As much as Colleen and I are loving HoCo, we both think some of the shopping centers look alike to the point that when we hear about one in particular, we both wonder, “Which one is that again?” The establishments that make them up and the people we’ve met in them are one-of-a-kind, nevertheless. This was certainly the case when I borrowed our friends PaCy (Paul and Lucy) Steinberg’s 2018 Honda Civic hybrid while they’re out of town and we’re housesitting, Man–that thing is quiet! I was on my way to meet Ned Tillman.
RoCo (us) first encountered Ned at the September general membership meeting of the Ellicott City & Western Howard Democratic Club (EC&WHDC). He spoke about environmental stewardship in 2018 Howard County and all that entails. He also brought word of the latest book he’s written, The Big Melt (TBM). It’s been available for purchase since October 15th. Get your copy on Amazon today!
As I found out at that meeting I mentioned, Ned’s deft at speaking on a topic that had instilled such anxiety in me over the last couple decades. If all of us on this planet Earth could think calmly and sensibly about the climate, I thought, like he does, then we’ve got a shot at survival. I asked Ned to meet a few weeks later at Riverside Coffee off Dobbin Road. I have yet to identify the river we were beside, but I didn’t care! I ordered what smelled like some good coffee and I was about to have some good company.
Related: See what Regina Clay, a local pastor, said about HoCo’s spiritual life.
Ice Ice Babies
In Ned Tillman’s latest venture, Marley and Brianne explore how climate change might unfold. As the reality of climate change dawns on them, and with the help of friends Jim, Wanda, Doc, and others, the teens act to avert their hometown’s collision course with a scalding-hot future.
When I asked Ned why he wanted to write about climate change from a young-adult perspective, he said he wanted to encourage kids to effect change.
“I hope kids will be more engaged and inspired to act,” Ned told me over coffee of TBM’s readers.
I don’t want to say too much about TBM, as you should experience it yourself, of course. But it’s in the vein of magical realism, a brand of fiction that melds reality and fantasy. It stylizes human experience, making sanguine points about it by adding a fictional flourish to it. It can be pretty scary when the topic is something serious, as I learned from TBM. In one of the first scenes in TBM, for example, Sleepy Valley literally starts melting. It’s terrifies Marley. That’s the thing about magical realism, though: it’s all sort of within the bounds of human experience, such as ours collective one here in HoCo.
“Howard County should be a leader,” Ned said, pointing out that the two “1000-year floods” in Ellicott City should motivate us to implement change now. We then wondered why our community wouldn’t act in its own best interests. Ned noted that if we take the lead, other communities will follow our example.
Ned pointed out that kicking the can down the Earthly road isn’t doing anyone any favors. We have to act on climate change now. It can be now, and be palatable, or it can be later, and be torturous. The heroic cast of TBM, archetypal yet idiosyncratic, can see this.
“When people say that acting to mitigate climate change is Big Government,” he added, “I say, ‘If we wait much longer it’s going to be Draconian.'”
Climate 2.0
When I asked Ned if fans of TBM could expect a sequel, I immediately thought that we’d have to see how things unfold before we’d know. Also, Ned’s not one to rush things at the expense of quality, clearly.
“I’m totally focused on this book at this time. It’s all-consuming,” Ned said.
That doesn’t mean he’ll stop working to educate people about a topic and a place he cares deeply about, though.
“In my talks, all I do is tell stories,” Ned said with a smile. That’s probably a little too humble, but I smiled then. The way he said it made me have hope. The Earth and what goes on here are things Ned knows a lot about, just like the animals who offer their thoughts on Sleepy Valley’s grave climate shifts. If he still believes it’s “fixable,” as he put it, then I know I should too.
And: See what Del. Frank Turner (D-13) said about the Maryland Promise scholarship.
His optimistic brand of pragmatism reminded me of some of the folks he writes about in his second book, The Chesapeake Watershed: A Sense of Place and a Call to Action. Ned profiles fisherman in that exploration of the place he calls “a local resource and a national treasure.” As you read his account and see how much they know about the land, you can’t help seeing how important the place is.
Just as it is in the regular dispatches on his blog, savingtheplaces.com, you get to know about something through Ned’s reporting of his interactions with it. That online destination–one Colleen and I can’t get enough of these days, amounts to a digital version of the nature walks Ned leads around HoCo.
Of course, in TBM, it’s the characters you can’t help but loving whose experiences show you the way things are, unmistakably.
For a more straightforward primer on climate change, visit the National Resources Defense Council’s (NRDC) website. It makes the instructive point, among others, that the global ecosystem is fragile.
“Even a seemingly slight average temperature rise is enough to cause a dramatic transformation of our planet,” the website says.
Introductions Are What Friends Are For
Ned and I share at least two friends in common. I did a double take when I Tim Lattimer’s name in the acknowledgements Ned wrote at the beginning of TBM. I asked Tim, who’s a retired foreign service worker and International Advisor at the U.S. Water Partnership (not to mention a member of the Howard County Democratic Central Committee) what his favorite part of reviewing the manuscript of TBM was. He told me he loved getting to see the world again through a kid’s eyes.
“We’re both realists about the importance of balancing environment & development too,” Tim said. “We’re not pie-in-the sky about this topic.”
The other person we both know is Sue Rosch Geckle. She’s the Help Desk and Student Labs Manager at Howard Community College. But I got to know her through local Democratic politics. She’s the president of the Ellicott City and Western Howard Democratic Club.
“I was introduced to Ned and his wife by fellow club member Richard Yocum at a Katie Fry Hester fundraiser in May,” Sue told me in an email exchange.
She’s always on the lookout for speaker possibilities for EC&WHDC. After she and Ned talked about his climate advocacy, she continue, she asked him to speak at our September meeting. Obviously, he said yes.
Children and the Future
Having grandkids, Ned said, made him think about the future and be more forward-thinking.
“I had a book reading the other day, and I was talking about my book when my grandchildren showed up,” he said with the unmistakable mixture of pride and protectiveness that only a grandparent can have. He said that his little ones–his littlest ones–rushed over to him, wonderfully oblivious to the way a lecture’s supposed to unfold, laughing and exclaiming as they embraced his legs. They wouldn’t move, he continued, so he just gently placed a hand on their heads and continued.
Ned has a remarkable stamina for speaking for long periods. After his hour-long talk at the EC&WHDC meeting, his only sign of wear and tear was a lock of his silver hair that was slightly out of place. Still, I hoped silently that the appearance that day of his grandkids had given him a boost. Now that’s some sustainable energy that’s free, easy to access, and joyous to boot!
You can see pictures of the whippersnapper generation of Tillman’s on savingtheplaces.com. When I saw them I thought, “One day these cuties will read their grandfather’s work and be really proud.” It’ll be a few years before they can read work as sophisticated as Ned’s first two books, Watershed and Saving the Places We Love: Paths to Environmental Stewardship. That’s all well and good, because in the meantime they can read TBM. As they fall in love with its cast and what they go through, it’ll be inscribed in their own experiences that we can and must fix–save–this place we love.
I have a feeling TBM is set to win some wards upon its release. I had a hunch just from reading it, but Ned’s previous book has paved the way for it here in HoCo. It was named Book of the Year by the Howard County Poetry and Literature Society, Howard Community College, and the Howard County Public Library System.
Ned’s work in sustainability shifted in the mid 2000s to mostly journalistic treatments of the subject. But he’s also maintained a big presence in research, consulting, and original thought in the field. He’s a partner at Sustainable Growth, LLC, a local environmental consulting firm. Ned also sits on numerous environmental boards in the region and as he put it, he’s led “environmental and energy firms for 27 years, providing services to many governments and corporations throughout the U.S. and abroad.”
Ned also advises the Howard County Council and County Executive on sustainability and energy policy and gives talks to local schools on the environment.
RoCo is pretty confident it our estimation of people, and we were impressed by Ned right of the bat. Yet we were still awed by Ned’s dizzying list of accomplishments, which he provides a summary of on savingtheplaces. He has a Bachelor’s degree in Earth Sciences from Franklin and Marshall and a Master’s in Earth Sciences from Syracuse University. In 2010 Saving the Places won the the Renewable National Resource Foundation’s Excellence in Journalism Award and Best Book on Environmental and Natural Resources selected by The American Society for Public Administration.
“We can fix this,” Ned said to me as I gathered my things to leave, “we just have to act.”
Progress Vs. Decline
Winston Churchill noted that we shouldn’t fear change.
“There is nothing wrong in change, if it is in the right direction,” he said. A perfect person, he opined, is one that’s changed often. By the same logic, a perfect society would be one that’s changed often, then. And finally, the closer HoCo gets to perfect, the more it’ll have changed.
Also: Get the deets on everything you’ve ever wanted to know about solid waste disposal in HoCo.
As the University of California Los Angeles website notes, the most often-quoted definition of sustainability is one formulated by the United Nations Commission on Environment and Development. That group says that sustainable development is that which “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Ned’s working, then, on ways for our generation to be able to meet its own needs in ways that don’t compromise the ability of the Tillmans–and HoCo-ans–of the future to do so.
Thanks for reading! Check back with us here at rocoinhoco.com every week as Robert, Colleen (and pup, Moses) get to know the many facets—one each week–of this prismatic place called Howard County. We want to take you along with us, so follow us on Twitter at @rocoinhoco, join our Facebook group, and follow us on Instagram at @rocoinhoco.