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| Our House |
A vision without a task is but a dream,
a task without a vision is drudgery,
a vision and a task is the hope of the world.
My dad borrowed this anonymous inscription
on an 18th century English church as the motto for his grassroots
organization, the Alternative Living Technologies and Energy Research (ALTER)
Project. His vision was of university-based
living laboratory teeming with eager students, earnest faculty, and engaged
community members all seeking a more harmonious relationship with Nature. His task was the transformation of a
forgotten farmhouse on the campus of Slippery Rock University into what would
become in 1990 the nation’s first Master of Science degree program in
Sustainable Systems. After its
renovation, we called the farm Harmony House in part because of the adjoining
Harmony Road but mostly to inspire a relationship with Nature we hoped would spring
from the seeds that would be nurtured there.
Twenty-seven years after his abrupt passing in the spring of 1990, just
weeks after having dedicated Harmony House to its mission (in true ministerial
tradition, just like his pastor father before him), the Robert A. Macoskey
Center for Sustainable Systems continues to fulfill three missions:
· Education about
sustainability through events, workshops and programs;
· Physical
demonstration of sustainable technologies and systems; and
· Supporting
sustainability-focused academic initiatives and research.
I am an environmental
scientist today in large part because of the hope he had for the world. In my high school years, I had no particular
career aspirations and was content to pursue the passions of youth. The mainframe computer with its decks of
Fortran cards was interesting but I didn’t ride the wave of computing that
captured the attention of many. I did
have a knack for drawing though that was encouraged by artistic parents. So, when senior year rolled around and I was
unable settle on a path, Dad took me to Slippery Rock so I could show his art professor
buddy my portfolio. Whether the
professor saw a glimmer of talent or was doing a favor for a pal I don’t know,
but I was welcomed the next fall to the art department.
That was 1977. Just four years earlier, the U.S. had
experienced its first energy crisis.
Three years before that, the first Earth Day had been celebrated and then
the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was formed. In response to those and other events my dad
had developed one of the more popular courses on campus called Philosophy and Alternative Futures. Through expert guest lecturers and student
research, he and his students explored the nexus of environmental ethics and innovative
technology that was permeating popular culture in works like Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth
(Fuller, 1969); Small is Beautiful
(Schumacher, 1973); Soft Energy Paths
(Lovins, 1977); and Progress As If
Survival Mattered (Friends of the Earth, 1977). Maybe it was attending his class that changed
my mind about my career path as an artist.
Maybe it was the awareness that I didn’t really understand the
environmental science behind what I was attempting to convey in my art. Or, maybe it was my pragmatic acknowledgement
to my future father-in-law (a salt-of-the earth Western PA steel worker) that
my earning potential as an artist was not as great as practically any other
choice. Whatever the reasons, my junior
year found me newly married and enrolled in the department of environmental
sciences. For the next two years, I’d
often commute the 30 minutes to and from our home town to campus with Dad and
talk about his vision and plans while trying to formulate my own.
Still at a bit of a
loss in those days about what to with a degree in environmental science, 1981
found me accepted to one of the few such graduate degree programs in the
country. Although by mutual agreement, the
marriage of high school sweethearts didn’t survive beyond two years at Mr.
Jefferson’s University of Virginia, one thing that did was my passion for a
systems integration of the environmental sciences. At UVA I discovered not only lifelong friends
including my wife of 32 years, but the interdisciplinary nature of
environmental issues and the importance of considering the multiple scientific
and social dimensions of our global problems and solutions. A few years later with that M.S. and a little
luck, I was able to validate my career path for a skeptical grandfather and
patron by landing a job as an air quality scientist with the consulting firm,
Environmental Science Associates, Inc. in San Francisco, California.
My naïve vision at
that time was of an environmental protection corps that would clean up all of
society’s pollution, establish an era of environmental stewardship and sustainability,
and eventually eliminate the need for environmental cleanup altogether. Thirty-one years later, while some of our
biggest environmental legacies like many Superfund sites, the ozone hole, and
atmospheric lead exposures have been mitigated; many old problems continue and
new ones constantly emerge. Sadly,
environmental issues aren’t going away and we need more people, not fewer,
working on these problems.
Several years ago I
created this blog and named it Unshutter
the Lantern as a reference to the hermit who emerges from his seclusion to
share his thoughts with whomever is willing to listen. As may be discerned from its address,
hermitorhero, I struggle with the dichotomy between a desire for hermit-like
seclusion and the need for hero-like leadership. One of the first things I posted was a series
entitled The Philosophy of Sustainability. It had taken me years to articulate and
express that vision and I felt good about the result but a practical task to
implement that vision eluded me.
One day as I sat in
an unstimulating office meeting this past August, I was excited to learn from the
local non-profit, Sustainable Pittsburgh, that Al Gore would be coming to town in
October to present training through his Climate Reality Corps. After a quick review of the organization and
their mission, I completed the application and submitted it for
consideration. My family and friends can
attest to my excitement on being accepted to what would become the 36th
and largest training event in the eleven years since An Inconvenient Truth started a movement.
Like most kids, mine drew pictures of our
house when they were children. One my
son drew from memory while in third grade gnawed at my psyche for years. While the front porch and awnings are a bit
crooked and the overall image is a bit abstract, he accurately depicted the
disintegrating concrete driveway with its cracks and weeds. That he had recalled those details as being integral
to his image of our home has stuck with me ever since. Not that as a child he would consider the
cracks to be good or bad but that he had internalized that decay as part of his
world. I lived with the recognition that
the disintegration of our driveway was normal to him and that bothered me. He was away at college by the time we were
able to finally have a new concrete driveway installed and sending him a
picture of that freshly-poured surface helped to exorcise those old feelings.
Then all of those old memories came
flooding back during one of the three days of Climate Reality training sessions
in October. We heard a story about a
woman in China whose child drew pictures of her home with skies colored gray. The mother asked why they were gray and
reminded the child that the sky is blue.
When she pointed to the sky and saw the hazy smog, she understood why
her child had internalized that as part of her reality.
Of course gray skies are just one of the
many consequences of our unsustainable lifestyles. The long list of large-scale consequences
includes ecosystem destruction, species extinction, sea level rise, increased
drought and fire, disappearing glaciers, and political instability. Closer to home, the annual western PA
waist-high snowfalls of my youth are long gone while tropical diseases like the
zika virus have already reached the Mason-Dixon line. Tick season lasts longer than ever, poison
ivy grows more persistently, and as I write we’re having a thunderstorm in
November, in Pittsburgh.
Nevertheless, as a scientist, consultant,
and systems thinker, I’ve had faith in the ingenuity and fortitude of people to
solve our global problems if we could recognize that the cracks in our driveway
and the leaden skies overheard were actually bad things – not permanent parts
of our reality that our children and theirs had to accept. Then came Trump and his systematic efforts to
dismantle environmental protections, global cooperation, and any sort of
meaningful leadership of Americans as global citizens. That was the last straw for me and one that I
believe broke the back of many sturdy folks who have held out hope that
national leaders would achieve positive change toward sustainable environmental
policies.
I want to look back 30 years from now in my
golden years with praise and admiration for the achievements we all have yet to
realize as we work to counter the reality we’ve all grown to accept as normal. Complacency and faith must be replaced with
urgency and action. Climate change is
not a belief system so don’t ask if people believe in it or not. It’s a reality and it’s just science. Sure, there are myriad complicated
interrelationships, but fundamentally it’s very simple. Does the energy equivalent of 400,000
Hiroshima atomic bombs sound significant?
What if you knew that globally we are releasing that amount of energy
into the atmosphere EVERY SINGLE DAY!
That’s not complicated – it’s just wrong.
So, when someone asks you, “must we change?”
tell them emphatically, “YES!”
When they ask, “but can we change?” The answer is “YES!”
Then ask them the question we all need to
internalize, “will you change?”
The reality of our climate crisis is that,
“YES, we will change.” Change is
inevitable, but at this time we still have the choice to change in a manner
that we can control and manage. It is
already late and the path to a sustainable future will be challenging, painful,
and sad regardless of how diligently and earnestly we work together to
mitigate, adapt, and reduce suffering. But,
the longer we wait, the less viable that path will be as Nature will dictate
the terms and the timeframe. There is still
hope if we band together with the many others around the globe who have been leading
our leaders to a sustainable future. If
you share the vision of a sustainable human future on Earth, the time is now to
find a related task worthy of your hero nature and get to work. If we all do that, there will always be a
need for blue crayons.
For more information, I urge you to explore
these resources:
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