For International Women’s Day, our school’s staff went on an outing to a fruit farm just outside Zhongshan. In Alberta, Canada, you see canola and wheat. Here, in a subtropical zone, you can see, and immediately EAT, these:
It is snowing in Edmonton, Alberta, today. 29 April, 2013. Temperature high of zero degrees Celcius. Which made me think of Bill Bryson.
If you’ve yet to read anything of Bill Bryson‘s, DO. He’s awesome.
The most recent book of his I’ve read is called A Short History of Nearly Everything. Among other fascinating things, he talks about the Tambora eruption in 1815. News travelled much more slowly then, but the entire world felt the effects eventually — it changed the weather. The average temperature the following summer — the growing season in the northern hemisphere — dropped by two degrees, which meant nothing would grow.
I genuinely don’t believe I’m being hysterical when I ponder if that’s why spring is taking so long to arrive. How many volcanic eruptions have there been the last few years? We can’t even agree on a plan to control the pollution we put into the atmosphere ourselves: what on earth will we do when an eruption like Krakatoa happens? How long would the growing season be delayed, and how many people would it effect?
Just thinking out loud…
