Aynsley Kellow

Edgar Elgar 2007

Hdbck 218pp

This book by Aynsley Kellow, Professor and Head of the School of Government at the University of Tasmania, Australia, is a provocative and in depth look at the degree to which the scientific underpinnings of environmental policy may be at times, and perhaps even chronically, be subject to a sort of “virtual corruption” in which results are biased consciously or unconsciously to fit what the researchers may perceive to be a virtuous cause of environmental protection; and how increasingly this is facilitated by the movement of actual scientific research away from direct observation and field studies towards a ‘virtual science’ of computer modelling.

Kellow asserts that “a purely ‘scientific’ basis for public policy may be a chimera: there is rarely a linear relationship between science and public policy, with scientific understanding leading to only one policy option.”

Kellow begins with the example of the “khting vor“, a species of horned cow in Vietnam which was on the 2003 Red List of endangered species put out by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) even though there was every indication that such an animal had never existed. It appeared to be a mythical beast of which numerous museum specimens were in fact fakes. “Much could be written about the process whereby the IUCN consensus (or other international consensus documents on science) was produced, but suffice to say that nobody really had a strong reason to oppose its inclusion, and plenty had some reason to list it. For any skeptics, the invocation of the precautionary principle has been enough to repel dissent. After all, it might have existed…”

In the next chapter Kellow examines the political ecology of conservation biology with reference of one of the bastions of environmental ideology, the question of biodiversity. This is one of the key indicators of human impact on the natural world: Greenpeace for example cites species loss at being anything from 50,000 to 100,000 species each year. However, as Kellow points out, few of these are actual known species whose extinction has been documented and confirmed. The IUCN-World Conservation Union, Kellow cites, claim that only ‘more than 800′ plant and animal extinctions since 1500 have been confirmed; the rest appear to be computer generated extrapolations. To put this in context, no one knows how many species there are anyway, with about 1.7million have been described while estimates of the total range from 5 to 100 million. Kellow cites examples of species that were believed to have been extinct that have then reappeared; and while loss of biodiversity and extinctions are of course concerning, most extinctions cited in the very large figures of Greenpeace for example seem to be “virtual’ extinctions.

(It might also be pointed out that in some cases extinction might be a good thing: in a recent conversation with an out-spoken neo-Malthusian of my acquaintance on this topic I gave smallpox and the AIDS virus as examples, to which the response was ‘Why?’- he seemed comfortable with the argument that since every species has equal right to exist alongside ourselves, we have no right to fight against diseases.)

The ideology behind this comes from the notion of the primacy of biodiversity- more diversity is always good as this contributes to the resilience ofthe ‘balance of nature’ and the strengthening of the fragile ‘web of life’.

Kellow questions these assumptions as well, arguing that “over the past 30 years the idea of adaptation to disturbance” has replaced the concept of the climax community among most ecological scientists” and goes onto say:

It is a point of some interest that in the popular imagination, the stability of the climax community is probably still the dominant ‘myth of nature’, sustained by constant repetition by political ecologists, and like ‘sustained yield’, the progenitor of ‘sustainable development’ (which emerged in a social context of great uncertainty in Germany), no doubt offering the reassurance of stability in uncertain and rapidly changing times. Similarly, ‘climate change’ suggests that the climate doesn’t usually change, which geological science tells us is poppycock.

Kelllow gives other examples of this: if the ecosystem (or the climate) is always changing, what state are we supposed to try to conserve? Whatever decisions we take in ecological management, they will inevitably be governed by our own human values about nature. A classic example of this is the ‘native-exotic’ debate: for example, in the woodlands of Glengariff near here, when they were granted SAC (Special Area od Conservation) status over 10 years ago, all the conifers including some high-grade timber such as Cedar and Douglas Fir were removed (I know as I have a couple of beams from those trees in my roundhouse frame) in order to keep the woodland as ‘native’ as possible: but to a permaculturalist, this conservation ethic seems arbitrary and wasteful. Few exotics are actually invasive (rhododendron being an obvious example) while maintaining areas as museum pieces frozen at a particular moment in time involves in keeping humans from taking a sustainable yield. David Holmgren gave me a more extreme example from New Zealand where Douglas Fir was invading the denuded slopes of the Southern Alps. This was dealt with by spraying herbicides from helicopters to deter this ‘invasive’ species.

(Michael Crichton gives other examples of this from the management of National Parks in America which he considers to have been disastrous causing more harm than good, and cites Alston Chase, Playing God in Yellowstone: the destruction of America’s first National Park. )

“Environmentalists took to the idea of a self-regulating ecosystem like ducks to Walden Pond” says Kellow, “but they failed to appreciate that it was the product of mathematics, part of the very post-Enlightenment rationality they were rejecting as they began to turn ecological science into religion, where knowledge rested on the ‘almost sensuous intuiting of natural harmonies’, as Theodore Rosak put it, and the balance of nature was thus granted sacred status.”

Kellow continues with these themes in the next two chapters on climate science, which he calls “post-normal” or “virtual” because of its reliance on computer models and its politicization. Kellow presents here a detailed examination of climate science, the problems with computer models and the way this is used to promote in his view a political agenda. They represent the most damning critique of climate science- all the more so since it was written before climategate but points some of the blame at many of the same players.

One of the problems with modelling is that the models are only as good as the data that is fed into them; yet they have a tendency to become tautological as the models themselves are then used to assess the quality of the data: this is one of the ways in which there may be a strong tendency for “virtuous corruption” in the field. For example, Kellow argues that not only does the data have to be nursed in order to “correct” for the Urban Heat Island Effect, but Kellow cites another example of erroneous data being fed into the models leading to misleading conclusions about future emissions from developing nations, an error based upon hugely underestimating their relative wealth and therefore over-estimating the likely increases in emissions as they develop.

Kellow takes a look at the infamous hockey-stick graph published in 1998 by Mann et al (later to play centre-stage in climategate) and how a couple of papers over-turned the accepted history of global temperatures by essentially eliminating the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) in order to make recent warming look “unprecedented.”

“What was surprising was not the publication of a couple of papers which challenged the established scientific orthodoxy- that happens all the time- but that these papers were accepted and became the new orthodoxy so quickly and so readily, and it is clear that both the alacrity and readiness and subsequent defence of the new orthodoxy were inextricably related to the political value of the findings.”

One of the most interesting sections is examples given of papers that might have questioned the so-called “consensus” on climate science, but which were rejected by journals or found difficulty in passing peer-review, and also Kellow’s critique of Oreskes 2004 paper claiming in a survey of all 928 scientific papers produced between 1993 and 2003 using the keywords “climate change” that there was essentially no peer-reviewed literature that questioned the “consensus”. Kellow is eviscerating of this paper which he sees as “palpable nonsense, as could quickly be verified by a replication of the search- a test any referee or editor could have subjected the paper to, had they bothered, and had they been at all skeptical of the claim…. ” …a search of the ISI database using ‘climate change’ produced 12000 papers, and Oreskes was forced to admit… that she had used the three keywords ‘global climate change’, which had reduced the return by an order of magnitude. Science published a correction by Oreskes but it refused to publish a letter from Dr. Benny Peiser which showed that her numbers could not be replicated, and another by Dr. Dennis Bray reporting a survey of climate scientists showing that fewer than 1 in 10 considered that climate change was principally caused by human activity.”

The general view expressed by Oreskes is that skeptics are in the pay of Big Oil and therefore there is a professional motive to cast doubt on the consensus. This naive view extends throughout the environmental movement- detractors to any environmental concern are angrily dismissed as industry stooges. While it is easy to see how the oil and coal industry may have a vested interest in casting such doubts, the gas an nuclear industries stand to gain from Kyoto-style treaties, and carbon- trading may be seriously open to corruption from unscrupulous financial corporations, a charge levied at Enron. Just as homeopathy is marketed as an “alternative” to Evil Big Pharma but is actually sold for maximum profit just like real pharmaceuticals, so multi-national environmental NGOs also have agendas, manipulate data to attract more funding, and the same may also be true of activist scientists.

Kellow then goes on in the next chapter to examine the specific case of the attack on Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist.

Swedish Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, Bjorn Lomborg was vilified- and continues to be so- not just for taking issue with proposed responses to climate change, namely the rapid Kyoto-style reduction in emissions, but in his challenge of the deeper tenets of environmentalism, namely that doomsday claims made by environmentalists are often not supported by the evidence and things may not be quite as bad as some would have us believe.

Kellow argues that the rise of virtual science based only on models and not checked in the real world reflect “the prominence among science of those who have been supporting a pessimistic view of environmental degradation since the re-emergence of Malthusianism from the late-1960s, exemplified particularly by Stanford University’s Paul Ehrlich and his associates.” Kellow examines a group centered around Ehrlich who vigorously defended there worldview which Lomborg characterized as the “Litany” of environmental doom.

Lomborg tells of how he had begin to examine the claims made by economist Julian Simon in the 1980s, who famously made a bet with Ehrlich that prices of a selection commodities would decline rather than increase, thus giving the lie to the Club of Rome’s 1972 report Limits to Growth. Simon won the bet, and as Lomborg examined his critiques of environmentalist pessimism also began to see how Ehrlich and others were wrong.

What is significant about the response to Lomborg was its irrationality, ad hominem attacks (IPCC chairman Pachauri likened Lomborg to Hitler) and lack of scientific rigour. Importantly however, one of the negative reviewers, Michael Grubb, accepted Lomborg’s view that the Litany was overplayed and in many areas things were in fact getting better:

To any modern professional, it is no news at all that the 1972 Limits to Growth study was mostly wrong or that Paul Ehrlich and Lester Brown have perennially exaggerated the problems of food supply

(It just happens that yesterday’s Guardian carries a story on just that- Lester Brown exaggerating the problems of food supply.).

The problem was that many of the attacks from the likes of Michael Grubb, Jeffrey Harvey and Stuart Pimm, and other in the Union of Concerned Scientists, were themselves subject to Lomborg’s critique of promoting the Litany:

Not only were these critics the principle “litanists” whose reputations Lomborg had called into question, they were a small and tightly-defined group. They all seemed to be connected by an association with one person: Paul Ehrlich, who had famously lost the wager with Julian Simon, the contrarian whose statistics Lomborg had set out to disprove.

Kellow makes the important point that of course there are strong reasons to protect biodiversity and address climate impacts, but that the specific policies promoted themselves fall outside the remit of pure science- they require more than just science to justify them; there is an irony in the exaggerated attack on Lomborg since it rather proved his point that the Litany is exaggerated; and that while in medical science for example there is a strong principle of declaring conflict of interests, “rarely do we find declarations of political conflict of interest in the broad field of what we might broadly call ‘environmental science.’ “

Kellow goes on to give many other examples of the politicization of what he calls “activist scientists” in general environmentalism and climate science. “Many ‘activist’ environmental scientists … seem largely unaware that it is there cultural views (or myths) of nature that largely drive their particular ‘take’ on science; while he also makes the case that there are large amounts of funding and vested interest at stake for environmental groups, who gain from the continual belief that we are facing into environmental catastrophe.

This is an important book which documents thoroughly some of the history of the environmental movement and how climate change became its flagship, based on virtual science and a leaping from data to policy that is presented to the public and policy makers as if neutral, when in fact it is frequently imbued with ideology. There are lots of questions to be asked of both the environmental movement and the process of science itself; ultimately however, Kellow concludes that there may not be outright dishonesty involved:

Virtuous corruption need not presuppose deliberate or even conscious manipulation of data or models, but simply the privileging of certain results through the lack of sufficient skepticism of data and methods that provide answers that are politically useful.

Simon Fairlie

Chelsea Green 2010

pbck 322pp

My name is Graham, I’m 46 years old and I am a born-again carnivore.

Like many of my generation, my first act of rebellion was to become a vegetarian sometime around the age of 14, following in my sister’s footprints and unfairly taking out my concerns for other species on my mother’s cooking, which was mainly of the traditional variety of English food, including a wide range of meat dishes.

“Rich westerners’ eating meat is the equivalent of eating the children of Africa, South America and Asia” admonished a Marxist text that came into my hands around that time, making a profound impression on me: we in the developed rich world were taking more than our fair share of the global pie, and starvation in other countries was the end result.

Clearly we had blood on our hands, of both the animals themseleves and that of the poor. The reasons for this were that it takes several times more land and resources to feed omnivores than it does vegetarians; in a world where many were brought up to “eat what I was given because there are starving in Africa” meat became a symbol for extravagance and exploitation.

I dont think I ever really took an ideological postion regarding humans’ right or otherwise to take the life of animals for food. Social justice and environmental concerns were paramount- it seemed obvious to me then that land taken for animals was not available for the greater biodiversity afforded by woodlands, and thus an early interest in trees drew me naturally to permaculture with its vision of forest gardens and great diversity combined with habitat.

By this time, in the mid-1980s I was living in a small rural commune on the Welsh borders where I had gone to learn to grow vegetables. This happened to be a vegan commune, and although I was never ideologically a vegan, I was happy to partake of the vegan diet and learn the pleasures of home-made soya milk and tofu. One year we even grew a reasonable crop of soya beans.

There were however at least two broad categories of vegan in this commune. On the one hand, there were those from an urban Animal Rights background, who were not too fussy about other considerations such as food miles, or whether their food included meat-substitutes like TVP, and were happy to eat white bread and even to go skip-diving for free food. Anything went so long as it was vegan, and this extended to other animal products such as clothing and footwear. They had ties with hunt saboteurs and wanted to give over some of our land for ailing sheep as an animal sanctuary.

On the other hand there were other vegans there who just didnt like animals. They wouldnt tolerate pets of any kind, much less farmed animals, retired or otherwise; land was for growing vegetables or natural habitat, period. This group tended to be much more purist about food on many levels- had to be organic and wholefood, while they didnt object so much to leather clothes.

I abandoned the vegan diet towards the end of my stay in the commune in the midst of what I thought of as The Vegan Wars, but almost never ate meat until much more recently when I moved to West Cork and meat has become a once or twice weekly part of my diet- much to the relief of my mother for now when I visit she no longer has to make a special vegetarian dish.

Here I am surrounded by small-holders who often keep some animals and local meat, fish and poultry are readily available. While factory farming has always been distasteful to me and the problems of a diet of meat three times a day seem all too obvious, I have long been persuaded at the environmental benefits of eating some meat and the ecological functions of animals in a permaculture system.

It is to these, and many other, issues of meat, veganism and farming that land rights activist Simon Fairlie, editor of The Land Magazine has addressed his fascinating book “Meat- A Benign Extravagance”.

The book is information dense, packed with statistics and graphs,and Fairlie gives a comprehensive analysis of many aspects of meat, farming and sustainability.

Interestingly, he states in the opening section that it is specifically to counter the arguments put forward by vegans that he has written the book.

His initial chapters are aimed at addressing a common figure quoted by many in the environmental movement, that it takes around 10 times the land to feed a meat eater as it does a vegetarian. Fairlie’s analysis shows how difficult this is to actually quantify: not all meat is the same; pigs traditionally were able to eat food and crop wastes and so didnt necessarily take any land; sheep can run around happily gathering nutrients from marginal land not suited to crops; farm animals can also provide other yields and services, the most important of which is manure to add fertility, without which the vegan would require more land for green manures.

Two other important points he makes which are often missing from this debate: first, that animals can be herded and shepherded, thus making the default farming system of the landless poor; second, that keeping animals acts as a buffer against shortages, allowing feed to be diverted quickly for human consumption in times of hardship or failed crops- a function that works apparently both on the small farm scale, as well as the global scale.

Fairlie has done an important analysis of 8 different land use models and calculated the land requirements to feed Britain, comparing each of organic/chemical (conventional) versions of vegan, livestock and permaculture systems.

Because organic yields of wheat and potatoes are only 60% of conventional production, and the need for grain to feed high-yielding beef and dairy cows, he concludes orthodox organic livestock-farming would have the most difficulty feeding Britain on the available land, but that with the use of traditional and permacultural practices to enhance the nutrient cycling abilities of animals, together with more dispersed production and rural settlement, this could be improved significantly.

Fairlie concludes that the actual figure is much more favourable to meat production than conventionally believed, taking all factors into consideration “the effective ratio of human edible feed to meat and other animal products in US feedlot beef comes to about 3.2:1″

Having established this- and making a strong case that the ecological benefits could outweigh the extra land with good animal husbandry- Fairlie then takes on the vegans first hand: what would the British landscape look like if it were all vegan? He suggests that few vegans have really contemplated this, and that we break our long-standing relationship with animals at out peril: the immediate question for the stockless gardener becomes, how to deal with the pests- from slugs to deer- if we cannot kill them, and what indeed will our relationship to the natural world be at all if all the unused land is simply fenced off, as Failrlie envisages would be the case if some strands of vegan thought were carried to their logical conclusion. He pokes fun at the vegans:

Nothing causes sleepless nights for conscience-stricken vegans so much as the sound of rats scuttling in the cavities in their walls.

Worse than that, is the danger of vegan dystopias of concentrated high-tech urban settlements, with vegan food produced entirley without animals in labs, possibly including synthetic meat cultured from artificial animal tissue, genetic engineering, and even transhumanism. Such visions of the future are promoted for example by influential vegan philopsopher Peter Singer, who apparently sees such developments as the logical result of a Buddhist concern to reduce suffering.

Those of us who value the natural world, and more especially our relations with members of the animal kingdom, wild and domestic, would do well to keep an eye on the vegan agenda, for it may not turn out to be quite as meek, disinterested and innocuous as it might seem.

He even takes on Greenpeace and other activists who continue to oppose whaling even of species whos stocks have increased beyond danger levels, and defends the rights of the hunter:

To the extent that they campaign against whaling on humane grounds, WWF, Greenpeace, Sea Shepherdand the like are no longer protectors of the environment, but have set themselves up as the world’s ethical policemen.

Fairlie goes onto argue that this dysfunctional vegan ethic has had a disproportionate influence on the permaculture movement, and gives an analyisis of the core text for cool temperate permaculture, Whitefield’s “The Earth Care Manual”, which he says reflects the general permaculture bias towards nuts, woodlands and forest gardens and hardly any mention of grass:

What some seem to forget is that permanent grass is an entire ecosystem of perennial species (with its own stacking system) which doesn’t have any above-ground infrastructure to maintain” and goes on to sing the virtues of grass: “it is highly bio-diverse and resilient, it creates organic matter in the soil, it introduces nitrogen and improves fertility, its fertility can be moved easily from one place to another with the aid of animals, it can be cut up for mulch, it opens up ground for sunlight, it can be walked on or driven on when mown or grazed, it is the easiest surface for picking up windfalls or shaken fruit, and it is good for playing football on.

In similar vein, Fairlie takes issue with recent claims that ruminants contribute to significant amounts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions through their release of methane, which he argues are exaggerated and hide pressure for policy to favour a move towards intensive models over pastoral practices, at the expense of tackling the real causes of climate change,which is clearly burning fossil fuels.

Fairlie hardly tries to hide his own ideological bias: a small holder and stock-keeper himself, he clearly feels a strong cultural and “spiritual” need for our traditional relationships with animals in addition to the environmental benefits.

He lets his ideology run away with him however when he dismisses genetic engineering as part of a techno dystopia, in opposition to the pre-industrial rural lifestyle he clearly favours; and he criticizes initiatives like The Declaration in Support of Protecting Nature with high Yielding Farming and Forestry signed by 800 scientists and pundits of the Center for Global Food Issues:

The gist of this declaration …is that to provide sufficient nitrogen to feed a future population of 8.5billion which industrialisation will spawn, we will have to resort not only to nitrogen and other fertilisers but also to genetic manipulation. Any attempt to secure nitrogen and other nutrients through organic means would require undue encroachment upon natural habitats- if not their total destruction. If we want to feed the world and preserve biodiversity then we’d better continue with industrial agriculture. Rather than share agricultural land with nature we should spare land elsewhere. To protect nature we have to farm unnaturally.

It is a shame Fairlie does not seem aware of the essential “Tomorrow’s table” by Ronald and Adamchuk which argues that GE and Organics make the perfect bedfellows- precisely because GE is a biological, rather than a chemical approach. One might ask, what is the meaning of the world “unnaturally” in the last sentence. Why should GE be any more “unnatural” than conventional plant breeding, or indeed than any other use of technology, agricultural or otherwise? GE is just another technology, which could be and I believe is being used to help organic farmers also, and to make organic farming more competitive and sustainable- surely something Fairlie would welcome as part of his hoped for “biological agricultural revolution”.

Fairlie then goes on on the next page to accept that it is nonetheless hard to believe these more integrated, small-scale and low-tech approaches could work for the burgeoning populations in countries such as China, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Egypt, thus tacitly accepting that Center for Global Food Issues are largely correct: it is the richer countries who now do indeed have the luxury to examine their food and farming systems critically, for there is clearly huge scope for improvement; but Fairlie is wrong rubbish the Green Revolution as benefiting only the rich at the expense of the poor, as it clearly did achieve its aims of feeding millions of people and staving off famines.

He misses the point that Paalberg makes (“Starved for Science”), that the majority of the remaining hungry people in the world are in Africa where they have not yet had the benefits of the Green Revolution, and where they are already practicing traditional organic small-scale agriculture- that is why they are hungry and poor because yields are so low.

Fairlie also gives a hard time to the Haber-Bosch method of manufacturing artificial fertliser from the air: both scientists were associated with the Nazis, Haber supported the war effort and developed the chlorine poison gas; he later became head of the chemical Warfare Service but was discovered to be a Jew and removed from his post. He died in 1934 befroe he could see the gas he had helped develop be used in the death camps.

So Fairlie asks the interesting question, since the fertilisers we use were a bye-product of the war, what would have happened had we not revolutionized farming with them,increasing yields but creating a dependence on fossil energy and interfering with traditional practices of nutrient cycling in the farm? Could humanity have not taken a different path?

This rather smacks of romaticism to me: certainly chemical farming did help displace people from the land, but this process was already underway for other reasons, for example developments in horse-drawn machinery, which was already reducing the labour force on the land and causing migrations to the city. It is an interesting question, but I think one of those “what ifs?” that could be asked equally of every other major technological development we have seen- perhaps even going back to the discovery of fire.

Fairlie fails to make a convincing critical appraisal of his own clearly stated bias against modernity and preference for what appears to be a mode of living somewhere around 2-300 years ago, where people were poor but happy, living in small family groups and villages with a cow and a couple of pigs and going to country fayres. No mention of how for example education would have to be rather severely curtailed if we all went back to the land to this degree, nor any discussion of the downside of the typically conservative, religious and even oppressive values held in many rural communities, or the historic vulnerability to famines, both of which may have contributed to people fleeing the countryside when they got a chance to. Perceived negatives in this Fairlie’s romantic vision are all dismissed as a result of the pressures of capitalism and the march of modernity forcing people off the land.

Fairlie’s book is an important contribution to permaculture, and discussions on animals in farming and diet, and more broadly, humans place in relationship to nature and the landscape in an increasingly urbanised world. He does a very good job of unpacking the ideologies behind some aspects of vegan movement and asks some very interesting questions about how this may be have created a strong vegan bias within the permaculture movement, and made a strong case that an element of meat in the diet- albeit a modest component- can still be sustainable and that farm animals play a crucial ecological function in the landscape.

I admire Fairlie’s work with The Land and of course as a rural permaculturalist I support moves to make it easier for people to create sustainable livelihoods for themseleves on the land.

I suspect however that far fewer people than he thinks really want to do this, and for good reasons: the city offers more opportunities in many ways, and life on the land is far harder for a society as a whole without various backups than he suggests. I dont accept Fairlie’s general view, the conventional one within the environmental movement, that times were necessarily better in the agrarian past at some undefined point, and people have always been forced off the land against their will;

nor do I assume as he does that people living even more post-industrial lives than they do now, would necessarily be any less happy than the self-sufficient small-holder, even if they were fed on synthesised meat tissue grown in a lab. I dont have such a horror of possible future technologies, nor do I have such a contempt for the life of the urbanite.

In fact I do wonder just where exactly Fairlie is actually coming from when I read this extraordinary statement in the final chapter:

The natural world is controlled by God, while the technological world is controlled by scientists. Both are tyrannical, but as tyrants go the former has a better record than the latter.

At this point I part company entirely with the author, who although he has done a good job of exposing some of the more extreme warped versions of what “nature” means in the end may be just trying to replace them with another, equally fanciful, of his own making

I am however glad to have such a well-researched and argued book to back me up as I go off to cook me sausages.

Robert Paalberg

Harvard University Press 2009 Pbck 235pp

Harvard Professor Robert Paalberg has written a book that makes essential reading for anyone interested in global food politics and why Africa still fails to feed many of its people.

Africa remains the only region on earth with increasing poverty and hunger. The number of Africans living on less than a dollar a day increased 50% since the early 90s; Between 1991 and 2002 the number of malnourished people in Africa increased from 169 to 206 million, with nearly a third of sub-Saharan Africa malnourished, compared with just 17% in the developing world as a whole.

Paalberg accounts for this as a result of policies that since the 1970s have resulted in a massive decline in investment in agricultural science in Africa. While in Asia and South America, farmers benefited from the new science of the green Revolution, and have been able to both feed their growing population- confounding the predictions of neo-Malthusians- and bring many out of poverty as well. India started planting new Green Revolution short-straw varieties in 1964; by 1970 production had doubled, averting fears of famine.

Why did Africa get left behind? Paalberg argues that while in Asia and South America had strong enough institutions and science to continue with their own scientific developments with little further outside assistance, Africa was became influenced by a change in the political and cultural climate in Europe from the 1980s onwards. In particular, this has seriously slowed the uptake of Genetic Engineering in Africa, which Paalberg argues is a result in part of the ideological position of many NGOs working in Africa.

In order to examine what lies behind this ideological position, Paalberg gives a detailed account of the rise of the Organic movement in the west, and a strong consumer movement demanding more natural food:

“This reification of what is “natural” is in part a cultural reaction to the hegemonic expansion of modern science. Advances in modern science tend to diminish both unspoiled nature and unquestioned faith, prompting those with a strong romantic or spiritual side to register their objections by seeking foods that incorporate less modern science. “

This view had already emerged in the US as early as 1892 when a clergyman called Sylvester Graham invented the “Graham Cracker” as a reaction against additives used to whiten bread. Paalberg points out Graham was a “patriarch and a prude; he thought women should go back to milling their own flour and believed in vegetarianism as a means to control sexual passions.”

In Europe, Rudolph Steiner founded the vitalist school of philosophy called Anthroposophy.

“‘Vitalism’” explains Paalberg “was the once-dominant view that living things had a chemical composition different from non-living things”- a view known to be untrue by science since 1780, yet one that still underpins much of the organic movement even today. Steiner’s “Biodynamic” techniques- a mixture of sympathetic magic, astrology and animal sacrifice- seem to have been growing in popularity in recent years.

Sir Albert Howard’s 1940 publication “An Agricultural Testament” was also influential in this reaction against science in farming: “Artificial manures lead inevitably to artificial nutrition, artificial food, artificial animals and finally to artificial men and women.”

Lady Eve Balfour was next in 1943 with her book “The Living Soil” which inspired the formation of the Soil Association in 1946, “still the institutional guardian of organic farming traditions in Great Britain.” The SA’s leading patron is HRH Prince Charles, “the most prominent exemplar of this blue-blood attachment in England to pre-industrial, chemical-free farming”.

In the US, J.I Rodale coined the term “Organic farming” and founded the “Organic Farming and Gardening” magazine in 1942. Rodale was also a big fan of alternative health care and supplements.

Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” perhaps did more than any other book to warn of the dangers of chemical pollution from farming. The environmental movement had come of age and began to have a real influence over public policy.

The movement grew rapidly with the rise of an alternative youth culture in the 1960s and 70s, getting a major boost in the US in 1990 with the creation of a single national standard for organic produce.

However, even today in the US the organic sector makes up only 2% of total food purchases and using only 0.4% of cropland. The claims of the organic movement of safer, more nutritious food, and of being more beneficial to nature, are not in general supported by scientific evidence. Paalberg argues that the per capita amount of land need to feed people has declined by more than 50% in the US since 1920; a switch now to organics would require far more land, threatening much of the remaining forest and wild areas.

“Carsonain environmentalists cannot refute this logic, but they resist accepting it because it requires them to endorse a larger rather than a smaller role for modern science.”

More science had already reduced some of the harm from chemical farming highlighted by Carson; bringing in more science to farming now is still the best way to address the environmental impacts by making farming more efficient. The Organic movement has proved to be still wedded to its ideological roots.

The prevalence of the “nature knows best” ideology has been possible because the west has already seen so much improvement in agricultural productivity, as a result of science and technology, that it is well-fed and unwilling to take on yet more in this sector, switching its concerns to reducing the impact on the environment of farming.

Paalberg accepts that this stance makes sense in the west with its excesses of CAFOs, and a subsidy system that encourages over-application of Nitrogen fertiliser, and problems of obesity rather than starvation.

In addition, the modern world seemed to feel an acute sense of loss of community and connection with the natural world and began to harbor romantic notions of returning to an agrarian past.

What might be understandable if misguided at home has become disastrous in Africa, where essentially farmers are poor- and therefore sometimes hungry- because of too little science, rather than too much. African farmers mostly own their own land (unlike in South America) and so would be well placed to benefit from improvements in crop technology for example, but a combination of powerful western NGOs and corrupt African governments discouraged investment in this area.

{Correction 16-09: Paalberg does not say most African farmers own their own land but emphasises that there is far more access to in Africa than in, say Latin America, with only 15 landless landless people in the countryside to every 100 smallholders: “This greater prevalence of land-secure smallholder farmers among the poor in rural Africa increases the chance they will benefit from a farm-technology upgrade. Yet not just any upgrade will do. A new farming technology will be pro-poor as well as pro-growth only if it raises the the total factor productivity of small as well as large farms.”}

This opposition to science is most strongly expressed when it comes to genetically engineered crops. This technology was first being developed at a time when public science funding in agriculture was declining, leaving private corporations like Monsanto to step in and lead the way. The organic movement has banned the use of GE crops; Europe has kept GE food crops out altogether so far. Paalberg sees the ideology behind this as going beyond the simple environmental and health concerns, extending to issues of carrying capacity and population:

“Carsonian environmentalists were offended because gene transfer was so clearly an attempt to engineer and dominate nature rather than live within nature’s normal reproductive constraints.”

Perversely, the environmental concerns of the rich world became transplanted into Africa, where people struggle to feed themseleves still.

“Farming in Africa is a world apart from farming in Europe or North America” writes Paalberg, and goes onto say:

“In Africa…farmers today are not involved in specialized factory farming. They are planting heirloom varieties in polycultures rather than scientifically improved varieties in monoculture. They have a food system that is traditional, local, nonindustrial, and very slow. Using few purchased inputs, they are de facto organic. And as a consequence they remain poor and poorly fed”.

Yields of maize in Malawi for example are less than one tenth of yields in the US.

Many NGOs working in Africa seem motivated to keep them this way. Doug Parr, chief scientist of Greenpeace places a great emphasis on safeguarding the “traditional knowledge” of the Africans. The International Federation of Organic Agricultural Movements (IFOAM) is the most prominent amongst NGOs promoting organics in developing countries; their mission in Africa is not to increase productivity but to enlist farmers there into the organic movement. Since so few farmers use synthetic chemicals it will be easy to get them certified. “Poor and nonproductive” Paalberg notes ruefully , “but certified organic.”

Paalberg is scathing about some of the approaches by NGOs. The German organisation Networking for Ecofarming in Africa has partners in 13 African countries to warn them of the dangers of “Western agricvulture” supplanting indigenous knowledge, yet promotes biodynamic farming in its workshops.

“German trainers at one NECOFA session in Kenya in 2005 took the time to introduce local participants the importance of light rhythms from the planets and to instruct them in developing manure preparations that included essential bits of stinging nettle, chamomile, and cow horn (NECOFA 2005). Such knowledge is neither farmer-derived nor indigenous to Africa. Nor is it even knowledge.”

Pedalling pseudo-science to hungry people is akin to quack therapists promoting homeopathy for AIDS or malaria.

Paalberg details the political process used by NGOs, aided and abetted by the UN and supported by a complacent governments in the west and corrupt urban-based officials in Africa, to block the use of science to improve the farmers lot there.

How much of this is to support lifestyle choices of the rich in western countries? Paalberg sees it as neo-colonial in its effects: nearly all certified organic produce in Africa is specialty crops destined for the west, not food for the locals. “Organic farming advocates from IFOAM nonetheless like to assert that organic agriculture in developing countries is not a luxury but somehow a precondition for attaining food security.”

What could GE crops do for African farmers? The most obvious is drought-tolerance (DT). Monsanto has played a big role in developing DT corn in the US, but African will have to wait before they can try it. Only South Africa is an exception to the red tape and stiffing restrictions that all other African governments have place don GE technology, following the European model.

In any case, the big companies are not developing DT varieties suitable for Africa because they see little commercial gain there; African farmers are simply too poor. If GE gets into Africa, it will be through philanthropic organisations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has formed a partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation called Alliance for a Green Revolution In Africa (AGRA). Monsanto is working with AGRA however to donate some of its technology to develop DT crops there. There remain many political obstacles, and Africa which needs this new technology more than anyone, seems destined to be the last to get it.

Friends of the Earth have been opposed to DT crops in Africa since 1999, citing the danger of them growing in areas currently unavailable to other crops as one of its main objections to GE.

“How strange that agricultural crops with new growth potential would be seen as a threat by the NGO community” notes Paalberg, “but such was the new political reality.”

A new generation of GE crops may help shift attitudes in the Europe. So far, the technology has been used to benefit farmers, with little apparent benefit to the consumer; new crops may have tangible benefits to those who eat them, and as with GE in medicine- which has not met with the same opposition- may then come to be more accepted.

Paalberg makes a tightly argued case for the unnecessary prolonging of hunger in Africa being at least partly fueled by ideological and even religiously motivated western NGOs. While there is an understandable attraction to the simple life of living from the land in the west- something that I have shared- those of us who choose this life are wealthy enough to afford everything from tools and polytunnels to the best seeds we can get, and we do not have to worry about going hungry if the rains dont come.

GE and other scientific advances would farmers here, and the environment also, but we are wealthy enough -because of the benefits technology has brought us so far- to have the choice. To actively campaign to keep these benefits from the poor is not just anti-science, but anti-humanity.

The Living Landscape: How to Read and Understand it

Patrick Whitefield

Permanent Publications 2009

334pp

48 color photos

When I first saw in the recent Permaculture Magazine that Patrick Whitefield had written a book on reading the landscape I became very excited and thought, “That’s probably a book David Holmgren would have liked to have written!”

Holmgren called it “reading the great Book of Life”- looking at the living landscape of the countryside  through the lens of ecology,botany, geology, archaeology, history and even politics and economics.

Observation of the natural world is the starting point of permaculture design and with this book Whitefield helps us gain an insight into the myriad of the many natural and human processes that make up our landscape, and how to interpret their  hidden indications.

Patrick Whitefield covers all of these impacts on the British Countryside, taking his examples from all over the country, and shows us how to be a kind of landscape detective, painstakingly uncovering the meaning of signs and indications of past land-use, some obvious – the absence of trees indicating ongoing grazing- some much less so- the horeshoe bat indicating an intact mosaic of different habitats.

The book begins with some  chapters on general patterns in the landscape and underlying features of   geology, soil and then climate and natural succession before moving onto more specific cases including animal signs; niches; succession;  Different Kinds of Woodlands; Grassland; Heaths and Moors; Water in the Landscape; and finally, Hedges and other field boundaries and Roads and Paths.

Throughout Patrick gives us pages from his extensive notebooks that he has kept over the years which show actual examples of reading the landscape in a wide range of landscape types he has encountered on travels up and down the country, from the Highlands of Scotland to the Somerset “Levels” – or Moors as they are more usually known locally; the remnants of diverse wildflower meadows still found on the chalk downs, and the semi-ancient wood of Lady Park Wood in the Wye valley.

Patrick is always an agreeable travel companion and makes fascinating observations throughout. The pleasure he takes at discovering new landscapes or unpicking the story of a woodland and how it got to have the species mix it has- the subtle interplay of geology, microclimate and grazing patterns- is always obvious, becoming most so when discovering a new hedgerow with large number of species ( a possible indicator of antiquity).

we have been using Patrick’s previous books, The Earth Care Manual and How to Make a Forest Garden on the Kinsale course for the past several years; The Living Landscape is another great addition which fills an important niche in permaculture literature. A fascinating and engaging read with great color photos,  it will have to find a place on every designers’ bookshelf.

a species of jumping plant lice, aphalara itadori, could bring down the mighty knotweed by guzzling its sap. If released to do its worst, it would be the first ever “biological control” deliberately introduced into Britain.

At present, knotweed can only be controlled with heavy-duty chemicals, and then only with great difficulty- it can remain dormant under the ground even after being cut for over a decade, and chews its way through concrete and tarmac for breakfast.

It is becoming a serious threat in Ireland however and there needs to be a concerted effort to educate how to stop its spreading. Take good note of the advice given in the above article:

And how to tackle it

• Don’t ignore it. A small Japanese knotweed plant quickly becomes a major infestation. • Do not strim, flail or chip it. It can reproduce from tiny fragments of rhizome, twig or even leaf. It is extremely unlikely you can eradicate it by digging it out, because the roots stretch down so deep into the soil. • Herbicides can check its growth but only the most powerful chemical treatments will eventually clear it. These are unsuitable for spraying near water. One approach is to allow the weed to grow to about 1m, in early summer, and spray then. You will need to re-spray regrowth in midsummer and again in September if necessary. Another approach is to cut it back and apply to the stumps a powerful weedkiller such as Roundup’s treatment for tree stumps and roots. • Be careful not to allow cuttings into any drains, streams or waterways. • Do not compost cuttings or put them in the rubbish bin. It is an offence under the Wildlife and Countryside Act to cause Japanese knotweed to grow in the wild so if you dispose of it carelessly you will be breaking the law. Do not dump it in the garden waste bin of your local recycling centre. Japanese knotweed (and contaminated soil) is classed as “controlled waste”, which means you must only dispose of it at certain, licensed landfill sites: check with your local council. If you are allowed to have a fire, burning the waste on site is another way to dispose of it. There are also commercial companies that specialise in the eradication of Japanese knotweed. • More advice at environment-agency.gov.uk