Sunday Dinner: Climate Change

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“To thrive in this new age of hyper-change and growing uncertainty,

it is now an imperative to learn a new competency —

how to accurately anticipate the future.”

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Dan Burrus

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“Many call this process ‘the destruction of nature.’

But it’s not really destruction, it’s change.

Nature cannot be destroyed.”

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Yuval Noah Harari

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“There are two primary choices in life:

to accept conditions as they exist,

or accept the responsibility for changing them.”

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Denis Waitley

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“Nothing endures but change.”

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Heraclitus Ephesus

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Woodland Gnome 2015

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Sea levels rise and fall along the Eastern coast of North America.  This has been going on for millions of years.  At one time, the sea lapped against the Blue Ridge Mountains, several hundred miles to our west.  Most of Virginia was underwater.  We know this from the fossil record. 

Archaeologists are finding the remains of great cities, now under water, off the coasts of Africa, India, and Southern Europe.  We know the topography of our planet changes continually. 

There is no longer any question that our climate and our landscape are changing.  I believe the important question is, “Why now?”  and “What, if anything, can we do?”

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Storms over the last two weeks are chewing up our sandy coastline.  Beaches and riverbanks continue eroding.  Flooding is widespread, and not just along the seacoast.  Heavy rain has brought flooding well inland from the Appalachian and Blue Ridge mountains all the way back towards the coasts from New England to the Gulf of Mexico. 

But this is insignificant compared to the effects of  Hurricane Joaquin’s winds on the islands it has attacked.   Millions of lives have been effected by severe weather this year across our planet. 

I believe there are many causes for our warming climate and increasingly severe storms.  Some may be caused by human activity.  Other causes are part of the natural rhythms of our planet.  Activity at the planet’s core controls vulcanism,  and the heat and gasses pouring into our oceans from underwater volcanoes. 

The amount of radiation from space, which makes it through to our atmosphere, has a tremendous impact on our climate and quality of life.  A weakening magnetosphere allows more of this Solar and cosmic radiation to reach our planet.  This is one of many complex factors which affects our climate and our weather patterns.

No one of us can control any of what is happening with climate change.  But we each must adapt. 

And we can do our own little part to bring our planet back into balance by the way we live our lives.  Every tree we nurture captures and sequesters carbon from the atmosphere.  Every garden we plant helps control erosion and contributes to the health of our ecosystem. 

Our choices of where to live and how much energy to consume play their part in this complex equation.

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And each of us has a political voice we can raise with our government representatives, demanding that they not only acknowledge this accelerated climate change on our planet, but that they take actions, based on our best research, to mitigate the effects. Our voices may be even more effective when lobbying corporations to make changes in how they manage our Earth’s resources.

I believe we are in uncharted territory now.  I don’t know if there is any precedent or model to help us understand the totality of the changes occurring now in our planet’s ecosystem.  But we can not ignore the issue and expect it to work itself out. 

I believe we are all getting a taste of what that looks like…

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WPC: Boundaries

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This week’s photo challenge topic is “Boundaries.” 

I’ve been thinking, today,about the many different sorts of boundaries which tailor our lives, and realized that while some of them might be as obvious as a fence, most exist mainly in our mind.  What stands between us and touching this bird, beyond our perception of boundaries?

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A lot of what passes for education and ‘home training’ is mostly about teaching us which boundaries to respect and how to comfortably live within them.

How often did you hear, growing up, “We just don’t do that,” or “Nice people just don’t say those things”?

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And so as surely as we learn to color within the lines of a coloring book, we learn to live our lives within the agreed upon boundaries of what is polite and proper; and ‘legal’.

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And of course, many of our mental boundaries are there to keep us safe in some way.    Untold dangers might lurk where we step across the boundaries into new experiences and new ways of living in our world.

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Just as our education is about learning to stay within certain boundaries, maturation is about learning how our lives change as we move beyond them.

We figure out which boundaries we need to respect and which we can survive when we cross.

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How have your own boundaries shifted, and enlarged, through the decades of your life?  What once firm  boundaries have we transcended with the creative application of technology?

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Creative spirits often see boundaries as permeable challenges.  How can we move beyond the seeming limitations of our lives?  What gizmo will allow us to explore places and experiences which once seemed ‘Out of Bounds”?

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Sometimes boundaries prove temporary.    Just as the high tide line moves up and down the beach with the season and the weather, so, too may our personal boundaries shift.

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Sometimes we want to harden the protective boundaries we put around ourselves, to keep others at a distance.

And then there are those magical moments when the boundaries shift, when we find we have made a bridge between our life, and another’s.

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I like that boundaries begin to fall away with age.

We have less fear, and more confidence to move beyond some of those boundaries which once locked us into a narrow way of being and thinking.

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As our fears evaporate, our path widens.  We understand how everything is connected together.  We begin to perceive a wider world where the boundaries blur and fade.

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Woodland Gnome 2015

For the Daily Post’s

Weekly Photo Challenge: Boundaries

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