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Planning for Forty Years Jimmy Carter was President 42 Years Ago [1]

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Date: 2022-07-21

From Bill Bryson’s “The Road to Little Dribbling”

Just outside Gloucester Road tube station in London is an open area that used to have a large planter in the middle of it. The planter contained some hardy shrubs and was enclosed by a low wall on which people could sitto eat a sandwich or wait for friends. I wasn’t sensational but i twas pleasant.

Then one day the council took the planter away, turning the open area into a kind of arid plaza. Soon afterward when I passed through, a couple of council officials in bright yellow vests were standing in the newly created emptiness making notes on clipboards. I asked them whey they had taken away the planter, and they told me that the borough didn’t have the resources to manage planters anymore. And I though: Is that really what we have come to now, in this cheap, shittily dispiriting age in which we permanently reside – that we can’t even afford a few shrubs in a planter?

Now hold that thought just for a minute while we speed north to the fine old city of Durham and stand outside the majestic heap of stone that is Durham Cathedral. I once spent an enjoyable morning being shown around by the cathedral's, Christopher Downs. I was a little surprised,frankly, to discover that a cathedral requires a full-time architect,but it does. It is in the nature of old building to want to fall down, and they need constant attention to prevent that happening. Stone, for one thing, isn’t nearly as eternal as you might think. Even hard stone tends to split and crumble after a couple of hundred years of facing into wind and rain. When that happens, Christopher told me, masons carefully chip out the old stone and slide a new one in. Why, I asked, didn’t they just pull out the existing stone and rotate it to a new face.

He looked at me,surprised at my architectural naivety. “Because the stones are only about six to nine inches thick,” he explained. It turns out that the walls of Durham Cathedral are not solid stone, as I had always vaguely supposed, but consist rather of an outer skin six to nine inches thick and an inner skin of similar thickness and in between a cavity five and half feet across, which the builders filled with rubble and hardcore held together with a kind of gloopy cement-like mortar.

So Durham Cathedral,like all great building of antiquity, is essentially a giant pile of rubble held in place by two thin layers of dressed stone. But – and here is the truly remarkable thing – because the gloppy mortar was contained between two impermeable out layers, the air couldn’t get to it, so it took a very long time – forty years to be precise –to dry out. As it dried, the whole structure gently settled, which meant that the cathedral masons had to build doorjambs, lintels and the like at slightly acute angles so that they would ease over time into the correct alignments. And that’s exactly what happened. After forty years of slow-motion sagging, the building settled into a position of impeccable horizontality, which it has maintained ever since. To me, that is just amazing – the idea that people would have the foresight and dedication to ensure perfection that they themselves might never see.

Now I am no expert on the matter, but I am pretty sure that we are a lot richer today than we were in the eleventh century, and yet back then they could find the resources to build something as splendid and eternal as Durham Cathedral and we can’t afford to keep six shrubs in a planter. And there is something seriously wrong with that, if you ask me.

President Carter began planning for today when he was in office 42 years ago. Too Bad, So Sad — instead of being prepared or, perhaps, avoiding the environmental collapse, we get an anemic Climate Emergency Declaration — so underwhelming.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/7/21/2111716/-Durham-Cathedral-Planning-for-Forty-Years-Jimmy-Carter-was-President-42-Years-Ago

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