Song of the semi-active activist

Mornings are not my best time. I wake myself up with a diet cola (caffeine but no chance of scalding myself with steam or boiling water) and graduate to a huge mug wherein heaping spoonsful of chocolate are mixed with coffee to provide my morning's maximum caffeine hit, which I drink while playing FreeCell on my computer.
Thus awakened, I look around me to see what the world is up to today. I see my husband has his Maclean's Magazine open to the book reviews and I read one. Brian Bethune is reviewing "Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans will Survive a Mass Extinction" by Annalee Newitz.
The title alone is enough words for my first read of the morning, but I am hooked, so I continue.
My favourite bit is: "If we're going to last long enough...we will need to give up our mindless fossil-fuel addiction"...



I just love "mindless fossil-fuel addiction" even though it isn't easy to say aloud so early in my day.
Of course, the review says more, and the book, one imagines, says even more than that, but I feel quite smug for so early in the day, because I think I've found my opinions validated.

Photos by Kay Davies

I return to my computer where, instead of playing more FreeCell, I check out what my blogging buddies have to say, and I actually reply to one of them.
It's Tuesday, so Daryl Edelstein features her husband's Toonman cartoon, in which he mentions her European travels vis a vis his own North American jaunts (New York to Toronto, anyone?).
Toonman doesn't offer any opinions about jet travel or about anything else, but I feel compelled to send Daryl a reply, in which I express my recently-emerging but still muddled thoughts on the subject of air travel:
"I am beginning to take another look at the whole flying thing, wondering if my responsibility as a tree-hugging anti-big-oil semi-active activist is to give up flying around the world. In the first place, I hate long flights, and in the second, I wonder if I'm being environmentally irresponsible by encouraging the use of all that jet fuel.

"My husband says the plane is going to go to Europe or South America or wherever anyway, with or without me, but still..."

Did I say mornings are not my best time? Well, they're not. Do pop over to Daryl's blog today and meet Toonman. You'll like that.

Meanwhile, this started out, a few years ago, as a travel blog, and is beginning to turn into an anti-travel blog. That will probably make me look like a hypocrite, but I don't mean it that way. I might not even stop traveling. Who knows? But I'm looking into giving it a lot of thought.

K