An aerial view shows New York City in a haze-filled sky as seen from the Empire State Building observatory on June 7. Yuki Iwamura/Associated Press
I’m grateful to the Portland Press Herald for its courage in publishing the recent editorial on the local effects of global climate change (“Our View: The effects of the global climate crisis will be local,” June 12). Using powerful language and images, your piece urges us to embrace the reality of the apocalyptic smoke from Nova Scotia’s wildfires that shrouded New York and other cities, and names a source of this smoke: our continued dependence on fossil fuels.
The image you published of New York’s skyline shrouded in the early-morning sunlight with gray-yellow smoke is one we all want to turn away from. And there will be more similar images this summer as the warmer flow of El Niño air moves over the Pacific, dries out swaths of vegetation and raises temperatures to almost unbreathable levels. And again, we will all want to turn away, as the images will scare us and at the same time make us feel helpless.
As the editorial suggested, the unfolding of catastrophic weather events is a global problem. It is caused by so many players well beyond my control: Big Oil; the big banks like Citi, Wells Fargo, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase, which fund new oil infrastructure; big meat producers like Tyson and Cargill.
Give me a burger and a beer, and stop showing me these images! I’m just one little person trying to get my lawn mowed before the rain comes. All those smart people who invented AI will surely come up with some technology to save me. What can I do in the face of this? Nothing, right?
I spent 50 years as a psychotherapist helping people find answers to problems that felt overwhelming and out of their control. Depression, anxiety, addictions: All rise out of feelings of helplessness, or what my profession came to call “lack of agency.” Now, at the end of my career, I have pivoted from working with individuals on unresolved family, career or self-esteem issues, to the question of what we, as ordinary individuals with lawns to mow and kids to feed, can do in the face of this terrifying global problem.
Action is the antidote to despair. This is the sentence we must mutter to ourselves each time we read about the how much faster the ice in the Arctic is melting or the Gulf of Maine is warming or, when, sometime soon, that smoke – perhaps from a fire here in Maine – is what we wake to outside our windows.
Here in Freeport, a group of us have formed a grassroots collective action climate organization, FreeportCAN. We CAN eat less meat, put heat pumps in our houses, solar on our roofs, mow less lawn, buy less stuff, hunt the thrift shops for cool recycled clothes. We can come together as a community and dispel our feelings of helplessness and despair. And in the process, we can develop deeper connections to our neighbors and our town government.
Last Saturday night – in the cold and rain – we held a community potluck supper at Mallet Barn at Wolfe Neck to kick off our six-week Eat Plants challenge. Neighbors cooked for each other and shared recipes. We had a great playlist of music about food, and some of us danced on the old barn floor to Fats Domino’s “Blueberry Hill.”
Action is the antidote to despair!
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