Changing Climate

The slew of stories related to climate change has turned from a leaky faucet a year and a half ago into a gushing torrent today. There is little use trying to keep up with all of them—from the destruction of sea horse habitat to the melting glaciers in the high Andes to the driest winter in 130 years in L.A.. To kick off Earth Day this year at Proctor, the Environmental Coordinator, Alan McIntyre, has asked the whole school to sit down and watch An Inconvenient Truth together. Amazingly (though not surprisingly), even this small, do-nothing act has stirred a tremendous amount of controversy. So much so, that the faculty had been zinging emails back and forth all weekend until the Dean of Faculty sent out a memorandum concerning appropriate communication skills to all teachers. Extrapolating outward from this experience, our path toward a greener lifeway looks anything but idyllic. Hold onto your seat belts, folks. The nastiness has just begun!

One story I thought to highlight is this article in today's NY Times about Water in the West. I couldn't resist posting this long-term drought map. Notice, the Northeast... We're experiencing anything but a drought. Again, we're reminded that all things are interconnected: find drought in one place, and you'll find flooding elsewhere.