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.

Above: rocket stove (foreground) and Storm Kettle behind

This was made out of a Feta cheese tin from the local wholefoods shop and a piece of single-wall stainless steel flu pipe attached to a 90degree bend (which cost about 30 euros). You cut the top off the tin with a pair of tin-snips and make a hole in the lid which then is pushed down into the tin forming a collar to support the flu; the 90degree elbow goes out the bottom through a similar hole in the side of the tin. The tin is filled with ash for insulation (before you slide the lid back over…).

Here is a neat video explaining exactly how to do it.

The stove works on the principle of the insulation allowing a hotter burn- so it is very efficient. We tried a little demo on the course for fun, with two teams, one making tea on the rocket stove, the other with a Storm Kettle. The stove one hands down- ok it wasnt really a fair test. the other team hadnt even managed to get the fire lit by the time our kettle had boiled!

I also recently bought a rocket stove from Wildstoves:

This is the StoveTec Wood & Charcoal Combination Rocket Stove I have been using it mainly for making tea outside whenever the weather is fine, which has been quite a bit lately. It is also easy to use, and well designed, very efficient- start the fire with a few shavings and a few minutes later with just three or four thumb-thickness sticks you have boiling water.

The stove is built to last, and has a handy steel rack for laying the sticks onto, which can then be pushed into the firebox as the burn. Also comes with a windshield, and this one has a ceramic brick you can insert into the firebox to protect the door from burning out when using charcoal.

I have yet to spend time cooking on it, but it would also be ideal to take camping if you have a vehicle. Also would be ideal next to the pizza oven for cooking up the source.

Wildstoves do a range of great looking stoves, including tiny ones for back-packing; if you want to make your own rocket stove (see above) they also supply DIY Rocket Stove elbows.

Another great source of information on stoves is WorldStoves.com

They work in developing countries where they set up factories to use local materials and skills to produce pyrolytic stoves- stoves which convert the fuel- which can be almost any biomass- into charcoal, which can be used as a soil amendment known as biochar. They have recently completed a project in Haiti.

The stoves are extremely efficient, combusting the wood gases also, thus saving wood and cutting down oin respiratory diseases common in many countries caused by cooking fires.

Another great source of information for DIY stove enthusiasts is the Aprovecho Research Centre, who design the StoveTec stoves.

Download their Capturing Heat pdf for details on more deigns for innovative stoves.

Happy stoving!

Click here for MP3

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

The first day will include charcoal making (a potential business opportunity), biochar (which improves soil while also combating climate change), rocket stoves, DIY stoves, site surveying & observation techniques, basic triangulation, measurement and levels.

One of the main practicals for the day will be charcoal & biochar making.

The second day will focus on forest gardening, which is an approach that works with nature as much as possible, to generate a high food yield with minimum effort.

Topics for the day include natural succession, deciduous forest layers, canopy distances, wild plants and canopy design. The main practical exercise for the day will focus around design & work in the new forest garden at Carraig Dúlra organic farm.

Both days are open to beginners, however those with some Permaculture experience will also benefit from the practical exercises and demonstrations. You can attend one or both days.

This event takes place at Carraig Dúlra organic farm in Glenealy, Co Wicklow. Participants are welcome to camp at the farm during the course. The cost for the event is €60 each day (coffee/tea/camping included), and pre-booking is required.

More information and booking: Carraig Dúlra · Glenealy, Co Wicklow info@dulra.org · www.dulra.org/practical-permaculture · 0404 69570

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.

Working with nature to grow edible Crops

by Martin Crawford

Green Books Hardback 384 pp

Forward by Rob Hopkins

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

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

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

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

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

The book is clearly laid out into three sections:

Part 1 How Forest gardens Work

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

There follows a survey of forest garden features and products;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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