Climate change is in the news this week, and I did my part by ordering barùkas, The World’s Healthiest Nuts. Ok, that last part may be marketing hype, but the climate change link is real. The nuts come from baruzeiro tree forests in South America, which are being burned down to make way for yucky industrial ag products like GMO soy. If demand for the nuts rises, perhaps farmers can make a living from the natural ecosystem.

Or will Monsanto create Frankenfood versions of barùka nuts that grow nutrient-free in degraded soil? I tasted the roasted ones, and I’m guessing they won’t get that popular. Though papayas sure did, who knew? Good luck finding an organic papaya anywhere, even in the Philippines.

I’m trying to make some changes since climate change is here, which I know from watching the Weather Channel, an endless source of spine-tingling graphic videos. I got a lot of useful ideas from David Pogue’s How to Prepare for Climate Change, though it is a little overwrought–I am not maintaining three go-bags for home, work, and car–and crazy wrong about food; just skip that section. Mostly I am trying to use my brain to think of ways to do things differently, on a variety of scales. For example, a small scale change around petroleum-based fuels would be, drive less, and I recently changed jobs in part to reduce my car commute. A medium scale change would be, get an electric car. A large scale change would be, live car-free.

Water shortages and drought-related wildfires will likely be the biggest problem in California. That’s a tougher nut to crack, as it were. A small scale plan would be to use less water, something I try to do, but consistency is elusive. Medium scale would be to improve the efficiency of our plumbing and associated fixtures, or even incorporate gray water into our home, though we won’t have much since it rarely rains. The long term plan for water is unknown, since Pogue thinks California won’t have any. Campaign for a desalination plant?

My own efforts are pointless if I’m alone, and recently it has come to my attention that a lot of folks have not internalized that people have to change as the climate does. The condo board, of which I am currently vice president, recently reduced the number of waste and recycling receptacles in our complex, and resident complaints were immediate: We’re going to run out of space every week. Ok, so the idea is that we save some money by moving toward reduce/reuse and away from recycle/discard. Recycling is pretty much a plastics industry scam: people feel virtuous placing their containers emblazoned with numbers inside triangles into the blue bin, even though most are sent to the landfill from the recycling center. If we don’t change, yes, we’re going to run out of space in our bins, and also in our landfills, and also on our planet.

Last summer, the county of SC set up a new bike lane on ten or so blocks of a local four-lane road, by which I mean a road with stop signs and/or crosswalks at almost every intersection. The change added a protected bike lane on either side and reduced the lane count to three, one each direction plus a shared left turn. Traffic was pretty bad the first couple of days, and the comments on Nextdoor were vitriolic. A typical example: This makes it easier for bikes and harder for cars, which makes no sense, because there are more cars than bikes.

Hello? Having more cars than bikes is the status quo, but it is also the problem we are trying to solve, by making a change. These changes are very much small scale ones. I’m thinking humanity may miss the boat on this one, or more likely, a lot of us will be in boats, wondering what to do next.