Boiling frogs

My friend, Richard, sends along an interesting collection of snippets describing an ominous trend for loss of power in large parts of the United States. It seems that St. Louis, Queens NY, San Diego, Orange, have all recently experienced long power outages caused in part by record demand and in part by weather (unusually violent storms.....hmmm). It's funny how we can fail to make the most obvious of connections among such events. I had the same reaction to this as to my still slowly dawning recognition of how many premature deaths are caused annually by dirty air -- about 3.6 million people per year, according to the WHO. The rape and destruction of the planet isn't just some delusion of left-wing pansies. We're living it. And dying of it. Still, the main response seems to be an urge that "they" (whoever...) roll up "their" sleeves and find solutions, air cleaners, new sources of power. Margaret Wente, a columnist for the Globe and Mail (Canada's "National" newspaper) who seems to me to have been put on the planet mostly to irritate me to death, wrote a column on the weekend that plumbed such new depths of idiocy that I found myself cutting it out and taping it to the fridge as a weight loss strategy (bulimia journalistica, it's called). She argued that since most of us prefer whizzing around in cars to any of the more sustainable alternatives (public transit in particular), efforts to encourage people to use alternatives were misguided. Instead, we should be using all that money and ingenuity to make better cars and more efficient highways. You have to pay to read the entire article, but take my word for it....don't.

In my own little life, things continue apace. I have some kind of upper respiratory affliction that has rendered me almost completely mute. I've responded by toiling away in my little garden like a monk on silent retreat, planning little squares of vegetable plants that we'll be eating through the fall. We don't have much acreage here (about the size of one of the larger commemorative postage stamps), but I'm resolved that everybody should grow some of the food they eat. I'm amazed by the interest my children have shown in the enterprise. I suppose that's in part because they're not used to seeing me plunging my arms up to their elbows in rich, black compost -- rather than staring into a computer screen or in repose with a book. But I also think that they have a natural kind of interest in growing things that I should do more to nurture.

The update on Gilbert. He's responding nicely to the palliative steroids. His life won't be any longer for it, but he'll live out his remaining days like a bouncy puppy.