The Environment

Thank you, Blog Action Day, for giving me something fun and different to review on an otherwise depressing Monday morning.

Someone was trying to argue with me the other day that it would be easier to just find a new planet to live on because we're destroying this one.

How bad is our environment? I'll admit that it's been a long time since I've been anywhere that anyone would call a natural environment. You know, a place where it's hard to find anything that people have built. I'm not even sure places like that exist anymore outside of, I duno, Canada probably. I almost remember something about it, though. It was like... it was like... I don't know. I've lost it. I know it was special in some way, but I can't tell you how anymore. It was something about the smell - but I've hardly had a sense of smell since I moved to the city. It had to do with being able to focus on something farther away than across the street. Part of it - I think - was related to wondering which rock or tree would protect me best if a sudden rainstorm came through. And I think - I think there was a time and a place where dirt was OK. It sounds crazy - but I remember digging in the dirt - you know, that stuff at the bottom of construction sites that they drive the piles into - with my bare hands, and it getting under my fingernails, and it being OK. Not OK for long, but OK for awhile because I was planting something. In the ground. Like a little flower or a tomato vine. Crazy. But it's been so long since I've experienced any of those things, I don't really know how bad our environment is.

But wait. It's not like I'm somehow outside the environment just because I live in a city. I still get rained on, I still see wildlife every day. Sometimes when I'm watching pigeons while I'm waiting for the bus, I like to imagine a city where they all have the proper number of toes, and all their feathers are clean and neatly groomed. Other birds manage to pull it off on their own, but pigeons seem to take city life especially hard. Maybe if we looked out for our pigeons, we'd save ourselves a little bit of disgust every time we pause on the sidewalk. We'd enjoy cities a little bit more. For that matter, maybe we should take care of the humans who seem to take city life especially hard - but this is a review of the environment, not local politics. My point is, I do know that at least in San Francisco, the rain is relatively acid free, the tap water is pretty darn drinkable, and while global warming seems to have somehow made us colder over the past few years, all in all we're really not that bad off. ...Yet.

Even with all it's problems, I still give our environment a 10 out of 10. I've never, ever, seen a better one. Even in Hubble pictures.