Category: Climate Change

Acting Where It Counts

On By Susan FeathersIn Citizen Action, Climate Change, CommunityLeave a comment

If you are like me, I frequently can feel overwhelmed with the constellation of problems Americans face in regard to integrity in government. Most of my calls to Mitch McConnell and other entrenched congressional men and women, have no perceptible impact.

However supporting a candidate to take his place has much more real impact. So that is where I am acting. Amy McGrath is the candidate I am supporting to replace Mitch, and Elizabeth Warren is the Presidential candidate to replace Trump, with a regular donation to each monthly.

*I want a new President with the character required of the office — Republican, Democrat, or Independent — he or she must raise the standards of American leadership.

On the state government level, I’ve decided to support women candidates where they run to change policies that make sense and improve the lot of families across the state. Party is not that important when a woman candidate has clarity of vision and experience to do a great job.

I’ve not been active with the city council. That will change this month as I decide to attend one of two council meetings each month at which I WILL use the term climate change which needs a thorough “airing” in Kentucky.

Personally, there all kinds of ways to support a clean environment and economic justice for families and workers. Equal pay for women is something I support. By charging what I am worth in my nonprofit consulting business I hope that I am applying pressure toward that goal.

Just being more “prickly” and less conciliatory (my natural inclination) can help this one Earthling, Kentuckian, Bowling Green resident, citizen to make an impact.

I am sure that those who read this blog are doing much the same. If you feel inspired, please share with us by making a comment to this post.

The key idea is to discern where one person can apply the most pressure toward the goals they support. Cut everything else out that is not achieving measurable pressure. Less online. More in person. Keep doing it.

 

 

Living in Climate Change: The Art

On By Susan FeathersIn Art and Culture, Art and Friendship, Climate Change, CommunityLeave a comment
Background vector created by freepik – www.freepik.com

We are living in an unprecedented time for the human community. Everyday we receive more dire news. An estimated seventy-five million refugees roam the planet in search of home and hearth. A good percentage are climate refugees: flooding, drought, storms break down food systems, infrastructure, and interrupt energy. It’s not just international refugees: the U.S. now has fire, flood, and infrastructure failure refugees, and our major agricultural breadbaskets are threatened.

How do we go about work, family commitments, and living in our local communities in such a time? Keep our sanity? A sense of hope and prosperous future for our kids and the generations coming along? Grandchildren and great grandchildren?

What of the landscapes that are threatened, the ones we call home, that we love and cherish and from which we receive healing and joy. The flowering trees and shrub, the birds, bees, animals that enrich our experience of being alive on Earth?

Well, we haul water and chop wood: we do what is within our means. I cannot afford a Prius so I drive less. Others create sanctuaries for wildlife in their yards, and we try to recycle given all the barriers. We espouse a love for people and the land and waters and we engage with local and state leaders to manage resources for the long term. If we are religious, we gather at the church, synagogue, or mosque to consider how our faith lines up with the ecological needs and challenges of our time.

We suffer no strangers. We are all connected across the planet with each other. We all want the same things, share common dreams.

It’s so easy to become despondent, afraid, and hopeless. We must put our arms around each other and do what is in our means. In doing so, bounty arises again as we rediscover the power of community and the invigoration of personal clarity in how we makes choices and what we can offer of our talents.

 

The New Abnormal: Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

On By Susan FeathersIn Citizen Action, Citizen Science, Climate Change, Environment, Global Security, Politics, Psychology, Sustainable Food Production, Sustainable SocietyLeave a comment

As the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board
prepared for its first set of Doomsday Clock
discussions this fall, it began referring to the
current world security situation as a “new
abnormal.” This new abnormal is a pernicious
and dangerous departure from the time when
the United States sought a leadership role in
designing and supporting global agreements
that advanced a safer and healthier planet. The
new abnormal describes a moment in which
fact is becoming indistinguishable from fiction,
undermining our very abilities to develop and
apply solutions to the big problems of our time.
The new abnormal risks emboldening autocrats
and lulling citizens around the world into a
dangerous sense of anomie and political paralysis.

The Bulletin serves as an authoritative guide that confronts man-made threats to our existence by advancing actionable ideas for the planet and its people. Read the latest bulletin below.

2019-Clock-Statement-Press-Print-Version

IPBES Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystems

On By Susan FeathersIn Citizen Action, Climate Change, Ecoliteracy, Ecology, Ethics, Global Security, Health and Wellness, Human RightsLeave a comment 
Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES)
Summary PDF for Policy-Makers (and the public)

Biodiversity is a key driver of ecosystem health and resilience. The more variety of genes and groups of genes in a particular habitat (# and kinds of living plants and animals, invertebrates, etc) the greater is its resiliency to impacts such as climate change, and human development and habitation.

A good example can be seen in our coastal ecosystems where an abundance of grasses, landforms, certain trees, sea grasses and coral reefs, promote resiliency to storms, development, etc. Dense human habitation along coastal areas has polluted waters that kill sea grasses, result in erosion of beaches which once provided a barrier to incoming storms and sea level rise.

Read the report and chat with your local city council and with your representations. Send them this short summary report. summary_for_policymakers_ipbes_global_assessment

Unsheltered – Barbara Kingsolver

On By Susan FeathersIn Books, Citizen Science, Climate Change, Culture, Family, Fiction2 Comments

With authors I value, like Barbara Kingsolver, the wait for a new work can often be lengthy. My wait was amply rewarded. In Unsheltered–2018 HarperCollins–she had created parallel narratives that articulate across two centuries in the American experience. Her device is a house and property shared by the characters in different centuries. The 21st Century Wilma and  19th Century Thatcher are adults navigating giant shifts in social paradigms. For Wilma and her family it is the economic collapse of the middle class and the dissolution of the ideals her generation pursued. Climate change knocks ominously at her door. For Thatcher it a pre-Darwin American culture in a panic to hold onto Christian perspectives by rejecting rational observation of how the world works (akin to today’s denial of science).

Wilma’s multigenerational family reflects at once a 1) disenfranchised, racist white America (grandfather); 2) boomer parents (Wilma and Iano); 3) grown kids who pursued differing paths–Harvard financial education (Zeke), and post-apocalyptic youth (Tig). Add Baby Dusty, Wilma’s grandson whom she is mothering after the death of Zeke’s wife,  and you have four generations, each navigating their own realities. The dialogue along the way explores the contemporary ocean of conflicting values and ideas of today’s American society with our economic, social, and environmental challenges.

Unsheltered is a nuanced conversation between Kingsolver, her characters, and the reader that is slow at times but never boring and long enough to examine previous and contemporary times for understanding the confabulations of collective memory–an existential wail of ‘Who are we?’

Twenty-something Tig exclaims to her mother, “The guys in charge of everything right now are so old. They really are, Mom. Older than you. They figured out the meaning of life in, I guess, the nineteen fifties and sixties. When it looked like there would always be plenty of everything. And they’re still applying that to now. It’s just so ridiculous.”

For individuals like me, awash in Trump-a-Con,  Unsheltered is a beacon. Kinsolver’s Afterward explains her own journey to understand “the times”, explaining to readers how she wrote a novel about real historical figures and set the novel in South Jersey in a small town, Vineland. Along the way, she traveled many miles, including London where walked in the footsteps of Charles Darwin.

This book is a needed contribution to understanding our time as one when the “world as we know it” appears to be ending. It is ultimately a great story that takes us into the author’s creative mind. I am so grateful to Kingsolver!

Replenishing the Earth – Wangari Maathai

On By Susan FeathersIn Citizen Action, Climate Change, Community, Culture, Democracy, Ecoliteracy, Ecology, Education, Environment, Ethics, Health and Wellness, Human Rights, Memoir, Politics, Spiritual, WomenLeave a comment
Winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2004

Wangari Maathai grew up in her homeland in Kenya, living close to the earth and learning traditional Kikuyu values and practices. Her memoir, Unbound, describes her daily activities as a child, her mother’s teachings, and how her people regarded the streams and forests in a land where the balance of nature is delicate, not to be abused without serious consequences for its inhabitants.

In Replenishing the Earth: Spiritual Values for Healing Ourselves and the World, Maathai’s wisdom is distilled onto each page, every sentence the next drop in the flow. Wangari describes herself as working practically to solve problems she learned about in discussions with communities and among women’s groups. Their need for clean water, and for access to earn a living, were her daily concerns. Eventually, Wangari and the women she served established the Greenbelt Movement that planted over 30 million trees in Kenya.

In Replenishing, Wangari’s concerns about the destruction of the environment in Kenya are examined in light of the world’s sacred traditions. Always a practical perspective, her observations and reflections give readers much to consider often through humor. For example she writes that God in his wisdom created Adam on Friday. If he’d created him on Monday he’d have perished for lack of food!

Wangari Maathai’s clarity of thought is invaluable in this age where massive destruction of oceans, rivers, wildlands, and forests have imperiled life the world over. She and the women of Kenya remind us of the earth-shaking power of people to replenish the earth, if we choose to do so.

Listen to an interview with Wangari Maathai on OnBeing.org.

 

 

A Gathering of Birds

On By Susan FeathersIn Birds, Citizen Science, Climate Change, Ecoliteracy, Ecology, Environment, Sustainable Society, Ecoliteracy1 Comment
From John J. Audubon’s Birds of America

Dad loved to birdwatch. He was an armchair ornithologist observing from his cozy chair near a picture window in his condo in Florida.

He kept binoculars and a bird guide on a stack of crossword dictionaries near his post as well as tobacco for his pipe.

Regular as a clock, I could keep time by the sound of that first pipe being lit, the front door opened if warm, and bright warbles and shrills from a cardinal pair on his feeders, or the chitter chatter of chickadees.

Because Dad kept the feeders and his vigil for more than two decades in the same location, his observation post would have been very useful had he taken the time to record his observations. But alas, he did not.

Scientists and conservationists missed an important record of changes over time from a citizen scientist. Well, Dad simply watched for the esthetics not the science. But my generation and those coming behind me are critical participants in helping ornithologists track bird movements all over the world – for the first time.

Today is the Big Day 2018  See video below. Then go to the link and establish an account. Download the mobile app on Google Play or Apple Store. Start recording!

LITERATURE CONNECTION

Read from John J. Audubon’s Birds of America printed in 1834 and presented online: you can explore and read by species and you can download a high quality print image of many of Audubon’s matchless paintings.

GLOBAL BIG DAY VIDEO

Healers of the Land

On By Susan FeathersIn Citizen Science, Climate Change, Community, Culture, Democracy, Ecoliteracy, Ecology, Education1 Comment

One of the best activities of my mature life has been an association with the Aldo Leopold Foundation and the Land Ethic Leaders. In 2012 I traveled to Baraboo, Wisconsin to attend a training to become a Land Ethic Leader in my community.

Leopold’s now famous essay on The Land Ethic is excellent guidance for our time.

The Land Ethic_A Sand County Almanac

I’ve continued to learn from leaders and staff at the Foundation but mostly from my fellow Land Ethic Leaders. John Matel is one who is blogging about the restoration of the Long Leaf Pine Ecosystem on his land. He is doing the careful, long term work of bringing fire back to the land to awaken long dormant seeds for the sedges and grasses on the land, grooming the understory and the pines themselves.

Read his latest blog and explore others to appreciate that there is a man, and many others like him, who are working on the long term solutions to our environmental crises. For example, read about the Panhandle Watershed Alliance and the Bream Fisherman’s Association led by an intrepid water ecologist and friend, Barbara Albrecht in Pensacola, Florida.

So, take heart that there are these menders and planters, stewards of land and the human spirit OUT THERE working against the tide of destruction.

On By Susan FeathersIn Citizen Action, Climate Change, Democracy, Environment, EthicsLeave a comment

This video of an interview with Rebecca Solnit, columnist with Harper’s Magazine, prolific author on climate change, environmental issues, and other culturally relevant issues, is a clear point for those of us who feel disoriented by the sweeping changes being made in D.C.

https://hot.dvlabs.com/democracynow/360/dn2017-0328.mp4?start=2758.0

From this interview on Democracy Now on March 28, 2017, this excerpt is most important for those of us who are engaged in resisting the dismantling of hard won environmental protections and action on climate change. I recommend listening to the whole interview at the link above. Solnit has a comprehensive perspective on “where we are” and what is the work now.

What concerns me, after 30 years of activism, is that a lot of people will think, “Well, we did something today, and we didn’t see results tomorrow.” So one of the things I’ve been writing about for The Guardian and elsewhere is just trying to remind people that this is a long process, that we may be in, you know, the early stages of really redefining what democracy is going to mean in this nation, reforming the systems that were already moribund and stagnant before—you know, Trump is a consequence of a dysfunctional system, not a cause of it. So we have enormous transformative work to do. And people are actually doing it. If we keep at it, if we’re smart, if we’re skillful, if we’re more passionate about solidarity than the kind of perfectionism of nitpicking small differences, I think that extraordinary things could happen, not that they’re guaranteed. It depends on what we do. But it’s an exciting and even exhilarating moment, as well as a heart-rending and terrifying one. And those things can coexist.

Farmers Could Help Reduce Climate Change Impact

On By Susan FeathersIn Climate Change, Community, Ecoliteracy, EcologyLeave a comment

In Threshold, Dr. Carla Connors takes a 2-yr sabbatical from her job as a climate scientist to learn from ethnologists at the Mission Garden in Tucson who are growing heirloom seeds to test for viability in new climate conditions, while demonstrating many previous cultures’ farming practices in their Timeline Garden.

Carla investigates the potential of plants to sequester carbon from the atmosphere and deposit it into the soil. While this is a normal activity of some kinds of microbes in the plants we call legumes (barley, soy, clover), she wants to know if the ways farmers planted, grew, and harvested crops actually may be important clues to how farmers might help stem global warming.

carbon-farming-heroIts called CARBON FARMING. See this article from Modern Farmer, “Carbon Farming: Hope for a Hot Planet” by Brian Barth, March 25 2016.

Scientists now believe carbon framing could become an important and beneficial tool in fighting the rise of carbon dioxide in the air and could potentially reverse it while producing healthier food and enriching top soil.