​Dear friends in Santa Fe, Santa Barbara, and oceans beyond,
Like many of you, we celebrate this holiday without family members’ ringing voices and inimitable smiles.  It was lonely but still okay.   Here are our musings after a turbulent year that challenged almost everyone's assumptions about daily life:     
This is the first year in 51 years together that we haven’t traveled somewhere new in the world, leaving a vacuum filled with long walks and swimming, movies, books, and other small pleasures that have become an oasis of comfort.  Some grateful highlights that have preserved sanity:   
Favorite streaming drama:  The Queen’s Gambit (Netflix)
Favorite documentary:  The Octopus Teacher
Favorite nature book:  Trees of the World (Tomas Micek)
Favorite food: Anything cooked on a Kamado Joe grill
Favorite non-profits:   Food Depot & Foodbank, Dollars4Schools, Fair Fight, and all environmental and wildlife non-profits. 
Favorite fantasy:  When Covid finally subsides, there is less reliance on virtual reality, and we reclaim some humanistic values from previous decades.
Favorite political wish:  The end of polarization and, finally, a coordinated global effort to clean up the environment.
Favorite digression:  ping pong.
Favorite  novelty:  feeding feral cats, possums, skunks and raccoons that live in our nearby ravine.
Favorite lesson from the pandemic:  No one is more important  than anyone else.
 

Most of all, 2020 has allowed us time to reflect on memories of you, and to recognize how important each of you are in our lives. This year has been hard for so many in the world—especially those without financial savings or resources.  And, like many of you, we reflect on losing some of our close friends.  As long as memory survives, good friendships never die.

Tidings of Gratitude and Hope

Pat and Michael

​​Attenborough’s  life has been a lens on the fragile beauty of nature and the struggle to maintain  biodiversity. As our population has grown from two billion to over seven billion, the  planet’s wilderness acreage has shrunk from about 70% in the  late 1950s, when Attenborough began exploring terra incognito, to 30% today. Over three trillion trees were logged or just destroyed.  Along with fewer trees, the oceans can no longer absorb the tons of carbon dioxide we emit.  

Old news does not mean irrelevant news.  Old news means it’s more relevant than ever.  If Earth were humanity's collective spouse, we would all be in prison for negligence and gross abuse.  Escaping a death sentence means  changing our behavior, our values, and our management of resources. We’ve already started. We should all feel proud.  Now for the disappointing news—we have so, so far to go.

 In fighting COVID-19, in learning how difficult a lifestyle change can be, most of us have come to believe in the efficacy  of sacrifice.  My wife tells me that repurposing the planet will require 7 billion heroes doing whatever they can.  If we each choose to do just one thing consistently, like picking up trash on the roadside, eating way more plant-based foods, finding the money to back environmental initiatives, consuming food grown on a fraction of the land farms use today (re: study the Netherlands), and cutting  our use of  plastics and fossils fuels, we will start a tsunami of hope.  Remember the nuclear disaster of  Chernobyl in the 1980s, and then see aerial shots of the city today. Humans are still forbidden to come near, but animals, trees and plants flourish mightily like a window on the future.