very special sunset

a gorgeous sunset last night - my phone camera couldn't get close to capturing the intensity of the colours....but I tried.

a worrying planning application

After all SAS' work on sewage drainage onto UK beaches, I can't believe that this is slipping through Cornwall County Council's net. Saw this alert on Drift surfing - get involved, especially if you live near, or visit, or just care abou Cornwall's beaches.

"Residents of the St Merryn area were last week made aware of a worrying planning application to put in a drainage [including treated sewage] pipe flowing onto the beach at Booby’s Bay in North Cornwall, which if granted will damage the surrounding area, the beach and the water quality, reports Adrian Philips of Fluid Juice. [Photo by Jamie Bott.]

It also transpired during a St Merryn Parish Council meeting on Thursday that the plan is not as was originally stated on the planning application “to drain surface water causing a wet garden” but is actually to drain the entire area to a depth of 3.2m to allow the construction of an intended new development at Little Polgarron overlooking the beach at Booby’s Bay, of which the first level is planned to be underground. The present water table is at approximately 1m below the surface. This lowering of the water table would affect a large area of both Special Scientific Interest and Outstanding Natural Beauty.

To make matters worse, it was also revealed that the developer intends all sewage to be treated on the premises and the resulting liquids to be disposed of through a soakaway and hence into the ground water and then drain through the proposed pipe onto the beach.

It seems unlikely that such a scheme could get passed by the planning department, but the original planning application [2009/00850] appears to have gone through very quietly. Now that we have the chance it’s important that normal people like ourselves stand up for what we believe is right – but we may not have much time so it’s important to lodge your comments and/or objections as soon as possible.

If you would like to know more please read the relevant planning application [2009/01754]. This area of the council’s website is REALLY slow, so it’s quicker to save the PDFs to your desktop and then read them.

If you would like to comment or object to the above proposal you can do so on the Cornwall County Council website."

Chris Jordan again

I've blogged about Chris Jordan's amazing art before and I have also mentioned the Pacific Gyre - the vast Texas sized dump in the middle of the ocean - and here they are both featured.... sad and wonderful and moving and sad, and obviously sad.

http://chrisjordan.com/current_set2.php?id=11

'if the sea is sick, we're sick'

From Drift Surfing - 'Save the Waves Environmental Director Josh Berry just sent over this short film, “Soundings.” Regardless of where you stand on Sea Shepherd, it’s hard to argue with Dave Rastovich’s simple breakdown of why the state of the oceans matters to every surfer everywhere. We immerse ourselves in the sea daily, it’s on our skin and in our mouths and eyes. If it’s sick, we’re sick–plain and simple.'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wj5xF1Udb-g&feature=player_embedded#

Instead of refraining from things, we need to do more things

Instead of refraining from things, we need to do more things is one of Stewart Brand's ideas for the future of environmentalism. He's someone who is crossing my radar more and more frequently - I know I'm slow - but he makes sense in a really positive, 'do something' way. Which dirtmeetsthewater likes very much. I found this on Howies' Brainfood blog and spread it forward here with props and acknowledgement as per...

"Stewart Brand has been at the forfront of Environmentalism since the 60’s in America. He says that he wants to foster an ‘un-idealistic, practical view about how to get things done’. He was the guy who got NASA to first publish images of Earth from the Apollo Space missions which changed our view of our planet forever. And for the computer nerds, you might like to know that he was there at the inception of the internet, developing a way of linking environmentalists via a system called ‘The Wall’. He has faith in human beings to do the right thing when given the opportunities and feels that the appropriate tools are key to this. He optimistically believes that we can create a world we believe in.

Watch his video on TED to judge for yourself. I learnt much from the talk I went, and I would like to share with you the information that is still ringing loud in my ears now, how does this information sit with you?

1. How do we frame a problem in a way that it’s solvable? (apparently engineers do this alot!)

2. Instead of refraining from things, we need to do more things.

3. There is a movement for ‘open-source genetic engineering’ so farmers everywhere can use it to modify their crops as they have done through breeding for generations. This could potentially stop world food sources being controlled by controversial giants such as Monsanto (one of the biggest fears of anti-GM campaigners). There is a book called ‘Mendel in the Kitchen’ by an American couple who write about combining the best of organic growing principles and GM technology.

4. He believes that there is currently a regular mis-use of the precautionary principle. Many things have un-intended consequences both positive and negative and it is best that we keep an eye out for both.

5. The new 3rd generation of nuclear power generators have the options to be small modular reactors, that can de-centralize power supplies, even a floating barge in Russia. Uranium supplies are from stable countries such as Australia and Canada. Third generation reactors can use the waste from first and second generation as fuel. Amusingly, 10% of America’s nuclear fuel comes from old soviet weapons, how’s that for recycling?! New methods of uranium processing are being developed to prevent any waste from the process being used in weapons. "

Note to self - the solutions are nearly always found by doing something, not by stopping doing stuff. Yes less can be more but Pig Will was the leader. Pig wont had to become Pig me too.....(courtesy of Richard Scarry)

what's in a name

We named our son Robbie so when he grows up he can be, Rob, Robert and of course Bob. In Italy he will be known as Roberto. So what's in a name? He is named after his Grandpa - a good man - but he carries a great moniker and i did have a little think about who he might emulate. No pressure then son.

Robert Plant - if you don't know you can't be in my gang

Robert Smith - he of the Cure and the godfather of goth

robert johnson - made a deal with the devil but invented the blues

robert cray - handy with a strat

robert palmer - smooth

robert wyatt - for shipbuilding....the song

Robert Rauschenberg - messy art

bob dylan....do I need to explain?

bob marley - likewise

bob geldof - a hero

Rob Trujilo - Bass player with Metallica & Suicidal tendancies

Robert Louis Stevenson - pirates
Robert De Niro - for Deerhunter
Robert Carlyle - for begbie
Robert Plant - again
Robert Redford - for the Sundance kid
Bobby Moore - for '66

Bob Weir - Guitar & Vocals, The Grateful Dead

Bob Willis - for Headingley '81

Robert Altman - for the Player and MASH

Bob Seeger - for Hollywood Nights' drumming

Bobby Gillespie - for Screamadelica

Bobbie Kennedy - for trying to step out of a shadow

Bobbie Darin - for mac the knife

Robert Frost - yankee poet

Robbie Robertson - for The Band

Robbie Coltrane - for Tutti Frutti

Robert Mitchum - for the Big Sleep & Cape Fear

Robert Downey Jnr - for weird science

Robert Duval - for Colonel Killgore...'smells like victory'

Robert Shaw - his boat wasn't big enough

Rob Lowe - for The West Wing & St Elmo's Fire

Robert Fripp - in the court of king crimson...mainly unlistenable but you have to at least 'know it'

Robert Kubica - fastest Pole

Robert Maplethorpe - flowers & fisting

Robert Powell - he was Jesus afterall

Robert the Bruce - jock King

Robert Burns - jock poems

Bob Kane - Creator of "Batman & Robin"

Bob Woodward - all the president's men

Robert Menzies - Former Prime Minister ofAustralia

Rpatz - coz hes soo like omg in heat magazine

Roberto Baggio - scored some goals. missed one penalty

Roberto Benigni - life IS beautiful

Roberta Flack - killing me softly

Sponge bob - he of the cuboid legwear

and yes robbie williams

so a pretty good name

as long as he has tiny bit of marley/dylan/willis/plant/wooodward/truiljio...then I'll be proud.

my boy Robbie

and today the world is a different place...... the arrival of Robbie Bruce has rocked my axis in the best way possible and everything that was important to me now seems either doubly so, or really rather trivial. a new life is a wonderful thing. The details for the record.

a boy. 7.14lbs (3.2kgs) born at 4.23pm on 12th january 2010 - a very snowy day.

sad but important

I think we all knew it was never going to deliver, but it seems that it was worse than we thought....

this from Greenpeace's Ben Stewart, via radiohead.com.

sad but important

"The most progressive U.S. President in a generation comes to the most important international meeting since the Second World War and delivers a speech so devoid of substance that he might as well have made it on speakerphone from a beach in Hawaii. His aides argue in private that he had no choice, such is the opposition on Capitol Hill to any action that might challenge the dominance of fossil fuels in American life. And so the nation which put a man on the moon can’t summon the collective will to protect men and women back here on Earth from the consequences of an economic model and lifestyle choice that has taken on the mantel of a religion.
Then a Chinese Premier who is in the process of converting his Communist nation to that new faith (high-carbon consumer capitalism) takes such umbrage at Obama’s speech that he refuses to meet – refuses, in fact, to do much of anything beyond sulking in his hotel room, as if this were a teenager’s house party instead of a final effort to stave off the breakdown of our biosphere.
Late in the evening the two men meet and cobble together a collection of paragraphs which they call a ‘deal’, although in reality it has all the meaning and authority of a bus ticket, not that it stops them affixing their signatures to it with great solemnity. Obama’s team then briefs the travelling White House press pack – most of whom, it seems, understand about as much about global climate politics as our own lobby hacks know about baseball – and before we know it the New York Times and CNN are declaring the birth of a ‘meaningful’ accord.
Meanwhile a friend on an African delegation emails to say that he and many fellow members of the G77 block of developing countries are streaming into the corridors after a long discussion about the perilous state of the talks, only to see Obama on the television announcing that the world has a deal. It’s the first they’ve heard about it, and a few minutes later, as they examine the text, they realise very quickly that it effectively condemns their continent to a century of devastating temperature rises.
By now the European leaders – who know this thing is a farce but have to present it to their publics as progress – have their aides phoning the directors of civil society organisations spinning that the talks have been a success. A success? This deal crosses so many of the red lines laid out by Europe before this summit started that there are scarlet skid marks across the floor of the Bella Centre, and one honest European diplomat tells us this is a ‘shitty shitty deal.’
Quite.
This deal is beyond bad. It contains no legally binding targets and no indication of when or how they’ll come about. There isn’t even a declaration that the world will aim to keep global temperature rises below 2 degrees C – instead leaders merely ‘recognise the science’ behind that vital threshold, as if that were enough to prevent us crossing it. The only part of this deal anyone sane came close to welcoming was the $100bn global climate fund, but it’s now becoming apparent that even that’s largely made up of existing budgets, with no indication of how new money will be raised and distributed so poorer countries can go green and adapt to climate change.
Not all of our politicians deserve the opprobrium of a dismayed world. Our own Ed Miliband fought hard on no sleep for a better outcome, while President Lula of Brazil offered to financially assist other developing countries to cope with climate change and put a relatively bold carbon target on the table. But the EU didn’t move on its own commitment (one so weak we’d actually have to work hard not to meet it) while the United States offered nothing and China stood firm.
Before the talks began I was of the opinion that we would only know Copenhagen was a success when plans for new coal-fired power stations across the developed world were dropped. If the giant utilities saw in the outcome of Copenhagen an unmistakable sign that governments were now determined to act, and that coal plants this century would be too expensive to run under the regime agreed at this meeting, then this summit would have succeeded. Instead, as the details of the agreement emerged last night we received reports of Japanese opposition MPs popping champagne corks as they savoured the possible collapse of their new government’s carbon targets. It’s not just that we haven’t got to where we needed to be, we’ve actually ceded huge ground. There is nothing in this deal – nothing – that would persuade an energy utility that the era of dirty coal is over. And the implications for humanity of that simple fact are profound.
I know we greens are partial to hyperbole. We use language as a bludgeon to direct attention to the crisis we’re facing, and you’ll hear much more of it in the coming days and weeks. But really, it’s no exaggeration to describe the outcome of Copenhagen as an historic failure that will live in infamy. In a single day, in a single space, a spectacle was played out in front of a disbelieving audience of people who have read and understood the stark warnings of humanity’s greatest scientific minds - and what they witnessed was nothing less than the very worst instincts of our species articulated by the most powerful men who ever lived.
I will leave the last word to the late Kurt Vonnegut Jr., who would have given voice to the insanity of Copenhagen better than I ever could, and whose poem Requiem is perhaps appropriate at this moment: ‘When the last living thing, has died on account of us, how poetical it would be if Earth could say, in a voice floating up, perhaps from the floor of the Grand Canyon, “It is done. People did not like it here”

all of me out there

Spurred on by the whole new-year-new-start vibe I had a little think about all my stuff out there in the cloud - because I'm often working all over the place I use gmail, google docs and flickr - felt a bit fractured and split. So I can now be found here.http://flavors.me/timleroy

It's lovely little app that I sense will become huge in 2010. I rather lost interest in tweeting; I just wasn't getting much from it - Steven Fry, Ross Noble and Bill Bailey are all heroes but my Lord do they prattle on. So I've resolved to only tweet with purpose and to let dirtmeetsthewater and flickr be my main reportage.

new start. again.

so a new year and a new start. With a slightly heavt heart, I've had to move (for work) away from the beach and into the depths of rural, frost-bound, Somerset but will start the new start with a resolution to blog more. Dirtmeetsthewater will continue to have an eco-slant as recycling and sustainable energy is my job and a passion, but hopefully it'll ramble off into uncharted territory and throw up something diverting from time to time.