Category Archives: Environmental politics

Environmental politics

Getting my South Downs trees straight

August 12, 2012 – 10:15 pm

Notes from a walk around the lovely Sustainability Centre on the South Downs, where I spent the weekend at the Little Green Gathering, led by David Hepper.

Outside the hostel is a lovely short avenue of sycamores (leaves shaped like maples’), which despite having been introduced from North America is the second-best for British insects (best oaks).

They grow and spread well, helped by their winged ‘helicopter’ seeds, and the wood is excellent for carving and firewood.

The centre boasts a glorious stand of copper beech – the copper colour being a ‘sunscreen’ for the leaves – it doesn’t appear in the shaded low leaves.

Beech is so effective in catching sunlight that there’s seldom any understory with a mature stand. Fungi often grows underneath and this is what breaks down the leaf litter so the trees can reuse the nutrients. Beech nuts (which have four seeds in each pod) were an important part of pannage, the common grazing for pigs. The wood is easy to work and inside will last more or less forever.

Beech was probably introduced by the Romans. It likes southeast England – and does well on chalk and limestone soils, which oaks aren’t keen on. Ash won’t grow without a decent loam.

Ash has a pinate leaf (this is just one leaf) and has sooty grey buds at the junction of leaves. It is reasonably quick growing and can get enormous – up to 13m in circumference around the base.

Silver birch also grows here but it isn’t common – this is the very southern end of its range. Trees here are basically relics left after the last ice age. On lowland heathland it is effectively a pest – hard to control. It co a huge areas of Scandanavia, Russia, and northern Canada.

Not a tree, but there’s lots of teasel growing here – as used in medieval times to comb wool. The leaves are arranged so as to collect water and it is rare in that flowering starts from the middle of the inflorescence, rather than the top or bottom, then spreads in both directions.

Many of the buildings here are roofed with chestnut shingles – it splits well but needs to be
correctly seasoned if it isn’t going to curl up over time.

There was lots more, but this was an excellent intro to the ecology of the area, which really is notably beautiful.

Cycling home I saw two roe deer running across fields near the above – they were fleeing a hay-mower, and leaping the piles of hay. One large, one smaller, possibly a well grown youngster…

No pics, but there are some lovely ones from the area here.

Permalink | Comment (0)
Books Environmental politics History Science

A fascinating (pre)history of manure – no, really. And possibly some lessons for today…

June 23, 2012 – 11:15 pm

A shorter version was first published on Blogcritics

The “new books” section at the London Library throw up many weird, wonderful and exciting possibilities. Not many readers might have picked up Manure Matters: Historical, Archaeological and Ethnographic Perspectives, but since it combines my interest in soils and history, how could I resist?

And I found parts of this collection of academic essays by different authors absolutely fascinating – and even a reader without my special interest would, I think, also do so. (Although I’ll admit that “Organic geochemical signatures of ancient manure use” is probably only of specialist concern – although I did learn from it that elephants, hyraxes and manatees are the only major vertebrates that don’t produce bile acids. Now there’s a pub quiz killer answer…)

Even the introduction, with its brief skip through the 20th-century organics movement, told me things I didn’t know, particularly the debt that this Western knowledge owes to the East. It identified a key text, published in 1911, Farmers of Forty Centuries, by Franklin King, who had made a research trip to China, Japan and Korea. “Critically, King was able to demonstrate that organic manures in the East enabled more to be grown per hectar.. than contemporary methods used in the West which were becoming ever more reliant on artificials [fertilisers]”. (p. 3) And India also contributed through the work of Sir Albert Howard, who eventually established the Institute of Plant Industry in Indore, where he established a manuring method, the Indore Process, that involves mixing vegetable and animal waste with chalk, limestone, wood ash, earth or claked lime, to neutralise the acidity produced by fermentation. His An Agricultural Testament (1940) informed Soil Association work.

But mostly, we’re going an awful lot further back in history – or more correctly prehistory. “Middening and manuring in Neolithic Europe” sets out much of the ground – the fact that stall manure is rarely spread more than 500 metres from its source, even with animal transport available, greatly raising the value of land in immediate proximity of human/animal housing. And that manuring is a slow investment – only 5-25% of the nutrients being usually available in the year after its spreading – which immediately raises questions of land tenure and inheritance. There’s a tension if new households are added – if they are to be in close proximity to existing ones, then this land will be encroached. This may explain areas such as central and northern Europe where dispersed settlements tend to be the norm.
read more »

Permalink | Comments (3)
Environmental politics Politics

Notes from the London “Alternative Rio” conference

June 17, 2012 – 10:54 pm

I spoke today at the session on “Women and Climate Change”, which I think went  well. I’ll be writing elsewhere about what I said, but among the things I learnt from the session were about:

  • *Bridge and  their very interesting-looking “gender and climate change pack”, which has gone to the top of my to-read pile. The related Institute of Development Studies also produced an interesting leaflet on food sovereignty.
  • About a government consultation on biofuels, with particular reference to the issue of palm oil
  • About the biological vulnerability of girls to radiation (with particular reference to Fukushima)
  • About the Greenheart project;
  • And while I’m posting links, I was promoting the useful GenderCC website.

Although I kept getting caught in conversation, I did manage to catch parts of two other sessions.

I was taken by comments from Dan Plesch of SOAS about the damage that has been done by the provision of limited liability for companies, which has led to the externalisation of risk while profits remain privatised. He was scathing about “corporate social responsibility”, noting that it was legally subject to the obligation to maximise shareholder value.  He noted that the Victorians were extremely suspicious of limited liability – referencing Gilbert & Sullivan’s Utopia Ltd, and up until the 1920s The Economist was opposed to it.

Rupert Read made a nice summary of Keynesianism as offering the tradeoff of continual growth in return for accepting continuing inequality  – “growthism is an endless excuse not to face up to inequality”. He said that the end of growth would mean a need to share out the pie more equally.

Green MEP Keith Taylor spoke on fracking (at what from the bit I heard was a very strong session – also very impressed with Frack Off). He said that for Europe the problem was that it was a fast-moving technology that was hard to keep up with, France and Bulgaria had banned it while Poland was rushing ahead.

Sian Berry from the Campaign for Better Transport spoke about “peak car“, the idea that young people in particular (in cities and large towns at least) are becoming less interested in driving – hey, you can’t use Facebook! And how the Department for Transport has over the past three decades consistently significantly over-estimated traffic growth, by assuming that it would simply grow in line with population. And given the fact that the government has been planning for that growth, providing the roads etc, the question arises about how much traffic might have gone done had that been what the government was planning for…

Coming up from the Campaign Against Climate Change: Zero Carbon Britain Day, July 21, and December 1, Global Day of Action on Climate Change.

Permalink | Comment (1)
Books Environmental politics

Elinor Ostrom – a true intellectual innovator

June 12, 2012 – 10:55 pm

When I studied agricultural science at university many years ago, we were taught “The Tragedy of the Commons” not as a claim, or as a situation arising from certain social circumstances, but as an inevitable fact of life.

Life experience, and a certain intellectual scorn for the quality of my university education, had led me to no longer believe that, but I was still delighted when Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Economics prize with her work on such commons that worked very well with community management over long periods of time – often better indeed than government or commercially managed models.

Also delighted that she was the first Economics laureate, although unsurprised to learn that she’d had to battle to be allowed to study for her doctorate, as a woman in a “man’s” field. (And I’m glad that I got the London Library to buy her Governing the Commons.)

Sad to learn then that she’s died today.

Here’s her Nobel lecture: Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems.

And her last article, on the Rio conference, published today.

A good day to read in her memory…

Permalink | Comments (2)
Environmental politics Politics

Green politics in Burgundy

June 5, 2012 – 9:46 pm

… well this is based on a very small sample of the meeting I went to this evening in St Leger sous Beuvray (population 500 or so). This is in the 3rd circonscription of Saone et Loire and the speaker was the candidate for the legislative elections starting on June 10, Francois Lotteau, who is also the mayoral candidate for Chalon sur Saone, the regional capital. (And it is also based on my limited French…thanks very much to the people I was talking to for their patience! )

The candidate’s literature begins “after decades of liberalisation, the state is powerless to resolve the global crisis. There are interdependent economic, social, ecological and financial crises. austerity is not the solution. Green politics is the highest response (response a hauteur) to the issue of the day.”

It talks about the development of “peasant” (paysan – I think perhaps “non-industrial” might be a better translation) agriculture, guaranteeing good food to consumers and decent income to farmers, the decline in numbers of which must be stopped.

That was one of the chief topics of discussion tonight – the problems of young farmers and access to land and capital, the complications and cost of getting organic certification, the fact that so much food in the shops is industrial and not tied to place or producer.

The leaflet also talks about the need to invest in the green energy sector, including insulation, to reduce unemployment and “the (financial) precariousness of life”. Most discussion this evening was despair at the French acceptance and promotion of nuclear power – I sympathised and explained about our rightwing government.
read more »

Permalink | Comment (0)
Books Environmental politics Science

Understand the birds – I do now, at least a little more…

May 27, 2012 – 10:52 pm

A shorter version of this post was originally published on Blogcritics

Today I was watching a buzzard soar above the Morvan National Park in Burgundy. Tonight, I’m listening to one owl – maybe more – hooting gently in the valley below me that the raptor was dominating earlier, as the scene is very gently lit by a waxing, but still small, moon. They seem mysterious, unknowable – hard to track their lives and imagine what they would be like, but I’ve got a bit more of an idea after reading Tim Birkhead’s Bird Sense: What It Is Like to Be a Bird.

I know that the raptor has a preponderance of cone cells in its retina (“like low-speed colour film – high-definition and performing best in bright light”), and the owl a majority of rod cells (which “can be thought of as working like old-fashioned high-speed black and white film – capable of detecting low levels of light”). While humans have only one fovea – a spot in the back of the eye where images are sharpest, some birds, including raptors, shrikes, hummingbirds, kingfishers and swallows, have two. So that buzzard’s visual acuity, ability to see fine detail, is roughly twice my own, while I probably didn’t need the science to tell me the owl can see a lot better in the dark than I. (I do sometimes go walking in the forest at night without a torch, but it’s a case of walking by feel rather than sight.)

That might sound quite technical, but really this is a highly readable book, that puts sometimes quite complicated science into terms entirely accessible to any interested lay person. The task of a mallard duck seeking food at the bottom of a muddy pond is likened to a human being given a morning bowl of muesli and milk to which has been added a handful of fine gravel.

“To understand how this is possible, first catch a duck. Then turn it over and open its beak so that you can examine its palate. The most striking feature is a series of grooves radiating around the curved tip, but you need to look beyond these at the outer edge of the bill. What you should be able to see now is a series of tiny holes or pores – some 30 of them. If you look on the lower jaw, you will find even more – about 180. Examining these pores with a magnifying glass, you will see that from each one protrudes the top of a cone-shaped structure called a ‘papilla’, inside which is a cluster of around 20 to 30 microscopic sensory nerve eningds – these are the touch receptors – that connect to the brain.” (p. 78)

Migration is of course one of the great mysteries of bird life, and what stands out from Birkhead’s very clear explanation of the current state of knowledge is just how sketchy and uncertain it is. He begins the chapter with an account of his own work with guillemots on Skomer Island, off the Pembrokeshire coast, getting from new geolocating technology finally, in 2009, after decades of working with them, a detailed understanding of where they go when not nesting on the island. (In short south at the end of July for a few weeks in the Bay of Biscay, before flying 1,500km north to spend most of the winter off northwest Scotland.)
read more »

Permalink | Comment (1)

« Previous Page — Next Page »

« Previous Page — Next Page »