The Parents' Guide to Climate Revolution: 100 Ways to Build a Fossil-Free Future, Raise Empowered Kids, and Still Get a Good Night's Sleep

by Gentlemen Hounds

Overview

“Relax,” writes author Mary DeMocker. “This isn’t another overwhelming pile of parental ‘to-do’s’ for shrinking your family’s carbon footprint through super-eco-heroism.” Instead, DeMocker, the cofounder and creative director of 350 Eugene, lays out a lively, empowering, and doable blueprint for engaging families in the urgent, all-important endeavor of “climate revolution.” Here, in one hundred brief, action-packed chapters, parents learn dozens of wide-ranging ideas and activities that can be part of this revolution — from embracing simplicity parenting, to freeing themselves from dead-end science debates, to teaching kids about the political power of creative protest, to changing their lifestyle in ways that will bring their family together, improve moods, and also reduce their impact on the earth. Engaging and creative, this is for every parent who wants to act effectively and empower their children to feel they can do the same.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781608684816
Publisher:	New World Library
Publication date:	04/15/2018
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	217,396
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

The cofounder and creative director of the Eugene, OR, chapter of 350.org, Mary DeMocker’s writing on conscious parenting and climate activism has appeared in The Sun, EcoWatch, Mothering.com, Spirituality & Health, Oregon Quarterly, The Oregonian, and ISLE (Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment) a quarterly journal published by Oxford University Press. She lives in Eugene, OR, with her physicist/math teacher husband and two teenage children.

Read an Excerpt

Excerpt from the Introduction —

Climate revolution is already happening. All you have to do is join.

Relax, this isn’t another light bulb list. It is not yet another overwhelming pile of parental “to do’s” for shrinking your family’s carbon footprint through your eco-super-heroism.

In fact, drop that lightbulb. Stop recycling. Get off your bike, stop gardening, leave your cloth bag in the SUV, and bring on the burgers. Let your faucets run, leave your windows open with the heat on and, for god’s sake, don’t hang your laundry.

Because busy parents—and everyone else-- have been fooled for years that individual lifestyle changes can stop the climate from spinning out of control. They just can’t, at least according to those in the know. Not by themselves, anyway, and this is the great lie this book kicks aside so we can get on with the business of building a fossil free future, raising empowered kids, and getting great sleep at night.

What we need is to come together for climate revolution.

I can hear the hecklers warming up—revolution? But hear me out. The climate revolution I’m talking about is already happening. It’s fun and connecting—which is the only kind that’s going to work, frankly—but it also harbors no illusions about what we’re up against.

It’s also everywhere, which makes joining it easy to do.

The climate revolution I’m talking about has solar farms in Texas, methane backpacks for cows in Argentina, and Oregon parents demanding climate literacy from schools.

It has bicycle highways for the Danish business crowd, New Yorkers on microgrids being paid to reduce their electric use, and defiant US governors upholding the Paris agreement in their own states. It has Washington parents stopping oil trains, bus stop swing-sets that power its lights, and presidents of low-lying island nations refusing “death sentences” from polluters.

It has solar roadways, backyard bio-gas composters in refugee camps, kayakers blocking oil tankers bound for Arctic drilling, and students designing sustainable police stations alongside officers.

It has British “energy gardens,” living room climate film fests, grandparents pivoting their retirement funds from frackers to wind farmers. It has nuns in Pennsylvania building chapels in the path of pipelines.

It has South African clerics marching with indigenous leaders at the head of climate justice marches, mayors helping fifth graders pass climate recovery laws, and scientists running industry-funded climate misinformation out of our kids’ museums.

It has 1-in-6 Americans willing to commit peaceful civil disobedience to stop new fossil fuel projects, and celebrities using their platforms to shine light on climate destruction.

It has kids off screens and in court to sue the president for violating their Constitutional rights to a livable planet. It has Vietnam vets supporting Standing Rock water supporters.

It even has a Cowboy and Indian Alliance. It has people sweeping madmen from office and replacing them with clear-eyed decisionmakers beholden not to oil companies but to children.

It also has love, gratitude, wit, and a kick in its stride.

It has the grit to study the heart of the problem and face the fact that we can’t save our children’s future through “bold initiatives” that don’t actually do what physics requires. It rejects Bill Gates’ dim-the-sun geo-engineering games, all of the colonize-Mars fantasies (sorry, NASA), and Big Green environmental group “partnerships” with the world’s biggest polluters (talking to you, Environmental Defense Fund and Nature Conservancy).

It rejects the idea that ordinary people can only help drawdown the greenhouse gasses by installing private Green infrastructures within an out-of-control fossil fuel economy.

It rejects the idea that government is all-good or all-bad, and imagines a rational one that protects air, water, soil, wildlife, metro systems, public education, and Social Security without recording our every phone call or shutting down peaceful demonstrations with riot police and tear gas.

It rejects the notion that you need wealth, a physics degree, or connections to celebrities, senators, or CEOs to wage a successful revolution. Like most parents, I have none of these.

All you need is a beating heart. This book invites you to show up with it when and where you want to.