A previously unpublished rant

This is something I wrote a few weeks back, kind of similar in theme to the article below. I thought I had posted it already, but I don't see it on the blog. So here it is:

It's funny this world of convenience we live in. For example, imagine the amount of energy and material it takes to make every plastic water or soda bottle you buy and casually dispose of. Little toxic bombs in everybody's hands. But there is no complaint about this phenomenon. When the price of gas goes up a few cents, or when the average temperature of Earth goes up a few degrees there is hysteria and global conferences called. What is really going on is that people are not spending enough time thinking about how they are living. A few cents more at the pumps doesn't add up to too much, no one's a hundred percent that fixing the carbon problem will reduce the temperature, but goddamn it if we washed a glass or a fork once in while would it kill us?

Sometimes I like to think of how people fit in the overall plan of evolution. Where are we compared to the dinosaurs and the death of the Sun. Will other beings someday mine down to our civilization, using are garbage dumps as an energy source in a time where the Sun's rays are starting to ebb a bit. Are we just some wonderful interim experiment of what happens when you take the two elements of life--the Adam and Eve, if you will--and cast them into an environment such as our own.

What puzzles me a bit is our insistence that for in order for intelligent life to exist on other planets they must have conditions like our own. A stable atmosphere, a moderate temperature, water. Well what if the seeds that scatter to those stars become other beings; what if they adapt to rivers of lava and million mile an hour winds. I tell you something, we wouldn't stand a chance against those boys if they decided to wage intergalactic war.

I can see how some people just don't care that much about what they do. Their lives are consumed by who they will be, rather than who they are. I suppose it is a perfectly natural, and perhaps essential trait on the grand scale. But the problem is that there are so many good people trying to be more than they aught, and too many great brains out there bent on convincing them. If there was half the energy it took to tell people to buy Gucci or Baskin Robbins put into a campaign about how all bottles should be reused as often as possible, it would be topsy-turvey and insane, but I for one would like to see it.

Right now I am drinking a bottle of 7-Up, one of many I have consumed over my life time. I think of the massive populating of this place over the last 200 years. How it has become profitable to put a soda in a plastic bottle designed for disposal. What a short and crazy trip from staking claims to living in big urban centres. That's what Canada is, the great land grab. A new land, claimed by a shrewd crew of English traders and an hearty bunch of French settlers. And then of course there are the founding peoples. A diverse group of nations, many of whom were subjected to harsh forms of cultural, if not actual genocide, that live among us today. When one adds the many Asians, Africans, Arab and Island people that come here it makes for quite an international stew.

That is what we should be proudest of. Not our seat in the exclusive G7 club, not even our hockey championships (although we should be damn proud of those). What we should be proudest of, and work hardest at, is the fact that we are all people from different places. And assuming our species can weather a few extra degrees, and the continuing possibility of all out nuclear holocaust, in a few hundred years we'll all be Irish-Polish-Tahitian-Jamaican-Tasmanian-Burundi-Cree-French-Korean and so on.

Now we are all here in this new free for all land that no one really knew was here (except for the original peoples of course) a land that is full of resources and so much space. Endless space with a great big Jambalaya of humans who like to drink soda from plastic bottles and drive cars. Most of us live in a few very concentrated spots near the southern boarder and would never dream of doing otherwise.

But being a pissy-pants about how other people live gets boring sometimes. It's not easy being a curmudgeon. Sometimes I like to just live too. Like yesterday when we took the holiday Monday and went to the beach. Those are the days when I can just hang up that bitter old critic and dig into life. Watching people, playing Frisbee having a mini barbecue on the grass at Bird's Hill's fake lake. That's what life is all about, the rest, quite frankly is nonsense.

The New Asceticism

I’m not much of an admirer of the current “Climate Change” fever that has politicians and popular personalities of all stripes singing and dancing for massive change. My much vilified university professor, Tim Ball, taught us to be skeptical, if not downright hostile, to the doomsayers of Climate Change, and though I am no-one’s toady or disciple I will admit that my skepticism continues in the face of considerable public sentiment to the contrary.

The earth has seen massive climate change before the industrial age, and in all likelihood it will see such changes again in future eons when our species is no longer dominant. It is possible that the carbon we produce so much of these days is a significant factor in the Earth’s warming, on the other hand, no-one is sure what the weather will be like next Wednesday, so who’s to say what really causes weather, and what doesn’t. Climate scientists may claim to know what is going on, but the priests and sages of eras past have spoken with as much authority only to be debunked.

However, to me the most interesting thing about our current green obsession is not what we believe is happening to our earth, but the way in which we frame how we will make changes to prevent disaster.

For instance, we insist that there must be other ways to produce energy efficiently and are so eager to believe this that we invest in dubious technologies like bio-fuels. Currently bio-fuels consume tremendous amounts of farmland and tax dollars to produce a negligible benefit. Perhaps in time we will master the extraction of fuels from plant-life, but so far it has proven to be a wasteful and expensive dream. Nonetheless bio-fuels remain a portent myth in the race to solve the climate change riddle.

The one, most obvious, solution to this problem however gets very little ink, and virtually no sound-bites. It is an idea that is as old as civilization itself, something that has been practiced by people of all times and ages whether by choice, or far more often, by necessity. It is called: living with less. Whereas virtually every argument one reads for the adoption of green technology contains some nod toward sustainable growth there is barely a soul alive who would propose that we move toward sustainable shrinkage.

The orthodoxy of modern economics posits that a civilization, in order to be successful and relevant in global terms, must continue to grow at all costs. Even as populations shrink in the nations most guilty of carbon spewing (with the noted exception of the United States) we continue to obsess over how we can go green and keep growing.

Here’s a radical thought. Why don’t we see what it would be like to not be so fixated on our status. How about we build homes that are affordable to heat and cool rather than massive, energy sucking monuments to our own perceived greatness and success. What if we had say one vehicle per family that reflected our needs rather than our annual salaries. Could we get by without lettuce in the dead of winter, and extravagant trips to foreign climbs? If we made more of an effort to live within our means would we still feel the guilt and doom of a future with no polar ice-caps and a prolonged hurricane season?

Like so much of what appears to be relevant today Climate Change is a product of hype and is mired in hyperbole. I am all for changing the way we live on Earth, for using less, working more on ourselves and less for our economies and for spending more time getting to know this fabulous biosphere we call home. But I don’t want to do it because jet-setting millionaires like Al Gore, Bono and Leonardo DiCapprio think it’s a good idea, and I don’t want to do it so Ford can sell me a new car that runs on rabbit food. I want to do it because I believe that our lives are about more than what we have owned when we die, and because I believe that a good, moral life is worthwhile despite the presence or absence of God(s), contrite politicians, Hollywood celebrities or speculative science.

I want to do it because I believe future generations have the right to enjoy the bounty of this planet, but should do so believing that the greatest imperative is take what is necessary and not more. If global warming continues to happen apace it will probably be the most valuable lesson we could learn.

HTML lesson from a know-it-all

Hi Ren,

I know I told you how to make a link on blogger, but I'm a bit of a know-it-all, as you may recall, and I like to show off my nerdy prowess. As a consequence of my peculiar vanity I thought I'd take a second to explain a bit of HTML. When you know how to do it manually you can leave links in the comments section of ALFA and impress your friends in other important ways.**

• First you use a triangluar bracket: "<" these brackets are always used in HTML to indicate that the text inside is a command, not an actual bit of text.
• After the bracket you type an "a". The "a" stands for Anchor--not entirely sure why Anchor, but it helps to remember the "a" if you know what it stands for.
  
• After that you leave a space and type "href" where "h" is short for "hypertext" and "ref" is short for "reference".
  
• Then you put an "=," for equals.
  
• After the "=" you must place a quotation mark otherwise the link will only refer to another page from the current web address no matter what you type as your link.
• Then you enter your address.
  
• Behind the address you place another quotation mark, and a closing triangle bracket ">" to close that portion of the command.
  
• Then you type the text you want the viewer to see eg. "link".
  
• After this you must end the command. You do this by putting another triangle bracket, then a forward slash "/" with an "a" meaning "stop anchor", then a closing bracket. After this all your text will be normal again.

It should look like this:

<a href="http://www.geostationarybananaovertexas.com">link</a>

The result is this: link

**Relevant, if useless, tidbit: I first gained entry into the inner sanctum of ALFA when I revealed this bit of web wisdom to Dave in a comment.

p.s. I have also blogged this email on the disclaimer.

Your Banner Ads Suck

A little bit of hate mail for the editors of the Free Press's on-line edition:

Dear Web Masters,

Do you know how distracting it is to read any of your paper on-line? Have you tried to read an article with all the banners that flash around the corners of your eye? I had forgotten just what a pain in the ass it is until I decided to try a new browser that I have not installed an ad-blocker on. It is in fact a mild form of torture. Were it not for the fact that your banners are animated to an annoying extent it is possible that I would never have bothered to seek out an ad-blocker for my previous browser in the first place. Static ads aren't that troublesome, they are far easier to ignore, they may even be something I read from time to time. But animated banners are an entirely different matter.

I don't have any statistics on how effective animated ads are vs. static ones, but for me personally I am far less likely to purchase a product or service from an advertiser who annoys me. I urge you to read a few articles in your paper with ad-blockers off just to see what I mean. Perhaps you can launch an unofficial poll to see what readers think. My guess is that the majority will agree that animating banners is bothersome and distracting and not very effective in terms of sales.