By Christy George
Hawthorne Fellow 2012
Independent TV producer Christy George is working on a novel and a book about climate change.
___________________________________________________________
An excerpt from the nonfiction book, My Vanishing Hometowns
It began with the feeling that the world could end in my lifetime.
I was born on the move.
Lansing, Michigan, the first of a succession of college towns. From then on, Dad - a newly minted newspaperman - changed job after job in city after city: New Orleans, Louisiana, Picayune, Mississippi, Dallas, Texas, Detroit, Michigan, Evanston, Illinois.
On my own, I kept moving - to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I became a political reporter. To Palo Alto, California, where I spent a year on a journalism fellowship. And to Portland, Oregon, where I live now.
All the moving I’ve done has left me with a love of new places, and a desperate desire to have some place I could call home. What scares me most is that climate change will irrevocably alter the places I love. The places I still call home.
It's no surprise that I've always looked for grand plots, schemes and conspiracies, growing up as I did in the Strangelove Sixties.
Imminent nuclear war was the biggest, scariest plot of all. Every Tuesday at noon, the air raid siren in Evanston went off. We kids marched down to the school basement and sat on a cold cement floor staring at the black and orange Civil Defense symbol on the wall until we got the all-clear.
People built fallout shelters in their backyards, and I worried what we would do if – like in an episode of the Twilight Zone - we had a shelter and too many neighbors wanted in. In 1964, my parents pasted a “Support Your Local Police” sticker on our Ford Fairlane and joined the John Birch Society. My fear of Commies invading Evanston haunted me in mushroom cloud nightmares.
My childhood taught me a bedrock belief in terrible threats organized by a handful of people. When I started working as a reporter, not long after Watergate, I looked for conspiracies. They weren't hard to find in Massachusetts, where politics is both local economy and sport, and political corruption is a tradition.
And then I changed.
In 1997, I took a job covering the intersection of business and the environment for the public radio show Marketplace. I thought I’d be looking at companies and CEOs and their corporate environmental practices, but it turned into a beat about the clash between the quest for endless growth and the finite nature of Earth itself.
Liberated from the existential threat of nuclear war, it didn’t take long to realize the new existential threat is us: our collective ability to alter big natural systems like weather, ocean circulation and ecological systems. And I learned that while you can take down the big, dirty smokestack, you can't put everyone in jail for emitting too much carbon dioxide from furnaces and gas guzzling cars.
You need to change attitudes in order to change behavior.
But when it comes to climate change, we haven’t changed a thing.
In Evanston, they still sound the air raid siren, only now it's for tornado warnings.