As we were saying...

Today's windy and cloudy weather feels threatening, sort of like the regime in Washington, D.C. I've been trying to track events and developments fairly closely during this past week and I've ended up with more take-aways on what NOT to do than what to do. I'm taking that as an opportunity to claim it's time to remember the parable of the babies in the river. [check it out, we'll wait right here]

There's also the quote from Ursula Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness: “Almost everything carried to its logical extreme becomes either depressing or carcinogenic.” I believe we've reached the logical extreme end of capitalistic oligarchy as exemplified by the current crew in D.C. To borrow a dictum from my time as a planner: "More of the same never solved a problem." And who was it that claimed "Life must be lived forward but can only be understood backwards"?

"We the People"  No Kings 10/18/2025

We aren't, I believe, likely to get ourselves out of the mess we're in by trying to return to anything like an old normal. The old normal was too extractive and, as we all know, "there are no jobs on a dead planet" and "there is no planet B." We need a transformative change so our society is no longer primarily dependent on growth and GDP as indicators of success. Let me once again share one of my all time favorite quotations from a 1968 speech by Robert F Kennedy:

Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

It is, I believe, time for us to head upstream and see who's throwing the babies in the river and stop them. This is neither an original nor a new idea. Wendell Berry writes of a similar approach in today's poem (if you allow for a certaain stretch of poetic license).

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

by Wendell Berry

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

Listen to carrion -- put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as Women do not go cheap
for power, please Women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

********************************************
Thanks for visiting. Come again when you can.
Please be kind to each other while you can.

We need a better system

Today’s posting is going to be short and not so sweet. Sorry!

Many pundits are commenting on the problems associated with the recent SCOTUS decision resulting in the demise of the Chevron deference. I would note that the Chevron deference has been in place for 40 years during which time the definition of Waters of the United States has been kicked from pillar to post and up and down many stairs in Washington, D.C.’s august buildings, without resolution. Meanwhile, our sources of “clean” water continue to be diminished as the effects of climate weirding continue to disrupt historic hydrologic cycles. Legal decisions, whether from legislative bodies and/or courts, with or without experts, have real world consequences, as does any lack of wisdom in such decisions. Perhaps it’s time to reflect on Shakespeare’s assessment:

Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

Is it possible that we have corrupted our application of some of the fundamental premises of federalism as practiced by the Iroquois? As things stand today, I can see fatal flaws in decisions by all three sectors and at the federal, state and local levels. Should we see what ChatGPT has to say? Are algorithms the equivalent of consensus? When does SCOTUS have to have a supermajority, like the Senate to overcome a filibuster?

My Wisdom

By Naomi Shihab Nye

When people have a lot

they want more

 

When people have nothing

they will happily share it

 

*

 

Some people say

never getting your way

builds character

By now our character must be

deep and wide as a continent

Africa, Australia

giant cascade of stars

spilling over our huge night

 

*

 

Where did the power go?

Did it enjoy its break?

Is power exhausted?

What is real power?

Who really has power?

Did the generator break?

Do we imagine silence

more powerful because

it might contain everything?

Quiet always lives

inside noise.

But does it get much done?

 

*

 

Silence waits

for truth to break it

 

*

 

Calendars can weep too

They want us to have better days

 

*

 

Welcome to every minute

Feel lucky you’re still in it

 

*

 

No bird builds a wall

 

*

 

Sky purse

     jingling

           change

 

*

 

Won’t give up

our hopes

            for anything!

 

*

 

Not your fault

You didn’t make the world

 

*

 

How dare this go on and on?

cried the person who believed in praying

God willing     God willing        God willing

There were others who prayed

   to ruins & stumps

 

*

 

Open palms

     hold more

 

*

 

Refuse to give

   mistakes

      too much power

 

 

*

Annoying person?

Person who told me to stay home

and do what other girls do?

If you disappeared

I still might miss you

 

*

 

Babies want to help us

They laugh

for no reason

 

*

 

Pay close attention to

a drop of water

on the kitchen table

 

*

 

You cannot say one word about religion

and exclude Ahmad

Two bee, two bee, doo

It is the season of drowning bees, when many wasps and hornets and bees gather at the sugar water feeders. Some get greedy and force their way through the feeding port guards into the reservoir of sugar water. They can’t fly nor swim so eventually, they drown from too much of a good thing. Most people only notice the critters that sneak into their cans of sugar water through the pop tops. Those often get shaken out.

I spent some time yesterday watching several kinds of wasps or hornets or bees trying to feed at the red hummingbird feeder on a front window. Hummers, with their long bills and tongues, get some sort of nourishment. I have no idea if the buzzers could reach any of the sugar water or not. The feeding ports in the red feeder are just large enough to accommodate a hummingbird’s bill and too narrow to allow even small bees entrance. What also fascinates me is the feeders are rarely visited by insects at other times of the year. This year, in fact, the ants never discovered the feeder hanging from the deck railing.

bee on Blue Giant Hyssop

Photo by J. Harrington

Bees are also availing themselves of what’s left of the season’s flowers. I much prefer seeing them in a more natural setting like the one above, rather than on or at a hummingbird feeder. (The bee is about dead center in the picture.) Both honeybees and wild bee populations are declining at unacceptable rates, even in a state like Minnesota, home to more than 500 species of bees.

Last year we left many of the fallen leaves in place to provide overwintering habitat for at least some pollinators. Then came spring with “No mow May.” The yard has taken on a much more natural look. That’s been compounded by the past summer’s drought. We have our fingers crossed that some reseeding the Better Half did the other day will help create a bee friendly lawn. She had some really encouraging reports on the thyme that’s replacing “bluegrass” and rye in the yard. I think that got planted / seeded last year.

[If you haven’t by now recognized today’s title, go listen to Frank Sinatra’s Strangers in the Night.]

Bees, so many bees.

By Anna Jackson

After twenty years of marriage, we walked out

of the bush and on to a rough dirt road

we followed till we saw a pond

we might be able to get to.

The ground was boggy and buzzing.

The pond was thick with weed

and slime. It was not

the sort of pond anyone would

swim in, but we did — picking and sliding

into the water over the bog and bees,

bees we suddenly noticed were

everywhere, were settling on our hair

as we swam, ducks turning surprised eyes

our way. After twenty years of marriage

what is surprising isn’t really so much

the person you are with but to find

yourselves so out of place in this scene, cold

but not able to get out without

stepping over bees, so many bees.

********************************************
Thanks for visiting. Come again when you can.
Please be kind to each other while you can.

The “fat lady” hasn’t sung. She’s not even on stage, yet.

I’m not denigrating the size, seriousness nor complexity of the issues we face locally, nationally nor globally, but among the current crop of books I’m reading, it’s obvious that humans and their societies have a long experience of making a mess of things and fumbling through. Will this time be different? We don’t know and won’t know unless and until enough [too many] of us give up. Furthermore, neither is this intended to be a “misery loves company” solution. Here’s the books I’m referring to:

• Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul: chapter 1, Pelagius, makes repeated reference to “the religion of the [Roman] empire was about to formalize a teaching that was convenient for imperial power, enabling empire to relativize people’s worth rather than reverence their dignity.” 


• The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity: chapter 1, Farewell to Humanity’s Childhood, asserts (all in UPPER case) among other things “How the conventional narrative of human history is not only wrong, but quite needlessly dull”


• On Immunity, an Innoculation (which I’m rereading) notes that “Throughout the nineteenth century, vaccination left a wound that would scar. “The mark of the beast,” some feared. In an Anglican archbishop’s 1882 sermon, vaccination was akin to an injection of sin, an “abominable mixture of corruption, the lees of human vice, and dregs of venial appetites, that in after life may foam upon the spirit, and develop helll within, and overwhelm the soul.”

not all serpents are snakes

Photo by J. Harrington

If you read the Bible’s Old Testament, you may have noticed that, although Adam and Eve had only one job, it didn’t take them long to screw it up. Then, some time later, the whole human race had to start over with Noah and the Ark. Does this mean that our species is hopeless? Probably not, but it seems to strongly suggest we are subject to evolutionary developments. If we continue to destroy earth’s climate and life support systems on which we depend for food, water and shelter, it might be unwise to expect divine intervention to bail our dumb asses, or us, out of our self-created diminution. What we seem to be facing is not a serpent in a tree but the excessive, egregious influence of non-human “persons” on our institutions, customs, and values. Frankly, the serpent was less pernicious.

A Map to the Next World

By Joy Harjo 

    for Desiray Kierra Chee

In the last days of the fourth world I wished to make a map for

those who would climb through the hole in the sky.

My only tools were the desires of humans as they emerged

from the killing fields, from the bedrooms and the kitchens.

For the soul is a wanderer with many hands and feet.

The map must be of sand and can’t be read by ordinary light. It

must carry fire to the next tribal town, for renewal of spirit.

In the legend are instructions on the language of the land, how it

was we forgot to acknowledge the gift, as if we were not in it or of it.

Take note of the proliferation of supermarkets and malls, the

altars of money. They best describe the detour from grace.

Keep track of the errors of our forgetfulness; the fog steals our

children while we sleep.

Flowers of rage spring up in the depression. Monsters are born

there of nuclear anger.

Trees of ashes wave good-bye to good-bye and the map appears to

disappear.

We no longer know the names of the birds here, how to speak to

them by their personal names.

Once we knew everything in this lush promise.

What I am telling you is real and is printed in a warning on the

map. Our forgetfulness stalks us, walks the earth behind us, leav-

ing a trail of paper diapers, needles, and wasted blood.

An imperfect map will have to do, little one.

The place of entry is the sea of your mother’s blood, your father’s

small death as he longs to know himself in another.

There is no exit.

The map can be interpreted through the wall of the intestine—a

spiral on the road of knowledge.

You will travel through the membrane of death, smell cooking

from the encampment where our relatives make a feast of fresh

deer meat and corn soup, in the Milky Way.

They have never left us; we abandoned them for science.

And when you take your next breath as we enter the fifth world

there will be no X, no guidebook with words you can carry.

You will have to navigate by your mother’s voice, renew the song

she is singing.

Fresh courage glimmers from planets.

And lights the map printed with the blood of history, a map you

will have to know by your intention, by the language of suns.

When you emerge note the tracks of the monster slayers where they

entered the cities of artificial light and killed what was killing us.

You will see red cliffs. They are the heart, contain the ladder.

A white deer will greet you when the last human climbs from the

destruction.

Remember the hole of shame marking the act of abandoning our

tribal grounds.

We were never perfect.

Yet, the journey we make together is perfect on this earth who was

once a star and made the same mistakes as humans.

We might make them again, she said.

Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end.

You must make your own map.

********************************************
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Please be kind to each other while you can.

An experiment in progress

 Smaller, shallower ponds are now ice covered. Some snow has melted, but snow and ice remain, covering much of the driveway and the fields behind the house. Perhaps more significantly, dark-eyed juncos have arrived. In fact, they've been hopping around the deck for several days now. Yet another  sign that Winter is settling in.

dark-eyed junco at feeder

Photo by J. Harrington

This morning a small flock of four hen turkeys gathered under  the pear tree. Last night several whitetail deer scampered through the far fields around the large spruce trees. Flocks of starlings have been seen taking flight from roadside shoulders and ditches. Local farmers still have some fields of both soy beans and corn to be harvested. If next week's thaw and return to seasonal temperatures doesn't turn the fields to mud, perhaps this year's harvest can be completed this year instead of next. 

The shapes and forms that life takes are simply astounding, if we slow down enough to just think about it. Life / nature / evolution are all ongoing experiments, variations on themes. Societies and cultures are probably also like that, efforts to discover what works better under which circumstances for whom. We are but one member of the hominids and might well be advised to remember that a number of other members of the family are no longer in existence. Starting to think about today's politics in such a context has helped me understand how so many voters in the US can support an unqualified, untrained, incompetent individual for one of the most powerful positions in the world. As Ralph Waldo Emerson has noted, "All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better." As our own history, and that of the only world we know, has shown us, not all experiments are successful. Not all survive. When, outside of Jurassic Park, was the last time you saw a live dinosaur? So, if you haven't yet, please go vote for those who offer a viable future for the rest of US. You know, those who are creating a future instead of a return to a non-viable past. Those who support life more than death. Your descendants will thank you.

Evolution

Linda Bierds

How, Alan Turing thought, does the soft-walled,
jellied, symmetrical cell
become the asymmetrical horse? It was just before dusk,
the sun’s last shafts doubling the fence posts,
all the dark mares on their dark shadows. It was just
after Schrodinger’s What is Life,
not long before Watson, Franklin, Crick, not long before
supper. How does a chemical soup,
he asked, give rise to a biological pattern? And how
does a pattern shift, an outer ear
gradually slough its fur, or a shorebird’s stubby beak
sharpen toward the trout?
He was halfway between the War’s last enigmas
and the cyanide apple—two bites—
that would kill him. Halfway along the taut wires
that hummed between crime
and pardon, indecency and privacy. How do solutions,
chemical, personal, stable, unstable,
harden into shapes? And how do shapes break?
What slips a micro-fissure
across a lightless cell, until time and matter
double their easy bickering? God?
Chance? A chemical shudder? He was happy and not,
tired and not, humming a bit
with the fence wires. How does a germ split to a self?
And what is a—We are not our acts
and remembrances, Schrodinger wrote. Should something—
God, chance, a chemical shudder?—
sever us from all we have been, still it would not kill us.
It was just before dusk, his segment
of earth slowly ticking toward night. Like time, he thought,
we are almost erased by rotation,
as the dark, symmetrical planet lifts its asymmetrical cargo
up to the sunset:  horses, ryegrass—
In no case, then, is there a loss of personal existence to
     deplore—
marten, whitethroat, blackbird,
lark—nor will there ever be.

********************************************
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Please be kind to each other while you can.

On who "we" are

I hope this finds you and those around you healthy and virus-free. The next few months will prove to be challenging, at best. They will also provide us with a much clearer picture of just how unlevel the "playing field" in the  US, and the rest of the world, has become. Many of those with the fewest resources will suffer the greatest harm from the  COVID-19 virus and its economic impacts.

Here We Are      Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

An online article raises the question "What would happen if the world reacted to climate change like it’s reacting to the coronavirus?" At first I thought it might be satire, directed at US, since, in addition to a failing, uncoordinated, falsehood laden coronavirus response, we're also the country that's pulling out of the  Paris Agreement. But, as noted in the article:

“Climate change also affects the most vulnerable first and worst,” says Boeve. “So we see that pattern play out as well, and how this is unfolding and how the response is and is not responding to that inequity and impact.”

 Is it possible that the coronavirus emergency is yet another effort by mother nature to help us all to see that there is no Planet B; that we are all in this together; that we need to manage our commons for the sake of all of us, not just to increase the wealth of the 1% or the profits of corporate "persons" and the politicians they own? I'm not naive enough  to believe we can and will change quickly enough to avoid significant problems resulting from our broken climate. I am enough of an optimist to hope that we can, over time, change enough to learn to work together so we can first bring the coronavirus to heel and, in the process, notice that, as Senator Wellstone used to tell us "We all do better when we all do better." For that to work most effectively, we need to broaden our definition of "we," don't we?

A Brave and Startling Truth

by Maya Angelou

We, this people, on a small and lonely planet

Traveling through casual space

Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns

To a destination where all signs tell us

It is possible and imperative that we learn

A brave and startling truth

And when we come to it

To the day of peacemaking

When we release our fingers

From fists of hostility

And allow the pure air to cool our palms

When we come to it

When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate

And faces sooted with scorn and scrubbed clean

When battlefields and coliseum

No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters

Up with the bruised and bloody grass

To lie in identical plots in foreign soil

When the rapacious storming of the churches

The screaming racket in the temples have ceased

When the pennants are waving gaily

When the banners of the world tremble

Stoutly in the good, clean breeze

When we come to it

When we let the rifles fall from our shoulders

And children dress their dolls in flags of truce

When land mines of death have been removed

And the aged can walk into evenings of peace

When religious ritual is not perfumed

By the incense of burning flesh

And childhood dreams are not kicked awake

By nightmares of abuse

When we come to it

Then we will confess that not the Pyramids

With their stones set in mysterious perfection

Nor the Gardens of Babylon

Hanging as eternal beauty

In our collective memory

Not the Grand Canyon

Kindled into delicious color

By Western sunsets

Nor the Danube, flowing its blue soul into Europe

Not the sacred peak of Mount Fuji

Stretching to the Rising Sun

Neither Father Amazon nor Mother Mississippi who, without favor,

Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the shores

These are not the only wonders of the world

When we come to it

We, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globe

Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade and the dagger

Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace

We, this people on this mote of matter

In whose mouths abide cankerous words

Which challenge our very existence

Yet out of those same mouths

Come songs of such exquisite sweetness

That the heart falters in its labor

And the body is quieted into awe

We, this people, on this small and drifting planet

Whose hands can strike with such abandon

That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living

Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness

That the haughty neck is happy to bow

And the proud back is glad to bend

Out of such chaos, of such contradiction

We learn that we are neither devils nor divines

When we come to it

We, this people, on this wayward, floating body

Created on this earth, of this earth

Have the power to fashion for this earth

A climate where every man and every woman

Can live freely without sanctimonious piety

Without crippling fear

When we come to it

We must confess that we are the possible

We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world

That is when, and only when

We come to it.

********************************************
Thanks for visiting. Come again when you can.
Please be kind to each other while you can.

Thoughts on Valentine's Day

Sorry, no hearts and flowers today. This Valentine's Day it seems particularly appropriate to share Carl Sagan's iconic Pale Blue Dot monologue, especially since NASA has recently updated (reprocessed) the original Voyager 1 photograph. For now, this pale blue dot is all we have. We need to take better care of it. That means we need to do better caring for each other. We're all in, and on, this together. It's past time we Get Together.

Enlarged version of the new Pale Blue Dot release. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

    From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

    The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

Residence on Earth

By Arthur Sze

As we approached the front door, I noticed

grills on the windows, bullet pockmarks

in the wall; inside, a maid served us salad,

potato and cilantro soup—and I saw,

in the amphitheater above Medellín,

the stage where twenty-eight poets read;

clouds gathered; in the ensuing downpour,

I expected the five thousand people to rush out;

instead, a sea of umbrellas appeared,

and people swayed under them; when the readings

resumed, a poet stood, chanted in Vietnamese,

and when I stepped up to the podium,

two rivers flowed down the steps to the far right

and left; as I read our emotions resemble leaves

and alive to their shapes we are nourished, 

I understood how poets from all over the world

had come for peace, solidarity, justice—

and when my host, and reader of my poems

in Spanish, invited me into his home, I saw

one way to live during our residencia en la tierra.

********************************************
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Please be kind to each other while you can.

To an age of the healthy family farm

Christmas is come and gone. We face the start of a New Year, a New Decade, and, hopefully, a New Beginning? The headlines listed below weren't grabbed randomly, but they do represent many of the issues that have shown up in Minnesota's mainstream news media over the past year. Ask yourself if there are dots to be connected among these issues. Could we, as a state and a society, have placed too much emphasis on individualism and not enough on community? Have we become overly reliant on what's legal, or can be made to appear so, rather than focusing on what's right, what's ethical? Is making the most of something, at the least cost, for a maximum profit, really at the heart of Minnesota's, and America's, values? Should each township have only one or two farms? Isn't that a real economy of scale?

a built environment needs constant maintenance

Photo by J. Harrington

None of these issues listed below speak directly to Minnesota's opportunities and responsibilities created by the Anthropocene climate breakdown. None seem to be directly related to what's come to be known as the Sixth Extinction. And yet... John Muir noted years ago:

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.

The point of today's posting is to encourage any who read it to consider whether solutions proposed for the following (or other) issues addresses a symptom, or a root cause. It seems to us that we're running out of time for treating only symptoms. There's less than two days left this year. How many years, if any, do we have left to get it right?

     Some current issues facing Minnesota:

• Minnesota’s workforce shortage


• A quiet crisis: Minnesota’s child care shortage


• ‘We need more housing’


• State lawmakers still stuck in efforts to reach solution to insulin crisis


• Mayo closes two more facilities, blames rural health care crisis


• Milk production is rising even as small dairy farms shut down

For a Coming Extinction

By W. S. Merwin

Gray whale

Now that we are sending you to The End

That great god

Tell him 

That we who follow you invented forgiveness

And forgive nothing

I write as though you could understand

And I could say it

One must always pretend something

Among the dying

When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks

Empty of you

Tell him that we were made

On another day

The bewilderment will diminish like an echo

Winding along your inner mountains

Unheard by us

And find its way out

Leaving behind it the future

Dead

And ours

When you will not see again

The whale calves trying the light

Consider what you will find in the black garden

And its court

The sea cows the Great Auks the gorillas

The irreplaceable hosts ranged countless

And fore-ordaining as stars

Our sacrifices

Join your word to theirs

Tell him

That it is we who are important

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Are you for the birds?

The black cherry tree behind the house has finally reached peak color. In fact, most of the trees in the neighborhood are at that stage these days. Having blue skies and sunshine to go along with peak colors makes the world seem a prettier place than the dreary, damp, downpour-ridden days we've been experiencing. Although we're several days past this month's full moon, this morning, early, was the first time in a long while the cloud cover's been broken enough to see moonlight.

black cherry leaves near peak color

Photo by J. Harrington

The local blue jays are back. We rarely see them around the property during the Summer, but they're a relatively common sight during the Autumn, Winter and early Spring. Most of the feeders we use are hanging feeders, reported to not be among the jay's favorite. Since our cold season visitors are mostly business-like buffs, grays, and blacks (nuthatches and chickadees), blue jays, and cardinals, add splashes of welcome colors.

black-capped chickadee

Photo by J. Harrington

Speaking of chickadees, we have to admit that this week we discovered our knowledge has been woefully lacking. We thought there was only the black-capped chickadee and were truly upset when we read that climate change might cause them to move from Minnesota. It turns out, as we did a little research, that there's a separate species, the boreal chickadee. (We should have read the article more carefully when we encountered the phrase "Boreal species such as warblers and chickadees will suffer greater effects because they are specialists and less adaptable to changes in temperature and habitat....") The boreal chickadee is the one that Minnesota may lose to climate breakdown. (In the research effort, we also learned there's the carolina chickadee, the mountain chickadee, the mexican chickadee, the gray-headed chickadee, and the chestnut-backed chickadee.) Our Winter feeders just wouldn't be the same without the cheerful, black-capped visitors that flitter in and out with a beguiling frequency.

If you missed the stories about the loss, since 1970, of 3 billion birds or the Audubon Society's estimated impacts of climate breakdown on birds, you can follow the links in this sentence to either or both reports. First, many years ago, it was market hunting that triggered species loss of passenger pigeons and diminished populations of waterfowl and other avians. That was largely corrected with hunting regulations and the creation of wetland protection programs funded largely through taxes and firearms and ammunition and the sale of federal and state "duck stamps." Climate change and habitat loss are going to be more challenging to address. We've demonstrated we're capable of responding to these kinds of issues. The bigger question is, are we willing? What's a bird in the hand or two in the bush worth to us?

Birds Again

Jim Harrison - 1937-2016

A secret came a week ago though I already
knew it just beyond the bruised lips of consciousness.
The very alive souls of thirty-five hundred dead birds
are harbored in my body. It’s not uncomfortable.
I’m only temporary habitat for these not-quite-
weightless creatures. I offered a wordless invitation
and now they’re roosting within me, recalling
how I had watched them at night
in fall and spring passing across earth moons,
little clouds of black confetti, chattering and singing
on their way north or south. Now in my dreams
I see from the air the rumpled green and beige,
the watery face of earth as if they’re carrying
me rather than me carrying them. Next winter
I’ll release them near the estuary west of Alvarado
and south of Veracruz. I can see them perching
on undiscovered Olmec heads. We’ll say goodbye
and I’ll return my dreams to earth.

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Today Is #ClimateStrike !

For most of the morning, this page redirected to the global climate strike's web notice. Then, after we returned from joining several dozen other local climate strike supporters in an event at the Chisago County Government Center, we discovered that Orion magazine has revised their home page for the day, in solidarity with the Climate Strike. That seems to us a more productive effort. Please go and read at least one of the climate strike-related Feature Articles at Orion today. Thanks.

We will return to our regular programming tomorrow.

We've succeeded with eagles and sandhill cranes, now let's tackle GHGs

Small flocks/families of sandhill cranes (adults and colts) are foraging in local fields that have been harvested of small grains, or weren't planted at all this year. We're not sure where or when our fondness for sandhill cranes originated, we do know A Sand County Almanac had a lot to do with it. Although, when Leopold wrote his Marshland Elegy essay, he was quite concerned about the prospects for the survival of the species. They've recovered from their population low points, as have many endangered species. It's important to learn and remember about our past successes in conservation and restoration of our lands, waters and wildlife as we continue to be beleaguered by reports of melting glaciers, Western wildfires, flooding rivers, the burning Amazon and Australia's persistence in coal mining.

sandhill crane families foraging in a field

Photo by J. Harrington

We've seen and read a little about granting legal rights to rivers. As an alternative, perhaps we should consider making ecocide and related behavior a crime against humanity. Several major fossil fuel companies have known the implications of using their product for many decades and withheld that information, putting humanity at risk of a severely diminished existence. It seems increasingly clear that our international institutions aren't sufficiently robust to promptly limit the actions of one nation, such as Brazil or Australia, that threaten the health and prosperity of many others. It will be interesting to see what happens at the upcoming G7 meeting that begins tomorrow.

Remember in the old time Western movies and tv series how the "town folks" were at the mercy of the rowdy bad guys until a good guy with a fast gun bought law and order to town. Well, these days the world needs to tell nations and corporations to "check their GHGs when they come into town," or something like that. If the world as we know it has become too much like Dodge City, Kansas in "Gunsmoke," who's going to be Marshal Dillon? Or would the movie "High Noon" better fit our current situations?

One reason we believe that much stronger international regulations and enforcement are required can be found in the fact that the United States, since at least 1972, has been relying on farmers' voluntary behavior to limit pollution from agricultural runoff. A news story this morning tells us that "MPCA reports show need for dramatic reduction in soil entering rivers." As noted in those reports,

While none of the area watersheds or Minnesota River meets standards in a variety or areas, the Clean Water Act does not generally allow for regulatory action against “nonpoint souce” pollution, which includes runoff and erosion. “Point source” pollutants — typically things like a pipe coming out of a factory or a city’s wastewater treatment plant — are regulated.

But states are required to develop programs to manage nonpoint source pollution and meet standards if they want to get certain federal funding.

Unfortunately, not enough of us think or act like the poet W.S. Merwin, who noted that:

On the last day of the world
I would want to plant a tree
– W.S. Merwin

Remember, if we all behaved better we wouldn't need the highway patrol to enforce speed limits. We're more like the mother and father in the following poem.

Native Trees

By W. S. Merwin

Neither my father nor my mother knew

the names of the trees

where I was born

what is that

I asked and my

father and mother did not

hear they did not look where I pointed

surfaces of furniture held

the attention of their fingers

and across the room they could watch

walls they had forgotten

where there were no questions

no voices and no shade

Were there trees

where they were children

where I had not been

I asked

were there trees in those places

where my father and my mother were born

and in that time did

my father and my mother see them

and when they said yes it meant

they did not remember

What were they I asked what were they

but both my father and my mother

said they never knew

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Memorial Day, 2019

My father, and my mother's brother, and my father-in-law, are part of The Greatest Generation. Each served in World War II (the last time a US Congress actually declared war). Their respective families were fortunate to have each of these members of our armed forces return home. We wonder, more and more often these days, what they would think of the country they had been willing to sacrifice their lives for.

when will the country soar like its symbol?

Photo by J. Harrington

During the last presidential election, more than 62 million voters cast their ballots for a clearly unqualified candidate who, since that election, sounds more and more like a nazi leader the Greatest Generation fought to protect our country against. Pundits are now questioning how long until we are engaged in our next civil war. Elections are being unduly influenced by global corporations (Citizens' United) and foreign governments (Mueller Report). One party in Congress aids and abets such behavior. The other articulates "tsk, tsks" and "yadda, yadda, yaddas," but does little more.

Meanwhile, the only world we know, the one on which we depend for our very lives, is coming unraveled and becoming dysfunctional because of capitalism and the need for profits derived from perpetual growth. From what I know of my father, my uncle, and my father-in-law, I'm pretty sure each and every one of them, and all the members of the Greatest Generation, who fought to make the world safe for democracy, would be ashamed of us, and rightly so. On this, and too many past Memorial Days, we have forgotten who we are, where we've come from, and how many have made the ultimate sacrifice just so that we could help create and, so far, fail to correct, the mess our country is in. I believe, and hope, that "we're better than this." Now I'd like to see us demonstrate it.

Memorial Day

By Michael Anania

It is easily forgotten, year to

year, exactly where the plot is,

though the place is entirely familiar—

a willow tree by a curving roadway

sweeping black asphalt with tender leaves;

damp grass strewn with flower boxes,

canvas chairs, darkskinned old ladies

circling in draped black crepe family stones,

fingers cramped red at the knuckles, discolored

nails, fresh soil for new plants, old rosaries;

such fingers kneading the damp earth gently down

on new roots, black humus caught in grey hair

brushed back, and the single waterfaucet,

birdlike upon its grey pipe stem,

a stream opening at its foot.

We know the stories that are told,

by starts and stops, by bent men at strange joy

regarding the precise enactments of their own

gesturing. And among the women there will be

a naming of families, a counting off, an ordering.

The morning may be brilliant; the season

is one of brilliances—sunlight through

the fountained willow behind us, its splayed

shadow spreading westward, our shadows westward,

irregular across damp grass, the close-set stones.

It may be that since our walk there is faltering,

moving in careful steps around snow-on-the-mountain,

bluebells and zebragrass toward that place

between the willow and the waterfaucet, the way

is lost, that we have no practiced step there,

and walking, our own sway and balance, fails us.

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How to salvage a soggy Summer

Summer solstice is about a month away. This year's weather has us wondering if we'll have enough dry wood for a Solstice fire, emphasis on the dry. After last night's winds, the drive and yard are again full of dead oak branches, none of them particularly dry. Weather forecasters are warning us the entire Summer may be cool and wet. We will have to bring about a major attitude adjustment, as well as break out our foul weather gear.

On the bright side, wet ground will make it easier to pull the smaller buckthorn bushes. On the darker side, frequent rains will severely hinder our planned attacks on the poison ivy that's now emerging. Thank heavens we're coming to rely more and more on certain lyrics by Leonard Cohen and a quotation of Samuel Beckett's.

• Cohen (from Anthem)
  
  Ring the bells that still can ring
  Forget your perfect offering
  There is a crack in everything
  That's how the light gets in 


• Beckett (from Worstword Ho)
  
  Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

If the reports of the IPCC and the UN are to be believed, and we think they are, weather, politics, economies and many factors in contemporary life are likely to get worse before they may get better. We've read too much of Rebecca Solnit to allow ourselves the luxury of despair. It took the Irish how long before they got the colonizers most of the way out of Ireland? Native Americans and other indigenous peoples have been resisting colonizers for how many hundreds of years? It is time for us to transform the values on which we base our judgements. We kind of like the way Banksy has phrased it for the Extinction Rebellion folks:

London Extinction Rebellion mural is a Banksy, says expert 

Perhaps because we're the product of a classical education, we're familiar with the (mock) Latin saying "Illegitimi non carborundum," but we much prefer Kris Kristofferson's version.

[UPDATE: we stumbled into this quote that, we think, nicely fits today's theme:

“Surely, in the light of history, it is more intelligent to hope rather than to fear, to try rather than not to try. For one thing we know beyond all doubt: Nothing has ever been achieved by the person who says, ‘It can’t be done.’”
               ~~Eleanor Roosevelt, Voice of America, November 11, 1951]

You Must

Jon Andersen

You must have a hope
that will let you stomp and sing
at any cold dawn.
You must not wait
to love the student who loves you
and would like to kill you.
You must read the story again
and again to the child
who receives you with a bovine stare.
You must get up
every day to punch in
not dreaming on transcendence,
not desiring new heroes or gods,
not looking the other way,
but looking for the other way
and ready to talk to everyone on the line.
You must not wait
for official approval
nor general consensus
to rage.  You must
come again to kneel
in shiny, rock-strewn soil
not to pray, but to plant.
Yes, even now
as ice caps melt and black top
goes soft in the sun
you must prepare for the harvest.

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Young Minnesotan helps organize US Youth Climate Strike

Today's post is about learning how to be, or at least behave, "better than this." For several days we've been fussing and fuming about what looked like a lack of participation by young people in the US in the growing international movement of school strikes for climate. We should have had more faith in our youth. After a limited beginning, the US school strike for climate is scheduled to expand on March 15 of this year. According to a story in the Washington Post, a New York teen "has joined forces with Haven Coleman, a 12-year-old striker from Colorado, and Isra Hirsi, the 15-year-old daughter of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), to organize the U.S. movement." We commend them all and thank them for their efforts to bring the rest of us to our senses. We are particularly delighted to see Minnesota well represented and showing some leadership on this issue.

THIS IS PLANET B
Image Credit: NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring

We're not sure what, if anything, it means, but our recollection of the early Vietnam War protests (yes, we are that old) was that many, perhaps most(?), of the participants were college age. Then again, many of the civil rights activists of the 1950s and '60s, such as the Little Rock Nine, were high school students.

Despite being a card-carrying member of the "Grumpy Old Men," we firmly disavow the concept that wisdom is ensconced only in society's elders. We live on a dynamic and changing planet in a dynamic and changing universe. We, and the rest of the current inhabitants of Earth, are facing challenges with catastrophic implications for the continuation of many species, including homo sapiens, if we do not transform our cultures and economies from a linear, once through, consumer focused model to a circular, regenerative, restorative model. Those embedded in a "we've never done it this way before" mindset may serve as dutiful followers but should not be allowed to serve as leaders. By coincidence, if you believe in coincidence, this morning we came across a set of recently developed resources on designing for the circular economy. They were created by IDEO and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. We'd like to see more folks aware of these tools and how to use them, especially the "younger generation." Let's face it, they have much more to gain, or to lose, by getting the needed changes done effectively (doing the right things) and efficiently (doing things right) than do those of us who've been around for awhile.

All of the preceding now has us wondering what a democracy would look like, and how it would function, if that democracy's goals were set by the younger generation (reverting back to our college days, let's call it those who can be trusted, i.e., under thirty.) and responsibility for figuring out how to attain those goals became the responsibility of the older generations. After all, Adam and Eve were, presumably, adults and look where that's got us. On the other hand, many of our "founding fathers" were mere striplings. "Many of the Founding Fathers were under 40 years old at the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776: Alexander Hamilton was 19, Aaron Burr was 20, Gouverneur Morris was 24." Think about that and consider how we can better honor the wisdom and integrity youth expresses through their honesty and impatience.

[Murmurs from the earth of this land]

By Muriel Rukeyser

Murmurs from the earth of this land, from the caves and craters,

       from the bowl of darkness. Down watercourses of our

       dragon childhood, where we ran barefoot.

We stand as growing women and men. Murmurs come down

        where water has not run for sixty years.

Murmurs from the tulip tree and the catalpa, from the ax of

        the stars, from the house on fire, ringing of glass; from

        the abandoned iron-black mill.

Stars with voices crying like mountain lions over forgotten

        colors.

Blue directions and a horizon, milky around the cities where the

        murmurs are deep enough to penetrate deep rock.

Trapping the lightning-bird, trapping the red central roots.

You know the murmurs. They come from your own throat.

You are the bridges to the city and the blazing food-plant green;

The sun of plants speaks in your voice, and the infinite shells of

        accretions

A beach of dream before the smoking mirror.

You are close to that surf, and the leaves heated by noon, and

        the star-ax, the miner’s glitter walls. The crests of the sea

Are the same strength you wake with, the darkness is the eyes

        of children forming for a blaze of sight and soon, soon,

Everywhere your own silence, who drink from the crater, the

        nebula, one another, the changes of the soul.

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