Tom Englehardt, of TomDispatch and The Nation, brings us a terrific essay by a Utah writer named Chip Ward. It focuses on what has gone wrong with bees in this country, with unusual depth (and grasp of the English language), but also offers a way forward different from our present path, and touches on the other disasters encircling our destructive way of life, such as climate chaos.
Think the way nature thinks: Surprises happen. Resilience matters. Control is impossible.
Think modularity.
I also have to link because Englehardt in his introduction makes the same point I’ve been making about the floods these past few weeks in England, now considered the worst in 200 years. He writes:
No American media figure, for instance, has wondered publicly whether,
someday, England could become, in Gore-like "inconvenient truth" terms,
the partially sunken Florida
of Europe (along undoubtedly with Holland and other low-lying areas of
the continent). It’s no less true that a season of startlingly
widespread and fierce wildfires, based on long-term drought in the
West, Southwest, and Southeast has been a news leader for months — the
TV news just adores the imagery of storms and fires — again, most of
the time, with little linkage to larger possible changes underway. We
are, it seems, a resistant species when it comes to thinking about the
need to truly reorganize ourselves on this fragile, but resilient, planet of ours.
(HT: JMG, of Grist)
Kit Stolz 