Are you OK?

Was (Not Was) asked the question. As a side note, can I explain the name? The Was brothers at the heart of the group always had to explain how to say their name, much like I do. It’s pronounced “wahz”. Not “was”.

Seems like they were on a hiding to nothing.

Anyway, the question was one of concern. And people do get concerned. People care about other people. People care a lot more about some people than others, but there is an overwhelming amount of consideration going on.

How does that scale up in society? In a static society, it means that everyone knows about everyone else’s problems and the majority looks after the minority. In nomadic cultures, everyone is aware of how delicate life’s balance is and everyone looks out for everyone.

Maybe that’s a bit over-simplistic, or even rosier-then-reality, but I do think there’s more than an element of truth in it. And I also think there’s more than element of truth in the assertion that large-scale societies don’t have the same tendency to care for the vulnerable.

Like climate change, nuclear waste disposal, child labour and poverty, there is a tendency to see caring as something for others to deal with—somebody else’s problem.

If a centrally organised society will not support those in need, can a devolved one do any better? Obviously, I think it can. By taking responsibility for anyone that strays into your community, it ceases to be anyone else’s problem.

There are a couple of real-world examples that strenuously test my assertion. First, my experience of a successful “intentional community”—what would be colloquially termed a commune. Second, the way the most difficult-to-deal-with homeless people in my own neighbourhood.

One of the longest-lasting intentional communities in the United States, if not the world, is in rural Virginia and I had the privilege of staying for a night and meeting many of the members. One of the reasons it might have been so successful is a refusal to deal with members with serious mental health issues: minor problems and idiosyncrasies were almost de rigueur but the members would ask anyone that was, in their opinion, too disruptive to leave.

If the world were composed of intentional communities, where would that leave its most vulnerable? I would like to think that, like many things that require concerted effort, that resources would be pooled to help those that need specialist care, while retaining a sense of responsibility for each individual. That, I have to admit, is still a sizeable issue.

The other instance worth mentioning are the homeless, here in Shepherd’s Bush. We have a hostel (or two) in the area, in which very few local people have any involvement (me included). I like to think that most people feel that their presence is no major inconvenience. At worst, it is depressing to see people in bad shape, begging, living from one can of beer to the next, or sometimes exhibiting the behaviour typical of smack addicts. At least, we can think, they have somewhere to sleep and get some hot food.

But even these hostels cannot accommodate anyone and everyone. Like the intentional community, without extra help, some people are just too disruptive. Excluded from shelter, their situation only gets worse and their attitude more belligerent.

One particular individual, Paul, was a real nuisance to everyone. Before they started locking the gate, he was sleeping in the parking area behind my flat, usually with his girlfriend, which was no big problem in itself, except they would scream at each other at all times of the night, fight, and break anything that came to hand. During the day, they would demand money on the street, still fighting each other, and turn on random passers-by.

The result for the community was edginess and extreme discomfort. The police were often called and eventually they used the only tool available to them—an anti-social behaviour order (ASBO) that excluded Paul from the area altogether. I’ve been told that ha has accommodation elsewhere, but essentially they made it clear that this was someone else’s problem.

Again, how would a world of intentional communities have dealt with Paul? And again, I can only suggest that individuals as difficult as him would have to be supported with the pooled resources of several communities, whether that meant improving the resources of the local hostel (in current terms) or having a specialist institution shared between, say, all West London.

Heroes Season Two

Having wittered on about the difference between fictional heroes and those worth giving some credit as humanity’s great achievers (might I also mention that I want to distance myself from childhood idolatry—something I don’t believe I ever really suffered from), I only had time to credit Per Gahrton as my first “hero”. This time, I won’t hang around.

Obviously, as someone calling himself a Gandhist, the Mahatma is a hero of mine. I’m not as widely read as I would like, but I deeply admire what I’ve discovered. I don’t believe in perfection, by which I don’t want to offend those who believe Gandhi achieved spiritual perfection, but I do want to acknowledge that there might be a grain of truth in accusations about his ego or sexuality. But his spiritual quest is not what makes him a hero of mine anyway.

The two things Gandhi did that I most admire are: that he professed a unity of faith with the conviction of Akbar, in which he saw common spiritual, but also highly practical, bases for all religions; and that he put his beliefs into practice with complete conviction. I think of what he did and said whenever I am trying to resolve issues of principal.

From the same country, but still very much alive and influencing people is Vandana Shiva. If anyone is the inheritor of Gandhi’s legacy, she is. She and I are also physicists first, but I have yet to see any influence on her ecological writing.

Shiva would be my hero for her chapters in Ecofeminism, which she co-wrote with Maria Mies, but she is also a leading light in the anti-globalisation movement (defending poor farmers against the grasping food multinationals). There are times when it is difficult to reconcile ideas in one area (such as feminism) with those in another (such as ecology), and it’s invaluable to have someone as lucid and sane as Shiva to guide you through.

At another point in my life, when I had joined the Green Party, read the manifesto, and a handful of books and pamphlets, I needed to make sense of how it all fitted together. If ever there was book to satisfy a need for a deeper understanding of green politics, it is Green Political Thought by Andrew Dobson.

I’ve met Andy Dobson (I’ve been in the presence of Vandana Shiva, but couldn’t find the courage or words) and he’s incredibly easy-going and approachable. Should I be surprised? After all, he’s provided an intellectual yet easily understood text contextualising almost all of ecopolitics.

My guess is that everyone in green politics has been inspired by the books or speeches of certain individuals: Henry Thoreau, John Muir, Petra Kelly, Jonathon Porritt, Ralph Nader, Al Gore, and even David Icke. These are many people’s heroes and deserve credit for the inspiration they have provided.

And I have one more to add, who I can’t quite call a hero because of a racist and sexist edge to his writing. Yet his writing is still inspirational: the original monkey-wrencher, Edward Abbey. Go read The Monkey Wrench Gang and consider blowing up a dam.

The flaws in the footprint

I have plenty more heroes to talk about, but first I’d like to address some questions I’ve been posed recently. First, how does what I’m proposing affect or apply to vulnerable places like the Arctic? Second, what makes carbon footprinting in any way right?

OK, I’ve paraphrased a little, but these are the thoughts I’ve been led to. And I think the two are the specific and general aspects of the same thing.

What carbon footprinting (auditing, backpacking, whatever) does is estimate the energy involved in any activity or product. Relativity doesn’t really apply here, but mass of one sort or another does have an equivalent energy, basically what it takes to make or replace something. For example, you can imagine the steps involved in making a wooden rafter (growing, felling, hauling, milling, treatment, etc.) and dealing with the waste.

This makes local, minimalist, low-impact operations more desirable than heavily mechanised ones that involve long-distance shipping. But is that the whole story?

Generally, one gallon of petrol is considered equivalent to any other. But one might have been extracted easily and without displacing people or animals, then refined, shipped and used carefully. Another might have been taken from a corrupt regime, by using armed might to exclude native people, and using processes that pollute and kill.

That’s where the general cynicism comes from: the suspicion that there is no right answer that we can ever approximate. Which is possibly true, except that the primary environmental problem is climate change and it is our energy use that is directly related to human carbon dioxide production.

Having said that, the environment is no our only concern and climate change is not our only environmental problem. If we are going to address sustainability as a whole, we do need other measures: for social justice and the economy. In other words, carbon footprinting is not fundamentally flawed—it does what it is meant to do—but it doesn’t provide a measure for all ills.

At the same time, carbon footprinting is a general measure of environmental impact. Our combined footprints criss-cross over the entire globe, several times over (hence the cliché that we need something like seven planets to support our lifestyle). Parts of those prints are in places that cannot take the impact.

Even the carbon in the most dainty footprint shares its effect with all the others, and parts of the world like the Pacific islands and the Arctic suffer disproportionately from the combined effect.
But there are more specific environmental problems than rising sea levels and changing and increasingly chaotic weather patterns: pollution, disrupted migration routes, imported pests and disease for example. All these have to be taken into consideration, along with the other aspects of sustainability.

Again but: but what this consideration does tell us is that our global carbon footprint has to be reduced by more than enough to save Western civilisation. It has to be reduced by enough, and fast enough, to save the most vulnerable ecosystems.

Heroes, Season One

There is a basic premise of superhero fiction, that the actions of an extraordinary individual (or group) can make all the difference between disaster and the safety of millions, if not all of humankind. It’s a premise I’m willing to accept for the sake of entertainment (I’m probably one of the sizeable minority eagerly waiting for Hellboy II).

The premise is flawed in a couple of ways when compared to reality, however. First, humans come equipped and/or develop a spectrum of abilities, but it’s a limited spectrum, with Olympians and geniuses at the upper limits. We know what they can do and, extraordinary though they might be, we know they cannot fly, leap tall buildings or move objects with the power of their minds. Second, and partly as a consequence of the first flaw, individuals can only have a limited effect on the course of human history.

There have been some disproportionately effective individuals, but their effect is more often as a catalyst for social forces that would find form with or without them, later if not as soon they made it so. The ironic example is Karl Marx, who pushed the cause of proletarian empowerment with Herculean forcefulness. The Twentieth Century is often portrayed as entirely coloured by the ink from his pen. Yet Marx himself recognised that revolution is a consequence of the social environment more than a conscious decision of the people. In other words, socialist-communist thinking would have evolved and manifested itself if Marx had never been heard.

It is difficult to argue that the world would be the same today without the actions of Adolf Hitler, but over centuries, I believe we would reach the same stage of development. Having said that, the rise of the Nazi Party was as much the consequence of the circumstances in Germany between the wars: economic depression, extreme national pride shamed by failure in the “Great War” and the disproportionate suffering of the poor Germans. So another catalyst might well have led Germany to the same awful state.

If all I’ve said here means anything, is there any point in having real-life heroes? Well, yes.

Because ecopolitics has an element of fatalism, which it shares with Marx, that doesn’t mean that it is without hope. Which brings me to my first hero: Per Gahrton. When I met Per, it was near the end of his long career in electoral politics. He had been a member of the Swedish Parliament for the People’s Party and left to co-found the Swedish Green Party. I don’t know why he did it, but he was one of the few “eurosceptic” voices in the European Parliament.

I’m not sure how effective he was in fighting “ever deeper union” from within, but I suspect he found it depressingly futile. He published a small booklet on his views of Green politics and it included an indictment of those who took Sweden into the EU, with their promises of Swedish independence on issues of economics and [stricter] environmental protection. Both were eroded almost immediately after Sweden joined.

At the end of the booklet, having exposed the erosion of all the Green principles he believes in, Per asked himself if this meant that he could still be optimistic. “I am not optimistic,” he said, “but I have hope.”

It’s a quote that makes me teary-eyed because I believe in the same principles and share the sentiment.

Next season: more heroes.

Human nature, part two

Self-determination, it has been said, is the route to insularity, prejudice and conservatism. And it’s certainly difficult to argue that a village of Daily Mail readers will become more liberal, progressive or anarchist. But I’ll try.

This is the issue of whether cultures that are already closed-minded can flourish when they are allowed to close themselves off from the rest of the world. Surely it is isolation, if only information-isolation and the isolation of the poverty divide, that has created enclaves of bigotry; self-determination would simply allow them to pull up the drawbridge.

In stating the problem, I’ve had to use some of the common misconceptions about self-determination, most common of which being that self-determination implies isolation. The assumption is based on the concept of communities that no longer share information because they share very few of their resources.

It’s certainly true that early human history was mapped out as knowledge and limited cultural understanding followed trade and migration routes. Even in the early-to-mid Twentieth Century, ordinary people got their glimpse of distant peoples in the tea, spices, fruit, fabrics, plates and other goods that made it around the world.

But we have moved on to an information age. Our global trade in bulk goods is destroying the planet but there is no reason why the internet shouldn’t be sustainable—an information resource that will be almost unlimited by human standards.

So, if we draw back our commitment to long-distance trade, that does not mean we will stop talking.

Communication includes the sharing of best practice—examples of what works and what does not. The examples of communities that spearhead sustainability could lead to initial fragmentation of nations and regions. The continued flow of information would not only encourage further devolution, but it could encourage individuals and communities to self-organise in more open, more inclusive and less oppressive ways.

The village of Daily Mail readers, slowly let go from their commuter-based incomes might initially think that the world was falling apart with the nation they felt rooted to. But kinship with other villages with similar cultures would not vanish. Large gardens and the surrounding farms would make it relatively easy to feed the populace. Inter-community support networks would mean that disasters such as floods did not mean devastation.

In other words, the rise of self-determination should actually mean a decline in isolationism.

Another argument in support of this assertion is that greater self-determination should erode centralised media. So, the Daily Mail would wither and die anyway.

I'm so glad for the meek

As Michael Stipe sang:

“I can't say that I love Jesus
that would be a hollow claim.
He did make some observations
and I'm quoting them today.”

One quote that stuck with me from childhood was “the meek… shall inherit the Earth”. I seem to remember that this was not a prophecy, as such, in the mind of our teachers. How, they reasoned, would the meek take control if they were, well, meek. The only possible explanation was that old JC didn’t mean it literally, more that they were yet another of the bless-ed crowd.

Meek, after all, means courteous, kind, merciful, indulgent, or not violent or strong, mild. How can these attributes gain you any territory or win you any elections?

Even allowing for mis-translation and shifting meanings, this is only one of His pronouncements that are often sidelined, ignored or re-interpreted. The teachings of Jesus form part of a pan-Eurasian heritage of religious thought that commonly advocates non-violence and fair-to-generous treatment of others.

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” is karmic in its effect. The common Western belief that karma is what ensures that what goes around comes around, is less accurate than the directive that to do right by others is simply the right thing to do.

But the role of the meek is both more complex than “do unto others…” yet more simple than my teachers made out. If anything, it encapsulates everything I’ve been trying to say in this blog in a single phrase. Violence is counter-productive and can only destroy. Those who practice humble non-violence will ultimately triumph. (Triumph isn’t exactly the right word, however, since this is the antithesis of will-to-power.)

It’s my limited belief that it was the co-option of Christianity as a state religion, first by Constantine, and then by other opportunist kings and emperors, that ensured its general decline as a radical force for peace and equality. To align a religion with nationalist sentiment, it must be stripped of anti-authoritarian ideals and skewed to show a preference for one group over another. The course of Christianity has been perverted through Late Roman, Crusading, Conquering and warring times.

The most extreme neutering of the Christian ideal was arguably the silencing and partial co-option of the Catholic Church in Nazi Germany. No religion built on non-conformity and peace could have been cowed in that way.

Incidentally, Gandhi’s opinion on what should be done about the Nazis--that the German people and all those affected should have stood up against them non-violently, both in opposition and to demonstrate how ruthless the Nazis were--is considered one of his most ridiculous ideas. But ridiculous though using non-violence against those capable of genocide might seem, and courageous beyond almost all belief that it would have been, it might have saved the world from the horrors partially covered by war.

With all I’ve said already, I must note that something of the pre-Constantine religion has lived on: in various “heretical” sects; in rebellious priests and preachers; and in groups such as the Quakers and Mennonites.

I can’t say that I love Jesus, but he did make some exceedingly good observations.

The local migrant

Green politics is all about the local. By which, I don’t mean just the pub, but everything that goes into a strong, positive community: from the basics of housing, food and education to the less tangibles of trust, belonging and sharing. In describing these things and how to achieve them, it is often implicit that this is a long-term, geographically rooted programme.

Well, it is. So where do migrants fit in the picture?

Let’s be clear: a migrant is anyone who moves from one local community to another, whether they do that regularly or just once in their lives, and whether they do that across the globe or between neighbouring villages. Not all (maybe hardly any) problems of migration are directly related to international movements, and it makes no difference what the motivations for moving are.

I write this as a migrant myself. I have not worked in my country of birth since I first left university. I have moved about once every two years in the last twenty, usually from one community to another and twice between continents. I did so out of what I would claim was necessity, to work or to affordable accommodation. And I’m far from exceptional.

There are some things we migrants can do easily: we can shop locally and take an interest in local affairs, wherever we are. We can also take over responsibility for our garden, join community groups that we find appealing and volunteer to help in local projects. From the beginning, we can bring an attitude of openness and experience of projects in other locales.

We can be the nomadic local, joining in wherever we go.

I’m not going to discourage anyone from being nomadic. It has its rewards: we understand what we all have in common and what makes one place unique compared to any other. Most positively of all, the local nomads can bring a cosmopolitan open-mindedness with them to counteract any insular tendencies.

Of course, sensitivity isn’t a guaranteed characteristic of the migrant, and I’ve known plenty incomers that have little respect for indigenous culture, import goods rather than try the local alternative, or generally annoy their new neighbours with brashness or insularity.

Then there are the elements of community that nomads can never bring, particularly continuity of experience and long-term commitment. Communities need continuity because there are elements of the community (mainly its spirit) that take time to develop. A place where people are only passing through is never much more than the sum of its parts (although hostellers know that even a little goes a long way).

In other words, a community is more than just a place or a group of people. A “hood” or “manor” has a reputation, its pubs and shops have a reputation and an atmosphere, and it has a direction. Plans for the development of social housing, schools, doctors and dentists take long-term commitment.

Individuals within the community have to invest years, often decades, of their lives to the institutions that reflect community will: teachers, doctors, councillors, police officers, residents’ association officers, etc.

If both migrants and locals have an important part to play in the community, there must be a sensible balance between them. It might be interesting to find indicators of community cohesion and positivity, measure them and compare communities with different amounts of resident “churn”. I suspect that getting a sensible mix is not particularly difficult and that the optimum will depend on many factors, including the cultures involved.

Which leaves us with the extreme communities: entirely local or overwhelmingly migrant. Are mono-cultural communities too slow-changing to be sustainable, and are they inherently xenophobic? And how much migration is too much migration?

These are questions that deserve a large space of their own.