The wikipedia article does a good job of relating all the topics covered in the three episodes, you might want to read that first if you havn’t seen the programs as I’m going to jump around a bit and pick out just some of the ideas that interested me.

The main theme of the series is that from the mid-20thCentury, new ideas emerging from ecology somehow hooked up with evolutionary theory, genetics and computer science to produce the idea that humans and human society, along with the rest of nature, can be understood as machines acting in a system, which are therefore controllable and predictable. Curtis sees this as a dangerous idea, that robs us of our human agency and makes us doubt the existence of free will, especially, the will to change things.

These themes converge dramatically in the Rwanda and Congo: -the Rwandan genocide is portrayed as the result of misguided liberal guilt of the departing Belgian colonialists, who had created artificial tribal conflict in colonial days by propagating the myth of Tutsi superiority; then encouraged the new Hutu government to rise up against the Tutsi minority who had oppressed them during colonial days. This was then exacerbated by misguided involvement of western aid agencies who set up camps which became breeding grounds for more violence; -meanwhile Dian Fossey studied Gorillas in Rwanda, ultimately coming to abuse the local people in efforts to protect the gorillas from poaching; -all this against a backdrop of the rise of computer technology which was fueled by the mining of Coltan in the Congo, spawning a war that has cost 4 million lives in the last 8 years- the computers being the machines which, according to some, then became the way out of economic boom and bust, the way to a stable society which could run itself- like a machine.

The series starts with a look at the influence of Ayn Rand’s influence on the modern world; I have to admit that I had no idea that her objectivist philosophy had had such influence on Alan Greenspan, who was one of here disciples.

While governments had been unable to provide stability in the markets, the advent of computers gave rise to the idea that human society itself could be modeled as a self-regulating system: computers became seen as a medium for liberation and equality. This idea emerged from Silicon valley in the 1970s at the dawn of the computer age. Environmentalist Stewart brand was one of the pioneers, providing one of the links between systems theory and ecology.

But prominent ecologists were already taking on the idea of nature as a self-organising machine. Jay Forrester was an early pioneer of cybernetics, the view that brains, cities and whole societies operated as networks of nodal connections, and that computers would be able to uncover their operating system.

The Odum brothers, Howard and Eugene, developed electronic models of ecosystems based on field data, which they claimed showed how nature self-organised towards balance: the idea of natural balance and the web-of-life. There models became accepted as fact within ecological science.

Although permaculture is not mentioned in the series, Howard Odum was a major influence on permaculture co-founder David Holmgren who dedicated his book “Permaculture: Principles and Pathways beyond Sustainability” (2002) to him. He also references cybernetics as another strand of systems thinking, but goes onto say

the influence of systems thinking in my development of permaculture and its design principles has not come through extensive study of the literature, but more through an osmotic absorption of ideas in the “cultural ether” which strike a chord with my own experience in permaculture design. Further, I believe many of the insights of systems thinking that are difficult to grasp as abstractions are truths that are embodied in the stories and myths of indigenous cultures.

His reference to indigenous cultures provides an interesting cross-over of the role of systems thinking in actual machines- computers- to human society and nature- that there is an “intuitive” aspect to this understanding as well as an empirical one.

I had also come across systems theory in the work of Joanna Macey and Deep Ecology, and had a vague feeling then that it was somehow at odds with the “holistic” “intuitive” side of things that Deep Ecology was supposed to be all about. Computers and machines seemed the exact opposite of emotional encounter groups that were the hallmark of Deep Ecology sessions. I see now that the cybernetics part was giving the movement scientific credibility- it was science, with models and graphs and studies to back it up, but of a “holistic” kind. There were also lots of references and general interest within Deep Ecology with New Science, Capra and the Tao of Physics, Buddhism and physics and David Bohm, and so on. (From there you are only a short step away from Deepak Chopra and The Secret.)

So these ideas were taken on by greens and the counter-culture without realizing that they came from something as dry and soulless and mechanistic as computer science- the very antithesis of what the movement imagined itself to be about. “Getting in touch with nature” was supposed to be about the emotions, and spiritual forces, not lines of computer code, a great irony in this whole story which I find quite fascinating.

The idea of human systems was also influential in the next part of Curtis’ narrative, the hippy commune, and one of the greatest migrations out of the cities in America took place during the 1970s as mainly young people flocked to the land to live in small utopian communes which were non-hierarchical -they were supposed to operate like self-regulating systems. Some communes did prosper and thrive and are still around today- like The Farm in Tennesee, although Curtis mentions only that most of them failed after a few months or at most a couple of years. Why? (I lived in two communes for short periods of time; they were both pretty dysfunctional and as was often the case had rapid turnovers of residents. A major course of conflict was the dish-washing rota.)

Perhaps the problem was with the underlying theory of stable, self-regulating eco-systems in the natural world which, as Curtis explains in the documentary, has not stood the test of time. The models that Odum had made were over-simplified; ecology has moved on from the notion of “natural balance” and most ecologists now agree that ecology is about constant dynamic change and adaptation. There may not even be such a thing as a distinct ecosytem anyway, since boundaries are always permeable. (The idea of the whole earth as a system was developed into the Gaia hypothesis by Lovelock, something Curtis only mentions in passing.)

There is no such thing as natural balance, and computer models cannot replicate natural systems very well at all. This is a theme explored by Aynsley Kellow in his book which I reviewed here.

So what does this mean for permaculture? I don’t know, but the idea of a design system based on natural systems does seem to me these days to be metaphorical at best: actually we don’t want our systems to be too much like nature for all sorts of obvious reasons. There are lots of good ideas in permaculture for design and the idea of self-regulation in a designed system makes perfect sense- collecting rainwater, managing perennial landscapes for food- this need not have anything to do with a natural system though. Still, it is interesting that the underlying theory may be based on a completely flawed view of nature.

This idea however went on to inform public policy quite profoundly long after the science had moved on. In 1972 the Club of Rome published The Limits to Growth, based on Forrester’s cybernetics. The report used computer models to forecast the point of overshoot when the population and consumption of people would outweigh the planet’s carrying capacity. This has become a seminal text, one of the foundations of environmentalism, and is still widely referenced today, eg in the preface of “Fleeing Vesuvius”.

Critics claim models are only as good as the data and assumptions that go into them, and that the modelers underestimated the ability of humans to innovate and adapt. Interestingly, Curtis does not mention climate change, although this would be an obvious extension to the narrative: a science relying heavily on models, but with sometimes poor data, trying to integrate human, ecological and climate systems in one huge model, a process that is itself having enormous influence on policy. It is almost as if we believe that, given enough data and computer power, we can predict the future.

Curtis takes these ideas through the east European revolutions in the early 2000s, that used the same idea of non-hierarchical organisation, but that went the same way as the communes: they failed to account for power and inequality already present and soon reverted back into corruption.

Richard Dawkins gets a mention as taking the theory further with the idea of the Selfish Gene (originally invented by William Hamilton): human behavior can be understood as being driven primarily by the impulse of the gene to survive. This doesnt make people selfish necessarily, but it does provide an explanation for things like the Rwandan genocide: from the gene’s point of view, it makes sense to kill our cousins, or at least those not too closely related but not too distantly related either.

Which raises a couple of interesting questions, because if genes mean that we really are like computers and the code is in our genetics, where then does lie free will? This is really the whole point of Curtis’ film, to question the validity of a theory that says, everything can work as an orderly whole, we are just cogs in the machine, so how can we really work to change things? Where can political action come from? Interesting questions, but I am not sure that free will’s existence or otherwise is a testable hypothesis.

Curtis is concerned that seeing ourselves as just part of a system with “natural balance” could be seen as a way of justifying discrimination and apartheid, as had been done by Field Marshall Smuts and his theory of “holism”- everything had a natural place, presided over by white men. In this sense then these ideas of basing human systems on natural systems and striving for some kind of pre-existing balance is far from liberating or progressive, but could lead to oppression and fascism.

So a lot of interesting ideas, covering science, environmentalism and policy. I’m sure I’ll return to explore more them more in the future.

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.

I dont know if this is really true even though it might seem it after the Meet the Skeptics documentary also, but here at least from a year ago is a fascinating Radio 4 episode of Analysis asking Are Environmentalists Bad for the Planet?

Featuring Greenpeace chairman John Sauven, Jonathan Porritt, Professor of Climate Change Mike Hulme; the theologian and United Nations adviser on climate change and world religions Martin Palmer; Sociologist Lord Anthony Giddens; John Gummer MP and policy director of the New Economics Foundation Andrew Simms and others, the main theme is that, whatever about the science of climate change, climate activists are using it as a way of imposing their anti-modernist, anti-technology agenda:

PALMER: I think the core of what the environmental movement has done is it has taken sin, guilt and fear from religion and has used those very strongly. The problem is that in good religion – if I can put it that way – that is always combined with a sense of hope, a sense of liberational salvation and a sense of personal responsibility but not the kind of responsibility that makes you feel you are a victim of the weight of your sins and guilt. Bad religion ignores the hope, salvation dimension of it and seeks to create a climate of fear which then means that those in control of creating that climate of fear are in control of those people and become dictators and there is – and I hate to say this – but there is a very strong –it’s very small – but there is a very strong green fascism in much of the environmental world. I’ve heard it said at meetings I’ve been at – that climate change is so important – democracy has to be sacrificed.

This is indeed the view of for example Professor of medicine and IPCC author Dr. David Shearman who apparently argues in his recent book The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy that democracy is incapable of dealing with the global climate change crisis, and therefore needs to be replaced by an authoritarian world government with the power to force people to do what Shearman thinks they ought to do.

And here is Prof. Mike Hulme:

HULME: Some of the deep green movement would buy into this – that actually climate change is the best opportunity that we have got in order to get our political goal of a more egalitarian, localist, less consumer driven society onto the table. And we’ve seen over 40 or 50 years different tactics I suppose from some of these deep greens, eco-socialists if you like, to drive forward this idea and climate change is the latest and is an opportunity.

Increasingly it seems to me judging from the kind of reactions I’m getting, people get so vexed at any hint of skepticism, not because they feel it is contradicting established science, but because it challenges the religious conviction that the modern world of technology and growing populations is just plain wrong and doomed anyway. That’s what they really mean by “denialist”- not just someone who questions cutting CO2 even with no good alternatives to fossil fuels, but anyone who questions the climate of doom.

Well worth listening to the whole episode.

I met Helena over 10 years ago in Dublin where I remember debating her on whether the people of Ladakh, where she has based her organisation the International Society for Ecology and Culture, really were happier than us in the west as she seemed to think, and whether their “consciousness” was really more advanced than our own, as she maintained.

Why I wondered, if that was the case, did they appear to have no premonition of the problems that might accrue once the Evil Modern World was let in. Apparently their culture was so fragile that not only could they do nothing to stop it but the whole fabric of their society fell apart as soon as it encountered consumerism, commercial advertising and globalisation.

In this new film, I was surprised to see some of the material from Norberg-Hodge’s earlier film Ancient Futures- Learning from Ladakh simply recycled as she recounts once again the story of an early visit to a Ladakh village where she asked a young man to show her the poor houses in the village. After thinking for a while he responds that there are not really any poor houses; but revisiting the same village 10 years later, after the arrival of tourism and their western values, she overhears the same man complain, “oh, we Ladakhis, we are so poor”.

It is a poignant story and the message is one of changing perceptions in a changing world. This must have made a particularly strong impression on Helena as she worked as a translator in Ladakh when visitors from the outside were rare, and had the unusual experience of seeing an ancient culture transformed almost before her eyes in just a few years as the modern world moved in for the first time.

ISEC has a twin approach to this issue of perception and the problem of dissatisfaction engendered by advertising: one is to take westerners to the villages where they can stay for a while and live with the locals on working on the farms. This brings in an income, but perhaps more importantly, helps with the Ladakhi’s self-esteem as they come to understand how valued their farming life-style, traditional community and local crafts are to disaffected post-modernists from the west.

More interestingly still, ISEC has arranged to take Ladakhis who had never previously left their villages to visit the west where they are wowed out by washing machines and other gadgets but also get the message that behind the bright lights and glitz the west has serious social problems unknown in back home. When they return their message is: “The west is not all it’s cracked up to be. Don’t go down that path.”

This is a very interesting take on East meets West and there is much to be learned from it but I’m not sure I take the same message that Helena presents in the new film. In fact, although there is a partial truth here, it is a blatant over-simplification with some glaring errors and misrepresentations.

Clive Hamilton is one of the interviewees and his message is: “Material wealth has never brought us happiness.” Excuse me? This is a central and prevalent myth of the environmental movement: poor people are happier. They have community, family, traditions- things we have lost and yearn for. There are certainly serious and real problems caused by affluence, which may include depression, but they are trivial in comparison to the problems of poverty. The Ladakhis do look very appealing to the neurotic romantic westerner who has so much mobility they are always feeling homesick, and a volunteer holiday working on a farm there for a few weeks could be a great thing to do, but we do not actually want to trade places with them. The lack of mobility in traditional communities would stifle us and we would I think find it more like a prison if we didnt know we had a plane ticket out of there.

(There are studies that suggest we dont get much happier beyond a certain level of wealth, but we still get a little happier; I think it may be the wealth of the wider society that would count here, the availability of expensive surgery perhaps when we need it, that would make a difference also.)

Nor would we be likely to admire the feudal political system, or the complete lack of any opportunities apart from those designated by circumstance at birth, the vagaries of the weather causing sporadic crop yields (shame about all that cheap subsidised food coming on the new road in smelly trucks, but it might save you from going hungry in a bad year) or the complete absence of that other Evil product of globalisation and modern technology, modern medicine and such things as hip replacements (my Mother just had her second at 85 years of age, now she’s like Riverdance).

(I havn’t been to Ladakh, but trekking in Nepal 20 years ago I was struck by how often I was stopped by locals who showed me wounds and sores or sick children and implored me for medicine. They wanted western medicine because they knew it worked.)

The film’s central message is: globalisation and the modern world are terrible; traditional communities are happier; we need an entirely new approach based on localisation. Not complete self-reliance, we are told, but local needs should come first, starting with local food, but also decentralised renewable energy in the form of wind and photovoltaic.

The latter point about energy is the most ridiculous part of the film. Who in their right minds in making general proposals of -not just renewables- but decentralised renewables? I myself do live off grid like that and I’m not advocating it!

Never mind that these technologies are absolutely the product of globalisation, they could scarcely be created locally, and mostly are manufactured in China using probably quite polluting processes that require rare Earth metals of which China has 95% of the world’s supply;

or that running decentralised energy systems to any extent is basically prohibited currently by limitations in storage- batteries- which is still very costly, and that such systems could only supply relatively very small amounts of power.

There is a big emphases on food of course. Vandana Shiva is there telling us that “our research” has proved that small farms consistently deliver 3-5x the yield of- what? large scale conventional farms? I think not, but one of the problems with films like this is that references are rather forgotten so it is hard to check. But anyway, all that “science” and “evidence” stuff is all part of the problem, innit? After all we are also talking a crisis of the Human Spirit, one really should try to avoid THINKING too much.

Conspicuously absent in the film was any mention of Genetic Engineering but in her brief talk afterwards Helena came out with the old canard about “for-profit seeds that have terminator genes in them.” Crikey, do these globe-trotting super-greenies not bother to read even basic information about the stuff they are promoting? Doesnt she listen to Skepteco??

Arch-doomer Richard Heinberg is also featured, claiming that globalisation is propelling us into a “universal famine”- forgetting perhaps that historically agrarian cultures have always been subject to intermittent famines, and the Green Revolution- which Shiva and Norberg-Hodge would be completely opposed to- has succeeded in more than keeping abreast of population and the incidence of famines has declined since the 1980s.

There are some contentious points about localisation made by Goldsmith in the film: “food miles” are not such a big component in food, especially if coming by sea (airfreight is another matter); but there are other difficulties with localisation of food: in a famine, you cannot just import food from somewhere else unless you have a global economy functioning; and some areas are better suited to some crops than others, so local food might lead to less choice.

Farmers markets are much promoted in the film of course and in the discussion afterwards, but it is questionable that lots of people driving to a farmers market as may be the case involves less “food miles” than them all walking to a central supermarket. And one other issue noticeably missing from any discussion: farmers markets, like organic food, tend to be more expensive, often supplying fancy artisan food rather than basics. Delicious, healthy, wonderful, I love farmers’ markets, but they are inevitably criticized as being middle-class and elitist, and cheap food is surely one of the great successes of globalisation.

Farming as a career is appealing to some, but I think of the essay written a few years ago by Heinberg himslef calling for 40 million more farmers in a post-peak oil world in America alone- this would completely reverse the trend of the last 50-60 years. Most people do not want to be subsistence farmers, it is too hard. I really wonder how many in the packed audience would really want to give up their electronic gadgets and all the other trappings of globalisation they benefit from and work on a farm for the rest of their lives, because for the localisation project to gain any real traction, must of them would have to do just that.

And would Helena really want to give up her jet-setting lifestyle of international travel as award-winning author and environmentalist and become grounded permanently and localised, perhaps in a remote village in Ladakh -or anywhere- herself rather than just romanticizing the lives of others?

There are important lessons to be learned from Ladakh, including issues around community, how we treat our old people and how to manage development; but this film has no depth and just regurgitates the same old over-simplified post-modern dirge we have been hearing for years.

We were born in pre-history, an integral part of Mother Nature who nurtured us and taught us the Wisdom of the wilds, plant spirit medicine, and much more.

Being connected to Nature, so this story goes, was a birth rite robbed from us when we opened Pandora’s box and started unpacking nature’s laws with science, which then unleashed technology- the very opposite of Nature, with which we have created what we call The Modern World.

And, according to this powerful story, the modern world is everything that nature is not: mechanical, devoid of emotion, rational, intellectual, cold and meaningless.

One of the early formulations of this story that I came across in my Deep Ecological days, going back over 10 years, was in Thom Hartmann’s The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight.

In Hartmann’s formulation, humanity lived in a kind of blissful garden of Eden for many thousands of years, safe and secure in the bosom of Mother Nature, wise enough to live lightly and sustainably on the earth, never taking more than their fair share or more than the natural world can replenish.

Then, Something Happened: somehow, we separated from Nature, and so began the long fall which lead to the Atom Bomb, GE crops and Twitter.

Even as I repeated this compelling and popular story in those Deep Ecology workshops years ago I was aware of a small problem: why, if things were so good, did we leave Eden? Why did we give up on such a good deal and make the mistake of going it alone?

The answer is, because nature wasnt actually so great in the first place. Nature meant that we died young- in neolithic times, the average life expectancy was only about 20.

Being close to Nature meant high infant mortality, disease, danger, frequent tribal warfare, famine, slavery and cannibalism.

Being close to nature meant that life was tough, very tough, a struggle for survival, so when adaptations such as farming came along, the hairless apes who were our ancestors took it- even though there was a price to pay in increased work.

And as time went on and further technological adaptations enticed us, we took them , all of them, because although they all came with a price- a more complex, stratified society, the need for standing armies to defend the newly gained wealth, the pollution, the danger of collapse and return to earlier times if the crops failed- we took them every time because it always seemed worth the pay-off for a better life, a life with more opportunities, and, eventually, longer and healthier lives as the hard-won wealth that was gained by exploiting nature allowed us -or some of us- to improve our own local environments, and then by extension to care about the environment more as a whole.

And now, in the ultra-globalized world of the 21st century, we have a situation where some of the wealthiest, most secure and most successful humans, mainly people who have never known hunger and have never known real hardship, or what it means to have to live your whole life in one village with oppressive values (particularly to women), who have traveled the world on jet planes and have had every opportunity of education and leisure in their lives, perhaps not even having to have spent much time working at all, have turned around from all this and viewed nature from this privileged position and seen the destruction that must take place if we are to continue with our lifestyles, and have concluded that this human world of technology and concrete, schools and prisons and toxic sludge, is all deeply, profoundly flawed, because it is Not Natural, and that the answer is to Go Back to Nature and Reconnect with Her Wisdom, Her Purity, Her Sanctity.

From this complex modern world of ours, with all its flaws and rules and regulations, the natural world can seem just so much more appealing. The sunset, the ocean, the forest- beauty in nature can take the breath away and awaken a deep yearning for… something intangible … that the hubris of TV and fashion and celebrity and the filth of industry and the routine of manufacturing just cannot fulfill.

But there is a real danger in this yearning for a return to an idealized version of nature, because nature really isnt like that. In fact, it is only possible to see the natural world in this way if one is truly ignorant of what if means to eek out a living from the land- if, indeed, one truly has been separated from True Nature.

Because this is harder than modern people can ever imagine, and while many may find it a satisfying and rewarding lifestyle for a while, we would not choose it I think without the support system a modern society provides, without the safety nets of welfare, modern health care and cheap, readily available industrial food to keep the wolf at bay.

A real Return to Nature means a return to the wolf. It means Grizzly Man, it means Into the Wild , it means a life that is likely to be nasty, brutish and short.

It is completely understandable that these philosophies of the Return, steeped as they are in western Judeo-Christian myths, should emerge, for the comforts of the modern world do indeed often have a pay-off of alienation: part of us misses the danger, the excitement, the adventure, of life in the wilderness, and we want to escape the confines of security.

This is made up for in the immense popularity of sports, and in outdoor pursuits, and in gardening. But if we had no trappings of technology and modernity to come back to, even after extended stays away, we might see nature rather differently.

I have been through all this myself. I have on occasion had brief tastes of what it means to be part of nature in this sense, such as when getting lost for a few days in the Himalayas, and running out of food, entirely alone. A powerful, life-changing experience for a young 20-something full of the spirit of youthful adventure, but not something I would wish to repeat.

There is no doubt that gardening is one of the most beneficial activities, for all sort of reasons: exercise. fresh air, connection with the natural world, building social capital, education. It can even provide a useful amount of produce and, if you work hard and are good at it, even save money or earn you a living. It is absolutely right that we should encourage home gardening, community orchards and many other ways of providing for ourselves, but we shouldnt kid ourselves we really want to be self-sufficient.

It is natural that in a recession many will start to provide something for themselves and growing food is a natural place to start, but I think its main benefits will be social, unless we experience a Cuba-style collapse- although even in Cuba most food is still grown on large industrial farms.

But modern home gardening, with its improved varieties, crop protection, automatic irrigation and so on is a far cry from living wild from the land; and it would be a choice few would make if they had a choice. No-one really want to be a subsistence farmer, except at the weekends.

It is no doubt true that complete detachment from the natural world, as may occur in some cities. is extremely unhealthy, can lead to psychological and emotional problems, and that contact with nature and gardening can be very therapeutic. As Geoff Lawton says, “You can heal everything in a garden”.

Our predicament as a species is existential; in terms of improving our lot, as we will inevitably want to do, there is always a cost to the environment, and to other parts opf ourselves. Yet, the wealthier and more successful we become, the more space and time and leisure we have to appreciate, and therefore protect, the environment, and this is how it should be.

But beware those who explain the core predicament of the modern world as being “separation from nature”, unless you want to be eaten by a Grizzly.

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.

http://skepteco.wordpress.com/

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.

The Living Landscape: How to Read and Understand it

Patrick Whitefield

Permanent Publications 2009

334pp

48 color photos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And how to tackle it

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