Green Scarf Stories   To be updated monthly                           -- October 2020 issue --. all content ©copyright JFGladstone.

Moral? This technological progress tells us about what humans assume is their right? Energy, heat, transport, things... Warming and de-forestation make us revise the morality of earth to people relationships?

 

Middle:  Please continue... Who in your family has been saved? 

End: Far from Obvious: Millions of lives saved, life extended for many, world population up from 2.5 billion when penicillin won the Nobel Prize in 1945, now 7.5 billion.

Action: Unclear: reduce antibiotic use? In humans, in  animals we eat? Reduce numbers -- now a fraught debate?

Note: In my long story (link to come) at the time of a murder over scarce penicillin, an elderly pathologist in the Stockholm morgue says: when you steal death from the gods, you extend life at your peril.

Middle: The earth is crowded, right? Pretty much everywhere? Even up Mount Everest.
 

End: Script not yet written.

Cautionary tale. The 'developed' world is built on cars, central heating....>>>>
 

(Note: in this site click on the blue arrow to change pages)

Inventing the Green scarf Idea --The Man Rutland:

We are trying to build a myth. Bill Rutland was from the American south, hated northern lumber companies....>>>>

How did we get to where we are?   2 (very short) Green Scarf Stories for starters...... 
 

1911 -- bILL rUTLAND, THE LUMBERJADKS AND THE RIGHT AND WRONG OF TREE CUTTING >>>>

2020-- Ms. Olnay finds herself called a criminal by the British state >>>>

2 GENERATIONS, WHY i FELT THE NEED TO INVENT THESE PEOPLE TO MAKE GREEN STORIES AND MORAL TALES >>>>

Green Scarf Images: Pollution comes from the previous generation’s desire for too much. This is an environmental website that tells stories about that desire. It is concerned with how the coming generation can deal with legacies. 

New Jersey Turnpike heading to New York City, –‘record’ Christmas deliveries, Dec 2018.
Christmas gifts/ up. Trucking/ up. Jobs/ up. Carbon usage/ up.
Francine Olnay's son, Nick Agopian asked his mother (who he saw as green): if we can afford a hot shower, by what right do we take it? If we take it by right, then do we take a ten minute shower by right? And if kids take a ten minute shower by right, do they take a 30 minute shower by right?
What is the morality of our energy use? Can we burn decayed matter laid down in the earth millions of years ago?
Is it ours to burn? he asked.
We failed to ask this hard enough -- my generation, she says. With your sister I had a vision, she says, about putting earth first and people second.

                                                  Walk when you can.
                                                 Ask the age of the trees.

                                                   Aim for the light.>Continue>>>
                                   
                              When you see trees 50 years old there were half

                                        the number of people on the planet
                                                 
                                                                                           

Green Scarf Stories is a website asking, through stories, how we are where we are. 

The 2020 earth is not the 2000 earth, nor the 1950 earth, nor the 1900 or -10,000 earth.

Green Scarf Stories links questions of environmental ethics -- who comes first, humans or earth?... are we stealing from our children?....links these with stories, images,  a fiction project and reviews and comment.

Green Scarf Stories is the © copyright of Francis 'greenscarf' Gladstone. It owes a great deal to collaborators. This is the September 2020 edition. It will be updated monthly. 

Trucks moving north, New Jersey Turnpike, USA, December 2018. Moral: do not decry the joys some of us have, getting what we can get. Green Scarf Stories is about the push for progress. And its problems and its power. Which is why its first two long stories are not 'green', instead about the push to dominate new weaponry in World War II and the push to save wounded troops lives with the then-new drug penicillin.

Where the idea began:

Yes, such trees once existed in the USA, although by 2020 almost every one of them has been cut. The expanding 19th century largely considered wilderness alien, lumber companies in the 20th considered old trees to be crooked, part rotten and taking up space where new growth might be planted.
It is not only in South America and southeast Asia where (rain) forest is under threat. The vast USA has only small pockets of virgin trees left. Britain preserves some old trees -- yet, for all its lovely landscape, is largely a tree denuded county.
 

It's not over yet. The green scarf in Green Scarf Stories is an act of homage to the canopy. Richard Powers' novel The Overstory is about people dying for trees as well as trees dying for people. Recent research has led to greater understanding of the way trees are not single organisms but symbiotic with fungus they feed and which acts as their brain. 

Read about trees, fight for trees, love trees, walk among trees.

Some Links
 

The kid who tried to stop them felling the virgin oak -- Bill Rutland and the origins of the Green Scarf idea. >>>

Francine Olnay -- the fashion designer whose daughter told her: 'it's simple, Mum. Put Earth first.' >>>

References to Time: Greta Thunberg, Andri Snaer Magnuson & development outrunning the human developers. >>>

Two tall women who looked so alike: Nathalie Armstrong, Francine Olnay, the push and push back human progress. >>>

Big Numbers to make readers think: the start of the Green Scarf Book of Big and Vast Numbers. >>>

Opening text of the lst Green Scarf Novel: OSRD, -- the woman who found the secret organization behind the American plan for world technological dominance. Read in PDF format. >>>

Further Reading:  Books from the Green Scarf Library. >>>