We escaped the N. American east coast blizzard completely! I feel like we, in Southern Ontario, are in the eye of a hurricane, a placid place compared to our more distant neighbours going through extreme conditions. It is very disconcerting because we have not been hit by anything quite as severe as Northern Ireland and the US coast are experiencing, since the ice-storm of 1998 that crippled whole areas of Quebec and Ontario. We are due one. This kind of mild weather here feels all wrong, as wrong as theirs. If the global warming deniers don't get sidelined and sidelined quick, we are in for some rough times ahead. Mozambique, the Mekong, Mexico and its neighbours, Australia, now Maritime temperate zones ... all experiencing extremes never seen before. Climate change is too late to reverse now. All we can do is mitigate for our children and grandchildren.
What I am saying to my daughter in Dublin, is things like ..." quit flying now, except for one flight. Either fly home and stay here or stay there" ... all this bloody flying is yet another nail in the earth, spewing filth into the atmosphere. All this flying around for tourism and useless feckin business meetings, is a load of tripe. We have all the communication technology sorted out so we can have decent human contact and a window on the world beyond our homes that is almost as real as that experience you so want to have by being there, now that 3D TV is on the horizon (if that's what turns you on). Quit going to those exotic places for now at least (most of them disappointing anyway!) until we have figured out a way to get there without slashing through the atmosphere with spewing shitty planes! If your surroundings don't look attractive, then walk and look around you within walking distance of where you live and find a spot that hasn't been impinged upon in every way, visual, auditory, olfactory or under your feet. Put your feet on the earth everyday. Immerse yourself in it and make bloody sure nobody rips the beauty out of those last untouched earth sanctuaries (if you can find one). Even Lough Patrick is compromised. Forget that church sanctuary. Look at the sanctuary that's all around you. The climate is the very rhythm of the earth and so, of us. We are turning the climate into a very rangy, mangy beast indeed, one that's bitin' back. That's all it knows. The earth is like a dog, a good dog, 95% of the time, and if it's treated properly, it will not bite back until our bite, our injuring, is just so deep and widespread, like a plague of fleas run amok. Then the 5% wild animal in her goes into biting-back mode. We are inflicting deep gashes on the planet's surface and its/our precious atmosphere.
It's bite-back time. And most of us think we're awfully kind to animals, don't we? We think of the earth as this massive inert ball, not as a huge creature we have attempted to tame, but we are as delicate as a fungus on the surface of snow when you think of the tiny, thin skin of life we are in, on this hurtling ball, racing through the immensity of space.
We're in trouble.
I'm sittin' tight this year and for the foreseeable future. I ain't flying anywhere. I ain't going nowhere. Not even driving to Florida. Not even sure I want to fly to Ireland ever again. I'm going to try to find whatever beauty is left in this corner of the world, every day, even on a gray, wintry day.