The annual climate assessment from the American Meteorological Society
Below is the full report.
See Link Here for the World Meteorological Organization maps, stats, and key messages.
Clearly, the captain of the American ship needs to read the stars.
Poster for State of the Climate 2024
…happiness is the end of government…consent the means…sovereignty the people…these are the foundations of government. from Thoughts on Government, John Adams.
My ruminations have turned to reading the founders and I can find no better founder than John Adams as a reference to what was forming in the minds of Americans brought together in Philadelphia to consider whether to declare independence or keep negotiating with Great Britain, hoping for mercy.
Adams was already thinking about the structure of the new government. He drew from the well of classic and modern scholars of governance and the rights of man. Both links on this post take you to the original document, Thoughts on Governance, where you can see why and how our Constitution came to the structure we have upheld for nearly 250 years.
Adams was for Independence from the start. In his own mind, he contemplated what a new government structure would best support the full flowering of a republic, which he asserted was the only form that could promote the general happiness of the people. By happiness Adams espoused an understanding it meant a government founded on virtue which would deliver the most happiness to the most people. (McCullough, John Adams, p. 102).
Further, Adams argued that good government was republican in nature, and the true idea of a republic was founded on the idea of an ’empire of laws and not men’. Thoughts on Government, National Constitution Center.
Question to Readers: What evidence do we observe today in American government that derives from a government based on virtue?
Leave a reply on this post for all to consider!
Wikipedia Commons: https://images.app.goo.gl/Exs3CFZaBPCHCfxg8
At the White House 2 + 2 = 0. ~ Anonymous
Republicans justifying cuts to programs through the One Big Beautiful Bill (Rescissions Act of 2025) assert that the States and private sector will make up for cuts to federal funding in the Congressional budget.
Alice Ruhnke, President of GrantStation, lists the ways the bill is disabling the Nonprofit Sector which provides a big swath of the Social Safety Net in America.
Read her work here. Interesting to see the progression month by month. Pay attention to proposed changes to the Johnson Amendment (1954). If passed, it would drag churches and charitable organizations into the maelstrom of partisanship politics.
For a new beginning. In out of the way places of the heart, where your thoughts never think to wonder, this beginning has been quietly forming, waiting until you were ready to emerge. For a long time it has watched your desire, feeling the emptiness growing inside you. Noticing how you willed yourself on, still unable to leave what you had outgrown. It watched you play with the seduction of safety and the gray promises that sameness whispered, heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent, wondered would you always live like this. Then the delight when your courage kindled and out you stepped onto new ground your eyes young again with energy and dream. A path of plentitude opening before you. Though your destination is not yet clear, you can trust the promise of this opening, unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning that is at one with your life’s desire. Awaken your spirit to adventure, holding nothing back. Learn to find ease in risk, soon you will be home in a new rhythm, for your soul senses the world that awaits you. ~ John O’Donohue, The Space Between Us
Dear Readers,
On my walk this morning, I chose to listen again to readings from John O’Donohue’s great works of poetry, spirit and landscape. John’s deep faith and philosophy emanate from his first experiences as a child growing up in Western Ireland in the landscape of the Burren.
Readers who have followed my blog over the years know that I, too, take my inspiration from the enduring spirit imbued withing each distinct landscape. For me that has always been the limestone region of East Tennessee and particularly along the Watauga River where my grandparent’s home was my spiritual center. I grew up in a military family, moving as frequently as once a year. But, every year possible, my parents brought my sisters and me back to the “Hilltop Farm” for summers or Christmas celebrations. Like John, this landscape form the warp and weft of me.
What brought me to remember John’s blessing quoted above, is the reminder that the path of plentitude is within us. We only have to awaken our imagination to it.
The power of the people in a democracy lies within each citizen, each person living on this sacred landscape. We must return to our deepest convictions that a free people must act together in eternal vigilance against an evil that hates liberty, wishes to slash and burn the spirit that we hold as an educated and free people whose combined efforts and guardianship has made this nation great, not perfect, but striving always toward the values it holds as our sacred trust.
For the first American citizens of a new democracy, people who had been “subjects of a monarchy” had to learn how to be a citizen. What did that mean? Require? In early American homes, taverns and gatherings, this was the topic. All agreed it meant something important. Something was required. Acting in another way meant being involved, and contributing to maintain the rights the democracy asserts belong to all of us. It is active, not reactionary.
A recent conversation between Heather Cox Richardson, American historian and author of Letters from An American Substack publication, and Joanne Freeman, Yale Professor of early American history, discussed the behavior of our current legislators. Richardson posed that their current behavior, with exceptions, overall is not about principles of democracy but rather about keeping their seat and about a consumer economy.
Listen here to their 20 minute discussion.
Questions: 1. Have we forgotten how to be a citizen and what is required? 2. Have our representatives forgotten what their role is in representing us and defending a democracy?
Richardson points out that around the 1980s our discourse and our representatives no longer shared a common understanding of what a democracy is and does. The original consensus shared by the majority of Americans regardless of party?
Richardson continues to conjecture that being a good citizen has changed from defending principles to defending political parties and a form of economic policy, to the point that the majority of us, including leaders, have lost sight of our responsibility as citizens.
Joanne Freeman believes we assumed that as we are going about our lives that the democracy would just hum along without our oversight, without our participation. Making money, following economic indicators, obtaining power through how much money you make have taken over our sense of the country to which we belong.
Richardson and Freeman both believe that we must regain self-empowerment in order to empower a government to protect and nourish the democracy.
Self-empowerment (self-actualization) leads to democracy empowerment when we come together to act for decency, right and wrong and stand together against oligarchy.
Self-actualization comes from values of behavior and action in a democratic society, self-improvement (hard work, education, and engagement with fellow citizens) to keep the conditions of freedom healthy and alive through collective action: stand up for principles whenever they are challenged.
What do you think?
This blog post below was posted in 2022 after moving to Virginia to be closer to my family. It is a short essay but contains the key sources on my own exploration of this question: How much is enough? Inspired by the great ethicists of my formative adult years, these writers were each examining what Albert Schweitzer called an ethical basis for life. I encourage you to read the post for its links to sources and collective direction these great thinkers still offer Americans and people everywhere on how to live together in peace and prosperity.
Affirmation of life is the spiritual act by which man ceases to live unreflectively and begins to devote himself to his life with reverence in order to raise it to its true value. To affirm life is to deepen, to make more inward, and to exalt the will to live.
Albert Schweitzer became my hero/mentor at an early age. The United Methodist Church library had a copy of a little book, “All Men Are Brothers” by Charlie May Simon. This is a very special book. Follow the link to purchase one of the remaining copies.
This introduction to Schweitzer seized my imagination. To live by one’s own inner thought and develop a life reflecting values you embrace — this has guided me all through my own Earth walk.
When I was in my early 30s, I read Out of My Life and Thought, which is Schweitzer’s memoir of the major events that informed him in his search for an ethical basis for living.
The quote is found on page 156 in Chapter 13 of the 1990 edition of Out of My Life and Time, published by Henry Holt and Company, Inc.
With this assertion, a person can manifest their destiny. It is the basis from which decisions are made and a person manifests in thought, word and deed the realization of it as they may choose to live it.
Today we need to return, each of us and together as a nation, to affirm the values at the core of our actions, words, and dreams. Americans are challenged to find our true compass: what do we affirm as the ethical basis for our government?
We can then turn to the Declaration of Independence to examine its words, the basis on which it is realized: “We hold these truths as self evident that all men are created equal….”
But I would add that its time to embrace all life on earth as living relatives without which humankind cannot live. “I am life that wills to live in the midst of life that wills to live.”
Fundamentally grounded in values, ethics are a moral sense of right and wrong. Ethics are demonstrated through one’s actions in everyday life; when a person cares about someone or something, their conduct conveys that care and respect, inviting the same in return. Ethics direct all members of a community to treat one another with respect for the common good. ~ The Land Ethic essay by Aldo Leopold.
As I learn more about the writing of our Constitution, it is clear to me that at least a few Founders, if not all, adhered to moral and political philosophies from classic literature to John Locke. To read from these foundational documents, is a window into the quality of education and personal pursuit of truth and morality that defined these men. Our Founders dared to establish a nation based on the belief that all people are have equal rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They also believed that societies are capable of governing themselves without the need for a King or despot to control them.
However, to live in such a manner, communities function best when there are ethics and processes by which individuals can strive to become their best self.
In the Declaration of Independence, these words encompass centuries of human understanding about an ethical basis for living your life. John Adams in particular understood Happiness to mean the freedom to pursue a life of learning to understand and practice our moral obligations to each other.
Aldo Leopold, centuries later, would broaden the Declaration to include the ecology of the Earth in his essay, “The Land Ethic.”
A Land Ethic®. expands the definition of “community” to include not only humans, but all of the other parts of the Earth, as well: soils, waters, plants, and animals – “the land”. In a Land Ethic®, the relationships between people and land are intertwined; care for people cannot be separated from care for the land. Thus, a Land Ethic® is a moral code of conduct that stems from these interconnected caring relationship. Aldo Leopold
Today’s post bringing the Declaration of Independence together with The Land Ethic is my way of pausing to reflect on the turmoil created by persons in power who follow no true ethic in governing America in 2025. There is no moral code or ethical basis in hurting citizens or the community of living beings that make our lives possible in the first place.
What is our moral and ethical basis for living in contemporary America?
[Next post will consider how Albert Schweitzer discovered the ethical basis for living.]
Leopold recognized that his dream of a widely accepted and implemented set of values based on caring – for people, for land, and for all the connections between them – would have to “evolve… in the minds of a thinking community.” Aldo Leopold Foundation
The divine right of kings is a lie; monarchy runs against God’s plans. ~ Thomas Paine, Common Sense.
“We have an opportunity to remake America and make it an example of freedom for the world; we should seize it. I shall conclude these remarks, with the following timely and well-intended hints. We ought to reflect, that there are three different ways by which an independancy may hereafter be effected; and that one of those three, will, one day or other, be the fate of America, viz. By the legal voice of the people in Congress; by a military power; or by a mob: It may not always happen that our soldiers are citizens, and the multitude a body of reasonable men; virtue, as I have already remarked, is not hereditary, neither is it perpetual. Should an independancy be brought about by the first of those means, we have every opportunity and every encouragement before us, to form the noblest, purest constitution on the face of the earth. We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand, and a race of men, perhaps as numerous as all Europe contains, are to receive their portion of freedom from the events of a few months. The reflection is awful, and in this point of view, how trifling, how ridiculous, do the little paltry cavilings of a few weak or interested men appear, when weighed against the business of a world.
“Let’s unite on behalf of America and win our independence. ”
~ Common Sense, Thomas Paine.
Susan Feathers 