There's a fun little test you can do over at Political Compass that will plot you on a political landscape. It uses two dimensions: Left/Right and Authoritarian/Libertarian (I never knew it was the French National Assembly of 1789 that came up with the Left/Right categories).
I came out smack in the middle of the Left Libertarian quandrant right next to Gandhi, Ralph Nader and the Green Party. No surprise there. Fifteen years ago I would have been much further Right.
A massive study by the UN co-ordinated 1360 scientiest across 95 countries to take a global inventory of the state of our ecosystems and quantify the effect that human activities are having on them. After four years, they recently published their findings.
It makes grim reading. You can read summaries from either the BBC or the Guardian or read the original report.
It makes it very, very clear we're living beyond our means. But we knew that, right? In a very interesting turn of phrase, the report talks about the "services of nature". It's a clever but apt "nature as business" metaphor. Two-thirds of these services provided by nature are being degraded by human pressure. Nature is going out of business and it's stock is falling quickly.
Three important messages from the report are worth repeating:
1) Protection of nature's services is unlikely to be a priority as long as they are perceived to be free and limitless by those using them - effective policies will be those that require natural costs to be taken into account for all economic decisions.
2) Local communities are far more likely to act in ways that conserve natural resources if they have real influence in the decisions on how they are used - and if they end up with a fairer share of the benefits.
3) Natural assets will receive far better protection if their importance is recognized in the central decision-making of governments and businesses, rather than leaving policies associated with ecosystems to relatively weak environment departments.
Well of course that's all well and good. But we're left with the fundamental problem of how we will ever make "radical changes in the way nature is treated at every level of decision-making". To make radical changes, we all need to give up priveleges that we've taken for granted for a long time.
I signed up for an RYA Day Skipper Practical course with Allabroad Sailing and flew down there on April 10th arriving just before noon.
I took a taxi to Marina Bay which was a total waste. You can easily walk there across the runway from the airport terminal. I was very early but I checked in at the office and left my bags. We weren't due to meet until 6pm so I had a good 6 hours to kill.
I wandered around Gibraltar. It's an odd littles place. By and large, it's British through and through but with a healthy smattering of Spanish. There's just one pedestrianised main street...and a big rock. And lots of buildings heaped up on one another clustered around that rock. Being a Sunday, almost everything was closed. I killed time eating and reading a novel I brought.
At six, I met the other students (David, Richard, Ben, Mark), settled into my cabin on the yacht and listened to safety briefing. In all there were two other boats going out so that evening, we all got together for dinner.
Monday
In the morning, we met our skipper, another Mark, had another safety briefing and received out safety and all weather gear. Then we went for an introductory sail in the harbour. Gibraltar is famous for it's dolphins and sure enough, a few dolphins eventually joined us playing in our bow wave. Marvellous!
Tuesday
Sailed down to Estepona. Not a whole lot of wind made for a fairly dull sail.
Wedensday
We prepared the boat and slipped our lines before sunrise. We had a beautiful sunrise as we crossed the straits of Gibraltar and headed to Africa. At first, we had to motor but eventually the wind picked up and we were able to sail the remaining distance to arrive at Smir.
Thursday
We spent the morning practising harbour maneuvers in Smir. The wind had come alive with a vengeance and we were excited to get out and do some sailing.
The afternoon passage across the straits was an adventure. The winds were gusting up to a least 36 knots. According to the Beaufort scale, that's a Force 8 also known as a Gale. Out in the middles of the straits, the waves were two to three meters high. I had a great time sailing the yacht bucking over them. The mail sail was in at the third reef and we had only a tiny amout of the jib out. We probably should have put up the storm jib since we later found rips in the jib.
Ben was amazing. He cooked a huge roast dinner for the crew while the yacht was heaving about. To eat, we had to heave-to and drift in the middle of the gale. We need to wait anyway since I had to get in some night hours and this was our last opportunity.
We set off again at dusk and made port late in the evening.
Friday
Sailed back to Gibraltar
Saturday
Killed the day wandering around flew back to London.
Qualified?
Today marks two years since my last day of employment. It doesn't feel like two years. Time still rushes by even when one isn't caught up in a career.
I sometimes feel a little guilty that I haven't accomplished a whole lot in two years. Then I remind myself that the whole make-something-of-yourself, self-improvement, get-ahead, consume-more mindset is an ingrained product of middle class rat race culture. My subscription to that has pretty much run out. How should one measure self-worth?
I haven't been inspired to take a dramatic leap into a new career. I was half hoping something inspirational would just happen. Nope! I plan to stick with computers as a way of eventually earning an income again. In fact, I finally wrote up my CV and applied for a short IT contract with the idea of dipping my toe into contracting work. No one called back. Oh well, with Jenny now back at school full-time, I'm in no hurry.
The UK elections are ten days away but I haven't been following it too closely.
Whatever policies Labour comes up with, I won't vote for Tony Blair. I'm disgusted with how he pandered to George Bush and took the UK to war. It was a stupid move for Blair to stand again. If Gordon Brown was leading the party, I might have voted Labour.
An excellent programme recently aired on Channel 4 called "Elections Unspun, Why Politicians Can't Tell The Truth". It described the current post-democracy where the political elite have evolved into a new kind of marketing machine using sophisticated software to identify and target swing voters with bland sound-bite policies. Stagecraft and PR is highly refined, controlled and restricted. Debate is minimal with "me too" messages. There's almost no ideological difference. Big uncomfortable issues with difficult solutions are ignored. Everyone is clustered in the center with personalities and credibility being promoted and attacked rather than anything substantial. How can anyone get excited by it?
It's ironic that only parties guaranteed to lose can afford brave policies and a long term vision.
A couple of days ago some kids passing our house found this friendly squirrel running all over the road. The kids caught him (or maybe the squirrel just wouldn't get off them) and they gave him to me since I was outside at the time. He really is very friendly. Climbs all over you. Doesn't bite. Not skittish and quite docile. Also pretty clumsy and not very well balanced. I figure he must be about three months old.
The law says you can't keep squirrels. There's also a law which says you can't release them into the wild. Catch-22! There's also a law about abandoning animals that can't survive by themselves.The advice from wildlife rescue societies was "if he's not hurt, let him go where you found him". Basically, he's cute vermin.
So I built him a little box which he easily took to and today put him out in our backyard on the picnic table so I can watch out for him. I've tried to make it hard for predators to get him in his box but I think the odds are against his survival. There's already another grey squirrel that owns our neighbourhood and there are a few cats about. He's also perfect owl bait. I'm going to feel dreadful if something gets him.
Jenny and I arrived at a pub this afternoon for a nice quiet lunch only to discover smoke billowing from the engine of my car. My first reaction was "engine fire!" but it eventually turned out to be on oil leak. The oil was burning when it dripped on the muffler. In fact with the engine running, oil would gush out and a 993 has a lot of oil! I'm sorry to say it got all over the pub car park. Luckily the breakdown service didn't take long to come but they quickly gave up and called for a recovery truck.
I spent the rest of the day at a garage while they tried to diagnose it. It's not the oil filter or any of the sensors. The current theory is that an engine seal has blown which is quite unusual. It's still at the garage and chances are it's gong to be a non-trivial repair. Groan!
Jenny and I sometimes chew over owning our very hobby farm but we both soon sober up knowing how much work that would be! Maybe just some chickens and an orchard would be nice. And a dog and a bunch of cats. Maybe a pig and a goat. A couple of ducks on a pond...
Northern Lights is the first book of the His Dark Materials trilogy. After this trilogy came third in The Big Read last year I knew I would have to read it at some point so I finally finished this first book over this last holiday. Only took me two days because I became thoroughly engrossed in the storyline.
I'm not yet convinced it deserves to come in third place (beating Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy no less) but I'll reserve judging too much until I've finished the other two books. On it's own, it's a well written fantasy set in a parallel universe. The other books takes the parallel universes theme further; I'm looking forward to how it develops.
As an aside, I remember seeing the northen lights on just a few occasions while living in Victoria, Canada. It's one of the most beautiful phenomena I've ever seen and it's something I'd really like to show Jenny and the kids one day. When and where is the best place to see it?
