Why Our Hope for the Planet Is Not Yet Extinct

New life is everywhere, renewing itself among us, reminding us not to give up.

...So we cling to good news in whatever form it takes. Whether it's tenuously hopeful global news (like the I.P.C.C.'s report that we still have time to prevent the worst ravages of climate change) or encouraging local news (like the people who are letting their lawns go wild to feed the bees), being reminded of what is yet possible goes a long way toward countering gloom.

...Americans are now more attuned than ever to the peril the natural world is in, and that is my greatest reason for hope. Ideological holdouts may continue to insist that climate change is a liberal hoax, and clueless people may continue to give the matter no thought at all. But these groups are no longer the norm. According to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, 72 percent of Americans believe the planet is warming. Seventy-seven percent support research into renewable energy. The same percentage believes that children should be taught about climate change in school... Margaret Renkl

PBS NewsHour | A backyard naturalist captures nature in essays | Season 2022 | PBS

Margaret Renkl
https://www.pbs.org/video/backyard-naturalist-1650661368/

Earth Day 2022

Today's annual Earth Day Doodle features real time-lapse imagery from Google Earth and other sources showing the impacts of climate change across our planet.
http://www.google.com/doodles/earth-day-2022

This Earth Day, We Could Be Helping the Environment—and Ukraine

Even as we watch the horrors daily inflicted on the Ukrainians, we have not been asked to change our daily habits in any way to be of help to them.

"For too long, we have wanted to help in the fight, but had no way into battle. Electrifying your home one machine at a time is today's Victory Garden—a thing you can do to fight tyranny, inflation, and runaway emissions." Bill McKibben, continues

Ministry for the future

 Kim Stanley Robinson hasn't stopped thinking of what humanity might yet make of itself. We're going to read his Ministry for the Future in Environmental Ethics this Fall, alongside Wendell Berry, Bill McKibben, Paul Hawken, and the Sunrise Movement. 

"Its setting is not a desolate, post-apocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us - and in which we might just overcome the extraordinary challenges we face." (g'r)

Yes, it's a work of fiction, of the imagination; but that's the source of possibility and the power of maybe. Maybe life will be worth living, climatically speaking, in the decades to come. Dreaming it is a necessary condition of its reality.

The burning source of all our power gets a cameo chapter and speaks bluntly.

“I am a god and I am not a god. Either way, you are my creatures. I keep you alive. Inside I am hot beyond all telling, and yet my outside is even hotter. At my touch you burn, though I spin outside the sky. As I breathe my big slow breaths, you freeze and burn, freeze and burn. Someday I will eat you. For now, I feed you. Beware my regard. Never look at me.”

We don't need to worship Sol, but we do need to respect her. Now. KSR says this possible future had best begin no later than January 2025. The window is shrinking fast.

Barbara Kingsolver

 It’s the birthday of American novelist Barbara Kingsolver (books by this author) born in Annapolis, Maryland (1955). She grew up in rural Kentucky and spent part of her childhood in the Congo, where her father was a physician and the family lived without running water or electricity. Both experiences left her passionate about social justice and biodiversity, issues that she explores in all her novels, especially The Poisonwood Bible (1998) — and Flight Behavior (2012) which tackles the effects of global climate change on monarch butterflies. In her memoir Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (2007) she described how her family moved from Arizona to a farm in Virginia, and spent a year growing all their food, from tomatoes to raising chickens and turkeys.

Kingsolver’s most recent work is a book of poetry published in 2020, How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons). WA