Climate Action Areas
West Community members who attended a workshop in November 2019 expressed their main concerns and hopes for helping solve the climate crisis while increasing our local resiliency. These ideas were categorized into nine focus areas. We are currently focusing our work in three of the nine areas, which you can read about below. We have formed action groups (committees) for Local Food Resilience, Renewable Energy, Waste Reduction. We encourage you to learn more about these actions, spearhead or get involved in a project, connect with us, and commit to our community’s vital work. Use our Contact form to let us know which of these Action Areas interest you the most.
West Marin has great (and potentially greater!) food self-sufficiency, thanks in part to productive local agriculture.
Local Food
Strong community agencies, engaged activists, and established food growers in a region of year-round farming, ranching, and gardening afford West Marin great local food resiliency. Our changing world and climate call for us to produce and share more of our own food—providing greater food security for everyone in the community and reducing the carbon costs of long-distance shipping.
A powerful choice for each citizen is simply to buy fewer things. It’s a personal value that can make our whole community more resilient.
Waste Reduction
Every object we buy and own has an environmental cost. These include pollution during manufacturing, oppressive labor practices, emissions from shipping and trucking, and plastic packaging. How can we step off the conveyor belt of conditioned consumerism? Sharing tools, learning to repair and repurpose useful things, and simply owning less are climate-smart lifestyle changes.
Much of the produce and packaged groceries Americans purchase enters the waste stream. It then generates potent greenhouse gas, while leaving many people hungry! By redirecting the food that residents and visitors do not consume, we can feed more people and also take better care of our “good garbage!”
Let’s keep usable food from going to waste! And reduce the amount of green waste, which produces methane, in our landfills.
Using solar technologies, we can eliminate the burning of fossil fuels to make electricity and become more energy self-sufficient locally.
Renewable Energy
We need to ramp up our efforts to reduce carbon emissions to avoid the greatest impacts from climate change. Tapping into local expertise, we can help the world transition from carbon-emitting fossil fuels to alternative, clean energy by advocating for improved energy policy and pursuing ideas for expanded solar energy here in West Marin.
Reducing our West Marin carbon footprint depends on adjustments in our necessary road travel. What creative solutions are possible?
We must shift our personal transportation away from fossil-fuel toward electric vehicles, public transit and bicycles. Let’s map the way forward to make these changes, and create more electric automobile charging stations, safer bike routes, and ways of sharing transportation.