About

About me

Bill Blackwater – I’m a political researcher and writer; a social democrat and an environmentalist.  I can be contacted at billblackwater[at]yahoo.co.uk.

About this blog

This is a blog with a few themes and purposes:

1. It will contain expositions of a philoshophical system I began to develop some years ago (as in here).

2. It will feature thoughts and references to other writing on the theme of environmentalist politics, philosophy, and economics.  In particular, it will seek to develop some environmentalist thinking inspired by, and in response to, the ideas of Herman Daly and Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen.

3. It will function as something of an ‘open notebook’, containing unformed sketches of ideas, as well as notes I take from books and other sources as I read them.  Some of this might help me to develop some of these ideas, and might also be useful to others.  In any case, it will help me to feel as though some of these ideas have a life of their own, even if I never get the time to realise them properly.

And the thing about Wotan…

Wotan is the Norse and Germanic god, of course.

He’s a fallible god, even though he is the chief of the gods.  The telling of the tale varies, but in the version I was brought up with he commissions the giants to construct a wall around the gods’ home, Asgard.  Wotan knows this needs to be built, in order to help defend the gods from attack by their enemies.  Except he defrauds the giants, because the gods do not have the money to have such impressive defences built.  And when the time comes for payment, the gods are cursed, and become doomed ultimately to perish in a battle with the giants when the world will end.

And I’ve always liked this and thought it terribly profound.  Because what it illustrates is that we are all compromised.  We all have to act against our own values, we all have to exploit other people and things, in order to survive; and it does all have its consequences.