Winter here remains warm and crunchy — all our snow has been called away to a big trade show in Boston — to the point that crocus emerge only to faint from thirst.  Shirtless fratboys are sowing front-yard gardens of PBR cans (I didn’t even know they still SOLD that stuff), and on Monday a promiscuous tabby charged across the street as I walked to work, his purr shouting, “Hey — NOTICE me!”  Robins and woodpeckers are making a racket.  Today Kaisha and I had a standoff with a coyote on the trail, each claiming silent ownership over the voles in the dry grass between them.  Hikers greet each other with, “Isn’t it a lovely day,” but think, “shouldn’t it be snowing?”  All very festive, in a foreboding sort of way.  But if it turns out to be a dry summer, we’ll adapt.  The prickly pear and yucca that molded like toadstools during last year’s wet summer will rise, spike, and bloom.  Wildfires will burn off the excess underbrush — and perhaps cull a few mountain McMansions too.

I’m learning lessons in adaptation myself.  The commute to my new office is now a few minutes longer, with a bus-ride added to my walk downtown, and a kind co-worker often offers me rides home.  A suburbanite these past eighteen years, I’d gotten lazily dependent on my car, despite all of my righteous climate-change politics.   I’m not proud to admit that it took a health issue to get me out from behind the wheel on a daily basis.   Once I get stable enough to bike to work I’ll really have no excuse, nor reason, to whine.  And once my seizures get enough under control to resume driving, I plan to keep out of the car except when “necessary”.  But to be brutally honest, my resolution may not survive the first winter; such has been the fate of my previous no-driving intentions.

Many of us indulge the flattering self-image that humans are capable of making difficult adaptive changes because we know we should, rather than because of forced external circumstance.  We believe that because our superior intelligence endows us with the power to foresee, we have the practical ability and discipline to avoid.  Those who campaign for social change to avoid the worst future impacts of climate change are animated by that belief.   I believe it too: about myself, and about my species.  But I must also admit that the available data are mostly otherwise.  So, if I pass my own test, may I then claim moral, and some shred of intellectual, consistency with my beliefs?  On the other hand, if I fail, does that make me — in addition to being a hypocrite — a “human nature denialist”?