Wow, another truly terrible week if you care about the environment this year. But I am still pointing to positive spots I saw this week, and I hope you can too.

1. Farmer's Market Treats- About every other Saturday we go to our farmer's market. The produce is great, but the food we get for lunch is maybe even better. I got a quesadilla filled with winter veggies, including beets, which are basically the best things ever. I used to hate beets. Life is filled with surprises. Also awesome? We got our apple cider from a lady in a pussy hat and snacked on Freedom fries. Eventually, I will want to get back to Pennsylvania. But at this moment, I just love my liberal bubble.

2. Solar Power- Just as the regulations which keep our air and water clean get stripped away so billionaires can get even more billionairy, a number of reports about solar power have come out, and lots of the news is good:

Amazon is continuing to go big on clean energy for their warehouses
China has opened a giant solar farm and has decreased their pollution and CO2 emissions with a huge solar push
Solar is now providing twice as many new jobs as coal
Renton's new Ikea has a giant solar farm on top (this could be all huge stores soon enough)
Tesla is speeding along on their solar roof (and it will cost less than a regular roof even before the energy savings)
Solar power is the cheapest form of energy in almost 60 countries
Japan is building floating solar farms (this video is beautiful)

Yay clean energy! If our government is going to be just TERRIBLE to try to help fossil fuels take more desperate grabs for money, it feels good to see solar (and wind) having such a great season anyway. I bet carriage-makers weren't that excited about the car, and they could try to keep them from happening, but I have to believe clean energy is as inevitable as it is necessary.


3. Faith Ringgold- This artist could not be speaking more prescient truths for this moment, and her work is so beautiful. This week, I read her book We Are America to a group of kids who both connected with her discussion of race and her quilt Tar Beach. So fun to see their projects and to talk about all the cultures that make up American culture. I bet when people donated these fabric scraps, they never expected something so cool.


4. Crayons and a Cardboard Box- This has been our primary form of entertainment for days. Everything they say about kids and boxes are true, and any weird drawings you see on the box are clearly The Boy's, because I am totally normal.

5. More and More Mainstream Environmentalism- You would think, in the current climate, that people would forget about the environment, but I think it has woken people up, and they see this is another area in which you have to be an active participant to do some good. Lots of mainstream sites (even Readers Digest) keep posting about the eco-friendly choices we should all be making. I am still hopeful that this horrible season doesn't do too much damage, and that it makes people more aware daily of how much their spending is their vote. We can do a lot of good once we identify who is really chipping away at American culture.