Inexpensive Progress

My Dad has just mentioned this on his seventieth birthday-brilliant stuff by John Betjeman:

Inexpensive Progress

Encase your legs in nylons,
Bestride your hills with pylons
O age without a soul;
Away with gentle willows
And all the elmy billows
That through your valleys roll.

Let’s say goodbye to hedges
And roads with grassy edges
And winding country lanes;
Let all things travel faster
Where motor car is master
Till only Speed remains.

Destroy the ancient inn-signs
But strew the roads with tin signs
‘Keep Left,’ ‘M4,’ ‘Keep Out!’
Command, instruction, warning,
Repetitive adorning
The rockeried roundabout;

For every raw obscenity
Must have its small ‘amenity,’
Its patch of shaven green,
And hoardings look a wonder
In banks of floribunda
With floodlights in between.

Leave no old village standing
Which could provide a landing
For aeroplanes to roar,
But spare such cheap defacements
As huts with shattered casements
Unlived-in since the war.

Let no provincial High Street
Which might be your or my street
Look as it used to do,
But let the chain stores place here
Their miles of black glass facia
And traffic thunder through.

And if there is some scenery,
Some unpretentious greenery,
Surviving anywhere,
It does not need protecting
For soon we’ll be erecting
A Power Station there.

When all our roads are lighted
By concrete monsters sited
Like gallows overhead,
Bathed in the yellow vomit
Each monster belches from it,
We’ll know that we are dead.

From “High and Low” (1966) & “Collected Poems”

© The Estate of John Betjeman

What’s in a “country”?

As Monti and Papademos set to making their nations’ balance sheets, well, balance -its got me thinking, why do we still have countries?

In our current, globalised set-up, countries are hardly the geographic “containers” for one people, one culture, one religion. As reported by The Economist this week, there are more Chinese living outside of China than French in France; 22 million Indians scattered across every continent (much to my benefit…); and a 40% increase in first generation immigrants since 1990. We are a-MIXING! Much of this movement is an easy rather than difficult choice, arising from better education and jobs abroad, not atrocities at home. And the internet has eased the way, connecting loved ones daily through skype and social media, rendering the single Christmas phone call a 9 minute chat from the past. So geographic nations aren’t the boundaries for “peoples”.

Moreover, we’re now much less likely to do the traditional warring and land grabs, for which “countries” were previously the foremost protagonists. Dragging myself through Machiavelli’s “The Prince”, although the principles of political manoeuvring still seem relevant today, the applications of power do not. Fortresses and sieges are very last season. Since the world wars, coalitions of super-powers mean that wars are rarely fought one-country-on-one. Nations have always looked to one another for partners in crime – but now so more than ever. And considering this, what is the point of our unitary division? Moreover, Greece, accordingl to Stefano Manos (an ex-finance Minister) has property worth £200 billion ready to dispose. This would account for more than 50% of its debt. Yet the notion of Greece selling this to Germany is laughable. Isn’t it?

Wular lake - over-exploited water resources in Asia

Perhaps more importantly than land and war – is trade and the environment. The interlinked nature of our world has been laid bare by our dependence on resources, both monetary and natural. We’ve all been waiting with baited breath over Italy as everyone knows that the repercussions could be worse than an end to parma ham and balsamic vinegar. Even through the trade links between Europe and the US aren’t that great (the US only sends 13% of its exports to the euro zone), America is still fearing a crisis that could top Lehman Brothers.  China, whom everyone considered immune, is suffering a lending shortage and the Euro zone has resorted to technocracies ruling with fear. One crisis affects us all – globally. Likewise – the environment. What can I say – we’re in for a tough time! Natural resources don’t respect boundaries. Rivalries over rivers in Asia, land grabs in Africa and energy in the West are daily reminders that we operate across borders.

Having said all this – it seems important that we act on a scale which returns both the benefits and problems of any action to the primary actor; only then does the real cost of any process become apparent and accountable. But this scale is not necessarily as large as a country – in fact, in today’s world – its not bound by geography, but by accountability. And that is the crux of the problem – country’s are no longer accountable.

Monti may be mopping up after Berlusconi, but Italy’s not going to be only ones who suffer. Likewise, the West has been belching carbon for decades, but its those living on Pacific Islands, suffering from African drought and dying in India’s intensifying heat waves who are going to pay the price.

Are countries accountable anymore – and is it worth having them?

Occupy London – 23rd Nov 2011

This gallery contains 6 photos.

As I wandered across to my wedding venue once upon a winter’s morn …

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Treasuring trash and keeping it local

Dinner? (c) myzerowaste.com

From rags to riches, trash to cash and rubbish to resource – the dream of closed loop recycling is both worthy and lucrative. Just this week, statistics revealed that the average British shopper bins almost 10% of their weekly food shop; not chucking fridge leftovers alone would save Brits £12bn a year.

But while recycling is a no-brainer, we need to be careful that loops of material reuse are small and local, returning both the advantages (and disadvantages) close to the source of the resource.

To do this, we need to be crafty; both like a fox and the Women’s Institute. I recently visited “Materials for Living”, an exhibition organised by two parliamentary groups, focusing on design and sustainable resources. The exhibition included a showcase of how by-products of today’s food system can be used to produce beautiful, durable, USEFUL materials.

A'Peel (c) Associate Parliamentary Design & Innovation Group

For example, orange peel is the rubbish of choice for Alkesh Parmar, who has utilised this by-product of juice extraction. The result of his ingenuity and hard work is a strong flexible material (A’Peel) which has the feel of bakelite, but which is completely biodegradable AND makes use of the millions of tonnes of Brazilian orange peel which would otherwise go to landfill.

It doesn't even smell. (c) Erik de Laurens

Erik de Laurens has produced a material made entirely from treated fish scales, again, an otherwise unwanted (and massively produced) by-product of the fishing industry. And pineapple leaves from the Philippines have been used by Carmen Hijosato make an alternative to leather.

Importantly, with all these projects – they return the benefits of reuse to the community from which the original resource came. On speaking to Carmen Hijosa, she was eager to emphasise that it is the pineapple growing farmers who have clubbed together to form a cooperative for processing and sell “Ananas Anam”, and it is they who profit from doing so.

Carmen Hijosa and her pineapple. (c) APDIG

But while positive project such as those above are offering solutions – there are many other examples where material loops, in our globalised world, are extended and sloppy. The result is that the impacts (both good and bad) of those who produce waste are divorced from those who recycle it.

The export of e-waste to developing countries

Stephen Metcalfe MP recently wrote about the horrors of electronic waste being dumped in developing countries for processing and reuse. Some argue that developing countries are keen to accept this source of materials, both as another source of income, as well as a way of joining the digital age at a cheaper price. But images of emaciated children picking their way through town-sized garbage tips reveal these countries’ lack of infrastructure to deal with the reality. For example, Nigeria, which despite having a population of 155 million people does not have one licensed landfill. The untold effects of heavy metal toxins on these people’s health and environment is reason enough to stop this digital dumping from the rich, onto the poor far, far away.

Next meal for the chickens? (c) CAFO, Foundation for Deep Ecology

Moreover, there was a recent House of Lords debate about the reintroduction of feeding animal by-products to livestock. Following the British BSE crisis in the late 90s, there have been very strict regulations on feeding animal by-products to other animals. But the EC is now looking to review these laws, and as such, so is the UK parliament. While it looks unlikely that cattle (as non-ruminants) will be fed offal anytime soon, pigs and chickens can certainly look forward to it on the menu. In theory, this is a good, environmentally-efficient practice (waste not want not what?). But the reality is that with today’s modern industrial farming methods and a globalised food system, feeding one dead animal (provenance unknown) to another is a super-efficient way to spread disease. After all, MRSA has been found in intensively reared pig farms, and let’s not forget why this practice was banned after the first BSE crisis. The recipients of the recycled goods (you and me picking up a pack of chicken breasts in Sainsbury’s) will be a very distant notion for the producers of the animal by-products from god-knows-where.

So the moral of the story? Reduce – yes, good. Reuse – go on then. Recycle – oh lordy, yes purhleease. But can we do it in our own back yard?

We need to be careful that the boons of recycling are not hijacked by economies of scale, as our food and banking systems have been. We need to connect benefits and costs. We need to keep things local. We need to tighten the noose on our resources.

Occupy Wall Street – harsh but fair?

Posh kids on iphones, no concerted message, and a public dressing down by Jon Snow – Occupy Wall Street: the protest we love to hate. But is there something in it?

After managing to read the whole of Time AND New Statesman on the train this weekend, I’m as educated as I’m ever going to be, and my conclusion is – there may well be. The protestors’ rally against a tide of rising inequality rings true, even if the groups’ modus operandi are bottom-clenchingly cringy.

Occupy Wall Street protestor David Graeber explains: “We are the 99%”. Graeber’s referring to the 99% of Americans whose average yearly income is $54,792, compared to the other 1%’s average yearly income of $1,530,773. Now while $54,792 may not seem that bad (yes please) – the point is that the money (and power) to control the 99% of peoples’ lives is held by the top 1%. The vested interests of the few are supposedly trumping the disparate wants of the majority. A view that is harder to disagree with when we learn that between 1979 and 2007, the share of total income for the top 1% increased from 10% to 20%, at the expense of a falling share of the income for the other 99% of the population.

The idea that an elite hold the reigns of our lives is supported by a recent analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations (TNCs), which shows that a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, hold disproportionate power over the global economy. To be precise, the study has found that there was a core of 1,318 companies with interlocking relationships, which had a tie to at least two other companies (on average, to twenty). Between them, this core represents 20% of global operating revenues, as well as control (through ownership)) of the majority of the world’s large blue chip and manufacturing firms. Even more powerful was the “super-entity” of the top 147 interconnected firms which controlled 40% of the total wealth of the network.

But it’s not just the wealth and relationships of TNCs which highlight this disparity. China’s increasingly restless populace is rocking the boat too. Widening income gaps are part of the reason for the dramatic increase of “mass incidents” of protest in scary waryChina, rising from 74,000 in 2004 to 180,000 in 2010. Australia, Canada, Irelandand the UK have also seen a rise in income inequality – in the UK, the gap famously widening more under Tony Blair than under Thatcher. And with the global population due to hit the 7 billion mark any day soon, the effects of income inequality are going to become more exaggerated. For example, experts (from the UN Population Reference Bureau) believe that the economic crisis pushed an additional 64 million people into extreme poverty. With 8 billion looming (by 2025), that’s an awful lot of inequality.

On the other hand, while OWS has a point (i.e. we need to tackle rising inequality) it needs to be more intelligent about the way it proposes change. It seems that their primal reaction is to lynch the people “at the top” – those evil, nasty bastards who are making all the money.  Hence the occupation of Wall Street. And this is a reaction which has been given credence for a while now. After the banking crisis, much public anger was directed towards the individuals packing up their cardboard boxes, walking out of the great glass towers; personal anger which is still holding strong years after the financial crisis as shown by Joris Luyendijk’s anthropological study of bankers. Companies at the top are considered greedy giants (Nestle), and the people who consume their goods soulless mignons. Louise Mensch’s views on theOccupy Wall Street protestors who drank Starbucks Coffee (as voiced on HIGNFY) exemplified this well.

But isn’t this all a bit too easy; a bit too George Bush – vilifying the top, private businesses and interests, and martyring the middle classes with their student loans? I feel it may be. And it seems that the problem is with the system, rather than those particular firms, banks, lobbyists and politicians at the top.

Common sense alone will tell you that of COURSE, all businesses, both large and small are going to operate in a way which maximizes every chance of success. If they didn’t they’d fail. Following any principle other than their own continuation would be madness/the end for most private firms, and we’re all happy to publicly lament the closure of a factory and the removal of jobs.  Even not-for-profit organizations are often driven by the need for a “surplus” and we shouldn’t kid ourselves that the third sector provides a viable alternative to the capitalist system. There are some rare and beautiful exceptions such as the clothing company Patagonia, who has asked their customers to stop buying their products in an effort to control their environmental impact. But for the most part, we’re all just trying to make ends meet.

And in the current system, “making ends meet” means growth, which means making a profit. And profits can only be achieved when a margin is generated – something from nothing, often achieved through economies of scale. Economies of scale require size, and size + profits=power.

So what can we expect? Occupy Wall Street is right – 99% should not be living under the jurisdiction of 1%. On the other hand, what practical, applicable solutions are there which we can invoke to change the way our world works? The system needs to be changed fundamentally – so if the protesters (and the rest of us) are serious about putting things right, I think we need to put our collective thinking caps on, rather than wailing around the place feeling sorry for ourselves.

Harsh but fair?

Wild and weighty beasts on the Norfolk coast

Yesterday, a good friend took me for a stroll along the beach in her part of the world, with Flash (ahhhahhh – saviour of the universe).
And what did we find? Wild and lumbering seals sneaking a sunbathe on a rather chilly shore.

(sorry about the quality- only had the iPhone)

Winston Churchill Wisdom

“It is as well to remember that the stomach governs the world”