Hope for Planet Earth

It was a beautiful day on the New Hampshire seacoast today, the sort of day Grace Metalious described which makes New England magical:

"In northern New England, Indian summer puts up a scarlet-tipped hand to hold winter back for a little while. She brings with her the time of the last warm spell, an unchartered season which lives until Winter moves in with its backbone of ice and accoutrements of leafless trees and hard frozen ground. Those grown old, who have had the youth bled from them by the jagged edged winds of winter, know sorrowfully that Indian summer is a sham to be met with hard-eyed cynicism. But the young wait anxiously, scanning the chill autumn skies for a sign of her coming. And sometimes the old, against all the warnings of better judgment, wait with the young and hopeful, their tired, winter eyes turned heavenward to seek the first traces of a false softening."


That is as evocative of the coming of autumn in these parts as anything I've ever read. 
Of course, last winter Indian summer lasted right through until this May.

But walking around, Portsmouth today, it was easy to forget  about those grisly photos of the Artic ice caps melting.  A great blue heron flew over South Pond, and cormorants splashed among sea gulls and mallards and the air was crisp.

Where I grew up, along the Potomac, in Maryland, 7 miles upstream from the Capitol Building, that river was so foul when I was eight years old, you would never think of dipping a toe in it, much less swim in it. No life was visible along the banks, and you certainly could not have seen life, if any existed, inches below the murky surface. But, returning, my Odyssey in the north finished, I settled by the river at age 34, and was astonished to see the river transformed. The water ran clear, and you could see to the bottom in places, and along the banks, and see fish and beaver, deer, foxes, heron, even bald eagles all lived there. 

Many voices had been raised, including that of Supreme Court Justice William Douglas, to save the river, and factories upstream, which had been making their profits and dumping their waste into the river had to spend some money protecting the river, cleaning their discharge before sending it into the water.

So, the actions of mankind polluted the natural world, and the actions of men cleaned it up, where that one river was concerned.

I'm not sure restoring the polar ice caps will be as direct or easy, but at least, one might say, there is precedent. 

Of course, we had Rachel Carson and a lot of men and women who persisted in convincing the doubters.  Nobody has been as successful in convincing Republicans global warming is real. As Upton Sinclair noted, it is difficult to bring a man to understanding, when his pocketbook will be hurt by that understanding.