Monday, February 9, 2009

Shades of Blue

This morning the sky was a beautiful clear blue.
The ocean, even with it's flatness, was yet another
shade of blue.  Despite the beauty of nature all around
me I was a different shade of blue.  The kind of blue
that comes with a sad reflective feeling.

I'm reading Thomas Friedman's book "Hot, Flat and Crowded".
It is a book that we all should be reading.  Unfortunately
the facts of our changed world, it's finite resources, and the
infinite demands of the earth's population as it grows, does
not present a very positive picture.  It doesn't bode well for
my grandkids.

 My mood was also coloredby a talk I watched given by
Charlie Moore of the Agalita Foundation.  Charlie is one of the
foremost authorities on plastics in the marine environment.
You can see that talk on the Jim Moriarty's blog at
www.surfrider.org. Please do the planet a favor and take the 
30 minutes to watch it.  One of the things that struck me was
a slide of a WWII victory poster. It's message was simple and 
all too relevant in this time of economic  and environmental crisis.
We'd do well to live by that message
today.  Conserve, walk to work, plant a garden, and don't waste
precious resources.  Our consumer based, afluenza ridden ways
are deadly.

Friedman's book, Charlie's talk, listening to rigid partisan
spokespeople on the Sunday news shows ridicule and criticize
those who don't agree with them is enough to make anyone blue.

As Charlie Moore and others are saying "shift happens".  We need
to learn from the past, change the tired old paradigms we use
to think about and solve problems.  My generation has contributed
to making a total mess out of things.  Let's all take action to change
the shade of blue that leads to despair and degradation.
 


1 comment:

Jim Moriarty said...

now all you need is some miles davis... kind of blue