“I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in.”
— Mickey Newberry
What with fires, hurricanes, other storms, heat waves, the ongoing pandemic, and outrageous laws targeting reproductive and voting rights, our condition is headed for the ICU. And that’s just in the United States.
I could rant about any and all of these things, but there are plenty of other people doing that. Instead, I want to make a point that might be getting overlooked as people deal with our many crises:
The normal that we thought we had doesn’t exist anymore. We can’t go back to the way things were, because that isn’t going to solve any of our problems.
Or as I put it in a senryu this week:
We keep making plans
for the way we wish things were,
not the way they are.
Take the hurricanes. The new levees held in New Orleans, so some flooding was prevented. But there were communities that didn’t have levees yet that were inundated. Plus the investor-owned utility “solutions” for making sure the city would still have electricity didn’t work — power is still out all over the area.
And none of that work stopped the damage in New York City, where people died in basement apartments due to flooding.
We can’t just respond to hurricanes by building a few levees and pretending we’ve addressed a complex problem that is getting much worse due to climate change. We have to look at preserving what’s left of barrier islands, to set up power systems based on micro grids and batteries, to stop building in areas that will flood repeatedly, and generally to approach the whole problem in a multifaceted way.
Otherwise, we’re going to end up with a lot of climate refugees within our own country. Continue reading “What Condition Our Condition Is In”…