As the earth completes another revolution around the sun, mankind seems to have become a bit more sophisticated about the environment and about how we need to take steps to protect it. The international gathering in Copenhagen has at least brought about a consensus that steps need to be jointly taken to reverse the earth’s warming trend.

While individually we can do little to solve the problem, we can each do small things in our homes and with our lifestyles and willingly support some of the bigger things our leaders decide, even if they tend to cost a bit of money and perhaps require minor changes in energy usage and methods of manufacturing. We don’t know the extent of the needs that the scientific community is dealing with.

What we can’t afford to do is to decide the global warmup is a hoax and then forget it. There are too many things changing to just write the problem off as some kind of a political fabrication. And a good start on our part would be to resolve to discover for ourselves the extent of the problem, especially if we tend not to trust the sources of information that we have so far heard.

I have always thought that family members that enjoyed nature together were vital to the maintenance of the environment. They spent time out of doors and noticed the changes as they began to take place. But times have changed greatly as our nation has become one of big cities rather than farms and rural dwellings.

Only a century ago we were an agricultural nation. If we didn’t live on farms or in small towns ourselves, someone in the family did. And when we visited these rural family members it was to touch a more natural way of life, where eggs were gathered, cows milked and much of the family’s food grown. And just a step away from where these activities took place the hunting of rabbits and pheasants on the back forty and fishing in the neighboring streams and lakes was a common part of everyday life. Today, so much of what we see and think we know about the environment comes from television where activities take place in ideal locations where few of us get many chances to participate.

Instead, even those of us who have still spent much of our lives out of doors, have noticed big changes in weather patterns and experienced pollution in places they never would have been a few decades back. Once I could safely drink from trout streams. I regularly ice fished safely on the day after Thanksgiving and schools were closed for the opening of pheasant season. I would venture to say that a great many people even here in Michigan have ever seen a pheasant outside of a zoo or a museum. But like the grayling, the buffalo and the carrier pigeons, those activities have disappeared in nearly every part of the planet.

In the year 2010 we need to change our ways of looking at things that are slowly but surely changing the earth we love. We can learn about it. We can conserve energy by being aware of the problems with fossil fuels and we can recycle. And we can resolve to pay attention to the little improvements we can make around our homes that can make a difference.

Happy New Year!