Green with ennui

A recent article in Lloyd’s List entitled ‘We can’t afford green ambition’ has brought forth an angry riposte from a shipbroker, who describes it as “a very poor piece of journalism” of which he feels “pretty ashamed”.

It was actually a very good piece of journalism, of the type we cannot have enough of in the shipping industry. We need writers who make us think differently about things, and who make us smile. We don’t have to agree with them.

The basic premise of the article was that we should maintain a proper perspective about the warming of the planet, and not believe everything the scientists tell us and start planning pell-mell for a better world in a thousand years’ time. We should take what scientists tell us with a pinch of salt, although not too much because that isn’t good for us.

The author of the article refers to the Green Party having seized control of the council in the town of Brighton, on England’s south coast. Walk the streets of Brighton today and you will see the results of a singular policy on refuse disposal which is only a step away from emptying our chamber pots out of the window.

Of course we cannot ignore scientists. It is obvious, for example, that if you subsist exclusively on a diet of offal and beer, and smoke 200 a day, you might not live long enough to be run over by a bus. But we should keep things in perspective.

There is nothing more tedious than reading wilfully extreme views about the effects of modern living on our planet. (Well, there is, actually, but this is neither the time nor the place).

We can be green without being extreme, and without ruining our own lives.

chris@merlinco.com

A sense of direction

In the January 31 edition of Lloyd’s List, Michael Grey laments the decline of education standards – and particularly those relating to the teaching of geography - in the UK. He is quite right. Our generation grew up knowing the important things about geography. We knew what was north of Cape Hatteras, we knew that Greenland wasn’t really as big as it looked on the map, and we knew that Chile was the long thin one in South America. Set us down on a bald man’s head, and we could find our way anywhere.

That is not the case today. We live in a society in which contestants on TV quiz shows tell us that Peru is the capital of Chile, and that Mount Olympus is the highest mountain in Austria. And it is not only geography teaching which is in decline. Ask those same TV quiz contestants a question relating to anybody or anything which is more than twenty years old and they will declaim, “Oh, that was before my time”, as if this were some sort of justification for wilful ignorance. The present generation finds it quaint that we used to learn about things that happened hundreds of years before we were born, and then used that information to inform our understanding of contemporary issues. It was called history.

Geography needn’t be dull. There are few things more fascinating than a good atlas, even if a third of the countries of the world are no longer coloured in pink. Geography is about more than finding your way about the place, too. It is about intuition, and instinct. Henri Charriere, in his book Banco, recalls how he once stopped on a street in Caracas and asked a local how long it would take him to get to the address he was heading for. The man drew in his breath, reflected for a moment, and said, “Oh, about two cigarettes”.

The only comparable directions I can recall are those offered on numerous occasions by Michael Grey himself, across the desk we shared at Fairplay. Michael used mercatorial projection theory in reverse to make his calculations. Wherever I was trying to get to, be it Harrow or Montmartre, he would say, after only a moment’s consideration, “Right. That’s only half an hour from your house”.

chris@merlinco.com