Our planet is a magical place. Leaves drop from trees to be transformed into fertile earth. Rainwater feeds the flora and then does a disappearing act into the soil, replenishing deep aquifers that provide fresh water. Vegetables, trees, grasses, fruits, and flowers sprout from tiny seeds like rabbits pulled from a hat. Without a wave of a wand or a tap on a top hat, the earth digests, recycles, and reforms her waste into abundance.

Forget Oz. This is a fantastic place.

Like Satchmo, we can think to ourselves “what a wonderful world” and believe every word of it. Skies of blue and clouds of white are above, and right now “clouds” of white are underfoot, too. We have ourselves a beautiful world, indeed. Crank up the iPod and put that lullaby on “repeat.”

But don’t turn it up so loud that you can’t hear Mother Earth singing the blues. “You just keep on using me,” she wails, “until you use me up.” And, my brother, unlike that song, the using doesn’t feel good.

What have we done? We’ve dug and drilled to harvest fuels. We’ve spewed chemicals from smokestacks and tailpipes and sprayed them onto fields and foods. We’ve stripped and burned the forests. And we have piled toxins and trash ever higher. We’ve done all this, refusing to believe that the effects of all this pumping and emitting and degrading and tossing have been anything but benign.

Like an over-indulgent frat boy on a Sunday morning, we are finally waking up with a hangover the size of Texas, realizing that our decades-long party of consumption is the cause of rapidly escalating global climate change. Not knowing our limits, we have exceeded our planet’s capacity to digest, recycle, and reform all of our waste.

While nursing our fossil fuel hangover, we must clean up the mess we made as we partied-hardy. Pick up the cans. Wipe up the spills. The party’s over.

Even in Wisconsin, where we deserve the reputation as educated and informed beings, there are fully-grown adults clasping their hands over their ears and defiantly singing nonsense syllables to block out any input about climate change. The time has come to pull down those hands. The time has come to quit fearing change.

The difference between those who are fearful or resistant and those busy learning and adapting is that the latter view change not as chore but as renewal. How often do we have the opportunity to start over and recreate the way we do things? How often do we contemplate how to make our communities, our country, our world a better, more sustainable place? This is our wonderful world to recreate. This is exciting!

Of those on the home front during World War II, some must have groaned. Food rationing, civil defense drills, recycling cooking fats, and fewer choices of goods to buy — certainly life was more difficult. But uniting against a joint hardship cultivates neighborliness. Americans banded together for mutual defense. Even today there is nostalgia for a time when cooperation and commitment to the common good were the norm. Joining to battle climate change could return to us something our society yearns for, even though most have never really experienced it — the now-ephemeral Community with a Big C.

There’s just one thing that will keep the planet’s magic going: us. We must learn how to combat the causes of climate change and then act on this knowledge, taking both the small and large steps needed to change our course. It is the responsibility of each of us. A wonderful, magical world or an earth that is exponentially increasing in its instability — the choice is entirely in our hands.