Category Archives: Environmental politics

Books Environmental politics History Science

A wise look at “weeds” and their place in our world

May 27, 2012 – 6:46 pm

A shorter version of this review was originally published on Blogcritics.

Arriving in France to a spring garden in which the nettles stand chest-high with the grass-seed heads waving alongside, it seemed the ideal time to pick up Richard Mabey’s Weeds: The Story of Outlaw Plants. It also turned out to be a book that crossed across many of the environmental news stories of today – as well as being simply a cracking good read. Mabey as a writer really knows how to let an anecdote rip across the page, and his sources and interests are wide and broad though never overwhelming, but he’s also a thinker, and the overview of human interaction with nature – our sheer blazing ignorance and careless destructiveness – come strongly through as a theme of Weeds.

One topical story is that of ragwort – a “weed” that last year got a UK government minister hellbent on its destruction as a “vile” plant into a lot of (entirely deserved) hot water. He quotes the country poet John Clare’s early 19th-century view of it as displaying “beautys manifold” in a “sunburnt & bare” spot on a degraded meadow, contrasting it with 20th-century hysteria about the poisoning of grazing animals, particularly horses. Mabey notes: “Neither wild nor domestic animals will usually eat growing ragwort if other forage is available. The vast majority of poisoning cases are from dried plants which have been cut with hay and, ironically, from wilted and shrunk specimens which have been sprayed with herbicide (the plant is just as toxic when dead, and less easily recognised by animals.)… Clare accepts ragwort as one of the adornments of the summer landscape, even by the side of the ‘waggonways’ used by horses. \the absence from the poem of any reference to local hostility (often mentioned in connection with other species) suggests there was some kind of rapprochement with the plant. It was a weed to be respected, not demonised.)” (p. 123)

Another strong theme now in the news is the overall massive loss of diversity over past centuries, but particularly last decades – highlighted today by news of how “the wholesale ripping up of hedgerows, draining of wetlands and ploughing over of meadows” has led to the loss of 50% of Europe’s farmland birds, and about the farming time-machine needed to try to reintroduce the short-haired bumblebee into Britain.

Mabey travels with a young Finn, Pehr Kalm, who in 1748 visited the farm of the celebrated British improver William Ellis. It was March, before plants had flowered, so the young visitor sorted through dried hay to establish what mix of species grew in the rich pastures. (The same method, Mabey notes, is still used by ecologists today.) There were 29 species, only nine of them grasses, “including several that would be regarded as grassland weeds today – hoary plantain, daisy, yarrow, knapweed, hawkweed” and, predominately what we now see as a lawn weed, bird’s-foot trefoil… which Ellis “praised beyond compare and set before all other grass species in his Modern Husbandman … to be in the highest perfection the most proper hay for feeding saddle-horses, deer, sheep and rabbits, as well as cattle”. (p.129) Mabey notes we now know that many of these despised “weeds” have higher nutritional value than the grasses they are killed with herbicide to make space for.

He also notes how many of the plants we now seek to destroy with noxious chemicals were put to good use – gorse, as a fuel plant, especially for bread ovens, and bracken, used to fuel brick and bread baking, and also as a litter for animals in the farmyard that then became an excellent manure for wheat, pea and corn crops. Mabey explains how on a common near his home, a radical local landowner in 1866 led a campaign of direct action against the enclosure of the common the Finn was describing. “On the day the fences were torn down, the local people flocked up to Berkhamsted Common and picked token sprigs of gorse to celebrate that the place was theirs again. Until the commons were finally sold off in the 1920s, the locals adhered to courteous and frugal codes to ensure the survival of their weed resource. There was a close-season for the gorse and bracken, between 1 June and 1 September. On 31 August the commoners would listen for the chimes of the parish church at midnight, and go up to stake out their claims, like gold prospectors.” (p. 130)

Then there’s the “hot” question of how much we can continue to engage in large-scale monoculture, maybe with genetically modified crops to deal with the multiple problems, an issue that’s being played out in Britain today in a dispute over GM wheat. There’s good cause to be worried about the risks of this controversial trial, but even more cause to be concerned about an attempt to use a simplistic solution to allow the continuation of our destructive broad-scale farming systems. Nature’s a lot smarter and faster than we are, as Mabey illustrates with the example of the rice bred for South-East Asian conditions too “out-smart” weed grasses. “In the rice paddies… there are weed grasses so similar to cultivated rice that farmers are unable to distinguish them before the wild grasses bloom. Plant breeders thought they might be able to trick the weed into showing itself by developing a variety of rice with a purple tinge. Within a matter of years the weed grass had turned purple too. The slight pigment that had enable plant breeders to develop the coloured rice also occurs occasionally in the weed. With each successive harvets it was this strain that … passed into next year’s seed store.” (p. 45)
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Books Environmental politics Science

The latest on the state of world agriculture, and how far we have to go to fix it

December 26, 2011 – 11:53 pm

A shorter version was published on Blogcritics.

Back in 2006, it was in part concern about world food supplies – and particularly the condition of the soils and water that produce them – that led me to join the Green Party. I did an agricultural science degree, a long time ago, and I never “practiced” as a scientist, but an interest in soils, and comprehension that their complexity is something that is terribly important and terribly poorly understood, has stayed with me. And being an Australian, particularly one who spent some time in the bush, an awareness of water scarcity is part of my DNA.

Since then, I’ve had to ration my reading on the subject. It’s too depressing to confront it too often. But it seemed when I came across The Coming Famine: The Global Food Crisis and What We Can Do To Avoid It by Julian Cribb, from the University of Technology Sydney (ah, I remember its wool science lab well!), published last year, it was time to update with the words of a specialist.

We’re already in a bad place. As Cribb notes, in the Soviet grain emergency of 1972-5, world food prices rose by 78%, while between 2005 and 2008, they rose on average by 80%. (p.3) But in the intervening period, it is very clear, global governments and NGOs took their eye off the ball. They thought food was fixed, sorted, and would keep on getting cheaper. And it is set to get a lot worse:

The challenge facing the world’s 1.8 billion women and men who grow our food is to double their output of food – suing far less water, less land, less energy, and less fertilizer. They must accomplish this on low and uncertain returns, with less new technology available, amid more red tape, economic disincentives, and corrupted markets, and in the teeth of spreading drought.” (p. 13)

On soil loss, Cribb is bigger than others I’ve read on the spread of cities, noting that adding all of the world’s urban areas together they are estimated to occupy 4.75 million square kilometres, about half the size of the US or China (p. 58), and making the, good, point, that not only do they consume land for housing, but also for leisure facilities around them – golf courses, playing fields etc, plus off course in the West anyway commuter belts. Because cities are usually located on the best agricultural land, they’re also pushing farming into more marginal territory, where soil degradation, saliniation etc are likely to be more of a problem.

Cribb follows one of my favourite issues in stressing how much cities once did and could again supply a significant proportion of their own food, but current planning policies actively work to prevent this. (This madness being just a small example.) And he’s big on the need for cities to preserve nutrients (yes, I’m a big fan of composting toilets for this reason) – “humanity is thought to produce around 3 billion tonnes of phosporus in its sewage, so, in theory at least, the world’s cities concentrate around 1.5 billion tonnes- an immense resource that is largely wasted by flushing it into the oceans”. (p. 80) Particularly telling since peak phosphorus (produced from rock) was around 1989 – and “there’ are no substitutes for phosphorus. It is fundamental to the chemistry that supports all forms of life”. (p. 76)

And supplies depend on a narrow range of sources: “The lion’s share of phospate production… comes from China (37%), Morocco and the Western Sahara (32%), South Africa (8%) and the US (7%). Potash [one of the other key nutrients] is obtained by mining potassium salts and comes chiefly from four countries – Canada (53%), Russia (22%), Belarus (9%) and Germany (9%).” (p. 72) Nitrogen, the other key element, is mostly made from synthetic ammonia made using natural gas and is made in more than 60 countries. (Still sounds like a powerful argument for the coplete fertiliser of compost to me!
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Books Environmental politics Politics

An “Occupy” novel – written a decade ago…

December 20, 2011 – 9:35 pm

First published on Blogcritics

I was reading an article about “Armageddon fiction” — well there is a lot of it around at the moment, for obvious reasons — and comment left on it recommended Gwyneth Jones’s Bold As Love in a way that caught my fancy. Something a bit both radical but also playful seemed like the seasonal thing, if you’re going to read something like this at all. (Couldn’t face The Road again – it is a brilliant book, but I spent two weeks depressed after reading it!)

Published in 2001, it tells the story of “Dissolution Summer”, as Britain splits into its constituent parts, the economic and technical systems break down, and total societal collapse looms. (The rest of the world, we sketchily learn, is on varying parts of the same spectrum.)

What’s curious, reading it now, is how many echoes there are of the Occupy movement, in a novel written more than a decade before the first Occupy tent peg was driven in. At the centre of the story are fans of alternative music, and alternative lifestyles, who gather at traditional spots (and some non-traditional) around the country and refuse to move. They’re keen on a particular mask (though this is fro a rock group, not a movie, as today). And there’s a faint echo of Charlie Brooker’s recent Black Mirror – albeit far grimmer, in the fall of England’s first prime minister/dictator.

There’s also a war with Islamic separatists in Yorkshire, 300,000 environmental refugees and cyclical brownouts as the fossil fuel runs out – not much that dates there. Although perhaps the nation looking to alternative music stars has – we’ve had far too much X Factor for that industry’s magical gloss to have been retained.

The whole thing is centred around a romance, told from the perspective of the female lead, which not being a reader of romances I often found quite irritating, and it fluctuates in tone and content between the fantasy genre (this is the first of the series and you get the feeling the main character’s “magic” credentials will come to the fore later – Jones gets a touch of JK Rowling influence there, you feel) and rather more realist disaster fiction – the later elements being those I found more interesting.
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Books Environmental politics Politics

The politics of Britain displayed through its architecture

December 17, 2011 – 11:07 pm

A shorter version was first published on Blogcritics

Sometimes it helps to approach politics from a sideways direction – from a different perspective you can see the old political issues – why was the British Labour government from 1997 to 2010 so awful in so many ways (only of course to be far surpassed by our current Tory-Lib Dem nightmare)? – in new ways.

Owen Hatherley in A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain approaches from the direction of architecture, and very enlightening, if depressing, that direction turns out to be – helped by a wry, not infrequently laugh-out-loud dry sarcasm and a minimum use of professional jargon. He’s on form on the Science Centre in Glasgow – “If we really need these comprehensive redevelopment-trailing enclaves of titanium tat housing interactive experiences to patronise pre-teens (and I see no reason why we do), then this is one of the better example.” (p. 191)

Despite the general lack of jargon, I did, however, learn a new term, Googie, for architecture that originated in American Forties to Sixties roadside diners and coffee shops, designed to catch the eye of passing motorists, and which Hatherley traces through “radical” architecture to the typical boring but “enlivened” by weird roof shapes and odd bits poking out or off kilter that characterises a mean and poky “luxury flat complex” that’s bound to be located near you – “its forbears are in the aesthetics of consumption and advertising, its forms designed to be seen at great speed, not in serene contemplation. It should not surprise us that a style of consumption would return under neoliberalism, but the formal affinities of Pseudomodernism with this aesthetic offers an alternative explanation for what often seems an arbitrary play of forms. By drawing on the futurism of the McCarthy era, the architecture of the equally conformist neoliberal consensus establishes a link between two eras of political stagnation and technological acceleration. It also allows us to reinterpret what purports to be an aesthetic of edification as one of consumption…. The architecture once described as deconstructivist owes less to Derrida than it does to McDonald’s.” (p. xxix)

So that pretty well tells you where Hatherley is coming from, both politically and architecturally. He’s a fervent critic of the past couple of decades of “regeneration” of British cities, and something of a defender, if far from an uncritical one, of the aspirations of the Fifties and Sixties – and the structures built then, often poorly and carelessly, but he says with good intentions, and designs that would have held up fine had faith, and investment, been maintained. Now instead we’ve got, he says, rightly in my view, mean and pinched, poorly built structures characterised by “vernacular” brickwork (often clearly “decorative”) and slatted wood, or even worse plastic and plasticky or metalled panelling in preschooler-friendly colours, thrown up by developers with no consideration to the environments in which they’re placed. Topped off, of course, with oddly angled or shaped roofs, which almost invariably leak. (I’m reminded of a Camden new block of flats crammed into a busy road that I visited recently – badly placed glass, odd shapes, and plaster weeping from barely finished walls to show the cheap and shoddy concrete block beneath.) And that’s without mentioning the seemingly deliberately, outright, unredeemably ugly hotels….
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Books Environmental politics Politics

Can we choose to descend to a less intensive, simpler level of technology and organisation? Have we done it before?

December 13, 2011 – 11:27 pm

I’ve been reading recently about the people of Southeast Asia who seem to have chosen a “lower” level of development – and a freer, less laborious life – with an attempt to look at a view of history from outside the nation state, and that took me on to Joseph A Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies.

Published in 1988 it is a book that sometimes shows its age (and I think its account of the Ik in northern Uganda – based on others’ research – is frankly bizarre and nonsensical; the controversy is discussed on Wikipedia).

But I found myself revisiting the thoughts of how many peoples through history might have chosen to move back to a lower level of complexity and technology, in the interests of a better life (a thought with obvious importance today).

Tainter is, as you’d expect, much interested in the fall of Rome, which he puts down to, as with other cases, to a decline on the rate of return on expansion, to the point where it starts to be negative: “the Empire had to maintain a far-flung, inflexible administrative and military structure on the basis of variable agricultural output, and in the face of an increasingly hostile political environment.” (p. 149) “During the fourth and fifth centuries .. The Empire… was suistaining itself by the consumption of its capital resources: producing lands and peasant population…. the Dominate paid for the present by undermining the future’s ability to pay taxes… reduced finances weakened military defense, while military disasters in turn meant further loss of producing lands and population.” (p. 150)

His view of the so-called Dark Ages is rather different to the classic one: “The collapse yielded at the same time both a reduction in the costs of complexity and an increase in the marginal return on its investment. The smaller, Germanic kingdoms that succeeded Roman rile in the West were more successful at resisting foreign incursions (e.g. Huns and Arabs) than had been the later Empire. They did so, morever, at lower administrative and military costs. The economic prosperity of North Africa actually rose under the Vandals, but declined again under Justinian’s reconquest when Imperial taxes were reimposed. Thus the paradoz of collapse: a drop in compexity brings ith it a corresponding rise in the marginal return on social investment.” (p. 151)

So there as, Tainter suggests, often a welcome for the “barbarians”. “Contemporary records indicate that, more than once, both rich and poor wished that the barbarians would deliver them from the burdens of Empire. While some of the civilian population resisted the barbarians (with varying degrees of earnestness), and many more were simply inert in the presence of the invaders, some actively fought for the barbarians. In 378, for example, Balkan miners went over en masse to the Visigoths. In Gaul the invaders were sometimes welcomed as liberators from the Imperial burden, and were even invited to occupy territory. … Zosimus, a writer of the second half of the fifth century AD, wrote of Thessaly and Macedonia that “as a result of this exaction of taxes city and ountryside ere full of laments and complaints and all invoked the barbarians and sought the help of the barbarians”.” (p. 147)
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Books Environmental politics History

Crow Country – an introduction to the life of a complex, intelligent and widespread species, the rook

October 2, 2011 – 9:55 pm

I confess I’m not really sure if they’re ravens, carrion crow or rooks — I haven’t got close enough to use my excellent RSPB bird books to distinguish them — but I do know that in a valley I regularly visit in the Morvan in Burgundy, there’s lots of one or more crow species, and they seem to interact in interesting ways, forming, particularly in winter, quite large groups that swoop around at dusk, raucously dominating the neighbourhood.

So when I saw Mark Cocker’s Crow Country, it was clearly a book that I’d not only read, but read in France. Which is what I’ve just done, and it’s left me with a strong desire to learn more about my local corvids, because I’m sure there’s a lot to be discovered.

The fact that Cocker describes himself as a “nature writer” did give me some pause — the more literary end of nature writing tends to leave me cold — but although some passages of Crow Country were a bit too far down the poetical side for my taste, overall I found it a fascinating account of the natural history of rooks and jackdaws in Britain, and gave me plenty of information about their French cousins.

The key line of the book is Cocker’s attempt to understand rook behaviour, and particularly their spending part of winter in large, sometimes enormous, mass roosts. He starts with their rookeries (breeding centres), the reasons for which are well established.

“In the nesting season, the abundant supply of worms is the key to the rook’s success. The onset of the breeding cycle in earliest spring is timed to coincide with the maximum availability of prey for the chicks. But the food items aren’t spread evenly, they’re clustered randomly…It’s thought that rooks have evolved to share resources and capitalise on the shifting and temporary abundances by pursuing a feeding strategy of follow-my-leader…. Each bird discovering a food hotspot faces the disadvantage of competition from neighbours, but it is more than compensated by the opportunity, on all occasions when it is less successful, to share the good fortune uncovered by others.” (p. 75)

That’s from late February to June, the nesting season, but the rest of the year, Cocker gradually concludes, they are roosting, often split between a late summer/early autumn roost and a later one – the latter reflecting a large concentration of birds. Roosts are usually in the middle of woods, even though these are birds that feed in grasslands (they’ve been recorded flying up to 32km to feeding grounds for the day – “as the crow flies”!), and he concludes that protection from weather, uninterrupted nights (they’re usually in very calm places) and perhaps to some degree predators (although there’s few of these now) , are an important part of the roosting behaviour.

But the biggest advantage for rooks in these huge gatherings is, he concludes, like in rookeries, the spread of information. It is, however, more complicated than that. In the Yare Valley roost he studied, numbers ranged from 10,000 to 40,000 at the year’s peak, numbers depending to a large degree on continental European visitors, who leave snow-covered territories for warmer western wintering grounds.

“For non-resident naive individuals the primary value might lie in following resident birds out to otherwise unknown feeding sites. The resident population may thus enjoy a dominant status in the roost and occupy more central locations in the trees. They can monopolise the best perches for thermal protection or defence against predators.” (p. 164.)

It’s well known that corvids are intelligent – the Caledonian crows having shocked researchers by inventing tools – but Cocker also finds real world examples. There’s the M4 rooks who’ve learnt to get to waste at the bottom of bin bags by gradually tugging them up the side of their frame, holding the bulked plastic under one foot, and those birds who’ll bury food for later consumption. (For jays this is standard, for rooks seemingly more learned behaviour.) So we learn in the Aberdeenshire vernacular a self-seeded tree is “craw(rook)-sown”. (p. 57)

Cocker’s also interested in history – both human, rook and how they intersect. He recounts tales of rooks acting as vulture-like scavengers, on sheep and dog carcasses, and infers an “ancient and resonant scene”.

“Our Mesolithic ancestors were accustomed to place deceased relatives on special excarnation platforms where natural predators would pick the bones clean, before the remains were taken to be buried in a barrow or cairn. I can just imagine the rook flock that chanced upon the same easy pickings, smothering the raised corpse in a blanket of dark wings and excited calls”. (p. 59)

But that’s not standard fare – Cocker explains it is mainly insects and arthropods in the upper topsoil, particularly worms, which explains their distribution as a bird of pastures and cropland. (Although they’ll also eat small mammals, eggs and grain.) They stab 5-6cm into the ground, then uses Zirkeln, open-billed probing, to find their prey. Forest is not for them.

“They occupy vast swathes of the Mongolian and Manchurian grasslands, right through to the outskirts of Beijing and the shores of the Yellow Sea. To the west they’ve conquered the immense oceanic expanses of Russia and Asian grassland from about 160E to a point half a world away on the Baltic coast. …Rooks were dependent on the westward spread of stock grazing and cereal agriculture … to make their own entry into Europe. So when you next pass a rookery remember to stop and listen. Amond the spring-summoning cacophony you’ll hear the faintest echo of a Neolitic axe.” (p61)

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