Monthly Archives: September 2009

Books Environmental politics

An essential guide to Green political thought

September 27, 2009 – 6:59 am

Green Political Thought is clearly a textbook, a survey of the current state of the field intended, I’d judge, for a senior undergraduate course. Given that Andrew Dobson’s text is in its fourth edition, it is clearly a successful one, but how does it work for an “ordinary,” non-student reader, looking for an overview of a fast-moving field?

The answer is “surprisingly well” – although with the inevitable frustration of a textbook meant to direct the student to further readings: you want more – more explanation, more details, more background.

Four key points, in particular, left me scrabbling in the bibliography, underlining and adding to my “must read” list:

1. Bruno Latour’s theory of “hybridity” – spreading the capacity to “speak” across the human and non-human realms. Sounds odd – but then his claim that some parts of nature “speak” very loudly – charismatic megafauna such as polar bears and orangutans (through influential organizations) – much louder than of what many humans are capable. This avoids many problems of the human/nature binary that Dobson briefly outlines. (Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, Harvard University Press, 2004)

2. The distinction between self-reliance and self-sufficiency – Greens almost invariably adopting for the former, not the latter (Albania’s lesson enough there) – the argument being that communities (or “bioregions”) should try to satisfy needs and wants locally, and only look outside when that is unavoidable. (Ekins, ed. The Living Economy, Routledge, 1986)

3. The claim that Habermas sees women’s movements as offering the only group that seeks “fundamental change from a universalistic standpoint” – that women can be the vanguard party of change, being the only group sufficiently disengaged from the current system to resist colonization by the system. (Roderick, Habermas and the Foundations of Critical Theory, Macmillan, 1986)

4. The claim that the call by some ecofeminists for women to embrace traditional female values is deeply dangerous to the liberation of women, what Plumwood calls “uncritical reversal” – “to use ideas that have already been turned against women, in the belief that, if they are taken up and used by everyone, a general improvement in the human and non-human condition will result. If they are not taken up, then women will have ‘sacrificed themselves to the environment’." (Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, Routledge, 1993)

But another reader, interested in different aspects of the past three decades (the framework Dobson identifies as marking the history of “ecologism” so far), might well light on an entirely different selection – for this is a wide-ranging text.

The basic thesis, which Dobson says has only crystallized since previous editions (this may be one case where the latest edition of the textbook is essential – far from often the case) is that ecologism is now a standalone bank of political thought that deserves to be considered in the same arenas as socialism, liberalism or feminism (and one chapter has a handy checklist of how it significantly differs from each of those).

This is primarily a book of theory, not practice; anyone engaged in practical Green politics won’t find a lot of tactical guidance, although plenty of food for thought, and Dobson does engage with a couple of key practical issues. He briefly surveys the ways in which the German Greens have struggled to maintain their critical edge in coalition governments. He then considers in the conclusion the ways in which the radical philosophy might play out for practical, electoralist reformers.

But perhaps the most interesting “practical” part of the book is his discussion of the potentialities and possible pitfalls of basic income – the idea that each member of a society should be given a basic decent income, no strings or means tests attached, which has been adopted by a number of Green parties, including that of England and Wales. As Dobson notes, this is far from an exclusively Green policy: backers have come from across the political spectrum. Dobson makes it very clear of the potential advantages of collapsing the distinctions between the informal and formal economy, and beyond that between work and paid employment, as well as any brief outline that I’ve read.

So what about a reader coming to this cold, someone who has no knowledge of Green political thought, or indeed politics in academia at all? Well here Dobson deserves particular credit, for a good 95% of the book requires no specialist vocabulary at all, which for a politics text published in 2007 is little short of miraculous. The only places where jargon does intrude is when Dobson and the Greens are engaging with Marxist political structures – and there is something about Marxism that somehow seems to make it impossible to talk about it in plain English.

There’s a lot in this book that readers of non-Green political persuasions would find interesting (and possibly infuriating); there’s a lot of food for thought particularly for “light greens” of other primary political persuasions, but most of all there’s a lot here for Greens – really everyone engaged in Green thought should read this book, then follow the angles within it that most fit their interests.

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Books History Politics

A short history of petitions

September 26, 2009 – 11:26 am

It is to the early 19th-century reformer Major John Cartwright that we owe the innovation of having individual sheets of paper for mass petitions, which could be spread around the country – previously they’d always been on one long sheet (with obvious logistical difficulties). His tour of the country in 1813 gathered 130,000 signatures in support of a taxypayer franchise.

Although he didn’t have a lot of effective success – most of his petitions were dismissed by parliament as inadequately framed. “Petitioning continues to this day to be regulated by an act of 1661 agauinst ‘tumultuous’ petitioning, and by 18th-century notions of ‘decent and respectable language.

(From Edward Vallance, A Radical History of England, p. 297)

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Books History

Too true

September 23, 2009 – 8:23 am

Richard Overton, English Civil War writer, in The Arraignment of Mr Persecution (1645), wrote that it was often the “most weak and passionate of men, the most unable to defend truth or their own opinions” who were “the most violent for persecution”. (From Edward Vallance, A Radical History of England, p. 155)

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History Politics

The “old neoliberals” – and yes, they made just as much of a mess

September 22, 2009 – 8:51 am

Have just been meeting “Les Physiocrats”, who believed in a “government of nature” – i.e. laissez faire, leaving everything to the market and being very hostile to any state intervention. Their leader was Francois Quesnay (1694-1774), who wrote the article on grains in The Encyclopedia.

In the reigns of both Louis XV and XVI there were regular food crisis, and the traditional method of trying to control these was by preventing the movement of grain across international frontiers, and also between provinces. In 1763/4 Louis XV authorised the transport of wheat between provinces, but fear of riots and dissent meant nothing happened until 1768.

In Burgundy, the rural parts of the province produced far more food than it needed, but it was swallowed up by the Lyon market, and in the spring of 1770 food riots and unrest started in Dijon.

In 1774, at the start of Louis XVI reign, a new controller of finances, Turgot, imbued with the ideas of the Physiocrats, had proclaimed on September 13 completely free internal trade in cereals. This gave free reign to speculators, hoarders and traders. Prices rose brutally – in spring in Dijon the price of wheat doubled, maize followed.

Thus started what was known at the time as The War of the Flours. On April 12 there was little grain in the market and prices were extremely high. No one doubted famine would follow. A grain merchant, Fauvernay, was roughed up in the market.

On the 18th a crowd of mostly women gathered, and grew through the morning. One of them donned “un bel habit rouge, une canne [walking stick] a pomme d’or a la main” in the manner of Nicolas Carre, the miller of l’Ouche, who was much detested. With the support of the provincial administration, he had adopted a technique promoted by the Physiocrats to produce white flour, which could only be afforded by the rich. The crowd chased him fown the street, but he found a house of refuge with another miller, so the crowd’s anger was redirected towards a parliamentary councillor, Jean-

Charles Filsjean de Sainte-Colombe, who was thought to speculate with Carre. He hid in the cellar as the crowd surged through his house, and – so the story goes – was dug out of his hiding place, a pile of manure. He was to survive however, until the Revolution, when he met a nasty end.

Soldiers were called in from Auxonne to restore order, and the parliament at Dijon pronounced severe penalties for the rioters. Some of the “sediteuses” were taken before the parliament on July 29,1775.

In 1776 Turgot was dismissed by the king but the principle of “liberty of grains” was not abandoned. More hunger and more unrest in Burgundy, and in 1784 the Quartermaster of Burgundy, Amelot de Chaillou, tried to set up a municipal flour shop, to ensure sufficient grain, but the notables object and the project was abandoned.

By 1789 there was trouble over grain across Burgundy – at Charolles, Tournus, Saulieu, Auxois, Autun, Beune, Sens, Dijon, Auxerre — carts were stopped, stores raided.
From “Jours sans pain, jours de colere” by Jean Bart in Pays de Bourgogne, No 222, June 2009, pp. 3-10.

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Books Feminism Women's history

Learning from a feminist utopia

September 20, 2009 – 4:13 pm

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, published in 1915, created a new sub-genre, the feminist utopia. There’s something delightfully ironic about the creation, for there’s no doubt her world, an all-female one getting along very nicely thank you, would have horrified the original creator of the form, Sir Thomas More, and indeed it initially horrified her three main characters, men of her own time, who in best traditional style, set out to explore this unknown, mysterious land.

The narrator is Vandyke, clearly the most sensible and level-headed of the three; it’s a marker of the age of the text, and its liberal origins, that he’s trained in sociology. The character who is a symbol of the “typical” man of his age, and the one who fails utterly to cope with a society where women aren’t automatically his prey, is Terry, who supplies the aircraft and the funds for the expedition into this hidden land, sealed off by a volcanic eruption some two millennia previously.

The atypical man, the one who finds himself at home in Herland,
is Jeff, the expedition doctor and science lover, the sensitive, poetic type not entirely at home in his own society.

It’s a society that’s constantly striving to perfect itself: “Moadine told him. ‘We have no laws over a hundred years old, and most of them are under twenty’.” The society is a democracy, if rather too fond of the decisions of the elders for modern tastes.

It’s developed what Vandyke finds is an entirely acceptable science, from astronomy to physiology, but where it has really excelled is agriculture, turning its limited environment into a veritable Garden of Eden (no accident that surely), in which every tree produces a crop and lives in managed harmony with is environment. In terms of another modern genre, they’ve terraformed it perfectly.

There’s only one thing it relies on from the time before the women were left – by combination of conflict and natural disaster – on their own to cope: a few huge old buildings, including the now largely redundant fortress.

As the author surely had no choice – and really as in science fiction today the science isn’t really the point – she skips over the essential development of virgin birth. It happens, and the women, understandably enough, come to revere it, putting motherhood at the centre of their society (although later, when they understand the limits of population growth controlling it by social pressure). But there’s little focus on heredity, and no desire for personal glory in it.

If there’s one main criticism of the nature of Herland today it is that as a society it is rather too perfect, impossibly so (even the men are forced to admire the practicality and suitability of the dress – although Perkins Gilmann’s concern with this, at the start of the 20th century, is understandable enough).

The 21st-century world is rather less sanguine about the perfectibility of human nature and indeed the possibility of perfection at all – Ursula Le Guin’s utopia/dystopia The Dispossessed in being a case in point.

Yet Perkins Gilmann can be excused in this: she wrote in a more innocent age – before the horrors of two world wars – and more importantly, she wrote at a time when women were barely allowed, and by most, thought possible of much practical constructive effort at all (although then as now, women on average worked harder and longer than their menfolk with the double burden of home and employment).

She was facing a huge mountain of public disbelief, and any flaw in the world of Herland would have been a fissure of opportunity for the enemies of feminism.

Although long neglected, Herland is indeed one of the founding texts of feminism, and anyone who’s interested in being a feminist should read it – but don’t worry, it is mercifully short and to the point, not at all flowerily “literary”. Its author is non-nonsense, getting on with the job, writing for purpose, not ego, just as her characters, and so often women generally, do.

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Books Women's history

Adding to the unlikely, if well-deserved, fame of Mary Anning

September 17, 2009 – 2:47 pm

Fame, particularly for women, is a strange and unpredictable thing. For centuries, most of the great things done by women, their outstanding talents and amazing discoveries, have been forgotten and later reinvented by men, or claimed from the start by men – and often there’s little chance of this being corrected. Yet sometimes, a story is so outstanding, so surprising, so amazing, that it’s survived to be revived and propagated in an age that seeks out these women’s deeds.

Who would have predicted that Mary Anning, a working-class woman, who spent much of her life only a few pounds from the workhouse, in an obscure little English coastal town, would today be one of the most famous women of the 19th century?

An actress portraying her regularly parades around the Natural History Museum, many of her great fossil discoveries are properly labelled with her details, and now, Tracy Chevalier, well known for her Girl with a Pearl Earring (although personally I prefer The Lady and the Unicorn) has made her the subject of her latest book, Remarkable Creatures.

Like those books, this isn’t great literature, but very good reading – built around finely woven characterisation and dialogue that superbly exercises that cardinal novelist’s rule: show don’t tell.

As in all of her other books, Chevalier has clearly done her research on Anning, and her other central character, Elizabeth Philpott, a middle-class if impoverished spinster who helped Anning, while doing her own fine and important work on fossil fishes. She’s also clearly absorbed the social mores of this stiff, superstitious, class-obsessed age, and the way it was deeply disturbed by the unmistakable message that emerged as the fossil record in the cliff of the coast around Lyme Regis started to be unearthed.

(N.B. This book has not yet been released in the US, but is available in the UK.)

If the structure of their relationship – its great split engendered by what seems like an unlikely obsession with a clearly unsuitable, unlikely man – seems a little forced and artificial, well that’s the price one pays for popularising Anning’s story. (And it has to be said that for all her virtues, Chevaliers always have the whiff of the writing class about them.)

Nevertheless, if you know Anning, you should read this book – it might not teach you anything new, but it will enjoyably put flesh on the bones of her story. If you don’t know Anning, read it for the entertainment value, but also because you’ll then know about a great woman of history, and have acquired the knowledge in an entirely pleasurable manner.

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