How I became environmentalist…

When I was a young kid, I must admit that I mostly was attracted by modernism, fast cars, airplanes and tall buildings. 

It’s only when I traveled to the USA in 1971, that I discovered the terms environment and ecology, especially around San Francisco. Then, we had the first oil crisis in 1973 that made me think of earth’s limited resources, but did stop me in my tracks. 

That concept hit closer to home, when in 1979, freshly installed in New York, I had to line up to fill up my car during the second oil crisis. I kept on traveling a lot, mostly with North America and Europe, but never thought for a second about my carbon footprint, totally ignoring what that animal was.

Once I became a Park City resident, I began to think about snowless winters and their increasing occurrences both in the Rockies and in the Alps, plus their impact on the industry I worked in, and began to worry about a day when snow wouldn’t show up. 

I always wanted to build a solar-passive house, but when it happened in 1990, there was just the sunny location of our new home that answered that call. It’s precisely in the 90s that we began to hear about climate-change issues after the Rio de Janeiro summit in 1992 and that of Kyoto in 1997. 

All along, me and my household had remained very thrifty and quite sensitive to our environment, for the most part driving economical cars and living well below our means. The early 2000 made me consider the terrible impact on the environment overpopulation was having. Our messed up environment was the symptom, but a crowded earth was the cause. 

All this led us to Al Gore’s book and film “An inconvenient truth” in 2006 and we became sold on planet warming and greenhouse effects. That same year, the movie “Who killed the electric car?” was released (it was killed by both George Bush and the oil industry). 

It took me until 2019 to install solar panels on my roof and 2022 to park an electric car in my garage. Progress does come eventually, but it always takes an awful lot of time!