I’ve always thought with my voice. I often don’t know what I think until I hear words fly from my own mouth, or see them as they hang in the air in front of me. If any sentences vibrate in resonance with my insides, I pin them to a page before they can flutter away. Then I sift and cut until something real emerges. 

My new friend knew me through written words, both public and private between us, but we’d never spoken. She didn’t yet know the chaos of me, the sensitivity that swirls around me like Medusa’s hair made of nerve endings. I was too much, and I was afraid she would meet me and run for the hills. 

As I drove, I worried. Then my leg started to hurt.

In September 2020, searing pain shot down my right side, originating in my hip and stabbing all the way into my foot. I kept up my daily run anyway. In October I was short of breath. By December, I quit running. My leg still burned all night.

My anxiety spun out of control, and I couldn’t exercise, which was my only reliable release valve. I was exhausted, the pandemic dragged on, my children needed me, and I floated, detached from my aching body.

In the spring of 2021, I went to see a doctor. She told me I was dangerously anemic and probably had been for months, thus explaining the breathing issues and fatigue. Once my red blood cell levels were safe again, though, I still hurt so much I couldn’t jog. 

In my first appointment, a physical therapist told me my pain came from overcompensation by certain parts of my body for weakness in others. A traumatic injury many years before had led to atrophy, re-aggravated by my pandemic running ritual. My body had worked so hard to protect my weakness that I’d been damaged by accident. The therapist explained how we would strengthen the weak parts together, but she warned me there was no quick fix and it would take months to heal. She took me through a series of stretches. By the time I left that day, I felt much better, and it was a miracle. It was mercy. 

This past year, I overcompensated for my re-traumatized trust with self-protective isolation. As I stretched out my hip at a rest stop, I pondered my atrophied vulnerability. My leg pain was quieter, shushed by the therapy techniques I’d learned, and I climbed back into the car. 

Driving past Birmingham, I realized my old injuries weren’t the only problem. Questions about my role in the broader climate movement were also feeding my fear. My new friend was a career activist and artist. What if she thought I was a fake, a poser whose efforts didn’t measure up? I took a deep breath and kept going.

Our weekend together was a delight, with an immediate sense of openness. My words filled the air. She accepted and sent them back across the space between us. My body relaxed. I wanted to be charming and funny but was, instead, pretty intense. She didn’t seem to mind. I brought too much food, and she brought me a cucumber from her garden. 

On Sunday, I drove back home and thought about my gratitude for this fellow human being, three dimensional with blood and muscle under her skin. I was thankful we were both alive and on our beloved planet at the same time.

I’m settling back into my routines this week, and my overdeveloped fear is quieter, shushed by joy.  A friend shared air and words with me, extended compassion and understanding, and it was a miracle. It was mercy. 

My courageous parts are slightly stronger, and I feel more able to claim my belonging in the climate justice movement. We all belong, and when we help each other heal, we’re doing important work. People are part of nature. We are what we’re trying to save, and we’re a wonder. 

The First Few Lies

The path forward runs straight through lies, and you’ll have to push them down to climb across.

A letter about climate change to my friend, a fellow white American Christian.

Darling friend, hello. You asked me to explain climate change to you “beyond its scientific facts,” which you now understand.

I think I know what you mean. The climate crisis is a longer story than carbon dioxide molecules can tell. It’s a tale about facts, sure, but it’s also about lies.

The path forward runs straight through those lies, and you’ll have to push them down to climb across. Some must fall to let the next one crash, like dominoes, while others may suddenly explode. Since you and I share a context in white American Christianity, you’ll begin in about the same spot that I did. 

I’ll map the first few lies I traversed, in the hope that it saves you some time:

1. The climate crisis is your fault.

Just one hundred oil and gas companies create most of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. They have resisted any attempts to get them to stop, or to tell the truth about what they are doing. 

The concept of a “carbon footprint” was popularized in 2004 by the fossil fuel company BP. This idea’s inventors understood that shame is a weapon. If you can obsess people with their own environmental righteousness, then they won’t oppose your destruction of oceans, mountains, or communities. 

My friend, you didn’t cause the warming that our planet has done so far, and your choices aren’t going to fix it alone, either. Individual environmental actions improve peoples’ lives and help motivate them to join the collective fight, but they will not fix our global predicament. The log in our own eyes that Jesus warned us about, in this case, has nothing to do with recycling and everything to do with polite acquiescence to the powerful.

2. Climate change is nobody’s fault.

Speaking of the powerful, oil and gas companies have known for decades that global warming is caused by fossil fuel emissions. Their own scientists studied and explained this. Rather than invest their oodles of money in other energy sources, they spent staggering budgets to perfect modern PR strategy. They deceived the public on purpose. This is documented history.

Across the 20th century, the oil and gas industry influenced governments in a quest for never-ending, expanding profit. They sold this death march as a journey toward progress. 

The captains of Western industry destroyed ecosystems and wildlife on an astonishing scale. They also sacrificed Indigenous lives, Black neighborhoods, and communities of color in the name of “civilization.” People who did nothing to cause climate change were considered necessary collateral damage for the comfort of the wealthy.

They still are. Our planet’s story has villains, and their organizations have grown into powers and principalities on the scale that Paul warned the Ephesians about. It is our sacred duty to struggle against them, even if we fled from within their ranks first.

They don’t have specks in their eyes, they have desolated forests.

3. It’s too late.

This lie seems to sprawl. I’ve encountered it both inside our faith, as trust in an all-powerful God, and far outside it, as nihilism and self-preservation. It’s an understandable reaction to our current emissions trajectory that fits neatly into the despair caused by our many interlocking global crises.

Beloved friend, please imagine me with you, next to you on the couch and holding your hand.  It’s not too late. There is so much we can still save.

You’ve probably heard some of the climate timeline numbers. In 2018, we were told we had 12 years, based on the results of a report called the IPCC. That number was based on scientifically conservative scenarios.

It’s a little harder to grasp that it’s not a doomsday countdown, like a New Year’s Eve clock. There’s no metaphorical asteroid striking 10 years from now, and we can’t send Bruce Willis to vaporize the consequences.

Instead, as Dr. Kate Marvel wrote, it’s a slope we’re sliding down. Every fraction of a degree of global warming makes a huge difference in the world we bequeath to the future.

Limits can evoke fear. This is not always bad. I strap my kids into car seats because I’m afraid of crashes. 

A time limit, looked at another way, is also inspiring. As Eric Holthaus likes to say, we were born at the perfect time to change everything.

4. Everything will be fine.

A lot of people in my life believe that if we keep calm and carry on, God or the folks in charge will make it all go away. The weather of the 1950s will return to us as payment for our panic-free faith.

It will not be OK. It’s not OK now. The Earth has already warmed by 1-1.5 degrees Celsius. The stronger, more frequent hurricanes, fires, floods, droughts, and tornadoes are here to stay. The coral reefs I love so much are already dying out; I will not take my children to see the same colors I remember. Numbers of people forced to migrate because of climate change will continue to grow.

You may now be wondering when I will get to the hopeful part of this message.

My friend, the hope I have found is in facing the truth alongside other people. It is freedom from queasy cognitive dissonance. Grief is a step toward courage. It’s the “hope with cleats on” of Barbara Brown Taylor’s recent sermon

One decade to save humanity is intimidating, of course, and it’s also maddening because it didn’t have to be this way. Nevertheless, we are creatures bound by time, the fourth dimension, and here is where we must make our choices. The planet we knew is gone. We must move together into a new world. 

5. A sustainable future would be miserable.

People whose wealth or power was built by exploiting others are threatened by a future where all could thrive, and so they try to make us afraid of it.  

Can you imagine a society in which everyone has enough? Enough time, enough resources. Connection and trust within communities designed as webs of interdependency rather than as competitions

I don’t get what’s so great about our current society except for the very wealthiest, and even those folks seem secretly unsure. I grew up in a huge suburban mansion and it echoed with scarcity, like Gollum clutching expensive knick-knacks instead of a magic ring. It spit me onto a sprinting treadmill to prepare me to buy my own mansion one day. 

I suppose when you define happiness as frequent trips to Disney world, hospitality as an exclusive party, and church as a gated country club, then when you’ve obtained those things you might feel satisfied with the status quo.

But if you’ve ever felt clanging loneliness, exhausted by the frantic rush, or devastated that our neighbors have to survive a lethal system of oppression, then a sustainable new world will be a joyous relief. Life will be better, even as we mourn what we’ve lost. 

A society that provides what people need for a decent, healthy life is possible with technology that exists right now, and it would save the planet. It also sounds heavenly, like the Kin-dom of God. I want that good future, for myself and for everyone’s children, and many days it feels close to me. 

On other days, maybe after watching my neighbors refuse to wear face masks in the summer of 2020, I find myself believing the old lies. 

I’ve found that after some time or crying or exercise, I am able to look again at the road I’ve already travelled and see that it lies behind me. Often someone else turns me back around to face forward. When I’m able, I take another step, or push at some new lie that’s in my way, such as my own worthlessness or that people can’t change. I’m surprised when that last one haunts me, since you and I have both transformed in the past few years, but minds are tricky things.

My friend, I can hear you coming behind me up the trail. A good future is waiting for us, and we will build it together with the millions of others travelling this road, following the leaders who went before us all. 

Unity

Train coming down the track,
train never going back.
Courage from a cracked heart,
got to pull the rails apart.

Van coming up the street,
van has another seat.
“Unity” is just a code,
got to stand in the road.

Ship sailed awhile ago,
ship riding fossil flow.
Hold each other up, team,
got to kick upstream.

Change coming, not far,
won’t change who we are.
Fierce love, keen eyes,
pushing up the sunrise.

I Failed to Save the World.

Now my poem is in a book about how we’ll do it together.

In January 2019, I was hired by a start-up developing technology to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. For the first time in my meandering career, I was on fire with passion for my job. I threw myself into the work.

It took about six months for disillusionment to creep in and another three for things to start coming apart. After a year, the company dissolved. Of course, there were many reasons the business didn’t succeed. All that mattered to me, though, was that I hadn’t saved the world even though I’d tried really, really hard.

I had begun following the work of women climate leaders just before I got the start-up job. Between investor pitches and proposal drafts, I listened to podcasts and audiobooks that approached climate change as a communal and moral problem rather than as a broken machine to repair. Through this crash course in environmental justice, I accidentally found a place to land when I tumbled from my Climate Savior pedestal later that year.

One evening in November 2019, I washed dishes while I mused over my inability to rescue my family from a difficult future. Words arrived behind my eyes and I rearranged them. When I finished drying the dinner pots, I typed that poem directly into Twitter, tagging several of the women whose work had inspired it. This is not how I usually do creative writing – I use notebooks or my ancient laptop, along with a giant brick eraser or heavy backspace finger.

I thought almost no one would see it. I was astonished to receive kind replies and deeply personal direct messages. I’d expected to start a friendly conversation or possibly be mocked for my lack of skill. Instead, “climate Twitter” reached through the screen to hug me.

I didn’t suddenly become a professional or knowledgeable poet. If asked to recite in verse, the only non-Bible stanzas I know are by Emily Dickinson. I did not become a famous Internet influencer, either. My anonymity remained post-poem, but I did find the best online friends in cyberspace.

Awhile later, Dr. Ayana Johnson and Dr. Katharine Wilkinson asked whether they could print the poem in an anthology of essays by women climate leaders. It was surreal to be contacted by heroes about a fluke expression of my emotions. When I learned the names of the contributors to All We Can Save, I sat down on the floor. So many of them belonged to the constellation of creators, writers, and activists who taught me to face climate change without despair.

In most rooms, I believe in introducing any elephants hanging around. Here’s one: my poem’s existence in print near Alice Walker’s and Joy Harjo’s is absurd. This is not modesty. I know I’m smart and good at many things, including Excel spreadsheets and baking banana brown sugar cake. I am not, however, a poet of well-deserved stature.

The people guiding All We Can Save, it turns out, enjoy this type of absurdity. I have never encountered a group so impressive and welcoming at the same time. Truly inclusive feminism eschews hierarchy, hero-worship, and gatekeeping. I knew this in theory but had never experienced it in institutional practice.

If a failure without credentials can be of use to this kind of climate movement, then so can you. You don’t have to finish a fancy degree or become an artistic genius to help us build a beautiful future. You just have to find a way to show up for others with honesty and humility. We have community building, healing, and good work to do together. Come join us.

Order a Book and Join a Circle!

All We Can Save will be released on 9.22.20, and you can pre-order your copy now.

The book will be an amazing read, of course, but it will also be a wide-open door to this community. There are free discussion guides and other bonuses planned to launch a network of discussion groups, or “circles,” all across the world!

I will lead a virtual circle here in Alabama, and I can’t wait to start this good work. I hope you’ll consider doing the same, or finding a circle to join yourself as the book launch date approaches.

How I Take On Climate Change as a Regular Person

It’s not my job to care about climate change. I’m not a professional activist, journalist, writer, scientist, or educator, nor am I a prominent figure in the global environmental movement, in a government, or in the public square. I worked in green technology for a bit but I don’t anymore.

When the coronavirus shutdown began, I was job hunting, so I don’t know exactly what’s next in my career. However, I’ll probably be doing typical engineering or management work in a cubicle (or via telework). Since I have two young kids, I never have much spare time, but I have almost none now during the Covid-19 pandemic.

In other words, I’m a privileged but regular person.

I used to think this meant that I couldn’t do much to help humanity survive the climate change crisis. Now I know that I’m a key part of the battle for our future.

I’ll tell you how, but first I want to explain what it took for me to get here, to this sense of purpose and confidence in my own usefulness.

In 2018, I climbed out of despair I’d slid into in my twenties. When I realized that I was back on higher ground, I thought about what I wanted to do now that I was mostly OK. What I wanted, more than anything, was to be useful to the world. My education in environmental engineering meant that I knew a lot about climate change, and so I decided to begin a personal Climate Quest. I just had to figure out how to start.

In the preceding years, it had been women who helped me heal; they showed me the trail markers and held me up when the terrain was tricky. So I thought that learning from women might be a good strategy in this area too. I Googled “women climate experts” and followed them on Twitter.

Soon, I discovered the No Place Like Home podcast, which I adored. I looked up every single guest listed in their episode descriptions. I read, watched, & listened to work by Mary Heglar, Dr. Ayana Johnson, Sarah Eagle Heart, Winona LaDuke, adrienne marie brown, Naomi Klein, Jamie Margolin, Dr. Katharine Wilkinson, Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, Dr. Kate Marvel, Emily Atkin, and Amy Westervelt.

Based on the leadership of these women, I began to try to work climate change into conversations, to connect physically with nature, to express my broken-hearted emotions rather than try to fix them, to think about how I could dismantle white supremacy in my privileged life, to research what local organizations I might join and define my role, and to reflect deeply about my own talents and resources.

I stopped chasing perfection as a goal and went after slight improvements instead. I started to think about the next right thing rather than the monstrous odds. I also gave up any idea of myself as a savior who might solve climate change if I could just be brilliant or rich enough, and began to see myself as a tiny but crucial part of a big movement.

Over the last year and a half, my life has changed in concrete ways. I took up gardening. I started writing poetry again, which I hadn’t done since my teenage years. I became a paying supporter of my favorite climate journalists and creators (Hot Take, Drilled News, and HEATED) and entered their community on Twitter. I donated to fundraising calls from sources I trusted. And most recently, I joined my local Sierra Club chapter and volunteered as chairperson of local outreach and advocacy initiatives.

This isn’t a fairy tale or an equation with a neat solution. Not everything I try is successful. I’m an unskilled gardener, so sometimes I kill my plants by accident. I admire so much about environmental organizations, but they are made of human beings and therefore have flaws. Going to club meetings (now on Zoom) is inconvenient, and group action often feels excruciatingly slow. Ideas move quickly on Twitter, but the site is designed to hook me, tank my self-esteem, and keep my face glued to my phone. Whenever I realize I’m craving novelty rather than the words of specific people, I have to cut myself off for awhile. As a privileged person with a home and securely-employed partner, giving money is an important action for me. However, my mind is in a constant tug-of-war between my ingrained scarcity mindset and a desire to buy an easy way out of guilt. Since Twitter at times feels like an endless fundraising plea, there are days I can’t handle the tension.

Yet it’s undeniable that when I take a step forward, I reap huge rewards. That frustrating first club meeting led to new local friends. While engagement on Twitter can lead to stress, or to apologies for mistakes I make, it has also led me to relationships with incredible people. Because I pay for subscriptions, resources from amazing women that make me smarter and bring me calm drop straight into my inbox. My amateur front-yard garden has yielded hundreds of conversations with neighbors. Recently, an elderly friend left five tomato seedlings and a note with his cell phone number on my front porch. We had never talked before he walked past while I was weeding. Now I text him every time I have a question about soil or bugs.

The tremendous joy that has come into my life this year is wildly out of proportion to the time, energy, and money I’ve put in.

Your life is different from mine in a million ways. I can’t tell you what you should do to tackle climate injustice. If you’re a regular person like me, though, and you want to do more but don’t know how to start, I have some advice.

First, find leaders you haven’t focused on before, especially women and other people on the margins of mainstream attention, who envision a future where everyone can flourish. Spend time reading and listening to their ideas. Then think hard about your specific self and life, and what you could do this week or month. Then try it, and keep an eye out for the next thing. You won’t be able to do everything, but you will be able to do something now, and another thing soon, and another after that.

You are welcome in the climate movement, in your messy human context, and you can help. I believe your life will be better if you try.