It has been very cold this week. I live on the southern shore of Lake Superior, and it’s been below zero Fahrenheit most of this week. The cold feels like a gasp of breath — like when someone is struggling to breathe, and they get in a gasp of breath that revives them for a bit. And there’s that little bit of hope; maybe it won’t be so bad, maybe we have time, maybe we can save some of it all.

I love your descriptions of your fierce little people. Yes, I think that they will need their fierceness and their ingenuity and their memories of the daffodils.

A friend commented yesterday that all this sunshine was driving away their winter depression. I wanted to feel happy for her. I remember growing up in the midwest and what the end of February felt like. I think about winter depression, full spectrum light bulbs… and that we’re sliding, sliding down. I think about the maple trees. Or, closer to home, the Redwoods my son and I planted at the school. I live in northern California now, and I watch when things bloom. I keep track of it for my ring-times with the children. I think of the children, of my most fiery boy and how difficult he is. I bring what I can to the children, through story, through gardening, through the circles. I work at a Waldorf school. When I was doing my teacher training and instructor once said, “This is the education environmentalists should be demanding for their children.” It’s not environmental news for 6-year-olds. It isn’t knowing who is on the endangered species list, or what is happening to our world at 6. It is gnomes and fairies. Magic and fairy tales. It is guarding, protecting, revering. Gardening. Celebrating. Walking. Playing with wool and wood and silk. We need these difficult strong outrageous children. Who knows what they will be up against. They need to remember a time when the earth was beautiful and that they celebrated the first leaves on the mulberry trees and the day that the daffodil first bloomed after watching for it for days. My difficult boy is a handful at six. But we worked all last spring on how to handle the snails he found in the garden. He has quite the attitude lately and it is driving us a bit crazy. But I figure he’ll need it.

Often I know who I can talk to. I say, “Jeff, are we going to get any rain Is winter going to come back?” He volunteers at Stebbins and gives tours at Cold Canyon. Both of his daughters have been in my kindergarten. We’ve taken field trips to their house, seen their parents’ wind turbin from a hill covered with vetch (and came down wearing green and purple wreaths), we’ve run through a field of fava beans and discovered snakes sleeping under planks of wood. One year we took the class on a field trip to Cold Canyon and learned about birds from “the Birdman”, courtesy of Nature’s Theater. Jeff says, “Yes. Winter is coming back.” I look at him and wonder – did he see the weather reports? Is it going to rain? He continues, “It has to rain.” Oh. Yea. It does.

No, not the cheeriest. I would like to see the film; I have you bookmarked.

I am constantly amazed by those who think that it’s all just a load of hype. We are frogs in a warming pot, eh? Tragic that it is coming both too fast and too slow.

The oceans of this planet are awesome and magnificent. They are also finite. I do not believe that our oceans can accept an infinite amount of human waste to no effect. I wish it were so.

I am not an oceanographer, so I must base my conclusions on the work of the men and women who study the seas.

The question is not whether we will kill our seas. Our seas have survived much more than humans could ever throw at them. I believe that the seas will eventually recover. The question is how many species will die off. The question is whether humans can survive a massive ocean die-off.

The Royal Society study that I quoted states: “Organisms will continue to live in the oceans wherever nutrients and light are available, even with ocean acidification. However, from the data available, it is not known if organisms at the various levels in the food web will be able to adapt or if one species will replace another. It is also not possible to predict what impacts this will have on the community structure and ultimately if it will affect the services that the ecosystems provide. Without significant action to reduce CO2 emissions into the atmosphere, this may mean that there will be no place in the future oceans for many of the species and ecosystems that we know today.”

“The abuse of power imbalance is the great moral weakness of laissez-faire capitalism.”

Well, I consider myself a capitalist to the bone, so I feel that I have to step in and defend my beloved ideology

In my opinion, it is the human nature to be imperfect. We strive for better, but never reach the total perfection. So it is with capitalism, it may not be perfect (even Adam Smith warned us that big corporations are bad) but it is the best that we had come up with.. so far, at least.

Every system we, as the human race, have tried so far had the problem of abuse of power imbalance.” Just look at the medieval kingdoms, totalitarian states of the early 1900s, and the hellish communism of most of the last century…

As far as objectivism goes, at least to my understanding, it is not the matter of choosing the right course of action, but more importantly being able to make that choice for ourselves. You can take the job or not, you can buy the toy or not, your choice.

Other part of objectivism would entail that the factory owner doesn’t HAVE to offer you a job (here I’m disregarding the toxicity issue) or help you in any way just because you can starve without his assistance. It’s his/her choice.

That brings us back to those human imperfections… we may be imperfect, but at least we are free to pursue our betterment (or worsement… if there even is such a word) at our own choosing. I don’t know about others but I’d rather be an imperfect freeman than an all-too-perfect slave

But it’s just my opinion.

P.S. I checked that wikipedia article and it doesn’t seem to be the best presentation of objectivism out there..