Good News, Bad News

As any of you who have read along for a while here know, I have been obsessed with global warming since Katrina last year. I had been hearing about the feedback effect for some time but I have just read first in-depth report.

The good news is that it has been snowing here since about 11AM. It is still coming down and it is after 5: PM now. It is a perfect powder snow that brushes off the windshield without much effort. My elderly dog and I went out to just revel in the delight of it. She is so skinny now that her little plaid winter coat slips & slides around her bony body but it does offer a bit of warmth, which she needed tonight.

The bad news, is that the Ayles Ice Shelf, 41 square miles across, has broken off into the ocean from Canada. Scientists are now watching the cumulative effects of a rapidly escalating feedback between events that could easily push us past the point where traditional carbon sinks, as oceans, ice and forests, are adequate to absorb emissions. And worse, writes Steve Conner, in The London Independent, December 29, 2006 (see: http://tinyurl.com/y78xh3). These traditional bulwarks that have held for 55 million years, may themselves become sources of emissions as they are pushed past a place of no return.

Drowning Polar Bears, etc

I have been writing about the drowning Polar Bears here for many months and thinking about them too.... Now the Bush administration wants to list them as threatened. Too little too late.

Juliet Eilperin, writing in the Washington Post yesterday http://tinyurl.com/ycf34y referenced the National Center for Atmospheric Research projection that summer sea ice, upon which they depend, could disappear by 2040.

Meanwhile, they are drowning, swimming as much as 80 miles out to sea looking desperately for seals to feed themselves and their young. The images in my mind of these heroic, ancient, gorgeous creatures swimming 80 miles in a state of starvation to feed themsleves and their young, only to drown, contrasts unbearably with the global demand for new housing and big cars that create carbon emissions. There are instances of them resorting to cannibalism and wandering into human settlements: desperately, desperately famished, weak with hunger.

In the Tufts Health Newsletter that came today, readers are encouraged to eat salmon and sardines- tho tempered with judicious awareness of how we have poisoned the seas and the fisheries and hence, ourselves. What wasn't even mentioned was how farmed salmon depends on caught wild species, further weakening and decimating the worlds fisheries.

Also today, CNN reported that we can eat cloned animals- tho many will die for each edible "product." So other animals are now a factory matter indeed and the casualties, living beings, in this process are as incidental as bycatch in the fisheries or the collateral damages spoken of in war when civilians are murdered. So who are the civilians now? Who are we at war with? I say everything living, including ourselves. In the guise of life we are pusueing death more avidly than the famished Polar Bears are pursueing ever-retreating seals.

This is an unspeakable world we have created. And I confess, every time I get in my car or use my computer, I am well aware of my personal contribution.

Spring for Christmas

It is a beautiful spring day on Vinalhaven Island, Maine. The sun shines brightly on the bright green grass. Shortly, I will leave for church to sing in the choir without the need of a jacket or gloves. The sound of the seagulls isn’t quite the same as song birds.

But soon, I might enjoy the smell of fresh cut grass. So what is wrong with this picture? It is going to be Christmas eve in a few hours today and it doesn’t look a bit like we'll have a white Christmas up here in the north land.

The good parts of global warming include that I can still do weeding in my garden- useful, if like me, you were too busy in the fall to finish cleaning up. My elderly dog is less reluctant than usual in the winter to go outside and brave the elements. She hasn’t come back once, shaking like a leaf, even in her plaid winter overcoat. She doesn’t even need her plaid winter coat.

The bad parts include that the entire fishing culture here on the island is threatened by the same carbon dioxide emissions that cause unnaturally green grass in December. Global warming is acidifying the oceans at alarming rates, promising more lost corals and disrupted food chains. Along with everything else threatening the fisheries, add that.

Of course energy giants are stumbling over each other, salivating over opening opportunities in once pristine and still fragile places such as the Barents Sea, Norway but Papua new Guinea and the Sunderbans of India are drowning, people, fisheries and tigers with them. I think about these things and the starving polar bears as I wander through my heather garden, which is flourishing but the wrong color.

Heathers are the most sensitive plants to temperature changes, shifting from greens to oranges in hours as the temperatures descend. I first planted them here for spring mud season, when nothing else looks cheery. Now, we seem to have a mud season that may last seven months. And the heathers are as vivid green as the confused grass.

Speaking to someone yesterday of the still stubborn naysayers about global warming and Al Gore’s movie, I exclaimed in exasperation, “soon, they can all swim to Gore and tell him whether they still think he is wrong.” By then, perhaps my elderly dog will be long gone but I won’t be and neither shall you.

Holiday warmth: Waning and Waxing

We are almost halfway thru the Hannukah season, four days from the winter solstice, a week from Christmas Eve and two weeks from the New Year. Each of those celebrations is about faith in a greater promise than any of us individually can offer. I want to wish everyone the most glorious mid-winter season and fulfilling year ahead. May it be one of greater peace, reconciliation and hope for all beings on this earth. Thank you all for being part of an expanding circle to see that vision realized worldwide.

I have posted less often than usual lately becuase my remaining elderly dog has been struggling with her health lately. Therefore, I too have been struggling with my own health as exhaustion sets in. The vet tells me her body will give out before her mind. So she paces on the floor below me when she needs to go out, when she needs help getting on the couch, when she wants me to let the cat in and when she wants me to roll the ball for her. She can no longer catch it often when I throw it. But rolling will do.

She may pace at regular intervals in any given night, including at 1AM, 3AM, 5AM and 6AM, often interrupting my sleep. If I don't wake and check, there may be a mess to clean up and even then, I am regularly too late for the event. She is contrite when that happens and shamed. But she has very little nerve control in her hind end. So I just clean it up, put her outside for a bit and go back upstairs to try to get more sleep.

My other elderly dog, who passed away in June, was clearly at the point where she had had enough. She hung around to be with me but it was more and more of an effort of generosity on both our parts. When she finally went in her sleep, it was a blessing for her. This one was never an easy dog. As a young dog, she was full of endless energy and occasional aggression. As a doberman, that earned her a bad reputation. As sweet and wise as she is now, she is well-aware of the difficulties she cannot control anymore. But after her remorse and sorrow is over, she still wants to play or go out for a walk, hobbled as she is, lame, athritic and weak.

In the old days, we the death of the older year, in the form of the male (or in some cases female) sacrifice, was the presumed source of generation of the young year (youth, spring) ahead. This year of world-shattering changes in the air, may I see the passing of my old dog as a sign that we have all done the best we can, and new things are coming with all the promise and risk that implies. And may that transition come in her time and not mine.

Tired

I did a "Virtual Concert" today at Talkshoe.com about putting the puzzle together. The puzzle is how Ecological Art can address global warming. I see many pieces and altho I am optimistic, I am tired. I could hear that exhaustion in my voice when I listened to the recording. Global warming is very, very tiring to deal with because there is so much inertia in the face of crisis.

Meanwhile, the grass here is more yellow. The snow has lingered and I shiver in my warm coat. This is good.

Snow

White at last covers the green grass that insulted the season of the year until today.

It began snowing mid-morning, while the carpenter fixed a broken headboard. By the time he sallied forth, check in hand, it was sticking.

Tonight, walking my elderly dog in the snow, our path was lit by a huge orange ball of a moon reflecting off the frozen snow. She was the most cheerful I've seen her all week, until she got stuck, splayed out on the ice in the driveway. I helped her up and we made it back inside where it was warm again. Then, after lifting her onto the couch, I went out again to rescue the summer potted geraniums, fooolishly blooming thier heads off under a drift.

All's well in the world as long as Maine can still have snow.