Editorial

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Signs of Change
It’s hard not to feel appreciative of the long autumn this year, temperatures are still holding at late October levels and few of us have even seen the season’s first dusting of white. Normally by the first week of December we’d expect that winter’s snowpack is here to stay, though we’re all starting to understand that what’s normal these days may or may not be what we always figured was normal. Nobody we know is complaining though, the long reprieve has given most of us a chance to catch up on things around the house that most years we don’t quite manage to. Leaves are well raked, houses buttoned down, woodpiles are high and dwindling slowly and will probably get many of us through the winter without worrying that we’ll have to scramble for firewood come February and March. It’s a pleasant change but one that most of us realize might somehow be connected with things we haven’t thought about much, so far.
Our ski areas will survive a late opening this year, hopefully making up for lost early season revenues with a first full season of a coordinated regional marketing campaign. We’ve been pushing such efforts for years and we’re delighted to see all of our regional ski areas finally in accord on its necessity. We’re also hoping this is the year people and not just visitors discover that Phoenicia and Hunter are actually connected by a road, and that it’s equally easy and incredibly scenic to drive north and south as well as east & west through our region.
With or without bitterly cold weather and major snowfall here, December it seems will be the big media month for climate change reporting, leading up to the President’s visit to Copenhagen on the ninth and the big conference’s pre-Christmas conclusion. We’re enormously hopeful for good news, though we think it’ll take the better part of two years to craft a workable global accord. In our view it’s not as if our national leaders really have a choice to make. Things are happening that we need to cope with and failure isn’t an option we can long or well survive. This is what evolution is, and the great anthropologist Gregory Bateson once defined it as a species trying to keep doing the same dance while the world around it changes. What evolves said Bateson isn’t just the single species but the relationship between it and all other species in a shared environment. Adaptation is survival, failure extinction. Our species needs food, water, breathable air, heat, and a few other things. We believe it has the wisdom to allow enough of all to exist so the dance can go on.
On the homefront we’re appreciative that the Catskill Watershed Corp has evidenced the vision to take these coming changes seriously. We encourage you to visit their website at www..cwconline.org and read for yourself what’s being predicted for our region. This isn’t speculative science anymore, it’s practical planning we all need to begin taking into account.
BP