unseasonable

Facebook reminded me today that three years ago, I was living in a home heated by wood, which meant waking up to add fuel to the fire and hauling wood with a sled after shoveling a path to the pile. 

Today I hauled groceries.

This bike jersey is not normally part of my January wardrobe:

In part, the change is that I've moved three degrees of latitude south and eight degrees of longitude closer to a coast, but that's not the whole story. Although I enjoyed the time on my bicycle today, I was at the same time painfully aware that the recent spate of sharply variable weather,  swinging from unseasonably frigid to unseasonably mild over the course of days, is a symptom of the brokenness of our ecosystem.

It increasingly feels like no amount of personal asceticism with regard to fossil fuel consumption can make a difference. We needed the systemic changes of the Paris Accord, or something like them,  to be operative ten years ago at least.

Yesterday I read this piece by my friend David about his disillusionment with the possibility of human survival on a warming planet, and today it was 67F here in DC, and I, fair-weather cyclist that I am, rode my bike to get groceries. Sunday's high will be 29F, and it will feel more like winter all of next week, but this is not normal.

What have we wrought?