Climate Change Apathy — A Personal Story
I am extremely disheartened by the apathy in my country. Not only is there a lack of compassion towards people (re: migrants fleeing violence and climate change — i.e.climate refugees), but there is a seemingly huge disinterest in solving the climate crisis.
People continue to go about their business of supporting capitalism with little to no thought about what the capitalist paradigm has done and is doing to our planet. Certainly, there are the naysayers who don’t even believe in climate change, although with the hard science to back it up, I am not sure why that is still an issue. Maybe denial. If people continue to live in denial they don’t have to take personal responsibility for anthropogenic induced climate change. Is that it?
The bizarre weather around the planet should be setting off alarm bells. Everyone should be paying attention to what is happening — if not in the world, then in their own communities. The flooding, the superstorms, the abnormal heat waves, and frigid cold spells are telling us that something is going on with our climate.
It is going to get worse before it gets better. Personally, I am very afraid. So much so that for the past twenty years I have been trying to find a suitable place to land to create a sustainable future for my family.
My husband (now ex-husband) and I started growing vegetables in our back yard as soon ad we started cohabitating. When we bought our own house, we added chickens. It only took a few years to realize that we wanted a larger space to garden and maybe keep goats for milk. Our lovely house was more expensive than we wanted to deal with long term, so we sold it and moved to the country.
Our entire homesteading experiment was a learning experience. (Read about our homesteading experiences here: https://onelittlefarm.blogspot.com) We got our goats, learned to milk them and make cheese. We sold eggs, milk, cheese, vegetables, and plant starts through the local food coop. It was never enough to support our family financially, but our diets had changed for the better from the Standard American Diet (SAD) to one that was mostly organic and made of real food.
We had about two and a half acres at our country home. We kept chickens, goats and I got two llamas in the hopes of utilizing their fiber and teaching them to pack. Some of our neighbors were supportive of our endeavors and I often gave farm tours of our little homestead. My husband taught classes in chicken keeping, gardening and other homestead skills. Life was almost good.
We had our ups and downs as a family with two small children and two teenagers, but we were getting by and building our dream. Until they (horrid Big Oil Industry) started fracking the land around us. This was never disclosed to us when we bought our property. Perhaps none of it started before we signed the mortgage, but it was a deal-breaker for us. We couldn’t stay there when we knew the potential harm that fracking could cause to our family and to our homestead. We became climate refugees--migrants looking for an environmentally clean place to live.
We ended up bouncing around the southwest, renting houses with acreage so we could keep our livestock and have room to garden. Some of our rentals were nightmares and some were a dream. We rented an Earthship outside of Taos, New Mexico for a little over a year and that was one of the best experiences I have ever had. That’s a story all its own.
Needless to say, we had to find our own place that we could put down permanent roots. Renting did not give us the ability to really do the things we wanted. We bought land in New Mexico and in Colorado, thinking each time we found our place to be. We even grew hemp on our property the first year it was legal to do so in Colorado. But code regulations or finances eventually sent us back to a city to look for a stable income. It turns out that not many people were really interested in our homesteading classes or organically produced food — not enough to support our family financially. Capitalism was killing us.
When we were in Taos we tried to belong to a community barter system and timebank with less than successful results. Everywhere we ended up, we struggled to make ends meet and decided we could move back to the city and try to make a go of our homestead in an urban setting. We had to sell off all of our livestock because the city we chose would not allow anything, not even backyard chickens.
At that time, I was pretty disillusioned with our homesteading endeavors anyway. We were spending more in organic feed than we could justify. Nothing was balancing out. We couldn’t find organically grown hay or alfalfa, although those crops were not sprayed as far as we knew where we bought it. I was tired.
Country folks seemed resistant to organically produced crops. A lot of people raised cattle for their livelihood and were not interested in changing things in how they ran their operations. We did meet a few organic farmers and were delighted to do business with them when we could. Sometimes we had the opportunity to learn from them as well, and that was the silver lining in our rural living experiment.
Everything my husband and I did for the past twenty years was geared toward living sustainably and trying to create some place our children could have to make it in a quickly changing world. We were afraid of what the future looked like, knowing most of the people we encountered were in denial about the climate or resistant to change. No one wants to give up their comforts. I get that. We experimented with off-grid living. We hauled our own water. We lived off of power from the sun and the wind. We ate the food we produced and grew in our gardens. We reduced our consumption and learned to live without. We boycotted consumerist American holidays (almost all of them) in an effort to resist cultural capitalism. We lived frugally and simply.
When we moved back to the city we were inundated by the capitalist culture. The lights, the stores, the spending, the cars…it was insanely overwhelming. Culture shock. Our homesteading past became our little secret, shared with only a select few. Most people we encountered were not interested enough to have conversations about Permaculture or how we could use community building to create sustainable local change. It was depressing. In the jobs we did find, we both continued to work towards being a part of creating sustainability in our community without necessarily advertising our own personal beliefs. People are resistant to others who are different than them. (Note the immigration crisis). As a family, we started to fall back into mainstream American consumerist culture and as a couple, we grew farther apart.
I am a cultural anthropologist by education and I have a Masters in Cultural Resource Management. My husband got his Masters in Sustainable Community Development. We have both studied Permaculture for years and at some point, my husband got his certification in Permaculture Design. Certification is expensive and I opted to get certified in other things like Life Coaching and Art Therapy.
Because of our educations and experience, you would think that we would garner some respect when we talk about climate change and the solutions towards combating the devastating crises coming. people just don’t want to hear about it. They don’t want to talk about it. They don’t want to take action in their own lives to slow the changes that are coming.
The apathy scares me more than anything. The polite stares and the nod and smile attitude I have gotten from people over the years has weighed heavy on my heart and mind. Before I went back to Grad School, I decided I would become a minister and start a church for the planet. Eco-spirituality. I am not religious. I don’t believe in any god anywhere, and I think leaving everything in the hands of some mythical being is a human cop-out. I respect people’s belief systems, sometimes. When people start hurting others or the environment and justify their actions through their religion, I have to personally denounce said religion as hypocritical nonsense.
Most of us know right from wrong. In my mind, taking care of the planet we live on and treating people with compassion and respect is the right thing to do. I wanted to base my church on that ideology. I had a church blog ( https://greendesertchurchfarm.blogspot.com) and wrote many a sermon on living as our higher selves because I firmly believe that if we heal the hurt within ourselves, we can heal the cultural hurts and in turn heal the planet from the wrongs we have done.
I gave up my church idea (I had like seven followers) and pursued my Masters because I thought if I had the credentials people would take me seriously. In my graduate work, I turned every paper and project into something about sustainability or social justice in the hope that at least my words might trickle into the minds of my cohort and subtly cause a change in their own actions and lives. I was very much trying to implant mind viruses everywhere I went, knowing that when enough people finally believed, things would begin to change (The Hundredth Monkey idea).
Not much has changed over my lifetime or the past ten years. Sure, there have been a few subtle changes: mainstream media now reports on climate change more often than they ever did ten years ago; people I know that used to brush me off are now bringing attention to some of the climate crises they see happening around them; the beloved little community I have chosen to live in is trying to go greener through active promotion of electric vehicles (my then-husband played a big part in that), recycling and creating its own city power company instead of being trapped and beholden to energy giants. I guess any good change is a step in the right direction.
Unfortunately, we are running out of time, which has been true for many years, but I feel the urgency upon me again to do something — to shout from the rooftops that humanity (and all species) are in dire straights unless we do something now.
But what can we do when nobody is interested in even hearing the problems? What can we do when people are blinded by capitalism and stuck in their day to day just trying to make ends meet?
Sigh. I still believe that humans have the capacity to solve the problems we are facing. It may be far too late at this point to do much about the climate changes coming, although it would be great to stop this runaway train right now. We may be at the juncture where we have to choose adaptation over ending climate threats. But maybe through adaptive practices, we can lessen future impacts so that humans can survive in a hostile climate environment.
The answers are all around us. Yes, we need to heal ourselves so that we can heal others. We need to look at alternatives to capitalism. We need to live more sustainably in every way. We need to build more sustainably and change building codes to fit new, greener practices. We need to teach and practice Permaculture in our communities and in our own yards. We need to give up everything that is contributing to climate instability. This is where it gets hard because people just don’t want to give up their comforts or change what they know. But we have to if we want our children and their children to survive.
Taking responsibility for ourselves, our own actions and emotions is a big tenet of Life Coaching. With my recent divorce, I have been living in a san and dark box of my own making — victimhood. I blame my ex-husband for a lot of what has gone wrong between us. It doesn’t matter. Obviously, we could not overcome our differences enough to remain together. I am responsible for me and he is responsible for himself. What do I choose to do with that?
I vow to get back on track. I want to finish the food forest I have been creating in my urban yard. I will continue to homeschool my children so that they are exposed to many ideas and belief systems and are not indoctrinated into the American capitalist culture. I will continue to recycle and shop at thrift stores. I will continue the reduced shower schedule to conserve water. I will continue to work on my house to make it more sustainable. I will walk more and drive less. I will continue to heal myself from my own childhood and relationship traumas so that I might begin to help others to heal themselves too. I will focus more on being the change I want to see and use my voice to educate others instead of whine about my own personal emotional crap.
Apathy. Maybe I fell down that hole too and forgot that every individual can make a difference. I want to care. I do care. As the world continues to move in ecologically unfriendly ways outside my front door, I will remember that I can choose to live differently and teach my children the skills they will need to survive in a rapidly changing world.
What can I do today?
