Good Bye Summer...

I saw the twitters coming in hot and fast last night about the earthquake in Chile. I immediately hopped on to facebook and sent a message to a couple of friends to see if they were OK. Amazingly, Macarena shot back immediately with her cute English: "Dear Emma, thanks God we are all ok!" While not related to climate change, these earthquakes that mother earth has dished out lately are starting to resemble an irritable mother, tired of sustaining those around her, and giving them a bit of a shove.I logged on to the BoM website today (which would have to be THE most popular website in Australia) and read a press release confirming that this summer was the hottest on record in West Australia. It gets worse. It was also their driest... "Provided no measurable rainfall is recorded in the remaining few days of summer, Perth is heading for its driest summer since rainfall records commenced in 1876".

It's these daily reminders, these small pieces of a very complex jigsaw, that drives me to the need to act on climate change. While I feel daily despair in varying degrees for the planet, I choose to put my energies into positive actions wherever I can. For a start, my kids would freak out if they saw us strung out and hopeless. It's really their futures that are at stake, isn't it, so I guess we owe it to them to create a positive way forward.. with enthusiasm... well, at least with a 'nose to the grindstone' kind of resolution.

Many of our friends know us as 'doers' in this household, but we're not totally gun-ho - we are also thinking doers. So we get nourished by locking ourselves indoors on rainy pre-Autumn weekends, where we get to think about the bigger picture, researching, reading and watching wonderful things that wonderful humans are doing around the world. And we always come back to the appeal of the Transition Towns movement. It's a positive, empowering process for communities to take the ideas and make it their own. The best thing about it is that we don't really know how it's going to end up, the idea is to make a start. Here in Kurilpa, the kinship and love for our fellow community members has been one of the most enriching experiences of my life.
Here's an example of the sorts of things that gets our mojo pumping: Robert just came across this idea today... Carrotmob. The idea is to collectively arrange friends (consumers) to support business to do the right thing (seeing the government is taking its time to act). It's a positive message and the idea is that businesses will always respond to the carrot, not the stick - especially when the carrot means extra money! Ideas like this are transition ideas - ways to get us off the treadmill of business-as-usual, and to start thinking about the ecological economy. It's the Blessed Unrest of our times.