Creation Care Mom

Happy Wednesday my readers,

I’m sorry that I was not around to greet you on Monday. I had two-fold reasons. First, I was shifted into the Treasurer position on our HOA board in August and have felt like I’ve been playing catch up ever since. Over the last two weeks, I’ve been spending most of my limited spare hours working on the HOA budget proposal for next year as well as filling out paperwork as needed for homeowners/lenders/title folk to complete a home sale. It’s felt super chaotic at times. I definitely feel like I’m in over my head!

But secondly, it’s been hard emotionally to sit down and write. There is so much climate chaos happening in the world right now. It’s bad. It depressing. It’s anxiety inducing. Repeated disasters leading to one humanitarian crisis after another. Hurricane Helene left 500 hundred miles of destruction and took over 200 lives. And now, Hurricane Milton is set to make landfall tonight in Florida. The second monster hurricane in just 2 weeks. Milton broke the record of the fastest hurricane to go from Category 1 to Category 5. This storm is expected to bring widespread devastation, record storm surge, and inevitably lives lost. It’s size and intensity are driven by extremely warm gulf waters that were only possible because of human caused global warming. So what do I write when it all looks awful?

It is easy to get bogged down in the worst of climate news. So I have to take a step back sometimes and look for hope.

Hope looks like action. Hope looks like stories. Hope looks like change. Hope looks like kids.

One of my favorite ways to find hope it to read Katherine Hayhoe’s weekly newsletter. If you haven’t subscribed yet, you can here. That link will also take you to the last 20 or so of her newsletters. She writes in a clear format of Good News, Not-so-good news, and What You Can Do. The good news section is always a place to find hope. In her most recent letter, she writes about how climate education is so impactful. These could be college courses that are required for all majors or expanding the amount of climate change content at the middle and high school level. In Katherine’s book, Saving Us, she tells of an experiment where middle school students learned about climate change, and were able to shift their parent’s views!

This is one of the reasons that the elections for your local and state school boards matters so much. In fact, here in Kansas they might be one of the most important elections of the year!

A few colleges have introduced requirements for graduation that include a climate course. UC San Diego, as of this fall, will now require all incoming freshman to take a climate course. In a insightful way, they have designed and approved courses to meet this requirement across multiple disciplines. Reworking existing upper division classes for specific majors to include more climate content and climate engagement. There reasoning is this, all jobs in the future will be impacted by climate change in some way. It finds it’s way into media and art, creates new challenges for urban planning, fuels expanding health crises, creates new ethical questions, and calls for new engineering solutions. To read more about the new requirement and see a list of courses, check out their recent article!

I also see hope in the news every day! New research and solutions receive funding which gives us more tools to reduce emissions or we hear that worldwide emissions should peak this year or next.

It’s worth remembering that some of global consequences of warming are here and here to stay, but every bit of carbon emissions that we cut matters. The Paris agreement aims for 1.5 degree Celsius with 2 degrees as the upper limit, and most days we hear that we will miss those targets. It’s still important to remember that a 2.3 degree world looks a whole lot different from a 3.5 degree world. Every bit matters. And almost every day you can find progress. Sometimes it’s simply about the time it takes to find the hope.

At home, I find hope in my son because I know how much more I’m willing to do to create a more livable planet for him. I am more willing to give things up, to change my everyday living, for him. I believe in the power of mothers (and fathers) and the power of women who mother kids not their own, to change the equation because of love. Love is a crazy thing that will move us farther and faster. Economics matter, but love will move us beyond expectations.

So whose life are you fighting for? What legacy are you leaving for those you care about? Who is your why?