Back to the future?

Yesterday was a Red Flag day and not just because it was Mother's Day! Low humidity, winds gusting into the low thirties mph, plus no precipitation for a week or so raised the grass fire danger over much of the state. We get this morning off and the Red Flag returns at noon for the afternoon and evening. Please keep your fingers crossed that all those exposed to danger and destruction stay safe. These days that includes about all of US and most other Earthlings, doesn't it?

brush fire: not all burns are controlled

Photo by J. Harrington

Have you noticed that many librarians are moving 1984 and Brave New World from the fiction to the nonfiction section? That's disheartening, to put it mildly. Although the term Anthropocene has been rejected as a new geological epoch, I think there's a more hopeful future for the term and those living during it. It will become known as the period in which humans finally became wise enough to stop destroying the life support systems of their home planet. This assessment is based on a growing number of books that flag intelligent and successful environmental restoration movements growing world-wide. Here's a few titles for your consideration:

• What if We Get It Right?, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
• Carbon, Paul Hawken
• Hydrate the Earth, Ananda Fitzsimmons, and
• Is a River Alive?, Robert Macfarlane

I'm rereading the third title, almost finished each of the first two, and looking forward to getting a copy of the fourth next month as a gift. To paraphrase from the opening of the original Star Wars crawl: "A long time ago in on a galaxy planet far, far away [in time]...." the First People(s) believed Earth a sacred part of the Great Mystery. If you're old enough, you'll recognize where we borrowed this from: "Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear."

I don't know about you, but I think it'd be great if we all stopped trying to burn up our home planet and dedicated more to tending what's left and restoring what we've trashed. Otherwise, we won't be the ancestors our children and theirs needed.

        Salvage

Ada Limón
1976 –

On the top of Mount Pisgah, on the western
slope of the Mayacamas, there’s a madrone
tree that’s half-burned from the fires, half-alive
from nature’s need to propagate. One side
of her is black ash and at her root is what
looks like a cavity that was hollowed out
by flame. On the other side, silvery green
broadleaf shoots ascend toward the winter
light and her bark is a cross between a bay
horse and a chestnut horse, red and velvety
like the animal’s neck she resembles. I have
been staring at the tree for a long time now.
I am reminded of the righteousness I had
before the scorch of time. I miss who I was.
I miss who we all were, before we were this: half
alive to the brightening sky, half dead already.
I place my hand on the unscarred bark that is cool
and unsullied, and because I cannot apologize
to the tree, to my own self I say, I am sorry.
I am sorry I have been so reckless with your life.

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

for the children

 Leaf buds are burst. Leaf out has begun. The creeping Charlie in front of the house  has pretty little blue flowers. The lily of the valley patch along the driveway is about half a foot tall. Spring is sprunging everywhere. Today's temperature is in the upper 70's approaching 80. Next Sunday is Mother's Day. The humming bird / oriole feeder has been filled and hung.

Image Credit: NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi
NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring

I'm trying, and sometimes failing, to not let the craziness emanating out of the state and national capitols sour me on the world and many of its inhabitants. When I stop doom scrolling and look around I can find beauty and goodness. Let's see if I feel optimistic enough this week to go buy a fishing license. 🤞

I bet you know that Minnesota's constitution has provisions governing spending lottery funds on environmental projects but doesn't have a "Green Amendment" establishing our right to clean air, clean water and a healthy environment. That strikes me as being a cart before the horse kind of deal. There's an organization / movement, Green Amendments For the Generations, with the mission:

to ensure every person and community across the United States is able to experience the health, quality of life, education, joy and economic prosperity provided by a clean, safe and healthy environment; to end environmental racism; and to help ensure that nature itself is able to thrive, by constitutionally empowering all people to secure and enforce their inalienable human right to pure water, clean air, a stable climate, healthy ecosystems and environments.

Minnesota is not listed as one of the states active in the Green Amendment movement. I'm curious to see if I can get a handle on why and how we might be able to change that. Please feel free to share thoughts in the comments

The Green Amendments movement is similar to but not the same as the Rights of Nature movement. The former focuses on anthropocentric values and the latter on nature's intrinsic values. I think we should look toward a "both and" approach rather than an either / or situation, but it may well turn out to be a one step at a time movement. Now that Minnesota is the headwaters of America's Most Threatened River, the Mississippi, perhaps the powers that be may become more amenable to the proverbial "clean up our act" effort. Stay tuned.

Today's poem is one of my own that I was fortunate enough to find a home for in a book by a friend of ours, Krista Detor's Flat Earth Diary. Most of those who will benefit from Green Amendments aren't yet born or grown up.

        A Way 

Earth's children grow
leave home
go away where
dragons roam

dragons fly aweigh
to lands on maps
filled with children grown
away from home

Hubble captures dragons a way from home
away from children
aweigh in space

children young and old
pass away as dragons fly
where earth aweigh
finds a way
to roam
home 

J Harrington

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