Allison Campbell Jensen

Walking inside a giant Tupperware bowl, I could not see the mountains to the north of Pasadena. The air pollution was so bad in 1990 that a day clear enough to see Catalina Island from Griffith Park rated a big photo on the front of the in the Los Angeles Times metro section. This was news, folks! Drive-by shootings didn’t make the front of that section that year–unless a child was killed by gunfire.

My asthmatic first husband would walk the mile from his work on the Cal Tech campus to our apartment, then lie down for a half hour to regain his breath. When I would walk to the library, people driving their cars would stare at me. All those people and yet I felt a little lonely on those empty sidewalks.

I hear the skies have cleared in the Los Angeles basin because of stricter emissions controls on cars. That’s good news. The bad news is, in Los Angeles and Paris and Mexico City and Beijing and the Twin Cities, we are putting 110 million tons of manmade global warming pollution into the atmosphere every single day. Al Gore, founder of the Climate Reality Project, Nobel Prize recipient and former Vice President of the United States, shared this fact as he trained new Climate Reality Leaders like me at a recent meeting in Minneapolis. Greenhouse gases, unlike the Los Angeles smog of nearly 30 years ago, are not visible to the eye.

Gah! Given the scale of this global climate crisis, what can an individual like myself do?

Well, I can make choices–on my commute, at the grocery, when I am traveling. Perhaps you’ve heard that Greta Thunberg, the brave Swede who is leading a global student movement to fight the climate crisis, is traveling by sail from Europe to America specifically to avoid the carbon costs of air travel. It’s not cushy, sailing on a yacht built for racing–creature comforts came last in its design. Yet she is living by her principles, which is why she is such a powerful leader.

Every day, I have the chance to make a small difference for the planet. A couple of days ago, I was going to the garage to get a vehicle for a trip. Playing with his bicycle in the driveway, grandson Presley said, “Oh, I will get out of your way.” “No worries,” I replied. “I am taking my bicycle.”

Love your planet. Make choices to counter this climate crisis. Take your bicycle, take the bus, eat locally (when possible) and, yes, think globally. The generation that includes my grandson? They are watching and learning.

Image: My husband and grandson leaving the Roseville library on Tuesday evening.