(Yes I did type that carefully).
She’s called Japanese knotweed and there’s one of her across the whole of Europe.
It all comes from one unsolicited sample sent to Kew gardens in 1850. A powerful example of unintended consequences.
I’ve been excavating my living room floor and I know that I’ve got to April, since I found the paperwork from the Fem08 conference*, which reminded me that I wanted blog about a report on homework in the UK from the Newsletter of Homeworkers Worldwide, Jan 2008, which reports the result of a survey from 2007. Most of the workers surveyed were paid piece rates, and they averaged £4.41 per hour – well below the minimum wage. “Some were paid as little as £1 an hour.”
Nearly half (48%) were not receiving any employment rights at all. The report says “the law in this area is unclear and inadequate” – and calls for reforms.
What are they doing? Sewing is the most common (23%), then packing and print finishing (22%), followed by delivery and distribution (10%).
The report doesn’t comment on gender, but I very much suspect that this is an overwhelmingly female group, making this very much a women’s issue.
*I try very hard not to pick up paper and new books — I’m trying to go almost entirely electronic — but somehow the cellulose still accumulates faster than I can manage to control it.
Thameside yesterday – I was taken by this interesting art form – commercial but entirely temporary:
There’s something primeval about producing art that will be wiped out by the next tide – or the next carwash.
Quoted in the programme of Her Naked Skin, the “suffragette play” now at the National Theatre:
Sir,
Everyone seems to agree upon the necessity of putting a stop to Suffragist outrages; but no one seems certain how to do so. There are two, and only two, ways in which this can be done. Both will be effectual.
1. Kill every woman in the United Kingdom.
2. Give women the vote.
Yours truly, Bertha Brewster
It’s a flawed play, but an absolutely gripping one: I’ve a review over on My London Your London.
Now up on Rage Against the Man-chine (great name!) is the Carnival of Feminists No 62. And a superb collection it is too – no sign at all of the summer silly season. I was particularly taken by the post of reflections on feminism from Mecca, and Fannie’s take on sport as acceptable soap opera for men.
But don’t waste time over here – go over there and check it out!
I often have random conversations with people about Australia (somehow my accent is still almost instantly recognisable despite some 15 years of not living there) and people are shocked when I say that the Australian environment has, on a broad scale, at least in the most productive parts of the country, been wrecked. While the human toll of environmental degradation and climate change might not be as large here as in parts of Africa, the overall damage is at least as bad if not worse.
So it is that the government is about the flood with seawater what had been a major wetland area in South Australia – near the mouth of the stricken Murray-Darling system.
Much further upstream, governments have just spent a very large sum on buying a major cotton farm in an attempt to save another seriously threatened wetland, even though there’s no guarantee at all that the plan will work. That’s because while the purchase included its licence for irrigation water, the dam that would supply it is only 18% full, and therefore there’s no water to be had. What’s REALLY obscene about this is that the farm was only developed in the 80s, when the water problems were already all too evident.
But to finish on a slightly positive note, as the New York Times reported it shipping costs are starting to crimp globalisation.
The cost of shipping a 40-foot container from Shanghai to the United States has risen to $8,000, compared with $3,000 early in the decade, according to a recent study of transportation costs. Big container ships, the pack mules of the 21st-century economy, have shaved their top speed by nearly 20 percent to save on fuel costs, substantially slowing shipping times.
And the campaigners are battling on – Jim on The Daily Maybe is keeping track of press coverage of the Camp for Climate Action here in the UK.
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