In recent months, the UUSR Climate Action Group has written about many climate-related things our congregational community, our town, State, country and world communities, can do to stave off climate-change events that can cause the demise of our planet.

On May 25th, in the Gloucester Daily Times, there was an article about Gloucester High School’s Sea Scout Ship Five, a group of Cape Ann students from Gloucester, and their effort to reduce the amount of plastic waste in our ocean. Their fairly simple idea was to install a refillable water bottle station behind the Harbormaster’s office on Harbor Loop.

“Designed to be used with refillable steel water bottles, the water station may not seem like such a big deal until you consider its cumulative effect on plastic refuse.”  But it is a big deal and Sea Scout Ship Five of Gloucester ought to be congratulated. And we, at the UUSR, should see this as an example of what all of us, as individuals, can do to help reduce the effects of climate change.

On the same May 25th, a Washington Post article described the EPA of the Biden Administration’s efforts to protect the salmon fishery in Alaska’s Bristol Bay area. By halting a proposal to mine for gold, copper and other valuable metals, if approved, this will save a tribal fishery that produces 37.5 million sockeye salmon a year, keeping industry and its industrial emissions out of the area and the ocean and its surrounding air more environmentally pristine…and as an added boost, keeping some of Alaska’s indigenous people working more and eating better.

These events show what we all can do to understand and prevent the environmental  and climate changes threatening our planet……….and mitigate the dire predictions in the recent report by scientists at UMass/Boston “that by the end of this century, just one lifetime away, temperatures could be ten degrees higher than 2000 levels,  seas could rise by ten feet (goodbye Bearskin Neck, East Gloucester, Gloucester’s Boulevard), precipitation could increase by 30%, causing flooding by surging rivers to increase by as much as 70%.”

For now, these are just predictions. They don’t have to become reality.