I plead guilty. I am utterly inconsistent when it comes to doing the right thing: reducing my carbon foot print.
I was thinking about this this morning when doing my weekly drive to one of my favorite places around Portland to walk the dog: 1000 acres in the Sandy River Delta. It is a 23 miles (37 km) drive mostly on the Highway, to a large natural area with meadows, forests, ponds and rivers. Dogs are allowed to roam there unleashed, and my 2 year-old German Shorthair Pointer goes crazy just by hearing the name of the park, much less during our arrival there at the parking lot.
I have a set route there which takes a good hour during the summer and twice as long during the rest of the year because I waddle in my rubber boots through the puddles and try not to slip on the mud that covers the paths. The parts of the parks closest to the parking lot see a good amount of foot traffic, but soon those unafraid of mud baths have all of nature to themselves. As a regular visitor you can observe the change in seasons, and as a dog owner you can rejoice at the pure joy emanating from the creature when he charges through the meadows in the everlasting, never fulfilled hopes of catching the swallows and the meadow larks.
So I compromise by making up for that insane Schlepp by taking the bus at least once a week for other errands, and try to walk as much as I can instead of using the car in the neighborhood.
Other contemplations of foot print reduction are guilt-inducing as well:
(the whole lot is listed here: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jan/19/how-to-reduce-carbon-footprint)
1.Biggest culprit: air travel. Guilty as charged.
2.Eating meat: Yes, our household is trying to reduce meat quite a bit, but man, I can’t give up the Leberwurst.
3. Home Heating – here we are several steps ahead. House got insulated, and daytime temps are 66, nighttime 58.
4. Boilers – by default, yes – we needed a new one and now have a responsible model.
4. LED lights – yes, installed. Grudgingly.
5. Home appliances: using laundry line inside and out, most of the time. Check. No extra freezer, either, don’t blow-dry hair.
6. Buy less – working on it, I swear. Without too much success. You know me and clothes…. But we still have furniture from 30 years ago, so that’s a start.
7. Buy local – increasingly so. Not enough, though.
Well, we leave it at that. Inconsistency, unresolved.
Today’s book recommendation is a fitting look at the godfather of environmentalism, Alexander von Humboldt.
I think I wrote about it here shortly after it came out, but I strongly recommend it to all interested in nature, South America and a portrait of a man who became a staunch abolitionist, but still could not quite jump over his Euro-centric shadow. An enlightening read.
So he digs a 30 meter long passage and has the thinnest member of the local spelunking club climb into Bruniquel cave in France. Another almost half kilometer on they find something mind boggling: “a vast chamber where several stalagmites had been deliberately broken. Most of the 400 pieces had been arranged into two rings—a large one between 4 and 7 metres across, and a smaller one just 2 metres wide. Others had been propped up against these donuts. Yet others had been stacked into four piles. Traces of fire were everywhere, and there was a mass of burnt bones. ” I am quoting from the attached article here: 
But now to my real wondering: how can it be that even in science there is so much happening due to pure chance? I am not referring to the determination of locals to explore their environs. The cave was discovered in 1990. By 1999 archeologist Francois Rouzaud had decided, by means of carbon dating the bear bones, that the stalagmite rings were older than any know cave painting, some 46.000 years or so, and thus could not have been the work of Homo Sapiens but the Neanderthals. He died of a heart attack that very year. Almost 15 years later, another caver who is also a specialist in stalagmites happens to vacation in the region. She hears about the cave, tests the stalagmites themselves with more modern means and voilà, they are actually 176,500 years old, give or take a few millennia. Given the nature of the rings, and the absence of functional items, or tools, scientists are now speculating this was a ritual place. Furthermore there are red and black streaks that are applied to diverse areas, hinting at the controlled use of fire hot enough to crack rocks. Views of social organization and communication patterns of Neanderthals are revised as we speak, following these discoveries. 
I got interested in the people who Darwin selected as correspondents after reading Roger McDonald’s Mr. Darwin’s Shooter, a book that tells the story from the perspective of Sym Covington, fiddle boy on the HMS Beagle and later man servant to Darwin. He ends up in Australia, still corresponding with Darwin and sending specimens collected there, increasingly deaf from his days of shooting rifles at Darwin’s behest. How would it have felt to have been so instrumental in collecting data (if only in the form of shot specimen) and yet to receive little recognition? Foreshadowing of the fate of graduate students, last on the authoring list? How did he reconcile his fervent religious beliefs with his support for someone seen to pull the rug up from under them? (Which, by the way, goes for Darwin’s wife as well.) (Review of the book: 
