My husband and I took a three-week trip this past June to the forests of Yosemite, Northern Arizona, Colorado, and Wyoming. We were alarmed to see great stretches of forests that were clearly dead. I would estimate that in the area around Breckenridge, Colo. approximately 40 percent of the forest visible from Interstate 70 was dead. We visited with a park ranger in Yellowstone who told us that the pine trees are being killed due to a pine bark beetle infestation. The winters have not been cold enough to kill off the beetles and recent multiple years of drought are taking their toll on our Western forests.
Returning home from our trip we coincidentally noticed the death of eight mature pine trees on our property. I have lived in Lake County 34 years on the same piece of property and have noticed other changes which I think are due to climate change … warmer winters with less snow, fewer sightings of frogs, bats and snakes and much hotter summers at 3,000 feet elevation. Having seen “An Inconvenient Truth,” (Al Gore”s movie about the urgency of mitigating climate change), I accepted that action was needed, but also became depressed and paralyzed about how overwhelming the problem seems.
However, hope and significant changes in my personal behavior occurred after attending a symposium in Lakeport last spring. The symposium was called Awakening the Dreamer, Changing the Dream. The four-hour interactive symposium looks at the state of our planet and leads each individual to develop their own action plan for becoming part of the solution and not part of the problem of climate change.
The Unitarian Universalist Community of Lake County is sponsoring the return of the Awakening the Dreamer symposium, to Kelseyville, on Oct. 10 from 1 to 5:30 p.m. A donation is requested, but no one is turned away. Registration is online at awakeningthedreamer.org or call 279-2257.
I feel most passionate about halting the degradation of our planet when I look in the faces of my grandchildren. What future are we creating for them? Please support this effort if you can.
Sue Hermann
Kelseyville
