Category Archives: Politics

Books Environmental politics Science

Trees: into mysticism and beyond to science

April 2, 2011 – 9:06 pm

Article first published on Blogcritics.

I would describe myself as “not the mystical sort”. That means that Diana Beresford-Kroeger’s The Global Forest: 40 Ways Trees Can Save Us is not an obvious book for me. But beyond its mystical side, it also contains a lot of science, and that’s what drew me to it. Particularly, it’s the sort of big picture science that helps you to see the world in new ways.

The author is described in the blurb as “a world expert on how trees connect the effect our environment” and the detailed knowledge and expertise behind the writing is obvious. Yet she puts this into something accessible and highly readable, the inspiration she says in the introduction, the traditional Irish storyteller. So The Global Forest is structured as 40 short essays, which range across key aspects of our global ecosystems, and historical and recent human interactions with them.

The basics are here. This the fact that in the 1950s 30% of global land was covered with forests, and in 2005 that figure was down to something like 5%. This the fact that the demand for paper, almost entirely reliant on trees, has led to exploding demand for pulp of 200 million tonnes a year for the Western world. And the fact that, despite the global garden offering a cornucopia of 80,000 potential food species, we now rely almost exclusively on eight food species. As the author says: “the traditional knowledge of the other 79,992 is rapidly being lost to future generations”.

And so are practical suggestions. One of the chief concerns of the book is the promotion of what she calls to two-tier agriculture, the combination of tree and ground crops in a “Savannah design”. The chief knowledge base is clearly grounded in North America, and she is fascinating on the subject of the nut crops and the nut milk Native Americans made from them. And also the future potential. “All of the hickory family produces particularly dense wood together with a colossal nut crop…. The hickory can sequester carbon out of the atmosphere like no other tree can. They have done this in the past enemy stretches of virgin forest and they can do it again.”

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Feminism

Time for a new rape crisis funding campaign

March 9, 2011 – 8:58 am

The Boris Keep Your Promise campaign did a great job in forcing London’s current mayor to get moderately close to keeping his word on the subject of funding rape crisis centres. The dreadful situation that saw only one centre (in Croydon!) serving the whole of London has been greatly improved, with the provision of three extra centres that broadly cover the capital.

BUT, there’s no guarantee this is going to continue. Funding is only guaranteed until 2012 – the next mayoral election. It’s yet another case of “a campaigner’s work is never done”.

I know that the campaign will be gearing up again soon to push all of the mayoral candidates to guarantee continuation of the funding. But there’s no need to wait. Any time I come across a London Assembly member or mayoral candidate, I’ll be making sure this is high on the agenda.

But we also need to stop this merry-go-round. Campaigning like this to maintain essential women’s services takes far too much time and energy. We need to ensure that central services like this are regarded as a core part of society’s provision – standard funding that is automatically included in annual budgets, not something that has to be fought for.

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Books Feminism

Reading Julia Kristeva

March 9, 2011 – 12:21 am

Julia Kristeva is one of those writers I feel I should read. And I did make a real effort after finding a new work from her, Hatred and Forgiveness (translated by Jenaine Herman), in the “new books” at the London Library. But I have to confess that I find the psychoanalytical approach to life seriously hard going – and frequently hard to stomach.

But I was pleased to learn this text marked her receipt of the Holberg Prize, and I did like the way in a historical survey of female writers she picked out as “the first female intellectual”, Anne Comnena (Anna Komnen). This is Kristeva’s account:
“…she was the author of a superb history of the crusades and the reign of her father, the Emperor Alexis I. This was the nomumental Alexiade, in fifteen volumes. Born in 1083, Comnena began writing this work in 1138 at the age of fifty-five, and completed it ten years later: as the first female historian, she offers us an interpretation of this period that is very different from those of western chroniclers such as William of Tyre or Foucher de Chartes. This devotee of what would later be called orthodox Christianity was nevertheless raised on the Greek classics and a fervent reader of Homer and Plato. She was sensitive, melancholy and indeed romantic, a girl who was proud of her father: she was a philosopher and a politician, and her writing shows an awareness of the need for European unity, which was such an important issue at that time.” (p.5-6)

I also found her interesting on…

On the virgin status of Mary:
“Her virginity constitutes the major scandal: our sensibility and simple reason can only denounce the dreadful inequty this virginity exposes, women’s exclusion from sexuality: a punitive chastity that seems to be the price women must pay for admission to the sacred– and to representation.” (p. 64)

On Colette:
“..the amorous Colette, endlessly betrayed and endlessly betraying, declared herself beyond romantic passion, “one of the great banalities of existence” from which one had to escapre, provided one was capable of participating in the plurality of the world – in a fulfillment of the ego through a multitude of ‘gay, varied and plentiful’ connections.” (p. 224)

On Georgia O’Keeffe:
“…you probably had to be a modern woman to decide that the sparest and most final image of death was the pelvic bone: this basin at the bottom of the spine that houses the lower abdomen and sexual organs, and that, deprived of flesh, is nothing but a coarse ring – the void itself…. THe Pelvis series… recall the Taoist representation of the sky, and Pi, a circle of jade with a hole, symbol of male emptiness.” (p. 243)

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Feminism Media

Women in the press: where are they?

March 3, 2011 – 10:01 pm

I spoke this evening at a Women in Journalism event that launched its study “Women in Journalism: A-Gendered Press?”, marking International Women’s Day. These are some thoughts from it…

The results of the report will come as no real surprise to anyone who works in the media. To take a few of the headlines: “74% of news journalists are men, whilst women make up just one third of journalists covering business and politics. Just 3% of sports journalists are women. Women are less likely to be in senior positions, with eight out of the top ten newspapers having almost twice as many male editors as women editors.”

You can, of course, look at this from different angles. When you consider that nearly 90% of the directors of FTSE 100 companies are male, and nearly 80% of MPs are male, you could say that (with the notable exception of sport), the press isn’t doing too badly.

If, however, you reflect that the press plays an important place in creating our view of the world, then the results are disgraceful.

There are two big questions really: why? and what can we do about it?
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Books Environmental politics Politics

The culture of the bicycle

February 24, 2011 – 10:39 am

A shorter version was published on Blogcritics

As an occasional participant in London’s Critical Mass, as a regular “it’s the best way to get around” cyclist on the streets of the British capital, and as a campaigner who thinks that cars get far, far too much consideration when it comes to town planning, when I saw One Less Car in Edinburgh’s bookshop, I just had to pick it up.

It’s the first history that I’ve seen of the politics of the bicycle, and while I know quite a bit about the late 20th century and early 21st-century campaigns around cycling, I knew little of what came before.

I now feel far more informed, although I was glad as I read of my sometimes too close knowledge of cultural studies and associated jargon, for the author, Jack Furness, his field as assistant professor of cultural studies at Columbia College Chicago, and it shows. Although to be fair, it’s pretty hard to talk about the Situationists, as Furness does, without using their jargon. He quotes Pierre Canjuers and Guy Debord: “A mistake made by all the city planners is to consider the private automobile … S essentially means of transportation. In reality, it is the most notable material symbol of the notion of happiness that developed capitalism tends to spread throughout the society. The automobile is at the centre of this general propaganda, both as supreme good of an alienated life and as essential product of the capitalist market.” (p54)
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Politics

Launching my London Assembly List campaign

February 23, 2011 – 9:54 am

Today I’m launching my campaign for the Green Party selection for the London Assembly List. My campaign website is here.

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