Paris Toujours

When I began this blog project, back in January, my first post was interrupted by the murderous attacks at Charlie Hebdo and the Kosher Supermarket. After acknowledging the horror, I resumed my year-long journey down the 'road to Paris,' noting in passing that the civil disruptions threatened by climate change may occur on a vastly larger scale than Islamist terror. Now I am again sharing the horror and outrage of Friday's attacks--so much more murderous, so random and thus generalized. But I can only hope, as France mourns, reflects, and regroups, that the COP 21 conference will proceed, sombre but undistracted. Because it's true: the threat of displacement, hunger, extreme weather, mass migration, all within a framework of global inequality and failure of the larger greenhouse gas emitters to accept due responsibility--all this remains a source of potential civil breakdown far worse than anything ISIS or Al Qaeda can trigger. So while I join the French--and the Lebanese, the Russians, the many other victims of ISIS's savagery--in mourning and deploring this intrusion of senseless violence into a world that has too much of it already, I also intend to continue with my tiny piece of the vast project to address the climate crisis. And to wish the delegates bon courage as they head for a locked-down Paris.