A baby born today will turn 100 in the year 2123.

Cool Petaluma just marked the end of the year with our second annual Stakeholder Shindig. A compelling combination of fun socializing, inspiring storytelling, and a clear call to action made the night a huge success.

Mayor Kevin McDonnell opened things up with a powerful appeal for civic engagement – most people are concerned about climate change, but what we need is to be fully committed to taking action on this crisis.

Petaluma is creating a “Blueprint for Carbon Neutrality,” and a draft version is now available for review at planpetaluma.org.

This is a big document that outlines what we need to do to live in balance with the natural world and restore ecosystem health for future generations. It means we are taking responsibility for our own role in the current climate crisis and leading the way for other small cities like us across the country.

Flying at 40,000 feet, you can see how thin our atmosphere is. On a school house globe, it would be the thickness of the clear coat. The troposphere – where our weather is – is only about 5-9 miles high, or from Petaluma to Rohnert Park. (It’s thicker at the equator and thinner at the poles.)

When people ask me what I do and I say I work for Cool Petaluma, a community climate action organization, it’s not uncommon for them to then ask, “What’s your real job.” I get it. Maybe I need to come up with a better job description. I’m sure many people who work in the nonprofit sector get this same reaction.

Do you have a SORE? If you don’t, your neighbor probably does. Small off-road engines, appropriately called SOREs, are deeply wounding both people and planet. We’re talking about the ubiquitous use of gas-powered landscape equipment like lawn mowers, string trimmers, and leaf blowers. Ahh, the sweet sounds of Saturday morning!

“Individually, I am but one drop in the ocean, but collectively, we are the ocean.”

Taking climate action can be exceedingly complicated and overwhelming. We live on an unusually complex planet with a sophisticated ecosystem that is intricately tied together in ways we are only beginning to understand. The same goes for the global manmade systems we’ve built over the centuries.

Cool Petaluma trained its first cohort of leaders exactly one year ago. They enthusiastically rallied their neighbors and together went on to take actions that reduce their resource consumption while improving their lives.

What does a community-led climate action movement look like? Anyone at last week’s Cool Petaluma Stakeholder Shindig saw firsthand what magic can happen when you combine community building with planetary protection. More than 200 people gathered together with this shared purpose and filled the room with joy, hope, and camaraderie.

For decades, we’ve been told that talking about climate change is divisive and polarizing, a Thanksgiving dinner table taboo that’s better left untouched. What happens if we challenge that assumption and start getting curious?

How good is your imagination?

Can you look down East Washington Street and envision a beautiful boulevard? I can see a vibrant east-west community connector made up of urban farms and playgrounds, basketball courts and skate parks, bandstands and dance floors, trees and bees and butterflies, with people of all ages laughing and playing as they wind their way across town by foot or bicycle or golf cart, while those in a hurry zip overhead in colorful gondolas. Crazy? Maybe. Maybe not.

Look around and you can probably count three or four natural gas appliances that are critical to your home’s performance – water heater, furnace, cooktop, and clothes dryer, perhaps? But “natural” gas is actually about 85% methane - a super-potent greenhouse gas.

When I lived in the Glen Park neighborhood of San Francisco, I could easily walk from my home to a delicious bakery, a cute coffee shop, and a variety of restaurants. There was also a fantastic grocery store, a jamb-packed hardware store, and a mid-century modern furniture store. All of these were locally owned and full of character.

Time, money, and bandwidth seem to be in short supply these days for many of us. The world keeps getting faster, more expensive, and more overwhelming. Given all of the demands on our attention, what are four super simple things we can all do right now to show respect for our beautiful, life-giving, finite planet?

My uncle is a retired FBI agent and he has some stories you wouldn't believe are true. And he also said something a few months ago that really stuck with me. He was giving my 17-year-old daughter some advice about going off to college and being safe in the world…