Blog – Page 54 – My Outdoor Living Room

It is with great pleasure that we welcome spring time. In the past week I have seen my first bees of the year, green shoots in the hedgerows and pink blossom coming through.

I’ve always loved seeing the white blossom of Hawthorn, either because it’s earliest coming into bloom or because of its white brilliance.

Easily though, the best aspect of spring is the dawn chorus. Trying to identify specific birds can be difficult, but nowadays there is a plethora of resource available online to help us work out what is around us. With some species, the cuckoo being a prime example, it is more common to hear them than see them. I’ve never seen a cuckoo but have heard them on many occasions.

Spring really is my favourite time of year, despite the topsy-turvy weather. It really is a great time of year for all of the senses – sight, sound and smell particularly. And when it’s over? The pure elegance of summer.

In my last post, I covered different aspects of what constitutes progress. I should probably say that I believe that humanity as a whole is regressing not progressing. I see progress in the form of its definition:

“development towards an improved or more advanced condition.”

Call me old fashioned but I feel that compromising the environment is in no way progress for us at all. After all, how do you measure progress? Inevitably it will be facts and figures, numbers and profits, not general human state. If you could capture that, I think it would be a different story.

I do admit that the planet is becoming overcrowded and we all need somewhere to call home. That can’t be disputed, but the manner in which it’s tackled is generally deplorable. For example, a few hundred acres of prime agricultural land is given up for housing. That for me would be more easy to accept if it was to have 500 suitable, sustainable family homes built on it. However, more often than not, the majority of houses are 3, 4 or 5 bedroom houses that don’t accurately fit in with the needs of that community’s housing needs. It is clearly down to the greed of developers and local authorities.

I have always been critical of HS2 here in the UK (a high speed rail link, that is cutting through the countryside including irreplaceable ancient woodland and wildlife corridors). It is wreaking all this destruction for what? So business users can get to the north for something ridiculous like 30 minutes quicker than they are now. Again, I ask, what for? Well it’s money and that word again, progress.

I was amused a long time ago by post I saw on social media. It hit the nail on the head for me about the general human state vs the environment. It said this:

“Imagine if trees gave off a WiFi signal. We’d be planting trees all over the place and we’d probably save the planet too.

Too bad they only produce the oxygen we breathe”.

The crying shame is, it’s true. If only we had the same attitude towards environment and nature as we have towards high speed broadband, high speed rail links, high speed everything.

Our human state is ultimately unhappy, and probably will continue on this path, but at least we can get there quicker.