by Marc Diacono

Hdbck 192pp Quadrille publishing 2011

Marc Diacono runs Otter Farm in Devon, “the UK’s only climate change farm where we’ve planting olives, peaches, pecans, persimmons, apricots, szechuan pepper, vines and much more.” He is also leads the Garden Team at Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage. He has worked closely with forest garden guruMartin Crawford whose influence in some of the choice of plants described here is evident, and the two appeared together on a recent R4 Food programme.

The notion of a climate change farm is an interesting one: facing the prospect of a warming climate Marc has started growing crops like those listed above that would have been considered marginal for Britain until recently. “The idea is beautifully sustainable” explains Marc- “if we can take advantage of climate change to grow food usually sourced from overseas we will be producing low carbon food for a domestic market – helping arrest the acceleration of climate change. As a result Otter Farm has become known as the ‘Climate Change Farm’.”

In this video clip from Jan 2009 Marc can be heard saying how mild the winters have become and how the grass doesn’t stop growing- this is quite surprising since it was in the middle of the first of the past two really cold winters we have had in Ireland at any rate, and I am wondering if he still thinks the winters are likely to be that mild, and whether he has lost some more tender stuff recently. For example, I lost many of my small Myrtus Ugni during the past two winters- and in this book, Marc does advise “if you live in a colder region, I’d be tempted to keep your plants undercover, at least through the colder months.” I live in a milder part of Ireland, and this is a plant that should be hardy to -10degrees C, so this does perhaps give an indication of the difficulties of adapting in terms of the plants we might grow to a climate that is unlikely to change in a linear fashion.

That being said, this is a sumptuously illustrated book full of good ideas and lots of sensible practical advice on both growing, preparing and cooking some really interesting food crops not found in the average allotment.

Marc’s philosophy is very simple and makes a lot of sense: why grow the same old standard staple veg like potatoes and cabbage, which can easily be bought cheaply (good old intensive industrial agriculture) when you could fill your garden with exquisitely delicious food crops like mulberries, Szechuan pepper, apricots and yacon?

he also advises to choose “easy winners” and going for perennials and plants that don’t need too much attention.

There is a great chapter on nut trees, in which he recommends perhaps surprisingly, in addition to chestnuts and walnuts- if you have space for them- also pecans which apparently he is having success with.

Under soft fruit he includes blue honeysuckle, autumn olive -Eleagnis umbellata- and fuchsia (ever tasted a fuchsia berry?).

Many of the plants he includes I am familiar with and am growing myself; one that was quite new to me is the perennial vegetable Kai lan, apparently a cross between kale, asparagus and broccoli, which sounds fantastic and definitely one I will try for next year.

All in all a lovely book, the perfect present etc., an essential addition to the forest gardening bookshelf and a great companion to Martin Crawford’s Creating a Forest Garden.

The Hockey Stick Illusion- Climategate and the Corruption of Science by A.W.Montford

pbck; 482pp

Stacey International 2010

In this thorough and well documented book Andrew Montford of the Bishop Hill blog tells the extraordinary story of one of the icons of the global warming argument, the “Hockey stick” graph, originally produced by Michael Mann in an article for Nature magazine in 1998, known commonly as MBH98 after the authors’ initials- Mann, Bradley and Hughes.

Although not necessarily crucial in proving ACC one way or the other, as Montford makes clear later in his book, the graph- showing that global average temperatures have spiked upwards in the late 20th century, presumably in response to rising levels of CO2 caused by burning fossil fuels, claimed a central place in the Third Assessment Report (TAR) of the IPCC. Montford writes:

“Whenever the Hockey Stick appeared, it was bigger, bolder and more colourful than any other temperature series presented. Mann must have been thrilled with the report. The final icing on the cake was when the IPCC chairman, Sir John Houghton, announcing the publication of the report, sat in front of an enormous blow-up of the Hockey Stick itself. This was Mann’s moment of triumph: 1998 was officially the warmest year of the millenium, a stunning recognition of his work.”

A number of issues were already raising eyebrows however. Prior to the Hockey Stick ,Mann had been an unknown researcher who had only just completed his PhD.: the IPCC, it should be noted, claims to represent the very best of climate science, assembling the most experienced and qualified scientists to pronounce upon the state of human knowledge of the climate. But by the time the TAR was published in 2001, Mann was already Lead Author of the paleoclimate chapter, presenting a potential conflict of interests, as he would be reviewing his own work- work which, says Montford, became so prominent in the report, “the whole IPCC report started to look like a locker room, it was so full of hockey sticks.”

The other most curious aspect to Mann’s paper was that it appeared to be a substantial revision of what was previously believed to be the case, that the world had in fact been warmer 1000 years ago during what is known as the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) as had been in fact stated in the IPCC First Assessment report in 1990.

Clearly, the rhetorical position that recent warming is “unprecedented” and therefore likely caused by rising anthropogenic CO2 emissions, would be seriously compromised if in fact the world had been warmer prior to the industrial age.

Curiouser and curiouser, studies that had begun to emphasize 20th century warming and limit any Medieval warming to a few regions of the northern hemisphere began to take more prominence, including one by Oklahoma geoscientist David Deming who had published a paper in Science in 1995 showing moderate warming in the 20th Century based on a study of boreholes in North America. Montford writes that Deming “also attracted the notice of people in the global warming industry, who thought they saw in Deming a valuable recruit to their cause” – and in a later article Deming claims that

They thought that I was on of them, someone who would pervert science in the service of social and political causes… A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said “We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm period!”

(According to Montford this email is reputed to have come from Johnathan Overpeck who says he has no recollection of sending the email, in the Climategate emails discussed below; Montford concludes however that “if future developments turn out to show that Overpeck did not make the statement attributed to him, it seems clear that he had at least indicated to his Hockey team colleagues that he would be happy to ‘contain’ evidence of past warming”.)

Other studies, such as Huang’s borehole study (1997) that showed a pronounced MWP could not get published. (A recent example of similar claims of such “gate-keeping” can be found discussed here.) The Second IPCC report began to play down the extent of the MWP;

Montford writes

It was simple for critics to point out that any conclusions drawn from this data would have to be highly speculative at best. Climate science wanted big funding and big political action and that was going to require definitive evidence. In order to strengthen the argument for the current warming being unprecedented, there was going to have to be a major study, presenting unimpeachable evidence that the Medieval Warm Period was a chimera. Enter the hockey Stick.

From this start, Montford goes onto describe the actual Hockey Stick paper and its critics and defenders in great detail over the rest of the book. Much of the story – and it does read like a detective story , keeping the reader turning the pages through sometimes challenging technical aspects of statistical analysis- focuses on Steve McIntyre of ClimateAudit, the retired mining engineer and statistician who took it upon himself to attempt a comprehensive audit of Mann’s paper.

In this account, we find McIntyre encounters a web of obstructions: in order to validate whether Manns conclusions are correct or not, he needs the original data and the computer code that was used to analyze the large body of data. At one point Phil Jones responds to a request by saying “We have 25 or so years in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try to find something wrong with it?”

It seems that actually determining the average global temperature in the past, prior to instrumental records, is no easy thing and relies on multiple “proxies” such as boreholes and tree ring data- “dendrochronology” and there is much discussion of the use or over-dependence in Mann’s study on tree ring data from just a few ancient trees, the Bristlecone pines and Foxtails (a closely related species) from the SW USA. McIntyre found that this incomplete and dubious series is one of the few proxies that shows a hockey-stick, but the type of statistical analysis used by Mann gives it an unjustifiable influence on the results.

The Bristlecone pines did not replicate modern temperature records, which brings into question if they should be used at all for reconstructing the temperature of the past; but a serious issue with the way the Hockey stick was presented was that the recent uptick- the blade of the Hockey Stick (Montford notes the “delicious irony” of this being an ice-hockey stick) was in fact using a completely different data set, of the thermometer record. While this is acknowledged in the small print as it were, the effect is to make the recent warming look much more dramatic than it should be (if indeed it is there at all) and anyone who doesnt examine the graph closely- the media and the general public, also perhaps policy makers- could be excused for not noticing.

Moreover, it may be that the methods used at analyzing the data would have turned up a hockey stick just from random data. According to McIntyre, Mann’s methods seemed unusual and contorted, but if the reader has difficulty fully understanding the statistics, the sub-plot is one of obscurification and obstruction at every turn as McIntyre repeatedly requests the data and code from both Mann, from the editors of journals, and from the IPCC even after McIntyre is himself published on the issue and had become an IPCC reviewer.

Without Mann’s help, it was simply impossible to replicate his results and thereby check if they are correct, but McIntyre’s skill and doggedness- as well as support from the legions of his blog followers, many of them highly qualified scientists and statisticians themselves, – exposed enough weaknesses and flaws in the study to bring it into serious question in any case.

One amusing episode is described where McIntyre wonders why the proxies from the Bristlecones has not been updated since 1980, and when told that this is because of their remoteness and the difficulties of conducting the field work, McIntyre sets out himself to collect the tree rings, proving that it is possible to have a Starbucks latte, collect tree rings and return the same evening.

The issue reached a head politically in 2005 with the establishment of an expert review panel by the national Academy of Sciences and congressional hearings in 2006 in Washington. This itself became something of a political battle between two congressmen, Boehlert who was more sympathetic to the Hockey team and Bartlett who was supporting the auditors McIntyre and his colleague Ross McKitrick. One thing that emerged from these hearings was just how circumspect other scientists were in assessing the proxy data, even though they were otherwise sympathetic to the ACC hypothesis.

“Geochemist Daniel Schrag said that it was very difficult to make an estimate of average temperature from instrumental data, let alone proxies, and that policy makers were demanding more than the scientific community could actually provide in practice.”

It was also revealed that the panel had themselves made no real attempt at replication of the Hockey Stick themselves; one of the panelists, Gerry North, subsequently admitted that they had just sat around and “just kind of winged it to see…”.

Montford also gives a chapter on discussing the various attempts to replicate the Hockey Stick. Other researchers had presented several other papers that claimed to replicate Mann’s original findings, but on close examination McIntyre finds that they generally used much of the same flawed data- including the Bristlecone pines. At every turn McIntyre’s investigations are obstructed by delays, sometimes for years, sometimes never, in receiving the data and codes needed to replicate the studies, and he goes to great and painstaking efforts to uncover the methods used himself.

Moreover, it is apparent that paleoclimatology is a very small and incestuous community, and most if not all these other studies are from members of the Hockey team- a tight-knit group centered around Michael Mann.

Montford sums up in his chapter towards the end of the book, “The Meaning of the Hockey stick” which has a very interesting and significant discussion on peer-review, which it seems often consists of a cursory looking over of a paper, with little if any checking of either the data or statistical methods used:

With a full explanation of methodology now often not possible from the text of a paper, replication can usually only be performed if the data and code are available. This is a major change from a hundred years ago, but in the 21st century it should be a trivial problem to address. In some specialisms it is just that. We have seen however how almost every attempt to obtain data from climatologists is met by a wall of evasion and obfuscation, with journals and funding bodies either unable or unwilling to assist. This is, of course, unethical and unacceptable, particularly for publicly funded scientists. The public has paid for nearly all this data and has the right to see it distributed and reused.

Richard Smith, former editor of the British Medical Journal, has been one of the foremost critics of peer-review, arguing “it is useless at exposing fraud, it is slow, expensive, profligate of academic time, highly subjective, something of a lottery, prone to bias and easily abused.”

Montford concludes therefore that “if governments are truly to have assurance that climate science is a sound basis for decision-making, they will have to set up a formal process for replicating key papers, one in which the oversight role is performed by scientists who are genuinely independent and have no financial interest in the outcome.”

The book ends with with a chapter on Climategate, which broke as the book was going to press in November 2009 when persons unknown hacked into the servers at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. Montford gives a brief tour of some of the more surprising comments made by members of the Hockey team in often confidential emails that mainly seem to indicate that there were indeed behind-the-scenes attempts to fend off the skeptics by the Hockey team, who discuss such things as how they should deal with Freedom of Information requests: there might not be any one statement that indicates some kind of coordinated conspiracy, but there is certainly a lack of openness and transparency one would expect for scientists involved in research that will play such a crucial role in energy policies in the coming decades.

Particularly eye-brow raising is comments like this from Michael Mann:

“Let’s our supporters in higher places use our scientific response to push the broader case against [McIntyre and McKitrick].”- worryingly indicative of political interference in the scientific process.

(There are many reasons to see the IPCC as primarily a political advocacy organisation, rather than a purely scientific one, not least in that it publishes its Summary for Policy Makers- the only part that most people get to read any of- months before the actual report containing the data and analysis the Summary is based on- meaning it is not possible to scrutinize and challenge the conclusions until long after the media reports have entered the public consciousness.)

How to assess the validity or otherwise of Montford’s book? Without a much deeper understanding of the scientific and statistical issues it is hard for the lay person to pass judgement; it might be worth a look at what the Hockey Team’s response to the book was.

Real Climate, commonly percieved by skeptics to be the mouthpiece of the Hockey Team, posted this review by Tamino in July 2010. One non-technical point he makes does rather seem to be bizarre, a red herring, mistaken or a smokescreen.

Tamino argues that Montford sees conspiracy everywhere he looks, and he quote-mined the suspicious phrase “…and better for our purposes…” from an email from Michael Hughes to Mann; but Montford acknowledged that there could be a straightforward explanation, but asks, why not just say “more reliable” if that is what he meant- a question Tamino quotes himself but fails to answer.

Further commentary on Tamino’s review can be read here.

All in all the RealClimate response just isnt very convincing given the seriousness of the issues and the coherence of Montford’s book, which it must be said contains none of the bluster that we get from Mann and Tamino.

Climate change – or rather the proposed policies we are told that must be implemented to counter its worst effects- is one of the defining issues of our age. Policy decisions based on science, involving drastic cuts in carbon emissions regardless of whether this is technologically justified or not, and carbon taxes which will mean higher fuel costs, will effect everyone for decades to come and we all deserve as open and honest an assessment of all the issues.

Montford’s book is essential reading for anyone who interested in a fairer and more objective analysis of this issue, and who can see through the hubris of claiming consensus in such a new scientific discipline and such a politically charged area.

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.

Fleeing Vesuvius Overcoming the risks of economic and environmental collapse

edited by Richard Douthwaite and Gillian Fallon

Feasta 2010 ppbck 417 pp.

The recent economic collapse is not just a financial and banking issue, not just an economic and political issue, not a result only of bad policies and lack of regulation, but actually precipitated by the passing of peak oil, which sent oil prices spiraling above $150/barrel in 2008 and is essentially sounding the death-knoll for industrial society. Not only will we never be able to return to economic growth, but we are now facing a chaotic period of decline and collapse. The peak of energy availability has passed and we are now staring into the abyss of continual economic contraction which will result in a vastly simplified society where human muscle power will progressively replace fossil energy, and we will return to the technologies of the Middle Ages or before.

Such is the fundamental of the oddly titled new book from Feasta the Irish-based think-tank on sustainable economics: Fleeing Vesuvius is not about responding to a natural catastrophe such as Vesuvius, the volcano that destroyed Pompeii in AD79; nor is it about fleeing, for as editor Richard Douthwaite asks rhetorically, “We expect to get any clearer warnings of impending disaster than the people of Pompeii received. There are already financial fires around the economic cone. If we are to survive we need to move out quickly. Now. But which way are we to go? Is there a map? It would be a poor book about an emergency situation which did not provide one. So, for the final chapter, my co-editor and I asked the contributors to suggest actions which readers could take or support at four levels- personal, community, national and global.”

The book is layed out in seven parts: “Energy Availability”; “Innovation in business, money and finance”; “New Ways of using the land”; “Dealing with Climate Change”; “Changing the Way we live”; “Changing the Way we Think”; and “Ideas for Action”;

There are 28 contributors including economist Richard Douthwaite (author of The Growth Illusion and Short Circuit; julian Darley of the Post carbon Institute; Nate Hagens of the Oil Drum; and Reinventing Collapse author Dmitri Orlov; and with an introduction by Eamon Ryan of the Irish Green Party who had been minister for Communication, Energy and Natural Resources in the last government.

While the starting point is the same for each- the financial crisis and its connection to peak oil-, there are several wide differences of opinion expressed by the various contributors: some see a gradual decline which is worth trying to manage through Transition Towns and international treaties on climate change; while arch-doomer Dmitry Orlov for example pokes fun at such ideas, suggesting instead we should be more concerned with getting enough sleep, avoiding drawing attention to ourselves too much less we become a target for marauding gangs, and collecting things that dont lose their value that are easy to store such as bronze nails.

“Is there a reason to think” he asks when considering such community solution, ” that it is possible to achieve this radical simplification in a series of controlled steps? Isn’t that a bit like asking a demolition crew to demolish a building brick by brick instead of what it normally does? Which is, mine it, blow it up, and bulldoze and haul away the debris?”

While there are many worthwhile discussion in the book, I’m going to argue here that the general thesis expressed by all the contributors is based on an outdated and discredited concept of environmentalism rooted more in ideology than rational thought.

The tone is set by our ex-Minister Eamon Ryan in his preface when he invokes the 1972 Club of Rome report The Limits to Growth when discussing the potential for new technologies:

“Some will argue that new natural gas supplies will allow us to get off the hook. It is true that new shale gas supplies have altered the international gas markets. However, as Dennis Meadows and others showed in the 1972 book The Limits to Growth, the challenge this century will be to avoid breaching one of a number of constraints that come with living on a finite planet. “Even if gas is more easily available and even if it has relatively low carbon emissions in comparison with other fossil fuels, the reality is that simply replacing oil with natural gas will see us breach the greenhouse gas limits that the best scientific advice says we have to avoid”. (my emphasis).

To my mind this statement rather well expresses some of the core contradictions and confusion in the environmental movement. Essentially, as regards shale gas or other potential ways of new energy sources, Ryan is arguing they should not be used because we have already past the “limits” of what should be used, with reference to a 40-year old report based on computer models.

Make no mistake: I used to think the same myself. I used to argue that limits had been reached a long time ago and any attempt to extend them further would merely lead to a bigger crash and die-off later. Neo-Malthusians argue the same: dont work to feed the hungry of the world, that will simply lead to them breeding all the more and even more people starving later on. (I personally know individuals who subscribe to this policy.) This vile philosophy fails to understand the essential ways in which humanity differs from other species who are indeed subject to limits of boom-and-bust cycles: language and technology.

Whatever about the “science” of climate change, Ryan fails to explain that the dangers of future climate change need to be balanced against the current benefits of cheap energy now and the future wealth it will foster which, coupled with ongoing technological innovation, will set us in a better position to withstand such future challenges.

There are certainly some interesting chapters. Richard Douthwaite, who has written an earlier book surveying attempts at various models of alternative currencies, and who initiated a L.E.T.S. system that I was briefly involved with in Westport, Co. Mayo, advocates regional Liquidity Exchange Networks to help with the credit crunch. Local councils would open accounts in Quids- the generic name for regional currencies- which could be used for public services, possibly to pay a proportion of tax and some other uses; the supply of currency would be completely transparent and can be automatically increased or decreased according to the needs of the system. It is not clear how well they might work on a regional level however; many local areas in Ireland have so little manufacturing that there might not be enough local economic activity to warrant their introduction. Nevertheless, Feasta is dong important work in researching such initiatives and new currency models of this kind may become essential in the near future as the financial crisis deepens.

None of the authors pick up on the fact that it has been the recession that has proved to be not only the most effective instrument by far in reducing CO2 emissions, but the only effective instrument, while environmental concerns have gone out the window for the same reasons, as evidenced by the annihilation of the Irish Green Party, including the loss of Minister Ryan’s seat, in the elections that followed the publication of this book.

Why on earth would anyone be interested in policies that might increase fuel prices when they are struggling to pay their mortgage or keep their jobs, while at the same time we are being told big international globalised institutions are unlikely to last much longer anyway, so the effort required to develop international climate treaties seems futile. Who would give a damn about small amounts of global average temperature increases that may or may not happen 100 years from now when the same people are telling us the supermarkets might be going to run out of food and we should start stashing cans of beans? These interesting issues are not explored by the contributors.

We are treated however to some rather glaring examples of ideological bias: -Patrick Andrews includes in his table comparing the “old and new mindset” “Giving back to Mother Earth more than we take”- an explicitly religious viewpoint; the idea that we need a new mindset and that Andrews is the one to tell us what it might be is just taken as a given- detractors are suffering from a cognitive dissonance attributable to a human propensity to assume that because everything has been ok so far it will be ok in the future. An alternative view might be that Andrews is the one suffering from cognitive dissonance attributable to the human tendency to spend decades and even lifetimes assuming that the End is Nigh.

-Brian Davey includes in his list of “well-established trends in global food production” – which he recommends “if you really want to be frightened”- the old canard about “terminator seeds”: “Development “terminator” seeds to concentrate all seed sales in the hands of a corporate elite.” Maybe his “peer-reviewed” source for this was The Economics of Happiness. How many times do I have to debunk this? Terminator seeds were never developed or used outside the laboratory, and were originally created only as a safeguard against gene-flow. GE seeds can be saved by farmers in most cases; most farmers however continue to buy their seeds quite happily without needing to invoke 9-11 type conspiracy theories.

-Davey will also raise some eyebrows with his unequivocal statement: “If fossil fuels create climate change they should be banned from sale without a permit. Period.” Which sounds not only quite nutty but a call for the end of debate and even maybe even democracy.

-in a later chapter Davy and Rutledge lament the loss of public trust in science, mentioning Climategate but not even considering the possibility that this might actually represent a good reason for people not to trust activist scientists.

-Anne Ryan in an chapter on “Changing the Way we think” is positioned firmly in the “nature knows best” naturalistic fallacy: “Nature favours cycles because they come to an organic end after a suitable period of growth. They do not go on growing because in nature, that is a cancer.” Maybe someone should explain to Ryan that cancer is nature as well. Cycles don’t come to an end in nature because nature knows better but because other species dont have the ability to innovate their way out of these limits. Give any species- including cancer cells- the ability to overcome the limits of evolution and they will take the chance just as we have done.

This kind of naive blabber about “nature” in the context of this book would really make you wonder whether Feasta is actually a “think tank” at all or merely another branch of the seemingly all-pervasive Church of Gaia.

Maybe it starts with the editor Richard Douthwaite, an excellent writer and economist whose chapter I enjoyed and he makes a lot of very sensible points about the problems with the euro and other aspects of our current economic plight. Douthwaite’s views seem however to be underpinned by a retro-romantic wish to return to the 16th century:

“I argued that the wrong turn was taken in England in the 16th Century as the population began to recover from the balck Death. The increased numbers- a rise from 1.6million to 5.5million in less than 200 years- naturally put pressure on resources and caused communities to have problems living within the limits imposed by their local environments. In 1631, Edmund Howes described how this had forced them to start burning coal…

“That was it. The thin end of the wedge. The slippery slope…” Oh dear. Just as humanity was doing OK and keeping everything nice and simple and civilized without too much technology, someone went and started digging out the smelly black stuff and its been downhill ever since.A few quick centuries later and we have those awful supermarkets stocked with cheap food and 27 types of chocolate rice crispies, Twitter, Lady Gaga and God knows what else. It’s all been a terrible mistake!

Mr. Douthwaite may well prefer to be living in the 16th century, but probably not as one of the vast majority of the population who were landless peasants with pretty much no further prospects from birth to a most likely early death. While he acknowledges that no-one was going to protest then against the shift to coal, he ignores the fact that there is no chance we will voluntarily leave fossil energy until there is a cheaper, better alternative. Thankfully, he at least accepts that individual actions like going off grid are futile and that energy solutions are better done collectively, while Corinna Byrne apparently thinks that “the installation of small wind turbines to power ones home will also help”- no it wont Corinna, dont be daft.

Douthwaite, in common with the other main authors, assume that technology will have little to offer, and hence “collapse is inevitable” as David Korowicz argues. I had the opportunity to ask David how he could be so sure that another energy transition was impossible, siting shale gas; fuel cells and breakthrough solar technology; oil from algae; and thorium reactors as potential candidates for new energy sources. He replied that a)there is no time- peak oil and financial collapse are upon us; and b)none of these (apart from oil from algae) actually replace the convenience of oil as a liquid fuel for transport. In a discussion later he recommended Vaclav Smil’s book Energy Myths and Realities. Apparently Smil does not accept the peak oil hypothesis but empasizes that an energy transition away from fossil fuels will take decades.

Clearly we have enormous challenges, but what the peak oil doomer theorists in this book fail to address is that growth, prosperity and development do not rely only on digging holes in the ground and extracting the goodies until they are all gone and collapse ensues, but also that we are clever monkeys whos defining nature is technology and innovation. This is nothing to do with the quasi-religious New Age beliefs that Davie Philip mentions in his chapter as being off-putting to some in the Transition Towns movement, and which are also clearly expressed in some of the offerings here, of having lost our way, separated from nature, fallen from Eden and having lead to the hubris of thinking we can control nature, but simply that that is what we are as human beings.

I could take the doomer prognosis expressed in this book more seriously if there wasn’t such an apparent rubbing of hands with glee at the prospect of collapse. This is clearest in Orlov’s chapter. Orlov clearly thinks that the enormous successes of the modern world at feeding people are just a huge mistake:

“What piece of technological innovation do we imagine will enable this maize-dependent population to diversify their food sources and learn to feed themselves without the use of fossil inputs?” but ignores the possible but politically incorrect answer of genetic engineering and other new plant breeding techniques which could indeed help lower the resources needed to feed the growing population. He is right of course that there should be more to life than fast food and computer games, but forgets that for the majority of human existence there has been little more to life than a rather brutal struggle for survival.

Korowicz told me he would love to be wrong, and has no wish to lose the benefits of the modern world, but finds it hard to be optimistic. This seems reasonable enough but predicting the future is still really little more than a parlor game. Other contributors seem naive beyond belief in terms of what a low-energy world where we learn to say “enough” will actually be like- not one I think we would ever chose.

While there are valuable ideas on the economy and new ways of organizing businesses and community contained in this book, it unfortunately fails to provide a credible analyses of the predicament we are in, instead providing only a hop-scotch of doomer predictions of the future and new age pap.

Roundwood Timber Framing

Building Naturally using Local Resources

Ben Law

In the opening to Ben Law’s new book he describes the journey he has made in self-built dwellings: from bender- the simplest, almost stone-age dwelling made by pushing both ends of long hazel poles into the ground, making a domed space which is covered in a tarpaulin; evolving next into a yurt, a more sophisticated structure using a hazel or willow lattice as walls, with straight roof-poles slotting into holes around the crown or “wheel” at the top of the roof; to finally a roundwood timber framed house made famous in the Grand Designs program, and in his earlier book, “The Woodland House”.

This is a journey I have followed in a similar fashion myself, although my roundwood timber reciprocal frame hut is barely a hovel compared to Ben’s woodland palace, it was in fact partly inspired by him: I met him briefly some 20 years ago at the then young Sustainability Centre in Hampshire, where he was building a reciprocal frame, the first time I had come across the concept.

Since then Ben has resurrected the place of the small-scale coppice worker in Britain and developed out of the woods a a method of timber frame construction using roundwood poles that he feels fulfills the natural builders’ need for creativity and organic shapes in building with the regulators stringent requirements:

Hand selecting trees with form and character that have their own intrinsic beauty and follow their own lines, rather than those that have been forced upon them by saw and right-angle, allows freedom of movement in a building whilst keeping within the parameters of the drawings on the table. The building itself has life, curves and natural form, the frames often looking like they are trees growing out of the floorboards. Each new building improves on the last and each joint is developed and refined. I feel roundwood timber framing has reached its evolution where the joints are advanced, the timbers tried and tested and a range of buildings including sheds, barns, dwellings, educational spaces and industrial buildings have been constructed and passed the vigorous analysis of the construction engineers and building inspectors.

Using roundwood poles has several practical advantages: they do not require milling and planing the way sawn dimensioned timber does, and thus have a lower embodied energy; and they are structurally stronger than sawn timber of the same dimensions because the natural flow of the fibres in the tree remain intact.

The method of building lends something to Scandanavian and North American log-cabin style construction, but requires far less poles and is best combined with infills of natural materials such as straw-bale or cob.

Roundwood construction requires a close relationship with the different tree species, as well as an understanding of coppice management, which are both covered in the book. The third chapter gives details of 10 tree species suitable for roundwood framing; Ben lives in a sweet chestnut coppice, and rates this species very highly as a coppice tree and for this purpose; for those less fortunate to have access to such a resource- sweet chestnut is rare in Ireland for example- soft-wood poles such as larch or Douglas Fir will probably be more readily available. Of particular interest to start growing is Black Locust Robinia pseudoacacia which is a very durable tree that coppices well, currently uncommon in the British Isles.

There follows chapters on Tools for Roundwood Timber Framing; Construction, which describes in detail all the joints used; beyond the Frame- looking at shingles for the roofs, and wall and floor options; and finally a chapter with case studies of Ben’s roundwood timber builds, including the recent Lodsworth Larder, community owned village shop.

Roundwood timber framing requires a degree of specialist tools and skills, and while the process is described well in the book, only an experienced builder with good practical skills already would be able to go out and start building with these methods just from the book. Ben does also give courses and offers apprenticeships. There is also an accompanying DVD.

The star of this book is the photos. They are absolutely stunning: of trees, woods and coppice, tools and buildings. All mouth-watering, and worth buying the book for those alone. You might not be in a position to go out and start roundwood timber framing yourself immediately, but you will certainly be inspired to dream and who knows one day those dreams could become a reality.

Roundwood Timber Framing will find an essential place in the Green Builders’ library, and provides a wonderful way of linking together trees, woods, humans and their dwellings.

Book review PeopleQuake by Fred Pearce Eden Project Books 2010 Pbck; 342pp

There is a scary book I have a half-share in with a neo-Malthusian friend which contains graphs of the exponential growth curves in population for each of the countries of the world.

The Rapid Growth of Human Population 1750-2000 by William Stanton predicts a likely collapse and massive die-off by the title’s latter date on account of human population exceeding the carrying capacity of the planet resulting in resource wars, famines and environmental systems failure.

Most of the graphs tell a similar, devastating story: starting around 1850- when the world reached its first Billion inhabitants- populations that in many cases had been relatively stable for thousands of years began to explode and the nearly flat lines all morph spontaneously into hockey-sticks. With another 84-million added to the planet every year at the books publication, the stats and the authors’ analysis lend powerful support to the petri-dish theory of humanity: like bacteria in a sugar solution, homo sapiens will simply keep on consuming all the available resources, leading to massive population increase, followed by die-off.

This is a compelling idea that originated of course 200 years ago in Surrey with Malthus, author of Essay on the Principles of Population in 1798, but as Fed Pearce shows in his recent rebuttal to Malthus PeopleQuakethe inevitability of die-off has strongly informed much of the environmental movement- and still does.

Including myself here on Z5. I have written at several blog posts over the last few years arguing that population is one of the “last taboos” which needs to be addressed much more strongly in debates on sustainability. The reasoning goes like this: all our powering down and reducing emissions can be canceled out- and are being canceled out- by increases in population.

Lets say the world manages to reduce its carbon emissions by 2%- something we dont yet seem to have managed anyway- but the population increases also by 2%- then the one might cancel out the other.

Of course it is more complicated than that, because it turns out that there is a huge disparity in footprints in the world, with someone in the richest 1 billion people consuming some 32 x what the average person in the rest of the world does;

however, I have countered that argument on the grounds that a)poor people want to get richer- consume more- and indeed that is surely their right; and b)we are in overshoot already, probably long past it: species extinction, peak oil, peak water, loss of topsoil and forest cover, all converging with the looming catastrophe of climate change- all of these would be easier to address with less people it seems, and in the event of catastrophes and famines, there would simply be less vulnerable people to suffer.

Of course we in the rich world should reduce consumption and be less greedy in every way possible- but just how far are we to go? Few in the West would give up basic amenities like washing machines, yet billions of people around the world dont even have electricity. So the question of “What is the carrying capacity of the Earth?” cannot be addressed without also asking “at what level of consumption are we willing to live?”

And therein lies the dilemma, because improving one’s lot may very likely involve increasing consumption.

Pearce’s book has made me question some of these assumptions, look at others in a new light, and realize that about some of the fundamental issues on population, I have been dead wrong.

Malthus was wrong

So far food production has in fact kept pace with population growth,and famines have been declining since the 1980s. Two-hundred years may be a long time to be wrong about something he was predicting in his own lifetime, but collapse theorists (like me) simply say: it’s coming. Peak Oil and all that- we have finally reached the point where the Malthusian nightmare of famines on a global scale are inevitable. The stresses we have placed on the environment that sustains us seem inevitably to overwhelm our technological improvements, with climate change the wild card with effects that may be impossible to prepare for adequately.

This view has been most forcefully expressed by Professor Al Bartlett in his discussions of the Exponential Function; and before him, William Catton in Overshoot (1980).

Pearce also looks at the landmark report “The Limits to Growth” by Dennis and Donella Meadows which came out in 1972. In an age of computer naivety, argues Pearce, the graphs were compelling enough to be taken at face value, without looking at the underlying assumptions.

It certainly grabbed attention. Science, the voice of American science, ran five pages. It noted that ‘the book reveals none of the assumptions and equations that are the meat of the model’. When these were finally published, critics said the apocalyptic conclusions had been fixed from the start. The formulae put into the model were Malthusian to the core. All the bad things- population, pollution, our deand on resources- were set to rise exponentially, while all the good things, like technological breakthroughs, increased only arithmetically. Surprise surprise, the world sank into a mire of pollution, soaring commodity prices and famine.

The counter to the Malthusian assumptions of meadows is that food production could keep pace with population proportionately- ie, the more people, the more labor, also the more minds and hands that might be able to make innovations to increase efficiency etc..

Pearce takes a historical view and explores Malthus from his upbringing, the world events he saw around him, and the political influence his ideas had.

Malthus didn’t see that technology could make a nonsense of his natural law. But just as importantly, I think, he was wrong about human nature. He saw the poor as mindless beasts driven by crude natural forces, incapable of controlling their own fertility. That was his “libel” on humanity. And it rather ignored the fact that his subjects were already controlling their own fertility.

Pearce explains how influential Malthus became, and why he was decried so much by for example Marx: After his death, British politicians, believing Malthus to be correct about population growth amongst the poor, did not act to intervene with the Irish Potato famine, in which millions starved while the island was operating the largest livestock exporting market in the world.

Was the famine a case study in the operation of Malthus’s law- or an illustration of its political misuse? In reality, the famine may be a terrible example of how, in the hands of mean-spirited politicians, Malthusianism can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Pearce also analyzes the Rwandan genocide, contesting Jared Diamond’s view of the crisis as “Malthus in Africa” in his famous book Collapse and arguing that it was the wealthy northern Hutus who perpetrated the genocide, not the over-crowded landless poor; the collapse of coffee prices 1989, plunging many smallholders in Rwanda into poverty, he cites as another contributory factor.

Pearce also suggests that the more densely populated Tutsi farmers were also planting trees and improving their land, even that there may have been more afforestation taking place amongst them than in the less densely populated areas; population growth and environmental destruction need not always coincide.

Still the doomsters will say: we are already in overshoot. Population needs to be reduced everywhere, not just in the poor world. This would be an argument from The Optimum Population Trust which puts a sustainable population for the UK at between 17 and 24million.

In addition, a country like Britain- one of the most densely populated of the world- also has one of the highest per capita footprints, and obviously depends on continued imports for essentials including food.

While this is undoubtedly true, with population, there can be no quick fix (unless one provided by Nature); clearly, we cannot let people starve and will continue to endeavor to feed them.

In Ehrlich’s famous equation I=PAT or Impact = population x Affluence x Technology, the last one is the least considered, but as Pearce points out, technology has been only one reason Malthus has been wrong

Malthus didn’t see that technology could make a nonsense of his natural law. But just as importantly, I think, he was wrong about human nature. He saw the poor as mindless beasts driven by crude natural forces, incapable of controlling their own fertility. That was his “libel” on humanity. And it rather ignored the fact that his subjects were already controlling their own fertility.

Blood and Soil and the Rise of the Greens

I have been aware for a while of course that the roots of some aspects of environmentalism are to be found in the Blood and Soil cults of early-20thCentury Right-wing movements including Nazism. Part of the Nazi ideology included the concept of lebensraum – the need to “space” for a people, a tribe- and an occult attachment of that people to a particular “soil” as in “The fatherland”.

A romantic and mystical view of the natural world as somehow “purer” than much of humanity also played a role in the rise of the Soil Association for example, which to this day has connections with Anthroposophy, an occult religion based on the teachings of Rudolph Steiner. Steiner’s views on karma and race should be more widely known; perhaps Anthroposophy is the clearest example of how this philosophy is still influential in parts today.

What also should be more widely known is that several of the most prominent contemporary Malthusians- including Bartlett, Herman Daly,William Rees and William Catton- are all on the National Board of Advisors to the Carrying Capacity Network, a Christian Right homophobic anti-immigration organization, which campaigns for stricter immigration policies in the US.

When I first looked at the CNN I thought it curious that a group concerned with population control should be homophobic- surely that would be opposing a potential solution? With so many of the heavy-weights of the Collapse movement associated with such ideologies, maybe it is worth questioning some of their other assumptions?

(It has been suggested to me that maybe some of those named as on the advisory board are not aware that their names are being used; this seems unlikely to me, but agreed it is also unlikely that some of them are involved with such an organisation.)

These associations do make me pause and wonder: just how much doomerism around, not just population but peak oil and general resource depletion, is actually influenced by this kind of right-wing agenda? To what extent has the environmental movement’s concern about the human footprint been colored by racist or anti-humanist ideologies?

Pearce makes a compelling case that immigration is good for both immigrants and host countries; it represents the fastest way for the poor to improve their lot, and money sent home makes a real difference to the economies of poor countries. There is much we should do to improve the circumstances and conditions of immigrants, but immigration is not itself necessarily the problem.

Demographic Patterns

Pearce’s book takes you deep into the world of the demographer, where one encounters fascinating concepts of baby booms and demographic windows; the politics of contraception and the history of attempts at population control such as the one-child policy in China ; graphs like mushrooms and inverted mushrooms (and the in the case of AIDS stricken South Africa, an hour-glass); and some surprising insights.

It was Stewart Brand who first made me question some of the conclusions from the Exponential Growth camp: worldwide, fertility rates have already peaked and are declining faster than expected. Population is expected to peak by 2050-some say by 2040- and will start to decline in total numbers.

One of the reasons for this is the large-scale movement of people from the countryside to the city, where surprisingly, footprints can be smaller per capita while opportunities for improvement increase. Like Brand, Pearce puts a positive spin on the burgeoning mega-slums of the world, many of which he has stayed in, finding them crowded, yes, but full of life and vitality, and far from hopeless.

As people move to the city and adopt more modern lives, consumption increases- but often from a very low vase to start with- while fertility tends to decrease as women gain more access to education, contraception and generally increase their independence and control over their lives.

Already across much of Europe, and this process is well underway, and the native population could halve by mid-century; but result will be an ageing population, the mushroom-shaped graph, as the baby-boomers of the 1960s- pass mid-life- I am myself now 45- and begin to age but with a much fewer children to follow on into the work force. An ageing population will have its own challenges of course, dramatically changing the dynamic of the world’s economies, and could even, as Pearce hopes, bring a more peaceful and thrifty world, in contrast to the testosterone-charged youthfulness of the last 50 years of rapid growth.

Pearce is of course aware of the enormous impact humans are having, but finds room for hope there too:

[In Costa Rica] tree cover is back to 50%, even though the population has grown more in the two decades since 1987 than in the two decades before… ‘We discovered it was government policies that were destroying the forests, not too many farmers. This is true across the world,’ says Carlos Manuel Rodriguez. This is an important lesson, and one which environmental pessimists miss. There is another way.

It seems that despite environmental angst and the darker motivations of groups like the CNN, and various government attempts to stave off Malthusian collapses with state-run large-scale family planning schemes , the world’s population is in any case inexorably heading towards decline.

The hockey-stick graphs of Stanton’s book were not wrong, they just didnt show the next couple of decades: if they had, the graphs would start to look more S-shaped.

In a resource depleted world, this still means that we in the rich world should power down and generally prepare for a leaner future. Pearce is no cornucopian: he knows that we are straining the limits of the planet nonetheless.

The issue of whether we can continue to feed the current population as it peaks and begins to decline over the next human generation is unknown. I have long believed that industrial food production is inherently unsustainable, but improvements in technology, combined with agro-ecological approaches are still feasible. This is really a topic for another post, but the key thing is that we have to try. We cannot just stop feeding people on the grounds that they might survive and breed and thereby increase the population and cause more problems.

Lamentably, I have recently heard more than one person argue quite emphatically that the only moral thing to do, in view of the impact humans continue to have on other species, is to cull our own.

Nor in my view is it ethical to deny people the opportunity to use technology to improve their food systems. In the rich world, even those of us back-to-the-landers are heavily subsidized simply by the wealth of our societies.

Most people would like to improve their lot and they have every right to do so. The life of a peasant is not an attractive one, and I for one, though I love my gardening life, do not wish to be at the mercy of the weather to be able to eat.

The Green Revolution was designed to maximize global food output.The next revolution needs to get local. It needs to help these poor farming communities, the ones largely left out of the last green revolution, to find ways to manage their own soils better, using livestock to fertilize soils, conserving rainwater on their land in case of drought, breeding and exchanging local crop varieties and finding natural predators for troublesome pests.

Humanity still faces huge challenges , but the leveling off of human population growth, and even its decline in the near future, is a fact that needs to be acknowledged.

Rather than worrying about population overshoot, we need to address the issues that will arise over the next 30-40 years with a much older population, and the very different society that will ensue: possibly, as Pearce hopes, one not just older, but wiser also.

We need to leave behind the idea that sustainability is only for a minority of the human family, and work to making a sustainable future for all.

Clive Hamilton

Earthscan 2010

Hdbck 286pp

Climate change is here with us now and the processes and feedbacks already underway will guarantee at least a global average of a further 4 degrees warming this century no matter what we do, with devastating effects for civilisation due to rising sea levels, loss of arable land due to desertification and water shortages, and consequent mass migrations on Biblical scales leading to unparalleled disruption, human misery and most likely a die-off of billions.

Irresponsible fear-mongering from a romantic- tragic prophet of doom? No, for as Australian philosophy professor Clive Hamilton convincingly shows in this eloquently argued and wide-ranging book, this is the inevitable conclusion from the best science we have, and we had better get used to it.

Hamilton’s book surveys the science we have on the subject, and then gives an interesting analysis of political responses, and relates these to the psychology of denial: why is it we have failed to act on the evidence to avoid catastrophe? Why is it that we are blind to the hopeless inadequacy of current proposed measures? Why are we so reluctant to face the music: the current way of life we have become accustomed to in the modern age is coming to an end.

In the chapter “Growth Fetishism” Hamilton argues that an overly-rationalistic economic model is partly to blame, reducing the measures need to address climate change to mere figures on a balance sheet: so much warming costs so much money. It is assumed by this model of economics that so long as economic growth can continue, climate change is merely another cost to factor in, an approach that ignores the runaway effect that now seems likely:

At its core, this preoccupation with growth is a religious urge, but one displaced from the genuinely sacred to the nominally profane.

In the next chapter Hamilton looks at the “consumer self” from a psychological perspective. Apparently at the extreme end of consumer hubris “it is now possible to buy capsules filled with 24-carat gold leaf which, when swallowed, make your excrement sparkle”. “Economic growth no longer creates happiness: [rather] unhappiness sustains economic growth.”

Hamilton also takes a shot at Green Consumerism and concepts such as ecological foot-printing which only reinforce the “personalising of responsibility”- he argues passionately throughout the book that only determined collective political actions can make any difference, switching light-bulbs just will not cut it when the future of the species is at stake.

The meat of the book is to be found in chapter 4 “Many forms of Denial” in which he discusses why we are unwilling to accept what is now established science about our likely fate, rather than make the significant lifestyle adjustments we need to before it is to late.

Quoting Festinger’s famous studies of cults in the 1950s Hamilton attributes this to the phenomenon of “cognitive dissonance”: “we surround ourselves with people who think as we do and ignore those who make us feel uncomfortable”. This he thinks helps us understand climate change denial: consumers or those unwilling to question the sustainability of their lifestyles are all to easily persuaded that scientists are biased and corrupt.

Hamilton traces the origins of this in the anti-environmentalist backlash that arose after the 1992 Rio Summit, when some on the Right in America saw the Green lobby as a threat to modernist progress. This lead to the development of fake citizens’ groups like The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC) who had the strategy of linking climate fears with anti-smoking, anti-nukes and anti-GE, in an attempt to discredit these issues as unjustified social panic.

While opposition from the Right is familiar and unsurprising in view of the interests of the fossil fuel industry, attacks have come also from the Left. In the UK for example the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), in their journal Living Marxism in the 1990s criticized the environmentalists for putting up a “middle class indulgence and neo-colonial smoke-screen” deflecting attention from the more traditional concerns of the Left, poverty and class inequality. Hamilton claims there are links between the RCP and Martin Durkin, the director of the notorious climate-change denial film The Great Global Warming Swindle.

A few years earlier, Durkin had made an equally inflammatory documentary called Against Nature which, according to the publicity material, characterized “environmentalist ideology as unscientific, irrational and anti-humanist”. It created a furor after it was broadcast in Britain, not least for its extraordinary claims that modern environmentalism has its roots in Nazi Germany (Hitler was a vegetarian-get it?) and that self-interested environmentalists are responsible for enormous suffering in the Third World. It combined images of Third World children dying of horrible illnesses with commentary on how environmentalists oppose dams that would bring clean water and electricity, portraying them as callous fanatics.

Hamilton then goes on to describe the link between neo-conservatives and the spread of post-modernism and cultural relativist attacks on science as being “malleable, contingent and contestable.”

Modernism now finds itself under seige from both the dwindling band of academic post-modernists and resurgent neo-conservatives. Both reject the claims of science to objective truth. For the former the truth of modernism was socially constructed and the real truth is always contestable; the latter never accepted the elevation of matters of fact over matters of belief. For the sceptics and their patrons loyalty to belief is paramount and every piece of evidence that challenges their convictions represents a threat to their worldview and must be destroyed.

I feel that here Hamilton’s analysis falls short; the links between the environmental movement and post-modern relativism are in fact very strong; this is most clearly seen in the anti-GM lobby which seems more motivated by anti-science and religious beliefs that “Nature knows Best”; the consequences of these widespread delusions may indeed have lead to unnecessary suffering and death, as reported by Stewart Brand .

The links between pseudo-scientific beliefs in alternative medicine, the religious views of Steiner and other forms of nature mysticism; reactionary anti-modernism and Nazism’s cult of “Blood and Soil”; together with post-modern anti-science and the environmental movement’s tolerance for these strands in general, are important topics worthy of attention, but Hamilton naively lays the blame on the shoulders of the critics and sceptics alone, not the environmental movement itself.

Unless the Greens tackle their ambivalent attitude towards science and tackle the anti-science and reactionary views found all-too-frequently amongst their supporters, they will always be liable to this kind of critique from the likes of Durkin.

Hamilton continues his discussions on the philosophical and psychological reasons for our failure to act on climate change in the next chapter, “Disconnection from Nature” but I feel he fails here as well for the same reasons: “today we take a dead Earth as a given” he states, ignoring the influence of New Age spirituality which has gained a lot of currency under the guise of “Holistic Science”.

Hamilton seems ambivalent himself about the relationship to of environmentalism and science, on the one hand promoting science as the only way we can know about our predicament, on the other hand arguing that the scientific-industrial revolution has lead to a disconnection from Nature which “led inexorably to a stronger orientation toward a personal self”. While this may be partly true, it seems that it is only same science that can lead us back. Instead, he hints that he would see a return to some kind of spirituality as for our salvation, seeing Gaia as fulfilling this need.

Confusingly he asks “If our scientific understanding and technological control over the world allowed us to discard the gods, will the reassertion of Nature’s power see us turn again to the sacred for protection? Will the late surge of militant atheism come to be seen as a Homeric burst of pride before the fall?” Surely reverting to religion or superstition is the last thing to protect us!

The latter chapters discuss if there is a way out but Hamilton’s ambiguity about the environmental movement and the science lets him down here as well; he criticizes Lovelock for his anti-wind farm stance but when comparing the capacity of nuclear vs wind to replace fossil fuels quotes only Greenpeace, which itself seems to be an ideologically-driven interest group with an anti-science approach to nuclear power.

There is a lot of merit in this book and Hamilton opens a lot of discussion in areas not always explored in other climate change books, but seems contradictory in the places I have mentioned above.

His conclusion is however clear, that we must pursue climate justice and act politically if we can mitigate the worst effects of whatever warming we are now committed to:

And we can begin preparing for the impacts of climate disruption not by self-protection but by vigorous political engagement aimed at collectively building democracies that can ensure the best defenses against a more hostile climate, ones that do not abandon the poor and vulnerable to their fate while those who are able to buy their way out of the crisis do so for as long as they can. For we should remember that once the dramatic implications of the climate crisis are recognised by the powerful as a threat to themselves and their children they will, unless resisted, impose their own solutions on the rest of us, ones that will respect their interests and exacerbate unequal access to the means of survival, leaving the weak to fend for themselves. This is how it has always been. We must democratise survivability.

They were discussing their respective books “Whole Earth Discipline” and “Solar”.

Apparently the two writers have known each other for some time. Their recent books have a certain amount in common and are indeed quite complimentary, hence the double-bill for this event.

McEwan’s novel takes climate change as its theme. McKewan is obviously very interested in science and actually joined an scientific expedition to the Arctic before writing the book, and based scenes in the book on the trip.

McEwan said he felt we have been fortunate to have lived through a Golden Age of science writing since the 1970 that this body of work from the likes of Dawkins, E.O Wilson, should be considered as of great literary merit as well as scienctific.

Solar is hilarious, had me nearly rolling around laughing. One of the themes he deals with is the huge conceptual gap in academia between science and humanities subjects, something I relate to from experience of a sociology degree (graffiti above the toilet-roll holder in the university toilets: “Get your sociology degree here.”)

In the novel, McEwan has his lead character the brilliant but dysfunctional Michael Beard, a physicist, fall in love with his first wife, a literature undergraduate. It seems he is able, in just a couple of weekends reading, to gain enough superficial knowledge of the girl’s favorite classical authors to impress her enough to win her heart. Compared to the enormously hard-won truths of science, as far as literature goes, it seems easy to fake it.

He also takes a few well-aimed potshots at “cultural relativists” who seem to think everything is just a matter of opinion, also to hilarious effect.

This theme- the gulf between those who understand things like climate science and those who are deeply suspicious of science in general, is directly relevant to Brand’s book, which takes on the four Holy Cows of the environmental movement: urbanization, population, nuclear power and GM crops. “I had learned to distrust the opinions of my environmental colleagues” Brand ruefully comments. Environmentalists are more in the “romantic” (=humanities) camp than the scientific/engineering camp that Brand represents.

One of the omissions in his book however is the subject of Peak Oil. He only makes one reference to it I think, stating that he does not believe it willl have the significant impact the like of Kunstler, Heinberg and Campbell believe it will.

I had partly traveled to the talk to get in a question on this, which I did: why did he not deal with this issue, which could be nearly considered to have become the fifth Holy Cow: the impending peak and decline in the world’s life-blood of liquid fossil energy.

Brand answered that he feels it will not be the main event that others claim. He feels we are on a plateau and this will probably be a long, uneven one rather than a sudden abrupt drop; that other technologies may yet come on stream to make up the shortfall; that market controls have already shown themselves extremely successful in rapidly changing behavior, viz. the demand destruction in the US of a couple of years ago when prices spiked above $150 a barrel.

I was not entirely convinced, particularly when he included shale oil gas as amongst new technologies, a climate disaster I would have thought. However, it is true that while many leading pundits think we are now past peak, and the presumably related financial collapse is still getting worse, we may not be staring over the abyss of total collapse and reversion to warlord-ism just yet.

Another theme I would have liked to have discuss with Brand had there been more time (he declined an interview) would have been his view of the prevalence amongst romantic environmentalists of the tragedy of life, and how there is therefore a resistance to engineers coming along trying to fix things. So strongly embedded are we in the idea that humans have gone horribly wrong and we are doomed, we prefer to wallow in the tragedy. If it were possible to fix the world with geo-engineering for example- another of Brand’s themes- that would imply that our excesses, our consumerist habits and inability to stop, and most of all, our presumed separation from “nature” might not be such tragic flaws after all.

These are fascinating ideas, and the bringing together of these two writers, particularly the embracing of science- with all its warts as embodied in the horrible character of Michael Beard- perhaps suggests the great divide between the sciences and the humanities can after all be bridged.

Working with nature to grow edible Crops

by Martin Crawford

Green Books Hardback 384 pp

Forward by Rob Hopkins

Martin Crawford, Director of the Agroforestry Research Trust in Devon, UK, has produced a beautiful and practical book which seems sure to become the definitive text for cool temperate forest gardens.

As part of his work at the ART Martin is already the author of many encyclopedic manuals covering dozens of topics and thousands of plants, and has been producing the essential Agroforestry News since he began his forest garden in the Dartington estate 15 years ago.

Above: Martin engulfed by bamboo with Italian Alder growing behind him at his garden at the ART

Creating a Forest Garden is eminently practical and down-to-earth, packed with information and good advice, and illustrated throughout with really gorgeous colour photos, including many full-page ones making it of interest to the general lover of plants and gardens as well as the serious forest garden designer. As such it succeeds in bringing together the technical issues of forest garden design, comprehensive details on edible and useful plants as well as introducing the concept to the non-specialist.

The concept of edible “food forests” -combining tree crops such as top fruit and nuts with various understory layers such as small and large shrubs, perennial vegetables, ground-covers, herbs and climbers- expresses many of the principles of permaculture: multiple function; stacking different layers; diversity and use of biological functions such as nitrogen fixing plants.

The book is clearly laid out into three sections:

Part 1 How Forest gardens Work

This section introduces the reader to the concept of forest gardens and how they evolved in British climates from the work of Robert Hart;

There follows a survey of forest garden features and products;

a fascinating look at the effects of climate change on the UK climate and the relevance of forest gardens to landscapes resilient to these changes;

and a brief discussion on the “native-exotic” debate- Martin points out that many definitions of what constitutes a “native plant” are in fact arbitrary:

…plants introduced by other animals to a new area are “allowed” as native but those introduced by humans (deliberately or not) are not. This is an example of the all-too-common attitude of the last few centuries, of humans being separated off from the natural world as though they are not a part of it. Just look where that has lead us!

This is an important issue to forest gardeners – as Martin points out, the range of “native” wild edibles is quite small in this part of the world; productive forest gardens here will need to introduce many plants, but it should be remembered that few of our food corps- much less ornamental shrubs- are actually “native” anyway.

This section ends with a detailed look at fertility in forest gardens. Martin shows how to make an assessment of the nutrient demands of your plants and average this out over the area you have, and then how to calculate how to meet this demand from nitrogen fixing plants and mineral accumulators like comfrey.

This key idea in forest gardens of achieving a high degree of self-maintenance is one of the great strengths of Martin’s approach. Unlike conventional annual veg growing, which tends to rely on inputs of manures for fertility, a forest garden would ideally cycle its own nutrients as far as possible and limit any extra inputs.

Part 2 Designing Your Forest Garden explains the other major aspect of the self-maintaining nature of edible forest gardens- they should have perennial or evergreen groundcovers to minimize weeds.

The key to this is how to establish useful ground covers that you want in the first place. In the book Martin shows how to first eliminate the existing vegetation with plastic or cardboard mulches, which should be down for a year before removing and then planting the area with suitable beneficial ground cover plants. In my experience this is the aspect of forest gardening that is most commonly neglected or poorly implemented- people’s initial interest tends to draw them to the trees and shrubs, but in many ways it seems to me that it is the perennial vegetable and ground cover layers that really define it as such- rather than an orchard with grass that needs mowing, and this takes careful preparation and selection of species.

The chapter on growing your own plants will be essential to most gardeners- the number of ground cover plants needed to fill a space quickly and keep those weeds down can be considerable and beyond most people’s budget. Martin takes you through the main propagation techniques for a range of plants including grafting trees and shrubs.

Chapters 9 and 10 take the reader from first design steps -starting with the selection of a suitable site if one is the market for buying land- and the important aspect of wind-break design.

Then follows a series of chapters for designing each in turn the canopy layer; the shrub layer; the herbaceous perennial and ground-cover layers; and annuals, biennials and climbers, with a chapter for each with comprehensive plant lists that make for hours of happy browsing and nearly justify the book purchase on their own

Part 3 Extra Design Elements and Maintenance covers the landscape features of paths and clearings and how design them into your forest garden for maximum light.

This followed by a chapter on one of the most fascinating potential yields that an be added into a forest garden- edible fungi and how to grow them on logs or sawdust;

-harvesting and preserving- tips on what to do once you have an abundance of yields;

and finally chapters on maintenance, including weeding (which is essential but should take minimal time in a forest garden) and pest control; and ongoing tasks.

Four useful glossary’s are found at the back of the book: Propagation tables; trees and shrubs for hedging and fencing; plants to attract beneficial insects; and edible crops by month of use.

Resources- useful organizations, suppliers and publications- complete the book

There is very little I could suggest to improve this comprehensive book. I would have liked to see a couple of references to research in places- for example in the first chapter he states “there is plenty of evidence that crops from perennial plants tend to be more nutritious than similar plants from annual plants”- it would be interesting to have some references to follow up.

My visit to Martin’s 2-acre forest garden in 2008 was an inspiration, reinvigorating my interest in the potential of the concept, and showing how multiple yields can be obtained efficiently with relatively little maintenance required.

While there is still little data to demonstrate to what extent forest gardens can really feed people in this part of the world- Martin does not claim they can or should completely replace annual vegetable gardens or conventional farming- this wonderful book is another demonstration of how the edible forest garden concept can successfully integrate productive food gardens with diverse habitats, and providing many other ecological and aesthetic qualities. It is sure to inspire many more new forest gardens and gardeners over the coming years.

Book Review: Whole Earth Discipline An Ecopragmatist Manifesto

by Stewart Brand

Atlantic Books 2009 316pp

“Civilization is at risk, but civilization is the problem”.

Stewart Brand is one of the iconic founders of the environmental movement, an original old hippy whose influence on the boomer generation should not be understated. With his latest book Whole Earth Discipline he takes that same movement to task for rejecting science and getting sidetracked by ideology at the very time when the practical application of science through engineering and technology may be the only way to save ourselves.

I came across an early copy of The Whole Earth Catalog, founded by Brand in 1968, on an early visit to a small “back to the land” commune about 25 years ago. It was a thrilling introduction to the possibilities of the burgeoning “alternative” lifestyle of organic gardening and renewable energy I was joining at the time.

Over the coming years, I read about his early involvement in LSD in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and currently have a copy of his 1999 book The Clock of the Long Now on my bookshelf.

In a recent interview, I heard Brand take on the environmental movement’s anti-science stance on various issues. I have been grappling with this issue myself for some time now, particularly in the credulous acceptance by most green organisations of “alternative medicine” for which there is no evidence, and the anti-science diatribes that are inevitably summoned up in defense.

More recently I have discovered for myself how little science there is behind the health claims of organic food, and how organisations such as the Soil Association are often pseudo-scientific in their claims and their treatment of evidence.

Whole Earth Discipline challenges the greens on four more holy cows: population, urbanisation, nuclear power and Genetically Engineered crops, and in reading this compelling and fascinating book I have had to do some serious re-thinking around these issues myself.

Of those four issues the one I have been most concerned about myself has been population: what use our hard-won per capita reductions in carbon emissions if this is to be always canceled out by more people? What chance of eco-system restoration if a growing population is constantly increasing the pressure?

In contrast to Brand- who had Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich as one of his early tutors- I do not see population really as a big environmentalist cause, rather it seems to be the elephant in the room that no-one wants to talk about, perhaps because of connections with oppressive regimes, racism and the sheer intractability of the problem.

Brand claims however that world population will most likely peak within another generation at around 9 billion, far less than was being predicted in the 70s and 80s, and that there is one major reason for this: urbanization. Most of humanity now live in cities and as the rural poor move there they reduce their numbers of offspring, so much so that far from a population crash, we are facing a crisis of an aging population.

Brand paints a very different picture of this process of the move to town than that of the conventional environmentalist. The move to the city Brand claims is liberating on the whole, and especially for women. Rural village life tends to be parochial and oppressive, offering little by way of opportunity. Peasant subsistence agriculture is far from the romantic view of the back-to-the-land movement for most, but back breaking toil subject to the vagaries of the weather with no back-up in case of crop failure.

The mega-slums of the developing world may appear to be hellish and grossly over-crowded polluted and destitute to the affluent western greenie, but Brand argues that in fact they are preferable to squalid farming because they offer opportunities to escape poverty. One way this is happening is by the ubiquitous spread of the cell phone: even the poorest of the poor have one, with incoming calls often free.

Not only that, but growing cities mean an emptying countryside which is good for forest regeneration. The point is made clearly: if you want to be green, than the compact life in the city id for you, while those in wealthy countries who set up their small-holdings in remote rural locations are likely to have a larger footprint, subsidised as they are by car transport and long supply lines. (I would be a classic example of this last category.)

Surprising though Brand’s analysis is on cities, his more controversial chapters are likely to be the ones on nuclear and GE crops.

While I attended anti-nuclear demos in my youth- CND was at its height in the late 1970s when I was leaving school- more recently I have been swayed by James Lovelock’s position on nuclear, that which ever way you look at it, coal is the real dirty fuel and if your concern is over future generations, addressing climate change by decarbonising the economy is your first priority.

It does indeed seem that fears over the dangers of nuclear waste have been exaggerated. The total per capita waste from a lifetime of using nuclear fuel for one family would fit into a soda can. France runs 80% of its electricity from nuclear, but while many die every day in car crashes, nuclear seems to be very safe these days. Not only that, but there are new generations of nuclear power stations which are relatively small and which can be deployed anywhere. One scheme is to produce small power stations which contain their entire lifetimes worth of fuel, are buried for the duration of the fuel and simply switched off when that is spent, with no waste extracted.

Brand also points out that all the existing nuclear powers developed weapons technology first, which then gave rise to civil energy uses, rather than the other way round; since Iran actually does need nuclear power, the international community would be in a very strong place to insist how this is developed safely. In the west meanwhile, large numbers of nukes are being used as a source of fuel for power generation.

What Brand skips over in his book with barely a mention is peak oil. He clearly thinks new technologies and fuel sources can fill the gap somehow; uranium can be extracted from sea water, and if that runs out, we can use thorium instead.

Peak oil doomers like myself have long argued against nuclear on the grounds that it will take too long to construct, that the carbon footprint is still high once you have counted the embodied energy in construction and decommissioning;that uranium will peak also before too long should we try to run everything from nuclear. While Brand makes a convincing case for the safety of modern reactors and the promise of new technologies, he is clearly under no illusion about the challenge facing us were we to try to replace existing coal and oil with a range of alternatives, including nuclear, before the climate tipping point. Brand is no techno-fantasist, but a pragmatic and practical engineer.

Perhaps even more of a Holy Cow for environmentalists than nuclear is Genetically Engineered crops. (Brand prefers “GE” to the more common “GM”.) This seems to go right to the heart of what sees as the problem with the ideological position of “romantic” greens who are motivated by a spurious ideological notions of what is “natural”. Tampering with genes, especially crossing the species divide, seems unnatural to many and unholy to some.

But scientists are no more concerned about GE technology than they are about plant breeding and loss of diversity from farming in general, because they know as Brand says that genes are extremely fungible in nature: transgenic mutations, especially on the microbial level, are apparently quite normal, indeed we could hardly have evolved without this process. Although the “strawberry with fish genes” is apparently an urban myth, in fact any given gene may be nearly identical in two very different species so splicing genes from one organism into another may not be nearly as “abnormal” as it may appear.

The problem is not this or that particular kind of farming, but farming in general. Unless you advocate a return to hunter-gatherer lifestyles (there are those who do) there is no reason to feel GE crops are uniquely evil or dangerous.

To an ecologist, or to a Gaian for that matter, agriculture is one vast catastrophe. The less of it the better.

Another urban myth which may be partly responsible for the extreme opposition to GE- in common with anti-abortion and anti-vivisection activism, anti-GE sentiment is deemed to justify violence on occasion- is the “terminator gene”, designed to produce sterile genes. This does appear to be unjustifiable, interfering as it does with ancient farming practices of seed-saving, until you read the true story: no “terminator” crops were ever actually produced, in part because of protests, but the real reason for their proposed development was to limit the dangers of the new crops running amok in the wild: in other words, terminator technology was part of the checks and balances that Monsanto were proposing to address some of the environmentalists concerns. Without this, preventing contamination may now be harder.

The absurdity of the opposition to these crops is expressed in the quote given by Vandana Shiva, from her book Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply (2000):

“The gradual spread of sterility in seeding plants would result in a global catastrophe that would eventually wipe out higher life forms, including humans, from the planet”- a biological impossibility, since terminator plants would be unable to spread by seeds.

Brand gives a shocking account of how ideologically motivated environmental organizations including Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth campaigned extensively against US food aid to Africa during famines in 2001 and 2002 because it contained GE crops, threatening to prevent any African imports to Europe if this badly needed food was accepted. Brand ruefully quotes Brecht: “Grub first, then ethics.”

Starvation was treated as a measure of commitment to the cause. In the service of what was thought to be a higher good, the environmental movement went sociopathic in Africa.

That well funded environmental groups in Europe campaigned so vociferously against food aid that was meant for starving people is surely a shocking indictment that there is something seriously wrong with the movement.

Many of the arguments Brand discusses in favour of GE crops are given here;

-after a decade of real life trials, no evidence suggests any human health implications from eating GE food;

-checks and balances are employed far more diligently in GE than in many other areas;

-GE is already becoming decentralised with many smaller companies and NGOs becoming involved in using the technology appropriately to help the poor and the hungry, with many beneficial effects for the environment including less use of pesticides:

“Developing countries are building their own non -corporate GE programs suited to their unique agricultural needs.” The democratization of the technology may even have been hampered by anti-GE activism: “Only a few big corporate players have survived a period of consolidation, caused partly by excessive anti-GE regulation that drove out small companies”.

And the potential of the technology is impressive: unlike conventional plant breeding, GE can be highly specific and precise in the traits it develops, and has had many successes despite the hampering of environmental protests.

Brand discusses at length how the bogus concept of the “precautionary” principle has been used to scupper development of the technology. In the absence of any clear evidence of danger, the precautionary principle is merely a recipe for social apoplexy. No doubt there were protesters using the same argument when people first discovered fire. In fact there are lots of checks and balances and the scientists who know what they are doing are far more aware of possible dangers than protesters.

Quasi-scientific propaganda against climate change is no different from quasi-scientific propaganda against genetic engineering. Both try to harness science to a political agenda.

In the coming years, GE seems certain to spread and eventually to be accepted: “The fact is that the fastest-moving countries now with GE crops are the developing nations that have the scientific competence and confidence to stand up to excessively cautious environmentalists- China, Brazil, India, South Africa, Argentina, the Philippines. as they go, so goes the world.”

As I write this I am getting forwarded emails asking me to sign the Avaaz petition against the recent decision by the European Council to allow GE potatoes to be grown here. I wont be signing, but I know most of my colleagues- many of whom have pulled up GM crops themselves- will.

In the future however, the strategy is likely to be to aim the benefits of the produce at the consumer: if the technology is good enough, people will simply prefer the better product. The proof will be in the pudding.

Brand returns to the issue of the dysfunction of Greens in his next chapter, Romantics, Scientist and Engineers

Here he suggests that one of the driving forces of green movements has been the romantic notion of decline. As a peak -oiler myself a lot of bells rang as I read through the book and I found myself stopping to question how much of my beliefs about the inevitability of collapse and “the long descent” are ideological rather than based on real evidence.

Clearly the potential for collapse is very real, and perhaps an over-optimistic world view based on “positive thinking” has contributed to the recent financial collapse, as Barbara Ehrenreich has argued in her book Smile or Die.

Without discussing the ins and outs of the collapse theory- he has already outlined some of the worst scenarios of climate change in the opening chapter- Brand explores the idea that romantic greens are ideologically opposed to finding solutions, whereas engineers believe there must be a solution to everything.

A new set of environmental players is shifting the balance. Engineers are arriving who see environmental problems neither as a romantic tragedy nor as a a scientific puzzle but simply as something to fix.

I myself used to buy into the still prevalent myth of the Fall from an idyllic past: for thousands of years,so this particular myth goes- humans lived in harmony with Nature, responsive to Her (usually feminine) deepest energies and understandings.

At a certain unspecified point in our history, we lost our way, separating from Nature and playing God by manipulating natural laws. It is because this myth is still so powerful that anti-GE and anti-nuclear sentiment remains so strong and vitriolic- Thou Shalt Not meddle with the Deeper Law.

In reality, there never was such an idyllic harmonious past; Rousseau’s Noble Savage never was.

Nature does not care about us, nor does it have plans or desires; rather, any species that were to evolve the adaptive advantages of opposable thumbs and the neo-cortex would have come to dominate our predators and competitors in the same way we have.

Being close to nature has always meant short life-span, high infant mortality and constant resource wars. It has only ever been our technology- starting with fire- that has allowed us to escape such an existence.

As Brand outlines so succinctly in his opening pages, the fundamental problem of humanity is not separation from nature, but existential: everything we do has a footprint; yet we want our children to survive and prosper.

Brand takes a brief look at how these retro-romantic views have been associated with, and are not incompatible with, Nazism: yearning for a purity in nature not found in culture; and an elitism only possible in the well fed to moralize to the hungry.

But the engineer’s approach is very different from any kind of deluded new age pseudo-therapy, rooted as it is in science and practical experience. There is surely no guarantee that we will be able to pull off the kind of techno-fixes Brand describes in his last chapters- which includes such things as giant sunshades in space and the sequestration of carbon through biochar on a massive scale- but the worst aspects of the romantic’s world view should not hinder these attempts which may be our last chance.

Every environmentalist should read this life-changing – and maybe even planet-changing book.

The long-evolved Green agenda is suddenly outdated- too negative, too tradition-bound, too specialized, too politically one-sided for the scale of the climate problem. Far from taking a new dominant role,environmentalists risk being marginalized more than ever, with many of their deep goals and well-honed strategies irrelevant to the new tasks. Accustomed to saving natural systems from civilization, Greens now have the unfamiliar task of saving civilization from a natural system- climate dynamics.