Changes or Stagnation?

Tip of the Day: Keep your motor running and make sure the headlights are kept on at all times: they will be coming for you and the world is growing darker. (Or maybe emigrate to Canada or Finland, for a bit of space and fresh air?)

It's alright really

What is happening to our world? My ageing father, who seems to be growing younger with age, more animated and more relaxed as he is ever more proven right that the world is a place lead by insane asses preferring problems to preventitive measures (which yield neither fame nor fortune and require constant vigilance and behind the scenes, arduous work) assures me that we cannot be going backwards.

Father-Mother Wisdom

I quote: "It is a load of rubbish when people say we will be leaving our planet in a worse state than we found it for the next generation."

Yes, the mess is not good. But it can be cleaned up. It will kill us in the meantime: nobody designed life to be fair or kind in a strategy of survival. (My father is not a practicing atheist, but he is generally agnostic.)

The progress is unmistakeable notwithstanding.
He marks the excess but believes it could easily settle down into a quiet all-round state of contentment; progress is not our enemy, nor is technology. (My mother doesn't mind innovative cancer treatments, but would happily chuck her smartphone.)

He points to how he helped solve the crisis of acid rain by selling patents for sulfuric extraction-installations to the countries who took the lead in the clean up operation (Japan, USA, Germany).

He laughs his socks off at how that Swedish Mother Theresa of Climate Change Girl was the runner-up for receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. He hopes she stays stuck on the shores of one of the biggest polluters, USA, because she can't find a (carbon neutral) catamaran to take her to the next Climate Conference in Madrid.

He thinks it might help to have at least one chemist in the government to get the facts straight on CO2, NOx and PFAS to help decide what to do regards emissions, contaminations and toxic levels. He has come to the (spiritual) insight that ego rules and machos flip coins and nobody can be bothered to do the right thing in and of themselves.

Still, my father remains optimistic that solutions can and will be found. They always have been. The planet may be finite, as is the sun, but for now life is better than it ever was before. I suppose, from a concrete perspective, it is indisputable that it is the best of all possible worlds. (My mother interjects with her Orwellian view: in some countries more so than others).

I quote him once more: "A hundred years ago kids were still largely illiterate in Western Europe and poverty amongst the lower classes ruled."

Once upon a time, the Vedic Hindus did not believe in change: Brahma is constant. The Buddhists created a perception of change by the introduction of suffering as something that could be avoided. Our philosophical West depends on seeing ourselves as affected by the time-space continuum which exists in order to change (or evolve us).

My mother feels, rather, that we have become stagnant. Some things simply haven't changed at all. Take the Daguerrotype: they were taking decent photographs since the 1840's already. And she totters off to fetch a photograph of my great aunt in Egypt. She points to her inseparable flower-pot hat (not sure it ever came off her head), which has a real function there in the noon-day sun and wonders whether she might need a shielding scarf on her own upcoming tour of Egypt.

I suppose I agree with both for argument's sake: what has really been innovated about the representation? Maybe it has got a little more lifeless, with added artificiality? Maybe, the viewer has become less artful at imagining it’s reality for the taker? Maybe our understanding of the world has stripped back our skill at co-creating (rather than representing, reproducing and repeating)? Certainly our skill at co-creating (making this world a wiser and truer place) has been outstripped by our endeavours to understand it through reason and physical evidence alone.

I wake up this morning, however, with a twinge of the past, hearing bucolic plague is back (in a couple in China).

Ch...ch...ch...Changes!

One of the most notable changes in North-Western Europe is the closing of the gap that was the difference between men and women. It seems that sporting and adventure activities made for the greatest divide, next to rulership (minus a Queen here or there).

We note the first stirrings of this narrowing in the first female explorers, like Maria Sibylla Merriam who went to Suriname (in 1699) to devote herself to recording (in paint) the metamorphosis of plants and their pollinators.

Or what about Sophie Blanchard, the first female balloonist (who crashed to her death on a rooftop in 1819, for lighting fireworks from her basket…groan... please let’s not comment on female aviators, be they on a plane or in a balloon, or think about Earhart's misadventure: statistics cannot be in their favour for the few that even dared to be that adventurous).

Let us turn our attention swiftly to the first female archaeologist, Lady Hester Stanhope (1776-1839); and see how women's rights to move and groove certainly took off when they began competing in the Olympics around the turn of the 20th Century.

In the meantime, men sharpened their wits, learning that sharp tools are the trick to building the best boats (as I learn from "The Boatbuilder" - sadly not very adventurously written but may make for a primary glimpse into the trade) and sharp tools are only made with sharp focus. The best builder has a stilled and concentrated mind.

While at the same time the wiser men never forget to learn from Nature herself and factor in the moisture of the wood which can be determined by its scent: yes, a proper boat builder will know the variable scent of every wood.

The Difference That Makes A Difference