Monthly Archives: July 2009

Environmental politics

A small example of how our economy went terribly wrong

July 19, 2009 – 9:34 am

A small piece of conversational journalism from 1980 has left me with a jolt of recognition of just how far off the rails we gone in the past quarter-century or so.

Harry Whewell was musing then on the availability of wild bird seed. Why would you think about that, you might ask today? Isn’t it nice that people are trying to help the birds?

Well, yes, it is good people are thinking about the environment (if also seeking some entertainment for themselves by attracting the birds).

But what struck me about the article was how in 1980 this was an odd and new idea – or at least could still be presented as such.

Harry asks, very logically, why it was that people weren’t simply feeding the birds scraps from their own table, or else allowing plants in their garden to grow and seed? (Indeed he also notes that dogs and cats used to almost invariably be fed human scraps, rather than specialist food.)

He asks: “was there anybody who could not find crumbs in their cake tin, stale slices in their bread bin, and bits of bacon rind in the sink tidy, enough to keep half a dozen sparrows, two blackbirds, and a robin happy?”

He worries that the seed might be grown in Africa and being taken human supplies, or taken from wild places: “A charm of Cheshire goldfinches might find one autumn that its normal supplies of thistle seeds had totally disappeared, the plants having been stripped by foraging schoolboys and the seeds sold to pet shops in Manchester.”

And when you think about it, he’s absolutely right. (And to add in today’s concerns: all of that seed was shipped, using fossil fuel, to the mixing plant, packaged in plastic bags made from petroleum products, shipped likewise to a supermarket, and very likely carried home in a private car.)

Meanwhile, the same people who are carefully pouring this into the bird feeder, are most likely throwing large quantities of perfectly good food – certainly good for the birds — into the waste bin, from where it is carried in lorries to a landfill site, where it will eventually produce globally warming methane. And the supermarket that is selling it is carefully locking into its rubbish bins huge quantities of the same.

And they are very likely carefully mowing their lawn into a perfect sward, excluding with poison any “weed” (for which read seeding plant that the birds might like).

So many things that we do today, when you start to deconstruct them, are wrong from start to finish – even buying bird seed.

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Books Politics

A migration, or a great journey…

July 11, 2009 – 11:40 pm

They arrive, these refugees, asylum-seekers, “economic migrants”, in the developed world, from their home states that are dreadfully poor, war-wracked, or sometimes where they were born will no longer recognise them as their own. Sometimes we hear their stories, the Congolese in London, the Haitians in New York, but more often they are statistics, issues, problems.

Rarely do they get a chance to speak for themselves, to tell their stories. But that’s what Bibish has been lucky, and clever, persistent and brave enough, to do in The Dancer from Khiva.

And it’s a story from parts of the world we’re rarely exposed to, for she was born in a small village in Uzbekistan, a traditional Muslim area, where women were bound by strong traditional limits and restrictions. And she’s moved herself to a city just outside Moscow.

Her story’s a reminder that these migrants, these asylum-seekers, these supplicants, are in fact the brightest, the bravest, the best – the humans who will not settle for a small, constrained, sad life, who strike out, however unwisely and uncertainly, in search of something better.

Following the tales of Bibish’s life, as she breaks taboos by dancing and appearing on television, running off to study on her own, finding her own husband, completing her higher exams with a newborn baby and appendicitis, moving her reluctant husband and two sons to Russia, where she barely speaks the language and they face rampant, vicious discrimination – this is a trek of a life that bears comparison with the great explorers of history.

Yet all of that effort, that bravery, manages only to take Bibish and her husband to an uncertain life as market traders, with no security of housing or income, vulnerable to dangers ranging from theft to official persecution.

Bibish doesn’t come out as an altogether likable character; she’s doughty, tough and persistent, but prone to self-pity (understandable as it is) and still capable of remarkable naivety and with a strictly limited view of the world.

Yet this is a remarkable story, one that illuminates the uncertain place that so many people living in our cities now inhabit. Last year the landmark of more than half of the world’s population living in cities was passed, and Bibish’s story, while exceptional in being told, gives an insight into the tremendous difficulty of their experience.

(Yes, there were lots of other things I should have been doing this afternoon rather than reading this – blame Judd Books in Bloomsbury!)

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Books History

The Victorian – a more humane age…

July 9, 2009 – 8:17 am

A book on child murderers – there are two obvious genres in which this might fit: the quick exploitative “true crime” paperback, whipped after some horrible crime has excited public attention, or the deep and impenetrable psychological study, expounding the author’s post-Freudian, post-Jungian, post-any-sense-at-all theory.

Happily, Loretta Loach’s The Devil’s Children is neither of these. Instead, it is a balanced, sensible account survey of the history of the treatment of children who’ve killed in British history. It’s not a comprehensive study, but it seems to be a solidly enough researched one, and the good news is that while some of the early accounts of the judicial system’s treatment of children is harrowing, it is mostly a tale of increasing, and surprisingly early, humane treatment of children who were understood to be something other than pure evil or simply mini-adult killers.

At least that’s until you get to the two most famous modern cases, that of Mary Bell, 11, who killed two young boys in 1968, and Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, who killed James Bulger in 1993, a case that provoked a degree of hysteria and a wave of vindictive public and judicial spite that the 19th century could hardly have matched.

In the Thompson and Venables case, Loach reports the officer leading the investigation as saying that the killing of James Bulger was “unique” because of the age of the killers. Yet there had been, in the 25 years since Mary Bell, at least 14 cases of children murdering children.

Loach doesn’t exactly say so, but it is pretty clear that her aim in writing the book is education of the public, to understand that children who kill are neither extraordinarily rare, nor extraordinarily evil. Indeed she demonstrates how children usually do not have a grasp of the true nature of death, particularly its finality, until well into adolescence, so juvenile cannot, she argues, form an intent to murder in the same sense as an adult. (Although it is surprising that in a book published this year she didn’t mention the recent work on how children brought up in abusive, high-stress environments fail to develop impulse control.)

Her first case is horrific to modern eyes from the behaviour of the adults: that of four-year-old Katherine Passeavant who was kept in St Albans jail in 1249 for more than a month, after pushing another child into boiling water by opening a door too quickly – which could surely only have been an accident. Her father, however, wrote to the king, and perhaps surprisingly the local sheriff was ordered to release her.

In the same century an 11-year-old boy, Thomas of Hordleigh in Maidstone Kent, was found to have killed a five-year-old with a hatchet as she tried to stop him stealing her family’s bread: he was sentenced to death, in large part because he tried to hide the body, seen as a sign of “heinous malice”. That sentence seems to have been carried out in 1299, but generally even in this period it seems a King’s pardon was often granted, although it might take a year or so of the child being in jail before it arrived.
read more »

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Miscellaneous

Elsewhere…

July 5, 2009 – 11:51 pm

I’ve been speaking to climate change campaigner Bill McKibben.

And interviewing Stephen Chan, professor of international relations at SOAS.

And reflecting on the 90th anniversary of the first publication of the Guardian Weekly.

Also – and this all amounts to my holiday stories really, so you don’t have to look unless you really want to, I’ve been learning about the La Tene Iron Age site, visiting the Romanesque cathedral of Tournus and checking out the Cro-Magnon site at Solutre

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