My Climate Justice Journey: Jeffrey James Madison, AB ‘85
My climate journey started during my airline pilot days. For a few years, I flew the same routes from America’s northeastern seaboard to its lower Great Lakes. During those flights, I used to marvel at just how vast and green our country was. Over time, I saw that green disappearing into the browns and reds and greys as trees were razed by the acre, baring ground, leveled and then developed into housing or industrial parks.
Jarring.
Later, after I joined another airline, I flew routes from Atlanta to Dallas over America’s Gulf Coast over and over again. Again I could marvel at both the size and green of our southern states, and the speed of human development.
The night of August 29, 2005, my crew and I departed Atlanta around 11:30 PM on a two-hour flight to Dallas. Earlier that day, Hurricane Katrina walloped the gulf states. By the time we reached our 32,000 feet cruising altitude halfway to our destination, we were above the massive storm and almost abeam Jackson, MS. Our electronic map displayed what Katrina’s enormous width obscured—the gulf to our left, Mobile, New Orleans Baton Rouge and under us. And from my view on the right side of the cockpit, I could see the northern edge of Katrina’s cloud bands just engulfing Jackson, MS. I also watched as several large electrical transformers in that city exploded, arc’ing massive blue and green bolts as the failed. I also watched as each city block around those transformers fell dark.
The next morning, we flew back to Atlanta just after dawn. Even at 29,000 feet, the giant scale of destruction was as clear as being just ten feet off the ground. Mind-blowing.
In 2006, I watched An Inconvenient Truth. Life changing.
By 2009, my wife and I’d started iLiveGreen Foundation—the mission of which was to teach school-aged children about the importance of planting trees to combat climate change. We educated about 80 students, who in turn sold enough, handmade, green, hemp bands to plant 10,000 trees.
In 2012 we sought to subscribe to a full-service food scrap composting service in DC. Finding none, we stared one of our own—Veteran Compost Residential. From 2013-2016, the year we sold it, we gained about 1,000 customers and helped divert over 695,000 pounds of food scraps into compost. It’s still in operation today under the new owners.
In 2020, having become depressed by the lack of people following my micro-climate leadership (solar panels on roof, rain barrels on downspouts, electric car), I chose to become a follower by co-founding a media and technology platform with my wife, The Climate, Inc. Its goal is to educate intelligent, curious people like you who care about working to combat climate change but who aren’t climate change experts. Its mission to amplify and disseminate diverse, inclusive and intersectional reporting and subject matter expert voices on the crucial issues of Climate Crisis mitigation, adaption, strategic relocation and intersectional environmental justice.
Since 2021, I’ve produced over 525 episodes of The Climate Daily podcast—stories of people and organizations taking action to climate change and delivered to you, in about 8 minutes. We now have an audience of about 25,000 listeners.
In January, 2023, The Climate successfully completed its first ever Climate Champions campaign. Inspired by our listeners, we partnered with 30 tree-planting organizations to commit to planting 10,000 trees at a time in one of seven regions around the world on our behalf.
My Climate Justice Journey is an initiative of the HACE Environmental Justice Committee. If you are interested in sharing your climate or environmental justice journey, please email us here.
