Environmental issues

The past two weeks have been interesting, and not in a good way. Our AC broke, our water pump decided to die, and my cat vanished. All of the above have been resolved finally, to our relief. But the one thing I noticed while all of these were going on was how it affected my writing.

I found that when it was blisteringly hot, as in even the box fans weren't keeping me cool (we got up to 106 F one day), I couldn't think. I just wanted to lay there and do nothing. I was having problems reading, let alone trying to get something written.

Now that things are mostly back to normal, I'm finding it easier to connect with life again. I realized that my environment plays a huge role in what I do and how I do things. The heat turned me sluggish. The water pump breaking sent me into an environment not my own. Losing my cat pulled a vital component out of my environment, which made things more difficult. (Reidar is home and fine. He just took a 4 day vacation. And we still don't know how he got where he ended up.)

I know I have environmental cues for when I'm out of the house that will trigger problems. Crowds of people can set me off. Loud noises bother me and I get anxious. Heat drains me and unless I find AC relatively soon after getting hot I get tired/irritable and am not a pleasant person to be around.

Our environment is a large part, I think, in how we react to things. If we're in our comfort zones it's easier for us to respond to stimuli. If something affects those comfort zones, people have a tendency to react in a negative fashion. The more uncomfortable a person becomes, the worse things get for them and possibly those around them.

What about you? How does your environment affect you? Is there something that will give you trouble every time?

Us and nature

We have Netflix. Himself and I each have our own profiles because we have very different tastes in what we watch. Over the weekend, when Himself wasn't on his computer (Netflix doesn't run on linux), I watched the documentary “The Blue Planet”, narrated by David Attenborough. It was an incredible view of our oceans. It made me realize just how little we know about our own world.

Then there was this announcement that they'd found a huge body of water under Asia. The description of how it got there was fascinating. Some people were even asking if this was the water from the flood described in the Bible. It was explained that it wasn't, but it's still interesting to think about where it came from.

I don't know how many new species have been found this year. But it's more than were discovered last year. And we're only in June. There are things that surprise those who have been studying nature for years. It's amazing at how life progresses.

The natural world around us is intense. There is so much to love, to see. It is our responsibility to preserve that world in whatever manner we can. There's so much I've seen in the news lately about how the monarch migration is ending and that we're losing our honeybees. Those are sad circumstances of our world, which were caused by our endless need to control our environment.

Humans have a burning desire to change our environment to suit our needs, instead of learning to change ourselves to match our environment. This is a far cry from our ancestors, who adapted to their surroundings and learned to live within them. But that changed a long time ago and we developed the need to change things. But people still managed to keep nature in mind when they built, when they hunted, when they made their gardens. Things are definitely not the same anymore.

We're becoming a more technologically advanced society. We connect via the internet through our phones and computers. We can send a message instantly to someone whose number we have by sending a quick text, assuming the person can receive text messages. Has that instantaneous contact disconnected us from the world around us?

Don't get me wrong. I'm not going to give up my technology and go live crazy in the forest wearing animal skins and eating what I catch. I'm not that much of a nature lover, though I enjoy walking through the forest or going to see other natural things. I'm as connected through technology as the rest of the world. I'd lose contact with two good friends if I didn't have it.

What I'm saying is we need to be more responsible tenants of this wondrous world we live in. We need to take stock of our actions and see how we can do things with less impact on the natural world. We should be working in tandem with the wondrous world around us rather than destroying it.

I'm really not an eco freak or anything like that. I just get very tired of hearing how we're damaging our world and very few people seem to want to go about fixing things in a rational way. There are those who go about trying to protect our world in the wrong way, just as there are those who go around subverting the natural world to propel us forward in the wrong way. Both sides have their fanatics. I just believe we need to open our minds and hearts more to the big, wide world around us.