(CNN) — Dear River
It’s been just over two years since. you joined Our Little Blue MarbleYou’ve been through the Milky Way, now you can say “Bill Weir, I want banana smoothie,” it is time to learn the difference between “Happy birthday” and “Happy anniversary”.“Happy Earth Day!”
Both are in April. One has Hopalong Andy cake and Hopalong Andy while the other is frustrated with humanity. Both involve balloons. Only on Earth Day, we can pick up their deflated pieces from a beach or hang them around a protest sign. March down Broadway
My boyhood was so horribly aware of the problems caused by an economy built on dirty fuels and planned obsolescence that leaders from both political parties agreed to create the Environmental Protection Agency and the Clean Air and Water Acts. This will become adorable as you learn more about Congress of your birth.
It was easier to be green by the 20th Earth Day, 1990. Advice of the DayTo save seagulls, ask the post office to stop sending junk mail. Meanwhile, 163 million tonnes of trashThey were left by Earth Day festival-goers in Central Park.
“These people didn’t leave as many behind as people who attend food festivals do,” said a sanitation official. “It was an environmentally sensitive group.”
We were all focused on our worst mistakes as a species. But none of us could see the billions of tons of pollution from fossil fuels that is destroying our planet and threatening our skies. The consequences were too subtle to notice.
No more.
A few weeks after your birth, we entered a hurricane year so active that we ran out alphabet letters to name them. The storms that followed a year later were also named. Even more expensive.
The day you learned how to open kitchen cupboards 15 Giant Sequoias trees It couldn’t withstand 2021, after being tossed by the California winds for 2,000+ years.
And the week before your 2nd birthday, it was 50°F above normal near the North Pole. This should have been alarming enough. However, it was also alarming. 70°F above normal near the South Pole.Because they are, per definition, polar opposites, THIS SHOULD NEVER HAPPEN. It can only get worse.
River, at the current carbon pollution levels River, when are you my ageScience predicts It will feel as though it has traveled over 500 miles south for the average American city. Anchorage could be warmer by 24°F and almost 360% wetter while Washington D.C. would have the heat and humidity of Greenwood, Mississippi. Tucson could jump 10°F while losing almost 40% of its already precious precipitation, putting it in the category of Mexican towns in the Sonoran Desert, and Jacksonville, Florida will feel like the northern border of Belize.
We don’t know how accurate these models are because, as scientists like to say: we don’t have spare Earths to test with. This is it. The test subjects are you, your sister, Matilda (your friend) and the rest of your neighborhood scooter gang.
You’ll wonder, when you look back, what we did with this information other than recycling junk mail and six-packs for seagull-safe six packs. But you should know that there were many good people who were willing to help. “What can we do?” I’ve heard this in many an airport, and at one point I started to reply with a list.
1. Get mad.
2. Get ready.
3. As many friends as possible.
Step 1 is straightforward. Step 1 is simple. First, assess your own eco-anxiety (a term that has jumped by 4,290% in 2019). Then, remember that scientists at the largest oil company in the world were eco anxious back then. “Saturday Night Fever,” was in theaters. Internal documents prove that they predicted exactly what is happening now.
Realizing that their bosses at the C-suites have chosen not to reveal anything to anyone for decades, your anger will become a renewable resource. It could fuel any number peaceful actions, including urban greening, lobbying in the statehouses, and volunteering in places where there is environmental injustice. Follow your passion and take action, as the climate crisis affects everyone, everywhere.
Yellowstone National Park was created and preserved because of nature photography. Your photographs of nature could help the planet. CNN’s Bill Weir shares his tips for improving your nature photography.
This feeds into Steps 2, and 3.
FEMA 2019 It has completely changed the way we think about things.They assess the risk of flooding across the country. Instead of focusing only on storm prediction and elevation they also considered 78 socioeconomic variables, such as income inequality, high speed internet access and church membership. These factors determine the speed of recovery. Therefore, towns 50 miles away were deemed less vulnerable because they have more trust in their communities.
We have created a pie chart by throwing Earth out of balance. It has three slices: adaptation (bracing to solve the problem), mitigation (stopping or addressing the problem), and pain. Although the relative sizes of each slice are yet to be determined a strong, organized community can help ease all three. Polluters are more terrified than anything.
Two years have passed since your birth. They have been full of insurrections and impeachment, as well as a pandemic, an insurrection, insurrection and a war in Eastern Europe. There has also been a deliberate erosion of truth. Add in industrial-sized addiction, distraction, and depression, and ’22 was… a lot.
This is why I realized that focusing on peer-reviewed doom all the time is dangerous for your health. We must keep our eyes on the prize for success and sanity. BothThe End of Life as We Know It AndLife as We Wish It Could Be. It won’t save what we love but it will help. Buckshot BlastsYou can find better ideas.
What about Earth Day? Consider this: What if you showed Mom that you love her every Mother’s Day? Even if you didn’t give her pain a second thought throughout the year, you would only be hurting your self.
Love,
Dad
