I was born in the Heights in Houston Texas in the long ago when the place was more of a town than a metroplex of six million people. Save for a stint when my father was finishing his degree at Texas A&M College and a few months in California, I have spent my life living south of downtown Houston. I now reside in Pearland, a suburb about twenty minutes away from the famous Texas Medical Center. I love my home, my neighbors and so much about this wonderful place, but I continue to worry about its fate as climate change creates more and more dangerous weather events for the area. 

I can recall every hurricane that came through since I was born. Each summer I more carefully follow the weather reports lest a big storm be coming our way. In all my years I can’t recall a hurricane coming to our area as early as the one that made a direct hit on us this past week. Most of the time those kind of storms don’t bother us until August or September. The fact that this one came at the beginning of July has me worried that it might not be the last one to hit us this season. It feels as though such events are becoming more and more common, not just around here but all over the United States and the world. If it’s not a hurricane it will be a flood or a wildfire or a monstrous tornado. 

I worries me that we are still doing so little to quell the pace of increasing temperatures and natural disasters. We become harried in the moment and then seem to simply drop back into all of our old routines and habits without thinking about the effect we are having on our planet. I know that when I write about such things I am mostly ignored and possibly even thought of as a kind of Chicken Little squawking with unnecessary anxiety about the future. Still my more than seven decades in the same area have shown me the dramatic changes in the weather while I have seen very few efforts to address the issues with scientific measures. 

I have to admit to being somewhat late to the discussion of climate change. I remember a discussion that I had with a fellow teacher whose area of expertise was science. She warned me about what she believed was coming to our world and why it would be happening, but like so many I mostly laughed at her sense of urgency once she was no longer in my presence. She sounded a bit neurotic to me and I chose to believe that the worst effects of climate change would not occur until I was long gone. I now admit that she was right and I was wrong. 

My grandchildren have been telling me for several years now that our planet is in trouble. They have literally studied the issue of climate change so well that they are predicting things before they even happen. I find their accuracy to be incredible and so I am more and more attuned to what they have to say. One of them is literally surveying the best places and methods to employ for survival in the future. He predicts a great and unstoppable migration as different parts of the earth become uninhabitable. He does not believe this will happen in my lifetime but he feels that his generation may live to see its effects in all aspect of life. 

My mother smoked until she was in her forties. She mostly ignored the suggestions that tobacco was bad for her health until it was no longer possible to smoke in public buildings. Then she got the message and snuffed out the last cigarette. She lived another forty years but died from lung cancer that her doctors feel certain came from her habit of inhaling nicotine for so long. She was always happy that neither me nor my brothers ever became addicted but also understood that even our exposure to her smoke might ultimately have a negative impact on our health. 

We are at a watershed moment in terms of saving our planet just as my mother once was. She gave herself a few more years than she might otherwise have had if she had continued smoking but the damage was already deadly. I would like to think that we have not reached that point with regard to climate change but the evidence that we have done ourselves in with our over use of fossil fuels is frightening. We should have listened to people like my science teacher colleague years ago and we would no doubt be in a position of more normal climate events rather than the strange ones that are ruining people’s lives all over the world. The seasonal cycles seem to be coming earlier and earlier and the effects are more and more brutal. 

My maiden name is Little. Perhaps it is just that I am the voice urging people to begin today, not tomorrow. The time is now to do more than ever before to make a difference in how we care for the earth and for each other. We have to find ways to protect our planet on a daily basis. We must be willing to sacrifice and work together. Our present ways are not sustainable. For the sake of our future descendants let us earnestly begin.