Yesterday’s Robert Hubbell newsletter was a very amplified version of the comments here on my last post (thank you everybody who commented here! No acts strike me as too small). Hundreds of people wrote in about what they’re doing about climate change. It’s worth a look.
Third Act is an activist group that organizes boomers, recognizing that many have resources that can be wielded to make a difference.
About boycotting fossil fuel industry in your investments, this was from The Financial Times yesterday:
Did you know that there are now “climate crisis therapists”? This week’s New Yorker article entitled “What to Do With Climate Emotions” talks about them. And of course, about the dilemma of being alive today and paying attention. The following paragraph is from that article.
“It may be impossible to seriously consider the reality of climate change for longer than ninety seconds without feeling depressed, angry, guilty, grief-stricken, or simply insane. The earth has warmed about 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit since pre-industrial times, and the damage is irreparable.”
From NYTimes, The Trillion Gallon Question
Today, it’s raining. Finn and I walked the shorter loop on account of it. I’ve just baked a chocolate cake and made mint cream cheese icing for a special somebody’s birthday (which is later in the week but since it’s just the two of us we’ll eat cake every night for days!)
We had family over to celebrate early this weekend. I don’t like to post pix of myself but since this reminded me a bit of one of my recent favorite TV shows (The Bear), here I am.
You know it’s bad when the hottest day in the history of tracking temperatures was beaten the very next day.
July 4. Then July 5.
This collage used photos from NYTimes Sunday piece wondering if California dams will hold.Below is a flagrant copyright violation. Does it matter if I do so intentionally and with attribution?
Four of the scariest words in the English language these days: faster than previously thought.
In a conversation today: recycling is promoted as a distraction from the fossil fuel industry.
Somewhere I read that becoming a vegetarian is more consequential than even switching to an electric vehicle.
We don’t invest in fossils fuel companies. A small step, one made without personal sacrifice, but one hopefully making a difference.
In the Northeast we are not under the heat dome that is causing so much suffering in the southern part of the country. But it has been too hot to walk Finn a couple days recently. Better to lay low.
Meanwhile, we have to fight.
How are you staying cool (if it’s hot)? How are you managing the deluge of bad climate news? What, if anything, do you do to minimize your contribution to global warming?
P S on another melancholy note, Lawrence O’Donnell gave a moving and elegiac speech mourning the Supreme Court recently. It’s very much worth a listen (google his name and SCOTUS and it comes right up).
Indulge me. Otherwise where will all these passages live? I randomly opened a writing group notebook and found this prompt response. I may do more of this.
Not that you need to know to appreciate my response, but these words were written about six months after my brother’s hemorrhagic stroke. The novel mentioned is Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam.
Who’s to say why the coagulation goes awry and what shoves the blob skyward to lung or brain? I don’t mean chemistry, but rather destiny.
Flannery O’Connor said anyone with a childhood has enough to write about for a lifetime. Two things: what if you don’t remember is one, the other is had she lived past 39 would the assertion have held?
Next up: a novel written about end times. A white couple in their forties rents a house from a Black couple in their sixties. The initial conflict centers on sympathetic flexibility — to exercise it or not — toward the Black couple. One of the younger characters in defense of helping them out keeps repeating, because they’re so old.
I’m so old. What an unexpected place to land critiquing a novel.
The radiology tech ticks through her questions: surgeries, Jewish genes, forebears with breast cancer. No. No. No. The final No gets an asterisk — none of my forebears having lived long enough. Same regarding hip fractures.
Without looking back (to childhood), what is there to say? My socks are damp. I hear a truck passing on Route 9. For some reason, my ears are ringing. What’s for lunch?
If I wrote an end times novel, the first floor would fill with water and the deer would swim all the way to Worcester to claim higher ground. Wouldn’t we be clever, crafting a boat out of an armoire, diving into the pantry to claim all those cans of beans and a can opener. He did scuba. I can sew. Does anything ensure survival?
The water froze on Saturday. A beautiful skim of ice not welcome or expected in the white ceramic pot outside where it awaits spring annuals.
Beautiful, cheerful, colorful spring annuals. Let the adjectives march off a cliff after I fill my pot. I want the thing instead of its description.
One child gets the bum thyroid, another my soft teeth. Their father imparted a singular disinclination to converse.
Check the bloods! Get the teeth polished! This week I learned that most hip fractures are from falling sideways.
It still knocks me back to hear my doctor ask, “Have you sustained any fractures that you know of?”
Husband and I would paddle out the second story window and collect the neighborhood cats, relieved that at least we wouldn’t have to listen to children screaming at the nearby playground anymore. The school and its surround submerged.
So much of privilege comes down to being able to effectively manage one’s annoyances.
Raucous, repetitious, grating. Adjectives that speak to the inability to control things.
Last week, I said to the Dive Master, “We’ve got a screamer this year. First period.” I blame the teachers.
He hasn’t donned a scuba mask in years and most of my sewing is of decorative items. Make a top why don’t you? Cover the goddamned ripped chair?
Marshaling skills in non-income producing venues is another sign of privilege.
Soon I shall reduce myself, not to a fine, ineluctable syrup, dense with flavor and mystery, but to apology. I am sorry. I am so, so sorry.
Everything is happening at once. The reefs dying off, the burning of the West, forests under stress. And here we are twiddling our thumbs as if we had all the time in the world.
I am sorry. I am so, so sorry.
Destructive, greedy, corrupt or willfully blind. Those adjectives feel necessarily to name what gets in the way.
Not to be too reductive. But it’s white men, specifically Republicans.
Chomsky called the GOP ‘the most destructive organization on the planet.’
Noun — GOP. Adjective — destructive. We get tired, all of us, tracking the damage. The clot gathering density, the vein about to collapse and send blood northward, glacial ice one-fourth the size of Rhode Island letting loose.
I got cold. Put on a sweater. My feet feel dry now. Sometimes that’s all we have — the noticing of damp, the preference for non-damp, and the gratitude for dry socks.
I dreamt I was on a cooking show. I couldn’t find a spoon or a bowl or eggs and I had to make Yorkshire Pudding. Time kept sliding past. I had nothing to show. I can’t get an F, I thought. I’ll make a sandwich!
One of THoSe dreams.
Maybe the dream was informed by a stretch of intense editing. I deleted two more chapters. I’m back to tracking word count. Recently, sliced out nearly 1,000 words.
Time keeps sliding past.
Some pretty snowflakes are falling right now, but yesterday was rain, rain, rain. There’s been a lot of rain falling this “winter.”
I found out that The Sketchbook Project’s library is closing its doors in Brooklyn. There’s a narrow window in which one could sign in, pay a fee, and request the return of your booklet. I submitted two, years back.
I couldn’t even sign in. Had the right everything. I know it. When I can’t sign in somewhere I usually don’t have that confidence.
I may try again but if I can’t get in, eh. I gave them up once, it shouldn’t be that hard to let the status quo reassert itself.
Paris Collage Club effort that used a Sketchbook Project page as a layer
When I tried to type “drought” in the title just now, it auto-corrected to “fright.” Exactly!
We are finally getting some rain, but it’s been bad, really bad — super hot and dry. Even that hardiest of perennials, the hosta, has struggled. I’ve dug up four shrubs and will likely have to dig up two more. Ferns have crisped and collapsed. Astilbe try valiantly, but barely make it despite daily watering. I’ve even been watering well-established trees for fear of losing them (NB: our reservoir, the Quabbin, has high levels right now).
It’s been a close-to-home wake up call for an area relatively immune to the drastic effects of climate change. Hurricanes are rare here. Tornados happen now again, but usually out by Worcester or Springfield. We don’t get flooding or wildfires and until now, drought was something that happened out West.
A dogwood that I planted at the elementary school years back doesn’t look like it’s gonna make it
A “flash drought” is nothing like the nearly decade-long drought in California, say, but it brings immediate consequences.
I read that a temperature change of 1.5 degrees would be catastrophic for forests in the Northeast.
This is not autumnal turning
No wonder some nights I feel the acid bloom of fear just as I’m dropping off to sleep.
