ThinkPint2

This post has two themes: family history and environment.

I have been interested in family history and genealogy for over 50 years. As a amateur genealogist I gathered information from older family members; requested certificates and records before the internet facilitated such things; preserved those stories by writing and giving them to family; and more recently, epublishing them. I wanted the stories of my ancestors, that I struggled to understand, last longer than I did.

My record on being an environmentalist is more rocky. If you count being raised on an Illinois farm adjacent to Rt. 66; being an avid 4-Her; and watching as my family were good stewards of the soil, I look better. Between my parents and brothers’ tenant farms they worked a total of 360 acres. I, though, wanted to leave Illinois and see a wider world and let others watch and tend the soil. Now I understand they had the lifestyle which was sustainable, not the one I chose to live.

I recall a former college roommate from Indiana University urging my involvement in the first Earth Day in 1970. I was by then more distant from the Midwest. I was a Ph.D. candidate at University of Oregon, but I said ‘sure’ and then did little. Communes were popular in Oregon at the time, but I felt I’d been there, done that, and wanted something different from going back to the earth. I read Al Gore’s The Earth in Balance when it came out in 1992 and thought he seems to be right on. At the time we were living in new digs just outside of Portland and after 2 years we thought it needed air-conditioning.

When we build in Portland in 1990 we believed we did not need air-conditioning. Who needs air conditioning in Oregon’s Willamette Valley? Both being former long-time Oregon residents we knew we would not need it.

The Portland stint was preceded by living for two years in Tucson, Arizona, in another new house which had air conditioning. During the Tucson period I read about water, as we did drip landscaping, and thinking maybe the future would have water wars.

My years went from farm living to urban living and having the opportunity to visit six continents and also the homeland areas of ancestors from Scotland, Ireland, and Germany. They eventually all landed in Illinois, even if some went farther afield in the U.S. later. Their stories inspired me. How could they do what they did, not knowing what the future would hold, even if their current circumstances in the ‘old country’ went from bad to dire and motivated the move across the ocean.

Personal losses accrued in my own life. By 2014 I turned 70 and my nuclear family and husband were deceased. But I was still here in 2014 and breathing even if each breathe was over 400 ppm of CO2 which is not the sustainable 350 ppm. Globally we were at the highest CO2 level in over 800,000 years and rising.

So, I thought, if I am still here, what was next.

A new interest emerged, which had been there before, but now I had the time to pursue it in more earnest as I struggled with what to do after another major loss.

The year 2013 ended with asking young friends to participate in writing an ebook about the year 2050 and what they thought would be true for them and their world by then. After initial enthusiasm, the project sank without a ripple, except that it encouraged my own thinking about 2050, which I had done in prior years for classes I taught at the University of Oregon. At that time I had used all of the State of the World reports of the Worldwatch Institute since the mid 80’s plus other similar materials. I knew about all of this. How did I let my eye get off the ball for a few years. Life intervened, for a poor excuse.

In early 2014 I watched over 200 videos on climate change; read many nonfiction sources; wrote checks to organizations that addressed the issues; encouraged my homeowner’s association to develop solar panel guidelines; looked at my own fossil fuel investments in mutual funds; and attended meetings of local climate activist groups. I believed climate change was real, caused by us, that it is bad, but that there was still hope if we acted now.

I began to carry around a stuffed duck mascot of our university, thinking who can be threatened by an older woman carrying a stuffed duck. It was a nerd-looking duck with large glasses whom I labeled Scholar Duck. He tried his hand at seeing and telling the world as it is regarding climate issues. I don’t know if many people took note, but I kept at it and continued to post on social media with Scholar Duck as my foil.

I discovered the genre of climate fiction (cli-fi) and in the summer of 2014 started reading cli-fi novels. Could I write such a thing? Could I combine two of my interests, genealogy and environment? In doing so, I would ponder life not of my ancestors as I had done in the past, but my descendants. Almost every video encouraged one to think of what their children and grandchildren will think of them for doing so little when we had time to mitigate and adapt.

This story is set in 2064. The protagonist is my great, great, great niece, Margaret (Greta for short) who sets out to discover what her ancestors were doing not only in the 19th and 20th century, but in the early 21st century when we had clear evidence of what was happening in the world. It reminds me of a piece I wrote set in the 1600’s with the main fictional character Wind-in-the-Grass who was a member of the Illinek Native Americans who lived on the land that would become Illinois. Wind-in-the-Grass moved seasonally with her tribe but as the Europeans came, life changed forever for her and her descendants. My relatives and others came to the Illinek area and cut the prairie grass and became coal miners and farmers.

Now Greta (born 2036) returns to Illinois to see this land is as she remembers from stories told by her mother Tessa (born 2011), grandmother (born 1984), and great grandmother (born 1959), and from writings of other ancestors of how the land used to be, but will never be again.

Theresa Ripley, © 2014