Lights, Policy, Climate Action!

My failed endeavor in volunteering to keep winter cold

Minneapolis’s Lake Harriet in winter; photo by Deborah Copperud

I want to stop humankind from asphyxiating ourselves with fossil fuel exhaust, and I want to keep my beloved Minnesota winters cold, so I fill out a “Get Involved” web form on a climate justice organization website. I have a tiny amount of spare time that I can dedicate to reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide. Exactly how I’ll mitigate carbon pollution? I’m not sure, and the climate justice organization’s volunteer coordinator isn’t sure, either.

On a follow-up phone call, she asks me about my particular skill set, strengths, and interests. I tell her that my interests include skimming news articles about record high arctic temperatures. I’m skilled at worrying about street gutter fish in Miami, desert creep in Central America, and wildfire rampages in Canada. My strengths include feeling guilty for eating meat, driving a car, and living in a home heated by natural gas. The volunteer coordinator takes my well-stocked climate change worrywart toolbox into consideration and invites me to observe a Policy Action Team meeting.

I’m in. Policy Action sounds virtuous and Hollywood-y, with the promise of forward momentum right in its name. Observe, though? Why just observe, I wonder? The volunteer coordinator says she wants to make sure the team and I are a good fit, which seems like an unfairly tentative commitment on her part. What won’t fit? They’re fixing climate change. And I’m like a polar bear on the last lonely iceberg, desperate to connect with other folks who are using their strengths and interests to wrestle man-made surface temperatures from creeping more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial temperatures. Of course I’ll be a good fit. They’ll love me and I’ll love them, and we’ll meet together on the second and fourth Wednesdays of every month in perpetuity, or at least until our efforts nominally cool down the planet like a box fan placed strategically behind a platter of ice cubes.

On the night of the observational tryout, I arrive at the climate justice headquarters. It’s just what a great fit looks like: a shabby old mansion that sits on a block north of Washburn Fair Oaks Park, two blocks from the Minneapolis Institute of Art. It’s part of a cluster of repurposed relics from the gilded age, enormous houses that have been converted to offices, retrofitted with particle board furniture, gunmetal gray filing cabinets, office chairs, and tables with faux wood surfaces and tacky soft edges, their hardwood floors covered in petrochemical synthetic wall-to-wall. I love antique properties and I can feel myself melding with the architecture like I’m the last interlocking piece in the Policy Action Team’s jigsaw puzzle.

As I walk down a hallway, hand-carved molding on the walls and low-pile carpet under my feet, I feel as thrilled as a starving polar bear floating toward a vulnerable seal family. This is where the world gets saved! And I’m going to help! Well, observe. Which is obviously just a formality. Of course I’ll fit right in with the Policy Action Team. I can hardly wait to discuss with them the Special Report on Global Warming published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is my favorite thing to read when I’m in a climate anxiety spiral. They’ll be so happy to hear my great ideas for regulating carbon emissions by banning cruise ships and plastic bottles, instituting a 150% tax on gasoline, and making a nationwide mandate for Meatless Mondays.

My new climate activist compatriots are a hodgepodge of well-meaning white people that includes the organization’s Executive Director, a woman whose prettiness is enhanced by her ornate, dangly earrings; the volunteer secretary, an older woman with unkempt salt-and-pepper hair; the organization’s entry-level employee, who keeps taking breaks to step outside and smoke cigarettes; an older male volunteer who has formed his entire personality around biking enthusiasm; and a younger male volunteer who sits at the head of the table and talks too much. I like everyone except for the younger male volunteer. He’s an amalgamation of every male co-worker I’ve ever had who talks over other people, full of entitlement and confidence. Not ideal, I think, but there’s always a guy who talks a little too much with a little too much bombast.

I can handle one irritating committee member for the sake of saving the atmosphere from ourselves. Lately, the weather fills me with horror movie trailer dread and jump scare anticipation. In a polar vortex year like this one, the way I understand it, arctic air moves in over Canada and the northern United States and sits, unmoving, because old jet stream patterns have changed with new, rising global temperatures. The air outside feels punishing and opposite of the term global warming. But I wonder if it’s the last truly cold weather I’ll ever experience. The lingering ice cubes at the bottom of a camping cooler. I’m not a scientist; I’m just a selective reader of dire climate reports and sensational newspaper articles. So I can’t really comprehend the timeline of climate consequences, but I know it’s getting worse, not better.

If the young male volunteer is here, like me, to save the world, he can’t be all that bad. Maybe his overconfidence is deserved confidence? Maybe he’s a real greenhouse gas-stopping powerhouse? I should do like the volunteer coordinator suggested and just observe.

The Team’s meeting agenda includes mostly strategic planning for the next calendar year. As the Executive Director runs a brainstorming groupthink exercise, I’m reminded of the futility of my old reference librarian job, when I worked in a grand building in downtown Saint Paul built by the railroad baron James J. Hill. My employer was a non-profit business library funded by a shrinking endowment that couldn’t keep pace with the building’s necessary upkeep. At that job, I earnestly scrawled my good ideas on giant sheets of paper as the library director squandered the endowment on a sequence of pricey consultants in a laughable attempt to make the library generate income. The whole sad situation was a good case study in how zero solutions emerged from team building exercises. Whiteboard brainstorming solves nothing. No one here in this shabby mansion-turned-office is going to solve climate change with a dry erase marker.

When are they going to get to the world saving part, I wonder? I listen to the team’s discussion about messaging, how they can convince a skeptical public to take action. They don’t talk about the actual action, like the ideas I was eager to share when I arrived. I’m not sure it’s appropriate for me to add anything to this futile discussion. I sit still and listen. They’re not at solutions yet, not even at bringing reusable bags to the grocery store. They’re still stuck on convincing skeptics about our planet’s avoidable, fiery fate.

I’m disappointed that the greenhouse gas surplus is destroying the Earth while I’m still here. I was led to believe in a Gore-ian timeline, where the golf season extended into December and bathtub-warm oceans coddled vacation swimmers. This was supposed to be the sweet spot on the human history timeline, where we enjoy the spoils of post-industrial late capitalism, before car culture fully extinguishes all of the apex predators. I feel terrible about the polar bears. I didn’t expect to see photographs of them drifting off to their inevitable demise before the warranty runs out on my hybrid vehicle battery. I thought my grandchildren’s kids would have to deal with asthmatic air, underwater coastal cities, and uninhabitable equatorial zones. This was supposed to be a “them” problem, not a “we” problem—and definitely not a “me” problem. I feel complicit, but I also know that nothing I’ve ever done in this life could make a dent in the four hundred parts per million level of carbon in the sky.

At the hour mark, the young male volunteer stands on his ramshackle office chair and holds an industrial weight stapler above his head, then drops it onto the table, punctuating his final statement with an office supply version of a mic drop. The noise jolts me into realizing that what I’m observing is just like the brainstorming meetings that didn’t save my old library. It’s just that. Only that. A meeting. No polar bears will be saved here. This means that as long as they’re not really saving the white-furred beasts, I don’t need to tolerate the rhetorical antics of an overconfident Policy Action Team member. My excitement plummets, like January overnight temperatures in Minnesota used to. I’ve gone from eager would-be participant to a jaded quitter in under ninety minutes. If the Earth’s going to heat up because of human-based industrialization and, now, complete inaction on behalf of governments and global businesses, then I at least want to float the balmy seas on an iceberg with people I like. It’s very clear that this stapler-dropping conference table activist is not someone I’d invite onto my icy island.

That’s it for me and the climate justice organization. When the meeting adjourns, I gather my belongings and leave. If there’s ever a personal reckoning for my complicity in the climate crisis, if I’m ever interrogated about my role in carbon pollution, if anyone ever asks what I did to stop the oceans from becoming pasta-cooking water, the poles from going liquid, the temperatures from ratcheting up from summer to steam room, I’ll say, “I went to a meeting.”

Deborah Copperud has been a reference librarian, stay-at-home parent, school volunteer, preschool choir accompanist, Democratic Party activist, rock band cellist, podcast co-host, and freelance writer. She lives in Minneapolis, MN, where she enjoys jogging around Lake Harriet in inclement weather. Her work has appeared in Glamour and The Rumpus, among other publications. She writes the Deborah Copperud Volunteers newsletter and co-hosts the It’s My Screen Time Too podcast. She is at work on an essay collection about volunteering.