Vlog 20160226 - Reflections on Climate Change (Patreon)

I should add -- upon rewatching this -- not everyone has the luxury of orienting their career around something like climate change. But many of us do, and with such a luxury comes an opportunity to lend a hand :)

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Okay! Hello patrons, it is Sunday night.

I've actually been pretty productive this weekend and I didn't want to interrupt my groove so I wanted to carry forward that theme that's been going on this entire month which is that I've been recording my vlogs on Sunday. I haven't heard any feedback positive or negative so I hope you guys are okay with it because it's working out for me.

It's interesting in that the the recording of the vlog has kind of supplanted that habit where Sunday night I was always finishing up Wasted Talent and it was always a little bit stressful and now the vlog is the thing that I finish up on Sunday night. And I kind of like the replacement of habit. I am a creature of habit you may have realized by now. I like doing certain things in certain ways.

But yeah, today's been pretty productive. I finished that box. Pretty happy with the outcome. That was a really complicated piece and it took longer than I would've wished for it to take in but I'm really happy with the outcome. I've become kind of addicted to finishing things and when it is not finishing it's like "whyyyyy" but now it's done and I can be happy about it.

I finished the wallpaper set and that was another thing that was one of the big 'art things' that I needed to finish for the Kickstarter, so I'm pretty happy that I am slowly completing and knocking down those obstacles that stand between me and the Kickstarter being completed.

On the other side... [just realized that this might not be recording audio but I think it is]. The other thing I managed to finish today was the climate change zine. So the pitch for the climate change zine that I just submitted. As $5 patrons you should be able to see little snippets of that zine that I've been posting and it was... good, I'm glad I got a chance to put that together, and glad I got a chance to put together a pitch that I was pretty happy with, and I wanted to talk a little bit about climate change today because it's actually pretty timely.

There's been a huge heat wave back East that a lot of people have been talking about. Here it hasn't been so bad. We've had an unusual winter for sure, where we had a lot of snow, a lot more snow than we've had in any year that I can remember while living in Vancouver... and then this week, this past week it was supposed to rain all week and then it didn't rain, it was sunny. Which I mean... is fine but it's also kind of weird. And I was recalling last year in Boston when they had those huge huge dumps of snow (was that last year? I can't quite remember...) but there was just that massive amount of snow that was socking the northeast over and over and over again.

And everyone over the years has been warning us that this type of disruption of the normal weather patterns is what we should be expecting and they're gonna be getting more and more extreme and this is just the new normal.

Abnormal is the new normal. And it's it's hard to live with.  It's very strange to live with something where you know it's been coming for a long time, you can see it coming as it's been predicted and it makes you feel very small in the face of it. You know what I mean? Like, climate change is not something that any one of us can stop.  Every single one of us can take individual steps... we can vote strategically, we can apply money towards sustainable sources and sustainable practices -- voting with our with our economics -- we can reorient our careers towards it, which is which is what I have done.  As I was putting together that pitch I was kind of reflecting on the fact that all the jobs that I've had of been sustainability focused and that has been a deliberate choice on my part.  

And yet when it comes down to it when it comes to these day-to-day realities of climate change and the impact that it's having both here and around the world... whether it's, you know, overseas disruptions in climate causing mass famine... is another outcome, and we're going to be seeing  that here soon I think-- not not a mass famine or anything I should  hope! -- but we're gonna have to expect disruptions in our food supply.  And the ridiculous plenty that we've been enjoying for the past 20 years cannot persist. It cannot persist in a way that will be accessible to two everyone. And standing up in the face of that and feeling so small and so powerless is something that I've been sitting with today.  How as much as I've done and as much as I continue to do and continue to speak and continue to write and learn and try and educate others on climate change and its impacta and what can be done about it... at the end of the day it's coming. At the end of the day this is no longer something that I feel that we can stop. So it's a matter of learning to withstand these disruptions. And it's scary. It's really scary because I think it's getting worse and worse and I really wish we had more political will behind it.

In British Columbia there is a pipeline that's coming through and it's been recently approved by the federal government which is going backwards on a campaign promise and a lot of people in British Columbia are mobilizing to oppose that effort and I think it's important to stay aware of it, and to act in action opposition of it.

But everything still feels so small.

So I hope if you're back East you are getting used to the warmer weather.  I read an article today that said that the weather in Vancouver in in 10 years is going to be-- was it 10 years or 20 years? I think it was 20 years they said it was going to be more like San Diego here than Vancouver.  Which-- you know, does not excite me. It makes me think about how much farther North I'll have to move someday because I don't want to live in San Diego.  And I hope that you are all not too badly affected by climate change so far but I'm interested in -- maybe -- how do you guys feel about it? How you all are reflecting on the increasing climate weirdness and how it affects you and whether you have changed your patterns in response.

I guess that's all I have to say today, I'm excited to move forward into the next week now that I have these two big big things off my plate. Maybe I'll get to tackle something small and interesting, I don't know! I'm gonna go enjoy the remainder of my Sunday and I wish you all a wonderful week. Alright! byee