Author of stories for children, Scientist and Philosopher organic cotton products, comments on life, the universe and everything, photography. Conservationist, Environmentalist. Lives on the pale blue dot. Humanity must tread more lightly on the world
The last gasp of neoliberal, exploitative capitalism that will either cause the planet to be uninhabitable for the human monkey or we will destroy it. There are only two options. Either we change as a species and the vacuencers and vacuous start seeing the bigger picture or we face a dire future with an increasing risk of human extinction. It’s not just about drastically reducing the burning of fossil fuels but a complete reset of human economics and justice for every human being.
Keeling Curve 270223Advertise here to kill the planet, the rise of digital advertising and continuing rise of greenhouse gasesCharing Cross Road energy use abuseDumb idea Fiji bottled waterPlastic WhalePlastic pollution, Lac Leman, SwitzerlandCashew nutsDental floss, where’s it from, where does it end up after use?
We were just approaching Cambridge Circus in London when we could hear music being played. It was a group called The Valla and they really have a great sound. If you get a chance give them a listen.
What places like London need are more spaces for performers and less traffic especially the blingmobiles and unnecessarily large polluting SUVs. We need to make cities like London for everyone and not just for car drivers.
Looking at this BBC news item it seems that one group of human monkeys are squaring up to another group of human monkeys as to who owns bits of the Earth. So in a future time when Homo Sapiens have possibly gone extinct either by war or climate change would an intelligent visiting alien species or a future evolved and greater consciousness discover these imaginary lines that the dumb human monkey currently draws on the planet’s surface?
Maybe we, if we want to move the species forward, could create International Peace Zones, called IPZs, that would belong to no nation where we separate two nations by say a 20km Earth Zone where there would be no Homo sapiens allowed. Regeneration zones where plants, insects, animals and birds etc could do what they were meant to do, evolve, without the interference of the very human centric mindset of a monkey that thinks he owns the planet. I say he because it’s still a majority of the male monkey that actually causes the problems in regards to the imaginary lines that said monkey draws on Earth’s surface. They are also, in the main, the ones that point guns at each other and I suspect that it’s the ones with the penis, that again in the main, design, develop, sell and run the companies that churn out ever better ways of killing those other monkeys. Time for the Homo sapiens monkey to move on, grow up or shuffle off the pale blue dot and let other life get on with evolving.
Sales figures? Growth figures? Money in? No, the figures that really matter. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere plus the other greenhouse gases, the extent of Arctic and Antarctic sea ice and the like. You know the figures that many, if not most businesses don’t give a damn about in the pursuit of profit or their contribution to.
So what is climate change? Very simply it’s you and I and the other 8,000,000,000 human monkeys being normal. It’s us going about our days with very little thought to what we as a total are doing to the very finite dot that we all reside on. Some of us drive cars, some of us live in mud huts, some of us use computers and are paid lots of what we call money for doing so while others walk kilometres a day just to collect dirty water or firewood. Climate change is the cumulative effect of 8,000,000,000 of us doing what we are doing from one instant to the next. And whether we are sitting in an office making wealth on a screen, or building a fossil fuel power plant that will hasten our demise or walking under the baking sun for some dirty water, few of the the collective consciousnesses are considering what will happen when we run out of moments. For instance, here’s an article on the flooding that will occur later this century. So whatever you are doing that is normal and that you are doing at this moment sit back and have a think about what the cumulative effects are of your 8,000,000,000 neighbours of the pale blue dot are before it’s too late.
Below are some dumb business ideas and use of plastic.
Dumb idea Fiji bottled waterPlastic WhalePlastic pollution, Lac Leman, SwitzerlandCashew nutsDental floss, where’s it from, where does it end up after use?
Whoever we are, whatever we are doing, we very rarely have time to think about what’s happening to everyone else and the rest of the planet at any one given moment. So some of us floss. We’ve been recommended to by our dentist, hygienist, parents, slick marketeers or whoever.
So consider this. Where does that plastic come from and where does it end up in it’s current form or as breakdown products in micro or nano particle size or as what is left after having been incinerated? Perhaps some of the plastic that we are all ingesting comes from the flossing we did the previous day. Wouldn’t that be ironic?
Now consider that there are 8,000,000,000 of us alive today and in all probability still increasing at the rate of 80,000,000 every 365 days. How many of them floss, how many of them can floss, how many of them have clean water to drink let alone floss? We talk about Sustainable Development Goals and they translate to everyone who wants to, being able to floss, but when is that going to happen in reality? As we know glacial reserves of water are melting and are not being replenished as quickly, two thirds of the world’s aquifers are under stress and rainfall patterns are being altered by climate change due to our burning of fossil fuels.
So when you stand in front of the bathroom mirror flossing your teeth, give a little thought to the really bigger picture of the moment and what your small part in it, is playing.
Chocolates used to come packaged in a cardboard box and each chocolate sat in a small paper tray and they sat quite close to each other. That was before marketing and advertising got to show the consumer that they were getting a lot more for their money by padding out a larger box with plastic pollution. Now as we know we’re consuming plastic particles every day whether we like it or not so there’s a good chance that we’ll be eating the internal packaging of this enlarged chocolate box or some form of life will. It may of course be recyclable and be recycled, oh yeah, like that’s really going to happen. Alternatively, it may end of getting burnt polluting the air we breathe with toxins and all because advertising and marketing people want to fool us and they have.
Can anyone remember when large digital screens started to be used to bombard privileged first world consumers with advertising and marketing of products, often produced with exploited labour in third world countries? It hasn’t been going on for that long but in the time of drastic greenhouse gas emissions it’s a disaster. Perhaps this will be on humanity’s tombstone, “The monkey went extinct because of its love of advertising, marketing and exploitation of other human monkeys and all other forms of life on Earth”. We cannot continue to consume at the rate we are consuming and we are morally bankrupt if we continue the exploitation of other Homo sapiens.
Can you imagine how many CO2 molecules are being released in powering the screens in the building below?
Candles are a popular gift at Christmas time and at other times of the year but do we stop to consider any of the potential negative aspects. What negative aspects?
Well there’s health for a start. How can you be sure that the candle you buy does not release toxins when it is burnt? Do you check or just assume that it’s OK?
Resource use. Remember there are 8,000,000,000 of us. The candles on the left of this photo are wrapped in plastic so what will happen to it? Th ones on the right are in glass so what becomes of the containers? Will they be used once and then thrown away or smashed up and recycled? Either way a one way journey and usage uses an awful lot of resources and energy. And what of tea lights either in plastic or metal. What happens to all that plastic or metal once they are used?
So do candles need to be wrapped in anything? It’s a question that must be addressed as part of the larger one in how we use the planet’s limited resources and energy in a sustainable way.
What happens to the plastic baubles that are sold with the flowers at Christmas? Are they stuck in a cupboard? Are they thrown away? How do they degrade? Will they pollute the environment? We really need to change the way we do things.
Paul Noël 