climate crisis – Page 2

Dear Tanna,

I wonder where and how you live, so far removed from my own reality. Are there crowds around you? Or has the human population declined? Do you live isolated from communities? Or do you live in a town? Or a city? Is there any countryside left?

We live on a small farm, with a picturesque pond in our front yard. A few years ago, our daughter brought half a dozen ducks and they provided passing entertainment through the years. Ducks can be hilarious when you watch them.

But they provided moments of introspection as well. Sometimes a duck will successfully hatch a clutch of eggs and it becomes imperative to herd them into the hen house for their own protection. This world is a big bad place for a baby duck—cats, coyotes, turtles, skunks, opossums, and even duck siblings make survival a real challenge. Hazards await even in a hen house.

Baby ducks are some of the cutest things! But messy. With a capital M. And they grow fast. After incubation, when that first chip appears on the egg shell, you wait and watch with bated breath until the little duck fully emerges. I am astounded at how compactly they curl into that little egg.

But the ducklings don’t always make it to adulthood. One morning I arrived in the hen house to release the fowl for some sunshine in the fenced yard, and found one little duck dead in the corner, smothered by cuddling ducklings during the night. I lifted that limp little body. Recently vibrant, it had peeped to its mother duck, and ran to keep up with her. And now—nothing. The body was the same perfect little miracle, but the spark of life was gone.

Life truly is a mystery. You could have all the right ingredients, a perfect physical specimen, but without that spark, there is nothing. When I held my own newborn daughter, I felt reverence for the spark which filled her perfect little form with life, so recently infused from the great mystery, so close to the Divine. I closed my eyes and breathed in the miracle, a prayer of awe and gratitude swirling in my mind.

I have been reading more than usual these last months, due in part to the slower pace of life brought on by the COVID 19 pandemic. One book, Eyes to the Wind, was written by a young man named Ady Barkan during the time he suffered with declining health due to ALS, a dread disease which in my time is a certain death proclamation. In your time, Tanna, I hope this disease has become non-existent, but today it is an incurable descent into neurological and physical hell until only the eyes can be controlled by the spark of life trapped inside the withered body.

Technology has provided remarkable possibilities for someone diagnosed with ALS. Ady described his excruciatingly slow writing process, with a special computer mounted on his wheel chair that tracked his eye pupils to identify letters, one-at-a-time, through infrared light. He finished an amazing book this way.

Tears filled my eyes as I visualized his painstaking process. He was still there. His essence remained vitally alive, trapped in a shrinking world. When the control he exerts over his eyes disappears, the essence of the man will be vitally alive, screaming silently inside his head.

I thought of that duckling and began to wonder if the essence of Ady wouldn’t even still exist after his physical self dies? What will I discover about my own spark of life as I pass from the physical realm?

With more final farewells than I care to count in my own life—family members and friends, including two infant children, my first husband, my parents, grandmothers, fathers-in-law, friends—I ponder their sparks, their essences. Instead of simply being squelched like a candle flame in the breeze, their essences returned to the mysterious invisible divine pool, an ocean of love. They are with me still, swirling and caressing, whispering encouragement as I scratch words across this page.

It’s not a big leap of faith to include my grandmothers and grandfathers back seven generations when our nation was still young. The essences of Charley and Frank, Wiley, Eliza, Alma, John, William, Clarissa, Edwin, Edith, Thomas and even another Ann swirl around me—people I never met but who contributed to my own life and breath. And it’s not such a stretch to think that the coming generations swirl in that ether of love, all the way through seven to you, Septanna. You also are with me as I write today, the mystery and miracle of life to come.

I keep thinking of the miracle of life during these days of vicious campaigning. We get hits several times a week in the postal box or on our phones from groups bent on spreading blatant lies about candidates we favor. I hope my friends and neighbors can see through the propaganda. When one candidate has nothing specific to offer besides lies about the other, that is called negative campaigning. It lacks integrity and makes me angry. Why not explain what you have to offer instead of slander your opponent? Voters should go to the source and seek the “rest of the story.”

Take Dr. Barbara Bollier, for example. I heard her speak. She’s intelligent and compassionate—hardly the extremist the other side claims. Dr. Bollier is a physician whose focus in life is to make things better for people. She wants to heal the ailing government. The opposition calls her an extremist liberal. How they come up with that is beyond me. She recently left the conservative party due to its extremist demands.

They say she wants to take away guns, but she herself grew up hunting with her family. She is not anti-gun. She wants common sense gun control to protect children, and to keep firearms away from psychotic shooters. She wants to save lives. Who can argue with that?

They say she is in favor of late term abortions, when in reality, she voted against an late term extremist abortion bill because it was based on flawed science. It also represented an unconscionable intrusion into the patient/physician relationship by government.

If we acknowledge that every life is unique, does it not follow that no two pregnancies are the same? You can’t have a one-size-fits-all policy for pregnant women. If something goes deadly wrong in an unborn child’s development, there need to be options—legal, safe options, offered with love and compassion to a mother already in anguish. As a woman, physician, and mother herself, Dr. Barbara Bollier understands this. Furthermore, given our ailing atmosphere, chemically ridden food, and poisonous water supply, the chances of severe birth defects increase as the environment degrades. There must be options for desperate, grieving families.

For many voters in today’s world, abortion is a hot-button issue. I suppose we all have them. For me, the climate crisis we face overshadows every other issue. If we cannot arrest the degradation of the living planet, nothing else on the list of issues matters. Dr. Bollier has been endorsed by environmental groups. That matters to me. I want you to have a healthy world in your time, Tanna.

The most powerful force in the universe is Love. We’re surrounded by love, the essence of our ancestors and departed loved ones. And there is a big difference between loving compassion and regulating life through legislation. Dr. Bollier is correct. The government should stay out of medicine and leave it up to trained physicians.

And so, I plan to vote for Dr. Bollier this November because of her common sense, and her compassionate approach to the current issues. I hope she wins.

You are out there, Tanna. I lift my affection on the winds of the Spirit to touch you in the unrealized future domain.

With my enduring affection and best wishes, Your 7^th Generation Grandmother.

Sheltering at home has not prevented or even postponed any adventures in life. Maybe it changed the route a bit. But like the proverbial door versus the window, my window opened onto an international stage and increased my exposure to international connections. And THAT, friends, is a most exciting adventure.

About a month ago, I received an email invitation to join a virtual book launch, London time! You know me and books, not to mention book launches. This book spoke to my heart, Every Woman’s Guide to Saving the Planet, by Natalie Isaacs. I had to make that Zoom launch.

With no clear recollection of the date I first learned about Natalie Isaacs and her Australian-based environmental group 1 Million Women, I do remember being intrigued and I signed up to support the mostly Australian project in my Kansas grandmother’s heart. We all recall the horror felt in the sights and sounds of the rash of bush fires in Australia last January, as well as the bleaching of coral reefs off Australian beaches. Climate change has no boundaries on the planet. Go for it, Aussie friends!

I wanted to participate in this book launch. It had an international, boundary-ignoring appeal. So I dragged myself to my office early in the morning of August 18 to meet faces from Australia, the UK, and other nations around the world, (Spain, Philippines, Germany, Canada) as well as a few other participants in the states (Illinois, California, Arkansas, Ohio). The organization Natalie founded in 2009 has received international awards at the UN Climate Conferences.

On that Tuesday morning, at 6:30 am, Natalie Isaacs launched her book to the UK. She herself, and many other participants, spoke from Australia where it was evening already. In London, it was 12:30, lunch time, and it was morning in the west.

With a youthful countenance that belies her grandmotherly status, Natalie opened the meeting with the notion that we are talking about profound behavior changes and how to make them stick. A cosmetics manufacturer for 24 years, she had heard about the climate challenge, but believed there was nothing she could do about it. Then came 2006, and the release of the documentary An Inconvenient Truth. The problem became hers and she set out to learn what she could do about it.

“When you don’t know enough about something, it’s easier to do nothing,” she said.

After 2006, she did something—something simple—but she saw an amazing result and it changed her life. She discovered ways to reduce her family’s electricity consumption by 20%. She realized that climate change wasn’t somebody else’s problem. “It was about me, and about living a different way of life.”

A lot of personal witness and encouragement was shared in that one-hour Zoom call. Towards the end, she offered a few minutes of break-out time with other participants. I was thrilled to be paired with a 30-something woman, Anna, in Melbourne, Australia. How invigorating to share perspectives from opposite sides of the planet!

Wrapped tightly in a warm robe, Anna was preparing to retire for the night. Her window already revealed nighttime outside. I was first a bit puzzled why she looked cold—it’s so warm here—until I remembered that it’s winter down under!

We returned to the main group moments later to wrap up the session. Natalie Isaacs gave two important take-away thoughts.

#1: We must understand—in our hearts (the woman’s realm) as well as our heads—that everything we do shapes the world. Though individual actions and choices seem inconsequential, we must realize we are a collective! Just do something. One small act leads to another.

#2: We need to nurture a relationship with Earth, just like we do with our families and friends. When you truly love something, you fight for it. And it’s a reciprocal relationship. Earth provides everything needed for our healthy, satisfying life. “Don’t take without giving back,” Natalie said. It’s as simple as that.

I just had to have one of her books. Clicking on the links provided, I ran into the same roadblock every time. The book suppliers and outlets do not yet have delivery options in Kansas, nor I suppose, in any of the states or countries in the western hemisphere. On the Amazon website, I learned that the US launch on Amazon will occur late this month (September 2020.) However, the e-book is already available.

The book’s prologue on my Kindle described the history of 1 Million Women. I learned the organization was launched in 2009. It is the story of individual women taking on the climate crisis by changing everyday “behaviours” (habits). Sections in the book give “Toolkits” for addressing consumerism and overconsumption, food, energy, plastic use, fashion and cosmetics, economic power, the burgeoning waste stream, and travel.

There is a free app you can download on your smart devices to help discriminate between choices. (Search: 1 Million Women app).

There is no time to waste, Natalie reminds us. “No time to talk about guilt or scold ourselves.” Just do something. With action from a million women—a million women on every continent, I would add—“Together we can literally change the world.”

The Zoom meeting concluded with more music from a previous Australian Love Earth festival, Katie Noonan singing “I Am Woman” and it brought back memories of Helen Reddy’s voice: “I am strong. I am invincible.”

What are you waiting for? Please share this post. Order one of Natalie’s books. Connect with your friends. Make some new friends. Take action.

The Bridge

Tag: climate crisis

Day 2: The Power of Love

That Open Window