Why do I bother blogging…….

Why do I bother blogging…….  I’ve been asking myself this a lot lately.  You may have noticed I haven’t been writing much lately.  A combination of having a hard working wwoofer here for over two months who has transformed the place, while I plod along trying to get this house more finished for selling, and now, display in this year’s Sustainable House Day.  Well, it’s days actually, the event is held over two consecutive Sundays, the 7th and the 14th of September.  The event is run by volunteers, and as a result things must happen slowly, our place is not yet listed as of today, almost the end of June.

Yes, in Qld that’s one year’s supply of firewood for an energy efficient AGA!

Alessandro, apart from making pizzas, has tidied up the yard extensively, finding so much firewood to burn in the AGA we have hardly touched our stockpile from last year.  Whoever buys this place will inherit a year’s supply of fuel to keep the old girl going all next winter.  Meantime, I’ve been finishing pelmets, painting doors, and even making the place actually lockable!  I may even have fixed quite a few air leaks in the process, hopefully making the place even warmer in Winter.  It’s only taken eight years or so…..  Alessandro who comes from a country rife with crime is totally bewildered by the fact we don’t lock our house.

Βut back to why do I bother blogging…….   To a large extent, I use DTM as a storage of information, and I use it during exchanges on certain forums by linking to articles published here in often vain attempts to convince people that major change is upon us.  I often fail.  Recently, the AIMN published an article by Kaye Lee on the worth of having High Speed Rail in Australia.  The AIMN is a barely hidden ALP lovefest site where the writers take turn at hating the current government.  Not that you can blame them mind you, but that topic can get tiresome.  So any time I get a chance to put some alternative stances on the state of the world, I grab it with both hands.  It always lands me in deep water, I’m labelled negative and without hope.

To be frank, I don’t know myself why I bother.  Neither I nor anyone else can ‘save the world’.  I won’t save Kaye Lee either.  She’s been convinced by the techno-utopians that we have a future low flying in renewable powered HSR.

Even Dave Pollard, a soulmate of mine in many regards is asking himself the same question….

In that recent entry of his, Dave mentions a book I’d never heard of, titled Straw Dogs, by John Gray.  Here is an excerpt:

The mass of mankind is ruled not by its own intermittent moral sensations, still less by self-interest, but by the needs of the moment. It seems fated to wreck the balance of life on Earth — and thereby to be the agent of its own destruction. What could be more hopeless than placing the Earth in the charge of this exceptionally destructive species? It is not of becoming the planet’s wise stewards that Earth-lovers dream, but of a time when humans have ceased to matter…

Political action has come to be a surrogate for salvation; but no political project can deliver humanity from its natural condition. However radical, political programmes are expedients — modest devices for coping with recurring evils. Hegel writes that humanity will be content only when it lives in a world of its own making. In contrast, Straw Dogs argues for a shift from human solipsism [belief in our aloneness and our disconnection from everything else]. Humans cannot save the world, but this is no reason for despair. It does not need saving. Happily, humans will never live in a world of their own making…

Homo Rapiens is only one of very many species, and not obviously worth preserving. Later or sooner, it will become extinct. When it is gone Earth will recover. Long after the last traces of the human animal have disappeared, many of the species it is bent on destroying will still be around, along with others that have yet to spring up. The Earth will forget mankind. The play of life will go on.

Homo Rapiens….  I’m going to use that from now on..!  A book worth reading obviously…..  I keep blogging, states Dave, because I owe just about everything about my current situation to my blog. My writing and my readers’ responses have shaped and radically altered my worldview.  I have to agree with this…… starting DTM was a bit of a life changing moment; I actually had to start thinking about why I did things, but lately, I feel that I have started running out of things to say.  How many times can I write about why Climate Change, Peak Oil, Limits to Growth, and Economic Collapse will combine to become our downfall before I’ve said it all?  And realistically, anything I add here now is to simply say ‘it’s all getting worse’ and ‘I told you so’.  And besides, Dave does a far better job than I, his blog is among the very best on the whole interweb as far as I’m concerned.

More of Alessandro’s handiwork

Also, something weird has happened over the past couple of months.  In March and April, DTM was going absolutely gangbusters (by my humble standards at least) with page reads going exponential.  Then it all stopped.  At first I couldn’t understand what was going on, maybe it was my lack of writing at this busy time, but WordPress gives its bloggers some neat tools, like the ability to see from which countries in the world visitors come from.  And it appears Americans have literally stopped coming here.  And I mean by more than 75%.  I know I’ve insulted a few by renouncing Guy McPherson’s near term extinction thesis (I’m prepared to give humanity another 150 years instead of just 30…) but at the expense of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, I wonder if the CIA or some such has put a block on this site.  The rapidity with which the numbers have fallen off is bewildering.  Not that blogging is a popularity contest, as I told Kaye Lee; it’s much easier to attract readership with how much you hate Tony Abbott than telling people civilisation is about to collapse……!

To change tack in this final paragraph, here we are near the end of June, and Winter has still not arrived.  We’ve had one cold morning that almost gave us a light frost (there was ice on the Citroen’s windscreen, but not the ute’s – and they were parked side by side – so go figure) but now the morning’s minimums are again over six degrees C, everyone’s still complaining about the flies (which are currently the worst we have ever seen, even in Summer), cabbage moths are still flying around the garden, and I’m still mowing the grass, even if very intermittently.  Down south, they’re being hammered by blizzards and storm strength winds, clearly we are stealing their warmth…  Climate Change?  WHAT Climate Change……?  Hopefully we’ll get a cold snap or two over the next couple of months, otherwise the garlic crop will be another failure, just like last year.  Aah Tasmania, wherefore art thou…?