Our big, beautiful world-- let's save it.

Our amazing solar system

Last night I dreamed I was on the Cape in the winter.  Mounds of snow were surrounded by elaborate dances of snow particles, which slowed as I approached and began again as I departed.  A lightening storm lit the sky, and from each cloud,where a lightening bolt descended, I could see lightening bolts descending as if they were the fires from  rocket launches.  Very beautiful and scary.

This morning I read that the sun released a large, class X solar flare between 7 pm. and 8 pm. last night.  .  Scientists say most likely the flare will produce a glancing blow today or tomorrow, rather than hitting the earth straight on.  if we're lucky, and the clouds cooperate, we may see the aurora borealis.

How fast is Earth moving through space?

To begin with, Earth is rotating on its axis at the familiar rate of one revolution per day. For those of us living at Earth's midlatitudes -- including the United States, Europe, and Japan -- the rate is almost a thousand miles an hour. The rate is higher at the equator and lower at the poles. In addition to this daily rotation, Earth orbits the Sun at an average speed of 67,000 mph, or 18.5 miles a second.

Perhaps that seems a bit sluggish -- after all, Mars Pathfinder journeyed to Mars at nearly 75,000 miles per hour. Buckle your seat belts, friends. The Sun, Earth, and the entire solar system also are in motion, orbiting the center of the Milky Way at a blazing 140 miles a second. Even at this great speed, though, our planetary neighborhood still takes about 200 million years to make one complete orbit -- a testament to the vast size of our home galaxy.

Dizzy yet? Well hold on. The Milky Way itself is moving through the vastness of intergalactic space. Our galaxy belongs to a cluster of nearby galaxies, the Local Group, and together we are easing toward the center of our cluster at a leisurely 25 miles a second.

If all this isn't enough to make you feel you deserve an intergalactic speeding ticket, consider that we, along with our cousins in the Local Group, are hurtling at a truly astonishing 375 miles a second toward the Virgo Cluster, an enormous collection of galaxies some 45 million light-years away.

From StarDate.  Photo from kiwizone's photostream at Flickr.

To kill a bee

This afternoon I was standing by the sunny back door of Arise for Social Justice when a fat bumblebee hovered briefly by me and contemplated the door.

"Nothing you want in there," I said, but the bee proceeded  to enter and I followed behind, hoping to move it back toward the open door, but no-- the bee continued its journey into the main room.  I walked ahead, announcing, in a calm voice, that a bee had entered the room.

One guy immediately expressed great physical alarm, flinching, flailing his arms and jumping around.

"Oh, are you allergic?" I said.

"No, no, just don't want to get stung."

"It won't sting you," I said.

Another guy grabbed a newspaper, rolled it up and went bee stalking.  I continued to the front door, where the bee seemed to be headed, but before I got it open, my brave friend swatted the bee against a window and killed it dead.

"Why did you do that?" I said.  "We need bees, bees are good."

"Then why do they always try to sting you?" a woman asked.

"They don't try to sting you, if they sting you, they die, bees are in trouble right now, we need them to pollinate our food."  Now came the blank looks:  Pollinate?  Bees?  Food? As if none of these things have anything do to with each other.  And of course for many people, they don't.

Coriander and coconut, cocoa and pumpkin, avocado and apricot, almond and cherry: we'd have none of these without our poor, stressed bees.

It was the wrong moment for a nature lesson at Arise-- didn't want to make folks feel either cowardly or cruel-- but the huge gap between our sense of ourselves and our relation to the rest of the world has been much on my mind.  If we can't find a way to close this gap, we're not long for this world-- or is it that the world is not long for us?


Now, you might think this kind of conceptual gap is widest among  poor or uneducated city people, but that would be a mistake.   I know many people who care deeply about the environment but who treat it as a thing in itself,  without making deep connections to human life.  They may know enough about industrial agriculture to want to eat well, and enough about corporations to know how outgunned we are, but they see human beings  as observers of the equation, not as participants unless to do damage.  But as Merry said to Treebeard, "You're part of this world, aren't you?"

Layer this on top of the genuine class differences between the lovers of the environment and the dwellers of the inner city.  Sometimes I feel like I'm standing astride a chasm.

I'm generalizing madly, of course.  Many people do get it-- just not enough, nowhere near, not if we're to have a chance.  And that's why I'm a community organizer, not a policy person, though God knows we need them..  We're not going to be able to save this planet, and ourselves on it, until most of us understand that humans and the environment are not just connected, but  inseparable.  Only then will we be willing to fight for our lives.

 Photo from petrichor's photostream at Flickr.

Doomsday Clock moved back one minute

Too much tragedy this week.....yet on Wednesday, January 13, the possibility of our survival as a species increased by one minute.  The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, citing the "growing political will" to tackle both the "terror of nuclear weapons" and "runaway climate change," has moved the Doomsday Clock back one minute, to the same setting as when it wa was first created in 1947.  BBC.  

Earth as art

Clouds over the Aleutian Islands. From NASA's Earth as Art website.

Earth from the Landsat Satellite - Himalayas

Soaring, snow-capped peaks and ridges of the eastern Himalayas Mountains create an irregular white-on-red patchwork between major rivers in southwestern China. The Himalayas are made up of three parallel mountain ranges that together extend more than 2900 kilometers. Our Earth as Art - NASA