“I am an optimist who worries,” so said [Madeleine] Albright when she was asked whether she was an optimist or a pessimist. How I identify with that statement. My family has accused me of being the perpetual worrier. (I was also labeled by my father as a Pollyanna… Maybe Anne with an E today.) Now the book that confirms that worry is the mild term for the “Time and Water” both of which are running out. Andri Snaer Magnason is amazed, as am I, that the dire situation we are in is taken so apathetically. If we are readers, we have read more than a few news items of dying life in various parts of the world: centuries old cacti, coral that is a living habitat for other ocean life species both large and small in size, our own species unable to tolerate the climbing heat and the ill health it brings. Of course, the list goes on. But, moaning, complaining, or worse taking it all in stride with an attitude that “Everything Works Out in the End,” I will just say here, is wrong.

Wolfgang Lucht, a professor at Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research in Germany, says that his most severe predictions from ten years ago have come true AND have been exceeded. He is a lover of poetry but became a climate scientist because he was good at math. He also feels he has become a modern day Cassandra who was given the ability to see the future and doomed to see it come true. We too can see not as scientists gathering the proofing information but as beings living where there is flood, fire, tornado, glacier melt, flood (in this era’s common phrase of “like we have never seen before). We have math running models now to predict the weather and we are getting a very true picture of what is happening with climate change. We know that island nations are forced to leave their land because the sea is rising to swallow it up. We have watched corals die because the temperature of their place in the ocean is beyond what they can live in. It does not seem to have the power to move the leaders we have, nor to move millions and millions of people to demand action…not just words but action.

There were movements of millions of people during the First and Second World Wars. There were Victory Gardens, and call up of men and women to give their lives. There were children who gathered scrap for the factories to use for arms. There was even a misguided action to save the world by exterminating citizens of two Japanese cities with atomic bombs. Horrifically, it happened. (Even my father, who would not buy a Japanese car because he had been in that particular theater during WWII, came to know and said that those bombs were not good). Can we not have the same concern and passion for our world today. We are as a frog, sure to die in a pot of water that will come to that boil, but which is not that uncomfortable yet. Is this harsh? Yes! I also have felt like a Cassandra with lots and lots of anecdotal evidence. And yet, I have to feel as Al Gore, who brought this to a much wider audience than the scientists who study climate, that THERE IS HOPE. Now shopping for an Electric Vehicle and hoping that Sierra County starts offering out of towners (flatlanders) a place to charge up their own.