immanence

I was interviewed yesterday by the local CBS-affiliated WCAX news show on the topic of how to motivate Vermonters to take action on climate change (while Bernie Sanders and Cornel West were speaking just up the road). What was used of our interview was fairly minimal, so I thought I would share the notes I prepared in the moments between getting their questions and doing the interview.

The entire piece can be read or viewed here. It also features VPIRG climate and energy program director Ben Edgerly Walsh (whose thesis I oversaw some years ago — great work, Ben!).

The gist of the questions Cat Viglienzoni posed to me was this: With Vermont being such a small and seemingly uninfluential state, and with the results of actions being so elusive, how do we motivate our fellow Vermonters to care about climate change enough to take action? 

My points in reply circle around the notions of locality, agency, and Vermonterness.

1) Locality: Caring about climate change has always been a difficult issue. Humans generally don’t tackle problems if they can successfully avoid doing that, and the bigger and more distant the problems, the easier to avoid them. As Katharine Hayhoe has recently said, the best way to get people to care is by making the issue personal. (Hayhoe was one of the co-authors of last week’s National Climate Assessment, and as a climate scientist and evangelical Christian who’s made efforts to convince the latter community to care about the issue, she has some some insights into the matter.)

As everyone knows (even if sometimes this country’s president pretends not to get it), weather is not climate. But weather is dependent on climate: it’s a local and temporary expression of it. Vermonters have always lived close to the weather: both our farmers and our recreational industries — the two linchpins of our economy — are dependent on it, so being able to plan around the weather forecast has always been an important part of the culture. (Which is why Vermont Public Radio dedicates so many minutes of every day to those longwinded reports from the guys at the Fairbanks Museum with their eyes on the skies.) If our weather is growing less predictable and more chaotic — as climate change models predict — that will impact Vermonters pretty directly.

Then there are the multiple ways we are already impacted: Hurricane Irene, spring and summer flooding, changing growing seasons, alterations in the mosquito and other pest populations, the spread of tick-borne diseases (which really are a kind of silent scourge for a growing number of people), and so on. So climate change is here, not just somewhere (and somewhen) else.

2) Agency: No single person, state, or nation alone is going to “solve” the climate crisis; that’s a given. The only way to address it is through deals and agreements by which we all encourage each other to act in ways that will contribute to a solution. When the federal government abdicates its responsibility, it’s up to states and cities to take the lead (as they have). As a state, Vermont can encourage other states. Vermont may be small in the US context, but it’s as large as some nations are.

Leadership, in any case, is not a matter of size, but a matter of example. And it is much easier to lead when you live in a small and politically nimble state like Vermont, with accessible local and state governments, a long tradition of town meetings, and so on. Since we can do things more easily, it’s arguably a moral imperative for us to do just that.

3) Vermonterness: Finally, there’s a way in which taking responsibility for “our” climate resonates with the deeply rooted, small-c conservative values held by many Vermonters. The stereotype of the Vermont “yankee” is that this person is frugal and thrifty, conservationist (i.e., hangs onto things, stores up for the winter like a good squirrel, etc.), takes responsibility for him or herself, and doesn’t pay much attention to the foibles of their neighbors. (Much the same could be said for the quarter of Vermonters of French-Canadian heritage.)

Stereotypes aside, we tend to “get” the idea of responsibility. Sometimes it pays to plan ahead for the cold winter that’s coming (or the extended summer, as the case may be). That may mean putting some resources aside for the future, not putting too much of one’s own exhaust (car exhaust or mental and verbal exhaust) into the air, and generally taking account of one’s actions so that others don’t have to pay for them. If you know you have to get up early next morning, it’s up to you to go to bed early tonight. If you know there’s a sh**storm coming — rising sea levels and worsening storms, refugees, wars over resources, and all of that — it’s good to get your own house in order so that you’ll be prepared not only to deal with it yourself, but to help others when that becomes necessary.

Vermonters generally understand that kind of logic. And if the prospect of carbon taxes raises the hackles of those who are suspicious of government (whether in Washington or in Montpelier), we can always reassure ourselves that we’re a small state and those people we vote in can always be voted out.

So, it shouldn’t take much convincing, and when it does, you can bet that it’s partly because of the ideological polarization that has infected the whole issue in this country. Fortunately, Vermonters are Vermonters, and we like to keep our distance from federal political wrangles. We should do that on the issue of climate change as well.