Written by Alan Hickman
Consciously or unconsciously, most people go through life guided by a world view that they constructed in their late teens and early twenties. That formative time started for me in the mid fifties with apprenticeship at an aircraft research facility in southern England. Apprenticeship over and ‘National Service’ looming, I pre-empted the inevitable by ‘volunteering’ for a five year term with the Royal Air Force and that changed everything.
Being plucked out of suburban Britain and plonked down half a world away on a speck of land in the South China Sea does wonders for a world view. World War II had been over for fifteen years, the Malaya ‘Emergency’ had ended a couple of years previously and confrontation with Indonesia had not yet heated up, so, RAF Labuan, off the west coast of Borneo, was a pleasantly sleepy staging-post en-route to nowhere in particular. With just a couple of dozen Europeans and a few thousand local people it wasn’t a desert island but it did offer lots of time for contemplation.
Like looking down the wrong end of a telescope, things looked very different from far away. The Eurocentric ‘Rule Britannia’ version of life that I had taken for granted looked, at best, decidedly iffy. My grandfather’s generation had brought two world wars and my father’s generation had landed us in Korea and was spraying Agent Orange on Vietnam. Based on the demonstrable truth that external threat engendered internal unity, it seemed that it would take some catastrophic global event to get national leaders to stop bickering and just put up with each other in the pursuit of common survival. In the ‘sixties, an invasion by Martians seemed like it might be not a bad idea!
Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring had just been published but I hadn’t heard of it far less read it. ‘Environment’ wasn’t on the radar, and the lethal mixture of smoke and fog in industrial cities, that killed people by the thousand, was just a fact of life; but there were questions. How much longer could coal really last? More abstractly, what did coal burning really do? It didn’t seem logical that all that stored-up energy could be released without doing something, and - given the way things tend to be - probably something not nice.
There were so many questions. How could an economy which relied on constant expansion work in the long term? Doesn’t there come a time when there are two cars and a garden weasel in every garage? And population. I had some vague notion of Malthus’ proposition that, left to breed unchecked, human beings would outrun their food supply. It hadn’t happened yet but surely, mustn’t it eventually?
Almost fifty years later, the generation I was born into and the one that followed have done a marginally better job than their forebears - at least we didn’t quite blow ourselves up and we did put off a world war three - but we’re still electing presidents with the intellect of the child Bush and we’ve repeatedly allowed despots like the unlamented Idi Amin and Sadam Hussein to grab nations by the throat. Research and technology have brought unimagined benefits but many of the old debates still haven’t got workable resolutions and Martians haven’t even answered our calls, let alone threatened us with death rays.
The present best bet for some unifying global catastrophe seems to have been laid out in last week’s report from the International Panel on Climate Change. In 1970, almost forty years before the report was written, Walt Kelly quite succinctly summed up the panel’s conclusions when he had Pogo say "We Have Met The Enemy and He Is Us". Given the report’s 99% confidence level, only the congenitally conservative and the most myopic of fossil fuel proponents are likely to try to argue against the predicted consequences of continuing along the path of non-renewable fuel consumption.
If your hobby is snowmobiling, roaring around the countryside to go nowhere, the news is all bad but for gardeners this can be a good news story. A city gardener can at least not make matters worse by simply doing more of the same. Spending more time in the garden means spending less time driving somewhere for ‘entertainment’. Making larger flower beds means less lawn, less mowing, less pest control and less run-off. Growing more vegetables, flowers and herbs at home means fewer items bought in stores and fewer miles driven by delivery trucks. More composting means less need for fertilizer and store bought mulch and less waste being trucked to who knows where for processing or disposal.
While individually we can make small changes, collectively we make much larger differences by forcing governments to aggressively adopt carbon reducing standards. For instance, at a city level, developers are presently required to designate some proportion of land as open space in order to get approvals. Why not require also that 25% of all the energy used by a new sub-division come from local self-generated renewable sources like solar collectors, wind generators, geothermal or whatever? Ten years from now, with newer technology and lower prices, the proportion of self-sufficiency for new development could be upped to perhaps 50%.
The trouble with a war on CO2 is that it is does not have the excitement or the instant gratification that sending stealth aircraft to drop bombs on some far-away country brings. On the up side, if we start now to make this the century of carbon-free energy, there might even be a generation of great-grandchildren born who will thank us for our efforts.
Answer Feb 8???d all the above
???Roses generally will not bloom if:
a They get less than 6 hours of sun
b They are pruned heavily in the spring
c The bud union is above ground level
Weather: Day -6 sun & cloud with light flurries Winds 20km/h P.O.P.30%
Night -12 Cloudy Winds 20km/h P.O.P.20%
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