Be-Think [Please visit BeThink.org]

Mother Earth Is Not Well. Her Climate Changed. Did Your Notice?

© copyright 2007 Betsy L. Angert

Please Ponder the Inconvenient Truth Trailer. As you view this video, reflect on the trauma of today's tornado in Florida.

Please indulge me, allow me to make a comparison that may seem obscure to some. Surely, the Bush/Cheney clan has yet to grasp what others and I have said for years. Humans are harming the balance of nature! We can choose to deny this. Citizen of the world can see them selves as separate from nature; however, we are one. A report released today by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the United Nations, validates this "claim." I offer this analogy in hopes that a personal realization may make the point more profoundly.

Weight loss may be equated with global warming. Those of us that have lost tonnage know that for years, months, or weeks few notice the pounds dropping away. We are aware of the subtle changes because we choose to be. When we work to be sensitive to the mind/body connection, when we work to honor each of these separate entities as one, we become aware of the nuances that surround change.

FEMA 2006, Failure Everywhere, Management Absent ©

The history of the Federal Emergency Management Agency [FEMA] is long and varied. Now, it may end; a Renaissance is proposed. There are formal recommendations; this agency must be abolished. Co-chairs of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Senators Susan Collins and Joseph Liebermann held a press conference this morning declaring FEMA a disaster.

Chairwoman Susan Collins told reporters today in Washington “FEMA is discredited, disorganized, demoralized and dysfunctional.'' She continued, “It is beyond repair. Just tweaking the organizational chart will not solve the problem.''

Senators Collins, Liebermann, and the Senate committee submitted a plan to 'key senators this week, the details of which will be released publicly next week.' In this, there are 86 recommendations. These would undo what our current President did to change the structure of FEMA.

The 800-plus-page accounting is titled, "Hurricane Katrina: A Nation Still Unprepared." This text is a summation of three government studies. Earlier House and White House evaluations are present in this report; however, they are cursory in contrast. This final record is far more comprehensive; its assertions are less delicate.

Katrina survivors and those lost in this storm, deservedly required this attention. The 2005 hurricane killed an estimated 1,460 people. Seven hundred and seventy thousand individuals were forced to flea their homes. Many are still not able to return some eight months later.