Below is the final special message describing how our organization is working to fix the climate.
Life on Earth depends on a fragile atmospheric security blanket. If Earth were an apple, this protective layer would be its skin — a paper-thin cloak that once saved George Washington’s army.
During the Battle of Trenton, the British attacked Brooklyn on three fronts. With Washington’s army caught off guard and outnumbered, only a series of fortunate events saved the American Revolution. First, the wind stopped – halting General William Howe’s ships from blocking American’s retreat across the river to Manhattan. Second, fog set in – hiding the continued movement of thousands of troops as the sun rose saving the Continental Army from destruction. Without these atmospheric interventions, the Revolution may have ended that day.
The point is clear. Our lives — and the future of humanity — depend on something as delicate as the skin of an apple. Today, however, our atmospheric “blanket” is increasingly tattered. As outlined in our previous three Special Messages, excess carbon and water fill the sky, while too much nitrogen saturates the ground. This imbalance drives the condition of our blanket – and I argue it is every Earthling’s duty to care for our carbon-water-nitrogen biochemical cycle.
The solution is simple: “2 down, 1 up” — our shorthand for restoring balance by moving carbon and water from the atmosphere to the ground and nitrogen from the ground to the sky. American Climate Partners, in collaboration with dozens of private and public entities, is leading four synergistic programs across Appalachia and the South to advance climate restoration. Each needs particular help described in our Annual Update 2024.
However, true success demands more than programs; it requires a shift in how we experience climate, and ourselves in it. As Sally McFague, Carpenter Professor of Theology at Vanderbilt University writes:
We are part and parcel of the web of life and exist in interdependence with all other beings, both human and nonhuman. As Pierre Teilhard de Chardin puts it ina moment of insight: “I realized that my own poor trifling existence was one with the immensity of all that is and all that is in process of becoming” (Teilhard 1968a, 25). Or, as the poet Wallace Stevens says, “Nothing is itself taken alone. Things are because of interrelations and interconnections” (Stevens, 163). The evolutionary, ecological perspective insists that we are, in the most profound way, “not our own”: we belong, from the cells of our bodies to the finest creations of our minds, to the intricate, ever-changing cosmos. We both depend on that web of life for our own continued existence and in a special way we are responsible for it, for we alone know that life is interrelated and we alone know how to destroy it. It is an awesome – and unsettling – thought.
Indeed we are not our own. That’s why, on January 1, 2025, American Climate Partners will move our main office from our current location at the Rapidan Mill to a building in Orange, Virginia that will facilitate greater connectedness with our various local communities. While our Rapidan Mill office will become the dedicated home of Rapidan Institute for river and riparian projects, our new headquarters in Orange will act as a prototype Climate Restoration Center for fostering our Southern Climate Restoration Solutions initiatives. Along with opportunities for adult, youth, and child experiential education, community inclusion and outreach activities, and related retail offering, the Center will support the work of our team and partners to transform nascent abstractions about climate from thinking to doing – providing a place for all of us and our visitors to touch the sky.
Some of you may remember how we renovated the derelict Rapidan Milling Company office years ago – through the generous support of many Patrons. That investment has allowed us to expand our important work, including purchasing Rapidan Mill Dam and adjacent Culpeper river bank – for future completion of a nationally signficant fish passage project, and our expansion to Orange will do the same.
This concludes our series of special messages. On behalf of our Directors, Advisors, and Staff, we thank you for considering a gift to our work.
And for the first time, for a minimum $500 gift, we will send you a StreamSweepers Clinch River or Central Appalachia t-shirt with incredible artwork by local Orange-based artist Maria Pace!
Wishing you a happy holiday season,
Mike