Wrapping up Climate Action Week with "what-ifs?"

Last week was a week designated for taking action regarding the Climate Crisis our planet faces. Of course, only one week out of the year is 51-weeks-short of what we could be doing, and I believe, should be doing.

I started the week by writing to two Orange Village officials about the environmental impact of a supposedly “green” housing development going up not far from our home. One wrote back, the other promises a phone call this week.

In the middle of the week I wrote to our Ohio U.S. Senators regarding climate. Senator Portman hasn’t responded (he probably will), and Senator Brown sent me a very comprehensive email stating his position.

Our main project this week was to eat locally-grown and produced vegetable-based meals. Perhaps you saw the post about that. As the week ended, I think we fulfilled that commitment quite well, and I don’t feel any worse off for it. I confess that it’s a bit of a challenge to think about where we go now food-wise, given our attention to planet-healthier eating options for a whole week. As I indicated in my original post, these are not entirely foreign practices for us, but maybe we’ve at least moved the marker a little closer to a truly sustainable diet.

Posting bogs about these acts is also part of my action. I realize my readership is extremely small, so I don’t expect to have much impact. I am not generally comfortable with participation in mass demonstrations, even though I know they can be very important. So if I write something that perhaps increases the awareness of one or two persons, that’s a least a small contribution.

I end this Climate Action week with a cluster of “what-if” questions that keep rattling around in my mind. I will try to state them as clearly as I can:

“What if we as a human race began to do all the things the scientists tell us we must do to counter the more drastic effects of climate change, and then discovered that the climate would have stabilized even if we had not done them? Are not climate-positive actions good for and beneficial to us without regard to their impact on our planet? Is doing the right thing for the sake of our planet’s future also doing the right thing for us as individuals and as societies?”

Do those questions make sense? Are they worth considering? I plan to keep working on them.

Thanks for reading.

How we eat

During this Climate Action Week, Maxine and I are doing a little something new. We've been inspired to do this by the report a couple of weeks ago regarding food and the climate/environment.

We are making an effort to eat locally-grown and produced food, and we are not eating meat.

When you live in Ohio, eating locally-grown food is much easier in September than it is in February. We belong to a food-buying club/co-op that provides us a bag full of fresh fruits and vegetables each week from May through October. I think being more intentional than we usually are about eating local during this week is helping us see how challenging it can be even when it is relative easy to do it.

At this point, we do not think we will give up all meat permanently. Maybe we should. There are many good reasons to do so. But to the extent that we do eat meat, we want to eat meat that is from animals raised as humanely and sustainably as possible. (I tried to write "slaughtered/harvested humanely," but that's a tough stretch.)

The environmental/climate implications of changing how we eat are profound. The major way we do agriculture, which could indeed "feed the world" if it were done justly, is extremely destructive to the natural environment, and contributes to the increasing rate of global climate change. Clearly, the billions of people now on planet Earth are not about to feed themselves year-round the way our agrarian ancestors did, so becoming more efficient and sustainable in the mass production and distribution of food should be a high priority for us and for the agricultural industry.

Maxine and I do not think these changes in our diet will prove to be permanent changes, although we have, in fact, been moving in these directions for many years. We think these are good moves for us and for the environment.

Nor do not believe what we are doing this week deserves any particular praise. It is more for our own awareness than for anything else. But I share it because it might get someone else to think about their own food habits. Perhaps you'd like to comment with your thoughts on the matter. I'd be grateful.

Have we given up on goodness?

Sometimes I think that when it becomes just too challenging to be "good," we revert to being "bad." That when doing "the right thing" gets really tough, we wallow in doing "the wrong thing."

That's what seems to have happened to our beloved nation, as well as throughout the world.

We–the USA–were, for years, proud to be the land where people could come when they had no other options. We celebrated any steps we took to overcome our legacy of institutional slavery and racism. We believed everyone deserved a fair shot at succeeding financially and socially. We counted on open and peaceful elections, and on our free, even if not always absolutely fair, press. Women felt, I believe, increasing power to determine their own destinies.

Courts could be counted on, at least some of the time, to side with the individual, particularly if their rights were being limited by practices and laws beyond their control. Our nation claimed to want to lead the world into new experiences of freedom and liberty.

We knew that compromise was essential to the survival of democracy, and treated our political adversaries with at least enough respect to give compromise a chance. We held that the minority always deserved to be heard and responded to, and that elected officials represented geographical areas inhabited by people of all kinds, not just their own partisans within that area.

We held that politeness and even grace should be the basis of almost any relationship.

In the last couple of decades or so many of us decided that all of this national "goodness" was too hard to pull off. It was not worth the effort. We began to doubt our own ability to be the nation we liked to say we were. Enough of us who had been trying to be that kind of citizen quit trying, which allowed those who never believed in such ideals anyway to step out of the shadows and into the light. Social media and the internet created breathing room for the worst of our doubts and fears, and continues to pump oxygen into them.

What will it take to restore our determination to be our best ethical selves in the the most just possible USA? What kind of leaders will successfully challenge us to go for "goodness" again?

Not those who shout and chastise and blame, or who refuse any compromise (except, when it serves their purposes, compromise with truth), or who lecture us as if we were ignorant. It will take quiet-spoken, thoughtful, and patient Americans who are willing to listen to all voices as well as to take responsibility for the decisions they finally make to get us to where we need to be, to where I honestly believe most of us truly want to be.

Enough, already!

Please, spare me any more jokes and Facebook memes about Sharpies!

The tendency of both President Trump and the press to blow something way of proportion has been demonstrated once again.

The president could have admitted he was wrong–blaming his "mistake" on bad information received from an underling–and that would of mercifully been the end of it. But he never makes mistakes, as he has told us so often, and he never, ever will admit to a mistake, as we have seen just as often.

The press–particularly organizations like CNN and USA Today–could have chalked it up as another awkward Trump misstatement, and let it go at that, but they continue to beat their drums about it. And the more they talk about it, the more he pushes back about it. Who knows how many words have been written about the presidential Sharpie?

There are, of course, serious issues behind all of this hoop-la.

For starters, President Trump, unlike most more-ordinary human beings, is never wrong. In order to prove he is right when he has been found to be wrong, he is willing to twist any agency of the government he can get his hands on participate in his mistake. That's a problem because it makes him sound like every self-obsessed dictator in human history.

But it's a problem for the press as well. Focusing endless attention on a relatively small matter, the press mostly ignores the major damage being done at the same time by a government bureaucracy accountable to no on but President Trump and his tweeted whims. This distraction from what really matters, from what is really eating away at our national psyche and health, is no doubt well-planned.

Which leads all this being our–the American peoples'– problem. The more we are chew on the silly and the ultimately inconsequential, the less likely it is that we will recognize the deadly poisons which government of, by, and for the people is being fed every day by the Trump administration and a Republican Party that has lost its way.

Thanks for reading. Now, please put your Sharpies away.