Sorry I didn’t get to the Tuesday Club meeting to hear about climate change so these are just a few of my thoughts.
I will be 85 in a couple of months’ time, so I supposed it’s my generation that’s buggered things up but I’m not sure how. We didn’t have rubbish like we have now, every Tuesday night when I put the red bin out it amazes me where all the rubbish came from, it’s nearly all packaging, stuff we didn’t ask for, stuff we didn’t want but you have to take it if you want the food and drink you need to live.
We used to buy things that if they broke down, we could repair them, not now, we throw them away and buy a new one, and on and on it goes………….
We are covering the world with concrete and not just with massive buildings and motorways. All our houses are built on concrete, my house stands on 450 square metres (floor-slab. driveway and path ways) and that’s just one house. Why does a house need a floor slab? Do two old people in their 80s need all of this? Does any house need this?
I was 38 when we came to Invercargill from the UK, it was the first time we had been overseas. We met some wonderful Southlanders of our own age who when they got married went to places like Timaru for their honeymoon. They all went the Queenstown for the January holidays and met up with people from Otago and a few from Christchurch and Queenstown prospered. Then it became full of people from all around the world so we stopped going to Queenstown and started going around the world. Now there is nothing wrong with this but where does it fit in with climate change? My old school mate Jack Kelly in the UK has never owned a passport or drivers’ licence and has had a great life.
- We are building new motorways, and nothing wrong with that either, but they run alongside our railway. The roads are full of big trucks and tourist busses, and the railway is virtually empty.
- We have big multi carparks in town now, should we need carparks in town? Do we all need a car?
- We all carry cell phones in our pockets and a lot people change them every year. This seems to apply to most of today’s technology. Where do all the thrown away phones go to?
- Our oceans are full of plastic and the outer space around the earth is full of space rubbish, and I am not responsible for that.
So, we are stuffing up our land our water and our space by the way we live. It’s a bit late for me now but if you want to change the climate you younger people are going to have to decide what kind of lifestyle you want.
I was discussing this with my old mate Ed Daniel in Wellington, here is part of an email I received from him.
The problem talking about Climate Change is it is all based around the fiction of the good old days; some mythical period of the good old days
What the advocates for Climate Change have failed to do is some BLUE-SKY thinking. What sort of world do we want in 2050 and 2100? If we need to fight a war or a pandemic we can always find the money… why can’t we look after our people in peace time? Perhaps we are more worried about the health of the economy than the health of the people and the environment. There is no point in protecting the environment on its own. We are part of it like all the other living things.
Here’s to the future ———–
John
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