My first ancestor to arrive in the United States was my great-grandfather, Matthew McAteer. He was born in Northern Ireland in 1856 and arrived in New Jersey through the port of Jersey City in 1882. Other relatives would arrive later though Castle Garden in lower Manhattan, the gateway to America before Ellis Island opened a decade later. Matthew would have sailed in steerage class on a coal-fired steamer for a fare of approximately four British pounds, the equivalent of almost 340 British pounds today. He was among the more than 1 million Irish who had come to the United States in the preceding fifty years to escape the great Irish potato famines. The famines were the direct result of unsustainable agriculture practices and a dangerous dependence on monoculture farming. Matthew settled in the New York City area. At that time, the world's population was approximately 1.2 billion people. New York City had grown to approximately 1.2 million people. What would follow Matthew to New York and to the country generally were a range of unsustainable practices already creating negative social outcomes around the world.

I doubt that when Matthew arrived in the US he had concerns about his carbon footprint. Although I can count six generations of McAteers since his arrival in the US, I do not recall a family conversation in which we openly discussed being complicit in pollution, inequality, or climate change. I'm sure most families would say the same thing. However, the signs were there if you wanted to look: