Bit of a Rant About Greenie Things

Earlier this year I attended a free lecture presented by Mark Carwardine at University College London. Mark is an expert in things fauna and environmental, a photographer, and a writer. About twenty years ago he and Douglas Adams went around the world to have a look at eight endangered animals. They called the book and series Last Chance to See. The day before Douglas Adams died he had been on the phone with Mark to discuss doing a follow-up programme. Last year the follow-up TV series was aired on the BBC, with Stephen Fry ably filling the role as a celebrity to haul in the viewers while Mark performed the role of expert. The series was fascinating, and showed one of the funniest things on TV in a long time: when the kakapo from New Zealand effectively raped Mark’s head.

It was a fascinating talk, too. Mark is a gifted speaker obviously passionate about his subject. It must be something he has repeated around the place a lot, but his presentation was fresh and invigorating, and pitched at an audience of many students, a few academic staff, and some interested people like my friend and I who had found out about it. In other words, not a hostile audience, exactly, although I was interested in the few who seemed to not be convinced.

One student who identified herself as studying geology questioned his statements about climate change being caused by human activity. Her point was that the geological evidence pointed to other times of climate change that caused species to be wiped out. Those times were before humankind turned up, ergo why should we just assume that the current evidence of climate chaos is our fault? I was impressed by how Mark patiently and respectfully, yet forcefully, answered her contention by repeating some of the stories of the evidence he has seen. They included the cutting down of forests in Borneo, with the direct impact not only on orang-utan populations but the climate. It affects rainfall patterns.

Writing this up, I’m reminded of something I learned when I was about 18 or 19 years old. I was at the Australian National University in Canberra, where I was an undergraduate student reading Politics and Modern History. Incidental to my book learning, I learned about the climate changes brought to the area of Canberra nestled around Lake Burley-Griffin. The lake is an artificial one. It’s quite large. Prior to its installation, Canberra used to be a pretty dry valley. With the lake came an increase in humidity, including rainfall. Demonstrable climate change as a direct result of human activity. Australia has quite a few other examples, and nowhere near all would be as benign as this one.

I have been sickened by the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and astounded by some of the more in depth reporting on it by the Rachel Maddow Show (MSNBC). As she keeps pointing out, the story does not end just by the stopping of the leak. It seems to have done amazing amounts of damage in the sea itself, and the wetlands that are integral to the environment on land. Only that last bit seems to be ignored by many and short term protection of big business, political advantage for the sake of power, and greed is at the top of a lot of people’s minds.

In related reporting, I was astounded to learn of large areas of what is called “dead sea” around parts of the USA. No doubt also to be found in other parts of the world, but I’m only going on about what US media have been reporting. It’s an awful term for an awful thing, and it is literal. The cause isn’t just over-fishing. Other causes include poisoning from the breaking down of plastics and other chemicals like pesticides in the water. That kills the small life-forms, which the bigger ones feed on. Only they can’t, because there’s no more food left for them because they’re dead. And so the chain goes up, leaving large empty spaces.

It’s for those reasons and the obvious consequences that make me a bit pissed off with politicians back-tracking like mad from any form of serious attempt to control this stuff. In fact, they seem to be gunning for any form of involvement with the short term cash cow that is oil and all the related industries which the human world has made a necessity. I don’t have, and won’t have, children. But I have friends and cousins who do, and I wonder about these politicians who purport to be all about the youth and the legacy they’re leaving them. Not just the politicians, really, because big business could start to seriously invest in weaning on to other forms of energy, and other developments that take us away from our invented dependency on oil. In the shorter term, they really should be investing in ways to deal with the mistakes that do happen, rather than the extraordinary devotion to attempting to manage the story – and failing at that, even with the amount of media that doesn’t question and just runs their story.

As I read this back over, I’m sighing and shaking my head. I know there will be those who will decide that I am some greenie nut who’d rather we all went back to the stone age. Well, I’m not, but I think we can learn from the rich history of other human inventions from all sorts of cultures and times. Australians who are awake will know at least a bit about how the aboriginal peoples had a bit of an idea about the country they inhabited before Europeans decided to take over with our superior intellect (ahem). We dismissed them because they weren’t like us; they hadn’t made what we called Australia look like Europe. Some individual Europeans were a bit quicker on the uptake, arguably, but the prevailing wisdom remains that white skin knows best… Slowly changing as more and more people understand that human beings have adapted in various different ways, and that includes different ways of looking at and interacting with the world. Perhaps no one way is The Right Way, but surely we should understand that our view certainly isn’t suited to everywhere on the planet. It’s not all bad, either. To me that’s one of the amazing opportunities afforded by globalism. We have that opportunity to learn from each other like we have had at no other time in our history. Let’s use it, not waste it.

Enough raving for this blog.