The City Mouse in the Country

 First off, I don't write fiction.   However it occurred to me that what I've been writing about lately is difficult to get our heads around.  Climate change is really happening in today's world, and at the risk of hyperbole, it really is end of the world type stuff. I needed to find a way to break it down to the indivdual level.   That thinking, and some natural curiosity about the New Madrid fault lin e got me thinking about how easily things could go bad for a society if a series of natural disasters hit in rapid succession.    Thanks to this writing prompt, something started to form in my head.   Please keep in mind that this is the first draft and it deals more with the themes I'm hoping to explore.   It does not have a current title. So without wasting time...here we go. The world, at least as most people understood it, ended on a rather ordinary Tuesday afternoon.    I remember it was a perfectly ordinary day. Before we can talk about what we built, what we

  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

When I first moved to the country I wanted to get involved in something.  I wanted to become part of the community.  I wanted to belong to, and add to, something greater than myself.    In small town America that usually means joining a Church or your local volunteer fire department but since I'm an agnostic bordering on atheism, the local Church was out.   I'm also old and out of shape so the fire department was out.    So that left the Odd Fellows who have a local chapter close to my home. While I may not always agree with who my local chapter supports as an organization and what they do butI know that I am making a small difference in the life of my community somehow.   A homeless person manages to snuggle under blankets provide by the Odd Fellows on a cold winter's day, a child gets a scholarship, someone gets a warm meal.  Today we don't think much about mutual aid unless we are giving funds to some charity or faced with some sort of natural disaster.   Many of us

As I entered the Energy Innovation Center near Pittsburgh's center,  the ladies at the registration desk asked me to write down what Solar Punk meant to me.  I declined.  The reason being that when I first learned about the Solar Punk movement, I was immediately attracted to its desire to change the fundamentals of the world; solar punk is more than an art and literary movement.    While Steam punk was about a time that never was and seemed to have a certain way of dress and style to it solar punk seemed more grounded.  An old pair of blue jeans bought second hand and work boots were functional and fashionable. Where Cyberpunk seemed to envision a cold harsh future, solar punk seems almost utopian.   It offers solutions through everyday acts like gardening, vegetarianism and recycling.  Those that believe in the solar punk movement are simply not sending money to some charity but living and working to make this world a better place.  Art, music and literature are all ways