Perhaps natural things don't really matter to us hubris-driven humans.
Because even huge natural catastrophes like Spanish Flu (and earlier global pandemics) and the volcano Krakatoa's volcanic winter didn't seem to count as much in the human mind as did a relatively small disaster that humans themselves were causing.
The unexpectedly large yield from the American thermonuclear test Castle Bravo in 1954 led to a strong plume of radioactive dust to fall on a Japanese fishing boat thousands of miles away, quickly killing one crewman.
It also added a relatively small amount of a much longer term radiation killer, strontium 90, to go high up into the atmosphere and then slowly fall all over the world, onto grass and then into cow's milk and eventually into the growing bones of babies.
Showing posts with label strontium 90. Show all posts
Showing posts with label strontium 90. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 23, 2015
Friday, May 1, 2015
in the Fifties my key influence was always TV - in the Sixties it was never TV
My partner Rebecca and I always get into disputes about me letting her son's daughter Sam watch so much videos on the computer : Peppa Pig, Little Bear, Arthur and Franklin and the like.
I myself loathe TV, rarely watch movies (but do enjoy detective mystery series from TV, as long as they are not thrillers).
I like popular music (though don't listen to it on the radio as much as when I was younger), never read fiction (though I liked it plenty until I left high school) but above all, am a total non fiction bookworm.
I read books, magazines, newspapers and increasingly, on the computer.
Rebecca is the one who watches TV or listens to CBC radio - not me --- I am the much bigger reader.
So you'd think I'd be the one to restrain Sam's TV time, but that's not so.
Because when I was small, before I could read (and even after I could read) I didn't really read much - more enjoyed simply staring at photos or illustrations and then trying to understand the short descriptive cutlines or captions below them.
Instead (from age six till I turned ten) I much preferred to play and talk with a big bunch of other kids, watch grownup movies or TV shows with my parents on the family TV or gaze out the car window soaking it all in, when our family went for long drives.
On the TV, war movies, murder mysteries, a few TV situation comedies, TV docudramas and Fifties Sci Fi movies made the biggest impression on me.
But in September 1961, that all abruptly ended - I wasn't allowed to leave our new rural home to visit other kids, there was no TV and no money to go to city movie houses or have a daily newspaper.
Print had to take up the slack and with two weeks I found I could read adult level books and magazines as fast and as easily as any adult who was a good reader.
But back in the Fifties, as a little kid, I could either not read at all, or so poorly, that I couldn't possibly hope to learn about worlds beyond my own through my print-understanding abilities.
But even as a small kid, I learned a lot about the adult world through observing the sounds, dialogue and actions of films and TV shows --- and matured in doing so.
Because even at age seven I thought A Walk In The Sun was a war movie well above the rest I had seen and I had already seen plenty by then.
Professional adult film critics (then and now) thoroughly agree with my childhood assessment.
I only wish my mother had stuck two year old me in front of a TV sometimes, instead of always outside, behind a wire fence enclosure ,to stare all day, every day, at the few cars that went past our home just beyond Dartmouth's 1954 town limits.
I was bored out of my skull - could have used some brain stimulation.
I was conceived in 1950 and was eight and a half in 1960, so I recall nothing of that decade from the simple-minded Dick and Jane books we had to read in school.
But the TV I watched at home was fully adult and its lessons taught me how to understand the adult 1950s world I saw outside my home.
As a result, I 'get' the 1950s, I really do --- and while I have much studied the 1940s, I don't get them at all.
Sam is a very smart two year old and she has no trouble separating the good children's shows from the bad children's shows - and she can tell me the plots and characters better than I can - and I watch them with her.
TV expands her mind as much as playtime and kids books do, I can see it do so in her.
And that it matches my memories of just what I can recall from a 1950s childhood - and it wasn't anything we were taught in school .
(Besides the exploding of Ripple Rock and the death of Pope Pius - interestingly, two external adult happenings brought into our simple classroom days by our teachers.)
So, no I never heard of 1957's Strontium 90 till 1962 but I saw its indirect effect on the world in all those junky Sci Fi films I saw back in the 1950s.
So let Sam watch TV and videos, I say - it'll expand her brain, not rot it ...
I myself loathe TV, rarely watch movies (but do enjoy detective mystery series from TV, as long as they are not thrillers).
I like popular music (though don't listen to it on the radio as much as when I was younger), never read fiction (though I liked it plenty until I left high school) but above all, am a total non fiction bookworm.
I read books, magazines, newspapers and increasingly, on the computer.
Rebecca is the one who watches TV or listens to CBC radio - not me --- I am the much bigger reader.
So you'd think I'd be the one to restrain Sam's TV time, but that's not so.
Because when I was small, before I could read (and even after I could read) I didn't really read much - more enjoyed simply staring at photos or illustrations and then trying to understand the short descriptive cutlines or captions below them.
Instead (from age six till I turned ten) I much preferred to play and talk with a big bunch of other kids, watch grownup movies or TV shows with my parents on the family TV or gaze out the car window soaking it all in, when our family went for long drives.
On the TV, war movies, murder mysteries, a few TV situation comedies, TV docudramas and Fifties Sci Fi movies made the biggest impression on me.
But in September 1961, that all abruptly ended - I wasn't allowed to leave our new rural home to visit other kids, there was no TV and no money to go to city movie houses or have a daily newspaper.
Print had to take up the slack and with two weeks I found I could read adult level books and magazines as fast and as easily as any adult who was a good reader.
But back in the Fifties, as a little kid, I could either not read at all, or so poorly, that I couldn't possibly hope to learn about worlds beyond my own through my print-understanding abilities.
But even as a small kid, I learned a lot about the adult world through observing the sounds, dialogue and actions of films and TV shows --- and matured in doing so.
Because even at age seven I thought A Walk In The Sun was a war movie well above the rest I had seen and I had already seen plenty by then.
Professional adult film critics (then and now) thoroughly agree with my childhood assessment.
I only wish my mother had stuck two year old me in front of a TV sometimes, instead of always outside, behind a wire fence enclosure ,to stare all day, every day, at the few cars that went past our home just beyond Dartmouth's 1954 town limits.
I was bored out of my skull - could have used some brain stimulation.
I was conceived in 1950 and was eight and a half in 1960, so I recall nothing of that decade from the simple-minded Dick and Jane books we had to read in school.
But the TV I watched at home was fully adult and its lessons taught me how to understand the adult 1950s world I saw outside my home.
As a result, I 'get' the 1950s, I really do --- and while I have much studied the 1940s, I don't get them at all.
Sam is a very smart two year old and she has no trouble separating the good children's shows from the bad children's shows - and she can tell me the plots and characters better than I can - and I watch them with her.
TV expands her mind as much as playtime and kids books do, I can see it do so in her.
And that it matches my memories of just what I can recall from a 1950s childhood - and it wasn't anything we were taught in school .
(Besides the exploding of Ripple Rock and the death of Pope Pius - interestingly, two external adult happenings brought into our simple classroom days by our teachers.)
So, no I never heard of 1957's Strontium 90 till 1962 but I saw its indirect effect on the world in all those junky Sci Fi films I saw back in the 1950s.
So let Sam watch TV and videos, I say - it'll expand her brain, not rot it ...
Greening the Red,White and Blue : corporations, not scientism, the major cause for postwar environmental disasters?
Anyone concerned about our planet - and not just the few of us busy slicing and dicing the past history of environmentalism - should read Thomas Jundt's "Greening of the Red,White and Blue" (Oxford University press, 2014.)
He's done the hard spade work to reveal a hidden 1945-1975 pre-history of environmental activism and corporate environmental greed that existed before environmentalism-the-word went mainstream.
(Because Strontium 90 made environmentalism-the-concern a worldwide activity well before the first ever Earth Day.)
My only comment is that I feel that Jundt lays too much of the blame on corporate short sighted greed and not enough on the still strong naive scientism from the scientists and the general public of the Era of Modernity...
He's done the hard spade work to reveal a hidden 1945-1975 pre-history of environmental activism and corporate environmental greed that existed before environmentalism-the-word went mainstream.
(Because Strontium 90 made environmentalism-the-concern a worldwide activity well before the first ever Earth Day.)
My only comment is that I feel that Jundt lays too much of the blame on corporate short sighted greed and not enough on the still strong naive scientism from the scientists and the general public of the Era of Modernity...
Saturday, December 27, 2014
Since Manhattan Project caused first global environmental crisis, it can hardly solve the new one ...
If your baby isn't dying from an overdose of Strontium 90 from mother's breast milk , it isn't for want of trying on the part of the permanently teenage males who brought us the first Manhattan Project.
They would have polished and re-polished the turd that is atomic bombs , with their deadly atmospheric tests, until all of us were full of atomic fallout radiation - including themselves.
That's the thing about dumb fucks - they can't stop harming even themselves .
Thankfully some of them became enlightened before they died (and a wrathful God forcefully did it for them).
But what then is the excuse of the permanently twenty something male (once again !) down the street who emerges from his make believe world of super hero comic books just long enough to earnestly inform us that "... another Manhattan Project , maybe in geo-engineering , will quickly solve any climate problem - if that problem actually exists...".
Yes Virginia, there is such a thing as 20/20 non-hindsight ....
They would have polished and re-polished the turd that is atomic bombs , with their deadly atmospheric tests, until all of us were full of atomic fallout radiation - including themselves.
That's the thing about dumb fucks - they can't stop harming even themselves .
Thankfully some of them became enlightened before they died (and a wrathful God forcefully did it for them).
But what then is the excuse of the permanently twenty something male (once again !) down the street who emerges from his make believe world of super hero comic books just long enough to earnestly inform us that "... another Manhattan Project , maybe in geo-engineering , will quickly solve any climate problem - if that problem actually exists...".
Yes Virginia, there is such a thing as 20/20 non-hindsight ....
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
GCN's 'Back Story' : growing up a "LITTORAL" commensalist, becoming a global commensalist ...
My own personal 'back story' actually.
I was three and a half in 1955 when I first saw Chezzetcook Inlet - we were moving into our new home in Seaforth, Nova Scotia, along that half drowned river valley cum estuary.
But it wasn't my first experience of living along a water's edge: far from it.
My parents grew up along the edge of St Clair River, part of the Great Lakes system, in Windsor Ontario - a few minutes walk to the river's edge. It seemed an hourly occurrence to see large steamships sail past the end of their street.
I was conceived there but was actually born born in Victoria, BC. Lived there twice, actually - both times close to the water's edge.
I later lived in Milton and Southsea, water's edge sections of Portsmouth - itself basically an island of the ocean, so very very close indeed to the mainland of Britain that most aren't aware of it's island status.
I lived for a time in Vancouver, but in the UBC Endowment grounds - at the very tip of Vancouver - the ocean minutes walking away, even for a small kid.
I later lived for a time in Putney and Ealing - river's edge suburbs of London England.
I live twice in Dartmouth Nova Scotia, the last time for 20 years and now for 30 years in Halifax --- very close to the water's edge.
However, like all my other homes bar one, still one not quite within sight of it.
You see, despite all those years living near the water's edge, I never actually lived within direct sight and smell and feel of it - except in Seaforth.
That it is why Seaforth was so important to my mental formation - that and the age I was when I lived there.
I lived there full time for only brief periods - in 1955-1956 and between 1961 and1965.
But both periods were critical. In the first I was just old enough to retain those all important firm first memories.
In the second period, I was in my critical 10-14 period of maturation.
In addition, I should say I was in Seaforth all summer between the ages of 14 and 18 and for much of the summer (and bouts of winter,fall and spring) ever since.
Our family still owns land there - my parents moved back gradually to full time residency, after moving to Dartmouth full time for just 5 years.
The next land fall our Seaforth house looks out seaward to, is I believe, Bordeaux in southern France. The open ocean is but 200 metres away---- and incidentally it is relatively rare in Nova Scotia to see the open ocean from a house- our province is a coast of deep bays.
Ocean wind and rain storms lash our 150 year old house, built literally like a sailing ship, until it creaks alarmingly like an old sailing ship 'working' in high seas.
But our part of Seaforth is only a tiny part of a much larger system : starting in the interior watershed for Chezzetcook River and Lake, it becomes a tidal flats cum narrow drowned river valley estuary, before emptying into the ocean between two guard barriers of resistance rock.
The original soil is terrible, but Chezzetcook is blessed by being the centre of a vast field of red clay drumlins that form its arable hills, its capes and its inlet islands.
Between drumlins and the rich marine life produced in such a littoral zone, the earliest settlers - first Micmac aboriginals and then their relatives among the earliest Acadians, eked out an adequate life here.
In 1962, aged ten, I heard and read the uproar about Rachel Carson's article and then book "SILENT SPRING". It impressed my young mind muchly. ( I had just started reading adult books and magazines and listening to adult radio.)
But may I confess ? I never could get far in her book - then and now - past the first chapter or two.
No mind - our family, like millions of others, was pre-sold to believe her based on our enjoyment of her earlier- better - book : "THE SEA AROUND US".
Our bible, every time we went to a beach or a rock pool.
Soooooooooo - given my 'back story' ---- how could I not help but to grow up a littoral commensalist .
And it was that plus the fact I knew as a young kid that my morning glass of milk was likely laced with Strontium 90 fallout from an nuclear explosion half a world away ,made me a confirmed global commensalist from an early age....
--- Michael Marshall
I was three and a half in 1955 when I first saw Chezzetcook Inlet - we were moving into our new home in Seaforth, Nova Scotia, along that half drowned river valley cum estuary.
But it wasn't my first experience of living along a water's edge: far from it.
My parents grew up along the edge of St Clair River, part of the Great Lakes system, in Windsor Ontario - a few minutes walk to the river's edge. It seemed an hourly occurrence to see large steamships sail past the end of their street.
I was conceived there but was actually born born in Victoria, BC. Lived there twice, actually - both times close to the water's edge.
I later lived in Milton and Southsea, water's edge sections of Portsmouth - itself basically an island of the ocean, so very very close indeed to the mainland of Britain that most aren't aware of it's island status.
I lived for a time in Vancouver, but in the UBC Endowment grounds - at the very tip of Vancouver - the ocean minutes walking away, even for a small kid.
I later lived for a time in Putney and Ealing - river's edge suburbs of London England.
I live twice in Dartmouth Nova Scotia, the last time for 20 years and now for 30 years in Halifax --- very close to the water's edge.
However, like all my other homes bar one, still one not quite within sight of it.
You see, despite all those years living near the water's edge, I never actually lived within direct sight and smell and feel of it - except in Seaforth.
That it is why Seaforth was so important to my mental formation - that and the age I was when I lived there.
I lived there full time for only brief periods - in 1955-1956 and between 1961 and1965.
But both periods were critical. In the first I was just old enough to retain those all important firm first memories.
In the second period, I was in my critical 10-14 period of maturation.
In addition, I should say I was in Seaforth all summer between the ages of 14 and 18 and for much of the summer (and bouts of winter,fall and spring) ever since.
Our family still owns land there - my parents moved back gradually to full time residency, after moving to Dartmouth full time for just 5 years.
The next land fall our Seaforth house looks out seaward to, is I believe, Bordeaux in southern France. The open ocean is but 200 metres away---- and incidentally it is relatively rare in Nova Scotia to see the open ocean from a house- our province is a coast of deep bays.
Ocean wind and rain storms lash our 150 year old house, built literally like a sailing ship, until it creaks alarmingly like an old sailing ship 'working' in high seas.
But our part of Seaforth is only a tiny part of a much larger system : starting in the interior watershed for Chezzetcook River and Lake, it becomes a tidal flats cum narrow drowned river valley estuary, before emptying into the ocean between two guard barriers of resistance rock.
The original soil is terrible, but Chezzetcook is blessed by being the centre of a vast field of red clay drumlins that form its arable hills, its capes and its inlet islands.
Between drumlins and the rich marine life produced in such a littoral zone, the earliest settlers - first Micmac aboriginals and then their relatives among the earliest Acadians, eked out an adequate life here.
In 1962, aged ten, I heard and read the uproar about Rachel Carson's article and then book "SILENT SPRING". It impressed my young mind muchly. ( I had just started reading adult books and magazines and listening to adult radio.)
But may I confess ? I never could get far in her book - then and now - past the first chapter or two.
No mind - our family, like millions of others, was pre-sold to believe her based on our enjoyment of her earlier- better - book : "THE SEA AROUND US".
Our bible, every time we went to a beach or a rock pool.
Soooooooooo - given my 'back story' ---- how could I not help but to grow up a littoral commensalist .
And it was that plus the fact I knew as a young kid that my morning glass of milk was likely laced with Strontium 90 fallout from an nuclear explosion half a world away ,made me a confirmed global commensalist from an early age....
--- Michael Marshall
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