Floral connections

Going into Tesco's tonight to placate the noisily starving felines I noticed these flowers licking at the glass and steel like white flames.

The large flower section that greets one's eyes these days at the doors of most Supermarkets always stir mixed emotions in me. I like flowers as much as the next person but this biomass comes with connections and consequences that taint both colour and scent. For a start of course there is the age old ambiguity of cut flowers; beautiful but dying like some consumptive bohemian beauty in a French melodrama.
Another aspect, and the one that predominantly occurs to me as I walk through these flowers, is the fact that like all living things on our planet they are almost entirely made up of water. The water in question for most of these plants comes from Lake Naivasha in Kenya around which cluster the huge flower farms that feed the global demand for floral ornamentation - now one of the most important industries in sub-Saharan Africa. The factories pump huge quantities out of the lake for irrigation and dump toxins back in, drying up and poisoning the lake. They also, of course, have moved in a large underpaid workforce and shanty towns of people hoping to make a living supplying the needs of the workers....all these people need water to live , they also try to supplement their meagre incomes by poaching fish to feed themselves, further depleting fish stocks devastated by the pumping operations....the result is a disaster for the environment, the wildlife, the farmers and a source of conflict between often heavy handed attempts at conservation, big business, and people trying to scratch a living. One of the casualties of that conflict has been Joan Root - a wildlife film maker whose work enhanced my childhood and helped influence me into becoming a zoologist - killed by AK 47 wielding thugs from one faction or another,

So the waters of Lake Naivasha now sit in the entrance of Tesco and the forecourts of garages, a sad little bit of Africa amongst today's sandwiches and magazines.