KW-48 In which many things fell to pieces

I also broke a few of them myself

The movement of the continents and oceans which make up the earth’s crust strike me as a particularly apposite metaphor for humankind. Whilst the tectonic subduction of nature by the unstoppable drive of man’s ingenuity is still held up unquestioningly as the force that will save us, the rifts cleaved in the landscape or our existence go uncommented.

Poor pigges. It’s all terribly muddy down at the pig house. But, I made them a table to eat off, so they aren’t snouting around in the muck too much, Can you still tell them apart.

Human Progress, our technology-powered unremitting search for growth at all costs is what got us into this mess, and the ideological belief that it will get us out again is a thought which exists just about as far from sensible as you can get.

Every (now abandoned) hope of 1.5 relied on technologies which did not exist. All of them. There has never been a projection which implied the possibility of our ecosystem (and hence us) surviving which did not have all the heavy lifting done by technologies sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable from magic.¹

And then I found this on the internet.²

"They imagine modifying the human body to digest cellulose, turning plastic into food, tasting smog, extracting spices and medicines from sewage, and growing meat in the lab."

Oh, for fuck’s sake. Can we please not. I desperately want to believe that this, if it is not satire, is not a thing which the authors actually believe. I would be happier believing that a couple of stoners came up with an idea for a truly dystopian book which, somehow, they ran with, and by the time it was finished, they figured they might as well publish it. It makes me slightly less angry than the idea that anyone anywhere in the world would actually consider a world like this to be viable.

I tried to get a pictorial sense of how much wood I chopped this week, but I can’t get it into the camera. Let’s say a lot.

I want apples and plums, potatoes and sweetcorn. I want fresh tomatoes, lettuces in season and fruits preserved in jars and called “jam”.

In whose mind is “tasting smog”, whatever the jolly christ that is supposed to mean, a better solution than “learning how to make compost”?

I know who. The exact same people who, having been properly forewarned about collapse, did absolutely nothing about it, because they had a deadline at work, and a dinner party to plan, and a holiday in the summer . They trusted in technology. They believed humans would clever us out of this. And they will complain about how the politicians did nothing³ and the bastard billionaires produced more waste than a small town⁴, and that it's all terrifically unfair.

there’s a hole in the wall where the rain gets in. It stops my mind from wandering

In actual barracks news, I have such a fabby plan for the study. Over the last two years, I have accumulated everything I need (I think), from metal-protecting spray paint to sheets of expanded polystyrene. So, I finally started. The metal in a much worse state than I thought, but once it’s done, it should be nice and snug in there.

Also, the Bezirksschornsteinfegermeister (love that word! He’s the head chimney sweep!) came round and laughed at my wood burning stove in the kitchen. I have to move it. Which he explained with the word Physics. It is a bit of a bummer because it’s one of the few jobs that I actually 100% finished inside the loft. Finished, but wrong. So that’s a biggie for this week.

I thought I was going to tell you all about it in this week’s missive, but I had a rant instead.

All the best, and with much piratey love

your

Pirate Ben

xoxo

1. Arthur C. Clarke, not me.

2. https://www.presentindicative.com/collections/new/products/the-anthropocene-cookbook-recipes-and-opportunities-for-future-catastrophes

3. True

4. Also true