This morning I celebrated blue skies and
Shades of Green
as I looked out at the pond behind our house and the trees beside our deck. I decided to play around with using my 100-400 mm lens with 1.4 extender to photograph what I saw. Making photos every day makes it easier for me to let myself play around and do “unreasonable” things like photograph lilac leaves with my long lens even though I could easily use a regular lens to make the photographs.
With the early morning sunlight back-lighting the leaves and the len’s long reach I was able to practice “shooting through” to get a delightful sense of green haze that looked to me like how this season feels.
Concerning Words
Later this morning as I was driving to an appointment and listening to Minnesota Public Radio I heard a snippet of an interview that disappointed but didn’t surprise me. In the interview, a reporter was talking with an economist about the American economy. Because it was so ridiculously true I memorized what the economist said during the interview and then as soon as I could wrote it down so that I wouldn’t forget it. But it seemed that neither the interviewer nor the economist reacted to it as I would have thought. Here is the snippet…
Americans are spending more money that they don’t have on more things that they don’t need than anywhere else in the world. And that’s why the American economy is doing so very well, better than any other economy in the world.
— Economist on public radio news segment
Think about it for a moment. How do you think this story will end when people are spending money that they don’t have on things that they don’t need?
I felt like shouting, “What’s wrong with you?” Do you not get that this is not a sustainable model for an economy or for our world? I’m not going to keep harping on this as it seems so self-evident to me. Obviously it is not to many.
I would love it if we all lived as polite guests here on earth, using only what we need, seeking sustainable solutions, reusing things, fixing them when they’re broken, giving back more than we take from our beautiful earth. We need some new stories that are not based upon people as consumers and clothing, appliances and tools as something to throw away when something more interesting comes along.
Enough said. I realize that it is not a simple thing to change from a model of consumption to one of sustainable care for the earth.
Please take some time to walk outside in nature and enjoy these beautiful days of spring.
May you walk in beauty.
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