Thoughts on lawnmower blades
e-mail: a.seaton{at}abdn.ac.uk
He was about my age and had left school at 15. ‘What was your first job?’ I asked. ‘Sharpening lawnmower blades; the old-fashioned ones you pushed’ he replied. It made me think. It must be 30 years since I did that. When we married 40 years ago, we had a cooker, but no car, washing machine, dryer, refrigerator, central heating, television or vacuum cleaner. My mother brought up her five children without any of these aids and I recall my grandmother, to whose home we were evacuated during the war, cooking in a small oven over an open coal fire. All through my childhood, a coal fire was the source of heating through the winter. We were not poor; this was the norm in the 1940s and 1950s.
The fuel that supplied our energy needs was coal. The coal industry employed about one-tenth of the male UK workforce, and chimneys everywhere belched out black smoke which, during temperature inversions, settled as a dense cloud over the cities and was responsible for many thousands of premature deaths. The major episode in London in 1952 led to the Clean Air Acts. Coal burning was prohibited in cities, power stations moved to the countryside and tall chimneys sent the sulphurous pollution to northern Europe where it acidified lakes and rivers. But the effects on our pollution have been dramatic. Less polluting fuels, more efficient engines, better insulated houses and less energy-dependent industries have allowed us to come close to closing the coal industry and given us the chance to live in a more fuel-efficient manner. All we had to do was to maintain the same austere lifestyle and all would have been well. But we overheat our houses, think nothing of flying away on holiday and drive cars seriously overpowered for our needs. We use fuel to cut our grass, wash everything, watch television, write articles and play games on computers, even to clean our teeth. Every time we do these things, we draw unrenewable energy from the planet and add to the burden of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
I believe that the concept of sustainable development is a comfortable myth. Global climate change is a reality and, as atmospheric CO2 continues to rise, we shall soon reach a point at which climatic changes will affect all those now under the age of 40. Indeed, it may already be too late to do other than mitigate the worst effects. At any time, death of forests and oceanic algae, melting of polar ice and release of methane could accelerate temperature rise, force more crop failures, flooding and drought and lead to further internecine war and migration from hard-hit places. We are entering a period of sustainable retrenchment. The young, who have grown-up accustomed to their parents’ profligacy, will find it difficult to adapt. It would help them if we now started to set a better example.
It is funny what lawnmowers make you think of.
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