force majeur
Snow has fallen heavily along the coast of the British Isles – 60cm, perhaps. With our maritime climate, this kind of weather is unusual enough that it has never been worthwhile investing vast resources in proofing our infrastructure against it: but common enough that when it happens it brings chaos. From the midst of this chaos rises the usual outcry: why can’t they do something about it? The same voices would be the first to complain of the waste if resources were squandered preparing the whole country for these few days of snow… It is really MOST tedious…
Of course, I can sit quietly at home enjoying the beauty that the skies have gifted us. Easy for me, you might say, because you don’t need to go out. That’s true. But then I wonder how many of us do… This frantic need to ‘get into work’ seems to me indicative of our hubris. The way that we insist that our routines must continue come what may. That the human ‘virtuality’ must trundle on irrespective of what is going on in the world. It is this kind of thinking that may well be leading us into the self-made disaster of global warming… It’s not as if we work all the time. We take time off. But those days of holiday are mandated by us. Perish the thought that we should have time off imposed on us by the climate, by the planet.
It seems to me that it’s about time that we started going more with the ‘flow of things’. Our climate deploys energy at levels that still dwarf those that we control. Yet, like the gods we feel ourselves to be (want to be!), we constantly set ourselves against these forces. This does not strike me as being wise…
