ad·ap·ta·tion /ˌadapˈtāSH(ə)n/noun
- a change or the process of change by which an organism or species becomes better suited to its environment.
As Yogi Berra noted, it’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.
It’s not your imagination. The world is changing faster. Glacier guide Rick Brown shared in a 5-minute video shot at Exit Glacier in Alaska that claims change that used to take hundreds of years is observable in mere months. Next month, Iceland will unveil a memorial to Ok Glacier, the first in the world lost to man-made climate change. “This monument is to acknowledge we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.” America is an educated country. We see the writing on the wall. Whether it’s true or not, America’s historical tradition is cutting-edge ingenuity. President Jimmy Carter (1977-81) put solar panels on the White House and expanded the federal judiciary by 33%, appointing 40 women and 57 minorities, creating a government representative of the country. The administration of Benedict Donald and Moscow Mitch is an anomaly and not representative of the vision that put America on the moon. We are moving backwards at a time when their brand of anthropocentric egotism has created an existential crisis that demands clear vision and bold leadership.
“Science and economics have no real way to value the fact that people have lived for millennia in a certain rhythm,” says Bill McKibben in his latest book, Falter, “have eaten the food and sung the songs of certain places that are now disappearing. This is a cost only art can measure, and it makes sense that the units of that measurement are sadness and fury — and also, remarkably, hope.”
In this issue, authors have struggled with the existential challenges of our current era—diminishing wilderness and resources, cultural divisiveness, and regressive governmental reforms. There are essays about tribalism and intolerance, memoirs of grief and redemption, stories about adjusting to the realities of a changing climate, poems about what it means to be human and the bittersweet recognition that we have allowed technology to overcome human camaraderie.
Time to find common ground in the recognition that the climate crisis and our political dysfunction are threats to our common existence, time to recognize our commonality rather than the voices of hate, time to bring us all together to the promise of United States of America (emphasis on United), the promise of the Constitution and that last phrase of the Declaration of Independence “all Men people are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”
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