#8 - #8.1

Having poured my heart out on the Facebook here...

Reading a book Orison to the Curlew and in it - it is a tough read because it is the story of wildlife decline in the past 60 years or so after the so called Green Revolution and neoliberalism. 

The amount of environmental destruction which took place over this time is monu-mental. Or monomanical. It is mostly based in Greece and Easter Europe - as in far Eastern and it is about the hunt for the slender-billed curlew. However what is striking is how despite all the science, governments do not care. This was what I saw over and over again in my ten years in the RSPB you could have all the data and evidence and talk about it till you are blue in the face, but if you have a government wedded to 80s style development, you can kiss any kind of sustainable future goodbye. 

One of the conservationists in the book says in exasperation after working in the field for 30 years, 'I used to think that if you have government the science, they would do something about it, but it is not true. If they really wanted to, they could clean up the entire Delta with two lorries in fifteen days. They tell you that they don't have money. They have money, it doesn't take much money. What they do not have is the will.' 

And THAT my friends is why i DO NOT BELIEVE any government official to stands there and tells me it is the science they are following. And they can kid you into thinking you forced them into following the science. As someone who has been at the coalface of trying to get them to see reason, whether it is education, women's rights, conservation, sustainable development (I mean they really are very unimaginative it has to be said) it is clear that do not do anything unless they are really want to do it and their motivations are highly questionable. 

The past two years we have seen the most poor go to the wall, the rich become richer than their wildest dreams, children abandoned. Oisin told me that Apple took 40 years to get to their first trillion, it got to its second trillion at the start of the pandemic and now, in the past year it is now worth 3 trillion. Is it right that a company is worth more than the GDP of more than several countries? 

Stop with the science. I have had enough of the science. Science without ethics, without morals, without a conscience, without imagination, without a heart is the same thing as fanaticism. It is corruption. It is so utterly utterly disappointing that we are now here. Perhaps humans are always doomed to repeat our cycle of stupidity. To come from nothing, build on it, get carried away and arrogant, enslave each other and then end up in an enormous bunfight and the cycle starts all over again. It is just go massively disappointing and depressing.

I think I need to stop reading this book...

I have decided I will continue to write about miserable things because it helps me process it, but I will also do some positive things - I will do one positive thing - conscious thing - a day. Today it will be to clean the house and to dye my hair blue. I will rinse my hair in vinegar and dye it blue - with the leftover blue. I will also rearrange my shoe cupboard and get ready to do some running tomorrow.