Sam Balto, a 37-year-old physical education teacher in Portland, Oregon, started a weekly “bike bus” for student cyclists.
Photographer: Thomas Teal/BloombergThey’re Not Like Regular Dads. They’re Climate Dads.
Move over, sports dads and car dads. Climate dads are a little bit nerdy, a little bit obsessive and 100% focused on saving the planet.
Ben Block’s family does all the things a climate-conscious brood can. They try to minimize driving, recently switched to an electric oven, and are constantly gut-checking purchases. When Block’s five-year-old son asked for a new toy truck earlier this year, the 37-year-old calibrated his response carefully: Cheap plastic toys are fun, he conceded, but they tend to get thrown out quickly. How about a long-lasting Lego set instead?
Still, Block worries. He worries about bringing up children in a world beset by environmental crises, what that world will look like and how difficult it might be to live in. He worries about his children’s children. Block worries about global warming so much that five years ago he and his friend Jason Sandman co-founded an advocacy group called Climate Dads. Its first gathering took place in a Philadelphia park on Father’s Day 2018.