Spreading Light or Darkness!

It’s so easy in the world of cyberspace to forget that real people with real feelings exist behind screen names so I hope this daily OM will be a reminder to all of us regardless that we can and do make a difference in our actions or lack thereof.

These photos were taken during my holiday travels. I especially like the thoughtful shot of my sister-in-law.

Spreading Your Light – How You Affect Others Daily

As the pace and fullness of modern life serve to isolate us from one another, the contact we do share becomes vastly more significant. We unconsciously absorb each other’s energy, adopting the temperament of those with whom we share close quarters, and find ourselves changed after the briefest encounters. Everything we do or say has the potential to affect not only the individuals we live, work, and play with but also those we’ve just met.

Though we may never know the impact we have had or the scope of our influence, accepting and
understanding that our attitudes and choices will affect others can help us remember to conduct ourselves with grace at all times. When we seek always to be friendly, helpful, and responsive, we effortlessly create an atmosphere around ourselves that is both uplifting and inspiring.

Most people rarely give thought to the effect they have had or will have on others. When we take a few moments to contemplate how our individual modes of being affect the people we spend time with each day, we come one step closer to seeing ourselves through the eyes of others. By asking ourselves whether those we encounter walk away feeling appreciated, respected, and liked, we can heighten our awareness of the effect we ultimately have. Something as simple as a smile given freely can temporarily brighten a person’s entire world.

Our value-driven conduct may inspire others to consider whether their own lives are reflective of their values. A word of advice can help others see life in an entirely new fashion. And small gestures of kindness can even prove to those embittered by the world that goodness still exists. By simply being ourselves, we influence other’s lives in both subtle and life-altering ways.

On the Move to Outrun Climate Change

Self-Preservation Forcing Wild Species, Businesses, Planning Officials to Act
By Blaine Harden and Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writers

SEATTLE — As the Bush administration debates much of the world about what to do about global warming, butterflies and ski-lift operators, polar bears and hydroelectric planners are on the move.

In their separate ways, wild creatures, business executives and regional planners are responding to climate changes that are rapidly recalibrating their chances for survival, for profit and for effective delivery of public services.

Butterflies are voting with their wings, abandoning southern Europe and flying north to the more amenable climes of Finland. Ski-lift operators in the West are lobbying for leases on federal land higher up in the Rockies, trying to outclimb snowlines that creep steadily upward.

Polar bears along Hudson Bay are losing weight and declining in number as the ice shelf melts and their feeding season shrinks. Power planners in the Pacific Northwest, which gets three-quarters of its electricity from hydroelectric dams, are meeting in brainstorming sessions and making contingency plans for early snow melts, increased wintertime rainfall, lower summertime river flows and electricity shortfalls during hotter, drier summers.

With the issue of a warming planet shifting rapidly from scientific projection to on-the-ground reality, animals and plants are being compelled, along with businesses and bureaucracies, to take action aimed at self-preservation. They are doing so even as the Bush administration eschews regulations, laws or international treaties that would require limits on carbon dioxide emissions, which scientists say are the main cause of global warming.

A newly published synthesis of 866 peer-reviewed studies of the effect of climate change on wild plants and animals has found what its author, Camille Parmesan, an assistant professor of integrative biology at the University of Texas at Austin, describes as a “clear, globally coherent conclusion.”

Flora and fauna are migrating north or climbing to higher ground if they can, said Parmesan, whose paper appears in the December issue of the Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics. If they cannot move, she said, their numbers are often declining, their health is getting worse, and some are disappearing altogether.

“Wild species don’t care who is in the White House,” Parmesan said. “It is very obvious they are desperately trying to move to respond to the changing climate. Some are succeeding. But for the ones that are already at the mountaintop or at the poles, there is no place for them to go. They are the ones that are going extinct.”

Among the most affected species, Parmesan said, are highland amphibians in the tropics. She said more than two-thirds of 110 species of harlequin frogs, which occupy mountain cloud forests in Central America, have become extinct in the past 35 years.

Meanwhile, many pest species — including roaches, fleas, ticks and tree-killing beetles — are surviving warming winters in increasing numbers. “We are seeing throughout the Northern Hemisphere that pests are able to have more generations per year, which allows them to increase their numbers without being killed off by cold winter temperatures,” said Parmesan.

Federal scientists say that the first six months of this year were the warmest on record in the United States and that the five warmest years over the past century have occurred since 1998. In her review of studies measuring the impact of climate change on wild plants and animals, Parmesan said this “sudden increase” in temperatures appears to have been a tipping point, triggering substantial responses from a broad range of species.

“The magnitude of impacts is so overwhelming that many biologists are now calling this the single most important problem they need to work on,” said Parmesan. “You can save all the habitat you want, but if it is not any good climatically, what is the point?”

Though President Bush has said that human activity has contributed to climate change, he has consistently rejected the idea of imposing mandatory curbs on carbon dioxide emissions.

In an interview shortly after this month’s congressional elections, James L. Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said the country would be better off setting a voluntary goal — such as increasing the use of renewable fuels — than dictating industrial greenhouse-gas emission levels.

“Setting a reasonably ambitious target and then exceeding it is a good way to make reasonable progress,” Connaughton said.

The Bush administration has outlined a strategic plan that calls for developing technology that would reduce carbon dioxide pollution. It now spends $3 billion a year on energy research and development. But when adjusted for inflation, this money is a fraction of what the federal government spent in the past. Researchers such as Reuel Shinnar and Francesco Citro, two chemical engineers at the Clean Fuels Institute at the City College of New York, estimate the country would have to spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year to make the transition to a carbon-free society.

From the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Northwest, the effects of global warming — along with the responses of animals, people, businesses and bureaucracies — are being woven into the fabric of everyday life.

On Cape Sable, on the far southwestern edge of Florida, boaters, sportsmen and scientists have watched as a rising sea level has transformed a freshwater marsh into a portion of the sea.

Where there had been saw grass, the distinctive vegetation of the Everglades, there are now mangrove trees, which thrive in salt water and open water. Redfish inhabit areas that once had been wetland. The endangered bird named after the area, the Cape Sable seaside sparrow, has fled northward.

Using historic photos and tidal gauge records, University of Miami professor Harold Wanless, chairman of the geology department, has studied the changes. Between the sinking of the land and the rise of the seas since the 1930s, the relative water level has risen nine inches, he said.

“Freshwater marshes on Cape Sable are now evolving into more or less open marine waters,” he said. “We’re not talking about global warming as something that will happen in the future. Its happening right now. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men won’t be able to put Cape Sable together again.”

In the high country of western Montana, ski resort manager Tom Maclay is trying to outrun climate change by persuading the U.S. Forest Service to lease 12,000 acres across Carlton Ridge and Lolo Peak. The land, which lies above property he owns, would allow his resort to reach a top elevation of 9,100 feet.

Maclay is well aware how climate change is transforming his business and how nearby resorts have suffered from a lack of snow in recent years. At nearby Glacier National Park, the U.S. Geological Survey quantifies the change, noting that there has been a 73 percent decline since 1850 in the area of the park covered by glaciers. Many smaller glaciers are now gone, it says, and larger ones have shrunk by about two-thirds.

Maclay and his resort’s chief executive, Jim Gill, are negotiating with snowmaking manufacturers who are asking for tens of millions of dollars for their services.

“Now with the snowline creeping up the hill, it’s tougher and tougher for the areas that are struggling at the margins to keep their base areas full of snow,” Gill said. “If you don’t have a good snowmaking operation, you’re not going to be able to compete.”

In the Pacific Northwest, which depends far more on hydroelectricity than any region of the country, research findings on global warming from the University of Washington’s Climate Impacts Group have prompted utilities, federal agencies and regional planning groups to convene brainstorming sessions in the past year.

They are looking at possible ways of mitigating power shortages as the summer flows of the region’s rivers decline — a result of less snow in the mountains and early melt.

For decades, the Pacific Northwest has had a surplus of power to send south to California during hot summer months. But if Northwest rivers run low as summers get hotter, the region could end up competing with California for power, said John Fazio, a senior power systems analyst for the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, a regional planning group.

“More and more, global warming is becoming a serious part of the planning process,” said Fazio.

Washington Post

After Thanksgiving!

Every year it seems as if we’ve reached new heights in the level of what we are capable of consuming as a nation whether it’s eating until we can’t move or shopping from 5 in the morning for those holiday bargains in any given town. I don’t like shopping malls so rarely do I find myself among those people willing to claw each other’s eyes out all in order to get the latest gadget or whatnot at a bargain price. I’m too old for that anyway.

This year since my daughter was doing an art show in the historic district of my hometown, I wandered about meeting quite a few new crafters that I’ll proudly support any time. It’s crucial to lend our encouragement to those artists that make unique pieces WalMart will never be able to replace. A few of these chains have been caught stealing ideas and ended up in court but that’s for another topic.

Today has been necessary to chill out since I’ve done way too much these past few days. The photos are ones that I took of some Christmas tree ornaments along the way. Much more to post but it will have to wait.

The Blues

The Blues, originally uploaded by Monster..

Steve Bailey

Amazing picture from an incredible photographer on Flickr! This is one of many incredible shots.

Living Within Limits

Natural Patterns of Living

By CARL N. McDANIEL

Every important environmental trend today is negative: growth of population and consumption, global warming, mounting pollution, loss of soil, declining biodiversity. Our modern world is headed toward the same place as old civilizations that overreached their ecological means: collapse — only this time on an unprecedented scale.

Yet we press on. Why?

Evolution selects only for behaviors that are successful in the present. That includes our brain, which evolved to fit small hunter-gatherer societies. First in Africa and then as we migrated some 100,000 years ago into Earth’s vast ecosystems, our species’ behaviors evolved in response to apparently boundless frontiers.

Our senses permitted us to know vanishingly little of why the biological-physical world works as it does. Try yourself to explain, without scientific insight, how a plant’s fundamental elements make stems, leaves and flowers. You can’t. The microworld of cells, genes and chemical signaling is too removed from our direct experience.

Our ancestors adapted by filling this gaping knowledge void with stories, imagined explanations of the natural world. Believing strongly, even to death, became a dominant element of human nature.

Hunter-gatherer cultures gave rise to a handful of agricultural societies. Middle Eastern agriculture birthed European scientific and economic culture. In the past 200 years it became phenomenally successful and global.

The problem is that we don’t accept limits. Rather, our in-the-present perspective and capacity to believe anything combine with technological competence and economic ingenuity to unintentionally foster global climate change, mass extinction of species and catastrophic life-support loss.

A Cathy cartoon says it all:

A few people gather around as one woman says, “I quit dieting and lost 25 pounds!”

More women gather as another woman says, “I quit dieting and lost 35 pounds!”

Then Cathy says, “I quit dieting, gained 15 pounds and went up three jean sizes.”

Cathy stands alone and says, “Hope attracts a crowd. Truth makes it disappear.”

Earth is replete with groups undone by hope for the essentially impossible.

We won’t make it on this blind optimism. We need true hopefulness. True hopefulness in dire straits means first recognizing odds are heavily against us, believing those odds, and then doing everything possible to beat them.

What are we up against? Human population size and consumption today are beyond what Earth can durably support. Human industry is forcing global climate change. We are fouling our nest everywhere. And biodiversity loss is accelerating toward the level of past mass extinctions.

Trends are clear. Most ocean fisheries are fished out or in decline. Many fish in our rivers are too contaminated to eat. Iowa’s topsoil is half gone in 150 years. Katrina-intensity storms are increasing. Species extinction rates are up at least a thousandfold.

To assess the meaning and then act on the distant consequences of these data is extremely hard for an animal that evolved to act in the present. And it will take monumental changes in belief. But it comes down to this question: Is it possible to create a worldwide culture adhering to the lessons of biology and ecology?

Contrary to the perception of boundlessness that drives economic growth, the human economy ultimately will be constrained by the ecosystems that support it. Earth was not made for us — we evolved for it. We are but one species among millions. Natural principles need to guide our actions, since they supersede human conventions.

Our challenge, if we are to maintain a pleasant and livable world for our grandchildren, is to create patterns of living grounded in biology and abiding by limits. We must scale back our impact: Kick fossil fuel addiction, stabilize and then reduce human population and consumption, preserve and restore habitats, stop releasing toxins, and create ecology-based local agricultures. We know how to do these things. And they can be done, but we must act out of hopefulness that is realistic and true.

Making global culture consistent with what the natural sciences teach us just might enable global civilization to avoid collapse — what the theologian Thomas Berry calls “The Great Work.” It is time to roll up our sleeves and get on with it.

Carl N. McDaniel is professor of biology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., and author of “Paradise for Sale,” with economist John M. Gowdy, and “Wisdom for a Livable Planet.” He wrote this comment for the Land Institute’s Prairie Writers Circle, Salina, Kan.