I do like waking up on a Sunday morning and hurrying to my laptop for the latest instalment of these well stories. They always transport me to another slower, quieter, deeper and more real and satisfying world. The thought that we are carpeting the countryside with wind turbines and solar panels, just to power our phones is appalling though.
"The thought that we are carpeting the countryside with wind turbines and solar panels, just to power our phones is appalling though."
Another thing I learned from Derrick Jensen was to watch out for that word "our". These are not "our" phones, or data centers, or wind power stations. Those things are *theirs*. This is not our government, it is *theirs*. This is not our military, or economy, it is *theirs*.
If you never learn to recognise that reality, you will always think and speak in absurdities.
Ah Derrick Jensen! Yes! His clarity and precision with such distinctions was eye opening for me as a younger man… not to mention the deep well of his empathy and passion for wild things and places… thank you for the reminder!
I will never buy that line of cr*p. It's corporate propaganda and a dodge. We are never given a choice on anything meaningful at that level, and any one-man boycott is fantastically-obviously tantamount to taking a whizz in the Colorado river.
So many people simply lack the intellectual honesty to admit when they are truly powerless and have been had by various implacable, ruthless, and sclerotic power structures.
Sorry, but I'm sticking with Wendell here. Very few of us, if any, do all we can to opt out. We are all implicated in the sense that we all could do more than we do in putting up resistance. Berry, by the way, is perhaps one of the least likely people on Earth to fall for a corporate dodge.
Just reading about evil, noted this quote from Craig Murray:
"I have frequently explained that when I sat in the International Court of Justice and heard Israel’s lawyers tell lie after lie to justify or excuse the Gaza genocide, I could feel I was palpably in the presence of evil.
At least in the Hague you could also feel and indeed observe that most people in the courtroom – including the majority of the judges – were repulsed by the evil.
Yesterday that same evil, and the same lies, was manifested in the US Congress by Netanyahu, to an audience which glorified, reflected and amplified that evil."
Evil? Americans, in America, are soaking in it. Even Wendell Berry, who lives in rural Kentucky, where my best friend went to visit her mother and found it to be such a shocking, hate-filled hellhole that upon returning home to Ohio wrote me a dreadful letter of the experience and then killed herself.
Rob, I'm not in the mood to hear anything from Americans about my responsibility as pertains to the relentless and daily-expanding crimes of your garbage, blight-on-the-world country:
Typically, we would be talking about corporate persons and/or consortia of said persons here, though I'm open to having a case made for particular plutocrats and oligarchs. Really, those among "they" are often genuinely monstrous institutional zombies that have accrued so much inertial cruft and heft they are something like vast, toxic, superfund sites that no one can even imagine ever cleaning up. I mean, that is exactly the "tech industry" right there, for starters.
I've found that frequent reading of such material helps me keep an even keel, especially at times when I can't get away to forest or field. Adrian Bell, Ronald Blythe, John Lewis-Stempel and other rural/nature writers of that sort are very important to me in that regard.
The part about the well doing its thing quietly reminded me of a homily I heard about God’s work being like a tree. God works quietly, slowly, at his own pace, and you think nothing is happening, but then there it is - like a fully grown tree.
I looked up the meaning of Ardnacrusha' ( my ears couldn't believe the rhyme of 'crusha' and 'crusher' and, if t'interweb is correct, it means 'the height of the cross' that once marked the boundary of the Diocese of Limerick. Perhaps that power station is also a boundary, that unknowingly was crossed a long time ago.
A bit academic but here’s an interesting article on the interplay between religion and electricity.
It is high time that the social aspects of electricity consumption are examined, the grid is as much a social construction as an engineering one and it is interesting how the availability of cheap power has not been examined in terms of how it has coarsened the human spirit. It’s always been seen as an unalloyed benefit...and unfettered access to power as a social good. Maybe rolling blackouts might refocus our minds!
Thank you, I hadn’t heard of her. It is so easy to come over as a crank talking about these things, the usual response points to the positive benefits, like dialysis machines, incubators for premature babies etc, and of course there are a myriad wonderful things that electricity has enabled (and I wouldn’t have worked in the industry if it didn’t).
But the biggest weakness of electricity, like money, is it’s liquidity, that is, you can use it to power PornHub or a hospital.
When rural electrification came to Ireland in the 1950s the country people were aware of the moral risks involved. I must look find the links to the ESB archives, it would be interesting to re hearr to some of those voices.
But I will look up Hannah Orbach, she sounds like my kind of lady!
Sorry Paul, but the issue of electrification and social change is one of my pet topics, even if it is a bit off the topic of holy wells.
One of the interesting selling points (although never officially endorsed) to persuade people to sign up was the Sacred Heart lamp, often permanently wired in (fire risk!) thus giving divine sanction for the electrification of the house.
Parish priests were often recruited to persuade people to sign up and farmers to give access to land.
I’m not valorising the sheer drudgery of the past, but there was a sophisticated PR machine used to shift cultural norms and there was no room for debate.
Don't know if you've read Niall William's 'This is Happiness' recounts this period in fiction and poetic words.
My aunt used to go to the Achill Islands as a child and I was surprised that she can't visit the Country Life museum at Turlough because it brings back memories of a 'very hard life.'
Thanks for this, I haven’t. Just to be clear, I am absolutely not valorising the sheer hard graft of Irish rural life before the advent of electricity and piped water.
I know how difficult life was, much of the work was undertaken by women, and life could be brutal, and short.
All I’m saying is that there is an undercurrent of contempt in the ESB marketing literature towards their ‘uneducated’ rural consumers, and there was no attempt made to take on their perspectives or see any value in their way of life.
This thread has continued in the advancement of all new technologies since, eg anyone who objects to the latest smartphone is a Luddite (who btw were unfairly smeared).
The reason I love this site is because I feel that here at least are others who question this narrative....
I’m new to substack and Paul's pages and I am amazed at the quality of thought and comment. Feel like I’ve come home. I did understand you. You’ve given me a perspective I have never thought about before.
Thanks for these comments. I'd be very interested to hear about peoples' voew on the moral risks of electricity in the 50s. It's impossible even to image a phrase like that making sense to people today, which shows how far we've been sucked in.
A piece I read recently looked at the concept of how, as we increase efficiency of how our various machines, devices, etc. consume electricity, rather than using less of it and lowering the cost of it, we find additional ways of consuming it. Server farms, in your example. Or, in the example of the piece I was reading, the Sphere arena in Las Vegas, a gigantic array of exterior and interior LEDs that wouldn't have been "affordable" or possible a decade or so ago.
So rather than consume less as we get more efficient, we find alternative ways to consume more, and get distracted from the streams (as in your example) quietly doing their thing all around us, often unnoticed...
That phenomenon is called Jevons paradox, after the economist who noted in the 19th century that the improved efficiency of steam engines lead to their increased use.
Technology has always been seen as value neutral, and engineers and scientists are never required to think about the social implications of their work.
It isn’t true, and has never been true that technology is value free. Faraday and Newton were committed Christians, but religion and ethics are now seen as ‘woo’ in scientific circles. Time to change?
A friend of mine has given guest lectures to engineering students at Stanford on ethics in science. It was a subject that they were not exposed to earlier in reference to their field of study…
This is true for economics as well. I remember reading not long ago that most economics majors get only one class in the history of their field, if that, and no courses in economic ethics except as electives.
A 'Woo' for ethics and faith are a good start and proffer a bit of hope here; Perhaps there's a need for a more eyebrow- raised 'Whew- how did we get here?'. Thanks very much for the lead (and link!) to Jevons' paradox; validations of hints and hunches that came my way decades back when I had a tangential role in maintaining a small municipal electric utility's operations for the benefit of our 6,500 constituents.
It's one of the great paradoxes of Environmentalism in that while it makes occasional gains in, say, efficiency standards, what happens is that because this lowers the cost of consumption, we all consume more. I remember a guy on my floor in college who was delighted to find "Low Fat Hostess Twinkies" because "Now I can eat twice as many".
Great achievements of Man, be they in arts or industry or sainthood, always seem to occur in conditions of constraint, however. Being made to work only with what is available lets us give that all the more attention.
I'm a photographer on the side, returning to it several years ago after having put it aside for a good 15 years while I raised my kids. While I love the possibilities of a digital cameras today, I still grab the old film cameras quite often simply because they force a constraint on what I can do (I've only got 15 shots left, I only have this one lens, and I loaded up Ilford 100). I have to make due, save my shots, and accept the possibility of failure.
Writ large, I think of the many saints who by and large just served their little parishes, or monasteries, or even just their neighbors - Matushka Olga of Alaska. She had little, but served mightily, and serves still. These saints did not have broadcast networks, they did not need them.
I am having such trouble (for many reasons) in finding Christ at the moment, sometimes I find myself wondering why I should even try to continue - then a post like this reminds me that the struggle is worth it, that the temples may fall but the water keeps flowing. Thank you Paul.
I read recently of an Orthodox Saint whose name escapes me. She told another later Saint in a vision how all of her sufferings and tortures she would go through 100 or more times again, to gain what she now has in the Kingdom of Heaven. Definitely worth the struggle I'd say!
Christ is Risen! He has trampled down death by death. Sometimes we have trouble seeing Him, but He has already won the victory, and His Kingdom is ever present, even if veiled.
When I was kid my parents paid about $10 a month for "power" or electricity. Today I pay on average $220 to $260 a month and the electricity is coming from the same sources. Technology progresses only if it can be monetized.
I might've posted about this here before but I can't pass up a chance to throw some dislike at these wind turbines.
There's a huge cross by the highway in Groom, TX. It would be the tallest thing in sight if it wasn't for the wind turbines that are now all around it. Quite symbolic.
"Got a problem with that? Then take a hammer to your phone!"
I had a bumper sticker made which says, "State Your Independence: Ice-pick Your Smartphone." I've had it on the car for a year now and have only gotten a handful of comments, most of them positive (although my 22 y.o. nephew didn't know what "ice-pick" meant, so perhaps "smash" or "shoot" may have been a better verb choice.)
It's interesting you mention "the sight" or da shelladh in Scots Gaelic. I just published a novel which concerns a person in the modern world who discovers he has the sight and how you deal with something that is immune to rationality and not provable. You are right those who had the sight were shunned and treated as dangerous, often because the sight gave warning of death and no one wants to know that, so in the age old fashion shoot the messenger. In my research I did find that people with the sight sought ways to be rid of it, no one who had it every enjoyed it, many sought help from churches, others from folk healing and spiritual exercises. Some unfortunately, took the ultimate cure and took their own lives.
My Welsh great grandmother in a writing about her by a daughter was said to have second sight. She was a farmer’s wife on the Illinois prairie and as she did her house work would sing hymns like “Jerusalem the Golden”. A gift of the Spirit.
There is a wonderful little book by Clark Strand 'Waking up to the Dark,'about the effects of electricity on our world and the Black Madonna. I think you Paul, and many here would resonate with his insightful writings. (if you haven't already) He is a former Zen buddhist too...
So glad to see that water still flowing beneath it all...
Where I live used to also be a place of great Salmon runs. For the past two years, salmon fishing has been banned. Every year, I look in my nearby creeks for spawning Salmon. When I see them, I feel that it is an auspicious sign for the year to come. I read somewhere that the ancient people of England & Ireland used to throw quartz crystals in the waterways to help guide the Salmon to their spawning grounds. I don't want to live in a world without wild Salmon.
Wow. Thank you for the VR comment. It always surprised me that as computer graphics grew better and better the external world grew uglier and uglier. Maybe, there is a hidden bargin in better graphics, a deal with the Devil so to speak. You have to pay with terrible real world aesthetics and infinitely increasing power demand. Almost like a curse from the fairies..
Sadly, a 9 year old at my school said "I'll just use my VR instead!", when asked by a Social Worker how he would feel about not going swimming while staying at Dad's.
I do like waking up on a Sunday morning and hurrying to my laptop for the latest instalment of these well stories. They always transport me to another slower, quieter, deeper and more real and satisfying world. The thought that we are carpeting the countryside with wind turbines and solar panels, just to power our phones is appalling though.
"The thought that we are carpeting the countryside with wind turbines and solar panels, just to power our phones is appalling though."
Another thing I learned from Derrick Jensen was to watch out for that word "our". These are not "our" phones, or data centers, or wind power stations. Those things are *theirs*. This is not our government, it is *theirs*. This is not our military, or economy, it is *theirs*.
If you never learn to recognise that reality, you will always think and speak in absurdities.
Ah Derrick Jensen! Yes! His clarity and precision with such distinctions was eye opening for me as a younger man… not to mention the deep well of his empathy and passion for wild things and places… thank you for the reminder!
But who is 'they'....?
"We have met the enemy and he is us." -- Pogo.
As the Great Man from Kentucky says, we're all implicated.
I will never buy that line of cr*p. It's corporate propaganda and a dodge. We are never given a choice on anything meaningful at that level, and any one-man boycott is fantastically-obviously tantamount to taking a whizz in the Colorado river.
So many people simply lack the intellectual honesty to admit when they are truly powerless and have been had by various implacable, ruthless, and sclerotic power structures.
Sorry, but I'm sticking with Wendell here. Very few of us, if any, do all we can to opt out. We are all implicated in the sense that we all could do more than we do in putting up resistance. Berry, by the way, is perhaps one of the least likely people on Earth to fall for a corporate dodge.
Just reading about evil, noted this quote from Craig Murray:
"I have frequently explained that when I sat in the International Court of Justice and heard Israel’s lawyers tell lie after lie to justify or excuse the Gaza genocide, I could feel I was palpably in the presence of evil.
At least in the Hague you could also feel and indeed observe that most people in the courtroom – including the majority of the judges – were repulsed by the evil.
Yesterday that same evil, and the same lies, was manifested in the US Congress by Netanyahu, to an audience which glorified, reflected and amplified that evil."
Evil? Americans, in America, are soaking in it. Even Wendell Berry, who lives in rural Kentucky, where my best friend went to visit her mother and found it to be such a shocking, hate-filled hellhole that upon returning home to Ohio wrote me a dreadful letter of the experience and then killed herself.
Rob, I'm not in the mood to hear anything from Americans about my responsibility as pertains to the relentless and daily-expanding crimes of your garbage, blight-on-the-world country:
https://consortiumnews.com/2024/07/27/patrick-lawrence-no-more-silence/
Typically, we would be talking about corporate persons and/or consortia of said persons here, though I'm open to having a case made for particular plutocrats and oligarchs. Really, those among "they" are often genuinely monstrous institutional zombies that have accrued so much inertial cruft and heft they are something like vast, toxic, superfund sites that no one can even imagine ever cleaning up. I mean, that is exactly the "tech industry" right there, for starters.
I've found that frequent reading of such material helps me keep an even keel, especially at times when I can't get away to forest or field. Adrian Bell, Ronald Blythe, John Lewis-Stempel and other rural/nature writers of that sort are very important to me in that regard.
The part about the well doing its thing quietly reminded me of a homily I heard about God’s work being like a tree. God works quietly, slowly, at his own pace, and you think nothing is happening, but then there it is - like a fully grown tree.
I looked up the meaning of Ardnacrusha' ( my ears couldn't believe the rhyme of 'crusha' and 'crusher' and, if t'interweb is correct, it means 'the height of the cross' that once marked the boundary of the Diocese of Limerick. Perhaps that power station is also a boundary, that unknowingly was crossed a long time ago.
A bit academic but here’s an interesting article on the interplay between religion and electricity.
It is high time that the social aspects of electricity consumption are examined, the grid is as much a social construction as an engineering one and it is interesting how the availability of cheap power has not been examined in terms of how it has coarsened the human spirit. It’s always been seen as an unalloyed benefit...and unfettered access to power as a social good. Maybe rolling blackouts might refocus our minds!
Thank you, I hadn’t heard of her. It is so easy to come over as a crank talking about these things, the usual response points to the positive benefits, like dialysis machines, incubators for premature babies etc, and of course there are a myriad wonderful things that electricity has enabled (and I wouldn’t have worked in the industry if it didn’t).
But the biggest weakness of electricity, like money, is it’s liquidity, that is, you can use it to power PornHub or a hospital.
When rural electrification came to Ireland in the 1950s the country people were aware of the moral risks involved. I must look find the links to the ESB archives, it would be interesting to re hearr to some of those voices.
But I will look up Hannah Orbach, she sounds like my kind of lady!
Sorry Paul, but the issue of electrification and social change is one of my pet topics, even if it is a bit off the topic of holy wells.
One of the interesting selling points (although never officially endorsed) to persuade people to sign up was the Sacred Heart lamp, often permanently wired in (fire risk!) thus giving divine sanction for the electrification of the house.
Parish priests were often recruited to persuade people to sign up and farmers to give access to land.
I’m not valorising the sheer drudgery of the past, but there was a sophisticated PR machine used to shift cultural norms and there was no room for debate.
Fascinating. I'd love to read more about this.
https://www.energyhistory.eu/en/special-issue/electricity-modernity-and-tradition-during-irish-rural-electrification-1940-1970
Thanks!
Don't know if you've read Niall William's 'This is Happiness' recounts this period in fiction and poetic words.
My aunt used to go to the Achill Islands as a child and I was surprised that she can't visit the Country Life museum at Turlough because it brings back memories of a 'very hard life.'
Thanks for this, I haven’t. Just to be clear, I am absolutely not valorising the sheer hard graft of Irish rural life before the advent of electricity and piped water.
I know how difficult life was, much of the work was undertaken by women, and life could be brutal, and short.
All I’m saying is that there is an undercurrent of contempt in the ESB marketing literature towards their ‘uneducated’ rural consumers, and there was no attempt made to take on their perspectives or see any value in their way of life.
This thread has continued in the advancement of all new technologies since, eg anyone who objects to the latest smartphone is a Luddite (who btw were unfairly smeared).
The reason I love this site is because I feel that here at least are others who question this narrative....
I’m new to substack and Paul's pages and I am amazed at the quality of thought and comment. Feel like I’ve come home. I did understand you. You’ve given me a perspective I have never thought about before.
Thanks for these comments. I'd be very interested to hear about peoples' voew on the moral risks of electricity in the 50s. It's impossible even to image a phrase like that making sense to people today, which shows how far we've been sucked in.
Not to labour the point but the first chapter of Ivan Illichs On Energy and Equityhas such brilliant insights on our energy addicted society.
‘the use of energy on a massive scale acts on society like a drug that is physically harmless but psychically enslaving’
https://blogs.ubc.ca/landscapesofenergy/files/2010/11/ivan-illich-energy_and_equity.pdf
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/aug/02/ultra-cheap-energy-for-every-household-could-a-different-kind-of-tariff-change-everything
Piece from the Guardian today....something in the air?
A piece I read recently looked at the concept of how, as we increase efficiency of how our various machines, devices, etc. consume electricity, rather than using less of it and lowering the cost of it, we find additional ways of consuming it. Server farms, in your example. Or, in the example of the piece I was reading, the Sphere arena in Las Vegas, a gigantic array of exterior and interior LEDs that wouldn't have been "affordable" or possible a decade or so ago.
So rather than consume less as we get more efficient, we find alternative ways to consume more, and get distracted from the streams (as in your example) quietly doing their thing all around us, often unnoticed...
That phenomenon is called Jevons paradox, after the economist who noted in the 19th century that the improved efficiency of steam engines lead to their increased use.
Technology has always been seen as value neutral, and engineers and scientists are never required to think about the social implications of their work.
It isn’t true, and has never been true that technology is value free. Faraday and Newton were committed Christians, but religion and ethics are now seen as ‘woo’ in scientific circles. Time to change?
https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2024/05/18/a-tour-of-the-jevons-paradox-how-energy-efficiency-backfires/
A friend of mine has given guest lectures to engineering students at Stanford on ethics in science. It was a subject that they were not exposed to earlier in reference to their field of study…
That sounds like a good start! IMO it is time to consider some type of Hippocratic oath for scientists and engineers...
This is true for economics as well. I remember reading not long ago that most economics majors get only one class in the history of their field, if that, and no courses in economic ethics except as electives.
I suppose if it's ever agreed that ethics would be a good topic to add to the education mix, the next question could be "whose ethics?..."
I’m sure it would not be a ready decided, imposed ethics, but an ethical system that is arrived at after deep thought and discussion .
A 'Woo' for ethics and faith are a good start and proffer a bit of hope here; Perhaps there's a need for a more eyebrow- raised 'Whew- how did we get here?'. Thanks very much for the lead (and link!) to Jevons' paradox; validations of hints and hunches that came my way decades back when I had a tangential role in maintaining a small municipal electric utility's operations for the benefit of our 6,500 constituents.
I used to work in the electrical industry so subject close to my heart...
Reportedly, over half the traffic in server farms is pornography. Victimless...
Sobering and sad if true.
It's one of the great paradoxes of Environmentalism in that while it makes occasional gains in, say, efficiency standards, what happens is that because this lowers the cost of consumption, we all consume more. I remember a guy on my floor in college who was delighted to find "Low Fat Hostess Twinkies" because "Now I can eat twice as many".
Great achievements of Man, be they in arts or industry or sainthood, always seem to occur in conditions of constraint, however. Being made to work only with what is available lets us give that all the more attention.
I'm a photographer on the side, returning to it several years ago after having put it aside for a good 15 years while I raised my kids. While I love the possibilities of a digital cameras today, I still grab the old film cameras quite often simply because they force a constraint on what I can do (I've only got 15 shots left, I only have this one lens, and I loaded up Ilford 100). I have to make due, save my shots, and accept the possibility of failure.
Writ large, I think of the many saints who by and large just served their little parishes, or monasteries, or even just their neighbors - Matushka Olga of Alaska. She had little, but served mightily, and serves still. These saints did not have broadcast networks, they did not need them.
The camera comment hits home. I probably save and process about 2% of my photos, simply because of the ease of taking so many...
I am having such trouble (for many reasons) in finding Christ at the moment, sometimes I find myself wondering why I should even try to continue - then a post like this reminds me that the struggle is worth it, that the temples may fall but the water keeps flowing. Thank you Paul.
May you close you eyes and know the free gift of the Light of Life rising up from within
Between Abbey of Misrule posts, read or reread the entire Narnia books. I still get a lump in my heart reading of Aslan singing Narnia into existence.
I read recently of an Orthodox Saint whose name escapes me. She told another later Saint in a vision how all of her sufferings and tortures she would go through 100 or more times again, to gain what she now has in the Kingdom of Heaven. Definitely worth the struggle I'd say!
Christ is Risen! He has trampled down death by death. Sometimes we have trouble seeing Him, but He has already won the victory, and His Kingdom is ever present, even if veiled.
When I was kid my parents paid about $10 a month for "power" or electricity. Today I pay on average $220 to $260 a month and the electricity is coming from the same sources. Technology progresses only if it can be monetized.
It does have to be paid for, and maintained, and controlled by government.
It may be the same electricity from the same sources, but those are not the same dollars.
I see this in healthcare - the economy of medicine the driver. Not all bad, but it skews what we end up with.
I might've posted about this here before but I can't pass up a chance to throw some dislike at these wind turbines.
There's a huge cross by the highway in Groom, TX. It would be the tallest thing in sight if it wasn't for the wind turbines that are now all around it. Quite symbolic.
"Got a problem with that? Then take a hammer to your phone!"
I had a bumper sticker made which says, "State Your Independence: Ice-pick Your Smartphone." I've had it on the car for a year now and have only gotten a handful of comments, most of them positive (although my 22 y.o. nephew didn't know what "ice-pick" meant, so perhaps "smash" or "shoot" may have been a better verb choice.)
It's interesting you mention "the sight" or da shelladh in Scots Gaelic. I just published a novel which concerns a person in the modern world who discovers he has the sight and how you deal with something that is immune to rationality and not provable. You are right those who had the sight were shunned and treated as dangerous, often because the sight gave warning of death and no one wants to know that, so in the age old fashion shoot the messenger. In my research I did find that people with the sight sought ways to be rid of it, no one who had it every enjoyed it, many sought help from churches, others from folk healing and spiritual exercises. Some unfortunately, took the ultimate cure and took their own lives.
My Welsh great grandmother in a writing about her by a daughter was said to have second sight. She was a farmer’s wife on the Illinois prairie and as she did her house work would sing hymns like “Jerusalem the Golden”. A gift of the Spirit.
There is a wonderful little book by Clark Strand 'Waking up to the Dark,'about the effects of electricity on our world and the Black Madonna. I think you Paul, and many here would resonate with his insightful writings. (if you haven't already) He is a former Zen buddhist too...
So glad to see that water still flowing beneath it all...
Yes, that is a beautiful book.
Just read this, it’s wonderful. Thanks for the recommendation.
Where I live used to also be a place of great Salmon runs. For the past two years, salmon fishing has been banned. Every year, I look in my nearby creeks for spawning Salmon. When I see them, I feel that it is an auspicious sign for the year to come. I read somewhere that the ancient people of England & Ireland used to throw quartz crystals in the waterways to help guide the Salmon to their spawning grounds. I don't want to live in a world without wild Salmon.
I can’t help but think Christ’s return to establish God’s kingdom here on earth is right around the corner.
Then my friend we will see a perfect world untainted by the ‘machine.’
Come quickly Lord Jesus.
Wow. Thank you for the VR comment. It always surprised me that as computer graphics grew better and better the external world grew uglier and uglier. Maybe, there is a hidden bargin in better graphics, a deal with the Devil so to speak. You have to pay with terrible real world aesthetics and infinitely increasing power demand. Almost like a curse from the fairies..
Sadly, a 9 year old at my school said "I'll just use my VR instead!", when asked by a Social Worker how he would feel about not going swimming while staying at Dad's.
Wow.
Coincidentally, this showed up in my news feed today (although from April...). Small changes in the right direction?
River restoration is encouraging Atlantic salmon to return to heart of the UK:
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2024/april/river-restoration-encouraging-atlantic-salmon-return-to-heart-of-uk.html