Be Weird - Save the Climate
Weird is having a moment this election cycle, and it seems to have gotten under Donald Trump’s skin. He has said “I’m not weird,” which is a hard thing to say without sounding like you are a little weird.
I certainly don’t want weird in the White House, but when it comes to fighting climate change, I think weird might have a place.
The way I see it, there are a couple different ways that we might save the climate. One is the normal way. Our lives won’t have to change very much. We’ll still drive cars everywhere, but they will be electric. We’ll still eat meat, but it will be lab grown. Our homes will be energy efficient, wrapped in foam insulation and plastic air barriers. And if none of this works, we can always resort to geo-engineering and just dull out the sun. Nothing will have to change, there will just be aerosols in the atmosphere cooling the Earth.
This is all fine, I suppose. We need to do everything we can to stop climate change, and I support any reasonable actions that will make the terrifying future a bit safer.
But it is worth remembering that there is another way to save the climate. I’ll call this the weird way. The weird way has streets filled with bike commuters during rush hour. Backyard gardens and root cellars. Handmade homes built of natural materials. Buying less stuff even when you can afford it.
What is really weird about this path is that we already know how to do it. It won’t cost us that much money, it will just involve remembering some of our old skills, working a little harder, and making do with less.
When I was in grade school, I can remember watching a video about a group of neighborhood kids playing detective and investigating a weird old lady who lived on their block. The lady kept her vegetable scraps in a bucket under her sink and had a milk jug filled with water in her toilet’s tank.
These nosy, junior detectives came to the conclusion that the old lady was an alien.
Nice job, Sherlocks!
Turns out the old lady was just composting and trying to use less water in her toilet. She was just a weird environmentalist.
I can relate. I have felt weird in my life for caring about the climate.
I was the only bike commuter when I worked as an engineer, pulling up to the office like Steve Carell in The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Coming out as a vegetarian for environmental reasons was the second hardest thing I have had to come out as. And I have had plenty of awkward conversations explaining why I try not to travel on airplanes.
A perk of getting older though, if you are lucky, is that you care less about what others think of you. I’m proud now that I care about the climate, even if it sometimes makes me a little bit weird and puts me outside the mainstream.
Right now, I live in a rather normal house with my husband. The homes on our street were built in the fifties, and when the neighborhood kids are out playing, lawnmowers are roaring, and older neighbors are chatting with us and offering to bring over some leftovers, the street can feel very charmingly 1950’s suburban.
As charming as it is, I have been trying to make things at the house at least a little bit weird.
Our home is woefully under-insulated for the cold winters typical of the Northern Great Lakes. There is a lot of work to do to make the home as friendly to the climate as I want it to be, and I am starting out by insulating one small wall of our porch.
The normal solution would have been to buy a synthetic foam board or fiberglass insulation from the big box store, slap up some plywood, and call it a day.
I went weirder.
Straw bales are a naturally insulating material. Straw is an agricultural waste product, and each bale actually sequesters a bit of carbon. The bales will be covered with three layers of earthen plaster when it’s done. It is messy, hard work, but the end result will hopefully be a wall that is thick and strong, beautiful in its hand-sculpted imperfections.
I am pretty sure this will be the only straw bale wall in the small city I live, which will make it weird in the sense that it is not usual, but it will be slightly less uncommon after my wall is finished. This is the reason to do weird things that are positive for the climate. It helps expand awareness of what solutions are out there to fight climate change.
I think there might be a reason why Donald Trump was so repulsed at being labelled weird. A billionaire wants nothing but to be considered successful, and in our culture success is normal. Winning is normal. Putting your self-interest above the rest of the world is normal.
Being normal is what has led us into the climate crisis. Maybe normal sort of solutions will get us out of it, but I sort of doubt it.
I think it might be worth giving weird a try.