Peters Park, Rodney flooding

Water rushes through Monona County's Peters Park near Rodney, Iowa after a levy broke on the Little Sioux River early Tuesday.

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As the climate heads into greater extremes globally, how can we best deal with future climate crises? The short answer is that we cannot deal with them unless we take care of nature's inner balance. We live in a tightly-closed and interdependent system in which everything boomerangs back to us. While living in such a system, we need to reconsider what we want and think, and how we treat each other, because our human connections are the primary influence on how nature responds to us. It is common to think that climate is dependent on factors outside of us-whether it be balances between heat and cold in the environment, or the effects of various kinds of pollution we emit-because we lack a complete picture of how our attitudes to each other bring about the strongest responses from nature toward us. No creature distorts nature the way that we people do. And it is not simply a matter of switching to renewable energy sources, electric cars and the like; it is a matter of how we relate to each other. If we truly wish to witness more balance throughout nature and not have to deal with all kinds of cold waves and other natural disasters, then similarly to how we have electricity, water and gas meters in our homes, we should also have meters that count how much evil we emit into the world from our negative attitudes to each other. What I mean is that if we could feel the extent to which we emit negative forces into the world, which negatively ricochet back to us, then we would wish to change this negative driver within us. We would want to switch it to a drive that makes our human connections positive, and which harmonizes us with nature. In simple terms, when we get up in the morning, we should first and foremost consider what we need to do in order for all people to have it good. Developing such an attitude is not so simple, yet we will need to seriously work on it as we head into the future. A life of increasing blows from nature or a life of peace and harmony depends on the extent to which we impact a shift in our attitudes to each other-from negative to positive.