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Sunbeams

I’m still learning how dogged people can be in denial, even when their freedom or their lives are at stake.

Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

Bowl, Large Cloth, Pair Of Chopsticks

The air is still. The governor is on the radio: “This could be the greatest loss of human lives and property due to wildfire in our state’s history.” I start vacuuming. It’s not until Amy gets home an hour later that we begin to outline what needs to be done: We need cat carriers to transport the cats. We need provisions for the animals. We need our medications. I am demonstrating how much we need our medications.

Fire All Around

Even though we all breathed the smoke from the destruction of the town of Paradise in 2018 — breathed in their burning cars, homes, animals, and bodies — it was still happening “over there” to “other people.”

Tuvalu

Tuvalu is in danger of disappearing due to sea-level rise. The ocean around it is rising about one inch every five years, twice the global average. It’s estimated that an eight- to sixteen-inch increase will be enough to make the country uninhabitable.

Our Great Reckoning

Eileen Crist On The Consequences Of Human Plunder

In this current pandemic the fear and upheaval drove Americans to hoard toilet paper and guns and ammo. Try to imagine a food shortage instead of a scarcity of toilet paper.

Sunbeams

Man’s attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.

Rachel Carson

A Shrinking World

Let’s put aside, for the moment, the thought of mass extinction. . . . Even if that is our eventual due, life will first look and feel different. Life as we know it won’t suddenly end, but it will be crimped; in many places, it already is.