the frig blig

Hanging loose at the beach in Yachats, in the zone.

Saw this hiking the Cedar Butte trail a few weeks ago. The owner kept out of sight however.

When I was a kid, people used to say “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.”

Nowadays people are frantically trying to figure out how to deal with what we’ve been doing about it, on a grand scale, after all.

Everybody loves cars, but hates traffic.

The season called spring officially kicked off nine days ago, coinciding with the vernal equinox. All that week you could see industrious Seattleites busily digging in the dirt preparing their gardens. Then yesterday afternoon, snow fell from the Seattle sky — big old clumps of flakes. It caused several fender-benders before it ended after about an hour and a half.

This is the first time I’ve seen it snow in Seattle this late in the season for the 17 years that I’ve lived here.

This afternoon I got out my bicycle, pumped up the tires and pedaled a mile-and-a-half to Stone Way hardware for a porcelain light fixture. My first bike ride of 2008 it was. While I huffed and puffed in my lined black gloves, old memories of my bicyclist past hooted at how out of shape and unbikerly I have become. Well let him hoot; it felt good to be back in the saddle again.

S was busy whipping our various garden spots into shape — the pea chair, the raspberry patch and the vegetable plot. For her spring means spring break, and she intends to be productive with it this year.

S and I accompanied our friend N from SLC on a hike along the riverbank near Darrington yesterday morning. Moss-draped trees graced our path as we walked and gawked.

Could bird flu be nature’s way of countering global warming?

Harvard psych professor Steven Pinker’s intriguing article ‘The Moral Instinct’ (New York Times Magazine 13-Jan cover story) made me dig out my old copy of the book ‘Mutual Aid’, in which author Kropotkin uses countless examples of animal behavior to illustrate how cooperation is at least as big, if not bigger, a species survival technique as is competition (Darwin’s ’survival of the fittest’).

Could this be moral philosophy’s prehistory?

This big guy taking a breath is a manatee at Homosassa Springs. All they do is swim around all day and eat in fresh 73-degree spring water. What a life! I visited these guys whilst driving from Tampa to Tallahassee last Sunday.

I’m wondering about why people seem to have a stronger response to the attack on the world trade center than the news that peoples carbon dioxide emissions have actually changed the planet’s climate, and worldwide changes are already occurring as a result. These changes include increasing global temperatures, vanishing glaciers and permafrost (which is expected to lead to rising ocean levels), and changes in the amount and pattern of precipitation.

An outbreak of malaria in southern Italy is a recent unpredicted effect, caused by the migration north of tropical mosquitos to places where they formerly could not thrive.

Obviously global climate change will have (and is having) a lot more impact on the lives and living conditions of people and other species all over the world; whereas the attack on the world trade center killed a few thousand people immediately, and indirectly led to the killing of a few thousand more (plus causing political changes such as repeal of the writ of habeus corpus, destabilization of Iraq, warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens and turning the U.S. budget surplus into the biggest deficit in history).

Obviously the twin towers going down in flames plays better on TV than a slow incremental temperature increase caused by invisible gases. And psychologically it’s more attractive to blame and attack enemy terrorists than to deal with our own culpability in the greenhouse effect.

But imagine if this country had spent the same amount of money spent on the Iraq war, on research and development of greenhouse gas reduction policies and technologies. It might still be too little, to late; but I can’t help think of the old proverb “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Known outside the U.S. as “a milligram of prevention is worth a kilogram of cure.”

I shot this short video of waves crashing against the rocks in Vernazza, Italy in April 2005. This morning I uploaded it to youtube: