Month: November 2023

Why Read the 5th National Climate Assessment?

Instead of cursing the darkness, light a candle.

commonly thought to be from Benjamin Franklin

While the 5th National Climate Assessment of the nation’s climate conditions gives much to be concerned about, there is also a clear path and examples where various states or communities are making strides toward sustaining practices, saving their communities money and spurring new business growth.

Why should Americans read the report? This is about the quality of your life and the future of your children. Nothing less.

The report illuminates job security and maybe new job opportunities; food production and food security (think prices and availability; recall the pandemic’s impact on availability of food and other necessities). See how other regions in the U.S might impact your area. Example: If ports on the East Coast are damaged by sea level rise or storms, how will it affect your company’s ability to export goods to the world? How will it affect food that is imported? Think coffee my friends. Gulp.

POST UPDATE 11/17/23: Good summary of the report on Vox.

IN THE REPORT …

1. Go to your region and read how climate will impact you. Scroll down the page to learn about temperature, rain, drought and other climate conditions and what may happen or is already happening as a result. How will this affect you and yours? Pay attention to health concerns. Do you have family members who suffer from asthma? Work outside to earn a living? Have heart conditions? All these will be made worse by heat and increased moisture in the air.

2. Make plans with your family, with your neighbors and your city to do what you can to prevent climate impacts and also to bring new opportunities to you and yours. How will climate affect your health? Do you work outside? What kind of transportation do you use to get to work or school?

3. ***Any local, state, or federal representatives for your location who is a climate change denier must be challenged. There is no time to argue. Move on to the reps who are working positively to protect and empower your location and community to both prepare and also to seize the economic opportunities available. Is your governor reaping federal grants and investments to bring new businesses to your state, your area? If not, find out why. Many states are reaping millions of dollars of business investment that bring new employment opportunities to your state.

4. What can your city do? What ARE they doing? This is the right time to contact your city council member who represents you and ask them what they are doing about climate change. No time to do it? Ask your employer then or your school principal. Wherever your life takes you, ask what is being done to prepare for and mitigate climate change and how can you help them?

5. Go here to learn about all the savings you can get for your home and your transportation when you go greener. Rewiring America. Depending on your income, you can get great discounts at the time of purchase of say, for example, an induction stove or clothes dryer; a heat pump air conditioner/heater. Also, if you want to purchase an all electric car or truck, there are great discounts plus great savings from no gas purchases! Download a booklet of how to achieve your goals, targeted to your budget and circumstances.

For all of us folks for whom a lot of these vehicle or home purchases to reduce fossil fuel burning are too expensive, fear not. The prices will come down precipitously over the next few years. Meantime, work with your housing association or apartment complex, or city transportation office to get the people who CAN afford it off their …. and into action!

Here is the Volts Podcast for November 15. David Roberts interviews Sonia Aggarwal, CEO of Energy Innovation. This is about President Biden’s Clean Energy Policies. An insider’s view.

A Book for Our Time: The Crystal Beads, Lalka’s Journey

A mother and child in 1939 Poland are talking. This is our way into a new book—The Crystal Beads, Lalka’s Journey written by Pat Black-Gould and illustrated by Katya Royz. It is a book written for children but is for any age and as I will show, particularly for today.

The time and place alert adults immediately to the context but for children they are gently led into the experience. A mother has found a way to gently guide her seven-year-old daughter on a safe path while terror stalks right outside their door. She asks her daughter to trade her Star of David for crystal beads – a rosary.

The author guides readers along with the illustrations driving the narrative and lending emotional texture. Tension builds with a terrifying encounter with Nazi interrogators. What might happen? We anticipate the worst. The terrifying men leave and we can breathe again. Lalka asks a question of the Mother Superior. It is not just any question: it is the question yet unresolved among us. Which of these is better: the Star of David or the Rosary?

Pat Black-Gould weaves a story of trust and love confronted with evil and brilliantly captured in Katya Royz’ art.

When I finished reading the story, my first thought was of Leo Tolstoy’s parable The Bear. Written for children, it has lasted through the centuries as a warning about the perils of oppression. Tolstoy showed how the bear became immured in a prison of its own thinking. It performs everyday for its master who has tethered it to a stump. Not until the bear is reminded he is endowed with the strength to break his bonds does he free himself from his oppressor.

I foresee The Crystal Beads will find its place among stories that illuminate dark times with truth. Everyone is endowed with his or her own right to be free and to pursue his or her own dreams. Each person is as valuable as the next. All faiths promote that and it is the soul of democratic governance.

The Nazis vilified the Jews leading to unspeakable crimes against humanity. This old dark root has risen over the last decade in many forms of hatred toward “the other.” Anger and hatred pit people against each other, playing out this old and tragic story about the human race. It must be illuminated for what it is: evil in many forms. We must be ever vigilent to guard against it for it can happen anywhere strong men’s manipulation of followers who, like the bear, are imprisoned by their own misperceptions and thinking.

I am so glad for the publication of The Crystal Beads. Pat Black-Gould is a practicing psychologist, playwright, and fiction writer. Perhaps this is why her book is so vital. The author has created a timeless story for all ages. The book has already garnered many awards.

Study guides for children and for adults are included.

Where American Democray Flows

Looking deeply over the oldest mountain chain in America: the Appalachians, heart of America. Photo by Susan L. Feathers

There is a quiescient American life rarely visible to the world at large. It plays out in homes, neighborhoods and small towns and cities over this vast country. We value our family life, the landscapes that make us who we are, and the pulse of democracy that beats in our chest like a second heart. Afterall, we have committed our lives and futures to a grand experiment in the world as it were: that all people are equal in their right to self-determination and self-governing by majority. A government for most of the people.

Over the last 247 years, we’ve more or less kept democracy working. It’s not for the faint of heart. Everyone of voting age has to strive year to year to protect its fragile nature which by and large depends on the character of the people we elect. Yet how curious that this essential element of leadership in a democratic society is rarely examined and may even be ignored when outright unlawfulness is proven in courts of law. We elect crooks and schemers.

It is in the home, the extended family, the church, the schools and universities and in civic clubs and convergences in public spaces where character is discussed, defined, and bulwarked among us. Children learn by observation, through the influence of elders and friends and the public institutions such as libraries and public spaces where community celebrations and historical remembrances take place regularly when and where we renew our devotion to democratic principles. This local democratic practice is like a heart pumping blood through the body politic, removing harmful substances and reoxygenating democratic life. It must be continously reinvigorated among all of us.

I recall fondly how my family of origin discussed the affairs of our government over a meal, taught and retold historical events chronicalling the country’s continuous work to keep democracy healthy and relevant to the Time. In school we were taught basic civics so that all of us knew how our government works. Much of this essential work of democracy has nearly disappeared like an ephermeral stream appearing only where individuals make efforts to revive it.

Yet, I know that stream, that current of American life, runs close to the surface and only requires a quorum of citizens working together in their everyday lives to make it rush again across this land, a bright current against darkened skies.

National Constitution Center – The NCC regularly sponsors zoom educational sessions about American history and constitutional law and lore. Highly recommend this site for contemporary topics that challenge us today. (See video to the right from a recent discussion by two historians about partisanship during Jefferson/Adams govenment, Sedition Acts in particular.)

iCivics.org

The Founding Fathers and the Politics of Character

PBS Interview with Jill Long Thompson, former Congresswoman from Indiana.