Blue sky and sunshine is very welcome even if accompanied by 0 degrees temperature.
My weather app promises a “high” of 3 degrees today!
The ice floe at the top of the lane leading to the millpond is as treacherous as ever but most of the ice on the millpond itself has melted, leaving only patches at the corners. As I approached the millpond this morning I heard the racket of geese flying overhead. Just as I was wondering to myself where they might be headed the raucous gang swirled round and landed on the millpond, causing the ice patch at my corner to bob up and down, making a curious rhythm agains the weeds growing at the edge.
George, the resident white goose, apparently unable to fly, and christened George by the locals, hastened to swim/paddle over to join them. Poor thing, he gives every impression of seriously wanting to be a Canada goose and join in all their communal activities! I suspect he also tries to be a swan when they come visiting.
I went on my way and saw a friend standing quietly on the path through the wooded area. She was clearly watching something. It was the deer again, this time too far up up the hillside to make a halfway decent photograph. There were three of them making their way up the hill.
A bit of nature study - not a bad way to start the day. We are fortunate to have so much so close to home.
I’ve just read Ursula Le Guin’s novel “The Dispossessed”, with the contrasting worlds of Anarres and Urras, one a sort of idealised communist (in the most basic meaning of the word) society where everything is held in common - nobody eats while another goes hungry and nobody goes hungry while another eats, although at times everyone goes hungry and everyone works to solve the problem - and the other a world of “propertarians”, an Anarrasti word for property owners, with a recognisable mix of (very) rich and (very) poor. The protagonist, a physicist, having gone to Urras to be able to continue work on his theory which could lead to instantaneous transference of matter, takes refuge eventually in the Terran Embassy. There he decides to gift his theory to everyone, rather than let Urras alone have it and use if as a weapon for war. Via the Terran embassy it will be transmitted to all societies. It will be used for peace not war because no-one “owns” it.
I found myself thinking of the arguments that have gone on recently about patents for Coronavirus vaccines. If the knowledge were freely shared it would be easier to vaccinate the world but instead some people are making vast amounts of money out of it. The knowledge is “owned”, mostly by big pharmaceutical companies.
Getting back to “The Dispossessed”, at one point the Terran ambassador explains to our hero, Shevek from Anarres, how the people of earth more or less destroyed their planet and were “rescued” by the Hainish, resettling them on Urras. A small population still lives on old Earth where forests and natural beauty have all been almost totally destroyed, where cities are in ruins. The blue planet has turned grey. Some things are able to be put right, perhaps, but, the ambassador tells him, the bits of plastic everywhere are a permanent blight.
Now, this book was published in 1974. I went and checked the date when the plastic problem was mentioned. We have reached a point where micro-plastic particles are everywhere. Even bodies contain micro-plastic particles. Too small to detect except in a science laboratory, they are in just about everything we ingest. We are trying to reduce world use of plastic. But how did Ursula Le Guin know that this was a problem back in the 1970s, when most of us where delighting in using Tupperware? Plastic was the storage and packaging solution. So how did she know it would become the problem it is today? Maybe she really was a prescient witch. Or maybe she just read a lot of scientific journals.
Keep on recycling and re-using. We don’t want our blue planet to turn grey as in the Le Guin universe.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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