Not Offloading much (day 19)

 

Having worked the entire of July without a break I finally got the day off on Friday ... and spent it cleaning the house. I got up early, cleaned Tomoya's room (very thoroughly, even dusted the bookshelves) then hoovered my office and down the landing, bumped the tall mirror that stands against the wall and shattered it into huge lethal pointy bits and equally dangerous tiny shards. After cleaning it up very thoroughly I moved on to clean the bathroom, then hoover my room, down the stairs, the hallway, living room and kitchen. I cleaned my lovely new front door and hoovered the porch (considering repainting the blue as not sure it goes well with the red).

Then I unblocked all the drains, including removing the kitchen U-bend, ran the hot water cleaning cycle on the washing machine and cleaned the filter. I put the hall rug to soak in the bath and washed the sofa cushion covers. Finally I cleaned out the worms and gave them new 'bedding'. In between I chatted to both Monkey and my sister, handed my telly off to Curry's to fix the DVD player, went to the library and the garden centre for a washing liquid refill, then to Dunk's for afternoon cuppa. So I was pretty smug and satisfied with the result by the end of the day and am free to ignore all domestic chores for a month.

Tish came across 'The Living Sea of Waking Dreams' by Richard Flanagan (Booker prize winner, but not this novel) and recommended it to me, which is nice because it's not something she's done before, we have quite different reading tastes. More weird shit. But in a different way. I ached for Anna's mother through the whole book, and had quite a chat with Monkey about the whole 'assisted dying' thing, which is linked in with this whole notion of keeping someone alive by force rather than allowing death to come naturally, (though not the same thing of course). Anna's mother Francie has multiple health problems and one son, Tommy, (with different kinds of problems) who lives nearby and cares for her. Her other son Terzo and her daughter Anna live further afield and prefer to just throw money at 'the problem'. When the doctor tentatively suggests that keeping her 'comfortable' is the best way to go Terzo goes apeshit and uses all his money and influence to get them to keep his mother hanging on by a thread, suffering. I hated him. Anna seems to then drift in to this dreamlike existence of sitting with her dying mother, almost as an excuse to escape her stressful life. And then the weird shit starts, and bits of her body start disappearing. And people don't seem to notice. I thought at first it was her imagination, but the body parts seem to be really gone. Then other people start losing body parts, including her son, who eventually becomes just a few fingers that continue to play video games in his darkened bedroom (see what I mean ... weird shit). 

And ... then there's the social media addiction and the horror of the destruction of the natural world, wildfires and ... and ...

The chat with Monkey also veered into the value of human life. How all human life is equal, but not. Valuable but also cheap and disposable. People are dying all the time. Huge amounts of money might be spent to save one person, like a child fallen into a well, or millionaires in a submarine that might or might not have exploded, but people drowning in the Channel or dying of starvation in Gaza are somehow not saveable. This book raised all those questions as the reader watches this rich man demand that his mother is kept alive at all costs. 

One of several quotes that often read more like someone's brain racing through thoughts, loved the word, Solastalgia:

"She googled vanishings. Nothing. She posted a penguin meme she couldn't hold her thoughts she couldn't read she clicked through smoke sending people crazy it triggers anxiety a professor said it's like war the enemy is attacking the city we don't know where the enemy is. The planet's life support system may collapse flat earth believers now number millions new words for a new age, reads a meme. Pyro-cumuloniumbus giant fire-generating clouds sixteen kilometres high creating more fire through lightening, ember attacks, wind, fire tornadoes. Omnicide. Solastalgia emotion induced by the loss of everything. What is the image for nothing? Where is a language she thought she didn't she tried Insta again it loaded. So much joy! Instagram, blessed Novocaine of the soul! Foodholidayssmilinggroupsshopping. She had to get off. She knew it. She had to get off." (p.103)

A very 21st century book, all the world's modern day problems encapsulated here. Sometimes I find the stories of tiny, tiny wins against the massive destruction more depressing than uplifting. But like the anti nuclear movement previously said, Protest and Survive.

Stay safe. Be kind. Don't be a fascist.

Stop and Think it Over

I intermittently contemplate giving up the blog. I struggle to express myself because I can't think of a reason why anyone would listen to me. It all feels a little pointless and self indulgent in the face of wars, global climate change and the terrifying rise and normalisation right wing ideology. I am horrified by the state of the world, so much death and destruction in Gaza, and governments acting in the last few days as if they only just noticed it was happening. I write to my MP and donate money but the bigger it is the more insignificant your efforts feel.  What else is there to do.

How do we lead moral lives in the age of bullies?

But I am an unremitting optimist ... and so I stop and think it over.

The basil is growing well this summer. I may have another go at making pesto ... 

Stay safe. Be kind. Don't be a fascist. 

Holocaust Memorial Day

The word Nazism is being bandied about a lot at the moment. Today it is important to remember what it really means and where it leads. We must remember the millions of Jews who were murdered. The world must stand fast against ideas that dehumanise any group of people. The richest man on the planet stood up and made a nazi salute a few days ago ... and the world's press tried to pretend it didn't mean anything. Even the Guardian. I was so angry I wrote a letter, which they chopped right down before they published it. 

"It was a nazi salute. It did not ‘appear’ to be. It was not ‘fascist-style’. He knew exactly what he was doing. Even the Guardian, somehow, could not bring themselves to call it like it is. We must not normalise or excuse this behaviour. We must challenge it at every turn."

Stay safe. Be kind. Never forget.

On Tyranny

After the American election lots of people started mentioning 'On Tyranny' by Timothy Snyder, written in 2017 during the first Trump administration, many of them quoting the first lesson: "Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do." 

I have been listening to Lord of the Rings on Youtube (for the third time) and at one point Frodo laments that the task has fallen to him, how hard it is to be living in such dark times. Monkey is currently on Okinawa and went today to the memorial to the 200,000 people who died in the Battle of Okinawa in 1945. I found myself very moved by the photos she sent. I guess many people never realise at the time that they are part of a dark time in history, nor the role they may have played. 

Timothy Snyder ends his lessons with this one and it left me feeling overwhelmed but also heartened to think that throughout history people have been prepared to die for their freedom, and wondering about my own courage:

"Be as courageous as you can. If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny."

New Year Resolutions

He looks such a nice ordinary bloke but I am still left to wonder what motivates Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky's desire to own Royal Mail, an apparently loss making company. His reputation precedes him. This quote from the bottom of the wiki page, "We want to make money in industries that are dying because we think they'll die much more slowly than the general consensus says." makes my blood run somewhat chilly, as does his undertaking not to take funds from the pension surplus ... for five years. It seems that what he has done with his life is just own stuff, companies mainly. And since Royal Mail seems so keen to be owned by him I can only assume the current board do not give many fucks about the company. Therefore my new year resolution is to withdraw my fuck-giving, and devote the next four years and two months to the bits of my life that are more important. Once my mortgage is paid and the rest of my pensions fall due I will quit and find something low key and part time to prop up my income.

My 2019 resolution not to beat myself up about things remains very much in place and ties in quite nicely with the new addition.

And Japanese ... I will continue to learn, for my brain health, and for ordering green tea when I go to Japan.

Stay safe. Be kind. Take care on the icy streets.

W is for What the F*** (not an A too Z post)

This is a patch of land on the corner of Princess road and Moss lane east, we walk past it on the way to the gym. It's just grass and a huge advertising hoarding, and in the summer it is covered with wildflowers (in between the irregular mowing). And yesterday there was this ... a meaningless stretch of tarmac, going nowhere and serving no purpose. What is the matter with people? 

Stay safe. Be kind. You are not crazy, the world is crazy.

Walking on Icebergs

'Otherlands' by Thomas Halliday has been a most educational read. In his acknowledgements he thanks his editors without whom  "this would have been a drearier, more saltatory, and more technical read", so I would like to thank them too because, despite some parts being scientific beyond my understanding, I found it incredibly accessible and absolutely fascinating (though I did just have to look up 'saltatory'). It is the kind of book that it would be good to read in digital form, so that you could look up random unfamiliar vocabulary, and I also kept wishing there were more illustrations of the strange and fabulous creatures from the far distant past. What astounds me the most is the mere fact that human beings have poured such huge energy and resources into knowing so much about our planet. And because of the current crisis that we find ourselves in you feel that this knowledge about the millions of years of change and adaptation have much to teach us. 

The book is a geological and evolutionary history of the planet, going backwards, starting 20,000 years ago and proceeding by leaps and bounds to 550 million years ago. Each chapter focusses on a particular location on the planet, mostly it seems because of the richness of the fossil record for that particular era. His style is something of a nature documentary, describing the environment you might have encountered, the sights and smells, the climate and the flora and fauna. All the time he links it forward to our own 'land', finding similarities or pointing out significant changes. 

Very quickly (in book terms, not in years) you are back in pre-history, and the animals are outlandish. This is a Tully Monster, Tullimonstrum, described thusly in the book: "They have a segmented torpedo of a body, and at the rear, two rippling fins that look a little like the wings of a squid. At the front, a long, thin feature, something like the hose of a vacuum cleaner, wiggles, with a  tiny tooth-filled grabbing claw at its end. Adding further confusion, there is a solid bar running from side to side across the top of the creature, horizontal stalks on which are set bulbous organs of some kind, which are generally assumed to be its eyes. All in all, it is unlike anything else that is known in over half a billion years of animal evolution." (p.195) But sometimes it seems as if everything he describes is unlike anything else. I don't know very much about evolution but I think the book helps get across the timescales that are involved. The process of a species adapting and being successful takes millions of years, and yet, confusingly, it can be observed in action in fruit flies. Again, he links forward constantly, telling you which modern creatures are related to the ones he describes. Incorporated into the history and the palaeobiology there is plenty of other stuff to learn. Here, when discussing Prototaxites, he diverts into a description of how fungi operate:

"Fungi are the great collaborators of life, forming close associations with species so distantly related to them that we place them in distinct kingdoms. The most intimate association they form is with a photosynthesising organism, whether a plant or a cyanobacterium, to form a lichen. Excellent at breaking down organic matter, the fungal partner in a lichen can extract huge amounts of mineral nutrient from even the barest surface, sharing it with a photosynthesising partner (known as a photobiont) and protecting it with a tough tissue sheath. In return, with access to light, the photobiont can make energy that will feed the fungus. This powerful combination means that, wherever there is a surface exposed to light and water, a lichen can grow." (p.208-9)

Here he teaches me about ancient mollusc, this one being most curious. It was thought to be extinct for several hundred million years, then a living specimen was pulled from the deep ocean by a fishing vessel in the 1950s. It is fascinating how some creatures are transformed over time and some find their niche and just stay there, barely altering.

"Monoplacoophorans are an extremely ancient type of mollusc, the oldest known from the fossil record. With a single, central, rippling foot, they shuffle around in the sediment. Wherever they go, they leave behind the scratchings of their rasping radulae, filing at the rocks to prise off their microscopic food. Monoplacophorans still survive in the present day, but where most fossil monoplacophorans live close to the shore, today they only exist in the deep ocean. The earliest of that group to venture into the deep, though, is Thermoconus at Yaman-Kasy. Perhaps, although the fossil record is to sparse to prove it, the monoplacophorans at Yaman-Kasy represent the beginnings of a retreat into the world where no others could survive, an evolutionary hiding place in an inaccessible niche-space, free of competition." (p.229-30)

As well as the flora and fauna each chapter tracks the transformation of the planet itself. It is easy to look at a map and assume that the world has always looked like this. I remember as a child learning how South America would fit against the coast of Africa and how the land used to be one huge continent. What I find from this book is that, as well as the massive changes in sea level, the land masses have had a long slow migration to their current positions that has taken them through many different configurations. He talks about how the crust of the earth is so thin, floating on a sea of magma: "The Himalayas have the thickest crust in the modern day, about 70 kilometres thick, but Mount Everest reaches only 9 kilometres above sea level. Mountains are tall because they have deep roots bobbing in the denser mantle. So much of our buoyant land is hidden below the surface. We, too, are walking on icebergs." (p.247) This (presumably artist's impression with some interpretation of data) shows the Devonian world (407 million years ago):

Here is a Promissum, a most ordinary creature, and here is the description of how it becomes fossilised (I borrowed this book without expectation and was continually fascinated by detailed information about the most random subjects):

"The rain of silt and algae that falls in the Soom summer also give the sea floor an unusual chemistry for fossil formation. If a Promissum dies in winter, it will sink to the bottom and become coated in and buried by that persistent subglacial black dirt. The body will decay, the teeth disappear, and nothing will be preserved. But in the summer, when the loess falls too, not all of it can be processed by the zooplankton and organic-eating bacteria, and it settles as a paler layer of rich sediment, enhanced by the organic input from dying plankton, a striped annual deposition called the varve. The preservation of this double-layering at Soom is an almanac, a yearly account of conditions some 440 million years ago, proportionally equivalent to having a daily diary for the earliest humans in western Europe, 1.2 million years before the present.

In the acidic conditions, the cartilaginous skeleton of Promissum will still decay, but other elemental forces will take hold. As the proteins in its muscles begin to disassemble, they release a chemical effusion of ammonia and potassium. Reacting with iron minerals, and dissolved within the spaces between individual sand grains, they turn into a rich illite clay. The shape of the muscle fibres determines the ultimate shape of the clay, and muscle is sculpted in mineral, replaced by its own facsimile. The conversion of soft muscle to clay at Soom is unique, and utterly beautiful, a vision of life in a sea that is advancing - as geologists defensively put it, transgressing - on the land, chasing the melting glaciers retreat." (p. 245-6)

The 'Big Five' extinction events also provide part of the structure of the book as they mark significant turning points for the balance of species, killing some and allowing others to become dominant. Another example of how well the book is written, explaining things without dumbing down (sometimes he assumed too much prior knowledge but not often). Apparently there is still debate about the cause of the Ordovician event, Thomas goes with the global cooling explanation:

"The algal blooms that still occur around Soon were ubiquitous, happening wherever these outwashes occurred, with bigger populations of bigger individuals. This glut increased the marine snowfall to the ocean floor from an occasional flurry to a continuous blizzard. As the algae's carbon-rich bodies settled and were buried, they drew with them carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. At the same time, a coincidental increase in volcanic eruptions as the Caledonides were raised produced a lot more silicate rock. As we have seen, the weathering of silicates causes reactions with carbon dioxide in the air. These fresh silicates helped to reduce the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, too. In the resultant rapid climate change, a full 85% of the species on Earth, almost all marine, went extinct. The glaciation did not last long, but it was long -lived enough to cause devastation. It was the first of the so-called 'Big Five' extinctions, and the only mass-extinction event directly caused by global cooling." (p.241)

Evolution is a weird thing. I find it annoying that much ordinary writing about it makes it seem as if it were intentional, moving forward to some kind of 'ideal' lifeform, rather than a pure chance. A creature cannot 'decide' to evolve, or try and make itself suit a new situation. Then he gives me this lovely explanation of why it seems that evolution is something that happened in the past, but not so much any more:

"Perhaps, in the Cambrian and earlier, the development from fertilised egg to embryo to animal was less defined. If so, fundamental changes to tissues and their arrangements would be, on average, less damaging. Once fixed in place, though, fundamentals become very difficult to change. As with the functioning of a computer, fiddling with the code of a single application is relatively simple, and unlikely to damage the overall function of the machine, but editing a line from the operating system is likely to cause problems. Natural selection, then, ends up being a tinkering mechanism, unable - or at least extremely unlikely - to take a sledgehammer to the basic internal structure. In this view, a new phylum cannot arise in modern day because the anatomy of living beings is simply too complex compared with that of their Cambrian and Precambrian forebears. Evolution today can only be played out within the constraints set by the past." (p257-8)

And then we find ourselves back at the very beginning, and life, life is a chance chemical reaction in the depths of the ocean, which just makes it all the more amazing. My only criticism of the book would be that I found going backwards sometimes confusing, in that you were seeing the opposite of 'progress' with fewer simpler organism. The book became for me a little like looking at the stars and realising how small you are; looking at the length of time over which the planet has been transformed makes you appreciate how brief the human race's presence is in the grand scale of millions of years. Though it is not a polemical book in any sense his epilogue is a demand that the world pay attention to the past in order the understand the future.

"As far as extinction is concerned, the absolute climate is not to blame, nor is the direction of change. It is the rapidity of change that is important. Communities of organisms need time to adapt - if too much change is thrust upon them at once, devastation and loss in the common response." (p.241)

"Unlike past occasions when a single species or group of species had fundamentally altered the biosphere - the oxygenation of the oceans, the laying down of the coal swamps - our species is in an unusual position of control over the outcome. We know that change is occurring, we know we are responsible, we know what will happen if it continues, we know we can stop it and we know how. The question is whether we will try." (p.286)

He talks about how close the planet has come, more than once, to the destruction of all life, but I was left feeling that, actually, life is pretty damn persistent, even in the face of a pitiless and inhospitable environment it just wouldn't give up.

Stay safe. Be kind. Don't give up.

(Weird creature images from Wikicommons.)

Hiroshima Day

Today is the anniversary of the destruction of the city of Hiroshima by atomic bomb. Despite decades of protests and treaties nuclear weapons still exist on this planet, more than enough to kill us all many times over. It is abominable. Here I repost from 2009 my review of 'Hiroshima' by John Hersey.

The contents of John Hersey's book Hiroshima first appeared in the New Yorker in August 1946, the editors choosing to dedicate an entire issue of the magazine to the series of articles which he had been commissioned to write. The introduction to this slim volume describes the incredible response that the article received around the world and the impact that it had. The dropping of the first atomic bomb had huge political and historical significance. What this book is trying to do is put a human face on the event, to remind us that it was real people who suffered and died, and it is important to hear and remember their story as well.

I found myself reading it a little dispassionately, partly, on reflection, because it is written slightly dispassionately. Although John Hersey uses directly the accounts of the people he met he does not report their exact words but describes everything in the third person, so you get a disconcerting sense of being disconnected from the events. I feel everything about the story and the way it is told, and the public reaction to it, is a reflection of when it was written. Nowadays we have such instantaneous access to news from all over the world, seeing people's reactions to disasters in the most intimate of detail, practically being 'in the thick of' real events as they happen, but in 1946 this was not the case. During WW2 it might be months before a family learned of their loved ones' death, now every individual loss is announced on the evening news bulletin. To have such personal stories retold around the world only a year after such an event was much more startling then than it would be today.

Hersey tells the stories of six individuals in some detail, moving abruptly from one person to another to progress the chain of events. He describes first a brief background of their life and then what was happening to them in the period immediately before the bomb exploded. Then he gives us their individual experience of the moment of the explosion. You get a sense of how unexpected and unreal the experience was for them all, a white flash and then the blast hitting whatever building they were in, and of course the strangest little aspects of their situation that meant they survived rather than died. Then you have what they did in the minutes, hours and days that followed. Nobody knew what had happened, nor could any of them envisage the scale of what had happened, people mainly assumed it was an air raid (which they had been anticipating for some time), and it is not until months later that there is any understanding of the nature of the weapon used against them. 

I think the book tells us a great deal about Japanese society and people, the strange (to me that is) things people talked about doing or thinking about, or what was important to them in the aftermath of the bomb. There is no hysteria or panic, people help each other as much as they are able. Those who are uninjured bring food and water for others, one of the interviewees ferries people across the river to escape the fires, people just get on and try and do what needs to be done, faced with a horrific situation. And yet by the end of the day it is almost as if they become immune to the suffering of others and resigned to their own fate. In such a short space of time each of them witnesses such extremes of suffering that you can only assume you stop being able to take it in. No one complains; Mr Tanimoto describes the crowds of people who arrive at a park, many horribly injured, and they just lie down and wait patiently, in hope that someone will help them. Many, many of them die overnight the first night, of injuries or the first effects of the radiation sickness, but there is almost complete silence. The atmosphere in the description of this first day is quite eerie. 

I think the book gives a true picture and that the people involved were brutally honest, no one tries to make themselves heroic or to exaggerate their own personal suffering or loss. The other thing you notice is the total lack of self pity, that they accepted that their country was at war and that they themselves could be a target of that war, and that in effect they were suffering for their Emperor. This loyalty and patriotism was most strikingly shown when someone describes hearing the Emperor announcing the end of the war on the radio, and how important that was, because they had never heard his actual voice before. As a group there did not appear to be any lasting resentment or anger towards America, in fact, just as they stoically endured their suffering, they appear to dismiss as not so important the discovery of the nature of the atomic bomb, seeing it as just another part of war and not some especially evil weapon. It is as if we (in the West that is) have given it so much significance, but for the people of Hiroshima it was not viewed like that. They don't dwell on what is done but focus more on the future and rebuilding their city.

Being a student of politics I was very interested to learn about this event from a more human level. There is quite a mythology surrounding the dropping of this bomb, and the impact that it has had and the way it is presented in history does not tell the full story. I am left thinking that Hiroshima has become symbolic only of the worst that human being are capable of; there was most certainly horror and immense suffering, but there was also great human strength and resilience.

Stay safe. Be kind. Remember.

Wrong

Sometimes the things that are going on in the world seem so out of kilter with what human beings need to exist together on the planet, and  I can feel so overwhelmed by the things that are beyond my control, and that the things I can do become smaller and even more meaningless that I need to go somewhere and scream ..... AAAAARRRRGGGGHHHHH!!!!

Stay safe. Be kind. Try not to be despondent.

World Refil Day

 I missed World Refill Day yesterday, only heard about it on the radio. Here are some random things that I refill. Salt pot, owned for at least a decade (the salt still comes in a plastic bag but it is less waste):

Washing up liquid bottle used for nearly as long; I have a five litre one under the sink that I get refilled and then transfer it to the smaller one that is easier to use. Also washing liquid, and more recently fabric conditioner (I hate the stuff but Tish likes it):

Herb and spice jars (the jam jars just go round and round for different uses). Unicorn (in Chorlton) sells their herbs and spices in biodegradable plastic:

Conditioner, a more recent refill, since I discovered Lentils and Lather:

Bagel bags, not refilled with bagels but washed and used for lunches until they go foisty:

Stay safe. Be kind. Refill, reuse, recycle.

What's wrong with the world

 

Prize for the most utterly meaningless headline today goes to:

"Bitcoin lowest since February as Musk tweets trigger whipsaw trading"

Man with more money than he knows what to do with sends digital message to the planet and caused the price of something that doesn't actually exist to fall.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world, we see the pathetic and ineffectual response of the world's governments to the slaughter of Palestinian people by the Israeli army . If you have any inclination to offer support to the Palestinians, who are kept systematically deprived of clean water, food supplies and medicines then you can donate to Medical Aid for Palestine here.

Stay safe. Hug your family. Give what you can to people in need.

100 Days - the magic that is the internet (day 68)

 

map of the internet

A young man came into the callers office today and asked me to 'go on the internet' and change the address on his parcel. I was momentarily confused. I asked for clarification. He said he wanted to send the parcel to the reception instead of his flat. The parcel had been dispatched and he was not able to change it, but I could, by some magic, alter the label that was on his parcel. I tried to explain in words of one syllable that this was not possible. He left making a sarcastic comment as if I had been unhelpful. 

The world is full of idiots.

#100DaysToOffload

Saving the world one sheet of paper towel at a time

I read an article recently where someone described how a friend who was a frequent business flyer asked them if it was better to use the hand dryer or a paper towel. I understand that there is not much in it carbon footprint wise, though patting your wet hands on your butt has no carbon footprint at all. The point being that the person was missing the point. If you want to change stuff in your life to reduce your carbon footprint, do the big things first. What do you do when you get down the list of things to do? I still walk round my office every day turning off the hundred or so lights that burn for nobody, despite the fact that I know there are hundreds of Royal Mail offices round the country where nobody is doing this. 

Here are stupid things I do that make no difference at all to the environmental catastrophe but make me feel a little less shit:

reusable kitchen roll, made from chopped up old sheets:

washing up cloths from old swimming towel:

plastic bags washed and reused for my lunch sandwiches:

Some of the left over lino repurposed as a heat mat on the kitchen side:

Conkers collected in Alexandra Park, chopped and dried to try making soap 

yogurt pots for planting tree seeds:

tree seeds, collected at the park and when out on delivery at work:

So, when you've done the no-car-no-flying-no-meat thing (we are not meat free but are eating very little and no red meat at all) you can still stop yourself sinking into a pit of self-hatred for breathing and producing carbon dioxide.

Rebellion book

We had a bit of a rebellion the other weekend. Extinction Rebellion Manchester has been planning the Northern Rebellion for some months now, and it all came together on Friday with the shutting down of Deansgate in central Manchester. Hundreds of people camped out for four days, and thousands of people passed through, chatted, listened to talks, danced to music, printed t-shirts and just hung around soaking up the (exhaust fume-free) atmosphere. This is my banner, I am pleased that so many people took photos and shared them. I did some overnight shifts manning the barricades, and was surprised by how many drunk people wanted to talk about climate change at 2am.

But much of the time I just read, 'Mend the Living' by Maylis de Kerangal. It is the story of a heart, belonging to a young man going out to surf. When Simon is killed in a crash his parents face the prospect of whether his heart will live on for another. It is a very intense book, sucking you into the lives of all the people involved in the events of the day; the doctor and nurse, the transplant organiser, Simon's parents, the woman who may receive the heart, watching their various reactions to the death and their relationship to it. The book's central theme is the way the heart becomes symbolic for human life, but it is also very much about death and how we, as individuals and as a society, respond to it.  I passed it on to mum so can't give you a quote. 

Finding the Joy in Life

I have been waiting for 'The Life-changing Magic of Tidying' by Marie Kondo (that's a Wiki link, she has a blog but its in Japanese) for MONTHS. It's really nice for her that she can make a living doing this, but this book really could have been a leaflet. I guess what you get with the book is her gushing enthusiasm for her own cleverness to convince you that you can change your life; I imagine that for those working with her in person she is a veritable force of nature. I guess also that she did realise the need to hector her acolytes to make sure they do not stray from the path of righteousness. Is it sounding a bit like a religion? well you could be right there. It is a bit like AA for messy people, and she claims to have no relapses amongst her followers. 

If you wish to create and sustain a brand image you have to insist very hard that there is a right and a wrong way to do things, so she discusses at length (such tedious length) how wrong she had been in her childhood and then her early career as a tidiness guru. At least, I suppose, she is not trying to sell you anything else. (I confess to being nearly suckered in by those suction storage systems that promise to reduce the volume of all the crap you own.) No, her system is very simple, you throw most of it away. There is nothing very new in this, blogs and websites have been hammering on about simplifying your life for years, Marie Kondo's twist is to turn it into a bit of a ceremony; holding each item in your hands to consider if it 'sparks joy', if not you discard it with a word of thanks for it having fulfilled its purpose in your life ... no hard feelings or anything but you are for the rubbish heap. Which brings me to my first criticism. Through the entire book she uses the phrase 'throw away'. At no point does she say 'recycle' or 'donate to charity' or 'pass on to someone else' or 'repurpose'. I have this image of people throwing out these 20 or 40 or 60 or 100 rubbish bags full of perfectly usable items that no longer give them joy. I makes my blood run cold. My second criticism is the anthropomorphism, which Helen Macdonald managed most successfully to avoid, but Marie Kondo does not:

"I have never encountered any possession that reproached its owner. These thoughts stem from the owner's sense of guilt, not from the person's belongings. (well duh, I thought she was making a sensible point for a moment, but then ...) Then what do the things in our homes that don't spark joy actually feel? I think they simply want to leave. Lying forgotten in your cupboards, they know better than anyone else that they are not bringing joy to you now." (p.222-3)

She then goes into a waffle about possessions releasing their energy back into the world and returning to you as something else. What a big pile of bollocks. *They are inanimate objects, they do not have feelings*. So how am I supposed to take this woman seriously, she spoils what is a perfectly good system for clearing the useless crap from your life with all this hokum. At other times she makes such good sense but it was often hard to spot the sensible bits amongst the waffle:

"Clutter is caused by a failure to return things to where they belong. Therefore storage should reduce the effort needed to put things away, not the effort to get them out. When we use something, we have a clear purpose for getting it out. Unless for some reason it is incredibly hard work, we usually don't mind the effort involved. Clutter has only two possible causes: too much effort is required to put things away or it is unclear where things belong. If we overlook this vital point, we are likely to create a system that results in clutter. For people like me, who are naturally lazy, I strongly recommend focussing storage in one spot. More often then not, the notion that it's more convenient to keep everything within arm's reach is an incorrect assumption." (p.165)

What I was left with after reading this book was the feeling that clutter is such a 'rich world' problem; we have so much money we don't know what to spend it on, then we don't know what to do with the stuff when we have it, and then we are bored with it almost instantaneously because we did not really want or need it in the first place. It is the perfect example of what is wrong with the world. What I think she has tapped into here is simply a treatment for the symptoms of the modern disease of buying stuff to satisfy some inner craving. She claims that once they have 'seen the light' her clients find that they no longer crave new stuff but I don't find myself convinced. She claims she is teaching people to appreciate the possessions that matter to them and so think more before they buy things, and while I am all for people thinking harder before they make purchases I am not sure this is a solution, it certainly is not tackling the root cause of blind consumerism.

Having said all that I made a start. She does say do the whole job in one go, but most of us don't have the luxury of time and energy to deal with things in that way. I cleared my wardrobe of (nearly) all the clothes that did not spark joy. I don't think that my Royal Mail uniform was ever going to fall into the 'spark joy' category, unfortunately it has to stay. I found that most of what I kept were clothes that I love and wear regularly and have had for many, many years. The cupboard is nearly empty. I am not happy to just dump things in the bin, that would not spark joy, and so the process of ridding the house of clutter will take much longer. She does have a very hard message about letting go of thing that you keep for 'just in case' and sentimental reasons, but talks a lot of sense about valuing the memories is not the same as having to keep every little nicknack that you have ever acquired. The idea is not to feel guilty about keeping things you value and spark fond memories, but to be honest about the difference between real mementos and bad photos from a beach holiday that you don't really remember. 

So the stages are: get your stuff out, see which things you love (you have to hold them to do this, she says, then the decision become easy) and get rid of the things you don't. Then store items of one kind all in one place, and have a place where everything goes. On one level I do know what she means: if you think about something you have loved owning, and then it getting damaged, and you keep it because you used to love it, but it makes you sad to see it broken, it is better to throw it out. She doesn't talk about things you own that are functional, I am not sure where they fit in her scheme of things. Even though my financial situation has mostly not allowed me to follow the principle I have always been with William Morris on this one, who said "Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful." I don't think that this book will magically change my life, the big problem is how to persuade other members of the household to consider tackling their own clutter.

Thank Smog

Naomi Klein's book 'This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate' was not an easy read; I could only manage a few pages at a time and then had to stop and do something else for a while to prevent my brain exploding, not because it is hard to understand, but because the examples of stupidity and injustice come so thick and fast you just have to take a break. I like to think that I am pretty aware of what goes on in the world, now I feel very well informed; the 100 pages of references detail the years of research that has gone into the writing of this book. The first half of the book deals with the many and various ways that modern human society has managed to trash the planet, and then she goes on to outline the possible things that might be done to mitigate the damage, and how far we are from doing them. (There are a lot of quotes here so beware, though in fact it will probably save you reading the book at all.)

Her first target is the climate change deniers, who have been getting more active and vociferous in recent years, and their shrill calls of 'socialism' aimed at any attempt to call out the capitalist system for the damage it is doing:

"More fundamental than any of this, though, is their deep fear that if the market system really has set in motion physical and chemical processes that, if allowed to continue unchecked, threaten large parts of humanity at an existential level, then their entire crusade to morally redeem capitalism has been for naught. With stakes like these, clearly greed is not so very good after all. And that is what is behind the abrupt rise in climate change denial among hardcore conservatives: they have come to understand that as soon as they admit that climate change is real, they will lose the central ideological battle of our time - whether we need to plan and manage our societies to reflect our goals and values, or whether that task can be left to the magic of the market." (p.40)

Then if it's not the deniers it's the people who are supposed to be doing something to fix the problem. The international meetings have been going on for decades, with very little result. Where the governments seem more than capable of enacting legally binding trade agreements, when it comes to responding to the imminent threat of climate change they barely manage to come to 'voluntary agreements'. This was one result that is reported from the Rio Earth Summit in 1992:

"Rather than push for the recalibration of the international trade rules to conform with the requirements of climate protection ... the Parties to the climate regime have ensured liberalised trade and an expanding global economy have been protected against trade-restrictive climate policies."

And everywhere, everyone seems to be unable to accept any responsibility for their own part in the crisis:

"And yet when the subject of climate change comes up in discussion in the wealthy, industrialised countries, the instant response, very often, is that it's all China's fault (and India's fault and Brazil's fault and so on). Why bother cutting our own emissions when everyone knows that the fast developing economies are the real problem, opening more coal plants every month than we could ever close. This argument is made as if we in the west are mere spectators to this reckless and dirty model of economic growth As if it was not our governments and our multinationals that pushed a model of export-led development that made all of this possible." (p.82)

And unable to accept that it is a systemic problem:

"This state of affairs is, of course, yet another legacy of the free market counterrevolution. In virtually every country, the political class accepts the premise that it is not the place of government to tell large corporations what they can and cannot do, even when public health and welfare - indeed the habitability of our shared home - are clearly at stake." (p.142)

What is so hard to read, of course, is that she doesn't let the reader off the hook. It's not so much an 'Us and Them' scenario as 'We'; we are all culpable of being part of the same mentality:

"And we tell ourselves all kinds of similarly implausible no-consequences stories all the time, about how we can ravage the world and suffer no adverse effects. Indeed we are always surprised when it works out otherwise. We extract and do not replenish and wonder why the fish have disappeared and the soil requires ever more 'inputs (like phosphate) to stay fertile. We occupy countries and arm their militias and then wonder why they hate us. We drive down wages, ship jobs overseas, destroy worker protections, hollow out local economies, then wonder why people can't afford to shop as much as they used to. We offer those failed shoppers subprime mortgages instead of steady jobs and then wonder who no one foresaw that a system built on bad debt would collapse." (p.166)

She outlines what she terms 'Extractivism', an attitude to the planet and our ability to use its resources:

"Extractivism is a nonreciprocal, dominance-based relationship with the earth, one purely of taking. It is the opposite of stewardship, which involves taking but also taking care that regeneration and future life continues. Extractives is the mentality of the mountaintop remover and the old-growth clear-cutter. It is the reduction of life into objects for the use of others, giving them no integrity or value of their own - turning living complex ecosystems into 'natural resources', mountains into 'overburden' (as the mining industry terms the forests, rocks, and streams that get in the way of its bulldozers)." (p.169)

Questions about the logic of this approach and the impact it is having have been going on for a long time:

"It was in this context that the underlying logic of extractivism - that there would always be more earth for us to consume - began to be forcefully challenges within the mainstream. The pinnacle of this debate came in 1972 when the Club of Rome published The Limits of Growth, a runaway best-seller that used early computer models to predict that if natural systems continued to be depleted at their current rate, humanity would overshoot the planet's carrying capacity by the middle of the twenty-first century. Saving a few beautiful mountain ranges wouldn't be enough to get us out of this fix; the logic of growth itself need to be confronted." (p.185-6)

But we really, really don't want to face up to it:

"The reasons for this political timidity had plenty to do with the themes already discussed: the power and allure of the free market logic that usurped so much intellectual life in the late 1980s and 1990s, including large parts of the conservation movement. But this persistent unwillingness to follow science to its conclusions also speaks to the power of the cultural narrative that tells us that humans are ultimately in control of the earth, and not the other way around. This is the same narrative that assures us that, however bad things get, we are going to be saved at the last minute - whether by the market, by philanthropic billionaires, or by technological wizards - or best of all, by all three at the same time. And while we wait, we keep digging in deeper." (p.186-7)

So, are there any solutions to the problems. Yes, lots. Are any of them working, well, not really. Because the culture of capitalism is so pervasive they have managed to make the solutions be more about ways that they can continue to operate as they wish than about achieving any real reductions is carbon emissions. Groups who's role is supposedly about protecting the environment and tackling the issues around climate change find themselves working with the enemy:

"The Nature Conservancy's job has been to identify habitat preservation and conservation projects to 'offset the impacts of oil and gas drilling pads and infrastructure.' From a climate change perspective, this is an absurd proposition, since the projects have no hope of offsetting the most damaging impact of all: the release of heat-trapping gasses into the atmosphere. Which is why the most important preservation work that any environmental group can do is preserving the carbon in the ground, wherever it is. (Then again, this is The Nature Conservancy, which has its very own gas well in the middle of a nature preserve in Texas.)" (p.215)

The whole arena of carbon offsetting seems to have been contrived by the major industries to enable them to put a positive spin on what they do, but has not forced them to change anything about their behaviour: look at us, we've planted all these trees, we love the environment, buy our petrol. The whole thing just became another means to make money, and carbon in the atmosphere ... it just keeps going up:

"Rather than straightforwardly requiring all industrialised countries to lower their greenhouse gas emissions by a fixed amount, the scheme would issue pollution permits, which they could use, sell if they didn't need them, or purchase so that they could pollute more. National programmes would be set up so that companies could similarly trade these permits, with the country staying within an overall emissions cap. Meanwhile, projects that were employing practices that claimed to be keeping carbon out of the atmosphere - whether plating trees that sequester carbon, or by producing low carbon energy, or by upgrading a dirty factory to lower its emissions - could qualify for carbon credits. These  credits could be purchased by polluters and used to offset their emissions." (p.218)

Organisations trying to protect the forests, for example, ended up trying to put a monetary value on the resources they want to protect, as if speaking to the capitalists in their own language might get through to them, but time and again it has been shown that trying to play the game their way only allows them to win more easily:

"The mantra of the early ecologists was 'everything is connected' - every tree a part of an intricate web of life. The mantra of the corporate-partnered conservationist, in sharp contrast, may well be 'everything is disconnected', since they have successfully constructed a new economy in which the tree is not a tree but rather a carbon sink used by people thousands of miles away to appease our consciences and maintain our levels of economic growth." (p.224)

And so the search for solutions goes from bad to worse. Solar Radiation Management (SRM) is science at its most insidious. It is all part of the same mentality that says, because we are such a clever species we can control the planet, and make it work the way we want, for our benefit. The premise is, assuming the temperature starts to go up, and do all the bad things that the climate change scientists say it will, we need instead (instead of dealing with our carbon emissions that is) to find a way to cool the planet down again. SRM involved putting various particles high up into the atmosphere to reflect the sunlight back and to reduce the temperature, a process that cannot be tested on  a large scale without potentially affecting a huge number of people, nor could it be reversed, we would potentially just have to keep on doing it:

"Given this, does it make sense to behave as if, with big enough brains and powerful enough computers, humans can master and control the climate crisis just as humans have been imagining they could master the natural world since the dawn of industrialisation - digging, damming, drilling, dyking. Is it really as simply as adding a new tool to our nature-taming arsenal: dimming?
This is the strange paradox of geoengineering. Yes, it is exponentially more ambitious and more dangerous than any engineering project humans have ever attempted before. But it is also very familiar, nearly a cliché, as if the past five humoured years of human history have been leading us, ineluctably, to precisely this place. Unlike cutting our emissions in line with the scientific consensus, succumbing to the logic of geoengineering does not require any change from us; it just requires that we keep doing what we have done for centuries, only much more so." (p.266-7)

What is most scary about the idea is that as the crisis deepens over the next decade or so such solutions could be explored much more seriously:

"This is how the shock doctrine works: in the desperation of a true crisis all kinds of sensible position melts away and all manner of high-risk behaviours seem temporarily acceptable. It is only outside of a crisis atmosphere that we can rationally evaluate the future ethics and risks of deploying geoengineering technologies should we find ourselves in a period of rapid change. And what those risks tell us is that dimming the sun is nothing like installing a sprinkler system - unless we are willing to accept that some of those sprinklers could very well spray gasoline instead of water. Oh -and that, once turned on, we might not be able to turn off the system without triggering in inferno that could burn down the entire building." (p.277)

And so she moves on to the beneficent billionaires who are going to save us all, or not as the case may be.

Richard Branson and Al Gore

"This frozen moment strikes me as the perfect snapshot of the first incarnation of the climate movement: a wealthy and powerful man with the whole world literally in his hands, promising to save the fragile blue planet on our behalf. This heroic feat will be accomplished, he has just announced, by harnessing the power of human genius and the desire to get really, really rich.
Pretty much everything is wrong with that picture. The reinvention of a major climate polluter into a climate saviour based on little more than good PR. The assumption that dangling enough money can solve any mess we create. And the certainty that the solution to climate change must come from above rather than below." (p.285)

Moving swiftly on (because this is an already monster review and I've probably lost most of you). She spends a lot of time looking at the work of indigenous peoples, mostly in the Americas and Canada, and their struggle to regain control over lands that were taken from them, and who have been a major force in the fight against extractive industries. It seems ironic that the people who's impact on the planet has been so minimal, who's way of life has been, and is being, destroyed by invasion, should be the ones struggling so hard to try and save it for the rest of us. she talks a little about the images of the earth taken in space, and how they changed something about the way that humans saw themselves and their planet. There is this quote from Kurt Vonnegut that sums up how maybe this slightly naive, idealised view of the beautiful blue planet floating in space did not tie up with the reality of life on earth: "It looks so clean. You can't see all the hungry, angry earthlings down there - and the smoke and the sewage and the trash and sophisticated weaponry."

"And all the while, just as Vonnegut warned, any acknowledgement of the people way down below the wispy clouds disappears - people with attachments to particular pieces of land with very different ideas about what constitutes a 'solution'. this chronic forgetfulness is the thread that unites so many fateful policy errors of recent years, from the decision to embrace fracked natural gas as a bridge fuel (failing to notice that there were people on those lands who were willing to fight against the shattering of their territory and the poisoning of their water) to cap-and-trade and carbon offsets (forgetting the people once again, the ones forced to breathe the toxic air next to the refineries that were being kept open thanks to these backroom deals, as well as the ones locked out of their traditional forests that were being converted into offsets.)" (p.287)

And so it turns out that we really do have to thank smog for what could be one aspect of a solution. The political and industrial elites in China that have been fuelling and benefitting from their race to industrialise over the last few decades had been determinedly ignoring the consequences of their actions. This was because they could shield themselves from the consequences, but the arrival of the 'smog', vast blankets of air pollution that cover entire cities, has forced them to rethink at least some of their policies:

"The reason, he explains, is that the elites had been able to insulate themselves from previous environmental threats, like baby milk and water contamination, because 'the rich, the powerful, have special channels of delivery, safer products [delivered] to their doorsteps.' But no matter how rich you are, there is no way to hide from the 'blanket' of toxic air. 'nobody can do anything for special [air] delivery,' he says. 'And thats the beauty of it.' " (p.351)

Are we left however to hope that the situation will become so bad that the 1% will finally find that their own existence is threatened, and then, finally they will become interested in finding a solution.

Whatever we do it's going to be expensive. Money is key, as well as the political will to act. But also we have to stop seeing the solution as something that will pit one part of the world against another:

"Saunter Narain, director general of one of the most influential environmental organisations in India, the New Delhi based Centre for Science and Environment, stresses that the solution is not for the wealthy world to contract its economies while allowing the developing world to pollute its way to prosperity (even if this were possible). It is for the developing countries to 'develop differently. We do not want to first pollute and then clean up. So we need money, we need technology, to be able to do things differently.' And that means the wealthy world must pay its climate debts.
And yet financing a just transition in fast-developing economies has not been a priority of activists in the North. Indeed a great many Big Green groups in the United States consider the idea of climate debt to be politically toxic, since, unlike the standard 'energy security' and green jobs arguments that present climate action as a race that rich countries can win, it requires emphasising the importance of international cooperation and solidarity." (p.414)

It helped the book a lot that she ended on what felt like a positive note. I think a lot of people would prefer to stick their heads in the sand because they are afraid of loosing what they see as all the benefits of modern life. The climate change movement, she points out, is not about us all going back to the middle ages, living in mud huts and growing our own turnips. It is not about stopping and going backwards. We need to be applying our technology, our intelligence and our creativity to finding real solutions to the problem, ones not motivated by profit but by a shared concern for the survival of our species. It has to be about going forward to a world where resources are respected and shared. It is about reaching homeostasis, where what we consume is balanced by what we put back, where the carbon we produce is balanced with what the earth is capable of absorbing. It reminded me that I should put E.F. Schumacher's 'Small is Beautiful' on my 101 books list. One of the striking things that I learned about in psychology is that the thing that really marks out human beings from other primates is our ability to cooperate in large groups. It is what lead to the development of more complex societies, and ultimately to the world we live in today. What we need more than anything  is to remember what a strength this is, and make our cooperative efforts the focus of our societies.

"Living nonextractively does not mean that extraction does not happen: all living things must take from nature in order to survive. But it does mean the end of the extractives mindset - of taking without caretaking, of treating land and people as resources to deplete rather than as complex entities with rights to a dignified existence based on renewal and regeneration. Even such traditionally destructive practices as logging can be done responsibly, as can small-scale mining, particularly when the activities are controlled by the people who live where the extraction is taking place and who have a stake in the ongoing health and productivity of the land. but most of all, living nonextractively means relying overwhelmingly on resources that can be continuously regenerated: deriving our food from farming methods that protect soil fertility; our energy from methods that harness the ever-renewing straight from the sun, wind and waves; our metals from recycled and reused sources."