Poor Leno

Survival means collaboration.
Existing as entertainment, living though your home is razed.
A room of your own that you may pace.
The last specimen.
You fade out alone.
Selected.

Who can bear to be forgotten?

Photo: (The last Thylacine) Public Domain, 1933

Vessels

Public domain

Before people worked in offices in the city, all of humanity was tied to the land. Once the beasts of burden were harnessed, humanity started to escape the limits of their own frailty. Across four millennia; the horse pulled the cart, the ox ploughed the field, and the donkey carried a messiah or two. The cereal crops harvested by these agricultural humans could both sustain the farmers and their animals. The humans ate the grain and the animals (both the working ones, and the unemployed ones bred for meat) ate the stalk.

Limited Capacity

The UN Convention on Biological Diversity has said that humans have pushed the limits of what the Terran ecosystem can handle. I could have fucking told you that. I could have also told you that we need to do something about this now. Not lay out progress targets for 2010, because like all great progress targets (Kyoto Protocol, Live8, The Middle-East "roadmap" to Peace, ad infinitum) they won't be met. I know it, you know it, the delegates who sign such agreements know it.

The First Time As A Tragedy...

The BBC informs me there's been a tanker accident in Alaska, while Wikinews informs me one also happened on Tuesday in the Baltic Sea.

Funnily enough, the second episode of Futurama on Tuesday was this.

Fry: What's happening?
[Zoidberg turns on another screen that displays the extent of the damage to the tanker. There is a huge gash most of the way along the hull. A gauge at one side of the screen drops as the dark matter levels go down.]
Zoidberg: All 6,000 hulls have been breached!
[Fry falls to his knees.]
Fry: Oh, the fools! If only they'd built it with 6,001 hulls! When will they learn?

According to the BBC, the double hull was...

a design brought in during the 1990s to protect cargoes.

Yes, it would truly be a tragedy if the cargo was damaged (how exactly do you damage oil?). Of course, the environment doesn't need protecting from the oil industry...

Landrover Destroyer 3: Meltdown

My word of the week is 'vomitous' (an Adjective which I appear to have made-up).

No advert that I have seen in the past week is more vomitous than that depicting a LandRover Discovery 3 driving across the plains of the Arctic, smugly showing the simple natives how to cross the ice in comfort (see here for examples). Now, I have not yet found emissions statistics for the Disco 3, but I'll gladly bet it's output is more environmentally damaging than a dog-sled (especially with the heating on). The most offensive aspect of the advert is its purported location - the very place that's going to disappear thanks to such "Sports Utility Vehicles".

The fact that Landrover is owned by Ford Motor Company, good friends of Hitler, is unsurprising. I want to know when the Green Parties of the world are going to see you can't change things through government when the multinationals are funding the major parties everywhere. Apparently it's too fucking late anyway. Be it on the head of every corporate exec, every American driver, every parent driving their children to school in a supertanker.

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He Had No Choice

BBC article:

So why is Britain - the world's fourth largest economy, a nuclear pioneer, blessed with wind, wave and tidal potential beyond the normal lot of nations, a once mighty coal producer, provider of innovators to the world, and with a generation's worth of North Sea booty to invest - facing an enormous shortfall in electricity provision while others are not?

Three years ago the government commissioned a report on the impending energy crisis, and the report recommended heavily investing in renewable sources... and now we find ourselves on the cusp of constructing a few more will-end-up-as-radioactive-concrete-monoliths.

Evolution For Your Eyes

Walking home from college for lunch, I saw a squirrel run across the road in exactly the same spot as the one I discovered dead yesterday. I thought this was coincidental until I saw the squirrel briefly pause beside that of the utterly flattened one.

It's as if the run-over squirrel stood in the way of the forces of economics and was deliberately flattened... almost as if drivers have some sort of grudge against it, its body is still sprawled over the tarmac - seeing something that used to be alive that flat seems unnatural and disturbing. Perhaps those bloody humans have annoyingly socialised me, but leaving a dead body where it died seems somehow disrespectful to the squirrel - even if it is "only" a squirrel.

Crushed by the Wheels of Mechanisation

I noticed at lunch whilst going back to college that there was something run-over on the road. Not a pleasant sight. Some morbid fascination made me stop to look at it up-close on the way home.

What I had initially thought was a seagull (somewhat notorious for exploding, supposedly from eating tipex chips), then a rather large rat, turned out to be a grey squirrel, quite common around this area with a surprising amount of other wildlife in the early morning.

The flies were scurrying all over it - which might explain why there were so many wasps around earlier. What you really notice when you get close to the squirrel's furry little body, is how red flesh is. From the way it had been squashed it was stuck between lying on its back, with limbs fanning out, and lying on its left-hand side. If you think the sight of a squirrel's mouth opened and spilling its brains out is disgusting, you really do not want to see how its bloody spine snapped and pierced the skin between the shoulder blades at an angle, jutting out by around 3cm.

I suppose it's a damn sight better than being one of 100 cats to have died in a fecal-carpeted house and have been stuffed between the walls and under the floor.

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Respect

Kids today are always banging on about how you have to earn their respect. Well I agree, but maybe the contingent of wee pricks that insist on dropping their litter all over the street ought to start giving the environment some fucking respect.

The environment cannot earn your respect. Your respect is prerequisite to the continued function of our environment. Fail to respect it and you will see the consequences, wether they be natural or artificial.