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London Bridge 15th March 2012
This is less a photo entry, more a sharing of despair.
Perhaps its my age where I have less friends to turn to as I struggle with dealing with both an increasing invisibility and an erosion of optimism in the future for mankind.
I had just finished Sebold’s book, The Rings of Saturn, a masterpiece but with little hope, which focussed the inevitability of cycles of decline & decay, when I heard of the death of Sherry Rowland. He was an outspoken hero scientist who, in 1974, discovered that chlorofluorocarbons, or CFS (then a common ingredient in air conditioners and refrigerators & aerosol sprays) would destroy the ozone layer in the upper atmosphere, which protects Earth from the Sun’s harmful ultraviolet radiation, unless their release was quickly phased out.
One evening in 1974 his wife, Joan, had asked Rowland, a man of extraordinary calm, about his work. “It’s going very well,” he replied. “It just means, I think, the end of the world.”
He fought against the chemical industry, which tried to discredit him to the extent that he was branded a KGB agent out to destroy capitalism. Then in 1987, over a decade later, observations of a huge ozone hole over the Antarctic finally resulted on an international ban of CFCs.
This picture was taken one smoggy morning; the week of his death, the day that air pollution hit record levels due to a combination of traffic fumes, relatively still weather and an influx of dirty air from the north of England and northern France.
Last month, the environment secretary, Caroline Spelman, was criticised by an influential group of MPs for rejecting their recommendations to cut pollution on the grounds that it was too costly. Poor air quality has been linked to nearly one in five deaths a year in London. The capital’s poor air quality, caused largely by traffic, has seen the UK facing £300m in fines for breaching EU targets. The government has successfully lobbied Europe to push back the deadline for meeting the targets.
Bam
