Category Archives: Books

Books Environmental politics

Food – how are we doing?

July 19, 2010 – 11:04 am

I’m currently reading Nature and Power, by Joachim Radkau, which is powerful and very interesting – nothing less than an attempt to set the framework for a mature study of environmental history.

But one fact in it really brought me up short. Before 1945, the vast bulk of the world depended on locally grown foodstuffs – very little was moved much distance at all – when you think about it every town in grain-growing areas of any size had a mill and presumably sold most of its flour more or less locally, and international trade was negligible.

Yet now, we’ve got vast amounts of bulk transports, and huge international transfers. In half a century, and I suspect lots of that change has happened in only the last 30 years or so, there’s been a huge unplanned, unconsidered, unmonitored change in how our most basic need is met.

Now I’ve been reading about the terrible rice crop in Vietnam, dreadful conditions in China, about the drought striking the Russian and central Asian breadbasket, and it has been extremely dry in much of Britain and France … and so I wondered how we are doing.

Looking around led me to this excellent overview from the London Review of Books, and to the US Department of Agriculture June report (which seems pretty sanguine – although some of the weather has happened since then – and it does predict a 7.5m tonne fall in wheat crop), and a very useful FAO summary site.

And today the Guardian reports that speculators are getting heavily into the whole business – just what we all don’t need.

So the short-term answer seems to be “worry”, and the longer-term answer is “be very, very worried”.

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Books Women's history

Theodora – but not quite Theodora

July 7, 2010 – 5:47 pm

First published as Book Review: Theodora: Actress. Empress. Whore. by Stella Duffy on Blogcritics

Theodora, wife of the Emperor Justinian, is perhaps my all-time favourite Roman empress – what’s not to like about a character who even her sworn enemy and libeller credited with saving her husband’s throne with resolute courage. So when I read good reviews of Stella Duffy’s fictional biography, I couldn’t resist.

The fact is, however, that he only major source we have for Theodora’s life is Procopius, who’s far from well inclined towards her in his Secret History, usually taken as his real views. There’s something about the slurs against her – that she was a teenage actress and whore, famous for her pornographic acts with geese – that draw questions in my mind. How is that women whom ancient (and not so ancient) historians never find their female characters just simple, garden-style sex workers, but make them always famous for their perversities?

Still, Duffy has chosen to go with the basic biographical outline provided by Procopius, and for the opening sections of the book, as Theodora is a young girl training for the Byzantine stage, then a star upon it, works pretty well.

We disappear into the back streets and sleazy alleys of Constantinople, its scents and colours, and I’ve no doubt Duffy has done her research on street names and geography. (There’s a bibliography for those who’d like to go further in non-fiction.)

And Duffy seems to capture well the mindset of a girl and a class of women who expect to have to make their own way in the world, through means that they mightn’t always like (not least for the social stigma), but are resigned to. There’s a sense here that she might have caught something real about a pre-Christian morality, although of course Christianity is fast taking hold in Theodora’s world.

The novel works less well, however, when Theodora, now a fugitive thief far from the city she calls home, hooks up with the quasi-heretic Alexandrian Patriarch Timothy, and has, she tells other characters, a not-quite Damacene conversion. She rejects as hysterics the conventional conversion narrative – liked that, for there must have been plenty of such scepticism at the time – but there’s never any real feel that sometime has changed in this character, although Duffy appears to want us to believe that it has.

Once again back in Constantinople, Duffy’s excellent on life inside the royal palace, its claustrophobia and fear, as Theodora winds her way into the life of Justinian, now heir-apparent to the aging Justin. It’s to the author’s credit, too, that she doesn’t try to make this a romance genre novel – strongly resists putting modern conventions of romance into the mind of either character.

But there’s a dryness to all of this, a dutifulness to the storytelling, that doesn’t quite grab the reader in the way this great character of history should.

The novel ends with the coronation – I can feel a sequel coming on, but I’m afraid I won’t be looking out for it. Much better try, I’d suggest, a non-fiction account of Theodora’s life.

(This novel is available in the UK, but appears as yet unavailable in the US.)

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Books Feminism

Sheila Rowbotham at Bookmarks

June 10, 2010 – 10:37 pm

To Bookmarks this evening, to hear Sheila Rowbotham talk about her new book Dreamers of a New Day.

She’s a non-dogmatic but very easy to listen to speaker, and looking forward to reading the book, but at the talk what she had to say about feminism from the Seventies to the present drew most attention, and questions.

She said that in the Seventies feminists had thought things were moving very slowly in progressing their aims, but “we didn’t bargain on the fact that the whole system was going into a completely different phase.. we didn’t believe the whole welfare state would be so radically diminished…we saw things like women in parliament and equal pay as details – but these details proved to be extremely difficult.”

She made another powerful point: “In the Seventies we assumed that once you’d made a gain it would stay there; now we know you can go backwards.”

I asked her about her views on the focus in parts of contemporary feminism on sexualisation, and thought her response was very interesting.

She said that a key issue was that sexuality was being used to sell things, which was not new, but the commodity culture had managed to penetrate into many areas of personal life where it had previously scarcely been. That had affected how young women thought about their bodies – but that had also crossed the gender divide, also affecting men, although in different manifestations.

She suggested that it was the selling, the ultra-capitalism that needed to be tackled as the real issue. “I don’t know how that kind of system will change. It was the Marxist assumption that the working class would be the agent for change, but it didn’t have much to say about selling and environmental issues. The only alternative vision is from the environmental movement.”

Campaigners needed to work out how to express the need to change society without using moralistic disapproval. “It is not the case of convincing small groups – you need to work out how to convince the masses of people now watching the World Cup and buying lots of gadgets.”

But it wasn’t all heavy going – there were plenty of laughs, and I’m looking forward to meeting in the book the turn of the century Mrs Grundy “who argued for women’s right to Turkish baths”.

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Books Feminism Politics Women's history

Want to know why we should get out of Afghanistan?

May 23, 2010 – 10:42 pm

Article first published as Book Review: Raising My Voice: The Extraordinary Story of the Afghan Woman Who Dares to Speak Out by Malalai Joya on Blogcritics.

When I was running for the Green Party in the recent British general election, there was one issue on which I had no doubt how audiences at hustings and meetings would react positively – our call to withdraw British (and NATO) troops from Afghanistan. Surveys show around 70% of the public back that stance, and it was close to 100% of the audiences at hustings.

As I told them, I’d had in the past some doubts about our party’s policy of immediate withdrawal, having been worried about the human rights situation that we’d leave behind, particularly for women. But it was a Human Rights Watch report last year, which found 60-80% of the marriages of Afghan women and girls are forced, and learning that the brave women of Rawa are calling for withdrawal that led me to change my mind.

Having just read the autobiography of Malalai Joya, an outstanding Afghan woman MP, I’m now even more strongly of that view. (It was published in the US as A Woman Among Warlords: The Extraordinary Story of an Afghan Who Dared to Raise her Voice.)

She’s an extraordinarily brave, stalwart – and very, very young! — woman who has dedicated her life, and taken enormous risks, to speak out on human rights in her native land. And she says very clearly – and loudly and publicly in her own land, which led to her being expelled from parliament – that the people the U.S. and its allies are backing in Afghanistan are entirely the wrong people, the old warlords, many of them in her eyes (and those of others) war criminals. And she has no doubt that this foreign occupation can only prolong and amplify her nation’s problems.

Her story is an extraordinary one. Certainly, she was lucky in her parents, particularly her father, a democracy activist who moved his family around Iran and Pakistan as an exile in search for good schooling for them. (He, like the rest of her family, can’t be identified for their own safety – the name ”Joya” is one she adopted to protect them.) There must be many other potential Malalai Joyas in Afghanistan who will never get that essential foundation or confidence.

But there’s no doubt she was exceptional. Noticed as a fine teacher in the refugee camps, at the age of 21 she was sent to found an underground girls’ school in Herat by the Organisation For Promoting Women’s Capabilities. Only three years later, she was appointed to head its work in three provinces, just before 9/11. Under the new regime, despite its resistance, on her account she set up a clinic, orphanage and was able to distribute food supplies.

She must thus have been well known in the poor isolated province that was to send her, a 25-year-old unmarried woman, as a delegate to the 2003 Loya Jurga (national gathering) that was to approve a new constitution. Still standing for office, addressing a room full of women mostly older than herself, in her first “political speech” must have been quite an experience, and her delicate naivete is touching….

“I had a lot to say, and I wanted to cram those few minutes with everything I had ever done in my life, with everything I believed possible for the future, with everything I wanted for the women of Afghanistan. I stressed that I would never compromise with those criminals who had bloodied the history of our country, and that I would always stand up for democracy and human rights.

“As I spoke, I knew that my message must be getting through, because when the other women were speaking, members of the audience were chatting and making noise and not paying much attention. But as I began to speak everyone quietened down and listened. They even clapped a number of times during my speech…"

Yet, worryingly, as she made her way to the Loya Jirga, she gets strong warnings, not just from Afghans, but from UN officials, not to speak so bluntly there. She says: “Most of them seemed sincerely worried. I am not sure, but it is possible that some of them wanted to scare me into silence.”

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Books

The pains of politics, Roman-style

March 14, 2010 – 11:52 am

Robert Harris’s 2007 The Ghost was a political roman a clef par excellence – in its unflattering picture of Tony Blair it piled outlandish premise on outlandish event, until it came to present an astonishing lifelike image of the man.

His latest, Lustrum, is a different beast – still about politics, but the politics of the dying days of the Roman Republic. It’s a well-trodden tale, with Cicero at its heart, and the giant characters of Pompey, Caesar and Cato stalking around – familiar at least in broad outline to anyone with a touch of classical history in their education.

As far as we know, it is true to life in outline, and makes reasonable deductions about the points of controversy, and the motivations of the main characters, so there is at one level no real surprises in the novel, despite its thriller-like opening with a mutilated body.

What it is, above all, is a superbly well-told, gripping tale, presented to us by a classic narrator, Tiro, Cicero’s slave secretary – a man who has his own hopes, dreams and passions, yet whose life is entirely centred around his master’s. He’s that unfashionable thing these days, an honest, intelligent, caring narrator – and the Cicero he, and we, see is true to the nature of the political man that history has handed down to us – intelligent, skilled, marked by the classic flaw of a “New Man” eager to play up his own importance, yet ultimately buffetted and scarred by forces beyond his control.

Politics of our own day, as the latest British polls show, is turbulent, fast-moving and often surprising, but Rome was in another class of mercurial altogether – a single clever speech, a quip even, could swing the Senate, or a huge mob – Prime Minister’s Questions has nothing on this.

Harris is interesting in his treatment of the women characters. In a story primarily set in the Senate, in the senator’s studies and the streets, they can’t be central, and Tiro doesn’t often see them in detail, but the portrait of Terentia, Cicero’s wife, no paragon of virtue, but an intelligent, strong-minded, often independent woman is an attractive one.

In the shadow of The Ghost, it is tempting to read this as yet another view on British politics. Yet if there’s one real lesson from it – which applies very clearly to the present moment, although the first man to which it should apply, Gordon Brown or David Cameron, is not yet known, is the dictum attributed to Enoch Powell – “all political careers end in failure”.

Given that as I write this I’m preparing to stand for the Westminster parliament, I might take that as depressing -but I’d rather take away a slightly different Ciceronian message – that you’ve got to try, and put your heart and soul into the effort. And be prepared to fail…

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Books Politics

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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