Making Scotland's Landscape

I previously recommended a five part BBC documentary series by Prof Iain Stewart called How Earth Made Us. Unfortunately, I only got around to mentioning it when it just about to disappear from BBC iPlayer. So this time, I would like to recommend a five part BBC documentary series by Iain Stewart with a little more time to spare (it's available for the next three weeks). Called Making Scotland's Landscape, it is a fascinating look at Scottish history through the human fingerprints all over Scotland's famed "natural" beauty. The first four episodes have already screened and are available on iPlayer: Trees, The Land, The Sea and Water. The final episode Climate is coming soon. I particularly enjoyed the second episode and the fourth was obviously shot during the cold snap last winter. Unfortunately, BBC iPlayer is only available to UK residents.

The central idea of the series is nothing new, being but an application of Bill McKibben's thesis in The End of Nature: that human activities have so colonised the natural world that "untouched" nature no longer exists. But it is beautifully shot, coherently narrated and brought home to landscapes with which I am increasingly familiar and of which I am increasingly fond.

This series may be of particular interest to those who think that it is arrogant to believe that our puny species could possible affect something as robust and enormous as the planet.

The energy density of oil

"When you draw 10 gallons [45.46L] of fuel into the tank of your car, in the sixty seconds it takes the energy flow is equivalent to the full output of a 25 megawatt power station."

- James Lovelock, The Vanishing Face of Gaia:
A Final Warning (London: Penguin, 2009), 64.

We have never found a substance as useful and powerful as oil. It is the distilled power of thousands of years of ancient sunlight poured into your petrol tank. Of course, oil is indeed a natural and renewable resource. It is just that the oil we use globally each year takes about three million years for the earth to replenish.*

Happy driving.
*This claim comes from How Earth Made Us, a fascinating BBC documentary series hosted by Prof Iain Stewart (and available on iPlayer to UK residents if you are very quick). I've also just read (amongst other things) this article in New Scientist, which gives a useful update on the state of "non-conventional" sources of oil. These include Canada's tar sands and large amounts of oil shale in the US. Bottom line: there are truly huge source of unconventional oil still in the ground, but getting them out will be very tricky. At the moment, they still do not represent a silver bullet for an impending energy shortfall.