This Saturday over 100 Bainbridge Island citizens met to listen to keynote speakers and to actively work on key climate issues that concern our Puget Sound island. Theme this year was “Our Island Home on an Unruly Planet”.

Keynote speaker Madeline Ostrander provided stories from her book “At Home on an Unruly Planet“. She covered four American communities impacted by climate crises. A firefighter works to rebuild her town after catastrophic western wildfires. A Florida preservationist strives to protect one of North America’s most historic cities from rising seas. An urban farmer struggles to transform a California city plagued by fossil fuel disasters. An Alaskan community heads for higher ground as its land erodes. These stories resonated really well locally.

Afternoon breakout sessions allowed for island neighbors to meet face to face. We also workshopped challenges such as Air Quality/ Smoke, Transportation and Groundwater & Surface Water.

Key Learnings:

• Climate activism happens when concerned citizens get to know each other and rally around a common space and theme
• Sustainability is underpinned with lots of data, but the keynote showed me the power of deeply personal stories
• These events are great to learn about new resources. One such resource is the NOAA Climate Explorer tool. It provides Temperature and Precipitation projections at a county (in my case Kitsap County) level.

This week I have the first follow-up meetings with some of the non-profits active on the island.