It's not all doom and gloom. It's about waking up to the new realities. It might be about perception as most of us prefer denial over change.

I encourage you to start preparing for the inevitable, which is change. After 8 years of chronic, systemic assault on the foundations of the American economy as we knew it, change you won't believe nor like has already started. Obama can't undo the consequences stemming from the direct and indirect actions of the Bush administration.

He'll be able to undo some but the Wall St. Bailout hamstrings his team.

So.... change: What's not to like about it? Just about everything. As this speaker points out, men will lose it while women will garden. It's really the men who should turn to gardening as a means of providing for themselves and family. And they won't be just providing food: they will be providing future generations with the means to adapt and cope with the radical, life-altering changes that are underway.

I'll make it easy on you. Don't read the entire speech. Don't read it at all. Just start composting. All you have to do is just compost.

Women seem much more able to cope. Perhaps it is because they have less of their ego invested in the whole dubious enterprise, or perhaps their sense of personal responsibility is tied to those around them and not some nebulous grand enterprise. In any case, the women always seem far more able to just put on their gardening gloves and go do something useful, while the men tend to sit around groaning about the Empire, or the Republic, or whatever it is that they lost.

Back to the future: no less an authoritative figure than James Lovelock says there's just one way to save the planet: compost. He's speaking about the fact that industrial agriculture has destroyed the soil. The Land Institute in Kansas believes that industrial agriculture is responsible for 40% of all carbon released into the atmosphere. industrial agriculture needs to start composting, or all the money in the world won't be able to help us.

I think that's what James Lovelock is referring to when he uses the word "charcoal".

There is one way we could save ourselves and that is through the massive burial of charcoal. It would mean farmers turning all their agricultural waste - which contains carbon that the plants have spent the summer sequestering - into non-biodegradable charcoal, and burying it in the soil.

Read the full interview with James Lovelock here. And then commit to leading by example: start composting.