Climate Action Challenge: A Proven Plan for Launching Your Eco-Initiative in 90 Days

CLIMATE

ACTION

CHALLENGE

––––––––

A Proven Plan for

Launching Your Eco-Initiative

in 90 Days

––––––––

Joan M Gregerson

Climate Action Challenge: A Proven Plan for Launching Your Eco-Initiative in 90 Days

Version 3.2, April 30, 2022

Copyright © 2020-2022 Joan M Gregerson,

Positive Energy Works LLC

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced without prior written permission by the author. The information in this book is intended for general guidance.

Published by Positive Energy Works LLC

Denver, CO USA, positiveenergyworks.com

We now need to create a worldwide grassroots movement that no one can ignore.

—António Guterres,

UN Secretary-General

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Note from the Author

This book is about climate action, and so much more...

The coronavirus pandemic hit in March 2020, just as I was finishing the first draft of this book. Within weeks, billions of people around the world were on lockdown, ordered to stay home to minimize the spread of a new and deadly virus.

At first, people asked, when will we get back to normal? But it didn’t take more than a few weeks to realize this was different. We would never go back to that previous normal.

A friend in Australia had told me the same a few months earlier. Historic wildfires had wiped out forests, killed a billion animals, and kept people indoors for months. After the fires stopped, she said, We can’t go back to how it was. We don’t want to. That ‘normal’ was the problem.

In May, when George Floyd, yet another black man, was unjustly killed at the hands of police in Minneapolis, millions of people rose up and took to the streets. People rose up and said, enough already.

Policies that had been deemed impossible to change for decades were revamped within weeks. School districts broke their contracts with police departments. Cities banned chokeholds. Teams finally ditched their offensive mascots.

Frank discussions of white supremacy and systemic oppression shined a light on the roots of the problems. The protests were not limited to the details of one murder. The uprisings called for a self-analysis of a country that was founded on and is propagating the legacy of white supremacy and racial violence.

Throughout the summer of 2020, the western U.S. broke one record after the next for high temperatures and wildfires. A record 10 percent of Oregon’s population was under evacuation orders, scrambling to find somewhere safe to go, somewhere to breathe easier.

The events of 2020 laid bare that the very fabric of society is woven of the threads of injustice, showing just how far we have yet to go.

The virus, air pollution, our fragile atmosphere, and racial violence are all pointing to the same thing.

The tenuous quality of breath asks for reverence in our relationships with each other and the world that holds us in her embrace.

2020 marks a turning point.

If the old normal was the problem, what will the new normal be?

Will we, as in the wake of the 1918 pandemic, allow these crises to amplify the inequities of the status quo? Will we call it good enough when communities of color endure more sickness, more pollution, more incarceration, and more violence?

Is it okay for the most affluent among us to cause the most pollution, weaken our fragile atmosphere, and turn a blind eye as less affluent nations and communities suffer?

Will we settle for a society that values some lives less than others? Or will we figure out how to create a more just, verdant, and harmonious world?

In this historic moment, we are presented with a choice. We can go along blithely with our conventional but ineffective and uncaring ways.

Or we can turn to Indigenous wisdom and to nature herself to become apprentices and faithful stewards of our only home.

We can move from merely respecting science to proactively nurturing deep, caring relationships with Mother Earth and each other.

We can stop waiting for someone else to fix everything for us. We can unleash our creativity, our love, and our brilliance. We can step up and become the leaders that we’ve been waiting for all along.

What say you, my friend? Shall we?

Joan Gregerson

Denver, Colorado, January 2021

Never forget that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can make a difference. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.

—Margaret Mead

CONTENTS

1. You’re in the Right Place

2. My Story & My Promise to You

3. Personal Vision

4. The 90-Day Action Plan & Your Journey

5. The State of the World

6. Mindset Matters: How to Handle Overwhelm and Thrive

7. A New Lens

8. What Is a Green Team? What Should Our Team Do?

9. Coaching for Transformative Change

10. Introducing the EMPOWER Green Team Success Blueprint

11. E: Embrace, Examples, Engage

12. M: iMagine, Mission, Meetings

13. P: 100 Ideal Partners

14. P: Deciding on Your Key 90-Day Challenge Events

15. P: Annual Success Schedule

16. O: Community Organizing, Outreach, Organization

17. W: Our Big Whys and the Wow Factor

18. E: Earth Day Festival & Evaluate

19. R: Recruit, Reflect, Relax, Ripple, Report

20. Troubleshooting Guide: Overcoming Obstacles

21. Promise Review

22. Hosting a Climate Action Challenge

Acknowledgements

Endnotes

About the Author

1. You’re in the Right Place

Ana

I should have known that Ana would reach out to me. In the boatloads of online trainings I’ve done, there’s one question that seems to get to people. I often say that I was a nature girl and ask if there are other nature kids in the group. The ones who pipe up immediately usually reach out to me directly later.

During the training, Ana had written in the chat, Me! I’m a nature girl! I always played in the creek near our house. My brother and I would swing from a tree into the river. We made our mom crazy coming home muddy and wet, with crawdads and frogs we wanted to keep as pets.

I work for the stormwater department in my town, Ana told me when we hopped on the phone together. I used to work as a civil engineer for a construction company, but I was appalled at how lax the safety was on site.

Oh, no! I replied.

I quit after a few years. I just couldn’t handle what was being done to the rivers, said Ana.

She told me how if things aren’t done properly during the construction process, topsoil is disturbed and gets washed away into the rivers. In addition, other construction debris also gets into the rivers. All this hurts the land, clogs the river, and kills the animal and plant life.

That’s why she got a job as an inspector in the stormwater department. She was determined to stick up for nature in any way she could.

But even as an inspector now, I’m heartbroken, Ana said.

She told me how the culture of the stormwater department was intermingled with the construction companies, with several key people going back and forth between inspector positions and construction companies.

It feels like a ‘buddy-buddy’ system, said Ana. I’ll report things, but then sometimes my reports aren’t even filed against the companies.

I drive the long way home alongside the river, letting the river know that I’m sorry and that I’m doing everything I can.

Ana told me that when she heard my story and found out about the system that I developed, she felt an immense wave of relief.

I’ve read all the IPCC reports, and I keep up with what’s going on with pollution, health, and species going extinct, and my heart just breaks. I was losing hope. I’ve been doing everything I can think of, but it’s not enough. So, when I joined your training and heard your story, I finally started to feel better. I realize that I’d been missing something that was there, right in front of me all along. For the first time in a long time, I feel optimistic. I’ve got direction and hope for moving forward. I can do this!

Darwin

I want to find a way to mitigate climate change. It’s getting hotter every year where I live in Zambia. I want to plant 10,000 trees, but I don’t know where to start.

Darwin Malwele found me online when I was doing a webinar on how to go from passion to action.

I also want to help families and schools start gardens, so they have a way to feed themselves nutritious food. During the lockdown for the pandemic, many families are going hungry, and I think this could help. 

Darwin had the idea that he could make a difference but wasn’t sure where to begin.

He attended the first Action Plan Retreat I ever offered in May 2020. After signing up for the retreat, Darwin began working through the steps outlined in this book. We quickly found dozens of potential partners and sponsors. And within two weeks, Darwin applied for and was approved to start Earth Guardians Zambia. That move helped him become part of an established organization that supports youth crews in over 60 countries.

As we exchanged emails, we were both doing a happy dance across the world together.

Darwin’s project idea quickly began taking root. This is just the beginning of his story.

Lara

Not everyone who wants to make a difference identifies as a nature kid.

Lara said that she was the kid who was always inside at gymnastics practice when the other kids were outside playing. She didn’t grow up camping or playing in the mountains or at the beach. She envied that but didn’t feel like she had a choice.

But that longing is still there.

Now an adult, coaching other kids, Lara told me she’s watched every episode of Blue Planet and Planet Earth. She can’t get enough of it.

And at their gym, they’re big on making sure the kids use reusable water bottles rather than disposable plastics.

Still, she feels like she should be doing more. She’s just not sure what.

You

Does Ana’s story hit home? Or maybe Darwin’s or Lara’s?

What’s your story?

From a young age, every one of us senses this deep connection to nature. And at some point, the realization comes that something is wrong. The realization that though we thought that our government or someone should be taking charge, it’s just not happening.

There’s a longing to feel connected and to be part of the solution, to somehow honor the very web of life that supports us. Try as we might, it seems incredibly hard to be of true service in the way that we yearn for.

Most people who come to me have tried so many things to stand up for nature, and with nature, and to make a difference.

Is this you, too?

Do you read the reports coming out that say we have only a decade to turn things around? And even though you’re super busy with work and family, you still want to figure out a way to make things better?

Do you want to be part of the solution, but feel like you’re actually just part of the problem?

Have you taken part in climate marches and felt the exhilaration of coming together and demanding a future that works for all? Then afterward, you felt defeated, wondering if it was all just an empty show?

Have you signed up with large environmental organizations, but then felt inundated with requests for donations and signing petitions, not sure if you’re really making an impact?

Have you found yourself on large committees working on projects that seem to go nowhere?

Have you tried starting your own projects but couldn’t seem to get much interest or ran into one obstacle after the next?

Do you feel you could do more in your community, but you don’t know where to start?

Do you bring your own bag when you go shopping? Do you try to keep up with the myriad of recycling rules, but feel you’re still not doing it right?

And even if you did manage to do it all perfectly, you know that recycling alone is not enough to protect the planet.

If that’s you, take a few deep breaths and let a little smile come to your face.

Believe me when I tell you that the fact that you haven’t been able to make a tremendous impact yet is not your fault.

You’re exactly where you’re meant to be, and I’m so glad we found each other.

Welcome, my friend.

You’re in the right place.

I’m going to show you how to move away from frustration and step into exciting results within 90 days.

Wouldn’t that be a welcome change! We’re going to do that, together.

But hold tight for a minute. Before we dive into that, I want to tell you my story.

2. My Story & My Promise to You

Growing up in a big family, whenever we got bored or antsy, my mom’s favorite refrain was, Go outside and play!

I came along as the seventh of eight kids. To this day, I can’t imagine how my parents did it: raising all of us on my dad’s salary. But shooing us outdoors was one key strategy that worked.

I grew up in the city, in Denver, Colorado, but I was enveloped and at ease in nature in our neighborhood. We played chase, running barefoot on the grass. My older brothers dug hideouts in the dirt in the corner of the yard. My sister and I made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and climbed up to have lunch in the apple tree.

On weekends, my parents took us up to the mountains. We ran and hid amongst the aspen and pine trees. We splashed around in the river and watched the hummingbirds do their mating flights.

In that big family with so much going on, I felt kind of invisible. Or like a bit of a burden. But outdoors, I felt at home. It’s not something I ever tried to talk about or even reason out. I knew it because I felt it. I always thought of myself as just a kid, but now I can see that from an early age, I was a nature kid.

I wonder, aren’t we all?

My Story

Finite

By age ten, I started working for my dad. It was a splendid way to earn a dollar and do something that seemed kind of cool with my daddy-o.

I was born in 1960, so this was way before personal computers or smartphones!

He would hand me two pages: one blank piece of logarithmic graph paper and another with a list of numbers. My job was to draw a dot on the graph for each data point. I was plotting oil and gas production history.

Once the data ran out, the next step was to grab a logarithmic curve. Each curve had a different slope and shape. I’d find the one that fit the data best, then draw it out to zero. That was how we projected how much oil or gas was remaining in that well.

By about the fifth one, I said, Wait, Dad. Soooooo, every one of these goes to zero, sooner or later?

Yes, exactly! he said.

But our cars and our homes are all using this. So what happens next? I asked.

I’ve been bringing this up at work. I’ve been telling them that we need to figure out something else because eventually all the oil and gas will be gone.

Oh, okay, I replied. I went back to finishing that graph so I’d get my dollar, but I couldn’t do any more that day.

I had an uneasy feeling.

That’s how I learned the meaning of finite before I ever knew the word.

This was long before concerns of climate change were mainstream. But pollution definitely was a thing.

It was also at age ten that I wrote my first piece of writing that was published. It was a poem called The Brown Cloud, after the polluted air visible in Denver.

But the 1970s also sparked a fresh wave of environmentalism.

After millions of people got together for teach-ins, marches, and festivals, the U.S. government under Republican President Nixon started the Environmental Protection Agency and passed the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act.

In 1978, President Jimmy Carter came to Colorado to commemorate the opening of the Solar Energy Research Institute.

It seemed like the adults were getting the message and doing the right things.

Elegant Design

When I went to the University of Colorado in Boulder in 1978, I told them I wanted to study solar energy. They informed me that that wasn’t an option. Instead, I was advised to enroll in engineering. And I did.

The absence of a solar program should have been my first clue that the adults didn’t have things as under control as I had hoped.

I graduated with a degree in electrical engineering in May 1982 and got married two weeks later. I got a job in the field of building energy efficiency and I was excited to be on track, using my skills to make a difference.

I was enamored with passive solar design, the kind I’d studied in college and thought I might build someday. But the most impressive example was the cliff dwellings designed by Indigenous people of southwestern Colorado at Mesa Verde somewhere around the late 1190s.

Large natural rock outcroppings protruded out to the south, keeping the living spaces cool all summer. Yet, when the sun dropped its path in the winter, the rays flooded in, heating up the thick interior walls, to radiate heat back out all night.

But, at our engineering firm, our clients only gave lip service to passive solar. The U.S. Department of Defense, cities, and home builders asked us to optimize design, but only within a small range. Changing the orientation of the building to what would be optimal for energy efficiency was usually out of the question. That was decided based on other factors.

I wondered, why would builders choose to literally align with nature nearly a thousand years ago, but now, it was suddenly completely out of the question?

Niwot

After having our first daughter, we moved to Niwot, a town of about 3,000 people. We were just ten or twenty minutes down the road between two larger cities, Boulder and Longmont.

This was 1987, and though we’d had recycling in Denver and Boulder, in Niwot there was no recycling. I usually traveled to work by bus, so it was even more annoying because it meant I had to make an extra trip driving to recycle. That made no sense at all.

In 1988, we added our second daughter to the family, but the town still didn’t add recycling.