Five of the six years that I was homeless in California were drought years. I didn't really understand or appreciate that until that last year when the rains ca

Five of the six years that I was homeless in California were drought years. I didn't really understand or appreciate that until that last year when the rains came and I did things like took out a loan to spend three nights in a hotel because my "safe from the storm" campsite was under multiple feet of water and the worst rains were yet to come. I clearly and obviously benefited significantly from having the good fortune to be homeless mostly during drought years in California. So I sometimes wonder how many silver linings get overlooked while we wring our hands about some obviously bad thing. Some pine trees cannot reproduce without fire. So if you stamp out forest fires entirely, you kill the forest in the long run. In reality, we never succeed in completely stamping out forest fires. So what happens is that successfully keeping it to a minimum results in a build up of dead wood and some of the worst fires in the US have followed years of good and successful forest management that was celebrated as a "win" at the time. Big storms, like typhoons, have been credited with carrying various species to islands where they become distinct species thanks to isolation. The distance crossed with the help of the storm is not one they can fly or navigate intentionally. I am an environmental studies major and I've lived without a car for over a decade and I've lived without an air conditioner for years. I'm concerned about climate change and I do my best to walk the walk. But I wonder at times about how things get discussed as if "X is good and Y is bad". I wonder if that's really the best and most useful way to have such discussions.