There’s no pleasing people. I’m living in Northern Germany and things are changing here, some would say for the better. When I first arrived, Uncle Sam made sure I was issued with two of the most important pieces of gear for survival in this area, arctic rated cold weather boots and- yeah, rain gear! We just passed Easter and the weather has been really glorious. It’s been warm, unseasonably so for up here, dry and SUNNY! And of course, that isn’t good either, there’s just no pleasing people I say!
Now, the north Germans can be a dour lot, it comes of existing under steady clouds for thousands of years. Everyone, and I mean every one of those permanently pale people complained steadily about the cold and lack of sunshine. That’s the reason the Vikings originally sailed south, they were looking for a tan! Well, now they’re getting a lot of sun here. There’s almost no snow in Winter anymore and the days where it drops below freezing have become seldom enough that people remark on them. Unfortunately, while the sales of sun tan lotion are rising, the sale of rubber boots is dropping and now the trees that evolved below a damn near steady fall of cool, cloud chilled water are thirsty. Thirsty and they aren’t doing very well.
The farms around here aren’t doing so hot either and most people are kind of looking at the spot where the North Sea meets dry land and wondering when it’s going to turn to salty mud. I’m not an alarmist, really I’m not, but I look at our local river, the Weser (Yep, the one the rats walked into), and the creeks that flow into the sea around here and they’re always high anymore. Every time I happen to notice it looks as if the water is right up to the top of the bank and it hasn’t been raining. Not here or in the mountains where the river is born.
Don’t get me wrong, the blue skies and warm breezes aren’t hard to take, but I believe the scientists and I wonder what my beautiful grandchildren are going to have to deal with after I’m safely dead. I don’t like the feeling I get when I think about that, when I’m forced to admit that I helped bring that about for them. Hey, I’m a polluter, we all are, and this has been brought about by human pollution.
There’s no shame in admitting it, some people don’t want to, they don’t like taking responsibility for this but I think we have to if we’re going to give our progeny any chance at getting this mess under control. The shame comes in not doing anything about it. That’s seriously shameful in my opinion.
We humans have a long history of polluting. A cursory look at the missing forests of Europe, England and America, gone to produce heat for homes and charcoal for the war efforts of a millennium will show that. The earth is dotted with mining tailings that go back in time almost as far as Man does, proof that we ripped what we wanted out of the Mother’s womb and left the bloody entrails there for everyone to trip over. That grass finally grows over the evidence of our pillaging, making it less ugly to the eye is only proof that the Mother tries to hide the wounds we visit upon her body.
And yet, we’ve evolved. We no longer burn those trees, we replant them- I saw a commercial that said so! And miners have to reconstitute the land once they’ve gotten what they want out of it. Don’t be so harsh on us, we’ve come a long way, baby and those ancestors didn’t know any better!
All right, okay. I’ll give you the argument about the ancestors, we had to get here somehow and at least they were taking the salt and copper ore out with antlers used for digging, later, iron picks and shovels. But we’re backsliding. I’ve worked in modern open pit mines. There isn’t a hand wielded shovel in the world that can keep up with a drag line, loader and column of trucks capable of carrying 350 tons of coal, gold or bauxite per load. They run 24/7, puking exhaust into the air. Did you use a plastic garbage bag today? Do you know they are made from petroleum? Almost all plastic is.
Climavolution, I fear the world is evolving around us to deal with what we won’t. There are insects and fish up here now that didn’t live here before, others have gone away as the temperatures rise. For the last ten years we’ve been told that the ticks are now a danger. It seems the ones that carry TBE- Tick borne Encephalitis, live where it is warmer than it ever used to get here. Well, now it gets to the temperatures that they like. They’re here to stay and part of the new climavolution reality.
I’m sad because I remember a river burning when I was a kid. The Cuyahoga in Ohio, “The river that oozes rather than flows” according to Time magazine. I remember a commercial of an American native crying as he watched a station wagon drive by, a tear slid down his stoic cheek as trash was thrown out onto the ground and I watched us change things on the strength of that- for a little while. But we didn’t evolve, we just looked for ways to keep doing exactly as we were doing that allowed us to feel good about it. Now the cheek wet with tears is my own.
Do you know there was an electric car in 1832? It was crude, but it was real.
That might be what’s making me grind my teeth on this issue, it could all have been different. But it wasn’t and humans can have a really steep learning curve. It’s a fact that in the fifties, people bought and used irradiated plates and kitchen wear because atomics were cool! Yeah, that brand of cigarettes eased your cough and this brand of gasoline put out less exhaust smoke- Oh, yeah, and Chernobyl is an amusement park now. Right.
Well, maybe we’ve been forced to grow up, a little, by current events but we damn sure haven’t evolved. Not when we’re ramping up our oil production so the rich among us can make more money and the poor folks are making excuses about why they just can’t give up their diesel or gasser- the electric ones are too quiet, there’s no Vroom Vroom as my granddaughter would say.
What an epitaph for our species.
Mankind, deceased.
“Doing it right was TOO FUCKING BORING!”
Oh that’ll be on our headstone alright, with a post script.
*+ profit!*
We are a resourceful race, I’m pretty sure humans can adapt to a planet that evolves to deal with our pollution, I just think it’s damn silly to have to when we really could make an effort, colossal to be sure, to arrest this developing crisis now. And I think we will once we get the willfully blind and gleefully corrupt out of power.
But that doesn’t make it any less stupid that we let it get this far, we saw the signs, we were warned, we ignored it. Yeah, we did. “Ooooh, palm trees on the frigid North Sea in thirty years, how cool will that be?” we said. I remember those conversations, I remember people warning us that it would be a different picture than the fantasy painted. We, well, to be fair, I- shrugged and went on with my day to day. It was a worry for down the road, I had things that needed my attention going on right now!
And now I regret my myopia, and enjoy the blue sky and warm breeze with a really guilty conscience and a sour stomach. This is the calm before the coming tempest and anything I can do now, as a little guy, seems so damned inadequate. Whales are washing up on shore dead of plastic poisoning and there are so many insects gone that you don’t have to clean your windshield of their carcasses anymore. That’s a plus, isn’t it? Not really, those insects killed by our pesticides and other pollutants fulfilled vital roles in the ecosystem that we depend on. They are dead and dying, what will we do when they’re gone beyond recovery?
Climavolution, we get on the right side of it fast, I think, or we get rolled over by it because the world isn’t waiting on us. For as powerful as we think we are, there isn’t a single one of us that can stop a hurricane or a tornado, nor can we turn back the clock when the southern quarter of America becomes a no go zone because of the non stop storms and Samoa is a memory.
I like to call doing openly stupid stuff that leads to an organism’s own demise “Evolution in action” that’s fitting isn’t it? Gods- I hope we don’t fall under that heading one day. I don’t think it would be good to have that applied to the human race.
Here’s a suggestion, use a hempen paper bag or a hand woven basket for your shopping if you can. I hope your weekend is great as you shop or do whatever you do.
Me, I’m gonna see what I can do to further my climavolution, I’m going to get my bicycle into working order and use it a lot more. Every little bit helps. Gods, I hope that’s true. I’m doing it whether it is or not.
Happy Friday
Kell
Cross posted from Kell's World