You are currently browsing the monthly archive for November 2007.
I’ve added NewsBiscuit to blogrolls because I have always enjoyed their comedy – and ‘philosophy’ of helping new comedy writers. This article – Climate Change: Loads More Bad Stuff - is typical. But look through their environment pages too.
Leadership is in vogue after the debacle of England failing to qualify for the European cup followed by the instant sacking of the team manager (for which he received 2.5 million quid compensation after just 12 games, thank-you very much) and ‘Not flash, just Gordon’ Brown’s recent miserable weeks as Prime Minister, in which he has learnt there is no place to hide when news is bad: namely, when the government has admitted it has no real idea about the number of immigrants in the country or exactly what they are doing (except the guy who was guarding the PM’s car), has committed the equivalent of 30 Millennium Domes’ worth of tax money to a small failing private bank, and mislaid confidential financial data on half the households in the land.
Now football and political leadership success may be exceptional in that they are driven acutely by results, either in terms of cups or elections, but arguably they share also a number of characteristics. First, the truism that in politics, as in football, success is usually held to breed success. The more a party or team looks like a winner, the more likely it is to be a winner. Second, success comes from results and leadership is a key ingredient – and perhaps to a greater extent than found in a say a soap company or supermarket chain – or for that matter a public forestry institution. Second, a football team or political party is identified to a large extent by the authority of its leader – who has to establish his/her authority, set standards, determine tactics, and organising the team/cabinet. Above all to get the team to perform depends on getting the right personnel, and through conviction to show that their methods are right.
And – as an aside – the old adage which seems true in football, but perhaps less so in politics: don’t promote the #2 (remember: they were chosen to be the #2…).
Leadership is about authority, confidence and competence. McLaren never demonstrated these characteristics; Brown is in danger of losing them irrevocably. It was on competence that Brown planned to fight the election that he bottled. Read the rest of this entry »
It is often claimed that French presidential elections are decided by key agricultural constituencies (so explaining in part the state support for agricultural subsidies); likewise British parliamentary elections supposedly turn on the decisions of less than 8,000 voters.
The Guardian claims that the Australian elections will be first to hinge on perceptions over climate change and the impacts of John Howard’s legacy. But they do things differently in Australia. The Labour party leader, Kevin Rudd, says he will sign up to Kyoto, but backs the construction of a pulp mill in Tasmania, where timber harvesting methods are reported to be somewhat extreme:
On the road that runs past his farm, huge logging trucks already pass every few minutes, loaded with wood cut from the hills. The scene confronting visitors to the forests is almost apocalyptic. Trees are bulldozed or blown apart with explosives and the ground cleared by fires, started by napalm dropped from helicopters. Any native wildlife that survives is culled by sodium fluoroacetate poison, allowing regimented new saplings to grow – monoculture on an industrial scale.
No chance of carbon credits for avoided deforestation for Tasmania then.
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When the fire swept through the Cutty Sark last year many people were gutted too. The ship has become part of the landscape in south-east London even though she has only been in the dry-dock since 1954. Fortunately as she is under restoration much of the ship was in storage and so not damaged.
An article in The Independent reports that antique teak from an Indian warehouse is being used to replace timbers damaged or lost in the fire.
It is a (just another) sign of the times that although the Cutty Sark is berthed in the shadows of the Canary Wharf financial centre across the Thames on the Isle of Dogs and so little is needed to fund the restoration work that the funding is not forthcoming. The ship is an emblem of technological advance, inspired by trade and risk-taking.
The Cutty Sark is a Grade 1 listed monument. Launched in 1869 to work as a tea clipper she did the passage from China to London in 1872 in 122 days, and later in life carrying wool made the passage from Australia to London in 67 days.
Cutty Sark webpage
My father made a wooden model of the Cutty Sark in the mid-1970s (I suspect that it took him as long as building the real thing).
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UPDATE: 18 Jan 2008
Peter Ackroyd has written a paean to the Cutty Sark in review of the book “The Log of the Cutty Sark” by Basil Lubbock in The Times
Yesterday’s speech by Gordon Brown was his first on environmental issues since becoming Prime Minister. The main points were his commitment to the carbon bill which he inherited, and to the UK meeting its share of the EU target to generate 20% of Europe’s power from renewable sources by 2020.
As expected the speech was full of platitudes to vision, and the penchant for declaring the UK to be at the forefront of the “fourth technological revolution”, London to be the self-evident centre for global carbon trading, and calling on Johnny Foreigner to jolly well catch up (which may be seen to be good for domestic politics, although goodness knows why, but must rankle with everyone else). Equally the speech was short on any immediate policy shifts or practical steps.
But this is not to deny the significance of the carbon bill. The first draft was published in March 2007, and was introduced to Parliament on November 14th 2007 following parliamentary and public consultations. When passed the law would aim to make the UK a low-carbon based economy. The draft bill includes a timetable for mandatory cuts in targeted greenhouse gas emissions, based upon binding domestic carbon reduction targets, 5-yearly carbon budgets, and annual progress reports to Parliament. The longer-term target is a 60% reduction – based on 1990 levels – in carbon emissions by 2050, and the more immediate target (described rightly by Polly Toynbee in The Guardian as “eye-wateringly tight”) for a reduction of between 26-32% by 2020.
How is this to be achieved? There are two main elements – pace the Stern Report – technology and pricing: energy efficiency will be important (if backed for example by mandatory emission targets for vehicles, power stations, etc.), changing the energy mix (hence the emphasis on renewable sources and recycling, but the nuclear option remains one of the elephants in the room), and carbon pricing.
Carbon emissions trading, such as the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, is essentially a business carbon tax (without the public revenues). The big political decision will be to extend such schemes (tradable energy quotas) to individual carbon allowances (i.e.rationing) for the consumption of the main types of fossil fuel (electricity, gas, petrol, flying), and to substitute green consumer taxes for VAT and income taxes. Those with lower emissions could trade the unused part of their personal carbon credit – which could have a income redistribution effect (if this income is not taxed… ), a concept flagged by David Milliband, the then Environment Minister.
The bill’s targets are UK-based, but at present the bill also includes the provision that emission reductions “purchased overseas” may be counted towards UK targets (Schedule 2 Trading Schemes Part 1, 11 (1) (b): “units under any other trading scheme … relating to greenhouse gas emissions”) which leaves the door wide open for forestry.
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A friend – Michael Richards – has recommended Amitav Ghosh’s fourth novel “The Glass Palace“. I haven’t read it but a quick look at some book reviews is enough for me to put it on my must-read list.
Described as a sweeping, historical romance, this is an epic tale which traces the fortunes of an orphan and the maid to the Burmese queen and their family from the arrival of the British (and their Indian troops) in Mandalay in 1885, through WW2 and to post-Independence Burma and contemporary Southern Asia — and en route takes in teak forest management and rubber plantations. A review in the Guardian book review concludes:
The implication, I think, is that history itself has its romances, that actual people do survive its horrors and defeats, or succumb to them with a dignity we wish we ourselves had. When Ghosh has one of his characters say that “politics . . . cannot be allowed to cannibalise all of life,” the context is Myanmar and the legacy of empire, and the point is similar to the one that the same character has already made about the ‘greatest danger’ and the ‘final defeat’. But the survival of dignity and generosity and honour is different from mere survival, and Ghosh’s characters are not so much idealised as highlighted against the darkness, creatures whose luck and kindness go hand in hand. Is this an answer to the bleakness of his political vision? It is not a political answer, and it is certainly not a solution. But it is a response to the terrible, intricate history he evokes so well, and it could perhaps be a condition of his, or anyone’s, acceptance of this inheritance that we refuse the despair it so plausibly urges on us.
Ghosh’s blog is subtitled “The vehemence of pride and audacity of freedom“
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The Amazonas Film Festival is taking place in Manaus. The self-styled eco-festival was established four years ago by Lionel Chouchan, who says in The Times article: “A single movie … can have more impact than any amount of Kyoto Protocol. Initially the idea of running an eco-festival appalled me because there wasn’t enough decent original material being made, but that has changed dramatically since 2003. The debate has gripped fashionable directors – eco-priests – who want to get involved. And it has become a good way for locals to find new ways of making money other than logging, selling parrots or clearing the forest for [ironically] eco-fuels.”
If life was only so easy… but it prompts the idea of starting a listing of forest films to accompany forest novels.
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Explanations for the ferocious post-Independence wars in West and Central Africa fall into two main camps. In “Fighting for the Rain Forest: War,Youth & Resources in Sierra Leone” (1996) Paul Richards refutes Robert Kaplan’s thesis that these wars are caused by social breakdown in turn resulting from population pressure and environmental collapse. Rather he argues that they are a consequence of political failure, specifically the crisis of patrimonial relationships in failing states: stagnant economies, rising poverty and corruption add up to social exclusion, isolation and dissatisfaction particularly amongst young people. Richards finds that many of those drawn into these conflicts seek peace, modernity, good government and sustainable use of natural resources.
Novelists have tackled the wars also. The writer and political and environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa was one of first, albeit some twenty years after the fighting, drawing upon his eye-witness experiences during the Biafran War in “Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English” (1985). He would also write the autobiography On A Darkling Plain: An Account of the Nigerian Civil War (1989). In Sozaboy Meme is a young apprentice driver of the truck “Progres”. To appease his girlfriend he joins the army, and is soon embroiled in the fighting in the forest (“And the bush no be any man friend”), becomes a prisoner and later a refugee. As he loses his naivete he realise that he has lost everything, including his identity. At the end as Meme walks away from his home town for ever he says:
And I was thinking how I was prouding and call myself Sozaboy. But now if anybody say anything about war or even fight, I will just run and run and run and run and run. Believe me yours sincerely.
The same fate falls to Agu the narrator of Uzodinma Iweala’s “Beasts of No Nation” (2005). This is an unflinching (often almost unreadable) violent story of a boy-soldier wrenched from family and childhood innocence by rebels and becoming a child capable of terror and revelling in killing. After killing a man for the first time he says to himself:
I am not a bad boy. I am not a bad boy. I am a soldier and soldier is not bad if he is killing. .. so if I am killing then I am only doing what is right.
By the end of his part in the fighting Agu is left homeless and speechless: “I am not saying many thing because I am knowing too many terrible thing to be saying…”
In both novels the protagonists share an incomprehension about the events which they are engulfed: both novels take place in unnamed countries and at unspecific times. Since both are narratives the novelists make good use of Nigerian and English pidgin, broken and idiomatic English, particularly in Meme’s ‘rotten’ English. Uzodinma Iweala is a young Nigerian writer, Ken Saro-Wiwa was executed by the Abacha military regime in November 1995. These are both great novels.
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Adventurers and explorers have also often been good writers. Many early travellers in the first part of the twentieth century were prompted by their schoolboy reading (they were predominantly men, Sybille Bedford being an exception), and most are characterised by the degree of amateurishness and almost comic incompetence in their preparations.
A classic example was Graham Greene – looking for a ‘blank’ space – who walked across Liberia in 1934 with several crates of whisky and his cousin Barbara. It was their first trip outside Europe. She hardly got a mention in his book “Journey Without Maps” (1935) but wrote her own account of this extraordinary trip some years later. For Greene this was to prove a defining journey in terms of his future work, sandwiched between his first commercial successes (Stamboul Train and A Gun for Sale). The book records both what he experienced and his emotions during the 4 week trek from the border with Sierra Leone to the coast.
Greene’s perceptive contemporaneous observations reflect his background and the age in which he lived. At almost same time the self-taught Patrick Leigh Fermor was setting out as 18-year old on a year-long walk across Europe to Constantinople. But his travelogues “A Time of Gifts” and “Between the Woods and the Water” were not written until four decades later, and perhaps reflect the experiences of a full life. Read the rest of this entry »
