Patty Mayeux Blog

Last week I happily blogged about staying positive and embracing the summer heat with the help of air conditioning. The posts were written before Monday when Houston suffered a direct hit from Hurricane Beryl, just weeks after the city lost power for days due to another severe and unusual weather event. As of this writing, more than half a million are still in the dark. Staying with gracious friends in their cooled and wired home helped to mitigate my bad weather mood. Where to put that gloom and doom that invades media outlets squawking about this particularly strong hurricane season? What if this “temporary” interruption will become a way of the future?

Warnings have circulated since the hippie Earth Day predictions way back in the seventies and before, but were we paying attention? Every single plastic bag, coffee pod or water bottle chips away at our deteriorating climate stability. Each online purchase from an unknown source, often prompted by social media ads bent on convincing us we are less-than without it, feeds our consumerism addiction. Our choices escalate the frequency and severity of weather events, but we’ve been mollified into thinking we are powerless in the environmental fight, so why even try? But try we must because back-to-back weather-related destruction is no joke.