The Yorkshireman
blogSheffield was nice. It has changed a lot since I was last there four or five years ago, notably the approach to the city from the station now has huge water features and there is an Andrew Motion poem there that encourages people to think ‘what if’. This blue sky thinking doesn’t much accord with the Yorkshiremen that I know, one of whom, my uncle Chris, is about thirty times more opinionated than I am.
He is currently campaigning against a Cemex fuel processing plant being built in his local village. Apparently Warwickshire county council are one of the worst in the country for recycling and so are encouraging this use of incineration to make up for the fact that they are running out of landfill. Chris made the interesting point that recycling is a complete con, reliant upon massive over-consumption of things that use too much packaging.
If you want to be ecofriendly then don’t consume, otherwise repair and reuse things rather than just chucking them away. It is something that we are going to have to get used to once we have hundreds of millions of people in Asia wanting to live at western standards and driving prices skywards. Chris Martenson’s crash course powerpoint presentation shows how difficult it is now to get copper from the ground and how the same will start happening to oil and all the other non-renewable resources.
The answer is to do and consume less in order that we might live more sustainably: the current efforts to bail out the ailing world economy is a waste of time if, as a consequence, we end up sailing over the edge of a waterfall.