Just asking!
A thin, grey light began to seep through the skylight. Snug and warm, I cracked one eye open. Protruding my feet from beneath the cozy covers, I rose into the day one toe at a time. Yesterday had been crackling cold, today was back to the normal dank drizzling wet of a coastal winter. I made coffee and reviewed the news headlines. Buried amid the tales of war and corruption is a story about the machinery we have dropped onto the face of Mars. Of all the data it is busy gathering, the audio recording of the Martian wind leaves us spellbound. A gentle murmuring over the face of our marvellous contraption is soothing, like a summer breeze in long grass. That sound is one more encouragement on our quest to find our way home, somewhere out there.
Well, that’s how my next blog began. Then I received an e-mail from a good friend in response to some remarks I’ve recently made. I replied and the rant is on! I haven’t posted a good rant for a long time.
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Hello Fred. It seems that many of the self proclaimed environmentalists have never left a city, have no idea how goods are transported, where the minerals that are used to make the every day essential goods we use come from nor how they are mined. We have a whole group of citizens who are educated by books and yet are totally clueless about the real world. Now unfortunately we have elected politicians that come from this group!! It does not bode well for our future. I would like to see them all go back to the caveman days. Walk, don’t ride bicycles because iron and aluminum have to be mined to manufacture the components to make bicycles. Live in caves because God help us if we cut down a tree! What a bunch of hypocrites they are to eat food that has to be trucked here from warmer climates where it can be grown. Oh and don’t let them buy anything made in China! Make them use sticks and bones as tools, and NO GORTEX high tech synthetic clothing that may have been made by petroleum byproducts. AAAAHHHHH!!!
Well, I have to go now. I am going to drive my diesel pickup truck to the store and buy some grapes grown in Chile and a bottle of South African wine, and I’m not going to feel guilty about it one bit.
Jimmy:
Will the wine be enjoyed with a New Zealand Lamb roast or Australian beef? Either way it came on a ship made in China fuelled with oil from Romania and delivered to your store in a Japanese truck rolling on tires made in Korea. And why, I ask, are we, in BC of all places, eating seafood from Asia? Even the otters are apparently getting into the act! (Remember Koi Boy?) Once again I offer my old saw about the chicken farmer who goes to town to buy eggs.
It is the biggest ongoing rant I have. In British Columbia, which with its natural boundaries, immense resources of energy, industry, clean water and agriculture could be a very, very wealthy sovereign state. (I’m quite in favour of the idea of Cascadia.) Anyone who can put down their I-pad and sweat, maybe even bleed a little and get some dirt on their hands, in other words produce something, should be wealthy. Instead, we import folks who are willing to do the grunt work and then regard them as inferior beings and complain if they get ahead in life.
We could, and should be, completely self-sufficient for food. We have been in the past. Those monster green houses in the lower mainland area could easily grow tea, coffee and citrus fruits instead of the marijuana they probably will cultivate in the future. The price for one cauliflower in the store yesterday was $8.99! That is to cover, I assume, the immense amount of diesel required to move it from Mexico to Vancouver Island. Or perhaps, from a Vancouver Island farm to a Toronto warehouse and then back here! Gawd! You now need to take out a mortgage to acquire a handful of asparagus! As you know, I have no acumen for financial management but I do understand that before you go off spending money on anything else, you figure out how to first feed yourself. We have, or had, very prime farmland throughout the province but we’ve managed to flood it, pave it over for malls and roads, or build subdivisions and golf courses. And, think of all the food we could grow if we simply replaced the expensive vanity and environmental stupidity of our lawns with vegetable gardens. Why are we importing any foodstuff? It is sheer political genius multiplied by our collective idiocy and comfort zone apathy.
We indeed will end up back in the caves as we deserve. We may now be able to listen to the Martian wind, but have learned bugger-all of basic value about living on this planet. With all of our technology we have dummied ourselves into a state of mental oblivion. A few years back someone came up with the bright notion of only consuming food produced within 60 KM of home. WOW! That’s original. The human race has been doing that in a much tighter radius for millennia. We don’t need rocket science to feed ourselves. Remember the Paul Simon lyrics? “Isn’t that astute, why don’t we call ourselves an institute?”
On a parallel note I watched a report on Scotland’s green energy program last night. Their goal is to be 100% green in a few years and are now rising through the 80% mark. This is a country which until recently, relied entirely on coal and its own rich resource of North Sea oil and gas. (England switched from coal to nuclear power years ago and is realizing the horrible pitfalls of that.)The Scots are now placing tidal generators on the ocean floor of their coastal waters, each of which will supply the needs of 1000 homes. They do not rely on sunlight or wind but use the regular and predictable diurnal tidal currents. They can calculate the energy that will be produced over the next twenty years simply by consulting the tidal books. I have advocated for that here in BC for decades. Both our coastal ocean currents and our mighty rivers produce massive amounts of unharnessed clean energy. Think of the electricity we could produce without flooding another inch of land or erecting ugly expensive wind generators. River turbines in Europe have proven themselves long ago. A few years ago, on the banks of Northumberland Channel near Nanaimo there was a serious proposal to build a natural gas-powered generating station. That immediately beside uncalculated kilowatts of eternal unharnessed tidal energy. The gas has to piped to Vancouver Island. Just what were they thinking? Fortunately, for once, public outcry was massive and the project was abandoned.
Oh to hell with it. At my age it’s easier to just move south and live with the unique problems down there. At least they grow their own food. Cave For Sale!
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Well, so it goes for two old farts who are still audacious enough to ask WTF! We may not have any answers, but refuse to live in a world where asking for simple logic seems increasingly out of order. And… I don’t know how to say Baaaaaaaaaa with a down-under accent.
Three more quotes from Thomas Sowell:
“People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.”
“Stopping illegal immigration would mean that wages would have to rise to a level where Americans would want the jobs currently taken by illegal aliens.”
“You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.”
Best blog of the year Fred!!
Well done Old Friend. I recently saw a quote that said: ” Good judgment comes from experience and experience, well that comes from bad judgment”.
What a world we live in.
Thanks for your inspiration. I love the quotes of Thomas Sowell… a guy I’d really like to drink beer with!
I like your reply to your friend, Fred – very good and well stated. The info about Scotland was especially encouraging. More examples like this need to be shared if we’re to have the hope and motivation our species needs to survive what we’ve brought on ourselves and our fellow creatures on this planet
As for your friend’s attitude to environmentalists: I believe he’s taking the easy route by falling prey to stereotypes that fit reality far less often than he might realize. This environmentalist left the city in 1977 and has never gone back. I worked for two decades as an environmental leader and my work was very much in the “real world”, in collaboration with folks from all walks of life including many from the blue-collar world. Nowadays, since I no longer have to put in 12-hour days on those duties anymore or attend what felt like endless meetings (though others do, for which I’m eternally grateful), my husband and I are able to live on a 60-metre diet, growing almost all of our own food – and for the little we buy, making sure we know where it comes from, how it was grown and how it’s transported. We drive an electric vehicle and keep our travel to a minimum, knowing the world can’t afford for us to act differently. We are not unique – there are lots of others who strive to live this way, even in the city. Knowing that many of these folks are a lot younger than me is one of my main sources of hope these days.
Thanks Laurie
Well, here i sit on my french made bought purchased in the us, imported into Canada, outfitted with sails from South Africa and Sri lanka with winches from Britain etc etc but sitting in a tropical anchorage wondering why I can’t buy some great Canadian maple syrup
Well…if you stopped asking for it in Cantonese…! Yep, it’s crazy out there. Remember that the Flat Earth Society has members all around the globe.