The Time Is Now
By Ivy Fredrickson. This story was collected and recorded at a live storytelling event at the Montana Folk Festival in Butte on July 15th, 2023. The event was held in partnership with Resilient Butte, Families for a Livable Climate, and the County of Butte-Silver Bow.
Butte has always had environmental threats. I went off to college with this drive to do environmental advocacy work and after college, I got an internship in Washington D.C. with an environmental non-profit organization. I was ready to make change! Stick it to the man! I figured I would hate D.C.; of course I loved it. The first day at my new internship was a climate activism conference at a fancy downtown hotel. They ran through all the climate science and predictions and basically said we’re on the brink now. But then it became immediately clear that there was pretty much no political will to do anything real about it.
This was 2004, twenty years ago. It felt defeating and scary. I recall a deep sense of dread and fear for the future. So I jumped into advocacy jobs; I lobbied congress, I wrote factsheets, I recruited stakeholders. It was a blast, but after a few years it became painfully clear that the power brokers knew the rules and I didn’t. I needed a law degree to teach me the game they were all so deftly playing.
Then I fell in love with a Butte boy and he went to Oregon with me for law school. After having kids, we moved home in 2015 and it was the best decision of our lives. I still get to do that great environmental advocacy, but I get to do it from the best place on earth.
Anyway, flashback to twenty years ago: I’m in D.C., my 23-year-old self in that fancy hotel, marble floors, crystal chandeliers. I’m in high heels and a new, ill-fitting pants suit. The impacts of climate change were already happening but weren’t quite as obvious then. It wasn’t staring everyone in the face as much as it is now. And solutions and real movement on climate felt so hopeless. It felt awful. Had I just chosen the most depressing career possible?
But fast forward to now, and the impacts of climate change are more and more obvious. We see it in our everyday lives. Wildfire smoke across the nation, not just every so often here in the northern Rockies region. Severe storms in places they shouldn’t be. “1000 year” floods occuring every few years. Measurable and indisputable sea level rise. These are very bad things, but these are game changers for real action. The impacts of climate change are now so obvious that they cannot be ignored. You cannot do business without considering the risks of climate change.
This is all to say that it feels so much more hopeful now. We are no longer screaming into the void. In my work, I see the people in power realizing they have to act. Real money and real economies are at stake. The banking industry and insurance industry know this is a real threat and if that’s what it takes to get their attention and take real action, so be it.
We are moving toward real change here in Butte and elsewhere in Montana. Real action is finally being taken on a global, national, regional and local scale. Global emissions are finally plateauing. Renewable energy is finally reaching a scale to truly make a difference. I think we are in a time of hopefulness, gratitude, and action. It’s a time for a resilient Butte, it’s a time for action, and it’s a time for radical optimism and ambition. The time is now.
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Ivy Fredrickson is a Senior Staff Attorney at Ocean Conservancy, a non-profit conservation organization based in Washington DC. Ivy serves as the Chair of the Butte-Silver Bow Board of Health.
