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Italy - Toarmina to Catania

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Toarmina to Catania

Again our hotel provided an excellent breakfast and we set out to explore more of the island before catching our boat to Naples.  This is how we ended up in the Jeep adventure in Toarmina (click here).

The weather was turning a bit nasty and after our previous close shaves I was looking for something a bit more relaxing so we decided not to go to the top of Mount Etna.  We could clearly see that the volcano was not erupting or dong anything exciting, so the shopper prevailed.  Off we went to one of the biggest purpose built designer villages I've ever seen.  It was much larger than a similar one we went to in California but featured many of the same outlets. There was no sign of poverty here.  The prevailing impression was of considerable Sicilian middle class prosperity in addition to a surprising number of tourists from other parts of Europe who may have come to Sicily just to buy clothes.  While I might complain about hours waiting around, these places provide a fascinating insight into contemporary society.  And this one provided a tasty pizza and excellent coffee to dull the pain of boredom.

In the end I bought something and Wendy didn't because I see shops as places where you get things you might need and part with money in exchange, while she sees them as places where you ponder every garment on display and then pass on to the next.  Moreover when they are in a foreign country you can't easily buy them and then take them back the following day.  I was done in about 15 minutes.  She was not done in two hours.

The boat was to sail from Catania late that evening.  We had tickets purchased on-line. We waited to board having arrived with plenty of time so that I could return the car miles away, beyond the airport, and get a cab back. This was fortunate as we hadn't realised that our printout had to be exchanged for the actual tickets at a distant office. 

 

On the boat to Naples

 

During our wait we had an interesting time watching tanker after tanker in addition to the usual containers and agricultural products being loaded onto the ship.  It was only after I was able to get assess to Wikipedia that I discovered that Sicily is an oil producer and energy exporter to the rest of Italy. 

These exports served to reinforce my impression that Sicily is now a cell of prosperity in otherwise depressed Southern Europe, hiding itself under a bushel.

 

 

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Travel

Cambodia and Vietnam

 

 

 In April 2010 we travelled to the previous French territories of Cambodia and Vietnam: ‘French Indochina’, as they had been called when I started school; until 1954. Since then many things have changed.  But of course, this has been a region of change for tens of thousands of years. Our trip ‘filled in’ areas of the map between our previous trips to India and China and did not disappoint.  There is certainly a sense in which Indochina is a blend of China and India; with differences tangential to both. Both have recovered from recent conflicts of which there is still evidence everywhere, like the smell of gunpowder after fireworks.

Read more: Cambodia and Vietnam

Fiction, Recollections & News

Julian Assange’s Endgame

A facebook friend has sent me this link 'Want to Know Julian Assange’s Endgame? He Told You a Decade Ago' (by Andy Greenberg, that appeared in WIRED in Oct 2016) and I couldn't resist bringing it to your attention.

To read it click on this image from the article:

 
Image (cropped): MARK CHEW/FAIRFAX MEDIA/GETTY IMAGES

 

Assange is an Australian who has already featured in several articles on this website:

Read more: Julian Assange’s Endgame

Opinions and Philosophy

Climate Emergency

 

 

 

emergency
/uh'merrjuhnsee, ee-/.
noun, plural emergencies.
1. an unforeseen occurrence; a sudden and urgent occasion for action.

 

 

Recent calls for action on climate change have taken to declaring that we are facing a 'Climate Emergency'.

This concerns me on a couple of levels.

The first seems obvious. There's nothing unforseen or sudden about our present predicament. 

My second concern is that 'emergency' implies something short lived.  It gives the impression that by 'fire fighting against carbon dioxide' or revolutionary action against governments, or commuters, activists can resolve the climate crisis and go back to 'normal' - whatever that is. Would it not be better to press for considered, incremental changes that might avoid the catastrophic collapse of civilisation and our collective 'human project' or at least give it a few more years sometime in the future?

Back in 1990, concluding my paper: Issues Arising from the Greenhouse Hypothesis I wrote:

We need to focus on the possible.

An appropriate response is to ensure that resource and transport efficiency is optimised and energy waste is reduced. Another is to explore less polluting energy sources. This needs to be explored more critically. Each so-called green power option should be carefully analysed for whole of life energy and greenhouse gas production, against the benchmark of present technology, before going beyond the demonstration or experimental stage.

Much more important are the cultural and technological changes needed to minimise World overpopulation. We desperately need to remove the socio-economic drivers to larger families, young motherhood and excessive personal consumption (from resource inefficiencies to long journeys to work).

Climate change may be inevitable. We should be working to climate “harden” the production of food, ensure that public infrastructure (roads, bridges, dams, hospitals, utilities and so) on are designed to accommodate change and that the places people live are not excessively vulnerable to drought, flood or storm. [I didn't mention fire]

Only by solving these problems will we have any hope of finding solutions to the other pressures human expansion is imposing on the planet. It is time to start looking for creative answers for NSW and Australia  now.

 

Read more: Climate Emergency

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