Looking Back at Hurricanes…

By Donald “Braveheart” Stewart

As I sit in my Kailyard I wonder often about the future.

I think the worst we have ever had is when it is blowing a hooley in Scotland and that was over a decade ago.

From over here, hurricane Ian looks terrifying. I have never known an Ian who did look terrifying. But he looks the part.

As it batters the US, we hear it has hit Georgia, South and North Carolina and has a category 4 hurricane strength. This is obviously hurricane season, and the strange way of naming hurricanes and weather events may cause a wry smile or two for us in the UK, but the reality of the climate being so hostile looks an inescapably horrific part of where we find ourselves right now.

A few years ago, we, in Scotland, were hit by Hurricane Bawbag. Cyclone Friedhelm was a massive shock to our system when, in December 2011 it ripped through the country. We woke up to hitherto unexperienced winds and weather.

We stayed calm and we beat the hurricane. T-shirts were printed as we celebrated beating this ferocious event. It did not truly wake us up to the way in which the planet is changing.
And it is changing.

Mother Earth appears to be knocking on all of our doors and saying – please, alter your ways.

If the pandemic should have told us anything, it was that the time to return to how things were done is gone. We need to refocus, change they systems and try and become more understanding of each other and of how we are going to help future generations survive the legacy we have left them.

Our stewardship of the earth is under the spotlight.

Hurricane Ian is not an indication of the climate emergency. It does not tell us that things have significantly altered, and we need to act now because we have never had such an event before. The hurricane season is exactly that – a season which has been with us a global community for some time. We also have monsoon season.

But in Pakistan that has been overtaken by floods which have seen as much as 12% of their country under water – 1,600 plus dead – and seriously affected by the flooding. Their homes are gone, their livelihoods devastated, and their future is bleak. The extent of the floods is an indication of just how much we need to turn our attention to the climate and change our ways.

COP 26 was in Glasgow. I saw the arrangements made for world leaders to come to my wee country and talk. And so, they talked. We await their action.

The earth awaits their action.

We recycle at home, we turn off the lights we don’t need, we look at changing from petrol cars to electric ones and we try to “do our bit”.

The challenge to that thinking arose when under Trump, the US turned its back on climate action, but Biden is not doing the same. It needs a bit more though. It needs a hell of a lot more.

In the UK, our new Prime Minister has changed all the positive green action into no action. She has decided we shall frack; despite the fact we do not need shale gas. We have, in Scotland, so much clean energy we export it. But we are facing the domestic fuel bills that may see many of us go under. It makes little sense. She increasingly makes no sense. In the end it is just nonsense. What we need is to harness green power, make the commitment to make the switch, recognize that the arrogance of a west that thought it could slave their way through centuries without any consequences is over and blow and absolute hooley through the subsequent stupidity that world leaders think they can spout and get away with.

The indigenous people knew more than a thing or two – they respected the land that gave them their lives – it is time to abandon the commercial capitalism of greed and turn to better ways of making the new bawbags make more sense.

A view from the new Kailyard or, how you look over there, from over here…

(Kailyard n. a cabbage patch, often attached to a school of writing – the Kailyard School – a genre of overly sentimental and sweet Scottish literature from the late 19th century where sentimental and nostalgic tales are told in escapist tales of fantasy, but here we seek to reverse it by making the Kailyard Observations of effective invective comment from that looks not to return to the past but to launch us into a better future by the one Donald worth believing…)

Blow a Hooley; A storm with very strong winds.