This spring has been a crazy one already. School trips and extracurriculars kept us all on the go, and then there was the Boston Marathon....
Boston is a whole post traumatic blog of its own, so we will just leave it at that. Time moves forward and the scary stuff slowly fades... a little.
But now we have run into a patch of rather rainy weather which is a nice change from the drought of last year. Everything is extremely green and lush. So lush that I have been out in the rain pulling weeds in a futile attempt at keeping ahead of the mid summer jungle. Now it is bordering on so wet that I may have to move my potted plants in out of the rain to prevent them from drowning and the flood reports are sounding the alarm for people in low lying areas.
It's a messed up weather pattern.
Which is probably why I haven't written in a while. I recently had someone tell me that, as much as they like what I write, it depresses them....
What do you say in response to that? "I'm sorry." "Then don't read it." "The truth is depressing" But they are right. What I write about does have a depressing aspect to it. There hasn't been a lot of good news on the farming/environmental front recently.
Imagine what it is like to live inside my head all the time.
It is only my feisty, "anxious to take on the world", children that keep me sane most of the time. I was enthralled the other day while listening to my son enthusiastically recount is discussion with classmates about politics and how he is trying to decide how best to get people to use electric cars that use only clean energy and whether or not he wants to run for Congress someday. I have GOT to see how this turns out!
But, while awaiting for my progeny to inherit this country and planet, I have been haunted by a single number.
350 ppm.
That is the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at which the systems on the planet can be sustained.
What worries me more is the current number.
>400 ppm ....and climbing.
The last time the world had this much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, we weren't here....as in, we didn't exist.
That's not to say that an equilibrium can't or won't be found, but the $64,000 question is, "At what expense?"
This is what I ponder while I walk around pulling weeds, transplanting tomatoes, mulching potatoes, cultivating corn, picking lettuce. This is what I think about as I check the blossoms on the apple trees and realize that there are approximately 1/4 the number of bees there than there had been previously. This is what paralyzes my mind as I watch a large chemical sprayer enter the field next to me and start spraying away with the petroleum based herbicides that will allow my farming neighbor to raise subsidized crops on hundreds of acres of land. This is what crosses my mind as I see news reports of an F5 tornado that completely devastates a town and kills dozens of people. 400 ppm.
What does a person do with this sort of crippling information? We do what we can locally to minimize our carbon footprint, but against the corporate giants that just don't care, it is hard to know where to start. So I write and look for a way to express my concerns in a way that might bring it home to people who otherwise just didn't get the message that we are in trouble here - you, me, our kids, our grandkids. And this isn't really something that we can just put on the back burner and not think of for a while in the hope that it will go away.
And then I look for news articles that point out the positive changes that are ever so slowly starting to take hold. I write a Congressman (or two,... or twenty), sign a few petitions, send some money if I have any, and then I go outside....
and garden in the rain.
