Earth Day 2013

So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes.  It shall answer the endless inquiry of the intellect, — What is truth? and of the affections, — What is good? by yielding itself passive to the educated Will.  Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions. A correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit.       ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

In the face of all the mayhem of the past month, maybe it is a good time to listen to the Romantics and take a look at life through different glasses.  There is a lot repair in the world, both things natural and things man made.

Since Earth Day 2012 we have had a lot of reminders that the we do not control the planet, the planet controls us.  Hurricane Sandy was the greatest reminder of that this past 12 months, but we did have over 8" of rain in one continuous storm last week in Iowa.  The most in a day for almost a 100 years.  That slow moving storm was enormous, spanning from Canada to Mexico, and as it crawled it's way over the Midwest, leaving flash flooding  in it's wake, I thought of what a fellow traveler had said to me on a recent trip.

He said that our grandchildren or our great grandchildren will say "Did you know they used to fly places?  Everyone could fly--in the air.  The weather was different then, and they used oil to fly planes--can you believe it?  They didn't stop, even after scientists told them what the effects of it were.  Now, of course, it is just too dangerous and unpredictable to do that."  And we will tell stories about when it was possible to use the skies for transportation.  Several hundred flights going through Chicago's O'Hare airport this week were cancelled, which I have no doubt left several thousand people stranded in various places.  All this going on while Boston coped with a bombing at the Boston Marathon and the subsequent man hunt.  We had man-made disasters and man-influenced climate to contend with.  Given our lack of a functional Congress, the influence that corporate money has on their decision making capacity, and the fact that in the face of escalating gun violence the Senate cannot even pass the simplest of regulations on gun ownership nor, in the wake of the Exxon oil spill in Arkansas, can they acknowledge that additional pipelines to carry oil might not be as important as funding alternative sources of energy.  One Congressman was quoted this month as saying he suspected that wind turbines had motors on them so we would all be fooled that they worked--that is the level of ignorance that we are dealing with in our elected officials.  We are bound to keep on living with the consequences--or not, in the case of the victims of gun violence--because we can't seem to manage to overcome the ignorance of the people we have charged with keeping our national infrastructure sound.

So from this Earth Day forward to the next, I am writing a little bit more to Congressmen, talking a little bit more about how I feel about this regardless of if I lose friends over it, and giving a little bit more money to the causes I support.  I am not convinced it will fix the problem, and I don't want to be optimistic about change given the lack of evidence for it,  but doing nothing certainly won't help.