Airplane Thoughts - Ocean Collapse Served Up By Gordon Ramsay

When you realise mid-flight that DEFCON RAMSAY is a real thing

This is a little bonus article, scribbled mid-flight somewhere over Europe. With a rare moment to reflect above the clouds (and well away from the chaos below).

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Are we the generation that finally pushes the ocean past its tipping point? Are we the ones that put profit so far ahead of protection that we find ourselves on the wrong side of history?

That same history has been littered with moments where the human race has made its presence known, to the extent that the world has never been the same again.

Creating ships of such strength and endurance that Europeans assimilated the rest of the planet in the 1500s, mining coal to warm our houses, inventing the combustion engine, killing whales for oil to light lanterns, inventing the telephone, manned flight, the tv, two world wars, nuclear weapons, space flight, plastic and Love Island.

It has all been leading to this. This moment where if we let ourselves think about it, we are well and truly fooked. I mean catastrophically and undeniably staring planetary extinction in the face.

In a weird way, when I just wrote that I felt some sort of comfort. It’s not actually my fault that we are probably doomed. It was our grandfathers, their mothers, and everyone else before them that led us down the garden path to destruction.

I think that’s where the problem lies.

This has been such a long process that we are like lobsters in a boiling pot. The water has got warmer and warmer and we haven’t really been paying attention. It actually feels quite nice to drive in a car, fly to Mallorca or feel the water in the pot slowly ease the aches and pains in our lobstery claws. But then all of a sudden, the bubbles start to appear, the relaxed muscles are tensing and we look up to see Gordon Ramsay leaning in to see how we are getting on.

We have hit that moment. Forget DEFCON 1 (or is it 5? Tom Cruise never explains which is the worst one in the movies) we have hit DEFCON RAMSEY. Our goose, or lobster, is nearly cooked. Our lives are almost about to be warmed to their demise.

So, is it Gordon’s fault? Or is it my Great Great Great Aunt Edith who insisted on gas lamps in her house? I don’t think either are to blame if I’m honest. They were just operating in the reality that they found themselves in. And 500 years and 40 billion people later we are at the tipping point.

As I write, I’m somewhere over Europe, Germany I think, flying back from our family holiday in Albania. Hands down the worst driving I have ever experienced. The driving there is not governed by everyone coexisting peacefully on the road, but everyone is in it for themselves (think Mad Max, with a Mediterranean twist). And I have no one to blame for this. As, if you don’t succumb and drive the same way, you will get stuck in traffic, you will get bullied off the road or you might end up plunging off a cliff.

So, how do we make Albanians into more considerate drivers? We can’t. It’s too late. The tipping point has been reached, passed, and set on fire. This is not a reflection on Albanians either, you couldn’t meet a nicer more welcoming bunch, but it’s normal, and therefore it’s accepted (I hate to think what a driving test is like there by the way).

Anyway I digress.

This isn’t an article where I have an answer, it’s more of a terrifying realisation that maybe we are well and truly buggered.

Unless.

We make Gordon the villain of the piece.

If we can make burning fossil fuels, flooding our oceans with chemicals, and deep sea trawling something which society is well aware of and staunchly against, may be we can save that lobster after all.

But we need enforceable laws, and to get there we need some Mad Men Don Draper level PR on this, and sadly, at the moment, the big corporations are the only ones that want to pay those sorts of bills.

Food for thought.

(PS. Sorry Mr Ramsay, sir).

- Luke

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