The Monday Mix (21/02/2022)
Hi friends,
Again, I’m late in sending this out, and again, I forgot to send my reading list for January out last week. I’ll put that straight this week and send it on Wednesday, followed by my reading list for February on Friday.
Here’s what I want to share with you this week:
How Fires Have Become Weirder
When you think of climate change, one of the worst consequences you think of is the raging wildfires. While they are bad, what’s interesting about this article is how much we don’t realise how integral fire is to our existence.
It’s vital to our environment, it’s integral to how we eat our food, and it’s likely we wouldn’t be here without it. I was blown away by this article and the implications of what climate change means for fires around the world. They’re going to be inevitable, but we’ve lost thousands of years of knowledge on how to deal with them effectively, instead, trying to stamp them out altogether.
Sometimes, the old ways are the best. We’d be wise to remember that right now.
How We Fixed The Ozone Layer
Climate change is one of the biggest threats we face in the years ahead. Rising temperature will lead to all sorts of consequences, many foreseen, others unforeseen. As tempting as it is to be pessimistic, instead, we should take inspiration from a previous environmental crisis we did manage to solve: the hole in the Ozone layer.
This was a massive problem in the 1980s, with a huge hole developing over Antarctica. What followed was an international treaty that banned CFC substances, which depleted the Ozone layer. What this article shows is that when there’s political will, seemingly impossible challenges can be successfully met.
Climate change is a huge problem, one that will demand greater action than that which solved the Ozone layer issue. But we can tackle it, and our previous success in reducing the hole in the Ozone layer to almost zero should give us hope.
Putin’s Hall of Mirrors
A fascinating insight into the mind of Vladimir Putin by one of the best historians around today, Timothy Snyder (I recommend you read as many of his books as you can if you want to understand the political situation in the west). With Putin escalating the crisis in Ukraine in the past few hours, and his rambling speech rewriting history, this article is as timely as can be.
Book I’m reading - The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson
A funny and riveting look at the world of psychiatry through one man’s journalistic curiosity. Ronson is a great writer and brings a strange kind of levity and intrigue to the world of psychiatry, and more accurately, psychopaths. This is a fun read and will leave you smarter and warier of people around you
Quote I’m pondering: “I can resist everything except temptation.”
That’s all for this week.
Until next time,
Tom