| <div class="ck-content"><h2>Factories</h2><p>A factory is, generally, an enormous building filled with machinery so that humans can make lots and lots of stuff. Factories are, to my way of thinking, abominations.</p><p>Every time a new factory is built, humans replace a large area of Earth’s living surface with a dead zone.</p><p>Before the factory, there was life. That land would have been filled with trees, perhaps a small creek, bushes, dirt, fungi, birds, mice, squirrels, butterflies, mosquitos, bears, coyotes, moths, worms…and so on. Diverse, interlocking forms of life - many of them provably sentient.</p><p>After the factory is built (along with the parking lot around it and the roads used to get to and from the factory), the only living things in that area will be humans, their pets, manicured gardens or lawns (maybe), and cockroaches. </p><p>The life lost in a dead zone (factory, road, sidewalk, house, skyscraper, vehicle, and so on) is not just those creatures who died when the dead zone was created. Every single day, week, month, year that goes by in which the dead zone is maintained means less life than would otherwise be present on the earth. I suppose you could think of this as “<span style="color:hsl(0, 75%, 60%);"><strong>killing it forward</strong></span>.”</p><p>From a climate change perspective, dead zones lead to more pollution, more poisoning of waters in rivers and oceans, more extinctions, more warming of the planet. Dead zones are really bad news for everything and everyone on Earth.</p><p>Sadly, almost all humans in urban, suburban and exurban communities, when you come right down to it, spend most of their time inside dead zones, seeking escape from the wonderful planet that makes life possible. How ironic. How debilitating.</p><p>All of which is to say:</p><ul><li>We should <strong>stop building any new factories on still-living surfaces</strong>. If you want to open a new factory, you should have to build on an existing dead zone. Ah, the shoulds of life!</li><li>Escape your dead zones as often as you can!</li></ul><h2>Urgency</h2><p>I keep pushing myself to do more, because I feel a profound sense of urgency. We are truly in a “save all we can” moment, as wars break out across the world at precisely the moment when humans need to be broadly unified to radically change how we live on our planet. Let's not fool ourselves. Tipping points are being, or will soon be, passed. More and more humans will be traumatized or killed. Which means that more and more of our money and time will be spent helping humans recover from human-caused climate chaos, less and less to ensure that non-humans survive our attacks on them.</p><p>So I figure I'd better hurry and give our native species a chance to get ahead of the invasives, make them as strong and widespread - and therefore more likely to survive - as possible.</p><p>Now, as to the <i>specifics</i> of my sense of urgency right now: </p><p>Wonderfully enough, at this moment we have more group leaders, people capable of working with 10-20 volunteers to remove invasives, than we do those volunteers.</p><p>I'm exploring ways to reach lots more people (ps, I hate social media and will not use it, but if others would be interested, I would not say no. 😀). </p><p style="text-align:center;"><span style="color:hsl(240,75%,60%);"><strong>Do you know of any groups that might want to turn out members on a day of their choosing to do some planet healing?</strong></span><br><span style="color:hsl(240,75%,60%);"><strong>If so, please let me know!</strong></span></p><h2>Joy</h2><p>It's so easy to get caught up in the deadly seriousness of it all, especially when reading headlines designed to spur outrage. Which is yet another outstanding reason to <strong>GO OUTSIDE</strong>. There, you get to meet other creatures living on this planet. Which gives you a chance to marvel at the wonders of evolution by natural selection, and to feel joy - I sure do feel joy - at the sheer awesomeness of it all. Here's a Spilosoma Virginian Tiger Moth in its caterpillar stage Sam came across in Brumley last week.</p><div class="raw-html-embed"><img src="https://drive.google.com/thumbnail?id=1m-RmAtdl6jIH0g2JCwVgrHITSoIXjC1W" alt="Big privet came down" width="600" height="400"></div><p>And just to reinforce the cause for joy…that gorgeous creature above metamorphizes into….</p><div class="raw-html-embed">
<img src="https://drive.google.com/thumbnail?id=19SHofT-PQ2RCNaK7GlNNx1DzYGPvvvHL" alt="Lovely moth" width="600" height="400"></div><p>What a world we live in! And a final expression of joy: the enormous pile of dead privet that Sam and I created in just 1.5 hours earlier in October. Again, driving home the point: we humans can do so much good for our planet, so much healing!</p><div class="raw-html-embed">
<img src="https://drive.google.com/thumbnail?id=1qqt0XQn0llc4tkab6gXajfJj9L878OXZ" alt="Lovely moth" width="600" height="400"></div></div> |