Raising Elijah

Within minutes they were back downstairs. Mama, we think you should come. An electronic device of some kind was ringing. It occurred to me that we didn’t have any toys that sounded like that. The kids solemnly followed me upstairs. Piercing bleeps came from everywhere and nowhere all at once. Like a tape loop used to disorient the enemy. Like the ring tone from hell.

I didn’t think to ask Faith and Elijah to leave the room. I just started tearing it apart—the beds, the bookshelf, the toy box. Finally, I dismantled the registers, and there it was inside the guts of the baseboard heater. But what was it? Bigger than a mouse. Coppery fur. A greasy face. Ugly. Finally, I noticed the folded umbrellas of its wings, and a Latin name scrolled into my mind—Eptesicus fuscus. The Big Brown Bat. It scrabbled along a pipe. Without the metal cover to create a resonating chamber, the volume of the bat’s chirps dropped to a series of pitiful twangs, like the plucked string of an unplugged electric guitar.

In upstate New York, 2 percent of big brown bats are infected with rabies. I was aware that if I failed to capture this one, my kids would be compelled to undergo rabies vaccinations, in accordance with protocols set forth by Centers for Disease Control guidelines. A friend of mine had endured the whole series of shots—and her kids, too—because her husband, after a chase scene involving a tennis racket, had opened a window and released the bat that had awoken them all by swooping through the bedrooms. Bats have razors for teeth; their bites can be undetectable. And, although the odds are 98 percent that any given bat is rabies-free, rabies is a disease with a 100 percent fatality rate. All this, she had told me as a cautionary tale whose moral was, Don’t free the bat.

I squatted in front of the disassembled heating register and devised a plan. What I needed was a long-sleeved shirt, a large yogurt container, and leather gloves. But these were all located in different parts of the house, and I didn’t want to leave my intruder while I gathered the tools for its arrest. Through the door, I asked Faith to bring me the phone book. On the inside cover, alongside the numbers for the sheriff, fire department, and suicide counseling, was the after-hours number for the Rabies Prevention Hotline. I asked Elijah to bring me the phone.

Within fifteen minutes, a wildlife removal specialist was standing next to me. Within another fifteen minutes the bat was inside a bucket in my freezer. By morning, its frozen corpse was in the hands of a pathologist. Twenty-four hours later, the head of the county’s rabies prevention program called me.

He said that we needed to come to county health for an interview. During the conversation that ensued, he asked if anybody had been sleeping in the room. No, but we had all slept there the night prior to the night of the bat discovery. He asked if the children had been alone in the room with the bat. I had to admit that they had. He asked about the kids’ encounter with the bat. He asked for the birth dates of each child. He wrote down the answers and was quiet for a while.

Then, with the kids out of the room, he reviewed with me the CDC guidelines: An encounter with a bat qualifies as a potential rabies exposure if a sleeping person awakens to find a bat in a room or if an adult witnesses a bat in a room with a previously unattended child, a mentally disabled person, or a drunk person. Elijah, as an unattended child, was on the cusp of what’s considered old enough to be a reliable narrator about whether direct contact with a rabid animal had occurred.

He said that the decision to undergo the vaccination series was up to me. Ours was not a clear-cut case. Only I knew how trustworthy my children’s stories were. I was encouraged to decide swiftly. The initial shots needed to be given within seventy-two hours of exposure. The remaining ones were given over twenty-eight days, according to a strict schedule. If I decided to go forward, county health would make all the arrangements.

For some reason, I felt the need to argue. I was giving an upcoming lecture at the University of Montana. I had to travel. How was that going to work? No problem. County health would arrange to send serum there by refrigerated courier. It would be waiting for me when I got off the plane. Oh, and by the way, he added, if your insurance does not reimburse, the county will pick up the cost of the vaccination series—which would be several thousand dollars—because we don’t want anyone making this decision on the basis of money. We want to err on the side of caution here.

Those words were so amazing to me that I asked him to say that last part again. I had enough outstanding medical bills that Jeff and I were nearly prevented from obtaining a mortgage for our house. In my whole life, no one has ever said to me: Look, we don’t want you to forgo a cancer screening because of financial worries, and so the government will guarantee payment. Or even: Look, we don’t know if you have been exposed, but we are removing carcinogens from your neighborhood because we want to err on the side of caution.

Back at home, I conducted some interviews of my own, calling each child over to the couch for a private chat. Faith claimed that she never saw the bat when she was alone in the room with it. She only heard it, and it sounded like it was under her bed. Elijah gave me the same basic story but with a twist: And then, the bat flew around and landed on my hand.

I suggested we get a snack. How about some apples? After we cored, sliced, and ate four apples and drank two cups of tea, I casually asked him to tell me again about the bat. So he gamely repeated the whole story, word for word, until he came to the end. The bat flew around the room and landed on my hand. It was carrying a tiny . . . gun.

We had the shots. County health really did make all the arrangements, our insurance company paid without protest (amount billed: $5,798.04), and a nurse at the university clinic in Missoula, Montana, was standing by when I got off the plane on the day that my third round of shots was due. And so my children and I were afforded 100 percent protection against an environmental disease to which we may have been exposed. Or not.

Within the United States, bats are the most common source of rabies, which is an incurable and almost-always fatal form of encephalitis. And yet, common in this context still means something incredibly rare. Between 1997 and 2006, nineteen people in the United States died of rabies, and encounters with bats were involved with fourteen of these deaths. Basically, the odds of contracting bat-related rabies are far less than the odds of winning the state lottery. (The Organization for Bat Conservation likes to point this out.) Rabies kills, on average, one American a year. Sometimes two.

A century ago, the death rate from rabies was a hundred times higher, and most cases were caused by bites from domesticated animals. The virtual elimination of rabies deaths in the United States—which, by necessity, involves prevention and prophylaxis—is a triumph of public health. And accomplishing it required an all-hands-on-deck approach. Pets were vaccinated, legislation passed, strays captured, surveillance and reporting systems established, virology labs funded, and public awareness raised. Rabies prevention was—and is—a concerted, multidisciplinary effort involving federal agencies, local agencies, state laws, emergency room doctors, pathology labs, veterinarians, animal shelters, and wildlife biologists.

The precautionary, tightly coordinated world of rabies control into which my children and I were temporarily swept was impressively efficient and comprehensive. Even after the crisis was over, the search for primary prevention continued: The wildlife removal guy crawled along my porch roof with me and showed me how to identify the tiny entry points that bats use as doorways. (Their wings leave a telltale oily stain.) We tented the house with bird netting, allowing roosting bats to leave—they freefall before opening their wings—but not re-enter, and so humanely banished the source of our problem. Jeff caulked the holes after they left in a final gesture of good riddance.

In doing so, I began to wonder why we don’t bring a rabies approach—with its urgent, multitiered, take-no-chances, can-do lines of attack—to climate change. The central lesson of rabies—that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure (okay, there is no cure)—seemed to apply in spades.

Unless significant actions are taken very soon to dramatically curtail fossil fuel emissions, the human toll will almost certainly become catastrophic, according to the British Medical Journal. A report jointly compiled by the University of London and the prestigious medical journal, The Lancet, reached the same conclusion.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has issued its own policy statement about the menace of climate change for children, as has the World Health Organization, which notes that, of the deaths presently attributable to climate disruption around the world, 85 percent of those who perished were not yet adults.

Climate change and bat bites are dissimilar in at least three ways, and these differences help illuminate the obstacles blocking an aggressive approach to mitigating the dangers of the former. First, rabies is a disease that possesses what physicians call high specificity. If I had foregone a rabies vaccination, and, months later, fell into a convulsive coma and died, we would all know what killed me. By contrast, if I go on to die of chronic pulmonary obstructive disorder or cardiac arrhythmia, we won’t know whether the higher ozone levels created by higher temperatures caused my death . . . or not. The summer heat wave that I suffered through in the final weeks of my pregnancy—and the crummy air I breathed as a result—could be responsible for Elijah’s reactive airways. Or not. The damage caused by climate change may be dramatic and global, but it’s not specific. It can hide in plain sight. Climate change manifests as shifting weather patterns, but it’s in the nature of weather to be changeable. By contrast, to look into the eyes of a rabid animal is to confront a concentrated, undeniable danger.

Second, to remove bat roosts from one’s attic is met with silence on the part of the bats. To remove fossil fuels from the economy is met with the opposite of silence by their manufacturers. If bats controlled as much of the global economy as Exxon, we would undoubtedly tolerate a much higher rabies death rate. (And aspersions would be openly cast on the posited link between bat attacks and rabies. Debate would swirl around the claim that bat saliva is a medium of transmission. In spite of government reports flatly asserting that “rabies transmission by bats is unequivocal,” the public would remain ambivalent and confused.)

Third—and this is the difference I want to focus on—climate change is a topic that is surrounded by considerable social silence. This is hardly the case for rabies. The death of Houston teenager, Zach Jones—the only death from rabies in all of the United States in 2006—made national news. (“Texas Rabies Death Spurs New Concern About Bats” was the headline in the Los Angeles Times). In its aftermath, hundreds of people captured and turned in bats, overwhelming Houston’s rabies control lab.

At about the same time, I discovered that my own bat story was welcomed at dinner parties. Even people who were terrified of bats—truly phobic—would listen in rapt horror as I described how a rabid bat the size of a chipmunk had used its wings to paddle across the baseboard heater behind Faith’s bed. My kids held court on the playground with their own versions of our bat story, and the vaccination Band-Aids on their shoulders were admired as badges of courage.

By contrast, climate change tends to be a conversation ender among friends. Not withstanding the few legions of valiant activists who are indeed at the barricades, talk of climate change does not incite riots in the hearts of men. Or even curiosity. Instead, a miasma of quiet anxiety hangs over the whole topic. Even among individuals who admit feeling truly concerned, news about climate change seems to disperse attention rather than gather it. Certainly, the drumbeat of evidence for its accelerating destructive power has not prompted alarmed citizens to inundate government labs with biological samples.

And nowhere is the silence thicker than around the human health consequences of climate change. Although several august medical authorities have clearly identified climate change as the number one threat to children, leading news organizations have failed to report on the public health implications of climate change. So discovered a 2010 survey, which also reports that the American public largely considers climate change a future environmental problem, not a here-and-now health problem—and certainly not a direct menace to their own children on par with, say, bullies or pedophiles.

Until recently, my own discourse about climate change followed a schizophrenic pattern. In public, I spoke boldly. In a commencement address I gave at a rural college in coal-is-king Pennsylvania, I made climate instability the centerpiece of my remarks. (Not all of the trustees were in a congratulatory frame of mind after I sat down.) Meanwhile, inside my own household, I followed a strict code of silence, underlain by my personal credo that childhood should be a time of wonderment and make believe, not for conversation about catastrophe. I’m particularly opposed to the idea that children should be pressed into public service as atmospheric junior rangers, believing instead that frightening problems need to be solved by adults who should just shut up and get to work.

First, Elijah asked to be a lightning bear for Halloween. It’s my totem animal, he informed me firmly. Lightning bear is Elijah’s word for polar bear, Faith hollered up the stairs, which made me guess that she was the one who had put him up to the totem thing. But I didn’t need convincing. I agreed that a lightning bear was a great thing to be for Halloween and suggested we make a costume from scraps of flannel and a chenille bedspread. (A background in animal vivisection does offer some practical life skills.)

To get a better idea of what the ears should look like, Elijah and I searched together through his picture books for drawings of polar bears, but there were none. I was afraid to go online because I didn’t want images of starving, drowning animals popping up on the computer screen. Finally, I came across a file box in my office about polar bears. But this, too, contained, among other things, papers about the shrinking ice floes on which the bears hunt. I rifled through them quickly and wondered if Elijah could read well enough to figure out what these reports were about. They contained projections that melting sea ice would bring about the extinction of polar bears within his lifetime. I ended up hiding the whole box from him and set out to create a pattern by amending one for a lion costume.

In November, Elijah came down the stairs for breakfast one morning and asked his sister for a weather report. Faith walked out onto the porch, spread out her arms in the manner of Saint Francis, and came back inside. It’s global warmingish. He nodded, and they both dug into to their cereal. This could have been an opening for a conversation. I didn’t take it.

During a weird balmy spell in January, when daffodils bloomed along the south wall, the front yard filled with mud, and a mosquito flew through the upstairs bathroom, I overheard a conversation on the playground. One child said, I know why it’s hot. Do you? Another said, It’s because the earth is sick. Other nearby children, hearing this, gathered around. They formed a circle, and they all nodded silently. I said nothing.

In early April, Elijah and I walked home from the library—no leaves to offer shade, the community bank’s time and temperature sign reading eighty-four degrees—and he turned his ingenuous face to mine to ask, Mama, is it supposed to be so hot? I smiled as reassuringly as I could.

With that, I realized that the pedagogical wisdom of even a few years ago is already quaint. When the environmental catastrophes were occurring in some far-off biosphere—like tropical rainforests—it was sensible to defer lessons about the planet’s problems for a more age-appropriate stage of development and send the kids out to the woods, to the park, to the backyard. But when the local ecosystem itself starts to shift—when the seasons around you stop making sense—maintaining silence in front of children starts to feel like a lie.

Here is one of my early memories: I was playing in the family room after dinner while a TV anchor reported the war news. When I looked up at the screen, I saw a Vietnamese child on fire. My father then stood up, walked over to the television set, clicked it off, and left the room. And my mother said that it was time to get ready for bed.

Something else was bothering me, too. In spite of the popular truism that having children invests you in the future of the planet, the lived reality was that the parents around me seemed to be cocooned within the same hear-no-evil zone as their kids, inhabiting a world where talk about mass extinctions and rising sea levels never penetrated. When mothers gathered for playgroups or band concert rehearsals or swimming lessons or book clubs, we might comment on how tough it was to keep kids entertained during five solid days of rain, but we didn’t speculate about why record-setting rains keep arriving or the latest report on the vanishing biodiversity. (One in four mammal species is headed for extinction. Discuss.) It’s as though we needed to protect ourselves from terrible knowledge along with our kids.

For all these reasons, I decided that it was time to sit down with my own kids and have the Global Warming Talk. I had carried off the Sex Talk—and its many sequels—with grace and good biology. Surely, I told myself, I could rise to this new, albeit awful, occasion. As a parent, I am tasked with the story about the birds and bees. Therefore, am I not also tasked with the story of where all the birds and bees have gone?

On the surface, procreation and climate change seemed opposite narratives. Sex knits molecules of air, food, and water into living organisms. Climate change unravels all that. The ending of the sex story is the creation of a family. Climate change is the story of de-creation, ending with what biologist E. O. Wilson calls the Eremozoic Era—the Era of Loneliness.

I did discover that the two tales shared a common epistemological challenge: They are both counterintuitive. In the former case, you have to accept that your ordinary existence began with an extraordinary, unthinkable act. In the latter case, you have to accept that the collective acts of ordinary objects—cars, planes, dishwashers—are ushering in things extraordinary and unthinkable (dissolving coral reefs, dying plankton, mosquitoes in January). So, I reasoned, perhaps the same pedagogical lessons apply. During the Big Talk, keep it simple, leave the door open for further conversation, offer reading material as follow-up.

Of which there was no shortage. In fact, a veritable cottage industry of children’s books on climate change has sprung up. There are fairy tales featuring carbon-breathing dragons and futuristic sci-fi novels in which child protagonists provide hope and leadership in the face of rising seas. The nonfiction selections range from the primer, Why Are the Ice Caps Melting? (Let’s Read and Find Out!), in which lessons on the ravaging of ecosystems also offer plenty of opportunities to practice silent e, to the ultra-sophisticated How We Know What We Know About Our Changing Climate: Scientists and Kids Explore Global Warming, by foremost environmental author Lynne Cherry, in which middle school readers are cast as co-principal investigators.

This literary subgenre is impressive. Reading its various offerings, I found myself admiring the respectful tones and clear explanations. These books describe global warming as a reality that no longer lingers in the realm of debate. The children’s books profile heroic individuals fighting to save the planet—in ways that kids can get involved. To read the children’s literature is to see the world’s people called to a greater purpose, working ardently and in concert with each other to solve a big problem—and enjoying a grand adventure while they’re at it.

Is this the fiction under which we all should be laboring? I don’t know. I do know that fatalism, which afflicts many adults but almost no children, is a big part of what’s preventing us from derailing the global warming train that has now left the station. I do know that we grown-ups also need visions of effective challenges and radical actions that can turn into selffulfilling prophecies.

I would like to tell you that, from these books, I pieced together the ideal Big Talk on Climate Change for young children. I did not. Talking with my kids about global warming was—and continues to be—a complete bummer. But through conversation, I did accomplish a couple of things. I managed to affirm the authority of my children’s own observations—you are right; apple trees are not supposed to bloom in December—and I opened a new line of communication. If you want to talk more, I’m available. I’m paying attention. I’m not pretending nothing’s wrong.

During the Cold War, when the specter of nuclear annihilation hung in the air, a teacher asked her third graders how many of them thought that nuclear war would happen. Only one child did not raise her hand. And in response to the question, Why not? the lone dissenter answered, Because my parents are working to stop it.

Her point was this: The way we protect our kids from terrible knowledge is not to hide the terrible knowledge, or change the subject, or even create an age-appropriate story about the terrible knowledge, but to let them watch us rise up in the face of terrible knowledge and do something. The immediate lesson for me was: Stop acting like a Good German around your kids and let them see that you are a member of the French Resistance.

Happily, for parents, transforming oneself into a climate partisan in full view of one’s offspring is not that difficult. It turns out that the work of achieving deep cuts in carbon emissions is carried out in two very different arenas, one of which is visible to children. But let’s talk first about the one that is not: the political arena.

Although climatologists, economists, and ecologists may disagree about which specific road map should be used to direct us away from petroleum and coal dependency, no one argues with the fact that fossil fuels will continue to be dug out of the ground and burned as long as they are the cheapest form of energy and nobody has to pay for using the atmosphere as a dump site. We need a strategy that makes them uncheap in comparison to the renewable alternatives. This means ending subsidies for, levying taxes on, and collecting carbon fees from fossil fuels. These would then be used to accelerate the development of clean energy.

There is also broad agreement that what’s preventing the enactment of such solutions is feeble public engagement. Says NASA climatologist James Hansen:

Actions needed for the world to move on to clean energies are feasible. The actions could restore clean air and water globally. But the actions are not happening. . .. Concerted action will only happen if the public, somehow, becomes forcefully involved.

What might a forceful public involvement in the climate crisis look like? Possibly a lot like the civil rights movement. There would be marches, teach-ins, sit-ins, direct actions, speeches, music, art, and appeals by the faith community. Instead of lunch counters, think coal plants. As climate writer and activist Bill McKibben points out, this kind of political action has multiplicative effects. The civil rights movement didn’t desegregate the South one lunch counter at a time. Instead, its leaders dramatized the events of one lunch counter to force a national change.

But swapping out fossil fuels for carbon-free, renewable energy is only half the battle. And it’s the eye-rolling, dream-on, pie-in-the-sky half. And that’s because, at the scale we now require, replacing all the energy contained in the supercharged carbon bonds of fossil fuels with alternatives like solar, geothermal, and wind power is nigh impossible. Thus, the unsexy, unpleasant, other half of the battle: changing the scale. Ending our dependency on fossil fuel is going to require dramatic reductions in energy consumption. With the willingness to make deep cuts, the whole project becomes doable.

This second arena of change—the child-visible one—is partly located in our own homes, the stage on which we parents play the role of lead actor. It’s the place where a thousand molehills really do a mountain make. Individual residences are responsible for 21.1 percent of total U.S. carbon dioxide emissions. Add driving and that number rises to 38 percent. This is not a trivial figure and, in one respect, is good news because it means we don’t have to wait around for political change before making immediate and radical transformations within our own spheres of influence. We can break the spell. We can prepare the way.

Indeed, many climate change analysts view the significant household contribution to climate change as the silver lining in a black cloud of otherwise ominous data. Because it represents the collective actions of individual people, rather than institutions, households are seen as a leverage point for swift change. As expressed in the title of one recent paper, “Household Actions Can Provide a Behavioral Wedge to Rapidly Reduce U.S. Carbon Emissions.” According to another, we householders could quickly shrink our collective carbon emissions by nearly a third (equals 11 percent of the U.S. total) just by changing our “selection and use of household and motor vehicle technologies.” By contrast, any lowering of emissions from other sectors—industrial, commercial, agricultural—is perceived, rightly or wrongly, to be thwarted by expensive infrastructure and the time required to implement complex new policy.

Maybe wrongly. I’m of two minds here. As someone who, not so far in the distant past, drove a car with more than 250,000 miles on the odometer and a coat hanger holding up the muffler while chanting you can’t break now, I am not convinced that my “selection of motor vehicle technologies” is more amenable to rapid change than those of well-capitalized corporations. Yes, a Prius currently sits in my driveway. My busriding husband and I share it. We paid cash. But the time lag between the decision to select this motor vehicle technology and its execution was not brief. And the next motor vehicle technology I’d like to select—no car in the driveway—is held hostage by the fact that the village bus stops running at 6:30 p.m. and doesn’t run at all in the middle of the day.

The presumption that householders are more malleable than business institutions sounds to me a lot like a cultural willingness to tell individuals how to behave coupled with a reluctance to hold the energy and manufacturing sectors to the same standards. And if the plan for blazing a path to a carbon-free future truly runs through households, shouldn’t part of the strategy include rapid transformation of building codes, appliance standards, and public transportation?

Some version of the same dreary list for how to green your house—the one that begins with adequate attic insulation—has been around since the Carter Administration, and it has not inspired a revolution yet. As recent investigations demonstrate, there remain significant psychological, economic, and institutional barriers to improved household energy efficiency. These include poverty; inconvenience; unclear metrics for estimating energy use; lack of actionable, coherent advice; and rental housing. As a homeowner with renter loyalties, I concede that the rental arrangement is a disincentive for action: The tenant receives bills for electricity and heat but can’t choose the equipment or the source; the landlord controls the energy flow but offloads the bills. It’s not a relationship to spur awareness. (For years on end, I wrote checks for heat from furnaces and boilers that I never even saw. It didn’t seem strange at the time.) So, who is taking on that disconnect?

According to the most reliable estimates, we require a very rapid, 80-percent cut in fossil fuel emissions in order to avoid the kinds of temperature changes that would tip us, within the lifetimes of our children, into total calamity. Without policy solutions and a global strategy, volunteer efforts on the part of individuals—what children can see—are trivial in the grand scheme of things.

On the other hand, waiting around and doing nothing, as though bewitched, on the grounds that nothing one can imagine doing is sufficient to keep the ice caps frozen, is also a form of avoidance. Paralyzing despair is its own refuge from responsibility. So is cynicism. So is denial. Whatever the odds, we have to shake off the stupor, appreciate the severity of our situation, and get to work, heroically, ardently, and in concert, just like the characters in children’s books.

And after reading a lot of them, I began to wonder: What if the heroes of the children’s books on the climate crisis came to life? What if they were us? How would we live? What would we do? Judging by these stories, we would throw ourselves joyfully and wholeheartedly into work of public engagement (storming barricades, throwing out bad guys) without fear of looking foolish. We would develop skills that allowed us to do some big practical things (growing our own food, designing carbon-free cities). And because we are heroes—and why shouldn’t we be; it’s our own children’s lives we are trying save after all—we would make whatever sacrifices were necessary. In this, the new crop of stories reminded me of some really old ones. In the Greek myths, sacrifices were serious undertakings and, when heroes headed out on their heroic journeys, obligatory. Done right, they could actually change the course of nature. Like calm the seas.

So I have three suggestions for individual actions that can serve as symbolic starting points for heroism and have some practical, long-term value from a systems point of view. (More on systems thinking momentarily.) They are not intended to turn sleep-deprived parents of young children into the Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks of the climate crisis—although we sorely need a few of those, too. Yes, they involve sacrifice but not irritating inconvenience. (There’s a difference.) They save rather than cost money; they can be implemented immediately; they promote health; and they are intended to inspire further action. But their central qualification for mention here is they are intended to serve as daily, visible reminders to all children of the family that our job as their parents is now, quite literarily, to change the course of nature, which has been placed, by human actions, on a terrible path. (Sacrifice: from the Latin, to perform sacred rites.)

And I’m going to ask you to refrain from laughter until you get to the end of the chapter (and I’ve explained the systems thinking thing). Here they are:

1. Plant a garden.

2. Mow grass without the assistance of fossil fuels.

3. And replace the clothes dryer with evaporation.

Okay, so you’re all laughing anyway—half of you because, given how far down the road of climate change we are already, you find these gestures pathetic and inconsequential, and the other half because, given how far down the road of frantic exhaustion working parents are, you find these gestures unrealistic and excessive.

I am quite possibly the world’s worst gardener. I would like to blame my yard for this. It’s full of shade, and the shade comes from walnut trees, which, as any gardener worth her salt can tell you, exude from their roots a substance called juglone, whose job it is to take out the competition by wilting the neighbors. So, my garden now has raised beds (and, thanks to Jeff, brick walkways between them). These are supposed to help keep the tender roots of the garden plants away from the death-peddling juglone below. Of course, the problem of the shade remains. But I am a new gardener, and I am determined to keep at it. So far, I have grown impressive crops of mint, parsley, and lettuce. I once harvested enough peas to feed all four of us. One meal. As a small side dish.

I am upstaged in the gardening department by my own compost pile. All kinds of things take root in it. Two years ago, some member of the squash family—possibly a cross-pollinated wild hybrid of some kind—planted its seedling flag atop the steamy, south-facing slope and began to grow. Soon, its stickle-backed leaves were the size of placemats, and they were attached to a stem as thick as a child’s wrist. When it started to climb the sides of the bin and spill over the top, blooming wildly with crepe-y orange flowers and shivering with bees, Elijah became so terrified that he bribed Faith into taking over his every-other-night compost-toting duty.

And so it had. Grabbing hold of a tree trunk next to the bin, the vine had climbed a small maple and entirely covered it. Its flowers had become fruits—deep green globes, each the size of a party balloon. And so we had squashes—or something—dangling above our heads. They tasted good. I sautéed them with garlic and basil, grated them up for soup stock, added them to muffins and pasta sauce, and, in one form or another, we ate them all winter.

If only my garden were half as prolific. To be sure, I’m mostly slumming when I’m working in it. Because our CSA farm is only a half-mile away—and its hoop houses, hen houses, and root cellars provide us eggs and produce year round—I have the luxury of leaving the serious crop production to the experts and can still carry into my kitchen (via bicycle or sled) locally grown food, burning no carbon to do it.

It’s likely that your garden will produce a much bigger fraction of your groceries than mine and thus save fossil fuels twice over—first, in the form of long-distance, refrigerated produce transportation and, second, in local trips to bring the food from market to kitchen. Regardless, the real climate value of the garden lies in three other places. The first is in building skills. If our children are going to grow up in a world of increasing environmental instability and declining oil reserves—and they are—it seems useful for them to know a few things about potatoes.

The second is in preserving the genetic diversity of seeds. In an unpredictable climate, we need as many varieties of as many fruits, grains, and vegetables as possible—the drought-resistant ones, the mildew resistant ones, the early blooming and late blooming kinds. Big commercial seed companies are, for the most part, not interested in the rare, the peculiar, and the untruckable. As a result, many traditional varieties are now on the edge of extinction. But gardens can function as living archives of genetic diversity, especially when backyard gardeners become seed savers. With almost no extra effort on your part, your garden can feed your family while also doubling as a gene bank.

The real carbon savings of gardens, however, comes from the compost, and this is the reason I am issuing a universal recommendation for gardening. Together, food waste and yard trimmings make up 26 percent of the municipal solid waste stream in the United States. And, when buried in landfills, they become fuel for the production of methane, a long-lived gas that is twenty-three times more powerful than carbon dioxide at trapping heat. (See Chapter 4.) According to the U.S. Department of Energy, methane is now fully 10 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions—and its slice of the emissions pie is growing. Furthermore, of the thirteen major sources of methane, the largest single one is landfills. (At 184.3 million metric tons per year, landfills add more methane to the atmosphere than “enteric fermentation,” which refers to, well, how the nation’s 100 million cattle add methane to the atmosphere.)

Rerouting one quarter of the waste stream to compost bins would seriously tamp down the number one source of methane gas emissions. And, because it serves as fertilizer for the garden, compost obviates the need to purchase synthetic fertilizers, which are manufactured from fossil fuels, and which, when used as directed, add a second noxious greenhouse gas to the air: nitrous oxide (whose heat-trapping powers are 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide; it is also a precursor of smog).

So, to summarize: By planting a garden, you create the need for compost, and by starting a compost pile, three problems are solved:

1. You direct food scraps away from the methane factories called landfills.

2. You make homemade fertilizer with no fossil fuels.

3. You prevent the formation of a smog-making, heat-retaining gas.

And the best part of all: The compost pile, nature’s Crock-Pot, requires almost no work whatsoever. Within months, dead leaves and old food will, all by themselves, transform into rich, black, loamy (non-smelly) humus. Depending on your perspective, this is either a holy blessing or the result of unpaid labor on the part of earthworms, fungi, and other members of the ecosystem service industry.

Depending on how you run your household, you can either send your eight- and five-year-old out to the compost pile on alternate nights, armed with a flashlight and a bucket of food scraps, because come on now, we all have to pitch in around here, or you can pay them.

And depending on your relationship to the various foodproviding institutions that surround you—churches, temples, hospitals, schools, nursing homes, restaurants—you can go public with your newfound skills and make monumental changes. Bates College in Maine composts all of its dining hall food scraps and returns them to the farmers’ fields that supply the (organic, local) food that is served there. The city of San Francisco has already instituted mandatory, curbside compost pick-up for urban residents. In short, the large-scale diversion of food scraps from methane-generating landfills is a doable project that awaits no technological breakthrough or venture capital investment. So, go do it.

Systems thinking is the idea that you can’t know everything about an organization by just looking at its parts. You also have to look at the interactions among the parts because certain properties emerge from the influence of one piece of the system on another. Systems thinking—and its heady conceptual underpinning—systems theory—has its roots in ecology. To understand the shape of a flower you need to understand the foraging behavior of the bee that pollinates the flower. And understanding the bee’s foraging behavior requires knowledge about the distribution of flowers across the landscape. In other words, the parts of the system (bees and flowers) are shaped by their reciprocal relationship (pollination) to each other.

Systems thinking has also been applied to human organizations—like corporations—and to the complicated boundary between human organizations and the natural world. Systems thinking shows us that the potential of vegetable gardens to mitigate climate change goes beyond their ability to sequester carbon. We need to look at the whole system of which the garden is part, including the waste disposal system, the transportation system, the fertilizer industry, and the role of experiential learning in early childhood.

In my family, I am the designated mower. Thinking narrowly, I could mow my half-acre with a gasoline-powered mower, and it would consume an hour of my day and maybe—what?—a half gallon of gas? Or I could spend two hours pushing around a manual reel mower and burn no gas. A half-gallon is not a lot, and two hours is. In fact, few parents I know have two hours a week to devote to mowing. But let’s widen the view and examine the whole lawn mowing system.

An hour of cutting the grass is not the same as burning a half-gallon of gasoline in a car. In fact, the mower emits in one hour the air pollution equivalent of driving an average car 200 miles. (Riding mowers are even worse.) Although the EPA required pollution reductions for new mowers starting in 1997—and may do so again by the time you read this—lawn mowers are still chimneys on wheels, and walking behind one is still more toxic than walking behind a car. Lawn mowers expose those who push them to benzene, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and fine particles. The exhaust from lawn mowers is especially rich in the chemical compounds that serve as raw materials for the creation of the lung destroyer, ozone. Five percent of smog is from lawn mowers.

Their hazards, of course, also include bodily harm. About 9,400 children are injured by lawn mowers each year, and their wounds are often complex and prone to infection. Many are disfiguring. There are fatalities. In fact, the epidemiology of lawn mower injuries is among the most gruesome subgenres within the medical literature. Consider “Stump Forming After Traumatic Foot Amputation of a Child—Description of a New Surgical Procedure and Literature Review of Lawnmower Accidents” and “Power Lawn Mower Decortication of Scalp and Skull.” (Yes, I looked it up: removal of the surface layer.)

The risk of injury stops when the mower is turned off, but the toxic pollution goes on. Gasoline-related vapors, including carcinogenic benzene, continue emanating from the machine even when it is sitting mutely in its corner next to the snow shovel. Through evaporative emissions, lawn mowers—along with gas cans, chainsaws, leaf blowers, and, of course, vehicles—can significantly contaminate the air of the garages they are stored in—and, according to a 2007 study, the homes those garages may be attached to.

Each year, 800 million gallons of gasoline are required to mow the nation’s grass, which covers 1.9 percent of the nation’s land surface. Indeed, turf grass is the single largest irrigated crop in the United States. Photosynthesizing away in the sun, grass functions—as plankton and trees do—to take carbon dioxide out the air and exchange it for oxygen. Green lawns and city parks are thus potential allies in the fight against climate change. However, they don’t always serve this role. The more that grass is mowed with combustion engines—and fed fossil-fuel-derived fertilizers, and blasted with gasoline-powered leaf blowers—the more that its carbon-sequestering powers are cancelled out. Indeed, many ornamental lawns are so intensively managed with fossil fuels, that they switch sides: like cars and cement plants—and unlike plankton and trees—they become net carbon emitters rather than net carbon collectors. And so breathes a strange new beast: grass that contributes to climate change.

Which is why I mow with reel mowers. (I have two of them.) My style is to mow the lawn a few rows at a time, about twenty to thirty minutes a day. Mowing thus becomes a daily ritual rather than a weekly task. As soon as my entire yard is mowed, I start over—although experientially, there is no start or end point. With a reel mower, cutting the grass becomes a Zen cycle of sickle blades that begins with the last rains of April and ends with October frost. Along the way, mowing satisfies some chunk of my hour-long daily exercise routine and so actually saves me time. Whatever minutes I don’t spend mowing, I spend running.

Given its aerobic benefits, here’s a marketing idea for the humble reel mower: Invite a team of design engineers to trick it out with a cup holder, a heart rate monitor, and an easy-to-read console that displays customizable workout programs. Now imagine entire suburban neighborhoods peopled with mowercising athletes, their cardio rates rising into the maximum fatburning zone as they pace determinedly back and forth across their yards. And, as an extra bonus, their grass gets cut.

I’m kidding. I wouldn’t want to live there either. But my question is an earnest one: If we are willing to break a sweat in a gym by using muscle power to operate machines—costing us time and money, taking us away from our kids, and accomplishing no useful work—why not look at the carbon-free, hand-powered tools of lawn care as state-of-the-art exercise equipment?

From a systems point of view, a silent mower that needs no fossil fuel offers parents a number of advantages. Most notably, you can mow whenever you want—for example, during the early and late hours of the day when it’s cooler. Or by the light of the moon. And because the machine is so twirlingly quiet, you can multitask. While pushing a reel mower, I’ve overseen play dates, supervised a trampoline party, drilled a child on the multiplication tables (her idea; not mine), and, on many summer afternoons, coaxed babies into napping. The weight of a reel mower—about 30 pounds—approximates a fully loaded stroller, and the shushing sound of the reel, like stroller wheels on pavement, is sleep-promoting. Babies and toddlers can slumber in the shade while you mow around them. (Of course, you should never leave a small child alone with any machine, reel mowers included.) By contrast, combining childcare with a gasoline mower is reckless endangerment. You can’t mow during naptime, and, if you have children too young to leave in the house unattended, you can’t mow at all because toddlers shouldn’t be anywhere near an exhaustspewing, rock-flinging, ninety-decibel machine as it advances through the yard. (Testifying to that are those 9,400 pediatric lawnmower injuries per year.)

I like to mow grass. It’s meditative yet vigorous. It’s good resistance training for triceps, deltoid, and trapezious muscles. I am therefore puzzled by men—and they are always men—who complain that reel mowers require too much sweaty drudgery, bog down in dense grass, cut poorly, and so on. How can this be? I weigh 125 pounds and cannot manage even a single pushup or chin-up. Boarding a plane, I look around for help to lift my bag into the overhead compartment. Yet I can manage a reel mower in dense grass. So also can the pair of thirteen-year-old boys who sometimes mow for me when I’m traveling or too busy. (They use my equipment. I’m not willing to ask someone else’s child to walk in a cloud of noise and carcinogens while cutting my grass.)

I’m less baffled by the complaints lodged by those who believe the American lawn is an antiquated waste of time, energy, and biodiversity no matter how little carbon is expended in maintaining it. These critics fall into two camps—those who advocate for the conversion of turf into pollinator-friendly meadows of native plants and those who argue for edible landscapes of fruit and nut trees, berry bushes, herbs, and vines. Both ideas make sense and are worth exploring.

In the meantime, the use of fossil fuels for maintaining ornamental grass should be forsaken. Here’s my idea for a universal philosophy of turf care: A lawn shall not exceed what its owner can comfortably cut with a reel mower. If it’s so big that it requires gasoline to manage, it’s too big. Plant something else. Like an orchard. In addition, exchange the synthetic fertilizer for some compost and replace the leaf blower and the weed wacker for a rake and a pair of shears. And as a reminder: In spite of all kinds of marketing imagery to the contrary, a strong machine doesn’t make you strong. When engulfed in the blue haze of a two-stroke engine, it is fossil fuel, not you, babe, that’s supplying the torque.

Some communities forbid them outright, on the grounds that clotheslines lower property values. Which is a strange thing because dryers are not used in many places where people have money and enjoy their clothes. It would be hard, for example, to accuse the Italians of stylistic indifference. And yet, fewer than 4 percent of Italian households own clothes dryers. In fact, well-dressed people all around the world employ elegant, well-designed systems for evaporating water from their wardrobes in ways that don’t draw from the power grid. Their houses are also smaller than ours with less space for stringing lines. Surely, we, too, can figure something out.

As it stands now, here is the choice: Loading a dryer with wet clothes takes one minute plus forty cents worth of electricity. Hanging a load is free but takes twenty minutes. (These are Jeff’s estimates. He currently heads up the laundry service in our household.) A twenty-fold time difference is huge. It’s a full order of magnitude greater than the time differential between mowing with fossil fuels and mowing without. And when you are washing eight or more loads a week, it matters. Added to this, the drying process itself is many times longer. On a breezy day, a cotton sheet might dry on a sunlit clothesline in thirty minutes, but a pair of jeans on a rainy Saturday will make you wait until late Monday.

A systems approach, however, can make the efficiency ratio look different. A tumble dryer is a clothes randomizer. What comes out is not a basketload of clean, dry, sorted, mated items. Another twenty minutes has to be devoted to folding clothes, hanging clothes, delivering clothes to closets and drawers, and chasing down the runaway spouses of all the jilted singleton socks.

In my own household, back in the days of the dryer, the baskets of clean but unfolded laundry formed the bottleneck between order and chaos. Everyone disliked the work of folding and sorting, and it represented yet another sit-down task, which is not healthy for anybody. The baskets just waited by the couch like so many guinea pigs whose litter needed changing. Sooner or later, somebody in search of a favorite outfit would start rooting around in the baskets, accelerating the rate of sock dispersal. Worse, dirty laundry would be tossed atop the clean. The bin labeled Home for Unwed Socks, which Faith tends, was overflowing.

By contrast, when you air dry, you can sort and mate as you go. If you use hangers instead of clothespins, it’s possible to create a prêt-à-porter clothesline. (For baby clothes, a drying rack is faster.) Thus, the twenty minutes of hanging laundry incorporates the twenty minutes of sock mating, hanger work, and underwear segregation that awaits you after the buzzer goes off on the tumble dryer. As a result, our Home for Unwed Socks is now nearly unoccupied, and Jeff has to field fewer questions about where a particular beloved article of clothing might be located. And because our clothes aren’t whirled around in tornadic heat, they last longer. (Lint: a mild-mannered word for disintegrated clothing.) As for evaporation, it just occurs on its own as one of the basic laws of physics. In this, a clothesline is more akin to a compost pile than a reel mower: The desired result, while slow, is autogenerated and can be achieved while everyone sleeps, which is not possible with a dryer. (A gentle reminder: “Never let your clothes dryer run while you are out of the house or asleep.” So says none other than the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Fire Administration.)

Clothes dryers pose hazards both direct and indirect. They might not seem as menacing as lawn mowers, but dryers are a leading cause of house fires, accounting for more than 15,000 blazes, 400 injuries, and 15 deaths a year. When not bursting into flames from lint buildup—and now I’m returning to the business at hand—a clothes dryer contributes, on average, 1,369 pounds of carbon dioxide a year to the atmosphere. More than half of all of the electricity that flows into our houses powers electrical appliances. After the refrigerator, the clothes dryer is the biggest consumer, using about $1,500 of electricity over its 18-year lifespan. (I’m assuming you’ve already got the memo about the significant energy savings offered by washing clothes in cold water rather than hot.) Nationally, 3 percent of all household electricity goes to running clothes dryers. If we did nothing else but scrap them all, we could shut down a couple of coal plants.

Let me say that another way: In the midst of a global crisis, we are pumping carbon into the air in order to accomplish something—evaporation of water—that happens anyway. It you let the lawn sit overnight, the grass will not be shorter in the morning. Without inputs from somewhere, dinner will not get cooked nor houses heated. But wet clothes, happily, require zero assistance from the energy sector.

The drying system that Jeff invented for us is probably not nearly as sleek and unobtrusive as whatever the Italians do, but it has charms of its own. During the six weeks of the year that we call summer here in upstate New York, the clothes go out on a traditional flapping clothesline, as do, all year long, the sheets and towels. For most of the year, however, the laundry is hung on a series of retractable cords suspended over the stairwell, like the strings of a violin. During the winter, we hang laundry before bed. As the wet clothes dry in the draft flowing upward, they humidify the air in the bedrooms and prevent Elijah from coughing. Thus, I don’t have to run an electric humidifier, which would further draw power from the grid. The moist air also allows me to keep the thermostat lower. In the morning, each kid is in charge of putting his/her own clothes away. Since we use hangers rather than clothespins, most things go right into their closet. Including pajamas.

Hanging laundry cannot stop global warming. The process that clotheslines—and reel mowers and compost piles—begin, however, is the denormalizing of fossil-fuel ways of living. They are daily reminders that we urgently need new choices within new systems. They are harbingers. They signal our eagerness to embrace much bigger changes. They bear witness to our children that we are willing to exert agency, that we are not cynical, that we respect their right to inherit a habitable planet. And they put the neighbors on notice.

The acquisition of new personal habits and new skills can change our thinking. It compels us to ask new questions. If all food scraps in the United States were composted, how much natural gas could we save? (Natural gas is the raw material for synthetic fertilizer.) What if homeowners associations encouraged, rather than forbade, clotheslines? (Project Laundry List is working on this.) What if all family homes and apartments had clothes-drying closets that doubled as humidifiers? What if landscaping services offered carbon-neutral lawn care? What if student athletes mowed their own playing fields with fleets of reel mowers as part of warm-ups?

A few months after our final rabies shot, in February 2006, an observant hiker noticed something unusual about the bats hibernating in a cave a hundred miles east of Ithaca. Some of them had white muzzles—as though their faces had been painted with stage makeup. He photographed them, along with a pile of bat carcasses, also flecked with white.

A year later, New York State biologists found hundreds of dead bats inside several caves and also dying in the snow outside, which was even stranger because bats are torpid during the winter and do not normally rouse from hibernation until spring. They all had cottony noses. But why had they awakened and flown into the frozen, insect-less, sky? It was a complete mystery.

As the problem spread further, it was given a name: white-nose syndrome. Over the next four years, afflicted bats were found in 115 different caves and mine shafts, from Tennessee to Quebec. By 2010, a million bats had died of white-nose syndrome, many populations collapsed entirely, and wildlife biologists predicted regional extinction for the worst hit of the seven decimated species, the formerly common and widespread little brown bat. The headlines of four years earlier, describing the panic over rabid bats, were now entirely different: “Bats Perish, and No One Knows Why”; “NY State Bat Populations May Be Extinct Within 20 Years.”

At this writing, whatever is killing the bats is still spreading and still a mystery. This much we know: The white fuzz is a fungus, and, when it grows on the exposed skin of a hibernating bat, it causes the animal to wake up, behave erratically, and burn up its fat reserves. Bats with white-nose syndrome starve to death. What we don’t know is whether the fungus is the direct trigger for the die-off or a symptom of some other underlying problem. In May 2010, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issued a statement saying, “The many people who enjoy watching the silent flight of bats through the trees or over wetlands in the night sky may no longer have that privilege.” It also warned backyard gardeners that we may see, as a result of the bats’ ongoing disappearance, increases in insect pests. The possible contribution of pesticides and climate change to the bats’ malady is a topic of discussion among field biologists—as is the synchronous vanishings of fungal-afflicted honeybees and frogs.

A few months later, I accompanied Elijah on his nighttime compost run, and we saw a fluttery shadow overhead. I like bats, he announced firmly, claiming to remember nothing about the fully armed one that had once showed up in his bedroom. He did remember the shots, though.

And then we went inside and read The Firebird, a picture book adaptation of the Russian fairy tale and Stravinsky ballet. In it, our hero, Prince Ivan, finds himself in a lifeless world, whose streams are empty of fish and woods of deer. It is a barren land ruled by Kostchei the Deathless, who turns all living men in his realm to stone. Ivan is afraid. He accepts the full severity of his situation, which appears hopeless. How can he vanquish a foe who claims to be deathless? Who keeps demons as pets? He is counseled to leave. But, in the end, although afraid, he decides on a course of direct action and, with an assist from the firebird, ultimately prevails. Of course, he gets the girl. But this is the part that Elijah and I like best: Once the hero proves that the ruler of the kingdom is not omnipotent after all, the enchantment is broken. The statues rediscover their humanity. They become alive again.