Blog 1478 – 10.04.2019

Cooler Days Have Finally Arrived

Last night’s low of 48°F and an expected high for today of only 70°F, I hope are signals that cooler days have finally arrived in southern Indiana. It has been unseasonably hot the last couple of weeks. For those who poo-pah man-made global warming I am sure they think those days were just a fluke. I do not and am not at all happy that more is not being done to restrict and limit carbon emissions which the overwhelming consensus of scientists says is the very real cause of changes in our weather patterns, these are expected to worsen as more ice melts and summer heat begins sooner and lasts longer.

For some years my day job has been mostly involved with the processing, transmission, and distribution of natural gas and although the use of natural gas is less harmful to the environment than coal to fire electric generating plants it should be thought of as a transition fuel till other more eco-friendly power sources take over. I have heard that more progressive democratic countries like Germany are now producing almost all of their electricity without burning fossil fuels.

For over two hundred years African Slavery was a very dirty business with great profits for the middle men, and plantation owners, but with disastrous results to the enslaved and society. Cheap slave labor has a lot in common with cheap energy. We forget as we castigate the Brazilians for destroying the Amazon rainforests to produce more land for cultivating crops that we did the same thing to much of North America. It is said that when the Europeans first landed on the shores of Virginia that the trees were so thick with low hanging branches that one could walk all the way to the Mississippi River without their feet touching the ground. How wonderful the air must have been to breathe and how full of plant life, birds, animals, and reptiles those lush forests must have been. Many of those species are long gone now, no thanks to us.

Dirty businesses must eventually come clean like slavery, the lead industry, the tobacco industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the coal industry, and big oil and gas to name but a few. As a brave if not happy young girl told the United Nations recently it is time the head long push for profits and the myths of an ever expanding economy gave way to more sensible ideas like saving the planet that is our food, our water, our mother, and the sky that is our birth right, our breathe, our father. Greta did not use exactly those words but google her speech to the U.N. It is way more profound and poignant than my choice of words.

Cooler days have arrived and how I hope cooler more sensible heads and hearts are not far behind. A wise supervisor that I once asked advice from about dating a young woman who worked at our same company, said I could if I chose but that he made it a personal practice not to shit where he ate. Colorful, descriptive language, to be sure, but I got his meaning and saved myself a lot of trouble and no little embarrassment by heeding that advice.

We might apply the same lesson to the environment. We have already messed it up, but perhaps we can stop doing what we have been doing, clean up our mess, and stop trying to wipe out our own species as we have already done so many others.

Your friend and fellow traveler,

Mother Earth and Father Sky lover,

As well as lover of my race, the Human Race.

David White

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vntA7fSu_wkOhPPlsrl3FblF1_Y6HXdq/view?usp=drivesdk

Cold, Cold Heart