A bunch of fuel drivers want more pay (and better terms and conditions), a minister blows it in spectacular style and we disrupt our buying patterns by 170% in a day, queues, empty garages and accidents with jerry cans.  The mere thought of a shortage and we manifest one instantly!  Last week I walked round Bewl Water, a new reservoir in Sussex, it is 770 acres of water and 12+ miles round, with a capacity of 6,900,000,000 gallons but when I went there it was less than half full, acres of bare earth and we are still in March with summer to come, and water restrictions already in place.  Isn’t modern society a complex, interconnected wonderment?

These are two of the key requirements for modern society, fuel and water and even the the thought of shortage and we are in turmoil!  Surely there are some lessons here?  There are so many ways we can all use and store water more sensibly.  I once spent a week bush crafting where we bathed in a bowl of water and everything we used we hauled and that taught me just how little we really needed.  We live in a country with copious rainfall and we do nothing to harvest or share it.  Developers are allowed to build new estates that fail to harvest  rain and direct it straight down the sewers. We know that in times of abundance the west has developed a consumption based culture with no thought to the resources we consume and in space of a few days we have a vision of the consequences.  I wonder if this is a wake-up call?

Change comes in many guises.  The slow, near invisible changes that Time brings about as we age, the instant changes left in the wake of a disaster, intention driven changes as a result of careful planning, the slow changes that exercise or diet can bring about if we really work at it.  They all need a trigger.  As a species we are infinitely adaptable and just need a spur.  Give people a good enough reason and they change; create a burning platform and they leap forwards.  Fuel for thought (if nothing else!)

“They have plundered the world, stripping naked the land in their hunger… they are driven by greed, if their enemy be rich; by ambition, if poor… They ravage, they slaughter, they seize by false pretences, and all of this they hail as the construction of empire. And when in their wake nothing remains but a desert, they call that peace.”    Tacitus, The Agricola and the Germania

“Any idiot can face a crisis – it’s day to day living that wears you out.”   Anton Chekhov