While the world burns earthlings look on. I can remember 40 years ago hearing the term “Global Warming” for the very first time
I remember the place I worked setting up two teams, one to stop the warming and one to deal with it if the first one failed.
They both failed. Not because they didn’t know what needed to be done, but because the people in charge had their heads buried in the sands of desertification.
The members of both teams threw their hands up and moved on. They learnt lots in 10 years but were never given the chance to implement anything.
And now look. A few days ago I could smell smoke in the morning. Faint wafts of burning wood. From Canada.
Maximilien Lamy. I hope you don’t mind us using your photo, because it perfectly explains the problem.
Such insouciance. Don’t look up.
We are addicted to burning oil.
Now there is nothing to be done. We are, quite literally, toast.
We are going to keep extracting fossil fuels. Because money.
But there is at least one microcosm where with a little bit of luck some life will survive. The Marsh.
It probably won’t be us though. We’ll be long gone.
But some of us feel duty bound to try and preserve something from the flames.
Undoing the mess that’s been made is hard.
But it will be worth it eventually.
We haven’t managed to fix this little bit of mankind’s stupidity. Someone thought draining the marsh beneath the river was a good idea, so we have to stop it. We’re not used to nuts and bolts which we’re going to have to master. It is lefty loosy isn’t it?
We gave up after an hour and only one nut cracked. We’ll have to go back to base and get a bigger hammer.
But we had more work planned downstream.
Earth mixed with water are our favoured materials.
So we dug earth from one spot
And mixed it with water in another.
We made Otterdam a bit more leakproof because it’s been such an amazing success. The whole marsh is on a very shallow gradient and a couple of inches of water level rise makes a big difference to the area of marsh that’s wet. If this works the beautiful lush oasis we’ve created would be much bigger.
Just a short distance away the marsh has dried up.
Back in the winter it was under water and now it could quite easily burn. And we really don’t want that happening.
We’ll have to see what happens. We’ve got our tentacles crossed. There is still water draining away from the marsh. Hopefully we’ve stopped a bit more of that happening.
But we are not alone. There are now 10 foot giants roaming the marsh. And we’ve got to defeat them.
And after an epic battle we could smell victory
But not everyone approves. It seems there are some rather narrow minded earthlings who’d rather we left the balsam alone.
“When we went walking, tentacle in hand
You could sense that the earthlings would not understand, they’d go tut tut when we got off the bus”
Some of them don’t deserve this beautiful planet.
Rural Reading 