The majority of Guardian articles are all very worthy investigations into the illegal hacking down of rainforests in order to make luxurious tree houses for the children of corrupt oil tycoons, and how the UK's rampant consumerism is helping to turn the world into an apocalyptic, slurry covered wasteland. So why is it that the 'Weekending' section of the Guardian's Saturday magazine is full of glossy photos of horrendously overpriced, useless items such as 'A Purple Tartan Bag, by English Eccentrics' (£395), or better still, a 'Fiji Bistro Table from John Lewis' (£150) ?
That would pay for a family of Sudanese refugees to eat a McDonalds Happy Meal every day for about a month, that would. And I can't stand all that smug crap about property investment and reviews of £20 ' Space NK Cool Feet Airbrush Catwalk Foot Spray' (yes, a foot spray that costs £20, you heard correctly) and adverts for second homes in France- with pools of course. I can't even afford to buy one house, never mind two. And the only way I'll ever end up with a pool is if the sea levels rise and flood the stairwell in my block of flats.
It's all very hypocritical. I'll happily bet you £20 (which would buy me a very cool pair of airbrushed, catwalk-perfect feet) that the Fiji Bistro Table is made from illegally sourced rainforest timber and held together by glue made from melted rhino horn and tiger's kidneys.
I like the David Shrigley cartoons though.
Tuesday, 17 July 2007
Tuesday, 12 June 2007
Thunder Without Rain
One of the main things that Eliot's deserted, sterile Waste Land lacks is water. The poem is packed with references to dryness, water and drought. In lines 332-337 Eliot says, "If there were water we should stop and drink /Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think". Followed by numerous entreaties: 'If there were the sound of water only'...'if there were water'...'a spring, a pool amongst the rock'...'but there is no water.'
In line 342 he tells of, "dry sterile thunder without rain".
Hope is as essential to life as water, but it has been gradually evaporating for some time now. With every new scare or apocalyptic prediction more people throw in the towel and wonder whether there is any point in trying to sort things out anymore. Personally, I just can't decide what I should be most worried about. A few months ago I chose climate change. The figurative societal drought envisioned by Eliot is rapidly becoming an actual one, particularly in Third World countries without the protective financial buffer that surrounds the developed world (meaning that all we currently experience is a muted sense of the weather not quite behaving as it should). But that state of affairs may not last much longer. The planet is currently in water crisis, meaning that since the Earth is beyond its carrying capacity with respect to available fresh water. Year 2025 forecasts state that two thirds of the world population will be without safe drinking water and basic sanitation services. This, I thought, was a good thing to focus my worry on.
However, I opened my newspaper on Saturday to find that the stony faced, dead-eyed Russian President Vladimir Putin is threatening a new Cold War. Apparently, the Kremlin is considering active counter-measures in response to Washington's decision to base interceptor missiles and radar installations in Poland and the Czech Republic, a move Russia says will change "the world's strategic stability" Fabulous, that's just great. But that's not all. A nuclear holocaust would at least be a showy, big budget end to civilization, as opposed to the far stranger threat posed by something called Colony Collapse Disorder. The colonies in question are bee colonies. From 1971 to 2006 approximately half of all honey bee colonies have vanished, but this decline includes the cumulative losses from all factors such as urbanization, pesticide use and has been somewhat gradual. Late in the year 2006 and in early 2007 however, the rate of disappearance suddenly reached new proportions, and the term "Colony Collapse Disorder" was proposed to describe this sudden rash of disappearances.
Why should you care, I hear you ask. Well, I read this rather bleak prediction in the press recently: "If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man." Have you got time to worry about the decline of bees and other pollinators though? I doubt it. The media doesn't even allow you time to catch your breath before it launches another showy, dramatic threat. The Supervolcano. Super in the sense of being alarmingly huge, rather than in any way fabulous or jolly. Only a handful exist in the world but when one erupts it will be unlike any volcano we have ever witnessed. The explosion will be heard around the world. The sky will darken, black rain will fall, and the Earth will be plunged into the equivalent of a nuclear winter. With the cheerful expression of a weathergirl predicting torrential rain for the bank holiday weekend, they then casually drop in the fact that the Supervolcano under Yellowstone Park in America is a few thousand years overdue for an eruption.
With all this, I bet some of you have forgotten to worry about Avian Flu. Just because the papers have stopped harping on about it doesn't mean that the threat has gone away. On September 29 2005, the newly-appointed Senior United Nations System Coordinator for Avian and Human Influenza, warned the world that an outbreak of avian influenza could kill anywhere between 5 million and 150 million people. Experts have identified key events (for example infecting new species, spreading to new areas) marking the progression of an avian flu virus towards becoming pandemic, and many of those key events have occurred more rapidly than expected. Woo hoo!
This is usually the point where the last trickle of hope drains away into the dry, red rock and I begin to think 'sod it, what's the point?' It's a phenomenon that I've decided to call worry fatigue. The symptoms include: spending all your money on nonsense, distracting gadgets and beer, not saving money for the future because you don't think you'll have one, not investing in a pension fund or in property for the same reason and generally living only in the present. You take out hundreds of credit cards and max them all out buying rubbish that you don't need. You take out loans and go on expensive holidays that you can't afford. The whole country is essentially behaving like a patient that's just been told they have six months to live. It's a culture of mindless, panicky consumption for consumption's sake which can only have negative consequences for the world as a whole, in particular the environment.
So, I offer you this meagre drip of hope, which will hopefully be the first drop in a more substantial downfall to come: stop this cycle of fear and greed. Ignore 90% of what you read in the papers, especially the tabloids. It's just 'thunder without rain': they feed you overblown, worrying stories (often about the dangers of climate change and the consequent threat to the Earth) which in turn leads to a sense of despair that you try to quell with relentless consumerism. This consumerism then leads to more damage, as China and other Eastern countries step up to the challenge of feeding the greedy West's desire for cheap, attractive goods. To create this massive flood of tat and cheap knickers, China needs vast amounts of energy which in turn raises the price of oil in the West meaning that any money you've saved through buying £3 Tesco t-shirts is drained out of you on your way home when you pull over at the local service station to fill up with increasingly expensive petrol.
If you want any more information about the incredible level of environmental damage being caused by the rapid growth of Chinese industry, feel free to click here. I warn you though, it's pretty depressing.
But it doesn't have to be like this. Just make a few small changes, don't assume that you can't do any good and don't be put off by doomsayers. In the words of the aforementioned supermarket giant (and all round bad guys) Tesco: 'Every Little Helps.' Stop using plastic bags, get a couple of reusable ones instead. Recycle more. Get a bike and cycle to work. Awareness is growing, people are starting to realise that it's not impossible to turn things around. Here is just one of several environmental good news stories available on thingsaregood.com
'The World Bank has gone into the national park business. While financing a large dam on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia, the Bank insisted on protecting 800,000 acres of forest on the watershed above the dam. The trees regulate water runoff and prevent the dam from silting up. Since many endangered species live there, the forest has become a tropical research station, bringing in foreign exchange from visiting scientists.'
I don't know what do do about that giant volcano though. Sorry.
In line 342 he tells of, "dry sterile thunder without rain".
Hope is as essential to life as water, but it has been gradually evaporating for some time now. With every new scare or apocalyptic prediction more people throw in the towel and wonder whether there is any point in trying to sort things out anymore. Personally, I just can't decide what I should be most worried about. A few months ago I chose climate change. The figurative societal drought envisioned by Eliot is rapidly becoming an actual one, particularly in Third World countries without the protective financial buffer that surrounds the developed world (meaning that all we currently experience is a muted sense of the weather not quite behaving as it should). But that state of affairs may not last much longer. The planet is currently in water crisis, meaning that since the Earth is beyond its carrying capacity with respect to available fresh water. Year 2025 forecasts state that two thirds of the world population will be without safe drinking water and basic sanitation services. This, I thought, was a good thing to focus my worry on.
However, I opened my newspaper on Saturday to find that the stony faced, dead-eyed Russian President Vladimir Putin is threatening a new Cold War. Apparently, the Kremlin is considering active counter-measures in response to Washington's decision to base interceptor missiles and radar installations in Poland and the Czech Republic, a move Russia says will change "the world's strategic stability" Fabulous, that's just great. But that's not all. A nuclear holocaust would at least be a showy, big budget end to civilization, as opposed to the far stranger threat posed by something called Colony Collapse Disorder. The colonies in question are bee colonies. From 1971 to 2006 approximately half of all honey bee colonies have vanished, but this decline includes the cumulative losses from all factors such as urbanization, pesticide use and has been somewhat gradual. Late in the year 2006 and in early 2007 however, the rate of disappearance suddenly reached new proportions, and the term "Colony Collapse Disorder" was proposed to describe this sudden rash of disappearances.
Why should you care, I hear you ask. Well, I read this rather bleak prediction in the press recently: "If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man." Have you got time to worry about the decline of bees and other pollinators though? I doubt it. The media doesn't even allow you time to catch your breath before it launches another showy, dramatic threat. The Supervolcano. Super in the sense of being alarmingly huge, rather than in any way fabulous or jolly. Only a handful exist in the world but when one erupts it will be unlike any volcano we have ever witnessed. The explosion will be heard around the world. The sky will darken, black rain will fall, and the Earth will be plunged into the equivalent of a nuclear winter. With the cheerful expression of a weathergirl predicting torrential rain for the bank holiday weekend, they then casually drop in the fact that the Supervolcano under Yellowstone Park in America is a few thousand years overdue for an eruption.
With all this, I bet some of you have forgotten to worry about Avian Flu. Just because the papers have stopped harping on about it doesn't mean that the threat has gone away. On September 29 2005, the newly-appointed Senior United Nations System Coordinator for Avian and Human Influenza, warned the world that an outbreak of avian influenza could kill anywhere between 5 million and 150 million people. Experts have identified key events (for example infecting new species, spreading to new areas) marking the progression of an avian flu virus towards becoming pandemic, and many of those key events have occurred more rapidly than expected. Woo hoo!
This is usually the point where the last trickle of hope drains away into the dry, red rock and I begin to think 'sod it, what's the point?' It's a phenomenon that I've decided to call worry fatigue. The symptoms include: spending all your money on nonsense, distracting gadgets and beer, not saving money for the future because you don't think you'll have one, not investing in a pension fund or in property for the same reason and generally living only in the present. You take out hundreds of credit cards and max them all out buying rubbish that you don't need. You take out loans and go on expensive holidays that you can't afford. The whole country is essentially behaving like a patient that's just been told they have six months to live. It's a culture of mindless, panicky consumption for consumption's sake which can only have negative consequences for the world as a whole, in particular the environment.
So, I offer you this meagre drip of hope, which will hopefully be the first drop in a more substantial downfall to come: stop this cycle of fear and greed. Ignore 90% of what you read in the papers, especially the tabloids. It's just 'thunder without rain': they feed you overblown, worrying stories (often about the dangers of climate change and the consequent threat to the Earth) which in turn leads to a sense of despair that you try to quell with relentless consumerism. This consumerism then leads to more damage, as China and other Eastern countries step up to the challenge of feeding the greedy West's desire for cheap, attractive goods. To create this massive flood of tat and cheap knickers, China needs vast amounts of energy which in turn raises the price of oil in the West meaning that any money you've saved through buying £3 Tesco t-shirts is drained out of you on your way home when you pull over at the local service station to fill up with increasingly expensive petrol.
If you want any more information about the incredible level of environmental damage being caused by the rapid growth of Chinese industry, feel free to click here. I warn you though, it's pretty depressing.
But it doesn't have to be like this. Just make a few small changes, don't assume that you can't do any good and don't be put off by doomsayers. In the words of the aforementioned supermarket giant (and all round bad guys) Tesco: 'Every Little Helps.' Stop using plastic bags, get a couple of reusable ones instead. Recycle more. Get a bike and cycle to work. Awareness is growing, people are starting to realise that it's not impossible to turn things around. Here is just one of several environmental good news stories available on thingsaregood.com
'The World Bank has gone into the national park business. While financing a large dam on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia, the Bank insisted on protecting 800,000 acres of forest on the watershed above the dam. The trees regulate water runoff and prevent the dam from silting up. Since many endangered species live there, the forest has become a tropical research station, bringing in foreign exchange from visiting scientists.'
I don't know what do do about that giant volcano though. Sorry.
Thursday, 31 May 2007
What are you doing?
It’s hard to fight the feeling that ours is a civilization in decline. When T.S. Eliot wrote The Waste Land in 1922, he set out to record this decline and to allow existence itself to give voice to its own meaninglessness and sterility. He mimicked the banal, futile chatter of day to day life:
“If you don't like it you can get on with it, I said.”
“Others can pick and choose if you can't.”
“But if Albert makes off, it won't be for lack of telling.”
“You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique.”
“(And her only thirty-one.)”
But we don’t need T.S. Eliot anymore (which is lucky, since he’s dead). No, we have Twitter to record society's vacant, witless ramblings. In case you don’t know, Twitter is a ‘micro-blog’ site. It’s a blog for people who can’t be bothered to sit down and actually write a blog, instead they just post ‘updates’ of no more than 140 characters. No doubt Eliot’s blank-eyed chatterers would have been amongst the first to sign up.
The clue’s in the name. The word ‘Twitter’ is an amalgam of ‘twit and witter’ which is vastly appropriate as it seems ideally suited to wittering twits. You don’t have to think of a subject or plan and write a detailed or structured entry, all you need to do is answer the daily question, which is the never changing ‘what are you doing?’ and over a period of weeks you create a patchwork quilt of banality. ‘Eating toast’, ‘not much’, ‘sitting at my computer’, ‘getting ready to go to the shop’, ‘chilling’, ‘drinking beer’, 'about to go to bed', ‘waiting for a pizza’. It’s a record of countless thousands of empty lives, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
However, it's statistically unlikely (if not impossible) that absolutely everyone on Twitter is a vacuous idiot. The fact is, 140 characters is not enough to allow you to express anything other than the most basic information, so even if you want to wax lyrical or fully express an interesting thought or idea, you can’t. It’s virtually impossible to sound intelligent using Twitter. Even Stephen Hawking would sound dimwitted. ‘Just finished writing another book about the Universe and stuff. Going to have early night tonight.’
Twitter's format alone is a telling sign of current societal trends: the posts require the bare minuimum of mental input on the part of the user. They have no real subject, require very little time or effort to create and are essentially pointless. It's entirely based in the present: 'What are you doing?' It asks. People are encouraged to 'live in the moment.' The past has been all but eradicated, few people have a really good grasp of history due to the dumbing down of the subject in schools. The future is too alarming to contemplate, with one apocalyptic scare after another. In such a climate, it's little wonder why the simplistic immediacy of Twitter is so popular.
It’s a digital desert: the Waste Land of the internet.
“If you don't like it you can get on with it, I said.”
“Others can pick and choose if you can't.”
“But if Albert makes off, it won't be for lack of telling.”
“You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique.”
“(And her only thirty-one.)”
But we don’t need T.S. Eliot anymore (which is lucky, since he’s dead). No, we have Twitter to record society's vacant, witless ramblings. In case you don’t know, Twitter is a ‘micro-blog’ site. It’s a blog for people who can’t be bothered to sit down and actually write a blog, instead they just post ‘updates’ of no more than 140 characters. No doubt Eliot’s blank-eyed chatterers would have been amongst the first to sign up.
The clue’s in the name. The word ‘Twitter’ is an amalgam of ‘twit and witter’ which is vastly appropriate as it seems ideally suited to wittering twits. You don’t have to think of a subject or plan and write a detailed or structured entry, all you need to do is answer the daily question, which is the never changing ‘what are you doing?’ and over a period of weeks you create a patchwork quilt of banality. ‘Eating toast’, ‘not much’, ‘sitting at my computer’, ‘getting ready to go to the shop’, ‘chilling’, ‘drinking beer’, 'about to go to bed', ‘waiting for a pizza’. It’s a record of countless thousands of empty lives, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
However, it's statistically unlikely (if not impossible) that absolutely everyone on Twitter is a vacuous idiot. The fact is, 140 characters is not enough to allow you to express anything other than the most basic information, so even if you want to wax lyrical or fully express an interesting thought or idea, you can’t. It’s virtually impossible to sound intelligent using Twitter. Even Stephen Hawking would sound dimwitted. ‘Just finished writing another book about the Universe and stuff. Going to have early night tonight.’
Twitter's format alone is a telling sign of current societal trends: the posts require the bare minuimum of mental input on the part of the user. They have no real subject, require very little time or effort to create and are essentially pointless. It's entirely based in the present: 'What are you doing?' It asks. People are encouraged to 'live in the moment.' The past has been all but eradicated, few people have a really good grasp of history due to the dumbing down of the subject in schools. The future is too alarming to contemplate, with one apocalyptic scare after another. In such a climate, it's little wonder why the simplistic immediacy of Twitter is so popular.
It’s a digital desert: the Waste Land of the internet.
Unreal City
'Unreal City/Under the brown fog of a winter dawn...'
Despite living in Edinburgh for the past eight years of my life, I've never really got used to it. It's like no other city in Britain. When you stand on Princes Street and look out across the gardens to the Old Town, the strange, tall buildings seem to hover behind the trees like a stage backdrop. The castle also seems unreal, but more sturdy: like an impressively large prop made from papier maché, cardboard, sticky back plastic and paint.
In the morning, commuters seem resolutely determined to ignore the sights on display. They hurry along Princes Street, their heads held low. In the summer, it is estimated that the population of Edinburgh almost doubles. In my experience, I would say that it triples. The cash machines run out of money, getting to work takes twice the time (as the bus is repeatedly flagged down like a taxi by deeply tanned, bemused tourists waving £20 notes) and the supermarkets fail to cope with demand, leading to shortages of staple goods such as bread, milk and most importantly, decent houmous.
In the face of such an invasion, even a welcome one, the genuine inhabitants of Edinburgh feel a basic and natural urge to mark themselves out. They fail to acknowledge even the most noticable landmarks and monuments, they most certainly don’t carry a camera around and they also tend to avoid any shop that sells tartan, shortbread, or tartan-patterned tins of shortbread. Even celebrities get short shrift during the festival. Since moving to Edinburgh I’ve ignored the following people: Jimmy Carr (he was buying fish and chips, I gave him a blank look), David Baddiel (he passed me as I was walking along George Street) and several others, mainly stand up comedians. They may be famous, but during the festival they’re just tourists: getting in the way, filling the streets, eating all the houmous. It’s just not on.
So yes, Edinburgh is very strange. It’s hard to just get on with day to day life when you feel like an extra on a very large film set. So instead, we all focus on the mundane: gazing out of the top deck of a bus not at the castle but at HMV. Avoiding the Royal Mile and heading to Poundstretchers on North Bridge instead. Maybe we should stop ignoring where we live, and start embracing it. I’ve decided to spend a day as a tourist this weekend. I’m going to ride an open top bus, visit the castle for the first time and buy questionable shortbread from a stall on the Royal Mile. Wish me luck.
Despite living in Edinburgh for the past eight years of my life, I've never really got used to it. It's like no other city in Britain. When you stand on Princes Street and look out across the gardens to the Old Town, the strange, tall buildings seem to hover behind the trees like a stage backdrop. The castle also seems unreal, but more sturdy: like an impressively large prop made from papier maché, cardboard, sticky back plastic and paint.
In the morning, commuters seem resolutely determined to ignore the sights on display. They hurry along Princes Street, their heads held low. In the summer, it is estimated that the population of Edinburgh almost doubles. In my experience, I would say that it triples. The cash machines run out of money, getting to work takes twice the time (as the bus is repeatedly flagged down like a taxi by deeply tanned, bemused tourists waving £20 notes) and the supermarkets fail to cope with demand, leading to shortages of staple goods such as bread, milk and most importantly, decent houmous.
In the face of such an invasion, even a welcome one, the genuine inhabitants of Edinburgh feel a basic and natural urge to mark themselves out. They fail to acknowledge even the most noticable landmarks and monuments, they most certainly don’t carry a camera around and they also tend to avoid any shop that sells tartan, shortbread, or tartan-patterned tins of shortbread. Even celebrities get short shrift during the festival. Since moving to Edinburgh I’ve ignored the following people: Jimmy Carr (he was buying fish and chips, I gave him a blank look), David Baddiel (he passed me as I was walking along George Street) and several others, mainly stand up comedians. They may be famous, but during the festival they’re just tourists: getting in the way, filling the streets, eating all the houmous. It’s just not on.
So yes, Edinburgh is very strange. It’s hard to just get on with day to day life when you feel like an extra on a very large film set. So instead, we all focus on the mundane: gazing out of the top deck of a bus not at the castle but at HMV. Avoiding the Royal Mile and heading to Poundstretchers on North Bridge instead. Maybe we should stop ignoring where we live, and start embracing it. I’ve decided to spend a day as a tourist this weekend. I’m going to ride an open top bus, visit the castle for the first time and buy questionable shortbread from a stall on the Royal Mile. Wish me luck.
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