Where are the fossil society’s soul? Perhaps outside a petrol station in the town of Sveg, where crowds of sportlovshuttrande families in funktionsunderställ and recycled fleece crammed in the toalettkön. Buying coffee in the pappmuggar with plastic cover and straighten out the cracking the joints after the long journey through the Swedish province of Hälsingland. Looking at the pumping stations is replenished estate cars and SUV-s with a refined product of ancient biomass, residues from fossilized prehistoric animals, the plankton and the algae and that in a natural process that takes about 100,000 years to evolve into a potent fuel, which in many ways has created the entire modern society.
the Scene can of course be reproduced – in Gävle, sweden, Malung, Särna, sweden and the other of the watering hole where the caravan with takboxturister will stop on the way for many swedes perhaps the most promised land: the mountains.
is the sheath of one of the inventions that suggest that man has earned his place in creation: a beautiful and ingenious device which is clamped on the feet and enables the user takes on the snow and also give its users happiness and peace of mind. For me, skiing is one of the things that gives life meaning; that I have taught my children to ski gives me at times a feeling that my existence here on earth may have had a certain importance. When I am gone, they will be able to continue the trip to the mountains – and hopefully also those propagating the knowledge and the feeling that it means that in the high-speed master a steep slope or the animal, meditative heat that presents itself after a few kilometers in the cross-country track.
Already drop Jämtland in pace with climate change 1-2 of snow cover days per year; in a period of twenty years, it means a month fewer ski days
So, it has in all cases been. When you have received klimatkrisens fragment in the eye also loses such things its original matter of course. The view over the gentle and beautiful Härjedalsfjällen broken against future visions of the terrible snow-free bergsytor, perhaps, here and there coated with nödtorftiga strings of a sad artificial snow. Already losing Jämtland in pace with climate change 1-2 of snow cover days per year; in a period of twenty years, it means a month fewer ski days.
why you see it so clearly: how the road to vinterparadiset lined with smutsbruna verges and black slag. In our society, is also life’s purest and most original constants inpyrda with the exhaust.
But the fossil fuels has entrenched itself in our lives not only in the road network and the economy, but also in the culture, yes, in our whole way of thinking. It is no coincidence that the right car has become one of the most important contemporary bearers of culture – both in concrete and metaphorical sense of the word. I remember it was in a burgundy Opel I believed that his choice for the first time in my life heard Bruce Springsteen, when my hockeytränare trafficked into a newly purchased cassette tape in the car stereo and I fell directly for the carefree saxintrot to ”Sherry darling”. Only much later I understood how even the text – certainly not one of the artist’s most profound – set in a sweaty traffic jam.
When I recently saw the tv version of Springsteen’s amazing Broadwayshow I was struck once again of how dependent the modern western story of the cars – driving them and the roads they travel on. Of Bruce Springsteen it is the giant neonskylten from the oil company Exxon, which spreads the light over the city, it is biltvättarna, the unfortunate trafikpoliserna, the lonely nattfärderna and the dream of leaving the broken and the ugly behind – it is a world that is completely unthinkable without cars and gasoline.
an even more epoch-making invention than the skis, even if it never had the same place in my dreams. Someone has pointed out that the car is a kind of ”moving territory” – it made it possible for man to combine revirets relative security of the physical movement, the benefits and the risks. It is no coincidence that many undergångsfilmer shows how the big motorlederna collapses, as our time The tower of babel. It is our own humanity that we affect when we drive the car.
It is therefore no coincidence that one of the first embryos to the French protest movement Yellow vests arose as a protest against the fact that the maximum speed was lowered to 80 km / h on the French highways. Not to the uprising, later to a large part directed against the government’s step-by-step increase of the petrol and diesel or to the movement’s symbol is the yellow varselvästar that all French people according to the law must have in the car.
of course, It is tragic that political action on the climate crisis is perceived as a threat to just the people closest to my heart. The transition goes out on the rescue these living conditions. But the yellow varselvästarna is also a reminder that the big klimatomställningen will never be able to be implemented without justice. Sooner or later there will be fossil fuel in the bensinstationernas pumps disappear. Slowly, slowly the world will become a different.
sportlovsveckan in the mountains, we see the sign for a charging station for electric cars, among bygdegårdarna on the traditional road between Ljusdal and Bollnäs. The skis are still in the box. A new old country is possible.
Read more by Björn Wimans chronicles of the climate crisis – and about the book ”Late on earth. 33 thoughts on the world’s biggest news” .
