Philobiblon

It might not have been for the right reasons, but almost by accident, the UK government has at least dropped a planned law that would effectively have reintroduced prison terms for soliciting.

The ending of the term “common prostitute”, another element that has been dropped from the bill, would have been a small positive, but from what I’ve read it is now seldom if ever used, so somewhat academic.

OK, serious European walkers might tell me that reaching a height of 700m is nothing, but try telling my calf muscles that. Set out on the one serious bit of exercise I plan for the trip – route 1 from the mairie in Anost, with the high point being the little hamlet of Les Miens. The guide reckons the walk is 12km, but I can’t believe it isn’t further – perhaps that’s on the map, but by the time you do the downs, and the ups, and the downs and the ups….. The estimate was four hours, and it took me 3.5.

It was a walk greatly boosted by an unexpected companion; this lovely collie had said “hello” in the village and when I started to head out he came with me. Around about this remarkably remote bus stop I thought he’d turn back before long, but he clearly knew what I was doing and had decided it was time for him to take a good walk, so that was what he did.

I was worried about sheep, and he took an interest in the one flock of those we saw, but it was no more than a serious look, and I hadn’t even thought about chickens, but he studiously ignored several free range flocks of those.

He ran ahead the whole way, continually looking back to make sure I was coming, and always responding to a whistle when he took the wrong fork in the path. And when we got to the hamlet of Mont Cemit, which seemed to specialise in seriously savage dogs, including several chained right on the main street, he took the very sensible option of scurrying through with ears and tail down, saying very clearly “just passing through, not looking for trouble”.

There was nothing particularly spectacular in the way of sites – a smattering of history, from hay cart to a tree with history.

And there were lots of wooden crosses, usually with dates on them – not sure if they are memorials, or just village expressions of piety. (Some have quite recent dates.)

What this region does seem to specialise in are lovely clear little mountain streams, like this one. Haven’t tried the water, but it certainly looks clean enough.

When we got back to Anost the collie took me to his home (the town farm), where I met his owner, who didn’t seem surprised about his activities….

Then I got back home to another friendly local – I’ve been formally adopted by this one, who’s basically moved in whenever I’m here … possibly encouraged by a loud and expressive love of milk.

Joel Kovel’s The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? Is a book that’s been recommended to me from several Green quarters recently, so being on holidays and fortified by that (having suffered several weeks of depression after reading Lovelock‘s Revenge of Gaia recently), I decided to take the plunge.

And, possibly more than I was expected, I found quite a lot with which I agreed, and learnt some new ways of looking at things that I haven’t encountered before. I entirely agreed with him about the suspicion with which Heidegger should be regarded in view of his Nazism, found his definition of the dialectical as “the bringing together of different points of view for the purposes of argument” (rather than the Hegelian binary of thesis and antithesis), and found him very interesting on the scientific aspects of entropy: “the struggle of life against entropy does not deny the Second Law because living creatures are anything but closed systems. … life is constantly taking in low-entropy energy to sustain its form.” (p. 103.)

And I liked his focus on sufficiency and realisation: “We should not seek to become larger… but more realized. Bach did not quantitatively expand music, making it louder and more insistent like forms of techno-rock music that mirror capitalist relations… Sufficiency makes more sense, building a world where nobody is hungry or cold or lacks healthcare or succour in old age.” (p. 228)

But there are two things that he really, to my mind, doesn’t get. One is gender. Which isn’t to say that he doesn’t try very, very hard on that – his heart is in the right place as he quotes Rosa Luxemburg in prison watching a buffalo being beaten and feeling its pain, and notes that this is a traditional female approach, but one available to all, and one greatly downgraded in our society.

But what he doesn’t get — and he left me feeling very philosophically radical feminist here — is the place of the family as a source of repression. He runs, without any evidence at all, the foundation of patriarchy and all subsequent repressions, in the age of the hunter gatherer (drawing all sorts of conclusion about the division of labour in societies tens of thousands of years ago on which we have no evidence at all). But after that there was apparently some golden age…

So he blames 21st century capitalism for a supposed explosion in the sex trade, and “the general rise of rape and spousal abuse as concomitants of a disintegrating social order so far gone that a recent UNICEF report indicates that nearly half the world’s women come under attack by those closest to them”.

Why is it that so many men (and some women) don’t get that there’s noting new about any of this? It was ever thus (if you read between the lines of women’s memoirs and fiction through the ages) – it is only now that at least (and you have to give the current conditions some credit here) that these things are being recognised as crimes, being given pejorative labels that women can apply to them.

He also greatly romanticises China and India as somehow living more in harmony with nature than the Christian West – certainly not the case in regard to China, which regarded nature as savage and something to be tamed, rather more if anything than did the West through most of the current millennium.

And then there’s the socialism. I’m not a socialist, in part because I think it makes no sense at all to adopt such a tainted word. True, as he might say, pretty well everywhere to which that label has been applied has been nothing of the sort, but tainted it still is.

But more fundamentally, if you hand over the means of production to the workers, what happens to those who fall, in one way or another outside that definition? You have to make the definition very, very broad indeed to cover everyone, and somehow I doubt that would happen. Producing children is undoubtedly work, but you can’t “own” them. And even among the workers, some will do well, some badly…would you prefer to “own” a garbage truck or a spa? I can’t see any way that you don’t slide into corruption and disadvantage.

But I do like his return to the term usufructuary – potentially a much more useful concept than ownership. “A usufructuary relationship is where one uses, enjoys and through that improves — another’s property, as for instance, community groups would use, enjoy and improve an abandoned city lot by turning it into a garden.” (p.268)

(Or, I add, the way allotments in England are let for a peppercorn rent on the condition that they are productively used.) A much better idea than ownership – access and productive enjoyment that simply ends when the individual moves on to other things or other places.

And he pretty thoroughly fudges, in a couple of pages, how we get from where we are now, with capitalism destroying the world’s ecosystem, to where he wants to be. He points to Gaviotas, the Zapatistas, the adoption by the ANC of the world’s most advanced constitution, and pretty well leaves it at that. Not that I have any answers here – except that really I’m with the discussion at the Green Party conference – all we can do now is work very hard to rein in and control capitalism, since we don’t know how to get to anything better and less damaging.

I reached the ancient Gallic hill fort of Bibract by what might be called the scenic route, over the top of the plateau from Chateau Chinon – there was a sign on the road saying something about snow tyres. Ha, I scoffed, it is not nearly that cold. I was right, but only just – as the following picture shows. There’s a cross country skying club hut at the top and if the road wasn’t icy it wasn’t far off it – just goes to show that you really shouldn’t let clueless Australians wander around the wilder parts of Europe.

Anyway, made it eventually and found the museum, not much to my surprise, isn’t open until mid-March, but the site is open access, so off I set to wander within the 5.3kms of ramparts, enclosing 135 hecatres – in which I managed to get fairly spectacularly lost , not having a map since the museum and shop were closed – still I did learn a possibly useful piece of info – even the steep hills here covered with millennium of leaf mulch are remarkably stable – very handy for scrambling.

I also got a sense of the different forest landscapes – the coniferous bits – mostly, I’d guess planted – certainly most of them are – are pretty sterile in the understorey, as are perhaps more surprisingly the native? Broadleaves, which I think are beech (please someone tell me if I’m wrong, I’m not very good on European trees). There is sometimes a loose understorye of holly – together this makes a beautiful coloured picture, with the moss on the trunks.

First “sight” is the grand, heavily reconstructed entrance gate. Caesar (who is thought to have spent several nights here – although they’ve resisted the “slept here” sign temptation – said: “This work…with alternate balks and stones which keep their proper courses in straight lines … is eminently suitable for the practical defence of cities.”

Around the rest of the site these are simply two steep earth banks, several metres high now, and several metres wide – you certainly souldn’t fancy storming them even now.
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Greetings from the little bourg of Anost – pronounced An-O – in the Morvan National Park in Burgundy, where this is a temporary home in the forest (well one of eight little homes in the forest, but if you shoot at the right angle it looks like solitude, and at this time of year virtually is, except for the people a couple of places down with a large golden retriever, which is not getting on terribly well with ma nouvelle copain … who has adopted me for the duration, I suspect. (Might have something to do with my usefulness as a milk supplier. And guess I’ll have to learn the French for “cat food”.)

Anost is pretty well the last village at the head of the valley, advertising itself as a walking and cycling resort, although also curiously a logging centre. (Well they do mostly seem to be logging the non-native conifers, and it is all arranged in small fields, so you don’t get huge bare patches.)

The tradition that the region celebrates is the ox-drivers – rebuilt in the central square is the traditional structure in which the oxes were shod (not had their “paws” done, as the English translation says, although I suppose you have to give them marks for trying.)
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I am going to, in all too few hours, be jumping on a Eurostar, changing in Paris for Dijon, and on my way to what I hope will be a lovely little hut in the middle of a Burgundy forest. Internet access is likely to be intermittent at best… which will probably be a good thing for my body and my head.

Apologies for the late notice, but in my own defence I was off at the Green Party conference getting through four motions, including two on gender issues, but I can now tell you … play trumpet and fanfare … that the Carnival of Feminists No 53 is now up on Uncool.

And a fine collection from the feminist blogosphere it is too, with an unusual but effective method of organisation. I was particularly taken by the “true love [doesn't] wait” post, but do go over there and find your own favourite! (And enjoy the starting graphic.)

(After you’ve done that, if you’re having a very quiet day, you might like to check out the Britblog Roundup, featuring one of those web storms in a tea-cup that show lack of perspective is hardly only a MSM trait.)

For the length of the Green Party conference, ie until Sunday lunchtime, you’ll find me over on Green Despatches, the joint conference blog.

First up I’ve posted the material that I presented today on severely disadvantaged children – particularly those in detention, in care, and those seeking asylum in the UK.

If the whole thing looks a bit dense on facts and figures do skim to the end – there’s a wonderful example of how the government, corporately, really doesn’t get the fact that asylum-seeking children are first and foremost, children.

… in a certain W1 dead-end mews on Sunday night.

It really isn’t a good idea to be exchanging several small foil-wrapped packages for a roll of 20s in full view.

‘Cause if you do, the Green Party leafletter who comes around the blind corner and nearly falls over the two of you will have to engage in an elaborate display of semaphoring body language to indicate – YES, I AM VERY CONCERNED WITH DOORS AND I’M REALLY NOT SEEING ANYTHING ELSE GOING ON AROUND ME.

I don’t play charades often enough to need the practice…

… but it seems per capita paper consumption is going down in the developed world.

We might not have quite achieved the paperless office, but it is getting closer…

And there is good news about increasing drinking of tap water in restaurants hidden in this story, but I’m not exactly astonished, but slightly bemused, that apparently one in five people are “too scared or nervous” to ask for it.

Lesson one: you are the customer. Ask for what you want!

I was doing a favour and flicking around the feminist blogosphere and found there seems to be surprisingly little on the Archbishop of Canterbury and his suggestion that the UK introduce aspects of sharia law. I suspect that may be because the whole thing is so obviously horrifying that it is hard to say anything about it.

No, I’m not falling for the “he means stoning and the chopping off of hands” of the tabloids; Rowan Williams is talking about family law, but just how you could consider introducing a law that allows men to divorce just with a few words, but makes it exceedingly hard for women, that simply shows women far less respect?

One of the lines being run by the “I’m being terribly reasonable” commentators is that a similar system with the Jewish community, known as Beth Din, works fine – except of course it doesn’t, forcing Jewish women who wish to remain within their faith community into horrendous situation, making many of them what are known as “chained women”, and forcing the secular law into complicate wriggles in an attempt to extract them.

Religious laws are misogynous. They were designed to keep women repressed under patriarchy. They do not belong in the 21st century.

Simple, and obvious, but I fear that it must be said – and said loudly and often.

From Colin Tudge, whose address I unfortunately largely missed at yesterday’s Green Economics Conference (love to know what happened to the 8.56 from Paddington to Oxford…), a couple of nice thoughts/facts:

There are more people in jail in America than working on the land.
The reality is ecology, the market is mere fantasy. (As a suggested response who say “we can’t do this because of the market.”)

I also learnt about a fascinating scheme in Alaska, the Alaska Permanent Fund, which takes about an eighth of the state’s oil revenues and invests them for the benefit of all, with residents being paid a dividend each year that makes a small basic income for all.

And that basic income is an idea taking off in parts of the developing world, including South Africa, Namibia and Mozambique.

There was a lot more excellent stuff, including an interesting outline of the state of trafficking law – about enter big changes now that the Council of Europe Convention on Action Against the Trafficking has come into force (which it did on Feb1, with sufficient countries ratifying it), and the UK government has promised to ratify it by the end of the year.

I was also introduced to the Women’s Budget Group, which to quote from its website: “brings together feminist economists, researchers, policy experts and activists to work towards our vision of a gender equal society in which women’s financial independence gives them greater autonomy at work, home, and in civil society”. Definitely needs doing!