FOOTPRINTS

A lovely sunny day, but cold. The tide was out and I walked with Ada down to Three Cliffs Clefts Bay, or Three Clefts Bay according to an old man who told us where and how to park, which path to take. From the wide, wet sandy beach we walked up winding paths of deep dry sand to the headland above. Piles of flowering gorse on either side, waves of scent across our path. Vanilla, I thought, but Will on the phone ‘Coconut’ and I think he was right. What’s in a smell?

Looking down from the headland, back onto the beach we’d walked across, we could barely make out our own footprints. What did stand out were two firm dotted lines of hoofmarks. We’d seen the horses ahead of us, turning when they reached the waters edge to splash along the line of the surf. The prints set me wondering. ‘Light footprint’ is a phrase in vogue, with the special reference to carbon emissions, and the assumption that the less mark we leave on the world the better. Does that go, I wondered, for the mark we leave on other people?

In the last Weekly Guardian, Monbiot gave a frightening forecast of global warming, which, he said, is now unpreventable. Too much talk – hot air – since Kyoto, and not enough action. Now temperatures likely to rise by 4 degrees, not the 2C maximum envisaged at Kyoto. And the hotting up will last another 1000 years.

I assume that the heating and drying will hit hardest in warmer areas, with deserts expanding north and south into more temperate grainlands of
Mid-West and Mediterranean. In our hemisphere, cultivation, if not cultivators, would be driven northwards. The developed, mainly northern, countries would expand food production, keep what they needed for themselves, export any surplus in aid or for profit, and combine to defend themselves against starving immigrants. As already happens, but less.
A terrible irony: those most responsible for famine best placed to survive it, while those who never did much harm are left to die. The northern peoples had to keep warm, turned to fossil fuels when the firewood ran out. The difficulties of making a living in a colder climate compelled them to innovate, industrialise.

Left to themselves, older, more relaxed economies might, but probably wouldn’t, have survived: even without colonial exploitation. New ways have ways of jumping gaps.

Apart from noting that, what would I do, what do I do? Drive less, heat less, foreswear cheap flights, or long journeys in general. Eat local, seasonal foods, fresh, not frozen (Polar bears are getting smaller, Ada read. Weigh one third less and eat each other when there’s nothing else in diminishing icelands)

If I assume that human populations will also have to shrink, how much to I care if this comes about through starvation, war and disease on other, unfamiliar continents?
We were talking over lunch a couple of days ago about the boundaries of empathy, how they expand and contract. How much can we feel for other people, over distances and differences? Or under pressure, in time of scarcity or frear. Primo Levi concluded from his concentration camp experience that great hardship did not breed solidarity, did not make people nice, and that it was not the good who survived.
What do I feel? Richard once had a dream of life breaking down at Fawler, our parents manor in what’s now Oxfordshire, after a nuclear attack on London: starving survivors fanned out across the countryside, breaking in, taking whatever they could. Why not? And what were we to do?
I remember the hardline Zionist, Zabotinsky, who warned that the Palestinians, like the Jews, would never give up their land, that there would have to be a fight. When I read that, it was almost a relief: not that he was showing mercy, but at least respect for his enemy. I can imagine feeling, even as I raised my gun to shoot, ‘My brother, my like…there but for the grace of God – what God? – go I.’