Living in the COVID-19 World and Beyond #9: The Climate Emergency and Me

I recently attended a weekend workshop (on Zoom of course) about the climate emergency.

I’m not going to repeat here the facts that I heard that explain why this is an emergency and why we need to take action to dramatically reduce our dependency on fossil fuels.

Instead, I want to talk about the journey that attending the workshop initiated within me.

The workshop facilitator encouraged us to look at our personal history of our relationship with the earth, with trees and plants, with animals, and with the whole natural world.

As I look back at my early life, I grew up feeling quite disconnected from nature and the environment.   As a child, I did not have any experiences of going to the ocean, planting a garden, going to lakes, hiking, camping, or fishing.   These were not activities that my mom and  dad were much interested in.  I grew up in a downtown area and there was not encouragement to be in or to appreciate nature.   

I remembered as a young person that I would kill ants and bugs.   I know there are people who when they see an ant on the sidewalk, they divert their path in order to avoid it.  That was not my way.  Instead, I would seek out ants … I would gladly stomp on them and squish them and destroy their colonies.   I even remember getting together with a young friend and systematically using water to drown large colonies of ants.

As I  remembered my early disregard for trees, flowers, insects, and wildlife, I realized that I grew up not caring about any of it.   I felt like I didn’t care about trees and flowers, that I didn’t care about birds and wildlife, and that the environment could all be destroyed and I wouldn’t care.

It is no wonder that I have been slow to become a climate change activist!

As I have reflected on my early life and tried to make sense of my disregard about nature and talked with others, I have found it important to connect my personal experience with the history of antisemitism.   One impact of antisemitism, as Jews were forced from one land to the next, often forbidden from owning land, and encouraged to assimilate, is that we Jews as a people often lost our connection to the land of our origins and our sense of belonging.   It has been very useful to me that reclaiming my connection with nature is not only a personal struggle but also a broader effort to overcome the effects of oppression.

More recently I have had some positive experiences of connecting with nature.  For example, when as an adult some deer would wander onto our lawn, I would enjoy looking at them and talking towards them as they watched me or when I would swim in a lake on Cape Cod and watch the breeze carry the sunlight through the trees.  This past summer I read the book The Overstory, and I started looking at trees with more sense of connection and caring.

I realize that as much as my mind understood the facts of the climate emergency, my heart was lagging far far behind.   For me, part of the work of becoming an effective climate activist (which I want to be) is to reclaim how fully connected I truly am with nature.

How does one reclaim one’s connection with nature when one’s early life was devoid of understanding that the natural world even matters?

Some thoughts that I have had for myself include:

·       Taking more walks and not just talking on the phone while I do so but actually looking at what I see

·       Growing something.   A friend suggested that I get a dixie cup and fill it with dirt and plant a bean.  I realized  that I did not even know for sure where beans come from until I remembered the story Jack and the Beanstalk.  Clearly, I have a significant knowledge gap!

·       Given the ongoing limits of pandemic living, watch more nature programs.   I recently watched My Octopus Teacher and found it fascinating and filled with information that was all new to me.

I will close the distance between my mind and my heart and realize that it is true that I do care deeply about people, our planet and beyond, and that it makes sense to act consistent with that caring in every way that I can and be a climate activist.

In future blogs, I’ll write about two initiatives that I’m just starting towards converting my concern about the climate emergency into action.