The dulling of autumn
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Posted on October 22, 2007
Filed Under Uncategorized, Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Greenhouse gas emissions, Earth spirituality, Inspiration and reflection
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
This one is hard to write. I love autumn. Growing up in Wisconsin, October was a time always marked by blazing color through the woods and parks. My favorite time is when the early colors, the maples especially with their vivid reds and oranges, are mixed among the greens of the later changing leaves and evergreens and pines.
I have seen the magnificence of New England foliage many times, and the gorgeous colors of autumn in the Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia, the Appalachians nearer to my Maryland home, etc. For me, October has always been a time of chasing the autumn colors. It is my favorite time to hike, the summer crowds gone from the woods and mountains, time alone with the deer, wild turkey, migrating birds.
Will we ever know autumns like that again?
Apparently, finally, I am not the only one who has noticed that climate change is taking this beauty away from us. As temperatures warm, the leaves of trees turn dull yellows and brown, the color of our world depleted as we ruin our atmosphere.
This AP article made the rounds over the weekend. It was in the Milwaukee paper and many others. This is a hard one for me — and autumn lovers throughout the Midwest and east. There is grief here just under the surface that I almost dare not allow to surface for fear that it might overwhelm.
We are going to lose so much.
I first noticed the dulling of New England autumns in 2005 when I had an opportunity to spend four weeks in a writers’ residency program at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, just two hours from the Canadian border. I noticed it again last year when visiting friends in southern Vermont and New Hampshire — a part of the world I can imagine settling into permanently one day.
Many Vermonters were more than aware — and grieving. This change in landscape accompanies the threat to the sugar maple industry of that region because of global warming and climate change. The sugar maples are retreating north, the sugaring season is changing significantly, and one day not long from now, there may be no more Vermont maple syrup.
We have posted about this before, and you can review the information here.
Grief is going to be part of this journey, friends. A lot of it.
I’m surprised sometimes by how often I cite Thomas Friedman on this blog, that unrepentent free market capitalist cheerleader. Friedman turned green in the past couple of years and writes and speaks pointedly now, and with the right sense of urgency, about the need to address climate change — NOW! — as in, right away, as in, yesterday.
He is also right, as he writes in this coumn from yesterday, in that changing individual consumer choices will not do it. The government and non-green corporate world would love for you, us, to quiet our fears and consciences by buying different light bulbs and buying hybrid cars. This is important, of course, but will do little to alter the rate of emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere. What is required is international and national government action. What is required is a new political culture that sees saving the planet as more important than the bottom line or who controls access to oil and natural gas around the world — by military force if necessary and the undermining of our constitutional rule of law.
What we must do is not just change our light bulbs. We must create a mass movement that builds on the many local and state initiatives already in play, and then force — through the ballot box and our inexorable lobbying and actions before, during, and after elections — the required changes in the nation’s priorities.
Don’t be fooled by any candidates’ expressions of concern at this point. Woefully lacking, especially on the part of lead candidates in both parties, is the passionate commitment to address the climate change crisis and to back the drastic new policies that will be required, immediately (it is already so very, very late), to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as fast as possible — the 80% by 2050 that is the rallying cry for much of the movement these days.
Okay, here’s one thing you can do right away. Long ago, we wholeheartedly and enthusiastically endorsed the Step It Up 2007 campaign which got launched with grassroots events around the country last spring. Now this group is calling for actions targeting politicans on November 3, just a couple of weeks from now.
Here is the link to the call to action. We urge you to participate.
Then let us know what you are feeling and thinking. This project of ours, Spirituality and Ecological Hope, is not an action group — we lend our support to those that already exist. Instead, we are seeking to articulate the spiritual and ethical dimensions of our crisis, and to articulate from that a spirituality for living through the great and difficult transition we face on this Earth. We need you to help enrich that reflection.
Grief is and will be part of this journey. If global warming is the reason for the dull autumn colors, we may never see the vivid colors again in places like Vermont and Wisconsin. How much of this kind of change do we want to endure in our lifetimes? How much of the wonder we have known do we want to steal from the future of our children and their children’s children?
Technorati Tags: dull autumn colors, Vermont autumn, Thomas Friedman, sugar maples, step it up 2007
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Dear Margaret Swedish,
Do not worry about the ecology and environment. It will take time for the green to readjust to the present atmospheric conditions. It is natural evolution; it takes its own time for coming back to terms. There are already changes in some other parts of the world like excessive rains and more sun shine, it takes cyclic changes to come over to the other parts of the world. Only we human beings can change by appropriately putting the saplings are seedlings and tend them to grow again. For this every human’s efforts are required. This not only increases the green on this earth but also reduces the environmental pollution and ecology is balanced.