Author Archives: Natalie Bennett

Water, soil and climate – which will crack first?

April 7, 2011 – 12:00 am

A shorter version of this post first appeared on Blogcritics.

I might never have “practiced” as an agricultural scientist, but an Australian degree in the subject has left me acutely aware of the global shortage of fresh water and quality soils – and how fast these are being degraded.

Australia might be an esspecially bad case – its ancient soils particularly ill-suited to imported European farming methods and its mostly desert interior having a desperate dryness most Europeans struggle to imagine – but erosion and degradation of soils is a huge global problem, as is shortage of water, and we have no alternative ways of producing food….

When I was studying some 20 years ago, climate change was hardly mentioned, but since then its threat to all of our futures has become glaringly obvious.

So which is going to get us first: water, soil or climate change? That sounds flippant, but it is an important question – we need to tackle all of these problems, urgently, and with every input we can muster, but there are some choices that have to be made, and some priorities selected.

Reading Lester Brown’s World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse, it’s clear that his calculations have produced one answer: water, not that there is any cause for comfort on the other two issues.

On soils, the tale of woe is long. In Lesotho, in the past 10 years its grain harvest has dropped by half in large part due to the soil fertility problems; Haiti, self-sufficient in grain 40 years ago, is now importing more than half; in Mongolia over the past 20 years nearly 3/4 of the wheat land has been abandoned and yields have fallen, cutting the harvest by 4/5.

But it is not just the developing world problem. Roughly one third of global crop land is losing soil at an excessive rate, and each inch means a lost 6% in grain production. We all know about America’s Dust Bowl, but since then it was the Soviet’s turn in the late 1950s. At its heart was Kazakhstan, which at its peak had more than 25 million hectares of land under grain; that has fallen to 7 million, but the average wheat yield is scarcely one tonne a hectare, compared to seven in France.

The new problems? China, which has roughly the same number of cattle as the US, but about 281 million sheep and goats, compared to America’s 9 million, and a huge problem with dust storms; India, with 24% of its land area turning into desert; and the expanding Sahara in Africa. It is estimated that land degradation across Africa costs it 8,000,000 tonnes of grain a year, about 8% of its annual harvest. This loss is expected to double by 2020.
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Helga Estby: an almost-lost woman now deservedly famous

April 5, 2011 – 10:42 pm

Post first published on Blogcritics

Why were there no women geniuses, women great artists, women adventurers in the past? It’s a question often asked by obvious and not so obvious misogynists, and if you want an answer, beyond the obvious “what’s your problem?”, then Linda Lawrence Hunt’s Bold Spirit: Helga Estby’s Forgotten Walk Across Victorian America provides it: There were, but their stories have very often been lost.

Helga’s life is pretty well summed up by the term the adventurous. She had been born in Norway, seen her mother widowed and remarried, and at age 11 moved to Michigan, where she had to learn to use a new language in a new culture. Then at age 15, in circumstances we can no longer know, she was pregnant. This cannot not but have been a disaster for an unmarried girl in a quite conservative Scandinavian-American community. One month before she gave birth, the now 16-year-old married a 28-year-old non-English speaking Norwegian immigrant, most likely not the father of her child, and probably an arranged match to cover the family’s “shame”.
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Trees: into mysticism and beyond to science

April 2, 2011 – 9:06 pm

Article first published on Blogcritics.

I would describe myself as “not the mystical sort”. That means that Diana Beresford-Kroeger’s The Global Forest: 40 Ways Trees Can Save Us is not an obvious book for me. But beyond its mystical side, it also contains a lot of science, and that’s what drew me to it. Particularly, it’s the sort of big picture science that helps you to see the world in new ways.

The author is described in the blurb as “a world expert on how trees connect the effect our environment” and the detailed knowledge and expertise behind the writing is obvious. Yet she puts this into something accessible and highly readable, the inspiration she says in the introduction, the traditional Irish storyteller. So The Global Forest is structured as 40 short essays, which range across key aspects of our global ecosystems, and historical and recent human interactions with them.

The basics are here. This the fact that in the 1950s 30% of global land was covered with forests, and in 2005 that figure was down to something like 5%. This the fact that the demand for paper, almost entirely reliant on trees, has led to exploding demand for pulp of 200 million tonnes a year for the Western world. And the fact that, despite the global garden offering a cornucopia of 80,000 potential food species, we now rely almost exclusively on eight food species. As the author says: “the traditional knowledge of the other 79,992 is rapidly being lost to future generations”.

And so are practical suggestions. One of the chief concerns of the book is the promotion of what she calls to two-tier agriculture, the combination of tree and ground crops in a “Savannah design”. The chief knowledge base is clearly grounded in North America, and she is fascinating on the subject of the nut crops and the nut milk Native Americans made from them. And also the future potential. “All of the hickory family produces particularly dense wood together with a colossal nut crop…. The hickory can sequester carbon out of the atmosphere like no other tree can. They have done this in the past enemy stretches of virgin forest and they can do it again.”

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Time for a new rape crisis funding campaign

March 9, 2011 – 8:58 am

The Boris Keep Your Promise campaign did a great job in forcing London’s current mayor to get moderately close to keeping his word on the subject of funding rape crisis centres. The dreadful situation that saw only one centre (in Croydon!) serving the whole of London has been greatly improved, with the provision of three extra centres that broadly cover the capital.

BUT, there’s no guarantee this is going to continue. Funding is only guaranteed until 2012 – the next mayoral election. It’s yet another case of “a campaigner’s work is never done”.

I know that the campaign will be gearing up again soon to push all of the mayoral candidates to guarantee continuation of the funding. But there’s no need to wait. Any time I come across a London Assembly member or mayoral candidate, I’ll be making sure this is high on the agenda.

But we also need to stop this merry-go-round. Campaigning like this to maintain essential women’s services takes far too much time and energy. We need to ensure that central services like this are regarded as a core part of society’s provision – standard funding that is automatically included in annual budgets, not something that has to be fought for.

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Reading Julia Kristeva

March 9, 2011 – 12:21 am

Julia Kristeva is one of those writers I feel I should read. And I did make a real effort after finding a new work from her, Hatred and Forgiveness (translated by Jenaine Herman), in the “new books” at the London Library. But I have to confess that I find the psychoanalytical approach to life seriously hard going – and frequently hard to stomach.

But I was pleased to learn this text marked her receipt of the Holberg Prize, and I did like the way in a historical survey of female writers she picked out as “the first female intellectual”, Anne Comnena (Anna Komnen). This is Kristeva’s account:
“…she was the author of a superb history of the crusades and the reign of her father, the Emperor Alexis I. This was the nomumental Alexiade, in fifteen volumes. Born in 1083, Comnena began writing this work in 1138 at the age of fifty-five, and completed it ten years later: as the first female historian, she offers us an interpretation of this period that is very different from those of western chroniclers such as William of Tyre or Foucher de Chartes. This devotee of what would later be called orthodox Christianity was nevertheless raised on the Greek classics and a fervent reader of Homer and Plato. She was sensitive, melancholy and indeed romantic, a girl who was proud of her father: she was a philosopher and a politician, and her writing shows an awareness of the need for European unity, which was such an important issue at that time.” (p.5-6)

I also found her interesting on…

On the virgin status of Mary:
“Her virginity constitutes the major scandal: our sensibility and simple reason can only denounce the dreadful inequty this virginity exposes, women’s exclusion from sexuality: a punitive chastity that seems to be the price women must pay for admission to the sacred– and to representation.” (p. 64)

On Colette:
“..the amorous Colette, endlessly betrayed and endlessly betraying, declared herself beyond romantic passion, “one of the great banalities of existence” from which one had to escapre, provided one was capable of participating in the plurality of the world – in a fulfillment of the ego through a multitude of ‘gay, varied and plentiful’ connections.” (p. 224)

On Georgia O’Keeffe:
“…you probably had to be a modern woman to decide that the sparest and most final image of death was the pelvic bone: this basin at the bottom of the spine that houses the lower abdomen and sexual organs, and that, deprived of flesh, is nothing but a coarse ring – the void itself…. THe Pelvis series… recall the Taoist representation of the sky, and Pi, a circle of jade with a hole, symbol of male emptiness.” (p. 243)

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Women in the press: where are they?

March 3, 2011 – 10:01 pm

I spoke this evening at a Women in Journalism event that launched its study “Women in Journalism: A-Gendered Press?”, marking International Women’s Day. These are some thoughts from it…

The results of the report will come as no real surprise to anyone who works in the media. To take a few of the headlines: “74% of news journalists are men, whilst women make up just one third of journalists covering business and politics. Just 3% of sports journalists are women. Women are less likely to be in senior positions, with eight out of the top ten newspapers having almost twice as many male editors as women editors.”

You can, of course, look at this from different angles. When you consider that nearly 90% of the directors of FTSE 100 companies are male, and nearly 80% of MPs are male, you could say that (with the notable exception of sport), the press isn’t doing too badly.

If, however, you reflect that the press plays an important place in creating our view of the world, then the results are disgraceful.

There are two big questions really: why? and what can we do about it?
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