Blog Action Day: Climate Change? It’s Personal For Me

Today I’m joining 8,000+ bloggers from 144 countries, reaching 11 million viewers to chime in one a single important global issue of climate change for Blog Action Day, and want to share with the world why this topic is personal for me.

While green living is popular, fashionable and trendy right now (hurray!), I’ve actually spent a lot of my own life being

green and supporting a variety of environmental movements, writing about environmental issues and absolutely loving nature to the point of clapping when I see an ocean wave crashing against the shore, marveling when the sunlight hits against green leaves and makes an almost translucent effect, and crying when an eco-disaster destroys part of the world, from the Exxon Valdez oil spill to the icebergs melting and killing the habitat of polar bears.

Here are some of the very personal reasons why I’m in love with nature and deeply, emotionally concerned about the impact of climate change on the environment.

Reason #1: I Lived In A Tent

When I was a baby, back in 1967, my parents found themselves suddenly homeless. Dad was a musician and had a great gig for a time working for an orchestra in Maine. When the contract came to an end, he didn’t have another gig lined up, and couldn’t afford the house they were renting.

We lived near the fisherman docks on the coast at this time, and Dad loved hanging out with the boat builders. One of his friends offered a patch of land in a boat yard that we could camp in for the summer, and Dad jumped on it – moving the three of us into a tent on the property. My Mom had never camped before in her life and was terrified of snakes. The mosquitoes were insane and apparently I

was covered in bites. We ate amazingly well, as everyday the fishermen gave us lobster – because at that time they couldn’t sell it on the market for some reason. I don’t remember it really (I was about 1 years old) but family members still talk to me about it, and my parents tell me these stories of how we lived off the land and got help from the community that summer. To this day I am in love with sleeping outside in a tent. I’m so happy being snuggled up, in the outdoors, in the woods or on a beach somewhere, where beautiful nature is all around.

If the climate changes, will the memories my family has of the coast of Maine just be memories? Will the coast of Maine be flooded and those fishermen's villages destroyed? Climate change, I take it personally!

Reason #2: My Grandfather Taught Me To Respect Nature

Often in the summers as a child, my family would join my grandparents in visiting the Adirondacks. Grandpa was

researching and writing a book about the great Adirondack explorer and surveyor Verplanck Colvin, and we’d join

my grandparents on adventures through the woods “bushwhacking” to find long forgotten survey marks left by

Colvin in the deepest woods. We also climbed the high peaks of the Adirondacks to find Colvin’s survey markers,

and at the tops of these incredible mountains were often endless rocks that you had to scramble up to get to the

peak. On these rocks grew lichen. As kids, we paid little attention to where we stepped and often trampled across

the lichen. We would also rip up some of it from its precious place clinging to the rocks, because we were curious

about it. Grandpa scolded us often and told us the story of the lichen plants that were thousands of years old, and

may have lived on the rocks since the time of the dinosaurs. His story made us think, and we then made a game

of trying not to step on the lichen. Grandpa also taught us repetitively the “carry it in carry out” philosophy for every

time we entered the woods. He spent most of his life as a Boy Scout Troop leader and brought many children into

the woods for camping trips and environmental educational excursions. To this day, now in his late nineties, he

looks over pictures of the Adirondack mountains that Colvin surveyed, and shows people his book. To this day, I

think about lichen, and still utter the phrase “carry it in, carry it out!”

Maybe if we all uttered the simple catchy phrase "carry it

in, carry it out" we could make a difference toward

climate change?

Reason #3: I Was A Reporter Covering Environmental Issues

For a number of years I had the best job of my life – working as a small town newspaper reporter in upstate New York. As a reporter, I covered everything for the community from cop reports to school board meetings to wacky stories, such as a woman who had a giant puffball growing in her garden that looked like a face. I loved it. Absolutely loved it. The rural area I was covering for news had many environmentally sensitive issues impacting it, with New York City pressing itself further north there were many land development concerns and the area was filled with fragile eco-systems that were under threat. I was an eye to all of these issues. I wrote a series of articles about the Wallkill River in upstate New York, and explored all the environmental threats from farming, to industrial waste to general pollution that threatened this river. For this I won an award, and got the attention of then Governor Mario Cuomo who cited it as an example in one of his speeches. I didn’t have to cover environmental issues to the extent that I chose to, but I made it my focus because of my love of the natural world.

 

There are many, many, more deeply personal reasons why I love the environment, but the above are three of my own reasons why I feel strongly about the issue we are all facing of climate change. I’m sure that the 8,000+ bloggers writing posts today also have intensely personal associations with the natural world, and I’m interested in reading some of the other posts that people share for Blog Action Day. Many people are going to write about the upcoming gathering of world leaders in Copenhagen for the United Nations Climate Change Conference and maybe if those world leaders give some contemplation of personal memories they have because of experiences in the natural world, they will care a lot more about climate change and do a lot more to make it stop happening.

 

I’m also interested in your personal stories about climate change here on Vox.com, so please join in today and register your blog at www.blogactionday.org

 

Concerned about climate change,

-Lisa

*The above images were found on Flickr and credit goes to:

Polar Bear:

Greenz4u’s

http://www.flickr.com/photos/80079525@N00/

Coast of Maine:

Ken Lund http://www.flickr.com/photos/kenlund/

 

Freeduh2’s Photo

http://www.flickr.com/photos/26862761@N03/