Hope

Personally, I find it very hard to be hopeful when I'm exhausted. It has been an exhausting year. But as we approach the last hours of 2014, I happen to be rested today and can think more lucidly about hope. Jim White, one of the scientists I work with always points out to me, when I feel gloomy about our environmental prospects, that there is always hope. It just gets harder.

At dawn this mooring I looked out my window to my Manhattan viewscape
to see a workman flexing his muscles for my camera.

The image I snapped this morning of a man on the roof across the way, looks like a small King Kong on the skyline. He may or may not have seen me taking shots, so may or not have been posing. But at this early hour, this man represented to me how humans stand on top of all we have created and look out to one another, or the future. But perhaps, we might more profitably consider what is below all we create, for example, soil or water and how fish might reflect the health of either.

The future many of us want to see these days is just something hopeful. I have written often here, about how fish are indicators of aquatic habitat health. Soil is a material that stands at a confluence between animal life,  geology, and water. It reflects the health of all the relationships that make clean water possible. It is what the quality of our food depends upon.

As the year turns, we have a few days to rest up and regather our stamina to go forward, to consider the basics that support us and build our "hope" muscles. As rested as I am, at least today, I think it is just a question of work and not impossible.

In other posts, I have written about Maxwells Demon, the premise from thermodynamics that implies that the energy of work can change the most closed systems on earth, by presenting new data. So, rest means we can do the work of that data transmission.

The task we build our hope muscles for, may be to identify that critical data that can make that critical transformation.

In the new year, I wish us all enuf rest to feel hope, to exercise the work of environmental transformation, to see more fish, that we may enjoy clean water and fertile soil.