We are in the depth of Winter here in Green Bay, but you would not know it. There is a smattering of snow across the fields, but mostly the ground is dark in color, not yet grey grass is still trying to capture some of the Sun's energy. I have a friend that has gone through the ice and lived to tell the story already this year and the pictures I am seeing from the brave souls who are catching fish through the ice don't give me much confidence that it will hold another month.We have been on both sides of freezing nearly every day for a month and the below zero temperatures that we are familiar with have not even come yet. I think that a recent report of our total snowfall this season was thirteen inches, but I shoveled it and I saw less than eight inches, and two of them were simply standing slush. Weather that used to find us in Southern Illinois seems to characterize winters in this Twenty-first Century. We have had a few bouts with freezing rain and mist, nothing that amounted to measurable precipitation, but it was enough to make walking treacherous. Now, don't get me wrong, the less the furnace has to work, the better I like the fossil energy bills, but this week I began to think seriously about it.
We are one species among many, it stands to reason that there is a complex relationship between each us and the whole that is unknowable due to it's vastness. We are passengers on Starship Earth. It now seems, at least to those of us in the U.S. of A. that no one is at the helm, few are able to elucidate a path toward doing a better job of stewardship and there are even agents within our own government that are beholden to foreign power (read money). The recent NRA admission that they laundered millions of Russian oligarch dollars to sway elections right here "at home" has caused many of us to wonder how we can have a democracy under the sway of our sworn enemies. Nations that have sworn to bring us down without firing a shot should not be allowed to influence our elections and they certainly should not be allowed to buy or install politicians. The more closely we look, the more people realize that is what has happened.
We are all aware that a certain percentage of our Representatives and a fair share of the Senate are cheerleaders for the Apocalypse. Spinning their webs of deceit that "god" wants humanity to fail or giving their gullible "base" that they will, one day soon, be able to use their guns at will or use up their survival rations under post apocalyptic conditions. My contention has always been, "What if the sky is not falling?" I do not say this because I am sticking my head in the sand, I say it because we have an unbroken history of the opposite to look back over which proves the opposite.
This Winter, for example. I will be saving, hold up, I have saved hundreds of dollars in fuel bills already this Winter. Every heating degree day I can avoid is putting money in my pocket and reducing my carbon footprint. Some parts of the world are actually investing in efficiency, alternative energy sources and new technology to keep carbon in the ground and in my neck of the woods, we are having our ecological impact reduced by the warming planet itself.
The reason that I mentioned political leaders is because they have been adept at doing the wrong thing, some would argue as far back as anyone can find. The idea of valuing the opinions of landowners over everyone else is not new, but when the most valuable thing changed from land to the ownership of debt instruments, a much smaller group was given political power. I am certainly not the first to say it, but our nation is at a crossroad. To help put our position in perspective, let us first think about population. If we were to imagine the world with only three nations, China, India and the U.S. Our precious U.S.A. would hold just ten percent of that planet. Both China and India are continuing to take major steps in the direction of sustainability.
I don't want to leave this idea of demographics alone just yet. To help get a sense of what is going on, Europe has twice as many people as the U.S. and they have been doing many of the right things regarding fossil energy for decades and Russia has about half the population of the U.S. and on the whole they have not. Now, we come to the two largest blind spots in the perception of most Americans, Africa and the rest of Asia. Africa has four times as many people as our nation, the rest of Asia, excluding China and India, has nearly three times as many people as China. If these numbers make your head swim, you are not alone. As I said decades ago, a tiny change multiplied by a huge number will also be a relatively large amount and that is how ecological sanity is creeping in, perhaps not here yet, but around most of the rest of the world, change is coming and it is changing fast! I may just need to relax. Mother Earth knows what she is doing.
We are one species among many, it stands to reason that there is a complex relationship between each us and the whole that is unknowable due to it's vastness. We are passengers on Starship Earth. It now seems, at least to those of us in the U.S. of A. that no one is at the helm, few are able to elucidate a path toward doing a better job of stewardship and there are even agents within our own government that are beholden to foreign power (read money). The recent NRA admission that they laundered millions of Russian oligarch dollars to sway elections right here "at home" has caused many of us to wonder how we can have a democracy under the sway of our sworn enemies. Nations that have sworn to bring us down without firing a shot should not be allowed to influence our elections and they certainly should not be allowed to buy or install politicians. The more closely we look, the more people realize that is what has happened.
We are all aware that a certain percentage of our Representatives and a fair share of the Senate are cheerleaders for the Apocalypse. Spinning their webs of deceit that "god" wants humanity to fail or giving their gullible "base" that they will, one day soon, be able to use their guns at will or use up their survival rations under post apocalyptic conditions. My contention has always been, "What if the sky is not falling?" I do not say this because I am sticking my head in the sand, I say it because we have an unbroken history of the opposite to look back over which proves the opposite.
This Winter, for example. I will be saving, hold up, I have saved hundreds of dollars in fuel bills already this Winter. Every heating degree day I can avoid is putting money in my pocket and reducing my carbon footprint. Some parts of the world are actually investing in efficiency, alternative energy sources and new technology to keep carbon in the ground and in my neck of the woods, we are having our ecological impact reduced by the warming planet itself.
The reason that I mentioned political leaders is because they have been adept at doing the wrong thing, some would argue as far back as anyone can find. The idea of valuing the opinions of landowners over everyone else is not new, but when the most valuable thing changed from land to the ownership of debt instruments, a much smaller group was given political power. I am certainly not the first to say it, but our nation is at a crossroad. To help put our position in perspective, let us first think about population. If we were to imagine the world with only three nations, China, India and the U.S. Our precious U.S.A. would hold just ten percent of that planet. Both China and India are continuing to take major steps in the direction of sustainability.
I don't want to leave this idea of demographics alone just yet. To help get a sense of what is going on, Europe has twice as many people as the U.S. and they have been doing many of the right things regarding fossil energy for decades and Russia has about half the population of the U.S. and on the whole they have not. Now, we come to the two largest blind spots in the perception of most Americans, Africa and the rest of Asia. Africa has four times as many people as our nation, the rest of Asia, excluding China and India, has nearly three times as many people as China. If these numbers make your head swim, you are not alone. As I said decades ago, a tiny change multiplied by a huge number will also be a relatively large amount and that is how ecological sanity is creeping in, perhaps not here yet, but around most of the rest of the world, change is coming and it is changing fast! I may just need to relax. Mother Earth knows what she is doing.
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