Today I noticed one pink azalea in front of my home in Chatham, New York. Usually, at this time of year, hundreds of flowers sprout from the two thirty-year-old plants that grace our front porch. But in the middle of March there was a spike of very warm weather that encouraged the plants to begin to blossom about a month early. Just as the flowers were beginning to emerge, a freeze stuck the region, killing all the azaleas, or so I thought. Today this one little survivor announced its presence.
This is small testament to much a much larger pattern: destruction of Earth's climate, bringing increasingly capricious weather that now assaults both nature and civilization.