This afternoon I took Blaze for a six-mile walk. It was shirt-sleeve weather (long sleeves, that is), a record-setting 65 degrees and cloudy. During any other year, today's cloud formations and humidity would have suggested the likelihood of a snowstorm. Not this year. Local media report that normal temperatures for the day are generally in the high 30s.
When the New York City meteorologists read the news, Monticello (the village where we live) is usually the coldest spot on the metropolitan map, often with the most severe weather. Located in the Catskills, I guess the city networks consider anything much north of Sullivan County to be outside their viewing area. We haven't even had one heavy snow, not that I'm wishing for it. I hate snow, but conditions have seemed so unnaturally warm this winter, coming at the same time as video images on the news of polar bears drowning due to lack of ice, and the near complete loss of the Greenland ice shelf (not to mention several devasting natural disasters of the last few years), that one wonders what the world is coming to. I haven't seen An Inconvenient Truth yet, but I know enough about Al Gore's thesis, and that it is supported by a large growing chorus of scientists, to pay attention.
It is a Hebrew tradition that Isaac's oldest son Esau "sold his birthright" to his younger brother Jacob for what 16th century English translators called a mess of pottage, or a bowl of soup or stew. As the story goes, as a result of this transaction, the birthright to the land of Israel went to the descendants of Jacob (aka Israel), rather than to Isaac's firstborn, Esau. Muslim tradition, of course, differs on some significant points in the telling of this story. But the point I want to make here is that humanity today is essentially selling its birthright for barrels of petroleum. If radical social changes don't occur soon (which don't appear likely, at least in the U.S.), the balance of life on Earth could be altered for centuries to come.
Of course I am not saying that today's warm weather in the Catskills is a part of the global warming trend, caused by humans' massive release of hydrocarbons into the atmosphere. I can't say that with certainty, but it certainly raises the subject since we do know that the Earth has warmed significantly in recent years as a result of human activities. Glacial ice caps on both poles are disappearing, ocean levels are rising around the world, and extremely severe storms are occurring more often. One wonders what it will require to awaken humanity to the global impact of its industries, and the cost we are paying for modern conveniences. Must cities and the economies of entire nations be wiped out? Must the poles shift on their axis?
The Earth will endure. She has been through much worse in the past and has undergone drastic changes. The question is whether Mother Nature will allow our distant descendants to live here at all, or where and under what conditions.
Esau wasn't the first one to foolishly give up his birthright, nor the last. The birthright of our children and grandchildren is a clean and healthy planet. Will we write them out of our will to satisfy gluttonous appetites for speed and convenience?