Early in her book, The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture, Mary Pipher notes that when Atlantic coastal communities from Cuba to New England were hit with the terrible devastation of Hurricane Sandy in October 2012, something shifted in the way we talk to each other here in the United States. "Overnight, the great unmentionable, global climate change, became mentionable, not only by environmentalists, but by the media and by mainstream political leaders."

And they are not the only ones! I notice people are talking differently with each other, too. A couple of days ago, I met up with a friend who is an engineer. We hadn't seen each other since last summer. Immediately our conversation jumped from the weather, to western wildfires, to climate change, a phrase neither one of us had ever uttered before in our nine years of being friends.

Suddenly we were sharing what we knew with each other. He told me how a new technology lets us see that the polar ice caps are melting underneath even faster than we had expected. I told him about the ongoing U.S. taxpayer subsidies to the fossil fuel corporations.

The "great unmentionable" is becoming mentionable. And I share Mary Pipher's sense of encouragement: "This breaking of the silence surrounding global climate change gives me hope that, at last, we as a society might have a conversation about the fate of our beloved planet. We cannot solve a problem we won't discuss. But now that the spell of silence has been broken, perhaps we can stay awake and go to work."

The quotations above are from p.6 and p.7 of The Green Boat.