Category Archives: Politics

Books Environmental politics History

Notes from The Wolf: Culture, Nature, Heritage

October 4, 2023 – 5:42 pm

France p. 23 “The survey indicates there are two plausible modes of wild wolf attacks on humans (a) those that are rabies related and (b) more difficult to explain predatory attacks by apparently ‘healthy’ wolves… rabid wolves attacked exclusively as a lone wold in an ‘indiscriminate’ fashion, exhibiting furious behavior as an extreme manifestation of hydrophohic canine rabies. Although rarely directly fatal to adults, violent and lunging rabid wolf attacks often resulted in serious multiple mauling injuries, often to the limbs, neck and face… evenly distributed among a broad age group and gender of human victims.”

Determined predatory attacks by one or more non-diseased wolves were identified on the basis of a swift attack and disappearance, possibly later attacking elsewhere … predominately against women and children, often resulting in serious injury and death.”

p. 26 Mariceau’s 6599 recorded wolf attacks in France span five centuries, from as early as 1421 until the last documented attack by a supposed healthy wolf in 1918. A total of 3,360 human deaths are attributable to rabid wolf attacks and 3239 can be linked to non-rabid predatory wolves, around 13 victims a year, a comparatively low figure when compared with other historic causes of human mortality such as disease, poverty and conflict … wolf-dog hybrids and perhaps feral dogs similar in appearance to wolves were involved… still possible to see big feral dogs who look like wolves (and are perhaps highly interbred with wolves) around settlements in southern and eastern Europe and the Caucasus.

p. 42 Wolves seem to have become extinct in England in the 14th century… it seems likely that the specioes became extinct in Wales around the same time…the wolf survived longest in Scotland… Sutherland, where there are records from ostensibly reliable local naturalists from the first half of the 17th century. They did not survive much longer…. Thomas Pennant (1726098)… suggested that the last wolf in Scotland was killed in 1680.”

p. 50 “Wolves occasionally and accidentally strating the streets of Rome were merely driven out of the city and largely left unharmed. Similar merciful treatment and approaches to the wolf are known from Greece. It seems that throughout Indo-European territories, from India to Ireland and from Scandinavia to Italy to Greece, the wold had attained a certain degree of untouchability that barred active persecution… The most plausible reason for this is that, during pre-Christian times, the wold was of social, perhaos even religious significance, and served as a role model of highly patriarchally organised Indo-European societies.. the koryos, the adolescents… youths aged from about 8-12 to 18-19, who for a number of years (this varies considerably in space and time) lived part or all of the year outside the protection of the teuta, having only each other to help survive the wilderness. The youngsters had no or very few possessions, perhaps only light weaponry, and had to keep alive by taking what the land had to offer, even if that had to be obtained by robbery or theft from their own kin. To do this, they had to cooperate and rely on each other above all else. For this, the koryos members might have taken example from wolves and even identified with them… In terms of social behaviour, wolves are closest to humans of all wild animals…. a sort of totem for the koryos, on both an individual and a collective level, which could explain the frequent wolf-based names of early medieval elites.”

p. 106 In March 2021, The Telegraph reported that the UK government … had been instructued by then Prime Minister Boris Johnson to create a rewilding ‘task force’ to gauge appetite for returning lynx and wolf to England. Although DEFRA soon published a refutation of this claim, the response of the chief executive of the Tenant Farmers Association, George Dunn, was decisiveL “reckless in the extreme… midguided idea about returning Britain to a sort of medieval wasteland.”

p. 109 Although the conception of the early medieval period as a wolf-infested ‘Dark Age’ is not based in historical fact, contemporary cultural products that engage with this notion are indeed rooted in the past, with the perception that life during this era as a ‘waking nightmare’ enforced and ‘reinforced by selective recreations of the Middle Ages … through the lens of gothic romance’ of the 18th to 20th centuries. The wolf is ‘an instantly recognisable companion to the crumbling castles, ruined churches and dark woods of neo-medieval goth horror’ … of the animal as a creature of ‘originary wilderness’ whose presence evokes ‘a sense of the primal’ and creates an ‘atmosphere of the long-distant and the far away.”

p. 112 “the majority of the population of early medieval England lived in far closer proximity to and intimacy with the natural world than most people do today, as is evidenced by the numerous zoocentric Old English riddles recoreded in the 10th-century Exeter Book manuscript whose author(s) contemplated non-human modes of being and ways of experiencing the world by adopting the perspective of the animal… bestial speakers … often challenge their exploitation by hjumans (for exmaple, in one riddle an animals laments its death and the transformation of its skin into the pages of a book) … known today as Wild and Eadwacer, this poem is written from the point of view of an unnamed female speaker about her lover, Wuld… an amibiguous being who can be taken as both a human and an animal… he is a sympathetic character persecuted by a group of weras (men) who in fact act more ‘wolfishly’ than he.”

p. 113 “The landscape of modern-day Britain is far more justificably described as a ‘wasteland’ than that of our medieval predecessors. These people lived alongside more than 130 species which subsequently disappeared after the turn of the 16th century”

p. 124 archaezoologists and molecular geneticists suggest that the domestication of the wolf probably occurred somewhere between 40,000 and 15,000 years ago, somewhere on the Eurasian continent, perhaps in more than one location. Two predominant origin stories seek to explain how the domestication of the wold took place. The commensual scavenger hypothesis suggests that wolves essential domesticated themse,llves by invading human settlements in seach of animal remains and other waste food discarded by hunter-gatherers. Over time, tolerance of these animals by humans gave a selective advantage to bolder, less fearful wolves… the alternative account … pet keeping or corss-species adoption… provides a different narrative. This draws heavily onf anthropoological observations of pet keeping among recent hunter-gatherers, and postulates that Palaeolitic people could have been similarly inclined to capture, adopt and rear infant mammals… provided the basis for the evolution of a cooperative social system involving both species.”

p. 152 “the wolf was chased and killed by the Japanese because it, and in particular the northern variant, the Hokkaido wolf, was allegedly a threat to newly imported developments in pasture utilisation from America (horse breeding). The Japanese wolf was one of the first victims of the orientation towards the West and the modernisation of Japan.”

p. 161 “The dingo is a naturalised Australian species. The oldest archaeological dingo remains have been carbon-dated between 3000 and 3509000 years ago … genetically disctint from both dogs and wolves for at least 8,000-11,000 years… several genomic studies have identified t he New Guinea singing dog as the dingo’s closest relative, and both dingoes and NGSDs are distinct from the free-ranging dogs found in Asia.

p. 163 “dingos strongly suppress herbivores weighing 7-100kg and introduced mesopredators in some locations … and can have beneficial effects on populations of small mammals and ground-nesting birds due to release from predation by mesopredators and vegetation suppression by herbivores… whilst hybridisation between dingos and dogs does occur, it is rare and most wild dingos carry more than 75% dingo ancestry”.

p. 179 A wild male wolf lived for eight years alone on a small cluster of islands off the south end of Vancouver Island and came to be known as Takaya … one of a unique population of wolves called coastal or sea wolves that live in the coastal habitats of British Columbia and the Alexander Archipelago of Alaska… at one time the sea wolf population extended from Alaska to California.”

p. 230 The Thylacine or Tasmanian wolf (Thylacinus cynocephalus) was the sole surviving member of the Thylacinidae lineage and the largest marsupial carnivor to have existed into modern tims… 19th century … considered slow, stupid, morose and cowardly, all of which could not be further from the truth.. notable feature … was its enormous gape, at 80 degrees the largest of any mammal… undoubtedly an advantage in securing fast moving prey, such as wallabies, but it was also used as a cautionary warning if threatened. The Thylacine’s tail also set it aside from the canids, as it was not abruptly separated from the body, but gradually tapered, like that of a kangaroo.”

p, 261 Greater Voyageurs Ecosystem, Minnesota Wold predation on beavers in the GVE fluctuates in predictable ways during the ice-free season (approximately April to October). As ice cover disappears in April, beavers begin foraging on land to replenish body fat lost during winter. Wolves respond to this and kill vulnerable beavers who venture on land. Predation peaks in May when young dispersing beavers, travelling in shallow waterways and across land, are readily killed when discovered by wolves. During May, beavers constitute approximately 53% of wolf pack diets in the GVE, although this varies considerably among packs, with beaver constituting up to 88% of some packs’ diets in May. Wolf predation on beavers decreases dramatically in June and July as wolves switch to hunting vulnerable deer fawns that are born at the end of May … increases again in late summer and autumn, when beavers forage more frequently on land too stockpile food for the upcoming winter … on average 24% of Sept-Oct wolf diest… substantial pack-level difference in predation … 53% of one packs, only 6% of another pack’s diet. Interestingly beaver density was c. 50% higher in the territory of the latter pack. By late autumn, lakes, ponds and rivers are frozen over and beavers remain largely locked below the ice.”

p. 264 “Wolves choose ambush locations to counter and capitalise on the sensory abilities of beavers. Beavers, like wolves, have well-developed olfactory acilities, which is their primary mode of detecting predators. On the other hand, beavers have extremely poor eyesight and visual acuity, and are therefore incapable of detecting motionless predators when on land… wolves almost always take into account wind direction when chosing ambush locations … often wolves wait in areas with little to no visual cover, suggesting wolves understand beavers cannot visually detect motionless predators. Beavers, can, however, visually detect pursuing predators. Thus wolves generally choose ambush locations very close (<5m) to where they expect beavers to be on land”

p. 291 There are countless examples in the world of people and communities managing to coexist with wild animals, in many cases animals that are much more dangerous and much more difficult to coexist with than our world… the village of Charotar, in central Gujarat in India, where people have learned to live alongside one of nature’s most danerous predators, the crocodile. Villagers have built islands for crocodiles where they can lie in the sun. Perhaps because they know that people help them from time to time, and because they do not expect anything to be done to them, crocodiles tolerate human encroachment, and even accept it when fishermen pick up and drag the animals. The day before setting their nets, fishermen moor their boats in the lake as a warning to the predatorws. They then usually retreat to neighbouring wetlands, or densely vegetated parts of the lake, giving the fishermen space.”

p. 292 “famous example of from the Australian whaling village of Eden, where for centuries local whalers in Twofold Bay cooperated with the resident orcas when hunting baleen whales”

p. 374 Lakes district, the Helsfell Wolf, lived between 1139 and 1197.. in a timeline when wolves coexisted with humans in our landscape … the density of place name distribution reveals the ‘shadowy presence’ of wolves across the North West

p. 377 The history of Britain is of an ever-downward spiral of destruction of wild nature from the elimination of predators inconvenient to land users. This led to the judgement by the Addison Committee, the first Parliamentary Committee on National Parks, in 1931, that there was no need of the types of National Park seen in North America that gave free, unfettered space to wild nature because Britain was a “country where the fauna is practically limited to birds, insects and the smaller mammals”… in whcat would be a well-rehearsed objection since then to reinstatement of large carbivors, the Committee went on to say: “Great Britain is small, densely populated and highly developed and has relatively little land which is not already put to some economic or productive use.” In effect, the report repudiated the notion that the depauperate state of Britain’s wild nature could be reversed.”

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Books History Politics

Notes from Derek Thompson On Work

October 4, 2023 – 10:35 am

p. x The decline of organized religion and social integration in the 20th century left many Americans bereft of any sense of spiritual progress in their lives. For some, work rose to fill the void. Many people today ask their jobs to provide community, transcendence, meaning, self-actualization, existential therapy … these workers – particularly highly educated workers in the white-collar economy – feel that their jobs cannot be “just jobs” and that their careers cannot be “just careers”. Their jobs must be their callings.

p. 45 “There is new enthusiasm for universal policies – like universal basic income, parental leave, subsidized childcare and a child allowance which would make long working hours less necessary for all Americans. These changes alone might not be enough to reduce Americans’ devotion to work for work’s sake, since it’s the rich who are most devoted. But they would spare the vast majority of the public from the pathological workaholism that grips today’s elites, and perhaps create a bottom-up movement to displace work as the center of the secular American identity.

On a deeper level, Americans have forgotten an old-fashioned goal of working. It’s about buying free time. The vast majority of workers are happier when they spend more hours with family, friends and partners, according to research conducted by Ashley Williams… In one study, she concluded that the happiest young workers were those who said around the time of their college graduation that they preferred careers that have them time away from the office to focus on their relationships and their hobbies. How quaint that sounds. But it’s the same perspective that inspired economist John Maynard Keynes to predict in 1930 that Americans would eventually have five-day weekends, rather than five-day weeks. It is the belief… that work is not life’s product, but its currency. What we choose to buy with it is the ultimate project of living.”

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Books Politics

Notes from Britain alone: How a decade of conflict remade the nation

October 4, 2023 – 10:26 am

p. 10 Put simply then, nationalisation means making the state more national… The concept developed in this book has two inspirations. The first is in the historical and sociological scholarship on nationalism, which situates it as a general feature of modernity. The second is Britain’s unique history of capitalist development through empire, and its post-imperial experience of ‘nationalisation’.”

p. 15 Nationalisation… to reuse Gellner’s working is the process in which the boundaries of the state are made more congruent with the boundaries of the nation. This process cannot be reduced to either cultural or economic forces. The redistribution of resources (which might typiucally be though of as economic) cannot work or make sense without the formal and informal boundaries of the nation (which might typically be thought of as cultural).

p. 18 It might seem off to describe the NHS as a founding myth to a nation that has existed for centuries. It might be more accurate and specific to instead characterise the NHS as a founding myth of post-imperial Britishness. The shift from empire-state-nation to nation-state produced Britishness as a kind of national identifiy we recognise today. It is a national identity made through the Second World War – the so-callled People’s War, where plucky Britain stood strong as Europe fell, with Britishness coming to stand for anti-fascist, tolerant and ordinary – and thereby conveniently placing colonialism and empire to one side and out of the picture. Post-war nationalism was not just for the British people then, it also helped cement the British peoples, shorn of empire. This is part of the meaning and significance of the National Health Service for a declining imperial power: it was as much a post-imperial project as it was a post-war project.

p. 23 Austerity was also nationalising in the way that it stoked social conflict over the distribution of resources. In short, existing conflict over who gets what, when and how – including struggle over the boundaries of the nation – intensidied. If the state governs on the basis that there’s not as much to go around and that failing to get spending under control is a matter of national survival, then there are going to be effects… Those with resources – ranging from the tangible, such as wealth, to the intangible, such as whiteness – worry that they will lose out, either by falling down a rung in social status or by losing out to others. People wonder where the money went, and which people – or what types of people, more accurately – took the money.”

p. 24 “For this post-crash situation, two or possibly three viable nationalisation projects emerged… The first… is obvious enough: Brexit…. Eurosceptic elites developed a nationalising narrative that mobilised a unique coalition of voters through concerns over inequalities, including with immigration. By claiming to speak up for the ‘left behind’, those elites could tell a compelling nationalist story about how leaving the EU would take control back from the so-called metropolitan elite. By detraying the left through their pro-immigration and out-of-touch metropolitan values, thise metropolitan elite also betrayed whiteness and its links to the British, and especially English, nation.”… The second… Scottish independence. The third, .. Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party … able to mobilise through the sense that stagnating growth, low wages and years of austerity meant that some parts of societty were losing out and staying poor as a feature of the system … the most high-profile policies .. invoked post-war and post-imperial nationalisation, especially in public ownership of key industries such as railways and increased profressive taxes.”

p. 185 new opportunities for nationalist, or class, political mobilisation. Based on the conflict of the last decade, mobilisation against inequality is more likely to take the form of fiscal populism through wealth taxes – in which the nation reclaims its rightful wealth from a small, immoral elite that have cheated their way to riches – rather than through rejigging capital-labour relations to redistribute resources through the social relations of employment… This kind of revenue could help fund a Green New Deal in the style of President Biden’s American Rescue Plan and American Great Jobs plan. The potential for nationalisation here is evident.”

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Books Environmental politics Feminism History Politics Women's history

Notes from Left Feminisms: Conversations on the Personal and Political

August 25, 2023 – 11:52 am

Nancy Fraser p. 38 “the ecological dimension has to be front and centre. It is not reducible to, but it is deeply intertwined, with the dynamics of the economic, financialisation and social reproduction crises. It was when I took this objective of a crisis critique that I found I could not any longer keep the ecological dimension in the margins”

p. 48 Akwugo Emejulu “If you see something that needs to change, you have to do it yourself. The idea that someone else either understands the issue better than you or has beeter ideas than you seems anti-egalitarian. This does not mean you are making someone else take responsibility for their own liberation… Rather , it’s to say: “If you want change to happen then you actually have to grab a broom and gather with others to make that happen.”

p. 53 In the UK you are one of 24 Black female professors out of 19,000 professors nationwide, 14,000 of whom are male.

p. 68 Sheila Rowbotham “After abolition the memory of the extraordinarily far-sighted and creative things that had been done just got completely pushed aside. The GLC’s radical scope was much wider than previous left councils in the past. Ken Livingstone had been influenced by Harvey Milk in San Francisco and was aware of the liberation and feminist politics in a way that was unusual among Labour Party politicians. I worked in Industry and Employment, the area for which Mike Ward was respobsible. Mike had been inspired by the visionary measures adopted by the Communist council in Bologna, but he also knew in detail about the history of local government in Brighton. Robin Murray, the chief economic adviser, had experience as a development economist and in community politics in Brighton where he lived. My immediate boss was Hilary Wainwright, then in her early 30s. … She contrived to link the creation of forms of democratic planning with economic policies that served human needs, transplanting the Lucas Aerospace Workers’ Alternative Plan into Local government.

JL So what did you do at the GLC?

“I initiated policies on childcare, deomstic labour and contract cleaning for the London Industrial Strategy. … creating jobs by funding women’s workplace co-ops and nurseries. We also funded a launderette run by older women under the Westway. About 20% of people in London at that time didn’t have their own washing machine. Many were pensioners. There had been municipal washing places that were being closed. The women who used one had campaigned for a replacement, a community laundrette. Westway was funded by Industry and Employment and the nursery by the Women’s Committee, headed by Val Wise. So the women who used the launderette had contact with the little children, and they also used to do the washing of all the nappies for the nursery.”

Veronica Gago Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires p. 85 “I think in Latin America the vocabulary of environmentalism has more to do with anti-extractive struggles than with ‘environmentalism’. The vocabulary is changing fast with younger generations. Whilst comrades in other areas talk about ecofeminism, I think that here, in Latin America, the struggles, the vocabulary, the imagery, have to do more with strategies of anti-extractivism and indigenous movements… extractivism for us is the main issue in rethinking the exploitation of land, the exploitations of corporations and the distribution of common resources… the agro-business model is now exploding in terms of environmental problems, both with the basic issues of food and water, and with the dispossession of indigenous people through the expropriation of plants. There is also a very long discussion about the colonial frame of developmentalism in ‘the Third World’, and the dilemmas ralted to the international division of labour for our countries.”

p. 92 Wendy Brown, Emeritus Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berleley. “One of the things I paid too little attention to in Undoing the Demos (2015) was the disintregration of the social… In erican case that disintregration has had two important effects. First, this process literally takes apart social bonds and social welfare – not simply by promoting a libertarian notion of freedom and dismantling the welfare state, but also by reducing legitimate political claims only to those advanced by and for families and individuals, not social groups generated by social powers. Second, something I didn’t emphasise adequately in 2015 … is the extent to which neoliberalism could generate a political formation that combined libertarianism with a very strong statism that works to secure, essentially, the deregulated public sphere that neoliberalism itself generated.”

p. 97 “We live in such nihilist times. By which I mean, drawing from Nietzsche, not that there are no values circulating, but that our values are commercialised, trivilaised, fungible; they’re traded, trafficked in, used for branding and profit.”

p. 107 Lynne Segal – “The mantra promoting notions of the autonomous, individualised self is indeed so strong today, although it has little connection to what it is to be human. This is especially pernicious when we enter the world of care, one where public support is crucial for so many. For instance, spaces for mothers with young children are being demolished before our eyes. According to the Sutton Trust, there was a 50 per cent cut in early years day care provision between 2010 and 2017, and at the very same time there was almost the exact same rise in referrals for children in crisis, creating an explosion in demand for child protection services; it is all so short sighted.”

p. 114 Lynne Segal “Biology and culture, biology and environment are never in any way separable. Donna Haraway has so much to say about how complicated this relationship is, seeing biology as an “endless resource” of “multiple possibilities”. Similarly, the neuroscientists Steven Rose points out how even the environment of chromosomes is unstable, making patterns of genetic transmission entirely unpredictable. Genetic outcomes not only depend upon endless external physical, social and cultural factors, but also on unstable internal cellular features. So, when we are trying to explain something as complex as how we become women, or men – if indeed we do identify with these gender positions we’re seen as born into – the complexity is quite phenomenal! The idea that we could separate out the intricacies of the biological from the convolutions of culture is foolish. And yet we have evolutionary speculators, such as Richard Dworkin, providing “biological” reasons why women wear high heels and tight dresses. However laughable, the media present these biological musings as gold standard science. Thus, popularisers of scientific folk tales come to be seen as leading scientists.”

Hilary Wainwright p. 130 After 2019 general election”one of the reasons why we lost, say, in the North East, and, to some degree, Wakefield, some of the north-western towns, and certainly in Stoke, is because in fact people’s political alienation, their experience of having no control over the decisions shaping their daily lives, was not actually a result of their experience of Europe, but rather their daily life experience, especially of Labour Councils that took their voters completely for granted, treating them more or less with contempt. Even on the interviews on the election night, you heard working-class people who voted Tory explain their decision by saying “Labour’s done nothing for us round here” as much as they talked about Brexit.”

p. 185 Angela McRobbie, Professor Emeritus at Goldsmiths University of London “Most of the time I’ve been working in Germany in the last three years has been dedicated to an AHRC three-city study of fashion micro-enterprises in London, Berlin and Milan…. The argument has emerged that it is the existence of a social wage which permits small creative enterprises to function where there is support and subsidy for rent of studio space and equipment, and a huge number of courses for upskilling and further training. Germany is the land of free at-the-point-of-delivery vocational training. The social democratic heritage, even as it is being transformed, remains pretty intact. And since Fashion is a female-led field, these provision benefit the context of women’s employment.

Gargi Bhattacharyya Professor fo Sociology at the University of East London

p. 197 “from Thatcher onwards – and escalating when we come to 2008, and the formal new institutionalisation fo the new austerity – part of how any public consensus around welfare or any social support operates is by increasingly making all of us guilty until proven innocent. Nearly all state functions become modelled as punitive, so instead of via the cuddly daddy who will tell you off, who will give you all a sweetie if you’ll just come and line up. Instead, we’ve got the state patriarch sating “Well I’m not sure any of you are my kids anyway. Can you prove it?” And so then we’re all endlessly having to prove how we are deserving of t he smallest indulgence, even the indulgence of being allowed to live our lives. That really shifts expectations. … it’s always “How can I avoid punishment?” even if the punishment is only taking away some of the small supports … everyone gets trained to look over their shoulder and to not ask for help because sometimes the threat of punishment is greater than the small social good that might be gained… The machinery enacting our rights is becoming increasingly punitive.”

Sylvie Walby p. 214 JL You describe feminism as a project, rather than an identity. Why?

“The concept of a ‘project’ contains the implications of change, of movement, of fluidity, of possibility. The concept of ‘identity’ is very fixed. I’m not comfortable with the concept of identity because of its tendency to essentialise, albeit on the level of culture rather than biology; hence I find it a relatively unproductive term … the concept of ‘project’ is better than ‘movement’ because it contains notions of practices, as well as ideas.”

p. 218 “There is a possibility of a cascade of changes, something which appears to be quite small can have very large effects … The concept of a cascade is really important. It’s an analysis of society as being made up of multiple systems. .. of two main kinds: regimes of inequality and institutional domains. The notion of the crisis ‘cascading’ is that it cascades through these interconnected systems. It’s not that the whole society will move at once, but that steo by step, one system could change another. But there’s no inevitability; and any specific system could absorb it. I used the example of the financial crisis, for example … there was no inevitability that there should be austerity. You might say the same with Covid there’s no inevitability that the closing down of the economy had to mean austerity. The government can simply print money” And if we compare the two crises, the government in this instance has simply printed money, whereas it didn’t in the previous one.”

Sophia Siddiqui, Institute of Race Relations

p. 250 “The reproductive labour of migrant women is essential to maintaining the capitalist system, as the care work needed to sustain families is increasingly outsourced onto their shoulders. But in every conceivable way, migrant women remain cordoned off from the body politic through immigration regimes that exclude them and push them out to the edges of society. And these immigration regimes often prevent them from being with and caring for their own families, who they have to leave behind in their countries of origin, to care for the families of more affluent others. We can’t look at these issues in silos; we need to see them together, particularly in the context of the multiple crises of care and of capitalism. That was how the term ‘reproductive racism’ emerged”

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Books Environmental politics History Politics

Notes from Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future

August 22, 2023 – 9:02 pm

P. 15 While material consumption is certainly falling in post-industrial nations like the Us and UK, on the other side of the world, in the countries whence Americans and Britons import most of their goods, it is rising at breakneck speed. … in 2019… we mined, dug and blasted more materials from the earth’s surface than the sum total of everything we extracted from the dawn of humanity all the way through to 1950. .. you could have said the precisely the same thing about every year since 2012… out appetite for raw materials continues to grow, up by 2.8% in 2019, with not a single category of mineral extraction, from sand and metals to oil and coal, falling.”

p. 67 “geologists … estimated that the amount of sand, soil and rock we humans mine and quarry and dredge each year is some 24 times greater than the amount of sediment moved each year by Earth’s natural erosion processes.. Humans, in other words, are a considerably bigger geological force than nature itself, and have been, according to the data, ever since 1955… by 2020 the total weight of human-made products … was greater than the total weight of every natural living thing on the planet…. The sum total amount of material that we have dug out of the ground in the past century … 6.7 teratonnes (or to be even more precise, 6,742,000,000,000 tonnes). .. for every human-made object on this planet, every building, plane, train, car and phone, try to picture a pile of earth, sand and dirt six times its weight. And the pile of moved material is getting bigger with every year that passes.”

p. 70 “Sand is serious business. According to the UN Environment Programme, if we are to avert a ‘sand crisis’ we should be treating it not as a commonplace resource but as a strategic mineral, something to be uttered in the same breath as metals like copper or even battery materials like lithium.” (Fibre optic cables eg)

p. 75 The recipe for the cement we mostly use today was patented in 1824 by a man called Joseph Aspdin. He called it Portland cement, because its colour resembled the Portland Stone quarried in Dorset. In truth, however, there were all sorts of vying recipes around the same time, and no one is quite sure whether ASpidin, a slightly shady character, really won the race or actually purloined his blueprint from somebody else.”

p. 82 Cement production accounts for a staggering 7-8% of all carbon emissions. At the time of writing, those emissions were split roughly 60:40 between the chemical reaction occurring in chalk or limestone as it burns off its carbon in the process of becoming cement, and the energy needed to heat the kiln. The latter is relatively easy to resolve .. but the chemical reaction is a far harder nut to crack.”

p. 108 better known as the main production hub for a company whose name is emblazoned in red on the buildings, TSMC. This is Fab 18 – the most advanced factory in the world .. founded in 1987 …a business whose sole purpose is to manufacture the processors dreamed up by Apple or Tesla or ‘fabless’ chip companies like Nvidia and Qualcomm… pushing the boundaries of physics… over a 3-year period from 2021, TSMC was budgeting to invest $135 billion”

p. 116 China spends more money on importing computer chips these days than it does importing oil … import costs as of 2017 were greater than Saudi Arabia’s total revenue from oil exports, or for that matter the global trade in aircraft.”

p. 128 Steve Sherlock, 6,000 years ago in Britain, Street House “the late Stone Age … the saltern – salt factory – here was up and running, churning out salt and cheese and possibly other products too, a thousand years before Stonehenge’s standing stones were even erected. .. the people who worked here – who are thought to have come across from mainland Europe, possibly from France – had brought with them knowledge about how to turn natural resources into a product before selling or trading it onwards.”

p. 133 “As early as AD 523 when the Ostrogoths ruled what was once the Western Roman Empire, their administrator Cassiodorus wrote to the Venetians that: “All your energies are spent on your salt-fields; in them indeed lies your prosperity and your power to purchase those things which you have not. For though there may be men who have little need of gold, yet none live who desire not salt”

p. 174 Today it is estimated that around half the nitrogen in our bodies was fixed from the air via the Haber-Bosch process…. But in these earliest years, the main use these nitrates were put to was creating explosives for the German army.”

p. 203 “there is about 32 billion tonnes of steel out there in the world … you could build seven high-speed rail tracks between the earth and the sub. Or, were you to divide it between every person on the planet, you would end up with about 4 tonnes per person. Given you already know there are around 15 tonnes per person in the developed world, that underlines another important point: the stocks of iron around the world are very unequally distributed. .. the average person in China today has roughly 7 tonnes of steel. The average person living in sub-Saharan Africa has less than a tonne of steel per capita.”

p. 216 “The ore is rock rich in iron oxide, essentially granulated rust, and turning that into a metal means ripping the oxygen atoms away from the iron atoms. And that, ultimately, is what this enormous furnace is here for: to provide an environment where the oxygen can leave the iron and bond with the carbon from the coal.”

p. 217 “Iron is a fossil fuel product. Each year we empty staggering quantities of coal – more than a billion tonnes … into the thousand or so blast furnaces operating around the world. The iron that comes out the other end may not have much carbon embedded in it, but its production entails the creation of enormous quantities of CO2 – around 7-8 percent of the global total.”

p. 221 “In 1800, 95% of Britain’s energy came from coal; at the very same point, almost all of France’s energy – over 90% – still came from burning wood.”

p. 225 “Around 70% of the world’s niobium = a rare earth element that helps harden steel for use in jet engines, critical pipelines, superconducting magnets, and the skeletons of bridges and skyscrapers – comes from a single mine in Brazil. During the Second World War, the Germans and British vies for the affections of neutral Turkey, in part because it produced nearly all of the chromium the Nazis used in their weapons and machinery.”

p. 230 “low-background steel … completely uncontaminated with radionucleotides … essential for the production of sensitive equipment like Geiger counters and some medical devices… the only way … is to find a source of the metal that dates back before those first nuclear tests in 1945. Old sunken battleships are a particularly popular source. .. there is a roaring trade in metal piracy from old warships, especially in the South China Sea.”

p. 287 “The flipside of getting ever more effective at mining ever poorer copper ores is that we displace ever more amounts of the planet in our bid to do so. Between 2004 and 2016 Chilean miners increased annual cooper production by 2.6%. Yet the amount of ore they had to dig out of the ground to produce this marginal increase in refined copper rose by 75% ,,, the numbers … show up in no environmental accounts of material flow analysis, which count only the refined metal. When it comes to even the United Nations’ measure of how much humans are affecting the planet, this waste rock doesn’t count.”

p. 340 “Engine knock was one of the great early challenges faced by the motor industry. In an effort to outdo its rivals at Ford, GM began in the 1920s to look for a way to quiet the engines in its Cadillacs. One of its engineers, a man called Thomas Midgeley, discovered that a drop of tetraethyl lead in gasoline would miraculously increase octane levels and stop all the pinging. And so began one of the most shameful stories of pollution in modern history … everyone knew the risks of putting lead in petrol right from the start. .. rather than seek a way to remove lead, GM simply removed the word from the chemical’s brand name, they called it ‘Ethyl”. There were warning signs from the start, with a spate of illnesses at a refinery in New Jersey shortly after it entered the market. Men were quite literally going mad, hallucinating and then working themselves up into a frenzy. Six men died who all worked in the same place, the section of the refinery where they synthesised tetraethyl lead … some states banned the use of leaded gasoline … but then, in an extraordinary stunt, the inventor, Thomas Midgley, held a press conference where he wasted his hands in a solution of tetraethyl lead and spent a minute inhaling its fumes … unbeknownst to the journalists witnessing it, Midgley had just spent a period in Florida recuperating from lead poisoning itself. GM and its lawyers suggested the men who died must have fallen victim to their own negligence .. This was the Roaring Twenties where anything went, and state by state the bans were revoked and the age of leaded petrol began.”

p. 352 polyethylene … “by the late 1930s, ICI came up with a system for mass prodicing the plastic… When war broke out shortly afterwards, this wonder substance was rapidly co-opted for the national effort. After Japan took control of Malaysia and all its rubber plantations, suddenly polyethylene was of critical importance . Production went into overdrive … the Royal Air Force could use it to cut the weight of its radar systems just enough to fit them inside its planes … pretty much every ton of polyethylene produced up to 1945 went into those radar cables, but once the war ended ICI was left with a sudden glut of the plastic, so it went looking for buyers. This would soon become a recurrent theme. Cheap plastic toys, beads, jewellery and other such trinkets often owed their existence less to consumer appetites than to a surplus of supply”.

p. 385 “Australia … has overtaken Chile as the world’s biggest lithium producer, though nearly all of their spodumene is actually shipped off to be processed in China …. It means Australia need not take responsibility for all the emissions produced when they are refined, which is rather a lot.”

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Books Politics

Notes from Certain Trumpets by Garry Wills

August 18, 2023 – 10:54 am

p. 16 Lincoln “GK Chesterton perfectly captured the delicacy of his operation: “He loved to repeat that slavery was intolery while he tolerated it; and to prove that something ought to be done while it was impossible to do it… But, for all that, this inconsistency beat the politicians at their own game … and this abstracted logic proved most practical after all. For, when the chance did come to do something, there was no doubt about the thing to be done. The thunderbolt fell from the clear heights of heaven.”

p. 90 “Armies of the ancient regime were precious items in themselves. An able officer corp of nobles was literally irreplaceable; it could not be expended recklessly. The officers were professionals with expensive training, and they led expensive mercenaries. The aim of such an army was not only to protect valuable territory but to protect its valuable self… All this was changed by the Revoltion. The new force was the People in Arms, raised by conscription for mass resistance to encirclement by the combined regents of Europe. The aim was no longer to maneuver for position but to destroy attacking armies, at whatever cost to one’s own troops. This is the “political fanaticism” Calusewitz attributes to the French of the period. Their officers were not the scions of noble houses, but talented men from the bourgeoiuse or the intelligentsia. Carnot himself was a poet-engineer, born of a notary. Armies were thrown into war with a new recklessness, once it was clear that officers’ positions could be rapidly filled again.”

p. 96 “After Napoleon became first consul for life – and then emperor – he merged the highest military and political authority in himself, and his military talent and appetite outran their real usefulness to the French nation. … Napoleon could not, in his civil capacity, control war because war controlled him. He was imprisoned by his own skills, a slave to them.”

p. 160 The young David Hume withdrew from society while he worked out his lasting contribution to philosophical method, the Treatise of Human Nature (1739). After he published that work, Hume did want followers, but he found none – the book’s influence would be exerted only over a long time and at some distance (initially in Germany). Hume then changed his whole mode of life and did become an intellectually leader – through his enormously popular History of England and his moral and political essays. He exemplified in his own life the two tendencies of intellectual excellence: (a) towards a more severe and lonely quest for the truth and (b) towards a less exacting but more accessible truth, one more to be disseminated than discovered. The best intellectual route is done by the first route, but leadership is made possibly only by the second.”

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