The Great Dreary.

 

I've been listening to this book on CD since April. Glory hallelujah I'm done! It's an excellent book, especially for readers who have a high tolerance for wallowing in misery. I'm apparently drawn to depressing books, especially in nonfiction. I have a special love of disasters. Of this I am not proud. And I recognize that it's not good for my mental health but I can't stop myself.

This book needs no description: the subtitle says it all. Although I think I would insert the word "suffering" somewhere in that subtitle: I came away with a very, very full picture of just how awful the aftermath of that storm was for the residents. And the saddest part is that it will happen again.

And while I'm discussing my sick obsession with disasters, here are some observations from an oceanographer who was on the Diane Rehm radio show yesterday. The discussion was all that plastic that's out there in our oceans. (Diane is no slouch in the disaster area herself.)

According to Charles Moore:

You know, we're driven by an economic paradigm that requires us to be wasteful. We produce waste in order to drive the economic system. But there's a wide range of possible scenarios in which attractive economic, social and environmental outcomes are possible without relying on economic growth. We need a steady state economy. We need -- all these ideas about recycling, that's really about a steady state economy, where you take back as much as you produce. And in order to do that, we need a change in the economic paradigm. And the 11th commandment can't be thou shalt grow the economy, but that's the only way a politician can get elected.

I feel that we're being driven into a barbaric situation by this push to constantly grow the economy. We've got to reign in the productive monster. You can't have unlimited growth on finite resources. It just defies logic. And that is a radical change that would deal with the climate crisis as well as the plastic pollution crisis. But we need radicals. Radicals drive change, and that's why I'm an activist.

I'm not an activist or a radical. I'm just a doomsayer. But I do recycle and I no longer buy shampoo so that's something.

Two unrelated items. Or maybe they're not unrelated.

With Mad Men off the air for a few more months, I have no must-see TV these days. Or maybe it's called "appointment TV." But HBO started a new series on Sunday called True Detective, and after Doug previewed a bit of it and deemed it "not too violent" I decided to try it out. (I don't do violent on TV or in movies any more, which is why I don't see a lot of movies or watch a lot of TV.) One of the characters in True Detective has this monologue that really grabbed me by the throat. Here it is. I fear he's right. Screenwriter is Nic Pizzolatto.

"I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in human evolution. We became too self aware, nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist, by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, a secretion of sensory experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody's nobody. I think the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal." Rustin Cohle (played by Matthew McConaughey) in True Detective

And this YouTube video is also wise. Quirky but wise.

Something that makes sense.

 

"Oslo — The Norwegian military said Tuesday it plans to put its troops on a vegetarian diet once a week in a bid to fight a new kind of enemy -- climate change." Full story here.


I say hooray for the depressed Norwegians. They really, really get it about what individual people can do to have even a prayer of halting this runaway train we call global warming/climate change. I fully believe that human actions -- not evil intent, just normal human progress -- is the major cause of [probably] harmful climate change. I'm part of the problem -- you don't see me giving up my car, or moving out of my too-big house, or even (yet) giving up beef. So when I see a large group of people who DO make meaningful changes I'm impressed. The Norwegians have hit upon a really simple way to make a difference. And improve their health at the same time. 

Here's a good article about the connection between beef and climate change. I'm not giving up a nice juicy steak now and then, but, inspired by the Norsemen, I hope to cut back a lot. Fair warning husband and son!

What's left after ivy is pulled off the foundation of a house.

Global warming / climate change is a subject I really want to understand. So I read and listen and think. But every time I think I've arrived at a comfortable position, I find something else that confuses me. The latest bit of confusion comes in this article by Nicholas Dawidoff about a physicist named Freeman Dyson. Dawidoff writes: "Dyson has said he believes that the truths of science are so profoundly concealed that the only thing we can really be sure of is that much of what we expect to happen won't come to pass." That sounds really, really logical to me.