My family history begins in the Smoky Mountains where many Irish, Welsh, and Scottish immigrants settled.  Though I was born there at the tail end of WWII, when my father – a native of east Tennessee – returned to the States, I was whisked up into 20 crazy years of military assignments and reassignments that took my family from coast to coast in the U.S. with one gentle, magical time in Honolulu at Hickam AFB.

Changing places frequently lends to a sense of loss and confusion precisely for the reasons that place is not  a location but is the font of our biological and psychological lives.  I am only now beginning to appreciate this phenomenon, now looking back, and frankly savoring all the rich, diverse places on my “dance card” in life.

I believe that as a child I innately understood this essential relationship and became a great explorer of natural places, lithe and intentional about getting to know each new place.  From laying on my tummy watching the miniature world of grass forests to the thrill of rolling down a leaf covered hill letting the Earth pull me to her breast – I longed for that intimate attachment.

Reading books like Janisse Ray’s Ecology of a Cracker Childhood is a powerful testament to the influence of land on our lives and livelihoods.  She describes like no other the long leaf pine communities that she has defended since early in her life…a community that once covered millions of acres in southeast Georgia and northern Florida and is now only little islands left to behold.

As Ray describes in poetic narrative, this community evolved with fire as its renewing element.  The canopies of long leaves are high up on the straight trunks wrapped in thick bark. The community of wiregrass below waits for fire to open its seeds and renew the land.  Among these towering pines animals and insects of unique character inhabit the land, air, water, and trees.  I recently visited the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, not too far from where Ray grew up.  When I shared this fact with friends recently, one remarked that she had no use for visiting swamps.  I thought to myself how wrong she is and how that is precisely what has destroyed so much of this land I now inhabit called Florida.

Okenfenokee lake normally receives 60 inches of rainfall each year and is the source of two rivers – the St. Mary’s which drains into the Atlantic, and the Suwannee which drains all the way to the Gulf of Mexico (280 miles).  Rangers at the refuge told me that the swamp has only received 8 inches of rain for each of the last two years and it has been on fire for one whole year.  Even as they spoke, the fire was still raging in some areas.  At the bottom of the swamp is a thick layer of peat which produces methane gas that bubbles to the top and lifts up soil and debris.  Seeds land on these natural flotillas, take root and grow.  That’s how the swamp had “grown” islands and isthmuses that provide critical habitat for birds, alligators, and fish, beavers, and deer, bobcats and before they were forced out, panthers. Because of this watery origin, the land “trembles” when you stomp your foot.  Okefenokee is the remnant of an old sea.

In my hometown of Pensacola, in northwest Florida, we are surrounded by oak and pine hammock and privileged to live by a barrier island network that stretches from Mississippi to the Great Bend of Florida.  Marshes once thickly lined these islands and dunes towered as high as thirty feet.  Development of the landscapes has radically altered these protective barriers to our natural renewing element: hurricanes.  Now when they come on shore, there is little to stop their ravaging ways.  But, forward thinkers – lovers of their home-scapes – have acted to save little slices of what once was a great Turtle Island, America.  In P-cola the main man is Jesse Earle Bowden who spearheaded the campaign to protect the islands by establishing the Gulf Islands National Seashore.

What places have formed an integral part of who you are?  How do you experience that relationship?  What are your concerns and your joys about the places where you live and breathe and go about your day?  Please let readers know so that we can share your experience here.

Meals on Wheels: Food truck dining in Florida – from Florida Trend, Florida’s Source For Business News.

The famous saguaro cactus is pleated so that on hot days a shadow is cast to keep the plant cool, and the structure is such that when it rains, the saguaro sucks up surface rain across a wide area through its shallow root system.  The pleated trunk expands like an accordion, gradually releasing the water to its cells over the dry season until the monsoon rains bless the landscape once again.

Dr. Mark Dimmit, Director of Living Collections at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum exclaims, “Desert plants do not just survive, they thrive through their seasons.”

How can we as a community living through hard times thrive instead of just coping, just surviving?  This is on my mind today as we set out into the year 2012.  How can we thrive?  There is something spirited about this approach—enabling us to bring forward all that is best in us, clever, joyful and resourceful.

What would that look like?  The new Admiral Mason Park storm water reclamation pond is a good example of what we can do to turn a site into a multi-use location with beauty and outdoor exercise tied into it.  Dedicated in 2011 adjacent to the Veterans’ Memorial Park, it now serves as a beautiful entrance to the city, a place to read, meditate, or just walk and bike.  As the eight live oaks grow and cast their shadows on the 3.5 acre pond, it will season into a place of beauty to honor our veterans.  After building the Aragon community the need to mitigate storm water became evident.  We combined ecosystem function with the human need for places of inspiration and physical exercise.

Another example of what we can do is the children’s recreation area at Lucia M. Tryon Branch Library.  Now that the playground, trees, and pond are in place, it will evolve into a natural habitat that attracts birds and bees and people to its lovely walking paths and to the many opportunities for kids to practice rock climbing, pretend play in the big pirate’s ship and watch fish and ducks through the tall reeds that line the pond.  It will become a place where children and parents are immersed in nature.

At UWF President Judy Bense is planning to build residential halls that are models of sustainable energy design with ecosystem services leading the design.  Living in an energy smart building is a teachable moment.  The UWF School of Science and Engineering was built to foster interdisciplinary collaboration.  Its design is the highest LEED standard for construction.  The environment stimulates creative thinking.

We might also think about going further by shaking off standard incremental improvement to design buildings that act like ecosystems.   Jason McLennan, architect at Kansas City-based BNIM Architects, is known for “living building” design.  To be certified as a living building (park or street) criteria in seven areas must be met:  site, water, energy, health, materials, equity, and beauty.  With Gulf Power’s support for geothermal energy designs, we have an opportunity to build something revolutionary next time we begin the design process.  We’ll save energy, restore environment, improve our health, offer good jobs to people who are most in need and involve students in learning futuristic planning while creating a surrounding that makes us feel great.  What could be better?

In 2012 I challenge myself and my fellow Pensacoleans to stop, wait and consider with each decision before us, how could we plan and act together to thrive- not just survive-in the New Year and decades to come?

It was into such spaces that Jesus was born – the infant who would become the man who overturned the tables of commerce that invaded the temples.  His rage, born of righteous indignation, was hardly a bleep on the screen of the powerful.  Had it occurred today the story would only make the local, petty-crime reports.  “Deranged Dude Goes Beserk”…the rush of money-changing undisturbed, the level of social penetration intensified and engrained in our mental frame of reference:  How much is it worth?—the National Credo.

As Jesus later reflected, new wine requires a new skin to contain it – allow for its full character to evolve, to come into its robust, unique flavor.  I’ve always enjoyed the few stories about Jesus that have survived through the ages.  As a child, I really “got” his message.  I think he would have loved and been a part of the local food movement, biking and alternative energy sector.  He would have worn American-made jeans, drunk fair-trade coffee with his friends.

Jesus would cut to the chase in America.  Per person, Americans consume more energy and goods than any other people on Earth, contributing most of the CO2 that is causing climate destabilization.  Since the poorest people are and will continue to suffer the impacts (drought, floods, disease, and starvation) Jesus would be “in our faces” about our reckless behavior.

But he would have had the same challenge as the nascent sustainability movement:  how do you get the word out to 9 billion people in time to divert a global disaster?

I am sure that Jesus would not have been politically correct nor would he engage in “people-pleasing.”

No, he would march right into the House and Senate, upturn a few tables and shout to the Heavens, “What on Earth do your think you are doing?” He would clear the air and the truth would ring across the Capitol.  For a brief moment, things would go in the right direction by just creating a pause in the fury.  Boy, do we need him now!

I wonder who will turn the tables in 2012?

Dad is a World War II veteran, B-29 bomber pilot and retired Air Force career officer.  My sisters and I tromped around America for 20 years from military base to military base.  Circumstances led to my move to Pensacola, Florida in 2008 to live near Dad, to help when needed, and to be closer to my own son and daughter who live in the Southeast now.  Sometimes I get caught up in the cares of the day and it is not until the next morning (I am a veteran early riser) when my thoughts are clearer, that I realize the gems of wisdom that roll forth from Dad as he looks back on nearly 100 years of life!  Think of that…nearly a century of personal experience.

Two things he shared last night as we discussed current seemingly intractable problems in America:  fossil-fuel cars, and the Congressional stale-mate over, well, everything it seems.  We simply can’t agree on one important step for millions of Americans.  In the middle of that discussion he remarked that during WWII there was a national vision of where we were going and that together we would accomplish something for the whole world.  That the world of nations looked to us to make things right, to defeat a terrible wave of human to human violence.  And we did.

The second thing Dad said, almost in passing, was that “you just can’t change American’s love affair with their cars.”  He described riding in a big, comfortable Buick that same day with his medical service to his doctor.  ” I remember the model T Ford.  When everyone could afford to get one… it was our greatest joy.”  He grew up on a small farm in eastern Tennessee and recalled trips my aunts and uncles and his family made to Asheville, NC (60 miles on a narrow two-lane, through hair pin mountain roads). Imagine going from horses to a gas-powered vehicle – the transforming impact of that one invention.  The model T opened up so many possibilities and connected people, places, and thus exchange of ideas and goods and services.

This morning as I was writing in my journal, a more than 50 year habit, I realized two key things that might offer us “younger” folks some direction:  1) a national vision everyone subscribes to; 2) an invention that changes the whole paradigm of our lives.  Perhaps if we can discern what these two factors might be in 2012, we could reinvent ourselves even as my father’s generation did so many years ago.

What dream are we chasing as a nation?  What does the world look to us to do?  What could transform our daily lives and rocket us into the next new big vision for America?

[Dad described the city of Chicago’s fleet of hydrogen cars.}

The meetings resulted in the adoption of 19 COP decisions and 17 CMP decisions and the approval of a number of conclusions by the subsidiary bodies. These outcomes cover a wide range of topics, notably the establishment of a second commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol, a decision on long-term cooperative action under the Convention, the launch of a new process towards an agreed outcome with legal force applicable to all parties to the Convention, and the  operationalization of the Green Climate Fund.

Results of COP17 2011     On the first couple of pages you can read a good summary of the history of climate change negotiations since 1992 among the Earth’s countries and leaders.  Its worth reading to refresh the context for the current negotiations at COP17.  See below for articles with different points of view regarding the “success” of the conference:

The National Post (Canada)
The Sacramento Bee (U.S.)

World News service for newspapers around the world on results of COP17

This podcast includes a presentation by Diana Liverman of the timescale of earth system function up to and after 1950, tracing not just temperature and population (the most common graphs) but use of water, fertilizers, paper, cars, loss of the ozone layer, deforestation of temperate and tropical forests, overfishing, biodiversity and other important indicators.  They discuss the period of the Great Acceleration (1950 being watermark for its beginning.)

The speaker explains what scientists mean when they use the term, Earth Systems.  Carbon Cycle, Water Cycle, and Air Circulation to the Dalai Lama. These is a great section of the video. ***Start at about 35 minutes for this section of the podcast.

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After my last post on the COP17 Climate Talks in Durban, South Africa I realized the links I posted take you, the reader, into a maze of reports and data sites, agendas, and very dense organizational structure.  I apologize for that having just spent time navigating (barely) through the site.  However if you go to the OneWorld blog  you can find up to date news and videos on the floor of the convention.  AFP.com International news for today describes how the whole political scene is in turmoil as delegations of developing countries (“Basic nations”) -the Group of 77 – are insisting that the Kyoto gas emission targets from the previous sessions be maintained to as late as 2020.  Among the 77 is China, now the largest emitter of CO2 on the planet.  Some delegates believe strongly that to not further curb emissions for another 8 years will bode disaster to earth’s operating systems.  In the original Kyoto agreements (1997), developed nations agreed that they have contributed the most to climate change through CO2 emissions and they assumed greater responsibility by agreeing to not only cut emissions but to provide the resources and expertise for developing countries to cope with the worst changes such as flooding, drought, and loss of food productivity due to warming of the planet.  Read the AFP article here.

For ongoing coverage of events and people this is also an excellent site:  iiSD RS @ Durban Climate Change Conference.

The United Nations Climate Change Conference, Durban 2011, will bring together representatives of the world’s governments, international organizations and civil society. The discussions will seek to advance, in a balanced fashion, the implementation of the Convention and the Kyoto Protocol, as well as the Bali Action Plan, agreed at COP 13 in 2007, and the Cancun Agreements, reached at COP 16 last December.

Go to this site throughout the next ten days to keep track of progress toward these goals and to use this information to contact your congressional representatives and local government for energy and economic steps that would contribute toward reduction in greenhouse gases (GHG).  We have an exceptional opportunity to make better decisions today but they are complex, pitting national goals seemingly against one another (jobs versus alternatives to fossil fuels i.e. oil sands, nuclear power, “clean” coal.)

Go to Yes! Magazine to keep a vision of what’s possible and what is already here in new technologies, new ways of knowing, and fresh ideas for sustaining communities with robust local economies.  Improve your ecological knowledge by going to Ecoliteracy Institute  and Small Planet Institute and New Economics Institute.