When I was a girl, the book Diet for a Small Planet was published. Frances Moore Lappé’s book argued for vegetarianism because eating meat is harmful to the environment and human health. I read the book, experimented with recipes, and learned how complete proteins are made with grains, legumes, and nuts.
Even 55 years ago, scientists knew Planet Earth would be too crowded to feed all human beings. As a 12 year old, I could imagine what my life might look like over its trajectory, but more importantly, the places in the world without the resources the United States has seemed more at risk. The book led to me becoming a vegetarian at a young age.
Some years later, when I was sixteen, I was given the opportunity to attend a UNICEF conference in New York City at its headquarters across from the United Nations. It was exciting and heady to be chosen because I’d spent my childhood taking an orange cardboard box from house to house asking for money for UNICEF, an international organization advocating for children.
Today, UNICEF’s response centers grapple with how the global climate crisis puts about one billion (about half) of the children in the world in danger of not having food or water. We’ve seen and read about higher frequencies and intensities of droughts, floods, wildfires, hurricanes and other extreme weather events, which have endangered communities and forced children, with or without their families, to migrate.
“In the Caribbean alone, the number of children displaced by extreme weather events increased six-fold in just five years,” UNICEF reports on its website.
Extreme weather events have been hitting close to home. Wildfires north and west of the Great Lakes Region have brought smoke that has at times been so thick, it’s hard to read highway signs. Air quality has sometimes been poor for days, interrupting our ability to be active outdoors. Just in the last month or so, Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton have arrived on our coastlines with great ferocity, the wind and water damage wiping out communities, even as far north as Asheville, North Carolina, which is four hundred miles from the Gulf Coast.
Climate deniers long held that the weather has cycles that are not manmade climate change or global warming. The only people who can deny that the Earth is warming up and causing extreme weather are those who are ill-informed. Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth came out in 2006, but many people didn’t watch it — they didn’t want to know. Today, climate deniers seem determined to ignore it, at the risk of inaction. Vice President Gore’s frightening concern about the Earth’s warming was backed up by a chart that showed Earth’s temperature rising up at a moderate rate and then shooting up exponentially. I’ll never forget my realization that it would happen in my lifetime.
It IS happening in my lifetime. I look ahead with dread as I consider what my grandchildren’s lives might be like in 60-70 years. For this reason, climate change may be our biggest issue. It increases migration, puts pressure on the economy, destroys homes and property, affects food and water availability, encourages disease, wipes out species of animals, takes away our tree canopies, increases our housing shortages, puts insurance companies out of business, and robs people of the ability to live lives that matter.
I feel the delicate balance of nature as I notice fewer lightning bugs, bees and birds. I know things are changing when coyotes appear in my backyard and when I read about bears entering residential areas to find food. I note that we used to plant our gardens after Memorial Day and now we can plant in early May. Our snowblower rarely comes out of the garage. As the oceans rise from de-glacierization, nothing else will matter but survival. We’re now beginning to understand the urgency. At this point, it’s more important to save the planet than save our country. You may be feeling that way as well.
Finally, after another record-breaking summer, we need to know where our presidential candidates stand on environmental issues. One political party wants to regulate and incentivize to restrain climate change, the other would ignore or deny there’s an issue. Harris was an early sponsor of the Green New Deal, a sweeping series of proposals meant to swiftly move the U.S. to fully green energy. The Trump campaign’s mantra, according to The Cleveland Plain Dealer, is “Drill, Baby, Drill,” and has cast climate change as a hoax. He would increase oil drilling on public lands and would re-exit the Paris Climate Accords.
As individuals, many of us are giving money to nonprofits like the Sierra Club, and we’re recycling, using less plastic, conserving water, and growing our own food. In this election year, it is critical that we get out there and vote for the presidential candidate who cares most about saving the planet. CNN recently reported that “a second Democratic administration will continue implementing Biden’s climate bill and defend many of Biden’s marquee climate rules against legal challenges.” The nonpartisan Rhodium Group found that while the U.S. isn’t on track to hit Biden’s goal of slashing emissions in half by 2030, it could surpass that goal by 2035, if we keep going in the right direction. Cutting emissions in the power sector will be essential to U.S, climate goals, a Rhodium analyst told CNN, “It will matter who’s in control of the EPA.”
Even so, there’s hope either way. The Economist wrote in its article “On energy and climate, Trump and Harris are different by degrees,” that “green subsidies will probably survive Mr. Trump’s re-election, and Big Oil will probably do just fine under Ms. Harris.” Let’s not just hope, let’s vote for the Earth to heal, for the human race to do what’s right and end the suffering that’s sure to continue unless we become radical.