And getting back to climate change

 "Our mother spanked us and sent us to bed without dinner."

 There. That was finally the feeling as I drove past the horror of Swannanoa's crushed buildings again and again. I'm not going to immunize myself to it. They may scrape up the mud turned to hard clay, and the many branches and roots of trees. They (our really great workers) are making some places be able to operate almost as normal. I drove through the Dunkin Donuts and picked up a Boston Cream Donut yesterday! Then looked across the street at the decimated buildings next to the Swannanoa River.

Mother nature is definitely mad at us. Here we are, the people who love the woods, hiking, fishing, swimming...working just in order to have weekends and vacations enjoying her bounty. But we sure forgot how to live in harmony with her. (And this goes up to a much higher chain of responsibility...not only political but religious!)

It started maybe a hundred years ago...commerce along highways. People wanting to live closer to their work sites and thus building nearer and nearer waterways. Not making laws to protect the steep slopes as people built up and up on the sides of mountains.

Yep, Mother Nature, our mother just spanked us good! Western North Carolina was a really safe climate change habitat from all intents and purposes. We had to learn our lesson though. I don't mean causality, that the people themselves who suffered made this happen. It is the fault of our civilization, our communities doing just what they wanted without having nature in the equation.

I don't mean to berate anyone. I just want to share that I feel like I've been sent to bed without dinner after that shameful spanking of Hurricane Helene.  We who kind of were working to help the problem of disassociated humans perhaps coming awake enough to save our planet from climate change...as well as many completely unaware people...boom, we're back to horse and buggy life. No water or electricity, many without safe homes, and get this... days without internet or cell service! That's a big BOOM to all of us.

I'm sooo very grateful that after 52 days of using bottled water to drink (I hadn't before, because of the plastic thing of course) we can now drink safely out of the tap. I'm just doing dishes and showering for now with tap water. Lots of these bottles in my house to use anyway.

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From Heather Cox Richardson last Monday:

On Sunday, speaking from the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, President Joe Biden said that it would not be possible to reverse America’s “clean energy revolution,” which has now provided jobs across the country, primarily in Republican-dominated states. Biden noted that the U.S. would spend $11 billion on financing international responses to climate change in 2024, an increase of six times from when he began his term.

But President-elect Trump has called climate change a hoax and has vowed to claw back money from the Inflation Reduction Act appropriated to mitigate it, and to turn the U.S. back to fossil fuels.

His intended choice of Secretary of Energy is a laugh...an oil czar!

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I must take a deep breath and pay attention to the "things I can control in my life." Politics has left the building. But I read, and listen half-heartedly to the news, and console my friends. And look and listen around me.

Folks, there are some dangerous things happening out there now, just around the corner from you, from me, from my relatives in the bigger city. It's as if the hate groups have been let out of the cages and they are going rampant.

I'll go more in depth about my thoughts and their experiences in another post, trying to keep climate change the focus on this one. It's so easy to digress...

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A bit of good news: all the Black Mountain and Asheville plastic water bottles - are they recyclable?

YES!'

We have plenty of capacity to bring all of those bottles into our facility to process and ensure that they are properly recycled,” Lawson said via email. “Markets may go up and down on plastics and other commodities. However, we have and will always accept plastic bottles for recycling.”

Source: Asheville Watchdog Answer Man interview with co-owner of "Curbie" (Curbside Management"  in August 2024

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Today's inspiration:

As a human being living on earth, it is important to learn to ground yourself in relation to your earth mother.