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Notes from Eating to Extinction: The World’s Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them

June 21, 2023 – 7:09 pm

p 33 Murnong grows up to 40cm tall. At the tip of its leafless stalk are buds heavy enough to make the plant tilt over into the shape of a shepherd’s hook. In the spring these open out into a spray of petals, so that the plant takes on the look of a big dandelion, as brightly coloured as a child’s drawing of the sun. Below ground, the tubes can grow as round as radishes or as thin as tapering carrots… Left untouched, the tubers grow in tight clumps, but disturbed by digging, they’re easily separated and scattered. This, Gott (Beth, in 1985, a botanist in her 60s who at Monash University dedicated a garden to Aboriginal wild plants – she catalogued more than 1,000 different species, including sleep-inducing dune thistles and silver cones pickled from woorike trees used to make sweet-tasting drinks) realised, was what had made the food so abundant. The actions of Aboriginal gatherers over thousands of years had spread murnong across the landscape.From the journals and diaries, it is clear Aboriginal people were aware of this, which is why some argue they should be considered the world’s earliest farmers.

p. 34 Fire also played a role. The plant needs direct sunlight, and so in the dry season Aboriginal people would set the bush alight. They did this with prevision, knowing exactly when and where to start a fire, and where the fire would end. This cleared away dead vegetation, but left murnong, with its tubers underground, unharmed. Harvesting was also easier on open ground, and the ash left from the fire would fertilise the soil… Murnong can be eaten raw, but Aboriginal cooks also made earth ovens in the ground in which hot stones were used to bake the tubers covered in layers of grass. In the journals, Gott found descriptions of communal feasts … these sweet, nutritious roots were eaten with seeds, shellfish and possum… across the year, Gott calculated, Aboriginal people consumed an average of 2kg of murnong each per day at least. The supply of this food must have seemed never ending.” BEFORe ” sheep started eating their way through the landscape… In the first decades of European settlement, farmers introduced millions of sheep, their numbers doubling every two or three years… the animals loved murnong. The soil was also light and soft, so they could nose their way right through to the roots. They cropped the plants with their teeth and, along with cattle, their hard hooves compacted the soil”

p. 35 “In 1839, just five years after the founding of Melbourne, James Dredge, a Methodist preacher who had spent a year with the Tongeworong people living in a bark hut, recorded in his diary a conversation with an Aboriginal man named Moonin. “Too many jumbuck [sheep] and bulgana [cattle],” Moonin said “plenty eat it myrnyong, all gone the murnong.”

p. 48 “In northeast India, close to the Himalayas and the border with Myanmar, Bangladesh and CHina, is the state of Meghalaya, home of the Khasi, a matrilineal tribe in which property and family names are passed down from mother to daughter. In this area of exceptional biodiversity there are orange-scented villages and forests of wild citrus … p. 49 over thousands of years, people from across Asia moved into Megha;aya and settled, creating an extraordinarily rich cultural diversity… Wild citrus holds a special kind of status: it is a medicine, a fruit to cook and preserve, and a sacred plant… Surrounding the Garo tribes are forests of a wild citrus they call memang narang (Scientific name Citrus indica), which means “the fruit of ghosts”. The name originates from the fruit’s use in a death ritual in which the freshly picked oranges are placed over the body of a dying relative… p. 50 “to most of us the taste would seem pretty extreme. “There’s an appreciation of sourness and bitterness in these communities the rest of the world has lost,” says Roy. In fact, we didn’t just lose sourness and bitterness, it was methodically removed from our food. Plant breeders in the 20th century, particularly after the juice industry took off in the 1950s, focused on producing larger and sweeter oranges that could be transported around the world. The orange varieties selected had low levels of phenols, bitter-tasting (but also health-giving) compounds. This meant they appealed to the increasingly sweet global palate, but left the global crop more vulnerable to pests and diseases, because the bitter chemicals … are a big part of the plant’s natural defenses. As we reduce these compounds in our quest for more sweetness, farmers have to compensate and protect the fruit with more chemical sprays.”

p. 85 “In july 1972, with the Green Revolution in full flow, the botanist Jack Harlan published an article entitled “the Genetics of Disaster”… crop diversity was being eroded at an equally unprecedented rate. … “We can survive if a forest of shade tree is destroyed, but who would survive if wheat, rice or maize were to be destroyed. We are taking risks we need not and should not take.”

p. 87 Franklin Hiram King … Farmers for Forty Centuries – “In the early 1900s, King, an agronomist from Wisconsin, worked at the US DEpartment of Agriculture, but he was regarded as a maverick, more interested in indigenous farming systems than the agricultural expansioh the department had been set up to deliver. Convinced that he could learn more from peasant farmers than the scientist in Washington, King left the US in 1909 and set out on an eight-month expedition through Asia ,…died in 1911 before he had completed his book and the work was pretty much forgotten until 1927, when a London publisher, Jonathan Cape, discovered the manuscript and published it, ensuring it remained in print for the next 20 years. It went on to influence the founding figures in Britain’s organic movement, Albert Howard and Eve Balfour.” in China now at the CEntre for Rural REconstruction crops and methods are being revived. 

p. 93 “The mulpa system has been described by the maize scholar Garrison Wilkes as “one of the most successful human inventions ever created”. To outsiders, a milpa looks like a busy hotchpotch of competing plants, but this mess of diversity is in fact a complex system that creates balance, not just notanically but also nutritionally. In the milpa system, maize is planted with its companions, beans and squashes, its stalks creating a frame for the beans to climb and the broad leaves of the squash giving ground cover, conserving moisture in the soil and suppressing weeds … below ground; the leguminous roots of the bean are host to microbes which fix nitrogen into the soil and help fertilise other crops. Combined on a plate, these plants also add up to a nutritionally complete meal. Maize provides carbohydrate, the  essential amino acids such as lysine and tryptophan (without which we’re unable to synthesis proteins) and the squash lots of vitamins. Once harvested, indigenous farmers would then take maize through an ingenious process call nixtamalisation…. evidence dates back 3,500 years.”

p. 95 At the beginning of the 20th century farmers were growing around 1,000 different open-pollinated varieties. After the Second World War, hybrids dominated. As the manufacture of explosives declined, a surplus of ammonium nitrate (an ingredient in fertiliser) became available and Fritz Haber’s invention began to plan a crucial role in the production of food. Applied to vast moncultures of F1 maize, the new supply of ferti;liser bolstered America’s position as the world’s pre-eminent exporter of grain. By the end of the century, American-grown F1 hybrids accounted for 50% of globally traded maize. From the tens of thousands of landrave varieties, just a handful now made up the commercial crop … Garrison Wilkes has likened this to “taking stones from the foundation of the house to repair the roof”

p. 96 After seed companies developed a new generation of hybrids, yields increased again. All the extra maize needed a home. This is whan maize started to turn up in the most unexpected places: as a sweetener in Coke, as a component in the plastic bottles containing that sugary drink; in toothpaste, soap, paint and shoe polish. It also helped fuel the revolution in livestock consumption: if you consume milk or eggs, chicken or beef, the animals is likely to have been fed maize. .. Even the cars people drive to buy these foods are partly fuelled by maize (around a third of the crop produced in the US is now converted into ethanol”.)

p. 106 BY the 1820s, seed merchants Messrs Sutton and Sons were publishing 100-page seed catalogues with prices and descriptions of cabbages (145 different varieties), peas (170 varieties) and onions (74 different kinds). In the 1830s, the US government saw it as a public duty to distribute diverse seeds “of the choicest varieties” for free through the US Postal Service to farmers and homesteaders. In the space of two decades, the Federal Government posted over a million seed packets to American farmers from a selection of 497 varieties of lettuce, 341 varieties of sequast, 288 varieties of beets and 408 varieties of tomato. BY the end of the 20th century, only a tenth of that diversity had survived.”

p. 134 “But in the 1970s, the soy boom reallyh intensified. This boom has a lot to do with a diminutive fish. For decades, vast shoals of anchovy were caught just off the Peruvian coast and used as the major protein in the poultry and cattle industries. But in 1972, a combination of overfishing and El Nino led to Peru’s anchovy harvest dropping by nearly 90%. A protein panic rippled across the agricultural world… the Nixon administration restricted exports of American soy. This in turn had an impact on Japan… there was no other big supplier to turn to, and so it had to create one. Brazil had been a marginal player in the soy business, but with Japanese investment and the clearance of virgin forest, including parts of the Cerrado, it became a giant. In 1960s, Brazil’s soy production was less than 300,000 metric tons. In the 1980s, helped by newly developed sot cultivars suited to the Cerrado’s acidic soil, this increase to around 20 million tonnes. The 2020 harvest, of 130 million tons, broke all records and exceeded the size of the American crop… By 2014, more than 90% of all soy grown in North and South America was GM.”

p. 258 “It’s 10,500 years since we first domesticated cattle and a watershed moment is approaching: the world’s dairy farmers will soon be producing more than one billion tonnes of milk each year. The sharp increases in world milk production seen in recent years are striking (from 690 tonnes in 2009 to 850 million tonnes in 2019”

p. 261 “In Burgundy, in the centre of the country, cheesemaking was for centuries the preserve of monasteries. Here, dark humid cellars, (places where moulds flourish) could be used for maturing cheese. Monks washed these cheese clean using alcohol and brine… IN the Ile-de-France and Normandy, in the north, people lived and farmed on more silty and sandy soils, where building cellars … was less practical. Instead, cheese were matured ion barns, where the flow of air introduced microbes that coated them in a fine, velvety mould. Because these farmers also lived closer to towns and cities, their cheese didn’t need to be hard and long-lasting. The results were soft, moulded coatded cheese including Brie and Camambert. Meanwhile, in the Loire Valley in western France, one of the legacies of the Arab conquest of the 8th century had been the introduction of goat farming … bite into a traditional piece of cheese and you will be eating into history, culture and an ecosystem.”

p. 263 “In the US for example, until the 1990s, most farms had fewer than 200 cows; today, the largest corporate dairies cabn house more than 9,000 cows… the industry focused on one breed: Holsteins. Between the 1960s and the early 2000s, the genetics of these animals was altered to such an extent that their milk yields doubled. Much of the cheese we eat today, wherever we are in the world, is made from milk processed by a smaller number of companies, sourced from the same breed of cattle, using bacteria created in a handful of labs. We are at risk of losing the diversity created by thousands of years of cheesemaking.”

p. 288 One in four beers drunk around the world are now brewed by just one company, A-B InBev (ABI), which owns Budweiser, Stella Artois and Corona and produces more than 88 billion pints a year (it sells the equivalent of three Olympic-sized swimming pools of beer an hour – more than its three nearest rivals combined.) The company’s strategy of buying up breweries has seen it engulf big brands as well as seemingly independent ‘craft breweries’.”

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Books History Women's history

Notes from Cleopatra’s Daughter And Other Royal Women of the Augustan Era

June 14, 2023 – 10:30 pm

p. ix Emphasis is on Cleopatra Selene of Mauretania, Glahpyra of Cappadocia, Salome of Judea, Dynamis of Bosporus and Pythodoris of Pontos. They were contemporaries, related through marriage to one another, and were closely allied with the imperial family in Rome and its own women, such as Livia and the younger Antonia, who themselves took on many of the characteristics of Hellenistic queens. The most famous was Cleopatra Selene, the daughter of Cleopatra VII and the triumvir Marcus Antonius, but the others were also of great importance in their own territories. .. In modern diction they are called “queens” (with the exception of Salome), an inadequate translation of the Greek words basileia and basillissa. Their role models went back to the heroic age as well as various prototypes from the late Classical and Hellensitic periods, and the concept of ‘queen’ had developed an important royal dynamic int he generations before … The women could offer greater political stability and status than their husbands, who might be subject to sudden death while on campaign, and their closeness to the imperial family provided precedents for the role of Roman aristocratic women. Cleopatra Selene was a cousion of members of the ruling Julio-Claudian family and was thus related to three Roman emperors. Others had personal contact with the imperial elite in Rome. Cleopatra Selen and Pythodoris were patronesses of intellectual culture and implemented the work of major scholars. And the descendants of the queens held royal power on the borders of the Roman Empire for generations afterwards.

p. 143 “it was Octavia who noused the queen’s children after their mother’s death; Cleopatra may have nad some hint that this could happen, or even suggested it to Octavian, knowing that Octavia had taken in another royal refugee, Juba, for a number of years. Cleopatra Selene lived in Rome for only five years, but she did so from the ahe of 10 to 15, certaimly a seminal period in any young person’s development. In 25bc Octavia implemented the marriage of the two royal refugees and they were sent to Mauretania. With Greek, Roman and probably Egyptian blood, the young princess found that yher years in Rome well prepared her for her new role as queen.”

p. 99 “The most important royal woman of the later Augustan era was Pythodoris, who, for more than half a century, ruled much of central and northern Asia Minor and the eastern Black Sea littoral. She survived well into the period of Tiberius and became the ancestor of a line of royal women that extended past the middle of the 1sy century AD. Like all women in antiquity, she remains shadowy, but due to the euologistic comments of the geographer and historian Strabo of Amaseia, her career is better documented than that of many of her ruling colleagues.

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Books Feminism History Politics Women's history

Notes from Leftist Internationalisms: A Transational Political History

June 14, 2023 – 10:09 pm

p. 16  the 1960s were also a crucial moment for what Francisco Dahan labels as the ‘global left-feminist movement’ whose contribution to the international codification of women’s rights is only starting to be explored. if the transnational nature and internationally engagement of early 20th century feminism are widely recognized, recent research is increasingly focusing on transnational networks that epitomised ‘forms of feminism that did not adhere to the frameworks of the West and global North’ originating both in the Socialist countries and in the Global South, especially in Latin America. Works dealing with the role played by feminist organizations from the Eastern block during the Cold War also show the global influence they had in the Promotion of a feminist agenda in international organisations, primarily the UN, whilst highlighting the consolidation of strong bilateral connections between communist and non-aligned Southern countries through this channel.

p. 98 in Australia, the Labour Party, headed by Bob Hawke, initiated financial deregulation and a floating national currency, prompting the economists Elizabeth Humphries and Daniel Cahill to emphasize its ‘active role in constructing neoliberalism in the country’. at the same time, the New Zealand Labour Party, which also came to power in 1983, ‘ushered in a period of radical deregulation known as Rogernomics – named for treasury minister Roger Douglas. These moves have led numerous scholars to conclude that socialism had entered an era of widespread neoliberal influence, particularly in Western Europe. in his authoritative test on the long-term history of the Left, Geoff Eley argued that Mitterand’s France and Gonzalez’s Spain rivaled the neoliberal economics off Thatchers Britain after 1982.

P 110 Exloring the socioeconomic landscape of the 1980s through the lens of supranational socialist organisation offers new insight into the relationship between democratic socialism and capitalism. Although socialist leaders had become increasingly reliant on economic experts who praised the virtues of austerity and supply-side policies, the genesis of Global Challenge confirms that there was also an ‘epistemically community’ that continued to believe in the prospect of a new international economic order based on ‘global Keynesian’ policies.

The story is unquestionably a tal of defeat, however. Coupled with the tense international political climate of the time, the SI’s structural weaknesses contributed to its inability to bring about meaningful change in the early 1980s. Most critically, the SI ailed to establish relationships with the leading politicians and experts of its members parties, most of whom were unwilling to engage in an ideological debate to begin with. The disconnect between these two circles helps explain why their economic philosophies took such divergent paths = @global neo=Keynesian relaunch” for the former and “austerity with a human fac” for the latter. .. the case of Michael Manley, whose abrupt conversion sowed profound disillusionment among socialists about the capacity of public institutions to offset the detrimental effects of ‘capitalism unleashed’. After his re=election as prime minister in 1989, the leader of the PNP promptly abandoned his former ideological convictions and began promoting a pro-market approach to the economy…. In an interview with a journalist from Le Monde, he openly admitted that the time for a mixed economy was over and that his vision for the economic development of Jamaica would henceforth rely on private enterprise and using the country’s modest resources to create a pro-business environment.@

P. 174 “The Wellesley conference – despite, or perhaps cause of, all the friction it generated – had important legacies for transnational feminism… ‘a painful clash between well-meaning American academicians who believed themselves to be ahead of American men, and free from colonial and imperialist limitations on one hand, and, on the other hand, overly optimistic third=world women who had believed that the impossible dialogue between developed,developing people could be restored by women, between women and for women,’ One of the immediate results of this conflict was the determination of many South-based intellectuals to claim control over knowledge production about their own societies…. The following year, this group founded AAWORD (Association of African Women for Research and Development.@ For organisations such as AAWORD, the United Nations and other institutions of liberal internationalism provided the structure, legitimacy and occasionally funding that supported networks of activist intellectuals offering a critical assessment of capitalist modernisation and emergency neoliberalism. The UN Decade for Women brought an explosion of civil society organisations and networks… Development Alternatives for Women for a New Era (DAWN) consisted principally of activist intellectuals who ran in policy making circles” and Encuentros Feministas Latinoamericanos y del Caribe. “brought together academic feminists with burn-it-down activists and free-thinking creatives”.

P. 177 “All three networks advocated for a political economy orientated towards social, cultural and ecological wellbeing and sustainability rather than developmentalist emphasis on growth, productivity and efficiency. These were, of course, longstanding priorities of women’s movements, dating back more than a century, but the UN Decade of Women spotlighted the gendered critiques of late 20th-century development schemes, which were predicated upon the Fordist imagery of a male headed, heteronormative, nuclear family, as the Danish economist Ester Boserup famously drew attention to the inappropriateness of this model.”

P. 181 “AAWORD members underscored that the pressure to shift agricultural land to commodities production and higher yield processes had fostered food insecurity and desertification – both problems that contributed substantially to women’s labour problems. … The report from their 1982 meeting in Dakar … “This present world crisis is the result of a process of Mail development originating from a growth model geared to the use of resources for private profit and power. This kind of development fails to satisfy the material and spiritual needs of the majority of the world‘s people and it penetrates all political and economic systems”

P. The authors of this critique – Nawal El-Sadawi, Fatima Mernissi and Mallorca Vajrathorn – all worked within the UN during this period… with other prominent network leaders such as Devaki Jain, Marie-Angelique Savane and Peggy Antrobus and renowned intellectuals such as Simone de Beauvoir, all contributed to the noted (and in some circles notorious) 1984 volume Sisterhood is Global.

Leftist Internationalisms: A Transational POlitical History

p. 16  the 1960s were also a crucial moment for what Francisco dahan labels as the ‘global left-feminist movement’ whose contribution to the international codification of women’s rights is only starting to be explored. if the transnational nature and internationally engagement of early 20th century feminism are widely recognized, recent research is increasingly focusing on transnational networks that epitomised ‘forms of feminism that did not adhere to the frameworks of the West and global North’ originating both in the Socialist countries and in the Global South, especially in Latin America. Works dealing with the role played by feminist organizations from the Eastern block during the Cold War also show the global influence they had in the Promotion of a feminist agenda in international organisations, primarily the UN, whilst highlighting the consolidation of strong bilateral connections between communist and non-aligned Southern countries through this channel.

p. 98 in Australia, the Labour Party, headed by Bob Hawke, initiated financial deregulation and a floating national currency, prompting the economists Elizabeth Humphries and Daniel Cahill to emphasize its ‘active role in constructing neoliberalism in the country’. at the same time, the New Zealand Labour Party, which also came to power in 1983, ‘ushered in a period of radical deregulation known as Rogernomics – named for treasury minister Roger Douglas. These moves have led numerous scholars to conclude that socialism had entered an era of widespread neoliberal influence, particularly in Western Europe. in his authoritative test on the long-term history of the Left, Geoff Eley argued that Mitterand’s France and Gonzalez’s Spain rivaled the neoliberal economics off Thatchers Britain after 1982.

P 110 Exloring the socioeconomic landscape of the 1980s through the lens of supranational socialist organisation offers new insight into the relationship between democratic socialism and capitalism. Although socialist leaders had become increasingly reliant on economic experts who praised the virtues of austerity and supply-side policies, the genesis of Global Challenge confirms that there was also an ‘epistemically community’ that continued to believe in the prospect of a new international economic order based on ‘global Keynesian’ policies.

The story is unquestionably a tal of defeat, however. Coupled with the tense international political climate of the time, the SI’s structural weaknesses contributed to its inability to bring about meaningful change in the early 1980s. Most critically, the SI ailed to establish relationships with the leading politicians and experts of its members parties, most of whom were unwilling to engage in an ideological debate to begin with. The disconnect between these two circles helps explain why their economic philosophies took such divergent paths = @global neo=Keynesian relaunch” for the former and “austerity with a human fac” for the latter. .. the case of Michael Manley, whose abrupt conversion sowed profound disillusionment among socialists about the capacity of public institutions to offset the detrimental effects of ‘capitalism unleashed’. After his re=election as prime minister in 1989, the leader of the PNP promptly abandoned his former ideological convictions and began promoting a pro-market approach to the economy…. In an interview with a journalist from Le Monde, he openly admitted that the time for a mixed economy was over and that his vision for the economic development of Jamaica would henceforth rely on private enterprise and using the country’s modest resources to create a pro-business environment.@

P. 174 “The Wellesley conference – despite, or perhaps cause of, all the friction it generated – had important legacies for transnational feminism… ‘a painful clash between well-meaning American academicians who believed themselves to be ahead of American men, and free from colonial and imperialist limitations on one hand, and, on the other hand, overly optimistic third=world women who had believed that the impossible dialogue between developed,developing people could be restored by women, between women and for women,’ One of the immediate results of this conflict was the determination of many South-based intellectuals to claim control over knowledge production about their own societies…. The following year, this group founded AAWORD (Association of African Women for Research and Development.@ For organisations such as AAWORD, the United Nations and other institutions of liberal internationalism provided the structure, legitimacy and occasionally funding that supported networks of activist intellectuals offering a critical assessment of capitalist modernisation and emergency neoliberalism. The UN Decade for Women brought an explosion of civil society organisations and networks… Development Alternatives for Women for a New Era (DAWN) @ consisted principally of activist intellectuals who ran in policy making circles” and Encuentros Feministas Latinoamericanos y del Caribe. “brought together academic feminists with burn-it-down activists and free-thinking creatives”.

P. 177 “All three networks advocated for a political economy orientated towards social, cultural and ecological wellbeing and sustainability rather than developmentalist emphasis on growth, productivity and efficiency. These were, of course, longstanding priorities of women’s movements, dating back more than a century, but the UN Decade of Women spotlighted the gendered critiques of late 20th-century development schemes, which were predicated upon the Fordist imagery of a male headed, heteronormative, nuclear family, as the Danish economist Ester Boserup famously drew attention to the inappropriateness of this model.”

P. 181 “AAWORD members underscored that the pressure to shift agricultural land to commodities production and higher yield processes had fostered food insecurity and desertification – both problems that contributed substantially to women’s labour problems. … The report from their 1982 meeting in Dakar … “This present world crisis is the result of a process of Mail development originating from a growth model geared to the use of resources for private profit and power. This kind of development fails to satisfy the material and spiritual needs of the majority of the world‘s people and it penetrates all political and economic systems”

P. The authors of this critique – Nawal El-Sadawi, Fatima Mernissi and Mallorca Vajrathorn – all worked within the UN during this period… with other prominent network leaders such as Devaki Jain, Marie-Angelique Savane and Peggy Antrobus and renowned intellectuals such as Simone de Beauvoir, all contributed to the noted (and in some circles notorious) 1984 volume Sisterhood is Global.

Leftist Internationalisms: A Transational Political History

p. 16  the 1960s were also a crucial moment for what Francisco dahan labels as the ‘global left-feminist movement’ whose contribution to the international codification of women’s rights is only starting to be explored. if the transnational nature and internationally engagement of early 20th century feminism are widely recognized, recent research is increasingly focusing on transnational networks that epitomised ‘forms of feminism that did not adhere to the frameworks of the West and global North’ originating both in the Socialist countries and in the Global South, especially in Latin America. Works dealing with the role played by feminist organizations from the Eastern block during the Cold War also show the global influence they had in the Promotion of a feminist agenda in international organisations, primarily the UN, whilst highlighting the consolidation of strong bilateral connections between communist and non-aligned Southern countries through this channel.

p. 98 in Australia, the Labour Party, headed by Bob Hawke, initiated financial deregulation and a floating national currency, prompting the economists Elizabeth Humphries and Daniel Cahill to emphasize its ‘active role in constructing neoliberalism in the country’. at the same time, the New Zealand Labour Party, which also came to power in 1983, ‘ushered in a period of radical deregulation known as Rogernomics – named for treasury minister Roger Douglas. These moves have led numerous scholars to conclude that socialism had entered an era of widespread neoliberal influence, particularly in Western Europe. in his authoritative test on the long-term history of the Left, Geoff Eley argued that Mitterand’s France and Gonzalez’s Spain rivaled the neoliberal economics off Thatchers Britain after 1982.

P 110 Exloring the socioeconomic landscape of the 1980s through the lens of supranational socialist organisation offers new insight into the relationship between democratic socialism and capitalism. Although socialist leaders had become increasingly reliant on economic experts who praised the virtues of austerity and supply-side policies, the genesis of Global Challenge confirms that there was also an ‘epistemically community’ that continued to believe in the prospect of a new international economic order based on ‘global Keynesian’ policies.

The story is unquestionably a tal of defeat, however. Coupled with the tense international political climate of the time, the SI’s structural weaknesses contributed to its inability to bring about meaningful change in the early 1980s. Most critically, the SI ailed to establish relationships with the leading politicians and experts of its members parties, most of whom were unwilling to engage in an ideological debate to begin with. The disconnect between these two circles helps explain why their economic philosophies took such divergent paths = @global neo=Keynesian relaunch” for the former and “austerity with a human fac” for the latter. .. the case of Michael Manley, whose abrupt conversion sowed profound disillusionment among socialists about the capacity of public institutions to offset the detrimental effects of ‘capitalism unleashed’. After his re=election as prime minister in 1989, the leader of the PNP promptly abandoned his former ideological convictions and began promoting a pro-market approach to the economy…. In an interview with a journalist from Le Monde, he openly admitted that the time for a mixed economy was over and that his vision for the economic development of Jamaica would henceforth rely on private enterprise and using the country’s modest resources to create a pro-business environment.@

P. 174 “The Wellesley conference – despite, or perhaps cause of, all the friction it generated – had important legacies for transnational feminism… ‘a painful clash between well-meaning American academicians who believed themselves to be ahead of American men, and free from colonial and imperialist limitations on one hand, and, on the other hand, overly optimistic third=world women who had believed that the impossible dialogue between developed,developing people could be restored by women, between women and for women,’ One of the immediate results of this conflict was the determination of many South-based intellectuals to claim control over knowledge production about their own societies…. The following year, this group founded AAWORD (Association of African Women for Research and Development.@ For organisations such as AAWORD, the United Nations and other institutions of liberal internationalism provided the structure, legitimacy and occasionally funding that supported networks of activist intellectuals offering a critical assessment of capitalist modernisation and emergency neoliberalism. The UN Decade for Women brought an explosion of civil society organisations and networks… Development Alternatives for Women for a New Era (DAWN) @ consisted principally of activist intellectuals who ran in policy making circles” and Encuentros Feministas Latinoamericanos y del Caribe. “brought together academic feminists with burn-it-down activists and free-thinking creatives”.

P. 177 “All three networks advocated for a political economy orientated towards social, cultural and ecological wellbeing and sustainability rather than developmentalist emphasis on growth, productivity and efficiency. These were, of course, longstanding priorities of women’s movements, dating back more than a century, but the UN Decade of Women spotlighted the gendered critiques of late 20th-century development schemes, which were predicated upon the Fordist imagery of a male headed, heteronormative, nuclear family, as the Danish economist Ester Boserup famously drew attention to the inappropriateness of this model.”

P. 181 “AAWORD members underscored that the pressure to shift agricultural land to commodities production and higher yield processes had fostered food insecurity and desertification – both problems that contributed substantially to women’s labour problems. … The report from their 1982 meeting in Dakar … “This present world crisis is the result of a process of Mail development originating from a growth model geared to the use of resources for private profit and power. This kind of development fails to satisfy the material and spiritual needs of the majority of the world‘s people and it penetrates all political and economic systems”

P. The authors of this critique – Nawal El-Sadawi, Fatima Mernissi and Mallorca Vajrathorn – all worked within the UN during this period… with other prominent network leaders such as Devaki Jain, Marie-Angelique Savane and Peggy Antrobus and renowned intellectuals such as Simone de Beauvoir, all contributed to the noted (and in some circles notorious) 1984 volume Sisterhood is Global.

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Books Environmental politics Politics

Notes from The Near Future in Twenty-First-Century Fiction: Climate, Retreat and Revolution

June 14, 2023 – 10:05 pm


p. 7 “Criticism has tended to assume that literature’s engagement with environmental crisis must be a constructive one”
p. 8 “this book finds that much fiction of the near future better resembles Clare Colebrook’s odd one-out contribution to the volume Climate and Literature, which observes that “the 21st-century imaginary, especially by way of the trope of the Anthropocene, has become intensely counter-apocalyptic” in the sense that it imagines the “end of the world” as nothing more than the end of liberal and affluent capitalist urbanity.”

p. 9 “If the domestic near future is characterised by a desire to retreat to the rural homestead, at the centre of that enclave, generating and defining it, lies the individual bodies and its comforts … this emphasis on the sensorially rich individual body is part of the same movement by which the prospective of a broader collective is dismissed, occasionally demonised. Such a two-part movement is suggestive of Hannah Arendt’s account of how actions, the deeds and speech which constitute both individual freedom and the political realm, is occluded under consumer capitalism by labour – the realm of the household and the body. A more historically eloquent explanation is provided by Jameson who describes that contraction of politics to the circumscribed space and time of the body as a consequence of colonisation and the shocking exposure of ‘the security of the ego or the unique personal self’ to a ‘demographic plenianisation of … subjectivity’ … This “reduction to the body” is a symptom of “the death of historicity … the weakening of our phenomenological experience of past and future” as we remain pinned to our ephemeral time of individual experience. The domestic near future shows this body to be the root of all the other forms of the ‘local’ named by Bruno Latour as providing one reactionary response to globalisation: “a land, a place, a soil, a community, a space, a milieu, a way of life, a trade, a skill.”

p. 14 “The questions of what forms of human cooperation – or, to put it more simply, politics – might prove adequate to planetary climate disaster has been taken up by non-fictional writers. However, as acute as their analyses can be, the prescriptions for what might be done about the contemporary situation tend towards the hazy, and lack narrative pathways into the future. For instance, Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright’s Climate Leviathan calls for ‘Climate X’ as an yet unrealised political model that would move beyond capitalism and concepts of planetary sovereignty, and be based on equality, dignity and solidarity. Jason Moor and Raj Patel’s A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things also looks towards indigenous movements and other traditions of anticapitalist and anti-imperialist struggle, but deliberately refrains from drawing a “road map for class struggle”; Andreas Malm’s The Progress of This Storm calls, like Clive Hamilton, for a new seriousness about anthropic agency, but also accounes the “death of affirmative politics” and hopes for an “induced implosion” of capitalism dependent on a “political movement endowed with powers not yet on the horizon. From a non-Marxist perspective, Bruno Latour’s Down to Earth diagnoses the need for a “third attractor” that would move beyond the current split between an outdated drive to fulfil the globalising project of modernity, and a reactive but equally hopeless retreat to the local, often accompanied by a focus on national and ethnic identity.A similar haziness characterises the titles in the Verso”Futures” series such as The Future by Marc Auge (2015), Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide by Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi (2015) and Deja Vu and the End of History by Paulo Virno (2015) – all of which deal with, to quite the website blurb, “the outer limits of political and social possibility”. 

p. 15 Frederic Jameson’s famous (in cultural studies, at least) cognate comment that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”, a slight sense of impatience can sometimes be detected in the recent mention of such ideas, as if we’ve had more than enough of them and it’s time to move on. The association of a loss of a sense of history with postmodernity was made in what remains Jameson’s most famous work, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, in 1989. However, in An American Utopia, published in 2016, he was still writing of the “waning of history, of historicity or historical consciousness” as the signal contemporary political problem, as if noothing much had changed … A reading od near-future fiction bears this out. This diagnosis might at first seem to contradict the notion that the zeitgeist is characterised by a sense of momentous change as inevitable and in part already here, but is is the collision and tension between these two that does much to make the headache-inducing weather of the near future. We know we need to change, we cannot change, nothing changes, change is coming, change is already happening. The struggle to locate an emergent near-future genre is the struggle to conceive of a novel of revolution for the Anthropocene.”

p. 30 “In the domestic near future, men as well as women can be primarily identified with the household, as we have seen in Clade and will see again in Her and Arcadia, reflecting the elevation of its economic and class significance over its gender connotations – men as much as women pine for their house in the country.”

p. 31 Mitch R Murray and Mathias Nilges have argued that ‘the arrival of cyberpunk in 1984 could be read … as an epitaph to the radical feminist science fiction of the 1960s and 1970s, which includes landmark novels by Ursula K Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Marge Piercy and Octavia Butler, while Philip Wegner … has suggested a range of ‘dialectical rejoinder{s} to cyberpunk, many of them by women. In a similar vein, the domestic near-future might be read as an epitaphic successor or rejoinder to these radical ‘feminist fabulations’ and ‘critical dystopias’, and as dialectically engagde not jnust with the near-future novels of revolution … but also with work that falls beyond its remit, such as the global and postcolonial science fiction …. or the fantasy novels of authors such as N.K. Jemsin, Nalo Hopkinson and Shawntelle Madison that, as Sami Schalk puts it ‘challenges readers’ assumptions and understandings of (dis)ability, race, gender and sexuality through the defamiliarization of these categories”. 

p. 64 “the arts in near-future fiction often seem to be called forth by the prospect of totality, but their attempts to appear its scalar and spatial demands push them towards the static image that erases the very narrative from which the totality might emerge. The resemblance of these static images to theoretical descriptions of the symbol then allows them to be understood as part of a continuation of the oppositional relationship between symbol and allegory, as it was inaugurated in its modern form by the Romantics. Planetary ecological crisis is thereby placed in a direct lineage with that earlier period of disruption and transformation – of revolutions, incipient nationalisms, a changing relationship to nature, and a self-consciously historicist sense of a break with the past – such that it can be better understood as part of the longue dureee crisis of capitalist modernity, rather than as an unprecedented epistemic and representational rupture, of the kind climate change is often presented as being.”

p. 70 “What the near-future resolution of The History of Bees reveals is the importance of the intermediary scales between micro and macro, which tend to be much less discussed by critical and theoretical accounts of literature in the Anthropocene. … some recent work on the challenges facing contemporary politics has zeroed in on it. For instance, in his study of contemporary democracy, David Runciman has described how “the space between the personal and apocalyptic which is where democratic politics traditionally plats out, has become a battleground for rival world views which are informed by personal or apocalyptic expectations of the worst that could happen. Mid-level politics is what’s missing… Bruno Latour has diagnosed the need for a future ‘third space’ that would lie between the outdated drive to fulfil the globalising project of modernity, and the equally untenable retreat to the local, often accompanied by a focus on national and ethnic identity.”

p. 159 paradigmatically ‘strong’ form of the near future: New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson “the novel cuts through the problems of historical legacy and revolutionary change .. by addressing them directly. A Marxist conception of global history replaces a submerged US regional imaginary, as the struggle between the oligarchy and the commons is posited as the genre of modern history, subsuming different instances within this synchronic form: the US can then serve as an easily recognisable territory to house the revolution, and as a scalar fulcrum between planet and populace… The utopianism of New York 2140 consists of a dialectical movement between the convergent global history of modernity as it spans that ‘G2’ and its particular national instances. Other dialectical movements fuse with this: between two kinds of revolution, a mass civil resistance and a conventional electoral capture; between past and future; between fiction and non-fiction. .. involves characters working as an allegorical assemblage, an interaction between understood in the light of the debate between symbol and allegory as it was inaugurated by the Romantics at the birth of capitalist modernity, rather than by the planetary scale of climate crisis to which contemporary allegory is often referred. However the need to stabilise the macro structure in New York 2140 raises hard questions with regard to gender, race and class… the hint of a St Elmo’s fire of violence and sex playing around the allegorical ropes that hold it in place, suggests the impossibility of finally resolving the tension between collective and individual. Equally, however, this tension is the generative dialectic that underlies the utopian impulse as it takes form in the genre of near-future revolution”.

p. 183 “a change in the historical timeline without a change in the relationship between violence, power and forms of identity such as gender, secuality and race, is no change at all. As we have seen, New York 2140 is cognisant of such issues and their importance, though its strategy is to act as if such propositions as gender, race and LGBT equality have been universally accepted, so that the struggle which might in our world join and direct these revolutionary forces, of the plural people against the oligarchy, can come overwhelmingly to the fore. In this sense the novel acts in the spirit of John Foran’s suggestion for a new kind of political party to ‘harness the people power, radical imagination and boundless energy of all these new actors of the future” such as “lack Lives Matter, Standing Rock, and many, many other rising voices, the vast majority of them not well known”. Nevertheless, the sense of strain we have also discerned within the allegorical structure suggests the impossibility of finally resolving the tension between collective and individual, or between ‘theories of the body’ and ‘theories of history’. New York 2140’s achievement is therefore not to somehow resolve this tension but to install it as a generative dialectic underlying the utopian impulse. As Jameson puts it – in a passage quoted by the novel … “”In this situation, what once can say, as Giambattista Vico seems to have been one of the first to do, is that while nature is meaningless, history has a meaning; even if there is no meaning, the project and the future produce it, on the individual as well as the collective basis. The great collective project has a meaning and it is that of utopia. But the problem of utopia, of collective meaning, is to find an individual meaning.”

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Books History Women's history

Notes from Sappho: A New Translation of the Complete Works (2023)

April 20, 2023 – 4:03 pm

p. 5-6 The first explicit statements about Sappho’s involvement in female homoeroticism date from the Hellenistic and Roman period… written four centuries or more after Sappho. Earlier testimonia portray Sappho as interested in men; in Attic comedies dating from the 4th century BCE, she is imagined to have had several male lovers at the same time. The earliest literary document that may reflect the reception of Sappho’s songs is a song by the Greek poet Anakreon. In this song, dating to the second half of the 6th century BCE, a male speaker complains that a girl from Lesbos, whom he desires, pays him no attention because of his white hair (a feminine noun in Greek) and instead gapes at another woman or another feminine object… the whole point of the song is that this is left ambiguous… How precisely the meaning of this verb or Anakreon’s girl of Lesbos relates to Sappho’s poetry is not clear, but they most likely reflect the reception of her poetry, which was very popular in this period. The Greeks at this time imagined Sappho to be hypersexual and equally interested in men and woman. … four Athenian vase paintings, although older than our written accounts, are also only indirect witnesses to Sappho. They date from the end of the 6th to the first hald of the 5th century BCE and associate Sappho with drinking parties (so-called symposia) or picture her in the private quarters of women, in which her poetry was apparently performed in classical Athens. We do not know how these performances relate to the original performance of her songs, let alone whether these portraits of Sappho resemble her real appearance in any way.”

p. 7 “Greek scholars from Alexandria edited around nine “books” (papyrus scrolls actually) with poetry of Sappho in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE… roughly 10,000 lines, of which only 650 survive. … the Suda ascribes the invention of the plectrum (string pick) to her. Sappho was indeed known not only as a poet but also as a musician. Like other lyric poets in this period, she performed her poetry to music or had other perform it for her… Of the melodies accompanying these songs nothing has survived.”

p. 15 “This may explain the mention of ‘pupils’ in the Suda and other sources; they are anachronistic references to the young women she trained in her choruses.”

“Another question is whether we can reconcile Sappho’s choral activities with the erotic relationships she sings about. Some scholars have suggested that Sappho had a homoerotic relationship with one girl in the chorus, which somehow would be the model for the whole group… They point to groups of boys that formed around one aristocratic boy and his adult lover on acnient Crete as a possible parallel. Another possibility is that the homoerotic feelings Sappho and the other female performers of her songs sing about do not reflect actual relationships, but are intended to be forms of public praise or statements about the general power of love.”

Four modern reconstructions of Sappho dominate the lierature about her: Sappho the chorus organiser, Sappho the teacher, Sappho the priestes, and Sappho the banqueter. Of these four the suggestion that she led young women’s choruses is the most plausible”

p. 17 However one would like to reconstruct Sappho’s life, above all she is a poet and the earliest Greek woman of whom at leasta substantial body of poetry is preserved. Other women poets date mainly from the Hellenistic period, and much less of their work has survived.”

p. 59 “My skin was [delicate] before, but now old age
[claims it]; my hair turned from black [to white].

My spirit has grown heavy; knees buckle
that once would dance light as fawns

I often groan, but what can I do?
It is impoosible for humans not to age

For they say, [pierced] by love rosy-armed Dawn
went to the ends of the earth holding Tithonos,

beautiful and young, but in time gray old age
seized him, even with a deathless wife…..

Yet I love the finer things. [Know] that passion for
the light of life has also granted me brilliance and beauty.”

p 88 The sweetest apple reddens on a high branch
high upon highest, missed by the applepickers:

No, they didn’t miss, so much as couldn’t touch.

Herdsmen cruh under their feet
a hyacinth in the mountains; on the ground
purple blooms…

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Books Environmental politics Science

Notes from An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms around Us

October 13, 2022 – 9:00 pm

p. 220 The tungara frog “after sunset, the males inflate their huge vocal sacs and force air through voice bosed larger than their brains. The esult is a short whine that falls in pitch, like a tiny, receding siren. After that, the male might add one ro more stort staccato embellishments that are known as chucks… female frog .. sit in front of various males, compare their whines and chucks, chose the most attractive-sounding specimen and allow him to fertilize her eggs…almost always for males who embellish their whines with chucks over males who merely whine. The chucks are so desirable that if a male is reluctant to make them, a female will sometimes body slam him until he does…. The frog’s inner ear is especially sensitive to frequencies of 2,130 Hz, which is just under the dominant frequency of the average chuck… They ought to chuck as frequently and repeatedly as possible, buty they’re strangely unwilling to do so…. The fringe-lipped bat turned out to be a voracious frog-eater. Turtle and Tyan showed that it tracks its prey by eavesdropping on its courtship calls, much as Ormia does with cricket songs. And the bat, just like the female tungara forgs, is particularly drawn to males that add chucks to their whines… The frog’s Umwelt shaped the frog’s calls, which then shaped the bat’s Umwelt. The senses dictate what animals find beautiful, and in doing so, they influence the form that beauty takes in the natural world.”

p. 233 “Although blue and fin whale songs can traverse oceans, no one knows if the whales actually communicate at such ranges. It’s possible that they’re signalling to nearby individuals with very loud calls … But Clark points out that they repeat the same notes, over and over again, and at very precise intervals. … It reminds him of the reperitive signals that Martian rovers use to beam dat back to Earth. If you wanted to design a signal that could be used to communicate across oceans, you’d come up with something  These songs might have other uses, too. Their notes can last for several seconds, with wavelengths as long as a football field. Clark once asked a Navy friend what he could do with such a call. “I could illuminate the ocean,” the friend replied. That is, he could map distant underwater landscapes, from submerged mountains to the seafloor itself, by processing the echoes returning from the far distant infrasounds… Clark sees evidence in their movements… he has seen blue whales emerging in polar waters between Iceland and Greenaldn and making a beeling – a whalelines? – for tropical Bermuda, singing all the way. He has seen whales slaloming between underwater mountain ranges, zigging and zagging between landmarks hundreds of miles apart. “When you watch these animals move, it’s as if they have an acoustic map of the oceans,” he says. He also suspects that the animals can build up such maps over their long lives, accruing soundbased memories that lurk in their mind’s ear. After all, Clark recalls veteran sonar specialists telling him that different parts of the sea had their own distinctive sounds. “They said: If you put a pair of headphones on me, I can tell you if I’m near Labrador of off the Bay of Biscay,” says Clark. “I thought that if a human being could do this in 30 years, what could an animal do with 10 million years…. Underwater, ultrasound waves take just under a minute to cover 50 miles. If a whale hears the song of another whale from a distance of 1,500 miles, it’s really listening back in time by about half an hour, like an astronomer gazing upon ancient light of a distant star. If a whale is trying to sense a mountain 500 miles away, it has to somehow connect its own call with an echo that arrives 10 minutes later. That might seem preposterous, but consider that a blue whale’s heart beats around 30 times a minute at the surface, and can slow to just 2 beats a minute on a dive. They surely operate on very different timescales to we do.”

p. 239

“Mice, rats and many other rodents do indeed make a wide repertroire of ‘ultrasonic’ calls, with frequencies too high to be audible to humans. They make these sounds when playing or mating, when stressed or cold, when aggressive or submissive. Pups that are separated from their nests make ultrasonic isolation calls that summon their mothers. Rats that are tickled by humans make ultrasonic chirps that have been compared to laughter… Male mice that sniff female hormones produce ultrasonic songs that are remarkably similar to those of birds, complete with distinct syllables and phrases. Females attracted to these serenades join their chosen partners in an ultrasoci duet. Rodents are amont the most common and intensively studied mammls in the world and have been fixtures of laboratories since the 17th century. All that time, they’ve been spiritedly talking to each other without any human realizing.”

“Like infrasound, the term ultrasound is an anthropocentric affection. It refers to sound waves with frequencies higher than 20 kHz, which marks the upper limit of the average human ear. It seems special – ultra, even – because we can’t hear it. But the vast majority of mammals actually hear very well into that range, and its likely that the ancestors of our group did too. Even out closest relatives, chimpanzees, can hear close to 30kHz. A dog can hear 45 kHz, a cat 85, a mouse 100, and a bottlenose dolphin 150. For all of these creatures, ultrasound is just sound. Many scinetifists have suggested that ultrasound offers animals a private communication channel that others can’t eavesedrop on – the same claim that was made about ultraviolet light. We can’t hear these sounds, so we bill them as “hidden” and “secretive”, even though they’re patently audible to many other species.”

p. 246 1939 – discovered bat echo-location “One distinguished physiologist was so shocked by our presentation that he seized Bob [Galambhos] by the shoulders and shook him while expostulating ‘You can’t really mean that!’ … Even Griffin underestimated echolocation at first. He saw it merely as a warning system that alerted bats to possible collissions. But his views changed in the summer of 1951. Sitting by a pond near Ithaca, he began to record wild echolocating bats for the first time… When bats were crusing through open skies, their pulses were longer and duller. When they swooped after insects, the steady put-put-puts would quicken and fuse into a staccato buzz. Wasn’t just a collision detector. It’s also how bats hunt. “Our scientific imaginations had simply failed to consider, even speculatively, [this] possibility,” he later wrote.

p. 262 “The US Navy started training dolphins in the 1960s to rescue lost divers, find sunken equipment and detect buried mines. In the 1970s, it invested heavily in echolocation research, not to understand how the dophins themselves perceived the world but to improve military soar by reverse-engineering the animal’s suprerior capabilities…  Dolphins could discriminate between different objects based on shape, size and material. They could distinguish between cylinders filled with water, alcohol and glycerine. They could identify distant targets from the information in a single sonar pulse. They could reliably find items buried under several feet of sediment, and they could tell if those objects were made of brass or steel – feats that no technological sonar can yet match. To date, “the only sonar that the Navy has that can detect buried mines in habors is a dolphin,” Au says … In 1987 Nachtigall’s team started working with a false killer whale – an 18-foot-long black-skinned dolphin species known for being smart and sociable. The animal, Klina, could use her sonar to tell the difference between hollow metal cylinders that looked identical to the human eye and that differed in thickness by the width of a hair. On one memorable occasion, the team tested Kina using two cylinders that had been manufactured to the same specifications. To everyone’s confusion, Kina repeatedly indicated that the objects were different. When the team had the cylinders remeasured, they realized that one had a miniscule taper and was 0.6mm wider at one end than the other. “It was incredible,” Nachtigall recalls. “We ordered them to be the same, the machinists said they were the same, and the animal said, “No, they’re different. And she was right.”

p. 296 “Although flowers are negatively charged, they grow into the positively charged air. Their very presence greatly strengthens the electric fields around them, and this effect is especially pronounced at points and edges, like leaf tips, petal rims, stigmas and anthers. Basded on its shape and size, every flower is surrounded by its own distinctive electric field. As Robert pondered these fields, “suddenly the question came: do bees know about this?… And the answer was yes.”

“Bumblebees…electroreceptors are the tiny hairs that make them so endearingly fuzzy. These hairs are sensitive to air currents and trigger nervous signals when they are deflected. But the electric fields around flowers are also strong enough to move them. Bees, though very different to electric fish or sharks, also seem to detect electric fields with an extended sense of touch … many insects, spiders and other artropods are coveed in touch-sensitive hairs. If these hairs can also be deflected by electric fields … then electric sense might be even more common on land than in the water.”

p. 307 As he showed in 1991, [sea] turtles have a compass. But their other magnetic sense proved to be even more improvessive. It hinges on two properties of the geomagnetic field. The first is inclination – the angle at which the geomagnetic field lines meet Earth’s surface. At the equator, those lines run parallel to the ground; at the magnetic poles, they are perpendicular. The second property is intensity – differences in the field’s strength. Both vary around the globe, and most spots in the ocean have a unique combination of the two. Together, they act like coordinates … allow the geomagnetic field to act as an oceanice map. And turtles, as Lohmann found, can read that map.”

p. 314 “Songbirds might be able to see Earth’s magnetic field, perhaps as a subtle visual cue that overlaps their normal field of vision.  “That’s the most likely scenario, but we don’t know because we can’t ask the birds,” Mouritsen says.”

p. 332 “Controlling a human body is relatively simple for a human brain because our bones and joints constrain our movement. .. But… an octopus has “a body of pure possibility”. Aside from its hard beak, it is soft, malleable and free to contort. Its skin can change colour and texture on a whim. Its arms can extend, contract, bend, and rotate anywhere along their lengths, and have practically infinite ways of performing even simple movements. How could a brain, even a large one, keep track of such boundless options? The question turns out to be irrelevant. The brain doesn’ty have to. It can mostly let the arms sort themselves out, while imposing the occasional guiding nudge.”

p 339 In 1886, shortly after Edison commercialised the electric lightbulb, nearly 1,000 birds died after colliding with an electrically illuminated tower in Derateur, Illinois. Over a century later, environmental scientist Travis Longcote and his collagues calculated that almost 7 million birds a year die in the United States and Canada after flying into communication towers. The red lights of those towers are meant to warn aircraft pilots, but they also risrupt the orientation of nocturnal avian fliers, which then veer into wires or each other. Many of these deaths could be avoided simply by replacing steady lights with blinking ones.”

p. 344 “Noise pollution masks not only the sounds that animals deliberately make but also the “web of unintended sounds that ties communities together,” Fristrip tells me. He means the gentle rustles that tell owls where their prey are, or the faint flaps that warn mice about impending doom… Every extra 3 decibels can halve the range over which natural sounds can be heard. Noise shrinks an animal’s perceptual world. And while some species like great tits and nightingagles stay and make the best of it, others just leave. .. In noisy conditions, prairie dogs spend more tim underground. Owls flub their attacks. Parasitic Ormia flies struggle to find their cricket hosts. Sage grouse abandon their breeding sites (and those that stay are more stressed.”

p. 346 “Between World War II and 2008, the global shipping fleet more than tripled, and began moving 10 times more cargo at higher speeds. Together, they raised the level of low-frequency noise in the oceans by 32 times, a 15 decibel increase over levels that Hildebrand suspects were already around 15 decibels louder than in primordial pre-propeller seas. Since giant whales can live for a century or more, there are likely individuals alive today who have personally wirnessed this growing underwater racket and who now hear only over a tenth of their former range. As shops pass in the night, humpback whales stop singing, orcas stop foraging, and right whales become stressed. Crabs stop feeding, cuttlefish change colors, damselfigh are more easily caught.”

p. 348 In the woodlands of New Mexico, Clinton Francis and Catherine Ortega found that the Woodhouse scrub-jay would flee from the noise of compressors used in extracting natural gas. The scrub jay spreads the seeds of the pinyon pine tree, and single bird can bury between 3,000 and 4,000 pine seeds a year…in quiet areas where they still thrive, pine seedlings are four times more common than in noisy areas that they have abandoned. Pinyon pines are the foundation of the ecosystems around them – a single species that provides food and shelter for hunreds of others, including indigenous Americans. To lose three-quarters of them would be disastrous. And since they grow slowly, “noise might have 100-plus-year consequences for the entire ecosystem”.

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