The Monthly Salon: June
Plus some videos, and other bits and bobs
Hello everyone. I hope you’re enjoying the ‘summer.’ I put the word in inverted commas because in Ireland we haven’t really had one. It’s been mostly cold, grey and wet here; unusually so even for the wild Atlantic west. But perhaps I shouldn’t complain, given that much of continental Europe is currently on fire, literally or metaphorically. The latest news from France is that officials are worried about people collapsing from heatstroke during the Paris Olympics. Possibly this may be something to do with the climate change that lots of people are still strenuously pretending isn’t happening.
I’m going away on holiday myself later this week, until early July. When I get back, I’m planning to write something here about nature and our relationship with it: a retrospective of sorts from the place I find myself in now, looking back on my Dark Mountain days. There’s something to be said about what I’ve taken to calling ‘the theology of the wild’, and it’s likely to dominate the future as the Machine continues to hit the buffers and denial becomes impossible even for the true believers.
But more on that later in the summer. For now, this is your monthly opportunity to open a conversation about anything you like. Before we get going, here are a few bits of news from me:
I had a conversation with Jonathan Pageau on his Youtube channel The Symbolic World a few weeks back, about technology, God, nature and the deep need for stories. I always enjoy talking to Jonathan. You can watch our conflab above.
Also available on my own Youtube channel now is a film of my recent talk to the Aldous Huxley Society in Estonia, in which I examined how close to the Brave New World our Machine society is, and also what the differences are from Huxley’s century-old vision. You can watch it here:
Finally, my friend Ragan Sutterfield, an Episcopalian priest in Arkansas, has a new book out which speaks to that theology of creation. His book is called The Art of Being a Creature, and it’s about the relationship between the Christian virtue of humility, and our relationship with nature. I can recommend it: Ragan is a good writer and he digs, quite literally, into the heart of the matter here. You can read more about it (and get a discount) on Ragan’s Substack.
With that, it’s over to you ….
If it's at all possible to ask this question without immediately attracting fierce disagreement... What is the actual situation with the ol' climate change?
My general view has always been that (a) the climate has always varied, and therefore (b) it's quite possible that we are coming out of a mini-Ice Age rather than experiencing a heating-up as such, (c) nobody truly knows how much effect emissions etc. have on this process, and (d) even if we were sure that e.g. carbon emissions were making things worse, the fact that China and other places intend to burn fossil fuels into the foreseeable future makes any real mitigation impossible. The whole Net Zero thing is therefore a silly, misguided effort to achieve the impossible. The huge amount of research by climatologists is not a conspiracy in the silly sense but there is lots of research funding to be had for those who accept the general climate change consensus and precious little for those who want to reject it, so it seems entirely possible that the scientific consensus (if there even is one) is way off.
Now, I also think though that pollution is nasty, trees are good, roads are bad, the small and local beats the big and industrial and all that stuff (I'm a subscriber here, after all!) and I would be heartily in favour of lots of sensible measures that would make things cleaner and greener and more sustainable. I just feel that whenever people mention climate change as such I need to count my spoons.
What am I to think?
Climate change is happening, as it always did. We are currently in a grand solar minimum, which may explain the unusually cold weather. People falling over in the heat at sporting events is hardly a new phenomenon. The green agenda is a depopulation agenda which is profoundly anti human.