The chart below shows the relative humidity and temperature and how they interplay to create lethal conditions such as heat stroke and death. See the second chart below which is in Celsius for recommendations to protect yourself.
National Weather Service health guidelines for extreme heat: https://www.weather.gov/safety/heat
Below is a similar chart in Celsius temperature readings. Scroll to the second page. SEE RECOMMENDED ACTIONS LISTED BY WET BULB TEMPERATURE.
Each independent bookstore is an important cog in democracies. Diverse voices, original works as they emerge, community engagement through book clubs and public programs, and a platform for emerging writers are all important aspects of locally owned, independent bookstores. I consider them the seat of what we once knew as town halls where people gathered to discusss our democracy.
Parnassus Books in Nashville was founded by two women, a beloved author, Ann Patchett, and Karen Hayes, a career professional in publishing and business partner, are good friends and savvy business women. Sign up for their weekly review of new titles and enjoy the kitchen/hearth warmth of women who love books. Join a book guild! Attend an author interview.
Birchbark Books in Minneapolis, founded by Louise Erdrich and partners, is a literary vortex for Indigenous writers and artists. Compared to William Faulker, Erdrich has published dozens of books and poetry that have received the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize among others. She promotes emerging writers in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction works. Louise was raised by an Ojibwe mother and German father who nutured her writing with stories from these streams of cultural influence. I live by the release of each new work by Louise. She just announced the latest novel: The Mighty Red.
The Lynx, a bookstore founded by Lauren Groff and her husband in Gainesville, Florida, is purposed to protect diverse voices (banned books in Florida and the nation). They open tomorrow – April 28, 2024. Expect it to be a vulcrum for diverse voices and excellent books in all genres. Lauren’s books have received national recognition and numerous awards. She illustrates the essential role writers play in freedom of thought and deeper examination of the values that underly our personal and political lives. The Vaster Wilds is her most recent novel. I read both print and audio. I recommend you read it in that order. It contains a profound message to Western culture regarding our future on Earth.
What are your favorite independent bookstores? Please comment on this post and give readers a link if you can. Also, tell us what you like about the local independent bookstore and why you think they are important in our culture.
“A reader lives a thousand lives before [s]he dies . . . The [hu]man who never reads lives only one.” ~ George R.R. Martin
Readers of this blog know that nature is a constant theme in my writing, reading and public work. We all have our roots plunged in soil we call home as did Lauren Groff, a magnificent writer who first found her inspiration at the family farm in New Hampshire.
Groff’s recent novels The Vaster Wilds and Matrix. pose profound questions about how religious and cultural practices have led to the depletion of nature’s resilience and how both men and women contribute to it when acting from an anthropocentric view. The journeys of discovery of both female protangonists is personal, imbued with hopes and dreams in the crucible of living their lives in times when women possess little social agency.
Groff is currently writing the third in the “triptych” of stories that carry the thread of inquiry and discovery. Readers are led to consider our present predicament of killing the very thing that gives us life: the living Earth.
Here are two excellent interviews that explore how Lauren Groff came to write each story, all the complex threads of thought, stories and influences that helped her conceive these outstanding novels.
The first interview explores The Vaster Wilds which takes place briefly in Jamestown colony in the “starving time”and mostly in the American wilds in 1609 North America.
The Matrix concerns Marie de France, the first published female poet in France, a poet and deep thinker whose writings are surprisingly free of social and religious strictures on women at a time of low female agency. Many sources contributed to the final story Groff tells. I found this instructive and supportive for writers of fiction.
This lecture from the University of Notre Dame is in my view the best exploration of how Matrix evolved and the exceptional thinking of one of America’s most brilliant writers of our time.
As a writer who shares the theme of nature I am so grateful to Lauren Groff for demonstrating the power of fiction to move us to understand the deep roots of our misunderstanding.
From the great science fiction novelist and futurist, Kim Stanley Robinson, another salient message.
His recent book, The Ministry for the Future, rocked the world of people concerned about climate change. Why? Kim took on the gargantuan task of imagining how our country and the world community finally made the realization it could no longer live at odds with a living planet.
It is not a straight line by any means. But, Kim shows how the world came together to secure the biosphere from the vantage point of a person looking back to the terrible twenties from 2071.
Kim Stanley Robinson on TED TALK
This is our work.
Billions of dollars have spawned so many good things in the clean energy transition – almost on a daily basis – most people miss the daily announcements of billions of dollars invested in business, communities and private citizens…lost in the drone and rancor of political news.
Due to the hard work of the Biden-Harris Administration and partners in many sectors of our society, America is deep into the transition!!
Volts Podcast on Substack is one of the most reliabe reporting sources in media today on the clean energy transition in the U.S. David Roberts, the host, interviews Costa Samaras, Chief Advisor for the White House Office of Science and Technology about where we are now on the clean energy transition.
https://www.volts.wtf/p/getting-ready-for-ira-2
Industrial supply chain, labor and widespread planning are next. Utilities that are ready for electrification is next on the trail to a clean, cheap energy society.
BIDEN AND HARRIS TOOT YOUR HORNS!
Update: Michael Thomas from another podcast, Distilled, on Substack reports on the building out of an EV charging network in the U.S.
Photo of Pensacola Beach by Susan L. Feathers
U.S. Capitol Building photo by Susan Feathers
There is an important misunderstanding among many of us about the nature of this Presidential election. Normally, the debates bring to the voter’s attention the policies of their respective political party which form a Presidential platform of ideas and legislation for voters to consider and then vote.
Instead, the Far Right is proposing a new form of Govenment.
This so-called Republican party openly endorses Putin and Ormand as examples of leadership they admire. The Far Right plans to end democracy and replace it with an autocracy. HELLO?
In any other time, the American public would be appalled and alarmed. But today a large segment of the American voting public has become desensitized to violent rhetoric, racist comments, and threats to change our government. Fear is the undelying force among supporters of the Far Right, which is against many things but not for what most American’s want.
Our public is asleep and/or hoodwinked by manipulative leaders and media.
Our common reality is that we have a clear and present danger in Donald Trump and the so-called Republicans. THEY MUST NOT GET INTO OFFICE
It will take all of us who love democracy and wish our country to continue as it has been for nearly 250 years (under both Democrats and Republicans) to assure Donald Trump and an authoritarian, nationalist political movement will not destroy our Republic.
We will have to show heretofore devotion to democracy as our form of government by voting for a ticket you might not normally endorse.
However, if you look closely, with a non-partisan eye, it might not be too far from your own views and hopes for the future. President Biden’s policies are focused on the best interests of all voters with programs to strengthen the middle class worker. Our economy rebounded from the Pandemic under Biden’s leadership and is top in the world in growth and low inflation. Business is booming and job creation at record levels.
Biden’s administration has made major investments in familes, industry and small business, and in the safety of our population and the world through climate change investments in business, science, and health and wellbeing.
The next five months before the election we must gather together and determine that our country’s democratic way of life will be sustained by electing a leader who has proven to be a guardian of democracy.
Here are some resources to consult:
Justices Sotomayor and Barrett discuss civic engagement, trust in public insitutions, polarization, and community as the locus for civic actions.
Justice Sandra Day O’Connor began the iCivics program when she observed that the American public did not know basic information about the three branches of government and their functions, i.e. how each functions to check power being centered in any one branch. They discuss how the Supreme Court Justices manage discussing and making decisions when there are conflicting perspectives and how in general the Court manages their relationships as friends and colleagues. We can learn much from this discussion at this point in American history.
See the National Constitution Center
A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best. A nationalist, ‘although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge,’ wrote Orwell, tends to be ‘uninterested in what happens in the real world.’ Nationalism is relativist, since the only truth is the resentment we feel when we contemplate others. As the novelist Danilo Kiš put it, nationalism ‘has no universal values, aesthetic or ethical.’ A patriot, by contrast, wants the nation to live up to its ideals, which means asking us to be our best selves. A patriot must be concerned with the real world, which is the only place where his country can be loved and sustained. A patriot has universal values, standards by which he judges his nation, always wishing it well—and wishing that it would do better.”
Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
Dr. Snyder’s book, On Tyranny, is pocket-sized for a reason. It’s meant as a guide and inspiration to discern antidemocratic forms and pundits while taking action to defend our Republic and democracies everywhere.
It infuriates me to listen to news commentators pick apart President Biden’s State of the Union Address as partisan. It was not. Biden’s first call for action addressed the assualt on our freedom and democracy. He shined a light on the Republican Party which seeks to destroy democracy – to weaken the Republic – to install a strong man, nationalist govenment. Biden is sounding an alarm, not promoting himself. Everyone of us should be echoing that charge!
We are a society of many religions, genders, and we all have immigrant origins. This vision emanates from the Founder’s vision for a new kind of government. For nearly 250 years the U.S.A. has been striving to achieve that vision.
We are not a nation of one religion, one dictator who makes decisions for us. To claims that nationalism is easier, I wonder how Republicans might react to their personal freedoms being taken away because one man decides to take it. Women on both sides of the political spectrum felt that when a law of the land for reproductive freedom was dramatically ended, after half a century of their god given right to make decisions about their own body. And the assault continues as the right to contraceptives is being threatened.
There are signs everywhere that nationalistic forces are pressing down on Liberty. We must stay vigilant and everyone who cares about American liberty must show up at the polls to vote, and bring along several people with them.
This morning an article about Joe Biden’s record of climate legislation appeared in Distilled on Substack. Michael Thomas, the author, believes most Americans need to know how much Biden has accomplished on climate legislation to move the nation and the world toward a viable future.
Thomas compares Biden’s record to what we can expect from a T(Rump) presidency. From believing climate change is a “hoax” to promising to raze environmental regulation, Trump plans to disengage from the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), which he did when in office (2017 to 2021), and promises to “drill baby drill” to increase oil and gas production. That is reckless with the futures of millions of young Americans and all the countries in the world affected by rising temperatures and its consequences. No one can buy us out of the climate catastrophe that awaits foolish decision makers and the public.
If you care about your children’s future wellbeing, it is imperative that we keep climate innovation at the pace spurred by investment into companies and communities toward a clean energy future through Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Billions of investment dollars are spurring innovation and contributing to a strong economy–stronger than any other nation in the world. The future of clean energy is being laid down now, but it is in its infancy. Will we let a mad man disrupt that again?
Read or listen to Michael Thomas on Distilled on Substack.
Read on Carbon Brief what is likely to occur if the former president is reelected.
Photo by Susan Feathers: Pensacola Beach
Related: “Last year, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) invested nearly $20 billion in promoting climate-smart systems such as advanced grazing management, manure composting, and soil health practices like cover cropping through the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) working lands programs. One of the issues under negotiation for the new Farm Bill is whether to keep these funds where they are – supporting and expanding climate smart conservation – or move some or all of the remaining funds into commodity programs where they will accelerate farmland consolidation and further disadvantage small to midscale farms. The 2024 Farm Bill must maintain or expand the IRA investment in helping farmers build climate resilience, sequester carbon, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions and not raid conservation to support the outdated “get big or get out” agribusiness paradigm.” ~ VA Association for Biological Farming
Democracies are bustling often raucous spaces. A country founded upon principles of freedom and the law is a marketplace of ideas, of groups grieving for freedom denied or improvements to the quality of life of groups overlooked by legislation. These strivings, using the principles and legal mechanisms for their lawful dispensation to all, in the Constitution of the United States, have resulted in a people generally welloff and generous of heart.
Our generosity extends to countries across the Earth. We have helped protect people who wish to live by a similar creed as seen through the NATO alliance and our strivings to bring peace in the Middle East. We stand by the people of Ukraine as they fight for the freedom the Russian oligarch strives to deny them.
Where we see one man (or woman) act only on his or her behalf in making decisions for all the people under his rule, we understand anew the value of democracies.
Generally speaking, people who speak about themselves more than their citizens, and strike down laws and protections that are beneficial for all citizens to favor only one demographic or religious tradition, are antidemocratic forces.
No leader is perfect as no person. We all make mistakes but we expect of each other that we are striving toward the laws that govern our way of life. We look at the person over time to discern what their true intention may be. Is this leader one who works together with other lawmakers to protect democracy and enact legislations that expands freedoms to the People?
Does a potential leader have a moral compass that guides him or her during very difficult times? Does a candidate tell the truth, admit mistakes, and generally collaborate “across the aisle” in our nation’s deliberative bodies, in Congress and among world leaders similarly devoted to freedoms worldwide?
Isolationism, demogoguery, lying and cheating, and above it all hoodwinking to reach personal power over some of the people–these is not the charater traits we must have in a leader of a free and just people.
Being an American takes work and devotion to protect and grow democracy. A good thing always draws an equal and opposite force. The work of democracy is the refinement and constant reconstituting by assertion and practice the verities of our founding fathers and all the people of America who have been able to maintain its sweet elixir of liberty for 247 years.
Susan Feathers 