Climate Change. How I reached my personal decision point. What I decided to do.

It’s human nature to doubt, to discount or disbelieve something we’re hearing from other people. What do they know, right? For most, reality is primarily based on their own personal experience.

Facts and figures may help change a few minds, but it’s also human nature to hold on to our beliefs, or dis-beliefs as it may be. So we can show some backbone, demonstrate we stand for something . . . even sometimes when it’s wrong.

And when we don’t feel there’s anything we could do to change a situation anyway, it’s much easier to delay our decision, one way or the other. We can justify this because “the data is inconclusive yet”. Better to delay than make the wrong decision. I don’t want to look foolish by acting on a falsehood.

It was easy for me to do this for many years when it came to climate change. Sure, I watched Al Gore’s movie and was quite moved by it. I started recycling, watching my water use and biking to work. It made me feel good, but was I really making much of a difference?

Then I started reading the reports how industrial waste was perhaps 10–100 times more than all consumer waste combined. I learned my recycling didn’t make that much of an impact after all.

I read that maybe, just maybe, the earth was going through some kind of natural cycle, that the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere was a due to increased volcanic activity, or something else. And maybe it wasn’t so bad; maybe I didn’t really need to make a decision about taking major action.

Recently, I was excited to start watching the Cosmos television series again. I remember watching Carl Sagan when I was younger and now we have Neil deGrasse Tyson as host. The series was fascinating to me and I noticed Neil mentioned more and more about climate change as the series progressed.

At the same time I found myself increasingly watching TED talks online and reading books that started changing my mind about the seriousness of the CO2 situation, the impacts on earth, and the tipping point we’re reaching.

Then I watched the season finales of Cosmos and something clicked in my head. I realized I’d reached that point where, for me, the evidence was clear.

There were many things that led to this, of course, but the final straw that convinced me was when Neil explained how science is able to distinguish between natural (i.e., volcano produced CO2) and CO2 generated by burning fossil fuels. He said there is no longer any question about who is responsible for the dramatic increase in earth’s atmosphere. Humans are.

Ok, so I was pretty depressed for a couple days. I can’t afford to buy an electric car yet. And how much benefit would just one car provide anyway. I started going down that road of, “What difference can I really make?”

Then I remembered that TED Talk that Alan Savory gave about restoring grasslands around the world, and his plans to pursue this on a massive scale. It made perfect sense to me that this method would sequester CO2, and do so by pulling it back into the soil to dually benefit our food supply.

Grasslands also hold more of the rain water that falls on them and this increases ground water for all humans. A “triple” benefit!

I found myself getting excited about this idea. It seemed like something humans could get involved in immediately and make a difference (unlike other natural CO2 sequestering like algae blooms). I wondered how I could get involved?

So, I started taking some action. I visited the Savory Institute website, learned more about their organization, and decided to send them an email from my Microsoft account to see if I could help them, only half-expecting an email reply.

To my surprise, I not only received a reply, I was asked to join Tre’ Cates (Savory Institute, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer) on a conference call in three days.

When I talked with Tre’, his qualities immediately came across as a warm, caring and driven individual. He took the time to understand my interests in the Savory Institute (SI) mission and then he dove in with three main SI goals he thought I could help them achieve:

I agreed to work on 1 and 2 immediately and once we got some “quick wins” than I would pursue #3. My thinking was that Bill Gates would be more interested in working with a non-profit that was already leveraging Microsoft technology and seeing benefits from that partnership. Tre’ agreed and we set a follow-up for one week later.

I was feeling really wonderful about SI’s interest, and now it was up to me to take the next steps and find some allies within Microsoft to help. More on that next time.

~Our earth is definitely . . . Worth Saving.

Originally published at medium.com on July 23, 2014.