The City Mouse in the Country

  I t's easy to think that we are living in the proverbial end times.  Smoke pours across our borders from unchecked Canadian wildfires, across the world the temperatures continue to rise and records are broken daily.  Deaths due to heat related issues are reported in monotone voices by our news anchors.   Nearly everyone admits that climate change is real and that we are experiencing it.  You have many that think it's to late, and see no reason to change their lives.  I used too be one of them.  Change however is inevitable and our species has a knack of getting itself into trouble only to find a way out of that trouble. For example in this week alone we learned of reclaimed coal mining land where 1 acre is feeding 2000 people , while it is certainly a green washing piece for the company - I'm going to concentrate on the positive.  The fact that 1 acre of land is feeding 2000 people and that restoration is occurring at all.   There was a time when the open pit of a mine w

A few days ago we had a series of very hot days, where the record for the hottest day was set and then broken the very next day.  Here in the United States we have various parts of the country that are under Heat Domes and other weather conditions have resulted in temperatures in the triple digits. One of the reasons that my wife and I moved to the country was to avoid increasing heat and humidity that we were experiencing in Florida.  However in moving to the country we bought a home that did not have central air or heat.  We were lucky enough to adapt to both extremes in a variety of ways and have adopted many of the concepts discussed here.  I have covered the topic of staying warm without central heat before in this blog and decided that I should talk about staying cool without central air this time around.  As the temperature rises in the future it's going to affect how we work, play, eat and even the decisions that we make .  It's also going to affect the most disenfran

  Where I live in Western Pennsylvania was mostly spared the worst of the soot and smoky skies caused by the recent Canadian wild fires.   However it still managed to blanket most of the North East in some of the worst air quality we've ever had . In some ways it was a taste of our near future. It's just one more thing that is piling up on the scale leading to an eventual tipping point.   It's not all doom and gloom of course...but it is mostly doom as study after study after study are all pointing to a difficult and deadly future. Now...that being said I'm still an optimist about the future.   I don't believe we are going to prevent "the worst" from occurring.   I do believe however that we can do what we can to at least delay the worst of it.  We are still going to have to deal with global warming and all the consequences it brings; from submerged coastlines to super storms to the forced mass migration of people. Delaying the worst of it gives us time to