It's Getting Personal

The Gulf Coast oil spill clearly is a disaster: the loss of lives, livelihoods, and its long-term impact on the region is both shocking and heartbreaking. Yet even with the pictures and on-the-ground news reports, living so far away makes it hard to grasp the spill’s true magnitude. Enter "If It Was My Home", a website where you can map the oil spill over your hometown. 

As you can see, the oil spill doesn’t just swamp the land around Portland--it actually covers nearly 1/3 of the entire state of Oregon. Go ahead, try it for yourself.  

A picture is certainly worth a thousand words, but even more important is the ability to personalize something that is on such a large scale to help us really understand what it means for our daily lives. Race car driver Leilani Münter does this in a really unique way in her Huffington Post blog.

I think it’s important that we do this with another big issue: climate change.  What would it mean to you personally if we fail to act on climate change?  What would you miss?  Fishing Oregon’s trout streams? Skiing its snow-capped mountains? Drinking a good Oregon pinot? Or is it the things that you’d have to worry about even more—wild fires, drought, and even worse asthma? Check out It’s Getting Personal to find out what people from around the world are thinking—and then add your own thoughts.

But don’t stop there.  We can’t just focus on the tragedy.  Now imagine a better future.  What does creating a thriving clean energy economy and solving climate change mean to you? Let us know right here in the comments section.