Buffering the Climate Emergency

Koda defending his otter.

Toula is our pug rescue.

Toby is our 17-year old Jack Russell who jumps like a puppy.

I followed Bill McKibben's lead, and got a puppy to go with my two older dogs. Most dogs haven't read the IPCC's dire reports. Deer, elk, squirrels, and wild birds are still magic to them, and should be to us. Koda is so smart he helps neighbor kids with their math homework.

A reader of this blog recently wrote I use too many statistics and lists. He said my readers weren't feeling the climate emergency. Yes, it's important to feel it, and it's also important to feel some joy in our days so we can keep telling people what many don't want to hear, and doing necessary work of truth-telling many don't want to do. It's odd to me this blog of a Pacific Northwest fisher/ecopoet has over 100,000 views -- odd in a good way. 

In a related matter regarding the "feeling" theme, I recently heard at Rock N' Roll True Stories, "The Cranberries former manager Allen Kovac would reveal to Rolling Stone magazine that the group's label Island Records urged The Cranberries not to release the politically-urgent song ["Zombie"] as a single. The label offered [Dolores] O'Riordan one million dollars to work on a different song but she ripped up the check, according to Kovac [ . . . . ]" Earlier in the Rock N' Roll True Stories video, it was noted "There would be one incident in particular that inspired the creation of the song. That occurred on March 20, 1993. Explosives hidden under a garbage can in the city of Warrington, Northwestern England, took the lives of a three-year-old and twelve-year-old boy, and injured dozens of others." My question for students, and others, is what is so important in your writing/singing/speaking/art you would tear up a million dollar check asking you to ignore it? (I contacted Universal Music Group to fact check the claim.)