The Rockies Red Glare or the Adelie Penguin

What do we care? Muscling tight corners in our SUVs. Legislators gleefully firing climate scientists at  state college. Playing with our hand-helds while the Rockies go up in flames.

     We’re hanging by a thread. Just imagine it. Thumbing our noses at those geeks while we spin and spin, plastic water bottles spraying from our hands as we glide through the air with the greatest of ease.

     I’m cool. How bout you?

     The Rockies red glare…

     Sure, I know someone but they’re halfway across the country…not in my backyard…

     I’m cool, I sent my contribution to Greenpeace, World Wildlife, Care Care Care…

     ***

     Match-Mismatch – species falling out of sync with their environment

     Ice-loving birds, the Adelie Penguin. What’s there not to love–black and white penguin suits, Fred Astaire looking for a Ginger

     Feisty–why I saw one, its breastbone torn back by a seal. “You could actually see her lungs working in there. But she spent a few days recouping, hunched over, and …in less than a week she was back in the water, feeding her chicks. She and her mate even pulled a brood off.” –Bill Fraser

     Ice-loving Antarctic birds.

     Match-Mismatch.

     “An entire ecosystem changing not in hundreds but 30-50.”–

      Melting sea ice. Ice-loving Adelie.

    ***
     Next time I see a tree pop, I’m outa there.

     Oh yeh? Jump in the lake?

     Ice-loving snow-loving — Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox

     “We’re sitting pretty, here in the Northland. Lots of water. No water wars here.”

     Unprecedented, ten inches of rain in two days. 

     A plume of silt miles out in the lake. No idea what effect…

     Changing not in hundreds…

     Thousands of birds the last time I was here…

     What gets me is that “these incredible animals have to take it in the neck because a bunch of humans can’t get together to decide what to do about the planet.” — Bill Fraser, ecologist, penguin expert in The New Yorker, 12/21-28, 2009

     

    
    

    

    

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