On destructive development, on food that isn’t food, on two-legged sheep, on the demise of thought and the war for the future

Saturday, May 10th, 2008

When today’s pensioners were young, there was no environmental awareness, no sense of impending climactic doom, and so we can forgive our forebears for building bold visions that sometimes worked in many respects, sometimes didn’t at all, but never had any consideration of the long-term impact of the bulldozers and diggers. Today’s power-wielding despots aren’t working out their grand money-making schemes in ignorance. They know the situation, locally and globally, and choose to press ahead regardless. Future generations—if there are any in a hundred years—won’t be able to look back on these people and forgive them their crimes which were and are committed in full knowledge of what’s coming.

The sad thing is, the depressing thing is, politicians have children too. Don’t they care what legacy they leave behind? Are they a heady and paradoxical mix of the craftily intelligent and unfathomably dumb?

It’s easy to despair, to think what is the point of becoming more self-sufficient, switching off electrical devices, recycling, reusing and so on. And when a tree is gone, when a green space is gone, it’s never going to come back. But then, while the lunatics have taken over complete control of the asylum there’s the importance of cultivating conscience as well as crops, of promoting self-worth and self-respect, of the desire to contribute something positive to the universe to consider. We can either fall in with the dodos, or we can try to do all we can, even constrained as we are. After all, if the worst-case scenario came to pass, wouldn’t you like to look into the eyes of children and say you did your best but it didn’t work out… instead of not being able to look them in the eye at all because of your shame?

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