'Modern' life

I read "Sons and Lovers" by D H Lawrence at school as a teenager and loved it. It seemed profound and beautifully written even though, given the nature of its themes rather outside the realm of my experience, I didn't understand some of its deeper currents.

Recently I decided to take "Lady Chatterly's Lover" down off my bookshelf and read it for the first time. It's not much of a secret that Lawrence was not overly keen on the increasing mechanisation of society but I found a segment that I read today that, though written in 1928, seemed prescient for our way of life today, so here it is:

Forty years had made a difference in the neighbourhood. The iron and coal had eaten deep into the bodies and souls of the men.

Incarnate ugliness, and yet alive! What would become of them all? Perhaps with the passing of the coal they would disappear again, off the face of the earth. They had appeared out of nowhere in their thousands, when the coal had called for them. Perhaps they were only weird fauna of the coal-seams. Creatures of another reality, they were elementals, serving the elements of coal, as the metal-workers were elementals, serving the element of iron. Men not men, but animas of coal and iron and clay. Fauna of the elements, carbon, iron, silicon: elementals. They had perhaps some of the weird, inhuman beauty of minerals, the lustre of coal, the weight and blueness and resistance of iron, the transparency of glass. Elemental creatures, weird and distorted, of the mineral world! They belonged the coal, the iron, the clay, as fish belong to the sea and worms to dead wood. The anima of material disintegration!

What will become of miners, and oil and gas workers when we can no longer burn fossil fuels because the idiocy of us destroying our own liveable environment for comfort will be seen for what it is? They will be no more necessary to life for most of us than a farrier would be today. Our fossil fuel burning extravaganza is so woven into our lives that it seems impossible that it will not always be there, but it must have seemed too that horses would always fill our streets, that most people would work on the land and that blacksmiths would have plenty of work to do, yet they have been cast aside by the reshaping power of black gold. But its time too is passing and I believe that the wheel will turn again to activities more human-scale and what seemed history may well become our future.

'Normal' postings may be resumed soon. Or not.

Got any unattractive natural resources?

This is just great and from the same people that brought you the crazed weather woman video.

I love the sultry voice and the general weirdness of the whole thing

After the hurricane

Two photographs I've seen online, the first from the 30th and the 2nd from today made me want to give them some captions:

"What happens when we keep burning our way through all that petrol"

Given the above, it seems appropriate to link to a rather amazing animated sequence about what's going up above New York.

I caught a headline from on the BBC that I couldn't stop thinking of when I then saw this image.

"East Coast residents were overjoyed to hear that the NYSE had re-opened!"

And then to wrap up, two entries from the Climate Progress blog:

The most recent one is a post about Governor Cuomo of New York City who would obviously disagree with the BBC reporter I heard yesterday say that "[Sandy] ... is a once in a generation storm". But then the BBC seem under the strictest orders never to mention Climate Change as even possibly playing a part in any extreme weather event that they report.

The other is the omission of the mention of Climate Change by the mainstream media when discussing Sandy's appearance, approach, arrival and aftermath. I particularly liked this tidbit from the USA - "During this July’s extreme heat wave, only 8.7 percent of television news coverage mentioned climate change; over the summer, television news outlets covered Paul Ryan’s P90-X workouts three times more than the record loss of Arctic sea ice;". I have to add that I've no idea who Paul Ryan is ...

Now here's a TV weather slot!

I feel bad about posting yet another video rather than relating my own beautifully worded record of life here on the lovely Essex coast, but when I saw this today I knew I had to pop it on here. I love the way that the news anchor continues to keep the programme sailing on in its usual fashion. :)

I don't Tweet and I'm not on Facebook so this is really my only place to post items that pique my interest. Anyway, I'll also include the intro text from the blog entry at Climate Progress and then the video.

I don't think I need to add anything else, perhaps apart from registering my continuing disbelief that the politicians in almost all countries appear to be sleepwalking right into the biggest crisis our species will ever face. As Caroline Lucas memorably said several years ago "We could be the first species to monitor its own extinction".

Here you are:

While the increase extreme weather has boosted Americans’ attention to climate issues, it still hasn’t spurred much alarm or concrete political action. Last week, after the underwhelming reaction to record melting of Arctic sea ice, George Monbiot of theGuardian labeled it as “the day the world went mad.”

Well, what if your local weatherwoman went
mad sane and told it like it is? The mock video below shows how that might play out:

And I thought that snails in our garden were a problem ...

I found this amazing photo of rows of cabbages online from Secrett's farm near Guildford and it illustrates why Climate Change could present some obstacles to the "We'll adapt" approach of Exxon's boss Rex Tillerson which he promoted at a recent press conference.

And how do you feel about being a member of the "illiterate public"? that clearly doesn't understand the situation at all ...

The industry's biggest challenge, [Tillerson] said, is "taking an illiterate public and try to help them understand why we can manage these risks."

A better world ...

I know, I will post something soon about a wonderful recent tour around the Tiptree marmalade fountains soon but for now here's a rather pithy cartoon: