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(DOING THE BEST WE CAN)

Wangari Maathai died on Sunday. Andy Revkin included that video in a post he made in her memory.

It’s a story about a fire, a hummingbird, and countless tiny beakfulls of water. What I love most about it is that it never really ends.

Front lawn, Los Angeles, CA. This is not the best we can do.

“The earth gives only one crop of gold. When that crop is divided among a thousand tenants, it feeds no one for long. This is bad husbandry.”

Richard Whiteside said that, in John Steinbeck’s Pastures of Heaven.

(HARMONY)

It’s a long-winded translation, but I think those big blue characters are trying to say that when people and water interact harmoniously, the south and north both benefit.

The south and north of China, that is. The land of the raging Yangtze River and the withering Yellow River, respectively. And the interaction is the south to north water diversion project, possibly the biggest infrastructure project in the history of the world.

It’s hard to blame a country of over a billion for trying not to spread their resources more evenly. But it’s also hard to imagine harmony relying so heavily on cement.

“It’s either one fluky summer or a harbinger of what climate change is going to bring. If it’s the latter, baseball teams may want to invest in retractable domes.”

It’s not every day that we see climate change mentioned (and taken sort of seriously) in a baseball column in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

(THE LESSER EVIL?)

Clouding the environmental conscience by appealing to the social conscience. Fascinating. Possibly brilliant. And definitely terrifying.

Thank you Mother Jones, and thank you Larry Pryor.

Strange animals, we humans.

(Photo by Scott Olson, originally published by Popular Science, republished by Joe Romm, and known to me because of this Think Progress post about climate change adaptation and spending cuts.)

“Without water we are nothing, the traveler thought. Even an emperor, denied water, would swiftly turn to dust. Water is the real monarch and we are all its slaves.”

That comes from Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence.

Wise words.

Makes me think of Cortés in Tenochtitlan and, more currently, the south-north water diversion project.

“The smell of gasoline made the sight of the palm trees seem sad.”

Pulled that from John Fante’s Ask the Dust.

Here’s the whole paragraph:

And so I was down on Fifth and Olive, where the big street cars chewed your ears with their noise, and the smell of gasoline made the sight of the palm trees seem sad, and the black pavement still wet from the fog of the night before.

Palm trees are everywhere in the book (everywhere in the first 60 pages, at least), and the narrator is worried about their happiness in a city increasingly dominated by cars.

It was a fair worry, in my opinion. But it’s worth noting that many of those same LA palms are hanging in there today, convinced, it seems, that trees still have some say in this city.

What Plato Might Think of the Climate Change Debate

Far too quiet on the blogs these past couple of months. Too little reading. Too much family. Too much Chinese study. Too many excuses.

But right now is a new right now, so maybe the dry spell is ending. With some nice, neat philosophical logic.

Thank you, Larry, for the heads up.