both George HW Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev had meetings with Chief Waterman's sister, Clan Mother Audrey Shenandoah. They both wanted to ask her abou environmental issues. She told him there are no mysteries, only common sense. If you pour toxic industrial wastes into a river, for example, you poison those down stream -- both in physical distance and in time.

My brother often has lunch with the environmental scientists at the university where he works. They have been saying for years that we are way past the tipping point. They point to the southwest, and even to Oregon, where they are. The climate is changing, and that has consequences that we, as a people, are ill prepared for.