In November 2009, I took on the title of “The Climate Change Comedian” and grabbed the website domain www.climatechangecomedian.com on a dare from my friend Naomi while I temporarily housesitting in Ashland, Oregon. On April 10, 2010, I created the ideal brand photo of me to market myself. I had a friend take a photo of me holding up my inflatable Earthball on a clear late afternoon standing on the shoreline by Copper Harbor, Michigan in the Upper Peninsula with Lake Superior directly behind me. 

With owning the website domain and a suitable image to promote myself, I felt ready to create my climatechangecomedian.com website. My big problem: I had no idea how to create a website. While spending the winter in my hometown of St. Louis, Missouri, I asked a family friend, John Dantico, who was adept at internet technology, to help me build and launch my website. He readily agreed and asked me to be at his house around 9 pm on a weeknight.

We picture people considered to be night owls as staying up to around 1 am to work on projects and focus on tasks. I am a late-night person, and my body yearns to go to bed around that time. However, John liked to stay up to about 4 to 5 am working, reading, and contemplating life. We spent hours working on this website as I grew more tired, grumpy, and eager to head home to go to bed. Finally, John got the website good enough to launch around 3 am. He encouraged me to write a quick introduction on my website’s homepage to describe briefly myself and how my website will benefit the reader.

John then gave me advice that shook me to my core. He remarked, “Now you will need to consistently set aside time to write a blog for your website so you can create followers and draw attention to your website.” 

My swallowed hard and my stomach tensed up. I thought, “Me! Write regularly? There’s no way! I am not a writer.” I would freak out in high school and college when I had to write required essays and term papers. When I was a student, I would spend hours procrastinating and stressing out over writing assignments. I was a B student in high school and college because I had to force myself at the last minute to complete my class writings. Because these required writings were often rush and sometimes late, they had many grammar and punctuation errors. I would put a lot of pressure on myself to write something to submit to my teachers. As a result, I hated writing as a teenager and young adult. I wanted nothing to do with it! 

On the other hand, I always loved a good challenge. In the previous three years, I satisfied my sense of adventure by skydiving in Florida and Oregon in 2007. I went out of my comfort zone to try surfing, parasailing, and snorkeling on the Big Island of Hawaii in October 2008. I jumped of the diving rock to swim in Crater Lake to keep up with my friend Lizzy when she came to visit me there in August 2009. By doing those activities and others, I had briefly conquered my fear of heights and fear of swimming in deep water. Thus, after John gave me that guidance, I said to myself, ‘You have overcome your fears by participating in adventurous activities. You can rise above your fear of writing by writing. You can do this!’

The problem was for that the next year, my fear of writing dominated over my eagerness to write to keep my website up to date. Days after John launched my website, it just sat there with no new writings. Towards the end of April, I drove across country from St. Louis to Crater Lake, Oregon. I planned to work another summer there as a seasonal park ranger at Crater Lake National Park. During the journey, I stopped near Vail, Colorado to try zip lining. Clearly, my craving for adventure seeking was not yet fully out of my system. 

After I returned to Crater Lake, I focused on delivering my ranger talks, hiking in the park, and hanging with my ranger friends. In June, I paid an outfitter in Grants Pass, Oregon for my friend, Lise Wall, and I to go up in a hot air balloon. In July, I arranged for my friend David Grimes, and I for a local pilot friend to take us up in her small airplane to get aerial views of Crater Lake. 

At the end of July, I began dating my ranger co-worker Lesley. I was absolutely smitten by her. For the rest of that summer at Crater Lake, I just wanted to spend time with her hiking, socializing with our mutual friends, and camping in the woods with her near our ranger housing. She left for the season to return to her home in Berkeley, California near the end of August. I took the train from southern Oregon to Berkeley to visit her that Labor Day weekend. She came to stay with me at Crater Lake on a weekend trip in early October. When I completed my season at Crater Lake in mid-October, I drove to Berkeley to stay with her until the beginning of November. I then traveled back to St. Louis to spend time with family for the winter. In early December, I flew from St. Louis to the Bay Area to be with her to attend her brother’s wedding. 

My relationship with Lesley was all consuming and turbulent with frequent arguing. I thought at that time I had found the one person to be with for the rest of my life. However, she never seemed fully committed to the relationship. She was hesitant to get too deeply involved with me. She was in therapy for bipolar depression from trying to overcome childhood abuse and trauma. One day, she would be delighted to see me, the next day she was cold and distance. I put all my energy into trying to make the relationship work when it was clearly not working. She broke up with me in early January 2011.  

To say this relationship had been a distraction from pursuing my passion to be a full-time climate change public speaker, organizer, and comedian would be an understatement. My website sat idle the entire time I dated her. 

I felt devastated and deeply depressed by the breakup. I needed to rebuild my life outside of her. In January 2011, I volunteered to lead a historical ecological program in the spring for Missouri Botanical Garden’s Earthways Center. That same month, I joined the local Toastmasters Club, South County Toastmasters, to become a better public speaker and climate change communicator. For almost a year, I ignored my www.climatechangecomedian.com website. 

On February 1, 2011, I still felt raw from my recent breakup. However, I decided I needed to adhere to my friend John Dantico’s advice to regularly blog and write on my website. I remember spending hours at my parents’ dining room table staring at my laptop to trying force myself to type up the first words for my blog. After hours of struggling what to write, I published a short blog on my website that day called, “My first Blog Ever.” It was only about three paragraphs long. It was a start. I forced myself to complete this blog. It was not fun. At the same time, I knew I needed to keep my website updated with writings. 

The next day, I wrote another blog, “Taking that First Step Forward.” It was about briefly describing myself and my climate change passion. It felt like a painful chore for me to write. I did not write more blogs until November 2011. I still felt a lot of pressure to blog for my website to motivate myself from overcoming writer’s block, I wrote my third blog on November 20, 2011, “Feeling Blue? Go Take a Hike!” It was a reminder to myself that I had always used hiking, spending time in nature, and working in the national parks to renew, discover, and inspire myself. 

In December 2011, I wrote blogs about my Toastmaster speeches. On December 1, 2011, I gave a speech for my Toastmaster’s Club called, “It’s Easy to Be Green.” I referenced the Kermit the Frog song “It’s Not Easy to be Green” to show that Kermit was wrong. I argued that becoming more energy efficient in your home, basically becoming more environmentally green, was easy and it saved you money. The fellow Toastmasters who were climate deniers liked this speech. They complimented me on it. Some of them even told me, ‘I still don’t believe in climate change, but I like to save money.’ The club members voted me to be the Best Speaker of four club members who gave speeches that evening. 

I discovered that I liked to write the speeches I would give for me Toastmasters Club. I could then turn the text of those speeches into blogs. This was a way to help me overcome my stress of having to create blogs and writings for my website. 

December 3 to 9, 2011, my friend Tom Smerling encouraged me to join him to attend the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Conference in San Francisco, California. It is one of the largest and more prestigious annual scientific conferences in the world. Nearly all the top climate scientists would present their latest findings there. He thought it would be an excellent opportunity for me to see these scientists up close, learn about climate change science from their presentations, and network with the climate scientists, as well as fellow climate change communicators. Tom’s advice to come to this AGU Conference was some of the best advice I received in my life. 

At the AGU conference, I met many renowned and respected climate scientists and communicators. One of them was Bud Ward, an environmental journalist and journalism educator. For 15 years, he was editor of Yale Climate Connections from 2007-2022. During this conference, I struck up a conversation with Bud about pursuing my passion of wanting to go to grad school and pursue a career as a climate change communicator. He gave me his business card and encouraged me to contact him after the conference. 

In the spring of 2012, I reached out to Bud to chat with him on the phone. I expressed my interest of wanting to go to grad school at possibly Yale University or elsewhere to devote myself to a career in climate change communications. 

As I explained my dream, Bud cut me off to bluntly say, “I don’t have any advice to help you with that. However, I do have something that is self-servicing that might benefit you. I was wondering if you could write something for my Yale Climate Communications website about how you were successful and your failures in communicating about climate change as a park ranger at Crater Lake National Park. If you can submit something soon, 800 to 1,000 words, within the next week or two, I will be happy to pay you for it.” 

I quickly jumped on this opportunity to submit a writing to a website associated to Yale University. Even more, it was exciting to know that Bud would pay me if he published my submission. That evening, I wrote out a 1,000-word essay for Bud about my experience communicating about climate change in the national parks. I wrote honestly about my high and low moments engaging with Crater Lake visitors about climate change. I submitted it to Bud the next day. 

Over the next two weeks, Bud and I exchanged emails about edits he wanted me to make with my writing submission. He corrected grammar and punctuation errors. He asked me to delete certain sections, and he wanted me to write more to expand my thoughts in other sections. When we agreed that the writing was to both of our satisfaction, Bud told me that my writing would be published several weeks later around the end of April 2012. 

On April 26, 2012, the excitement felt like Christmas Day when my essay, “Communicating Climate Change in a National Park” was published on the Yale Climate Communications website. Outside of my website, I had never seen my own writing in print before then. My parents, family, and many friends were very excited and happy for me. 

Weeks later, Bud mailed me the check for my writing submission. The amount of money was the equivalent to one of my paychecks working as a ranger at Crater Lake National Park. For the first time in my life, I was a paid writer! I never dreamed I could get paid for writing. I treasured receiving that check and getting paid for writing an article that I enjoyed creating. For the first time in my life, I could see writing could be fulfilling and I could even receive money doing that! 

I will always be grateful for Bud Ward for that opportunity to get published and paid contributing a writing piece to the Yale Climate Communications. It was the first time in my life that I started seeing that I could be a writer. In a sense, I have been writing ever since then on my www.climatechangecomedian.com website, I have written over 160 blogs. Several friends over the years, asked me to contribute writings to their blogs. 

On April 19, 2013, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published my first opinion editorial, “For Earth Day a GOP Market Solution to Climate Change.” This published writing happened the same weekend my parents, family, and over a hundred of their friends came together to celebrate my parents’ 50^th wedding anniversary. My first published newspaper commentary added to the joy of that occasion. On March 1, 2013, the Post-Dispatch published my first letter to the editor urging our local electric utility, Ameren, to close the nearby Meramec Coal Plant in South St. Louis County. 

On July 10, 2013, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published my second opinion editorial, “What Keeps Me Up Late at Night.” Like my March letter to the editor, this opinion commentary asked Ameren to close the Meramec Power Plant. 

Those successes getting published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch inspired me to submit opinion editorials to newspapers across Oregon in the fall of 2013 while I worked as a seasonal park ranger at Crater Lake National Park that summer. Ten Oregon newspapers published my opinion commentary, including The Oregonian, on October 4, 2013. I estimate my I have had around 20 opinion editorials published in Missouri and Oregon over the years. I had numerous letters to the editor published over the years, including most recent in The Oregonian last Sunday, March 15 asking Oregon Legislators to prioritize climate legislation. 

I cannot imagine life without regularly writing now. Since January 2023, I regularly took a “Writing Your Story” adult continuing education class through Mt. Hood Community College. My dream is to eventually compile and edit my blogs to write a book about my life as a park ranger turned climate organizer and wannabe comedian. My hope is that a major book publisher will want to publish my memoir. I want to inspire others through my writings and hopefully a published memoir someday to take action to reduce the threat of climate change, as well as pursuing their dreams, as I have in my life. 

I am amazed how far I have evolved in life from a child who hated writing for school assignments to someone who can’t imagine life without writing and blogging about it.