Category Archives: Books

Books Environmental politics

An American view of the disappearance of the bees – more telling than it knows

July 27, 2011 – 12:46 pm

A shorter version was first published on Blogcritics

I was sitting on a terrace in Burgundy, watching a dozen honeybees bustling amid the lavender bushes, when I decided that The Beekeeper’s Lament had to be the next book to come out of the “to read” pile. While the hills of the Morvan National Park, with a mixture of forests and pasture lands, often still divided by hedges, bear little resemblance to the extensive, pesticide-soaked monocultures that characterise American agriculture. But now bees are in trouble everywhere around the globe, and it is a problem for all of us. Indeed, that’s partly why I planted those lavender bushes.

The problem is known as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) – at least that is the latest, it becomes clear, of a long line of problems that have been haunting beekeepers. The most commonly suggested cause, and certainly still very much in the frame, are neonicotinoid insecticides – used on more than 150 different crops, and in pet flea collars. Genetically modified corn, mobile phone masts, and many other causes have also been suggested. Often, also, traditional pests and diseases of bees – the most destructive of which is the varoa mite – have also been blamed. As Nordhaus amusingly notes, it’s also been claimed as an early sign of Judgement Day – those industrious bees being the first to rise to heaven.

But the explanation that seems to be gaining increasing traction is more complex. Nordhaus notes that CCD seems to share with HIV/AIDS the fact that the condition sees otherwise healthy hives fall prey to conditions laid usually resist -something is weakening the bees. This is not thought to be one single infective agent or other single cause, but fact that these are simply being worked too hard, moved around too much, exposed to too many pesticides, even in tiny doses, facing too difficult weather conditions. But above all, Nordhaus suggests, the of being fed too limited diet – “suffering from the same kind of bad nutrition afflicting humans who eat processed junk food. … Sprawl, mono crops, flawless lawns, weedless gardens, and a general decline in pasture land of make hard for bees to find a suitable diversity of nectar and pollen sources. Bees, it turns out, need natural places.” (p. 249) (And bats, which have ecological similarities to be bees, also suffering hugely –particularly from mysterious “white nose syndrome”.)

One of the things this book makes clear is just how complex and sophisticated bees are. Here’s Nordhaus’s accounts of the production of a pound of honey – which will take a hive a day. “The 50,000 or 80,000 bees who live together in a hive at the height of summer will travel a collective 55,000 miles and visit more than 2 million flowers. … One worker will visit 50 to 100 flowers on each trip from the hive, in the process collecting and dispersing pollen from flower to flower, allowing the plants it touches to reproduce.” (p. 235)

Yet American beekeepers are frequently paid less than the cost production for their honey, and what is sold as honey can be up to 80% corn syrup. Regulation has been judged to be a low priority. (p. 241) And here’s a warning, imports of Chinese honey were banned in 2002, as result of antibiotic contamination, yet curiously after that the top 12 honey-exporting countries now export more than total home production. Few checks are made. (p. 243)
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Books Environmental politics Politics

Control the car and the supermarkets: a recipe for healthier individuals and a happier society

July 3, 2011 – 5:55 pm

(A shorter version of this article was published on Blogcritics)

It’s all too obvious now that in many ways developed societies have lost their way. Climate change, economic crisis, huge inequality of which part is misery for some and fearful uncertainty for many more, many hundreds of millions going hungry while obesity is cutting lifespans in a growing number of cases – economies clearly did not, as Keynes and others thought after the Second World War they would, reach a state of sensible material sufficiency, then look to improve quality of life rather than quantity of stuff.

So where did it all go so horribly wrong? Ian Roberts (writing with Phil Edwards) in The Energy Glut: The Politics of Fatness in an Overheating World has at least part of the answer. He ties together the building of societies and economies around the needs of fossil-fuel powered transport to the rise in obesity and removal of almost all physical activity from many Western individuals’ lives, combined with a huge toll or death and injury on developing, and developed, countries’ roads, and the rise of the supermarkets and foods rich in calories and low in nutrients. He’s very firm that obesity is not an individual problem – simply a reflection of the fact that all of us have got steadily fatter, which has of course pushed the upper end of the distribution curve well into “obese”.

It’s a book that contains many shocking statistics.

* Globally road crashes kill 1,000 children a day and disable many times more. And that’s simply “accidents” – there’s also the cardiac and respiratory diseases road pollution causes, and of course climate change.
* The WHO reports that expenses arising from road injuries cost poor countries around 2% of GDP – nearly $100bn, twice what they receive in aid.
* In England and Wales there were 205 road deaths of children pedestrians between 2001 and 2003 – and children from the lowest social group were five times more likely to die than the highest (which the authors say is simply because the dangers of the roads have driven everyone who can afford it into a car – every step of which of course makes the roads more dangerous).
* In the UK between 1975 and 2003 average miles walked per person fell from 255 to 192; cycled from 51 to 34 (and the authors say these figures would already have dropped hugely from only a couple of decades earlier). (p. 39)
* Shopping accounts for about 20% of car journeys in the UK. (p. 56)
* America’s “security costs” for “defending” petroleum supplies from the Middle East are estimated at between $100 billion and $200bn annually.
* In 1932 General Motor bought up America’s tram system in order to shut it down.
* The overall risk of death from all causes among people who cycle to work is between 10 and 30% lower than for those who drive to work (p. 108)
* English composer Sir Edward Elgar took up cycling in his 40s and cycled up to 40 miles a day around the lanes of Herefordshire (used as a sign of how readily people took on distances considered almost heroic today) (p. 111)

So what to do? One clear action in the developed world is that we need to start to cut away at the social dominance of the supermarket (and for the sake of our farmers there are plenty of other reasons for doing this), and their car-demanding, car-encouraging and obesity-encouraging system.

The authors report that in the UK supermarkets account for 93% of food spending and (as of 2007 and growing fast) 41% of fuel sales. And more than three quarters of British households do their main food shopping by car. “Supermarkets sell energy, either as food or petrol. … as people move less, all things being equal, they tend to eat less. .. we could think of supermarkets as simply the retail arm of the petro-nutritional complex. Supermarkets don’t care how they make profits, whether by selling us food or petrol, but either way it makes us fat…[and] fat populations consume considerably more food than lean populations. It has been estimated that the amount of food energy consumed by a ‘fat’ population (average BMI 29) is around 20 per cent more than that consumed by a ‘normal’ weight population (average BMI 25). The heavier our bodies become, the harder and more unpleasant it is to move about in them and the more dependent we become on our cars” (p. 55-6)

And there’s been a huge change in the balance of food types. Not only has food, relative to other expenses, never been cheaper, (UK household spending percentage has fallen from 20% in 1970 to 10% in 2002), but it is energy-dense, fats and sugars, that have fallen most, while fruit, vegetables and grain have fallen much less. And sugary drinks have fallen in price most of all, and now more than three-quarters of school children drink at least one fizzy drink a day (unsurprising when they see on average 10 food industry adverts per hour of TV). “North American children are drowning in liquid calories. And the rest of the world is jumping to join them Coca-Cola boasts 1.5 billion consumer servings a day.” (p. 59)

Another action needed is to stop the subsidising of the motor and associated industries. As the authors say: “Although most of the world’s population will never own a car, road building is invariably funded by public funds, in rich and poor countries alike. Road transportation is 95% oil-dependent, and ensuing a steady supply of cheap oil also involves massive public expenditure. Then there is the automobile industry…(with huge subsidies and bailouts).” (p. 68)

It’s here that the book is likely to be most controversial, even among those likely to broadly back its conclusions. It says that there’s no evidence to show that roads encourage economic development, while noting that congestion hampers economic output and the poor bear the majority of the negative costs of road building. (p. 73) The only real benefit lies, the authors say, is in profits for big, often foreign, companies. What Africa (with which it is chiefly concerned in this context) needs is not fancy roads for cars, but simple solid paths for bicycles – and the bicycles to use on them.

And it’s also clear we need to curb the lobbying power and influence of the motor industry. Roberts tells the astonishing tale of the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile’s Commission for Global Road Safety, which has an industry members — oils, tyres and car making among their origins — and as patron Prince Michael of Kent, former racing driver and member of the British Racing Drivers Club. It’s keen on pedestrian education, Roberts says, decide decades of research showing this to be wholly ineffective, as well as sending the message that “road space belongs to drivers and pedestrians and cyclists must look out or die”. (p. 83) Driver training too, has a negative impact on safety (p. 124).

But above all, the message that Roberts wants to deliver is that we need to go back to bicycle and walking as the primary form of individual transport (while also improving mass transit systems). The arguments are on both climate change/environmental and health grounds.

First health: “Take a 50-year-old office worker who drives 4.5km to work every day, a distance that is easily manageable by bicycle. If he switches from driving to cycling for 90% of these trips, at the end of the first year he could have shed up to 5 kilos of adipose tissue and will enjoy a 20 to 40% reduction in the risk of premature death and a 30% reduction in the risk of type 2 diabetes. He will also have better mental health and improved fitness.” (p. 108) (And if you think it will take longer, note that the average car speed in London is 11kph – for bicycles it is 10kph – p. 110)

But conversely, in the developing world, cycles (rather than walking) would reduce calorie consumption and thus improve health: “The lion’s share of transport in Africa is in rural areas, on unpaved paths and tracks, carrying crops from the fields to the villages…. (70-80% by women) carrying headloads of crops, typically weighing 30kg or more over an average distance of about 5km… A 2m-wide unpaved bike trail would cost less than 10% of the cost of a 6m-wide rural road for motor vehicle use…. One study in the Makete District of Tanzania found that, whereas building a feeder road saved households 120 hours per year, investing in a bicycle saved the family 200 hours a year…. a ‘before and after study’ of subsidised bicycle provision in Uganda found a range of beneficial effects, including more frequent trips to market and health-care facilities and increased household income.” (p. 104)

Second, there’s the argument of quality of life. Cars and trucks destroy community life, removing people (particularly children) from the streets. And above all, there’s climate change – cars simply cannot continue to rule.

This is a book every council planner, every councillor, should read. It’s not without faults. The writing has a hasty feel, as does the editing – it sometimes harms its argument by quoting different figures for the same facts in different places and is extremely uneven in its treatment of units of measure; some parts of the text appear to fit rather awkwardly with the rest (no doubt cooperative writing isn’t easy). Nevertheless, I can pretty much guarantee that if you read this, there’ll be at least one gripping fact you’ll continue to quote for years to come.

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Books Women's history

A classic of Australian women’s history

May 29, 2011 – 10:24 pm

First published on Blogcritics

The some 200 convict women who sailed to Sydney Cove on the Lady Julian might be considered the foremothers of the Australian nation – sent not only because Britain’s jails in the 1780s were packed beyond sense with women left without economic options by the return of tens of thousands of servicemen from the American War of Independent, and forced on the street by Prime Minister William Pitt’s tax on maidservants over the age of 16, but also because the penal colony’s founding governor had asked for a balancing of the sexes after the hugely male-dominated First Fleet.

Yet we don’t even know now exactly how many women were on the ship, or all of their names, but thanks for the classic work of popular, but very well-done historical reporting in The Floating Brothel we know some of their stories, and even for those whose identities are lost, have a sense of what their lives had been like, and how they might have ended up sentenced to seven years (or life) in Botany Bay.

Rees is a sympathetic but realistic guide to the lives of these women, so far removed from most of ours. They were mostly young, had spent much of their lives with no certainty of where their next meal was coming from, had often been brutalised into violence and thieving in a world where this was normal behaviour, and when placed in a situation where a sailor might choose them as a “wife” for many months of a voyage into the unknown would have little choice but to accept, or indeed to compete for the “privilege” of the extra protection and rations that it might offer them.

She’s also done a prodigious amount of research on the lives of the more exceptional women – almost by definition the ones’ whose lives are likely to be better documented, from “the most flamboyant” among them, Elizabeth Barnsley, a shoplifter who “stole from the best addresses”, and had been caught “lifting £6 worth of muslin from Hoggkinson, Warrener and Percival of Bond Street, to the pathetic 19-year-old Sarah Dorset, who had eloped from the home of her good family, but “had not been with the villain six weeks” before he abandoned her and “she was forced by want upon the streets”.

For the account of the voyage, Rees is heavily dependent on the memoirs, dictated 30 years later in Edinburgh, by the ship’s steward and cooper Jon Nicol, a curiously modern if rather pathetic figure, who fell in love with the convict Sarah Whitelam, and spent much of his life trying to get back to Sydney Cove, where they’d been forced to part when the Lady Julian sailed for Canton, not knowing that Sarah, no doubt very sensibly, had married another man the day he sailed out of Sydney Cove, which perhaps shows a lot about how most of the women regarded the liaisons they were forced into on the voyage and after.
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Books Environmental politics

“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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Books Politics

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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Books Feminism

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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