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.