Climate Change at Home

Lucas Harsche ’23 interviewed Williamsburg City Councilman Caleb Rogers ’20 and Hub Coordinator of the Williamsburg Sunrise Movement Gracie Patten ’22 in an exploration of the effects of climate change at home and ways students can get involved in climate change activism.

This past August, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released the Working Group I’s contribution to the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report, Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis, which addresses the current scientific understanding of the climate system and climate change through a combination of paleoclimate studies, climate simulations, and various other observations. The results of the Sixth Assessment Report are quite damning — “Climate change is already affecting nearly every part of the planet, and human activities are unequivocally the cause.” Yes, you read that correctly. Anthropogenic climate change is no longer a future threat that we must work in the present to prevent; rather, it is like a blazing fire which is already scorching up critical areas of our planet, especially those which are most vulnerable. It is clear that to continually deny the human hand in this unprecedented catastrophe is tantamount to claiming that the earth is flat.

Has this all hit close to home yet? Look no further than Williamsburg, Virginia: home to thousands of students attending the College of William and Mary, students from across the United States whose home states have already felt the impacts of climate change. Williamsburg City Councilman Caleb Rogers ’20 hails most recently from Charlottesville, Va but has made Williamsburg his hometown. Charlottesville, according to Rogers, is “moderately temperatured. It’s certainly not as swampy as Williamsburg on a day like this in late October” (at the time of interviewing). Due to Charlottesville’s proximity to the Blue Ridge Mountains, Rogers explained that the mornings are relatively cool but that the summers can be hot. Other students, like Gracie Patten ’22, come from as far away from Williamsburg as one can get while still being in the US. Patten, who hails from Seattle, Washington states she “only came east when I moved to university.” Despite the popular stereotype, Patten explained it does not constantly rain in Seattle throughout the year. On the contrary, “It’s really nice in the summer,” Patten said. “When it rains, it doesn’t rain like it does here; it rains as if it’s misting, and so the air is wet, but it’s not unpleasant necessarily. Sometimes it’s not great, but most of the time [when] it’s rainy it doesn’t actually bother people who live there — it only bothers tourists.”

As the effects of anthropogenic climate change have begun to proliferate more generally across the country, both Rogers and Patten have personally witnessed the emerging frequency of change-related environmental issues where they live.

“[Climate change] was a thing that was perforating in what people were talking about for as long as I remember,” Patten recalled, “but I think the first time I became aware of it as a problem that would affect me was in 2017 . . . I was visiting family in New York, and I read this article by David Wallace- Wells. His article eventually expanded into his book, The Uninhabitable Earth, and it was basically about all of the horrible things that are going to happen if we don’t stop climate change.”

Patten remembered the ill-effects of climate change playing a noticeable role in her life in 2019.

“I went to the Renaissance Fair with a friend, and it was so smoky that even in the car with the windows closed, you could smell the smoke,” Patten explained.

Forest fires are not an unprecedented occurrence in Washington State. As Patten notes, “It’s part of the ecosystem. Indigenous people performed controlled burns throughout the West for millennia. Recently, however, according to the Washington State Department of Ecology, climate change has created more arid conditions, increased droughts, and caused the trees and plants, which fuel wildfires, to be drier, thus more flammable. As a result, the number of large wildfires in the West doubled from 1984 to 2015. Forest fires themselves are not the issue, given their traditional role in the ecosystem. However, the exponentially increasing rate of forest fires, the result of the changes brought about by anthropogenic climate change, has now become unsustainable.

While Washingtonians worry about fires, Virginians worry about water. Rogers noted that in his home state of Virginia, the issue of rising sea levels is a major concern and one that is on the minds of some state lawmakers. According to a report from the Georgetown Climate Center, Virginia lawmakers have good reason to be concerned about rising sea levels, especially when it comes to Hampton Roads, home to 1.7 million people and the “second-most vulnerable area in the country to rising seas behind New Orleans”. Additionally, the report concluded that based on current trends, scientists predict that Virginia will experience at least 1.5 feet of sea-level rise during the next 20 to 50 years, a phenomenon which will put coastal communities increasingly at risk. With the presence of a major United States Navy base in Norfolk, Virginia, the threat of sea level rise in Hampton Roads becomes an issue of national security. Despite the very real threats posed by climate change not only to Virginia and Washington, but to the United States as a whole, climate change denial is still a major problem.

To politicians who continue to propagate denialist claims, especially those who benefit from donations made by fossil fuel companies, Patten has this to say: “Stand with us or step aside. They have nowhere to go, they are on the wrong side of this issue, and they will be on the wrong side of history, so I guess we have to vote them out.”

While Rogers holds a similar sentiment regarding the urgency of the climate crisis — his response to denialist politicians is simply “Why?” — he is also careful to address those Americans who are not necessarily opposed to tackling climate change. These Americans are wary of the unprecedented changes that mitigating the effects of climate change could bring to their livelihoods, particularly in the case of coal miners.

“I think there are... a lot [of folks] out there that are more just personally and economically worried about what [a shift to clean energy] would mean for them and their livelihoods,” Rogers explained. Rogers’s advice to activists is “Be aware of the fact that this is an unbelievable amount of change that we have been told needs to happen by 2050 ... Try to find ways to bring anyone into the fold.” Patten and Rogers also have advice for those who recognise the urgent threat of climate change and who are prepared to make the necessary sacrifices that may accompany actions toward mitigating it. First, and perhaps most importantly vote and hold accountable those leaders whose actions have the potential to shape the future of our climate. Both Patten and Rogers said that a candidate’s position on climate change is an important consideration for them when voting.

“Climate justice is where my focus lies, and under that umbrella lies things like racial justice, and reproductive justice, and gender justice, and that sort of thing,” Patten explained “So, I try to vote in a way that furthers all of those ends . . . The climate crisis is so intertwined with other crises that we’re facing that it would be hard to be a single-issue climate voter.”

COURTESY IMAGE // GRACIE PATTEN

Climate change is also a key issue for Rogers when he votes as a citizen, and as a City Councilman in Williamsburg, he also has an opportunity to sponsor change at a local governmental level. “[When] I started campaigning . . . a major thing on my platform [was] the development of a climate action plan for Williamsburg,” Rogers said. “We have a lot to be proud of there. We’re considered by this group called SolSmart [to be] a very bikeable city, which is something to be excited about . . . We do still have robust recycling collection plans, but I also think that there is an opportunity to go farther than that.”

The next step for Williamsburg to take, according to Rogers, would be an “ audit of our greenhouse gas emissions, from facilities that the city has to some of our major institutions like CW [Colonial Williamsburg], William and Mary, transportation that goes on within the city, WATA [Williamsburg Area Transport Authority]. . . to figure out where are we from an emissions standpoint at the moment? And then how do we try to hit 50 per cent reductions by 2030 and 100 per cent reductions by 2050, which would be in line with the Paris Climate Accords?”

Besides voting, there are also plenty of opportunities for students to get more involved in fighting the climate crisis in their daily lives. Patten serves as the Hub Coordinator for the Williamsburg Sunrise Movement, a “movement of young people to stop the climate crisis by making the GND [Green New Deal] a priority among elected officials,” according to their Instagram bio. Patten invites students who are interested in climate change activism to attend a Williamsburg Sunrise meeting on Tuesdays in Tucker Hall 221 at 7pm.

Additionally, Rogers is part of an organisation called the Global Youth Climate Network (GYCN), an organisation for people, who, according to Rogers “want to get involved in climate change and who want to represent the [United States] — or whatever their home country is if they are an international student . . . Part of the programme was listening to policy practitioners talk about the work that they do — people from the International Monetary Fund, or the IPCC . . . and then the other half was three projects challenging you — you being the ambassador — to do for your home country.”

As one of his challenges as an ambassador for the United States, Rogers decided to bike across the state of Virginia in a one-week, 447- mile trip to fundraise and raise awareness about climate change. To do so, he partnered with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, a non-profit which aims to protect the Chesapeake Bay ecosystem. Rogers explained that his endeavour was a success, raising $5,755, 115 per cent of his goal. “It was really a great project,” Rogers reflected. “I feel lucky to have been able to play the part of being a steward, in some ways, of people getting involved in the Chesapeake Bay . . . It was a really nice way to kind of cap off the summer.”

COURTESY IMAGE // CALEB ROGERS

Both the Sunrise Movement and the GYCN serve as great opportunities for students to get involved in the climate crisis. While the effects of anthropogenic climate change have indeed arrived, it is still within our power to mitigate the worst of its effects and preserve the natural beauty of our planet for generations to come. That power has to come about collectively, and it has to come now.

“My belief that we will be able to stop this is not an excuse for complacency,” says Patten. “That belief is intrinsically tied to my continued involvement in the fight. I only believe that we will stop this if we are all actually doing something.”

Sources

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change AR6 Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

The Washington State Department of Ecology