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I’ve got a dirty car, and I can downshift my way through the climate crisis

Wednesday November 22 2017
reef

This file photo taken on November 20, 2014 shows an aerial view of the Great Barrier Reef, a massive stretch of coral teeming with marine life, off the coast of the Whitsunday Islands, along the central coast of Queensland, Australia. It is one of the natural sites declared as "threatened by climate change". PHOTO | AFP

By ELSIE EYAKUZE

It is called downshifting. My driving instructor, while unconventional, was exactly the kind of guy you want to teach you how to drive.

We used to spend hours just practising my reversing skills, and looking down into the engine of the car in the hope that I would remember something. Radiator, battery, battery cables. The thingy with the ma-bobs and the doo-dads that froom-froom.

Also remember to buy the oil otherwise the car will whoopsie daisy if you don’t lubricate her regularly; of course. The hot water bottle in the front of the fan belt? Totally know how to fill that!

My instructor did a good job of teaching a disinterested student. But best of all he taught me how to drive my manual if the brakes failed.

Mostly, downshifting is a great way to make sure you don’t need brakes to get down a hill or to stop if things get thick on you. Sorry, this is a distraction; I am supposed to be using this as a metaphor for the environmental disaster that is upon us.

A few thousand scientists have been telling us for the past forever that the environment was in trouble, and that it would have consequences. As a greener, I am always on the side of scientists.

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There isn’t a mammal that I have met that I didn’t want to hug. And while I hate everything in the ocean, I certainly respect their right to creepily swim around in that horrendously deep scary saltwater bath. Ugh.

Now that it is summer in Dar es Salaam, everything is coming out to play. Butterflies and frogs and millipedes, yay! Vervet monkeys, carnivorous ants and flowers on trees.

Other... things. Frequent power cuts. I like the rest but thoughts of effective hydroelectricity are making me aware of the environment again, what it may do to us and what it may not. It has been a bit of a tough year for the world in terms of storms.

As a tree hugger of course I want to big up the doom aspect of it all and demand that we all just revert to sandals and candle-light... but. Technology keeps opening new insights into what the future holds.

Please understand: I will always be dependably and vocally upset by change and I invite my fellow grinches to admit that it is just the worst. Except when it isn’t.

Nothing is more difficult to deal with than when things are not what they used to be. So with the environmental thing, there are two things I have to embrace: It is over.

We will never get the Great Barrier Reef back, we won’t put trees on this planet like we should, we have crossed the line and we are doomed.

Also, being doomed is precisely what encourages most organisms to evolve beyond their limitations, because of evolution and technology. Even though humanity is just about to go over the hump of needing fossil fuels for the most part, this makes me sad as I am a product of my time.

Tanzania still needs to sell our natural gas and petroleum to someone, eh. But at the end of the day I have become a believer that our technology will save the day, as it always has, as it always will.

The more I learn about it, the more I believe that maybe there is a way to drive this planet in manual and downshift the environmental disaster to a sweet slow stop.

We are greening up and the hippies are coming back by wearing old people’s facial hair and learning how to can their own tomatoes. And drive a sweet manual down a hill like a real person, eh, probably fuelled by kerosene but that’s a subject for another economic debate.

Elsie Eyakuze is an independent consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report. E-mail: [email protected]

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