Our hearts are heavy. With every report of loss and devastation from the latest climate catastrophe, my sadness—and sometimes even despair—deepens. In 1970, during my first semester at the University of Colorado, I took a course where we studied a book that forecasted the very ecological disaster we are living through today. While most people rejected its premise at the time, I did not. Having grown up in a family that celebrated the natural world, I took the dire predictions seriously—and I acted.
In those days, “recycling” didn’t exist. My spouse and I did what we could to reduce what came into our lives, to reuse everything possible, and to embrace sustainable living. Diet for a Small Planet and its companion cookbook became my bibles. I spent hours sending postcards to companies asking them to stop sending me catalogs. We shopped secondhand and drove the interstates at 55 mph. At some point in the 80s, we found a farmer willing to use scrap paper in place of some straw in the stalls for his dairy cows but we had to remove the plastic address “window” from the envelopes we gave him. With each small action, we felt we were doing our part to avert the calamitous future becoming ever more real.
Now, more than 50 years later it feels like we’re holding our breaths for the next climate disaster. I sometimes retreat into denial, mindlessly playing solitaire or escaping into a “brain candy” book. But I don’t stay there long. A reminder—like seeing that a friend’s children will miss more than a week of school while their community puts itself back together—brings me back to reality. Wondering how my colleagues in the North Carolina Public Health Association are coping with the personal, professional, and Association needs/demands renews my energy to do everything I can.
The work is relentless but we can’t afford to sit down. As Joycelyn Elders said, “When you’re dancing with a bear, you can’t get tired and sit down. You have to wait for the bear to get tired.” And while we work and wait for the bear to get tired, we must find joy to feed our souls. So when I hear the Joycelyn Elders quote I always think of a song my children and I loved: Waltzing with Bears. Feel free to turn up the volume and dance! We have a long road ahead, but together, we can keep dancing forward.
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