Not just more, but all the more?

 This is the current read. At this point I don't know if it fulfills one of the check boxes for the reading challenge I was part of. I had a list of categories. It seemed so easy, and after we got home I was thinking I'd have lots of time to read. Somehow it didn't work out, but I'm trying to make time.

It's sort of appropriate I was reading it now. Thanksgiving is supposed to be a time for, well, giving thanks for what you have. There are lots of people throughout history who not only didn't have enough, what little they had was taken from them. If you think about what most people in Europe, North America, and a few other countries have, it should be pretty clear that most of the people who have ever lived could not imagine such a life. 

Think even of the world my parents were born into. Electricity itself was a fairly new thing. The DC-3 had just been introduced, making airline passenger traffic possible. If you wanted to cross an ocean, you almost certainly took a steam ship. Letters took days, sometimes weeks to arrive, and phone calls were rare and expensive. Lots has changed since then. 

One of the common refrains heard in immigrant communities is that people came to Canada to give their children a better life. Why anyone thinks that is no longer true is beyond me. They were willing to work to earn it, sometimes in conditions that we now consider actively unsafe. They scrimped and saved and made do. I spent part of my childhood in barns and sheds on my grandparent's farms. These were full of all sorts of interesting bits and bobs, set aside for a time they might be needed. The grandparents had survived the depression as young adults and beyond doubt knew what 'doing without' looked like.

At that point, for most people, 'more' was about getting enough. A few, of course, had ever so much more. The Robber Barons of the Gilded Age were the richest people who had ever existed, and if you take inflation into account, and depending on your exact assumptions, the super-wealthy of today are right up there with them. 

Somewhere along the way, we lost all sense of constraint about what 'enough' meant. For people like Trump, he could have it all, and he'd still complain that someone else had enough to buy food. For much of our lives till we moved out, my brother and I shared a bedroom. Now, having children share a bedroom is practically a crime. Houses have been getting bigger and bigger (and uglier and uglier) to where childless couples rattle around in McMansions of empty rooms. 

And cars! Depending on which figures you use, there are more registered vehicles than there are drivers. Our whole society is structured around vehicles. For many people, if you told them they couldn't use a car for a weekly grocery shopping trip, they'd get hungry. We have two grocery stores within easy walking distance (A Safeway and a Costco, with a Co-op being a longish walk) but it's carrying the groceries home that would be the tough part.

Our burning fossil fuels and pumping carbon dioxide into the air is a huge problem. Doing this has been very good economically for a few people, (see Gilded Age), has produced a comfortable life for many more people (me included), and helped pull a billion people out of abject poverty. 

The problem is that this cannot go on. We know our climate is changing. We are getting more extreme weather events. Entire species are going extinct. There's always been parts of the earth where people couldn't live, but those areas are growing. Many people refuse to even consider the idea this is actually a problem, let alone actually do anything about it. 

Even those that might be willing to make changes ask themselves, "why should I make me and my family uncomfortable when nobody else is doing anything?" It's a fair question. Somehow, our society has to grow up enough to seriously discuss such things, and many others, and do so fairly quickly. Starting now would be good. The various discussions around the Paris and Kyoto accords are barely a warmup. 

Enough of the serious stuff, I hear you saying. The photos, where are the photos? We went for a walk in Fish Creek the other day, heading across bridge 3, up the hill, and turning left to walk along the bluff on the south side of the river. 

I hadn't actually turned the camera on when I saw the guy in the blue jacket almost disappearing into the wood. There was some frantic adjusting and clicking.

I've tried a couple of times to build a panorama, but Lightroom isn't cooperating. So you have to make do with an ordinary photo.

On the way back, this was the view along the north side of the new stormwater pond.

Of the Day

Curtis

As of Sunday morning he seems a bit perkier. Still not eating the renal crunchies, but is eating some tuna. This was the day before the vet visit.

Flower

The dahlias were in great light yesterday, and I worked my way around the house. This might be the last day for them, since tonight is projected to be zero.

White peony

Driftwood