newspeak

I grow old … I grow old …         120

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.         125

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown         130

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

via 1. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. T.S. Eliot. 1920. Prufrock and Other Observations.

Arctic Resources, Exposed by Warming, Set Off Competition – NYTimes.com.

It is an issue whose value for social thought and action has been difficult to pin down, and thus gets forgotten. It’s hard to pin in part because the melting arctic, and all that it implies regarding resources and their getting, almost implicitly involves military defence and fossil-fuel or other geo-stripping technology. There is in short nothing beautiful to look forward to, where “beautiful” implies something whose value lies independent of the natural resources, the commodities, that lie underneath, underground and soon to be revealed to those with the most money, biggest companies, largest and most powerful navies. 

That I live in Canada is not irrelevant. That Canada’s huge wealth derives mainly from its natural resources and their gross exploitation is important to any future calculus. That there has been an effective deprecation of innovative technologies, especially green ones, is to the point. Canada, after all, has programmatically removed itself from International green treaties, and it is only very locally that one sees the necessary efforts made to keep up with, for instance, trash. But that is by no means enough. (I find this frustrating. Canada could, and should, be the world leader in Green Technology. Argh.)