Many years ago, the mayor of New York City – where snow is always an unexpected quantity – responded to questions of what the city was going to do to get rid of unwanted snow on the streets: “God put it there,” said Fiorella LaGuardia, “and God will take it away.”

We in Maine may have just as strong a faith, but usually less patience, and we are prepared to help it along. But these recent unusual April snowstorms – as unexpected and undesirable as anything New Yorkers may have faced – prompted me to give more thought to LaGuardia’s remark.

Especially since I live in the hills of Temple, on a dirt road. In this last nor’easter the town contractor (for reasons I am disinclined to argue with) has apparently adopted LaGuardia’s philosophy. In the spring, plowing tends to remove just as much of the road as the snow that lays on it. I have just come back to the house from looking over the road at the bottom of my steep driveway. The snow sits where God put it, with only my neighbor’s tire tracks from yesterday marking its fall. We are apparently waiting for God to take it away.

I know it isn’t the first time we have had such late and heavy storms. I remember another storm many years ago, when I had first come to Temple.

It was so many years ago, that I can hardly reconstruct what I was thinking when I did what I did, but it seemed logical at the time.

I was eager to start a garden, and was reading seed catalogs and garden manuals. My parents had always had small kitchen gardens, but I had never been responsible for one myself. And all the garden manuals insisted that you should have your peas in by Patriot’s Day.

The trouble was, as Patriot’s Day approached, there wasn’t any bare ground anywhere. In fact, the snow was 2 feet deep. I wanted to get my peas in, and I wanted to follow the advice of the manuals, so I went out and shoveled off the garden spot. The ground underneath was soft (if a little cold) and I planted my peas.

The next day, a nor’easter, the like of this last one but colder, blew in. It was all snow, and filled in the small plot I had dug out as if I had never been there. Later, when the snow departed by more natural means, one little lone pea seed sprouted. It wasn’t much of a crop.

I am now a seasoned Mainer, with more experience and philosophy than when I shoveled out that garden plot. Even still, though I know we have had storms like this before, and will again, there is still something troubling about this unusual weather.

I think it is that while this weather doesn’t fall outside of our experience, it starts to fit into a different norm than the one we have lived with: a norm that includes tsunamis and hurricanes of unprecedented destruction.

“What changed in the U.S. with Katrina was a feeling that we had entered a period of consequences,” Al Gore has said.

Weather scientists say it is not individual events that mark a shift in the global climate: many such events are within the established extremes of recorded weather for our region. It is instead the steady accumulation of extreme events, more and more of them in more and more places, which mark a shift into something new.

We always thought we couldn’t do anything about the weather. Perhaps we have been – unwittingly – doing something about it all along, something that has consequences we are being forced to own up to. And while we might seek comfort in thinking that there are larger, societal forces out of our personal control that are the problem, it’s not necessarily true.

For instance, the biggest cause of air pollution is not industry but that machine that we all have one or two of, that we use daily, that we can’t do without: the automobile. In this case, it’s not huge-scale industrial plants but the accretion of individual decisions that matters most. And there are little, personal choices we make that can make a difference.

Did you know that properly inflating your tires could improve your mileage by more than 3 percent? Frequently replacing your air filter can improve efficiency by 10 percent? It’s important to keep your car tuned up and greased (when just 1 percent of car owners properly maintain their cars, nearly a billion pounds of carbon dioxide are kept out of the atmosphere, according to Gore) and don’t carry loads you don’t need to (clean out the trunk; weight decreases mileage.)

Other ideas:

• Increase your highway mileage by 2 to 4 mpg by driving 60 instead of 70

• Avoid jack-rabbit starts and quick stops; they just eat up gas.

• Highway driving with the windows down increases drag and lowers your fuel economy by as much as 10 percent

• Don’t let the car idle while you wait, and don’t use gas warming it up before you start out: a fuel injected car needs only 30 seconds warm-up before getting into gear.

Adopt other new habits, like combining chores into one trip, driving with friends, and walking where possible, and suddenly you are part of the solution. You save hundreds of dollars a year, you save wear and tear on your vehicle, and you alter the ratio of the pounds of carbon that are being injected into the atmosphere each year and causing global warming.

Scientists and global activists like Gore have made predictions of what will happen to the world – predictions that are based on the status quo, on nothing changing, on individuals not being willing to inconvenience themselves.

But that is exactly what cannot be factored into dire predictions: what humans will do to change their behavior.

So I look at this April snow, and wonder if God really did put it there, or if it is the consequence of our choices, and if it is up to us to take it away.