Tag: lobbyists

Hello Eunice

Lizard Point – in 2014

It’s not so much that we’ve never had weather like this before. The big difference is that severe weather is afflicting us more frequently; and so although I could try to support the ‘argument’ that climate change is fake news by citing this photo taken in 2014 and claiming that the weather has always been like this the only fact that matters is that there are many more extreme weather events than we had in the past, and it’s not down to sunspots, 5G telephone masts or Russian hackers it’s down to our profligate use of fossil fuels.

And so yesterday we were up at the allotment trying to make everything as secure as possible and then we went to the campervan to make sure it is as safe as we can make it. It’s parked within a hundred metres of the Severn Beach sea wall which, today , is the subject of red alert weather and flood warnings. Spring tide + force 10 winds always equals a storm surge so we’re paying constant attention to the mobiles for alerts . We once lived at the tidal end of the river Avon when we had the same combination of events combined with a snow melt and I’ve never seen water rise so rapidly, or menacingly. It was eerily silent as it topped the harbour walls and raced across the road towards us. Mercifully it stopped rising just a few inches below the point at which our basement would have flooded. This morning the only damage so far seems to be a flying fence from the Air BnB opposite the flat; and the scratches and dents were confined to the car which was abandoned by a previous tenant who took care to remove the plates before dumping it. At Green Park Station the glass roof – which was already in a precarious state – is shedding panes on to the ground, so probably no farmers’ market tomorrow. Ah well!

This week we’ve had two named storms; the first, Dudley, affected the north of the country but today’s storm Eunice is all over the South West. It kicked off at about 7.00am and built to crescendo during the morning. Apart from the flying fence the only other casualty looks like a smallish tree across the green. These winds growl and search at the windows with a real malignancy. Opposite my window as I write this, there’s a 20′ extractor chimney above a burger joint that’s become semi-detached at the top and is waving around alarmingly. It’s all very scary.

So the question is – how can we live sane, flourishing and fulfilled lives in this insane society – or should we even try to do so? Years ago we were at the much missed Bristol Flower Show when we encountered a man in a wheelchair who’d had both of his legs amputated. He was being pushed by his son who had lovingly attached an ashtray to the arm of the chair with a jubilee clip so that his dad could carry on smoking, having no feet to stub out his dog-ends. Obviously it’s not sensible to be angry or berate either the man or his son for assisting the habit that was so obviously killing him. My reaction was to feel overwhelmed by a strange kind of hopeless compassion for someone who was being slowly killed, not entirely through his own idiocy but through human weakness and a powerful culture created and funded by the tobacco industry.

I don’t want to spend a moment more than necessary being angry. How much time am I prepared to waste on shouting at the television and frothing with indignation – because that too is a killer! Most of us have a role in the decay of this society. We’re all a mixture; somewhere between the son and the father; and so we’re all both victim of climate change as well as being part of the problem. Nothing suits the fossil fuel lobby better than a situation where we all blame and fight against one another; cyclists against motorists, vegetarians and vegans against omnivores, city dwellers against farmers – and so on ad infinitum. In the end we all have to live in each others’ crap so let’s forget the squabbles and go after the real villains and their stooges in the press and in government. It seems to me that one way of changing things is to make sinning as difficult as possible. We should be hitting the fossil fuel corporations where it hurts them most – in the bottom line. We should go after their lobbyists – naming and shaming them for pandering to their employers. Public scorn – as we are seeing at the moment – can really wound the powerful.

But we needn’t be angry – it saps the soul. With the allotment, the campervan and a hand lens in my pocket; and with a copy of the Tao te Ching somewhere to hand – I can live as sane, as flourishing and as fulfilled a life as is granted to me. Who could ask for more?

Postscript

Once the red alert had dropped to amber we went to look at the allotment and noticed a number of roof tiles near the entrance to the back door of the block where we live – any of them would have killed someone walking below. The allotment was completely hammered, with overturned sheds and broken greenhouses. Lots of glass flying about obviously. Our plot was mercifully intact but others were a sorry sight. The flood alert affecting the campervan site continues until tomorrow but we’re hoping with less wind and a smaller tidal surge we’ll be OK.

* “But a voice sounds in my ear. Why so fast, mortal?”

The moon rising over the apple trees behind our borrowed cottage in Lleyn

Full marks if you already know the title and author of the quotation at the top of this post. RS Thomas of course; poet and once parish priest of Aberdaron, just down the road from here. Sometimes when I feel completely dry and empty from too much reading and too many hopes squandered by politicians, RS is the one I turn to because he was one of the few poets who dared to stay in that mindspace and wrestle a blessing from it.

Coming back yesterday from our apple scrumping expedition we drank cider and sat peacefully in the sunshine, looking westwards towards Ireland. I’d struggled through the first 100 pages of Jacques Ellul’s “The Technological Society” and I was finding it difficult to see a way forward beyond his gloomy picture of a technological future that seemed to grow like a tumour; vascularizing and metastasizing until the life systems of the earth collapse. Are all the greener, more regenerative alternatives I’ve been happy to read about really just distractions from the only show in town?

We may quote here Jacques Soustelle’s well-known remark of May, 1960, in reference to the atomic bomb. It expresses the deep feeling of us all: “Since it was possible, it was necessary.” Really a master phrase for all technical evolution

Quoted in “The Technological Society”

So that Syngenta factory in Huddersfield that we drove past three years ago, and which produces Paraquat to sell in only in the developing world because it’s banned here – is it there by virtue of some iron law of technological development? How do I know what they make there? Because of a case in the High court in which they were fined £200,000 for a leak amounting to three and a half tons of the deadly stuff. How do I know what it does? Because a friend from art school committed suicide with it, and also I was once called to the bedside of a woman in hospital who was lucid and just about conscious and waiting for her organs to fatally break down. She was sedated but the nurses were in pieces.

Ellul seemed to think it was a logical error to suppose that any individual could alter the course of technological development but history has challenged his pessimistic view. In fact paraquat was responsible for so many deaths, both deliberate and accidental that it was banned across the developed world. That it’s still being made in Huddersfield is due to the continued sale of the weed killer in the developing world where, lacking regulation and safety precautions, the company wilfully allows the sale of a mortally dangerous compound. That’s no kind of iron law of technological development but a sign of corporate greed and moral failure at the same level as arms manufacturers who absolve themself from any responsibility for the use of their products to kill and maim. Printing a warning not to ingest a product on the side of a large container that will almost certainly be broken down into unmarked bottles is of no help to a semi-literate subsistence farmer.

Sixty years on from the publication of Ellul’s book we’ve experienced decades of economic growth, and nuclear weapons are way down the list of most peoples’ preoccupations. What bothers us since the Berlin wall came down is that the iron laws of history turned out to be no such thing, and the iron laws of economics have left most of us wondering what all that economic growth has actually brought us in terms of human happiness; and why is there always an enemy worth fighting a war against. And of course, now the earth’s vital systems are closing down; fatally poisoned. But only technology remains untouchable; the shape-shifting beast of the apocalypse like the one with the body of a lion and the head of a man that *Yeats saw in his vision and *RS Thomas mentions: ” …. [whose] hour come round at last,  slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

Well, not so fast! RS says to himself, and weighs the power of the religious past against the power of the “spiritus mundi” – the consciousness, the culture, the spirit of the age. Are we that much in the thrall and power of a technology that watches our every move, predicts and shapes the choices we make to steer us away from dangerously insurrectionary thoughts. Do we really love that technology which impoverishes our lives and takes away jobs without the least scruple and sends the victims to the food banks. Do we really love the technology that feeds us with industrialised food that makes us sick and obese and then blames us. Do we really love the technology that disseminates lies at the speed of light and corrupts democracy. And when we talk about freedom isn’t it usually the trivial kind of freedom to choose between a dozen identical small objects of desire in a supermarket? If it looks like a turd and smells like a turd it probably is a turd and sprinkling a few sparkles on it won’t change its nature.

Of course technology’s principal beneficiaries would like us to believe that there is no alternative, but we’ve seen organic farming and gardening grow and grow. We’ve seen rewilding schemes demonstrating that life without chemicals is possible. We’ve seen regenerative farming gain serious support at government level. We’ve seen the power of vegetarians and vegans to force change in the offer of the food industry. We’ve seen the extraordinary growth of awareness of the coming linked crises of economic collapse, global climatic disaster and the mass extinction of pollinating insects. More particularly we’ve seen how nervous the industrial food complex and the agrochemical industry have become; spending millions on disputing with and then and trashing scientists who challenge their autonomy; funding fake experiments with fake results and spending more millions on lobbyists to bypass the science altogether and knobble the politicians directly.

Why shouldn’t it be true that the writing is on the wall and they know it. All epochal changes or paradigm shifts are like one economist described going bankrupt – it’s very very slow and then it’s very fast.

So now’s the time to hold fast.

And if you’ve stayed with me all these thousand or so words here’s a picture taken today at Porth Neigwl in the teeth of a south westerly gale and sheeting rain at times. Known in English as Hell’s Mouth the wide bay is the scene of innumerable shipwrecks; and reading the information board today I discovered an ironic reference to the fact that a small schooner named The Twelve Apostles was beached and completely wrecked by a fierce storm. Luckily the crew all survived. The problem is that there’s no escape from a southwesterly gale and so the ships – and there were many of them – were inexorably blown in to their doom. Can’t think of a better image of a paradigm shift!

* The WB Yeats poem that I refer to is “The Second Coming”; and RS Thomas wrote the equally marvellous poem “The Moon in Lleyn”.