A Fun Way to Spend a Weekend (Talking about Climate Change)

We have a wonderful house guest here this weekend, and oh, what fun we're having. If you can call yakking about climate change till all hours of the day and night "fun"! ;-)

Our guest is Earth Doctor Reese Halter, one of the most dedicated environmental activists we've ever met. We're doing some filming at different sites around our island community to help support his Save Nature Now: Bees, Trees and Seas campaign to mobilize the Millennials and TBDs (apparently the younger generation doesn't have a name yet). 

We've filmed on the beach and on the bluff, at a garden and in a forest, and at a marina with orca whales in the backdrop.

Dr. Halter, who considers himself a specialist in Earth's life support systems, is a hero in our eyes. He has dedicated his whole life to helping people around the world wake up to what we're doing to the biosphere. Nature is collapsing all around us. Climate instability is impacting every region on Earth. 

Reese does TV interviews, radio shows and daily podcasts. He attends protests and demonstrations. He teaches and lectures. He speaks on behalf of the orcas, the bees and the trees -- and man, does he ever know his stuff! He fights poachers and plastics. His "clients" are Nature and all the animals (including the human ones). 

What Reese wants to do is let young people know that there are some wonderful technological solutions in store. But they have to get to work guarding the oceans and forests, and saying no to oil, gas, coal, fracking and pipelines. The science is irrefutably precise. But there's no time to lose. We've run out of time. Our planet's ecosystems -- the oceans and forests that support us -- are under siege. 

Reese is going to confirm for young people something they've perhaps been inarticulately feeling -- that they're enslaved by fossil fuels corporations and the big banks. They (indeed, we) are no longer free. To win back their freedom, they'll have to join the fight to Save Nature Now!

Earth Doctor Reese Halter is someone who exemplifies that old adage by Chief Dan George:

If you talk to the animals they will talk with you and you will know each other. If you do not talk to them you will not know them and what you do not know, you will fear. What one fears, one destroys.

Then with his outgoing and enthusiastic nature, Reese combines the Chief Dan George quote with this more positive outlook of Senegalese forestry engineer, Baba Dioum:

In the end we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.

I hope you'll spend some time learning about Reese Halter and letting him teach you. For the sake of the children's love for all animals, of all species, and for all the collapsing ecosystems ... the bees, the trees and the seas.

125 Days Left - We Have Become Nature Voyeurs

I live in a beautiful seaside place where we get to see killer whales go past from time to time. Orcas are magnificent animals, and over the years, we've had some very moving experiences with them.

This morning, the rocks by the beach were covered with human animals, waiting to catch a glimpse of these powerful black and white creatures. As we watched the orcas spyhop and blow and slap their fins, I heard someone say, "It's like the paparazzi here, with all the cameras clicking."

And that's when it struck me. In our culture, we tend to "do" Nature, like voyeurs or like athletes, rather than experiencing the rest of Nature as parties to it, as a part of it.

It reminded me of a teenaged tourist about to go off on an Africa safari in Kruger Park, South Africa. "Dad," she complained to her father, "if you've seen one giraffe, you've seen them all."

Actually, no. Spend any time with giraffes — or any other creature on Earth — and you will soon see all the differences between individuals within species and between species that seem quite similar. You'll also discover all the similarities that unite us as living beings on one planet. But we have to take that time.

Part of safeguarding the future is going to entail a slowing down, a rebonding, a relearning of the ancient connection between all living things. 

And the longer we just sit, observing our neighbours of other species, or falling asleep in the sun, or chewing on some grass, the less we're driving about spewing greenhouse gas emissions!

My husband and I have been greeted — eye to eye — by whales, have sung to whales, have watched whales push a sick pod member to the surface, have witnessed a baby whale nursing. We would have missed the privilege of all these fantastic shared moments had we not just slowed down a bit and gotten past the notion that Nature is a "show."