Tag: climate change

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call: Take 2

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So Stewart (Brand) gave birth to this idea that if we could show the world from the outside, if we realized what an amazing, extraordinary, unique gift that was — this tiny, little planet teeming with life, swimming around in a dead universe, as far as we know.

We still don’t know that there’s any other life in the universe, which is phenomenal, if you think about it. We still don’t know. We might be the only life in the universe. I think about that nearly every day. I think it’s the most sobering thought. I think that should be shouted from the rooftops every day.

That’s my version of seeing the whole Earth from space — getting people to understand that we might be the only life. It might all be on this one place, and bloody hell, shouldn’t we look after it a bit better, then?

Then those things make me constantly think and constantly be grateful for the fact that I’m alive. I remember reading this comment from a New York taxi driver. He’s driving, and he turns to the customer and says, “Oh, life. I’m so glad I got in.” [Laughs.]

I just love the idea that it’s like an amazing show at a theater and you managed to get a ticket to see it. I appreciate that kind of gratitude.

— Brian Eno interviewed by Ezra Klein, from “A Breath of Fresh Air with Brian Eno” (NY Times, October 3, 2025. The Ezra Klein Show)

Brian Eno Portrait by Shamil Tanna @ Pitchfork.com

T.G.I.F.: If the world were fair…

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If the world were fair, destruction and creation would take the same effort. It is far too easy to destroy something. A red strike through a sentence. A flame through a forest. A fist through a flower’s roots. What took life a hundred years to create could be felled in mere minutes.

— Katie Goh, Foreign Fruit: A Personal History of the Orange (Tin House Books, May 6, 2025)

Notes:

  • NPR Book Review (May 5, 2025): “Supermarket displays of oranges will never look the same after reading ‘Foreign Fruit'”
  • Chicago Review of Books (May 5, 2025): “Unpeeling the history of citrus”

Walking. Blue on Bone.

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High Tide. 100% overcast. Winds spitting rain. 45° F — wet, wet to the bone. DeLillo’s dusk, silence, iron chill.

It was the time of year, the time of day, for a small insistent sadness to pass into the texture of things. Dusk, silence, iron chill. Something lonely in the bone. – Don DeLillo, White Noise.

I stare at the photo. A sad looking street light slouches heavily downward, destroying the symmetry of the view. One sweep of the trackpad and Photoshop clears the way, leaving the foreground awash in its light. There, all better. Gone. No irony in that. No sirree. Street light straining to stand, its light straining to illuminate our way. Blue Blue Blue horizon.

I walk. 1,797 consecutive (almost) days on this daybreak walk at Cove Island Park. Like in a row.

Continue reading “Walking. Blue on Bone.” →

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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…I have spent 63 years trying to cultivate hope, but my thoughts wander in this direction too often these days. Why protect the wildflowers that grow in our yard when all the emerald yards nearby are drenched in herbicides and when their purely ornamental shrubs are drenched in insecticides? Why trouble myself to keep the stock-tank ponds filled with water when every spring there are fewer and fewer tree frogs who might need a nursery for their eggs? Why turn off the lights to protect nocturnal creatures when all around me the houses are lit up like airport runways? Why bother to plant saplings when a builder will only cut them down later, after my husband and I are gone, to make room for yet another foolishly large house that glows in the dark? …

More and more I find it hard not to ask the question I have spent my adult life avoiding: What is the point of even trying? …

At my lowest, I have never entirely given up my faith that good people working together can change the world for the better. When I have been downhearted in the past, I have always explained to myself that I am not alone in my efforts to cultivate change — by writing, by planting, by loving the living world in every way I can find to love it. Individual efforts gather momentum through the individual efforts of others…

In saving the leaves for the moths and the fireflies and the dark-eyed juncos, I am still trying. And in the trying perhaps I can save my own soul.

— Margaret Renkl, from “How to Keep Your Own Soul Safe in the Dark” (NY Times, December 9, 2024)

Miracle. All of it.

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although all things
are present, a

fact a day a
bird that warps the
arithmetic of per-
fection with its

arc, passing again &
again in the evening
air, in the pre-
vailing wind, making no

mistake—yr in-
difference is yr
principal beauty
the mind says all the

time—I hear it—I
hear it every-
where. The earth
said remember

me. I am the
earth it said. Re-
member me.

— Jorie Graham, from “Poem” in Swarm (Ecco Press, 2000). (via Thoughts)

Notes:

  • DK Photo: Gull @ Twilight. October 25, 2024. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT
  • Post Title Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle.”