Watching Films of Badgers and Fish

January 8^th and Christmas is but a memory.  There seems to be hardly a place in The Cotswolds that hasn’t escaped the floods.  It has affected everywhere to some extent. 

Over the Christmas period while the family was all together, we thought it would be fun to look over some our films that we had made. There were some of the badgers, the children when they were small and some great fishing ones which showed off the sunny days, the glorious river and some of the magnificent trout I had caught.  Nostalgia can be so very sobering.

Everyday things that we all take for granted until incidents happen that totally shatter our belief and trust in the powers that govern all of us, the greatest environmental disaster of all time, Fukushima.  Every single day 300 tonnes of radioactive water enters the Pacific Ocean.  The radioactive material that is being released will outlive everything living  on this planet, constantly building up in the food chain.  Nobody will ever know for sure how many poor souls will develop cancer and other health problems as a result of the Fukushima nuclear disaster.  It is a nuclear holocaust that is just too horrifying to believe. 

It is estimated that there is 1300 nuclear rods that need to be removed and disposed of.  According to Reuters the combined amount of Cesium-137 contained in the nuclear fuel rods is 14,000 times greater than that what was released when the US dropped the atomic bomb onto Hiroshima at the end of World War 2.  Other estimates put this far higher. 

Something is causing fish along the West Coast of Canada to bleed from their gills, bellies and eye balls, Fukushima cannot be ruled out. 

Cesium-137 from Fukushima has been found in fish as far away as California and the duration of the clean-up of Fukushima will probably be in excess of fifty years.

The true horror of this disaster is only just starting to be understood.  Our drive for cheaper energy is causing circumstances that Mother Nature just cannot deal with.  I am well aware that wind farms and solar farms are a blot on the landscape and their productive capacity at this moment in time is quite clumsy and laboured, but surely it is best for us to try and harness nature to nurture us rather than obliterate the very things, the simple, down to earth things that life will be intolerable to be without.

I know reading this you might think it is terribly dramatic but Fukushima will affect the whole Northern Hemisphere by the time we are finished with it so when our Ministers talk of H20 ripping up more countryside to gain a few minutes at the end of a journey just to waste those few minutes doing something that is often so banal, I think we should all look at the nature that is around each and every one of us.  Cherish our rivers and our ancient woodlands and all wildlife within it. 

Here is a short film of my badgers grooming each other back in September 2013.  Nature has surely got to be one of our major priorities.

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roFmahwh9h0

Two Badgers Grooming at My Badger Sett