Long Walks On Leafy Streets

3/11/2014 Boulevar Luis Ferre, Ponce, Puerto Rico
Last night I watched part of the all night session on climate change in the US senate. Sen. Reid of Nevada mentioned the Dalai Lama’s plea for Congress to address climate change. In fact on the Dalai Lama’s website there is an excerpt of a talk by him in 1990, 16 years before Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.” In it he talks about how the permanent snow in Tibet has been getting sparser and sparser. Many religious groups and leaders have been talking about our moral obligation to fight climate change. Here in this area I have been supporting a group called Greater Washington Interfaith Power and Light that works with churches and other faith communities to adopt environmentally friendly practices and preach about the need to protect the environment.
I have made it the goal of my life to do whatever I can to fight climate change. Not just because of my love of nature but also because India and other developing countries are going to be most affected by climate change.
At the same time I am also learning how difficult it is for people to understand the seriousness of climate change and appreciate the urgent need to act on it. Today I was talking to my mother about climate change. It was a beautiful, warm day. Spring had just arrived over the weekend, finally. My parents had arrived at our home on Sunday. I was driving her around to get some groceries. She remarked that it was much warmer inside the car compared to outside. I told her about the greenhouse effect and how that was causing global warming and climate change. Immediately she responded, “but it has been much colder this year!” Certainly true, as I have been saying on previous posts. I then told her how it is the average temperature that matters, and that many more places on the earth have been warmer than average than there have been places that had colder than average winters.
This is the main difficulty when dealing with climate change. It is hard for people to understand even in the absence of the vast propaganda campaign by the oil, gas and coal industry that has more wealth than most of the countries of the world. Even when they understand it, it is difficult for people to act on it because that means changing their behavior. Cheap oil, gas and coal enable people to live in a certain level of comfort while paying less for it. People like to have big powerful cars in which they can drive their family and big houses heated and cooled by electricity. They cannot accept that they have to reduce their comfort level in order to tackle a problem that they don’t understand much less experience.
But the good news is that more and more people have been becoming aware of the problem. More and more countries are planning to take aggressive action to increase use of clean energy and reduce their carbon emissions. It is getting cheaper by the day to produce electricity from solar and wind energy. Engineers have been developing technologies to produce more energy efficient homes and cars. The sale of electric and hybrid cars have been increasing fast. So people may be able to maintain their lifestyle without harming the planet. But it will be best if we can change our technology and change our lifestyle at the same time. No matter how sustainable a lifestyle is, as long as you are using machines and energy you are using the resources of the planet.
I am by nature an optimistic person. Just as the arrival of spring brings sunshine and more pleasant weather and new life to the earth I am confident that the coming years will bring a change in attitude among people and with it a healing of this beautiful planet.

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