How 2023 Turned Me Into a Climate-Crazed Eccentric

Climate anxiety … This is fine? / Illustration by James Boyle

“What the hell is that?” my next-door neighbor asks, peering over our shared backyard fence at the enormous orange plastic orb that’s taken up residence on my patio.

“It’s a rain barrel,” I tell Gloria proudly, grabbing a tin bucket to demonstrate for her. “The county gave it to us for free!” I watch as her gaze follows the new trajectory of our downspouting along the side of the patio roof, which used to lead to another downspout on the side of the house but now ends abruptly two feet above the orange monster. “It collects rainwater runoff, and then I can use this spout to empty it and water the garden.” I demonstrate for her by filling the bucket; the barrel water gives off a satisfying clink against the metal bottom.

“Hmm,” Gloria says, and goes on taking groceries out of her car.

Frankly, I’m disappointed in her reaction. I thought she’d be more intrigued by such a cool way of conserving water and improving the environment. She asked me once, not long after she and her family moved in, about my composter, and when I explained that I put produce scraps and garden waste in it and it makes soil, she went out and bought one herself. Granted, I don’t see her use it much. Or, really, ever. In fact, I’m not sure it’s still in her yard. But hey, Gloria’s young; she’s got a husband and a one-year-old and a five-year-old to take care of. Water conservation probably isn’t really high on her list of concerns.

Which is kind of weird, it occurs to me, because she’s got two little kids. After the summer we had — after a wild season of raging fires and searing heat and Canadian smoke and torrential storms — isn’t she concerned about climate change? Hell, I think about it all the time. What kind of Earth will those kids be growing up in — and, someday, raising kids of their own in? I heard on NPR today about a new space mission to find what scientists think could be water on the moon, to see whether it can be harvested and refined. You never know — we might have to check out from our planet one of these days. Isn’t it incumbent on all of us to do what we can?

The young couple on the other side of us — I’ll call them Fred and Ethel — are ­newlyweds and pretty taciturn, at least with neighbors older than their parents, like we are. They keep to themselves, only emerging occasionally to let their dogs romp in the yard. I don’t think they’re particularly eco-conscious from the way they run their air conditioners 24/7 even when it’s cool enough to open the windows. They leave the outdoor lights on 24/7, too. Speaking of which, I noticed the other day that the string lights hanging above Gloria’s pool are also on around the clock. My husband Doug and I, on the other hand, have looked into installing solar panels on the second-story roof. It seems worth the cost to save the energy. We don’t even have air conditioners, much less run them all the time. Believe it or not, I use an old-school push mower for our lawn. It’s not just that we’re cheap. I need the exercise — and I worry more and more about the climate. Who wouldn’t, after a year in which the world caught fire?

My own kids, apparently. In spite of all the information out there on the negative climate effects of jet travel, they think nothing of heading off to California or Mexico or even Kenya for a wedding. Son Jake is going to Japan this month, just for kicks. I guess it’s great for them to see the world while they’re still young and hale. But don’t their consciences nag at them after these profligate adventures? Wouldn’t a weekend trip to, oh, say, Lancaster be just as good?

And don’t get me started on their automobiles. Jake drives a big old Chevy Impala; Marcy and her husband have a monster SUV. I guess they’re not big readers of Consumer Reports. Hell, who am I kidding? They don’t read any magazines, which is the only reason I can gripe about them in this one the way I do.

I’m learning more about the rain barrel as the late summer winds on. Doug told me after the class he took — you had to take a class to get a barrel for free, and I sure don’t have time for schoolwork — that it would totally fill itself up in just 15 minutes during a heavy rainstorm. It does, too! That’s in drastic contrast, I’ve found, to how long it takes me to empty the thing, one bucket at a shot. The first time I did so, I kept lifting the lid, with its tight-­fitting screen to keep out bugs and debris, to check the water level. It took, like, 10 buckets to make any dent in it at all. Emptying it down to the bottom took more than two hours — two hours of steady filling and hauling and emptying and trudging back and forth across the yard. To complicate matters, there’s a limit to how long you’re supposed to leave the water just sitting there in the barrel: 72 hours. Three days. (You know — mosquitoes and West Nile and bad stuff like that.) In the midst of all the filling and carrying, I came to several conclusions: 1) I have got to buy a second bucket; 2) It isn’t very likely the garden will need watering three days after a rainstorm that fills the barrel; and 3) This is why my people left Lithuania.

One other tidbit Doug learned in his rain-barrel class was that the thing works on gravity. If the water isn’t coming out of the spigot fast enough, you’re supposed to raise the barrel higher with more cinder blocks or bricks or whatever you’re using for a base (in our case, a stack of four concrete pavers Doug salvaged out of Gloria’s trash). I totally scoffed at that. “Ridiculous!” I told him. “Say we raise it up another six inches. How much gravity could there possibly be in six inches? That just doesn’t make sense.” Gravity, at least the way I learned about it, is for planets and suns and meteors and like that, not for six-inch differences in height.

You know what does make the water come out faster, though? Using the release valve that’s six inches below the spigot. Boy, you open that sucker up and you’ve got Niagara Falls. The only problem this new method posed was: With our barrel placed atop Gloria’s pavers, I couldn’t fit our ­buckets — yeah, we now had two — under the­ valve. So we went to Home Depot and bought four more pavers for under the barrel, while I reminded myself that the &%*$# thing had been free.

Sure enough, that did seem to speed things up, which explains why I always got sub-par grades in science. Of course, there’s still another five or six inches of water lying below the valve that has to be drained somehow. When the barrel’s almost empty, I can manage to tilt it far enough to get nearly all the water out. But I still wind up in impromptu wrestling matches with the ungainly thing.

I wasn’t really reckoning, when we signed up for the rain barrel, that we’d actually snag one. There were hundreds of names on the waiting list ahead of ours, Doug told me. (He’d also done the signing-up part, because, you know, he’s retired now. It’s up to me to do the scut work, though.) It wasn’t until months after he first signed on that he got an email inviting him to Collegeville to pick up our barrel. I think it’s possible our orange monster might have previously been gently used — that some starry-eyed Greta Thunberg wannabe got it before we did, tried it out a few times, and decided that taking on a part-time job as a water porter every time it rained wasn’t such a practical idea. I could definitely understand that happening.

Because, as I told my young neighbor Fred the other day as he was exercising the dogs, filling and carrying all those buckets is really hard work. You have to have the leisure time to stand around and wait for them to fill, and then the physical strength and stamina to haul them to the far-distant corners of your yard, which is really only workable at my house because the far-distant corners are just 50 feet away. I didn’t get much more out of him than a sympathetic grunt. He’s a strapping lad, ex-military, emblazoned with tattoos and bulging with muscles. He clearly thought the problem was less with the barrel and more with me.

After my first few emptying trials, I researched buying some sort of soaker hose that would let me make use of the barrel water more, ahem, passively. Damn if I didn’t run into all sorts of gravity problems again. Those customers who’d bought soaker hoses for their barrels left some pretty vicious product reviews for them online, bitching that they clogged up and backed up and kinked up and just stopped working; apparently hell hath no fury like a thwarted environmental do-gooder. It wasn’t inspirational, let’s say.

And if you follow the barrel directions and use the spigot instead of that lower valve, you wind up standing around and waiting for the buckets to refill — a process that gets slower (gravity again, I guess) as the water level goes down. I’ve never been very good at standing around waiting. But for someone like Gloria, or my daughter Marcy, who’s also got two little kids, standing around waiting is an unimaginable luxury. There’s always a mountain of laundry to fold or a dishwasher to unload or a baby bottom that requires wiping or a knee scrape that could use bandaging. Plus dinner to make, and stories to read, and … is it really so surprising that vexing long-term problems like plastics pollution and renewable energy and polar-bear extinction get short shrift? That’s precisely what made Greta Thunberg so famous in the first place — that a 15-year-old would spend her days picketing the Swedish parliament to demand it pay attention to climate change. Why wasn’t she playing soccer or looking at TikToks like all the other kids? You have to have lived long enough to remember the snowy winters of the ’60s “mini Ice Age” in which I grew up to understand how dire our global situation has become. And you have to be retired and live a life filled with long stretches of voidness to be willing to spend them emptying bucket after bucket after bucket of rainwater runoff from a giant orange barrel. Especially after this past Noah-esque summer. These days, when I hear the splish of water in the tin bucket, I think of the introduction to that old TV soap opera: “Like sands through an hourglass, these are The Days of Our Lives.”

It’s the hoary patience-vs.-energy debate in a nutshell: Old people have the former, and young people have the latter, and they’re not interchangeable virtues. Besides, how you look at time changes as enough of it goes by. When I was young and had little kids, every single day seemed endless, a slowly drawn-out skein of chores and duties and responsibilities. Whereas now, my high-school days seem like just a heartbeat ago, and 40 years of marriage were gone in a flash. So the notion that, say, all the polar ice caps will be totally melted sometime in the next decade is terrifying.

Unless, of course, you’re just trying to get two little kids to quiet the hell down already so they’ll sleep and you can finally have that glass of wine.

Maybe the world is changing in other ways, though. Maybe the hellish year we’ve had climate-wise is awakening some sleeping giants. I was interested to read over the summer about the court in Montana that ruled the state had violated the rights of a group of young people by promoting the use of fossil fuels — Montana is apparently the state richest in coal deposits and has never met a fossil-fuel project it didn’t like — over cleaner sources of energy. The plaintiffs are 16 young Montanans ranging in age between five and 22, and their suit was the first of its kind in the nation to win a court’s favor, but likely not the last. Their argument is that their elders — that would be me — are callously and carelessly breaching their constitutionally guaranteed right to “a clean and healthful environment.” And the U.N.’s independent panel of experts recently declared that all nations have a legally binding duty to protect children from environmental degradation.

Good on them. Yet I also kept reading articles over the summer about the growing opposition of various community groups to all sorts of clean-energy projects, including solar-panel farms and the proposed oceanic windmills off Ocean City. I’ve seen big wind turbines along the Pennsylvania Turnpike out by Somerset, and I always found their long, slow revolutions mesmerizing to watch. It’s not like there’s all that much to do out at the beach, if you want to be honest about it. You either page through magazines or nap or run around after your kids. I don’t see how turbines would interfere with any of that. And the Jersey Shore isn’t exactly pristine the way it is now, what with high tide pushing along a steady wave of discarded popsicle sticks, the planes flying Coppertone ads, the screaming of insufficiently napped and over-carbed children, and those goddamn cigarette boats crashing through the waves. A few gently revolving wind turbines would be positively lulling compared to all that.

Then again, perhaps I’m discounting my neighborly influence. Gloria did at least buy a composter. And while Ethel on our other side initially had her dad visit on weekends with his weed wacker to do the yardwork, she eventually bought a lawn mower of her own — an old-fashioned reel mower, just like the one I’ve been using for the past 30 years. It’s hard for me to believe any young person nowadays even knows such a thing exists, so I’m flattering myself and imagining that she saw and admired mine.

Then again again. The other day, Doug and I were drinking coffee in the kitchen during a sudden downpour when we heard a deafening crash. When we looked out back, we saw that the Orange Monster had worked its way off its paving-block base and was leaning against the posts that hold up the patio roof. It was also full and thus weighed 8,000 tons, so it was impossible for even the two of us working together to move it back again. We had to resort to opening the valve and the spigot and letting it drain. While we waited, Doug, the Most Patient Man in the Universe, tilted his head at me and said, “This thing is kind of a pain in the ass, isn’t it?”

I’ve been thinking a lot lately that all the pitting of one generation against another that goes on these days is a genuine problem. Oh, it’s absolutely true that millennials murdered mayonnaise. But the constant battles between blue and red, old and young, folks with cars and folks with bikes, those whose college loans are paid off and those whose aren’t — isn’t that all just part of what those Rich Men North of Richmond play up to retain their stranglehold on power? Oliver Anthony, the country dude who wrote that song, said as much recently when he decried those who use America’s diversity as a “political tool”: “We’ve got to go back to the roots of what made this country great in the first place, which was our sense of community.” What our nation needs is less division and more reaching across fences, if you ask me.

And what I mean by that is: Ethel and Fred next door don’t even need to put in for a rain barrel of their own to be environmental heroes, not really. They could just come over here every few days and empty mine out, in the name of ecology.

Published as “Adventures in Ecology” in the November 2023 issue of Philadelphia magazine.