Tag: Climate Change

To Govern Ourselves

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.]

Dreaming a New World

Below is the dedication of my first novel, Threshold, in which I give credit to my grandparents for sparking the idea to write a novel of hope and possibilities.

Dedication of the Novel Building Air CastlesDownload

Echoes of Gardens in the Dunes

Leslie Marmon Silko is whispering to us, we people wandering the Earth in 2025. In 2010, I wrote seven book reviews by authors and their novels that are speaking to us at times when people wander the Earth in search of safety, food, good work, and peace. In light of the people without a home after devastating fires in Southern California, I was reminded of this book review. It is one chapter in a small unpublished book titled Seven Stories (S. Feathers, 2010).

gardens-in-the-dunes-book-synopsis1_2Download

Where Climate and Politics Meet

 If the last year has been about a phase change in our planet’s climate, the next year has to be about a phase change in our planet’s politics. ~ Bill McKibben on Substack, August 22, 2023

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are the only candidates who are engaged at the national and state levels to manage climate adaptation and the clean energy transition – both of which lead to reduction of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide that are drivers of heating the atmosphere and thus the oceans.

Joe Biden and his Cabinet of experts formulated the Inflation Reduction Act, a historic commitment to funding business, communities and families to make the transition to a clean energy economy. This is an historic achievement.

Oceans have been a sink for heat in the atmosphere throughout the Earth’s history. The ice sheets at the polar caps also reflect incoming sunlight, another of Earth’s modifying functions. Both of these processes have managed to keep the Earth’s temperature at a temperature that supports life. It had been so for 4.3 million years. Humans have long benefitted from the planet’s incredible renewing forces that have made life so abundant and predictable.

Then came the industrial age and with it the burning of fossil fuels. Hundreds of years of wanton deforestation has also removed another natural carbon dioxide “sink” that once kept the Earth cool. The Earth’s temperature has been rising since the industrialization of farming and later industries that burn coal, gas, and other fuels put too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

We have been made aware of this for a century. (Actually, Alexander Humbolt, in the 1799, warned people that the Earth was heating up from human induced causes.) But, I’ve learned something about humans. We are short term thinkers on the whole. When it shows up at our door, we might act but that is not even a guarantee. The problem with that kind of thinking is that once the heat is in the oceans and the atmosphere, it stays there for centuries.

I watch as so much of our heartland is being destroyed by floods and fires, and hurricanes with massive flooding events. Iconic cities and natural areas are disappearing before our eyes. And with them, our livlihoods and lives.

With the other party denying climate change, heads in the sand, while extolling how brilliant they are, please vote for the team already leading on climate mitigation and solutions for our children and all the children to come.

For two centuries the USA has been the biggest emitter and so we have contributed most to the warming of the atmosphere and oceans. Cry babies, some who hold Congressional offices, cry out that China is the biggest emitter today, ignoring our much longer contributions. We have to become adults!

Its about our generation standing up for future generations. Our Children’s Trust recently put it very succintly.

Vote for Harris and Walz as if your life depends on it, because it does.

The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.

Wendell Berry

Photo by Susan Feathers. Pensacola Beach on Santa Rosa Island, Florida

Kamala Harris: On Climate and the Environment

Living on Earth Podcast featured a program last week reviewing Harris’s record on Climate and the Environment. Marianne Lavelle from Inside Climate News is interviewed by hosts Steve Curwood and Aynsley O’Neill.

I found this illuminating. There is much that Harris has accomplished during her service as Attorney General in California and as Vice President with the Biden Administration.

Check out Inside Climate News, a nonpartisn climate media nonprofit, for the latest on how voters view Kamala Harris’ environmental record on climate related issues.

See Trend with Youth Voters from the Environmental Voter Project Survey:

august-2024-youth-battleground-state-pollDownload

Check out the latest on climate change from NOAA. Use the table below to stay safe during the next week of record high temps. Its all about the humidity.

Return to Nature and Beauty

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.

Riding on this election?

Nothing less than our survival.

Aldo Leopold Shack and Restored Prairie. Photo by Susan Feathers

The rights of individuals as written in the U.S. Constitution and a system of secular governance and freedom of religion are the principles at the heart of the American Republic.

Our European ancestors and writers of the Constitution had all lived under the tyranny of kings and queens and the Church, often in cahoots with an authoritarian government.

The Constitution was written to free individuals from those bonds to determine their own lives within a system of laws and justice. Protestant or Catholic, Jew or Muslim, atheist or agnostic, Calvanist or Puritan, Amish or Mennonite, and so on… each with the freedom to pursue their religious lives. The Bill of Rights freed citizens to determine for themselves how to live their lives. As long as a citizen’s choices did not infringe on another’s, they were free to pursue ideas and courses of action to develop happiness and meaning. Actions, property, social norms were subject to laws that protect individuals’ freedoms.

This is what is unique about American governance: at its core is the belief that all persons are created equal.

At the heart of the MAGA Republican movement is the rejection of this principle. All men are not equal and, America should be a Christian country.

UNDERSTAND THAT THE INTENT OF THE MAGA REPUBLICANS IS TO END THE FORM OF GOVERNANCE ESTABLISHED IN THE CONSTITUTION.

What are the actions promised by the candidate they support:

  1. End all restrictions on oil and gas development;
  2. Slash and Burn the institutions of the Republic and replace them with an authoriarian governing system;
  3. Further suppress women’s reproductive rights including birth control;
  4. Rid the government of environmental and climate change experts, departments and regulations associated with them. We are free to kill ourselves, our families, fellow human, plant and animal lives on planet Earth.
  5. Support authoritarian leaders and governments. Putin and Russia, Kim Jong Un and North Korea; Viktor Orbán and Hungary; Xi Jingping and China. All enemies of democracy.

ARE YOU PAYING ATTENTION? THIS IS NOT A NORMAL ELECTION. THIS IS ABOUT THE LOSS OF OUR DEMOCRACY AND OUR WAY OF LIFE!

Listen to historian Heather Cox Richardson and historian Jeffrey Rosen interviewed by Ken Burns. Richardson published Democracy Awakening and Jeff Rosen, The Pursuit of Happiness this year. They remind us what democracy is and how we always agreed about these principles among our political parties. We debated how those principles should be carried out and protected, generation after generation. This was the American Project. Now, one party intends to destroy these governing principle for an autocracy.

New Orleans Book Festival

A Reading Life

“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.

There is a music interlude to begin. Start of the Interview is 5 min. 23 sec

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.