Today featured two triumphs – or at least they seemed that way to me. The first was that, after several years of wearing XL sized shirts, I picked a shirt out of the wardrobe this morning sized L and it fitted me with room to spare. That pleased me a lot. Since my last diabetes update two days ago, I’ve lost a further half kilo (1.3 lb to North Americans.)
The second triumph was fixing a problem with a typewriter that’s been bugging me for a week – an AEG Olympia Traveller Deluxe S, made sometime in the 1980s I think. Everything worked fine except the letter ‘a’ which wasn’t striking cleanly. It is now. That means that I now have three working typewriters and one more that needs some work. Of course, with four typewriters in the shed, I absolutely am not keeping my eyes open in charity shops and online for more. Nor would I like it to be generally known that I am interested in typewriters so that people might find them and give them to me (especially ultra-portables in reasonable condition*.) Oh no. That would be silly.
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After posting a couple of days ago about rewilding, I was catching up with a stack of half-read New Scientists and read an article in the 1 December 2021 issue titled Why the myth of ‘wilderness’ harms both nature and humanity, by Emma Marris. The article covered a lot of ground but her concluding paragraphs were:
We value “naturalness” so highly that in some places we are even willing to hurt and kill animals to protect it. When non-native animals are killed simply because they “don’t belong” and not because they are clearly causing some measurable harm, we have decided that erasing the taint of the human is more important than the lives of animals – who, lest we forget, have no conception that they are in the “wrong” place.
To make good environmental decisions, we must stop focusing on trying to remove or undo human influence, on turning back time or freezing the non-human world in amber. We must instead acknowledge the extent to which we have influenced our current world and take some responsibility for its future trajectory. Given that we actively use at least half of Earth’s land for our own ends and actively manage many of our protected areas, a gardening metaphor seems right. But our global garden is, and should be, rambunctious because we must always leave room for the autonomy of non-humans. We shouldn’t seek to carefully control every plant and animal on the planet. We couldn’t even if we wanted to.
Rejecting the human/nature dichotomy doesn’t mean condoning all human actions because, as animals, everything we do is “natural”. Using “natural” as a substitute for “good” is the problem here, not the solution. Many human actions have been bad for us, bad for other species, bad all around. As a collective, we humans have clearly taken more than our fair share of space, water and other resources. But we don’t fix that by exiling ourselves from the rest of Earth’s species and building a wall between us. We fix that through repairing the systems by which we make our living, by learning – or re-learning – better, positive relationships with the species with which we share Earth.
I agree with that. She also argues that:
Our concepts of nature and wilderness sadly limit the solutions that we can imagine. Perhaps because of the bluntly extractive tendencies of their ancestors, it remains very difficult for many people with primarily European ancestry to wrap their minds around even the idea of a positive, mutually beneficial relationship with other species. Thus they can see only two conceptual options: destruction of nature by humans or separation of humans from nature. To save nature, we must exile ourselves from it – like latter-day Adams and Eves leaving Eden in shame after despoiling it.
I think there’s a straw man lurking there, but agree with her basic point.
On a tangential subject, I read in today’s Guardian that Chemical pollution has passed safe limit for humanity, say scientists.
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I watched Marvel’s The Eternals which I wanted to enjoy, but instead stuck with to the end in a state of appalled fascination. The talented cast were wasted on a wooden script – a script as wooden as a log cabin in a redwood forest: so wooden that I had to check I wasn’t watching a DC film.
I also watched the final episode of The Expanse, which wrapped the programme up nicely and left me wanting more. I continue to enjoy Blade Runner : Black Lotus.
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*Ultra-portable models include:
- Hermes Baby/ Hermes Baby Rocket
- Empire Aristocrat
- Adler Tippa/Gossen Tippa
- Remington Travel Riter
- Groma Kalibri
- Princess 300
- Smith-Corona Skyriter
- Smith-Corona Zephyr
- Antares Parva
- Olympia SF
If anyone in the UK spots one of these going cheap … (the clue is in the name, they are usually surprisingly small and specifically designed for travelling rather than sitting on desks.) Generally speaking, these are all overpriced online, priced up for a collectors market that doesn’t really exist in the UK. Asking a premium price for a fully-refurbished machine is one thing, but for an eBay/charity shop special is something else.
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