Niagara Falls and climate change

This photo of the Niagara Falls was taken just over 100 years ago, in 1911. Has anyone seen anything like it recently? Will we ever see its like again?

Niagara Falls in 1911

Hat-tip to Nourishing Obscurity, where there are more pictures of the same event.

 

 

 

Blog action day on the environment

Blog action day on the environment — and it’s today!

I hadn’t heard anything about it before, and wonder if any South African “green” blogs are taking part. Anyway, for those interested, here’s the blurb:

An international initiative of bloggers known as “Blog Action Day” launched today, with the aim of uniting thousands of blogging voices, talking about one issue for one day. This year on Blog Action Day, which is slated for Oct. 15, 2007, bloggers will be discussing the environment.

Major blogs have signed up to participate, including Lifehacker, Dumb Little Man, Lifehack.org, Get Rich Slowly, Web Worker Daily, GigaOm, The Simple Dollar, Zen Habits, Freelance Switch, LifeClever, Unclutterer, Pronet Advertising, Wise Bread and many more.

“For just one day, we’d like to unite as many of the millions of bloggers around the world and speak about one issue – the environment,” said Collis Ta’eed, an Australian blogger from FreelanceSwitch.com, and a cofounder of Blog Action Day. “We want to display the potential and the power of the blogging community, which is a disparate community but one with an amazing size, breadth and diversity. By bringing everyone together for one day, we can see just how much can be achieved, and how much we can be heard.”

Images of creation

Sally’s Journey: Ecology, responsibility and mission, has some images relating to creation. One showed a leaf, with a face that reminded me of a praying mantis. The other, from Matt Stone, Lord of the Fertile Earth, shows Jesus as the Green Man, crucified.

Sally asked for comments, and I said that neither of those images really spoke to me. But at the same time I do believe that we need some images that can speak to the theme of Ecology, responsibility and mission. These images of creation speak to me of one aspect of it.

I don’t think the first picture was intended to look like a praying mantis. That was just something it reminded me of. But it is sometimes said that |kaggen, the creator God of the San, the earliest human inhabitants of South Africa, sometimes took the form of a mantis.

The San, who were called Bushmen by white settlers, lived as hunter-gatherers, and painted numerous pictures on the rocks and caves of South Africa, but for the most part the meaning of the pictures was not preserved when the San were driven out by the white and black pastoralists.

Trevor Verryn, in his book Symbols and scriptures gives an acount of some preserved explanations that were written down from San informants from the |Xam people of the Drakensberg, whose totem was the eland, and told the story of some of the paintings. The story of creation and fall according to at least some of the San was thus preserved.

|kaggen (God) gave orders and caused all things to appear – sun, moonm stars, wind mountains and animals. |kaggen reprimanded his wife who spoilt his knife by using it to sharpen her digging stick, and as a result she brought forth an eland calf. One day |kaggen’s son shot the eland, and |kaggen mourned for it. So |kaggen mourned for the evil that had befallen his creation.

This is a very abbeviated account, but it shows God mourning for his spoiled creation. But the mantis too is a creature. If it is a symbol of God, it is yet not God. I’m not sure that a mantis is an appropriate image for a wounded creation.

I found Matt Stone’s image of the crucified Green Man also didn’t really speak to me. It seems to mix two incompatible concepts, though I can’t really put a finger on it. Maybe some others have some ideas on how they relate or don’t relate.

I suppose one of the reasons that it doesn’t speak to me is that the symbolism is obscure. Until the 1930s the name “The Green Man” was used for pubs, and it was only in the 20th century that it began to be applied to the foliate heads found on medieval churches. Of course that is one of the advantages of postmodernity — one can make up traditions and symbolisms to mean anything one wants. But to me, at least, a crucified green man just doesn’t seem to fit.

But when it comes to ecology, the image of Adam naming the animals seems to fit better. Perhaps he was the original green man!

Interfaith environmental conference

I’ve spent the last couple of days at a meeting of the management board of SAFCEI — the South African Faith Communities Environmental Institute. Our Archbishop Seraphim (seen here with Anglican Bishop Geoff Davies, the Executive Director of the Institute) has been a member of the SAFCEI board since its inception, and invited the board to meet at St Cosmas and St Damian Orthodox Church in Sophiatown, Johannesburg.

You can read more about what happened at the conference itself in my LiveJournal.

But one of the things that became clear at the conference was the eagerness with which Canadians were destroying the environment. There are plenty of countries that have been pointed out as villains in the world, but Canada has not usually been among them. But the evidence has started piling up.

I had known for some time that Canadians seemed to have some strange ideas. They have had trolley buses in western towns like Vancouver, and that seems to be a good environment-friendly means of public transport, running it on locally-generated renewable hydro-electric power. But now they seem to want to run their buses on diesel fuel — a non-renewable fossil fuel, most likely imported from the Middle East.

That’s just odd, and anyway I’m prejudiced in favour of trolley buses.

But now, it appears, the Canadians are intending to bring aluminium ore here to South Africa, and refine it here using heavily-subsidised electricity generated in coal-fired plants, and export the ingots. So our electricity bills are inflated to make Canadian companies rich, our cities have to endure acid rain to make Canadian companies rich, and our non-renewable fossil fuels are being depleted to make Canadian companies rich.

And Canada is, apparently, one of the biggest pushers of genetically-modified foods.

That makes Canada a bigger threat to our life-support system than Al-Quaeda. Bush and Blair, move aside. Your villany has been superseded.

Now I’ll have to Google to find out who the Prime Minister of Canada is.