Category Archives: Politics

Environmental politics

Time to stop sending catalogues?

April 21, 2006 – 11:19 am

I read today about a neat protest against Victoria’s Secret, which mails 395 million catalogs annually [in the US], most printed on virgin paper. The protesters want it to use recycled paper – a start, but not, I’d suggest enough. Why, in the multimedia age, do we still need to not only print on paper, but then ship that vast weight around countries (and even across the world) – consuming lots of fossil fuel in the process?

I recently rang up Land’s End, a particularly egregarious offender in sending vast numbers of catalogues, sometimes it seems at weekly intervals, and asked them to stop. “Don’t you like us any more?” was the line of questioning. “No,” I said, “if I decided I need any more white T-shirts or similar, I will look on the website.”

Surely it is time for companies to at least provide the option of not getting catalogues? By all means send me a regular email with special offers etc, or reminding me to visit your website – I think the environment can bear the electrons – but don’t use 20th-century methods of promotion; you’ll only annoy me.

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Environmental politics Politics

The other London

April 20, 2006 – 10:37 am

One reason why I enjoy canvassing is the glimpses it provides into the many styles of London life. Some of the glimpses are, however, almost unbearably sad.

One group that arouses such emotion are the South Asian women who meet you at the door with a look very close to terror in their eyes. It is, I think, a varying mix of a fear of encountering a world that is strange and foreign, and that they’ve probably been warned against, fear that their behaviour will be judged inappropriate by husband or mother-in-law, fear that their lack of English skills and other “life skills” will be exposed.

I thought of them when I read the story of a Bangladeshi woman treated with great sense by a judge, who gave her a suspended jail term.

Rahella Khanom, 24, caused the five-month-old boy in her care to suffer fractures to his breast bone and ribs as she tried to rid him of evil spirits, Southwark Crown Court was told.

The story reveals how, despite living in London for years, she was effectively still kept in a Bangladeshi village:

The judge said that Khanom’s strong cultural and religious beliefs, and the fact that she had been forced by her husband to live in isolation since coming to Britain from Bangladesh, meant that there were exceptional circumstances in her case.

So sad, so sad for the child, who suffered brain damage, and so sad for any children she might have, who will have a parent unable to be any sort of support in their world, and, of course, so sad for her, able to develop to only a tiny fraction of her human potential.

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Politics

Small but revealing

April 20, 2006 – 10:12 am

Sometimes it is the small(er) things that really reveal the fundamental nature and mindset of regimes. In America, the Bush government is reclassifying as “secret” material already placed in the National Archive:

Documents have been disappearing since 1999 because intelligence officials have wanted them to. And under the terms of two disturbing agreements — with the C.I.A. and the Air Force — the National Archives has been allowing officials to reclassify declassified documents, which means removing them from the public eye. So far 55,000 pages, some of them from the 1950’s, have vanished. This not only violates the mission of the National Archives; it is also antithetical to the natural flow of information in an open society.

An open, democratic society? That’s the last thing that Bush and his controllers want. Might result in resistence to the latest foreign adventure or environmental destruction.

In Britain – and this is a “little thing” only in that a relatively small number of people are likely to be affected – the Blair government is planning to both drastically cut payments to people wrongfully convicted of crime, but to entirely abolish a millennia-old principle, “innocent until proven guilty”.

Mr Clarke acknowledged that a move to a “not proven” verdict would be a major change. “It would be a radical change. We are going to have a look at it. The time has come to assess it,” he said.

Behind this is an anti-liberty, very Daily Mail rightwing attitude that we are the respectable middle classes and they – anyone in the dock – must be the dangerous other. And if they happen to be found not guilty – by a jury of their peers – it must have been a mistake, for the instruments of state authority are always right.

But sometimes the little things also demonstrate individual creativity and initiative. Sussex ambulance service has created a series of first aid instructions for MP3 players.

The project was the idea of a paramedic, Stuart Rutland, who said that he hoped it might help in an emergency. “I like to go running and listen to music – but what if I turned the corner and somebody had collapsed? I have 11 years of paramedic training, but not everyone will. It’s just about what to do in those moments before an ambulance arrives.

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Environmental politics

A new medical condition

April 18, 2006 – 9:23 pm

A discovery for medical science: I’ve identified a new syndrome – leafletter’s knuckle. After delivering about 2,700 Green Party leaflets over a couple of days, most of the skin has gone off the knuckles on my right hand (the result of paper cuts and encounters with letter-boxes that seem to have been adapted from a design for mousetraps).

I’ve also had lots of encounters with deadly basement flat stairs, and some horribly bodgy lifts. At the fourth rattle and the fifth squeak, I think: “I’m glad mobile phones were invented; at least it will be easy to call the fire brigade.” That is often followed by the thought: “What was this building called again?”

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Feminism

Women explode from traditional society

April 18, 2006 – 10:56 am

It looks like India is producing a new “Bandit Queen”.

The report:

Three years ago, 16-year-old Jagari Baske vanished from a remote village in the Indian state of West Bengal. But unlike most girls her age who suddenly flee their homes in the country’s conservative countryside, she was not eloping with a boyfriend opposed by her family. Instead, Baske ran away to join Maoist rebels who claim to be fighting for the rights of the rural dispossessed but who have been responsible for a wave of killings this year as they step up their battle with the state.
Now 19, Baske is described by security forces as a dangerous foe. “Jagari is fearless and a crackshot,” said a senior intelligence official in West Bengal’s capital, Kolkata. “She is ruthless and has taken part in dozens of Maoist attacks in the last two years.”

Food for thought there for those opposed to women in Western militaries. You’ve got one of the most patriarchal, restrictive-to-women states on earth, and women are emerging from it as fighters, warriors even you might say.

Lest anyone should think I’m celebrating this, I stress that such extremes usually only emerge from societies under extreme pressure, and societies where many other women are suffering horribly without rebelling. As this report says:

Poverty among the region’s traditionally marginalised tribal people-who make up many of the movement’s guerrillas and sympathisers-is a major factor in driving women into the hands of the Maoists in a matrilineal society where mothers and wives play the dominant role in managing families. “Most of them cannot afford one square meal,” says Ajay Nand, police superintendent in Maoist-infested West Midnapore district of West Bengal. “With money and food assured, some women do not think twice about joining the rebels.

And as the Cambodia Killing Fields demonstrated all too clearly, when you allow such pressure to build up, nasty events tend to explode.

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Environmental politics Feminism

An alternative, feminist, pin-up

April 17, 2006 – 1:40 pm

That great Sydney tradition, the Royal East Show, has one seemingly inexplicable, but highly popular, element – the woodchopping. In a small arena, a line of people armed only with an axe line up for the starting gun. Then the chips fly and they’ll each slice through a hefty lump of wood in no time at all. Why is it so popular? I suspect it has a lot to do with the Australian mythology of “The Bush”, the theory that Australians are bushies at heart, despite living in one of the most urbanised societies on earth.

I learn from the Sydney Morning Herald that the Americans are now competing in force, and their lumberjills (wince) are presenting an alternative image of womanhood. Not at all bad… every woman should know how to chop her own wood. (Before you ask, yes I am a dab hand with an axe. Never chopped down a whole tree, but have split up a lot of firewood in my time.)

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To something closer to most people’s – and particularly women’s – working reality, being a waitperson. This article sets out the realities of this job in America – where the workers are almost entirely dependent on tips for their livelihood. Theoretically, this is supposed to be the ultimate in “performance-related pay”, but the article explains that the actual level of service has almost no effect on the level of a tip: “How sunny it is outside has the same impact on a tip as good service does.”
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And finally, good environmental news. Hate to say it, but this will probably have more effect than a thousand sensible messages: the US glossy magazines have decided that “Green is the new black”.

“Vanity Fair, the self-confessed bible for America’s high rollers, has emphatically embraced the green cause. Inside a leaf-coloured cover, an alpha list of names from Julia Roberts to Robert Kennedy Jnr, and George Clooney to Bette Midler are sending a message to their President and all those still in eco-denial. “Time to get real, ” the magazine tells its 1 million buyers. “Global warming is the problem ­ the biggest problem. It’s not a matter of when any longer. It’s here. Green is the future ­ the only future.”
Hot in pursuit, Elle magazine (“go green with our round-up of the best organic treatments for your body”) will unveil its own environmentally friendly issue this week for May with a competing clutch of celebrities, including Cameron Diaz, television star Evangeline Lilly, supermodel Carolyn Murphy, and ­ yes ­ Robert Kennedy Jnr.”

The reality still has some way to go to catch up with the rhetoric, however:

The “green edition” [Vanity Fair], critics calculate, has used up 2,247 tons of trees. And that’s not to mention the production of 4,331,757 pounds of greenhouse gases, 13,413,922 gallons of waste water and 1,744,060 pounds of solid waste.

Elle at least managed to print on recycled paper.

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