Someone once made the comment that Fayetteville was a liberal bastion of pessimists. I am not sure what a liberal bastion is but I am not a pessimist. I am definitely an optimist when it comes to climate change.
A few months ago while traveling across country I was encouraged to see so many fields of wind generators and even on small farms. Homes, businesses, hospitals and towns were using solar panels to generate electricity. There were bike trails in towns and even old railroad tracks converted to bike and hiking trails.
The city of Portland is a model for rapid transit. They have transit systems all over the city and surrounding areas connecting to light rail. These are handicap accessible and can carry bicycles on board. The bicycles can be rented at one location and dropped off at another.
I saw farmers markets, community gardens, school gardens and home gardens providing clean healthy food, not contaminated with chemical pesticides and fertilizers polluting our air and water supply. Gardens are even planted on city roofs in places like Chicago.
A big contributor to greenhouse gas is the transporting of food from farm to market and our frequent trips to the grocery store to pick up a few items. Some cities are developing small pocket communities where people can walk or bicycle to local stores for basic needs.
If we want to affect climate change we need to think global but act locally, and that is what these communities are doing. This is happening worldwide in places like Portugal, Costa Rica Germany and Sweden.
There are exciting jobs ahead. Wind and solar production is already creating more jobs than coal mining. We should be building transmission lines and grids sending energy from sunny and windy areas to places where the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. There is a future in designing and developing electric cars but we need to pay attention to where that electricity is being generated.
Our salvation in climate change may be plants and trees. Plants take in carbon dioxide and give us oxygen. We can develop healthier, more productive plants and plant trees with forests in areas destroyed by coal mining. If we give up our love affair with cars and use mass transit, we can turn parking areas into parks and gardens.
Education is our most important issue. Our young people should be educated in the reality of climate change and trained for these future jobs. It is a long-term problem but if we continue making changes now we may have that time.
Change is happening from the ground up and not from the top down. Cities, businesses and citizens are already taking action. Everything we do now will save our health and our lives.
The choices we make and the people we elect to office will make all the difference in our future.
Kelly Holst
Fayetteville
Commentary on 09/28/2017