Digging and thinking. Thinking and digging.

All over the country allotmenteers, well those lucky enough to not have had their sites expropriated for Olympic Parks or Convicted Looter Holding Camps, are looking at their plots with some satisfaction. Despite the very dry spring this has turned out to be an exceptionally good growing season, especially for fruit. With food prices rising and most people getting more strapped for cash there never has been a better time to grow your own.

We don't hear quite so much about climate change these days and in many ways this is a blessing. At least we don't have to suffer the hapless children of the bourgeoisie stridently proclaiming that the future of the planet is in their hands. No, they've all invested in posh frocks and suits and gone off to work in PR. We are also spared having to listen the folk dirge of the insufferable Seize The Day at demos so all in all I find the demise of "Climate Change" to be a good thing. But don't run away with the idea that the problem has disappeared along with the protesters because nothing could be further from the truth. Climate change is real enough and with it comes a multitude of problems that will take all of our innate human ingenuity to cope with. There will be winners and losers for one thing and you can be sure that as life becomes more difficult in some parts of the world there will be mass migrations to more temperate regions. At the moment food shortages are due to a failure of distribution rather than production; plenty of food but the poor can't afford it. That could change and we could face real food shortages in future. Extreme weather events, rising sea levels, unpredictable harvests will combine with the mass movement of people around the globe to create perhaps the greatest challenge that our species has faced so far. The task is not to try and reverse climate change with wind farms, electric cars and non-farting cows but to cope with the effects of such changes. Are we up for it? I think so but only if we radically re-think the way that we do things. We will have to do better than the market led expanding economy model and create whole new ways of dealing with both each other and the world around us. Anyway, something to ponder as you dig those spuds.