Will we harvest what we’ve sown?

Today, at 6:56 pm local time, we will experience peak full moon for September. Some of us have no expectation of seeing it tonight, too much cloud cover. Perhaps tomorrow night will have to do. In case you’re wondering, the Ojibwe call this the Rice Moon while the Lakota refer to it as the Brown Leaves Moon. According to NASA,

As the full Moon closest to the autumnal equinox, this is the Harvest Moon, an old European name. The Oxford English Dictionary gives 1706 as the year of its first published use. Farmers sometimes need to work late by the light of the Moon for the harvest.

a September full moon

Photo by J. Harrington

I can understand, and make allowances for, people being more aberrant  around the time of the full moon, but for the past five or six years, at least, aberrant behavior seems to have been increasing daily, weekly, monthly and yearly. And more and more people seem willing to normalize aberrant actions. Meanwhile, the climate crises continues to get worse, as does the death count from COVID-19, and the decrease in biodiversity, and the increase in inequity, and...there’s apparently a long-standing failure to respond appropriately by government because...????

Have you seen mention of Gus Speth’s recent publication, They Knew?

A devastating, compelling account of the federal government's leading role in bringing about today's climate crisis.

In 2015, a group of twenty-one young people sued the federal government in Juliana v. United States for violating their constitutional rights by promoting climate catastrophe and thereby depriving them of life, liberty, and property without due process and equal protection of law. They Knew offers evidence supporting the children's claims, presenting a devastating and compelling account of the federal government's role in bringing about today's climate crisis. James Gustave Speth, tapped by the plaintiffs as one of twenty-one preeminent experts in their climate case, analyzes how administrations from Carter to Trump—despite having information about the impending climate crisis and the connection to fossil fuels—continued aggressive support of a fossil fuel based energy system.

Tomorrow Paul Hawken’s Regeneration is published. It follows his editing of the book Drawdown. I’ve read the latter and plan to read the former because 

This is a watershed moment in history where all of humanity has come together, whether we realize it or not. The heating planet is our commons. It holds us all. To address and reverse warming requires connection and reciprocity. It calls for moving out of our comfort zones to find a depth of courage we may have never known. It doesn’t mean being right in a way that makes others wrong; it means listening intently and respectfully, stitching together the broken strands that separate us from life and each other. It doesn’t mean hope or despair; it calls for action that is courageous and fearless. We have created an astonishing moment of truth. The climate crisis is not a science problem. It is a human problem. The ultimate power to change the world does not reside in technologies. It relies on reverence, respect, and compassion—for ourselves, all people, all life. This is regeneration.

I have reached a point at which I’m cynical and angry enough to have little confidence in most government and business entities. That basically leaves the option of thinking I can solve the world’s problems on my own, or try doing it with my fellow humans. I’m curious to see what Hawken has to offer. Reading Speth is most likely to just do bad things for and/or to my blood pressure. I’m tired of focusing so much on all that’s wrong and want to pay attention to how to make it all right!

The Harvest Moon

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - 1807-1882

It is the Harvest Moon! On gilded vanes
  And roofs of villages, on woodland crests
  And their aerial neighborhoods of nests
  Deserted, on the curtained window-panes
Of rooms where children sleep, on country lanes
  And harvest-fields, its mystic splendor rests!
  Gone are the birds that were our summer guests,
  With the last sheaves return the laboring wains!
All things are symbols: the external shows
  Of Nature have their image in the mind,
  As flowers and fruits and falling of the leaves;
The song-birds leave us at the summer's close,
  Only the empty nests are left behind,
  And pipings of the quail among the sheaves.

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