How do we welcome our innocent newborns to a Planet where once there used to be more wonder than now? The years of our lives have become a calendar for the destiny of Earth, framed by the greenhouse gas emission history we are plotting for good or ill. I was born in 1949. When I graduated from high school in 1967 there were 40% more species on earth than today in the year of our grandson’s birth. By 1978, when our first child, Joel, was in his first year, Exxon already had scientific evidence that burning fossil fuels was causing climate change. We now know Exxon scientist James Black showed the science to the company’s top management the year before. And he told them the world needed to act. By my 40th year the 1990 climate convention in Kyoto, Japan established that year’s concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere as the benchmark against which our future behavior would be examined. Indeed the level of emissions in 1990 has become the calibration by which our morality is determined. In my 40th year, some earthlings began to wake up and others began decades of denial, promoting their lies as scientific truth. That was when I was 40. Now, as our son, Joel, turns 40, he and Laura are bringing their first child into the next climate future, one of the newest citizens of Earth.

The emissions calendar from the Paris Accords, signed by 191 nations, is Jackson’s calendar. Now he is a newborn. By 2025, when Jackson starts first grade, Paris commits us to cutting emissions 20% below those 1990 levels. By 2035, when we need to be 40% below 1990, Jackson will graduate from high school. By 2050, when humankind must cut emissions 80% below 1990, Jackson, if he chooses, will be starting his own family. I will be in my 101st year in case you wanted to know!

In the meantime, what is the proper welcome for our precious and innocent newborns to this diminished but awesome Planet? Will they know the wonder that still awaits us around every corner? Will they hear the sound of a humpback blow and taste the saltwater on their lips? Will they see the moon eclipsing the sun and feel the coolness that blankets the earth as a bright summer afternoon turns to midnight?   Will they witness the splash of the Osprey as he pulls a trout from the river turning it in his talons to face forward as he strains to rise toward the nest to feed his young? Will they know the territorial bugle of the bull elk in the meadow at dawn and the whisper of owl wings at nightfall? We must take them to the places where they can teach us to pay attention.

I want them to know the leguminous magic of how the winter pea, in partnership with bacterii in the soil, takes nitrogen from the air we breathe and makes it into food for the garden. I want them to taste the magic of pollinators in honey made of the nectar of marionberry flowers by the creative democracy of the hive. I want them to get close enough to the cow moose and sow grizzly to smell their fear and understand what they are ready to sacrifice when they know their children’s futures are endangered. I want them to touch ancient ice, witness the recession and weep blue glacial tears for what we have done. I want them to walk in ancient dwellings to try and comprehend the ways of living that deserve the welcome of our earth Mother and ponder why, after millennia, the culture disappeared so soon. I want them to feel the earth move as waves pound the beach and realize that, in the Divine scheme of things we are like grains of sand and don’t really amount to much. Then, I can only hope they will help us learn the compassion for Earth that only comes with humility. Maybe then we’ll have a chance.

In mid-summer I attended a strategy session of leaders from around the State of Oregon, preparing for our next run to pass a Cap and Investment bill into law in the 2019 Legislative Session. We were asked to introduce ourselves as we began and tell of the earliest time in our lives we could remember being part of a protest, advocacy or civil disobedience. In a room of 50, mostly young adults, I was amazed at how many said virtually the same thing. They remembered being very young and their parents or grandparents taking them.

Nothing says “Welcome to Earth tiny human,” like taking our little ones to witness the wonder and putting them on our shoulders as we resist the powers that destroy it. Welcome Jackson. Welcome Children of Earth. Great your new day.