Once this blog migrates to the new site — which should happen as soon as the UVM blogmasters press the right buttons and set the transition into motion — I plan to start a regular (weekly or so) feature directing readers to interesting developments in ecoculture and geophilosophy. (And sometimes “mediapolitics,” where it converges with the other two.) It won’t be a comprehensive report, but more a briefing in the style of Harper’s Findings, with a nod and a wink, and footnotes added. (I love Popdose’s attempts to set those findings to music.)
In that spirit… Over the last little while, Robert Graves and Didier Madoc-Jones sent fourteen postcards from the future in which climate change has already taken place, essentially as geophysicists were warning. Greenland warmed to the idea, setting its own glaciers to break their own speed limits. Chinese Daoists opened a temple atop Mount Yi, adding to the growing rebirth of the philosophical and religious tradition most clearly aimed at keeping those glaciers intact. Nature artists meeting in South Korea continued to craft objects of beauty in blissful ignorance of the conflagration brewing up around them. Bats beat out six other contenders for the title of Animal with the Weirdest Genitalia on Earth. Elsewhere, Sarah Palin was caught fishing too close to bears, the state movie of both Missouri and North Dakota became Jesus Camp, and the state word of Nevada became “debauchery.” Scientists found that dark matter pulls things together and dark energy pushes them apart. Between the pushing and the pulling they expect we’ll be able to catch our breath for a while longer.
(Hat tip to Tim for the postcards.)