Letter to the Editor: Daniel Marie on Climate Change - Iowa City Press-Citizen

Letter to the Editor: Daniel Marie on Climate Change

Letter to the Editor: Climate Change

The season of Autumn is upon us again. With it comes the anticipated allure of cooler temperatures, changing leaves, and fall harvest. Yet these days we may not feel those traditional calls to get away to multi-colored forests or gather up piles of leaves. The impacts of climate change are all around us. This early October has yet again been another Autumn hit with more days of summer-like temperatures and trees not yet ready to shed their leaves. While we may enjoy the extra green days, numerous other records are of a more perilous sort. In 2023, just a few catastrophes we have seen are unprecedented forest fires spewing out smoke to encroach major cities, record droughts, and once-in-a-century tropical storms.

In spite of these alarming events, there is still great hope and promise to mitigate catastrophic human-aggravated climate change. Project Drawdown(www. drawdown.org) offers a comprehensive overview of 100 solutions that if enacted over the next 30 years would actually reduce atmospheric carbon concentrations to preindustrial levels and thus even reverse climate change. Many of the solutions, including mass production of electric vehicles and generating renewable wind and solar energy, are already starting to be implemented and can trigger massive economic growth. Other solutions, like restoring hundreds of millions of hectares of abandoned farmland and conserving and restoring tropical forests, when combined could sequester a total of hundreds of gigatons of carbon over the next few decades.

Individuals and communities can work to enact many of the proposed Drawdown solutions in daily personal, business, and community practices. Also, nations can work to implement carbon footprint reduction at national levels through legislation and innovation. One such example currently circulating in U.S. Congress is the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act (H.R.5744) ( https://citizensclimatelobby.org/get-loud-take-action/energy-innovation…). This act would place a tax on excess carbon and pay out dividends back to Americans to invest in green energy, transportation, and lifestyle changes.

The past few years around Autumn, I have found myself returning to the poem "Gathering Leaves" by Robert Frost ( https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/148658/gathering-leaves). The poem’s speaker reflects upon the laborious Autumn task of gathering leaves: “I make a great noise //Of rustling all day.” Often, the speakers’ efforts seem futile and the leaves themselves seem to lose value.: “I may load and unload // Again and again //Till I fill the whole shed, //And what have I then?” But the speaker’s final realization is that both the speaker’s efforts and the decaying leaves still have lasting value as they are all part of the ongoing processes of Nature.

With a crisis as colossal as climate change, reactions are certain to be more profound than the speaker in Frost’s poem. It is understandable to feel overwhelmed and helpless with threats of even worsening natural disasters and ever-increasing risks to civilization over the coming century. But the colder Iowa temperatures now circulating after 80 and 90-degree highs can serve as a reminder that there is still hope and promise to mitigate and solve the climate crisis. Just as Frost’s poem offers, human ingenuity and Nature’s sacred and magnificent forces are offering us the tools and resources we need to enact effective solutions to climate change. This Autumn and over the next few years and coming decades, we can enact solutions proposed by Drawdown to reverse climate change and ensure a healthy, sustainable, and prosperous future for humanity in the coming centuries and millennia. The question is perhaps not if we will answer the call to help ensure continued flourishing for humanity and countless other creatures on our numinous planet, but when?

Daniel Marie lives in Coralville and is working to spread awareness about climate change solutions.