As individuals, try to talk to other people about it, tell them that flying around on foreign holidays and consuming like they are doing is just absolute fucking madness. Nobody wants to hear that, though. They want to book a holiday, buy a bigger house, eat whatever they want, buy more pointless clothes and then use a fucking tote bag at the checkout and think it’s sorted.
It’s fucked and we fucked it. In my lifetime the world has been ruined. I can’t even think about it too much any more. It’s like thinking about death. There’s no happy thought I can counter the terrible inevitability of it with that’s not just a delusion.
I guess destruction of the planet through greed was inevitable since we’re all programmed from the beginning for survival, and greed is an exaggeration of that. All that’s happened is we’ve developed the tools to do the damage a lot more in the last couple hundred of years so it’s accelerated.
Just need Elon and Jeff etc to hurry the fuck up with interplanetary colonies so we get to do Star Wars for real.
China is a massive problem. They are the world’s biggest pollutants and clearly don’t give a fuck. No one is going to stand up to them and say shit. As individuals, pressuring your MP to try and actually get it talked about in parliament is probably more useful than any token environmentalism
I was only last week talking to someone about Lorne. I was truly saddened to hear that he’s gone. Not only did he build Stockwell, but he’s also the man responsible for Skate Escape in Portland, Dorset, (long gone now), which was more than likely the UK’s first skatepark. Add to that Kennington, Meanwhile 2 and two other similar London based ‘modular radical bank’ parks, namely Vauxhall and Edgeware Road. From
my fuzzy memory he may also have had something to do with the original Meanwhile Gardens as well.
After moving to Dorset in the mid 80’s I found myself at a school with only a couple of skaters, so we kind of stood out. I was approached by a kid who didn’t skate who proudly announced that his Dad built the first skatepark in the country and he was mates with Stacy Peralta and that Stacy had sent some packages of the first Bones wheels ever over to his Dad. I, of course, took this to be total bollocks, and simply wondered how someone who didn’t skate knew about any of that stuff. I think I called him out over it. I do know that it was never never spoken about again. Fast forward a year or two, a friend and I were hitting a bump to wall ride spot on the seafront one night when ‘some old dude’ wandered up and said that he used to skate and he’d like to have a chat about skating and what state the scene was in…would we like to go for a pint? (Seems pretty dubious now I write that down, lol) We were 14/15 years old and this dude seemed like a dinosaur to us at the time, but no ‘adults’ really ever showed an interest in skating, unless they were telling us to fuck off. He seemed cool, so off we went. An evening of filling him in on what was currently going on with skateboarding ensued. He seemed enthusiastic and into it and said he used to go to some parks in London and he’d been planning to revisit some and if we fancied it he’d be pleased to take us along with him next weekend. We agreed. I told my Dad that I was off to London the following weekend with a complete stranger I’d met one night on the seafront who was at least 30 years old. Dad said he had to meet the guy. He did, and Lorne being the easy going schmoozer that he was, got us the OK.
It was on the journey up that we began to find out a few things about his involvement with skating. He knew Stacy, had indeed built a few parks and had been inspired after a trip to the States in the mid 70’s. These things just slipped out organically, he never name dropped or boasted about the things that he’d done.
He took us to Kennington, where he insisted we hit proper lines and didn’t mini ramp tram line back and forth. He was insistent that he had once had a key stored somewhere that could level the slabs but couldn’t remember where, but said he’d get right on it… I guess tracking that down never worked out. We did the full tour of ‘his’ parks that day. He even got us into Edgeware that had become part of a playgroup/ youth centre and was only accessible through a building. The old sweet talking worked again. The day finished up at Latimer Road at the scary as fuck metal very ramp. Thanks to Lorne that’s the only vert ramp to this day that I have ever dropped in on.
After that trip, Lorne got involved with our small scene and we funded and he built a rad 6ft high, 20ft wide mini on some derelict land in town.
Over the years, more of Lorne’s skate related exploits were revealed to me, mostly through chance conversations with other ‘lifers’. It was just last year when flicking through a copy of Same Old magazine, that I discovered that there was more than likely a package of Bones wheels sent over. There was a copy of a letter from Stacy to James Davies, Lorne and Steve(?). In it he reveals that he’s left G&S, hooked up with George Powell and that they have decks and wheels coming out soon. He mentions Alan Gelfand and how he’s doing 2 foot no handed aerials in pools. Stacy goes on to list the ‘newest’ tricks. He says that he was meant to have sent some wheels to Lorne a while ago but he wanted to wait and send him some new Bones…Anyway I digress. I guess, over 35 years later, I owe his son an apology for calling bullshit that day in the classroom.
As skaters do, I moved away and travelled around, but every now and then I’d bump in to Lorne we would always stop and chat and never without big smiles on our faces. He’d always ask, ‘still skating?’ and I’m glad to say that I have never had to say no.
I’ve been lurking on here and the Sidewalk forum for years and have never actually posted anything. I couldn’t let this slide. I’m not on any social media as a rule. This made finding out about Lorne’s passing a bit of a shock. I tried to find out some details and was only able to come up with a Rob Ashby post on the Friends of Stockwell FB page. I just felt like saying something about a man who was responsible for a improving a lot of our lives as uk skateboarders even though most skaters more than likely haven’t heard of him. I saw that In his post Rob referred to him as a Grandfather of UK skateboarding. I think that’s well deserved. The guy was a great human being and I for one will miss him. RIP Lorne.
TLDR: Lorne Edwards died from Covid-19 in April this year. He built some skateparks and was a top bloke. Oh, and I have a tendency to ramble…
Depends on how you look at it. There are a lot of people in China. But if you look at CO2 per capita then there’s a huge list of countries to have a go at before you get to China:
India and Pakistan are the world’s most polluted countries but a cursory Google seems to indicate that in 2018 China emitted twice as much CO2 as the next most polluting country (the US)
And so the country should be doing more to limit their populations impact on the environment no? A lot of the worst countries per capita are developing. Developed countries should be on top of this shit
I still don’t really understand why I should be writing letters to my MP about China in particular when the citizens in dozens of other countries, our own included, are worse offenders.
