Monbiot, science and stuff...

I am very much enjoying George Monbiot self-puffing in the Guardian for his new book Feral… Who knows, if I have the means I may even buy the book. The latest piece has two points of interest.

The first is megafauna. It’s astonishing to think that the Americas once had mammoths and giant bison with seven foot horns, sabre tooth salmon and a bird with a 26 foot wingspan. This is exciting stuff. The world was once very different and presumably will be in the future. It’s a step away from Another World is Possible.

There are slight dangers in measuring the quality of nature by the quality and variety of megafauna. Humanity is the planet’s dominant species if you consider that it now quite possibly harnesses more energy than all natural processes put together. That said, by most other measures, biomass, variety of species, variety of habitats colonised etc, bacteria are winning the race for life, they dominant domain of life on Earth. 

Monbiot’s point about “rewilding” wildlife reserves and other expanses of nature is apt. Wildlife reserves are often not teaming with life. They are places that are kept as they have been discovered (or perhaps we should say acknowledged), which is frequently in a depleted state. If rewilding is to be practical and progressive it should be taken into the city. The challenge is to reintegrate civilisation and everyday life into the rhythms of nature, have it accord rather than clash with the flows of energy (the water cycle, the carbon cycle etc), and do all this without attacking people’s standards of living.

More thoughts for the brain

Asteroids and comets are almost the functional equivalent of nuclear war today. They are a function of alienation in Marxism and the uncanny is Psychoanalysis. Despite the persistence (within the human context) of capitalist civilisation we know in our marrow that it is unsustainable. 

Despite various adventures, we always seem to be back where we began, like we’re in an ongoing sitcom. Ecocide and revolution are difficult to imagine. Only the prospect of existential cosmic calamity it seems can erase that. We rightly fear such an event, yet we do not sublimate or banish it from our minds, as often happens with climate change. The only difference between this and nuclear war is you can check the news every now and then - phew another asteroid will miss us.

A staffed mission to an asteroid is a good idea. We need to start working out how to defend civilisation from the threat of cosmic debris.

Another green world - some ideas

There will of course be lots more refined ideas out there, but these are some suggestions that can act as both demands and an means to get people active:

Housing:
There should be an urgent house building programme, linked firstly to available brownfield sites and secondly to a plan for redistributing work around the country. All building materials to be locally sourced where possible. Priority should be given to key workers, then to workers in nearby industries, thus reducing the need and length of communing, reducing emissions and costs. New houses to be owned by an elected local government commissioner and administered by Tennants and Residents associations. Rent control to be administered

All houses, new and old, are to be properly insulated and supplied with solar panels where appropriate. Where possible houses to be redesigned to make them energy efficient more generally.

Controlled flooding should be carried out in vulnerable areas. The new land should be used either for recreation or as a wildlife reserve.

Transport:

The centre of all towns and cities with populations over 100,000 (or whatever appropriate figure) are to be pedestrianised, with vehicle access given only to residents and business access. This will reduce both emissions and lower accident numbers. This measure (combined with the reduction in commuting) will lower particulate levels, leading to a decrease in asthma, bronchitis and other lung diseases.

Food:

Brownfield sites not converted into new housing or parkland should be turned into city farms, all city farms should be twinned with local primary and secondary schools. All local shops and supermarkets should be sourced primarily by local  farms, with incentives given to farmers to use organic rather than artificial inputs. The cumulative effect would be to reduce both emissions and costs.

Another green world...

Using the non-pejorative sense, a utopian idea is an end without a means. One of the benefits of utopian, or perhaps thinking beyond immediate goals, is it can inform and refresh political activity. One of the sites I occasionally browse is the Long Now Foundation. As you can see it is quite corporate, and it’s very obvious the location within current social structure makes it utopian. Yet it's projects, from wildlife recording to language preservation to the general emphasis on planning and legacy are exactly the kind of things a communal society would be doing in earnest.

Here is a blog post about flood control, not the sexiest subject perhaps but given the fact of global climate change and how much of human settlement is based in low-lying areas it’s an important topic. The great investment the Dutch government made in flood control paid itself in a few decades. In order to allow residents to continue living in parts of the country the proposal is to convert farmland into flood land, another long-term project. The lives and livelihoods of affected farmers must be taken into consideration (I don’t know if they have been) but, apparently the cost-benefit ratio is worth it in terms of housing stock but I would guess also biodiversity.

I don’t like the term eco-socialism. It seems to me to be apologetic. The Green movement, judged on its own terms is not such a fantastic success, no more than any other movement. Socialists should incorporate environmental concerns without incorporating utopianism. The biggest difficulty for Green politics is agency. There are a number of ways in which environmental reform can be realised. Green politics can pull in several directions. Lest we forget, there is such a thing as eco-fascism though it’s usually an attack-term – Karl Max Schwarz anyone?).

Linking environmental concerns to working class agency of course starts with issues around the quality and cost of living, the first will be driven down and the second up as the legacy of climate change accumulates. Flood defence is one issue. Electricity generation is another. Why, in a country like Britain, with long hours of sunlight, consistent wind (Britainhas 40% of Europe’s wind energy but only generates 10% of wind-powered electricity) and three tidal rivers, do we not have cheap, clean and plentiful energy? Environmental concerns permeate issues such as transport, housing and food. It is still difficult to found a meaningful environmentalist practice though. Global climate change is an even bigger challenge than capitalist austerity. But solutions will need to come.

Climate and capitalism

Socialism will most likely be an emergency regime, the mass application of democracy to solve the huge environmental crisis left over from capitalism.

Environmental catastrophe seems to be eerily coupled with economic depression. Famously the drought of the 1930s drove millions of people from the American heartland into the coastal cities, adding to the already swollen pool of labour.

The dust bowl wasn’t just caused by lack of rain. Intensive farming without crop rotation leading to soil depletion was a contributory factor, deep ploughing, removing deep rooted grasses that helped reduce wind erosion. Such farming was determined by the capitalist prerogative, competitive accumulation.

But more than this, disaster is not just man-made but it seems to strike at exactly the worst moment.

The US is crucial to global food markets as the world's largest exporter of corn, soy beans and wheat, so the impact of the drought will be felt across the globe.

Corn prices have already shot up 40% since June to hit all-time highs, soy bean prices have jumped 30% to record levels, and wheat has surged 50%.

It is not just the US. Unseasonal weather, thought to be caused by climate change, is affecting farmers across the world.

This is quite possibly to do with economic margins and effective political will. A crisis can be averted by effective mobilisation of people and resources. Can the current network of states respond effectively to a food crisis, or will the different ruling classes prove too short-sighted, decadent and corrupt to measure up? We have every reason to be worried:

Flash flooding in Russia could also affect the wheat harvest. Traders are particularly concerned about the latter as Russia might limit exports if it is worried about wheat supplies at home, causing further price spikes.

Shortages have been compounded by huge orders for corn and soy beans to make biofuels, in order to meet quotas in the US and Europe.

We’re often constrained to imagine wars over water, and they may well happen. Imagine wars over food and see a future techno-feudalism.

An interesting solution to reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide: using iron (via the algae that is attracted to it in nature) to lock carbon at the bottom of the ocean. Of course it’s not yet as simple as dumping iron in the sea. We must be careful of unintended consequences. If we dump the profit a planet-wide response becomes possible.

Article of interest...

Something of interest: a short article about extreme energy. A summary: despite the ongoing recession, the price of oil is creeping back up, almost to pre-recession records. This begs the question, have we reached peak oil production? Is humanity currently extracting as much in the way of hydrocarbons as its ever going to extract. If we are not there we will shortly get there.

The input to output ratio of energy extraction is rising. It takes more energy put in to get less energy out (similar to the rise of constant to variable capital). This is because the oil fields easiest to tap have been run down. Oil companies are now looking at more remote, more inaccessible sources. The Deepwater Horizon disaster was especially catastrophic because of the difficulty in capping the well. If we continue to have a commodity economy based on fossil fuels our society will have to account for more disasters like these.

But, more significantly, if we continue to have a commodity economy based on fossil fuels, once peak oil production is passed, the price of oil will go up and will not stop. One of the key factors which broke the last boom, sending us into the current recession, was the price of oil. Without change, we face the prospect of permanent economic turmoil.