A tiny bit of winter colour

A tiny bit of winter colour.

I saw a Winter Aconite in full bloom just below Broadhill. Beautiful in its solitude though it was, and probably finding its way down the brae from somebody’s garden by one means or other – is this delightful piece of colour just simply another herald of dangerous times ahead. Perhaps it is just the odd man out, these are normally very early flowers anyway and are the flowers that create the massive yellow carpet under the trees in the policies by the river at Firhall. No sign of them up there yet, however. Their name is misleading, they are not aconites at all but part of the Hellebore family.
A new report out today will try and warn us that we have very little time left to reverse global warming, if we can at all, and the effects will come far sooner than we think. We could well start paying the price very soon. But will we give up our addiction to cars or give an inch on our overwhelming desire to go to places like the golden mile in Inverness? It would probably take roadblocks by armed policemen.
So within a very short time we could be in the grip of irreversible global climate change that will accelerate at a remarkable rate. Seas rising, agriculture failing, droughts creating new deserts, forests dying, disease rampant and populations on the move seeking safety. All this could put even the most impressive pension plan under serious pressure as the world’s economy changes.
There is much debate about where the supermarket is to go in Nairn and who will build it but how long will the Earth be capable of producing the food to fill the shelves of all the supermarkets. What can we do? There doesn’t seem to be any real desire in society to do anything, Big Brother gets more attention than this subject. Shall we keep our heads in the sand and just hope that if it does happen, it comes after our time?