Category Archives: Italy

Unknown's avatar

Oiling down the science

by

This photograph was taken outside Waterloo Station in London in 2020, when the UK was locked down due to the coronavirus pandemic. The streets were so quiet you could feel the air breathing.

Now we’re back to ‘go’, our emissions trails choking the planet as we rush for growth. And we’re all locked in to the rush – reaching for the quick plastic solution to something, or taking that flight, our guilt moderated by the idea that governments and big business are doing far worse and far bigger.

That’s the problem. Who are these governments? Often the ones we chose. And these companies? Many are the profitable ones with safe, secure shares, good for the pension pot, hooking us all.

Yesterday I read an article in the Wall Street Journal about Exxon, and then found another in The Guardian covering the same story. Apparently, as far back as the 1970s, Exxon’s own scientists predicted the path of global warming with great accuracy, and in 2006 the company publicly acknowledged that fossil fuels did contribute to the problem. However, for many years since, it seems Exxon’s internal direction has been to comfort blanket the climate crisis in the idea that it’s not as bad as the science suggests.

This kind of double messaging nudges many of us to ‘doubt climate science’, to stand blinking as the planet burns, floods, and wind whips itself into chaos around us.

Surely, we need to think better, urgently. The evidence is mounting – climate caused devastation, slow or sudden, is truly calamitous.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023

Unknown's avatar

Gosport and the Canadians

by

Not sure if this photograph can give you a sense of just how cold it was in the wind today at Stokes Bay, Gosport. We’d come to have lunch at Pebbles Fish and Wine Bar.

It was only once inside, warm and waiting for food, that we saw through the window the stone commemorating the Canadian troops who took part in the D Day landings. It’s not a big stone.

This evening I did a little research. It seems that right where we’d been enjoying delicious fresh fish and hot chips, young Canadian service personnel had once packed the beach front, preparing to launch themselves into a war thousands of miles from home. I can’t imagine how they felt, preparing to fight for, and against, nations many of them may never even have visited.

Other than the rock we saw no sign of them, nor of the docks from which they set off. The only traces I did see were in the freedom of the windblown families who came and went around us.

Here is some footage I found of those preparations and departures from Stokes Bay in 1944 (The last video of the three – around five minutes each – is to do with the Canadians)

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023

Unknown's avatar

Over the hills to Elantxobe

by

On a day when the sun neither came nor went, we decided to go for a drive to the fishing village of Elantxobe. We wound up and down through wooded hills, until we found it gleaming beneath us.

We parked beside the fishing boats, and wandered out along the wide concrete arms of the harbour. It was hard to imagine storms in the calm, but the muscle in those protective limbs made it clear that the town remembered.

From the harbour we took the cobbled street that twisted up through the houses behind. It was so steep that we abandoned it after a short while, opting instead to walk back up to a cafe we spotted on the edge of the road we’d just driven down. This boulder was outside the cafe. Below it was a sign which said that the rock weighed 301kg, and that it had been thrown to that point by the storm of the 30th of January 1990.

Suddenly the geography and forces of nature surrounding the little harbour became much clearer.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023