Ashton Boatman

Following the Green victory in the Denton and Gorton election my right wing friends seem to be concentrating on attacking the party for its rather liberal drugs policy. Let me preface my comments by pointing out that I do not have skin in this game. I am not dependent on mind altering chemicals legal or illegal. I do however live in a town where chemical abuse, including legal alcohol , is obvious and linked to health issues and petty crime. The war on drugs seems to have been lost here.

Let's scroll back to 1996. We kept most of our boats at the Boat and Butty yard in Runcorn. The Boat and Butty was set up by the wonderful Peter Shrubsall, Shrubbie, and his partner Marion. Unfortunately Shrubbie died in about 1985. Marion carried on the business but did little more than call in every month to collect mooring fees.

Our boats were occupied  by young people who kept them afloat and formed a loose community.   After "Forget me Not"s launch in 1994 I moved there and lived on "Raymond". There were other people living there on their own boats, including Ginger.

Nobody really disliked Ginger but he was shuffled away to the far end of the moorings because of his need to stick needles in himself. His partner, Linda, had a similar need to fill herself with alcohol. I remember seeing her getting into a taxi to go for rehab. I have actually seen healthier looking corpses.

Ginger needed to be in Runcorn because it gave him easy access to the drug dependency unit in Widnes. This supplied most of his needs. Because of the War On Drugs it was closed down. The only way that Ginger could get what he needed was to engage in the retail trade for illegal substances. A continual stream of sad shuffling people started to call at Ginger's boat. Unoccupied boats on the moorings were broken into.

 Retailers need wholesalers, who arrived in a black BMW.

Ignorant of what was actually going on I challenged these people. They claimed to be plain clothes police but could not prove it.  I said that in that case I'd call the real police. They said that if I did that they'd kill me. I don't give in to threats so I rang the police. I asked them to be discreet. 

The police were soon there, sirens blaring. They leaped out of their car, truncheons drawn, shouting my name. Discreet I said. The BMW had gone.

Usually when someone says they're going to kill you they don't mean it literally. It was pointed out to me that these people probably did mean it. Being stubborn I stayed on, spending each night in a different place. The nice friendly community evaporated. Most people kept their heads down. There had been several drug related murders in Liverpool recently. One person started a campaign of vandalism against me, damaging my possessions. I believe that he sank "Raymond" while I was away. I later learned that he had been told to make the place safe for the drug dealers with threats against his daughter as an incentive.

All hell was let loose. The criminals ruled the boatyard and the police seemed happy to let it go on as long as only hairy hippy boat dwellers were affected. All night cars and motorbikes were coming and going providing a delivery service. 

The man who was damaging my property was actually in touch with someone well known, who I can't name but some people will be able to guess, who put it around the canal grapevine that I was funding the boats by drug dealing. If this had been true we might have them all restored by now.

We started making plans for moving our boats out of Runcorn. Luckily we'd been invited to move them to Portland Basin.

Suddenly things calmed down. I read in the local paper that 3 men from Kirkby had been arrested in Widnes outside an industrial unit. Inside the warehouse was the biggest indoor skunk growing farm busted up to that point. The 3 men were in a black BMW.

Friends of Raymond took over that boat. Sometime later I delivered some of her fittings to one of their members at Braunston. He opened his front door and, when I announced who I was, he took a step back and looked scared. I hate to think what he'd been told about me. Canal gossipmongers can do a lot of harm.

All the above happened because of the WAR ON DRUGS. It was similar when they banned alcohol in the USA. More people died of alcoholic poisoning, crime increased and the only people to benefit were the Mafia.

In my view the only political party with a sensible and responsible drugs policy is the Green party.

I wasn't sure what to call this piece. My first thought was The Curse of Cassandra, closely followed by What's the F*****g Point.  I settled on a derivation of the phrase The Elephant in the Room. That seemed most appropriate because it's dealing with a subject that is so big and scary and bound to change our lives fundamentally that most people prefer to ignore it, or claim that it doesn't exist.

I must admit that I have a tendency towards depression. Some people will use that last sentence to dismiss all that I say, but no, there's a lot of factors behind my occasional mood disorders, one of them being a tendency to face and try to work my way through problems rather than shy away from them. Despair and depression come from an inability to find a solution. Kitten videos just don't work for me.

I woke up this morning full of things that I was going to do today, perhaps too many things, but my mind was also working away at apparently unsolvable problems. Strangely the last straw was to find that we'd run out of toilet paper, a very unusual problem as Em usually stocks up for about 6 months ahead. I could simply have gone to the corner shop to get some, but instead I lay down in the spare room and wrapped a duvet over my head.

Back in 1973 I had a job driving a little van for TV hire company Multibroadcast. My friend Geoff Monaghan also drove for them. I'd already pretty much rejected the usual path through life, career, mortgage, marriage, 2.4 kids etc and had my concerns about what our species was doing to our planet. I came across 2 things that underlined my concerns. One was the Club of Rome. Limits to Growth report, one of the first major computer modelling exercises that concluded that, unless our species controlled growth in population, pollution, energy use, etc etc, sooner or later everything would screw up and we would suffer a population crash. The other was that our species was churning out carbon dioxide into the atmosphere faster than the plants and oceans were absorbing it.

I told Geoff about this. He didn't believe me. I didn't know what the consequences would be but I could see that they wouldn't be good.

 The Limits to Growth  report was a warning. It should have been mailed to every person on the planet. Instead it was hardly mentioned in the media, dismissed, ridiculed and ignored. In the 50+ years since its publication the actual graphs of uncontrolled growth have closely followed the doompath projected by those old computers if we were to change nothing. 

Being aware of this, I've tried to live my life with a pretty low impact on our planet. Now, people may think this would make me miserable. I have admitted to a tendency to depression, but I believe that I would have that I would have that same tendency even if I lived in a mansion and travelled in a private jet. So many rich people I have met who live sad lives of tension and conflict in spite of, perhaps partly because of, their wealth. Happiness and contentment come from within, provided that you have the basic needs of life.

Some people may say that my efforts to live simply, so that others may simply live (Gandhi) were futile. Perhaps so, but at least I don't have being a big part of the problem on my conscience. 

Humans are good at solving problems. Remember the problem about fridges causing a depletion of the ozone layer that would cause us all to get skin cancer?  All the countries of the world got together to ban the offending refrigerants and replace them with something less harmful. The ozone hole is still there, but it's shrinking.

Remember acid rain killing Europe's forests? I recall being at a talk about acid rain. The lecturer pointed out that the first sign of acid rain damage was "a sudden outbreak of blindness among foresters", ie, they just didn't want to see it. That's an important observation. By international agreement coal fired power stations now have scrubbers to remove the offending chemicals from their chimneys. In Britain we no longer use coal for power generation anyway.

So, what's the big problem about tackling the climate crisis?   For most people it seems too big and its consequences too dire for them to dare to take their heads out of the sand. It also threatens their ambitions. Rich people want to get richer, poor people want to get rich and the destitute want, quite rightly, to stop being destitute. They're all in competition with each other and the fear is that, by stepping aside from that competition they'll slide back down to destitution again. This is particularly so in countries, even rich ones like the USA, with no viable support system for "losers" in the fight for wealth. 

Everyone is locked into a struggle for resources. As John Lennon put it, "There's room at the top they're telling you still, as long as you learn how to smile as you kill". Of course, for most people it's not as stark as that, but everyone knows that the people who 'get on in life' are often the ones who are good at networking and buttering up the boss. Yes, I know, working hard (or getting your staff to work hard) to get results helps too. The result of this is people wearing themselves out, mentally and/or physically to be cast aside when they can no longer perform.

The same thing happens between nations, trapping their citizens into a rat race and often fostering distrust and hatred of those living in other lands. I grew up during the Cold War. The Americans and the Russians were competing to build more nuclear warheads than the other, even though they could each end life on Earth several times over. During the Cuban missile crisis I was 8, and terrified of what was likely to happen. Happily, they pulled back from the brink and I've lived to be a septuagenarian. 

Some limited sanity in this area came along when Ronald Reagan watched a film called The Day After. This shows how getting out the true information rather than the propaganda can change things. Reagan's military top brass had been telling him that they could win a nuclear war, because their careers were boosted by him believing that. 

https://collider.com/the-day-after-ronald-reagan/

This conversion of Reagan led eventually to the SALT talks etc, scaling down each country's nuclear arsenal. However, a major factor in the Soviet Union agreeing to reductions was that it did not have the economic capacity to carry on competing militarily with the USA. Capitalism had shown itself to be capable of superior economic growth to the USSR's command economy (masquerading as socialism). 

Here's the big problem, which I don't have a solution for. Economic growth is bound to make our planet uninhabitable, but, our planet is divided into nations. If any nation eschews economic growth it will become less able to manufacture or purchase the latest weapons. Without the latest weapons that nation will become unable to deter and defend against aggressor nations. This is currently being demonstrated in Ukraine, where the greater resources of Russia has allowed it to gradually take over large parts of Ukraine, in spite of fierce and brave resistance. To many politicians, aware of the dog eat dog nature of international affairs, stopping economic growth would be suicidal, but so is carrying on with economic growth.

Strangely enough, Margaret Thatcher (who I despise) was one of the first major politicians to raise the issue.

Of course, then there's business. The rich want to keep on getting richer. They own the media and so control what information is shared with the rest of us. In the short term they can make more and more profits by selling us more and more stuff. They've got most people convinced that if they buy things that are bigger and better, if they fly away on holidays and cruises that are further and further away then they will become happy. Of course, to afford these things we'll have to work harder and harder (for them). In order to prevent change that may threaten their short term profits they pour vast amounts of funds into lobbying governments and promote online memes spreading disinformation about  what David Cameron famously referred to as "green crap". This has led to politicians consciously moving away from the very solutions that could save our collective bacon even though they clearly understand how vital a transition away from fossil fuels is.

I don't get it. Oil company bosses are not stupid, though they may be a bit crazy. They understand the science. They have children and grandchildren. Perhaps they think that somehow their wealth will protect them from mass extinction. Certainly it is rumoured that the world's richest person has a bunker in Alaska. Talking about crazy, he seems to live in a sort of Dan Dare version of reality where escape to Mars while the Earth boils is a possibility.

The climate crisis seems to have become the issue that dare not speak its name. Frustratingly it's become a political issue between left and right, with the right currently gaining traction.  I don't understand how atmospheric physics can possibly be a matter of political debate, any more than gravity or electrical conductivity can be. These are things established by scientific research and mathematical equations. I am clearly of the left, but like to maintain friendships among people of all political persuasions, as long as they're not actually promoting hatred. You may note that the two politicians that I have cited are right wing, but they accepted the evidence.

The most powerful person in the world claims to believe that climate change is a Chinese hoax, despite his own scientists having done much of the work on understanding it. It's a very personal thing. I have a friend who apparently understands the problem and lives a low impact life. He sometimes gets work on dairy farms and does not believe that bovine emissions are part of the problem, and yet the evidence is solid on this. Belief is a problem. I don't believe in belief. When someone says you just have to believe they mean that you should suspend all rational thought. I have friends who regularly fly, who drive everywhere, who go on cruises ( the absolute most polluting form of holiday) and yet I say nothing. Many of them understand the science but clearly think that somebody else should deal with the problem. How can I constantly be criticising my friends lifestyles. 

If I talk about climate change, particularly if I mention the need for immediate action, I'm seen as a Jeremiah, a spoilsport, a party pooper etc, and yet, how can I not talk about it when it hangs above us like a tidal wave about to break and wash away our secure and comfortable lives. The dinosaurs didn't know the meteorite was coming. We know what's happening, but choose to pretend otherwise.

I plant trees, partly to replace the ones I use, partly to absorb a bit of carbon. I wonder what the point is. Probably they'll die in a catastrophic drought or get burned in a forest fire, but I have to hope that my little bit will help.

2010-07-12 @ 20:15:00 by ashtonboatman

A sign of the times.

It was a hot sunny day and I was busy working on the boats at Portland Basin when I noticed a wheelbarrow parked on the towpath across the canal. As we have wheelbarrows on the boats for collecting on recycling trips, I went over to see if someone had borrowed on of ours. When I got there I could hear banging and slushing noises from the other side of the stone wall. The ground drops steeply down about 20 feet of wooded rocky bank to the River Tame. I looked over and saw three men sploshing about in the river and dragging out rusty bikes, scaffold poles etc. One of them saw me looking and explained that they had decided to clean up the river.

This public spirited explanation was slightly marred by the fact that they only seemed to be removing metal objects, leaving behind much, equally unsightly, but valueless, plastic.

They dragged their ochre encrusted booty up the bank, over the wall and managed to load it into the sagging barrow ( which wasn't one of ours). I imagine they must have had a van nearby because it's over 2 miles to the nearest scrapyard that takes iron.

I think it's a good thing that people clear up and weigh in the clutter that others have carelessly discarded, but I also see desperation in the men's actions. I haven't seen this sort of activity since the 1980s when long years of unemployment spurred the picking up of beer cans, dragging ditches for scrap metal and other forms of scavenging. Anything to make a few bob to try to make ends meet. Are we now going to have another no hope generation like that of the Thatcher years? Growing up with no understanding of the concept of working for a living.