This heatwave in western Europe this week has been very bad. Spain, France and Italy suffered the worst with upwards towards 40′ and here in Britain because of the curve of Earth towards the North Pole the Light of the Sun is a little less intense. We were in the 30-37′ temperature bracket, and it is not good. Because of the strange geography of Britain, London and the southern lands are horribly hot and worryingly dry. Above 54’N the breezes blow a little more freely and there is more green. The vast concrete expanses of Manchester and the ‘northern’ industrial mid part of Britain, now a mass of modern student housing, bigger transport, the destruction obvious in the HS2 building site on approach to Birmingham, and the miles of new housing developments merge the once small villages with towns and cities, all into one huge concrete swathe. Up here the modern horrors of Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and Bradford are left behind and the mountains and moorlands, rivers and dales can breathe what air is left without a few feet of concrete on top. Traffic queues of summer tourist cars are still on the roads, and the increasing housing developments have not yet covered every blade of grass or chopped down every tree, though this is the government’s ambition. Concrete creates heat, does not absorb rain, and leads to all sorts of other temperature and climate impacts, in the making of it, the transport, the energy required, just like the humans in their cars, the paved gardens, the heated homes, the luxurious student accommodation, the airports, and the planes which fly overhead.
This week has been very horrible all over the ‘UK’ and Eire and public talk has been of ice creams, air con and lack of it, and what the “government should do”. As the heat moves east to traumatize eastern Europe it is worth asking how humans survived difficult temperature conditions before the ‘UK’ in the last few decades expected every mod con in a dwelling.
‘The Earth’ is this celestial body on which the humans live, spinning in space in a non-negotiable system of the centre of our being and existence, Sol, An Ghrian, Helios, the Sun. The names are ultimately irrelevant, we are dependent on these facts whether we like it or not. Earth is also earth, the soil of organic matter, minerals, some leaf mound, all biological matter returned to what it really is, oxygen, water and a million zillion bacteria to keep things going. Within earth, clay forms where the hydrous aluminium phylosillicates have been left as other soil constituents wash away, like along old water courses, and even where water is still flowing, the clay along the banks is used by potters in Britain, as over millennia all over this spinning planet Earth.
In India the indigenous peoples use local clay to make matkas, the terracotta pots, unglazed and porous from being unglazed. Terracotta in Latin, terra cocta, in Italian terra cotta, is merely earth cooked. It is still earth, terracotta looks earthy in its redness from 5-8% iron content. Kaolin clay, as found in Devon and Cornwall is white, because it has no iron, but feldspar. For millennia Indians, the indigenous humans in India, have cool water without a refrigerator but from a matka instead. The evaporating water through the porous clay pot takes with it the heat, leaving cooler and cooler water, and filtering it at the same time. Terracotta pots large and small are part of Indian households to cool water, and hot chai tea is drunk which paradoxically cools the body, such are the realities of biology. https://www.arabnews.pk/node/2525701/world
The Chinese traditionally keep cool by the sort of combination expected of Chinese peoples, the inward and the outward. Bamboo or reed sleeping mats allowing just that little movement of air around the body rather than the memory foam of the west, cooling foods of cucumber and mung beans and a little umbrella or a hand fan. Lying out in the sun to tan is not an eastern practice, and the medical expertise in tea means as with so many cultures around Earth, certain teas are used in bodily cooling . The People’s Daily online this week made a quick historical snapshot. https://en.people.cn/n3/2023/0710/c90000-20041955.html
This blog is not an advert for anyone or anything, but the following is an article on societies who built for the temperature https://louisaneill.substack.com/p/the-pre-ac-age-how-did-buildings and the ‘ac’ in there is of course air con, or air conditioning to give it its full name, which means cooling the air not heating it. With air con available in many countries now, and the aim to get survival by air con, it did raise an enquiry for this blog in just how many buildings of the past were constructed with such basic requirements in mind of either warm or cool. Old medical infirmaries and cottage hospitals in Britain before the catastrophic NHS swallowing up of health and medical matters were built of sandstone, or granite in a granite area, and built facing the east to get morning light, the fresh air, the rising of Sol, (not east like churches in ad orientem – orientating towards the Christ to come again which will likely be a long wait) but east because the human body is a biological body and sunlight and air and heat and cool are vital parts of life. The old infirmaries are often sited up a little to get the best breezes, but not on the top to get the gales, and have a fresh springwater supply. Primary schools also, they were designed for open windows in summer and thick stone walls to keep the heat in during winter, such were the practicalities of construction in Britain until the modern way took over.
All hot countries wear loose long clothing to let air circulate and the Light of the Sun off direct skin. At the other end of the heat spectrum, we in the Norse ancestry know about keeping warm, obviously with not a vegan in sight https://thevikingdragon.com/blogs/news/surviving-and-thriving-how-the-vikings-conquered-the-cold?srsltid=AfmBOopxhk4GSkn9OeLL-flIudCugeWLjnhD05kPmvPhU2e2YdIXu0Ac
In Namibia where, as in all hot countries, the indigenous peoples have a high melanin content in their skin so do not burn like a Brit, and as in all hot countries where the usual behaviour is justu to avoid the heat of the day and lie low and quiet, the cheerfulness about the heat can turn to recipes and pleasure of fruits, and this blog writer has been in Namibia and did know the searing 40′ degree heat of the sand dunes and the pleasure of a fruit under a shelter – https://www.namibian.com.na/the-fresh-fight-against-summer-heat
Something very interesting indeed however appeared to this blog’s eye in thinking about native cooling, and it is in Tahiti that the true renewables do appear. That a hospital has demonstrated the use of seawater for air conditioning, and that Tahiti is in French Polynesia, therefore Paris is the overall governmental power with Tahiti highly devolved, is probably why such news has not appeared in English language newspapers or to the ‘UK’ government because although London and Paris are very very near geographically, not a lot of communication on real matters goes on. The ‘UK’ talks big on renewables and ending fossil fuels, though has not utilised the technology available for flexible tidal power, nor apparently known anything about using seawater as air cooling, air con in modern parlance. With the geography of the ‘UK’ and the part of the ‘UK’ on Eire surrounded by so much seawater there could not be any more, why can we not revert to ancient technologies here as well? https://www.france24.com/en/tv-shows/focus/20230202-hospital-on-french-island-of-tahiti-uses-seawater-for-air-conditioning This worrying week of heat is forecast as becoming the norm, and yet, and yet, here we have no sense of looking to what is there already, or advice on the loose clothing and food/tea use.
Neither do we in the ‘UK’ have any public health information on salt, that essential part of bodies. Anyone connected with animals health knows how the larger animals need a salt supply in hot weather, and they lick it https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/animal-lick-saltpptx/251452759 Likewise, humans living in hot countries know also that humans need salt, and adjust their diets for that. British humans going to work overseas in the tropics, diplomatic, church or education, they are advised on salt tablets and maintaining health in the unnatural climate (for them). Now the climate is collapsing everywhere, and the humidity last week here in Britain was so bad that many people were ill, the government has no public health advice for people on such realities, and if it was doing its job, the Dept. of Health would give funding to each local Council to ensure a public salt lick be put out for humans to lick several times a day to balance the internal composition after humidity has sweated out the vital body salts.