Snow day

The predicted snow has begun. I ask Stephen how much will fall, and he tells me that the accumulation for our area will be four to eight inches. It doesn’t seem like much in relation to the big hoopla about the storm’s immensity, although meteorologists are undoubtedly looking at the larger cumulative effects across the Eastern seaboard.

My younger brother grumbles last night on the phone that the Philadelphia school systems announced that they would be closed today before so much as a flake fell. Knowing my brother, I can only imagine that he is annoyed that our technology can, more or less, accurately predict snowstorms, and yet we are not unable, or unwilling, to effectively harness our collective wills or our technology to not continue to harm this precious world that we have gotten pretty good at listening to.

Earlier in the day, I laughed out loud, snorting in a cynical kind of way, at this week’s River Reporter story about how Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection is essentially putting a moratorium on subdivisions due to a new ruling that will safeguard the high quality streams in the area by insisting that developers and homeowners submit a sewage management plan for new construction before permits will be issued. It seems ironic that the environmental agency will allow thousands of natural gas wells to be hydrofracked, each leaving up to 2.5 million gallons of water that has highly carcinogenic substances added to it deep underground, while worrying that human excrement cannot break down in cement holding tanks.

“It’s the DEP way,” a colleague commented.

Undoubtedly, it’s easier to instruct municipalities to figure out a system to require homeowners to pump their septic tanks every three years than it is to balance a nation’s insatiable energy needs and our developed palate for turning natural resources into financial fodder. Undoubtedly, the DEP is relying on the concept that the toxic water is separated from our fresh water sources by thousands of feet of dense rock layers, rock layers some of which get fractured in the process. But unlike sophisticated satellite imagery that now allows our meteorologists to see and track a developing storm, we have no science on hydro-fracking. We actually don’t know what will happen decades to come to our water supplies. Interestingly, we are starting to track how a deteriorating planet affects our psychology and sense of well-being.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/magazine/31ecopsych-t.html

The snow is graceful this morning. The branches on the white pines across the side field are now dusted in white, like a sweet confection. The snow will assert itself on our day today, allowing many of us to stay home and contemplate how we are dependent and interdependent with the nature outside our doors. And while we might think that we gain some measure of control with our accurate predictions, the earth’s system will be the final arbiter of today’s activities, which is, in my mind, makes perfect sense.