Author Archives: Natalie Bennett

Things I failed to learn from my grandmother

February 14, 2010 – 9:07 am

Since I tried to make my first ever batch of preserves, at the age of 43, I’ve been musing on how much knowledge my grandmother had that she took to her grave, because I failed to learn it from it.

Sure, when I found myself with a very large pumpkin, home-grown, a feat achieved rather more by good luck than good management, I could look up a recipe for pumpkin chutney on the internet. I could look up the process for sterilising jars, then sterilising their contents, and off I went. But there are aspects of such things that are by far the best learnt from watching and working with an expert. (The onion definitely needs to be chopped small, I learnt, too late…)

And I’ve no doubt that my grandmother was an expert. She lived in a classic Australian house on a quarter-acre block, and the whole of the extensive back yard was devoted to fruits and vegetables. Well into her 70s, she tended that garden, producing an extensive range of produce that she stored and preserved in a wide variety of forms.

Not that I often ate it as a child, although there must have been great quantities of it. But I was taught to regard this lovely, homegrown, almost-zero-food-miles produce as embarassing, laughable even. “Proper” food came out of a supermarket freezer or from a can or bottle. Homegrown was a sign of embarrassing poverty and failure. (And it required skilled labour to process.)

Many other aspects of my grandmother’s life were also a cause for family embarrassment. She almost never threw anything away, and bought very little – the house was furnished with the furniture bought on marriage, and every potentially useful item – string, wrapping paper, bits of wire, were carefully arranged in drawers, available for use whenever required.

This all required thought, organisation, planning, system – things that I failed to learn from her.

Yet now, as I try to live an increasingly “green”, environmentally-friendly life, I’m forced to reinvent the knowledge that was second nature to my grandmother.

I’m trying to cut to almost zero my use of throwaway plastic containers, where it be Chinese takeaway or packaged berries, bottled soups or coffee cups. Yet I doubt my grandmother used in her life as any as I still use in a year, much as I try to cut down.

Whenever she left home, she took a packed lunch wrapped in paper, and a thermos of tea. There might have been a tin or two of soup in the cupboard for emergencies (when she was ill), but basically she cooked everything fresh, from scratch. And if berries weren’t in season on the bush outside, she went to her preserves.

I remember her telling me a story, very late in life, she was probably in her nineties by then, about a pair of scissors she was still using. As I recall the story her sister had been cutting some flowers, and had accidentally left these scissors in the newspaper in which the clippings were thrown on the compost heap. A couple of days later my grandma realised what had happened and rescued the now rusty implements. She soaked them in oil, then sandpapered off the rust, and here there were, perhaps eight decades later, still in effective use.

I was too young then, and perhaps too wrapped in consumer culture, to really grasp what I suspect she was trying to tell me, about more than a pair of scissors: get quality things, treat them with care, and make them last a lifetime.

And yet there’s also a darker, feminist moral in my grandmother’s life – she had made much of it, yet she lived as a virtual slave, her fine cooking, food-growing and preserving going to the service of a husband who treated her very poorly, who dropped his dirty clothes on the floor for her to pick up, and ordered a cooked breakfast every morning.

I certainly would never wish to be using the skills she had, should I be able to reconstruct them, for such a purpose, so as we do return, as we must, to these skills, this careful, preserving lifestyle, there’s something we’ve got to be very careful to do differently than did this early 20th-century generation: these must be skills for everyone to learn, everyone to exercise – men, women, and children too.

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Women’s rugby – that takes me back

February 8, 2010 – 12:09 am

Was pleased to see in the Independent a very decent piece on the England women’s rugby captain, which only occasionally slips into the “gosh, girls are really playing” mode.

Catherine Spencer’s comment about not being recognised without mud in her hair takes me back to my rugby days – well my one rugby season.

I played for the really-not-very-good University of New England (Australia) team, which only made up the numbers with some “friends of players” who’d been talked into it without wanting to be there. Which meant when you got to the wings there were some players really not at all keen to tackle anyone.

I was No 8, a position for which I was way, way too slow, but we had a surplus of second rowers, which was probably where I belonged.

The mud line reminded me of my sporting fame moment when the local television stringer – who’d worked for me when I’d been news editor of the local daily paper – turned up to film a game, and was absolutely delighted to film me at the end of it, with a face as red as a desert sun, and hair that had reached the indescribable stage. (I do hope that tape has been safely confined to history, since I was also so high on adrenaline I was probably incoherent.)

Probably fortunately, I’ve forgotten the score of our biggest thrashing, when we played Newcastle Uni, which actually had Australian team members playing for them. One of them was a centre, who I recall only from the back, chasing her fruitlessly down the field…

File under nostalgia…

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So what would a steady state society look like?

January 17, 2010 – 8:58 am

When I went to the launch of Tim Jackson’s Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet before Christmas, the London Review of Books shop in Bloomsbury was packed to the last usually-quiet corner, even though it was a foul, stormy evening. It was a curiously mixed crowd – environmental campaigners from the “respectable” (generally no dreadlocks) end of the movement, lots of civil servants with folding cycles, and a few real “suits” from the Treasury, as well as the usual large (since the crisis, enormous) collection of hopeful interns from just about everywhere.

Launching the book, Jonathan Porrit said, “This book is so subversive it won’t be allowed through the doors of Defra.” He gave a telling account of the launch of the report from the Sustainable Development Commission from which the book is a development: “No 10 in an unnamed street had gone ballistic. It was the weekend the G20 was in London to talk about kickstarting growth. It fell into a deafening media silence. It is a complex message and hard for people to get their head around.”

But, he said, there had been great public interest. The volume of downloads had been huge, and public meetings around the country had been held to discuss it. In Bath, 200 people had crowded into a small room and had two hours of intense discussion.

I’ve finally had time to read Prosperity Without Growth and while it is a sober book of economic theory, not flashy nor overtly radical in its language – it even contains a few traditional economists’ equations – I can now see why its ideas are so hard for traditional economic thinkers to stomach. And yet they are so obviously sensible.

The idea that there are ecological limits on the planet is one of the starting points – okay that even some traditional economists are starting to get a handle on, although as Jackson explains, none have developed any sort of macro-economic theory that starts to take account of the value of the natural world and the services it provides us – that flashy stuff like air to breathe, water to drink and soil to grow things in.

His use of Amartya Sen’s “capability for flourishing” (forced into polite academic notice by the writer’s Nobel Prize) is also within the range of most forward-thinking bureaucrats and academics. He quotes Sen on what this means for people’s functioning: “Are they well nourished? Are they free from avoidably morbidity? Do they live long? Can they take part in the life of the community? Can they appear in public without shame and without feeling disgraced? Can they find worthwhile jobs? Can they keep themselves warm? Can they use their school education? Can they visit friends and relations if they choose?”

So far, so in the environmental mainstream. But it is when Jackson starts to look at carbon decoupling – the idea that economic growth can continue so long as its carbon emissions (and implicitly or explicitly its other environmental impacts) are greatly reduced. Jackson makes it very, very clear that this is nonsense. (And this is where, as the Earthscan MD Jonathan Sinclair Wilson said at the launch, the Al Gores and Sir Nicholas Sterns are.)

“In a world of 9 billion people all aspiring to Western lifestyles, the carbon intensity of every dollar of output must be at least 130 times lower in 2050 than it is today. By the end of the century, economic activity will need to be taking carbon out of the atmosphere, not adding to it. Never mind that no-one knows what such an economy looks like. Never mind that decoupling isn’t happening on anything like that scale. Never mind that all our institutions and incentive structures continually point in the wrong direction. That dilemma, once recognized, looks so dangerously over our future that we are desperate to believe in miracles. Technology will save us. Capitalism is good at technology. So let’s keep the show on the road and hope for the best.”

Jackson takes to task even those generally “green” economists who have suggested adopting a service-based economy looks like a way out. He stresses that they mean something much more than the few Western economies we have now that have been so labeled (which mostly means they’ve exported the manufacturing jobs and their resource usage). What about these “new” service economies? Jackson says:

“So what exactly constitutes productive economic activity in this economy? It isn’t immediately clear. Selling ‘energy services’, certainly, rather than energy supplies. Selling mobility rather than cars. Re-cycling, reusing, leasing, maybe. Yoga lessons, perhaps, hairdressing and gardening, so long as these aren’t carried out using buildings, don’t involve the latest fashion, and you don’t need a car to get to them. The humble broom would need to be preferred to the diabolical leafblower, for instance. The fundamental question is this: can you really make enough money from these activities to keep an economy growing? And the truth is we just don’t know. We have never at any point in history lived in such an economy. That doesn’t mean we couldn’t. Again, having a convincing macro-economics for such an economy would be a good starting point. But it sounds at the moment suspiciously like something the Independent on Sunday would instantly dismiss as a yurt-based economy.”

But Jackson says, there is still something here, in the valuing of jobs and activities that clearly do add to human flourishing, and that yet traditional economics dismiss as “inefficient," “unproductive.” “Their labour productivity is ‘dismal’ — in the language of the dismal science.
This is where Jackson, unusually in the book as a whole, lets his heart hang out:

“We’re getting perilously close here to the lunacy at the heart of the growth-obsessed, resource-intensive, consumer economy. Here is a sector which would provide meaningful work, offer people capabilities for flourishing, contribute positively to community and have a decent chance of being materially light. And yet it is denigrated as worthless because it’s actually employing people … it shows up the fetish with macro-economic labour productivity for what it is: a recipe for undermining work, community and environment.”

And, as he’s explained earlier, it is the hunt for and success in achieving “improved productivity” that is one of the drivers of the desperate seeking of economic growth – for without it, and with the “improved productivity,” unemployment grows. Yet of course, as Jackson points out, there is another alternative in a non-growing economy – working shorter hours. (And he quotes the sociologist Gerhard Bosch: “One of the fundamental pre-conditions for the working time policy pursued in Germany and Denmark was a stable and relatively equal earning distribution.”)

And in the economic model Jackson is working towards, he suggests restricting working hours is likely to be one of the key levers of economic management.

Another change he suggests is needed is in balance between investment and consumption. He looks at the need to balance new investments in energy efficiency and fossil-fuel replacements:
“If we invest too slowly, we run out of resources before alternatives are in place. Fuel prices soar and economies crash. If we invest too fast, there’s a risk of slowing down the economy to the extent that the resources required for further investment aren’t available… If the savings ratio is increased and more of the national income is allocated to investment, the flexibility to achieve the transition is higher.”

Which is where Jackson gets even deeper into politics:

“The ecology of investment will itself have to change. Investment in long-term infrastructures and public goods will have to be judged against different criteria. And this may mean rethinking the ownership of assets and the distribution of surpluses from them. … The public sector is often best placed to identify and protect long-term social assets. Public sector rates of return are typically lower than commercial ones, allowing longer investment horizons and less punishing requirements in terms of productivity.”

He acknowledges that traditional industries will have to continue, if on a much reduced scale, and in significantly different ways: “Manufacturing will need to pay more attention to durability and repairability. Construction must prioritize refurbishment of existing buildings and the design of new sustainable and repairable infrastructures. Agriculture will have to pay more attention to the integrity of the land and the welfare of livestock. Financial intermediation will depend less on monetary expansion and more on prudent long-term stable investment.”

He sums up the three clear principles he wants this economy to operate on:
• Positive contribution to flourishing
• Provision of decent livelihoods
• Low material and energy throughput

And his main economic levers are:
• Structural transition to service-based activities
• Investment in ecological assets,
• And, working time policy as a stabilizing mechanism.

You can see why UK bureaucrats might have filed this in the

"too-hard" file. It says: go back to the drawing board, forget everything learnt in Economics 101 and thereafter, and create an entirely new model for the economy. All previous assumptions must be re-examined. That’s a tough assignment, and as Porritt said at the launch, bureaucrats usually want to know what they can do about a report on Monday.

But while Jackson clearly doesn’t have – and doesn’t claim to have – all of the answers, he got a start here of an entirely new thinking as well as some practical suggestions. For example: if you hear someone proclaiming an innovation as great for productivity, ask questions (and if it means workers won’t spend 10 hours a day breaking rocks, great, but if it means a machine replaces a person doing a decent, proper job, ask why? then ask again).

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Theories on the Fall of the Roman Empire, No 211 – and not a bad one

December 28, 2009 – 10:12 pm

Is it possible to write about the fall of the West Roman Empire without making it a lesson about your own day? Since at least Gibbon, that’s been the reason for covering the final centuries of Rome’s pre-eminence, and Adrian Goldsworthy’s The Fall of the West is no exception.

What does make Goldsworthy’s work different is that he attempts to tell the story of the empire in the third, fourth, fifth and sixth centuries, then draw the conclusions, rather than allow the explanation to infuse through the whole text, as was the case in one book I’ve recently reviewed, where the overconsumption of energy was the theory of choice.

Goldsworth has thus produced a rather old-fashioned narrative history – emperor follows emperor, usurper knocks out usurper, and the swirl around. That has its strengths – if you want to get the latest historical thinking on, say, the “end of Roman” Britain, Goldsworthy is drawing on the latest archaeology and thinking.

He’s clearer than many in setting out the structure of late 4th-century Roman Britain, “a diocese under a vicarius based in London and responsible to the praetorian prefect. The diocese was subdivided into either four or five provinces…The Comes Britanniae commanded a force of comitatenses consisting of three infantry and six cavalry units…The Dux Britanniarum commanded units of limitanei, mostly stationed in the north and including the garrisons of some named forts on Hadrian’s Wall. Finally, there was the ‘Count of the Sexon Shore’ controlling limitanei based around the east and south coasts.”

On the vexed subject of the “Saxon invasion” (did it happen? did it involve significant numbers? were the existing populations pushed aside?) he’s sensibly agnostic, noting that the academic fashion has swung, probably too far, towards denial. He challenges recent interpretations of “mixed” Saxon and Briitish cemeteries, noting “considerable caution needs to be used before assuming that a particular object automatically denotes someone of a particular race. Brooches were both functional and valuable. ..In the end brooches and belt buckles were there to hold up clothes more than to express identity.”

This section is relatively analytical – and addresses one of those questions that history can’t help worrying at – but the careful narrative approach in other sections can get rather monotonous and repetitive.

To take just a couple of pages: In March 238 the proconsul of Africa was proclaimed emperor, in resistance to the newish Maximus , who was too preoccupied in the west to deal with an attack by Ardashir a couple of years before. The Senate in Rome rejoiced, and accepted the usurper, but within weeks the governor of the neighbouring province had defeated his son and co-emperor in battle, and Gordian hanged himself. But the Senate couldn’t go backwards, so selected two of their number, Balbinus and Pupienus, as co-emperors, and they were immediately forced to co-opt a third, Gordian’s young grandson, aged just 13. Maximus got bogged down in fighting, then his troops killed him, but they didn’t fancy the two senators either, and soon killed them too, leaving the teenager as titular head of the empire, to be married to the daughter of his Praetorian Prefect Caius Timesitheus, effective ruler. He died at age 19, either at the hands of the Persians, or his own troops after a defeat by the eastern enemy.

It might make a good board game, but it is hard to get interested in this fast-moving, if shortlived, cast of characters, about which we learn little. So while as a reference this is a handy book, it wouldn’t be the best thing to take on a long train trip when seeking an engaging read.

So what of its grand theory? Well as you might expect from a narrative historian chiefly concerned with political history, it concerns political structures. Goldsworthy argued that the marginalisation of the senatorial class in the third century meant that the possible range of emperors, or usurpers, was greatly widened, and emperors had to fear practically anyone who got some sort of influence over some troops.
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Britblog Roundup No 251

December 7, 2009 – 12:45 am

Here we are again – another week, another crop of political debates.

But let’s leave those for a while: start with some almost forgotten, frequently glossed-over history – Philip on English Buildings has been looking into the Sheela na gig at Kilpeck, Herefordshire. And yes, I might be a little biased in putting that first, since I was writing about them back in 2004, (but at least it proves I can truly wear a “veteran blogger” tag!)

Stay on architectural decoration, Ornamental Passions has been taking a close look at the frieze decorating the Saville Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue, now the Odeon cinema, Covent Garden. Walking right around the building: parts one, two, three, four, five. What you get is a complete snapshot history of theatre.

And while we’re on institutions frozen in stone, here seems an appropriate place to point you towards Two Doctors questions for the Anglican church.

Flowing on (sorry!), we get to an introduction to the world of the narrowboat from Bristling Badger.

We can’t, however leave politics as in the bash and stoush stuff for too long, so let’s start with Charles Crawford’s interesting take on the Chilcot inquiry: is the inner, inner circle, dumping on Blair’s inner circle? And what should we think about that?

Staying traditionally political, Dodgblogium has a short and snappy take on the non-dom Zac Goldsmith.

Then getting down to street-level politics, Jim from The Daily (Maybe) was taking his (practical) hat (and coat) to the streets of London for The Wave, and summing up the subsequent reporting.

Staying with practical politics, Matt Sellwood looks at the issues raised by a community squat in Hackney.

And then hit the rails as Jonathan Calder on Liberal England considering one (of the many) problems with privatised train companies.

Meanwhile Kate on Cruela blogs points out the incredibly obvious problem with a police anti-rape campaign. Really, in the 21st century, blaming the victim? and Jo on A Week is a Long Time, looks at the latest abortion figures. Where is the role of men being included in this debate? she asks.

And on The F-Word, Laurie Penny says transphobic feminism makes no sense.

And on Go Litel Blog Go, Backwatersman is considered about the character of Bercow. No, not the Labour one…

Also, David Herzig guest blogs, on Is there more to life than shoes, about the Swiss minaret referendum. And Prodicus offers his graphical take on the climate change debate.

Okay, enough of the politics, back to real life: Random Acts of Reality explains ambulance life as it really, really is. Not great!

And The Magistrate takes on the blogging policeman on the issue of sentencing. This is what you call seriously lively debate.

Then, sorry, this is London, but an issue of public information: where has the London Evening Standard gone? Diamond Geezer finds there are heaps in some parts of the capital, and none in other parts.

But to finish off, let’s have some Christmas cheer – and Ruscombe Green reports that Stroud started the festive season in fine style, even if it was all a bit much for an old canal horse.

You might find in the roundup that I’m linking to places I wouldn’t usually link: that’s the rules of hosting, you take the nominations as you find them, and leave your readers to draw their own conclusions. Not always a comfortable rule, but, I think, a good one. More on the roundup.

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Doggerland – romance and fearful possibilities

November 29, 2009 – 10:44 am

Most cultures around the world have a Noah’s ark-style story – of a great inundation that consumes the whole planet. One rare exception is the eastern parts of the British Isles. Which is odd, because the archaeologists have recently established that just off the east coast of England there was a great lost land, an area greater than the existing UK, you might even call it a culture, which disappeared completely beneath the waves only around 6,000 years before today. One explanation for this loss might be that the repeated invasions of the east coast in the historical period disrupted regional myth cycles, in contrast to the continuity of Celtic cultures of the west coast.

But one effect of this historical disruption is clear: it makes Europe’s Lost World: The Rediscovery of Doggerland particularly fascinating and gripping – slightly odd really, when you consider that this has the dry-sounding subtitle of “Research Report No 160 Council of British Archaeology”.

You’d have, however, to be a very dry sort indeed, not to be captured by the tale of the gradual unfolding of knowledge of an entire lost world in Europe – a world that the geological surveys of oil companies and pipe-laying firms has enabled the experts to map, and the archaeologists to reconstruct. Some of the seismic data is a bit on the technical side; some of the images (and the council deserves credit for producing such a finely and voluminously illustrated as well as accessible monograph) are only for the expert to really judge, but they do bring alive this story of a lost – and possibly one day recoverable – culture.

The name Doggerland comes from the Dogger Bank, a relatively shallow area in the North Sea from which fishermen have for decades been dredging artefacts – including some finely carved tools and weapons.

Europe’s Lost World takes the unusual step for something labelled a “research report” of following the gradual unfolding of knowledge of Doggerland, starting with the work early in the 20th century of Clement Reid, who in a little book called Submerged Forests identified the potential archaeological value of buried lands: “In them the successive stages are separated and isolated instead of being mingled.”

The report then goes on to look at what is known from the land of the sites of the period – the Mesolithic, the intermediate culture that it says has traditionally been neglected between the deep mysteries of the Paleolithic and the excitement of great change into farming of the Neolithic. The authors here make a now fashionable claim that at least some of the peoples of the time were considerably less nomadic, and built grander structures, than has traditionally been thought.

They look in detail at the site of Thatcham in Berkshire, centred around a hut about 6m in diameter. (It is impossible now due to erosion to know whether this was solitary or part of the group.) “All the evidence suggested that the house had been maintained and rebuilt on several occasions by a family group, perhaps six or eight people, and that it served several generations of hunters… burnt bone fragments included wild pig, fox and, possibly, a domestic dog. Marine shellfish, particularly dog whelks, were also present on the site.”
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