That phrase, “tender mercies”, came to mind a couple of months ago, as I was looking at a blog entry written by a couple of Friends in Michigan.

…It came to my mind a second time a week or so later, when one Friend raised the issue of nuclear power right here on this site, and another Friend responded by defending nuclear as an answer to global warming.

The phrase was one of John Woolman’s favorites….

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The itch to have ways of foretelling the winter is an awfully widespread itch.

Go up to the Yukon and the Indians will tell you how they tell how severe the winter will be by the shape of the tracks the snowshoe hares leave in the ground. Go to Tennessee, and the mountain folk will tell you how they predict the severity of the cold by the markings on the fur of the woolly bear caterpillar. In the Northeast there are those who check to see how bushy the squirrels’ tails are, and those who look to see how high the wasps are building their nests.

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Looking for ways to get your local monthly meeting off dead-center, vis-à-vis environmental matters?

Looking for ways to get your co-workers, friends and neighbors thinking about life-style changes?

Just show them the images below.

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In case you haven’t already noticed, here’s a little landmark in the unfolding drama of greenhouse warming.

Lohachara, an island in the Sundarban island chain, located in the delta of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers — an island where 10,000 people once lived — has sunk completely beneath the rising Indian Ocean.

The island’s final disappearance was noted two months ago by researchers at Jadavpur University. The researchers attributed the disappearance to a rising sea level, mostly caused by global warming.

This would make Lohachara the first inhabited island to have disappeared completely for this reason.

But naturally, this news has provoked controversy….

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According to an anonymous official in the U.S. Department of the Interior, the Bush regime has caved in under the pressure of a lawsuit from three environmental organizations, and is about to propose that polar bears be listed as “threatened” under the U.S. Endangered Species Act.

A listing of polar bears under the Act — if it indeed happens — will constitute a formal written admission from the Bush regime that global warming is real and is threatening at least one well-known and beloved species.

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These were the original words sung to the tune we now call “Adeste fidelis” —

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Communication between the creatures and ourselves comes in all sorts of flavors. In the presence of that black snake, I knew that I’d been sized up and casually dismissed.

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I visualized poor people, unemployed people lacking my own resources, passing through the field where I was standing in the sunset. Unlike me, they might not have had money for a restaurant meal or a motel room. The corn I was looking at would have been useless to them. Game would have been hard to come by. This was a rich land I was looking at, and yet it would be barren to the poor.

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