Having Fun in a Changing World
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When I wrote this series about 8 weeks ago, I thought I’d be a little late for the whole Occupy Movement thing. But, with the economic protests/riots in Europe and the conversations continuing in the US about the 99%, it seems this movement has legs.
This generated some comments on Daily Ink, including:
How are you supposed to get the smell out of major living areas, then??
I replied:
Open a window, cook something nice like fresh bread, pick some nice natural flowers, use dishes of baking soda, or natural lavender or eucalyptus oil, or simply strike a match or have a tea light in the bathroom that you can light.
I’ve never shot anything, but I think it is good to face up to where the meat we eat comes from. We aren’t growing it in the lab (yet…), so every bit of meat we eat comes from an animal that was killed. I don’t eat anything unless I know that it had a good life and a humane death.
But I think I would struggle to shoot a deer (or a duck).
Following on from this week’s Sunday cartoon, here are some more of Oscar’s igloo redesigns:
This cartoon caused some comment on Daily Ink:
Posted 04/07/2012, 06:53am
Why take a job with a major oil company when you can continue your prehistoric subsistence life-style so admired by the Greenies?Posted 04/07/2012, 08:32am
I remember back in the Seventies when they wanted to ban Snowmobiles in the north. Inuit were not impressed.Posted 04/07/2012, 11:16am
This type of thing may have been true in the 1960s and ’70s, but today, Inuit advise Environment Canada & the Nunavut Dept. of Environment in regards to environmental and land management (called the Elders Advisory Committee or Inutuqait Mianiksijiit Angngutiksanik). (I’m kind of into Arctic Studies!)
My response:
I was commenting more on the fact that sea ice is shrinking and that a lot of Inuit (and polar bears) use this sea ice for hunting.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/05/070515-inuit-arctic.html
“And faster-melting ice is causing a decrease in hunting days each year, while igloos, which native hunters prefer to tents when they are on the trail, are much harder to build with less snow and ice.”
And the reason that sea ice is shrinking? Global warming caused by massive release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere (mainly from fossil fuel burning, but also release of methane from the melting permafrost).
Everyone is entitled to their point of view on this, but the science overwhelmingly points to climate change being real and the sooner we switch to cleaner fuels, the better.
The boyf and I went to Tasmania and loved it. It’s not all beautiful – there is a lot of heavy industry, mining and forestry, but the other scenery is fantastic, the wildlfe is incredbible and the people were, for the most part, friendly (the exception being the woman in the “British” pub in Deloraine who must have sniffed me out as one of the “greenies” she loathes). Mouse over for captions…
Say it isn't so!
Yes, I worked this out. I assumed that each person would need at least a metre squared to stand on. 7 billion square metres is the same as 7,000 square kilometres (1000 m x 1000m). I then did a search to find islands bigger than 7000 sq km. I would have dearly loved to use one of the Falkland Islands, but I’m not sure they are as well known as in Margaret Thatcher’s era…So I went for Vancouver Island, instead – a little roomier at over 30,000 sq km.
I’m not making this up: