Recently in Environment Category

Sometime it is just not possible to find an environmentally friendly version of the product you want to buy. But now you can ease your conscience by using one of a range of 'green' credit cards to make your purchase.
-- Hey green spender! Spend (and borrow) a little money with these -- The Observer, August 5

I wrote a couple of months back on the slowly burgeoning backlash against eco-consumerism. That was before the great hulking beast of Live Earth spluttered across the planet, pop-stars attempting to make a difference as only they knew how, by asking you to spend money, drink beer and watch Bon Jovi.

Since then, the eco-consumerism juggernaut (biodiesel fuelled) has been gathering pace, creating one of the greatest marketing opportunities of the decade. That quote above comes from a new column launched in the Observer this week devoted to "eco-finance" issues. There are many important issues within this bailiwick, to be sure, and sensible, ethical investment is one of the few ways I believe an individual can have a serious impact on the carbon emissions of the multinationals. So bravo for the column.

However, this (generally very intelligent) paper has fallen for the hype -- "if it is just not possible to find an environmentally friendly version of the product you want to buy", heaven forbid that you wouldn't buy it. Buy it with a credit card that not only gives you great low rates (of course with a slight "conscience" premium) but contributes a token amount to an environmental cause!

The ever-readable, ever-reliable and ever-angry George Monbiot published a column last week in the Observer's weekday sister, The Guardian, surveying the absurdities of this emerging market, from eco-gadgets to free conference junk made from recycled paper:

"Uncomfortable as this is for both the media and its advertisers, giving things up is an essential component of going green. A section on ethical shopping in Goldsmith's book advises us to buy organic, buy seasonal, buy local, buy sustainable, buy recycled. But it says nothing about buying less."

"Green consumerism is becoming a pox on the planet. If it merely swapped the damaging goods we buy for less damaging ones, I would champion it. But two parallel markets are developing: one for unethical products and one for ethical products, and the expansion of the second does little to hinder the growth of the first."

Monbiot's article illustrates the inherent class-snobbery of eco-consumerism, and the sometimes even destructive effects of a showboating ecological hobby lifestyle. The world needs the answers to fit within the pages of a glossy.

Damn. There goes my whole "we have no dominion over this planet" sermon. Every time somebody suggests we know all there is to know about this planet, that we are greater than nature, or at least its keeper, my trump card response has always been two simple words -- "giant squid". For all the stories, for all the folklore, for the few occasional bodies washed up on shore or toothmarks found on the carcass of a whale, we've still never actually seen one of these monsters alive in anything other than anecdote. Deep in parts of the ocean we can't even begin to comprehend, they rule a dominion unknown to all but the hardiest of sea creatures.

But things change, don't they? A good millennium or so after the kraken scared the bejesus out of some mild-mannered Norwegian fisherfolk, and just 250 years since they were described in Pontopiddan's natural history of Norway as being roughly the size of a small island, we've finally gone and captured one on film.

I guess that's it guys, it's our planet now.

The poor thing lost a tentacle during filming, which initially stirred up some ethical ire in me. But then I thought "hey, giant squid". It's not like humankind has ever had a good relationship with them. I reckon they're pretty evil, and have generations of fisherfolk in my ancestry who would mutter agreement on that point. Certainly more evil than a cookie cutter shark (known for its "neat, cookie shaped wounds" that probably are not so good as cookies for the victim). There are so many many things deep under the ocean that can do nothing but cause you to question. Contemplating the cyberpunk glow of the strange beasts of the abyssopelagic (as I do often in my tiny submarine), it strikes me that our obsession with the extra-terrestrial might just be a case of getting ahead of ourselves. We've got enough freaky shit down there to be thinking about at length...

And still, while we uncover Tennyson's ancient evil and marvel at the ocean floor, the debate about intelligent design rages on...

I wonder what they baited the hook with. It could have been a salty sea dog with a pipe rested on his lip, or perhaps a confused sperm whale wondering if there were worse fates to be had off this wretched Japanese coast...

Technorati Tags: evolution, ocean, squid

Don't tell me 40,000 people are coming here. They're not here.

My last post here was, vaguely, about the nature of human behaviour. How much of how we behave is learned, and how much is innate? When I posted, I hadn't expected New Orleans to become the sort of theatre it has over the past few days. Suddenly people are starting to quote Yeats and mumble things about ever widening gyres, and post rock bands everywhere are dusting off their strings, ready to play in the endtimes, the hour come around at last.

But something much more complex than an apocalypse is going on here. In a way I've seen no other natural disaster unfold, the truth of dying people has led directly not to platitudes and fundraising feel-betters, but to savage self analysis, and the uncovering of brutal truths about a nation and a world that is fundamentally sick.

I have been watching CNN--"Your Hurricane Headquarters"--and just caught the full playback of an absolutely electric interview with New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin. Declaring that he is 'pissed', Nagin burns every bridge he might still have but manages to come across as the only sympathetic politician in this entire mess - the others, he rightly says, are too busy thanking each other and holding press conferences. He talks of the horror on the ground, and savages the state and the White House for their response.

I'm watching Bush now, headed down to fly over New Orleans in Air Force One, and I see real terror in his eyes. Real, desperate and immediate tragedy, not far away empire building orchestrated by his hawks. This is a scared man, an innefective and pathetic one. There is no rhetoric that can spin this one away. And while people die, while anarchy descends, the federal government turns in on itself, aware of its paralysis, aware that all those years in the deserts of Iraq have meant nothing if they can't pump water into the poorest parts of their own country.

Could it have been prevented? Well, nobody saw it coming.

This, then, is the day when America sees the truth. All the issues of race and poverty, problems to be dealt with one day when the more immediate dangers of terror are passed, are now raging in the faces. As Salon editor Joan Walsh's extraordinarily angry and incisive op-ed says, America has seen itself, it has seen what it has done to itself, and it wants to help. It just hopes it politicians will take the lead. Walsh says a war on poverty is as futile as a war on terror, but do you remember that truism you used to love in high school about how you could feed the whole damn world for a year on a week's worth of defence budget?

And if we needed evidence of Walsh's shift, CNN is right now analysing the socio-economic disparities of the Big Easy in depth, with infographics. They seem not only surprised to be discussing it, but surprised that what they are discussing is the true, undeniable reality of the greatest of cities. "Race, Poverty in New Orleans", says the caption. If you forget the lunkhead looters for a moment, it seems the spectacle for once has been overshadowed by the truth it has exposed.

To those of you on the streets of New Orleans and throughout the South, the world will not let you keep dying. George Bush may have kept holidaying, the media may have told us you were looting, but the truth is coming through. Jesse Jackson Jr is now saying just this on the television news - who are we to say what law and order should be in unspeakable circumstances. People, he says, who "never even owned a pan before", let alone a house, now find themselves with less than nothing, in stadiums, not hotels. Heck, they're saying, why weren't they given cruise ships, not football stadiums?

Everything changes today. Am I watching America change, live on your hurricane headquarters?

Technorati Tags: katrina, neworleans

Bizarre eco-justice. Prisoners incarcerated for their part in the Rwandan genocide are now powering their own prison with their shit. Rwandan prisons are of course massively overpopulated, and even power for cooking can cost into the millions. So now their own waste is used to generate natural gas for cooking, and the leftovers as fertiliser. Biogas is a great idea (and one that we'll swallow in this country right after we're ready to swallow grey water--that is, right when we don't have a choice), but this whole strange mix of genocide and ecology is both brilliant and disturbing:

Martin Wright, an Ashden Awards judge who traveled to Rwanda and visited the prison at Cyangugu, got down on his hands and knees to take a whiff of the manure.
"I've sniffed the residue and there is no smell at all," he said.
As remarkable as the odorless fertilizer is, Wright said that he was even more impressed by the idea that the new energy project involves people being held on charges of genocide in Cyangugu, just across the border from the volatile civil war raging in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
"(That) they've become the site for this amazing pioneering project means that you're taking something that's a consequence of human misery and producing something hopeful out of it," he said.

Watching BBC world news this evening, banner graphics flashed behind the newsreader declaring a "War on Ideology". Not an ideological war, or a war based on a fundamental conflict between ideologies, but a war on ideology. The idea being that only the evil have ideology. We just have the one true path. One more reason there why the war will never be won, at least in terms that we can yet understand.

And a question, then, one that I have been wondering about for the past couple of weeks. How can this all play out? What is the end game of a global ideological war? People will keep strapping C-4 to their chests (or backs) for as long as there is fundamentalism. And the funny thing about fundamentalists is that they never give an inch, for to give an inch is to be defeated. America and Friends will never compromise, and nor will the networks of Bin Laden. How does this end? How does it escalate? Who will be our Jack Bauer? Are we playing the end game now?

I ask these not as rhetorical questions and not as a prelude to an intelligent statement that explains exactly how it ends. I'm not used to being the one asking dumb simplistic questions, but the truth is I don't know where to look for hope. I think if there is any, it lays in the hands of the overwhelming majority of the Muslim community--those who are good, who are not islamo-fascists. They do have the power to cut-off fundamentalism at the limbs. Cut off the blood supply. Sure, America could do its bit by not invading countries, and it could stop swaggering around like a global sheriff that's about as benevolent as the Sheriff of Nottingham. And we allies, we league of extraordinary flunkies (wasn't that the term?), we could ease up on the fundamental rage and rhetoric. But we won't. That's defeat. Now we're fighting. Fighting like our grandfathers did, battlers, diggers, whatever. But we're fighting a war where every wound makes things worse.

One of the most memorable pieces in the (by now legendary) comic book edition of McSweeney's was a little chap-book by Ronald J Regé that dropped out from Chris Ware's foldable cover art. It relates the transcript of an interview between a would-be suicide bomber, who aborted at the last minute, and her interrogators. The bomber is an impossibly young girl, who knows hate like we would never wish. But she is innocent, too. She has her reasons. She could not do it, but in these panels there is the devastating truth about why people choose to blow themselves up. And some idea of why this war, this crazy abstract war on ideas, scares the hell out of me.

Technorati Tags: environment, waronterror, rwanda