Along with political lies and stone-deafness to her tears. our Mother Earth has become frantic.  We speak of the oceans being our mother, but they’re our step-mother.  Nature, personified by the Mother Earth metaphor, is our real mother.  She’s so sad and frightened  (like the fecund women in abortion-prohibited states) that she doesn’t know what to do (like the old woman who lived in a shoe with so many children…).

Her first responders are brave, but so far unable to rouse the Emergency Rescue Squads needed to keep her alive. (The head of the World Bank,  recently asked whether the burning of oil, gas and coal was driving climate change, refused to answer.)

Current heartaches:  At this very minute, extremely destructive hurricane Ian is roaring north across the United States.  “Hurricane Ian is going to be a storm that we talk about for decades,” administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency Deanne Criswell said yesterday.  [If Mother Earth is still alive in decades.]

Earlier in the month Pakistan’s climate minister called the flooding in his country “Biblical.”   Greenpeace  shared videos in which a central Pakistani hotel crumbled in the duration of a  “TikTok.”  

U.N. Secretary-General, António Guterres visited Pakistan and called the climate crisis a “code red for humanity,”  He said that he hadn’t seen this scale of climate change  in his life (he is 76.)  The areas underwater in Pakistan are larger than Britain. 

Keep your eyes open on the current destruction by hurricane Ian.

The nine planetary boundaries:  In addition to the causes of climate change, a planetary boundary framework originated in 2009 to define required limits on human activities to prevent collapse of vital Earth operating systems. They include biodiversity loss, freshwater, air pollution, climate change, high phosphorus and nitrogen levels, ocean acidity, land use changes, ozone layer decay, and contamination by human-made chemicals.