The cucurbits are yellowing, dinky, stringy. Too small. Too reluctant to grow further into the cold, wet summer. Maybe it’s not just the cold; maybe the manure in their beds have aminopyralids lingering, or maybe the ground under the manure is just too nutrient-poor after decades under gravel. But the cold feels the most obvious thing. It’s hardly got above 22C/71F in Glasgow so far this year, with most days ranging between 15C/59F and 18C/64F. Personally, I enjoy this kind of weather. I function at my best when the light isn’t too bright, when it’s not too hot to think. Though I do sometimes think, maybe just a couple degrees warmer would be nice? Might be good for the cucumbers, for the zucchini? But I am deeply reluctant to complain about it, to say that desire out loud. In other parts of the world, animals are falling dead out of the trees from heat (in Mexico City, in Dehli). People are dying. Rivers are drying up. Islands are being torn apart by hurricanes. Forests are burning. Land is unworkable, ungrowable. And not all of it is from fossil fuels (the private jets, the endless plastic production), but from the unconscionable mechanisms of colonialism, of capitalism: an endless stream of planes and their emissions bringing and dropping bombs, white phosphorous, tanks, diggers, snipers and their rifles, so much land moved for illegal mines, for palm oil plantations, for shrimp farming, for cattle rearing. To complain about a cooler-than-usual summer with plenty of rain feels wildly ungrateful, in the context of everything that is happening right now.
Thank you. Thank you for writing about what hardly anyone is talking about. It's courageous and UTTERLY necessary, and I share all your daily anxieties.
We stood as Green candidates in local elections when we lived in Devon, which is mainly a Tory stronghold (though our local Totnes had and possibly still has a Green mayor). I now live in Brittany, and don't have the right to vote. We have the looming possibility of the far right being elected.
It's hard to know how to address all you speak of, other than refusing to be complicit and compliant; and doing what one can on one's won small patch, as we are here.
Thank you Meg for writing of that which is much the that which I feel although in very different circumstances.
Farming on the chalk hills in South Dorset where summer droughts have a big effect on the Cattle and Sheep fields of grass.
Unfelt Shifting Baselines as viewed detachedly whether through windows as we transport ourselves at speed, through sunglasses when out, our buildings when in & through our multitude of technological tunnelings with Nature a dwindling byline.
I have voted for the Green Party for the first time as this really should be the home for most farmers' votes who don't farm on an Industrial scale.
Thank you Bruce, that means a lot to hear! All my fingers are crossed for you that your candidate wins, and that we see historic Green Party gains tomorrow!
I find myself almost-never-not thinking about Walter Benjamin's writings about the weather, both the more famous quote "Nothing is more characteristic than that precisely this most intimate and mysterious affair, the working of the weather on humans, should have become the theme of their emptiest chatter. Nothing bores the ordinary man more than the cosmos. Hence, for him, the deepest connection between weather and boredom. How fine the ironic overcoming of this attitude in the story of the splenetic Englishman who wakes up one morning and shoots himself because it is raining." But also, "For who can say more of his own existence than that it has passed through the lives of two or three others as gently and closely as the weather?" The weather, of course, gets less gentle by the day, but still.
Thank you. Thank you for writing about what hardly anyone is talking about. It's courageous and UTTERLY necessary, and I share all your daily anxieties.
We stood as Green candidates in local elections when we lived in Devon, which is mainly a Tory stronghold (though our local Totnes had and possibly still has a Green mayor). I now live in Brittany, and don't have the right to vote. We have the looming possibility of the far right being elected.
It's hard to know how to address all you speak of, other than refusing to be complicit and compliant; and doing what one can on one's won small patch, as we are here.
Please don't stop writing of such things.
Thank you Meg for writing of that which is much the that which I feel although in very different circumstances.
Farming on the chalk hills in South Dorset where summer droughts have a big effect on the Cattle and Sheep fields of grass.
Unfelt Shifting Baselines as viewed detachedly whether through windows as we transport ourselves at speed, through sunglasses when out, our buildings when in & through our multitude of technological tunnelings with Nature a dwindling byline.
I have voted for the Green Party for the first time as this really should be the home for most farmers' votes who don't farm on an Industrial scale.
Thank you Bruce, that means a lot to hear! All my fingers are crossed for you that your candidate wins, and that we see historic Green Party gains tomorrow!
I find myself almost-never-not thinking about Walter Benjamin's writings about the weather, both the more famous quote "Nothing is more characteristic than that precisely this most intimate and mysterious affair, the working of the weather on humans, should have become the theme of their emptiest chatter. Nothing bores the ordinary man more than the cosmos. Hence, for him, the deepest connection between weather and boredom. How fine the ironic overcoming of this attitude in the story of the splenetic Englishman who wakes up one morning and shoots himself because it is raining." But also, "For who can say more of his own existence than that it has passed through the lives of two or three others as gently and closely as the weather?" The weather, of course, gets less gentle by the day, but still.
Oh Walter Benjamin, yes!!
We have no Scottish Green candidate in Argyl and Bute 😫😭
oh noo, how disappointing!!