It doesn't sound bad enough

My complete thanks go to the Now Show (BBC R4, 23 January 2015) for this post.

Global warming and climate change don't, to many people, sound that bad, said Nish Kumar. Too true. In the middle of the damp, cold, bone-biting, and joint-aching January, a bit of warmth doesn't sound like all too bad a thing. A changing climate is neither here nor there. We're surrounded by change all the time.

We need some alternatives, and here are a few of Nish's suggestions:

"Turdpocalypse"
"Kicked in the weather-balls"

And, for the CEOs of major corporations, whose major concerns at Davos were regulation and taxation:

"Increased regulation and taxation of ...oxygen"

(Listen online for the next 29 days, go on, do: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04yk373http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04yk373)

Time to think of some more emotive, urgent synonyms for global warming and climate change. And while we're at it, green. It doesn't make sense, really. How can a colour be a solution to a weather-based issue?. What words do we use to make it sound worse? Perhaps we need to be more concrete: drought, flood, fire. Hunger, famine, war. 

Land ethic

What's changed in the last 60 years?

In 1949, the American forester and writer, Aldo Leopold wrote in his Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There, that what we lack is a system of ethics.

There is as yet no ethic dealing with man's relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it. Land, like Odysseus' slave girls, is still property. The land-relation is still strickly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations...

And, later on in the same work:

We have no land ethic yet, but we have at least drawn nearer to the point of admitting that birds should continue as a matter of biotic right, regardless of the presence or absence of economic advantage to us.

Sixty years on, have we got the ethics we needed? Or is our relationship to the land limited to economic terms?

December haiku

Winter coming home

Butterfly in a lampshade

Paper flickers dark

A non-verbal homage to Cubbington Woods

I won't write the obvious cliché about the value of pictures, though you can probably guess what it is. In this blog I wanted to tell the story of a wood just to the north of where I live, which lies in the proposed trajectory of HS2. It's where we go blackberry picking in the late summer; people walk their dogs nearby, and it's close enough to the edge of town to be just the right balance of accessible but wild. Sometimes there are buzzards.

This is my homage to the Cubbington Woods:

All of the above are (c)Eleanor Perkins

Word of the day?

Just a quick exercise today, to see what some of our online media providers are writing about in their environment sections at the moment. Click on each of the wordles to see the original in detail.

A selection of today's hot words are:
- Continue
- Just
- UN
- Britain
- Government
- Trillion

Guardian environment:

 
Telegraph Earth



BBC Science/Environment:

 

Independent Environment:

Nature as a poet: John Muir

Nature as a poet, an enthusiastic workingman, becomes more and more visible the farther and higher we go; for the mountains are fountains - beginning places, however related to sources beyond mortal ken.

John Muir (1838 - 1914) writes effusively in My first summer in the Sierra of the wonders that he sees. Every tree, flower, mountain, and even house fly he sees there is a miracle, a beauty to be contemplated; to be enjoyed and protected. In 1869, he is the companion to a group taking a herd of sheep ('woolly locusts', he terms them) to find fresh pasture in the mountain meadows of the Yosemite. Taking his leave of the group for sometimes days on end, Muir walks and sketches and makes copious notes of his surroundings.

I think his predecessor and fellow Scotsman, Hugh Miller (1802 - 1856) would have agreed with Muir's 'nature as a poet' approach:  

Nature is a vast tablet, inscribed with signs, each of which has its own significancy, and becomes poetry in the mind when read; and geology is simply the key by which myriads of these signs, hitherto indecipherable, can be unlocked and perused, and thus a new province added to the poetical domain. (Lecture third) 
 

Blog action day: inequality

Inequality, to me, is legalese. It's harsh, unfeeling and grey. The word doesn't demand action of us: it's a state of being, a mathematical comment on the way the world is. A brick is heavier than a feather - that's inequality. It doesn't make me want to do anything about it.

So I wondered about the synonyms for inequality, and a quick search on the clever Google Ngram showed me something interesting. We used to talk about injustice much more than we talked about inequality. Something happened between 1973 and 1974, and inequality took over. There's not space (or time) to look at why that happened, but it seems that the sense of justice went out of fashion. We were no longer talking about what was right or wrong.

Does 'injustice' demand more response than 'inequality'? Or which other words could we use?

Here's the graph, and you can have a go yourself, using a good thesaurus (or thesaurus.com) and Google Ngram.

(For comparison, I've also included 'unfairness', which doesn't seem to have been very popular at all.)

Find out more about Blog Action day