"Did we even try to stem the tide?"
Jul. 2nd, 2010 12:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greygirlbeastOne cannot genuinely hate a season, but autumn instills in me a deep uneasiness. Yesterday and today, it feels like autumn here in Providence. That carnivorous blue sky, low humidity, temperatures in the seventies Fahrenheit. I'm glad for the break from the heat, but not glad that means a splash of autumn in July.
Dreamsickness this morning for the first time in a couple of months. I have a pill to stop that now, but something nasty wriggled in under the pharmacological wire.
Every bit of yesterday was spent editing "The Maltese Unicorn." No, that's not quite true. Only the hours spent working. And I didn't finish the editing. It sprawls over into today, and maybe also into tomorrow. Did I write anything new yesterday? Yes, but I don't think there was any net gain. I would write a paragraph, which would take half an hour or an hour, and then I would erase it.
Please do have a look at the current eBay auctions. Thanks very much.
When the editing was done for the day yesterday, I watched an episode of American Experience about the Dust Bowl (Spooky had gone to the market). I found a curious parallel. During the 1930s, during a time of great economic hardship, the nation is suffering a man-made ecological disaster, an agrocalamity. Short-sighted farming techniques in the Southern Plains led to conditions in which a layer of topsoil that had taken a thousand years to form was blown away in a few minutes. Anyway, now, in a time of economic hardship, the nation has suffered a man-made ecological disaster, an petrocalamity. Short-sighted use of fossil fuels, combined with greed and carelessness, is threatening a gulf ecosystem that has taken many tens of millions of years to evolve. In the episode of American Experience, a number of people who had been children during the Dust Bowl were interviewed. There are two I would like to quote:
Melt White, Dalhart, Texas: "It looked like the greatest thing would never end. So they abused the land. They abused it somethin’ terrible. They raped it. They got everything out they could. And we don’t think. We don’t think. Except for ourselves and it comes down to greed. We’re selfish and we want what we want and we don’t even think of what the end results might be."
J.R. Davison, Texhoma, Oklahoma: "I think that most of those people thought this is just what we might say 'hog heaven’. It’ll always be this way. So they kept breaking this country out and they plowed up a lot of country that should never have been plowed up. They got the whole country plowed up nearly and, ah, that’s about the time it turned off terribly dry."
Change a few words here and there, and this could be an interview in, say, 2075, of people who were children during this year, recalling the spring and summer the seafloor of the Gulf of Mexico bled crude oil and methane.
And now I have to edit.
Dreamsickness this morning for the first time in a couple of months. I have a pill to stop that now, but something nasty wriggled in under the pharmacological wire.
Every bit of yesterday was spent editing "The Maltese Unicorn." No, that's not quite true. Only the hours spent working. And I didn't finish the editing. It sprawls over into today, and maybe also into tomorrow. Did I write anything new yesterday? Yes, but I don't think there was any net gain. I would write a paragraph, which would take half an hour or an hour, and then I would erase it.
Please do have a look at the current eBay auctions. Thanks very much.
When the editing was done for the day yesterday, I watched an episode of American Experience about the Dust Bowl (Spooky had gone to the market). I found a curious parallel. During the 1930s, during a time of great economic hardship, the nation is suffering a man-made ecological disaster, an agrocalamity. Short-sighted farming techniques in the Southern Plains led to conditions in which a layer of topsoil that had taken a thousand years to form was blown away in a few minutes. Anyway, now, in a time of economic hardship, the nation has suffered a man-made ecological disaster, an petrocalamity. Short-sighted use of fossil fuels, combined with greed and carelessness, is threatening a gulf ecosystem that has taken many tens of millions of years to evolve. In the episode of American Experience, a number of people who had been children during the Dust Bowl were interviewed. There are two I would like to quote:
Melt White, Dalhart, Texas: "It looked like the greatest thing would never end. So they abused the land. They abused it somethin’ terrible. They raped it. They got everything out they could. And we don’t think. We don’t think. Except for ourselves and it comes down to greed. We’re selfish and we want what we want and we don’t even think of what the end results might be."
J.R. Davison, Texhoma, Oklahoma: "I think that most of those people thought this is just what we might say 'hog heaven’. It’ll always be this way. So they kept breaking this country out and they plowed up a lot of country that should never have been plowed up. They got the whole country plowed up nearly and, ah, that’s about the time it turned off terribly dry."
Change a few words here and there, and this could be an interview in, say, 2075, of people who were children during this year, recalling the spring and summer the seafloor of the Gulf of Mexico bled crude oil and methane.
And now I have to edit.
