2023 Life Logs, Day 09: A Trip to Newbridge on the Charles
Date: Monday, January 9, 2023
Weather: Partly Sunny; High 41, Low 31 degrees F
Sunrise and Sunset: 7:09 am & 4:31 pm
Location: At Home in the Cottage, East Falmouth, MA
Okay. I admit that I am obsessed with tracking the increase in daylight minutes. But I just have to report that today we gained 2 minutes of daylight when sunset moved from 4:29 pm yesterday to 4:31 today. I love it!
I picked Heather up this morning, and we drove north to Dedham to Newbridge on the Charles. When you Google Newbridge online, it is described as “modern senior living community offering dynamic, top-tier amenities.” And from my visits there with my good friends Alan and Helaine Kanegsberg I would definitely agree with that description. Helaine is part of a Newbridge environmental group that invited Heather to come speak today. Before her presentation, we had lunch with Helaine and the three women who help set the agenda for the environmental group. What a dynamic group of women!
Sixty members of their environment group came to hear Heather speak. I overhead people saying what a masterful speaker she is, and I have to agree. She takes very complex information and somehow breaks it down so that you as the listener can easily understand. Today, I heard people gasp when they saw a few of the PowerPoint slides she presented. One slide showed a graph of world climate changes over the past 800,000 years. After the last ice age, climate variations have gone up and down, but within reasonable ranges. Then around the time of the Industrial Revolution, the rate of change started climbing radically. You could instantly see how out of line it is now as compared to what it had been for the previous 800,000 years. I’m probably not describing this exactly right, but the point is that it was immediately obvious that we are now off the charts. Heather also left the audience with a sense of empowerment. Yes, we need to take immediate action, any action that can help. Things are dire. But the good news is that we caused problem. When Heather said that, you could hear the questioning in the audience. How can causing a problem be good news? Her answer was that if we caused the problem, then we can fix it. And one thing we can all do is to just start talking about climate change with other people. According to a survey, only 35 percent of Massachusetts residents discuss climate change at least occasionally. It has become so politicized that we are afraid to talk about it for fear of alienating others. According to Heather, it is better to start talking which will hopefully lead to more action. Good job, Heather. And thank you Helaine and your Newbridge friends for hosting us.
