Grains of Sand

Afghanistan again

2009-07-19T22:33:00.003+01:00

Nearly eight years on, Paul Rogers's judgment remains clear.

Backwards and downwards!

2009-07-17T06:43:00.016+01:00

Manifestos with bold aims sometimes echo down the years in irony, satire and farce. [1] Disorganising on the streets of Paris in the 1960s, the Situationists took the slogan "Workers of the world, Unite!" from Marx and Engel's 1848 mother of all manifestos and turned it into "Workers of the World, Disperse!". Two decades later huge crowds in Moscow marched under the banner, "Workers of the World, We apologize!" [2]

Today sees a launch event for the Dark Mountain project, a "literary movement for a time of global disruption." In its manifesto, project curators Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine weigh in against "the civilising project, which has become the progenitor of ecocide" [3] and in favour of "a non-human perspective...which sees us as one strand of a web rather than as the first palanquin in a glorious procession."

Having spent the last year or two trying to better understand and write about the momentous extinctions and creations of the Anthropocene (and having been around gloom for a while longer [4]), I sympathize with much of what is said in the manifesto. [5] I will follow the project with interest but with these provisos in mind:

A) There is already a lot of dark work out there in both in literary and popular culture, stretching back to at least Han Shen. [6]

B) There are limits on the ability for most humans most of the time to break out of the "bubble" of distorted perceptions. The bubble just changes shape. It may even be that the most we can know is that, in certain respects, we are always in a bubble of illusion. [7]

C) When Gandhi was asked what he thought of Western civilisation he replied "it would be an excellent idea". In that spirit, I think the need is for different civilisation, not uncivilisation. We need to engage in politics and a struggle for justice for the majority who for decades to come are likely to live and die in cities (and megaslums like those of Lima, Manila and Lagos). It is they who may play the largest role in determining what happens to the world. Only a lucky few can "head for the foothills". As we enter a valley that may be darker even than the 1930s, not everyone who talks about democracy will be, in Robinson Jeffers's phrase, a dupe. [8]

Footnotes

[1] In Hendrik Hertzberg's account, Sarah Palin's declaration/manifesto of independence may seem like farce, but -- with, say, the support of News International -- it could yet lead to tragedy.

[2] Long before the Situationists, writes Andrei Codrescu in The Posthuman Dada Guide, the first Dada soiree in July 1915 included a sendup of The Communist Manifesto which concluded "Workers of the World, Go Dada!". But the (anti) artists soon found themselves outdone by reality. Codrescu notes:

In the winter of 1915, an estimated 120,000 French soldiers were killed in a single brief offensive (against the Hindenberg line, 150 miles from Paris ) and a serious mutiny ensued. One of the most striking events of that dark time was the procession of a group of infantrymen through a town, baaing like sheep, to protest that they were being led like lambs to the slaughter.

A case of "Workers of the World, Go Baa Baa!", perhaps.

[3] The curators write that "the bubble" -- the illusion of progress -- is built on

foundations... of coal, oil and gas -- millions upon millions of years of ancient sunlight, dragged from the planet and burned with abandon...on top of all the unseen layers on a well tended surface are you and I: unaware or uninterested, in what goes on beneath us; demanding that the authorities keep us in the manner to which we have become accustomed; occasionally feeling twinges of guilt that lead us to buy organic chickens or locally produced lettuces.

There is an allusion here, conscious or not, to George Orwell (The Road to Wigan Pier):

...Under the capitalist system, in order that England may live in comparative comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation--an evil state of affairs, but you acquiesce in it every time you step into a taxi or eat a plate of strawberries and cream.

[4] See for example, Whatever happened to Gaia?, written some time before Lovelock's most pessimistic pronouncements and before the risk of catastrophic climate change was as widely entertained as it is today.

[5] See Dark Patrons

[6] Some consider Cormac McCarthy's The Road a defining text (see Michael Chabon's commentary), but the literature goes much wider and, arguably, mainstream horror movies like 28 Days Later inhabit some of the same territory. For gluttons, see my essay on climate change, imagination and culture (parts 1, 2 and 3 ) and a short note on the new new nature writing. One ancient Chinese poems goes like this:

Everyone who glimpses Cold Mountain
starts complaining about insane winds,
about a look human eyes can't endure
and a shape nothing but tattered robes.

They can't fathom these words of mine.
Theirs I won't even mention. I just tell
all those busy people bustling around:
Come face Cold Mountain for a change.

[7] See, e.g., Making up the Mind: How the Brain Creates our Mental World by Chris Frith. See also the Diamond Sutra:

Thus should one view all of the fleeting world - a drop of dew, a bubble in a stream, a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, a star at dawn, a phantom, and a dream.

[8] See Eno on The feeling that everything is going to get worse, Ehrlichs on The return of the population bomb.

Image: Maunsell Forts in the Thames Estuary

Karakoram to Kashmir

2009-07-14T07:15:00.007+01:00

A few years ago on a hike high in the Karakoram my companion and I bumped into some blokes with fearsome thick beards and wild eyes. It turned out that most of them worked for Siemens in Karachi, and were on holiday. They were a lovely chaps: educated, sophisticated and funny.

Even though I am now the father of a small child and hardly have a brain any more, I remain vaguely aware that all kinds of stuff is happening in this part of the world (including, on the sidelines, normal eccentricities such as a polo match at Shandur Pass), not to mention 'at home'.

Nevertheless it's sobering to be reminded via Joe Romm's blog of what is likely to be an important part of the big picture:

According to an article by Stephen Faris in Foreign Policy and the IPCC, the Himalayan glacier in the Kashmir province that provides 90 percent of Pakistan’s water for agricultural irrigation will disappear by 2035 as a consequence of climate change.

Is this really what the IPCC estimate says? They may:

a) be wrong on rate of melt: it could take longer;
b) underestimate the likely rate of temperature rise;
c) ...?

System failure

2009-07-13T17:34:00.012+01:00

In her attack on Sarah Palin, Peggy Noonan writes :

Here are a few examples of what we may face in the next 10 years: a profound and prolonged American crash, with the admission of bankruptcy and the spread of deep social unrest; one or more American cities getting hit with weapons of mass destruction from an unknown source; faint glimmers of actual secessionist movements as Americans for various reasons and in various areas decide the burdens and assumptions of the federal government are no longer attractive or legitimate.

Noonan may or may not be right with some of these predictions. [1] What is sure, though, is that serious leadership is needed, [2] and in many areas Obama is yet to prove more than words. Kevin Baker writes in the July edition of Harper's (my copy finally arrived: it comes to the U.K by slow boat):

Much like Herbert Hoover, Barack Obama is a man attempting to realize a stirring new vision of his society without cutting himself free from the dogmas of the past -- without accepting the inevitable conflict.

...Obama will have to directly attack the fortified bastion of the newest "new class" - the makers of the paper economy in which he came of age - if he is to accomplish anything. These interests did not spend fifty year shipping the greatest industrial economy in the history of the world overseas only to be challenged by a newly empowered, green-economy working class. They did not spend much of the past two decades gobbling up previously public sectors such as health care, education, and transportation only to have to compete with a reinvigorated public sector. They mean, even now, to use the bailout to make the government their helpless junior partner, and if they can they will devour every federal dollar available to recoup their own losses, and thereby preclude the use of any monies for the rest of Barack Obama's splendid vision.[3]

Baker may or may not be right. With more likelihood, the Obama administration is already failing to meet the challenges of climate change, and -- without a radical push -- will be incapable of doing so. [4]

P.S. 14 July: I suppose the hope is that Obama may prove more Lincoln than Hoover: finding himself obliged to adopt a more radical goal (in Lincoln's case abolition) than the one (preservation of the Union) he first had in mind.

Footnotes:

1. See, for example, the U.S. government assessment of the threat of a nuclear bomb to a major western city (news report, workshop report).

2. Hard to see this coming from the Republicans. Truly bizarre, to me, is Noonan's characterization of 'the media' as the enemy. Isn't she a featured writer in the Wall Street Journal, owned by News International, which also owns Fox News etc? Also, I have a niggle with American usage of the word 'elite', a collective noun, to mean an individual. This is like using 'base' to mean an individual voter or activist.

3. See For Goldman, a swift return to lofty profits.

4. See, for example, James Hansen, 13 July 2009: Strategies and Sundance Kid.

Ex Africa aliquid bonum

2009-07-09T17:11:00.003+01:00

Elizabeth Ohene comments on the visit of Bama Obarack, or is it Marack Omaba?

Political, not personal

2009-07-09T16:46:00.003+01:00

Forget short showers, says Derek Jensen

Would any sane person think dumpster diving would have stopped Hitler, or that composting would have ended slavery or brought about the eight-hour workday, or that chopping wood and carrying water would have gotten people out of Tsarist prisons, or that dancing naked around a fire would have helped put in place the Voting Rights Act of 1957 or the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Then why now, with all the world at stake,do so many people retreat into these entirely personal “solutions”?

Part of the problem is that we’ve been victims of a campaign of systematic misdirection. Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organized political resistance...

Six impossible things before breakfast

2009-07-08T20:56:00.002+01:00

Fred Pearce has argued that the proposed G8 pledge is/was scientifically illiterate. This looks more so:

As President Obama arrived for three days of meetings, negotiators for the world’s 17 leading polluters dropped a proposal to cut global greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent by midcentury, and emissions from the most advanced economies by 80 percent. But both the G-8 and the developing countries agreed to set a goal of stopping world temperatures from rising by more than 2 degrees Celsius from preindustrial levels.

-- G-8 Nations Fail to Agree on Plan to Fight Climate Change

The sun watt won it

2009-07-06T09:06:00.006+01:00

A solar-powered printing press invented by Augustin Mouchot printing 500 copies per hour of Le Chaleur Solaire for the festival of L'Union Francaises de la Jeuenesse at Jardin des Tuileries in Paris, 6 August 1882. Image featured in web pages for The Manchester Report

The forest of lost children

2009-07-04T06:27:00.002+01:00

The endangerment of children—that persistent [and greatly exaggerated] theme of our lives, arts, and literature over the past twenty years—resonates so strongly because, as parents, as members of preceding generations, we look at the poisoned legacy of modern industrial society and its ills, at the world of strife and radioactivity, climatological disaster, overpopulation, and commodification, and feel guilty. As the national feeling of guilt over the extermination of the Indians led to the creation of a kind of cult of the Indian, so our children have become cult objects to us, too precious to be risked. At the same time they have become fetishes, the objects of an unhealthy and diseased fixation. And once something is fetishized, capitalism steps in and finds a way to sell it.

-- from The Wilderness of Childhood by Michael Chabon

Memory and history

2009-07-03T18:41:00.003+01:00

If any European country seems out of place in today's Europe, stranded in another historical moment, it is Belarus under the dictatorship of Aleksandr Lukashenko. Yet while Lukashenko prefers to ignore the Soviet killing fields in his country, wishing to build a highway over the death pits at Kuropaty, in some respects Lukashenko remembers European history better than his critics. By starving Soviet prisoners of war, shooting and gassing Jews, and shooting civilians in anti-partisan actions, German forces made Belarus the deadliest place in the world between 1941 and 1944. Half of the population of Soviet Belarus was either killed or forcibly displaced during World War II: nothing of the kind can be said of any other European country.

Belarusian memories of this experience, cultivated by the current dictatorial regime, help to explain suspicions of initiatives coming from the West. Yet West Europeans would generally be surprised to learn that Belarus was both the epicenter of European mass killing and the base of operations of anti-Nazi partisans who actually contributed to the victory of the Allies. It is striking that such a country can be entirely displaced from European remembrance. The absence of Belarus from discussions of the past is the clearest sign of the difference between memory and history...

...If there is a general political lesson of the history of mass killing, it is the need to be wary of what might be called privileged development: attempts by states to realize a form of economic expansion that designates victims, that motivates prosperity by mortality. The possibility cannot be excluded that the murder of one group can benefit another, or at least can be seen to do so. That is a version of politics that Europe has in fact witnessed and may witness again. The only sufficient answer is an ethical commitment to the individual, such that the individual counts in life rather than in death, and schemes of this sort become unthinkable.

The Europe of today is remarkable precisely in its unity of prosperity with social justice and human rights. Probably more than any other part of the world, it is immune, at least for the time being, to such heartlessly instrumental pursuits of economic growth. Yet memory has made some odd departures from history, at a time when history is needed more than ever. The recent European past may resemble the near future of the rest of the world. This is one more reason for getting the reckonings right.

-- from Holocaust: The Ignored Reality by Timothy Snyder

England's glory

2009-07-03T18:37:00.004+01:00

Jonathan Stevenson quotes Lord Denning on the right of jurors to follow their own judgment:

This principle was established as long ago as 1670 in a celebrated case of the Quakers, William Penn and William Mead. All that they had done was to preach in London on a Sunday afternoon. They were charged with causing an unlawful and tumultuous assembly there. The judge directed the jury to find the Quakers guilty, but they refused. The Jury said Penn was guilty of preaching, but not of unlawful assembly. The Judge refused to accept this verdict. He threatened them with all sorts of pains and punishments. He kept them 'all night without meat, drink, fire, or other accommodation: they had not so much as a chamber pot, though desired'. They still refused to find the Quakers guilty of an unlawful assembly. He kept them another night and still they refused. He then commanded each to answer to his name and give his verdict separately. Each gave his verdict 'Not Guilty'. For this the judge fined them 40 marks apiece and cast them into prison until it was paid. One of them Edward Bushell, thereupon brought his (case) before the Court of the King's Bench. It was there held that no judge had any right to imprison a juryman for finding against his direction on a point of law; for the judge could never direct what the law was without knowing the facts, and of the facts the jury were the sole judge. The jury were thereupon set free.

P.S. But Stevenson and his co-defendents were found guilty.

Afghanistan

2009-07-03T09:34:00.005+01:00

When we are not presented with a dystopian vision, we are encouraged to be implausibly optimistic. ‘There can be only one winner: democracy and a strong Afghan state,’ Gordon Brown predicted in his most recent speech on the subject. Obama and Brown rely on a hypnotising policy language which can – and perhaps will – be applied as easily to Somalia or Yemen as Afghanistan. It misleads us in several respects simultaneously: minimising differences between cultures, exaggerating our fears, aggrandising our ambitions, inflating a sense of moral obligations and power, and confusing our goals. All these attitudes are aspects of a single worldview and create an almost irresistible illusion.

-- from The Irresistible Illusion by Rory Stewart.

P.S 13 July: a Review of In the Graveyard of Empires by Seth Jones

CCS and the boffins

2009-06-30T16:25:00.005+01:00

An apparent contrast in views on carbon capture and storage between a Royal Society working group and David Mackay.

Going on the press release, the Society give as a prominent place to CCS. MacKay thinks it is the last thing we should talk about.

P.S. See correction in the comment attached to this post.

Old art, new art

2009-06-30T09:20:00.002+01:00

Reviewing Radical Nature, Hari Kunzru thinks many artists have lowered their sights over recent decades:

If one thing unifies the second generation of Radical Nature's artists, it's a certain pragmatism. This may seem an odd thing to say of people who put wolves on trailers and build rafts for plants, but in a show where it's often hard to tell whether a piece was made in 1973 or 2003 it's one of the few areas where they seem to separate themselves from their predecessors. If the 70s generation was about global ideas and blue-sky thinking, there's now a certain modesty in the air. No one believes we're about to enter a new age. It's more about making the best of the old one. Projects are conceived in local terms and (barring floating cities) are less about saving the world than recovering some flotsam and jetsam from the collapse. This is perhaps another source of the pervasive sense of sadness I felt going round the show - the feeling that, 40 years ago, there was a sense of possibility that has since vanished.

He also mentions Amy Balkin, whose ambitions are sky high:

[the] legal battles [of this radical Californian artist] to make a piece of desert land truly "public" (This Is the Public Domain) and to create a global "climate park" in the atmosphere (Public Smog) show that the field has moved further on than one might think from wandering round the Barbican gallery.

The child in time

2009-06-29T12:06:00.009+01:00

Abbie Garrington suggests that one impact of climate change may be to shake contemporary culture beyond postmodernism, which "created narratives in which time became uncertain...[and] we were invited to think again about the nature of storytelling". In the new regime:

narratives play with time in response to the overarching question of climate change – the priority has shifted from the storytelling itself, to the tale told, the message of the story, and the likely responses of the reader. This imagined future on the smallest scale – the future anticipated thoughts and actions of the reader of or listener to the narrative – is the point where storytelling meets activism. [1]

As has been well said, anthropogenic climate change pushes us to think about time in a very different way. This includes a challenge to adequately imagine the human place in deep time; one cannot, I think, really *get it* unless one fully digests the enormity behind phrases such as "greatest change since the PETM". [2]

A striking instance comes from Martin Brasier, who wonders whether we may be on the cusp of something as big as the Cambrian explosion. As I have noted

his hunch [is] that the perturbations in the Earth system consequent upon human activities [are] so great that 'we could be on the cusp of a Cambrian-like transformation' of life on Earth (bigger than, say, the K-T) -- though whether it [will] be a 'new Cambrian explosion' or a 'return pre-Cambrian conditions' he was not, when I asked him, inclined to speculate.

Get to this kind of scale, and a bifurcation explored by Thomas Nagel comes to mind:

From far enough outside my birth seems accidental, my life pointless, and my death insignificant, but from inside my never having been born seems nearly unimaginable, my life monstrously important, and my death catastrophic. Though the two viewpoints clearly belong to one person -- these problems wouldn’t arise if they didn’t -- they function independently enough so that each can come as something of a surprise to the other, like an identity that has been temporarily forgotten.

One of the challenges for stories tellers, activists and other change makers is to bridge that gap in ways that help provide a sense of meaning (and so may form part of the foundation for effective non-violent political organising to defeat 'planet traitors' [3]). It means, as has been well said, "finishing Darwin's sentence": coming to terms with evolution over the long term a human place in co-creation of the future. [4]

Related posts on this blog include The Holy Crap Factor, Holy Crap 2, Embers and Fear and Trembling.

Footnotes

[1] Garrington's post is one of several by participants in a 20 June workshop titled Changing Climate Stories. She continues:

Stories have the advantage over scientific data in this respect. While science has the analytical tools to predict the future, beyond modelling it cannot imaginatively inhabit the future it predicts. This is where stories come in.

[2] David MacKay's book (Robert Butler notes) is dedicated "to those who will not have the benefit of two billion years' accumulated energy reserves". This seems to join the long term and short term nicely in the mind (although I wonder about the reasoning behind "two billion years." Weren't the majority of fossil fuels, including methane clathrates, laid down in a shorter period just a few hundred million years ago?).

[3] Note the criticism of this rhetoric here.

[4] For Thomas Berry, an optimist: the perspective of evolution provides the most comprehensive context for understanding the human phenomenon in relation to other life forms. This implies for Berry that we are one species among others and as self reflective beings we need to understand our particular responsibility for the continuation of the evolutionary process. We have reached a juncture where we are realizing that we will determine which life forms survive and which will become extinct. We have become co-creators as we have become conscious of our role in this extraordinary, irreversible developmental sequence of the emergence of life forms.

To read

2009-06-26T10:04:00.002+01:00

‘This is a guide for instructing posthumans in living a Dada life’ Codrescu begins. ‘It is not advisable, nor was it ever, to lead a Dada life. It is and it was always foolish and self-destructive to lead a Dada life because a Dada life will include by definition pranks, buffoonery, masking, deranged senses, intoxication, sabotage, taboo breaking, playing childish and/or dangerous games, waking up dead gods, and not taking education seriously.’ This entirely impractical self-help guide to Dada provides an A-Z encyclopedia of the movement’s buzz-words, all in the context of an imaginary chess game between Tristan Tzaa and V.I. Lenin.

-- from The Posthuman Dada Guide by Andrei Codrescu

Iran analysis

2009-06-25T20:43:00.004+01:00

Danny Postel circulates four views:

Slavoj Žižek
We are witnessing a great emancipatory event... If our cynical pragmatism will make us lose the capacity to recognize this emancipatory dimension, then we in the West are effectively entering a post-democratic era, getting ready for our own Ahmadinejads.

Hamid Dabashi
We are witness to something quite extraordinary, perhaps even a social revolution... We need to adjust our lenses and languages in order to see better... This movement is ahead of our inherited politics, floating ideologies or mismatched theories.

Robert Fisk
Symbols are not enough to win this battle: It is indeed an 'intifada' that has broken out in Iran, however hopeless its aims.

Behzad Yaghmaian
A specter is haunting Iran, the specter of a bloody civil war... The democracy movement may become collateral damage in a larger war.

Gadgets of desire

2009-06-25T08:47:00.003+01:00

At last, my search for what it takes to be a real man is over...

With technological brilliance of this order to hand, tackling global warming should a cinch.

Anime in the Anthropocene

2009-06-24T08:23:00.004+01:00

A O Scott makes a case for Princess Mononoke by Hayao Miyazaki as a response to anxieties around global warming and environmental catastrophes.

Flows, not stores

2009-06-24T07:46:00.002+01:00

Oliver Morton, sounding a little like Walt Patterson, talks sense:

The fact that a great deal of energy was stored away in fossil fuels over time has conditioned people to think of energy itself as something embodied in fuels. But energy, which cannot be created or destroyed, is far better seen in terms of flows than of stores.
An extraordinary amount of solar energy flows through the earth-system, coming in as sunlight, leaving as infrared radiation. On its way through the system it runs through many different channels, like the wind and the waves and the carbon cycle. The challenge of the carbon-climate crisis is to put to work these flows and others — the flow of heat stored for billions of years in the interior of the earth, and of energy stored away earlier still in the nuclei of radioactive elements — in ways that make civilization independent of the fossil fuels stored away in the crust.

The question of how to use the biosphere against global warming is thus better seen in terms of harvesting energy from the carbon cycle, rather than storing away carbon. And there is much that can be done here. Biomass already supplies a lot of energy — a large part of the world cooks with it, for example — but the ways in which it is used are terribly inefficient. New agronomy, new crops and new technologies can all add to the flow of energy out of the plant and into the cooker battery, hot water or whatever. In that way, bioenergy can be substituted for fossil fuel.

But, Morton continues, "in itself, expanding the carbon cycle this way cannot be the whole solution."

Meanwhile, James Hansen and others make a stand against coal.

'Values and stories'

2009-06-22T15:05:00.005+01:00

Remarks by Caspar Henderson for Panel 1, "The necessities of conservation" at The Open Ground, 20 June 2009.

Intro

I didn’t have to think for very long about the title of this panel before I realised that the questions it raises are too difficult for me. So instead here is some recent news from a parallel universe:

Dateline: Earth. Former U.S. vice president Al Gore—who for the past three decades has unsuccessfully attempted to warn humanity of the coming destruction of our planet, only to be mocked and derided by the very people he has tried to save—launched his infant son into space Monday in the faint hope that his only child would reach the safety of another world...

In the final moments before the Earth's destruction, Gore expressed hope that his son would one day grow up to carry on his mission by fighting for truth, justice, and the American way elsewhere in the universe, using his Earth-given superpowers to become a champion of the downtrodden and a reducer of carbon emissions across the galaxy.

OK, that’s enough from The Onion.[1] Speaking seriously now, the issues require much greater knowledge and understanding than I have. My fellow panelists Sam Turvey and Emily Nicholson have already outlined more than a few of the rudiments, as well as some warnings. Still, in the few minutes available I want to make a some remarks that I hope will help open space for thought and exchange in the discussion that follows. I want to say something about values and stories.

1. Values on shifting ground

I can think of at least two sets of questions relating to our title, ‘the necessities of conservation’. First, what is needed in order to conserve threatened species and ecosystems (not to speak of cultures)? In other words, how do we do it? Second, what are the reasons we need conservation? In other words, why do we do it?

I suspect that for many people here the answer to this second set of questions seems obvious, and goes something like this: even where we do not depend directly on threatened species and ecosystems for our life and well-being they have absolute value as a source of beauty, wonder and potentiality; we and the world are better off merely by the fact of their existence. [2]

I want try and explore what an answer like that really means. It’s not that I don’t endorse it. I probably do. It is, rather, that I think we need to look deeper and further ahead if an answer along those lines is going to stand up in a world that, as we’ve been hearing, is already greatly impoverished in its biodiversity and where things look likely to get worse.

In the cultures of contemporary industrial capitalism, and in other cultures, we make a distinction between on the one hand things and beings that are instrumentally useful (that is, entities that may be used or consumed), and on the other hand things and beings judged to be of absolute valuable (entities that may not be used or consumed, or at least only used or consumed in specific and limited ways). So, to take a trivial example, a cool drink on a hot day has value in use, in consumption: it is instrumental in quenching thirst (and, maybe, providing a pleasurable taste). By contrast, the well-being of my little daughter is -- for me, and in law -- an absolute good. I can ‘use’ her by asking her to fetch me a cool drink, but I will not exchange her for a cool drink, at least not today!

In our society, and in others, the line between what is instrumentally useful and absolutely valuable shifts over time. Think of the institution of slavery and laws on human rights or even animal rights. This line, or borderland, remains a matter of intense negotiation and debate. [3] But in every culture, as far as I know, there are things and beings that are considered absolutely valuable (or sacred) and which cannot be wholly consumed or exchanged for things that are of only instrumental value. [By the way, if anyone thinks this last assertion is wrong I’d be fascinated to hear the argument.]

With regard to conservation today, there comes a point -- or so many conservationists and others believe -- when instrumentality goes too far, and you have to make a stand for the absolute value of you seek to protect, no matter what the cost. Where ‘nature, like liberty, has no price tag …[and] species are priceless, as are human dignity and freedom’.

That assertion, made by the prominent conservationist Richard Leakey in 1997, is taken up by another, a bird man named Nigel Collar [4], in a paper published in 2003 titled ‘Beyond Value: biodiversity and the freedom of the mind’.

The diminishment of nature is the diminishment of man. Extinction is the negation of the possible; it creates poverty in the mind. Our capacity to experience, to imagine, to contemplate, erodes with the erosion of nature, and with it we forfeit piecemeal — landscape by landscape, site by site, species by species — the freedom of mind which yet we cherish as ultimately the greatest feature of our human identity. This is not to say that we should never seek to provide justiﬁcations for conservation based on precise, measurable beneﬁts to mankind at whatever scale. It is, however, to say that we should also and primarily have the courage and honesty to assert that the reason biodiversity matters is because it confers on us an imprecise, unmeasurable and immeasurable well-being that is located in the spirit rather than in the wallet.

Fine words, you may think. How well will they fare against the challenges of the 21st century?

Your answer will depend in part on what you think those challenges are. I will assert, rather simplistically, that they are of two kinds. First, there are the obstacles presented by people and institutions in our own society and in others who simply do not accept the claims made by Leakey, Collar and others, either because they are indifferent or because their sense of what is absolutely valuable does not extend to threatened ecosystems and species. To take just one example, there are those whose “deeply embedded view is that Christ is returning soon, so why should we care about the environment?” The good news, I think, is that while overcoming these kinds of obstacles will be far from easy and is not guaranteed, it is -- other things being equal -- achievable. [5]

But, of course, other things are seldom equal, and this is where we come to the second set of challenges, which may be deeper and more intractable. I’m thinking of the challenges presented by rapid environmental change and the consequences for ecosystems and human behaviour.

Exactly how these changes manifest now and how they will manifest in future is something on which reasonable people disagree, up to a certain point. Quite a lot is unpredictable and/or depends, at least in part, on decisions not yet made. Nevertheless, a powerful body of evidence indicates that, in addition to the ‘normal’ encroachments and impacts of economic development (which by themselves can collapse a fishery or eliminate up to 80% of wild orangutans in a decade [6]), human activity is also leading to turbulence in the biogeochemical cycle greater than at any time in hundreds of thousands or even millions of years. This is likely to lead to large scale displacement and/or extinction of plant and animal species (creating space for other ecosystems and species). We may also see large scale social disruption: mass migration [7] and conflict as societies seek new coping strategies or fail to cope.

However complex the picture is already, there are further uncertainties. We may well see new ways in which human beings become resourceful. There is the possibility of ‘game-changing’ advances in science and technology (including but not limited to step changes in information-, energy- and biotechnology). There may be surprises, for good or ill, that we have hardly imagined.

This second set of challenges and what flows from them is, I think, likely to alter the ground, both literally and figuratively speaking, on which our values lie. Our sense that there are some things that are absolute goods may not change, but our sense of what they are may well do so.

2. New stories

One of the important ways in which values are communicated and tested is through stories. I’m using the word story here in a very broad sense -- governing myths and narratives, and the many ways people string events, ideas, symbols together in fiction and other arts, marketing [8] and propaganda. The poet Muriel Rukeyser was largely not completely wrong when she said “the universe is made up of stories, not of atoms."

Here’s another quote: "If Lévi-Strauss is right, myths are constructed by a universal logic that, like language itself, is as characteristic for human beings as nest-building is for birds." [9]

So wrote Lewis Thomas, a noted American physician and essayist who died in 1993. He continued "our powerful story [today], equivalent in its way to a universal myth, is evolution. Never mind that it is true whereas myths are not; it is filled with symbolism, and this is the way it has influenced the mind of society."[10]

Thomas’s contention is nicely illustrated by the neurologist and author Oliver Sacks. In an essay titled Darwin and the Meaning of Flowers, he recalls how his mother helped to open a new way of looking at the world to him:
While most of the flowers in the garden had rich scents and colors, we also had two magnolia trees, with huge but pale and scentless flowers. The magnolia flowers, when ripe, would be crawling with tiny insects, little beetles. Magnolias, my mother explained, were among the most ancient of flowering plants and had appeared nearly a hundred million years ago, at a time when "modern" insects like bees had not yet evolved, so they had to rely on a more ancient insect, a beetle, for pollination. Bees and butterflies, flowers with colors and scents, were not preordained, waiting in the wings -- and they might never have appeared. The would develop together, in infinitesimal stages, over millions of years. The idea of a world without bees or butterflies, without scent or color, affected me with awe.

The notion of such vast eons of time, and the power of tiny, undirected changes which by their accumulation could generate new worlds -- worlds of enormous richness and variety -- was intoxicating. Evolutionary theory provided, for many of us, a sense of deep meaning and satisfaction that belief in a Divine Plan had never achieved. The world became a transparent surface, through which one could see the whole history of life...
Evolution is one of the big stories in our society and in others over the last 150 years or so. But it is not the only one. Another -- older but no less potent for that -- is what Mankind does with the powers it acquires. “Our quest, as a civilisation”, says Jaron Lanier, a pioneer of ‘virtual reality’, “is to answer the question, how do we save ourselves from ourselves without losing ourselves?”

Contrasting future scenarios are captured in the terms ‘Eremozoic’ and ‘Ecozoic’.

The Eremozoic means the ‘age of loneliness’. The term was coined by the entomologist E O Wilson , who had in mind the prospect of a biological age after the sixth great extinction when life on earth will be greatly impoverished as a result of human activities. John Gray, the political philosopher famous for his pessimism, picks up and runs with the term:

It seems feasible that over the coming century human nature will be scientifically remodeled. If so, it will be done haphazardly, as an upshot of struggles in the murky realm where big business, organised crime, and the hidden parts of government vie for control. If the human species is re-engineered it will not be as a result of humanity assuming a godlike control of its destiny. It will be another twist in man's fate.

The Ecozoic, by contrast, is ‘happy time.’ Thomas Berry, an eco-theologian and deep ecologist who died aged 94 at the beginning of this month, defined it as:

the future period when human conduct will be guided by the ideal of an integral earth community, a period when humans will be present upon the Earth in a mutually enhancing manner. [11]

Those two scenarios (cartoon-like in how I present them here) lie towards the extreme of a continuum where outcomes are more mixed and murky. And it’s somewhere in this middle of this continuum, unsure of how things will go, that we actually live and tell our stories.

I am writer, not a conservation practitioner. (My experience of actual conservation work is pretty much confined to planting trees in rain and mud!) At the moment I am working on something called The Book of Barely Imagined Beings. It’s a 21st ‘bestiary’: stories about unlikely animals and other beings that share the continuum with us. I use the word ‘stories’ advisedly. All of the animals I am writing about are real, and all of the stories are true. But why write about animals at all? Part of the answer is that (to quote the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss once again and very much out of context ) “animals are good to think with.” [12]

Here are a few examples (not necessarily covered in the book):

The African clawed frog, Xenopus laevis

An example you may be familiar with, not least thanks to a recent article about extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert published in the New Yorker. This remarkable amphibian was used for the first widespread pregnancy tests in the early 20th century after it was discovered that the urine from pregnant women induced oocyte (female germ cell) production in the frog. The frog was distributed to physicians offices all round the world. Unfortunately, it looks as if Xenopus Laevis had a hitchhiker: a fungus called Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis which causes it no harm is fatal to many other amphibian species: global amphibian crash.

‘Blood falls’, Antarctica

Not an animal but surely one of the strangest life forms on the planet [13]. Get a bit weird here: in a thousand years will humans or their descendants living in Antarctica (contra Stephen Pyne End of the World) [Try not to sound insane]

The Honey Badger

The ‘fiercest mustelid.’ Widespread dryland distribution. Interaction (debated) with Honeyguide in East Africa. Hadza people of Tanzania. The ‘man-eating badgers’ of Basra urban legend in 2007, and the British armed forces forced to deny responsibility (comedy). Serious point: the badgers may have been fleeing the newly re-flooded wetlands that Saddam had drained to eliminate a haven for his enemies.

The Japanese Macaque

Those are the characters you see in hot springs in the mountains of Japan. They are the northernmost member of the genus Macaque, which are the second most widespread primates after man. Macaques are not especially intelligent, but they do have particular kind of cunning, sometimes termed Machiavellian intelligence. The behavioural biologist Dario Maestripieri writes: By the time human beings start the global nuclear war that will destroy our civilization, there won’t be any great apes left for Earth to become the Planet of the Apes. But chances are there will still be plenty of rhesus macaques around.

Pacific Salmon

Pacific Salmon can distinguish a single drop from their own river among 8 million litres of seawater. When they arrive at their home rivers some of them swim as much as 2,000 miles upstream. They move against strong currents with little effort, much as a yacht tacks into the wind. And these are animals we now farm in cages.

The White-naped Crane

Something like 5,000 individuals remain in the wild. IUCN classes it as vulnerable to extinction. Breeds in Mongolia, China, and Russia (Khinganski Nature Reserve). One of its few remaining overwintering grounds is the DMZ in Korea, one of the world’s ‘Involuntary parks’ (other examples include the closed zone around Chernobyl). A beautiful and rare bird’s survival is at least in part down to multi-decade phony war that, even now, could spill into nuclear conflict. [more on ‘the dark side’].

A happy ending

Barack Obama’s remarkable speech in Cairo. [14] Crucial, he said, respect the dignity of all human beings. Conservation mission: extend recognition of dignity, glory (?!) (but not equivalence) to a wider-range of beings and earth system processes.

Also

Prosperity consists in our ability to flourish as human beings – within the ecological limits of a finite planet. The challenge for our society is to create the conditions under which this is possible. It is the most urgent task of our times. [15]

Footnotes

1. Al Gore Places Infant Son In Rocket To Escape Dying Planet. The Onion, July 30, 2008.

2. In an old trope, failing to protect the rain forests is like allowing a library to burn down without having any idea of what’s in the books. Perhaps this image is obsolete in the electronic age.

3. See, for example, Michael Sandel, Reith Lectures 2009

4. Leventis Fellow in Conservation Biology, Birdlife International, Cambridge University Dept of Zoology

5. See The Eco Evangelist. The Observer, 7 June 2009. Craig Sorley an American evangelical Christian and head of Care of Creation Kenya. Selected as a ‘hero of the environment' for 2008 by Time Magazine.

Sorley's primary occupation is to use the Bible to make an environmental case: God delighted in his creation (Genesis 1:31) and put man in his garden "to work it and take care of it" (Genesis 2:15); Jesus found more glory in the wonders of nature than in the constructions of man (Matthew 6:28-29); all things were created by Christ and for Christ (Colossians 1:16). Conservative Evangelicals are far more receptive to an environmental message, explains Sorley, when it's presented to them in "the language they appreciate most ... the language of the Bible."

6. Among examples in the media in just the last few days: Mekong dolphins ‘almost extinct’ (BBC 18 June 2009): Pollution in the Mekong river has pushed freshwater dolphins in Cambodia and Laos to the brink of extinction, the conservation group WWF has said. Only 64 to 76 Irrawaddy dolphins remain in the Mekong, it says

7. See, for example, Making the Case for Climate as a Migration Driver by Tom Zeller, Green Inc, 15 June 2009 (thanks to Benjamin Morris for this link);The Human Tsunami: How Climate Change Will Move Masses -- Ghana’s Environment Refugees, Financial Times, 19 June 2009. Many parts of the world start from a position of high vulnerability. See: World hunger 'hits one billion', BBC online 19 June 2009

8. Marketing is now “the most dominant force in human culture,” claims Darwinian psychologist Geoffrey Miller.

9. See On the Origin of Stories by Brian Boyd (2009)

10. from Some Biomythology published in The Lives of a Cell (1974).

11. Happy as it may be, it doesn’t come without work. As one commentator on Berry’s work puts it:

the perspective of evolution provides the most comprehensive context for understanding the human phenomenon in relation to other life forms. This implies for Berry that we are one species among others and as self reflective beings we need to understand our particular responsibility for the continuation of the evolutionary process. We have reached a juncture where we are realizing that we will determine which life forms survive and which will become extinct. We have become co-creators as we have become conscious of our role in this extraordinary, irreversible developmental sequence of the emergence of life forms.

[12] "Animals which are tabooed are chosen…because they are good to think, not because they are good to eat." Animals that are good to think. What exactly does this mean? In The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption, the anthropologists Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood explain:
If it is said that the essential function of language is its capacity for poetry, we shall assume that the essential function of consumption is its capacity to make sense… Forget that commodities are good for eating, clothing, and shelter; forget their usefulness and try instead the idea that commodities are good for thinking; treat them as a nonverbal medium for the human creative faculty.
(http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/papers/travis.html)

13. Glacier "Bleeds" Proof of Million-Year-Old Life-Forms National Geographic News, April 16, 2009

Gushing from a glacier, rust-stained Blood Falls contains evidence that microbes have survived in prehistoric seawater deep under ice for perhaps millions of years, a new study says. The colony of microscopic life-forms may have been trapped when Antarctica's then advancing Taylor Glacier reached into the ocean 1.5 to 4 million years ago. What's more, the tiny organisms' feeding habits apparently give the falls their shocking color.

14. Barack Obama concluded:

All of us share this world for but a brief moment in time. The question is whether we spend that time focused on what pushes us apart, or whether we commit ourselves to an effort -- a sustained effort -- to find common ground, to focus on the future we seek for our children, and to respect the dignity of all human beings.

15. the UK Sustainable Development Commission report Prosperity without growth

Clocking carbon

2009-06-19T10:12:00.012+01:00

The carbon counter unveiled in New York City (report) is worth a look.

Its creators claim to have originated the idea of a real-time carbon counter as a way of providing people with a simple explanation of a complex problem.

But this is a creation with more than one paternity claim attached. At openDemocracy in 2005 we created a crude working model of a version proposed by E3G (see article here; the clock itself is no longer online).

Most conspicuous in the Deutsche Bank version is a display showing the total amount, in tonnes, of carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gases represented in carbon dioxide equivalent) estimated to be in the atmosphere.

In our version we tried to show the rising level of total CO2(e).

Which works better as a communication tool? Two advantage of our version, I'd say were:

1) You could look at that number in relation to whatever is judged to be a 'safe' level of atmospheric concentrations; and

2) the figures increased at a slow but steady pace, clicking over every few seconds like the tenths of a mile of the milometer in a fast moving car (only in this case measuring thousandths and hundreds of thousandths of parts per million). This was, I think, easier for the eye to take in, and -- perhaps -- more conducive to reflection than the hell-for-leather breakneck speed of the DB clock.

But it had disadvantages too.

You could, of course, make a case for another measure on the clock altogether, such as a countdown of the remaining carbon - perhaps half a trillion tonnes - that it is (within explicitly stated grounds of uncertainty) 'safe' to burn.

Or you can take another approach altogether. It's good to be reminded, for example, of what may be one of the best pieces of communication on climate change so far.

Living democracy

2009-06-18T10:15:00.001+01:00

Let's see democracy as journey, not destination; let's stop worrying about where we end up, and start thinking about where we begin. I think that at Climate Camp we have a very strong sense that the project of revivifying democracy does not begin with a constitutional convention; it does not begin with electoral reform; it does not begin with citizen's juries, or people's peers, or independent MPs, or any of the other ideas you get coming out of the political and media elite. It begins with ordinary people, like you and me, taking action on something we believe in, and transforming society by first transforming ourselves. Because democracy is not something which is given, it is not something which is created from above - it is something which is won.

- Liam Taylor of the Camp for Climate Action at a session on "Radical democracy and imagination" hosted by Real Change at the Compass conference last Saturday, and online at Our Kingdom

From Iran

2009-06-17T08:16:00.001+01:00

Live tweeting the revolution - AS.

P.S. The NYT Opinionator has a range of views on the tweets.

Mistaken

2009-06-17T07:50:00.000+01:00

The need for control can inspire great achievements, such as dams that prevent flooding, medicines to ease our lives, and perfectly confected chocolate soufflés. But it can also lead to sub-optimal behavior...Studies show that people feel more confident they’ll win at dice if they toss the dice themselves than if others toss them, and that they are likely to bet more money if they make their wager before the dice are tossed than afterward (where the outcome has been concealed)... In each of these situations, the subjects knew that the enterprises in which they were engaged were unpredictable and beyond their control. When questioned, for example, none of the lottery players said they believed that being allowed to choose their card influenced their probability of winning. Yet on a deep, subconscious level they must have felt it did, because they behaved as if it did.

-- from Leonard Mlodinow on the limits of control

RB notes Joshua Greene's observation on why we care most about what is closest to hand.