Author Archives: Natalie Bennett

“The responsibility for managing this world of wounds we’ve created is uniquely ours”

May 29, 2011 – 5:49 pm

A shorter version of this post was published on Blogcritics. (Yes sorry, this is very long, but really you should read the book!)

The latest book by Australia’s foremost science intellectual, Tim Flannery, Here on Earth: A New Beginning should really be read with at least one other person in the room. That way you can look up and say: “Whow, did you know that continental drift ensures the saltiness of the ocean remains constant?” (Flannery explains that while water takes 30,000 to 40,000 years to recycle from evaporation in the ocean through precipitation and hence through soil and rock (picking up salt) and down rivers back to the sea, but over 10 million to 100 million years it passes through hydrothermal vents in the ocean crust, which remove the salt. – p 53)

“Or did you know that soils represent a huge carbon reserve, about 150 billion tonnes, roughly twice that in the atmosphere?” (Flannery explains that soil carbon is made up of humus (which makes it took black and is relatively stable, and can absorb its own weight in moisture), charcoal and roots and other underground parts of plants, which is the most prevalent form, but intensively used croplands have lost from 30 to 75% of their carbon content over the past two centuries. Lots more – though not enough is known to estimate a value – has been lost from poorly managed grazing lands and eroded soils.- p.264)

Or, “gosh, listen to this great Adam Smith quote… ‘The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from [the business community] out always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same as the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it’.” (p. 220)

Or “did you know there were natural nuclear reactors in Africa about 1.8 billion years ago?” (Flannery explains that in the Oklo and Bangombe regions of Gabon, French miners found mostly Uranium-238 – “spent” fiel, rather than the Uranium-235 used in reactors, and concluded that it had been gathered in algal mats in the estuary of an ancient river that flowed over uranium-bearing rocks, and eventually the concentration was sufficient to start a nuclear reaction. – p. 193)

Or “did you know that the first agriculture in the world was probably in Papua New Guinea, 10,000 years ago – earlier than the Fertile Crescent or China?” (Flannery explains it was based on taro and banana, and probably the most productive, supporting the highest rural population densities on earth. And the two most widely planted varieties of sugar cane originated in PNG. – p. 138)

As those examples suggest, Here on Earth is a wide-ranging book – in fact it attempts not just to tell the story of how life has developed on, and shaped, Earth, but how we as life’s conscious beings might ensure that our own and other life continues. It’s really a fleshing-out of James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, with some added politics and sociology that consider us as an important part of the tapestry and history of life.

Flannery takes as his frame what he sees as the two great contrasting scientific approaches to evolution and change – “reductionist science as epitomised by Charles Darwin and Richard Dawkins, and the great holistic analyses of the likes of Alfred Russel Wallace and James Lovelock”, arguing that both are needed to understand life on earth “and what sustainability entails” ([. xvii).

Flannery clearly accepts the idea that Gaia can be seen as a single living organism – but in what way? Flannery points out that we humans are made up of a number of independent or formerly independent elements – our cells are powered by mitochondria that were once independent living things “these partners must have started by forming a loose association, but after more than a billion years of evolution they have become indivisible parts of an organism” – p. 55 And within a human are still independent organisms that make up part of what we think of as us – “Without many of these creatures – for example gut bacteria – we could not exist. These fellow travellers make up 10% of our weight, and are so pervasively distributed over our bodies that were we to take away all ‘human’ cells, a detailed body shadow consisting of them would remain – p 56.” If you look at an individual person that way, it is not so hard to look at the Earth as in some sense a single organism.

But of course the Earth lacks what Flannery calls a “command-and-control” system, but as he says, so do extreme complex ant colonies. They rely on pheromones (and can be remarkably “democratic”, for if a colony is looking for a new home ants will spend longer in places they think best, laying a trail of these chemicals, and the greatest concentration of these will be the place selected for the new home). And Flannery suggests potential substances in Gaia that act as “geo-pheromones”, which act to help maintain conditions suitable to life, including ozone, which shields life from ultraviolet rays, the greenhouses gases, which play a critical role in controlling surface temperature, and dimethyl sulphide, produced by certain algae, which assists in cloud formation. There’s also atmospheric dust, much of which is organic in origin.

He sees as a vital mechanism in making this work coevolution “natural selection that is triggered by interactions between related things… it can act at every level, from that of individual amino acids to entire organisms, and it may not be just a property of life…astromers argue that black holes and galaxies develop an interdependence that’s akin to biological evolution”. (p. 65) In simpler terms, antelope have evolved to run just faster than lions (there’s no advantage in running a lot faster), so lions can catch only the old and the weak. And, Flannery says, critically, we humans and our ancestors have been co-evolving with many species of seven million years. He gives the lovely example of the greater African honeyguide, which feeds solely on the larvae, wax and honey of beehives. When it sees a human, it makes a striking call to attract the human’s attention, “then moves off, stopping frequently to ensure that the person is following it, all the while fanning its tail to display white spots that we visually oriented humans find easy to see. When native Africans reach a hive with the help of a honeyguide, they break it open and often thank the bird with a gift of honey.” Yes, sadly says, this relationship is beginning to break down, because with cheap sugar available, humans can no longer be bothered to seek out honey. Flannery sees this a s a symbol of the way we’ve “destroyed many coevolutionary bonds that lie at the heart of productive ecosystems” (p.68).
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What’s wrong with our understanding of genocide?

May 21, 2011 – 5:30 pm

Christian Gerlach’s Extremely Violent Societies: Mass Violence in the Twentieth Century is, as you might expect, an extremely uncomfortable read. It’s also a rather monotonous one, because the author, who has a rather 20th-century focus on empericism and precise data collection, is determined to list in great detail, or where this is still far from clear to list completing narratives in great detail, about what happened in the mass slaughter in Indonesia in 1965-6, the destruction of the Armenians 1915-23, the mass violence and famine in Bangladesh (initially east Pakistan) in 1971-77, and the crisis in Greece during and after the Nazi operation. He also looks at anti-guerrilla activity in the late colonial and early post-colonial period (and it is interesting, and feels right, that he includes the activities – particularly when you look at the detail of the activities, that this all be grouped together).

I’ll admit to skipping over the detail in places, but nevertheless, I think this is an important book with a thesis worth further exploration – that the approach being taken to many recent incidences of mass violence – that of genocide, is inadequate, and the solutions that arise from that result ineffective. He says that approach encourages the identification of one “core motive”, it assumes that all actors are behaving monolithically for the same purpose, and that the “intent” can be identified. It also assumes that the state is an actor controlling or directing all others.

He says: “Societies are not intrinsically or inevitably violent, they turn extremely violent in what is a temporary process. … Indirect, structural violence is transformed into a variety of uses of direct, brute force: either by radicalization under pressure, by the diversion of pressures and aggression to prevent the outbreak of other conflicts, or by counter-violence by former victims (often allegedly to prevent other, more substantial violence.) A perception of social crisis also helps to explain why the use of violence is so often not just a matter of the state.” (p. 12)
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Using historical examples to consider how to end ‘honour’ killings of women

May 21, 2011 – 2:37 pm

A shorter version was published on Blogcritics.

The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen by Kwame Anthony Appiah asks some very interesting questions, and confronts a truly pressing problem. He asks, using the examples of dueling in Britain, footbinding of women in China, and the suppression of Atlantic slavery, how actions and activities that had been seen as acceptable, even honourable, can suddenly come to be seen as the opposite. He’s using these historic examples to try to see how so-called “honour” killings of women, particularly in Pakistan, which a UN report estimated in 2000 globally claimed 5,000 lives a year, might be made clearly and unambiguously dishonourable. His claim is that honour as a concept can be put to good causes, such as saving lives.

I’m not entirely convinced, but there certainly is some useful things to be learned from this book, particularly the fact that in all of the historic examples, it wasn’t some new fact, new knowledge or expanded understanding that led to the abolition of the practice. Argument on its own, no matter how obviously “right”, wasn’t going to win out.

In short Appiah suggests that in the case of dueling it was its slide down the social scale that helped to kill it, together, perversely, with the declining importance of the aristocratic class with which it was associated. Once linen merchants and bank managers starting dueling, it ceased to be honourable. Appiah quotes Guy Crouchback in Evelyn Waugh’s WWII novel Officers and Gentlemen. When asked what he’d do if challenged, the character replies “Laugh”.

On footbinding, Appiah says that the successful movement against it had its roots not only in Christian missionaries and the Western business elite, but also among the Chinese literati*, who saw it was necessary for China to modernise to compete in the world. On slavery, he says there was an important link with the struggle for respect by the working people (particularly then the working men) of Britain, who, while seeking political power had ” a new symbolic investment in their own dignity”, and since they did physical labour, its link with slavery diminished them: “For many of them, slavery rankled. Not simply because, as Britons, they cared about the nation’s honour, not just as a matter of Christian conscience, and not just because they were in competition with slaves (they were not). It rankled because they, like the slaves, labored and produced by the sweat of their brow.”

Appiah says that in fact there are two kinds of honour – esteem honour – which might be held by a top sportswoman or a government leader (well we can but hope). That reflects admiration for their achievements and abilities, and is competitive – you can raise your honour by doing better than honours. But a broader honour is recognition respect, which comes from simply accepting a person or group as a peer, deserving of rights and respect that you’d expect to be given yourself.

So this is his solution for Pakistan is first to enlist outsiders, primarily international feminist groups (which he says to a large extent already understand this), and more broadly women around the world, to see that the practice “treats women as less worthy of respect – less honourable – than men. They care about the issue as an issue of justice, no doubt. But they are also motivated to a significant degree by the symbolic meaning of honour killing as an expression of women’s subordination. It reflects a conviction that they are not entitled to a very basic kind of respect.” (p. 167) And then international disrespect, and opprobrium, needs to be applied to pressure Pakistan to change its view on what is honourable.

I’ve got doubts about the idea of “using” honour – it is something that seems so often to have been used against women, but I can see the argument about the importance of, and difficulty of getting recognition from men that women are their peers. We’re certainly finding that hard enough in Westminster.

*He provides an account of a fasinating woman “Mrs Little” – she’d earlier had a career as a novelist under her maiden name of Alicia Bewicke satirising “the empty social lives of the rich and the follies of the marriage market (p. 86), who was married to a businessman and who saw the danger of associating the movement with Christians, so touried the country seeking literati to support it – she succeeded in converting Li Hongzhang, governor-general of Guangzhou, to the cause.

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Interesting 18th-century acknowledgement of female sexual desire

May 18, 2011 – 10:23 pm

At Bartholomew’s Fair in London “many a handsome wench exchanges her maidenhead for a small favour, such as a moiety of bone lace, a slight silver bodkin, a hoopt-ring, or the like toye; for she comes not thither with her sweet-heart, to serve her owne turne only, but also to satisfy her desire…”

(An anonymous quote in – Dianne Payne “Smithfield’s Bartholomew Fair” The Historian, No 109, Spring 2011, pp. 12-16 – yes I’d really like that reference to have more information, but from the context I’d guess 18th century! The article is, however, beautifully illustrated.)

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Playing truant with some mid-Tudor writers at the IHR

May 18, 2011 – 9:36 pm

Played truant from politics last week to drop in on the Seminar in Medieval and Tudor London History at the Institute for Historical Research, to hear Mike Jones from Girton College, Cambridge speak on : ‘O London, London’: Mid-Tudor Literature and the City.”

I wasn’t sure what ‘mid-Tudor’ would be, it turned out in this case to be late 1540s and early 1550s – a dangerous time with its setbacks for reformers after Cromwell’s fall and Anne Askew’s death – the city “a fractured and contested site of spiritual movements”. And also a time of massive inflation accompanying the debasement of the coinage. This is a bit earlier than my chief personal interest here, which revolves around Isabella Whitney and the end of Elizabeth’s reign, but enjoyed the account of what came before her nonetheless.

We heard that the literature of the period had a strong focus on the urban poor, words that have a strong echo today (that’s my interpretation, not Jones’s): e.g. Latimer’s sermon “in London their brother shall die in the streets for cold”; or the reformer Thomas Lever “old fathers, poor widows, and young lie begging in the mirey streets”. And echoing today even more, there was a lot of anxiety expressed about the “able-bodied” poor hiding amid the deserving poor and thereby getting aid. Latimer: “In times past men were full of pity and compassion; but now there is no pity.”

And there was a lot of concern about the expansion of the urban marketplace and increased varieties of goods available: Henry Brinklow coined the lovely word trish-trash, which often referred to items of “Popery”, but could also mean simply a critique of greedy consumption. Lever: “be not merchants of mischief”, “silks and sables and foolish feathers”.

Also we heard that it was hard for the works to escape the metaphorical shadows of Troy or Geoffrey of Monmouth’s hugely influential description of the foundation of the city, and of course Biblical cities, particularly Babylon.

Many modern echoes…

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Alternatives to the cuts…

May 15, 2011 – 5:23 pm

Some notes from the “Fink Club” False Economy meeting I attended last week (an interesting format – opening speakers only had three minutes each and many contributions from the floor invited, of 1 minute each – and the presentation was “in the round”, never had to speak to an audience in 360-degrees before, but it certainly added energy and movement compared to the traditional “speakers behind a table” format).

Possibly the best line of the evening was from Andrew Simms, New Economics Foundation, who was the host, on the pro-cuts protesters: “fanboys of economic selfharming”. He added: “NEF was going to be on a debate on Newsnight with them, but even Newsnight found them a little weird so it was called off.”

Clifford Singer, False Economy, suggested three alternative plans: Plan B, as presented by the TUC – a robin hood tax, an end cuts to get the economy going again, but admitted that this had been perhaps fairly criticised as “a list of good things” rather than a plan. Plan C, as presented by the New Political Economy Network (PDF), which has a particular focus on clamping down on tax-dodging. Clifford noted that Richard Murphy estimated this cost £120bn, the government says £42bn. “If you split the difference that’s £81bn, which is what govt decided to cut.” Plan D was something altogether bigger: do we really want to maximise human happiness, and if we do, how would we reshape society?

Anne Pettifor, Green New Deal Group, noted that the average G20 debt is 100% of GDP; we are heading towards 83%.
Japan was now applying green new deal principles in trying to rebuild after the tsunami. “We haven’t had a tsunami, but we have had a crater blown in our economy, 2.5m people at least are not doing anything at moment, and we’ve got companies that can’t invest because they can’t get loans. The crater has to be filled by economic activity. We have to nationalise banks, probably will have to soon anyway due to their continuing crisis state.

Steve from UKuncut raised a concept I hadn’t heard before that sounded very interesting, that the war to stop tax avoidance is by introducing a “general avoidance” principle into law. He noted that we, the public, are now giving £220bn in services to banks.

Anna Coute from the New Economics Foundation said “the logic of cuts is when we have dealt with the crisis we will return to business as usual”. But she suggested the alternative of reducing working hours, so that “those who are current overworked have more time to be better citizens and people who can’t get a job have the opportunity to work”.
The proposition was gaining ground among economists, she said. People who work shorter hours are more productive; people who work longer hours have more carbon emissions even when adjusted for income.” But it was essential to ensure everyone had a decent living wage, so a gradual introduction over 10 years was the way to go. She referred to the “lump of labour fallacy” – it is possible to create more jobs by reducing hours that people work.

A contributor from the floor whose name I didn’t catch pointed out that you can set an almost-bank yourself, an industrial provident society, for a £40 registration fee with the FSA. It has a limit of £20m assets, and any one member can put in a maximum of £20k. It can pay interest and loan money. “If we all did this could mop up the bank’s money.”

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