Category Archives: Books

Books Environmental politics History

Crow Country – an introduction to the life of a complex, intelligent and widespread species, the rook

October 2, 2011 – 9:55 pm

I confess I’m not really sure if they’re ravens, carrion crow or rooks — I haven’t got close enough to use my excellent RSPB bird books to distinguish them — but I do know that in a valley I regularly visit in the Morvan in Burgundy, there’s lots of one or more crow species, and they seem to interact in interesting ways, forming, particularly in winter, quite large groups that swoop around at dusk, raucously dominating the neighbourhood.

So when I saw Mark Cocker’s Crow Country, it was clearly a book that I’d not only read, but read in France. Which is what I’ve just done, and it’s left me with a strong desire to learn more about my local corvids, because I’m sure there’s a lot to be discovered.

The fact that Cocker describes himself as a “nature writer” did give me some pause — the more literary end of nature writing tends to leave me cold — but although some passages of Crow Country were a bit too far down the poetical side for my taste, overall I found it a fascinating account of the natural history of rooks and jackdaws in Britain, and gave me plenty of information about their French cousins.

The key line of the book is Cocker’s attempt to understand rook behaviour, and particularly their spending part of winter in large, sometimes enormous, mass roosts. He starts with their rookeries (breeding centres), the reasons for which are well established.

“In the nesting season, the abundant supply of worms is the key to the rook’s success. The onset of the breeding cycle in earliest spring is timed to coincide with the maximum availability of prey for the chicks. But the food items aren’t spread evenly, they’re clustered randomly…It’s thought that rooks have evolved to share resources and capitalise on the shifting and temporary abundances by pursuing a feeding strategy of follow-my-leader…. Each bird discovering a food hotspot faces the disadvantage of competition from neighbours, but it is more than compensated by the opportunity, on all occasions when it is less successful, to share the good fortune uncovered by others.” (p. 75)

That’s from late February to June, the nesting season, but the rest of the year, Cocker gradually concludes, they are roosting, often split between a late summer/early autumn roost and a later one – the latter reflecting a large concentration of birds. Roosts are usually in the middle of woods, even though these are birds that feed in grasslands (they’ve been recorded flying up to 32km to feeding grounds for the day – “as the crow flies”!), and he concludes that protection from weather, uninterrupted nights (they’re usually in very calm places) and perhaps to some degree predators (although there’s few of these now) , are an important part of the roosting behaviour.

But the biggest advantage for rooks in these huge gatherings is, he concludes, like in rookeries, the spread of information. It is, however, more complicated than that. In the Yare Valley roost he studied, numbers ranged from 10,000 to 40,000 at the year’s peak, numbers depending to a large degree on continental European visitors, who leave snow-covered territories for warmer western wintering grounds.

“For non-resident naive individuals the primary value might lie in following resident birds out to otherwise unknown feeding sites. The resident population may thus enjoy a dominant status in the roost and occupy more central locations in the trees. They can monopolise the best perches for thermal protection or defence against predators.” (p. 164.)

It’s well known that corvids are intelligent – the Caledonian crows having shocked researchers by inventing tools – but Cocker also finds real world examples. There’s the M4 rooks who’ve learnt to get to waste at the bottom of bin bags by gradually tugging them up the side of their frame, holding the bulked plastic under one foot, and those birds who’ll bury food for later consumption. (For jays this is standard, for rooks seemingly more learned behaviour.) So we learn in the Aberdeenshire vernacular a self-seeded tree is “craw(rook)-sown”. (p. 57)

Cocker’s also interested in history – both human, rook and how they intersect. He recounts tales of rooks acting as vulture-like scavengers, on sheep and dog carcasses, and infers an “ancient and resonant scene”.

“Our Mesolithic ancestors were accustomed to place deceased relatives on special excarnation platforms where natural predators would pick the bones clean, before the remains were taken to be buried in a barrow or cairn. I can just imagine the rook flock that chanced upon the same easy pickings, smothering the raised corpse in a blanket of dark wings and excited calls”. (p. 59)

But that’s not standard fare – Cocker explains it is mainly insects and arthropods in the upper topsoil, particularly worms, which explains their distribution as a bird of pastures and cropland. (Although they’ll also eat small mammals, eggs and grain.) They stab 5-6cm into the ground, then uses Zirkeln, open-billed probing, to find their prey. Forest is not for them.

“They occupy vast swathes of the Mongolian and Manchurian grasslands, right through to the outskirts of Beijing and the shores of the Yellow Sea. To the west they’ve conquered the immense oceanic expanses of Russia and Asian grassland from about 160E to a point half a world away on the Baltic coast. …Rooks were dependent on the westward spread of stock grazing and cereal agriculture … to make their own entry into Europe. So when you next pass a rookery remember to stop and listen. Amond the spring-summoning cacophony you’ll hear the faintest echo of a Neolitic axe.” (p61)

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Books Feminism

Astell, Cavendish, Behn, Philips: Women fighting political, scientific and literary exclusion

October 1, 2011 – 10:04 pm

A shorter version of this article was first published on Blogcritics.

A holiday (finally!) and the chance to read a few books on subjects I’m interested in that have no practical use whatsoever. First up was Early Modern Englishwomen Testing Ideas, edited by Jo Wallwork and Paul Salzman.

I understand that a collection of loosely linked academic essays in a monograph is not everyone’s idea of holiday reading, but ranging through Mary Astell, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Katherine Philips and Eliza Haywood, it covers a range of 17th and 18th-century women on which I’d like to know more. And this is an interesting period in women’s history – as women try (albeit unsuccessfully) to resist the exclusion from the public sphere that was one of the chief characteristics of the Enlightenment (indeed Jo Wallwork argues here in her Margaret Cavendish paper was a central part of its project) and which was to continue for a couple of centuries more.

As you’d expect from a range of academic papers they range widely in jargon-intensity, interest to the general reader and my favourites might not be yours.

But I did particularly take to Jacqueline Broad’s account of Mary Astell’s political spat with Charles Davenant, an uncritical proponent of Machiavelli as a political adviser. Broad shows how Astell (who while she was one of the early proponents of what has been seen as a women’s university is also a Tory and a religious enthusiast with whom I have little natural sympathy) showed that Davenant had managed to uncritically give Queen Anne entirely contradictory advice on the subject of how the ruler should manage faction.

She also skewered him very successfully on Broad’s account on inconsistency in his view of Elizabeth I – Davenant both says that Elizabeth “had a Mind above her Sex”, and that “For the Good Government of a free country, such as this Kingdom, no more Skill, no more Policies are requisite than what may be comprehended by a Woman, as was seen in the Instance of Queen Elizabeth” (p. 18). In contrast, Astell says that prudence, “the capacity to discern between good and bad in one’s practical deliberations” is a chief political virtue, and for Queen Anne “there’s nothing either Wise, or Good, or Great that is above Her Sex”. (p. 21)

I also enjoyed Wallwork’s discussion of the well documented visit by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, to the Royal Society. The modern author uses this as a way of exploring the way in which the men of the Royal Society used the exclusion of women from their space as a way of defining what they weren’t, as well as what they were. (Not a lot has changed in modern science…women were only admitted to the Royal Society in 1945 under threat of legal action.)
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Books Politics

Owen Jones’s Chavs, a true must-read

August 7, 2011 – 5:33 pm

A shorter version was published on Blogcritics.

You couldn’t open a British newspaper last month without seeing a columnist referring to Owen Jones’s Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class. Influential it certainly has been, and now that I’ve laid my hands on a copy, it isn’t hard to see why.

First, it serves as a solid primer of the economic dispossession of the past 30 years that has seen working class communities, particularly in traditional manufacturing areas robbed of most of the things that make life living – robbed of decently paid, steady jobs, robbed of the chance to see their children and grandchildren living near them through a lack of housing, and robbed most particularly of hope – of their long-maintained communal aspiration to see the lives of everyone in the community improve together. There’s one figure here that really should be trumpeted from the rooftops: “Nearly two-thirds of the nation’s wealth went on wages back in 1973. Today’s it’s only a little over half.” (p. 157)

And the fact from one survey found that four out of ten middle-income workers felt their occupation had a lower status than their father’s, while only 29 per cent felt it was higher. “Lower middle class” workers, clerical and administrative workers and supervisors, now have lower incomes, and lower status, than the skilled working class of one generation before. (p. 159) Yet, Jones quotes the New Economics Foundation study that found the real value of many lowly-paid occupations is high, while many high-paid cost us a great deal.

This is Jones’s summary of the Thatcher government: “For the first time in generations, it was a blatant government aim to shovel as much money in the direction of the rich as possible.In the first Budget, top bracket taxes of 83 per cent on earned income and 98 per cent on unearned income were slashed to 60 per cent, and corporation tax went from 52 to 35 pre cent. In 1988 the then-chancellor Nigel Lawson went even further: the top rate of tax was reduced to 40 per cent. … the reality of this part of Thatcher’s class war is that it shifted tax burden from the rich to everyone else.” And while in 1979 the average rate of tex was 31.1 per cent, by 1996 that had risen to 37.7 per cent – while the rich kept so much more. (p. 63)

And this book is also good on both the economic and human sides of the huge shift in the British economy from manufacturing to service industries, particularly retailing, which is now the second-biggest employer in the country, with nearly three million people, more than one in 10 workers, nearly two-thirds of them women, employed in shops, a threefold increase since 1980, and half earn less than £7 an hour, while since 2007 25% have seen their pay slashed, a third had their hours cut and a fifth lost benefits.

Yet, as Jones points out, the “Chavtown” website (no, I’ not going to link to it) defines working in a shop as one sign of “chavdom”, even though working in shops was not so long ago considered quite a genteel, middle-class occupation. He follows the life and story of Mary Cunnningham, the now 55-year-old daughter of a miner, who has spent her career in supermarkets. She says: “When I started, you could have a little bit of time with a customer, and get to know your customer, you had your regulars that came to you because you had that little bit of rapport with them. Now it’s get on with the job, you have to have targets… you’re supposed to get through so many customers per hour.” And Mary notes how workers are vulnerable to bullying from managers, and customers. (p. 143)

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Books Environmental politics Politics

Touching on conservatives and greens

August 6, 2011 – 12:04 pm

Made a quick whip through Kieron O’Hara’s Conservatism, a chance encounter at the London Library that left me intrigued by its “green” chapter.

It is very explicitly a book about “small c” conservatism – excluding and rejecting all traces of neoliberal economic theory, so a long way from a lot of what we encounter in practical politics.

There’s a couple of things O’Hara identifies as key to this conservatism – one is that knowledge and data, particularly that on which governments make decisions, are limited and uncertain. “Massive government spending based on little or no idea of whether it would do any good: a scandal? [referring to recent stiumulus spending] Possibly, but goverments rarely understand the effects of their actions.This is a dramatic example, but a common type of deficit in knowledge.” (p. 24)

The second is what he calls the change principle “because the current state of society is typically undervalued, and because the effects of innovations cannot be known fully in advance, then social change (a) must always risk destroying beneficial institutions and norms and, (b) cannot be guaranteed to achieve the aims for which it was implemented. It therefore follows that societies should be risk-averse with respect to social change and the burden of proof placed on the innovator, not his or her opponents. It also follows that change, when it does come, should ideally be (a) experimental (b) reversible where possible and (c) rigorously evaluated before the next incremental step.” (p. 88)

Do how does this play out in the environment? Proving that conservatives can have a sense of humour, O’Hara first offers this: “Temperamentally, environmentalists and conservatives are miles apart; while the Tory sups champagne at White’s the green annoys nothing so much as creating a new type of compost. They move in different circles and have different enemies (often each other). Yet I shall argue… that, both philosophicaly and programtically, conservatism is the best-placed ideology for defending our environment.” (p. 273)
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Books Feminism

The must-read feminist book of the summer – it lives up to the hype

August 1, 2011 – 10:27 pm

A shorter version was published on Blogcritics

If you move in feminist circles, there’s really no choice this summer – you have to read Caitlin Moran’s How To Be A Woman: otherwise, you won’t be able to keep up with the conversations. And it’s not hard to see why it has made a splash – it covers all of the usual issues: body image, harassment, and the general difficulties of being a female teenager in an in-your-face, often laugh-out-loud funny, manner – how an all-women friendship group is likely to talk down the pub just before closing time.

And broadly I’d agree with the hype – if you’ve got a 15-year-old daughter, or know one, I’d want to make sure she read it. Given the nature of 15-year-olds, you probably can’t just give it to her – hide it on the back row of the top shelf of books beside The Joy of Sex; she’s sure to find it. Although if she’s already read Puberty Blues she’s going to recognise the genre.

There were bits of the book that really left me thinking yes, you’ve nailed it – really exposed something not much recognised. Particularly on eating disorders. “Overeating, or comfort eating, is the cheap, meek option for self-satisfaction, and self-obliteration. You get all the temporary release of drinking, fucking or taking drugs, but without – and I think this is the important bit – ever being left in a state where you can’t remain responsible and cogent. In a nutshell, then, by choosing food as your drug – sugar highs, or the deep, soporific calm of carbs, the Valium of the working classes – you can still make the packed lunches, do the school run, look after the baby, pop in on your mum and then stay up all night with an ill five-year-old – something that isn’t an option if you’re caning off a gigantic bag of skunk , or regularly climbing into the cupboard under the stairs and knocking back quarts of Scotch. Over-eating is the addiction of choice of carers, and that’s why it’s come to be regarded as the lowest-ranking of all the addictions.” (p. 117)

She’s also very solid and sensible on plastic surgery – even “good” plastic surgery, that makes the operee look just amazingly well-preserved for their age (“women living in fear of aging, and pulling painful and expensive tricks to hide it from the wold”) is still not defensible (p. 294); and abortion and the need for honestness and openness (she’s had an abortion, and a miscarriage, and says there’s a similarity in both – her body or her mind “had decided this baby was not to be” – p. 277) and the fact that women still find it hard to say they don’t want to have children (because of social reactions), even though many don’t want to, and those who have had will, when honest, admit that they regret it. And on the ludicrousness of the continuing existence of high heels.
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Books Feminism Women's history

Millicent Fawcett’s campaigning – not much has changed in far too many ways!

August 1, 2011 – 8:38 pm

Reading The Women’s Victory – and After: Personal Reminiscences, 1911-1918 by Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1920), it’s hard not to think that little has changed in the campaigning world. Fawcett was president of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, and this little memoir is a pretty well blow-by-blow account of the final push from the non-militant wing of the suffragist movement. (They were, you might say, today’s Friends of the Earth and the suffragettes, with their militant tactics, the Sea Shepherd of the time.)

The parliamentary tactics, the lobbying, the enlisting of parliamentary supporters to convert waverers, the plotting to find ways to disarm the enemies of your cause, and the betrayals coming from those who’d promised support but found excuses to back down might come straight from an account of any similar efforts today.

As today, that often involved meetings with people with whom you had little sympathy – and they the same for you. Fawcett is delightful on the subject of her first meeting with the Chancellor Asquith. “We had with us Miss Emily Davies, the founder of Girton college; Lady Strachey, wife of the well-known Indian administrator; Miss Frances Sterling; Miss I.O. Ford, and other well-known suffrage leaders from our various societies. While we were still in the waiting-room, I was sent for by myself for a preliminary interview with Mr Asquith’s private secretary. If found him a rather agitated-looking young man, who said: ‘I want you, Mrs Fawcett, to give me your personal word of honour that no member of your deputation will employ physical violence.’ ‘Indeed,’ I replied, ‘you astonish me. I had no idea you were so frightened.’ He instantly repudiated being frightened… As we entered the room, where Mr Asquith was sitting with his back to the light on our right, I observed in the opposite corner on our extreme left a lady I did not know. So I said to the secretary in a clear voice, ‘I give no guarantee for that lady’ I do now know her.’ ‘Oh that,’ he rejoined, and again showed some agitation – that lady is Miss Asquith.’” (p. 17)

There’s also some of the same dilemmas as for today about how far a “non-party” campaigning group should do in backing parties that support it and working against those with which it disagrees. There’s some clear defensiveness in Fawcett’s tone as she describes the decision from 1912, after the Liberals had gone back on plans to include women’s votes in the Government Reform Bill in 1911. “It is interesting now to look back at the NUWSS report in the year 1912, and see the care with which we defined our position. No Government candidate was to be supported, because the Government, under Mr Asquith, had shown the most determined opposition to our enfranchisement. When a Conservative candidate was supported, it was because we deemed this the best way of securing the defeat of a Government candidate; when the Labour candidate was supported, it was made clear that this was done because the Labour Party was the only party which had made women’s suffrage part of its programme, and had, moreover, rendered us the signal service of calling upon its parliamentary representatives to oppose any Franchise Bill which did not include women.” (p. 34)
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