My darlings.  My dear small handful of readers.  Even among you there is a diversity of thoughts and voting in this election.  I don't want to turn you away.  I want us to stay together and not break up.  Because dialogue and openness is the most important thing everybody needs right now.  Along with goodness, and you all are people I value so much.

I have to cheat on you though, and I want to tell you why.  11/9 changed me from who I was when I started this blog. I began this journey as encouraging you to be environmentalish and allowed myself and us all to believe that was the pathway to progress.  Do one thing.  Make it a habit.  Rinse, repeat.  That the drumbeat of progress on environment and climate would be steady at the national level - we had just made AMAZING gains - and you and I together just had to make small changes to our dailies to get there.  I was wrong.  I was heartbreakingly and painfully wrong.  In the wake of President Trump winning people have accused me of hubris, of thinking I'm "better than", of not listening.  They have said I only care about what happened in this election because my job depends on it.  They have laughed in victory at my Facebook posts of the grief cycle I'm going through after pouring myself into 15 years of environmental work.  They have attacked me personally for decrying the hate crime spike after this election.  They have called me a racist for defending minorities against that hate (no really, I quote: "the definition of a bigot").

I may have been wrong about this election, but those people?  They've got me all wrong.  Most of you know me in real life, so I know you might think this doesn't need to be said, but as a woman and an environmentalist, America just indicted me.  Slapped me upside the head and spit on me. Some of my fellow citizens just tumbled me to the bottom of Mt Everest with no oxygen and bricks in my backpack.  I'm gonna need to take a moment to assess my scrapes and bumps and bruises (done, check).  And now I need a minute of affirmation before I get back to climbing (spoiler alert: I WILL NEVER STOP CLIMBING). 

Who am I then? I am an optimist.  I am hopeful.  I believe in the importance of active listening, of going deeper than soundbites.  I look for the inspirational.  I love to laugh about things that should make us all weep (not kidding).  When I think about what I do every day when I get up and go to work, I think about whether I'm having an impact.  Whether I'm making a difference. I worked hard to learn my craft.  I practice what I preach.  I am a builder.   I am a Catholic.  I reach across the aisle.  And those people who want to bring me down?  Haters gonna hate.  Says a whole lot more about them than me.  And besides, I've long ago decide to be myself anyway.  And sounds like I'm in good company....PREACH AMBER, PREACH!
[Read more after the break]

I finally figured out the stats of my blog site and turns out I have more than one reader.  Huzzah!  The most interest was my recent EcoPartyDownload...so here's to listening and continuing that conversation. These type of posts take me a lot more time, but is it worth it?  Give the people what they want?  You tell me! 

I had to update the "Meet Megan" section of this blog recently and realized I've been doing environmental work for almost 15 years.  Shoot. Time flies.  But then again, in such a fast-moving and constantly evolving profession as sustainability has turned out to be, that feels like light years ago.  Particularly when thinking about the future I see for how corporate sustainability is shifting.  And in this regard, the environmental movement and its theory of change going back decades has not yet embraced what I believe to be the greatest opportunity for corporate America to "step up".  But before I can get to advocating for what I think is the answer, we have to get on the same page, and that involves dipping into how we all got here (I'll make it quick! Like ripping off a band-aid).  But I really do have to give you the skinny on why the environmentalists got to their belief system on what causes corporations to reduce their impact on the planet.  They have a really good reason for being that way.

In the days of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and the blue marble photo of Earth that sparked the environmental movement, there wasn't a political lens to it.  I mean, consider: who doesn't benefit or get impacted by waterways, drinking water and air clean of pollution? Passage of the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act were strongly supported on a bipartisan basis by Congress (I know...feels like a fairy tale to say that these days!).  And then....came the reaction.  The backlash.  President Reagan's underlying principle of "economy vs environment" meant appointing a blatantly anti-environmentalist to lead the EPA and ripping out the solar water heating system installed by President Carter.  Which all led to the formalization and codification of environmental issues being deeply partisan with the GOP being "anti" for all things environmental, and that divide has stayed the rule pretty much to this day.  With the notable and extremely temporary exception of when climate had it's moment in 2007 where conservatives supported taking action until they collapsed into this still toxic and resistant strain of denialism. Deep roots that denialism has. Sigh.  Anyways, that concrete-like hardening on the political front was a result of multinational corporations deciding that environmental regulation was onerous, expensive and corporates came in heavy to all levels of government against any further action.

So how did this play out outside of the Beltway?  How were companies interacting on environmental issues in their business during the 80s and 90s before corporate sustainability became "a thing"?
(Read on below the jump)

I used to think the world was so organized.  Blame it on the media I grew up with - a book, a movie, a television show.  Everything seemed so neatly organized into distinct units with a beginning, middle and end.  So I've become increasingly interested in gatherings that defy my own limitation.  Climate Week NYC is one of those weeks.  It has become a week on the calendar where strategic, global thinkers on climate from government, private sector, universities...anywhere...swarm the city and all kinds of micro and macro announcements are made.  More importantly, all kinds of connections are made between those with funding to those with the big ideas that are going to solve this thing.

And almost in perfect PR unity, the Empire State Building, eco-famous for it's own massive environmental retrofit, now has LED lights (eco-perfect!) which can mark the occasion.

Excited to see what comes out of this Climate Week 2016!  Take a look at the 3 minute overview video on the organizing group.  FWIW...pretty proud I'm one of the 100,000 EVs driving on the road in the U.S.  "Everything we do locally will have an impact globally"...pretty slick quote and I dig it.

So I'm clearly pro-Obama.  On this blog I've called him my Prezzy in Rezzy and POTUS with the MOSTUS.  This I know, dear lone reader.  But this time around, when Obama finally said the words that I've been waiting to hear for 2788 days of his Presidency (not to mention eight. extremely. looooooooong. years. of that Dubb-ya fella)...when Obama finally said to the press comments on climate change in real terms the way I've long hoped and expected my President to say...it's as awesome as it is bittersweet.  I can only explain it by saying this: if you've been waiting at a restaurant to be served dinner and after hours and hours the waiter finally drops off dessert minutes before the restaurant closes...how much do you enjoy the dessert?  Isn't the decadence lessened by the long wait and by the coming close? 

I can only relish Obama's climate change talk in the context of his arrival to the end of his POTUS-ness.  Not to mention the sword of Damocles of it potentially all coming undone when an under-minded and small-handed Donald Drumpf potentially wins. God help us all. So even though Obama has done amazing work and joined the Paris Agreement which I've waited my whole enviro(ish) life to see....I just need to take just a beat, just a few short minutes, to point out how absurdly long it took President Obama to get here and finally give this interview to the NY Times on climate.  Seems only fair to have one little blog posted into the interwebs abyss after waiting 66,912 hours.  4,147,320 minutes.  You get the idea.

Because yes.  Obviously.  Absolutely.  He said the things I've longed and ached to hear from POTUS about this issue.  That climate change is terrifying and hearing about it in briefings both depresses people in his Administration and spurs them into action.  That what makes it difficult is the fact it's not an "instantaneous catastrophic event" but "a slow-moving issue that, on a day-to-day basis, people don’t experience and don’t see."  That it's the greatest long-term threat facing the world, one that could lead to massive refugee crises (multiple!) and political instability unseen in our lifetimes.  Welcome to me circa 2002 when I first started looking at these charts and trends.  I mean for reals.  Seriously. I still remember experiencing heart-racing panic in my environmental studies classes.  Actual to-my-bone-marrow, all-out PANIC that this was happening and people were still going about their daily lives in trucks and SUVs, leaving their lights on and letting the A/C or heat out.  Didn't they KNOW?  I remember thinking how panicked they would be too if only they had the same information I did...that any person with even a bit of common sense would be equally freaked out.  If only I could snap them out of it we could get down to doing some real change.  But alas,  I would fail for many years due to a well-funded counter-opinion war by oil companies.  Really "great corporate citizens" who hired literally the same guy that worked for tobacco companies trying to sway opinions that smoking didn't cause cancer to also combat opinions that climate change isn't real and we're not the cause.  No, I'm not kidding.

So it's rewarding to hear my inner dialogue, the one based upon facts and reason and logic...and you know...SCIENCE...coming out of the lips of the person sitting in the most important job in the country and arguably around the globe.  That's a great and wonderful and amazing thing, and my environmentalish philosophy is to celebrate the good...so I'm celebrating it.  I promise.  But 2788 days into his Presidency, I also have to ask just this once, why did it take this obscenely long?

I finally caught up with Al Gore's most recent TED talk from earlier this year giving the latest updates on climate change and the case for optimism.  That's right, optimism!  The results are compelling when it comes to the clean energy revolution, eye-popping proof positive that we are not only going to win this in future tense, but are already on an accelerated path towards winning it right now. 

I'll go through the facts and figures in a future post (or posts...there's a LOT of them!) but as usual wanted to make this personal.  So gotta give a requisite SPOILER ALERT.  Al Gore ends his TED talk with a remembrance to when he was young and heard President Kennedy announce that we would land a man on the moon within ten years.  He recalls hearing adults of the day say that it's reckless, expensive and will fail.  But lo, eight years and two months later when Neil Armstrong stepped out onto the moon, the cheer that went up from NASA's mission control was done by a group of systems engineers average age 26.  Meaning they were 18 when they heard Kennedy's announcement and the subtext is that Kennedy's inspiration drove them to commit their careers to space...a mission that proliferated technologies and brought us the "blue marble" view of our planet that helped birth the environmental movement.

My friends, that is me.  I am that "space nerd" except the cause that rallied me was climate change.  At the age of 19 when I began learning about this issue and all environmental issues I felt a deep and lasting pull of the significance of the damage we have caused not only to the planet but to the ecosystems on which we depend for our lives.  What better purpose in life could I find than dedicating myself to overcoming a seemingly insurmountable issue that will save humanity?  By the time An Inconvenient Truth came out I was already on the journey and it just added fuel to my en fuego (thank you to my enviro professor & honors thesis advisor who gifted me this book!)  I've worked in environmental positions since undergrad, always seeking new opportunities to have an even greater impact.  I even spent the dark climate backlash years posting on social media in a failed attempt to change hearts & minds (not sure that worked...a bit of self-reflective criticism on this blog too.  Am I speaking into the void?  What do you think dear reader, my dear singular reader?)

People confuse optimism with naivete.  That optimism can only happen if you don't have enough reality.  I can't tell you the number of times people have looked at me and stated directly that I just don't know better, I'm too young, or rhetorically did a pat on the head for "that's cute" that I have this passion for our planet.  I strongly, whole-heartedly and forever disagree.  And the systems engineers in mission control would too. 

I have walked through the hellfire of what I like to call "eco depression".  I went deep into the dark depths of how badly we've choked ourselves and other living creatures on this planet.  But here's the thing: I've come out the other side.  My optimism comes precisely because I have a strong dose of reality.  I know exactly how steep the path is towards that destruction, but I see the ladders to redemption too, and I choose to go there and bring as many people as I can with me. I choose to amplify and enable those opportunities.  I've made it my life journey and career to find those ladders and invite others to see them and join me on the climb.  "Alone we can go fast, but together we can go far."

It doesn't mean I don't hear "no".  In fact it's quite the opposite.  I hear Oh. So. MANY. No's.  I laugh a little too hard and personally at lines in movies of "No? Is the only word you know, NO?"  But I see those no's as someone who just hasn't gotten the right or enough information to see what I see. 

So get dosed in reality and join team optimistic on climate change.  Take a look at America's climate-explainer-in-chief on the latest for climate change and why we all have cause and hope to be optimistic...I know I am!

So I work for "the man" and I've been around corporate America these last 7+ years.  I like to think of myself as a middle-of-the-road kind of gal.  But the more I dig into the facts and what's happening since my #NoDAPL blogpost on the outrageous event that happened when Native Americans this past holiday weekend stood with Standing Rock Sioux against the Dakota Pipeline and were bitten by dogs and attacked with pepperspray...the more outrageous such an already obscene event has become.  The more I'm certain that this corporate entity is the epitome of a bad actor and evil in both its actions and its premeditated intentions.  If "corporations are people" according to the Supreme Court, then Enbridge and Dakota Access LLC are diagnosed psychopaths.  Here's why....

There's a little discussed fact in the U.S. when it comes to Tribal peoples mobilization against pipelines in Canada.  They have been at it a lot longer, and they have been successful.  In fact, to understand why Keystone XL pipeline even was requested to bring crude oil allllllll the way down from Alberta (that's Canada) through the U.S. to the Gulf, you have to trace the failure of those same oil companies to successfully get passage on a much shorter westerly journey through British Columbia.  (See my EcoPartyDownload on Keystone XL for more).

I woke up this morning to news that the primarily Native American activists protesting the newly desired corporate pipeline in Dakota walked onto private land to block the construction that had started while the appeal is awaiting to be heard in court...and those people were attacked by dogs from the company's private security firm.  Yes, PEACEFUL PROTESTERS WERE JUST ATTACKED BY DOGS IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.  I mean...W.T.F.  Is this amateur hour?  Is it 1963? Has the opposition not learned ANYTHING from history?  Is it "opposite day" when it comes to how best to handle peaceful social justice protests?  Who are these awful security people and why should we now trust the people who hired them?  Some kind of modern-era Bull Connors from Birmingham styling themselves as "big deals" because they have a walkie and a dog frothing at the mouth?  Dogs biting children...sigh...why does history always have to repeat itself?  When will people learn?  Why do the words of Nelson Mandela feel so necessary right now for those corporate oilmen to hear?

Activism seems very "environmentalist" instead of "environmentalish" of me...I get it.  Feels intense.  But.... (stick with me after the jump)

Only SNL Weekend Update legend Seth Meyers can:

• take the fact that this is the hottest summer & year on record and make it funny
  
• point out we've experienced extreme weather events that should only happen every 500 years eight times in the last 12 months and make us giggle
  
• make fun of Donald Drumpf's lack of using "all the best words" to even describe the problem...and provide only a hand gesure "like this"
  

Here's to paying attention housewives in lingerie in front of the tv.  Personally, I've always thought the planet has some damn sexy legs....work it girl...work it Mother Earth!

People.  PEOPLE!  I woke up to the news that President Barack Obama and Premier Xi Jinping jointly, formally joined the international climate agreement reached in Paris last year.  It is so FREAKING AWESOME and inspiring that I finally got THE steroid shot of inspiration to get off my duff to blog again...which isn't to say that SO MUCH isn't happening that's already awesome: getting to laugh about extreme weather this summer, getting full-on optimistic by the insanely high adoption of clean energy and getting Republicans to be so supportive of wind it would get removed "over my dead body".  Wow.

But that wow ain't nothing compared to this: having the two largest greenhouse gas emitters JOINTLY agree that their countries have met the necessary requirements and set reductions targets...this my friends is the turning point for our planet and a turnaround that has been 20 years in the making.  

As someone who's been in this space since 2003, there's two certainties if you find normal people with whom to chat about this topic (not the flipping weirdos who argue with me about climate change...but I digress)...they will say "there's no way Congress will pass this" and "well why would we do anything if China won't."  Which were decent points well made until about 5 years ago...particularly because China has become a world leader in the green energy revolution and received absolutely no credit from everyday Americans for this huge successful pivot.  Which means I have spent a ENTIRE DECADE of my life having to argue something that today's joint agreement makes totally irrelevant in the most amazing way.  Let me break this down for you...

Living inside the Beltway for over 3 years I learned a valuable lesson.  Sometimes you really do have to find a way to laugh so that you don't cry.  Thankfully while working on and getting depressed by the George W. Administration's environmentally "protective" activities, I had the Daily Show and Colbert Report to keep me laughing.  And that was before Congress made doing nothing the most electable trait.

So I've long been an admirer of folks who can be pithy and funny about climate change.  It's a talent I will never possess.  Especially when it comes to fitting it all into 140 characters or less, like Stephen Colbert did in my favorite tweet ever... 

​That right there, boom.  Makes you see the absurdity of what people say about this issue.  Bless satire for this power.  

And here's a shiny new best example, the comedic viral video geniuses behind Funny or Die partnered with celebrities to make this spoof on 1985's "We Are The World"...now titled "The Earth's Not Getting Warmer" and brought to you by the Koch Brothers.  Having seen "Green Team" from many years ago, which is funny but unnecessarily off-color, I had my reservations.  But this thing is 110% enviro(ish) approved.

Keep us laughing comedians.  We simply have to laugh so as not to cry. That's been my motto for this past decade, but I might have to rethink it.   With an international climate accord for the first time ever...maybe The Force Awakens is on trend beyond the box office (Harrison Ford! Love that guy.  Bless)...it's time for A New Hope that things are looking up for once.  There is hope for humanity (and our planet) after all.

I've been reading about the climate deal struck in Paris over the weekend and reflecting this whole year about what might happen.  Something different was in the air.  And it's really, actually, happened.  200 nations have signed onto the climate accord, and it's been something I've hoped for going on 12 years now.  Personally.  Even the horrible California drought I escaped from this year had a respite after five years.  This has been the longest drought of my enviro-life (let's not talk about dating...)

On the Paris Agreement there's nay-sayers and yay-sayers and everyone weighing in and yet I don't hear the most impactful thing being discussed here in the U.S.  It's been and continues to be earnestly discussed.  Since 2007 climate change was buried in the media and hardly given the focal point it deserved.  I've had to read articles outside the U.S. for the best news coverage.  Unlike the past, this year I've heard daily coverage of the talks in Paris in the manner they should be covered - who's there, what's being traded, what's the impact, what the island nation coalition says, what corporations are advocating for.  Every day I hear the coverage and said a prayer in gratitude for the fact that this massive global climate treaty was being treated in the press like a massive global climate treaty. That in and of itself is a huge WIN.  Seriously.  HUGE.  And that's not just my Stockholm syndrome induced by climate change deniers talking.

How climate change is presented and communicated matters.  In fact, I believe that the presentation of this issue matters more than any other aspect.  Climate change is not actually controversial.  Scientifically, logically, morally.  It's pretty straightforward in substance.  Not so straightforward and in fact, twisted, when it translates into the public domain.  In fact, I've been paying close attention over the past year to some signals that fiscal conservatives and Christians from evangelicals to Catholics are rallying behind this great moral test of our time.  Our use of natural resources that is unsustainable and comes from war-torn and unstable places....and maybe that's the best reason ever to stop overusing those resources.

Oh you want to hear more about the actual climate accord and my take?  Not just celebrate the AMAZINGLY POSITIVE news that it's happened and call it a day?  That my friends is the problem with society!  But fine fine, EcoPartyDownload after the jump...