Drip. Drip. Drip.

~ Live & Learn

airconditioning

“There you are, turning the ignition of your car,” he writes. “And it creeps up on you.” Every time you fire up your engine you don’t mean to harm the Earth, “let alone cause the Sixth Mass Extinction Event in the four-and-a-half billion-year history of life on this planet”. But “harm to Earth is precisely what is happening”. Part of what’s so uncomfortable about this is that our individual acts may be statistically and morally insignificant, but when you multiply them millions and billions of times – as they are performed by an entire species – they are a collective act of ecological destruction. Coral bleaching isn’t just occurring over yonder, on the Great Barrier Reef; it’s happening wherever you switch on the air conditioning. In short, Morton says, “everything is interconnected”.

~ Alex Blasdel, ’A reckoning for our species’: (Timothy Morton) the philosopher prophet of the Anthropocene (The Guardian, June 17, 2017)

Photograph: Residential house in Shinagawa, Tokyo by Jan Vranovský, 2016 @ Parallel World. Jan Vranovský (*1986, Prague) is a Czech born architect, graphic designer and photographer, currently living in Tokyo.

23 thoughts on “Drip. Drip. Drip.”

  2. I keep thinking that any effort is worthwhile – relearning how to ride a bike, using little energy (not my own 😉) – and then I read this and I feel like we have to do something really really big.

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  5. I’m here now in the Whitsundays on the Great Barrier Reef. Absolutely beautiful. Only golf buggys that run on electricity are driven here, its so nice to see no cars, but that’s not real life anywhere else. Not sure how we stop it?

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  7. For us “little folk”, I feel every little bit we does, helps. We might not see it as much but it is a part of the solution. If everyone took that attitude.
    So funny, a friend of mine wrote about this very subject over on Steemit…

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  8. What a coincidence you posting this, Dave. Only this morning, over the morning tea, I had one of my rants about vehicles discharging noxious quantities of diesel fumes and making me convulse in coughing fits. Yesterday, my son and I were out walking the dog and had to cover our noses and mouths for several minutes after a car started up next to us and belched out fumes all down the road. It was a white car, but it’s rear end was black with dirt. …Grrrrr, Such people deserve to be fined a huge amount and their vehicles impounded, and then they should have to do community service cleaning pollution off buildings in their nearest city.

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    1. Sarah, in U.S. we have emissions testing so all cars need to demonstrate passing a test. Yet, I see what you see, the violators still get away with it….agree on heavy community service as penance.

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  9. We’re a bit soft; we are not as ‘tough’ I’m afraid, as our grandparents… who soldiered on without ac or heat set at the cozy 75 degrees. I certainly can’t function in 105 degrees in the house w/o AC I have no idea, how they did it. At some point though, we may have no choice.

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  10. Oh, yes. I totally grok this one. I observe – that is my nature. I was in Costco yesterday watching the hordes of people loading up on their plastic bottles of water. On their bags and boxes of chemical laden food. Of their whiny, grasping children, soon to be good little consumers. And where it ends, I know not. Then to the gas pumps, lines and lines of oversized vehicles with solo drivers. Sigh.

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