As we consider local concerns, we see how worldly events affect us all. Last week, we learned from the Cape Gazette that our senators, Chris Coons and Tom Carper, are working earnestly on many concerns including “maximizing our offshore wind efforts.” Over recent weeks, we've been breathing smoke from Canada, where more than 24 million acres (an acre is about the size of a soccer field) are on fire; the smoke, full of carbon dioxide and other emissions, and the loss of trees to take in the CO2 and produce oxygen and sugar through photosynthesis, furthers climate change and makes the efforts to increase renewable energy, that with little to no CO2, of Sens. Coons and Carper even more necessary and urgent.
May we support them and may all of us do all we can to respond. Next week, I take the train, one of the more efficient modes of transport, from Washington, D.C., to Seattle, Wash., from where I head east by bicycle. I’ll be biking to appreciate our landscape and its challenges (e.g. climate change, biodiversity loss). I hope, too, all of us get outdoors and enjoy and appreciate our wondrous and sustaining and beautiful natural world and respond (e.g. walk and bike more, adjust your thermostats, recycle better…) and consider supporting, among others, Chesapeake Climate Action Network and the College of William and Mary Center of Conservation Biology. Our challenged natural world, one which supports us all, deserves appreciation and response from all of us.
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