Simeon Brody
Over the weekend I went to work at one of my favourite events of the year, Masham Steam Rally. Masham is one of the friendliest towns I know, and 'Professor Fiddlesticks' has been a regular entertainer at the Steam Rally and the Black Sheep Brewery for the best part of a decade. However, with weeks of unseasonably wet weather, the ground was very boggy and I was suprised the organisers were going on with it. But they did, and I therefore had a weekend's work, in challenging conditions, such as unicycling in the mud and creating balloon animals in drizzle. Saturday was very wet, with poor attendance, but Sunday was better and after lunch the sun came out and it felt quite summery.
The washout summer has made many people wonder if this is climate change at work. Any meterologist will tell you that individual weather occurrances and climate are different things, but that with a warmer world, we can expect greater extremes of weather, bigger storms, more floods. So yes, we could consider this summer's record rainfall and high temperatures to be indicative of climate change.
And what's causing the change? It's our hugely rapid release of carbon, trapped by plants over millions of years, being released in record quantities worldwide, double-glazing our earthly greenhouse. And then I find myself supporting an event with a large carbon footprint, several dozen coal-guzzling traction engines, stunt motorcyclists jumping through oil-soaked blazing bales of straw, a bi-plane doing 15 minutes of aerobatics both days, and a large field cum car park with the biggest collection of 4 wheel drives I've ever seen. My mind can not help making connections and wondering what price we are paying for our lifestyle, our fun and entertainment, my job even?
I did chat with one of the organisers about the environmental impact of the event, taking care not to criticise, and we touched on the subject of offsetting the emissions with tree-planting or other schemes, but I suspect we've a long way to go before the likes of the Steam Rally organisers have climate change on their agenda. But I'd love to be proved wrong!
I will continue to work at events which do not quite match my politics. And I do really enjoy the Rally, the people are lovely, enjoy what I do, and I've a soft spot for the magnificent engineering and human inginuity that has created these metal monsters.
My Green Tip Of The Week has nothing much to do with traction engines! I have discovered a good website which I think is worth a visit, called 'treehugger' (OK, stop giggling!) and in particular, http://treehugger.com/gogreen.php which has a really good list of 'how to's'. They'll even send you a daily or weekly email.
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