Paving Paradise

I didn't make it out to any of the Step it Up protests today, but I did get out for an after-dinner walk with the dog. We did some cloud-watching as the evening burnished the bottoms of the clouds with gold and yet still lit the very tops brilliant white.

During dinner, we had been talking with a friend of ours who wants to be a Red Cross worker after she retires, and is already looking into how to get the right training. It seems like a good idea: climate change almost certainly means climate chaos (after all, why should the climate take to change any better than we do?). I mean, really. Hailstones as big as fists landed in Dallas and late spring snow fell all across the southern plains this week, followed by violent thunderstorms.

But back to cloud watching. I grew up in the 60's and 70's, and I like a lot of that music. I have what I call a "green mix" on my ipod that I put together for an event about ecologically sound choices. So by pure coincidence, I ended up walking across a wide swath of wetland/open space that Nintendo has posted permits to build on while listening to Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi" - you know, the one about paving paradise with parking lots. I was singing it, too, really loudly, and Nixie, our golden retriever, was walking in front of me with her tail wagging to the beat. A few songs later, back on the main street, John Denver crooned through "Rocky Mountain High."

These songs were seeds of change.

We've been working on these same issues for forty years. We've made a little progress.

The last song in my Mix is "Imagine" by John Lennon. If you know those lyrics, that's what we need to do now.