Happy Earth Day, Dear Mowgli

I just signed up for Boobquake on Facebook. Earthquakes have been on my mind lately -- and probably a good many other people's as well -- and it's both a good experiment and a good excuse to wear something low-cut. Unfortunately, we have a design flaw in the experiment, namely, that there are so darned many earthquakes lately that it'll be hard to separate signal from noise.

Recently I was watching TV while nursing the little one. This happens a lot; he tends to keep my hands too full to do much of use, so I try to put it on something educational for one or both of us. This particular time, I was learning about the last great ice age and glaciation, and that the mass of ice on the center of North America was sufficient to bend the continental plate, heaving up such features as Florida.

You know. Nothing big. Just Florida.

Then we had a nice run of quakes and volcanic eruptions all over the place. This sort of thing makes me thoughtful, and that's like the TV-watching. There's more time for it these days when I'm pinned under a breast-feeding baby. Eventually I wiggled free and played with Google. You can get some very interesting scholarly papers from 2006 or so predicting that decreased glacier mass would cause reduced downward pressure on continental tectonic plates and therefore more volcanic eruptions and more earthquakes.

I noticed that the first few results said nothing about the corresponding increase in pressure on the oceanic plates. Granted, every inch downward the oceanic plates are forced is an inch less that the ocean rises to swamp continents, and that's great if you're on a continent and rather sucks if you're on an island. However, it seems to me that taking this pressure into account makes the melting of glaciers an even bigger problem. Surprise! It's all one planet, and when something changes in the atmosphere, that can affect the crust.

So, what can one worried mother, who would feel bad bringing forth a son into a world of lava falling from the sky onto the constantly trembling earth, do?

I can drive less, and decrease my carbon footprint (and expenses). I can eat less beef, and decrease the methane footprint. Surprisingly, a great many green choices save some green in the other sense: living on whole foods is cheaper than living on processed ones, and there's a lot less discarding of peels, cartilege, and so on in home prep, especially if you give yourself a jaw workout on the cartilege. I'm hoping to replace our energy-sucking fridge with one that would pay for itself in about two years. All of these are small acts by one small person, but it beats not doing them.

Naturally, this is when Georgia in its infinite wisdom thinks it'll help people's finances by NOT funding public transit. Whose finances, exactly? Public transit tends to benefit those who cannot afford to drive, and I'm not too clear on what they're supposed to do without it. Gas prices are supposed to go up right in time. We chose this house because there was a bus stop at the end of the block; being near public transit lines was the big selling point of this lemon.