Blog Posts

Breaking up is hard to do

1/13/2018

The demise of my relationship with the Internal Combustion Engine

One of my goals in recent years has been to end my over-dependency on fossil fuels before I turn 40. We’ve had a particularly toxic relationship since I got my first car over two decades ago…

I’ve known for a while that my relationship with the Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) had run its course. After all, cars have changed a lot since I started driving, and so have I!

At age 16, my Ford Bronco was largely a source of entertainment that I took off-roading in the deserts of Eastern Washington with friends (much to my parents’ dismay). But now, cars just remind me of climate change, poor air quality, stress and obesity.

As I sit idling in M50 traffic, I can’t help but think about how much cars alter the planet and my daughter’s future, and I’m ashamed of the energy I wasted driving through deserts as a teenager.

The spark between ICE and I was most definitely gone, but I wasn’t quite ready to throw in the towel this year.

I know the future of transport lies primarily in public transport, walking and cycling but unfortunately my part of the country has patchy infrastructure and so while I don't need a car on a daily basis, I do still require one a few times a week for basic errands and childcare.

I had a little 2008 Nissan Micra that served those purposes as my faithful companion for a decade. At least she was low on emissions and I tried to use her as little as possible. My mechanic assured me she wouldn’t leave me anytime soon...

But something went gravely wrong last November on the M7 on a late-night trip back from Kerry– first a rattle, then a bang and smoke began pouring out of her bonnet as the whole car shook violently. It felt like her engine literally dropped out onto the motorway. My ICE was mostly dead.

Cue my knights in shining armour – My local mechanic, Darren Darker of A+ Service Centre had me in a loaner car the very next day while I awaited diagnosis.

When reports came back that my Micra was beyond repair, Renault’s Paddy Magee sent me a car to get me through Christmas while I decided what to do next. Chivalry is not yet dead, ladies!

I knew I couldn’t in good conscience fall into bed with another ICE, but I felt unprepared for the radical commitment of becoming an electric vehicle (EV) owner...

I test drove the usual suspects over the next few weeks. As the leading EV sold in Ireland for the past four years, the Nissan Leaf was my first port of call.

2018 Nissan Leaf

My dad was visiting from the USA at the time and disapproved of his daughter’s irrational desire for an EV. – “Too risky and unreliable!”, he exclaimed. After the test drive, with boyish wonderment, he said he’d “seen the future” and marveled at the superior technology of the EV. With far less moving parts and maintenance requirements than the ICE, the EV acquired the elusive parental seal of approval!

I test drove the Hyundai Ioniq too. With its autonomous driving features and sporty cockpit, it definitely had the wow factor. Driving an EV was the closest I’d come to driving a sports car, and it was exciting.

The guilty thoughts that once plagued me behind the wheel of my ICE began to melt away with the space age whiz of the electric motor. Driving felt fun again.

At the end of the day, however, what mattered most was size… I mean, range! 😉 I’d heard about the affliction of range anxiety that can affect EV owners, so I wanted the biggest range I could get.

2018 Hyundai Ioniq

Without the means to afford a Tesla (nor the patience for their waiting list), the Renault Zoe was the next best option with a theoretical 400km range (disclaimer: provided you drive like a granny on a windless, flat road in summer).

Renault’s Jeremy Warnock gave me the sage advice to borrow a Zoe for a few days to see how she could foster a term he coined, "range confidence" instead of anxiety.

I took Zoe for a spin around the block to learn about her features before we headed off on our own. It was an awkward first date as I struggled to get my head around her foreign personality – so silent I thought she was dead, yet so responsive I felt like a clumsy fool behind her wheel.

I drove Zoe from Bray into Dublin city centre the following morning to see how she managed a day in my life (though normally I would take the DART).

Once I got used to Zoe’s silence, it was bliss. In fact, I felt like we were floating rather than driving. Her touch screen dashboard, showing where energy was going through the car in real time, was also fascinating and made me drive far more efficiently than I ever did in my ICE.

If Zoe could make me a happier, better person while enduring Dublin traffic, I knew she was the car for me.

After a round trip commute from Bray to Dublin in peak traffic and cold weather, Zoe’s battery dropped from 70% to less than 40% charge.

Without a home charge point, I was dependent on ESB charge points to “refuel”. A friend suggested I join some of the EV owner Facebook groups for support, but I was surprised how much of the conversation was about poor and broken infrastructure. I’ve heard repeatedly that Ireland has some of the best EV infrastructure in Europe, but there does seem to be a problem in some areas with charge points breaking or being vandalized and not repaired.

Thank God for Sean Smith, who gave me a crash course in ecar infrastructure with this ESB map and the power of Facebook!

Zoe’s GPS told me there were four charge points within a kilometre of my house, but much to my dismay, the fast charger at Bray’s Tesco was listed as broken, leaving just the three slow charge points.

To make matters worse, it turns out there are at least three different types of chargers with different voltages and sockets in Ireland.

I found myself trying to recall high school physics to figure out which once I could go to and feeling a bit dumb and overwhelmed!

I can’t believe there isn’t a legal standard in place for charging sockets and plugs. Have we learned nothing from proprietary mobile phone chargers?!

I started to feel anxious... It wasn’t Zoe’s fault, she was great. Maybe I just wasn’t ready for such a dramatic change in my life. Maybe we needed to wait a few years until EVs and I were more mature. Maybe Zoe was too good for me and deserved someone smarter, who remembered more about currents, voltage and ohms…

Zoe’s GPS guided me to the nearest appropriate charge point on Bray sea front and I decided to use the time she was recharging to recharge myself with a run and a coffee.

I felt like a bit of a plonker pulling up to the charge point, getting my giant cable out of the boot, and trying to figure out how to plug it all in. I didn’t like the attention and feeling eyes on me as I struggled with my first charge.

Fortunately, it was all pretty idiot proof with the Ecar charger clearly telling me what to do at each stage. Zoe charged away and it didn’t cost me a single cent!

Fantasies of a life free of petrol costs filled my head while I ran... Maybe Zoe and I really could live happily ever after.

Luckily, Wicklow County Council (unlike Dublin City Council) gives EV owners up to three hours of free parking while on charge because it took that long to get Zoe back up to full strength.

I made a mental note that a home charge point would be essential if Zoe and I were to commit to a long-term relationship! SEAI currently refunds the cost of installation so this isn’t an obstacle for us.

The most surprising thing about being in Zoe’s company was the reaction from other people. The number of passers-by that gave me thumbs ups and nods of approval or stopped to ask questions about her was inspiring.

People were generally excited to see an EV and wanted to know more and that made me feel positive about the revolutionary low-carbon transition Ireland has to make.

I have a hunch the reason EV uptake isn’t higher is not due so much to limits in technology or lack of incentives, but rather because of limits in public awareness.

Car companies are focused on selling their particular EV to a niche group of techy or environmentally conscious consumers, but no one is selling EVs as a whole to the public though that is part of what it will take to decarbonise our transport system in the next three decades.

Maybe everyone needs a trial run like I had with Zoe to alleviate apprehension before they can fully commit. - Just like a long courtship before marriage, it makes sense to properly try before you buy!

I've just committed to a 2018 Black Renault Zoe EV!!!

I’ll be honest – while I’m excited, I’m also a little nervous about the prospect of a long-term future with something I know so little about.

Breaking up with fossil fuels is hard to do, particularly when everyone else around you are still wedded to them!

Going electric feels like a radical change for me and there's still the problem that our grid is fed largely by fossil fuels, but I’m passionate about climate action so it would be hypocritical to stay with ICE when I have the opportunity to leave.

I always find I learn the most and change for the best from the scariest things in my life. Becoming dependent on relatively new EV infrastructure to get around is definitely in the moderately scary category for me, so the learning curve should be interesting to say the least...

Stay tuned for my adventures with Zoe, which I’ll continue to chronicle on this blog, for better or for worse...

Keep fighting the good fight!
-Cara

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Globalization's Uncomfortable New Truth

9/17/2017

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On September 9th, I was invited to speak at Sinn Fein’s annual summer school alongside an esteemed group of politicians, including Icelandic Pirate Party MEP Birgitta Jonsdottir – self-proclaimed Anarchist and “Poetician”; Greek Secretary of the Central Council of the Youth of Synaspismos, Nasos Iliopolous; and Sinn Fein MEP, Matt Carthy, on the topic of globalization.

Cara Augustenborg speaking at Sinn Fein's Summer School, Sept. 2017

Only the night before the event did I realize this is a rather intimidating task for me –During the last General Election, I was critical of Sinn Fein's (lack of) climate policies in their manifesto, so I wasn’t expecting a warm welcome.

Even the topic they asked me to speak about brought me out of my comfort zone because right now, in this crazy world of geopolitics, I find myself conflicted about the role of globalization in climate action…

Globalization creates the perfect storm

If you’d asked me about the role of globalization on climate change before Donald Trump became president of the U.S.A, it would be easy to asses. We’ve known for a long time that globalization generally increases greenhouse gas emissions. In 2004, The OECD reported that for every 1% increase in international trade, a 0.58% increase in carbon emissions is observed (though hopefully that figure is at least slightly lower now that countries are beginning to de-carbonize their energy system and move toward renewables).

We also know that the transport related to global trade currently contributes to 14% of global emissions, with shipping and aviation emissions (now accounting for 6% of global emissions) expected to double or treble by 2050. More worryingly, because most of our aviation and shipping occur between countries, they’re not included in the Paris Agreement and are thus making slow progress in any kind of emission reduction planning.

Plus, these new super trade agreements like TTIP, TTP and CETA all point to further risks to climate and environment through global trade – primarily through their inclusion of an investor dispute system or investor court system, which allow private corporations to sue governments if the governments make decisions that might compromise a company’s profits.

We’ve already seen companies like US oil company Lone Pine using NAFTA’s court system to challenge Quebec’s moratorium on fracking in 2012. That’s one example, but Canada is facing legal challenges of over $2.6 billion from US companies over their environmental protection laws and this is a huge risk from global trade agreements that included these investor court systems.

We also know that almost everything we need to do to address climate change is contrary to the globalization model, namely doing things like encouraging more local and seasonal food purchases and more local energy distribution based on renewables. And we know that the impacts of climate change – in the form of the kind of extreme weather we’ve seen recently -are amplified due to globalization. In other words, extreme weather that happens on one side of the globe now has economic impacts all over the world. We witnessed this during the Russian fires and drought in 2010, which resulted in a ban on wheat export and a spike in global food prices that had a disproportionate effect on people in other developing countries who spend a large percentage of their income on food. We may experience something similar now as parts of Western USA are in a state of emergency due to droughts and fires, some of which they are saying won’t be extinguished until snow falls in October.

An Uncomfortable New Truth

Clearly, globalization has a negative impact on climate change. Yet, as a result of Trump announcing U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement last June, we now find ourselves in this uncomfortable situation of looking to both global corporations (and individual States) to fill the U.S. leadership vacuum on climate action. For someone like me who has a general distrust of global corporations, this is almost as uncomfortable as hoping the leader of North Korea is a more rational actor that the current president of the United States (also something I’ve bizarrely found myself praying for in recent weeks).

Everything about climate change has become uncomfortable since Donald Trump became president – Last week, he stood outside an oil refinery in North Dakota congratulating himself about reopening the Keystone and Dakota pipelines, saying how bad the Paris Agreement was, and that burning oil was more environmentally friendly.

This was the most tragic moment in the history of climate action to date in my opinion, made all the more tragic because so many people were suffering the impact of Hurricane Harvey and Irma at the same time.

We find ourselves in this sad situation of no longer being able to count on the USA to lead global climate action, and what’s left is the hope that corporations will join the 159 countries who have ratified the Paris agreement (along with the US Climate Alliance of states who plan to continue to uphold its aims) to lead a revolution on the scale of the Industrial Revolution.

Corporations are doing it for themselves

Corporations are unlikely to act on climate for selfless reasons, but fortunately they have plenty of selfish interest to do so now. -Europe’s largest insurer, Allianz, reports climate change stands to increase insured losses on an average of 37 percent per year over the next decade and single year losses could top US$1 trillion, and that was before Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. World Bank President Jim Yong Kim has stated: “Every company, investor and bank that screens new and existing investments for climate risk is simply being pragmatic”. Insurers now acknowledge climate change is the main threat to their industry and the economy.

This technological transition is not just limited to the insurance sector. The 2017 report “Power Forward 3.0: How the largest U.S. companies are capturing business value while addressing climate change” found 63% of Fortune 100 companies and nearly half of all Fortune 500s have set one or more clean energy targets, with significant numbers of companies setting 100 percent renewable energy goals and science-based greenhouse gas reduction targets to align with the Paris Climate Agreement.

Last May, 30 high-profile CEOs encouraged the US President to honor the U.S. commitment to the Paris Agreement, perhaps because they saw the trend that solar power is becoming cheap enough to push coal and natural-gas plants out of business faster than previously forecast. The current political landscape in Washington may slow this boom, but a great transition from the Industrial Revolution is already there for any corporations who choose to grab it.

In the coming year, global efforts toward the next Industrial Revolution will ramp up, aided by the U.N. Paris Agreement. To depend on US corporations to lead this transition instead of the USA itself is less than ideal.

It certainly indicates we need to be even more wary of these new global trade agreements, which pay no heed to climate impacts and give corporations way too much power to obstruct climate action. However, the alternative now being proposed – to weaken international climate efforts to encourage the U.S. to remain in the Paris Agreement – would spell disaster for the climate. So, ironically (and just for now), I find myself advocating for the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to wash their hands of the Trump’s America and let States and corporations pave the way to a fossil free future instead.

What I learned at Sinn Fein Summer School

I was delighted Sinn Fein MEP Matt Carthy picked up on my concerns about trade agreements like TTIP and CETA in his own talk and was so well briefed on the issue of trade. It was a relief to see we have some representation in Europe who gets that these trade agreements would be a disaster for agricultural, health, labour and environmental interests in Europe and particularly in Ireland. However, I still didn’t see any sign of interest in the climate issue out of Sinn Fein leadership from my limited time at their summer school.

They hosted a fabulous debate between Sinn Fein TD Eoin O’Brion and the legendary Vincent Browne asking “Will Sinn Fein be the party to transform Ireland?” and while O’Brion proposed lots of plans to build social housing, not once did he mention the biggest transformation the world (and Ireland) will face in the next 30 years -to get off fossil fuels and adapt to a rapidly changing climate.

I can’t take any political party talking about “transformation” seriously if they don’t at least acknowledge the fossil free transition we’ve agreed to both in our own legislation and through our commitments under the U.N. Paris Agreement, so here’s hoping Sinn Fein (and all the other political parties in Ireland) have a few more “think ins” about real transformation before I read their next election manifestos.

Keep fighting the good fight!
-Cara

Special thanks to the organizers of Sinn Fein summer school for giving my daughter and I a warm West Cork welcome and to the Mills Inn for being so child-friendly! ;-)

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Plastic Paradise

5/21/2017

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This week, I was asked in to East Coast FM to have a chat with Declan Meehan about a report on the discovery of over 38 million piece of plastic on uninhabited Henderson Island located 5,000 km from the nearest population.

The plastic problem has received lots of media attention in the last few months, both internationally and in Ireland, so the latest report on Henderson Island doesn’t surprise me.

I’ve been following stories of the Great Pacific Garbage patch for years now (one of five marine garbage patches worldwide) and scheming ways to someday get out there to see it for myself. -If you ever wanted to witness the true scale of human impact on the planet, I can’t think of a bigger representation than an area of plastic “soup” that is alleged to be somewhere between the size of Texas to twice the size of the continental United States!

We’ve spread plastic globally, roughly doubling the amount of debris in the marine environment every decade. Plastic is being used more and more, not just in food packaging but also in clothing and items we think are paper-based like coffee cups. A report by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation in 2016 forecast there will be more plastic than fish in oceans by 2050! The Irish alone generate 35kg of plastic packaging waste each year, but worldwide only 10% of plastic waste is actually recycled.

Not only has our plastic waste migrated to uninhabited islands, but it’s also in the bellies of more than 200 marine species, including all sea birds. Plastic in the marine environment attracts algae growth and so it smells like krill to marine animals. They fill up on this plastic and then risk starvation due to a lack of calories and nutrition.

This plastic then goes back up the food chain when we consume seafood, including farm-raised species such as mussels, and water contaminated with micro-plastic which passes through filtration systems. Plastic acts as a hormone disruptor when it is injested, contributing to cancers and developmental disorders.

About 20% of marine trash comes from ships and offshore platforms while the rest comes from litter being blown into the sea, picked up by tides on the beach, or intentional garbage dumping. Ireland, as an island nation, is particularly susceptible to contributing and being impacted by this kind of pollution. However, as with most environmental problems in this country, we’re behind in how we’re dealing with it.

We’ve adapted to recycling very quickly in Ireland, but due to a lack of standardised practices, we don’t recycle well and our incinerator-focused waste system is more inclined to use plastic as a fossil fuel source to burn rather than to make new products.

Recycling is energy intensive and downright confusing, as I found out trying to manage the waste at Electric Picnic last summer. When it comes to saving our oceans and ourselves from plastic, we need to focus on reducing. You can start by buying reusable beverage containers made of things like silicon or stainless steel. Check out the Conscious Cup Campaign recently set up by an informal group of Irish citizens who are campaigning against single use disposable cups (of which we dispose of half a billion per year!), encouraging individuals to carry reusable cups and cafes to incentivise this by offering a discount and publicising it well. In Ireland, Starbucks already offers 35c off the cost of tea/coffee if you bring your own mug, which is equivalent to getting your 8th cup of coffee for free (better than your average loyalty card).

We need to urge retailers and wholesalers to use less packaging. In Germany, buyers remove all packaging at the shop and leave the retailer to dispose of it, which is a huge incentive to get retailers to reduce waste. In San Francisco, they’ve banned the sale of plastic bottles at public events to encourage people to bring their own containers. In France, they’ve banned the sale of all single use cutlery, plates and cups altogether.

Even here in Ireland, Friends of the Earth discovered huge success when we ran a deposit refund scheme on plastic cups and bottles, paying out 20 cents for every cup that was returned. In total, EUR 31,000 was given to those who returned cups. Over 150,000 cups stayed out of an incinerator and the arena grounds were practically devoid of plastic as a result.

One “eco-entrepreneur” earned over EUR 1,000 in refunds, covering the cost his festival ticket and leaving him with more than EUR 700 in spending money!

Last year, Cashel became the first town in Ireland to begin the journey to become a Zero Waste community to join over 200 cities and towns worldwide that aim to create little to no waste through waste prevention, reuse and repair, recycling and composting efforts. Expect to see lots of innovation coming out of Cashel in the next few years as they discover creative ways to convert waste into resources. Here’s hoping it becomes a model for the rest of Ireland to follow.

Zero Waste Cashel

Keep fighting the good fight!
-Cara

Coming Up: I'll be at Bloom in the Park June 1-5th showcasing Friends of the Earth's Postcard Nature garden at the main entrance. Find out what we're planning here and come say hi if you're visiting Bloom.

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Blog like nobody’s watching: The Verdant Yank’s One Year Anniversary

3/16/2017

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It’s hard to believe it’s already been one year since I launched The Verdant Yank blog on St. Patrick’s Day 2016. Honestly, the blog was born out of pure frustration. -There were stories that needed to be told but conventional media wasn’t giving me a platform to tell them, in part because conventional media is generally poor on environmental coverage but also because they had no interest in content from a “blow in” with a funny accent and even funnier last name. Hence, with some encouragement from friends, I decided to own the challenge and embark on my second blog ‘The Verdant Yank’ – Blogs on Ireland’s environment from my outlandish Irish-American perspective.

Those same friends thought I’d lost a few marbles when I accompanied my first blog on the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with an off-the-wall video that involved eating copious amounts of cream cake, but the blog was my laboratory and it was fun to see what kind of reaction letting out the cray-cray would get. If not on Paddy's Day, then when?!

Over the year, I’ve become more media savvy and found creative ways to get environmental stories into the mainstream Irish and international press. Thus, ‘The Verdant Yank’ has become a playground for a different type of writing – something more personal and cathartic. My musings in the mainstream press are things I think other people need to know, while what I write on the blog helps me work through my arguments and conflicting thoughts. The blog is my only platform to write about environmental problems in a deeply personal way, which seems to resonate with those looking for something different and authentic.

My motto for blogging is the same as my motto for dancing: Do it like nobody’s watching. -Drop the ego and insecurities and get funky!

Ironically, my blogs occasionally have more impact than mainstream content even though the latter reaches a wider readership. For example, during the Irish General Election of 2016, I wanted to analyze how Ireland’s political parties stacked up on climate policies in their manifestos, mainly to figure out who to vote for in my own constituency. Nonetheless, I decided to blog and vlog about it to save some other poor soul the trouble of reading nearly 700 pages of manifesto promises.

My effort featured on RTE News and the Irish Times with many people writing to thank me for doing the work so they didn’t have to. I made some enemies within a few political parties who weren’t too happy with my critical analysis, but I’m willing to bet they’ll dot their i’s and cross their t’s the next time they address climate change in their manifestos, and that’s the kind of impact I’d be really happy with.

Looking back on this year of blogging, I was curious to find out which blogs got the most attention. Overwhelmingly, it was a post I wrote after a train wreck of a TV appearance on TV3's 'Tonight with Vincent Browne' show last August. I’d been assured before I went on that the debate would be about Ireland’s response to climate change, not an archaic debate about the existence of climate change, but the minute we went live it was clear I’d been misled when the presenter started the show asking the audience “are you a believer?” as if the science of climate change was some kind of religious belief.

My colleagues and I valiantly argued against the token contrarian “communications consultant” but went away disappointed we didn’t get to tackle the real burning issue of the Irish government’s complacency on climate change.

In an effort to reclaim the debate, I took to the blog that night and vented my frustrations. The post, sarcastically titled "Long live the status quo!", went viral the next day though I suspected I’d never be invited back on Vincent Browne’s show again after expressing my opinion so publicly. Fair dues to the show’s producers, however. They invited me back on as a regular contributor to discuss the news headlines with Vincent Browne and I’m about to make my fourth appearance this coming Tuesday. It’s been an even better opportunity to bring environmental issues into everyday news and it’s a good learning experience to develop informed opinions beyond climate and environmental issues. A blog I expected to spell career suicide turned out to be an opportunity in disguise.

The biggest surprise of my year of blogging ‘The Verdant Yank’ was winning the Irish blog awards in the current affairs and politics category last year. I applied for that category along with the science category but had been disappointed when I didn’t make the short list for science, which seemed a more obvious fit, so I never expected to win an award in current affairs and politics. As it turned out, having an environmental blog nationally recognised as a current affairs issue was far more meaningful than having it recognised as an obvious science issue.

The award put my blog “on the map” and resulted in a lot of amazing opportunities, including getting recognized on the Irish Independent’s list of 20 "influencers" in Ireland’s response to climate change -a deeply satisfying moment of my career to date because it made all the trolling and frustration over the years worthwhile.

The Verdant Yank lives on (at least as long as I have a U.S. passport). I’m fuelled to keep writing by the wonderful comments I get from readers. Thanks to those of you who have reached out to let me know you’ve been inspired to ‘keep fighting the good fight’ through my work. Environmental advocacy can be a thankless vocation, so those comments mean more than you can imagine and keep me fighting the good fight too. In this world of dark skies, it’s nice that we have each other. :-)

Happy St. Patrick’s Day from The Verdant Yank and, as always, keep fighting the good fight!
-Cara

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What it means to miss New Orleans: An environmentalist’s view growing up below the sea

3/14/2017

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I spent ten of my formative years in The Big Easy -New Orleans, Louisiana or NOLA as we lovingly refer to it. My parents and I moved there on Mardi Gras day 1982, straight off the plane from two years in the Middle East.

We couldn’t have stepped into any more of a contrast from the burkas and mosques of Abu Dhabi to completely naked women walking down Bourbon Street. You can only imagine what I thought as the taxi forced its way through crowds of parade goers to our hotel -something close to “WTF kind of crazy place have my parents brought me to?!”

New Orleans is unique in every aspect, both culturally and geographically. For example, when you live in New Orleans, you get used to walking up, not down, to the water. New Orleans is a city that shouldn’t exist. The mighty Mississippi River winds its way above the land with earthen and concrete levees to protect us from drowning in it.

This feat of engineering sustained a city of up to 400,000 people for over 70 years, but they have to bury their dead in ornate sarcophagi because the ground is too spongy and flood prone to keep them below ground. Growing up below the sea gives one a unique perspective and is perhaps the reason why walking down to the sea from my home in Ireland still seems like a novelty for this Southern Belle.

In the decade my family and I lived in NOLA, we fell head over heels in love with the city. It was easy to see why many people from New Orleans never even cross the Mississippi River, let alone leave the state. Why would you go anywhere else when you live in what’s regarded as the “most unique” city in America? The food, the music, the history, traditions and people were out of this world in all respects, and I feel privileged to have been infused with their “laissez les bon temps rouler” spirit. However, the New Orleans of my youth wasn’t paradise. -It was gritty, poor, dangerous, unofficially segregated and downright racist in places. In 1992, my parents felt we needed to move west for a safer life that allowed teenage Cara a lot more freedom (and them a lot less worry).

Hurricane Katrina hit the city 13 years later in 2005. It is ranked as the third most intense tropical cyclone to make landfall in the USA and the deadliest since 1928, taking at least 1,465 lives. It flooded 80% of the city of New Orleans, mostly due to a storm surge and levee failures that could have been prevented through better engineering. Hurricane Katrina was the costliest natural disaster in the history of the United States and it’s considered the world’s worst engineering disaster since Chernobyl.

My parents and I watched on the television as our former city fell apart and was utterly ignored by the political elite in Washington D.C. Old friends drowned in their attics and our hearts were broken. In response, my father returned to New Orleans to help bring power back to the city, sleeping on a cruise ship docked along the Mississippi River for three months while working for the U.S. Department of Energy.

Climate change wasn’t high on my radar when Katrina hit New Orleans. I still naively thought dwindling freshwater resources would be the biggest environmental problem of my generation and that climate change was a longer-term challenge with less urgency. I can’t even say I made the connection between Katrina and climate change when it happened because hurricanes had always been a part of my life. My elementary school teachers in New Orleans recounted terrifying stories of Hurricanes Betsy, which killed 81 people in 1965, and we prepared to evacuate during hurricane season every year just in case another big one hit. Hurricanes, flooding, termites, fire ants, stinging caterpillars and humidity were the sacrifices we made for the privilege of living in New Orleans.

It wasn’t until 2007 that I started to connect the dots on how climate change might destroy everything I love, including the city that raised me. That’s when Al Gore eloquently explained the link between our warming ocean and more violent storms in his movie, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, and that’s when I realized the culture and history I grew up with might one day be lost beneath the sea forever.

Last week, I returned to the Crescent City for a family gathering. It was my first time back since Katrina. As I entered the USA via New Jersey, I was surprised how much had changed state-side since I left 14 years ago. Restaurant staff in Newark airport have been replaced with ipads so you scan your credit card and place your order via computer and only come into contact with a person when they silently place your meal in front of you. -Some how they still managed to lose my order... Everyone in the airport was on their phones and disconnected from what was going on around them. America seemed a lot more high-tech but less friendly than when I lived there.

I expected to see big changes in New Orleans too. I mean, the internet hadn’t even been invented when I grew up there so the city had plenty of scope for modernization since my day. Instead, I found a city that seemed to be stuck in a time warp. The poverty rate of 30% has remained the same as it was in 2000 and the murder rate remains the highest in the United States. Aside from the tourist spots, the parts of the city I visited looked poorer than ever.

The impacts of Katrina fell disproportionately on the black community, who now comprise a smaller percentage of the population and are less represented in government. Nearly 100,000 black people and 11,000 white people never returned to the city after Katrina. In the lower 9th ward, 40% of the mostly black population never returned, in most cases because they couldn’t afford to. Of those who did return to New Orleans, the median income of black households is a staggering 54% lower than of white households.

In spite of the inequality and poverty, New Orleans is still wonderful. I savoured as many of my favourite childhood foods as I could from beignets to crawfish and gumbo; I marvelled at the jazz musicians on street corners and clubs of Frenchman St., so talented I couldn’t comprehend why they weren’t playing in giant sold out concert halls; and I had fascinating conversations with taxi drivers and waiters about their lives. Even more than a decade later, everyone wanted to tell me where they were when Katrina hit and how they survived in the months afterwards under truly primitive conditions.

Tourism is nearly back to pre-Katrina levels and it’s easy to see why. -There is simply no place and no people in the world that can do it like they do it in New Orleans. However, as I flew out of New Orleans International Airport to return home, I could see just how close the sea was to consuming the city.

Here's my version of heaven. #NOLA #Brass #Jazz pic.twitter.com/93pvkSxFUZ
— DrCara Augustenborg (@CAugustenborg) March 11, 2017

Under “normal” conditions over its 300 year history, most of New Orleans is about half a meter to 2 meters below sea level but the Northwest Gulf of Mexico is now experiencing some of the largest rates of relative sea level rise in the USA and New Orleans is projected to have one of the highest increases in sea level among 138 coastal cities on the planet.

The existing levees rise 2m above sea level in the most populated parts of the city, but not all parts of the city are as protected and subsidence is causing those levees to sink by nearly half a meter per decade in some places. The land being swallowed by the Gulf waters also houses half of America’s oil refineries, along with pipelines that serve 90 percent of the nation’s offshore energy production and 30 percent of its oil and gas supply, giving us another good reason to divest from fossil fuels before they too are underwater. A 2015 study indicates New Orleans is locked in to drowning by the end of the century based on our actions to date. Already, a football field worth of land is being lost to the sea every hour in Louisiana.

All of us will lose things we love to climate change eventually but how surreal to live at a time when that includes losing the entire city you grew up in. New Orleans is a city which can both least afford to be further below the sea and least deserves any further tragedy, yet it will be most impacted by climate change and its resulting sea level rise. In Louis Armstrong’s famous words, I think I finally know what it means to miss New Orleans because now I understand that it won’t always be there to return to.

Thanks to the people of NOLA for being amazing, kind and resilient and making my trip “home” magical and memorable. Keep fighting the good fight.

-Cara

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Kurt Cobain’s 50th birthday shows how far we’ve strayed from nirvana

2/19/2017

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Me and my crew, high school days in Washington State circa 1993 when Nirvana was all the rage

Kurt Cobain would have turned fifty years old today had he not committed suicide on April 5th, 1994. At the height of Nirvana’s fame, I was in my early teens living in the heart of the USA grunge scene in Washington State. I loved the mosh pits, stage diving and the shock on my parents’ faces as I wore baggy pyjamas and old men’s flannel shirts to school. I reveled in the rebelliousness and anger of Kurt Cobain’s screaming vocals and the anti-establishment ethos Cobain reluctantly represented.

Two decades later, I can’t help but wonder what Kurt Cobain would have thought of the world now if he were still alive.

Musically-speaking, he’d be sickened by the boy bands and X-factor contestants conforming to corporations and market research when he felt “the duty of youth is to challenge corruption”. But beyond the bubble-gum pop and triteness of so much of today’s music, I wonder what Kurt Cobain would think of our society more generally.

Twenty-four years ago, I was brought to tears of joy as saxophone-playing Bill Clinton was inaugurated as the 42nd President of the United States, believing he represented the needs of my generation. Today, the neoliberal polices of lower regulation, more competition and free trade agreements promoted by every U.S. president in my lifetime have dismantled social institutions and democracy, making the 1% wealthier while the 99% are squeezed to the point of near-collapse.

Twenty years ago, the science of climate change was well-established, yet we’ve done little to address it and are still headed toward global warming that will make much of the Earth uninhabitable by the end of the century. Already, boats of migrants drown in the Mediterranean Sea fleeing hardship in their home countries exacerbated by extreme weather. More will come as the climate continues to destabilize.

Twenty years ago, I thought becoming an educated woman would allow me to “have it all” thanks to feminism. Now, I realize the opportunity women’s liberation gave me was to become a "double-shift employee", working by day to make countries and corporations rich and by night as a guilt-stricken caregiver trying to make up for lost time with her child. Where did those twelve years I spent in university get me? They’re becoming worthless fast as so many ivory towers join the market economy to become degree supermarkets for those who can afford to pay their premiums.

Twenty years ago, the U.S. was well into fighting its “war on drugs”, which it eventually lost in 2011 but not before it became the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world where approximately one in every 32 Americans are under criminal justice system control and one in five black Americans spend part of their lives behind bars. And while America was fighting that futile war on drugs, the U.S. obesity rate went from 11% in 1990 to 35% today and the number of homeless went from less than 300,000 to more than half a million (a quarter of which are now children).

“Birds scream at the top of their lungs in horrified hellish rage every morning at daybreak to warn us all of the truth, but sadly we don't speak bird.”

Cobain wrote those cryptic words in ‘The Journals’, the birds symbolizing “grumpy old men with turrets syndrome” and representing his passion for the writings of William S. Burroughs. Would 50 year old Cobain scream in hellish rage at the world today? In Cobain’s suicide note, he explained:

There's good in all of us and I think I simply love people too much, so much that it makes me feel too fucking sad.

Perhaps the broken systems we’re surrounded by today would be too much for his sensitive soul to bear. This is something I relate all too well with now as a mother –caring so much for the well-being of the next generation that it hurts.

So, what do you do when everything around you, all the systems you were taught to trust are broken and it hurts? You either give up and try to join the apocalypse party, or you try to fix one thing that has positive, knock-on effects to all the other broken systems.

To me, that one fix comes in the form of a low-carbon transition, transforming society away from the fossil fuel dominated energy production that powered our Industrial Revolution toward clean, renewable energy production as part of a Technological Revolution.

Ironically, William S. Burroughs had similarly strong opinions about the need to move on from the Industrial Revolution. In ‘The Place of the Dead Roads’, Burroughs explored more sustainable forms of human organisation, writing:

We will endeavor to halt the Industrial Revolution before it is too late, to regulate population at a reasonable point, to eventually replace quantitative money with qualitative money, to decentralize, to conserve resources. The Industrial Revolution is primarily a virus revolution, dedicated to controlled proliferation of identical objects and persons. You are making soap, you don't give a shit who buys your soap, the more the soapier. And you don't give a shit who makes it, who works in your factories. Just so they make soap.

Who would have ever imagined the invention of the combustion engine would be the cause of both so much human prosperity and yet so many global problems at the same time?

Clearly, a low-carbon transition would solve a lot of our climate and environmental problems, but it could also be the solution to so many of our other broken socio-economic systems too. Evidence shows moving to a clean-energy society:

Increases employment
Takes people out of extreme poverty
Improves heath, including decreasing obesity and incidence of respiratory disease
Revitalises towns and villages
Alleviates fuel poverty through energy efficiency
Reduces likelihood of migration of climate refugees
And is an essential part of feminism, as women are disproportionately victims of climate change and traditionally perform the “low carbon” duty of caregiving.

Lately, I’ve been approached by a lot of people in need of hope. The alarming rate of warming in the Arctic and current global politics are getting to everyone around me, particularly parents and millennials. I’m struggling too – questioning my decision to bring a child into this world; wondering if the country I grew up in will become too dirty to drink the water or breathe the air as the current regime dismantles environmental protection; and worrying that U.S. politics might halt urgently needed global progress on climate action.

For today, I’ll let Kurt Cobain influence me again. He once said:

There are a lot of things I wish I would have done, instead of just sitting around and complaining about having a boring life.

perhaps echoing the words of Burroughs who argued “there are no innocent bystanders – What are they doing there in the first place?”

So I’ll do something (anything) rather than remain a bystander because I can’t afford to spend twenty more years sitting around while our “leaders” take us further away from nirvana.

High school me complete with flannel and (yes) slippers in anti-establishment chic, 1993

Happy Birthday, Kurt Cobain -wherever you are- and thanks for two decades of inspiration. To my fellow generation X/Y-ers who where inspired by Cobain too, keep fighting the good fight! ;-)
-Cara

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On Trade and Environment, ‘Hunky Trudeau’ disappoints

2/14/2017

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When Canadian author Naomi Klein came to Dublin on a book tour in 2016, the audience giggled as she presented a photo of Justin Trudeau and referred to him as her “hunky new prime minister” or "ikemen shusho" as they refer to him in Japan. Like Barrack Obama, fresh-faced Trudeau campaigned on a platform of “change” and the world was smitten. He straddled a line between left and right politics and led the Liberal Party of Canada back into power in 2015 after their worst showing in history just four years earlier.

Even my own heart skipped a beat last April when Trudeau schooled a reporter on quantum computing, and I wished there were more politicians in the world like him.

Like most romance, fifteen months into Trudeau’s premiership, the glimmer is fading. His empathy for the disadvantaged and public support of climate action is darkened by his neo-liberal advocacy of global trade deals and oil pipelines.

At a town hall meeting in Alberta last January, Trudeau defended his pro-pipeline stance by saying:

The responsibility of any Canadian prime minister is to get our resources to market and yes, that includes our oil sands fossil fuels.

Compare this to Trudeau’s gutsy 2015 campaign commitment to “work in partnership with the United States and Mexico to develop an ambitious North American clean energy and environmental agreement” and your heart starts to break.

Trudeau’s nationalistic approach to fossil fuel infrastructure ignores Canada’s commitment to the United Nations’ climate agreement. Canadian tar sands contain approximately 240 gigatons of carbon or half of the world’s carbon we can burn to stay under the 2-degree Celsius limit considered “safe” for humanity. If we’re serious about addressing climate change, most of that tar sand oil needs to stay in the ground and building a pipeline to transport it is a regressive move.

Canadian tar sand extraction. Photo credit: greenpeace.org

Trudeau has already approved three pipelines in his short tenure as prime minister, most notably the Keystone XL pipeline between Canada and the U.S.A. which Barrack Obama vetoed following high-profile protests in the United States. SCROTUS Donald Trump recently reinstated plans for the Keystone XL pipeline, a move that was welcomed by Trudeau.

In a joint statement between Trudeau and Trump this week, they explained:

“As the process continues for the Keystone XL pipeline, we remain committed to moving forward on energy infrastructure projects that will create jobs while respecting the environment.”

Building an oil pipeline does anything but respect the environment or the ability of future generations to meet their needs in an uninhabitable climate, but such contradictory statements are becoming more frequent as Trudeau attempts to appeal to a diverse electorate who want to retain jobs in dirty tar sand fields while miraculously preserving the environment and leading on climate action.

On the other side of the pond, Trudeau’s behavior is equally troubling. He is championing the Canada-Europe trade deal, CETA, which will remove customs duties between Canada and the EU. Global trade deals are designed to improve efficiency for global companies, meaning job losses and lower wages. For Europe, CETA is likely to impact the agricultural sector worst of all as Canadian agriculture can out-compete due to lower regulatory standards and more intensive farming practices.

Modern trade agreements also create arbitration courts that let companies and investors file lawsuits against countries who pass regulations that damage their profits. This has grave implications for any public health and environmental regulations a country may want to pursue in the future, but Trudeau calls CETA "one of the most progressive trade deals ever proposed" and continues to ignore widespread public opposition to the agreement.

Trudeau has been described as the progressive counterweight to the likes of Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen. However, on climate and on trade, Trudeau has adopted a similarly nationalist agenda that pits Canadian self-interest against the environment and neighbouring economies. It would be nice if Trudeau represented a new generation of leaders with vision and joined up thinking, but the evidence suggests he is just another man who speaks out of both sides of his mouth to appeal to the widest voter base.

Perhaps actress Jane Fonda summed up Trudeau best last month when she said:

“I guess the lesson is we shouldn't be fooled by good-looking liberals no matter how well-spoken they are."

If we want an antidote to the extreme nationalism sweeping the globe, it appears “hunky Trudeau" is not our knight in shining armor.

All the more reason for the rest of us to "keep fighting the good fight" for ourselves rather than wait to be rescued!

Happy Valentine's Day! ;-)
-Cara

* CETA is scheduled to be voted on by EU Parliament tomorrow. Find out how your MEP plans to vote and contact them here!

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Divestment by any other name would smell as sweet

1/28/2017

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https://www.facebook.com/peoplesclimateireland/

Two years ago, I joined the first divestment march in Dublin calling for the Irish government to remove fossil fuel assets from our Strategic Investment Fund. It was a bitter cold Valentine’s day, and I felt guilty dragging my 4-year-old out on a march. With less than 50 people in attendance, Ireland’s likelihood of “breaking up with fossil fuels” as a result of our efforts seemed improbable.

While I agreed completely with the premise of divestment, the word and concept failed to capture the public’s imagination so I questioned the value of campaigning on the issue. We were struggling as it was to get people to take any action on climate despite its effects becoming more urgent and obvious by the minute. How could we expect people to act on a poorly understood concept involving money most people would never see?

I was reassured when I met Bill McKibben a few months later. At a conference hosted by Trocaire and University of Maynooth, he told the audience divestment was already a major national movement in the USA. By 2016, more than $3.5 trillion worth of fossil fuel investments had been withdrawn due to U.S. divestment campaigning, making fossil fuel divestment the fastest divestment movement in history.

L to R: Trocaire's Lorna Gold, 350.org's Bill McKibben, Green Party's Eamon Ryan & Cara Augustenborg at Trocaire's 2016 conference on Climate Justice

https://www.facebook.com/peoplesclimateireland/

This divestment movement was born on U.S. college campuses. The “youth” of today continually impress me – They have led the charge against toxic free trade deals like TTIP and CETA and now they lead on divestment, neither of which are topics for the faint of heart.

Following Trocaire’s conference, Ireland’s university divestment campaigns blossomed, with students at Maynooth University, Trinity College Dublin, NUI Galway, and our neighbors at Queens University Belfast all leading the charge. Trocaire deserves tremendous credit for fostering an Irish divestment movement, particularly as an organisation whose mandate focuses primarily on global and national poverty rather than environment.

Just less than two years after my daughter and I joined the Valentine’s day march to encourage Ireland to break up with fossil fuels, something super sweet just happened. Ireland actually did it!

This week, the Dail voted 90 to 53 to move forward with legislation to divest the Irish Strategic Investment Fund from all fossil fuels. If passed into law soon, this legislation would make Ireland the first country in the world to divest state assets fully from fossil fuels. While financially this effort is relatively small, it sends a strong message to the rest of the world that Ireland is preparing to transition to a low carbon economy where fossil fuels will become stranded assets for those who hold them.

https://www.facebook.com/peoplesclimateireland/

In addition to the hard work of campaigning organisations like Trocaire, other Stop Climate Chaos members and tireless university students, Ireland’s divestment success is also due to the unique political situation we find ourselves in today. The divestment legislation passed in spite of our dominant political party’s opposition because all other parties and independents supported it. Our electorate’s disruption of the traditionally bipartisan power base in Ireland’s last election has led to more progress on climate action today than ever before. The election of several small parties and independents has created the perfect storm to finally get stuff done, not just divestment but also a national fracking ban scheduled to become law in October and hopefully more climate action to come.

Yesterday, I heard news commentators complaining that the lack of a majority Irish government was preventing big policy reform to address our healthcare, housing and education crises. However as long as I’ve lived here (14 years), I’ve never seen any significant reform of those problems even when there was a majority government. Instead, today I see voting small works. In spite of being sandwiched between two countries whose political systems are leading to extremism, Ireland is in the midst of a great political experiment in compromise. When it comes to climate action, this experiment seems to be working.

This week’s divestment success is not only a victory for climate action, but also one for democracy. No matter how elusive the term may seem, “divestment” by any other name would smell as sweet!

Keep fighting the good fight!
-Cara

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Tomorrow provides hope on Inauguration Day

1/20/2017

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Today is the day Donald Trump will be inaugurated as America’s 45th president. I planned to wake this morning and tweet, “I'm embarrassed to be an American for the first time in my life”. I even contemplated changing my blog from 'Verdant Yank' to 'Verdant Paddy' or even 'Verdant Viking', in keeping with my Scandinavian roots!

However, yesterday I previewed the French film “Demain” (Tomorrow) in preparation for Friends of the Earth’s Dublin screening event tonight and all my Yankee troubles seemed to fade away.

I once said to a colleague that if I had the budget to create a split screen movie of what your day to day life would be in a world of climate action versus a world of climate chaos 20-30 years from now, the move toward climate action would be instantaneous. -All the co-benefits of what it takes to tackle climate change are so great we would all want that life if we could see it. I tried to paint that vision in words during my TEDxUCD talk last year, but nothing can compete with the power of film to capture the imagination.

Directors Cyril Dion and Melanie Laurent must have been thinking along similar lines when they created Demain. It’s a snapshot of what a world of climate action would look like. From food to energy, education, economics, and politics, Demain shows us that if we take an ecosystem approach to all those systems we create happier, healthier communities while also decarbonizing society and tackling climate change.

Demain takes my own split-screen concept one step further by showing such initiatives are already steaming ahead with great success and creating much more liveable communities.

Demain’s producers are distributing the mostly English film to communities all over the world, encouraging you to host your own screening and providing great background materials to make it a truly impactful event. This is documentary distribution at its finest – not just designed to entertain but to make a long-lasting difference across the globe. More of this please!

Friends of the Earth Ireland timed our screening to coincide with U.S. Inauguration Day. This is a dark day for colleagues in the USA, marking the start of a steep uphill battle for protection of environment and public health. My heart goes out to all of them as signs so far indicate life and work in the USA will be extremely difficult under the Trump regime, but the rest of the world is still moving forward. U.N. climate negotiations still progress and China is chomping at the bit to take the leadership role in the world’s low-carbon transition.

What I should have tweeted this morning was “I’ve never been happier to be Irish”, not just because I have the option of living outside the USA far away from that political mess, but also because some amazing things are starting to take place here politically and environmentally that are so counter to what’s happening with the “clowns to the left of us” and “jokers to the right”.

Here in Ireland, we have a political system moving left of centre while others speed to the far right, and we’re disrupting the power base of the old guard with a mix of independent elected representatives and small political parties. As a result, a majority of our parliamentarians recently committed to ban fracking across Ireland and drop fossil fuel investments from the Irish Strategic Investment Fund.

These are huge victories in a country whose Prime Minister has opposed any kind of climate action over his six years of “leadership”. In a hodge-podge government we were told would result in chaos and inaction, we’re achieving more action on climate than we have in over a decade (if not longer). Funny how that works…

We’re privileged to exist at an incredible moment in time on the cusp of an evolution from our fossil fuel driven past to a world powered by clean energy. The last time humans witnessed such a technological transformation was more than one hundred years ago at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Fossil fuels deserve some credit for making humans the most dominant species on Earth. However, in the same way cave men came out of their caves and ditched their clubs for more efficient hunting tools, it’s time we moved on to something better. This time, it’s infinitely abundant, clean energy sources to drive the next phase in our evolution.

Those who can’t see the change that’s coming are the last remaining dinosaurs – The Donald Trumps, Rex Tillersons, Scott Pruits, and Jim Inhofes of the world. They’re the dinosaurs who haven’t moved on from their 1980s ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous’ ambitions, and their obsession with burning carbon will eventually cause their extinction. -The last men standing with stranded fossil fuel assets will most certainly be the biggest losers.

The rest of us have already started to evolve. That’s clear when you watch Demain or witness what’s happening politically in places like Ireland, Iceland, Holland and even “oil country” Texas -which now produces more wind power than any other U.S. state!

What I learned from ‘Tomorrow’ is we have no need to despair over one man today.

Keep fighting the good fight!
-Cara

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When you lose hope in a room full of broken toys

12/1/2016

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Photo credit: dailybeast.com

2016 has been a tragic year in many respects. From the refugee crisis to the rise of the far right fuelled by xenophobia and hate, it seems like the world is falling apart socially while the planet falls apart ecologically.

I’ve watched friends working in the environmental arena fall apart emotionally this year too, pushed over the edge by Brexit and the US election of Donald Trump -convinced that if we couldn’t address climate change before these events, we’re certainly cooked now.

In social settings, my colleagues and I talk about preparing for the worst, planned retreat and re-learning basic survival skills. We talk about whether we were irresponsible by bringing children into this world and whether, as adults, our children would be wise not to have children themselves.

If you think we’re over reacting, just look at the stunning pace of climate change in recent decades. Play out the impacts of climate change on our food, land, infrastructure and health and you’ll start imagining apocalyptic scenarios too.

After that introduction, you’ll be surprised to hear that I’m an incredible optimist. No matter what the science tells me, I refuse to wallow in this bleak outlook. So while acknowledging the scary science, I find ways to keep myself from drawing the curtains and living the rest of my days in darkness.

Cue Friends of the Earth. -I’ve been involved with Friends of the Earth Ireland for nearly a decade because it’s so effective at enacting change in my home country (and manages to have fun in the process), but simply working on change in Ireland is not enough to get this "Verdant Yank" out of bed. As a tiny rock on the edge of Europe, what we do in Ireland won’t be enough to solve the climate crisis.

Friends of the Earth Ireland brings 'Environment" back into Ireland's government departments with a creative photo stunt and petition, 2016

The best we can hope for is that Ireland might inspire the rest of the world to act in a similar fashion, but that seems unlikely based on our appalling lack of leadership to date. That’s why I’m so grateful over the last few years to be exposed to the Friends of the Earth International federation -a network of 77 national Friends of the Earth member groups comprising the largest grassroots environmental organization in the world.

Friends of the Earth International Biennial General Meeting 2016, Indonesia. Photo Credit: Amelia Collins

I’m writing this post from the Friends of the Earth International Biennial General Meeting (#BGM2016). This year, it’s hosted by our Indonesian member group, Walhi. It’s the second BGM I’ve attended and each time I’m refuelled to keep fighting the good fight, even as we talk of recent news of the ‘extraordinarily hot’ Arctic temperatures in between our daily business.

I step back from the meeting and wonder,

How can I stay hopeful and engaged with Friends of the Earth while the pace of the climate crisis quickens at a rate our solutions aren't keeping up with?

My answer comes by listening to the work going on in the 76 other countries represented here. I wish all my friends who are losing hope could be flies on the wall of this room. I imagine if my despondent friends met the hundreds of intelligent, creative, kind people here from all over the world and learned about their work, even the most sceptical of them would find hope again.

What’s amazing about the work throughout the Friends of the Earth network is how interconnected it is, recognising that all our systems fail to provide a sustainable quality of life for most of the world’s people: Climate, food, biodiversity, natural resources, economy, energy access, politics, human rights, patriarchy etc. -Nearly everything is broken.

Trying to fix every broken toy in the room individually doesn’t address the source of the problem. We have to mend every toy, but we also have to question why the room is so trashed and all the toys are broken in the first place to prevent the room's continued destruction?

What are we doing fundamentally wrong to create such a mess?

If we want to fix everything, we defy convention and reinvent from the bottom up. Hence, a “grassroots”, people focused movement is essential. In Friends of the Earth’s words, they’re working for “system change not climate change” and by that they mean every broken system!

If only you could sit in this room in the middle of the Sumatran jungle with me and watch how these people leave no stone unturned in achieving that goal, and they do it with love, generosity and creativity to boot.

Friends of the Earth International members, BGM 2016. Photo credit: Amelia Collins

Several of the delegates here recount moments when colleagues were murdered, family members kidnapped and they themselves were tortured, but they’re still here working on system change because nothing will deter them from advancing this work.

At this BGM, my Friends of the Earth U.S. colleagues remind me of Senator Bernie Sander's words,

...Political and social revolutions that attempt to transform out society never end. They continue every day, every week and every month in the fight to create a nation of social and economic justice.

We are not alone though sometimes it may seem that way as we navigate through our daily lives. While our voices may get drowned out by more powerful voices who just want us to keep playing in the room full of broken toys rather than fix them, there are hundreds of thousands of people working every day to make this room a clean, bright and healthy place to live and play.

Cara (right) with Friends of the Earth International colleagues at 2016 Biennial General Meeting, Indonesia

When you lose hope, please think of the people in this room and the thousands of communities they work with and stay inspired to keep fighting the good fight!

With hope from Sumatra,
-Cara

Check out Friends of the Earth International's photo blogspot of BGM 2016 Indonesia here.

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Breaking up is hard to do

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Breaking up with fossil fuels is hard to do, particularly when everyone else around you are still wedded to them!

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Globalization creates the perfect storm

An Uncomfortable New Truth

Corporations are doing it for themselves

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Plastic Paradise

Blog like nobody’s watching: The Verdant Yank’s One Year Anniversary

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What it means to miss New Orleans: An environmentalist’s view growing up below the sea

Kurt Cobain’s 50th birthday shows how far we’ve strayed from nirvana

On Trade and Environment, ‘Hunky Trudeau’ disappoints

Divestment by any other name would smell as sweet

Tomorrow provides hope on Inauguration Day

When you lose hope in a room full of broken toys

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The demise of my relationship with the Internal Combustion Engine

I knew I couldn’t in good conscience fall into bed with another ICE, but I felt unprepared for the radical commitment of becoming an electric vehicle (EV) owner... ​

I've just committed to a 2018 Black Renault Zoe EV!!!

Breaking up with fossil fuels is hard to do, particularly when everyone else around you are still wedded to them!

Globalization creates the perfect storm

An Uncomfortable New Truth

Corporations are doing it for themselves

What I learned at Sinn Fein Summer School

For monthly blog notifications straight to your inbox:

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I knew I couldn’t in good conscience fall into bed with another ICE, but I felt unprepared for the radical commitment of becoming an electric vehicle (EV) owner...