they’re baking on a rock when the tide’s out. Warmer tem- peratures can hurt them. So, we’d talk about the issue as much as they wanted to.
Forcing it usually doesn’t work. But climate change is truly the reality for them. We’ve got to call on the younger generation to save this planet—because our generation hasn’t done a good job of it.
There are a lot of books on climate change—but yours illustrates the urgency of the issue in a way that’s very tangible to people who value their experiences in the outdoors. We tend to think that the impact of climate change will be in the distant future, but that’s not the case. By some pre- dictions, the glaciers of Glacier National Park will be gone by 2020—and virtually every national park has its own story about effects that are visible today. It’s powerful stuff to think that by the time my kids are my age these places will be radically different.
They were just nine and seven years old when you started to work on Before They’re Gone. How did you talk to them about climate change? I was surprised by how much they were able to understand and by how interested they were in the subject: we’d be out hiking and they would bring it up out of the blue. Or we’d see something, say, a tidewater boulder—coated with mussel shells and sea anemones—which is both an incred- ible sight and an opportunity to explain, well, a lot of these creatures spend half the day exposed to the sunlight, so
Your kids have had many opportunities to engage with the natural world. But do you remember what first sparked your own passion for the outdoors? I didn’t grow up camping or anything like that. But when I was college age, I had a few experiences that changed my perspective. The summer before my sophomore year I noticed on a map that there was a road all the way to the top of Mount Greylock, the highest mountain in Massachusetts. It was about a hundred miles from my hometown. So I said to two of my best friends, “Hey, let’s go on a bike trip.” We had no idea what we were doing—we had those huge old synthetic sleeping bags the size of hay bales and no real jackets. It rained on us the whole first day. We got abso- lutely soaked. And then we just kind of walked off the road into the woods to camp. We didn’t have a tent, but we had brought these two sheets of clear plastic. So we put one of them on the ground and the other one on top of us, and we just lay there all night with water pooling around us. It was pathetic, just laughable. But we got up in the morning and we got on our bikes
and we finished the ride. And you know, even today it’s still among the most memorable trips I’ve ever had, because it was one of the first times I stepped outside my comfort zone and my own experience. The outdoors can open mental doors for you. You realize, wow, there’s so much more out there than what I know.
Which serves as encouragement to keep exploring, to keep pushing your own boundaries. It’s self-reinforcing. Right. In fact, one of the things I remember most clearly about that trip is another rider we met going the other di- rection. He had panniers and a helmet with a little mirror on it—you know, a real bicycle guy. He said he was headed to the New Hampshire coast, which we gave him some credit for, and then we asked, “Where are you coming from?” And he said, “Seattle.” We were just floored. We thought it was a big deal that we were taking a four-day trip—like we were really getting INSIGHT · 27
courtesy of michael lanza
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