My husband lies on the couch—barely able to move, fighting a wracking cough.

“For three weeks, I asked you to buy or cut some stakes. It would have taken only five minutes! I know you’re tired, but sometimes you have to do things anyway. Now the tomato plants are ruined and broken. The trellis I built with scraps collapsed. You couldn’t be bothered to help when it was possible to save the crop, even when I had put months of work into the garden and I was only asking you for five minutes!”

As we struggle against climate change the effects are making that farming and everything else harder - Creative Commons image by Kevin Dooley

I stand over him--furious, drenched with sweat and shaking from an hour's hard effort trying to save what I could of our once beautiful tomato crop.

I’m legally blind. I can handle most things in the garden, but I never learned to cut poles with an ax and I can’t drive to the lumber store. So, I had asked and pleaded and warned him for weeks. I could see that my fragile tomato trellis wouldn’t hold up.

That’s right. I’m fighting with my exhausted husband over tomatoes. Homegrown, organic tomatoes.

We live in a country where organic tomatoes are far beyond the means of the average family. They are only for the wealthy. I had hoped, planned, schemed and sweated to beat the odds and make them available to us from our own garden.

But I’m not really just fighting about tomatoes. Gardening is part of our commitment to living in an environmentally sustainable way. It’s not just about tomatoes, organic or otherwise. It’s about fighting climate change, the threat that hangs over us like an ominous cloud—heralded by increasingly unbalanced weather, unmanageable plagues of garden pests and waves of refugees from the south on the news every day.

Lake Hume at 4 percent - Creative Commons image by Tim J Keegan — Lake Hume at 4 percent - Creative Commons image by Tim J Keegan

“I’m exhausted.” My husband’s voice is anguished. He coughs again, doubling up. “Every day. I’m just living from day to day, barely making it.”

Don’t I know it? I don’t rest between 6:00 am and 11:00 pm, almost never stop moving unless my hands are going at 70 words per minute on a keyboard. And I feel guilty about those few hours, because I’m doing something I love—writing part of each day, rather than only doing the grueling parts.

I sit down and take my husband’s head on my lap. “I know. I’m sorry. I know how tired you are.”

I feel guilty because my herbalist skills have not been able to keep his chronic cough at bay this year, after six years of relative success. Is that part of the worsening environmental conditions too?

Fear seeps in around me. I am utterly exhausted myself. I’m trying so hard to live in an environmentally sustainable way and it's a lot of work.

The scale of the forces fighting over the future - Creative Commons image by Kevin Dooley

We don’t own a TV. We grow a lot of our own food now. We don’t use a clothes drier except in the very middle of the winter when nothing will dry outside at all. Our house is extraordinarily well insulated. We use only small amounts of energy to heat. Solar panels would be relatively ineffective on our north-facing slope, but we’re saving for them anyway. Our light bulbs are the low-energy kind, even though they make it even harder for me to see at night with my low vision. I obviously don’t drive. My husband does, but he often takes the train to work, even though it means a 30 extra minutes of commute time. We all own good bikes and use them when we can. The kids and I get around on foot, by bike and by train.

Okay, I fly. Once every two years usually. To see my family across the Atlantic. I know it’s a big one. And it’s hard to give up.

Would I stop flying if I knew it would make the difference? Sure, I would.

The problem is that it wouldn’t.

If I as an individual never saw my family again to skimp on my carbon footprint, it would make no difference in the number of flights crossing the ocean. I would suffer the loss of my parents, brothers, nieces and nephews. My children would lose grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. For nothing. That’s the hard part.

The hard facts

There are facts about climate change that we can’t avoid. Most of these are so basic that they’re documented in a wide variety of sources, but I’ll list a few good links at the end, in case anyone wants to check me.

Even so, I’m not really writing for climate skeptics. I’m writing for people like me, those who are already very concerned about climate change. The facts aren’t really controversial. It’s what we’re supposed to do about them that is problematic:

Mongolians trying to farm amid extreme weather - Creative Commons image by Asia Development Bank — Mongolians trying to farm amid extreme weather - Creative Commons image by Asia Development Bank

Unprecedented swift climate change is happening.
It is caused by human activities, primarily CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuel. Almost all scientists agree on this. Those that don’t are invariably linked to the oil industry and others who don’t want to admit the truth because reducing emissions would negatively impact their business..
If we don’t drastically reduce our greenhouse emissions across the board, the temperature of the earth will rise by 4 to 5 degrees by 2100.
That may not sound bad. But it would in fact mean huge food shortages, mass starvation. Vast areas near the equator which now have high populations would become uninhabitable, we would lose many more species, and sea level rise would wipe out the Netherlands, much of Vietnam, 316 coastal American cities, island countries and many many other places
Even if you live in a relatively cold and high elevation area like I do, logically you have to know that life will not be good if this happens. Even if Central Europe or Canada somehow avoids direct devastation and famine, we will be beset from all sides by seas of desperate refugees, starving and landless. Our economies will not be able to absorb them and if we don’t give them relief, we will be the targets of war and terrorism.
The lifestyles we are living now will not continue for more than a few decades, no matter what we do. Either we change or we will be changed.
There are things you can do to reduce your personal impact on climate change. Most of those things are difficult, time-consuming and/or expensive. Doing all of them on a shoestring budget leads to the exhaustion my family is experiencing.
Unless most of humanity joins you in doing these things, it won’t matter.
It is physically POSSIBLE for humans to change course and only end up with a 2 degree rise in temperature by 2100, but even that rise would cause significant suffering and hunger for our grandchildren. And such a change of course would require a reduction of CO2 emissions of around six percent every year for fifty years.
It’s theoretically possible but sociologically extremely unlikely. No country has started to significantly reduce CO2 emissions on the levels needed and mitigation of this disaster would require intense and well-coordinated change by all or almost all major producers of CO2 emissions sustained over decades.
No one anywhere has yet achieved a 6 percent reduction of CO2 emissions in a year, let alone continued to reduce by that amount year after year.
Scientists routinely present unrealistically rosy scenarios of what we can achieve with climate change mitigation because that’s what they are commissioned to do. It is very hard to motivate people through despair and voters will not vote for politicians who talk about despair, even if they know it is true.
Corporations protecting their profits and politicians banking on the next election keep climate change out of mainstream discussion, even as national and international agencies mark it as the worst defense threat--worse than terrorism or nuclear war.
Environmental organizations usually advise individuals to do the following things to reduce their personal contribution to climate change:

Families Facing Climate Change demonstration in Melbourne, Australia - Creative Commons image by Takver of Flickr — Families Facing Climate Change demonstration in Melbourne, Australia - Creative Commons image by Takver of Flickr

Walk, take public transportation or at least carpool,
Use energy efficient light bulbs,
Rebuild your residence to have better insulation,
Never use clothes driers. Hang your clothes out to dry.
Grow a lot of your own food.
Buy organic if you can’t grow your own.
Eat less meat.
Recycle everything.
Only buy things with minimal packaging.
Choose energy plans that use more renewable sources.
Never fly on an airplane.
Write and call your political representatives to ask them for regulations requiring polluters to pay for their emissions.
Vote for politicians who champion renewable energy.
Donate to environmental organizations (usually including a link for donations to whichever organization issued the list).

All those are good things to do and I do most of them… well, all except the never flying on an airplane.
But if you do all or most of those things, as many of us do, you will be exhausted and burned out and have little time or energy left for activism beyond the basic letter writing, voting and donating variety. Maybe there are ways for wealthy people to pay for some of these things to decrease the personal burden but for most of us, the physical challenge is huge.
And if only a small percent of us continue to do these things, our exhaustion won’t change much.

Past exhaustion

My husband sits up and rubs his eyes.

“I’ve been thinking about the slug problem,” he says. “I think it’s time we got some ducks. And we might as well get chickens while we’re at it.”

I stare at him. He is still exhausted, his shoulders slumped, his face lined. But he’s serious. We've talked about chickens for years, but always found the prospect a bit too daunting. Now we don’t just have slugs. We have a blanket of slugs. He used to go out at night and collect buckets full of them, until so many came that collecting made no discernible difference. And I can’t do much to help him collect slugs when I can’t see them.

“Is growing food still a priority for you?” I ask tentatively, trying not to look pointedly at his envelope from Greenpeace lying on the cabinet next to him. He is so unassuming that for the first year, he didn’t even tell me he was sending money to Greenpeace out of his meager paycheck.

“Frankly, if I had my choice, we wouldn't have a garden. I don’t really like gardening,” he says.
He grew up on a farm but he was never an enthusiastic farm boy. He has no illusions about it being easy or romantic. I grew up with subsistence farming too, so we make a reasonably good team.

I don’t know what to say. He goes through these ups and downs of despair and forced hope.

“Would you do some research on keeping ducks and chickens in the same coop?” he asks. “Oh, and find me some sketches so I can build it. There’s no way we’ll get the money together to buy something.”

I kiss him. Of course, I’ll do the research. Dyslexia makes that job grueling to him, just as I’ve never been very good with an electric saw or a screw gun.

We keep trying at this. Banking on our strengths. Finding ways around our weaknesses.

Let them eat carbon protest - Creative Commons image by Oxfam International

Here’s the thing. It isn’t easy. It’s in fact very hard. We keep on. We aren’t hippies or off-the-gridders. We aren’t young and physically strong. We’re actually weakening as we get older. But we’re informed and unwilling to pretend we don’t know. It’s exhausting. We are trying and what we are doing still isn’t nearly enough.

We have two small children and every day we face the silent question. We can't afford to give up. There will come a day when the next generation will ask if we knew about climate change in 2015 and if we knew what we did about it.

I'm writing for people who are already concerned, primarily because people who aren't worried about climate change aren't likely to read my blog. But for those of us who are worried, the biggest question is how we can convince our neighbors, political leaders and companies to drop everything and focus on fighting climate change? Leave a ideas in the comments please.