Let's be serious then let’s be creative

 

From Katharine Hayhoe's newsletter, "Talking Climate"

In late April, in the coastal city of Santa Marta, Colombia, something remarkable happened. Representatives from 57 countries from across the globe gathered for the first-ever conference dedicated to transitioning away from fossil fuels.

 
After three decades of UN climate negotiations and still-rising emissions, many countries have had enough. As COP30 in Belem wrapped up last November, Colombia and the Netherlands announced they were co-hosting this new conference to provide a kind of practical reckoning: what does leaving fossil fuels behind actually look like, and how do we collectively get there? 
 
The conference was inspired by the Fossil Fuel Treaty, a concept developed by my fellow Canadian and lifetime climate advocate, Tzeporah Berman. She explains it here so perfectly, you’ll wonder why everyone doesn’t see it as a no-brainer!
 
“We decided not to resign ourselves to an economy built on the destruction of life. We decided that the transition away from fossil fuels could no longer remain a slogan but must become a concrete, political and collective endeavour,” said Irene Vélez Torres, chair of the talks and Colombia’s environment minister. “When people look back on us from the future, they will remember whether or not we rose to the challenge of our time.”
 
The countries who showed up represent over half of global GDP, roughly one-third of energy demand, and about 20% of fossil fuel supply. They describe themselves as the “coalition of the willing” and all pledged to develop voluntary roadmaps for drawing down their fossil fuel use.

Next year’s conference will take place in Tuvalu co-hosted by Ireland, and participating countries have been asked to have drafted their roadmaps by then. 

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Tuvalu is an archipelagic country in the Polynesian sub-region of Oceania in the Pacific Ocean, about midway between Hawaii and Australia. It lies east-northeast of the Santa Cruz Islands (which belong to Solomon Islands), northeast of Vanuatu, southeast of Nauru, south of Kiribati, west of Tokelau, northwest of Samoa and Wallis and Futuna, and north of Fiji.

Tuvalu is composed of three reef islands and six atolls spread out between the latitude of 5° and 10° south and between the longitude of 176° and 180°. They lie west of the International Date Line. The 2022 census determined that Tuvalu had a population of 10,643, making it the 194th most populous country, exceeding only Niue and the Vatican City in population. Tuvalu's total land area is 25.14 square kilometres (9.71 sq mi).

Today I'm sharing a far-off bit of environmental interest. Not exactly far-out as we hippies used to say.

In my own life I'm moving toward dependence upon the real people in my life, sorry blogger friends. Yes you are definitely important, but when I need a ride, or help deciding what to pack, or even packing, or definitely how to get from here to there...I need people who are walking around within my own region. Not Tuvalu-ans. Not bloggers who I know and love, but only interact with a few minutes a day. Sorry guys and gals.

So if I'm missing in making comments, just know I'm reading as many blogs as this defunct program posts...and if I don't even post daily, I'm still here! I now understand how and why so many bloggers have backed slowly away.

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My steadily improving health is somewhat remarkable. Before pneumonia I would at times be a bit light headed, and walked around holding onto furniture inside. Outside I'd get out of breath easily. I spoke to several doctors/nurses about this, and one prescribed an anti-nausea drug, which also can make one sleepy (Meclizine)

I've learned sleepy side effects mean this is a central nervous system depressant, which is not good for my breathing needs. So that's put away for now.

And after sitting around the first 4 weeks post hospitalization, I am now having consistent 93 pulse ox readings, no matter what I'm doing. I'm not using the oxygen for moving around any of the daytime.  I don't get out of breath walking across the parking lot to the mailboxes most days. There are still some ups and downs.

Bronchiectasis may not go away, and I still will continue to encourage the healthy coughing to clear my lungs with various devices and drugs. Yet having days with minimal coughing means my energy can be used in other pursuits!

The other day I dusted my bedside table and lampshade. Whew, did they need it. Since I don't have a regular cleaner, I am doing what I can when I can. Baby steps.

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We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.

MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

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What if, when we write we are participating in Earth’s generativity—the same exact process that creates trees and insects, clouds and flowers—creativity itself?

To some writers, words seem to come from above. When Joseph Heller, the author of Catch-22, was asked about how he began writing a new work, he said: “I don’t understand the process of imagination—though I know that I am very much at its mercy. I feel that these ideas are floating around in the air and they pick me to settle upon.” Similarly, the novelist Henry Miller thought artists were people who had antennas attached to their heads that were hooked up “to the currents which are in the atmosphere, in the cosmos,” and that all the elements that go into a great novel or poem “are already in the air” just waiting for us to give them voice.

For me, writing is a gesture of the body, a gesture of creativity, a working from the inside out,” wrote Gloria Anzaldúa in Light in the Dark / Luz en lo Oscuro. “The material body is center, and central. The body is the ground of thought. The body is a text. Writing is not about being in your head; it’s about being in your body.”

Of course, what happens beneath our skin and inside our skulls is connected to everything else. Our bodies need water and the energy from glucose to function, glucose that ultimately comes from photosynthesis: the miracle of plants pulling sugar out of sunlight in the sky.

IT’S TEMPTING TO ASSUME, especially when we use misleading terms like “the cloud” to describe digital storage, that ChatGPT generates words out of thin air. But AI is just as industrial as car manufacturing and mechanizes the written word to the point of absurdity. Like our human bodies, ChatGPT requires water, earth, minerals, and electricity. Once, I asked my students to spend five minutes writing about the internet as a place. None of them described, or even imagined, data centers.

From:

IN DEFENSE OF GENERATION(S)

by Stephanie Krzywonos

Emergence Magazine

Story Telling, aka Myths

Excerpt from :

An Outlandish Generosity, On Dr. Martin Shaw's Mythteller Trilogy

 by Dougald Hine, Feb 10, 2026

"The environmental movement has long tended to frame things in terms of the vulnerability of the planet. This is, in an important sense, a misunderstanding of what is at stake. Yes, we are living in a time of extraordinary ecological destruction, a mass extinction, perhaps the sixth in our planet’s history. But there’s the thing: the planet has been here before. Even the rapid shift in climate we have set in motion may not be unprecedented from a geological perspective. A million years from now, the planet will almost certainly be here, alive, in some as yet unimaginable ecological configuration. This is not to excuse the epic of destruction we have unleashed, but to try to understand it better.

What is at stake is not the planet, as such, but a way of living within it that we have created as a species, parts of which go back tens of thousands of years, while other parts are barely a generation deep, though we already struggle to imagine living without them. Our sense of loss at all the shadowed beauty being driven out of existence, our guilt, our still-remaining desire to feel proud of our place as a species — all of this exists in tension with our attachment to what we know and our sense of powerlessness within the structures we have built. These forces play out within us and on a planetary scale.

Within the traditions on which he draws, (Dr. Martin) Shaw distinguishes two modes of story, the pastoral and the prophetic:

The pastoral offers a salve, an affirmation of old, shared values, a reiteration of the power of the herd. The prophetic almost always brings some conflict with it — it disarms, awakens, challenges, and deepens. It is far less to do with enchantment and much more to do with waking up.

It is this second kind of story we need right now, Shaw suggests: the kind that takes us out of who we think we are, that allows for the emergence of something new. Yet one of the characteristics of mythological thinking is that such pairings are not reduced to oppositions: instead, if we look carefully, we catch sight of the mutual dependence between seeming opposites.

The old stories most often end with a homecoming, a feast, a celebration of the union of opposites. By contrast, if we go any distance along the wild paths to which Shaw invites us, our own return to the everyday is likely to be lonelier. We come back to a reality in which a myth is something to be debunked. Our experience of the possibility of other ways of knowing is met with incomprehension or disinterest. One of the strengths of Dr. Martin Shaw's books is that they contain a great deal of experience of how to live between worlds — which is to say, between very different ways of understanding the world — without withdrawing, going crazy or burning out. That alone is worth the price of admission.

There remains, though, the larger question: what does it mean to appeal to the imagination, to the realm of fairytales, in a world of failing negotiations and melting icebergs?

One answer is that it provides a clue to the real nature of this crisis.

To understand the relationships between the inner and outer worlds that define the crisis, something like the subtlety of mythological thinking is required, its ability to dance with paradox and its openness to surprise. And perhaps, even now, there remains within the stories the capacity to make those relationships anew. For as Shaw says, that has always been the power of story: to ground us in such a way that a universe becomes a cosmos."

• A Branch from the Lightning Tree and Snowy Tower are available direct from Cista Mystica Press.

• Liturgies of the Wild is out now from Penguin.

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I have tried reading Dr. Shaw's books, and watched several of his videos (see YouTube) and find him most engaging and entertaining, but somewhat beyond my own daily sense of existence. I am not educated in mythology, alas. But story telling does mean a lot to a culture, having been humanity's original form of history making. So I would love for others to enjoy his writings and lectures, and tell me all about it!

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Sharing with Thankful Thursday

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You must cherish one another. You must work — we all must work — to make this world worthy of its children.

PABLO CASALS

Saturday's Critters

 First - some older shots. 

Don't miss the squirrel. And are there really 6 doves around the birdbath?

(A reposted photo from 2013 above.)

In 2014 we drove along a back road in North Carolina with a traffic jam.

No farmer around, and not many places of interest to these cows.

They were kind enough to move to the far side of the road so we drove on by.

In 2018 I found the Canada Geese weren't shy about people walking right past them. If they wanted to nap or feed by Lake Tomahawk, they'd just do it.

In June 2023, there were goslings to capture as well as protective parents.

And this week I met these critters:

Are these white doves? Or pigeons?

David was walking his three little friends (and I only remember the tri-colored one is Winnie.)

Sharing with Eileen's Saturday's Critters.

July 30 post on Facebook

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Today's quote:

Like the whales, we each sing a unique song that heals and uplifts our collective.

Old photo:

Myself and daughter-in-law to-be Michelle, at falls in Georgia. Probably around 1997.

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My Sepia Saturday post for this week is in Three Family Trees, about Families, horses, children, and Indigenous homes.

What if...

Yellow iris by Lake Tomahawk, Black Mountain NC

Unknown dates - Antarctica

Antarctica

Mom'sCleanAirForce 8.14.24 on FB

Katharine Hayhoe - EveryChoiceMatters

Sharing with Wordless Wednesday

and Signs2

and My Corner of the World

Today's quote:

Gratefulness helps us return to ourselves, restoring our equilibrium and helping us to see beyond what’s broken to the beauty and wholeness of life.

Tim Roberts Tree sculpture with dried honesty seeds

My environment and hospital food

 

This tree just shines in dawn light as the sun hits it first thing, and I love seeing it out my window, but can't capture that from the distance.

These are the slim and not so healthy (tiny green shoots!) remains of the lilies of the valley under the big old maple tree.

Hospital notes: 

I had a rather limited view of Asheville downtown looking north. That big window also made my room very cold at times. When I first came in (4 or 5) I finally asked for some way to be warmer. The thermostat had been set at 55  degrees F, and outside was in the 30s and rapidly going down.

Parts of this hospital are quite old, so the houses around it are probably either residences of staff, or perhaps changed into specialty offices of doctors.

Looking over the roof of another wing of the hospital, which has just been refurbished before being bought out by HCA, a conglomerate which the public of  Asheville has complained about since...at least I had a view of the mountains that lie to the north. There are still legal cases being worked about problems of care that don't meet the contracts, and staff shortages publicized frequently, and lots of complaints.

I have to say that all the staff that I met went far beyond just a smile and doing their "defined job."

There was just one guy working with me in the ER was not sure of things, but he admitted that even though it was his first day there, he'd been doing this for 30 years.

There were a couple of places where shortcomings were evident. The housekeeping seemed nil...a very streaked mirror, dust all over bedside table, medical stuff (tubes in baggies) left lying around, sticky places on the floor (before getting socks to wear) and the night nurse had to collect the bags of soiled linens and trash.

I did have some delicious beef stroganoff, without a creamy sauce. The beef was tender and lean, and the best thing I think I ate the whole visit.

My friendly nurse, Becca, was on two shifts while I was there, so she introduced me to an alternative menu that was available for patients who didn't want the standard menu from the "kitchen." We went through making my choices, when I knew I'd be staying over the second night, because I hadn't been there to order for the first day, and missed at least one meal because I needed a test on an empty stomach.

So I chose a delightful sounding breakfast, and a lunch with a hamburger and a baked potato and a salad.

Breakfast- I received scrambled eggs, sausage and little cut up potatoes with lots of seasoning. All unsalted. That's apparently a no-no for a regular diet (not diabetic, not carb reduced, not vegetarian, etc.) There was a tiny packet of salt that I added to the eggs.  Why? Because all I've been able to return to tasting so far are salt and sweet...and unfortunately, pepper. Which I don't like. I scrape if off if I can.  Anyway, my super breakfast didn't come, and I asked the server if I could get what I'd ordered, and she said it would take a while. I just said I'd be happy to eat this. And I did.

When the same thing happened at lunch, I took what came. I later mentioned it to my last nurse (not Becca who helped place my orders that hadn't been fulfilled.) She said that must have been someone new. Because they hadn't been doing that since before covid! That was 5 years ago. I laughed. Poor Becca went to all that trouble for me, and did I ever have my hopes up to have something beside hospital food. I ate my chicken stew with a biscuit made of puff pastry on top.

Here's my dinner, first day.  It had grilled chicken strips with imbedded pepper, so I ate just a couple, and used my tiny salt packet on half the broccoli and half the rice,, which I ate...as well as the pineapple (not sour, but naturally sweet). I drank the sweet tea as well as some non-brand ginger ale, and saved the jello for a snack.

If you notice I can't always come up with a correct simple word, I blame it on brain disfunction, which became even worse while I was there at the hospital.

I did talk to the doctor about that, and that's my next story I'll tell you!

Today's quote:

Observers in the full enjoyment of their bodily senses pity me, but it is because they do not see the golden chamber in my life where I dwell delighted; for, dark as my path may seem to them, I carry a magic light in my heart. Faith, the spiritual strong searchlight, illumines the way, and although sinister doubts lurk in the shadow, I walk unafraid towards the Enchanted Wood where the foliage is always green, where joy abides, where nightingales nest and sing, and where life and death are one ... 
      -  Helen Keller, Midstream, My Later Life.

Today's art:

An Invitation, 2019 by Andrea Kowch

I always get a kick out of these surrealistic/photo realistic interactions between women and animals, and often food. There's a story there which some readers of mine might be able to define...and I can't!

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Today's family album:

Ancestors from my ex-husband's family: his Uncle Carl Heym who served in WWI as a sergeant in the US Army Ordnance Department. He is shown with his mother, Fannie Martin Heym in 1919. Fannie was also mu ex's grandmother, though he never met her.

Good news, and not so good news

 This is me and Teresa behind me, about to start sit-r-cise on Wednesday. I did pretty well, considering how little action I'd really been doing lately. However, the story continues, as you may have heard, with an Xray of my chest the next morning, after a bad night of fevers, and again no Covid, no flu...but now pneumonia! 

Americans of Conscience offers this good news:

All good news

• The Yurok Tribe lays 11,500 pounds of native plant seeds along the Klamath River.
• A federal court rules that the president overstepped his constitutional authority in freezing most spending on U.S. humanitarian work abroad that Congress appropriated for this purpose.
• Transgender service members stay on active duty as a federal court blocks implementation of the president's ban on trans service members while litigation proceeds.
• The House reintroduces the bipartisan CROWN Act, which would ban discrimination
• against individuals based on their hairstyle or hair texture due to their race.
• Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), new senator and ex-CIA, critiques the anti-democratic actions of the current president.
• AZ: A circuit court strikes down two state laws intended to suppress voters.
• CT: The governor's bipartisan working group for Ranked Choice Voting is working collaboratively across party lines.
• NJ expands early voting opportunities for primary elections.
• NY: Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D) holds Know Your Rights forums to provide accurate immigration-related information to New Yorkers of diverse national origin.
• San Francisco celebrates Women's History Month in diverse and creative ways.
• Montgomery and Selma, AL host a weekend of events commemorating the 60th Bridge Crossing Jubilee and Bloody Sunday.
• Rural organizers and grassroots leaders in the U.S. form the Rural Defenders Union to support under-resourced anti-authoritarian actions.
• Across the U.S. and the world, scientists, researchers, and those who support science protest the current administration’s research-funding cuts, federal layoffs, and obfuscation of facts.
• Principled artists–including Rhiannon Giddens, Renée Fleming, Ben Folds, and Shonda Rhimes–resign from the Kennedy Center and cancel appearances in protest of the president’s takeover of the board.
• Pope Francis rebukes the U.S. president’s harsh immigration policies and refutes a close-minded interpretation of Catholic theology by the vice president.
• In honor of Reading Month, 60 volunteers show up to a Michigan elementary school to read with third-graders.

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So here I was, at the hospital from Thursday afternoon till Saturday afternoon...very well cared for by great staff from all departments. I had quite an adventure, got many tests and good news from most.

Here I'm holding a device which delivers cardio and pulse-ox info to the nurses station by radio waves, rather than having the readout in each room as well as the bells...and maybe another readout at the station. I hated it before I got it off finally, it was like carrying a kitten that was hanging by those leads stuck to my chest and I couldn't stand up without holding it (I guess some gowns come with a pocket for them)...and sleep meant moving it as I turned over all night.

Shows the places for the stuck on leads all over my torso!

 Came home on a sunny warmish day and couldn't get to sleep because of being tired and yet amped up on steroids. I'm sooo glad to be home again.

Stories of hospital life will wait for another post.

Back to my original format...

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Today's quote:

Extend the circle of “us” to include as much of the world as you possibly can.

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Today's art:

by Aram Hunanyan

and how it also reflects off an earlier potter woman in England,...

by Clarice Cliff, 1899

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Family album:

Son Marty and granddaughter Cayenne, several years ago! She has graduated college and is living on her own and working a great job.

One thing that happens when I go to the hospital is getting to talk to my sons on the phone. I got caught up on some of the family doings. Need to work on more frequent calls. They are busy people!

Looking Deeper into Our recycling (and a poem)

 This is interesting to see where actual recycling is sent for final processing.

 Buncombe County NC let us know in an excellent article just what is recyclable and what isn't. It's hidden in there somewhere. With the poor service at picking up recyclables, most people have given up in exasperation at the situation. Here at least the people doing recycling identify what they can and can't do, and where they send what they can recycle.  LINK HERE FOR WHOLE ARTICLE.

Confusion abounds in Buncombe about what trash can be recycled. Here’s why.

Economics, technology drive what can actually be repurposed; residents, officials call for better messaging.

It really comes down to what the recycling entity in your locality accepts and has a market for. 

Here in Buncombe, when you send over those blue recycling bags — or other plastics such as microwaveable containers and clamshell packaging for takeout food — they end up in the landfill as garbage. That’s because Curbside Management, the main recycling facility in Buncombe and other western NC counties, cannot recycle them.

Curbside Management, commonly known as Curbie, accepts and recycles plenty of other items – plastic bottles, tubs, yogurt cups, milk jugs and more – because it has a market for the materials and it makes economic sense. But it lacks the equipment and a market for other, harder-to-recycle plastics such as clamshells or heat-resistant meal holders.

Curbie employs a “single stream” method of recycling. Localities encourage customers to put everything into the large rolling bins loosely, so everything comes into the plant mixed.  Machinery does most of the sorting, but humans have to remove offending items by hand while they whiz by on conveyor belts at dizzying speeds.

A mountain of material awaits the recycling process at Curbside Management, commonly known as Curbie.  Watchdog photo by Starr Sariego

Part of the problem, environmentalists say, is that the petroleum industry that creates all these plastic products has convinced Americans that the recycling triangle and number inside equate to recyclability. Really, that symbol just tells you what kind of plastic it is.

The Center for Climate Integrity, which seeks to make the petroleum industry pay for the effects of global warming, makes a blunt case that the industry misled consumers for decades about the recyclability of plastics.

There are “thousands of different types of plastic, each with its own chemical composition and characteristics,” states a February 2024 report from the left-of-center group titled “The Fraud of Plastic Recycling, How Big Oil and the plastics industry deceived the public for decades and caused the plastic waste crisis.”

Curbie has a good market for bottles and jugs.

“We’ve got three or four different vendors that we ship to, and those three or four vendors are either turning that PET into carpet, or some of them are grinding it up and washing it and turning it into a flake or pellet, that can be really turned back into anything,” Lawson said. “But carpet is probably the largest consumer of that plastic in this region.”

The county tells customers to keep it simple and remember Buncombe recycling isn’t done by number but by shape — plastic bottles, jars, tubs, and jugs are all recyclable.

“If it’s not one of those shapes, it’s most likely not recyclable,” Govus said.

While recycling is a global industry, it’s really a “hyper-local process,” she pointed out.

Lawson provided a map Curbie produced that shows where collected and sorted items actually go. 

What moves the fastest? The slowest?

Besides having a buyer to make recycling practical, Curbie also needs a sizable amount of a material. 

A map and chart provided by Curbie show where recycled materials are shipped once they’ve been sorted at the Woodin facility.

“We wouldn’t recycle anything that we can’t get 40,000 pounds of,” Lawson said. “That’s the threshold. In order for us to ship something out of our plant, we ship 40,000 pounds. That’s the truck weight going down the road.”

Aluminum cans are the most valuable commodity Curbie handles, followed by clear or natural colored milk jugs. The least valuable commodity is glass, which Curbie breaks and grinds up when it comes in.

The highest volume material is cardboard, followed closely by mixed paper — junk mail and office paper. Confusion remains here, too, though, as some kinds of paper, such as tissue or receipts, are not recyclable. 

“So almost all of our paper and cardboard go to container board manufacturers,” Lawson said. “All of those plants will take that and break down those fibers or break down the paper into the fiber, and then they’ll kind of press it into big long sheets that are hundreds of feet long.”

Thanks to Asheville Watchdog, a nonprofit news team producing stories that matter to Asheville and Buncombe County.

And a great quote for today, a poem from Mary Oliver: