​The headlines get hotter as the temperature gets hotter. We read and hear about rising world temperatures and have to wonder, “what will next year bring?” Our human condition seems to be one of concern, but at the same time ignoring our complicity in generating carbon emissions.
 
What can you do? What should you do?
 
Rather than wringing our collective and singular hands, we can all act. Every individual can take specific steps to change behavior and actions. Those steps can be small or big.
 
If you own a low MPG vehicle, like a large pickup truck, the next time you purchase a vehicle, make it one that gets improved mileage. Shoot for an average of 30 MPG minimum. It can be done. Force the hands for the auto makers.
 
If you’re handing down a vehicle to one of your kids who is just starting to drive, make it a hybrid. Lower emissions, better gas mileage on average than pure gasoline-fired autos.
 
Do other people head the same direction that you do for work? Consider car pooling.
 
A good friend has gone to a vegetarian diet in the past three years after heavily researching what steps an individual can take to reduce their personal carbon footprint and finding that eliminating meat from your diet is the biggest positive step you can take. Maybe you don’t want to totally cut out meat, so take steps to reduce your intake incrementally. See where that goes.
 
Stop mowing your grass so much. Take some of your grass out of commission and plant other native vegetation or create some artistic structure that fires your creativity and gets compliments from the neighbors. That’s fun.
 
Walk. Ride your bike. Even more fun, buy an e-bike. We had the opportunity to ride one on a trip recently, and what a joy it was to pedal longer distances with less effort. Put baskets on the e-bike. Run errands with it. Pedal to the supermarket, library, post office, or your other local stops effortlessly with the e-boost.
 
Plant diverse trees on your property. We have added 30-40 different types of trees on our property over the past seven years. Some didn’t make it, so the number that will mature is not that high. Keep planting. If one type of tree won’t make it in your climate zone, find the best trees for your area and put those in instead. Experiment. Appreciate the hard exercise and sweat equity you put into digging and depositing dirt, dropping the tree roots into the hole, covering it up and tamping it down.
 
No one is impotent when it comes to actions they can take to lower our world carbon output. We all have influence. We all should take steps. Don’t put it off.
 
There has never been a perfect world, nor will there ever be. The human species has always been faced with evolutionary challenges. Our blessing and our curse are our ability to think ahead and create tools to enhance our lives. We’ve built a degree of leisure and ease into our lives at the expense of rapidly changing the ecosystem which sustains us in a very short period of time by historical standards.
 
Our brains and ability to develop and deploy technology are at the root of finding the solutions to the byproducts we create. It’s on all of us. We must commit and act. Now is the time.

​This past weekend, I chowed down on a Dairy Queen (DQ) large chocolate dipped cone. Yum!
 
On the drive home, as the chocolate collapsed and sent a sheet or two into the fabric of the car seat, and as the soft ice cream melted and had to be rapidly licked to keep it from dripping on my lap, my passenger (a close friend) decided to give a philosophical analysis of eating the DQ chocolate dipped cone. He had obviously thought about this a lot.
 
He laid out the emotions of consumption – the specific initial crunch of the chocolate, feeling the thin layers crinkle, crack and fall apart, then the ice cream beginning its route towards a full meltdown. The senses you get, the reward and mixture of the two tastes and competing textures that make this cone so special.
 
Then, he followed up with the evolution of eating this special treat. How you have to speed up just a bit because the cone wants to get ahead of you in falling apart. You increase your speed, licking the soft serve, crunching the chocolate layers, getting a wee bit concerned that you’re going to miss out, that YOU JUST MIGHT HAVE SOMETHING DRIP ON YOU, DAMMIT, so you up your game.
 
You’ve become the pro by this point, using your expertise in DQ cone eating to dominate the treat, swirling it from the sides, sucking on the larger portions that could topple and fall, and licking off the juices seeking to contaminate your clothing. This takes confidence and diligence as you conquer the cone, using your prior knowledge to keep on top of the collapsing dessert.

At this point, you may be halfway through consumption. The chocolate has fallen (mostly). You’ve mounded the vanilla in the middle, creating a decent-sized hill. But there’s still a ways to go, to savor the bitty morsels left of the chocolate, to shape the soft serve with your tongue.
 
You continue to stay focused. You must, or things melt too quickly, and your clothes catch the debris.
 
Attacking the cone is coming into sight. You close in by mounding the vanilla ice cream repeatedly so that it stays within the contours of the cone, setting you up for the final push.
 
Yes, the soft serve is flattened. When you bite the cone, savor that first burst of the flaky carbo encrusted lightness, you know nothing will dribble out. You chew, the vanilla flavor swirling with the cone and a hint of chocolate. Nirvana!
 
Then, there’s the middle bite of the cone. OH, YEAH! Full mixture of the soft serve flavor and texture with the flavor and texture of the cone. It takes your emotions to another level. You don’t want this to end.

But, it must. There’s that last tiny piece of cone, with the soft serve wedged fully into it. Should you wait and make it two bites or ram the whole thing in your mouth so your cheeks bulge?
 
We know the answer to that. Smack your lips. Smile. Breathe deeply through your nose so you thoroughly let the tastes go to your buds. You’ve conquered the large chocolate dipped cone at DQ, a conquest, and emotional and philosophical experience. Next time you don’t have to think about it. Enjoy the ride. 

​A lot has been written over the past 5-10 years about emotionally irate parents who go to the sporting events of their offspring and choose to rant at the officials blowing the whistles, throwing the flags or making the balls and strikes calls. The theme that runs through many of these news stories is that the behavior of these parents is leading to a nationwide shortage of sports officials.
 
This past weekend, I had the privilege to serve as a clinician at a basketball referee camp in Lancaster, PA, helping officials with constructive feedback to improve the skill sets and potentially rise to a level where they get the opportunity to work DII or DIII college basketball that. That meant a LOT of basketball games over two days, tired kids, worn out officials, cranky parents. A toxic brew for a parent to mouth off. For the most part that did not happen.

This column is not about out-of-control parents. Instead, it’s about how to deal with people who can go crazy over a game and cause problems for game management, officials, players and even coaches. This is not a recipe. But, it is a good story.
 
We were at the next-to-last game Saturday night. Two opponents – big, fast, strong and physical – were playing each other. A lot of fouls had been called. Most people in the gym were probably ready to go to bed. One mother decided she wanted to tell us what to do as we sat on the sidelines, observing, taking notes to give feedback to the three officials on the court so that they build their skill sets and become better officials in the years ahead.
 
She approached my co-clinician and me, telling us in no uncertain terms that the officials were not calling enough fouls, that too much contact was occurring AND that the game was taking too long. The contradiction of those concepts (calling more fouls causes the game to go longer, so reducing the foul count would cause even more contact, something she did not want) caused us to look at each other with wry smiles. She asked us if we were the ones observing before she went on this tirade. We acknowledged this, yes.
 
When someone goes off like this, it’s typically about blowing off steam. In today’s world you must be very careful in how you handle these emotionally charged situations.
 
She stood there, giving us the evil eye. My teammate on the sidelines said, “Thank you.”
 
I looked at her. She glared.
 
Again, he said, “Thank you.”
 
No response.
 
In a firm voice, he said “thank you” a third time. She huffed off.
 
I’m not sure if my partner had that practiced response or it came off the top of the head, but it worked perfectly, and I will remember it for myself for future use. I learn all the time in these situations how to defuse angry, frustrated, emotionally-on-edge people who want to be heard. It’s difficult. It can be tense. But, with training and examples like I got from my partner that night, you can be much better prepared for the next time.
 
All of us need more of these tools in today’s world, where too many people appear on edge because of perceived slights. Saying “thank you” can go a long way towards defusing these potential confrontations.

​If we need another example to demonstrate our interconnected world, it’s the smoke meandering down into the United States from Canada the past few weeks, fouling air for thousands of miles for multiple days in a row. Just this past week, Milwaukee and other upper Midwest cities were listed as being in the top five worst cities in the world for air quality. That wasn’t surprising if you lived under the smoke attack.
 
Tuesdays, I play in a 62+ baseball league, and as I got on the highway towards the fields (south and west of Milwaukee), the bog of smog/smoke overwhelmed your vision. Didn’t seem too bad the first few miles. Then, five miles later, you couldn’t see landmarks in the distance. By arrival time at the ballpark, you couldn’t see two miles ahead of the car.
 
After the game, it was worse. Visibility was down to half-a-mile. You could smell it, taste it. It affected your eyes and mucus membranes. This smoke blanket lasted for three days.
 
With wind changes, the jarring change in weather lifted. You could see with near-clarity, the sky actually blue. In retrospect, as these types of events jar our daily lives, you think how connected we are to the world environment and how we all better rethink our daily lives to take personal steps to reduce our individual carbon footprints. Otherwise, these events will worsen, becoming more cataclysmic as years become decades.
 
The smoke invasion also got me thinking of how we all have to remove whatever blinders we have and look more and more at the global impacts of how we live. Covid was a big indicator that demonstrated borders don’t exist. Living in one country or another ensures nothing in terms of safety.
 
A virus, like smoke, could care less where it goes. It just migrates along wind currents, ultimately affecting people thousands of miles away and on separate continents. Read up on the eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington state in 1980 to see how quickly and how far the volcanic ash plume spread, and you will understand how there’s no wall to build for protection.
 
Even today, we still have not effectively fully recovered a steady supply chain following the Covid-related shutdowns across the world. It’s difficult to find a new car. If you need parts to repair your current car, they can take more time to locate and get to your local repair shop. Logistics are not as seamless as they were four years ago, and it’s a global disruption.
 
As global population continues to increase and everyone is looking to get a slice of the cake, the pinching down will only continue. Grapes go in short supply if a weather crisis happens in Chile. The bird flu drives up the price of chicken. None of these are issues affecting solely one country.

We are a world without borders when it comes to weather, pollution, food, manufacturing. This will become increasingly apparent over the years ahead. We need to pay close attention and prepare more methodically for change if we want to reduce the chaos. If not, the lurching from crises to crises only expands.