Author: Susan Feathers

COP26 requires the USA, the biggest emitter of GHG per person in the world, to arrive with real commitments from our nation to do our fair share of actions that will keep humankind’s contributions to heating the Earth below 1.5 degrees centigrade global average. Even then, heating will not be evenly distributed as we see now, with many areas already experiencing extreme heat and humidity. Read IPCC Physical Science Report.

Still we have congressional leaders who act as if this is negotiable. The science tells another story. But, who is listening, truly? Countries who have contributed little to the GHG problem but due to geographical location and political/economic conditions within their nations are feeling it more — they are not only listening but speaking, especially to Americans.

Youth are paying attention and watching their future slip away in the haggling morass of the U.S. Congress, and the vitriol and divisiveness of so much of our national press. Turn it off. Listen to good music, take care of yourself and family and community. Plan for solutions to be very local. Turn to each other, wherever you live, and secure each other’s welfare.

Do all you can as citizens to move our leaders to action and to protect this Republic from the assault on its democratic institutions. Beyond that, you can analyze how you can become more resilient to coming climate challenges. Secure what you can for yourself and your family. And just keep on working with your legislators and social movers on the hope that good will win over evil. And then turn to your loved ones and friends and all whom you can possibly encourage or assist, and celebrate love, friendship, and the blessings of our Creator, however you understand Her.

Enjoy walking, feed the birds, care for trees and plant more in your location, and support all the efforts toward a just and safe world. Reciprocity is the basic and golden principle of life on Earth. Give and receive, back and forth, with joy and firm belief this is the only sure path at anytime, but especially at this moment in time and place. God bless you all!

See an interactive heat map showing Bowling Green as a very hot city compared to other cities in Kentucky.

In 1959 my father, a Lt. Colonel in the USAF, was assigned to Ice Island T-3 in the Baltic Sea. The iceberg base provided a landing zone in the era of nuclear threat.  However, there was a real physical threat to my father lurking in the shadows of the mess hall trailer.

Dad was a bomber pilot aging out of flight—a prospect he abhorred. Flying was his passion.  My mother believed her husband was banished to the “North Pole” by a tyrannical general at Plattsburgh AFB.  

Plattsburgh, New York is located near the Canadian border, a beautiful small town when we were assigned there. I skied at White Face Mountain and ice skated under the moon, ignoring the travails of adults. However, when Dad received his orders, it got my attention. He would be gone for a year, and Mom had just discovered she was pregnant.

Reality set in hard and stark. We women were moved from the three-story brick home on Officer’s Row to a Levittown-style house. Women and kids were ancillary baggage, last to be considered. My sisters and me took care of Mom. I matured early feeling responsible for her and my little sister.

The only communication with Dad was via Hamm radio. Our go-between in the mid-West became a friend. Desperate were our few conversations in the flickering voice transmission and static. Brief exchanges with Dad left me bereft. Mom was having trouble with her pregnancy—she’d given birth to us three girls and as many miscarriages prior to the Pill. At age 38 she was at risk. I worried constantly. I recall a quiet household. Waiting. Life on hold.

Then came the neighbor pounding on our door one Saturday morning, a Time magazine clutched in his hand. He held it up in front of him with one finger pointing to a small box in the corner where a polar bear glared and which read, “Colonel’s Wanted.”

My sisters and I hovered over Mom’s shoulders reading about the attack that happened one night as Dad left the mess hall. A polar bear foraging in a nearby trash receptacle suddenly turned on him. The reporter described Dad’s desperate attempt to flee in heavy gear and deep snow. He was saved from mauling when a pregnant female husky got in the way, and was mauled but held the bear off long enough for men inside to hear the ruckus, get a rifle and shoot the bear.

The husky survived and gave birth the next day despite her wounds, and not long after, Mom gave birth to a 10-pound baby girl, my sister Kathy. Several months later, Dad arrived at our doorstep looking very much like a bear. He’d gained 30 pounds, was white as a grub with dark circles under his beady black eyes and bushy eyebrows. A frightening countenance but nonetheless our cherished father.

He brought a wooden crate with him. The preserved skin of the polar bear– a parting gift to Dad, reminder of his frigid incarceration. It wasn’t until several years later that mom smelled a foul odor in our garage in Merced, California. The original preservation had been poorly executed and, alas, the bear skin never made it to a wall behind Dad’s desk.

Today, I recall that Time magazine photo of a ferocious polar bear and its cryptic message. The nuclear threat never materialized but the threat of human striving is manifest. T-3 is melting in the warming Northern Hemisphere. Polar bears are at risk in rapid ecological change. In the chronicles of a distant time there may yet be a photo of a human face and a final message, “Humans Wanted.”

Born into a military family in 1945 just a month before the end of WWII – the largest conflagration among humans in modern history – I have only known a great nation and people who believe in justice and freedom.

With each decade of my life I have participated in this nation’s great dreams and the struggle to fully realize them. I’ve learned about our collective warts and failings, even despicable acts upon our own people and people abroad, but I’ve never lost my faith in this Republic.

My parents, Millie and Ed Feathers, came from small towns in the South, working families, but strivers. They made sure their children got a college education, heretofore impossible for most working families. They had four daughters and all four of us have Master’s degrees.

Both my grandparents and parents believed in America, voted, read history, and as long as I lived at home, family time always included the discussion of ideas, politics, and social movements. They taught us to engage in our nation’s development. We did and we have remained so in our respective communities.

To be an American is to live up to high ideals of protecting the principles upon which the Republic was founded and working shoulder to shoulder with your neighbors to make this nation work for everyone and to protect fundamentals like the right to vote, and willingness to compromise when competing ideas threaten to tear the fabric of democracy in our hands.

These very basic but fundamental pillars of the Republic are embattled in this very moment. The only fix is for each American of any age to recommit to participate fully as a citizen, and that means protecting the right of vote and it means study, exchange of competing ideas, compromise, and faith that exercising these functions of a democracy will result in a strong nation.

If you want to live in a democracy, if you want America to be a bastion in the world for justice and freedom, then you have to work at it! I am exhausted with all the name calling and pointing to others to blame. Remember the old saying that when you point, three fingers are pointing back at you.

Stand up Americans, take personal responsibility, do your part, and soberly examine your part in the mess we have become. It’s mine and it’s your responsibility to get us back on a good path. This is true now just as it has always been at any point on our collective path to create a great democracy. If we fail, it’s mine and it’s your fault. Not some other person’s, party’s, or President’s fault.

We are in this together. Together we will fall or we will rise.

See this article in Forbes describing a new tool to follow sea level rise by region of the world, from decade to decade. NASA has prepared this new tool to help leaders and communities make plans to mitigate and adapt to rising sea rise as projected by the IPCC.

See the article.