Waiting for gods on machines to save the world – tech and complacency

Late in 2015, I sat in a huge conference centre full of men, listening to talks about the ways that technology would fix the world’s problems. We heard that quantum computing would let us work out how to sythesize fertiliser and transmit energy more efficiently, as well as breaking strong encryption (erm.. horay?). The Internet of Things (IoT) would reduce energy consumption and also make all industries (including agriculture) more efficient and productive. It would allow pesticides to be more quickly and precisely targeted. An IoT guru gave a list of predictions about the future – everyone with self driving cars, more vegetarianism. Finally, he proclaimed confidently “We will survive climate change”, although he gave no guidance about what changes we’d have to make in our lives to make this happen.

Afterwards, I was discussing the talk with an intelligent, nice man who’d also attended. To my horror, he’d taken from this talk that we as individuals didn’t need to do anything particular to fix climate change – the world’s technology is changing at such as fast rate, we would be amazed at what would appear in a few decades to clear things up.

This is my first problem with such a message. ‘Gods on machines’ of the title refers to the ancient greek theatrical ploy “whereby a seemingly unsolvable problem is suddenly and abruptly resolved by the contrived and unexpected intervention of some new event, character, ability or object – a lazy theatrical technique for rounding off a story that’s got a bit out of control” (Wikipedia, thank you). Yes technology has evolved rapidly, particularly around communication. But the tech that controls our energy generation is still largely crude and unsustainable. If we’re talking about new tech that involves engineering – ie changing physical systems in the world, systems that works without requiring HUGE amounts of energy, and without unforseen consequences.. well I’m not sure some huge change is coming soon. The dreamlike complacency that comes from waiting is deadly to our chances of keeping a healthy ecosystem on earth. What’s more, ‘we will survive’ is a biased – in fact nationalist, or even racist – description, with the kind of bias that the speaker doesn’t realise is present. The words were spoken by an American in London. At the moment ‘we’ are mostly surviving, though are homes are getting a bit damp or trashed by storms. People in other parts of the world are already dying from extreme weather caused by man made climate change.

We can’t wait for the god on the machine – it might never come, and if it really does, it won’t be in time, or it might have its own ideas, like gods tend to.

There’s a story that goes something like this, we’ve all heard it – an intrepid crew are stranded in a station, far from home. Oxygen or supplies are running out in the station, but there isn’t enough fuel to get back to base. The scientist has locked themselves in the lab, talking of some wonderful machine that can get them there… the scientist has been gone a while now. Some members of the team want to wait, others want to go. Eventually, they ALWAYS chose action over inaction – they set out, find ways of stretching the fuel… it’s still not enough, but at the last moment, the scientist appears on a prototype machine. It’s going thunk-a thunk-a and vibrating like crazy, but they manage to get most of the crew home before it blows up and they have to spend another 50 years working on it.

What are we waiting for? We need to invest massively in renewable energy and energy conservation now, we need to work together to reduce our consumption. What we can achieve might not be enough to prevent some further temperature rises, but it’s better than just waiting for something that might not happen. And maybe it can be enough…

My second issue with the message of events like this is that when you are selling a tech product, the world’s problems and their solutions are seen via the lenses of the large companies that you are selling to. And that old chestnut applies, ‘when all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail’.

What if the problems are partly political? For example there was much talk about the looming food crisis – a growing population and not enough food – and the technological solutions to this problem. What we didn’t consider was the wider context. For example, the financial systems that make farmers in countries with hunger problems give up land for luxury crops to sell overseas, and the large amount of land dedicated to animal feed. What if small scale, low tech efforts (like regenerative agriculture) might actually be a better solution to hunger? This might not be part of the remit of a tech conference, but we tech people shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking we and our clients are the wizards with the solutions to all the world’s problems.

Protesting at the Paris Climate negotiations

I’m just back from an intense weekend in Paris, protesting with Friends of the Earth, 350 and everyone, to demand strong action on climate change.

Because of the recent attacks, most of the the actions were kept separate from the conference centre where the powerful and mighty were talking. Friends of the Earth (Ollie!) in particular had done a great organisation job getting people over to Paris.

The actions were diverse and beautiful. With FOE, we split into little groups and spread through the city to spell out CLIMATE JUSTICE PEACE, chatting in broken frenglish to locals who were overwhelmingly interested & positive; the lovely waiter who let us sticker him ‘Exigeons la justice climatique!’, the mum on the metro who came over to ask about the actions and give her support, the granny collecting stickers for her granddaugher, activists from across the world bumping into each other here there & everywhere.

FOE activists use geo-location to spell out Climate Justice Peace in Paris

After that we set off for the Red Lines action at the Arc de Triomphe, a sea of red symbolising the limits that we mustn’t pass, red flowers to mourn the dead from war, terror and climate change, creative, funny and angry banners and chants,  and giant inflatable blockades bouncing everywhere, surrounded in turn by lines of serious looking riot police in grey… one of them might have actually smiled at one point but it’s hard to tell.

350 video showing the Red Lines action

The next action was to form a chain around the Eifel Tower… there were so many of us that this lead to an impromptu march from Arc de Triomphe to the Eifel Tower, 15,000 strong, and a sit in on the bridge.  The feeling of empowerment and community was intense.

15,000 Protesters form an inpromptu march from Arc de Triomphe to the Eifel Tower

Some thoughts on the agreement itself and what’s next:

1. Getting world leaders to agree that temperatures must rise no more than 2 degrees with an aim of 1.5 degrees is a big achievement. It’s going to be a huge boost for people fighting for action on climate change – we can demand that our Governments take action to meet this target and call them out on their hypocrisy.
2. The agreement is nowhere near enough to prevent a 2 degree rise. The emission reduction targets in the agreement are based on  voluntary ‘pledges’, which are currently not enough to keep warming below 2 degrees. Each country’s contribution must be reviewed and strengthened in 5 years, but it’s not the immediate action we need, to keep 80% of fossil fuels in the ground. The agreement makes no reference to fossil fuels, instead it talks about achieving “a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century“. This vague wording could let people slime off the hook with crazy geo-engineering schemes, ‘let’s wait for fission’, and other such dangerous bollox, rather than putting efforts into just reducing the emissions that are causing the problem. The agreement was also flawed in its exclusion of human rights and indigenous rights, among other areas.

What next for us?

There are so many groups forming across the world to demand our survival, and this is where hope is. A particular star was the speaker from the Lancashire Nanas against fracking. She talked about how community action on the environment  can bring people together across the political spectrum.

In the UK specifically, we can challenge our Government on:

• Why are they cutting the solar tariff feed in?
• Why are they blocking onshore wind farms?
• Why aren’t they urgently funding a renewable energy infrastructure?
• Why are they actively pushing & funding fracking?
• Why are they subsidising the fossil fuel industry?

We need to pile in en masse to challenge them on each of these areas, on the streets, in their inboxes and phone lines, at their public meetings and review, like a giant human snowball full of rocks heading for Downing Street. Let’s do it!!! 

There are local groups you can join, from the big environmental charities to independent action groups with a specific focus like divestment or fracking, and if you can’t find one you can start 1 – even if it’s just you, your friend and a Facebook page!

Links:

350 – campaign on Divestment (persuading organisations to remove their investments and pension funds from fossil fuel companies)

Friends of the Earth – check out their Asad Rehman, a powerful & passionate speaker on climate change

Greenpeace

Frack off UK – do you want climate changing, water polluting, earthquake causing fracking near you, when we could be building wind or solar instead? Nor do these people.

Some inspiration – The Climate Angels , Rev Billy & the Stop Shopping Choir – if you are a bit theatrical, maybe you’d like some performance protest like these folks. Who doesn’t want to dress up as an angel or polar bear and demand justice, or try to exorcise your local evil law firm?

If you’re religious, your spiritual affinity group might be taking action on Climate Change. There’s Christian Aid, Muslim Climate Action, and small independent groups like Scottish Pagans against fracking, to mention just a few.

UK Green Party leader Natalie Bennet poses with Muslim Climate Action members in Paris

About the agreement:

Bill McKibben’s summary of the Paris talks – Climate Deal – the pistol has fired, so why aren’t we running? 

NY Times write up of key points of the agreement

Love, sentimentality and nature

What’s the difference between love and sentimentality? What does it mean for us a wild humans?

Love for nature can get squashed down to a half love for the domestic species that we share homes and cities with.  It’s not hard to understand why you might be more attached to an animal that likes you and offers you affection that the birds, insects and city mammals that rush by without a care for your existence. I call it half love because it can come with rejection – a disgust and unwillingness to accept the more animal aspects of their behaviour – the dead birds, the litter trays and picking up poo in the park, fighting, rolling in fox poo and leg humping. It can come with a unwillingness to see the other’s nature – in some cases pets get anthropomorphised, from cute names and outfits, to human readings of their behaviour.

Wild animals that are near our lives are harder to sentimentalise – they don’t need us, so there’s no need on their part for submissive behaviour and affection with an aim. Their animal nature is in plain sight, as they come into conflict with our city lives, just by living, making homes, mating, and raising their young, in all their smelly, unashamed noisiness, those foxes keeping us awake with their incredible sex lives. With wild birds there can be a partial relationship of need, but the animals themselves remain for the most fearful and beyond our responsibility in their frequent illness and death.
It wouldn’t be possible to maintain the attachment we have for a pet for wild animals, without opening a mini hospice.. which some kind souls do. I remember seeing a baby bird in the gutter as a child, and persuading my mum to take it home, where we kept it in a box and tried to feed it worms. My parents must have known it was going to die, but kept on with the care for my sake. It was a creamy grey colour under a few feathers, and for years after we found it, I couldn’t eat [redacted] soup because of some association with its alien helplessness and death. It’s challenging to love something brittle, ill, and very different to you. I haven’t rescued (as in housed and cared for) an injured wild animal since though I deeply admire the people who do.

The love that humans have for pets sometimes shows its limits. A while ago, there were a bunch of stories in the media about the way that pet cats were put down en masse in the UK at the start of the second world war. It just became this done thing. The owners’ attachment could be discarded. At the other end of the scale, back in the safety of an emotional range that goes from fear to sentimentality and no further, you have the disaster movies where the happy family unit escape fire and flood, saving and being saved by their dog many times, while messy, panicking people outside their golden sphere die all around. This emotional range, as the lady in the Piano Teacher said of a mediocre performance, before she pissed herself in a carpark from desire and sabotaged her love rival’s career with a pocketful of glass, is “dripping with sentimentality and indifference”.

When it comes to eating habits, it’s possible to love your pets, but happily eat meat from animals raised in factory conditions.

Wild animals that live far away can be safely sentimentalised as their vulnerability, death, dirt, smell and needs are far away. I don’t think humans are ‘superior’ in some way – we have all the characteristics we find disturbing in our animal siblings, and worse, an inability to see this, and a ruthless, systematic indifference to suffering characterised by factory farming, that goes beyond any cruelty shown by a more innocent predator to its prey. The sentimentalisation of wild animals can take the form of entertainment – loving the cartoons, animations and documentaries that show their beauty and character, while posessing a vague indifference to the survival of their species in the wild, their loss of habitat from direct competition with humans or climate change. A picture of a beautiful wild creature picking its way through a forest goes up on Facebook… the question is ‘are they domesticated?’. ‘Can I have one?’ I remember a vegetarian friend long ago, back when I was not, loving the animated film about the tap dancing penguin, but being suspicious about climate change, changing the conversation back away from this zone of discomfort. The cartoon had warmth, heart, and love – this was reality, starvation and death, and their relationship with our purchases, work and leisure was not.

What’s sentimentality? It’s is a hygienic, neutered form of love, that does us a disservice as humans.

What’s going to lead us out of our sentimentality to love? Not me moaning on my blog. Maybe the same crazy people, those who dress their cats in suits, those who have daily conversations with a bird they’ve named Mr Robin, those who love tap dancing penguins, who also have a deep connection to wild animals in their beauty, strength, dirt, desperation, and freedom. It’s good that we are as weird, inconsistent, unpredictable, vulnerable and ALIVE as wild animals – somehow from that we might be able to protect them from the ruthless processes and machines we build around our needs.

Pets as toys – animals, free will and consent

A bit of a veer in topic. I’ve been thinking recently about how pets and wild animals are treated.

A particular memory – a friend’s giant fluffy persian cat, which retreated with great dignity and sadness from my attempt to stroke it.
You realised that almost every human it met had reached out their sticky hand to touch it’s beautiful fur, and it didn’t like it. I don’t know if I’m reading too much into it to imagine in the sadness a lack of security and ease. A memory of my own – a much younger me sitting in a pub with a boyfriend & his friends. They’re talking about something I don’t understand and am not interested in. I am welcomed and patronised. Looking back, my presence is decorative and symbolic. At I don’t know why they’re being nice to me, and though I am meeting some basic need of my own having a boyfriend and the company of a group, I feel uncertain of my welcome.

Pets have often been bred for extreme characteristics that humans find cute or amusing. The hugely fluffy cat, the dog like a pom pom, or with tiny legs and a long back. They say a dog’s not for Christmas, extending that I’d say it’s not just to satisfy our aesthetics either. Anyone who really loves their pet knows that pets are smelly, emotional, wilful beings with their own likes, dislikes and needs, just like humans, even if we’ve warped their shape and responses to try to make them into a toy. How much this has happened to humans in positions of powerlessness, particularly women, is an interesting thought.

An animal’s choice to avoid contact is often taken lightly, as an amusing challenge. I’ve seen humans use our physical advantage to overpower pets, their escape attempt is laughed at – because of course we aren’t doing anything wrong, we just want to cuddle them. I’ve been that person too. The more I think about it, the more this makes me uneasy.

When it comes to wild animals we haven’t had the same impact on the animal’s physical form, but we remove their freedom to live
as they choose though the destruction of habitats on a large scale (e.g. buying products that use unsustainable palm oil or wood) or small
(e.g. that tree’s taking up too much light/ let’s put a patio in and get rid of all those weeds). The impact on the wildlife using these habitats isn’t considered, or if it is, its in an abstract way, separate from your own actions.

I know I have been guilty of treating pets as toys, without a will of their own, and guilty of dissociating my every day actions from the starvation and death of wild animals.

If I always thought of animals as people, or people as animals – all of us as the same thing anyhow, as agents, maybe that would help. The difference between us is really not so big.

Fossil fuels and selling doom

How many times has this happened… you talk to someone fairly reasonable about man made climate change, they argue that other things can cause climate change (solar activity! volcanoes!), and when you persuade them that industrial civilisation is doing enough to cause it without any help, they go for Doom. ‘I’ll be dead, what does it matter’. ‘There’s nothing we can do’. ‘There’s no point us stopping using oil, India and China won’t’. ‘We’re overdue to be wiped out anyway (list of volcanos, meteors, flipping magnetic poles etc)’.

Something odd’s going on. Have we always been this resigned, inactive and generally cowardly?

This is not the human spirit we’re shown so often in films, and about half the time in life – the spirit that never gives up despite all the odds, that keeps on walking to the goal when supplies won’t last another day, that fights on even when reinforcements aren’t coming. How did we get broken so badly?

When I hear this argument for inaction – an argument for why I don’t care – I think of fossil fuel industry PR strategy. They have some masters of the art on their side. If you can persuade people that they are complicit, that they wouldn’t survive without an oil economy, facing up to the damage it’s causing becomes difficult. It’s made more difficult still by the global scale of the problem, the behemoth of oil-based industry, and our relative powerlessness, so difficult that a childlike negation of responsibility is easier. Maybe there’s some kind of guilt in there too – an acknowledgement of the horrible destruction the society that we enjoy is causing in the natural world (the mass extinctions and loss of habitats).

But climate change won’t help that! Unlike some other ‘collapse of civilisation’ paths, this one takes most of our co-habitees with us.

Typical for my blog, this is an old school grumble. Environmental campaigning organisations like Greenpeace & Friends of the Earth seem to have the right idea in projecting the idea of joining a growing community who are fighting together to change society.

And locally, a diverse group of initiatives such local food growers, divestment campaigns, nature-based spirituality groups and renewable energy schemes are helping to build that community.

Cult of sociopathy

A disclaimer before I get stuck in. I’m not an expert on sociopathy or related conditions. This blog is about sociopathy as it’s popularly understood in our culture, rather than the condition itself (if there is such a thing).

I was on a trip with a friend many years ago, and we were arguing about ethics in business. Out of the blue he turned to me and said, with the pride of a 5 year old who’d learnt to ride a bike, ‘I’m a sociopath!’.

I laughed at him because his naïve pride seemed so at odds with the idea of a sociopath (unless his goal was to be honest while making me think he was cute, which worked). But his pride was interesting. Among his young, high level City colleagues & friends, it seems that sociopathy was an accomplishment, a sign that you’ll go far. The implications of this for the choices businesses make are scary.

Moving over to popular culture, particularly US films, sociopathy and psychopathy seem to be treated like a modern day superpower. Cite, Dexter – the killer who kills other killers – a twist on a superhero story. The idea of a superpower of ruthless, objective indifference is found far & wide.  As Angelina Jolie fans know, she stole the show in Girl Interrupted with her portrayal of a character with sociopathy. She was more interesting, more intelligent, more driven, more fun, and the incredibly powerful acting made her character’s fate seem irrelevant. On to another Jolie film – Mr & Mrs Smith, where the a golden couple are portrayed as contract killers. In contrast to their dull suburban neighbours, they can dodge bullets, kill efficiently, use their networks and social skills to manipulate the world to their advantage. Sociopathic behaviour is held up for admiration again and again in less obvious ways – to pick a few at random, in the comedy this is 40, where the couple at the centre of the film bond over their ability to lie about their harsh treatment of another parent at their children’s school, in the series Orphan Black where Alison’s efficiency in dealing with murder and body disposal is presented as an endearing strength.

What’s behind this? I think that fear and a feeling of powerlessness might be the root. Our longing for a superpower that stops the horror of the world, or at least saves us, is deep. I feel that horror with the world wars and the atrocities that were committed during them is a strong driving force behind the superhero phenomenon, the films & comics where the dreadful thing is averted and the hero saves the day. The contrast with European cinema, where everybody tends to have a miserable time is striking. Rooting for a vulnerable character is terrifying. Associated with a vulnerable character who gets hurt, hurts. Why would anyone want to do that when they could disassociate, feel clearly – ‘I’m not you’. And better still, associate with someone who saves the day, or at least themselves, through their detachment.

The direction our human culture is going in can feel like a ratchet of terror and destruction. I’m thinking specifically of climate change and the wars and misery it’s starting to seed, the destruction of natural habitats and our beautiful co-habitees, and a tightening of government control that stops us challenging this state of affairs. Everyone can feel it in some way, whether they blame it on capitalism, greed, ‘foreigners’, house prices or aliens. Specialised film genres like Disaster play out our fears of an end to civilisation as entertainment, as Horror entertains us with our fear of death, then slightly relieved because we’ve parcelled it up into fiction, we go back to the everyday.

And the fear builds up again, relentless. It’s no wonder we want a superpower. And you start to think, what if that time you really weren’t that sad at that funeral, what if that time you really didn’t care about something but pretended to, was a sign of this secret power, a calling? Needless to say I disagree. The superpower we really need is to see the horror, and not dissociate from it. Easier said than done.

Full Fact’s election fact checking needs to dig deeper

I was very excited, a few months ago, to hear of the launch of an independent political fact checking organisation in the UK called Full Fact.

This excitement turned to disappointment when I checked their pages on the TTIP trade agreement and the NHS. I found the article to be overly reliant on official reassurances, without considering the wider context – more on this in a later blog, as I want to focus on election fact checking here.

I put this to the back of my mind, but had a horrible shock in March, when 38 Degrees, a campaigning organisation that I respect, posted a link to a Buzzfeed article that purported to contain ’10 claims from the leaders debate – fact checked’ – this referred to the leaders debate between Cameron and Miliband. The article was written by Full Fact.

It contained an shallow and in some cases misleading analysis of the statements made by Cameron and Milliband.

Cameron’s assertion about the number of people in employment was treated at face value. He claimed that there were “1.89 million more people in work since the 2010 election”. The article checked the official stats, accepted the claim, and just issues a minor tap on the wrist for double counting people with two jobs. The Full Fact answer never questioned the definition of ‘in employment’ used by Cameron. The fact that this figure includes people on the Conservative Government’s ‘workfare’ schemes, and people with part time jobs and zero hours contracts which in no way provide a living wage, but which have increased proportionally, was never raised in the response.

Statements about economic claims were also misleading. One of the claims analysed was Miliband’s claim that “a Labour government would inherit a £75 billion deficit”.

The Full Fact response acknowledged that this amount would be inherited, but went on to say reassuringly “But on current forecasts and based on current spending plans, the UK is currently expected to get back in the black by 2018/19.” This is utterly misleading, conflating deficit (overspend in a particular time period) with total debt, which will certainly NOT be back in the black any time soon, and has grown hugely under the con-dem colalition. It is the kind of language used by politicians, and a very poor choice for a fact checking organisation.

Cameron’s claim that “the annual overdraft has come down by one-half as a share of GDP” was accepted without any mention of the fact that the deficit was falling under Labour until the banking crisis, at which point we bailed out the banks and supported a large number of people being made redundant. Failing to point out the understandable cause of higher deficit at the end of Labour’s term gives a false impression, playing to the tory narrative of Labour Governments as profligate.

On to living standards, and Ed Miliband’s claim that “living standards are falling”. Full Fact provide a very brief response to the effect that “recent data and forecasts show that living standards are beginning to rise” (as you might expect, following a recession), but fail to carry out any wider analysis of how this is distributed.

How can such a shallow analysis be considered to be useful?

It makes me realise that any analysis of a politician’s statements must be carried out with an awareness of the wider context, not as a box ticking exercise, checking if ‘computer says yes’ to a particular statistic as it is given. In other words, it needs to be carried out with some political awareness – as one might find with an academic or journalist. Of course, journalists often have a political axe to grind (as do I, being a lefty). Can there be such a thing as impartial fact checking? It would be a good start to assume that political parties are trying to mislead us with statistics (who’d have thought) and look to the definitions of the terms in the stats.

Who are Full Fact?

Full Fact are not funded by any political party.

Their website lists several charitable funders, one corporate sponsor – the City of London corporation, and crowdfunding as a source of income.

I am not suggesting on this basis, or on the basis of the complaints I’m making in this blog, that they are politically biased. I am also basing the complaints on a small number of articles, as time is short – maybe they are not representative. For the articles I’ve read, a tick box attitude seems to be the problem.

However, with the rise of astroturfing, indirectly industry-funded lobbying groups and continued existence of a less than impartial press, I feel strongly that attempts to control the information we read is something we should be vigilant about… so let’s keep checking the fact checkers 🙂

Dave Goulson on bees and modern agriculture

If you have the time, I highly recommend the episode of BBC Radio 4 show The Life Scientific with Dave Goulson, academic and founder of The Bumblebee Conservation Trust. He articulates very clearly the threats facing bumblebees (which he was instrumental in researching), and provides the best response I’ve heard to farmers complaining about the impact of the temporary EU moratorium on neonicotinide pesticides.

Here’s a summary of the key points he makes.

On the threats currently facing bees in the UK (but also applies elsewhere):

They’re facing a three pronged threat from habitat loss, as hay meadows and chalk down habitats are lost, the introduction of bee diseases and parasites from other parts of the world, and the increasing use of pesticides. In his words “essentially they’re hungry, infected with bee diseases, and being gently poisoned all at the same time”.

On neonicotides:

Most of the studies that claimed to show neonicotides were harmless just checked whether the bees were still alive after exposure. He was sceptical about whether they were harming bees, but after requests from the Bumblebee Conservation Trust members, decided to carry out a study. Bees were exposed to the same levels of neonicotides they’d be exposed to if they were gathering food in a field treated with these pesticides for two weeks. A control group of bees were not exposed to neonicotinides. Hives from both groups were the put outside near each other. The success of each hive was measured by the number of new queens produced by each hive. There was a shocking 85% reduction in the number of new queens produced by the hives exposed to neonicotides.

The explanation for this is the effect of neonicotindes on bees’ ability to gather pollen. The pesticide is a neurotoxin which doesn’t kill individual bees outright, but affects their memory.

Dave explains that following on from his and other groups studies, the EU completed a 6 month study that lead to the moratorium, which only applies to the use of neonics on flowering crops. (The British Government voted against this moratorium).

Later in the interview, they played a clip from a farming show, where a farmer was complaining about the failure of his rapeseed oil crop (think fields of bright yellow flowers) due to a pest, laying the blame on the neonicotinide ban.

Dave’s response is to point out that tales of a devastated rapeseed oil crop are somewhat exaggerated – according to the Home Grown Cereals Authority, 2.6% of the crop was lost, half of which was successfully re-sown. Bad weather conditions contributed to the prevalence of the pest.

(In fact a report I found on the Scottish Government site suggests that overall rapeseed oil production rose in 2014 http://www.gov.scot/Resource/0046/00466564.pdf, in Scotland at least!)

He then goes on to counter the farmer’s point that he is carrying out an essential task (the implication is that it should not be hindered in any way), growing food for the nation: we are in no danger of running out of food, instead there are high levels of food waste. (I’d add to this that rapeseed is primarily grown as cattle feed). Finally, he makes the point that if some crop loss is the cost of a living environment, it is more than worth it. Modern agricultural practices are having a devastating effect on the environment, and mean that farmers no longer use traditional methods of reducing pests such as rotating crops, and using resistant crop species. Intensive pesticide (“a blizzard of pesticides… every field is treated with at least 20 different pesticides in a single season”) use has unbalanced the natural environment, removing natural predators of the species that damage crops.

We need to rethink our farming practices and move away from the current short term, quick fix approach of chemical sprays as a solution to everything.

This blog is my paraphrasing of the interview with my own views interjected – to hear it from the horse’s mouth, here’s that link to the podcast again – it’s very interesting, entertaining and well worth a listen.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/tls

CCD killed my bees; GMO corn suspected

shooflyfarmblog

Today I had to destroy my hives.

New beekeepers might find this surprising, that bees can die mysteriously. But it’s becoming a common problem for beeks.

About two weeks ago, I noticed that no bees were coming and going from my two hives. I watched them, and knew they were dead. It wasn’t a total surprise. Last summer, I had die-offs in both hives, so I didn’t rob the honey, hoping the colonies would bounce back. It was my hope that by leaving the honey, then they could survive the winter. They didn’t.

So, today, I opened up the hives — a chore I had been putting off.

Each of my hives held about 65 pounds of honey — a classic symptom of colony collapse disorder (CCD): lots of honey, no bees. (Photo: shooflyfarmblog, Jim Ewing)

What I found was at first surprising. Each of the hives held about 65…

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First Green party meeting, London

I’ve been meaning to set up a blog for various political and social thoughts for ages, but joining the Green party and attending my first welcome meeting tonight has given me the push to do it.

The event was incredibly energising. We were in a room packed with 40 – 50 people who’d all recently joined up, and got introduced to the party by party members including deputy leader Shahrar Ali who gave a forceful overview of Green policies, and took questions. It started off fairly quietly with introductions to party structure and ways to get involved. As the evening went on, the energy built up in the room, particularly when we went round each new member, asking their reasons for joining.

I have this gloomy tendency to expect to be disappointed in other people, but as each person spoke, this dropped away and I was astounded by the clear, rational and passionate points being put forward. There was a big diversity in terms of backgrounds, ages, working lives, and political interests, but we were unified by a sense that we needed a party which was unequivocally and bravely for social justice, which stood against all corruption, could plan for the long term, and give power back to the people of the country. I felt as I was listening that this was a party where the power was surging up from the grass roots, rather than from the top down. The people in that room – from the health service, sciences, academia, carers and parents, social care sector, tech sector, and new grads trying to make their way, were going to go on to be the new generation of volunteers, organisers, campaigners, and representatives, and any one of them, from what I could tell, had more integrity, reason and political awareness than the current crop in power!

I can’t really do them justice, but some of the common reasons for joining up were:

• A feeling that the party was maturing and developing a full range of well thought out policies – the most given reason was ‘I agreed with all or almost all of the policies’ which is a pretty good reason for joining a party!
• The momentum of a sudden uptake in membership, particularly among younger people – your friend joining a party makes it less of an abstract idea, more of a thing you might do yourself
• Massive concern about housing, working rights, and the impact of austerity on society and in particular the most vulnerable
• A feeling that the Labour party was too close to big business, too neo-liberal in outlook, and not committing strongly enough to anti-austerity, re-nationalisation, and green measures
• Complete and utter disgust with the Cons on all fronts
• Concern about climate change, and a wish to do something constructive about it
• A wish to combat the politics of blaming minorities and people receiving benefits, and in particular the rise of U*** and resulting swerve to the right in the media.

These meetings happen regularly as membership continues to rise, and its exciting to think of wave after wave of competent new people coming into the party, and building it up with them.

Another interesting aspect of the meeting was the lack of formality and directness of the arguments made. There was no sense of people trying to climb the greasy pole or hold back their opinions out of fear or respect for power, although there was a sense of personal respect between the attendees.

If you are considering joining up, I’d strongly encourage you do do so!