Dear governments: If you won't think in systems about climate change then please think in systems about war and if you won't think in systems about war then please think in system about microplastics and if you won't think in systems about microplastics then please think in systems about long covid and if you won't think in systems about long covid then please think in systems about avian influenza in mammals in concentrated systems that could involve human exposures and if you won't think in systems about about avian influenza then please think

If this is the summer you've decided "climate change is here and its bad", welcome to the movement(s). We need you. There's so much to do, and much that can be turned. In fact, there's so much to do, that no matter what you are good at, you are really, really needed.

If the whole of Earth's people slowed down for 1 week to process the meaning of the IPCC report (stayed home, closed down shop sat at their dinner tables and their town squares together) at least we'd have cut a week's worth of CO2 emissions and we might emerge more able to act and since much of who and what we are acting for would be at those dinner tables and town squares, who knows where it could lead?

Though I've used it often myself, I don't really like the "window of opportunity" metaphor that becomes one of the sound bites with every IPCC report. That sounds like some window gradually, ever so slowly, inching closed until someday it will be shut tight.

You ever just think how odd it is that current systems will only find ways to save the only livable planet we have if it pencils out as profitable according to a highly contrived set of rules about what does or doesn't count as an expense. Fossil fuels are profitable as long as you don't count the costs to people's bodies, homes, rivers, and life support system. Not profitable at all if you count those costs.

Pretty sure we are getting some AI generated responses on the application for our opening at Multisolving Institute. I would say that
(a) they stand out,
(b) they resemble each other, which is obvious to the reader but not the submitter, (c) given our 'rubric' - created before we started to get responses - they don't advance applicants to the next stage of our process

(but if they did: what do the applicants think they will do to follow up on this at the interview?)

Do you ever stop and think that we only the know the 3 year time course of covid-19 infection and that beyond that is unknown territory?

Or that we don't really know how bodies full of microplastics will age? Or wonder about the ripples if the shells of billions of tiny creatures in the ocean dissolve away?

There is a lot to be done, but somehow we need to do it more flexibly and with more grace for each other. At least that's my reflection on 2023 so far, as a project manager. A lot of people are not ok, health-wise, emotionally, relationship-wise. Some are in the thick of atmospheric rivers or digging out of record snow or, or, or.....