U is for Unraveling

January 3, 2026

Happy new year! I hope...

I have begun a fiber-art project - from the Tempestry Project - that visually shows changes in average temperatures over the last couple of centuries. It is a wall-hanging made of multiple horizontal crocheted stripes. The colors of the stripes depict "deviation-from-normal" temperatures, with the bottom stripe of the wall-hanging representing where we were globally in 1800, and the top stripe representing where we are now. Colors range from shades of blue (cooler) through yellows and oranges to reds (warmer). I hope that makes sense!

When you look at the finished piece you will be able to see from the color changes how global temperatures have increased since 1800.

Well, it has been awhile since I have crocheted anything, and I will tell you this - I have not made it past the second stripe. I keep trying, carefully following the printed and youtubed instructions only to have to unravel the stripe again and again, starting over. Lumps and irregular shapes.

I am determined to get this right. I keep unraveling it and trying again.

Unraveling. Coming or taking apart. If kind of feels like our nation is unraveling.

In the middle of last night, under the US president's orders with no congressional oversight, our nation bombed Venezuela and captured Venezuela's president and his wife, bringing them to the US where they have been charged with crimes related to "drug trafficking and narco-terrorism conspiracies." In his press conference about this, the president informed us that the US would now be "running" Venezuela, heretofore a sovereign nation.

I will say it again. Regardless of how you might view Venezuela's president, Venezuela is a sovereign nation. And keep in mind that the US president recently pardoned the former president of Honduras who had been convicted of massive drug trafficking in the US.

Drug trafficking and narco-terrorism conspiracies. In reality, based on the president’s comments, the US has taken over a nation that has rich untapped oil reserves. Someone is going to be making a lot of money. We will see expansion of the oil industry at a time when our climate continues to warm and people across the globe continue to experience unprecedented storms, floods, and wildfires - and at a time when non-renewable energy sources are becoming more efficient in terms of cost and effectiveness.

There is so much wrong with this whole scenario that I don't know where to start. It is exhausting trying to keep up with the criminality and lawlessness of the president. I won't even try.

But I will share some of Rebecca Solnit’s thoughts related to connections between our dependence on oil and other fossil fuels and international stability:

“The carnage associated with fossil fuel is why speeding the transition to renewables is good for international stability as well as everything else. Fossil fuel is inseparable from violence, and dependence on it has created a brutal world order in which some states have corrosive outsize power due to their possession of oil and gas while others have corrosive dependency on these often-human-rights-abusing regimes. This has been true so long it seems normal, but when it is over we will see it as a second cold war that sometimes became a hot war. Today is one of those days. (When Russia invaded Ukraine, it seemed to think European dependence on its methane gas/natural gas would subdue European reaction; one meaningful European response was to instead speed the energy transition.)

This is why the climate movement has always been a peace movement. A movement for peace with nature, since climate chaos is the result of a war against nature and life on earth, but also for the peace that could come after the fossil fuel era winds down. Oil Change International founder Stephen Kretzmann said this morning: " The fact that wars and lots of blood for oil are somehow an acceptable price to pay for energy has never ever been ok. This alone is more than enough reason to phase out fossil fuels asap." Sun, wind, geothermal, and hydropower are widely distributed across the earth and will not generate any such conflicts and corrosive geopolitics.”

Bill McKibben also comments about the connection between fossil fuels and fighting:

“What if we could, simply by supporting an environmentally and economically sound transition to clean energy, remove the reason for the fighting? I don’t know how to stop the bully from beating people up for their lunch money—but what if lunch was free, and no one was carrying lunch money? Not for the first time, and not for the last, I’m going to make the observation that it’s going to be hard to figure out how to fight wars over sunshine.”

An unraveling democracy. I remind myself that there is an alternate definition of unraveling.

Unraveling can mean coming apart. OR it can refer to resolving the complexity or intricacy of a situation - as in "unraveling a mystery."

We are also in the midst of unraveling what happened on January 6, 2021 (hard to believe it was five years ago), thanks to the calm, focused, and professional work of Special Counsel Jack Smith. Watching Jack Smith's testimony before the House Judiciary Committee this past week gave me some hope - he testified to a true nonpartisan approach, to allegiance to the law and evidence, to protection of and respect for the other public servants who worked so hard on the cases only to lose their jobs in what appeared to be revenge acts of the president.

May we keep images at front of mind that we have thousands and thousands of public servants like Jack Smith - and so many others who provide education, health care, child care, environmental protection, postal service, food growing, transportation facilitation... so many trying to make our nation a better home for all.

May we continue to unravel the mysteries of how we got here, and what we need to do to get out of this mess (one step being to continue to move away from dependence on fossil fuels).

And may I find the patience to keep working on my Tempestry crocheting project! If I ever get it done, I will post a photo of it. In the meantime…

“Caracas Under Siege: A Beginning of… What?”

Painted January 3, 2026