 Pledge to reduce plastic use this July! Track simple, voluntary actions all month long to show the impact. To participate, visit icgov.org/reduce.
 The City Park Pool remodel project is well underway, with a special effort made to reduce demolition waste in the process: rather then send more than 3,000 tons of concrete from the old pool to the landfill, it was retained, crushed, and cleaned on site. The new pool will rest on a bed of structural backfill made from the repurposed material, saving the City roughly $50,000 in construction costs and reducing the carbon footprint of the new pool at the same time. Get a glimpse of the process in action at this video on City Channel 4 online.
Sarah Outterson-Murphy
Climate Ambassador
 How do you take climate action?
Whatever you love to do, turn it into climate action. I am an English teacher, so I teach poems and stories and speeches about climate change. I also ran a Climate Fiction Book Club at the public library this spring. Use your creativity! We need everyone working on this, whatever your job is.
Insulate your attic. Heat pumps (instead of furnaces and AC) are incredibly efficient, and ours has reduced our utilities bill while getting us off fossil gas (natural gas) entirely. Wash laundry on cold. Shorten your showers. Set up a laundry line. Garden! It’s good for your soul as well as the planet.
Why is it important to take climate action?
Climate action is all about respecting the larger reality around us, both nonhumans and future humans, and prioritizing it over our immediate greed. I am a Christian and I believe the world is filled with the Creator’s love, but we have done grievous wrong to it and to each other through our selfish and anxious desire for control and comfort. Exploitation of the earth so often is accompanied by exploitation of people. We are stealing a livable world from future generations as well. It's a human rights issue and a spiritual issue to me far more than simply "save the whales" (as amazing as whales are).
What can others do to take climate action?
Sometimes people concerned about climate will get distracted by individual actions like recycling or turning off lights, and miss the larger systemic issues that make one individual’s choices a drop in the ocean. Others see individual climate action as too small to be important, and instead just blame the system as an excuse to live extravagantly. Both of these are mistakes. I think we all need to find ways to simplify and slow down our everyday lives, prioritizing what really matters, not just for the direct climate impact but because taking action changes us and changes the culture around us, making it easier for others to take action too. Do what you can even if it seems small, and do it with courage and joy. Our actions now will have an impact on the future even if we can't know exactly how.
Iowa City’s Climate Action Commission open meetings
The next meeting of the Climate Action Commission will be August 4, and the public is welcome to attend. Access upcoming and past meeting packets at the Climate Action Commission web page.
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