Did you know that NorthWestern Energy plans to power our children’s futures with fossil fuels, and our elected officials are going along with it? Did you know that Canadian-owned TC Energy is fast tracking construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline through northeastern Montana without all the necessary permits and while litigation continues, threatening our Missouri River, and much more? Take action! Here are 4 ways you can take action on climate in Montana today!

I am writing this on your 7th birthday, today on your 38th you know all too well that in 2019 we failed to stop carbon emissions in time to prevent catastrophic changes. Venice, Miami, Manhattan, and many of our greatest coastal cities are changed forever as the oceans rose into the streets and canals of the centers of our civic life. God’s creation, evolved into complex forms and relationships that provide beauty while sustaining us are forever gone. I am sorry that we didn’t have success in saving more for you.

This is a must watch--beyond what you would expect, laying out the challenge of this decade and the greatest call to action we've ever faced. Take 75 minutes this weekend and watch it. It will help you get clear on the scale of the issue, and the need to do what’s necessary.

I hope you will read this letter 30 years from now, maybe with your own children around you. It’s fun to imagine you not as a wriggling, dancing 6 year-old, but as grown-up and living as the capable and thoughtful citizen that your parents are now nurturing. I wonder what your world will look like; what is wonderful and what is terrible, what inspires you and what furrows your brow…My greatest hopes are that we here now will participate in a global movement that demands and builds a new way of living that can persist on a small planet.

In their latest gambit to maintain powerful sway over Montana’s energy economy and jobs, and most Montana families’ pocketbooks, NorthWestern Energy is attempting to withhold an important stockholder proposal from its spring 2020 shareholder meeting proxy materials.

“(It) is so evident that through our greed and unawareness that your future, the future of the children everywhere, as well as the natural world is in peril…It is a deep heartbreak – so deep and dark that is aches through my limbs.

“And yet I know that letting myself feel into this heartbreak is an important step. It is from this further opening, this letting myself break open that I can find my clarity, my efficacy, my way into what little me can do in this most important time. I can be brave enough to wake up.”

Happy New Year!  Thank you for taking action on climate in 2019! All of our volunteers at Families for a Livable Climate are grateful to be connected with you in this work. Together, we are organizing families and connecting in community to build political will for strong climate action in Montana.

I am inspired tonight by a post on Facebook from Sunrise Movement Gallatin County that asks us to honor Greta Thunberg by watching (or re-watching) her powerful TED Talk from November 2018 (just three months after she began striking).

We can no longer plan our backpacking and camping trips for August without wondering whether we will be smoked out, or whether the forests will be closed due to extreme fire danger. The abrupt switch from clear summers to smoke in 2000 was shocking, although in our mobile society I’ve found that many people who live in Missoula now don’t realize summers were not always this way.