I knew that it had been a while since my last posting, but I had no idea how long it had been. John Lennon is usually given credit for saying that “life is what happens while you are making other plans,” which is included in the lyrics for Beautiful Boy, written for his son, Sean. Since my last blog, we’ve had two major holidays (Christmas and New Year’s), and more than a month has slipped away while I was busy making other plans. And shoveling snow. It is, after all, winter in Michigan….
We have had some winter weather in Michigan, and I have certainly had some snow to shovel. We’ve also had some atypical warm spells, including two recent days (in February, no less) with 50-degree (F) days. One of my azalea bushes leafed out, and now yesterday and today, we’re having another major winter storm. I will want to use the snow blower to clear what’s on my drive. From what I have read and seen in news reports, the weather has been strange nearly everywhere this year. El Niño is usually given credit or blame for the weather pattern this year, but most of the strangeness of this year’s weather is probably due to climate change. As most of our recent climate change seems to be a direct result of human activity, it is something I think all of us should be concerned about.
Here in the States we should all be concerned about the growing partisan divide. Of course, we always did have a “partisan divide, as singer/songwriter Tom Lehrer pointed out back in the 1970s. It may be, in fact, that the partisan divide is based on the primitive concepts of tribal affiliations and conflicts over resources. Protestants and Catholics, after all, fought The Hundred Years War over what Jonathan Swift later called the war between the Big Enders and Little Enders, based on which end of a soft-boiled egg should be opened first. You would think that by now we (humans) would have learned that we need to find a better way to resolve differences.
Given modern technologies, especially current military technologies, we have to question how much longer humans can bicker about their differences if we—and all living things on earth—can long survive. Perhaps we have reached what some branches of Christianity call the end of times, but not because Biblical prophesy is being fulfilled. Futurist and philosopher Barbara Marx Hubbard makes a good case for a reinterpretation of the New Testament. For her book on this subject, see The Evolutionary Testament of Co-Creation. For a video summary, see her YouTube video.
I am beginning to have a sense of urgency about our need to make some fundamental changes in the way we examine what are universal problems. It is increasingly obvious that we can no longer say, “I’m swimming in the ‘No Peeing’ end of the pool.” There is no pristine place left on the planet. Human pollution extends from the North Pole to the South Pole. Our oceans are filled with plastic waste and a variety of other pollutants. We are heading for what is usually called the Sixth Extinction. For more information about that, see the book by that title, written by Elizabeth Kolbert.
As the saying goes, time is indeed flying, and we can’t afford to continue allowing politicians and corporations willing to sacrifice resources and people for profit. The Earth is resilient. After all, the planet has seen five previous mass extinctions. After each, life returned in abundance. My sense is that if the sixth extinction proves our fate, Earth will regenerate, and life will flourish once again. That life may not, of course, resemble life as we have known it since humanity first stood on two legs.
