online: 21 may 2005
modified: 26 may 2005

21 may 2005 out of the nest


12:12 A neighbour was trying to get into the back garden to save two young crows unable to fly... eventually we got close to the birds and chased them to perhaps safer perches... While we did so two parent birds came close to us, cawing aggressively. Eventually we left the birds to their fate, hoping that the parents will feed the young ones until their wings grow and they are able to fly. The crow's nest from which they may have come has been unused for years but this year it is occupied. For the last month or so two red balloons have been moving in the wind within a metre of the nest but now they are deflated.

As we attempted to save the crows i realised that our own lives and houses are also quite fragile or vulnerable - the order and comfort of our homes is easily disturbed - but perhaps it is also easily restored. I remember the night bombing of British cities in World War 2 - i was told that a bombed railway was sometimes repaired by lunch time and a bombed factory could be back in production in a week... i don't think houses were repaired so quickly but many people took to sleeping in bomb proof shelters - or else on the platforms of underground train stations.

Next day:
Professor Sir David King (onetime protestor against apartheid and now Chief Scientific Adviser to the British government) stated on radio that future generations can expect the sea level to rise up to 7 or 8 metres due to the melting of ice and the warming and expansion of the sea. I guess that would submerge the central parts of London and many other cities. He said that the Thames Barrier was designed to keep out exceptionally high tides 2 or 3 times a year (or did he say 'every 2 or 3 years'?) - but already it is used about 6 times a year.

Then he spoke of the big cultural change that is needed if global warming is to be appreciably reduced. As he said that, i thought of the probably much greater, and less understood, changes that i see as necessary if industrial living is to be demechanised and humanised... At which thought i felt a call to do what i (and few others) can do about this - and then i thought

is it possible for anyone, or even everyone, to consciously redirect this strange culture that is changing its earthly context and is itself composed of our own perceptions?.

These thoughts, of the young crows, of the vulnerability and the repairability of our life as it was, of the threat of global warming, and of the cultural changes needed, not only to rectify our misuses of physical energy but to change the nature of industrial culture... these thoughts, which have recurred throughout my life, seem now to be reaching a crisis. Perhaps at last it is possible to take action...

What is the first step?

I think it is to ask this question in public and in such a way that others can react to it (as it stands it could immobilise)...



anyone wanting to respond to these questions may use the forum that Jonathan Moberly set up for the discussion of the internet and everyone and which Daniel Brozak urges me to put to wider use:

forum





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