Now we know

There is such a tendency to think we are free and independent. We are city dwellers or live in towns or in rural villages or farms. We have our own lives and we are unaffected by things going on in other places - until we are.

I’m indoors with air conditioner and air purifier running full blast. It’s better today with high moderate air pollution as opposed to two days ago when air quality in my city was the worst in the world. US neighboring cities are experiencing the same problems - caused by forest fires in several of our Canadian provinces. Air pollution doesn’t respect international boundaries. Fires take their own direction from the wind. We like to think we are in charge of the earth. We aren’t. We thought we had a master-slave relationship with nature. Nature is talking back.

Getting out of this will take more than modest remediation. Many are evacuated from their homes. Some have lost their homes entirely. My current discomfort is minor and I need to stop whining. Governments have work to do. Companies that burn fossils or like to log have work to do. Ordinary people have work to do - to protect themselves, yes, but to go much further. Now it is not only the dispossessed that can’t breathe. Now we know.

Very High Confidence

“There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all (very high confidence).”

Very high confidence that we are headed toward disaster, What does it say about us as human beings in 2023?

It is a message from hundreds of scholars studying the climate emergency and approved by 195 countries. It points to the disaster caused by the continuing use of fossil fuels. Those of us in the west - focused on bank failures and interest rates and whining. while we enjoy the prosperity and other parts of the world suffer much more. The UN Secretary is right to see us as sitting on a time bomb.

Despair is not the answer. Any action is better than none. These are the strategies that the studies propose:

• Expand solar and wind power

• Improve energy efficiency.

• Make cities more friendly for walkers and cyclists.

• Reduce nitrogen pollution from agriculture.

• Eat better.

• Reduce food waste.

Every one of these have implications for individual actions. All of them have a relationship with fossil fuels. Every one is related to what we value. It is a reminder that the most powerful countries are the largest promoters of fossil fuels - and we are not far behind. Nature shows considerable power to answer to our treating it as a communal gas station. Will we continue to ignore what we are doing at our peril?

We are members of many communities - neighborhoods, the arts, faith groups, political parties, social action groups. Voices used to be only top down but now they can be raised from the smallest and most surprising places. Let’s use them.

Practical changes

Turning to practical things I should be doing to save the planet allows a short break from thinking about other things. There is a new coach in this area in the Washington Post who is now offering weekly tips.

He points out the dilemma we continually face. One person’s actions doesn’t have a significant effect. Nevertheless, united efforts do. Anything we can do to encourage friends and colleagues to join in can help. So here is my help in spreading the news - some counter-intuitive. We live in the age of wonderful appliances that do their jobs well.

1. Stop pre-rinsing the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher. The appliance uses less water than washing by hand and detergents are effective. Scraping is good; rinsing is unnecessary.

2. Turn out the lights as your parents always used to remind you to do - but recognize that this action is a minor one now with the invention of LED units. Make sure you have replaced any old ones because these new ones emit more light with only 10% of the previous electricity use. What this means is keeping up with the applications of good science from reputable sources and paying attention to it.

3. Pay more attention to the food on the back of the fridge shelf that may be going bad than worrying about changing the temperature. Food waste is a bigger issue.

4. Wash your clothes in cold water. Detergents have improved. You can also try those detergent sheets that friends of mine keep recommending. I meant to order some online but did notice them in a nearby shop so I now have no excuse to buy another of those large plastic bottles that take a lot of shelf space to transport.

Livable Cities

I’m glad to live in one. Here they are according to the Economist

Vienna, Austria
2)  Copenhagen, Denmark
3)  Zurich, Switzerland (tie)
3)  Calgary, Canada (tie)
5)  Vancouver, Canada
6)  Geneva, Switzerland
7)  Frankfurt, Germany
8)  Toronto, Canada
9)  Amsterdam, Netherlands
10)  Osaka, Japan (tie)
10)  Melbourne, Australia (tie)

And the other interesting part - not one American City made it . . . .

The Speed of Change

I’ve been busy with many things in my life and remiss in writing. I observed to someone recently, “Keep your day job, You will be much less busy than you will be later in retirement”. The Canadian orchestral conductor, Boris Brott, observed in an interview that he would not want to ever retire. Sadly he did not, when he died in a hit and run accident.

I don’t have paid employment, but I have lots of it in volunteer and self -imposed places. Reading and other kinds of writing do take up time. And reading gives me my best posts - not original at all, but thought provoking. Here is one from Larry Rasmussen’s Earth Honoring Faith: Religious Ethics in a New Key.

“Anyone born in 1936 and still alive in 2003 (I was for both ) was around for 97.5 percent of all the oil ever pumped and burned. In the prodigious half-century from 1950 to 2000 the global consumer economy produced, transported and consumed as many goods and services as throughout the entirety of prior history.”

What is enough is a question that has been asked before. The Limits to Growth, the Report of the Club of Rome was published in 1972. Forty years later we still avoid it. Rassmussen does not let us off the hook. He’s asking for changes based on the faiths we have inherited which asks things of us. I’ll be quoting more from him in the future.