“If you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.”

― Toni Morrison

This quote, along with Marian Wright Edelman’s, “Service is the rent we pay for being. It is the very purpose of life, and not something you do in your spare time,” is the foundation from which I have lived my life. They were not my intentional motivations, but what I learned from my family as I grew up. I was not taught to succeed in a silo, but to live and breathe in community.

My daughter opened the very full recycling bin in my kitchen today. “You know this really isn’t going to make a difference, right?”

I thought for a few moments – of the corporations that are emptying colossal amounts of toxic chemicals into rivers and streams, of automobiles producing significant amounts of nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide and other pollution into our atmosphere, of the Dakota Access Pipeline which has had at least 10 spills totaling hundreds of gallons of crude oil since it began operations in June 2017, and everywhere on earth, the ice is changing. Kilimanjaro’s snows have melted more than 80 percent since 1912. Glaciers in the Garhwal Himalaya in India are retreating so fast that researchers believe that most central and eastern Himalayan glaciers could virtually disappear by 2035. Arctic sea ice has thinned significantly over the past half century, and its extent has declined by about 10 percent in the past 30 years, and the edges of Greenland's ice sheet are shrinking. (Glick 2019)