The climes they are a-changing
Today trash is piling up at home – unless some slippery property ninja threw it on a pile in the ‘hood.
How prescient that our 14-day wildcat strike by a fearsome and loathsome union comes at a time when the human world is meeting to discuss the burgeoning global trash pile such as the garbage patch forming in the Atlantic.
There are two human mind-sets at play: one focuses on the grubby little palace intrigues which beset our nation and its economy, the other knows that bigger things are coming.
Climate change, shift, crisis, call it what you will, and nation politics and economy are big bros, one is spurred on furiously by the other.
I am interested in the people who care, who are interested, who possibly find it engrossing in its enormity, who want to keep up with the whole icecap melting thing and the earth’s temperature hitting up towards the deadly two degrees warmer than pre-industrial times. Last year we were at 1 degree and the big human effort now is to stop it at 1.5 degrees.
There is a hole in the ozone of Eastern Cape thinking. For years greenies and scientists have been getting wound up about climate change, but if you asked any of them here to point it out in our backyard, you got a mouthful of science bollocks, mostly about how it cannot be quantified or precisely identified.
Frustrating when I watched pot plants being washed off the Royal Alfred Marina, surfers catching lefts near the Kowie Bridge, the Orange River running dry, fires blazing on the Garden Route, ice particles from a storm blasting the Cederberg on the way to Namibia last month in summer ... It just keeps on and and on and on.
It can feel crazy that while the politicians and business people battle on, the very stage upon which they strut and give off all that hot air, is in a state of ominous, freaky flux.
So many little things that just keep adding up. You want to go to bed and hide under the covers.
Then, a piece in this very newspaper about the final encroachment: all that plastic we buy from retailers and industry and toss in the bin is landing up, not only in the ocean, or Nahoon Corner on Sunday, but inside us!
Yes, plastic particles, teeny-weeny nurdles in the food we eat are landing up in our bods! We are the plastic people in more ways than one.
Don’t be petrified. Humans are amazingly flexible and smart. Change will come.
I am willing to bet that the way we consume fossil fuels and plastic, the way we build, the way our factories produce and gorge themselves on resources, the way everything is organised, the order of society itself, will bend and yield.
Corporations can hold out for so long and then pressure from a polluted, ailing, angry, hurt public will push them too. When cancer and additives and hazardous fumes collide, it’s going to be fierce.
It’s bleak and it could be bloody but kids, you and I know, there will be new ways to get our heads around.
It will start with public awareness. Food will be a big issue. The vegans are coming! Sharpen your tongs! We won’t want plastic at all, not in our food, in our clothes nor in our bodies.
But I ask immediately that any additives and antibiotics in chicken go first because somehow what’s in them breasts has made it into my breasts!
Cop24, the UN’s arena for nation states to haggle and shout over how they are going to try and stop the temperature rising is taking place in Katowice, Poland, from Monday to Friday December 14.
Everything goes down at these events. They are real, and startling, scary and you learn plenty.
But the best, dear kideos, are the events that run on the margin of the big, swinging, Ds inside - the nation bosses.
There were hundreds of young climate activists camped out around the event, all protesting and being so sharp about it. They are on another level. They know what’s here now, and they are looking ahead.
You have to experience it.
And hey, I am sorry about the mess.