It's not what your country can do for you

This story on NPR got me thinking about times in our country's past when we made sacrifices for our united well being. It made me start thinking, what can we do today to improve our country's financial state. I'm not talking on a policy level, but I'm thinking day-to-day life changes and sacrifices. There are several areas where I'm recommitting myself to my country and to bettering my communities economic situation:

1) Act Green - The environmental situation we find ourselves in is really a global crisis equal to the economic crisis and intricately connected I believe. So where can we start to make headway, everybody's heard it before: Turn off your lights; buy energy efficient bulbs; use less water; recycle; reuse old objects in a new way; give hand-me-downs and hand ups to people who need what you have but aren't using . . . the list can go on. If we care for what we have here in natural resources, we'll better our environment and our country as a whole.

2) Volunteer - Everyone is busy and scheduled to the max these days, but there's no one who can't give three hours to benefit another person once a month. When we volunteer we not only improve another person's life, we provide the potential that they will then feel more uplifted and be able to pay it forward to someone else. We also improve our collective attitude by contributing to a sense of optimism and hope for a better future. I think a positive attitude goes a very long way in increasing people's energy and our ability to pull out of a desperate situation. In Nashville TN 'Hands on Nashville' is a great place to start when looking for a volunteer opportunity.

3) Buy local - There are many things that we can put our money towards, but I think small local businesses that use very few resources and support local economies is always a noble cause. At a time when big banks and big businesses are being bailed out by our federal government, let's bail out that local farm by purchasing their strawberries this summer, let's go to our small local grocery store, let's buy handmade gifts from a local artist, let's eat at local restaurants, and let's shop at our local bookstores.

That's the start of my stimulus package, what are you planning on doing for your country in it's time of need?

party lines

I was a member of the young Dems in college, but is recent years I've been trying to keep party loyalty out of my politics, so I can truly understand what I believe and why. This has certainly not made me more conservative, but it's made me more articulate and well versed in issues I feel passionately about. I have to say though, I'm having a hard time containing my disappointment in the republican leadership's response to the economic situation and their insistence on towing a party line. Particularly when Obama has made such an important reach across the aisle to use brain power from all parties to solve this crisis. I want to play nice, but the conservative positions on social issues and their inability to recognize the needs of their constituents has curdled my blood and I'm having a hard time maintaining my compassion and openness to their positions. However, I will keep trying . . . as I am want to do.

Getting excited about March!

The Vegilantes are gearing up for their first meeting in the end of March/beginning April. Our first step will be smaller than this project, seed bombs, but this video is truly inspirational! Get ready to grow Nashvegas!

Is our congress just monkeying around?

Where oh where has February gone?

To the dogs, that's where it's gone. Today needs a pick me up, because frankly, it's miserable and sad. Here's something that made me laugh in the midst of it all.

brilliant - fun

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Everyone must read this news

All Things Considered, January 26, 2009 · Climate change is essentially irreversible, according to a sobering new scientific study.

As carbon dioxide emissions continue to rise, the world will experience more and more long-term environmental disruption. The damage will persist even when, and if, emissions are brought under control, says study author Susan Solomon, who is among the world's top climate scientists.

"We're used to thinking about pollution problems as things that we can fix," Solomon says. "Smog, we just cut back and everything will be better later. Or haze, you know, it'll go away pretty quickly."

That's the case for some of the gases that contribute to climate change, such as methane and nitrous oxide. But as Solomon and colleagues suggest in a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, it is not true for the most abundant greenhouse gas: carbon dioxide. Turning off the carbon dioxide emissions won't stop global warming.

"People have imagined that if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide that the climate would go back to normal in 100 years or 200 years. What we're showing here is that's not right. It's essentially an irreversible change that will last for more than a thousand years," Solomon says.

This is because the oceans are currently soaking up a lot of the planet's excess heat — and a lot of the carbon dioxide put into the air. The carbon dioxide and heat will eventually start coming out of the ocean. And that will take place for many hundreds of years.

Solomon is a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Her new study looked at the consequences of this long-term effect in terms of sea level rise and drought.

If we continue with business as usual for even a few more decades, she says, those emissions could be enough to create permanent dust-bowl conditions in the U.S. Southwest and around the Mediterranean.

"The sea level rise is a much slower thing, so it will take a long time to happen, but we will lock into it, based on the peak level of [carbon dioxide] we reach in this century," Solomon says.

The idea that changes will be irreversible has consequences for how we should deal with climate change. The global thermostat can't be turned down quickly once it's been turned up, so scientists say we need to proceed with more caution right now.

"These are all ... changes that are starting to happen in at least a minor way already," says Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton University. "So the question becomes, where do we stop it, when does all of this become dangerous?"

The answer, he says, is sooner rather than later. Scientists have been trying to advise politicians about finding an acceptable level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The new study suggests that it's even more important to aim low. If we overshoot, the damage can't be easily undone. Oppenheimer feels more urgency than ever to deal with climate change, but he says that in the end, setting acceptable limits for carbon dioxide is a judgment call.

"That's really a political decision because there's more at issue than just the science. It's the issue of what the science says, plus what's feasible politically, plus what's reasonable economically to do," Oppenheimer says.

But despite this grim prognosis, Solomon says this is not time to declare the problem hopeless and give up.

"I guess if it's irreversible, to me it seems all the more reason you might want to do something about it," she says. "Because committing to something that you can't back out of seems to me like a step that you'd want to take even more carefully than something you thought you could reverse."