In Flames
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Recent reports of forest fires around the world have been distressing. Conflagrations that burn and burn have to be one of the worst human nightmares.
Closer to home, we have suffered our own blaze as the local television mast went up in flames yesterday depriving almost a million homes across the region of their radio and TV reception, "indefinitely" according to some reports.
Obviously a Smart TV would be the answer but with the constraints on rural broadband I'm unsure how many people will be able to rely satisfactorily on this if everyone starts to stream at the same time. There are also many households (we being one of them) who don't even possess such technology although we do cast to our living room TV from a variety of other devices instead.
Fortunately we are still at that stage of retirement where the television set is frequently silent as we find other diversions to distract and entertain us. Fast forward another 20 years, however, and our dependence on that box in the corner may well change.
In these days of staycations and social distancing, for many elderly and vulnerable people the televison and radio are a beneficial and, dare I say, even essential connection to the outside world and on which many of them clearly rely. Indeed on my next visit to my mother, I now have to remember to download
the BBC's iPlayer onto her tablet, just in case we really are going to
be deprived for the long term. It is strange in the third decade of the twenty-first century to be contemplating life without the technology that we have grown up with, however temporarily.
Of course, it's a little thing compared to the problems that have been encountered in recent weeks in California, Greece, Italy and now Algeria. Strange too that after learning to live with a pandemic, it takes the loss of a minor comfort to bring home the reality of greater catastrophes and an understanding of how fragile the system in which we live and all the automation on which we depend potentially are.
As if Covid wasn't enough, newspapers are overflowing with bad news stories on climate change and the future impact on human life. Hugging a tree may no longer be sufficient when that simple retirement life I've been seeking appears to be hurtling into central vision, whether I hunt it out or not!
Comments
In Ontario where I live, wildfires are burning in the Northern regions. Several Indigenous fly-in communities have been evacuated. Yesterday 400 people were flown into our Southern Ontario city as no hotel rooms in Northern cities were available.
This summer is exceptionally hot and dry. Rains that usually help to keep the forest floor damp (thus inhibiting fires) have not come. Many fires start with lightning strikes; unfortunately, some are started by careless humans.