I don’t know why, but I’m SPECTACULARLY annoyed by an article that I’ve just read on the BBC News website. What makes my annoyance even more annoying is the fact that by rights the subject of the article should be very interesting. You can read it here. The gist of the article is that marine archaeologists have been studying a group of apparently man made artefacts that have been discovered off the small island of Damsey in Orkney.
The thing that specifically annoys me about the article is two quotes from two experts interviewed for the article. I can’t be sure of course if their words have been quoted out of context because of the high level and brevity of the article. For the moment though I’ll assume for now that they said what they said and that they meant what they said.
The first comment is from Sue Dawson, a geomorphologist from the University of Dundee who said the discovery is important, “so we can look to times when maybe environmental changes have been much more rapid and much more catastrophic in some instances and people have survived and adapted and it’s that adaption to climate change is one of the key things that we need to get to grips with.”
Second quote is fairly similar in content. Caroline Wickham-Jones said “The really interesting thing about this bay is the stories relating to things under the sea and sea-level change. Our ancestors were dealing with similar problems to ourselves and we’d like to see how they coped with it.”
Now I’m not an archaeologist, and I’m certainly not a geomorphologist. In fact as a historian I generally spit on archaeologists, much the same way as they spit on Channel 4’s Time Team program, but even I can see that the answer is fairly obvious. Early man when confronted by rising sea levels pulled up sticks and MOVED SOMEWHERE ELSE. It was NO BOTHER to him what so ever. It might seem incredible to us, living here in the future, but he didn’t have to inform the land registry, or close his account with the Gas Board, and he definitely didn’t have to fill in Form 27b/6. If his house was in danger of getting flooded he didn’t have to worry about insurance premiums, or his plasma TV getting wet.
Long term rising sea levels and climate change are an issue that will plague generation after generation of humans, but only because so many humans are short sighted and greedy. It’s the thousands upon thousands of people that when given the choice between buying a four bedroom house in a new development on a reclaimed flood plain, or a smaller urban semi-detached in the suburbs chose the big house because it’s big. It takes as special kind of stupid to build houses on historic flood plains, diverted river courses and reclaimed land and then wonder why people complain when their up to their armpits in smelly brown water. It’s not like most of these people in their identikit George Wilson Homes specifically need good fertile land like that.