Yesterday was a mild, “feels like spring” day.  Enjoying the sunlight, we took the Batavia River Walk for a stroll southward towards the dam by the old Challenge  windmill factory.  A visit to the dam is a reminder of the immense power of flowing water, moved by gravitational pull toward the Mississippi River ultimately joining the salt water of the Gulf of Mexico.  The story of the rivers on our planet always have been inspiring to me.

A river is a useful locale for civilization to take root.  The first settlers to the area in the early 1800s saw the Fox River as useful for transportation and for the power potential of  early manufacturing.  A factory for manufacturing Conestoga wagons as well as three windmill factories found a home by the river in the 1900s.  The river powered those factories that made the Windmill pumps which made settling the West possible.

The old Challenge Windmill factory has been preserved, partially renovated to current standards for office space.  The old smokestack still stands, with substantial lettering, erect, regal, pointing toward the blue sky.  The water yet flows majestic and powerful over the dam.  How much does our civil society, our comfortable, relatively safe form-of-life owe to this river?

This walkway by the Fox river will be lush with vegetation in a few weeks.  Spring, the renewal of growth will be announced by singing birds and green sprouts emerging from the thawing humus of the woodland floor.

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On a contrasting note I was sobered while reading a front page report in the New York Times.  The report was about the fires in Australia, some of which are still burning weeks after the news of the outbreak of massive wildfires was received here.  Climate catastrophe is upon us, and the Australians are among the first to know how bad this is going to be.  Here is an excerpt of a bit of the Times report:

The End of Australia as We Know It

What many of us have witnessed this fire season feels alive and monstrous. With climate change forcing a relaxed country to stumble toward new ways of work, leisure and life, will politics follow?

By Damien Cave
Feb. 15, 2020

“I am standing here a traveler from a new reality, a burning Australia,” Lynette Wallworth, an Australian filmmaker, told a crowd of international executives and politicians in Davos, Switzerland, last month. “What was feared and what was warned is no longer in our future, a topic for debate — it is here.”

“We have seen,” she added, “the unfolding wings of climate change.”
….“If there’s not a major shift that comes out of this, we’re doomed,” said Robyn Eckersley, a political scientist at the University of Melbourne who has written extensively about environmental policy around the world. “It does change everything — or it should.”

Professor Eckersley is one of many for whom climate change has shifted from the distant and theoretical to the personal and emotional.

……Since the fires started, tens of millions of acres have been incinerated in areas that are deeply connected to the national psyche. If you’re American, imagine Cape Cod, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the Sierra Nevadas and California’s Pacific Coast, all rolled into one — and burned.

If you’d like to read the entire article CLICK HERE.

Is it too early to mourn a burnt land?