Patricia Mcardle is a firm believer in the power of the sun.
She recently retired from 27 years at the State Department, often overseas. During her last posting in Afghanistan she realized that simple solar powered stoves could solve the problem of cooking with scarce supplies of wood. When she first arrived the landscape was barren. There were no trees anywhere. She learned from the locals that it hadn't always been that way. Until a few decades ago green forests had covered much of the land. The trees had been cut down cut down for firewood, leaving just brush for cooking fuel.
The children now had to scour for miles to find enough brush to feed the fires that their mothers would use for cooking the family meals. Now the land has little groundcover to protect it from flooding and erosion, making what is an already difficult life for the average Afghani villager even more arduous and dangerous. Patricia saw the children return after a hard day looking for what little brush was left, and she wondered whether there was a better solution in a country that has brilliant sunshine for much of the year. She remembered using simple solar stoves when she was young and, after a little Internet research found a simple design built with cardboard and aluminum foil. The prototype she made astonished a crowd of Afghani men by boiling a pot of water using only the reflected rays of the sun.
Witnessing the destruction to the environment in Afghanistan was a wake-up call for Patricia. She realized that using forests for fuel not only led to that barren, vulnerable landscape, but was also contributing to the greenhouse gas pollution that was causing climate change. Burning the trees both released carbon into the atmosphere and took away the prime way of soaking up carbon dioxide from the air. Hungry for more information on climate change she went to see An Inconvenient Truth. She was hit hard by what she saw and felt compelled to get actively involved. Patricia contacted the Climate Project and applied to be a climate crisis messenger.
Patricia focuses her presentations on solutions to the climate crisis. She knows that we have abundant supplies of clean, renewable energy all around us from the sun, wind and waves, and has seen first hand the harm of relying on fossil fuels. She talks about how the U.S. could meet all of its current energy needs by harnessing solar power from a tiny percentage of the land, and how there's enough wind potential in the continental U.S. to meet three times our energy demand.
Patricia Mcardle is on a mission: to educate as many people as she can about climate change and how it can be solved. And a mission to make one such solution - the solar cooker - a reality that would improve the lives of many people around world while fighting climate change.
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