Here’s a picture of Milton as it churns it’s way towards Florida. It fills up the entire Gulf of Mexico. It accelerated from a normal, puny little hurricane to Cat 5 in a matter of hours.
Big storm. Warm water.
Of course everyone already knows about Hurricane Helene, she just visited this area a few days ago. She dropped as much as 30 inches of rain in some places up in the mountains of North Carolina, far from where she made landfall. People are still digging out and drying off from that disaster, atleast the ones that survived. Over 200 people are dead and a whole bunch of people are missing. Now it’s Milton’s turn. He looks poised to hit one of the most populated and low lying areas anywhere in the United States - Tampa Bay.
Wildfires. They have increased in frequency and intensity over the last 20 years. Even the Amazon has been on fire. The total for this year, from January to August is 13.4 million acres burned up in the Amazon rain forest. That’s a 100% increase from last year. Back in 2003 (and I remember this), after an unusually dry summer, enormous forest fires erupted in Siberia and the Russian Far East. The Siberian Taiga fires burned 55 million acres, and became the largest wildfire in recorded history. It created a plume of smoke that was visible in Kyoto, Japan, thousands of miles away. The Camp Fire blaze in 2018 was California’s most deadly and destructive wildfire ever, or so far. It killed 85 people, destroyed 18,000 buildings and consumed 150,000 acres including the entire town of Paradise. Ironic huh?
This is exactly what the climate scientists have been telling us for years. Natural disasters are going to get worse and become more frequent. I’m not an alarmist but it is something to be alarmed about. I hope you’re sitting in a safe place because it’s going to touch all of us. Sooner or later we’re going to have to deal with this and it looks like sooner is basically now.
I don’t know what it takes to get you motivated: crisis, inconvenience, fear but for me it’s when I feel like I’m abrogating my responsibility, when I feel out of balance with my body or my society or my planet. I don’t like that feeling. I need to do something. And I guess that’s why I’m writing this screed. Trying to do something.
Learning about all these natural disasters and looking at them is disheartening, for sure. I don’t like it but it also motivates me. Stark, dire and other negative descriptors leap to mind.
What does it take to be aware of and respond to the urgent things happening in our world? That’s the question.
Actually it’s a great question. What motivates us to make fundamental changes in our life? Can we talk about this? The politicians don’t want to deal with it because it’s hard to spin disasters that happen because of our own arrogance. They’ll never talk about it straight up and if they did they would never get elected. Look at Al Gore.
It’s up to us, the people. ‘We the people’ and all that. That’s how the Constitution starts off: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” An eminently altruistic document, as probably most country’s constitutions are. But nobody actually reads that unless they’re trying to spin it one way or another in front of the Supreme Court. And then the Supreme Court decides how eminent and altruistic it actually is.
The question remains, what will motivate people to respond? Or put another way, what happens when people don’t respond? Our planet is heating up and putting the squeeze on so many systems in our biosphere in so many ways. What if we don’t respond, or not enough?
The answer to that question will determine how we live or even if we live.
We could actually make this a heaven on earth, a paradise. Remember the ‘Lord’s Prayer’? It’s in the Bible. “Your will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.” What does that mean? That means heaven on earth, people. We have all the tools. We’ve got all the technology. If we just stopped having wars and started focusing our energies on building a beautiful world. A beautiful world for our children and their children down to the 7th generation according to the Cherokee, or was it the Iroquois. Ha. Yeah. Exactly. To live in a simple sustainable way on this beautiful Earth, like we are supposed to, like our ancestors did for thousands of years. Have you not read my book?
That was just a joke actually. I know you haven’t read my book. Nobody has. That’s alright, I had to write it for my own reasons. I needed to do something.
fire and rain