Paul "Horned-Owl" McC. sent this along. Some excellent links in this piece. Get active folks. Congress is in session. Time to write to your congress-peops to remind them about stuff like polar bear protection and impeachment of dumb asses.

Watching the weather - change

Judith D. Schwartz

Friday, December 29

It's been happening a lot during this oddly balmy December. While out walking my dog I'll pass a stranger who remarks, "Beautiful weather for this time of year, isn't it," and shakes his head gloomily.

Or another dog-walker who says, "Great day to be out with the dog," and then, ill at ease, turns away. You see, weather has always been a staple of innocuous small talk. But the persistent strangeness of our weather, and what we fear is its cause, is something we don't know how to talk about. Hence the discomfort.

How can we begin to talk about climate change? It's too big to wrap your head around. Melting glaciers. Rising oceans. Hurricanes and draughts on a biblical scale. And yet here we are, immersed in our vehicle-dependent, plugged-in lives. What do we do? If ever there was a time we needed leadership, this is it. And yet, as polar bears scramble in vain for solid ice and migratory birds stop migrating, President Bush has said little about global warming except to deny it. As long as we've got this administration, we're stuck with a through-the-looking-glass world where a "Clear Skies Initiative" means weakening the Clean Air Act, and 90 percent of scientists - that is, virtually all those except for the ones who've been paid off - must be wrong because the president says so.

Meanwhile, we're at war. And aside from the horrendous loss of life and devastation to a region, another casualty of war is the environment. Think of the huge use of fuel to train, transport, arm, and support hundreds of thousands of troops and contractors and move heavily armored vehicles around the desert. The billions spent on the Iraq war would arguably have been better put toward developing cleaner alternatives to fossil fuels.

This costly war was unnecessary (and perhaps illegal). And the notion of pre-emptive strike as a pretext for war has once again raised the specter of limited nuclear war. Research now suggests that even a small regional nuclear conflict could provoke devastating climate changes throughout the world. This brings new meaning to the term "collateral damage." But does our president seem inclined to end the Iraq war or stop developing weapons? Hardly.

Clearly those of us concerned about global warming need to go elsewhere for guidance.

Fortunately, there are a few voices in the wilderness: the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and, famously, Al Gore. Plus Web-based groups like stopglobalwarming.org, which has organized a half-million people in a "virtual march", Energize America ( www.ea2020.org ), and climatecrisis.net. We all need to listen to such voices and inform ourselves about the issues and learn what we can do as individuals. Then start making noise and urging our representatives to take action. The new balance of power in the Senate and House presents an opportunity for concerned citizens to be heard. We have to begin on a grassroots level-while we still have grass and that grass still has roots.

And all of us need to find the courage to talk about climate change and bring our awareness of it into our daily lives.

There are those who do speak frankly about this growing crisis: kids. The other day, my eleven-year-old son and his friend looked outside and sneered at the rain. "It used to snow a lot," his friend said. "But that was before this global warming thing." They both shrugged.

Our children are inheriting this world. We can't just shrug. We owe it to them not to.

Judith D. Schwartz of peacetrain lives in Bennington.

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