When you give your money to an aid agency, don’t you want to know how it is being spent? My latest audioblog asks when are aid agencies going to start being more upfront about their work. Transcript below…

There is no question in my mind what the most affecting story of the past week was. It was Sean Penn’s erudite, thoughtful, really powerful interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!  

Sean has become the manager of an intentional refugee camp in Haiti that currently houses 55,000 people, and he is bringing his not inconsiderable intelligence, strength of will, his enviable network of contacts, and the organisational skills honed by years of working in the unpredictable world of making movies to bear to provide security and access to healthcare and other services. It’s absolutely worth taking an hour out, perhaps over your lunch break, to listen to what he has to say.

The report was made all the more poignant because it has been six months since the earthquake devastated one of the poorest countries in the world. With the hurricane season bearing down on the displaced Haitians, you’d expect to see some progress in helping them to rebuild their lives, maybe some permanent structures to help them weather the coming storm. But that just hasn’t happened.

Let’s put aside for the moment the $5.3 billion in relief aid pledged by world governments. Less than 2 per cent of this, by the way, has actually been paid and most rich nations continue to drag their heels on the issue of when they are actually going to pay up. I think most of us have become cynical enough not to expect governments to deliver on the promises they make to those most in need. But aid agencies – that is a whole different kettle of fish.

The world’s aid agencies are our interface with this crisis and indeed with crises anywhere else in the world. They are the networks through which we as citizens of one country show that we care about what is happening in another country. They are our way of reaching out to strangers.

So it’s a reasonable question to ask: just how well are these agencies representing our human compassion and concern to these beleaguered, bedraggled fellow citizens.

And the answer is we really don’t know. And worse than that, the big aid agencies like Red Cross, Save the Children and World vision really don’t like us asking.

 Last week a report from the Disaster Accountability Project turned up some disturbing facts about the Haitian relief effort. For instance of the 197 organizations identified as soliciting money for their activities in Haiti following the earthquake:

• Only 6 had publicly available, regularly updated, factual situation reports detailing their activities in that country.
• The vast majority, 128, did not have such reports available on their websites.
• Only around ten percent, 21, were responsive to the Project’s request for more information, and of those that did respond, many provided only incomplete information which made judging their progress almost impossible

In the wake of the disaster hundreds, if not thousands, of relief organisations sprung up asking for money and the public has given generously. As of this month some $1.3 billion has been donated by private citizens. And mostly we never asked the big questions or demanded the facts about how many people were being served by this money, or where and how was it being spent? The relief agencies, it appears, didn’t ask themselves that either and this, as Sean Penn notes in his interview, has really hindered basic coordination of efforts in Haiti.

This raises a lot of questions for me. For a very long time, certainly for my lifetime, we have been conditioned to believe that our aid agencies are forces for good. It is taboo question this assumption. I can still hear the very vocal affront of Bob Geldof  when 25 years on he is still being  questioned about Live Aid and where the money actually went.  Admittedly he can be a pretty easy target.

The fact is our larger, more long established aid agencies are not just kindly do-gooders. They are major corporations with premises, and financial investments, and staff, and overheads and all the same frustrating hierarchies that you find in any large organisation. Sometimes the right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing.

Our global aid agencies are also brands and each of them works hard to reinforce, to really sell, their image in the public mind. Again this was something that the Disaster Accountability Project found. When it asked for facts, what it got was links to facebook pages and blogs full of purely anecdotal accounts, heart wrenching pictures of children and other emotional appeals to tug at our heart strings and our wallets and make us feel that the agency was this force for good. Some even claimed that if you wanted to know what they were doing, you should log onto their Twitter pages. I mean, seriously, how much factual information can you give in 140 characters?

This is absolutely unacceptable, and really it’s a disgrace. And while there is no doubt that the job in Haiti is difficult and chaotic, and there is also no doubt that independent groups like Sean Penn’s are leaner, more fluid and more able, sometimes through sheer force of will, to cut across the wasteful bureaucracies that have become such a part of the aid agency functioning, there is a dark side to the international aid business which may be contributing to the lack of focused response. In part it is schadenfreude, the often unexamined but exquisite pleasure in the misfortune of others, but it’s also the continual back biting and dick measuring and competition to be the hero of the piece, that needs to be dragged out into the light of day. Environmentalists take note – since we can sometimes suffer from the same lack of awareness of our motives.

Six months on the reality is that only 28,000 of the 1.5 million refugees have been rehoused. Spontaneous camps have become lawless, frightening places where. Looting and rape are daily occurrences and disease is rife. Whatever the difficulties, it is absolutely not good enough

And you have to ask yourself, is this what you intended when you donated your money to help?

My own evolving view is that aid agencies must be subject to the same accountability as any other corporations and we as a concerned and compassionate public should be much more demanding of these groups that rely on our donations to keep them going. Perhaps it really is time to come up with an accountability checklist that all aid agencies must adhere to and to have an overall international authority that demands accountability of our aid agencies so those of us who want to help but who cannot abandon our day jobs or families to do so, can be assured that when we offer what we can in the form of a donation the people most in need will benefit immediately and fully from that gift.

This article is a transcript from the audioblog ecoreflections360, which provides extended commentary on those stories that I found most meaningful and interesting amongst those which I have tweeted during the previous week. You can listen here.

Pat’s previous AlterNet post can be found here.

I’d been looking for stories that made me feel something other than just plain angry… not so easy these days. And then I had an idea.

The result was my audioblog, ecoreflections360, the text of which appears below, and which provides extended commentary on those stories that I found most meaningful and interesting and uplifting amongst those which I have tweeted during the previous week. You can listen here.

Being  (Fully) Human

It’s really, really difficult to know how to begin, how to pick out the best stories in the news, especially when we are so bombarded with information on a daily basis. I think the journalist in me always wants to pick the biggest story or the brightest angle, to be seen to be staying on top of the news.

But the human being in me tends to look for those stories that connect either literally or symbolically with what’s going on in my own world in my own inner life. And because of that I was immensely grateful for an essay [Struggling to be ‘Fully Alive’] by Robert Jensen at the University of Texas at Austin, which was trying to get to the bottom of the feelings that accompany our intellectual understanding that we live in a world in collapse.

It was a fascinating collection of responses to his request that people write to him and tell him what they are feeling. Not just what they think, not just the facts about how enormous the national debt is, or much CO2 is in the atmosphere, or how much oil is spewing into the Gulf of Mexico from that giant hole in the earth, but what they feel when confronted with these things. And it renewed my faith in humanity that we are not, as we are sometimes portrayed, a race of desensitised individuals. I mean there’s always going to be someone who tells you that we need to be rational – whatever that is – that a feeling response to events is not practical, and there will always be people who are so out of touch with their own feeling response that they actively resent yours.

But what I was reading here were the sensitive thoughtful, complex responses to the grief that so many of us feel as we watch the world basically go down the toilet: hopelessness, sadness, a sense of amusement at the absurdity of it all, pressure, rage, guilt, a sense of being trapped and an enormous amount of anger at what Jensen called the ‘elites’; the politicians the multinationals and the media propagandists who promote, continue to promote, in spite of all the evidence, the same arrogant and greedy and ethically and morally deficient behaviour which is hastening this collapse.

And although there has been a lot in the press lately about how environmentalists need to stop being doom mongers, how we need to be more positive, more upbeat I tend to believe that we could be more effective if we could not just learn to communicate more effectively the urgency of our situation, but also help people embrace the emotional reality of it, to have faith that strong emotions don’t need to be paralysing. That they can be inspiring and motivating.

In fact, the more we deny or repress essential parts of ourselves the more havoc those parts can cause. The natural flow of human life is towards self expression and if the self can’t for whatever reason express itself positively it will express itself in destruction and chaos and envy and prejudice.

This was summed up better than I could have done it in an essay, a 2002 essay, by Thomas Moore posted on the Planet Waves website – a little more than a week ago. This wasn’t an essay about the environment – far from it. It was called The Temple of the Body: Sex in an Anti-erotic Age.  And if that sounds provocative well it was, in part. It was certainly about what happens when we deny the instincts of the body, when make some sort of sterile purity and perfection in ourselves and those around us the main goal. But in a larger sense it was also about the felt experience, about what happens when we hack off bits of our common humanity, our spirituality, our deepest desires and the trouble that that causes; the havoc that a population of fragmented, partial people can cause. In the final paragraph Moore says:

“Every day we could choose to be intimate rather than distant, bodily rather than mental, acting thoughtfully from desire instead of from discipline, seeking deep pleasures rather than superficial entertainments, getting in touch with the world rather than analyzing it at a distance, making a culture that gives us pleasure rather than one that merely works, allowing plenty of room in our own and others’ lives for the eccentricities of sexual desire, and generally taking the role of lovers rather than doers and judges”

Well, amen to that.

The more I look at this issue the more I think that we humans have taken a rather strange path in our development. You know we are always striving for more, trying to push past our boundaries and somewhere along the line that message, that natural impulse has become distorted.

The self has an infinite, almost heroic capacity to give more, even when we think we are empty. But instead of pushing past our own personal boundaries to become smarter, more involved, more sensitive, more honest and more loving, we turn our attention outward, and exploit the finite resources of the earth instead.

And look at the damage that it’s done.

What is more creating a broken world to reflect our broken selves actually plays into the hands of those ‘elites’ that Robert Jensen was talking about, because when we are so broken, we are so much easier to lie to, so much easier to manipulate. I know that sounds like a challenging thing to say word but can there be any doubt that this is what we have allowed ourselves to become?

The evidence isn’t much fun at the moment, it’s scary and it’s complex, overwhelming really, and it’s the stuff I struggle with every day. You probably struggle with this stuff too.

The facts of our lives are challenging. But the answer, I think, is to strive, not to create the next technofix, but to become our whole selves again, to be fully human with all that that entails. I’m thinking now of Duane Elgin author of Voluntary Simplicity and his belief that simplifying our outer lives, living more lightly on the earth, has a knock on effect of creating much  more space for a complex and fulfilling inner life.

And with that thought I’m going to leave you until the next time. I’m Pat Thomas. Thanks for listening.

You can find my previous AlterNet post here.

How a head and heart response to Deepwater Horizon can help fight Gulf Fatigue. By Pat Thomas

It was with some trepidation that I tweeted an unconventional prayer for the Gulf of Mexico this morning. Bang goes my badass eco persona. And possibly my intellectual credibility.

It’s extraordinary that those of us who identify as ‘spiritual but not religious’ (SBNR – there’s even a facebook page)  are so often afraid to admit to our esoteric sides for fear of being dismissed as incapable of rational thought or scientific understanding – or worse lumped in with the extreme end of the spectrum goofy narcissistic new-agers.

Nuts to that – I won’t be pigeon-holed.

My longheld belief is that we need to look at and understand the world, and each other, and current events from a lot of different perspectives in order to keep our thinking sharp and our souls courageous.

Besides, it wasn’t just that the poem that moved me. It was also my growing unease with the media scramble to be first with the biggest exclusives, the freshest perspectives and the hardest facts on the Gulf disaster. In newsrooms across the globe you can smell the testosterone, even amongst the women, as everyone elbows everyone else out of the way in the battle for a prominent byline and a place in the history of the event.

For politicians, likewise, the BP disaster is an opportunity to tough talk the spill in terms of national pride, economics, political gain and stock market prices. It’s a hot potato in the apparently ‘special’ relationship between the US and the UK. Same again with social network sites like Twitter which, at their best, can be rich sources of different perspectives and original thought, but which have become awash with received opinions and endless retweets of the same old (BP) stories.

The melee has plunged us into information overload. We are drowning in a sludgy sea of everything from number crunching the gallons of oil lost, to the bookies’ odds on which endangered species will drift into extinction first. It’s an overwhelming tidal wave of ever longer strings of adjectives describing the horror of unfolding events.

I think I must be suffering from Gulf Fatigue, and I can’t help but wonder: if we continually respond from our heads, or worse from our competitive, cavemen (and cavewomen) selves aren’t we in danger of reinforcing the same kind of cultural shallowness and even arrogance, that led to the explosion in the first place? Doesn’t the overload follow the same dreary business-as-usual way of being and threaten to endanger certain things in us as human beings? Perspective for one. A thoughtful felt response for another. And I suppose a sense of spiritual wounding as well.

When I talk about a spiritual response to the Gulf, I am speaking less about lighting candles and burning incense and chanting and more about a well-rounded response that includes the raw facts, the number crunching, certainly, but also one that acknowledges the fear, the shock, the symbolic nature of the event and the grief. I am speaking of both head and heart.

Thus, in my state of spiritual and emotional Gulf exhaustion, those stories in the last week or so that have really grabbed me have been the ‘softer’ ones which are rich in the symbolism of the event and help connect, in a human way, with a disaster that would otherwise be abstract and incomprehensible.

For instance at Planet Waves, where civil action and political commentary meets thoughtful astrology (and a touch of liberated sexuality), the inimitable Eric Francis  riffed on the totem meanings for Pelicans (help us float above the surface of the water when life’s trials and tribulations get intense), Turtles (guardians of time, and representative the Great Mother) and Dolphins (guardians of breath, which take us to another dimension of reality) and looked at the watery overtones of the current planetary setup and the watery emotional dimension of the spill:

“Now we have an uncontrolled toxic release from below the bottom of the sea, contaminating the realm of feelings, dreams and visions. More significantly, the sensitive, fertile meeting places where land meets water are taking the worst beating, and will take the longest to return to a position where they can sustain life. This region where land meets water is where we go for inspiration, rejuvenation and those rare moments of relaxation. And now that space, on the Earth and in our psyches, is being fouled.”

Allied to this are the increasingly watery dreams of some of my friends – massive tidal waves; carrying their children on their shoulders to safety in rough tides; boats or, in my case roofs and windows with uncontrollable leaks in them. These dreams are facts too and they speak to the deep grip this incident has on our psyches.

At Common Dreams Jill S. Schneiderman, Professor of Earth Science at Vassar College described the spill as “as a bellwether of slow violence” – a term coined by Rob Nixon to describe acts whose “lethal repercussions sprawl across space and time.”

She writes:

“Devastated communities and environmental refugees, dead or injured living beings, and absolutely altered land, water, and air…brutality in the guise of slow-moving and spatially extensive environmental transformations that are out of sync with the nano-second attention spans of the 21st century. But what will enable us unflaggingly to confront slow violence?

“In her memoir, Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience, Sharon Salzberg writes, ‘When we stand before a chasm of futility, it is first of all faith in this [the] larger perspective that enables us to go on.’ Some might scoff at the idea that faith has any place as a healing quality, a refuge, during this calamity and in the future it foreshadows. But human beings must begin to live and act in accordance with the reality of connectedness famously articulated by John Muir: ‘When we try to pick out anything by itself we find that it is bound fast by a thousand invisible cords that cannot be broken, to everything in the universe.’”

Amen. This is writing for the soul – as necessary as writing for the mind and too often absent from the ‘news’  in times of crisis.

What is more, this isn’t the SBNR new-ageism of yesterday with its ‘me, me, me’ overtones. With its spiritual materialism and chanting for abundance, for that lottery win and for that shiny new Hummer in the garage. This is intelligent spiritualism focused more on ‘us, us, us’. On our interconnectedness, on our interdependence, on the solid understanding that our actions have consequences and on the bigger picture.

Oil spills are an ongoing and international problem. Last month when the 13 grandmothers – an international council of indigenous elders – called for a day of prayer to heal the waters of the earth, they meant all the waters of the earth, not just the American ones.

They were praying not just for the seas, but for all our waters that have been abused and polluted. They were praying not just for the wounded Gulf but for those affected by the spills in Port Arthur Texas in January of this year, in the Great Barrier Reef in Australia in April, in the Singapore Straight in May. they were praying for those in Nigeria where, also in May this year, a ruptured ExxonMobil pipeline flooded 1 million gallons of oil the once fertile Niger Delta destroying the habitat there and threatening the livelihoods of people who have fewer resources and much less resilience in the face of such overwhelming crisis than those living along the Gulf Coast. Indeed 40 years of oil company abuse in Nigeria has left the country in ruins.

Why should it matter to US citizens? Because the 606 oilfields in the Niger Delta supply 40% of all the crude the United States imports. Oil is a dirty business wherever it’s found and, as John Vidal of the Guardian reports, due to the oil pollution in the Niger Delta life expectancy in its rural communities, half of which have no access to clean water, has fallen to little more than 40 years over the past two generations. I’d be dead by now if I lived in Nigeria. So would many of my dearest friends and family. Maybe you would be too. Think about that the next time you jump in your car for a 2 minute trip to the mini mart.

Some observers have suggested that one way to turn things around is for business to begin to  incorporate spiritualism as a fourth bottom line. Maybe it’s the fatigue talking, but I have some doubts. Most companies can’t keep up with the triple bottom line which aims to add environmental quality and social justice to the traditional single bottom-line of profit and loss to create ‘win-win-win’ business.

Although initially intended as a philosophical way for businesses to think about sustainability, TBL has largely failed to deliver any noticeable changes and has become just another form of accounting, a different way of cooking the books. And the people doing the accounting are largely ignorant of what ecology and justice entail. What on earth would they make of the intangibles of spirit?

Likely they would end up focusing on what can be most easily measured (the very tip of the spiritual iceberg) such as ethics and miss the 90% of what can’t be expressed through words, let alone measured in terms of annual economic performance. Witness how quickly ethics and CSR reports become just a gaudy sideshow, an efficiency drive aimed at increasing profits and a competition amongst some very dirty companies – BP included – to appear ‘clean’.

There are some groups and individuals who are focusing on a nexus of economics and spirituality and who believe that the economic life of a nation is reflective of its spiritual attitudes. This is what the European Spirituality in Economics and Society forum (as just one example) is grappling with, albeit in a rather high, intellectual way. Best of luck to them.

Bhutan’s Gross Happiness Index mixes the intangibles of spirit with the tangibles of daily economic life in a progressive way that reflects quality of life measures.

Sound far fetched? In 2003 the UK government took it seriously enough to publish a paper known as the Life Satisfaction Report recommending policies that might increase the nation’s wellbeing as well as “finding an alternative to gross domestic product as a measure of how well the country is doing – one that reflects happiness as well as welfare, education and human rights.”  

Sadly it sought to quantify happiness in salary rise equivalents (i.e. marriage boosts your happiness by as much as a £72,000 pay rise; losing your job decimates your  happiness as much as a £276,000 salary cut). And lest the government be lumped in with all those goofy new-agers, losing its reputation for rationality and people-friendly policies that really work, the paper has emblazoned across the cover “This is not a statement of government policy”. We’ve got a long way to go, baby.

Although not directly connected with BP green economist Molly Scott Cato’s recent treatise on the Rational Economic Man (REM)  –  the antithesis of the Earth Mother, who lives obsessively in his head and not in his body and nurtures a self-image of invulnerability and intellectual superiority, seemed a better place to start with the job of humanising economics. For me at least, the image of REM made the issue of economics personal again and reinforced my belief that we can’t get through all the tough times ahead by thought alone.

When we tackle the BP crisis with our heads only we are aping Rational Economic Man, or in the case of my profession Rational Journalist Man, winning at all costs but failing to get to the heart of things, failing to see where change needs to happen, and failing to feel our own sense of connectedness and responsibility. Without that spiritual and emotional IQ we’re only half as smart as we think we are.

It’s spiritual maturity or bust for our planet and its people. You choose. Which is it going to be?

© Pat Thomas 2010. No reproduction without author’s permission.

BP’s heart isn’t in the clean-up because, says Pat Thomas, to them Deepwater Horizon really is just a drop in the ocean.

So let’s review where we are.

In a series of lack-lustre attempts to stem the flow of oil in the gulf British Petroleum, third largest energy company and the fourth largest company in the world has employed:

• Oil booms to contain the spill. Result: They haven’t really managed to contain much
• Controlled burning. Result: Ooops, burning oil causes serious air pollution
• Chemical dispersants. Result: BP chose to use the cheapest and least effective dispersant – one that had been stockpiled in local warehouses – and astonishingly it hasn’t really worked. The ingredients are toxic to marine life and mixed with all the chemicals in the Gulf, probably especially nitrogen fertilisers, it may form even more toxic chemical compounds
• Trying to put a lid on it. Result: No good; the big dome placed over the leak became blocked by ice crystals
• A mile-long tube to suck up the oil on the surface. Result: Erm, it didn’t actually suck up much oil
• “Operation Top-kill” – a  typically GI Joe nomenclature for a plan in which in which heavy mud was going to be pumped into the gaping hole in the pipe. Result: They threw a lot of mud at it but none of it stuck
• Robots to cut into the pipes. Result: No news yet but given the company’s track record…

In a handful of life-imitating-Homer-Simpson moments the company has also proposed throwing pantyhose, dog and human hair and golf balls at the problem. As if there wasn’t already enough garbage in the Gulf.

D’oh!

Along the Gulf Coast residents are increasingly asking the not unreasonable question: “Where’s the plan?”

The truth is there isn’t one.

A careful review of BP’s 583-page oil spill response plan by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), a national alliance of local state and federal resource professionals, shows a document that is “studded with patently inaccurate and inapplicable information”.

The BP Regional Oil Spill Response Plan – Gulf of Mexico dated June 30, 2009 covers all of the company’s operations in the Gulf, not just the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon.  The plan (and I quote):

• Lists “Sea Lions, Seals, Sea Otters [and] Walruses” none of which actually inhabit the gulf of Mexico as “Sensitive Biological Resources” in the Gulf, suggesting that portions were cribbed from previous Arctic exploratory planning;
• Gives a web site for a Japanese home shopping site as the link to one of its “primary equipment providers for BP in the Gulf of Mexico Region [for] rapid deployment of spill response resources on a 24 hour, 7 days a week basis”; and
• Directs its media spokespeople to never make “promises that property, ecology, or anything else will be restored to normal,” implying that BP will only commit candor by omission.

More seriously, the plan does not contain information about tracking sub-surface oil plumes from deepwater blowouts or preventing disease transmission (viruses, bacteria, etc)  to captured animals in rehab facilities, which was found to be a very serious risk following the Exxon Valdez spill. It also lacks any oceanographic or meteorological information, despite the clear relevance of this data to spill response.

No wonder PEER board member Rick Steiner, a noted marine professor and conservationist who tracked the Exxon Valdez spill, was moved to say the document wasn’t ”worth the paper it is written on” (perhaps unused copies of it could be used to soak up some oil?). But then again it was never meant to be. It is an exercise in superficiality like so much of BP’s CSR.

Why is BP essentially tinkering around the edges of what some believe is the worst oil spill in history? Because to them – the PR disaster aside – it really is a minor problem. BP chief executive Tony Hayward has gone on record referring to the spill as “relatively tiny”. He’s not being callous (well, yes, actually he is being callous, but that is a comment for another day). He’s being a businessman. Since when did businessmen ever give a flying albatross for anything except profit? And why do we continue to wish/believe/hope for them to change?

BP and all who sail in her are bottom-line thinkers, looking first and foremmost at barrels produced versus barrels lost.

Accurate figures for how much oil has actually been ‘lost’ are almost impossible to come by – and they all come from BP. Even the White House has said it can’t trust BP’s estimates which at first assured the Obama administration and the world that the spill would be no greater than 1,000 barrels per day. Estimates now range from 12,000 to 19,000 barrels a day.

But what if the top estimates are true?

We in the media bat these words around alot – barrels, gallons, litres, tons, and tonnes – as if we really understand their import. Mostly we don’t. And neither do the general public (there are 42 gallons of oil per barrel and, on average – the figure varies by country – 7.33 barrels per metric ton (tonne)). Most of us just know that something important is terribly broken and is in urgent need of repair. We think it’s the pipeline or the ecosystem of the Gulf itself. But really it’s the economic system and a business model no longer fit for purpose, that is at the heart of these kinds of tragedies.

When Tony Hayward says the spill is “tiny” what is he thinking? According to BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy June 2008, the world consumed 3952.8 million tonnes of oil in 2007 and produced 3905.9 million tonnes in the same time period.

According to the International Tanker Owners Pollution Federation (so assume it’s an under estimate, but even so) 5.5 million tonnes of oil have been lost in spillage since 1970.

BP don’t care because over three decades that’s less than 2/10ths of a single percent of what we currently use every year.

Assume 19,000 barrels a day have been gushing into the Gulf for 44 days. That’s 2603 tonnes per day, or 114,530 tonnes since the pipe broke. One ten-thousandth of America’s annual usage of 943.1 million tonnes. They don’t care about the oil itself because in the narrow world of profit and loss it is a meaningless amount to them. Even the cost of the cleanup is meaningless: £1 billion is one tenth of what the company is investing in North Sea oil over the next decade. It’s an eighth of what the company is investing in renewable energy to 2015. A fraction of the £22 billion it spent trying to find new oil in 2008. These guys push big money around like it was monopoly money. They expect both losses and gains. They don’t care about the environment because their business is exploiting the environment, not taking care of it. And collateral damage is part of the deal.

I say this not to excuse what is being done, or rather what is not being done, in the Gulf. It is inexcusable. But it may help explain why all our attempts to find the words and concepts to frame this disaster and give it context have only served to make the picture bigger and more terrifying, creating a kind of public and media frenzy that makes a lot of noise but doesn’t (often) say anything meaningful.

The Deepwater Horizon blowout, for instance, has been framed as a political disaster. Pundits have asked how the Obama administration will cope. The administration for its part has kept its comments frustratingly brief and has been forced to admit publicly that the US government and military don’t possess the technology to plug the leaking well.  This means continued reliance on BP and its private industry partners to say “yes we can”. Only they can’t. As a display of government ties to and its puny weakness in relationship with big business it is a chilling spectacle.

A similar dilemma was faced by Nature Conservancy which on the one hand should be shouting loud and campaigning hard on behalf of the environment, but which is on the other has been supported financially by BP – to the tune of $10 million in cash and land contributions from BP and affiliated corporations over the years. Strong advocates for nature, it seems, have also been hogtied by their connections to industry.

The explosion has also been framed as a business disaster – BP has recently seen a 13% plunge in its share prices and had £12 billion wiped off its share prices. And this provided yet another sobering view of how all things are connected – and not always in a good way – since many UK pension funds are linked to BP profits. Indeed BP claim that it is responsible for £1 in every £7 of dividends that the pension funds receive. We will all pay for this disaster in the end, but the ones who might pay most are the ones who can least afford to.

A couple weeks ago 100 protesters, from CodePink (a ‘women for peace’ organisation) took to the sidewalk outside the US headquarters of BP in various states of undress, in order to “bare the truth” about the giant oil spill that is threatening environmental disaster for the Gulf of Mexico.

In tabloid stylee, they accused BP of ‘naked greed”.

They all appeared to be model thin, and I couldn’t stifle a growing concern that Deepwater Horizon has become yet another platform for a whole ragbag of conspiracy theorists, armchair environmentalists and Leo DiCaprio/Daryl Hannah wannabes to find their five minutes of fame as outraged ‘protesters’, ‘activists’ and ‘campaigners’ (I mean, seriously, it’s so easy to be outraged by this – where are they all when it’s time to be outraged at all the other deeply damaging stuff that doesn’t involve dolphins and is mostly hidden from view?).

But the thing that struck me the most, while considering these half naked Boudicas was how impotent this crisis has made most of us feel, how exposed WE are as citizens for our lack of understanding, for the daily blinkers we wear, for our complicity in events, and for our seeming inability to muster the resources – emotional, spiritual, intellectual and practical – to help mobilse change.

That we experience Deepwater Horizon as a personal tragedy – no matter where we live – is testimony to our deep connection to the sea. As John F Kennedy mused: “… we all came from the sea. And it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have, in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch it we are going back from whence we came.”

Only we can’t go back because the sea which lifts our little blue planet above all others, which spawned ALL life on earth is dying and polluted. And the lack of weight given to this serious tragedy of the commons by the business community is distressing. Peraps it’s time we stopped letting them be the arbiters of what is valuable?

From the position of this enormous grief that we as citizens feel, we expect grief also from BP. We keep expecting them to have some sort of epiphany; to realise the error of their ways; to be contrite to, worry about the impact both immediate and long-term of their carelessness. We expect them to be honest and live up to their CSR hype. We expect them to be a ‘them’ when really they are an ‘it’.

Companies may have citizen status under US law, but they are not citizens. They don’t think like citizens, they don’t act like citizens and, most appallingly of all, they are not punished like citizens.

Next week (June 8th) is World Oceans Day – a day to celebrate the sea, and maybe to really feel our own sadness over this ongoing tragedy and pray for healing as well as recommit to being an active part of the solution, instead of a passive part of the problem.

But after the celebrations and tears and prayers are finished we must find the will to be more realistic about how much we’ve let companies like BP get away with for decades through our own acquiescence to the soothing idea that megacorporations are just big ‘families’ working for our benefit.

As my dad used to say if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, well then…

Maybe it’s time to go duck hunting.

Originally posted here.

Pat’s previous AlterNet post can be found here.

© Pat Thomas 2010. No reproduction without author’s permission.

The people have voted for change in the UK general elections, says Pat Thomas. Which political leader will be courageous enough to respond?

Stability. Ever since the votes were counted in the UK’s general election and the reality of a hung parliament was made clear, ’stability’ has been the message of our potential leaders.

The juxtaposition of concepts is pure PR gold. These are ‘changing times’, ‘challenging times’ and we need ‘stability’. The strongest leader will be the one that can supply that quality in the greatest measure. At the moment voters are assured that behind the scenes, and with no single party having an overall majority, Labour, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats and a handful of independents are bargaining for the benefit of the country, for the stability that we all want – and need.

But is stability really what we want – or need? And as goals go is it really the best thing for the country in the short-term? 

Certainly, in pursuit of a good story, in desperation to make the election sexy and dramatic, the media are guilty of devoting far too many column inches to the disaster scenarios of a possible hung parliament.  Encouragingly  voters didn’t buy into them. Some actively hankered after them.

Even before the polls opened, voters from across London gathered in Parliament Square to express their support for a hung parliament and displeasure with the scare tactics of the (largely) right-wing tabloid press. The organisers of the ‘flashmob’ protest called it the  “biggest rolled-up newspaper sword fight ever” – an off the cuff demonstration organised by word of mouth, through facebook, the email lists of online civil society groups Avaaz and 38 Degrees and on individual blogs and Twitter pages.

There was a petition calling for Rupert Murdoch and the British tabloid press to, “…stop spreading fear and trying to manipulate how people vote”. Over 30,000 people signed it.

In particular our newspapers and TV news programmes love to play follow the leader and the prospect of a hung parliament deeply challenges their political affiliations and indeed their corporate identities. What’s the point of being a Tory or a Labour rag if neither party has the leadership? In some ways a coalition government could be the remaking of the media since it hands back to journalists the opportunity to think their own independent thoughts again. If you don’t think that this is vital to democracy, think again.

In reality an outcome where no party has an overall majority is not unusual nor insurmountable, though it can be a nightmare for those whose sole aim is to put their personal stamp on a country or create a personal power base. So it is worthwhile speculating whom all this hand-wringing actually serves. And why in a time of tremendous change we keep grasping for ’stability’ when embracing the disruption and chaos might ultimately be more productive?

A different reading of events suggests that while our political leaders think they are facing-off some potential disaster, the public are actually relishing the prospect of this moment of change and negotiation.

We think of politics and the political process as a done deal – as systems of governance that were worked out a long time ago and which will always function in the same way. In fact politics is little more than an evolving experiment in collective living. Thinking of it as a fixed entity is what leads to bribery and corruption, expenses scandals, cuts in education and health, big subsidies for polluting industries and ever widening gaps between the haves and have-nots.

Because of this belief there is an overriding notion that this hung parliament is somehow dysfunctional and needs to be fixed as soon as possible. The other way of looking at it is that the way the British public has voted is a recognition, on a very deep level, that the political system in its current state is dysfunctional and needs to be re-envisaged.

On the Saturday after the election another flash protest broke out in central London The 1500 or so protesters – a coalition of democracy campaigners, political activists and ordinary voters – were calling for a fairer electoral system and for support for their Take Back Parliament petition. Within a few days over 35,000 people (out of a hoped for 50,000 or more) had signed the online petition calling for a Citizens Convention to decide on a new voting system to be put to the people in a referendum.

Unfairness has long been a flaw in our system of government. The voting public knows this, has experienced it in its daily life, and has expressed its anger with both politics and politicians. The pre-election surge in support for the Liberal Democrats, unmasked the unfairness of the electoral systemand the need to reconsider the long-standing first past the post system and adopt proportional representation instead. While all this is working itself out a hung (or maybe we should be thinking of it as ‘balanced’?) parliament could better represent what the voters want, give us some breathing space to work out a better system, and possibly encourage MPs to be more aware of and responsive to public opinion.

We can’t remove this election from its national or international context. Under pressure from a number of social and environmental challenges including climate change, peak oil/energy descent, economic instability, rising population and loss of biodiversity, the world is reinventing itself everyday. There are ‘hung parliament’ scenarios – that is to say shifting paradigms of power and priorities, changes in heart and mind – running through everything that we do now. 

But, as author Thomas Homer-Dixon has said, there is an upside to all this down. From an environmental perspective (if I can bang a personal drum for a moment) there is already the recognition of the opportunity to reform governmental attitude and policy. The day after the election seven of the UK’s largest environmental organisations issued a joint statement to remind those politicians haggling for their share of the power base to put action on climate change back on the political agenda.

According to David Norman, head of Campaigns at WWF: “Whoever becomes Prime Minister, one of their most pressing tasks will be to take rapid action to deal with the threat of climate change. They must also take action to protect our under-pressure natural environment. 

“This is an historic opportunity. The next Government has the power to establish the UK as a climate leader and to reap the tremendous benefits to the UK’s economy, society and security of doing so.

“Scientists say global greenhouse gases must peak during this Parliament and then decline if we are to prevent serious, irreversible consequences. All parties say they are committed; now what we need is action.” 

The coalition’s top priorities for government are:

● A cut in greenhouse gas emissions of at least 42 per cent by 2020.

● Investment in green industries, infrastructure and skills to boost the economy and ensure the UK becomes a world leader in low carbon technology.

● A dramatic shift to renewable sources of energy generation – at least 15 per cent by 2020.

● No new coal-fired power stations unless they are able to fully capture and store their emissions.

● No third runway at Heathrow and a new aviation policy compatible with the Climate Change Act.

● Financial support to developing countries to help them develop cleanly, adapt to climate change and stop deforestation.

● Urgent action to protect and enhance the UK’s natural environment including a White Paper on nature.
 
Almost any industry, NGO or community group could – and should – come up with a similar wish list. Many are in the process of doing so. Three days after the election the real campaigning is, in many respects, just beginning. The hung parliament is a chance to build effective coalitions, to work together and find solutions rather than bargain for personal glory. Entered into willingly and with a positive attitude it could be a watershed for our politicians. It could signal an end to playground squabbling, a recognition of the need to grow up.

And the result of this recognition could me a more democratic process of governance. Or it could just turn into a political bun fight, egged on by the media. It’s hard to tell which way it will go.

Gordon Brown, who has more to lose than anyone – at least publicly – accepted that the process of negotiation will take time and cooperation. We can only speculate about the temper tantrums behind the scenes Nick Clegg is under intense pressure not to sell his party down the river, especially on the issue of electoral reform. David Cameron’s response has been bullish. Even before the election he indicated that if no party had an overall majority the Conservatives would consider challenging the convention that if Britain votes for a hung parliament, the existing Prime Minister gets the first chance to form a government.

If he doesn’t get what he wants out of the backroom horsetrading, will he drag the country into a messy constitutional wrangle that may ultimately show up the ugly side of his own will to power and damage people’s faith in politicians and politics even more?

Really, it’s time to end the politics of confrontation and bluster, of personal favours and  cooking the books, of privileges for the few and stuff the rest.

In a world of change people will want more say in the decisions that affect their daily lives; the personal becomes more and more political with every passing moment. It is perhaps a debate for another day whether centralised government, as opposed to more localised government, is flexible and responsive enough to meet this need.

What is clear is that voters are awakening to the need for an electoral system that better represents them and are continuing to voice their deep distrust of politicians both as keepers of the public trust and as people. Likewise there is growing mistrust of the process of politics, as something little more than a sleight of hand game in which the needs of the wealthiest individuals and the biggest global corporations are held to be more important than the needs of the majority of average individuals and their communities and environments.

Whether the voting public knew it intellectually or intuitively a hung parliament was the outcome everyone wanted because it would be a vote for change. As the world changes, politics must change too. And it is a truism of personal change, that is wholly applicable to social change, that when we fear it the most this can be an indication that change is not only inevitable but necessary. Our strongest leaders will not only acknowledge this but  be humbled enough by the election outcome to realise that political office is not something taken by force of personality, but is instead offered in service. To paraphrase Tao the Ching, the strongest leaders are those that follow the people.

Originally posted here.

Pat’s previous AlterNet post can be found here.

© Pat Thomas 2010. No reproduction without author’s permission.

Wildlife documentaries? Eco-tourism? Pat Thomas asks: Are we loving nature to death?

A new report puts forward the theory that wildlife film makers are invading the privacy of animals by going to ever greater extremes to film otherwise unseen moments of life in the animal kingdom.

According to Brett Mills, a lecturer in film studies at the University of East Anglia, the growing use of miniature cameras by wildlife photographers and film makers produces an invasive level of surveillance most humans would find objectionable if they were on the other end of the lens: “The key thing in most wildlife documentaries is filming those very private moments of mating or giving birth. Many of these activities, in the human realm, are considered deeply private, but with other species we don’t recognise that”.

He adds that while it might seem strange to claim that animals have a right to privacy, the idea should not be dismissed: “We can never really know if animals are giving consent, but they do often engage in forms of behaviour which suggest they’d rather not encounter humans”.

Debate on animals and privacy is largely philosophical. Allowing for the general validity of Mills’ argument, the very use of the term ‘privacy’, a mainly anthropocentric concern, may be obscuring the point of what is a potentially important discussion about the rest of the animal kingdom.

To require privacy requires a sense of oneself and as well as awareness of being observed by others. Some higher mammals appear to have one or both of these senses, but not all animals do. While they may not explicitly seek privacy, animals are exquisitely aware of their environments and will, when necessary, seek refuge or shelter or take other measures to ensure safety for themselves and their young and their group. 

Human sexual behaviour isn’t just for procreation and (usually) has a private element to it. But in the animal world mating rituals can be gloriously public, flashy, competitive, even violent. These open displays of sexuality have some practical purposes. They define territory and hierarchy assuring that the strongest males are given the chance to pass their genetic traits on; it also allows the most prolific breeding females to display their fecundity. All this happens to support the survival of the species; it’s only relatively recently that these activities have come to be regarded as entertainment for humans.

We all have to live on the same earth together and it would seem a given that all animals should have the right to exist in a way and in an environment that is natural to them without being deliberately interfered with, exploited or intruded upon. But most humans have such trouble with this simple notion that we have invented wildlife preserves and parks and zoos to keep the animals, that once had free roam of the wilderness, enclosed in legally defined territory (a few humans are now challenging this with the concept of rewilding, though to some extent both ideas assume the right of humans to dictate terms).

And, of course, we also have wildlife films that safely confine our experience of animals to screens big and small.

Wildlife film makers explain their craft in part by saying that they are providing a public service by helping more of us to know, love and maybe protect the natural world. Newer technologies, they argue, mean that the act of watching animals in their natural or near-natural habitat is less and less invasive. All of this is true – up to a point. And I admit to being one of those who first fell in love with the nature that extended well beyond my back garden through watching wildlife programmes. As a small child in the 60’s I was hooked on the corny wildlife films on The Wonderful World of Disney, the Wild Kingdom and the Undersea Adventures of Jacques Cousteau. Through most of my adult life David Attenborough’s obvious love for his subject has also been inspirational.

But nature films are also a big industry now. There are endless cable channels hungry for content and there is big money to be spent and made. March of the Penguins, for example, grossed £85 million [$130 million] at the global box office and the BBC notes that Planet Earth “has been sold to 95 countries and territories and the DVD was the highest ever TV DVD pre-order on Amazon. It has already generated over £22 million [$34 millon] of gross revenue”.

It is in this comodification of nature, the packaging of it for mass appeal and profit, where the issue of what has been termed ‘wildlife porn’ or ‘nature porn’ starts to make sense.

For some, the juxtaposition of the words ‘nature’ and ‘pornography’ may seem strange. The linking factor is the way pornography objectifies its subject by removing context, whether that context might be character, life story, environment or ecosystem. You know you are watching nature porn when nature becomes a commodity – and this, of course, is how the human body and sexual experience is presented in human pornography – something to be consumed and then discarded as we flick the channel over to X-factor or Lost or the night’s football or a re-run of Friends.

David Attenborough’s Planet Earth was, at the time of its release, considered by some to be a good example of ‘wildlife porn’ – a near constant flow of epic imagery, of vast desert vistas and brooding forests, of skies brim full of migratory flocks birds, of flowing rivers and raging oceans, all filmed and edited to provoke arousal and to incite powerful feelings in the viewer. Beautiful, yes, but also in some ways numbing and ultimately a false reassurance that, when it comes to the natural world, voyeurism is our only role. And of course, it also ignored the many genuine environmental perils going on behind the scenes.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the rise of the nature documentary/series/film doesn’t seem to have inspired many of us to take better care of the world, but it has helped give rise to the idea of eco-tourism. Essentially, you’ve bought the album, now see the live show.

This leads to another issue; namely that we change what we observe. This isn’t just the experience of quantum physics. Any observed ‘object’, if it is alive and aware or can sense that it is being observed, will react to the observation, even if the reactions are unconscious or unintentional.

The intrusion of wildlife photographers and, perhaps worse, eco-tourists into the natural world to watch, to feel a part of nature while still being apart from it, is having a profound effect on wildlife. It doesn’t just put habitats under pressure; it also impacts the reproductive behaviour of the animals within those systems.

Eco-tourism may superficially seem to be an antidote to couch-potato consumption of nature documentaries, but the fact is that at a very basic level, taking busloads of people into the wild crowds the natural environment of the animals and alters their biology and behaviour in significant ways.

In 2004 New Scientist reported on studies showing that polar bears, penguins, dolphins, dingoes, even birds in the rainforest were becoming stressed as a result the invasion from eco-tourism. The physiological effects noted were sometimes subtle: changes to an animal’s heart rate, metabolism, stress hormone levels and social behaviour. But the wider impacts on the animals were worryingly high and included fewer hours of sleep each day, weight loss, lower resistance to disease, lower reproductive rates and premature death.

Two years ago the Wall Street Journal reported that the boom in eco-tourism to the Galápagos Islands was having a devastating effect on wildlife there. Unsustainable development, an influx of workers from the mainland and introduced species were, the article noted, putting endemic biodiversity and habitats at risk.

In the forests of California, scientists have found that hiking, bird watching and other similar ‘low-impact’ non-consumptive activities can interfere with the mating habits of bobcats and coyotes. Where the eco-tourists went, there was a fivefold reduction in numbers of these animals. After banning the tourists, their numbers began to rise again.

We understood how animals respond to crowding even before eco-tourism came into being. Over the years studies have shown that animal populations living in crowded conditions display a number of behaviours that tend to limit the size of the population, including aberrant forms of sexual behaviour, small litter sizes, a higher incidence of spontaneous abortion, ineffectual maternal care and even cannibalism of their young.

In this respect ‘privacy’, or whatever we choose to call it, may be important to the normal physiology of many species, even when particular individuals or groups don’t appear to live, or in the case of zoo animals, may never have lived, in a very ‘private’ environment.

For me the unasked questions are: Why do we watch nature films? What is it about the drama of birth, sex, survival and death of other species that draws us in? What do we – that is we who are not scientists – get out of the experience? Nature has long been our blank canvas and it’s tempting to consider whether our interest in animal lifestyles is really just a projection of our desire to be more free in our own mating choices and habits, to be more in tune with our natural environment, instincts and biology. What a strange world we live in where we can effectively watch a parade of elephants, tigers, chimps and whales humping all day long, but where a man, a human animal, can be prosected for indecent exposure (though finally, sensibly acquitted) after a neighbour, out walking with her child, inadvertently spied him making coffee in the nude in the privacy his own home.

As humans we believe that awareness of ourselves is our greatest gift. Maybe it’s time to apply some of this sentience in a less inwardly-focused way. It’s reassuring that so many of us love nature. But as with all forms of consumption we should at least question our ongoing, really voracious, desire for nature porn, and ask where it gets us, what it is displacing, what is lost through it, what might serve us better and what the potential damage is, to us and to the rest of the animal kingdom, if we don’t direct our interest in a more positive, practical way. These questions are more than a philosophical game, they are the obligations of a conscious, enlightened society.

Originally posted here.

Pat’s pevious AlterNet post can be found here.

© Pat Thomas 2010. No reproduction without author’s permission.

As the planes return to European skies, campaigner Pat Thomas gives a personal account of what the last five days of peace and quiet, and alternative transport, have meant to her.

The planes returned to the London sky today. I admit to being a little resentful.

As environmentalists go, I’m a weird mixture. My early life was defined by airplanes. My late father was a weekend pilot. We had a little Cessna 150 which we flew everywhere. We called her Juliette after the last letter of her call sign.

I loved to fly; the sense of freedom was spectacular and daddy’s obvious happiness at being in the air was infectious. I got my first passport when I was 13 and graduating to international travel opened up the world to me. Ironically, it was a key factor in my choosing environmentalism as a profession. How can you see this world and not appreciate its uniqueness, its beauty, its depth and its complex web of connections? And how can you appreciate those things without wanting to ensure they remain intact?

When I was little we used to sit with our sandwiches and watch the planes at the local airport for fun. My dad taught me how to identify them on sight – a pastime my own son appreciated as a child. Daddy taught me how to drive propped up on phone books in the big expanse of the airport in California where we kept our plane. And we drove my mother crazy by talking to each other as if over the radio:  “Six-One Juliette, over and out…”

Back in the here and now, and living in London, I’ve been luxuriating in five days of blissful peace, especially during my near daily jaunts to the local park. London’s parks can be wonderful refuges from city noise and stress. The only intrusion is often the booming, groaning and whining of the regular parade of planes overhead. It’s given me pause to think, to try and untangle the complicated emotional relationship I have to air travel (a relationship that also applies to cars, but we’ll leave that for another day).

As a child, and as a young woman whose work took me all over the world, I could look up into the sky and the jet trails, or contrails, held meaning for me. They were exciting reminders of a world waiting to be explored. Joni Mitchell once called them ‘the hexagram of the heavens’; maybe not geometrically correct but indicative of a way of writing our own messages across an empty sky. Today things couldn’t be more different, and as the planes returned to the sky this morning I felt discontented and sad. The jet trails looked like scars or wounds and I wondered how different our approach and enthusiasm for air travel might be if we reframed them as such. And how much more positive our approach to the environment would be if we could admit to and really feel the grief of the passing of lifestyles that no longer serve us or the planet, and then move on from them.

In the EU, aviation accounts for 3% of CO₂ emissions. In the UK, the figure is higher at about 6%. But even these figures are misleading because every country has its own way of collecting data and often this doesn’t include emissions from charter flights or some international routes. The real figures are probably substantially higher.

While the fuel efficiency of planes has increased steadily, at around 1.2% a year, this needs to be viewed in the context of an industry that is growing at a rate of 8% every year, and which is predicted to quadruple in size between by 2050.

The growth of the aviation industry is in direct conflict with the need to reduce CO₂ emissions by 80% by 2050 in order to avoid irreversible climate change.

The UK’s Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research has said that if we accept this 80% reduction target, and if aviation continues to grow as predicted, it will require the whole of the rest of UK to be zero carbon, simply to allow us to continue flying. It can’t be done, which is one reason why I’ve thrown my support behind the Airplot, Greenpeace’s clever initiative to stop the third runway being built at London’s Heathrow.

Of course this narrow focus on carbon reduction (yet another story for another day) doesn’t even begin to take into the account of the damage caused by contrails which are made up of toxic emissions of soot and sulphur dioxide. In effect contrails are high, thin, man-made clouds that seed other types high, thin clouds known as cirrus clouds which in turn increase the temperature down here on earth.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) the climate changing potential of contrails is nearly three times that of CO₂. These facts, as I have pointed out previously, are the trouble with travel. They equate to a wound that can only be healed by a reduction in air travel. And as the flight ban has shown, planes aren’t the only way to get around; trains, boats, ferries and coaches have all come into their own these last few days.

Then there is this issue of the ‘empty’ sky and the arrogance of those who would seek it fill it. Clearly the sky is not empty. Never has been. There is sun, moon, stars and clouds; showers, rainbows and breezes. There are butterflies, dragonflies and bees. And birds. Maybe it’s my imagination, but these last few days the birds seemed to be singing with greater gusto – probably it’s just the absence of plane noise, but maybe at some level they are aware of and appreciating the opportunity to call for a mate in daylight. There was a heartbreaking story a couple of years ago about birds beginning to sing at night because during the day it was so noisy with planes and cars and the general noisy mishegas of city life, that their potential mates couldn’t hear them. For days my street has been positively bursting with a sexy springtime symphony of birdsong. Better than anything currently on stage in the West End.

This notion of an empty sky is intriguing to me. It is a peculiarity of humans that when we see an empty space – that is, one devoid of human input – we feel the need to fill it up. In this case to make clouds, to make an even louder ‘bird’ song, to paint our human designs on any and every ‘blank’ canvas we come across. What are contrails but aviation graffiti? A displaced act of creation that becomes an act of destruction.

Disruption aside, with a volcanic eruption there is the sheer excitement of the Earth giving birth to itself. At the most basic level that’s what volcanoes do. I can recall many years ago, visiting beautiful Hawaii with my 10 year old son, and being moved by the realisation that he was standing on ground that was younger than he was. For me this genuine act of creation, and the pause for thought that it provided, was much more important than any perceived ‘lack’ of pineapple chunks from Ghana or baby sweetcorn from Thailand or cut flowers from Africa  – none of which I would buy anyway. The disruption of this particular economy has shown just how brittle and vulnerable the international food system really is. Perhaps some good will come of that.

Then there is the fact that without the planes the air felt cleaner. The air was cleaner. Even though Eyjafjallajökull has spewed plenty of ash, it was emitting far less greenhouse gas than the grounded planes would have generated.

Researchers at Durham University calculated that carbon dioxide emissions from the Icelandic volcano totalled 150,000 tonnes a day in the early days of the eruption, compared to 510,000 tonnes per day emitted when planes are flying as normal over the continent. That means a cut of 340,000 tonnes a day in Europe. There was even some hint that the ash, should it settle, could give our gardens a boost because it contains a variety of elements and nutrients that can help regenerate the soil.

But all that is over now. From today, friends stranded in New York will return. Friends who might have been at the Bolivian People’s World Conference on Climate Change have by now made their peace with the fact that no matter how fantastic and useful the conference might be, it was probably a happy accident of nature that they didn’t fly there and that video conferencing is both appropriate and effective.

For me, I’ve been grateful for the peace of the last few days. I admit to secretly loving the way nature throws us these curveballs from time to time. Whether they are random or part of some higher ‘plan’, they are a welcome opportunity to reassess so much of what we take for granted. It has been a chance to ‘talk’ to my dad and explain to him why the sound of jet engines isn’t really music to me anymore, why I haven’t flown anywhere in 4 years, why I believe there is work for all of us to do on the homefront before we jet off somewhere exotic, and to remember that the earth is talking to us all the time.

We just need to tune in, in order to hear what she is saying.

Originally posted here.

Pat’s pevious AlterNet post can be found here.

© Pat Thomas 2010

In the run up to the British general election, Pat Thomas says the various party manifestos are starved of sound policies on food security and sustainability.  

Food is a four letter word. Or at least that’s the impression given by the election manifestos of the main political parties. Most of the documents devote a demure handful of paragraphs to the issue of food. Reading them you’d think that Britain was populated with some sort of 61-million-strong super race that had evolved beyond the need to eat every day.

Not long before Barack Obama took office, author and campaigner Michael Pollan wrote a lengthy and impassioned open letter to the President Elect, the ‘Farmer in Chief’, urging him get to grips with the way that food intersects with every area of our lives. Climate change, energy use, pollution, toxic chemicals, health, the global economy, social justice, animal welfare; every issue that is important eventually finds its way back to the food system. He urged the resolarisation and the reregionalisation of the American food supply and recommended a back to basics approach that even included a federal definition of “food” – as distinct from “junk food”. Every politician should read this letter – but a trawl through the manifestos of the UK’s political parties suggests that, with the possible exception of the Green party, none did.

Let’s start with the common ground. All the parties promise to reform the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) – an easy promise since CAP is up for reform by 2013 anyway. Whether any of them really get the better deal for UK farmers as promised remains to be seen. Likewise most talk about reforming the EU Common Fisheries Policy – again a process that is already in place. All the manifestos talk about creating a supermarket ombudsman – another easy promise since earlier this year the Competition Commission, after years of lobbying by food and consumer groups, strongly advised that we needed a body specifically to monitor supermarket behaviour and to enforce the Groceries Supply Code of Practice (GSCOP), which came into force in February of this year. At that time the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills finally accepted this recommendation and committed to forming such a body. Likewise nearly all the parties commit to clearer labelling of food, particularly with regards to country of origin. The Liberal Democrat manifesto, in fact, makes no commitment to food beyond these areas.

Labour, the Conservatives and the Green Party also commit to encouraging more ‘grow your own’ schemes and (to varying degrees) to more access to allotments. Labour and the Greens also commit to more nutritious and to free school meals and to encouraging schools to have more vegetable gardens. The Conservatives focus a great deal on schools in general, but the only nod to food is a suggested a ban on vending machines.

From here the parties diverge into a variety of largely half-baked commitments and not terribly innovative ideas.

The incumbent Labour government has put a figure on its sustainable food plan – £1 billion. To those of us struggling to meet our mortgages, that may seem like a lot. But in reality it’s a pretty small investment – less than the cash commitments for education, health, transport and defence – and there is no real detail of how this food money will be spent.

Labour also makes a promise to balance “the multiple uses of land: safeguarding food security at the same time as enriching our natural environment; protecting distinctive landscapes while enabling environmentally sensitive development”, a range of diffuse promises all rooted in the same system of production that has got us into trouble in the first pace. Implicit in the document is the idea that we can somehow balance an equation that has never before been balanced; i.e. we can produce mountains of food cheaply, pay our farmers good profits, keep prices at the till low, and at the same time protect the environment, our soil and biodiversity.

The thrust of the Conservative argument is to ‘Buy British’ – a fantastic example of how to take a good idea and turn it into campaign slogan. They are a little sketchy on the details of what buying British actually means except where meat is concerned. The party want consumers to be assured that “meat labelled as ‘British’ is born and bred in Britain”.  

In all this ‘Buy British’ fervour it’s easy to forget that labels can mislead. A Union Jack on the label can be used to cover all kinds of unacceptable practices such as massive indoor dairy facilities where the cows never see the light of day, battery chicken operations, British scallops obtained by dredging the ocean floor, British livestock fed on food containing GM soya and maize and…well, you get the picture. Likewise, it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility, given our addiction to wasteful transport in the food system, that British born and bred meat will still be sent elsewhere to be processed and packaged before being sent back to the UK for sale.

UKIP get around this by proposing: “…labels that differentiate between ethically-produced and non ethically-produced food products”, though this begs the questions: why would anybody consciously choose non-ethical products and why not just ban them outright? Where meat production is concerned this is exactly what the Green Party proposes: to “phase out all forms of factory farming of animals and enforce strict animal welfare standards generally, including in organic agriculture”.

On the subject of GM and labelling, the Conservatives do make a commitment to better labelling of foods that may contain GM ingredients so that consumers can choose to buy or not. Again fair enough in principle, but what is the implied message here? That GM is inevitable and that we should leave it to market forces decide if people want to eat it? Is a label the biggest muscle a proposed Conservative government has to flex when it comes to genetically modified food? And where is the recognition that once GM is in the marketplace it can never be taken out again – effectively removing our freedom of choice regarding GM or non-GM foods?

Labour and the Liberal Democrats don’t mention GM food at all. UKIP jumps on the labelling bandwagon, but hedges its bets once more. The party vows to: “Continue to oppose the production of GM crops in Britain” whilst remaining “open to evolving scientific advice”. How different this is to the Green Party commitment to “Support GM-free zones and continue to work for a complete ban on genetically modified food in Europe.”

On the basis of the manifestos alone, and not just the information contained in them, but the language used to convey that information, the Green Party distinguishes itself from the others both in terms its understanding of the role of food in our lives, cultures and economies, and in the provision of some more concrete proposals to ensure a better, cleaner, fairer food supply.

Its manifesto acknowledges the role of small, mixed farms in providing the UK with a healthy diet and food security and makes clear commitments to: “Localise the food chain, including assistance for small farms, starting farmers’ markets, farm box schemes and locally owned co-ops”; to “set new targets every five years and a minimum conversion of 10% of UK food production to organic every five years”. It also commits to reducing the dominance of supermarket chains through a range of measures that go beyond the ombudsman to: “vigorously enforcing monopoly legislation against the existing largest chains; prohibiting new out-of-town retailing”, and “requiring parking charges for private car parks with exemption for the disabled” and “insisting that 50% of retail floor space in all new developments is affordable space for local small businesses”.

If only the manifestos of those likely to be in power after May 6th would go this far in their thinking.

Even so, there is more to be done in this area….

For the full version of this article, including some additional thoughts that should be  incorporated in every food manifesto, click here.

Pat’s previous AlterNet post can be found here.

© Pat Thomas 2010.

“The people are revolting” – as the old joke goes. But revolting against what? And just who are this era’s revolutionaries?

The metaphorical, if not actual, role of the revolutionary is to have a vision. It is to overthrow a tired status quo, to liberate the enslaved – whether they are physically enslaved or whether they are bound to ideologies that no longer function. The revolutionary tends to be a free thinker, a liberal concerned with a fairer deal for all. Rightly or wrongly (and for blogging expediency this is a greatly simplified view) the revolutionary wants to move us forward.

The new revolutionaries, however, have emerged from some freakish opposite dimension. They are ultraconservatives, fighting for poorer health, poverty, ideological enslavement, wider gaps between the haves and have nots, the pre-eminence of ‘rights’ over needs, unlimited economic growth even if it leads to societal and planetary collapse and most incomprehensible of all Sarah Palin for President.  If the inconsistencies and contradictions weren’t so funny they would be truly frightening.

Their revolution is based in fear rather than vision. It is a collective, but completely unconscious and poorly conceived uprising of the all-too-common man who, after years of media scare stories about the coming Armageddon, feels that he is losing everything and paradoxically has nothing to lose. It’s the collective equivalent of the guy who goes berserk with a gun in a gas station because the mini-mart didn’t have his favourite kind of donut.

This ‘Tea Bagger’ revolution has nothing to do with what is really wrong, nor is it intended to fix anything. It is just a senseless acting out of what Robert Bly called the Sibling Society – a society populated by emotionally inarticulate adults of the late post-war generation who have come to be ruled by consumerism, professional, personal self interest and narcissism.  The end result? Emotionally stunted or “half-grown adults”, intent on their own agendas, and incapable of fulfilling their parental, nurturing and leadership obligations to the next generation. In short, a society populated by a bunch of pseudo-adolescents who want everything all the time and who can’t think past their own childish tantrums to the damage they are doing.

Which brings me to my second point – where are the real revolutionaries? The ones who understand the complexity of modern life and the urgent need for change and are agitating to move us forward within that framework.

A few years ago my more liberal activist pals and I would toss around words like ‘revolution’ with glee. Every baby step towards sustainability, every minor green victory was the social tipping point that would prompt the people to rise up and demand a more sustainable, more fair, more inclusive world. Every assault on human dignity, on the wholeness of the planet, on the destruction of culture and community, was seen as the final spark that would ignite the flame.

We’d done the research, we’d got the data, we had charts and graphs and we’d seen the future. We were ready for the revolution.  Sociologists even gave us a name – the Cultural Creatives – the ones with the education and intelligence, the depth and breadth of understanding, to envision a better world and to drive meaningful change. Paul Hawken called us the ‘movement of movements’. But I see precious little movement here and definitely nothing revolutionary. So where the hell are you guys?

Watching events unfold I can’t help thinking that we are all victims of a bigger agenda. That there is a political expediency in letting such extreme childish behaviour run its course.

The environmental and social problems we face are complex and the solutions we need must acknowledge that complexity – and that makes policymaking difficult. Policymakers like clear cut options, and the truth is we are way beyond that reality now. But keep the focus on the extremes, and the voice of the educated  middle eventually gets lost – and then ignored. And without all those tiresome people – the ones who take a long-term view and see both sides of the story –policymaking is so much easier.

In any hierarchy the organisation can only be as complex as the guy at the top. In this respect Americans can thank their lucky stars and stripes that they have a leader who appears to have a degree of complexity. In the UK the race for Prime Minister is between ‘dumb and dumber’ where both candidates have lost sight of the issues and each seems determined to outdo the other in terms of childishness tantrums and meaningless rhetoric. The prospects for our own ‘sibling society’ are not encouraging.

Back in the US of A the thing I find most bewildering is that these ultraconservative ‘revolutionaries’ are being framed merely as Average Joes exercising their right to protest.

Not long ago environmental campaigners, engaged in largely peaceful and lawful activism were reframed as a major terrorist threat on US soil. Documents released a few years ago show that a private security company run by former Secret Service officers spied on Greenpeace and other environmental organisations from the late 1990s through at least 2000. Two years ago in the UK activist group Plane Stupid was infiltrated by an aviation industry spy and last year it was revealed that EDF – the French energy giant – was illegally spying on environmentalists and infiltrating their ranks. 

It may well have been the abuse of basic civil liberties and long arm of the law coming down on them – for instance by removing their right to take part in protests – that has driven many green protesters underground. Many in the environmental  movement now seem happy to be pacified with ‘green consumerism’ and the lie that they are doing their bit with every solar powered cappuccino whisk they buy.

The new conservative revolutionaries – the ones who think their President is a closet ‘mooslem’ and Guantanamo Bay is a holiday camp – are throwing not just insults but punches and bricks, and they are making death threats  in order to influence government policy. In short, they are seeking to “(i) intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion”.  Doesn’t that put these fine patriots in direct breach of the Patriot Act?

Aren’t they just domestic terrorists? And if so isn’t it time they suffered the appropriate penalties?

In the mean time, what will it take for these Cultural Creatives, this movement of movements, to stop trying to shop its way out of trouble and start its own visionary revolution for a better world; something more inspiring and inclusive than name-calling and flag-waving.

Seriously, what will it take?

Read more by Pat Thomas here and here. Vist Pat’s website, Howl at the Moon, here.

Pat’s previous AlterNet post can be found here.

News agencies, newspapers and especially the blogs of Big Agriculture and the livestock industry are rubbing their hand with glee. A new analysis claims that meat may not have as great a climate impact as has recently been reported.

The paper, Clearing the Air:  Livestock’s Contribution to Climate Change, suggests that figures in the UN 2006 report Livestock’s Long Shadow – which says that livestock is responsible for 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions – are unfairly compared to emissions from transport.

The basis of lead-author Frank Mitloehner’s beef is that while the livestock figures are based on a comprehensive life-cycle analysis which even includes emissions from land clearance, the figures from transport are less comprehensive. If they were, he argues, transport’s contribution would be greatly increased. This may well be true. And maybe one day we will live in a world where our understanding of transport’s contribution to climate change will be based on embedded emissions instead of smoke and mirrors. It’s certainly long overdue.

Likewise, most food campaigners accept that Livestock’s Long Shadow is a flawed report. Its recommendation of more intensive livestock farming, for example, is incomprehensible.

What is less easy to accept is the argument that, since beef production on US soil does not directly involve the clearing of vital rainforests, US producers should be encouraged to continue on a business as usual trajectory and even increase the production of meat and dairy through more intensive farming practices.

For an ‘air quality expert’ Mitloehner – who has borne the brunt of the PR burden for this paper – shows remarkably little awareness of the fact that greenhouse gases do not respect international borders. They don’t get turned away firmly but politely by US immigration. Climate change is an international problem. To paraphrase that old chaos chestnut: if a cow farts in Argentina, it could well cause a tornado in Texas.

The livestock industry aims to double its output globally by 2050 and farm animals, like every other living thing, need to eat. According to David Pimentel:  “More than half the U.S. grain and nearly 40 percent of world grain is being fed to livestock rather than being consumed directly by humans”.

Where will the food for increased numbers of future livestock come from? How many rainforests does it take to preserve every American’s right to a Big Mac? This is why the land use question is important.

A little bit of extra context may also be helpful here. Clearing the Air was originally published in October 2009 and attracted little interest until December 2009 when two events panicked US and European beef producers – the European Parliament event Less Meat = Less Heat, which featured speakers such as Sir Paul McCartney, founder of the UK’s Meat Free Monday campaign, Dr Rajendra Pachauri  Chair of the IPCC and Olivier de Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, making compelling arguments for meat reduction (NOTE: meat reduction, not  total abstinence from meat in our diets, as is so often misreported) and the climate summit at Copenhagen.

The original press release for the 2009 paper noted that the study was “…supported by a $26,000 research grant from the Beef Checkoff Program, which funds research and other activities, including promotion and consumer education, through fees on beef producers in the U.S. It also noted that “Since 2002, Mitloehner has received $5 million in research funding, with 5 percent of the total from agricultural commodities groups, such as beef producers.” Facts that, for some reason, were left off the 2010 press release.

UC Davis may need to invest in a calculator. If you read the funding disclosure document it shows that Big Ag funding accounted for closer to 11 percent of Mitloehner’s funding over the period 2003-09.

The funding of any scientific report or study is germane and should be made plain not only to for the benefit of the scientific community but for an interested public. To find the 2009 press release required journalists to ask questions and do some digging – in the UK only the Guardian newspaper has, so far, tackled the story with any serious intent – which is why most news agencies, newspapers and livestock industry blogs haven’t managed to make the connection. Instead they simply reprinted the press release without asking even basic questions about the authors or the analysis, and used it as a springboard from which to make ridiculous leaps of logic about meat having little or no impact on climate.

You’d expect that kind of sloppy self-serving behaviour from the beef barons and the livestock lobbyists – but shame on the news media for doing such a mediocre job.

Read more by Pat Thomas here . Visit Pat’s webite, Howl at the Moon, here.

Pat’s previous AlterNet post can be found here.