I'm lucky to be living so close to the Great Lakes - we're likely to have a much more stable water supply than many parts of the world. But we're still running into water quality issues, including from agricultural runoff and from salt contamination due to people oversalting during the winter.

I loved getting to talk to a local museum about ways they can incorporate more and new environmental topics into the programming they provide.

I think sometimes I actually need to practice doing things away from a screen. I notice that for the first while I tend to keep checking my phone every few minutes, and I find it hard to focus on, say, reading a book for more than a few pages at a time. But as I keep going, my brain gets back in the rhythm and I get more into whatever I'm doing, and then I can go hours before I go back to my phone.

The other thing I've learned is that if I'm doing something I'm not 100% engaged with, like being in a meeting, watching a webinar, or even playing an RPG where I have to wait for other people to have their turns before I can do anything again, if my hands are free I'll pull out a phone or get distracted with other tabs on my computer. The solution is to bring knitting along - that gives my hands something to do, and takes just enough of my attention that I spend the rest of it on the meeting (or whatever) instead of getting all of my attention sucked away by a screen.

I've thought about it, and decided I'll never be able to go fully vegetarian. There are enough vegetable staples that I'm not willing to eat that I couldn't keep myself fed and healthy without some meat. However, after seeing charts of how beef emissions are vastly higher than even other types of meat, I've committed to not eating beef, other than rare occasions like being a guest at someone's home and that's what they're serving. Other than that, when I'm the one making the choice, I'll choose an option that isn't beef. I was never a huge hamburger fan to begin with, so this isn't a particularly hard sacrifice for me to make, but I'm glad I'm making at least one choice to address the challenge of our global food systems' emissions.

I think one of the coolest aspects of low-income solar programs is allowing people who have never had a stable connection to the electrical grid to finally have power that's available and under their own control. When the town I'd served in as a Peace Corps Volunteer got solar and batteries on their high school, the principal was so pleased that they would no longer be dependent on the unreliable island grid. Whether it was government-mandated online tests, or just having power in the first few days after a typhoon, before diesel deliveries to the island resumed, the school would have reliable power for the first time ever.

I'm in the Midwest of the U.S. We've seen a few different effects of climate change here. A few years ago, we had a thousand-year flood. Luckily it wasn't a mass casualty event like some flooding we've seen (I think one gentleman died), but there were stories of people camping out at a library and a Walmart overnight because they couldn't get home safely, and there was significant damage to local infrastructure. My parents' basement flooded, even though they were on top of a hill, from the force of the flowing water making its way into their septic tank and backing it up through the floor drain in their basement. Since then we've had a couple of summers with weeks at a time of poor air quality from wildfire smoke. Maybe less dramatic, but we also have just been getting a lot more unseasonal weather. This August we had a bunch of weather that felt like October. Then the first week in October felt like it should have been back in August! For people it can be kind of nice to get that variation in weather (even if some outdoor events were a bit miserable because it was 20 F colder and much wetter than anticipated), but I hate to think how that might be affecting plants and animals who are trying to live their lives without the benefit of weather reports and while depending on a bunch of other species whose internal clocks might be using different triggers, meaning they get out of sync from one another.