Rip Up The Roads
We’re driving ourselves out
Not to overdo the gloom, but isn’t global warming pretty much self-correcting?
We’re part of nature, so the proof that climate change is happening — if we still need proof — is that we’re adapting at an instinctive level. Birth rates are falling, et cetera. It’s in our nature, for want of a better expression, to get out of the way.
Where is the fertile earth?
I got caught in a traffic jam on the way to the recycling centre. In the back of the car, I had glass and plastic bottles, cans, cardboard, paper. Around me, there were cars, exhaust fumes, more cars.
Underneath all of us, tarmac. A wide, flat road laid down on fertile earth, connecting us to the great network of tarmac surfaces laid down on so much of the fertile earth.
On either side of us, shops. Glass windows showing us — on that stretch of road — skiing and outdoor gear, furniture, bedroom suites, a showroom full of electric bicycles. Empty shops as well.
And underneath it all, far below, hidden, more of the fertile earth.
Millions of acres
There is, in Falmouth, a building called The View. It’s a block of student flats. It stands between an older row of terraced cottages and any sight of the sea. In an act of concrete justice, its own view of the sea is similarly obscured.
I thought of The View, and then I thought of the millions of acres of tarmac and buildings, car parks, offices, blocks of flats and housing developments, that we’ve laid down on the flood plains and the fertile earth.
Then I thought about the traffic jam around me. Until recently, my idea of “too much traffic” was enough cars to slow me down on the long, open stretches of road where I should be able to burn up fuel and go fast. It wasn’t the static, exhaust-emitting presence of cars held up by temporary traffic lights protecting traffic cones and vacant tarmac on Commercial Road. But they’re hostile things too, breathing out their fumes.
We’ve built our monument
The road network is recent. The first motorway in the world opened in 1929, in Italy, and then came a German autobahn at some unspecified (by Wikipedia) date in the 1930s. The M1 in England opened in 1959.
The Wikipedia page Evolution of motorway construction in European nations shows far more dramatic rises than anything about global temperature. The road network spread like spilt oil, viscous, thick.
If you seek our monument, look around you. We’ve waterproofed the landscape with non-porous tarmac. Just in time for the rains. Is tarmac flammable?
Unborn children
When I got home from my recycling trip, I looked up “global birth rate” on Google. Pew Research Centre tells me: “For the first time in modern history, the world’s population is expected to virtually stop growing by the end of this century, due in large part to falling global fertility rates.”
Are we preventing ourselves quickly enough? Will climate change get there first? Maybe our instincts will give us more arguments, relationship break-ups, disagreements?
Ironic, I’d say, if the argumentative angels of our nature goaded us to the planet’s salvation.
Here’s an old one.
