Not in My Backyard…

There’s a lot of mileage in that phrase – Not In My Backyard or NIMBY as it’s also known. For example, a lot of people object to having recycling facilities / renewable energy  close to them. But it got me thinking…

…yes, I know that’s dangerous…

… like the Smog that Britain has been covered with this week. The UK has clean air policies which means we don’t produce as much Smog as we used to (no pea soupers in London anymore) yet, we still get the Smog from other countries.

There’s even a website that will show you what the air quality is like in your country –

From – http://aqicn.org/map/world/

But while I was thinking about this, the thought occurred to me that the whole world is our backyard now. There are people who I talk to every day on Facebook who in the “Real World” (as opposed to The Internet) are hundreds and thousands of miles away from me, but we carry on conversations about various things as if we were leaning on the fence in the back garden, or having coffee together …

…actually in some cases, we are both drinking coffee even though we aren’t in the same place.

I can talk to someone in Australia, several people in america and a couple of people in Asia (Japan / China / Thailand) at the same time as talking to someone in London and Edinburgh, while having a separate conversation with TOH in my living room about the kids or what to have for dinner.

When I was a kid, the phone was something that sat in the hall on a wire. Computer games ran through a TV and we had to pay through the nose to talk to our dad in the USA… Now, it’s all so commonplace and unremarkable.

The whole world is our Backyard.

Air Pollution, Global Warming, Wars –  They’re not Somebody Else’s Problem anymore, we all have to deal with it.

And that is scary.