Why Bother? and the cheap-energy mentality

In the NYT Magazine for last Sunday, Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food - An Eater's Manifesto (in the UK published as In Defence of Food - The Myths of Nutrition and the Pleasures of Eating) has written a really brilliant comment piece called "Why Bother?". He poses the question that so many pose, and then immediately give up - in the face of the enormity of environmental peril and climate change: how can my actions possibly make a difference? Pollan says his heart sank when at the end of Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth, his exhortation is for everyone to change their light bulbs. (Yeah, that really does bite. Thanks for that, Al.) After making a rather weak appeal (in my opinion, but I guess one does have to choose ones words, and the article is already four pages, very economically worded) to out-of-fashion concepts like virtue and community, he turns to the even more out-of-fashion Wendell Berry, a man with whom we should all be (but possibly some of us are not) familiar. Berry was the originator of the "cheap-energy mentality" critique. This is getting more to the heart of the matter, as Pollan points out that it is cheap energy, the division of labour, and the resultant atomisation of communities that both contributes massively to global warning and at the same time, makes changing our ways so impossible, and even impossible to think about or understand.
Then, thankfully, after laying out the utter hopelessness of the case, he turns to hope. You can only do what you can do, and he does give reasons why we should do it. So the task now is to decide - what is the most effective thing to do, the most urgent, and also fully within the realm of possibility? (Hint: it's not light bulbs, it's not "carbon offsets" and it's not writing a cheque or joining a club.) The answer is to grow your own food. Yep, just exactly what all us hippies said to do way back in 1970. Damn shame we were all too high to make a coherent point.

Hurricanes may hardly ever happen . . .

. . . in Hampshire, according to Professor 'iggins. But what about tornadoes?

An Inconvenient Truth (a film)

I am not sure what this trailer is trying to say, except that it concerns a film called An Inconvenient Truth. I am not sure what the "41,974 people" thing is or why it is in "selected theatres" or if it will later be in general release or if anyone is trying to found a movement around it. But anyway, there it is. An inconvenient truth indeed.

Flying kills

George Monbiot is never one to mince words, and todays column in the Guardian is a classic example. The uncompromising headline above, Flying Kills, is prelude to an uncompromising look at the massive impact that air travel has on the planet. It looks unflinchingly (well, maybe a little flinchingly, in fact) at the disparity in income levels between those who use the air the most, those who can barely ever afford to, and those who suffer most from the consequences and the article is especially unsparing of those who know perfectly well how harmful it is but have no intention at all of changing their own behaviour. Then of course, from the personal to the political, there is the institutionalised support for the continued growth (a new Heathrow every five years) and the almost total lack of viable alternatives, whether in modes of travel or fuel for aircraft.

Thinking nationally and acting pro-actively . . .

In Which parts of the U.S. have put themselves in nature's way? the online environmental magazine Weekly Grist attempts to predict where the next Katrina-style disaster for the US might occur. Complete with interactive topgraphic map and scary symbols.

California fires

Still raging on, still killing people and destroying lives. This is now a major story everywhere in the world.

Only in Britain

. . . could you have this story. Bookies lose shirts as record tumbles, says the Guardian (and in a special report, no less!) What record is this that has such an enormous impact? Why, the weather, the temperature! And the really British thing about it is that, even though temperatures have officially been measured in Celsius for decades, it was the "magic" numbers of 99 and 100 on the F scale that the punters bet on. This so wonderfully combines the British impulse for silly vices (they will bet on literally anything) and the obsession with the weather (which outstrips even Minnesota's, though I would not have thought that possible.)
Does the fact that I am blogging about it mean I have gone native at last? God, I hope not.