Re: Global warming and your garden

On Sun, 18 May 2008 18:15:02 -0400, Bill <b2forewagner@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
wrote:

[...]

>And with Eric and his crew in 
>> mind, it can be argued that if they had changed some of their old
habits 
>> and adopted some of the Inuits strategies for staying
>> alive, instead of the stiff-necked insistence on being good Norwegians,
>> they probably would have survived.

[...]

Exactly the same argument has been made for the British explorers who
failed over and over to find the Northwest Passage.  Instead
of the "stiffnecked insistence on being good [Britishers]" they might
have survived.  Bu, one after another the expeditions -- notably the
last Franklin one -- failed, and the most of the explorers died
because (excuse this, amigas/os across the pond) in that era,
post-Napoleonic Wars,* triumphalist Britain  thought the sun shone out
of their you-know-what.  In their missionary deal to Christianize the
"savages", they failed to notice that the "savages" had survived very
nicely for thousands of years by adapting their food, clothing, and
hunting methods to the local conditions. 

*Post Napoleonic Wars, there were a lot of surplus naval officers on
half-pay, who had no other way to find glory, so they signed up for
these expeditions to find the Northwest Passage, a more direct way to
the riches of the Orient.

Ironically, had they waited a few centuries till climate change really
kicked in, they could have had an ice-free route through the
Northwest Passage in this year of 2008.  But by the time the
Passage was traversed in 1906,  it was no longer needed economically,
the Panama Canal was completed in 1914.

It was a very good Norwegian indeed, my hero Roald Amundsen,
who, with his small, efficient ****p and experienced crew [antithesis
of Franklin's huge Navy-style expedition]  befriended the "savages".
They taught him how to live off the land beween 1903 and 1906 -- the
year he finished the traverse of the Northwest Passage.

The only "Brit" that I know of, and he was a card-carrying Scot
who wasn't too good to learn from the locals, was the great 
explorer and mapper,  Dr. John Rae.  

Persephone