For those of you that have just joined us, my name is Gary Bremen and I’m a National Park Ranger and have been so for the past 36 years. I decided to do this when I was about seven years old and always intended that I would do it in various places all over the country, amazing places far away from where I was born here in Dade County, and that really didn’t end up happening. I have been at Biscayne National Park for some 30 plus years now, which is I can almost see from here, which is out that way. It is not Key Biscayne. It is everything south of Key Biscayne all the way down to Key Largo. It’s an extraordinary place, and there is something extraordinarily special about being able to say that you helped take care of a place that you knew as a child, and there’s something really special about feeling like you know a place exceptionally well, but that it always surprises you with new lessons on almost a daily basis when you’re out there.

(01:30)
My passion is sharing these things with people, and sometimes that means I do some really kooky things. And for 20 years, I created and ran a program called Family Fun Fest at Biscayne National Park. For five months out of the year. On a Sunday, we would have this big event with five activity stations and people running all over, and kids that would come month after month, year after year to these events with their families, grew up in the program and we had crazy themes. We had a Disco Lives theme one time. We did Harry Otter and the Magical Ocean, anything that we could use to kind of hook the kids in. And I created crazy characters from a used bone salesman to a hawker at an Old West Medicine show who believed that salt water was the cure for anything.

(02:38)
And so when the idea of climate change education started to move to the front burner, I wanted to be involved with that, because what about climate change isn’t fun? So we’re going to be doing this. How are we going to do this? Nobody wants to be told that they are the reason the planet is being destroyed. That’s not a fun thing to hear. So how could I make climate change fun? And so we came up with activities, a science activity where we used aquarium pH kits to color the water, a tinge of blue. And as they blew carbon dioxide through it with a straw and added carbon dioxide to the water, it became yellow. And they saw how carbon dioxide can influence the chemistry of water. We pulled out clay in baking dishes and had them make models of the park with the islands. And then we poured water in it to see what sea level was going to do to these islands as it changed.

(03:51)
We created a really hilarious wet and sloppy relay race with a bucket full of water that had a hole in the bottom, and it was an obstacle course that they had to run through the coral reef and over the islands and through the mangroves to demonstrate how storm surge impacts all of that and cuts down on the amount of water that arrives on land here where it can impact us the most. We created a game where we were throwing ping pong balls at models of the atmospheres of Venus, Mars and the Earth to demonstrate how those molecules of gases are getting through or limiting how things get through and how we can actually change our atmosphere at every family fun fest. There was always a skit, a silly, silly skit of some sort. And these were over the top goofy. And again, nobody wants to be told that they are the cause of a planet being destroyed.

(05:03)
And so I thought a lot about that. It’s just kind of counterproductive. If somebody shuts down immediately upon hearing something, they’re not going to be listening to the real causes and reasons that this happen. And so I thought, what if we could just rely on the old human adage of blaming somebody else? Because we do that really well. Who were we going to blame? I created a character. Her name was Dr. Verduga from the Spanish word for executioner. She was from Uranus, partly because Uranus is by far the planet with the most comedic value for kids and adults clearly. And also because it’s really far out there and it’s really cold.

(06:01)
You see, Dr. Verduga hated the cold, absolutely hated the cold. She wore a slinky blue dress, beautiful woman with misty, frosty hair. She hated the cold. She wanted to go someplace warmer. She wanted to find an entirely different planet. And she thought that earth was almost perfect, almost. It needed to be a little bit warmer. She really wished it had more ocean, more beaches, less ice, because that reminded her of back home. She really didn’t like all those squishy things that lived in the ocean. She wanted less of those. So she was trying to figure out how to make this possible. How was she going to warm up the earth? And she came up with all kinds of plans. She started by planning to build campfires all over the planet. She was just going to warm it all up that way. And then she came up with an idea she was going to have a gigantic magnifying glass aimed at the planet and just burn it up and boil all that water and clear it all up.

(07:08)
And while she’s coming up with all these crazy schemes, her mother calls, mothers always have the best advice. So they have a little chit-chat conversation in this skit. And, “Yeah, how you doing, dear?” And she tells her about her problem. And she says, “Well, I just wish you had paid attention in science class like I told you. I know you’re a doctor and all, but if you just paid attention in science class, you would know that there are other ways to warm up the planet. That earth. It’s got people on it. What if you got them to do it for you? All you got to do is talk them into driving their cars more. You could get them to leave lights on. You could get them to eat higher on the food chain. More beef means more cows farting. You can do all kinds of things to get them to do your dirty work for you.”

(08:04)
And she thinks this is brilliant. So Dr. Verduga becomes the superhero villain because that’s a trope that everybody understands. There are villains that do horrible things to people, and suddenly we are completely past this who’s to blame thing and we can get into why climate change is happening and how it’s being impacted. So this is her plan. Subsequent episodes of this skit in subsequent months, it was a series and subsequent episodes all took place in a climate 911 dispatch center. There is an absolutely frazzled ranger up at the front answering phone calls, getting emails. He’s getting dispatches from all over the country where climate emergencies are happening, and his job is to go out into the superhero waiting room, the audience, and find the perfect superhero who can go fix that problem. Because we’ve seen in the movies, superheroes can do all kinds of amazing things, and they get called on for specific tasks all the time.

(09:24)
So a call comes in from Alaska, Kenai Fjords National Park, Exit Glacier is melting incredibly fast. The dispatcher looks out, he finds Ice Baby. Ice Baby can shake his rattle at a melting glacier, and instantly it refreezes. A ranger comes walking in from the back of the room, he’s wet to the knees. He’s from Everglades where sea level is rising so incredibly fast, he doesn’t know what to do about it. The dispatcher calls on The Sponge. The Sponge can suck up that water super fast and drain everything away. A call comes in from the Great Lakes National Parks up there are finding that the lake levels are dropping and dropping and dropping as the planet’s warming up and the rainfall is changing and all of that. He looks out, he sees Quench. Quench has a gigantic water gun that she can use to refill those lakes out there. Coral reefs in Biscayne are starting to bleach out because the algae that give them color are going away. He looks out there, he sees The Colorizer. Giant paintbrush, bleached out reefs are fixed instantaneously.

(10:59)
Ocean acidification. The ocean is getting more acidic, what can we do about that? Well, we call on Buffer Boy. Buffer Boy has gigantic antacid tablets that change the chemistry of the water back to what they should be. Hurricanes are hitting South Florida more and more frequently. The dispatcher calls on The Fan who can suck so much air into her lungs that she blows those storms right back out to sea. Sorry, I got to use some notes here. I’m forgetting things about what I want to say. So anyway, putting the blame somewhere else is something that seems to help. It’s funny. They know the trope already. They know how it works, and they know it’s not really real. Superheroes really aren’t real. So you can kind of get by all of that. But though it’s non-threatening, there had to be more. So in the final episode of Climate 911, the waiting room is filled with superheroes who are red royally pissed off. They are overworked. They’ve got way too much to do. They’re getting called out constantly, and the dispatcher doesn’t know what to do.

(12:26)
He’s got angry employees. He puts an ad in the newspaper for new superheroes, and the response is abysmal. He doesn’t know what to do. Finally, someone walks in holding the newspaper, says meekly, “I’m here for the superhero job.” And the dispatcher’s super excited on one hand, but super disappointed because she just does not look like a superhero at all. I mean, clearly she does, because she’s got a cape on. And he says, “Oh, okay, well, I see you’ve got a cape on there with an I on it. What’s the I stand for?” And she says, “What do you mean what’s it stand for? It doesn’t stand for anything.” And he says, “Well, it’s got to stand for something. There’s Buffer Boy over there and Quench over there. It’s got to stand for something.” She says, “Nope, it’s just I.” He’s exasperated. But he moves on with the interview and he says, “All right, what can I do about climate change?”

(13:35)
And she goes on to rattle off, “Well, you could turn the likes off when you leave the room. You could ride your bike to school. I can ride my bike to school. I can get dad to inflate the tires properly on his car. I can do meatless Mondays and eat less beef. Turns out that I can do a lot about climate change, but I can’t do it alone. I needs help.” The grammar didn’t always work out. It leaves everyone on a more hopeful note, gives them some marching orders, and I fully believe that lots and lots of little things done over and over and over, if everyone did, it really would make a difference. But I also recognize, having worked with the public all of my career, the vast majority of people are not going to do anything, and that is really hard.

(14:47)
So what I can do seems overwhelmingly small. Even in a National Park where I work, I routinely find every light in an entirely empty building on. I see co-workers drinking from plastic bottles and tossing them into a regular garbage can. And I’m not leaving myself out of this equation at all. Number one, I’m an American. Americans use 40 times more or produce 40 times more greenhouse gases than the average Bangladeshi. So right there, I’m doing bad stuff by being. I drive a hybrid, but I drive it 68 miles each way to work. I really love the idea of eating lower on the food chain, but I also really love chicken. So I wonder what I can do. So I do live in a relatively small house. I have zero lawn, so I’m not sending bags of clippings to the landfill like a lot of my neighbors are doing on a regular basis.

(16:26)
There’s no gas for mowers. There’s no noise. There’s habitat for birds and butterflies, and sadly, lots and lots of iguanas as well. All those trees shade my house. My electric bills are literally half of what my neighbors are. I would love to be able to get rid of my car, and I intend to do that when I retire. But when I retire at the end of the year, four months and 21 days from now, when I retire, I will get rid of my car. That’ll cut down on some. The leaves and twigs from my trees are going to mulch themselves in the lawn. So I’m not going to Home Depot, I’m not buying plastic bags full of literally chopped up trees to spread on my ground while I put the bag of grass out to the corner to send away. I’m really looking forward to ways that this new climate bill can help me get solar on my house.

(17:42)
The biggest thing that I’ve done though is not super popular with a lot of people. It was not my intent to do it for this particular reason, but it’s pretty huge. It is 25 times as effective as getting rid of my car. It is 37 times more impactful in reducing carbon emissions, then eliminating a transatlantic round trip, or even installing solar about the same amount. It is 70 times more effective than going vegan. It’s 300 times more effective than recycling. I don’t have kids, and I know that is not a popular choice. It is my choice. Every human being should be able to make the choice about whether to have a child or not.

(18:47)
I have made my decision and that helps me live with myself a little bit better. Everyone has to make that decision for themselves. I don’t hate kids. I’ve dedicated 36 years of my life to educating people about the amazing planet that we live on, and a really big number of those people were kids. As I approach the end of my career, as I’m cleaning out files and reading over the papers of programs that I’ve created and things that I’ve done, as I pull out photographs from those programs, and I see people when they were this big, that years and even decades later, have invited me to their school plays, their graduation parties, their weddings, I wonder to myself, “Have I done enough? And what even is enough?” I shared a version of this story the other day with someone, and he said, “Wow, you went from climate change to existential Krakatoa.”

(20:11)
I worry about all of this. I don’t know what doing enough is. And some people are drawn to making sweeping changes in the world through politics or writing a book or creating a blockbuster movie, or Greta Thunberg sailing across the ocean to come to a climate conference for youth. Some people are like that. I’m 57 years old, I think I’m past a lot of that. I’m not going to be doing any of that. They’re not in my limited future. But maybe what I have done is incrementally, glacially moved forward through one-on-one contacts and through sharing stories with others. Maybe I’ve advanced that vision just a little bit more. And events like this, help us all do that through the sharing of our stories. Thanks.

Yay.