An early work-in-progress dedicated to helping,
circuitously, precipitate the Great Mobilisation
Dare to be wise!
Kant
Contents
author Cimino
work-in-progress published 20240709
Flat-Bottom Infatuation: Rather than Cimino’s obsession—Philip C Bolger’s dashing Black Skimmer sharpie depicted here—a more pedestrian but vastly more appropriate Bolger design was commissioned and built in Cimino’s Huawai Bay boatshop – an example of the first of Bolger’s box sharpie mini-cruisers, the Cynthia J. On an almost flat-calm Mahurangi Heads, she easily outsailed most who imagined she’d make easy pickings. plans and profile Philip C Bolger | HH Payson & Company
Before forsaking the sea, and since his fourth-form high-school year, Cimino’s hobby—and sporadic vocation—had been boat design. In an undisciplined effort to learn about naval architecture, he’d read every book on small-boat design he could lay his hands on. Until, in the late 1970s, he became infatuated by Philip C Bolger’s rakish Black Skimmer sharpie design, an example of which appeared on a Scotts Landing mooring, across and up-harbour from where Cimino and Sarah lived. Then, Bolger’s then two bookswere to become, seven, detailing a fraction of his 670 or so different boat designs became Cimino’s bibles.
Cimino was in Bolger’s thrall as much for aspects of the Massachusettsan’s ethos, as his skill in designing myriad craft at home in knee-, if not ankle-, deep estuarine water. An enthusiastic rower since gaining access to the kauri clinker dinghy that could floated from its berth at the rear of Lady Llewellyn Jones’ Waiwera Estuary property, of a full, evening tide, had rowed in a grammar-school coxed four in his final school year. Having been brought up encouraged to first eat his greens, Cimino was surprised, then delighted, by Bolger’s recommendation to row down-wind, when setting out. His philosophy was twofold. The wind may moderate—or better-yet, reverse—for the return leg, but in any event, body and mind will be adjusted to the activity and make comparatively light work of the home stretch.
Having failed for a second time to make headway to begin adequately describing the Great Polycrisis, beyond the following preamble, Cimino decided to take a leaf out of the Small Boats book and not butt into the howling headwind that is the popular reluctance to acknowledge the recent doubling of long-lived atmospheric-greenhouse-gas radiative forcing and its associated crises. Cimino found the challenge of succinctly describing the labyrinthine Great Polycrisis profoundly difficult and debilitatingly retraumatising. Hitting its straps in 2023, industrial-scale ai enshittification of the internet demonstrates, as if any reminder was needed, the wickedness of the Great Polycrisis problem—humanity divided against itself is epic tragedy in the making. Combine that with the contribution of what should be the beyond-urgent Great Mobilisation—whereby the battery-electrification of the private light vehicle, and hydrogen powered jet travel, for just two popular-and-mediamainstream, social, fake-calling, and more myths, shamelessly masquerading as climate-change solutions. Quite randomly it reminds Cimino of a related-by-marriage politician asking, only semi-Cimino hopes, but the question may well have been entirely, rhetoricalrhetorically:
What’s to fix with mmp?
By its first centennial, all bets are off as to what the ever-deepening, mega-climate polycrisis will be being called, much less by the time its first millenniala 1000th anniversary or its celebration. First known, adjectival use recorded 1660 rolls round. Cimino, in 2025, has adopted Great 3rd Millennium Polycrisis, fully cognisant of the possibility that, by the end of the decade, English speakers and their dictionaries may well have disdained polycrisis , much less in any of its compoundssuch as Anthropopolycrisis or combinations. The Hundred Years’ War, after all, took half a millennium to be consistently named.
Hundreds Upon Billion: Sixty million—a little fewer than the known number of those currently serving or in reserve, worldwide—would represent the mother-of-all mobilisations to date. Given the existential stakes, one billion—an eight of all humanity—would not be an unreasonable target for the number of active personnel enlisted to salvage a survivable climate. Pictured in-shot here parading on Queen Street, 1942, are about 300 American troops—about a 200 000th of the number of people currently in uniform, globally. image New Zealand Herald archive
Although poly lacks the cracker-impact of hyper, mega, super, and some other prefixes to be sure, Cimino is nevertheless convinced of the need to incorporate the term polycrisis, which Lawrence et al., 2022 define generically as:
the causal entanglement of crises in multiple global systems in ways that significantly degrade humanity’s prospects.
Currently, those saluting polycrisis, appear to be favouring either Polycrisis or Climate Polycrisis . Cimino leans toward the latter given climate’s multiplier effect on species extinctions and sea-level rise, to mention just two fiendishly entangled crises, but has always considered climate as intrinsically too comfortable. Maybe, to be consistent with Great Mobilisation, and to reinforce the relationship between problem and solution, great is as good it gets, and Great Polycrisis would do a greater amount of work than the alternatives.
Of the entangled crises, the overheating climate, comprehensively, is the greatest crisis visited by civilisation upon itself, guaranteeing suffering on scale not previously recorded by history. Only in the paleorecord, is there an analogue that comes anywhere close. Cimino determinedly rejects the recent fashion for demonising the fossil-fuel industry had nurtured civilisation in good faith for centuries. Granted it has, collectively, needlessly, recast itself as a villain, but so has much of the greenwashed renewables industry, without the excuse of scientific ignorance. When Cimino first began concertedly studying the unfortunately named enhanced greenhousenot only is “greenhouse effect” not a particularly close analogy of the phenomenon, “enhanced” to describe a dire impact is decidedly unhelpful effect, there was every indication that a century-old dictum could be extended to:
Truth is the first casualty of the war on carbon.
Demonising carbon and its suppliers, Cimino considered, was dishonest, undignified, and likely to prove disastrously counterproductive. Building a low- greenhouse-gas-emissions world was a monumental undertaking. It was also as urgent as it was essential.
Not only was it fair and honest, Cimino believed, to acknowledge that anthropogenic global heating was the mother of all unintended consequences, fossil fuel would be indispensable in building the zero-carbon infrastructure desperately needed. The undisciplined response, which is refusing to evolve into the surgically strategic mobilisation necessary, is a rerun of the sorry recycling saga that sees Aotearoa shipping its unsavoury waste to low-wage countries to sort—at least that which it doesn’t spend a fortune burying a fortune, in leaching landfills. The case for a searingly strategic Great Mobilisation is writ large in the current, end-to-end vanity projects, with no net reversal in global greenhouse emissions, much less their rapid reduction.
Civilisation seems to be beset by pursuing historic struggles: Christian versus Muslim, Black versus White, East versus West, not least Left versus Right. These struggles—which in Aotearoa include indigenous versus colonist—are deemed by their protagonists as core struggles that have already waited too long for resolution. Somehow, however, and exceedingly quickly, humanity must accept that, given the urgency to act decisively, some cans will need to be, if not kicked, then dribbled down the road, while the survivability of the biosphere is secured, supposing that such is still possible. With 2325 hindsight, one, and only one struggle will be agreed to have been so urgent that it had to be the first mandatory policy-box ticked. Salvaging a survivable climate. Even in the disappearingly unlikely eventuality that anthropogenic global heating proves to be a much easier nut to crack, 2025 is no time to roll the dice on such a fortuitous outcome—akin to playing Russian roulette with the distinct possibility that, at best, only one chamber remains empty…
anthropogenic global heating Also known, more gently, as global warming and climate change. Anthropogenic global heating can fairly be described as the mother-of-all unintended consequences. It began in earnest with industrialisation and large-scale burning of coal. Coal and other ubiquitous fossil fuels—for example fuel oil, petrol, diesel, and natural gas—has facilitated the massive growth of human and domesticated animal populations and in material consumption, and travel. Despite climate science warning that significant regions of Planet Earth will become too hot to be habitable within several lifetimes, even low-grade coal is still mined and burned at scale. In a local, every-little-bit-hurts example, ‘100% Pure’ New Zealand, since 2016, has burnt about six million tonnescuriously, the y-axis scale of Dr Earl Bardsley’s chart is marked in “tons” of Indonesian coal, diesel-trucked the last 90-odd km from the Port of Auckland to the navigable-by-rivertwo founding members of Mahurangi Action campaigned vigorously for canals connecting the Makaurau isthmus harbours and the Waikato river Huntly Power Station…
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