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Albert defends Steiner on the basis that Anthroposophy has created a “tribe” which he sees as a good thing. In reality, Anthroposophy is more like a cult, which obscures its intentions, and is doing untold harm in persuading people that just making stuff up is somehow just as good as scientific experimentation. Albert gives an uncritical appraisal of Steiner’s contributions to education, social care and organic farming, claiming that it provides a “holistic world view” lacking in reductionist, mechanistic approaches.

I have blogged on zone5 about biodynamics before, describing what it is, reviewing some of the scientific evidence, and explaining why it can have no place in permaculture.

BD is a system of superstition, based on astrology, sympathetic magic and animal sacrifice, believed to be true entirely on the say so of Rudolph Steiner, who never gardened or farmed himself, and claimed his knowledge came from clairvoyance, not scientific experimentation.

It is surely obvious that the reason people think it “works” is because they are doing all the things right that you need to do anyway to be a successful gardener or farmer. The superstition has nothing to do with it, although it can be argued that BD growers do well because they are more committed and spend more time in the field, and pay more attention to detail.

Anecdotes such as “I smelled the soil on a BD farm, it was wonderful!” are not science. Anecdotally I can tell you that people regularly come to my own garden, smell the soil and say “how do you get such rich black soil, it smells wonderful!”

Now, if I told them it was because I work with cycles of the moon and hang deer bladders from trees which I then add to the compost to bring down etheric energies, maybe that would be enough to convert them to BD.

Permaculture however is based on a scientific understanding of ecology, also physics, chemistry etc; so something as wacky as BD that lies far outside anything verifiable by science can play no role here.

Call a spade a spade: BD- and the occult philosophy of Anthroposophy it is a part of- is a religion. As such it can have no more part in permaculture than any religion- eg. how would permaculture students respond i wonder if I told them in a class that praying to Mecca five times a day will help the plants grow?

At this point folk will probably ask “what’s the harm?” but this is unfortunately easily answered.

BD is not just any old superstitious woo, but part of what has been called the most successful form of ‘alternative’ religion in the [twentieth] century, with hundreds of organisations worldwide including banks (Triodos), schools and colleges, and the social care Camphill Communities.

This is all very impressive- would that permaculture had achieved as much!- and therein lies the real danger, because underneath the superficial similarities with the aims of permaculturalists of alternative education, community care, organic gardening etc. lies a seriously dysfunctional ideology of anti-science and mystic racism.

Anthroposophy had historic connections with the rise of Nazism and propagates notions of Aryan supremacy, as has been extensively researched by Peter Staudenmeier.

The education system of Steiner-Waldorf schools is based on Steiner’s racist beliefs about karmic incarnation:

On the one hand there is the black race, which is the most earthly. When this race goes toward the West, it dies out. Then there is the yellow race, in the middle between the earth and the cosmos. When this race goes toward the East, it turns brown, it attaches itself too much to the cosmos and dies out. The white race is the race of the future, the spiritually creative race.

http://sites.google.com/site/waldorfwatch/steiners-racism

For many years now there has been a growing movement by parents disaffected with the covert aims of Steiner-Waldorf education, which is not to educate but to somehow guide the child’s “soul-journey”. Pity is, neither parents nor children are told exactly what is going on, while the schools themselves continue to pose as a more child-focused, alternative educational choice in order to seek state funding. In fact, they are part of a growing organisation based on a shadowy occult religion, where poor academic standards, cultish beliefs about racial purity, bullying (“it’s his/her karma”) and hard-core astrological mumbo-jumbo all-too-often prevail.

The Camphill Communities, run on Anthroposophical lines, might look like a benevolent form of social care but in fact often are based on the religious belief of Karma, ie that the physically or mentally impaired are so for karmic reasons, such as wrong-doing in a previous life.

What exactly the aims of this religion are is difficult to say, but like all religions Anthroposophy is trying hard to propagate itself, and the environmental movement, organics and now permaculture as well are all easy targets which have become vehicles for distributing a frankly vile set of beliefs.

Compost Teas- evidence that Biodynamics works?

In Albert’s interview, he points to the work of the controversial Elaine Ingham with aerated compost teas (ACTs) as evidence that Steiner was really onto something.

There seems little if any scientific research that actually supports the claims made by Ingham and her company Soil Foodweb, which sells costly tea brewers and other bits of kit.

Most scientists and reputable organizations are dubious at best. See for example this paper by Linda Chalker-Scott

and this discussion on The Garden Rant

Here is another useful discussion:

http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/load/verm/msg0620302417324.html

The upshot seems to be:

-there is little evidence ACTs work or do what they claim;

-there is a real danger of contamination with E.coli because those organisms may also be increased by the aeration process;

-the claims made seem to be more marketing hype than science, and involve the purchase of expensive equipment and the use of electricity to make the teas;

-even if they do have some benefit, you can achieve the same with simpler, cheaper and well-tried and tested methods, like just using compost itself, good mulches, no-till methods etc..

Moreover, I don’t think it is true to say that the use of ACTs a la Ingham actually replicate anything Steiner was really saying; in fact BD is often credited with being on a par with another pseudoscience, homeopathy, as described on the Village Community Farm page:

The farm is not only organic (no artificial fertilisers or pesticides) but is also Bio-dynamic -a method which aims to improve the health and fertility of the land through preparations similar to homeopathy.

Now, homeopathy is essentially no treatment at all- it is just water. So a homeopathic addition of soil nutrients or micro-organisms would be no use at all unless you believe in Steiner’s woo. Indeed, my own experiences of working alongside BD-trained gardeners in Co. Monaghan some years ago were that they clearly believed they were sprinkling magic water “homeopathically” (I dont think they actually used the word) over the land to “bring down the etheric forces” to protect and energize the plants.

The BD method of making the “preparations” involved hand-stirring a bucket of the tea for an hour or so at a certain phase of the moon- a far cry from what is demanded to make ACT, 24hrs of constant mechanical bubbling in a special tea-maker.

In Permaculture there are the Ethical Principles of “Care of the Earth, Care of the People, and Fair Shares”. Care of the People must include in my view giving the best information we can based on science, and protecting the more vulnerable from pseudoscience, snake-oil salesmen and other hocus-pocus. Permaculturalists everywhere should inform themselves about Anthroposophy and how it operates in the world and reject it as having anything useful to offer.

Further reading

Biodynamics is a Hoax

Peter Staudenmaier

Waldorf Critics

Waldorf watch

Zooey’s Blog

Nagara

The Skeptic’s Guide to Biodynamic Wine

I attended an Earth Day conference organized by Sustainable Ireland (now Cultivate) about 10 or 12 years ago in Maynooth which brought together anti-GE activists Vandana Shiva and Dr. Mae-Wan Ho with a representative from Monsanto. There must have been over 100 people in the conference hall; I’d guess every single one was anti-GM, and certainly anti-Monsanto. Many had been involved in pulling up GE trial crops, or would have been ready to.

That includes me, and if you had asked me just a few months ago I might have felt the same- in particular the thought of “Terminator Genes” could only send a shiver down one’s back and there is an understandable suspicion of big apparently unaccountable companies making money from controlling our food supply.

But it turns out Terminator Genes were never marketed, and their original purpose was as a safeguard against the dangers of GE crops seeding into the wild with possibly unintended consequences.

Many GE crops have been developed by independent universities and Government agencies, and not even always for profit. Could it be that GE crops, which after all represent a biological technique (rather than a chemical one) may not be the feared next step of corporate industrial food, but may actually provide a way out of over-industrialised chemical-based farming practices?

A key reference for our podcast is the remarkable book Tomorrow’s Table by Pamela Ronald and Raoul Adamchuk. You can find the Ronald’s website of the same name here. Their book suggests the potential for a surprising marriage between organics and GE- if only the Organics regulations would permit its use.

The bottom line is this: the peer-reviewed science suggests no special dangers in GE crops, and satisfactory regulatory measures. (Contrast this with clear dangers in some “conventional” “foods” eg some soda drinks.)

GE is essentially just a more precise means of plant breeding, no different in its basic outcomes than the aeons of plant breeding farmers have always engaged in, and unlike for example hybrid varieties- which are accepted even by organic standards- in most cases, the farmers can still save their seeds from these improved varieites.

Scaremongering and calling for a total ban is likely to only push the companies into more secrecy, making regulation more difficult. Instead, it beholds all of us to become informed about what could be a very useful technology for us all.

See the SkeptEco website for more references.

http://skepteco.wordpress.com/

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.

with Eoin O’Callaghan, Naomi Fein, Christina LaPerle, Graham Strouts and Michael Wellock

The SkeptEco podcast came out of a study group that has been meeting around Kinsale for the past few months. Our interest has been to examine critically claims of the environmental movement by reading the existing published scientific research. Links to all the papers referred to can be found on the SkeptEco website.

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.

Fortunately I was able to get to a doctor who took my temperature, peered down my throat, made the diagnosis- my father had already guessed correctly- and prescribed some antibiotics. The visit lasted only a few minutes- there was no time for a lengthy lifestyle analysis or discussion of my psychological state and so could hardly be called “holistic” but the whole experience was pleasant one, the doctor was chatty and very affable, I hadnt even had to wait long, and most importantly, within 24 hours I had made a miraculous recovery and had no barely symptoms left at all after 48hours.

Now, this is just anecdotal of course and proves nothing- maybe I would have got better anyway- but since this was a very rare trip to the doctor- my mother refers to all doctors as “quacks” – it seems worth noting that it was as pleasant and as trouble-free an experience as I could have hoped for.

However, as I sat in the waiting room I couldnt help noticing a prominent sign advertising the services of Homeopaths and Reflexologists; if I hadnt been so sick and had there been more time I would have loved to have asked the kind doctor his views on promoting such fraudulent “remedies” in his surgery, and to have had a chat about evidence-based medicine and the public perception of in general.

All this is by way of prelude to drawing your attention to the new 10:23 campaign in the UK: “Homeopathy- there’s nothing in it”.

http://www.1023.org.uk/

 This campaign is tackling head on the inconsistent postion of high street pharmacists like Boots who claim to have the best interests of their customers at heart and yet sell sugar pills and water as medicine.

One of the main excuses of homeopaths is that their methods are more “holistic”- they incude a lengthy interview covering many detials of the patients’ personal life before making proscribing the remedy, while allopathic medicine “only treats the symptoms”- the implication here is that there is always some kind of emotional/psychologiclal/spiritual component to illness.

Apart from the fact that this is largely mystical mumbo-jumbo- my tonsillitis for example was caused by the bacterium actinomyces and not by some kind of negative energy in my chakras- this whole process is side-stepped by the fact that anyone can just walk into a chemists’ shop and buy whatever type of sugar pill they fancy straight off the shelf. If homeopaths themsleves think that remedies should only be given by a trained practitioner after lengthy holistic interviews surely they should be coming on board fully behind the 10:23 campaign themselves.

The other aspect of this is that belief in quack medicine is inherently anti-science. I could give loads of examples from conversations I have had with mystically minded folk. Start by telling them that there is no scientific evidence to support the efficiacy of things like homeopathy and they will recount anecdotes along the lines of “homeopathy cured my hamster”, even though many conditions people seek treatments for- like the ‘flu- are self-limiting.

 If like me you are more insistent, 9 times out of 10 they will attack science in general as being biased- “science has been wrong before” “science doesnt know everything” or most infuriatingly invoke something they call “the observer effect”- the idea that you can discount any scientific evidence whenever it suits you on the basis that the observer will affect what is being observed, possibly on the quantum level.

The claim here is that their own opinions are more vaild- infallible even- and less biased than science, which just displays a complete ignorance of the scientific method, which is by definition an attempt to overcome our own personal, subjective bias. Anecdotes are not evidence; lots of anecdotes do not constitute data.

I recently was discussing evidence-based medicine with a herbalist who had just completed a degree. I asked him about whether he had looked at clinical trials during his degree course; he had to some extent, but was quite happy to tell me that he didnt think it necessary to have evidence for everything.

His real interest it turned out was plant-spirit medicine and shamanism (which were not you will be relieved to hear covered on the degree); the degree was just a front to give more credibility for what he was really practicing. Since he made his own preperations from home-grown herbs I asked him how he could control the concentrations of active ingredients, which could vary wildly from plant to plant; his response was just to shrug his shoulders and say, “I know I make good stuff, the clients like it and know it is good stuff”. In other words, weather the treatments worked or not was immaterial; all that counts is can he sell them. 

Another  conversation I had on this topic was with someone I would certainly expect to support the role of science in the environmental movement, specifically climate change. When she questioned the value of evidence-based medicine, I pointed out that clinical trials on medical treatments are routine and trivial compared to say the incredibly complex body of evidence from many different scientific disciplines accumulated over decades that constitutes climate science; yet the evidence that homeopathy and other “alternative” therapies do not work is much less ambiguous than the evidence for climate change. I was shocked that her response was that there is no scientifc consensus on climate change, that science is all just a matter of opinion.

Quack medicine is not just an assault on science and reason but appears to lead people to abandon even the most basic standards of ethics, honesty and common sense.

Unfortunately, as I have covered on Zone5 many times, the environmental movement seems to have no discernment when it comes to quack medicine. Wherever you see the word “Green” or “Organic” you can be sure the homeopaths and the herbalists will not be far behind. Alternative therapists seem to make up a significant part of the environmental movement in general and are keen to protect their public image of progressive, natural and holistic alternatives to the nasty world of Big Pharma.

In fact, the persistence of these practices undermine our ability to understand and respnd to the much more serious issues confronting us and make the green movement the laughing stock of the more rational sections of society, and thereby feeds the climate change deniers’ case.

The 10:23 Campaign looks like being the start of a more direct way of tackling these issues head on, let’s all get behind it.

More information on this week’s episode on the Pod Delusion:

http://poddelusion.co.uk/blog/

Fascinating account of the inside world of CAM and more insights into homeopathy here:

http://aillas.blogspot.com/2009/12/open-university-perspectives-on.html

The Atheists’ Guide is a brilliant anthology of atheist and science writing, comedy, fiction and even a section on silly party games, and the best thing about it is that half the profits go to the Terrence Higgins’ Trust

Pod Delusion #11 also includes some other great topical material on the Climate change email leaks (yes, these prove beyond doubt that climate change is a scam) and the new campaign against Boots for selling homeopathic remedies that they admit don’t work. Don’t miss!

Warning! Not suitable for Breatharians

Andy Murray

The Good Elf Press  2009

187pp

Astrology is an amazing tool to run your life by, without having to waste time with the fraudulent pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo of Science. Astrology explains wars, thunderstorms and plagues. We can even use it historically. For example, if we know exactly when and where Queen Elizabeth was born, we can find out exactly who she was without having to waste time on fictitious history books. With it we can even discover why Einstein was so damn clever. Astrology is way better than sex.

You don’t have to be a vegan to enjoy Andy Murray’s brilliant Heretic’s Guide, which is packed with dozens of tasty simple recipes to satisfy even the most hardened omnivore at least some of the time, you dont  even need to have any great interest in cooking  or even food. That is because for our amusement and philosophical delectation there are numerous passages in between the recipes giving us fascinating and hilarious perspectives from the Mecca of New Age beliefs in Britain, the town of Glastonbury near where the author lives.

While waiting for the pumpkin soup to cook  or in between  making preperations for the Hazelnut and Celery Risotto you will be able to work up an appetite by rolling around clutching your belly after reading the sure -to-become-classic passages “Reiki Reiki Rise and Shine” “Cooking with Astrology” or “Breeding Gurus for Profit”.

This book has it all really- great advice on cooking with fresh ingredients and all the usual good reasons to grow your own and buy local; loads of easy to follow recipes including a big choice of soups, salads and dips; and inspirational chapter on cooking in the great outdoors, including a useful guide to wild food; Posh Things to Do with Vegetables; Main Meals; Side Dishes and Extras; Desserts, and Cakes and Biscuits.

And then the alternative Contents covers everything else- Cults, Gurus, Satanism, Religion, Crop Circles, Homeopathy- nothing is sacred and nothing is spared the sharp rib-splitting egg-whisk of Murray’s irreverence.

Homeopathic Cookery Doubters of this form of cookery pour scorn on the fact that a diner might receive a drop of gravy and a shred of carrot on a plate. How can this be a meal, they ask? What they fail to understand is that carbon,the building block of all life, has a memory. A potentised meal maintains a complete carbon hologram, the information of the whole, even down to the smallest atomic sum of its parts.A homeopathic amount of food is of course more than sufficient to provide all the nutritional benefits that would be expected from a plateful of food, and puts paid to any shrill cries of fraud. Filthy skeptics who come to the  homeopathic table having already made up their tiny minds will trhow down their napkins and walk away still believing what they believe tio be true, and little can be done to change their wrongness.

Even the his own sacred Creed of Veganism is given the once-over. This is something I know a little about, because I once lived in a vegan community on the Welsh Borders. I was not especially into veganism per se and went there to learn to grow vegetables; I happily lived a vegan diet however, but was aware of an accute divide between some of my fellow communards, who seemed to be at each other’s throats all the time.

On  one extreme there were the the vegans who were happy to eat anything so long as it was vegan, including skip food, vegan chocolate from Malaysia (or somewhere) and chip butty’s. This group of vegans were also keen to give over some of the best land we had to rescued sheep and ageing dogs, and generally turn the place into an animal sanctury.

All this tended to jar somewhat with the second group who apart from being rather snobby in their choice of edibles- Vegan Organic Wholefoods only, no white flour allowed, lots of Miso- didnt seem to like animals at all anywhere near them. Wild animals were OK in their own wild homes, but no pets, farm animals or incontinent retired donkeys of any kind permitted.

Murray gives a total of 7 Vegan groups, including the Fat Vegan, the Sensitive Vegan and the Style Vegan, but presumable fitsd into he first category of The Common Vegan:

The most widespread of all vegans, the common vegan has been quietly animal free for years and still hasn’t died. Usually healthy, fit and happy, they tend to be quite normal, although sometimes a little willowy to stand in a strong wind.

For Murray, veganism might well play a role in a sustainable future, but is mainly just about bloody good food. While no longer a Vegan myself,  my animal-free taste buds have been re-awakened by the Heretics Guide and who knows, so have  some of my chakras.

And with that I think Ill go and make a quick Potato Rosti.