John Timothy

My interest in science was ignited in 1980 by Carl Sagan's Cosmos on PBS. I fell in love with the natural world, micro and macro. I devoured the nature documentaries of David Attenborough and Jacques Cousteau. I read some New Yorker articles on scientific subjects. I was in awe, and I was curious. Then the internet made a whole lot of information available.

As I learned more, I became obsessed with three questions:

1. How serious is this climate change/species extinction problem anyway? (Answer: Very. Existentially. Fifteen years ago, I didn't think I would live to see any dramatic effects. Now we are all living among those effects.)

2. Why don't the countries of the world unite to address this threat effectively, as they did in WW II, for example? (Good question! I don't have an answer. It may be a moot question at this point. The window of opportunity may have closed.)

3. What can one person do?

Well, that is the question, isn't it? For a long time, I could not come up with an answer. Gigantic multinational corporations held governments in their grip. The media were drowning in disinformation. The public were at best "concerned," not jumping up and down and screaming, as they should have been. Political protests a la the 60's and 70's seemed ineffectual.

In 2020 I read Doug Tallamy's Bringing Nature Home, and a light switch flipped on in my brain. I literally saw the world differently. Driving around the San Francisco Bay Area, I saw a lot of palm trees, sycamores, eucalyptus, and Japanese maples - all alien to this area - and I thought, what have we done?

Digging up lawns and re-landscaping with native plants was something individuals and small groups of people could do. The effects would be beneficial even in the worst-case scenarios: surviving tribes of hunter-gatherers would have something of the natural world left to sustain them.

In 2023, when my old friend Mike Berst called from Michigan to let me know that Kay Charter would be doing a series of presentations in Southern California on birds and native habitats, I volunteered to set up some speaking engagements for her in the Bay Area. Her presentation was enthusiastically received at a bird festival in Berkeley, a state college, two churches, and a community center. She also spoke to several elementary and high school classes.

So, over time, I've learned a little. I've made some good connections with people in the local native plant movement. I'm involved in some interesting projects for 2024. I like to support events where people get dirt under their fingernails: I think that's how folks learn best.