Voting is the most important thing we can do to protect our children’s future.
I’ve been following the Guardian’s State of Emergency newletter. Today, the Guardian reports that hundreds of scientists who are involved in the IPCC’s tracking of climate change responded to a query about the most important thing people can do to help curb a warming planet.
“The science is there, but the lack of will of politicians worldwide is retarding climate change [action],” said Prof Alexander Milner, at the University of Birmingham in the UK. ~ The Guardian
When I started this blog back in 2009, it was focused on nature and writing. I want to return to that practice now, knowing that how I vote is essential to protecting what I love most: my family, the sanctuary of woods and shoreline, the adventure of writing and reading.
During these fraught days of political warfare in America and violence and hunger in many parts of the world, I have sought that “quiet wood” through the authors who have influenced my life and offer sanity and a good way to live. I turned to Aldo Leopold last week, picking up A Sand County Almanac for another read.
As political rhetoric dominates the airways, I instead have been walking with Leopold through the months of his hunting, observing and reflection. Long ago, when his family was young and Leopold worked at the University of Wisconsin, developing their Arboretum, he bought an 80-acre, “worn-out” farm in the sand counties. Surprising his family one morning with the news, he invited his wife, daughter and sons to join him to restore it to its natural state.
Thus began the now famous experiment that literally millions of people around the world have read about, been inspired to do the same and visited the farm where the chicken coop was transformed into the now famous “shack.” Below is a photo from my own pilgrimage in 2014. You see the restored prairie grassland and maturing forest around it.
Aldo Leopold Foundation, Baraboo, Wisconsin: “The Shack” and Restored Landscape. Photo by Susan L Feathers
Here is a little of the quiet peace I found in the Almanac which sustains me through this raucous period in history. Leopold extols the virtue of early rising.
Like many another treaty of restraint, the pre-dawn pact lasts only as long as darkness humbles the arrogant.
To my fellow Americans, please go vote for the leaders who recognize climate change and propose to continue climate safe policies. Go here for voting information. There is still time to register!
If not, Leopold’s great work may be more a eulogy to a once wondrous Earth.
Go here to read more about Leopold’s Land Ethic.
Susan Feathers 