It Is Never All Right . . .

When I graduated from college, I married, and moved far away from where I was raised. It was then that my life became my own. My husband and I furnished our first apartment with a Magnavox hi-fi and built a bookcase from bricks scavenged from the city. The bricks supported long planks to hold our growing collection of nonfiction, social activism, theology/philosophy, and poetry.

We wrote to our parents and described with excitement our new home. Our parents wrote back that we should lead a more conventional lifestyle. However, we had no intention of doing so!

We discovered more freedom by being able to travel to new places. From our home on the East Coast, we explored from Maine to Cape Hatteras in North Carolina. My world expanded with this new sense of geography. It was an exhilarating time.

Four years later, we moved back to the Midwest and traded the lovely Appalachians for the Rocky Mountains. Every summer, we packed the car with camping gear and headed west and north into Canada with our two daughters. When they left for college, we camped across the South and Southwest.

Eventually, my husband and I crossed the Atlantic and backpacked across the British Isles and Europe. And then further - to Asia, Africa, and South America. Travel became a lens to learn about people, whose lives differed from mine. I came to believe each of us need to find commonality with others - whose lives differ from our own.

 My husband and I passed our passion for travel onto our children and grandchildren. Along with learning good-sense wisdom about staying safe. Don’t hike mountain trails alone. Don’t challenge wildlife bigger than you. Carry your passport close to your body. Travel light. Don’t take anything with you that you can’t afford to lose. Learn a few basic words such as please and thank you. Be curious – and respectful. Remember, people from other cultures will be just as curious about you.

Then this winter, the massacre in Paris happened. Paris – one of the safest cities in the world. The terrorists’ target was Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical weekly magazine. Along with so many other people, I was stunned. The world in which I once roamed so freely now held potential dangers I never before imagined.

As different cultures collide, fear of anyone different from oneself festers and sometimes explodes into violence. The challenge that confronts us lies in our present world of instant connection. Via the touch of our fingers on a computer keyboard, we see and hear in ways that were never before possible.

It took decades for my world to expand gradually. I was always literally on another’s territory as a guest. When I returned home, I had ample time to reflect on my experiences, allowing them to transform me.

Every journey added one more piece for me to ponder about both the commonness of cultures and the vast differences in the way people viewed the world and how I saw my own place in an increasingly heterogeneous society.

The world is not the same world I stepped into so many decades ago!

I continue to believe in a fundamental principle. No matter how you feel about the freedom to express views that are counter to your own, raining death upon people never solves anything. These people in Paris, whose lives were cut short, loved their families and friends. And their friends and families loved them in return.

During the week following the tragic event in Paris and after much scrutiny by news analysts and multiple comments by “common folks on the street,” I wrote the following piece of poetry:

             Housebound

an ailing back has me housebound

computer, email, MPR music, connections

to a world temporarily beyond reach

today’s radio play-list grates on my nerves

I ask myself, where do they get some of this music

that wanders in search of a melody

yesterday they played the Sixth Brandenburg

I could live on Bach’s music as a steady diet

throw in a Mozart or two and then more Bach

outside the sky is grey – again

I’ve have lost track of how many days

this winter the sun has hidden itself away

I want tulips, fat red blooms

and daffodil-sunshine to feed my soul

new leaves creating a light-green haze on trees

I want to breath fresh air

not the polluted variety that hangs low

over my city these past months

more important, I want back a trustworthy world

not this one in which terrorists hang low as smog

hooded vultures waiting to descend on innocents

places I’ve traveled no longer feel as safe

Paris, London, Rome, and Madrid

to name a few, airport security on high alert

why can’t we learn to live in peace

without guns and blood-lust, fueling sad

distortions of religions whose true messages are peace

meanwhile I am housebound

filled with yearning for life experiences ahead

for everyone full of laughter, love, and promise

       do I ask for too much?

Have you noticed the elephant in the Living Room? It is Heading Your Way. (Part II)

By having a reverence for life,

we enter into a spiritual relation with the world.

                                            ―  Albert Schweitzer

The rules of scientific investigation always require us,

when we enter the domains of conjecture,

 to adopt that hypothesis by which the greatest number of

 known facts and phenomena may be reconciled.

                                                       ―  Matthew Fontaine Maury 

Do not ignore tornado alerts.
When the sirens sound, head for safety.
Don't expect a tornado will go out of its way
to spare you.

The big question is not whether climate change is a real phenomenon or not. It is why do Americans tip-toe around the elephant in the living room? Why is it that in a country that prides itself on its educational system, are there more climate change deniers here than in many others countries?

In June 2014, Time magazine ran an article by Michael Grunwald discussing a global survey Time had done about attitudes toward energy and conservation. On almost every question asked, people in this country were least likely to believe scientific evidence regarding climate change or that anything should be done about it.

The survey reflected how beliefs (or denial) regarding climate change consequences were reflected in people’s behaviors. People in Germany, South Korea, Turkey, Brazil, and India were more likely than Americans to “turn off the lights when leaving a room or power down their computers at night and by far the least likely to walk or take public transit.” More people here were against bike lanes and carbon taxes/carbon limits and were less concerned about “polluted air, higher sea levels and almost every other problem the pollsters asked except higher gas prices.”

Two recently released major reports on climate change support the premise that we are big trouble. Meta-analysis of weather patterns and a variety of other criteria show how much trouble we are in, if nothing is done to address the issues. Grunwald reiterates this position, stating if action depends on Americans “getting outraged . . . we are in trouble.” And our children and our grandchildren are even more so 

A cursory search on the internet describes how huge amounts of money have been devoted to fostering the idea that climate change is a myth. Much of this money comes from oil and coal companies or a tangled network of organizations that funnel funds toward fostering the idea that the scientific evidence is dead wrong. And a considerable amount of those funds have been given to GOP legislators.

The reaction of many people is to shrug their shoulders, before moving to other topics. While weather extremes have been battering the county. One would think the immediacy of damage to one’s property would make it personal – from the flooding of Manhattan due to Superstorm Sandy, rising sea levels for Virginians with homes on the coast, high tide surges swamping streets in Miami Beach, extensive drought in western states to a stuck polar vortex over the center of the country this winter causing so much harsh weather. Doesn’t anyone notice and ask why is this happening?

Part of the difficulty with the data regarding climate change lies in confusing weather and long-term climate patterns. And in misunderstandings about how science works. There are few facts in science. But that not mean that we continue to learn things about the Earth and  its inhabitants. Good science does not begin with theories. It begins with collection of data, analysis of the data, and then looking for patterns that lead to hypothesis. Only the accumulation of data moves us from isolated phenomena to hypotheses and sometimes to theory.

We know the Earth is round, not flat, as earlier people believed and as later astronomers concluded from accumulated viewing the skies with ever-sophisticated telescopes. No danger of falling or sailing off the edge! Beautiful photos of Earth from space have given us precious images of this breath-taking blue marble seeming to float in the void.

We understand that gravity (or some such force) causes things to fall downward, not upward. Drop something and take note when it lands on your foot. Likewise, we have learned how photosynthesis is the powerhouse behind green growing things. It feeds us, gives us gardens for our pleasure (and a continuous crop of weeds to be removed), and forests covering huge areas.

Just as careful research on the conception of human life has taken us beyond earlier beliefs of how life is created.  Babies result from sperm penetrating an egg, not from some mysterious process. Nor as my mother-in-law said, babies come off the sheets.

Yes, climate change is not a fact – such as the roundness of the Earth, the obvious action of gravity, occurrence of green plants, or understanding where babies come from. But the data supporting the reality of climate change is overwhelming.

Hence, the question: why is climate change in this country the elephant in the living room. From my own experience, I know that it is not possible to ignore an elephant’s presence on the dirt road in front of you! Nor is an elephant likely to remain peacefully in anyone’s living room.

Is avoidance of climate change a consequence of the enormity of the problem? An elephant on the road  - who thinks it is her road – requires putting your camera down and backing up quickly. Are the effects of climate change so great that it is hard to get one’s head around the idea or a sense of not having any options? Do many people feel an overwhelming sense of helplessness and hope that humming a little tune is the best they can do, like Winnie the Pooh,?

Or is it that people observe short-sighted big businesses being in control and feel they have no voice in these company strategies and their generation of products for profits? Is people’s frustration and anger at their government’s paralysis so great that some of them join the Tea Party, which demands big government get out of people’s lives and turn control over to local and state government – a Tea Party ironically funded money-wise by the same corporations that preach climate change denial.

Is it the belief that what one individual can do is not enough to matter –even as those same people become better at recycling?  Or are some people so short-sighted that they figure they will “be long gone” before any predicted dire effects are manifest?

No facts here – just questions as to why the general public is not been galvanized to address human causes of the destruction of life as we know it.

Tornadoes and their paths of destruction are visual images for both those who experience a tornado and those of us who view the results either personally or through news media. However, most people have never encountered an elephant in the wild. They think that humans are smarter (or more powerful) than animals and they don’t recognize elephants have their own ideas about territories. - until the massive animal comes charging toward them. 

An elephant heading straight at you indeed is a sight to behold!

The Elephant in the Living Room: What Ever Have We Done (Part I)

Life is only a flicker of melted ice.

                                             ― Dejan Stojanovic 

                              from The Sun Watches the Sun

I think the worse thing you can do about a situation

is nothing.

                             ― Ice Cube

Two years ago, climate change became a reality for me. After spending time in Vladivostok, Siberia in late April, we headed north by ship to the Amchitka Peninsula. I was eager to see its fabled wild beauty.

It was not long before we began to encounter floating sheets of ice.

The ice began nudging the ship’s sides. The ship slowed, finally crawling along at approximately one knot. Passengers ran to their rooms for cameras, iPads, and cell phones. They lined the outside decks, eager to see this unexpected sight. Until as far as the eye could see, we became surrounded by floating ice.

We were out of range of GPS in this remote area, which meant the captain had to sail as sailors have for centuries. Lacking satellite images, he navigated from his experience, his eyes, and compass readings – and had no way to gauge how far the ice stretched ahead of us.

The ice floes began piling up on top of each other. I will never forget the sight of incredible beauty of the masses of ice - and the sounds of ice scraping and pressing against the ship. After hours of trying to find a way through the ice floes, the captain, out of fear for the ship’s safety, made the difficult decision to return to Japan - and seek an alternative route across the northern Pacific Ocean.

Later, we learned this ice pack had been pushed southward by fifty-mile-an-hour winds after the melting pieces broke off from the frozen sea of the high Arctic. Despite its beauty and the thrill of an unexpected adventure, it was also a dire warning. Some of the ice floes carried doomed seals, who lived only in the very far north. Their likely demise was a metaphor of the possible plight of humans cast into a bewildering and altered world.

Creative thinking has taken us to places beyond our imagination. We would still be writing letters in longhand (or scratching out messages on rock walls) and be tethered to the wall by land-line phones. No airplanes to take us from North American to Japan and beyond. Ships would not be guided by a host of technological devices and we still would be sailing the seas by the seat of our pants.

We need a massive transformation in thinking about climate change – which begins with elephants in the living room. Creative thinking can re-imagine how we produce energy, grow food, and travel from place to place in ways that counter the warming of the seas.

After all, as Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says in its 2014 Fifth Assessment Report: Nobody on this planet is going to be untouched by the impacts of climate change.

Not even the heads of current energy-producing companies.