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
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?
I posted this in February 2022 as well as in 2021. I don’t suppose things have changed much in that time.
25th February 2021
Ouch! That hurt didn’t it? We are all part of the human species and therefore we have some responsibility for its actions on the planet. No other species possesses the level of consciousness that Homo sapiens does at this present time.
If you are fortunate enough to go on a climate change causing holiday once the corona virus pandemic clears if you have any sense of duty to the natural world then you should boycott these four countries and in addition try to avoid buying any goods from them. They are China, Laos, Vietnam and Thailand. What we do to intensively farmed animals like cattle is bad enough but this is just depraved.
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.
Originally published on the 10th of February 2022. Almost a year later and if anything the situation is worse, perhaps far worse. And yet outside of our petty little disagreements the greatest instrument that humans have ever built collects more and more information about the majesty that is our universe.
The pinnacle of human consciousness but with war and preparation for war, Ukraine, North Korea, etc and the increasing mathematical possibility of our species extinction through not acting to solve climate change we risk not being here to receive and analyse the data from what is our greatest feat of science and engineering. The human primate needs to make a massive leap in its development. Our descendants if we survive our current stupidity will be nation less, we will be one nation, the human nation. https://phys.org/news/2022-02-nasa-james-webb-space-telescope.html
OK, so it’s not February the 1st and I have posted this a couple of times before. But what happened to the Christmas trees of 2020, 2021 and 2022 and before that of course? We should all be concerned.
1st February 2021
All those cut down Christmas trees must be rotting away somewhere releasing CO2 into the atmosphere or worse still burnt and releasing toxins and particulate matter as well. Are there still pesticides residing in the houses of the people who bought them? Christmas 2021 is a long way off but give a thought to celebrating a growing living tree in your neighbourhood next season. Our relationship with the living world will be so much better for it.
Cashew nuts are very good for us unless you are unfortunate to have an allergy. But like many things that we in first world countries take for granted and pick up every day, only stopping probably to reflect on the price, is what and who is involved in getting the cashews to us.
Looking at the side of the packet which I have never done before tells me that they were grown in Vietnam. So the cashews have covered a lot of food miles probably by burning fossil fuels so there’s the aspect of climate change to consider as well.
Cashews produce of Vietnam
We should but few do, ask ourselves what sort of life the farmers or the people working in the growing and packaging of these cashew nuts lead. Are they well paid, well housed and do they have clean running water? Do they go on holiday and do their kids go to school? All normal things that the people buying the packet of cashews take for granted and would complain if they had to live without them. We all need to think about our impact on the planet but also the many invisible people that supply us with food.
Then of course there’s that plastic packaging. Where’s that going to end up? Incinerated, polluting the air we breathe or as nano sized plastic particles that may carry toxins or pathogens into our bodies and possibly end up giving us a serious health issue?
A lot to think about as we are going to have to change whether we like it or not.
Below are a few more photos of food miles and plastic pollution to think about.
Food milesDumb idea Fiji bottled waterChocolates in plasticInside the Mercat de Sant Josep de la Boqueria, La Rambla, Ciutat Vella, Barcelona, SpainMarket scene
This is the size of a car over 50 years ago and in dense city and town centres where speeds are limited to 20 mph/30 kmh it should be the only size of cars that should be allowed today. Photographed in Soho in London on January 2nd 2023. The large SUVs and blingmobiles should be banned as being too large and fast for built up areas. For a greener future cars in these areas should be shareable and not privately owned freeing up road and parking spaces for other things.
First posted in July 2018 and it has got a lost worse since then.
How much more evidence do we need before we admit that the industrial revolution has been a complete disaster for the environment and that our economic monopoly model of continuous expansion and consumption at the expense of exploited humans is deleterious to the life support systems and eventually to us.
Paul Noël 