As I read news of the understanding of earth’s temperature swings throughout its history, you wonder the liklihood of humans surviving the swings to come. I read this story and ‘felt good’, to see human driven climate change as a ‘natural’ shift means, for example, lots of extinctions happen throughout history all the time, some events catalyzing faster change than at other times, like the asteroid. So we’re just accelerting earth into a change faster. You wonder, a sense of justice and solution makes me hope that humans are the first to go, maybe mitigating the effects of burning energy and creating extra heat trapping gasses. When I was young, we’d occasionally go to the de Young museum in Golden Gate park. There was a mural on the side of the museum facing the parking lot, pictured above. It depicted a dilapidated SF city scape, apparently void of humans, the POV from a highway overpass above the city, with traffic signs hanging askew and deer and birds grazing on the weeds that cracked up through the silent pavement.

That gave me hope as a kid. I was always taught a sort of ‘supremacy’ of nature, and knew of the damage humans were causing. (This is around 1970, for social context, around the time of the first Earth Day.)

In buddhism I learned to be cold when it’s cold, and to be hot when it’s hot. As with pain, it increases and decreases depending much on your level of acceptance of it. Fighting what is causes pain, as much as the condition. There comes the level though where life is unsustainable, when temps are simply too high for a certain species to survive. I’m sure, outside long term evolution and adaptaion, a beaver would probably fare better than an electricity-free human as temperatures climb towards unlivable levels. There will be many opportunities to practice for sure.