In the absence of a comprehensive federal policy relating to climate change issues, many local governments are stepping up. Most famously, our own Seattle mayor started the U.S. Climate Protection Agreement . Lately, I have seen the following phrase (or others like it) appearing frequently in local government documents:
Climate change planning is not only about reducing our impact through lowering greenhouse gas production, it is also about planning our response to a changing climate.
More and more, the talk is shifting from “avoiding climate climate change” to “dealing with climate change.” Governments are being forced to take remedial action. So far, this is mostly in small island nations or coastal counties. I have seen references to resilience and ruggedizing urging individuals to prepare themselves. So what does preparing for climate change mean to a parent? Besides ruggedizing our family to withstand the immediate changes that are beginning to take place, how does one prepare a child for the world they will inhabit as an adult?
I can teach my kids to pick up litter and recycle, and that’s enough to earn my suburban cred as a good green mom. But what are the skills that I should be teaching them to survive adult life in the greenhouse? My youngest will be 21 in 2029. By most climate models, our course will be set by then. We will already be on track to control carbon emissions, or we won’t. Most likely, either way, we will be locked in to climate change for the rest of her lifetime.
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| Parenting Manual? |
The conversation about resiliency and adaptation is just beginning. For our kids, though, it will not be adaptation. It will just be their world. How do I show them the world that we are losing – the one with living coral reefs and remnants of old growth forest, with weather patterns that repeat every year – before it is gone? It’s a little like the question faced by indigenous elders – how much do you emphasize learning the old ways so they understand where they came from and what precious things are being lost, and how much do you focus on teaching the skills they need to survive in the new world? How do you teach those skills when you yourself may not have them or even know what they are?
Should I start studying Mad Max movies? Go radical homemaker?
If you live in one of the communities where climate change preparation is taking place, it is pretty likely that changing weather patterns have been identified and their impacts modeled. So I already know that when my daughter is an adult there will be less winter snow and more winter flooding, with more severe summer drought in my region. Do we quit ski school and take up carpentry so we can rebuild our house on stilts and turn the old basement into a water catchment system? Or will my daughter spend her teen years in a 21st century PWA program to build flood controls and water catchment on a regional scale? The science is there, but it raises more questions than it answers. To quote Jack Skellington, “Fascinating! But what does it mean?”
