Hold your horses, or rather, get ’em out of the stable – It’s
Feb. 28 and the latest 7-day weather forecast in Brooklyn calls for this range
of daily Fahrenheit highs (68, 50, 41, 41, 43, 52, and 56).
That’ll take us into the second week in March, when we New
Yorkers think spring will be just around the corner.
OK. It’s OK to be not spending the time I usually do on the
treadmill. But shorts and a singlet on outdoor runs in February?
I’m sorry, but that’s just weird.
Here’s a crazy thought. Imagine the new president setting
aside his notes for his speech to Congress tonight and saying he’s gonna fight
for ordinary Americans. He’s going to quote from this recent article by
Benjamin Kunkel in the London Review of Books.
“How is the ecological predicament of the 21st century to be
conceived of? Politically, how is it to be confronted, and by whom? The basic
features of the problem are plain enough, when you can stand to look. Universal
carbon pollution, known by the mild term ‘climate change’, is already
distempering the seasons with bounding extremes of heat and cold, and
magnifying storms and droughts; increasingly, it will spoil harvests, spread
tropical diseases, and drown coastlines. (Less well known is the threat of more
frequent earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.) Excess carbon dioxide in the air, partly
absorbed by the waters below, turns the oceans more acid, corroding coral reefs
as well as the shells of clams, oysters and other calcifying organisms. Ocean
acidification, a chief cause of the Great Permian Extinction some 250 million
years ago, may come to factor in the ‘mass extinction event’ – a planetary
culling of life-forms with few rivals in the earth’s history – currently taking
place. For now, fatal habitat loss, both underwater and on land, has more to do
with local conditions becoming abruptly warmer or dryer; the arrival of
unfamiliar species traveling in the entourage of globally mobile humans; and
encroachment by farmland and roads. Farmland itself may be faring better than
wilder and more biodiverse terrain, but here too there are grounds for concern:
topsoil acreage is dwindling, as are glaciers and aquifers vital to irrigation,
on a planet that must feed seven and, soon, nine or ten billion people. Most of
this population is poor by European or North American standards and doesn’t
constitute any automatic constituency for ecological restraint. Governments and
corporations, for their part, have little incentive to slow, much less stop the
general destruction. The collective activity of humanity is sapping the
ecological basis of civilization – and no collective agency capable of
reckoning with the fact can yet be discerned.”
I know, a crazy thought. But with March coming in like a
lamb – and leaving like a lamb – I couldn’t resist.
Next: Running for Your Life: ‘Miserables’ Thoughts
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