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Fearing the wrong storm

Panicky news media and political opposition frets and pre-surrenders to the prospects of what the next US president will do to climate goals and renewable energy projects. If you’re not accustomed to pushing back, prepare to be pushed around.

A few facts:

The U.S. currently produces more crude oil than any country, ever. What more fracking and drill babying will do to the price oil is an unsolvable mystery.

A powerful bomb cyclone is ripping the Pacific Northwest with hurricane-strength winds as the season’s first atmospheric river comes ashore in Northern California, promising torrential rains, floods and mudslides across the region.

Advanced energy capacity is concentrated in renewables, just ask the U.S. military.

Meanwhile, farmers continue to take massive financial hits from the effects of destructive storms.

What to do with this information (yes, after you stop ignoring it)? Use it to make decisions, including voting, but not just that. But speaking of voting, leaders have to be led to the safe place to do the right thing. Who’s going to do that? Who’s going to create the safe place and lead them there?

It’s almost flattering to think global warming is complicated and difficult to solve.

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Literalism, and three owl feathers

Versus say, parables or allegory. Some things are naturally compelling.

Okay, fine.

Taken to its logical extreme, watching National Geographic videos about a fragmented animal kingdom run amok – punctured at its edges by people and clothing [people with desires, clothing with labels] can get one’s mind off of walking to work or growing your own vegetables, at least for a while. But what does this have to do with the price of gas?

Speaking of $3.75 per gallon, what about $7.50? I wonder if that will get people’s attention. But… the animal kingdom: if we can be compelled into getting outside more (seems natural enough), perhaps we can break the cycle facilitating our isolation, the consequences of which seem to make it so easy to rule our own lives so corruptly. You know, the home-car-work-car-home cycle allows the kind of talk radio- and t.v.-insulation against ever letting one’s foot touch anything real that bears a non-trivial relation to not letting one’s brain encounter anything similarly natural. Reducing our environment to only that which re-enforces our world view, this many of us take quite literally. These things are connected – it doesn’t take Bertrand Russell to see that.

A family of owls has taken up residence in my neighborhood over the last couple of years. Huge birds that swoop down like the night but allow themselves and their offspring to be observed quite openly before twilight. Funny thing when people start gathering outside at dusk to look up at birds in trees. The things people don’t say.

Anyway, they are the likely source of some really bizarre night sounds of late – not the hooting that sounds so fake it could be a commando signal. This was some unearthly hissing, long and sharp shreaks of hisses coming unseen from up in the leafy canopy.

I’m left to wonder if these strange calls might augur some ecological inerrancy.