The time we’re most familiar with is a unit of measurement and the way in which we experience the advancement of our lives. Religious pundits have for centuries described time as a circle, ever evolving upward. Yet every year we experience a birthday, an anniversary, a holiday, making our perception of time both circular and linear. Confused yet? If so, then you need to read Fractal Time: The Secret of 2012 and a New World Age
Fractal Time
If you look up the word “time” in Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, you’ll see a list of fourteen definitions for time as a noun, eight as a colloquialism, five as a verb, eleven as an adjective, one as an adverb, and no less than forty-one words that start with the word time (time lapse, time-out, time immemorial, to name a few). Judging by the amount of “time” Webster’s devotes to the word, time appears to be as ubiquitous as air. No wonder we don’t understand it. Read more here…
Charitable giving is always a good idea. According to one belief system we are all connected. If that’s true, giving to another is the same as giving to yourself.
Our sister site knows a thing or two about giving. Find out more here.
Graduation Day
It’s a rite of passage, a period of great change and enormous possibilities. One where you hope someone will be there, preferably holding a road map with a big fat X marking the next spot and detailed instructions on how to get there. Well, here it is. Your graduation “go-to” info from one of the funniest, and now wisest people . . . Jim Carrey.
Have you kissed a frog lately and thanked it? If not, this is your chance because May is National Wetlands Month.
“Wait…what?”you say. “What the heck is National Wetlands Month?”
Funny you should ask. You see, the federal government recognizes the beauty, the raw power, and the undeniable necessity of wetlands, not because of the commercial development value, but because of their intrinsic and strategic value in maintaining a healthy ecosystem.
Wetlands have three distinct parameters that earn them the title. First, they are water-saturated and can always be wet, like swamps, marshes, bogs and coastal wetlands, or seasonally wet, resulting from winter snow melt, and occurring in forested or wooded or open areas that collect standing water, and sometimes dry like ephemeral pools or streams which reemerge after a rain event and dry out with the sun until the next rain event. Second, their soils are hydric meaning that at least for some part of the year the soils will be immersed in water. Thirdly, they have more than less hydrophytic vegetation which simply means that this type of plant thrives in a water environment. Unless it’s an obvious wetland like a marsh or bog or coastal plain, a bit of scientific investigation is necessary to make a wetlands determination as it’s not always apparent to the naked eye. Permits are required to build in wetlands as well as avoidance and minimization of the planned disturbance and mitigation for whatever amount of wetlands are converted to uplands. It’s a bit of a complicated process, but with the federal government’s “no net loss”of wetlands policy, a crucial one.
Why, gosh darn it, are these mosquito-infested swamps so important? Well, wetlands act like a sponge. They control flooding, filter pollutants, and buffer storm surges like nobody’s business. The Mississippi Delta which is practically one huge wetland has over 40% of the wetlands in the lower 48 states and has lost over 1,900 square miles since the 1930’s. About two football fields worth of wetlands are lost every hour. It used to be that 50 miles of wetlands separated New Orleans from the next hurricane, but no more. Now storm surges and big winds have their way with her.
Philadelphia, was also a big wetland when the colonists first settled, but they ditched and drained their way to what is now known as Center City Philadelphia. The problem is not necessarily the conversion of wetlands. Many port towns around the coasts of our country were once inundated with wetlands and are now bustling metropolises rather than said mosquito-filled swamps, but overdevelopment, such as in the Florida Keyes and surrounding environs, has resulted in life out of balance. As coastal cities continue to build out, or develop their barrier islands beyond holding capacity, the 100-year storm which now seems to happen every five or ten years will continue to pound what used to be only shoreline, but is now littered with million dollar homes.
How many wetlands do we need to control flooding, keep pollutants out of our rivers and streams, and help blunt the surge of rising winds and tides? It’s a fact specific, case-by-case analysis, but as climate change forces sea levels to rise, I’d hazard a guess that we’re reaching critical mass in some of the more densely populated coastal areas, for example, the Jersey Shore. Maybe a few more acres of wetlands wouldn’t have stopped Hurricane Sandy, but they would have cut down way down on the property damage. As the sea levels rise, wetlands have become more important than ever. Insurance companies are keenly aware of this —pun intended —sea change, and have started charging more for policies on climate-threatened properties. Some are even suing municipalities to pay for the cost of global warming such as Farmers Insurance Co. did with some Chicago-area governments in a landmark class action suit filed on May 2, 2014 (Illinois Farmers Insurance Co. v. The Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago District, et al., Case No. 14CH06608, in the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois).
By the way, about the frog: they are extremely important to the balance of the ecosystem since they eat bugs, filter our drinking water (tadpoles), and are themselves a source of food for other species, as well as the source of many medical advances for humans. Plus they make the most rockin’music! Unfortunately, they’ve been on the decline for the last 50 years with fewer numbers and more mutations because of a variety of things, but degrading water quality, habitat loss and overuse of pesticides are a few of the major ones. Frogs are to the ecosystem like the canary is to the coal mine. Their death is the first indication that there’s a problem and where frogs go, humans will follow.
We can’t all have beach front property, not at great public and personal cost, but we can all enjoy the beach. What is it the Buddha said? Everything in moderation? So for National Wetlands Month, go ahead and build that dream vacation home, but build it on a upland so tomorrow our kids will still have a frog or two left to kiss.
For thousands of years, we’ve used and reused the same water as the dinosaurs, Galileo, Genghis Kahn, and Jesus. Until now. Now the water is chock full of contaminants that the ancients didn’t even know how to pronounce. That’s because Mama Nature doesn’t know how to remove radionuclides, usually held safely within the earth’s crust, and other chemicals found in the fracking wastewater that’s slowly making its way into Her rivers, lakes, and streams. Until now, we’d been sipping the same stuff as Adam and Eve. Until now.
Enjoy an excerpt from THE QUALITY OF LIGHT:
She died that night. Doc attended the funeral along with dozens and dozens of ranchers and their families all come to pay their respects to this great woman, one of the “stickers” whose family had come in the late-1800s during the first boom and bust era of timbering and mining and oil and construction and who had stayed on to make a living. They worked the land for what it would produce – cattle. So when the time came and they asked if anyone wanted to say anything on behalf of this fine woman, Doc’s hand raised itself, his body stood up, and he took over the funeral.
“Twila’s great-grandfather was thrilled when the first oil men knocked on his door with a check and a promise. They may not have tamed the harsh out of the land, but at least they made it more hospitable. They built roads and paid well, and the ranchers loved them. That was the heyday when oil flowed like free love out of those great big underground reservoirs. Sweet gas, they called it. Back then a whisper could’ve coaxed that oil out of the ground.” To read more of this post, click here…
Earth Day 2014 is right around the corner. . .and as as you might guess, we have something to say about it. Herewith, the first installment of our tree-hugging, dirt-adoring, planet-loving perspectives.
Have you ever loved something so much that you would die for it? John Vogelin, Billy’s grandfather does. Fire on the Mountain depicts Vogelin’s struggle to preserve his New Mexico ranch as told through the eyes of his grandson, Billy, who lives each school year in the city, high on the expectation of returning to his grandfather’s ranch for a summer of living the cowboy life. READ THE REST
We like to support like-minded writers everywhere.
Just like this blogger. And why not? If the universe is comprised of infinite possibilities, then why not angelic repairmen who get the job done?
For the last week, we excerpted ourselves, from our First Blush files. Why, you may well ask? Because we have so much to say about our home planet, and we love her too much to let her languish while we stand idly by. Read more here — and join the revolution.
There are sonnets and sonatas that our Mother has not written yet, complex plant life that She has not yet evolved to produce, future medicines found in the leaves of Her favorite plants that She has not yet decided to share. Should we wipe this all out before we see what She has in store for us? As we evolve, She evolves, not one without the other, but both in tandem for we are part of Nature and that is its essence, a lyrical dance where She and We constantly reveal ourselves to ourselves. Why would we ever want to stop the dance of so much possibility?
As a writer, I don’t just like paper, I adore it. Yet, what if I had to pay the real cost for paper? It takes 3 gallons of water to make a sheet of paper. Then there’s the cost of the land and logs, the cost of the fuel to run the equipment to cut the tree down, the cost of getting the tree to the paper mill, of packaging and distributing the paper, of labor, and other costs I’m not thinking of, and the most hidden cost, the increased CO2 emissions because of the loss of the tree. If I had to pay, say $3 for a piece of paper, would I squander it or use every precious inch? (Hint: pay and conserve.) We have oversimplified many an environmental argument by hiding the true cost of bringing the product to market.
Perhaps if we stopped, took a breath and a pay check, i.e., tally our resources. We live in a time where denial has become de rigueur. It’s not effecting me today, so let tomorrow’s people deal with it. Yet our children are tomorrow’s people and what are we leaving them except a set of problems that have become near impossible to unravel, like the Gordian knot. If we have to whack it off and start fresh — given the intractability of some of these issues — it’s not likely that fresh is going to comport with easy-peasy. Somewhere in the muck of logging and deforestation is a solution, probably a more expensive one, yes, but one where people get to keep a job and the planet. It may not be the same job so flexibility is a bonus. However, without flexibility and thoughtful discussion, as opposed to the high octane verbal sparring you see on talk shows, there can be no consensus, and without consensus, how will the riddle of supplying ourselves with sufficient resources to fuel our modern lifestyle without overtaxing our very generous Mother ever be solved, but badly? Often it’s only in the absence of something that people finally recognize its brilliance. Unfortunately for us, there may be no one left to see the light.
There are healthy ways to harvest the planet’s resources while allowing Her to thrive. In the Pacific Northwest in the early1990s, clear-cutting was slowly being replaced with more sustainable harvesting techniques. That was because residents got a clear picture of what the future looked like with erosion and sedimentation runoff from the naked hillsides, extinction of both plant and animal species, and the degradation of watersheds and reduced water quality, to name a few, so they started speaking up, and more importantly, they voted — with their wallets. You think you are just one person, but you are wrong. You are a global force and what you think and say and intend matters. More than anything, it is the consumer that drives the marketplace and if consumers are clamoring for sustainably harvested forests, then that’s what they shall have. It takes a forest to house a complex community of macro and microorganisms sufficient to support not just life, but growth and it takes READ THE REST HERE.
persephone's step-sisters 