On St. Croix, he lived near a beach where the giant leatherback turtles lay their eggs. In Norway, he lived on the coast where sea eagles circled over his roof. He lived on the tundra where the reindeer grazed . . . and where the sun disappeared for two months, and the cold became so deep that if he did not quickly drink the coffee in his mug as he walked in the morning in the dark to the Sami College (minus 40 degrees Centigrade on a normal January morning), his coffee would freeze into a black plug of ice. In St. Petersburg, Russia, he lived in the heart of the great city during the cold, dark, dangerous Russian depression of the 1990s.
Everywhere he taught, he found bright, motivated students, who wanted to learn English so they could reach out to the world.These students, these young people, are the first global generation in human history, able to communicate with each other, able to learn from each other, able to support each other. And thus able to work together, tackling the great challenges as they inherit a troubled world. They did not burn the oil and the coal for a century and a half, but they will inherit at least a century and a half of climate fluctuations, severe weather, and crop failures. Unprecedented floods, unprecedented droughts. Migrations of hungry, desperate people.
John Slade wrote his newest book, "Climate Change and the Oceans", by weaving a decade of research on climate change and clean energy into seven stories, set in seven locations around the world, stories which dramatize the probable changes coming to our home towns in the near future.
He wants to see this global generation rise to the challenges of climate change, while they discover the many benefits from clean energy. We have been taking baby steps. The time has come for bold, giant strides. The wind and the sun have both been waiting for a long, long time.
Wind turbines produce clean energy. Wind turbines create jobs. Wind turbines galvanize schools with new programs. Wind turbines teach international cooperation. Oil will forever engender despots and poverty and war; wind turbines can engender jobs, and education, and thus democracy, and thus . . . peace.
No one ever went to war over a wind turbine.
Eight hundred years ago, long before the Industrial Revolution, people built the magnificent cathedrals that rose above the mud hovels of the day. The time has come to scrape the mire of war from our shoes, and to build anew. Let a global web of clean energy, and a global web of universities, be the cathedral of our age.
