Late Summer Dahlia

There are practically no butterflies the garden now, due in part to the fires and smoky atmosphere for two years in a row here. An article in the paper this morning said that the bird population has dropped by 27% worldwide, and many species are threatened. So it was heartening to see that we still have quite a lot of bees. They are so bent on collecting the last of the pollen from the last of the flowers in the garden, that this one stayed busily at work even after I had cut the flower it was on and was carrying it down to the house....

It seems appropriate to mention that there was a 'GlobalStrike' organized to take place today, the day the UN General Assembly was holding an emergency meeting to address climate change. The reins have been handed over to the young people of the country who left school and jobs to join the protest. As Greta Thunberg, the dynamic 16 year old activist from Sweden said in New York, 'Why should we study for a future that is being taken away from us?'

In California we have been fighting air pollution for as long as I can remember. When I was in elementary school I remember waking to the red sun shining through the smoke of a wildfire, finding it difficult to take a deep breath because it hurt my lungs, and taking out our incinerator when backyard burning  was banned in the late 50's. We began to see the erosion of the coastline when I was in high school, and by the time I was living in Berkeley, shots of houses literally falling into the sea as the cliffs beneath them eroded, appeared in the newspaper every winter. And of course two years ago, right here in Santa Rosa 6,000 houses burned down as a result of a firestorm caused by high temperatures, low humidity and freakily high winds.

California has been enacting legislation on pollution control combating climate change for a long time. Higher emission control standards for cars became the gold standard for the auto industry and has now not only been lowered by Trump, who insists that California must conform to his standards, basically because we don't support him and in his third grade mentality he wants to punish us, despite the fact that four automakers have announced that they will continue to build cars to the higher standards. 

Trump has gone to court to try to force the automakers into compliance with his lower standards, but I heard an interesting statistic the other day. Trump has always done business by threatening or inviting lawsuits. He runs the country as if it was one of his (failed) businesses. In the past, the Federal government has won 70% of the lawsuits brought against it. Since Trump has been president, there have been far more lawsuits, and the Federal government has lost 90% of them.

As Greta Thunberg said this morning, "If you belong to that small group of people who feel threatened by us, we have some very bad news for you, because this is only the beginning. Change is coming whether they like it or not."

There was a strike in Santa Rosa this morning. I decided to leave it to the young people and stayed home and wrote letters.