Gone with the wind……

Excerpts from a Blog in the Editorial Times of India newspaper

GONE WITH THE WIND – one of the first technicolored films ever created by hollywood. The movie also depicted a lot of issues back in the civil war such as slavery, adultery, and theft. “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a whoop” was almost the most famous line in the 1939 classic. If film censors had their way, the most famous line in Gone With the Wind — the final words Rhett Butler says to Scarlett O’Hara — might have been this: “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a whoop.”

Gone With The Wind was originally a novel by Margaret Mitchell and was published on 1936.  The poem that inspired the title to Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 classic Civil War romance novel Gone With the Wind comes from a line in a poem written by the tragic poet Ernest Dowson. Mitchell’s title comes from the first line of the third stanza of Dowson’s 1894 poem, Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae.

Margaret Mitchell was an American novelist. After a broken ankle immobilized her in 1926, Mitchell started writing a novel that would become Gone With the Wind. Published in 1936, Gone With the Wind made Mitchell an instant celebrity and earned her the Pulitzer Prize.

gone with the wind. Disappeared, gone forever, as in With these unforeseen expenses, our profits are gone with the wind. This phrase became famous as the title of Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel, which alludes to the Civil War’s causing the disappearance of a Southern way of life. The main theme in Gone with the Wind is that of survival in times during which traditions, ways of life and thinking, even love and understanding are gone with the wind, such as in the South during the Civil War.

A phrase used to describe something that has disappeared, passed, or vanished, permanently or completely. The phrase was popularized by Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel of the same name. Oh, that project was gone with the wind once the CEO voiced his concerns about it.

Musing upon what might cause the end of the world, Robert Frost considered fire and ice as the most likely causes: “From what I’ve tasted of desire/ I hold with those who favour fire./ But if it had to perish twice,/  I think I know enough of hate/ To say that for destruction ice/ Is also great/ And would suffice.”

The poet missed out on a third factor which science has suggested might result in large-scale extinction, if not the end of the world: gas, or more precisely, methane gas expelled by herbivores. According to a team of Scottish scientists, plant-eating dinosaurs unwittingly engineered their own extinction by emitting vast quantities of methane gas, which led to global warming and climate change which in turn caused the huge beasts to die out for want of sufficient vegetation to feed their voracious appetites.

The methane theory of what might be called Jurassic Dark – or dinosauracide, the extinction of the dinosaurs – seeks to replace a previous theory which proposed that the species had died out following a major meteorite collision with the earth which caused a climate-changing dust cloud which spelt doom for the great creatures.

Methane, largely produced in the digestive tracts of grazing animals, is said to be 20 times more effective in trapping heat in the atmosphere  than carbon dioxide, produced by industrial plants and automotive exhausts and believed by many to be the single most significant contributor to climate change. According to the Scottish scientists, a single 90-tonne argentinosaurus would have produced many thousands of litres of methane a day. Collectively, the animals would have expelled over 500 million tonnes of the gas a year, more than all of today’s methane sources put together.

The new theory about the dying of the dinosaurs could well have far-ranging repercussions not only on the controversial subject of climate change and its causes but also on a far older source – or sauce – of disputation: that of veggies versus non-veggies. Cultural, religious and ethical reasons aside, vegetarians and non-vegetarians are  increasingly at odds with each other over the adverse effects which each others’ eating habits have on the environment.

According to the veggies, the non-veggie preference for meat requires that millions of acres of potentially grain-producing farmland are kept as pastures for cattle and other livestock bred for meat, leading to global food shortages. In other words, one man’s steak is another’s starvation.

Non-veggies, however, are quick to refute such claims regarding the fallout of their dietary habits. They point out that sheep-rearing countries  are seriously considering imposing a ‘gas tax’ on wool-producing sheep farms which are believed to contribute majorly to methane pollution.

The solution, according to the non-vegetarian lobby, is to encourage the consumption of mutton, which would reduce the number of sheep and the gas they produce. Meat-eaters of the world, unite – you have nothing to lose but your methane, say non-veggies, making an environment-friendly virtue of what veggies perceive to be their vice. Whichever way you look at it, thanks to the dinosaurs, we have been given more food for thought on the subject of climate change.