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An opportunity to be a leader in our climate future.
Good afternoon.
Sara Rubin here, thinking about both how much and how little has changed since 2006. That was the year former vice president Al Gore released the documentary An Inconvenient Truth, bringing attention to the science underlying climate change and calling on viewers to take urgent action. At that time, it was already starting to feel too late. Now, 17 years later, it’s even more immediate.
“We don’t have a lot of years,” Charlotte Bear tells me, counting those years in terms of Earth Days. “That’s the urgency we’re feeling here. If we’re listening to the latest IPCC report, we have six Earth Days left to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. The stakes are very high.”
That’s a time frame that understandably gets a lot of people down, and it’s easy to feel like we failed. (We did fail, in the last 17 years.) But both Bear and Gore remain optimistic—in a pragmatic way—about taking steps to address the crisis going forward, on a timeline that still matters.
Gore went on to found a nonprofit called The Climate Reality Project, which trains people to be “climate reality leaders.” Bear, who lives in Salinas, has been an environmentalist since childhood. In 2016, after Donald Trump was elected as president, she felt compelled to increase her own level of action. “I thought, oh my gosh, we are heading toward a very frightening, polarized political situation and we are not making enough headway on this crisis—and we don’t have time,” Bear says. So she applied for a climate reality leadership cohort, and went to Denver for her training.
She’s been active since then in the Climate Reality Project’s San Francisco Bay Area chapter, and this month, launched a Monterey Bay chapter. Their first chapter meeting happens tomorrow night, May 23, at 7pm via Zoom. (To sign up to get involved and receive future updates, click here.)
Part of what this new chapter plans to do is bring together existing organizations that are active in different realms of climate advocacy—from bicycling to EV charging stations to marine protection—looking to apply principles learned in leadership training. Electrification and a clean energy transition are high on the priority list, but the agenda will be driven by volunteers.
I think it’s easy and forgivable to feel disempowered and hopeless in the face of the still-worsening climate crisis. But Bear is not willing to give in to despair.
“It is not an option for me not to act,” she says. “This is the overarching issue of our time—this is existential. I will not abandon mine or the next generation by saying, ‘I’m too tired, I’m checking out.’”
Bear is perhaps wired for hopefulness. In her day job, she works as a health care chaplain, counseling people who are facing the hardest news of their lives. She is constantly amazed by their ability to find hope amid despair.
The other thing that gives Bear hope is the commitment of other activists, joining together to do this work. “Where I find hope, courage and strength is in the passion, heart and ingenuity of other activists,” Bear says. “This is not something we’re meant to do alone.”
-Sara Rubin, editor, sara@mcweekly.com
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