Let the beautiful Earth provide

A climate background section follows the Pledge, and next are the steps in greater detail: guided explanations and their benefits to you, society, and our Earth. Our postcard featuring these steps is available: email us to request postcards (tree-free paper; 25 cents each or $14 for 100).

I pledge to begin taking as many of the following steps as I can to stave off the worst effects of global warming, and spread the word. In so doing I will cut fossil fuel use. I will do some or all of the following:

1. Cut down on driving my vehicle, or carpool. I will walk or bike, and not buy a car if I do not have one (best of all). I will support and use mass transit. I may work closer to my home.
2. Cut down on working just for money: I can thereby barter more, and cut down on commuting.
3. Depave my driveway, or help others’ depave their driveways, or depave parking lots, and grow food in depaved land.
4. Unplug or retire my television, and perhaps go off the electricity grid. I will reduce energy for heating, and share appliances such as my oven with neighbors, and not buy or use power tools or jet skis, etc.
5. Publicly oppose new road construction and road widening in my community, to start undoing sprawl, prevent growth in traffic, and halt the spread of forest roads allowing clearcuts.
6. Take vacations without jet air travel, and avoid career activity dependent on jet travel.
7. Plant trees, collect rainwater, and avoid overusing municipal water as it is energy-consumptive (and thus may emit CO2, the main heat-trapping gas that fossil fuels release).
8. Buy local products, buy as little plastic as possible, carry a travel mug. Minimize consumption. Support alternative plant materials to cut down on petrochemicals and trees for paper. Avoid eating animal products especially shipped-in beef.
9. Not bring more children into the world, or limit my offspring to one, and possibly adopt. I recognize the threat of overpopulation.
10. Inform my community and the greater national and global community on the need to take action such as the above for climate stability.”

Ten detailed steps for greenhouse relief and benefits

1. Drive your car less, or give it up. Perhaps you can try carpooling or renting a car. Eventually you could move your residence closer to work, or find a job closer to home. Ride a bike, walk, take the bus or the train. Use bike-carts for hauling. Each gallon of gasoline burned means five pounds of carbon into the atmosphere. The U.S. burns over 115 billion gallons a year.
2. Cut down on working just for cash. Personal arrangements reduce commuting and boost community. Garden or farm locally so you can share in the food. Help clean or repair someone’s home, and in return perhaps get your hair styled or get a massage! Do some child care or teaching in your immediate neighborhood so others don’t have to drive their kids, and you may be compensated in the form of getting some clothing, firewood or music lessons. Establish local currency.
3. Depave your driveway or someone else’s. Grow food. Tear up a parking lot. Good soil for growing food is often under asphalt and concrete, except when a bed of rocks was put in and soil scraped away. Narrowing a road (which calms traffic and lowers the “urban heat island effect” of pavement) can allow for all-important tree planting. Create compost with kitchen scraps and garden clippings, for growing depaved veggies. Save urine for fertilizing trees; dilute it for garden plants.
4. Unplug the television and other electric or motorized appliances or toys. Read books, play non-electric musical instruments, and talk with your family. Get news and entertainment from a solar or handcrank radio. Get off the grid: use no electricity in first one room, then others. Reduce heating. Share ovens: Six loaves of bread can bake at once instead of one-this means getting together with neighbors! Go to bed early so as to not turn night into day. Use non-petroleum oil lamps. Minimize outdoor lighting. No motorized recreational toys or two-stroke engines. Push-mow lawns; bring back the scythe to clear fields.
5. Halt road construction at local, state and national levels. More roads and wider roads bring about more car and truck traffic and CO2 emissions, and allow sprawl development which means more electricity-demand and less green space. Roads are the way forests have been clearcut. There should be no compromise: our biosphere is running out of time. Cheap oil is running out too fast for myriad roads to be useful.
6. Reject the jet: Take vacations without air travel. Sail. Go into a line of work not requiring jet travel. Jets are less energy efficient than cars, per capita, comparing a jet full of passengers to one person driving. Forget jet skis too!
7. Plant trees on lawns (including golf courses), and everywhere: they suck up CO2. Vital places for restoration include stream and river banks, and dirt roads that have been closed. (Do close roads; the Earth would approve.) Hope that increasingly violent storms due to global warming will not destroy forests and plants too badly. Collect rain water and use water sparingly for washing, especially cars, as pumping municipal water can use much fossil-fuel energy that adds to global warming.
8. Buy and consume locally: This cuts down on petroleum-based transport. Also, buy smart: little or no petroleum plastic. Reuse paper bags and glass containers. Support sustainable, nontoxic materials-industries such as hemp: it replaces pulping of trees. Buy in bulk. Reuse and recycle everything including kitchen scraps for compost. Avoid eating animal products especially shipped-in beef. Consume no factory-farm animal products; the herds create methane and demand great quantities of electricity and petroleum. Earth’s petroleum—oil and natural gas—will be virtually gone before 2050. Growing food organically does not use fertilizers made from natural gas or pesticides from oil. To improve diet for health and localization, look into www.living-foods.com.
9. Reduce population growth: Adopt a child instead of reproducing, but bearing one child is better than adding two to the population. Fewer consumers especially in the highest per capita energy-using nation (the U.S.) means lower global-warming emissions. Why bring another life into an overpopulated, greenhouse world? Instead of “More Jobs” for more people, what about less people? More “jobs”=more CO2 emissions.
10. Community action: Aim it toward governments and big corporations. If today’s level of outcry against genetically engineered food and the excesses of world corporate trade were combined, that might be enough to get the ball rolling. So, write letters, demonstrate in the streets, form boycotts, and attend city-council and county-supervisor hearings. Use the Internet to email this, and link websites to www.culturechange.org. Take loving action to discourage fellow citizens’ climate-changing habits. Good luck to us all; we are all one.

Apparently, government and greenhouse-gas generating corporations are not up to the task of saving the climate. So, let us act for the Earth at this critical time. The world’s transport sector is the worst offender in greenhouse-gas emissions—especially the U.S. car fleet. Waiting for the “technofix” for industry could be ecocide: renewable energy cannot support a huge consumer economy; it is expected to rely on the same unsustainable infrastructure, and dwindling cheap petroleum in its diverse uses cannot be fully substituted.

We have launched the Global Warming Crisis Council to respond to the hammering on our global climate perpetrated by industry and overpopulation. The dominant culture may not be able to properly address global warming, but those of us in the vanguard to sustainability are getting started "by (almost) any means necessary." See our special page on the Global Warming Crisis Council.

The Earth lovingly provides its wondrous array of species, food, water and climates for our survival, so let’s save it and be proud and conscious of what we are bequeathing to the next generations.