Little Victories

Well, this is a little victory in itself.

This book took a long time to get here.

I had the idea way back when I published The Soul of Adam Short, thinking about a YA novel set in Ireland, and the part of Ireland I know best is obviously South County Dublin and North Wicklow.

The problem of fires and farmers and the protection of nesting birds was something that started back then, and of course has kept going years later….

It merged with an idea I had when I was around 17….

The characters came separately, from a different inspiration.

It took a while to get the pen to paper, but my first typed document has a date of June 2015.

Then the first draft was done in 2018.

Yes. I can be 3 years on a book that’s only around 60k words!

I gave a copy of the third or fourth draft to my family – the younger ones – asking for feedback.

Crickets.

For a couple of years.

I got on with writing my long novel, Paul and the Pyramid Builders.

Then I asked my ex-publisher of Adam Short to have a look at it, and see if it was for the drawer.

She says it’s not.

So here it is. Edited and proof-read and ready for reviews.

.

Here’s the blurb….

Nicky and her two new friends, Mark and Ash, spend spring racing their mountain bikes through south Dublin – both down hillsides and hitching rides from HGVs – and exploring their feelings towards one another. They’re aghast to one day find an illegal fire on the mountain, just set by a farmer. When the police say they can do nothing about it, the three determine to catch the culprit red-handed. But life is as complicated as love, and as Nicky comes to terms with this, she discovers that sometimes you have to accept whatever little victories come your way.

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It’s dedicated to my good friend Phil, no longer with us, who was a great man for the biking round south Dublin and Wicklow, though more on a road bike than mountain bike.

It’s on Pre Order now, and will be published before my birthday – Paddy’s Day to be exact.

March is when this novel kicks off, when the fires that beleaguer the Dublin and Wicklow mountains should be stopped rather than started.

Anyone who’s interested in a review copy can email me at davidjmobrienauthor@gmail.com

Happy St. David’s Day, everyone.

Don’t forget, if you see a brush fire in Ireland from today, it’s illegal.

The End of the Rainbow…

Peter and the Little People republished!

And a poem that the Little People would understand from a longer term perspective than humans seem able to take…

I hope summer is going well for everyone and the new (for us fifth) wave of infections is not affecting you.

I have some news: I have republished my children’s novel, Peter and the Little People, since the original publishers have sadly closed recently. I took the opportunity to re-edit it, so it reads a lot smoother, especially in the first chapters.

It’s available on pre-order now, and will download automatically onto your kindles etc. on the publication date which will be August 15th!

AND it is available in Paperback! So you can pre-order it now and it will pop in the post for you, too.

Till then, here’s a poem that was inspired by a different book written and set in Ireland.

Children of the Rainbow is a book from decades ago, but it’s well worth reading if you have any connection with the Island.

At the same time, I was reading Barry Lopez’s Horizon, which was quite impactful, too.

So the poem that came out is not quite as hopeful as Peter and the Little People regarding our planet. But I hope it’s still beautiful.

For there is yet beauty all around us if only we appreciate it and preserve it.

            The Fading of the Rainbow

.

Our grandparents grew up under the bow of wonder

Shades of beauty forty-fold and more, so vivid 

The colours were within reach, like the hand of God,

Life bursting out of every bud and bloom, butterflies

And bees humming just one tune in Nature’s symphony

.

But today, we stare across a broad sweep of fields, all

Furrowed into one with faint lines left where once

Grew hedgerows; rooks caws accompany cows now,

Gone the curlew call and corncrake, cuckoo only

Heard on distant hills: a sound of childhood, half

Remembered. The skylark leaves a faint line upon

The heart where before flew nightingales and chorus

Of dawn songbirds, silenced like the wolf and other

Wild animals swept away before the sheep browsing.

.

Now even that centrepiece of pristineness, poster

Child of evolution in isolation and archipelagos lies

Lessened, the frenzy of breeding becoming bare as

Feral goats graze the spare seedlings, dogs attack

Basking iguanas, cats and rats run riot, into ruin 

One of the last remaining untouched outposts upon

.

The vast planet, pinched a little smaller each season,

Swept into sameness, as only colonisers cling to barren

Land. If these distant places are as doomed as our city

Streets, what place has hope this side of the rainbow;

Faded, bleached, and ragged, can it even hold any

Hidden at the end, like a crock of leprechaun gold?

My first Self-Published Book!

So I haven’t been all that unproductive, really. It’s taken many months to write – actually more than a year, which is pretty sad for a novella! – but I have completed a dystopian novella set in our future – sixty years down the line.

It’s called The Logical Solution.

It’s something I think is appropriate to our own time – as in all the best dystopias! – so I have decided to self publish it, on Kindle Direct, and have it out there asap for  everyone living through this crisis – the pandemic: let’s take things one step at a time, but there are more crises to worry about later  (and that’s everyone on the planet, bar the bastard politicians and the rich who pull their strings) – can have a look and see how much worse things could get!

Seriously, it’s supposed to be funny, too. Things might not get that bad…

 

It’s on pre-order right now, for 99 cents! a steal. and it will come out on September 1st.

You can hit me up for a review copy if you can’t wait that long – but the review needs (please!) to be ready by publishing day so you can post it on Goodreads and Amazon and anywhere else you reckon the readers of the world will see it!

And since the novella talks about computer algorithms and whatnot – a small heads up: if everyone I know buys this book before Sept 1, then it will become an automatic best seller on Amazon. Seriously. It’s that simple to fool the computers. Then it gets on adverts from Amazon and more people see it and buy it. And then you get to say you know a best-selling author, instead of saying that one of your mates writes books, but you’ve never read any of them (yet).

Take a peak at the blurb here:

https://davidjmobrien.wordpress.com/the-logical-solution/

 

 

 

 

 

“From a Distance…”

In my last blog post I said that we need government to get us out of this crisis we are immersed in (it’s 20˚C in Pamplona today, the 26^thof February, while the kids in my school are supposedly up in the Pyrenees skiing for the week).

 

The problem is that governments are only interested in keeping their economies going full steam ahead on the coal of capitalism.

 

Of course, some of them are so fucking shit that they’re doing the opposite of what their puppet masters would have them do. It’s possible that they might help the planet by fucking up our society… something pondered in this next poem.

 

 

Macro Views

 

What would another species say

About our world?

 

Watching these tiny actions,

While the worst barely awaits,

Each effort hardly abates.

 

Indeed, we are bathers

Intent upon our piece of sand,

While the wave rears up behind.

 

The idiocy of some, the ignorance

Of others, ill intent and greed of

Thirds all add up to cancel out

The efforts of all the rest

To avoid the coming destruction and

Current misery.

 

Yet, in cold chemical analysis, knowing

The decimation imminent for so many

Might an outsider smile at

Individual deaths

Inflicted by despicable people if that

Also impedes the current trajectory:

 

Disruption of our good government,

The usual business of bustling populations

Slowing down the business as usual

Which we aren’t wont to stop

But must if we are to have

Any business being on the planet

In the usual way we’ve been since

First becoming people.

 

The course needs altering, if not

Halting. The actors less relevant

Than the actions: Evil instead of

Well-intentioned will still be better

Than acting not at all.

 

 

You can see the walls, but can you see the fuckwits from space?

 

No points for guessing who is the main person I had in mind for this clusterfuck.

 

 

International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples.

 

At the End of the Days

 

Ultimately, if our civilization

Can’t continue without further

Ecological destruction and

Genocide of tribal peoples,

It’s not very fucking advanced.

 

5/8/18

I wrote this the other day after Reading Gary Snyder’s The Old Ways.

Then I heard that August 9th is the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples.

Here’s a video.

The main point about allowing people to live the way they always have is to understand that they are not “Stone Age,” nor primitive, and that if they have not already become part of our globalised civilisation it is because they do not want to, not because they’re too ignorant to know better. They do know better. They have heard of the ways of the world outside and they have rejected it. Sometimes because of a very real fear for their lives.

Second thing is to understand that the land they live on, if it belongs to anyone, belongs to them. We need to stay the hell out of there – and that mostly  includes loggers, miners, ranchers, palm oil producers… all those nice people…

Here’s another video. As it asks, how long could you last alone in the forest?

On the other hand, how long do you think it would take one of the Yanomami kids, currently being affected by a measles epidemic,  to figure out how to play FIFA on your playstation?

Five minutes, is the answer to both….

As Snyder said back in the 70s, to be able to survive off what the land under your feet provides is a sign of extreme advancement. Our society can’t do that. it needs so much more…

here’s another poem.

 

Equilibrium

 

Balance comes in all we observe;

It is a fundament of our Universe:

Strong forces and electromagnetism

Keep atoms unified or flimsy, gravity

Balanced with a satellite’s speed keep it

Spinning instead of spiralling away.

So too on our planet, as the mountains

Rise, so the earth underneath goes ever

Deeper. In our humanity we see the same

Climbing by pushing down others: leisure

Comes only by enslaving or exploiting,

Creating peasants and proletariats;

Cites spread by denuding vast areas outside;

And imperialism depends upon

Ecological destruction.

5/8/18

 

I donate 10% of my royalties on the Silver Nights Trilogy to Survival International.

The planet needs them, and they need us.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Easter Island: What if they saw it coming?

George Monbiot has an interesting, if depressing, article out this week about the British Govt. doing more or less nothing to solve the environmental crises we are facing.

We all know the shit is approaching the fan, and it will surely hit it at speed and force should we so blithely as we currently are, continue to do our business as usual on the planet.

I have used in Easter Island as an example in my biology classes for more than a decade now. I had my students read use the essay Twilight at Easter by Jared Diamond in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2005 before he I read his book Collapse.

It’s an instructive, if depressing, lesson on how people can undermine their own future by going with the business as usual way of doing things, even when that means short-term gains lead to long-term destruction.

People often wonder what the person who cut the last tree on Easter Island thought as he did so.

And the answer of course, is that he didn’t cut down a big tree, he only cut a small tree that he needed to cut to cook his meal, and it looked just like all the other bushes around, so he didn’t think very much of it at all – the big trees had been gone for a while.

We always assumed those poor sods were ignorant, that they didn’t have the benefit of hindsight like we do. If we, with their example, do the same stupid thing, then we would be so many times dumber than they were.

However, perhaps the Eastern Islanders weren’t all that stupid. I mean, perhaps all of them were not that stupid. The ones who weren’t so blind were nearly stymied by the majority of stupid.

I’m sure some saw it coming.

It’s clear that they didn’t do very much to stop it.

More importantly than asking what the guy who cut the last tree, we should ask what went through the mind of the guy on Easter Island who was shouting out to stop the cutting of all the trees. The guy(s and gals) who were predicting the future, pointing out the disappearance of the birds they used to eat, lamenting the old state of the canoes that could not be replaced and meant dolphin and deep-sea fish were off the menu, etc.

You can almost imagine a Monty Python-esque scene where the proto-ecologist says to the crowd that the big statures aren’t going to help get more food or help make canoes to catch tuna, and one of the stone masons shouts back say to him, “Shut up, you, or I’ll bloody throttle you – I’ve a good job here making them statues.”

If it were indeed case that some knew the collapse of their society and lives was imminent, well, it would make Easter Island an even more instructive, and depressing, lesson for us today as we face the guardians of the status quo.

Even more so than the statues of Easter Island, the status quo is a hard stone to roll off us.

“But if we cut down all the trees, Bob, we’ll be fucked!”

“Shut your face, BigNose! I’ll look much more enigmatic surrounded by grass.”

It’s time to put warning labels on meat.

I just signed this pledge, to reduce the amount of meat I eat.

https://secure.avaaz.org/campaign/en/meatless_day_loc/

The organisers seem to be mostly concerned about the slaughter of so many animals to feed us gluttons.

It’s true, that 56 billion animals are treated fairly shittily every year. But that’s not quite my main motivation…

I want to reduce global climate change impacts.

I watched this video from the satirical character, Jonathon Pie, the other day, about how people are upset that the British Govt don’t think animals are sentient, when of course everyone loves their dogs so much they dress them up in shiny winter jackets nowadays. He was taking the piss because most of the same people don’t give a toss about the environment or wildlife.

 

And he’s right.

But hey, if people stop eating meat because they can’t stomach the idea of a cute little piggy getting stuck with a knife and hearing that death squeal, well, that’s all to the good.

At this stage of the game, motivation does not matter. Only the end result.

Just like making petrol very expensive in Europe makes the emissions here not quite so fucking outlandish as in America.

So in order to save the planet’s bacon, as it were, we need to reduce meat consumption, and we can either make it expensive – like cigarettes- and/or make it unpalatable – also like cigarettes.

So how do we do the latter?

We put labels on meat that explicitly say, “Did you know that this pig (photo of cute pig) went through this (photo of bloody gutted corpse) to make this tasty ham?”

Perhaps followed by the sentence – “If you are okway with this, then go right ahead and enjoy the tasty meat…”

This will put off quite a few people.

Myself excluded, of course. I always have the actual animal in mind when I’m eating them. I’ve seen dead animals, seen animals die, had a hand in that death myself. That doesn’t make me a bad person, it just makes me a realist. It’s the folk who haven’t seen, and worse, don’t want to see, or even think about, the death that went before the packaging and purchase, who are the problem here.

It is not often their fault, though – the supermarkets and food companies have purposefully separated the nastiness from the tastiness. Who sees the butcher at work in their supermarket?

In Spain, you can still see dead rabbits, fur on, in the butcher’s counter, along with pig heads, baby pigs, chickens hanging with heads and legs on. That’s the way it should be.

But that doesn’t mean we aren’t fed a pile of shite at the same time.

This advert is running on Spanish TV at the moment. Watch it. It’s 20 seconds.

I have eaten this ham. It’s nice enough. But eff me, what the hell is that ad all about?

There’s not even a shot of the farm, never mind the pig.

Associating a cooked ham with strawberries, or mother’s milk is far from fucking natural, folks, let’s just make that clear.

Natural is seeing the animal on the farm. Natural is seeing it being butchered.

If you don’t want to see the latter, then no problem – just stay away from meat.

And we’ll all be happy – except the food companies.

 

Sunflowers on Steroids

Here’s a short story for your spring, now that we see the flowers growing like they’re on steroids – and they are, of course – for a flash fiction challenge about invasive species – a topic I’ve talked about before….

 

Invasive Sunflowers.

 

Always said them scientists would mess everythin’ up, playin’ round with Creation like they was God.

The environmental beatniks said it too, course, but they said all kind of whatnot, like the weather was changin’, that we didn’t listen much to them guys. Joel McCallum, though, he reads the scientific papers, and he said they reckoned the canola plants’d be the ones that did it, them being so common and close to weeds anyway. He said the genetically modified canola would mix with the field mustard plants, and lead to a superweed that nothin’ could get rid of. The idea of sunflowers takin’ over like they was on steroids, well, we none of us predicted that.

What we never saw comin’, either, was losing our land to the federal government after trying so hard to keep independent from them assholes in DC.

We bought the land fair and square, set up our town ten years beforehand. We were self-sufficient by then, hundred per cent, and all set for the apocalypse, should it decide to turn up. We never did think it’d turn out this way.

It was the federal government’s fault, though, too. Always knew that would be true. They were the ones invited that crazy sonbitch to plant those damn sunflower plants out our way. Gave him permission to use federal land we used to graze cattle off, not twenty miles from town. Well, we didn’t think no sunflowers’d stand the shallow soil there. No depth at all, after the dustbowl years took it clean away. Even the grass dried up when it didn’t rain in late spring. We didn’t think the plants would stand up in the wind, first time we went out there and they told us what it was they were growin’.

Joel tried to explain what they’d done to the sunflowers – struck in some genes from a creeper, a vine of some sort that was supposed to only change the roots from the deep taproots sunflowers supposed to grow, into wide spreading roots that’d keep the plants upright and get them enough water from what rains came. They’d spread the seeds out farther than normal to compensate. Well, Joel didn’t know what way they’d messed up – whether they’d put in the wrong piece of string or if the gene did more jobs than just make roots of one sort or the other, but mess up they did, good and well. Plants grew up stringy and creeping; stretched along the ground, covering the empty patches between plants till it was just a sea of green, with all trace of the rows they’d been planted in gone. The flowers were small, but each plant had four or five ‘stead of one. We was amazed that first year. The scientists just took notes. They harvested some, but with the way the plants were all higgledy-piggledy, they missed half the seed heads.

Course, we didn’t like to let the food go to waste. We was self-sufficient, but it’s a sin to waste such bounty as the Lord places before you. We planted some in our own plots – and planned to keep plantin’ it, till we realised it didn’t need no plantin’. The wind came through one night, the way it does, and the seeds flew everywhere on it. Next year, it was everywhere. It invaded the wheat fields, covered the town. It was kinda pretty at first. We used the oil for our trucks, couple of years. But we soon saw it was gettin’ serious when it covered the forest floors, started cloggin’ the creek, and broke half the corn plants before they got to cobbin’. It wrapped around everything – I mean everything – like vines, like morning glory, or that Japanese knotweed and them other invasive species they’re always goin’ on about. These creepers blocked out the light from every other plant, till there were was nothin’ else we could grow.

Well, we thought we could at least use the oil to cut and burn it out, but eventually, much as it galled us to do it, we had to ask the federal government for help. It was their problem, all said and done.

They came, in helicopters, since the roads were practically overgrown by then. One fella told Joel they was comin’ anyhow, whether we asked them or not. Their scientists told them to shut down the whole operation – and more. They was goin’ to move us – would’ve paid us to up and move sticks someplace else. But what we asked for help, they just took us out, told us to gather up our belonging, and make damn sure it was all clean of vegetative material, they called it.

We did as was asked – we weren’t no fools, wishing this upon everyone, or anyone else. That would be a sin not even God might forgive. Besides, we weren’t ready for this kind of apocalypse. Nor were we ready for any kind of reckonin’ without our land, our shelters, our supplies.

When they took us up in the helicopters, we saw them start the firebombin’ straight off. That shit smelt like the end of the world. No wonder them Vietnamese hated us, using that shit on them. I asked the pilot how much they was going to burn. Five thousand square miles, he told me. Hell of a lot of Napalm man. Of course, we had some Napalm ourselves, just in case. When I saw the town explode, I thought, well, there’s an end to it. We might not survive the next apocalypse, but at least we helped the world avoid this one.

That’s what I thought. That’s what we all thought, true as the Lord is lookin’ down on me.

Thing about sunflowers, though, even these crazy ass ones, was the seeds were real tasty. The kids in town used to go round all day, biting on them and spitting out the shells. Well, how can you put the blame on the shoulders of a little kid, not eight year old, instead of the scientist that made them seeds? She meant t’ eat them, of course, and all would’ve been well. But when she saw the explosion from all the stuff we’d in storage, well, she jumped so high she near enough fell out of the damn chopper herself. Only natural the bag slipped out her hand.

 

 

Why do hunters have to be such arseholes?

Okay, modify that: why do so many hunters have to be arseholes? After all, I’m one myself; a hunter, not an arsehole.

Seriously, I see so many gobshites who should never be allowed to take up a weapon, it’s embarrassing.

The good news this week that Danish wolves exist again was tempered by the sad fact that the authorities are not going to tell anyone where the wolves are – and what a boon for eco tourism it would be, if we could all go and see the wolves! – because they are afraid of hunters going there to try kill them.

Why would hunters want to kill wolves?

(If that seems like a stupid question, I have another – are you sure you’re not an arsehole?)

Do they really feel that the wolves (five of them, for Christ’s sake) are going to reduce the numbers of animals they can hunt?

The government has that all regulated, and mostly it’s because of the other hunters that you can’t kill more. In Ireland, where there are relatively few hunters, we can hunt lots of deer each (depending on the area, of course) but here in Spain, where I am currently applying for a hunting licence – after several years of living here – it’s hard to get a spot in a red deer hunting area, and it’s a lot more expensive.

What’s the solution to too many hunters?

Perhaps act like an arsehole so that people don’t want to be associated with you.

In fact, that’s one of the reason I never bothered applying for a hunting licence here before. It’s a much more dangerous activity here than in Ireland.

The type of hunting can, perhaps, be more hazardous – larger groups of people in an area, hunting animals that are on the run.

But that’s no excuse for the number of hunters killed by their companions every year.

That’s just recklessness.

If you have to wear an orange jacket, there’s something wrong with the people around you (photo from Washington Dept. of Fish and wildlife).

In the course I had to do for the hunting exam, I encountered a few of the kind of shitehawks I’d never want to share a cup of tea with up on the hill, never mind hunt with. Dangerously dismissive of the rules, they argued that since they had the guns, they should win the arguments with the walkers and the mushroom pickers that can fuck up a hunt. And they seemed inclined to think that anyone who moved off his post during a beaten hunt deserved to get shot, rather than consider it their duty to identify the target before shooting at something moving past them.

I won’t be hunting with those guys – if indeed they’ll be hunting with anyone, for I’ve serious doubts they’ll study for the exam. Nor will I be running to join a boar hunt, to be honest. I’d rather hunt alone here. I can go home to Ireland for companionable hunting. At least I’ll know I’m not going to get killed by my companions, and the only animals getting shot will be ones permitted.

Yet, separate and apart from my personal problems, the more important point is the issue of our good name. Hunting is getting a bad name, despite its importance in our and other societies. I consider it a necessary activity as well as an interesting one, and believe it will continue, but it will do some in a much more regulated and restricted fashion in most places.

Hunters should not have this bad name. As a collective, disregarding my own intense love of nature, we should be the most vocal, the most powerful guardians of the environment out there. Our integrity and conviction should be unquestionable. It’s a matter not of our personal preferences, but of the survival of our sport.

Hunters should have better long term planning than some are currently displaying.

But, then again, given our human history thus far, perhaps that’s just beyond us.

The Anomaly

 

We are indeed an anomaly.

That is what they will say about us. By us I mean those alive right now in the early twenty-first century.

 

When we talk about the environmental havoc humans have played with the planet, we have a tendency to say “it was the time” – in the Fifties they didn’t know any better, like they didn’t know that corporal punishment or locking up unmarried mother was barbaric or smoking, or lead, or asbestos was bad for your health, or that it was worth preserving national monuments for posterity.

They let the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger die in the 1930s because they weren’t aware there were no more left in the wild, and captive breeding programs were unheard of.

The Alhambra in Andalucia, now a huge tourist attraction, was let go to rack and ruin until the eighties. The walls of Pamplona were torn down in grand part in the early part of the twentieth century to extend the city, and now what remains is the town’s main attraction outside of San Fermines. An application as a Unesco site was denied in the eighties because the walls weren’t complete.

 

But they didn’t know any better then. Not like we do now.

Now we’d never destroy a piece of patrimony, an example of our heritage. Except Isis, the mad bastards.

But we still do.

The wooden road discovered in Ireland which is a millennium older than any Roman roads and which is right now being shredded for sale as peat moss is just an example. The people in control just don’t give a fuck, simple as that. Same now as it ever was.

 

We hear about the dangers of cigarette smoking and asbestos and lead all the time. The companies peddling or using them knew a hell of a lot longer than the general public, though. However, they’d never endanger public health with those things now.

 

Oh yes they would, and oh yes they do.

 

They still use asbestos in developing countries to build houses. They still sell cigarettes to people and pressurise, or sue, governments to allow them do so in the way they want. A look at the headlines tells us all we need to know about what they think about saving money to keep kids away from being poisoned by lead in their environment.

 

Despite the horror show awaiting us at the hands of global warming, companies like VW and Exxon keep on trucking the same way they want to and fuck us and our flimsy attempts to use the law to keep us safe.

 

It seems we humans are intent on keeping on destroying things until they’re gone. Then we will try to rebuild the treasure we have ruined, like they rebuilt the Liceu opera house in Barcelona when it burnt down. Hey, there’s money in construction… like there’s money in war. Better build up Miami Beach than slow down the submerging…

Easier to rebuild the walls of Pamplona, or of Rome, than the kind of treasures we are letting die out around us. A Tasmanian tiger is a loss, but so much more is the Sumatran, the Siberian, the Bengal.

 

They call it business as usual. But it’s not. It’s only been like that for a very short time. And it will only last a little bit more, no matter what we do in the next few years and decades. It’s only a blip on human history, never mind geological time.

Afterward, when we all – what’s left of us – will live a very different kind of life; one more in tune with the planet, more in line with its resources.

 

The great pity – though only one of the pities – is that if we went now towards the way we must all live, it would be so much easier, so much better for us and the world around us.

Like getting by without asbestos is better than having to remove it, and preventing illness is better than paying the healthcare costs of those affected, or letting them die, as many are.

This radio show about life expectancy says that of American Whites is declining, and that of Hispanics much higher than expected simply because of the difference in smoking rates between these two groups. John Oliver’s very informative and funny show about lead says that every dollar spent in lead abatement brings back seventeen in savings of special education, healthcare and crime effects of lead poisoning.

Think of how much better things would have been if those bastards running those lobbies didn’t do their jobs so well and we had stopped using them way back when they figured out they were dangerous.

 

I know it sounds pessimistic, but I really think we’ll be living very different lives sooner than we think. We won’t be driving the cars we are now for one. We will all go to solar electricity and drive cars that don’t contaminate. It’s the only way forward, because of what economists pretend we don’t know – that finite resources thingy.

 

Most of these vehicles will go a little slower than your average Audi. And that’s okay. I mean, why do we need to have cars now that can go so fast? It’s not as if they can do that on city streets more accelerate to the next red light. Why do we need cars that can go double the speed limit so smoothly that we hardly notice we’re endangering ourselves and others and are surprised when we get the speeding ticket? We’ve seen that they can’t do this without producing a shit load of pollution, and so called efficiency in engines has been mere illegal IT trickery and pollution control fraud (for which I can’t see anyone in jail yet).

 

So why not start now? Why not stop making cars which are so fast? Especially since it seems basically impossible to make them both fast and as efficient as they are legally supposed to.

 

What’s the point in one generation having the experience of super gas guzzling cars – which never see their full potential on our roads –  when every other generation in the future will have to get by with a the equivalent of a Prius?

 

If we don’t stop this short aberration of extreme greed – for we’re all greedy, but usually our peers slap us around the head and tell us to get a grip on ourselves when we go too far. This has not unfortunately happened to CEOs and hedge fund managers yet (who sometimes get billions of dollars a year – I mean, like, what the actual fuck? They could pay for lead abatement out of their back pockets, they could fucking buy Sumatra to make a tiger reserve…) Unless we slap the hands of those holding the reins, we’re liable to ruin the little wonder we have left around us in this anomaly of idiocy.

 

People post quaint photos on social media and ask if you could stay in a cabin in the woods and live a simple life. Many say no. Not me. I’d love it. But even I would say no if there was no woods around the cabin. That’s the simplified future we could be facing, though.