Starting My Climate Change Journal

This version of “Other Homes and Gardens,” is a combination of two of my old blogs – “Other Homes and Gardens” and “Fashion Sense by Alice.” Though I have talked about climate change in both blogs (see among others High Water in Prague in 2013), I recently have had the life-changing experience of taking Professor Peter Singer’s Practical Ethics MOOC. This Massive Open Online Course at Coursera (which is still going on) addresses issues like what we owe to the global poor, animal rights, and affirmative action. The section on climate change a couple of weeks ago featured a lecture by Dale Jamieson, whose new book Reason in a Dark Time I’m currently reading. All of this has made me think deeply and seriously about climate change, and  I decided to use this blog as a Climate Change Journal so I can keep track of local and global aspects of climate change and delineate some of the ways I will work to reduce my carbon footprint. I also plan to address the issue of how Climate Change makes the lives of the poor more difficult and dangerous. To help reduce my carbon footprint, I have made the following pledges: 1) To reduce my use of heating and air-conditioning (though I haven’t decided yet how to quantify that); 2) To be a vegan -- at every meal, every day; and 3) To limit riding in a car to two round trips per week.

Here in Tucson I walk a lot, but this city exemplifies sprawl, so I often have to make trips by car or bus. I am one of 1,500 members of the Tucson Bus Riders Union, which in its current incarnation relies heavily on the organizing might of Casa Maria, a Catholic Worker community. The Bus Riders Union has done a tremendous amount to keep the city from raising fares and cutting service. All the members were encouraged to attend Tuesday night's city council meeting, and as you can see from the photo at the CasaMaria site, we showed up in large numbers, wearing our bright yellow Bus Riders Union tee shirts. Organizations that sent representatives included Service Employees International Union, Sustainable Tucson, Derechos Humanos, and Veterans for Peace. As Brian Flagg noted in his post yesterday, the Daily Star failed to mention the Bus Riders Union in its article, "City Council scraps bus changes in budget plan," but there's no doubt that BRU played a major part in the Council's decision to hold off on route changes. Unfortunately, this is just a temporary respite, and the fare increases and route cuts will be back on the City Council agenda in the fall. Which is why Brian Flagg concluded his post by saying, "The time is now to organize bigger and better."