NYT Story
www.nytimes.com/2023/05/08/dining/arizona-drought-garden-produce.html
Comment
Okay, fine, I get it. Words can be boring. Personally I find them challenging because I can’t do anything else while reading them. I do not like stopping whatever I am building, coding, planting, inventing myself to stare at them. I don’t like their tricks and ambiguity, and I definitely think as such a verbose writer myself they can be cumbersome.
However, like an astronomer, I also respect words can be brilliant pins of light in a disappearing dark sky signifying infinitesimally large objects that can never really be understood in our infinitesimally small lives. Another analogy? Yea I know.
The point is words can also be the metering mark of a species that has seriously bent the curve of the universe towards its own extinction.
We are all dying, true, but we have not always been doomed. There were ancestors that left the people and our words with confidence that their descendants will suffer less to thrive than they suffered. No one can honestly do that today.
I believe the NYT gets this. I think when I read the NYT’s response to the catastrophic symptoms of our own design that they really do understand the words they write about places, people, the times today only matters if we prevail against the Climate Change Emergency.
I think the NYT sees that their millions of words in print and beyond are vulnerable to the same physical environmental hazards each of is susceptible to now if don’t seriously change our minds and hearts and directly address the inequalities, floods, infections and fires. The NYT appears to understand that if they can use their empire of words to help these innovative homesteaders in Arizona succeed in their experiments with agriculture their empire of words could survive too.