And so...

On Tuesday, I went into MIT for a symposium on earth revolutions (i.e., climate change). At some point the taped & edited version be up on the internet, and I'll come back an add the link. It was very interesting, and I got more out of it than I thought I would. I had to blow off my studio session to do it, but that's OK. Opportunities such as that don't present themselves often. It was free & open to the public, so I had little to lose.

There were some pretty reputable people at this symposium. We are headed down a really scary road if we don't do some very, very quickly. I'm seriously hoping that 2007 turns out to be the year that we all wake up.

For instance, the whole opening of the Northwest passage thing. NOBODY was predicting this would happen. No model's were forecasting it - it caught everyone by surprise. The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), which incidentally was awarded half of the Nobel Peace Prize today, certainly didn't forecast it. Here's a nifty little graph that overlays this year's arctic sea ice loss with IPCC's forecasted sea ice loss (complete with ranges, and the average loss rate). This should be really, really scary. Nobody saw this coming so soon. And with the loss of the albedo effect (sea ice is white, white reflects light & thus heat, which keeps the arctic cool, preventing the oceans from warming at an accelerated rate, which impacts the entire global climate), then you SHOULD be loosing sleep at night.

It's not easy. There is more information out there than you can sort through, and it's frequently confusing & conflicting. But the ONE strategy that seems to be the most sound, and the most all-encompassing is to buy local whenever you possibly can. The less stuff that you buy that has to be shipped in, the better off you'll be. This goes beyond "buy American" (which means little - my subaru was built in the midwest, but aren't a lot of american cars now built in Mexico where labor is cheaper?)

Besides... buying local helps your neighbor. It keeps him in business. It keeps money in your community, and you can directly see who benefits. It keeps your neighbor employeed. It keeps their mortgage paid, their house lived in.

For instance: I decided I wanted a turkey pot pie yesterday. Turns out that the turkey farm 5 min up the road sells more than Thanksgiving Turkey's. In 15 minutes, I had gone to the store, picked up not only a frozen turkey pot pie, but also a turkey meatloaf for later use, come home & put them in my freezer. I know where those turkey's came from, and where that meat was processed - and I trust it. Meanwhile, ConAgra was fighting to avoid a recall on their chicken pot pies, even though 139 people in 30 states have gotten salmonella poising from them. I did a quick spreadsheet yesterday using recall notices on the USDA website. To date, over 22 MILLION pounds of meat have been recalled this year. That's just WRONG.

The silly season is coming. My mother & my sister are already bugging us about what we want. I'm going to try to see whether I can do the whole christmas gift thing by buying local. I'll let you know how it goes.

Eventually, our entire lifestyles are going to change drastically over time. We can deny it, or we can make it for the better, and make it ours. It's kind of like the difference between aging gracefully or repeatedly getting costly & drastic plastic surgery and continuously dying your hair/mustache/eyebrows...

I have a lot of changing to do. My lightbulbs were all changed years ago. It's not enough. I garden, I compost, I recycle. But it's not enough. There is always one more step to take, one more small thing I can do. So we'll try doing Christmas gifts local. It's a start.