For the last 15 years or so I’ve been reading about climate and growing increasingly alarmed at the inaction by our federal government. I am baffled that climate change has become a partisan issue.
As a way of channeling my frustration into something productive, I started posting something I called “Climate Fridays” on my Facebook. Inspired by Greta Thunberg’s “Fridays for the Climate,” I wanted to provide people with a positive, solutions-oriented series of posts related to climate. I don’t believe that fear-mongering is an effective tactic, but I also don’t want to sugar-coat what we’re facing.
I believe that climate change, also known as “global weirding,” is an existential threat to our way of life. I started posting every week in the spring of 2021. In late July of that year, I decided to launch this blog with the help of my wife. She has a master’s degree in sustainability and does public relations and marketing for cleantech companies for a living. How I got her to agree to help with this blog, I’m not sure, but I’m grateful.
I have an MBA in energy and sustainability myself and work in the solar industry. Like a lot of Millennials, I first started paying attention to climate after watching An Inconvenient Truth when I was in high school. While I’ve cared about climate change for a long time, it took me a few years to realize that I wanted to devote my career to it. In college I took a few courses on climate and Earth sciences while majoring in Global Affairs. After spending a year in South Korea and traveling around Asia and Europe, I returned to the United States and started working in healthcare, which wasn’t for me. Meanwhile, climate change continued to get worse, so I went back to school to pivot into a career where I would be contributing to the transition to clean energy.
Other than climate change, my interests include studying Italian, making fresh pasta, learning new vegetarian dishes, watching documentaries, spending time with my wife and our dog, walking around Cambridge and Boston, and reading about a wide range of topics.
This blog is one of my ways of trying to do something about what we’re facing. The truth is, I often feel helpless in the face of a slow-moving catastrophe. We are now well past the point of “stopping” climate change. The greenhouse gases that we’ve emitted over the last 150 years will likely alter the climate for the next few centuries. Even if we do everything right, I will never see a return to a stable, flourishing planet. We are in trouble, but we are not without hope. We must work to move our society away from fossil fuels, and towards a carbon negative economy, but we must also get ready for what’s to come. I hope you’ll join me on my journey.
Why “The Mangrove”
Mangroves are a symbol of strength and perseverance in the face of heavy storms, as well as a safe place to grow and learn. They are transitional ecosystems. They arise, and thrive, between the extremes of land and ocean. They foster the future of life in the water and on land, by providing a nursery for marine species, and protecting coastlines from flooding, heavy winds, and storm surges.
The Mangrove is a symbol of where we are. We are in a transition: between old climate patterns and new, between a fossil fuel dependent past and a clean energy future, between unbridled growth and a circular economy — and this transition is going to last the rest of our lives. The Mangrove provides insights and resources to help you understand these transitions, build resiliency, adapt, and maybe even thrive, in our changing world.
The Mangrove 