Passionate reading

I’ve been reading George Monbiot’s The Age of Consent, which (and I’m only on Chapter 3) calls for the setting up of a world parliament. It’s a funny thing as it reminded me, reading through it last night, of when dad used to tell us stories when we were kids. These stories seemed ahead of their time – one I remember well was based on the concept of a world parliament. So it’s funny, how this idea has lain dormant in my mind for all these years, only to come out again when reading The Age of Consent.

I consider myself generally optimistic about humankind, that generally people want peace, want justice and have a sense of fairness that goes beyond the narrow boundaries of what’s “best for me”. Yet, I have to say that his book disturbed me by forcing me to confront beliefs about “other people” that I didn’t know I had.

NSPCC Campaigning Newsletter

Now that I'm a parent, campaigns aimed at protecting children take on an altogether different perspective, so I've followed a few campaigns organised by the NSPCC. Just got an email with their campaigns update:

http://www.nspcc.org.uk/getinvolved/campaign/aboutcampaigning/facingforwardnewsletter/Facing_forward_front_wda59564.html

Could Climate Change be a great opportunity for the Developing World?

On the face of it, climate change looks like it will disproportionately affect the developing world more than the rich northern countries. Predictions are that vast areas of Bangladesh will be subjected to even more severe, or even permanent, flooding. More of Africa will become desert, and, in one of the predictions I was most surprised by, the Amazon basin will become savannah. Each of these, set alongside hotter summers in southern Europe, and milder, drier winters in England, seem to suggest that the developing world will suffer more than we will, through increased poverty, competition for water and farmland, and local environmental issues.

So it’s an odd premise that climate change could be looked at as an opportunity. Yet, climate change, “the defining issue of our age” as various pundits have called it, could be the first event that will unequivocally affect every single person on the planet. Hotter summers, wetter winters and the reduction in food-growing capability around the world, as well as rising sea levels, will affect us all, rich or poor, north or south. Wherever we are, if the climate change predictions come true, we will have to adapt and this will affect our economies, our politics, our lives in every way. If everyone is affected, then everyone has a stake in solving the problem.

Perhaps I’m being overly optimistic, in the face of all historical evidence, but this could be our opportunity to come together and devise not just a solution to climate change, but to all the other issues that are intrinsically linked – the issues of local environmental degradation, crushing poverty, unfair trade rules & deregulation. In the same way that climate change will affect us all, regardless of national boundaries or income bracket, so the solutions will benefit us all. We can, in essence, use climate change to build that better world.

Buying the Rainforest

Seems there is an Early Day Motion 893 to look at this proposal from the president of Guyana to set aside 80% of his country's rainforest as a carbon sink. Controversial, intruiging, but definitely a step in the right direction. Until the money-value of living rainforest is greater than the value of its logs, gold seams etc, we will continue to cut them down.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7603695.stm

An interesting comment on the BBC

There was an interesting article on the BBC the other day about reform of the various environmental agencies:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7592899.stm

Even more interesting was one of the comments posted by a reader, who stated:

The world is full of "do-gooders" who have a vision of a "perfect sustainable unchanging fair-to-all world". All they need is everybody else's money to do it. "No thanks!"

Interesting, is that presumably he preferred a vision of a world that was inherently unfair & unsustainable?

Pale Blue Dot

This sent to me from one of the guys at work with a picture of a bunch of stars and a pale blue spot:

The picture was taken by Voyager 1 in 1990, at his suggestion engineers turned the craft around for one last look at Earth when it was 4 billion miles away. At the moment it is about 10 billion miles away, before you read the extract think about that - 10 billion miles, coupled with the extract below it really made me think!

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbour life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

Turns out it's on Wikipedia (what isn't?) from Carl Sagan, the astronomer and author. I like this as it pretty much summed up the reasons why I called this blog SpaceOasis. If the universe really is a desert, then this pale blue dot is a tiny oasis in that vastness.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot

The master at work

I mentioned George Monbiot's blog page in a previous post - got my first mail today, and was hooked. Here's a guy who writes as brilliantly in a short article as he does in his books. I was really bowled over, and (as per last week's post on his archive) now really interested in older varieties of fruit trees! You'll have to take a look to get what I'm talking about:

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/09/02/strange-fruit/

I'd mentioned the list at the back of Heat for organisations committed to combatting climate change:
www.foe.co.uk
www.greenpeace.org.uk
www.wwf.org.uk

were the obvious choices, but also liked:
www.transport2000.org.uk

Complete Muppet

Being a complete muppet, I still haven't sorted out making a will. It's the single most important thing on my list of things to do, but keeps getting put off. So a poster in the Help the Aged shop prompted me to go to (and sign up with) willaid.org. For a suggested donation this November, a qualified solicitor will draw up your will and the money will go to one of a number of charities you can choose from a list of participating charities. Since 1988, the scheme has raised over £7m for good causes.

Looks like the government's coming in for a pounding today over its refusal to provide some sort of one-off payment to cover the rise in fuel costs for the most needy people - Hilary Benn, the Environment Secretary argued for improvements in energy saving measures such as insulation etc rather than a one-off payment or a windfall tax on energy companies. But surely this is just avoiding the root cause of the issue - namely that we cannot guarantee energy security in the current climate (economic, political &, hey, why not climate change too), that a deregulated energy market cannot prevent speculation, and that energy companies may not always be working in the public interest, despite what their PR says. Until we tackle those things, energy is always going to be a social issue.

On a more cheery note, Planet Earth interviewed a chap called Johan Eliasch, a businessman who "put his money where his mouth is" and bought a huge chunk of rainforest from a logging company to prevent its destruction. Lo and behold, I wikipedia it and come across http://www.coolearth.org/. What a great idea - and it provides jobs for local people at the same time. And even James Lovelock approves!

Debt Week 2008

Again, from the Jubilee Debt Campaign's email - I did this one last night (though I've got a funny feeling I've mailed him before!)

Pick up the pace in Debt Week 2008
From 12-19 October 2008 it will be the second Global Week of Action Against Debt and the International Financial Institutions. In the UK we’re using the opportunity to keep up the pressure on the UK government to Pick Up the Pace on debt cancellation.
With lots of grand talk expected at upcoming summits about tackling poverty, we need to make the case that more debt cancellation is urgently needed if countries are going to be able to emerge from the poverty trap. TAKE ACTION: Email Douglas Alexander, International Development Minister, and ask him to drop much more debt.

50 crucial days

From the Jubilee Debt Campaign:

Today is the first of 50 Global Days of Action Against Poverty and Inequality, taking place in more than 100 countries around the world. After several years of drifting and inaction, the rich world has a series of opportunities in the coming months to take serious action to tackle global poverty - and we have to make sure they take them.

Make aid work and drop the debt
Rich country governments are gathering in Accra, Ghana, from tomorrow for a summit to discuss the effectiveness of aid. Jubilee Debt Campaign supports the global aid campaign’s efforts to ensure that new, concrete targets and indicators come out of this summit for rich countries to deliver on their aid promises. But we have also joined our voices with other movements and civil society organisations to warn that unless unpayable poor country debts are cancelled, it will be very difficult for aid to work effectively.
Click here to read more.

Ethical Superstore

When I used to travel to York quite a bit with work, there was a supermarket where I'd buy lunch on the way to the office; can't remember the name of it, but everything in it was "ethical" in various ways. They used to do amazing Tamil Curry pasties! Sadly, the store closed down, but when I saw ethicalsuperstore.com advertised, I was pretty impressed. They don't sell Tamil Curry pasties, but they do sell a whole range of stuff - I particularly liked their eco-toaster! Our toaster's still going strong, but as soon as it packs up, you know where I'll be heading. They also sell in bulk - I'm waiting for them to start selling huge boxes of ecover dishwasher tablets (they sell a lot of ecover in bulk, but not those!) and then I'll be converted.

Heat

No! Not Heat, that crappy magazine about celebrities (sorry, I just have a thing about celebrity mags and probably celebrities in general!), but the book by George Monbiot. Finished it on the train going up north this week - I think he succeeded in his mission - I was stirred, impressed and deeply worried all at once by his book. Monbiot argues that targets set by governments are not really workable in that they're based on targets that won't achieve what they're set out to achieve. Add to that, the fact that despite what people say, they (we?) don't actually want our governments & representatives to push too hard on these aggressive climate targets.

Despite this, his views seem both incredibly reasonable, and also would bring about the kind of world (at least in Britain) that must be a step forward for the one we have now. His chapters on integrated transport policy and energy policy actually make you excited to think what could be possible if we just put our minds to it.

Heat? Get a copy and see what you think.

Getting in the way

I’m sitting here in the dark, in a hotel room (travelling for work), having just watched the last episode of Planet Earth on my work laptop. My brain is buzzing a bit with all of the things I’ve been reading, watching and thinking over the last few days and weeks. I’m sitting in the dark, partly because the video is brighter with all the lights off, but also because here in the room there must be about eight lights that come on automatically when I walk in the room and put my electronic key card in the slot just inside the front door. Add to that the fact that the TV is always “on”, on standby mode, 24 hours a day and you’ve already got a pretty big footprint. Luckily, there is a (slightly platiscated) feedback card so I’m going to suggest they do something about that.

Planet Earth has been a pretty amazing series – I bought it with my Christmas money (!) and it’s taken me just over eight months to watch it all. It’s been exhilarating, yes, really, and also depressing. Sad that so much wildlife and wilderness is being destroyed all over the world, and it’s still difficult to see what we can do about it. I think one of the difficulties is that individuals are well-meaning but distracted by a lot of the day to day things we have to do – jobs, families, etc. (Big) businesses on the other hand, have people whose jobs it is to undertake activities that, sometimes by definition, conflict with what some of us consider important (the environment, justice, fairness etc). One of the chaps being interviewed in this last episode was a something-of sustainable agriculture for a large drug & hygiene products company. He suggested that part of his remit was to promote a balance between sustainability & production (in this case, of palm oil). I just don’t buy it. If you work for a business, you’re in the game to make money. The other things are only a by-product. If doing things sustainably is compatible with making money, that’s great; but if it’s not, then that’s the end of it, they will only ever do what’s going to make money, create profit & satisfy shareholders.

So, certainly the last few weeks has seen one step in the right direction for me – I’ve finally ditched my “evil” old bank and transferred all my dealings to the UK’s foremost ethical bank, the Cooperative Bank. They have a strong ethical policy and I can sleep soundly (when small daughters permit!) knowing that my money isn’t going into funding arms dealers and tin pot dictators around the world. My previous bank responded positively to accusations that they were supporting the remnants of Zimbabwe’s government, in defiance of the views of the rest of the world, and quickly shut off the money. But I wanted a bank that didn’t need to do that, that didn’t try to push the envelope of what they could get away with – I wanted one that had a moral and ethical stance built in. I’m only annoyed that I didn’t do it earlier. I’ve known for years and years that my bank was particularly “unethical” but never got round to switching. I think that’s one of the big things that prevents us doing the “right thing” – it’s not that we consciously choose wrong, it’s that other things get in the way.

Greyhounds

I’ve been reading Heat by George Monbiot – the book that defies you to read it and not to want to make a change. In fact, in the conclusion he tells the reader to return the book & ask for a refund if it doesn’t make you want to make a difference. Well, it did, though perhaps he was preaching to the converted. There were a number of areas where I was really impressed, notably about the conservation of energy in the home (some real areas for me to think about there) and also about the public transport system, which I’ve long been frustrated by, particularly with it being cheaper (and arguably more pleasant) to drive somewhere in the car, compared to public transport. However, public transport, always the preserve of the desperately poor (esp in the USA, where the Greyhound was an entertaining insight into the impoverished classes and the mentally unstable drifters of the west coast, but one I wouldn’t want to spend too much time indulging in) is really the way forward, so something I really want to push on. There was a (surprisingly small) section at the back of the book, of organisations committed to tackling climate change, so I’ll have to look further in to it. The one area where Monbiot claims to fail is air transport, and I have to say this is a difficult area, even for us, who take one short-haul flight per year, to see the relatives in Ireland. Having tried once by car & ferry, when Daughter Number 1 was very small, I’m in no hurry to do it again. The ferry part was wonderful – the cabin was comfortable and really quite elegant, but the car journey, with a less-than-one year old who screamed from leaving the house at six o’clock in the evening, and only stopped when we rolled down the ramp into the ferry some six hours later, just in time to unload her from the car into the cabin – was a nightmare. I suspect the only way to do it, especially now with two littlies, would be to either hire a bigger car (or buy one if our current car dies a death soon!) or go by the dreaded public transport. With the amount of stuff we have to cart around for two weeks with the rellies is anything to go by, it’ll be a while before I’m brave enough to do that.