My name is Karen Roothaan and on Saturday I will be 59 years old. I had my first vegetable garden 

when I was sixteen, so I have been a gardener for over 40 years. In my own lifetime, I have seen the 

climate change, and I have brought with me an "expert witness." 

One of the first things I learned as a gardener was that tomato plants were not to be planted out 

before Memorial Day. This was a rule taught to me by more experienced gardeners, a rule intended to 

prevent enthusiastic young gardeners from setting out plants on a warm sunny day only to watch them 

die in a late spring freeze. This year our last frost was in early April, and I set my plants out weeks ago, 

saving this one silent witness for today. 

This plant is basically about a month ahead of schedule. Last year we planted only two weeks early, 

yet corn farmers in Illinois had to wait to plant due to excessively wet soil. Every fall for the last few 

years 1 have watched flowers appear on trees that normally bloom in spring, such as magnolia and 

crabapple. These seemingly small changes are only the ones I have seen in my own lifetime, but I know 

that other more drastic changes are happening right now as we speak. 

Those affected drastically are not here today. The polar bears that swim for miles, looking for ice, and 

the farmers in sub-Saharan Africa waiting for rain, are not here today, but we have a moral responsibility 

to remember them as we consider the changes we need to make. 

Some of these changes need to be made on a personal level through better choices in food, 

transportation, and shelter. I grow most of my vegetables in the summer and have helped to start two 

community vegetable gardens. I commute mostly by bus and bicycle, and I weatherized my home two 

years ago. I take one or two vacations a year, by train, and I am sure I could go on for a long time about 

my mostly good (but definitely not perfect) environmental choices. But I am one of over 300 million 

Americans, so my individual choices mean little unless I encourage others to take similar steps. 

What I do for a living is teach mathematics at the community college level. Over the years I have 

introduced environmental considerations into my classes when appropriate, and what I have learned 

from my students is that people are starting to understand that the choices they make have a global 

impact. But this change is very recent, as the following will illustrate. 

One very hot day in 2007, I arrived late to class, hot and out of breath from my bicycle ride. I asked my 

students how much gas they had burned to get there, and none of them knew. Of course this was a 

teachable moment and I created what I thought was a very basic assignment, to look up their gas 

mileage on the EPA website, and to then calculate their annual C02 emissions based on that 

information. 

However, none of those college students knew that EPA stands for Environmental Protection Agency. I 

am asking you today to live up to your name and mission and protect our environment. I am asking for 

the polar bears and the people of the world who live in flood plains and depend on subsistence 

agriculture for their daily bread, but I am also asking for those of us less at risk. We need to know what 

~ the EPA stands for, and.we need to see you take a ~tJnd. 

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