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information into their curriculum on Earth Day. When I presented this project to my son’s principal, he not only approved it gratefully but also volunteered to walk around after school handing out the flier to drivers who appeared to need a more direct, personal approach. For my own neighborhood, I’ve adapted a more generalized fact sheet to give to the taxi drivers and take-out delivery people who idle outside of my building. I’ve proposed to the high school’s environmental club that they target the local drive-through restaurants and hand out fliers to people who are idling there, urging them to consider parking instead of crawling along in the drive-through line. Every day I get to practice my approach, and it feels most authentic and clear to me when I present it in the spirit of sharing a true gift, from one human to another. It is information about a simple shift that can be made, something one can do that will help us all out. This feels immeasurably more constructive than what I was doing last year: sitting alone in my car, fuming to myself and idling my own “judgment-engine.” I’m grateful that I found a way to turn that key.

Neige Christenson is an improvisational dancer, teacher, therapist, writer, and mother. She is a graduate of the School for the Work of Byron Katie, which has supported openness and creativity not only in her art but also in her relationship to community and to the environment. Her writing has appeared in Contact Quarterly, The Sun, Fire in the Womb: Mothers and Creativity (Xlibris press), and The Mom Egg, a literary periodical of Mamapalooza. She lives with her family in Boston, Massachusetts.

Shut Up and Vote

ERIC RUBURY

After thousands of years of mankind’s self-inflicted wounds such as war, poverty, slavery, and genocide, who would have thought we could come up with a new one like global warming? What to do? How to think about it? Well, we can always whine and shift the blame: SUV soccer moms. Capitalism. Television (except the good shows that I happen to watch, including “Monster Truck Makeover”). The Other Political Party. Maybe some collective guilt, such as gravely intoning that “we’re all responsible.” And although some of these easy answers are crowd pleasers (some have actually made me look smart at dinner parties), it doesn’t accomplish much—sort of the sonic equivalent of graffiti. And at this point, isn’t criticizing global-warming-deniers a bit like shooting fish in a barrel?

Besides, I try to restrict my high-moral-ground whining to a minimum, and to only what is necessary to impress my peers, friends, family, and neighbors. I try to restrict it because … I am a hypocrite. I was once part of this global warming problem in a big way. It turns out that I’ve had to work for a living, and my chosen vocation at one time in my life was that of a geologist. An oil company geologist. A Big Oil company geologist. It gets worse, so hang in there: a Big Oil company geologist who prospected for oil in some of the most environmentally sensitive places on this planet. Real sensitive places. Animal Planet–National Geographic–Discovery Channel kinds of places. So many wells that I sometimes lie awake at night and can almost hear the whiffle ball-like sound coming from the holes out there.

I now realize I was part of The Problem. My first awareness of complicity was on a well site in Guatemala. Guerrillas had attacked the rig, executed a handful of people, blew up the generators and landing strip, and no one was going to secure our jungle site for at least a week. I found myself hiding at the edge of an open waste-oil pit and thinking two things: 1) I need to ask for a raise, and 2) How am I going to explain my role in this mess to our children years from now? Staring at a seat in Hell impels one to take stock of life and think about what one can do in one’s remaining years to perhaps be eligible for some sort of parole. Fortunately, dear reader, you likely don’t need to worry about these things—unless you drive a car (and yes, a hybrid is a car, so you still get a full demerit);