on the future

Listen to James Lovelock talking to Oliver Norton of Nature.

This is the first occasion I've heard his voice. I don't know why, he must have been on YouTube before. I suppose, generally, I would only check out the dubious loons I come across in print, and their manner in person, on video, usually supports this first impression. It didn't apply to Lovelock when I read him and hearing him speak now confirms that opinion. And he seems like a real nice guy to boot, despite his message.

on the weather

In England it's important to know the weather. Especially these days when I have an allotment and seven potentially free days in which to indulge myself. My browser has a quick link to the BBC-Met. Office local forecast for Gloucester - it's the closest they get. This site gives a full forecast at three hourly periods for the next 24 hours, followed by a brief forecast for the next five days. It changes hourly and most of the time fails to keep up with the weather.

Basically, it doesn't work.

But we keep persevering with it, in hope, because Brits are, as anyone who knows us will tell you, weather-obsessed. Paradoxically, we complain constantly about whatever weather we're given, too wet, too hot, too cold, too windy, and yet we're optimistic it'll improve.

I once heard a Met. Office spokesman explain how difficult it was to predict with any degree of accuracy a short-range forecast, say tomorrow or next weekend; it was much easier to do long-range ones, say in a month's time. A year hence is even better, a relative cinch. It doesn't take a genius to realise what a futile endeavour forecasting is. It will rain sometimes, we're not sure when.

All this is, in some way, confirmed in this forecast for the coming summer; it will be hotter and drier than the previous two summers. "Good news, finally", says BBC forecaster Laura Tobin. "Compared to last summer, which was miserable... it will probably be positive for the majority of people."

YIPPEE!

However, a grey cloud, the Met. Office's government services director, Rob Varley warns, "They are not forecasts which can be used to plan a summer holiday or inform an outdoor event."

Right, as you were....

Nevertheless, allotmenteers, keep your barrels filled!

on t-shirts

The more I look into VideoJug - remember, Life Explained. On Film. - the more I feel I'm being had. Have a look at this clip showing you how to fold a T-shirt. I've got a drawer full of these myself. In fact, these days they're the only shirts I tend to wear: they're easy, comfortable, and quick. Never thought it was a problem until now; I've watched this film five times and each time takes me further from the truth...

ciren bicycle

I've just read that plans are afoot to make our town centre ''more pedestrian-friendly''. I think this will be a good thing. The area known as Market Place lends itself perfectly to a piazza style arrangement - or ''café culture'', as the paper puts it. The current arrangement of two two-lane roads separated by an island and taxi rank/car park isn't realising its potential, plus we have the grand church front as its centre-piece. I don't know how they'll arrange the traffic flow and I don't really care. How can it be worse than it already is? Most of the time I'll walk into town: it's not far, and quite pleasant.

Recently, I've dusted off the bike and intend using it more. It's quicker. It's even quicker than the car at certain times, and there's no parking charges. Not that I would ever pay parking charges: there's plenty of places to park free if you know where to look. But with a bike you don't have to bother with all that. However, I hope they do something better with the cycle routes in the grand scheme. We have them, here and there, but no one thought to join them up.

My front brakes squeal like a pig, and my rears hardly work at all; I fear the cable has stretched. My dérailleurs front and back are temperamental to say the least. I need bicycle repairman! Youtube, normally a good point of call, has so far not come up with the goods. Instead I got a YouTube copy, VideoJug, - tagline ''Life Explained. On Film.'', and three videos on bike care, none of which are particularly any good unless you happen to be an alien just arrived from planet Zogg, or somewhere else where they've never seen a bicycle, however, this one is worth watching for the funny bike-owning guy. I like the cut of his comic jib and don't know why I haven't seen him on telly.

Turning more hopefully to (fanfare of trumpet) How to Maintain your Mountain Bike for Peak Performance!, (that's more like it!) I was amazed to be shown how to wash my bike with soapy water and a stiff brush. Er...? Tell you what, here's that funny guy again in this video where his bike's half-inched, and half-inched some more. Pay careful attention! I'm always worried I'll get back to my bike and find it gone. Still, the walk home isn't far, and quite pleasant.

asparagus

Allotment Tales: Late April

After the forced rhubarb, the next crop we enjoy is asparagus. I say ''we'' but I'm the only one in our house who likes rhubarb. I can't fathom why. Nevertheless, we forced the smallest clump - we have three separate clumps, all inherited from the previous allotmenteer - under an old dustbin. I recommend forcing for rhubarb lovers who can't wait to get their rhubarb under an oaty crumble, with custard. It is the pinkest, smoothest rhubarb you can imagine. It's all gone now - the forced stuff - so it's on to the asparagus.

We've had two bunches from our bed already. We're lucky to have inherited it as a mature bed along with the rhubarb and several fruit bushes. Lucky because new beds shouldn't be harvested for the first three years! Even then, the cutting should be stopped after six weeks, and eight weeks on a mature bed, to allow the crowns to take in energy and gain strength. After the cutting season, the asparagus is left to grow into tall, elegant fronds which look attractive blowing in the breeze and are a coveted prize amongst flower arrangers. Don't let them! They're storing more energy for next year. Only cut the fronds when the berries appear to ripen, and before they fall, and cut them all down to the ground. Then give them to flower arrangers, if still desired.

Asparagus is a good choice for allotments. Considering what they cost in the shop in season, you can recoup your allotment rent in a few cuttings. Last year, our first year, we were eating asparagus 2 - 3 times a week for eight weeks. I noticed it was three quid a pop in the local farm shop! There are many ways to eat asparagus and with all that cutting we must have tried most but simply steaming and serving with butter and freshly ground black pepper wins hands down. Plot to plate in under half an hour - lovely.

adolf hitler & winston churchill

A curious thing that connects both these leaders, apart from the obvious, was their ability to paint. Churchill, it is said, discovered his fondness for daubing in his forties when he needed a calming distraction from politics. Hitler, on the other hand, appears to have done most of his dabbling while a young man, well before politics destroyed him. There's something to be said for art as therapy.

I caught this news item today and was interested to see how good an artist young Adolf really was. Hitler chose watercolours (top) whereas, as I found out later, Winston preferred oils (left). Of course, I had to check his work out too.

I'm not sure but I don't think Josef Stalin or Franklin D. Roosevelt ever painted, more's the pity, though I think Stalin might have enjoyed Photoshop.

it's not the honey, stupid

There was an interesting documentary last night on BBC Four; Martha Kearney was asking, Who Killed The Honey Bee? The honey bee is one creature found the world over and plays a crucial role in maintaining the biosphere. Man, another global creature, has long used bees as a source of food - honey - originally by raiding the food stores of wild bee colonies and then, much later, keeping bees in artificial hives around the home. This is what I believed until seeing this programme.

It's quite a shock to see the commercial scale keeping of bees in America and Australia. In the US, these businesses transport thousands upon thousands of boxed bees across state to pollinate whatever crop is in flower. Cotton, almonds, apples - the sizes of these monocultures are as unimaginable as the truck loads of bees needed to produce fruit. The appalling homogeneity of landscape only adds to the awfulness of this enterprise; we are too big for this world, that is my growing suspicion concerning all our problems.

Inexplicably, honey bees are disappearing at an alarming rate everywhere, except for Australia. They have a number of suspects for the disappearances; viral infections, parasites, cocktails of pesticides, the increased use of monocultures, climate change. However, despite tests a satisfactory truth is not yet forthcoming. Bees continue to suffer ''colony collapse disorder'' (CCD).

It has been predicted that if the bee ever became extinct, then man would follow them within four years. Funding for research into CCD is urgently needed but governments appear not to notice the crisis - one too many crises, perhaps. With many of our leaders and ordinary citizens being urbanites, I'm convinced they think it's a trivial matter of not having honey for tea. But it isn't. The honey is a bonus, a by-product of the bees real purpose on Earth, to pollinate virtually all the land plants included in the food chain. This really could be much more serious than the economic crisis.

the greenhouse

Here's a piece I wrote in March for another website. I was intending to include some allotment stories here, so, by way of a start...

Allotment Tales:
Late March

It's been ten weeks since I was last formally employed in exchange for money and I've settled into a routine so naturally, I can't quite believe it. My biggest fear now is having to go back to work, something that will have to be considered in due course unless providence shines its light upon me for the rest of my working life. For the first time in thirty years of working for a living I realise what ''working for yourself'' and ''being your own boss'' truly mean: literally that.

Needless to say all my working hours have been spent on the patch. We acquired a small greenhouse for nothing, we borrowed a van to collect it and replaced the missing glass by salvaging old wooden casement windows someone had thoughtfully donated to the communal allotment odds-and-sods store (which is in itself a fabulously thoughtful idea). Now we will grow exotics!

Had I still been employed - and I earned quite a decent wage - I may have given up waiting on freecycle and gotten my wallet out and bought a new greenhouse or polytunnel. It would have been so easy. Life is that easy. Too easy when you think of it. A brand new product being manufactured when a perfectly good one is going unused somewhere nearby. Consumerism has conditioned us to earn money by making or things for the marketplace so that we can go out and buy other things made by other people for the market place so they can earn money to buy stuff, maybe the things we made, to keep the economy going. Some people don't even make anything: they buy other people's made stuff, add ''value'' to it (good one that?) and resell it back to the market. Some call this enterprise. Of course, because bogus value has been added to it, it costs more so people need more money so they have to make more new things and persuade more people to make more purchases, and on and on. In control theory this is known as positive feedback; in layman's terms things get bigger and bigger until they go pop! And it's no good sticking a green star on it and calling it sustainable development or sustainable growth because there ain't no such thing. Eventually it'll go pop too; think about it.

Our allotment and that of my neighbours is shaded by trees. This reduces the amount of sunshine on our greenhouse end and reduces his growing potential. We got permission to cut them down but I like trees, so we pollarded them. This means cutting the tops down to the trunk at manageable proportions and allowing the tree to produce new shoots from beneath the bark, in turn these being cut each season to keep the height low and unobstruct sunshine. Now I've never done this before but if it goes to plan the new shoots harvested could be used for supporting beans and things rather than buying imported bamboo canes.

In any event I've recently learned that burning them or letting them rot is not as good as cooking them - turning them into charcoal. It's an astounding fact that the biosphere removes 18 times more CO2 than we humans pump into it. The trouble is this CO2 is soon returned to the atmosphere when the green stuff rots down or is burnt. Charcoal on the other hand is relatively inert and traps the carbon in for long periods. It has been proposed that if green waste is turned into charcoal rather than burnt or composted, and buried in landfills or in the ocean, the planet itself will go a long way to right the CO2 levels in the atmosphere. But will we do that? No, because we are told composting is saving the planet. It's a crazy world, and one day it's going to end and it's our fault.
~
I took the photo (above) today - greenhouse doing fine. no results yet on the pollarding.

small is beautiful, big is ugly

I found a couple of interesting video clips on BBC news. They're both about Spain and harnessing wind power. The first clip illustrates what is appalling about ''wind farms'', and why we shouldn't call them wind farms. Look at the relative scale compared to the surrounding countryside (especially the scene about 2.00 into the clip), it's a large scale industrial invasion, not some quaint farmyard scene. For instance, just think of the tonnage of concrete needed to secure these whirling monsters into the earth! And this is to provide energy for people who live in the cities so that they may carry on ''business as usual''. As there's more of them than those living in the areas of countryside at risk, they'll be justified by due democratic process. Good, isn't it? No, not really.

The second clip is a good news story. But first it's interesting to spot that though the clouds are moving gracefully across the skyline, the turbines are very, very still. For whatever reason - maintenance, mechanical failure, or likely just not enough wind - these things don't work all the time and, on their own, aren't going to provide the energy needed for the towns and cities. As I said, this is a good story because the people of El Hierro (pop. 10,000) have understood this and combined the small number of turbines - just five - with a hydro-electricity plant, thereby storing the energy gathered by the wind by converting it into a head of water to be utilised when there is not enough wind. They claim it, along with existing solar energy systems, will make the island self-reliant in electrical power. This looks like clear thinking. I know we can't easily use the combined system of wind and hydro- everywhere, we're a bigger island, we have big urban areas that need massive amounts of energy and we don't have that ideal topography in the amounts needed. Instead our turbines will need to be backed up by conventional power stations.
Not good.

(i got the) home town blues

James Lovelock's informative and thought provoking Revenge of Gaia ends with a sober vision of desperate human survival in a hot, post climate change planet. Reading the book it's hard to get a handle on whether he's optimistic or pessimistic about the outcome of this crisis. In a newspaper interview he remarks he's an optimist; he knows climate change is going to happen. Enjoy life while you can is his advice. We may have as little as two decades left.

Enjoying life while you can means to me appreciating our world more. Not just nature, or what passes as the natural world in a man-made environment, but civilization; art, science, literature, and history, especially. I was looking for a site on Cirencester 21 - which I think is a local movement involved in transition, peak oil, energy etc. - and ended up on a BBC film archive watching 28 minutes of A Day Out in Cirencester, part of a series made in 1979. I don't know if there ever was a ''Golden Age of Television'' but programmes certainly looked gentler and more quaint in those days. But less superficial maybe. I can't imagine even the Beeb making a series like this today. It's all ''reality'' now, only it isn't really that real. Whereas A Day Out is.

Anyway, this has been my adopted town for the last eighteen years. Recently, I've been feeling an urge to move on to new pastures - maybe further west, or Wales. This little film has made me feel I belong here. I shall have to give it a little think.

on cars

Would you buy a new electric car if your government offered you £5000 towards it? You know, I might.

Rough estimates put the new electric models at twice the retail price of conventional infernal combustion types. I wouldn't dream of paying more than, say, £12000 for any car, so it works out to about a quarter to a third discount. One of the misconceptions I've held is that they don't perform as well. Apparently, they do (or will). The new models can attain speeds of up to 100 mph, and because electric motors produce more effective torque than ICs, they'll manage to accelerate 0-60mph in a few seconds.

Distances per charge are improving too. You'll want that. I mean, you don't want a golf buggy when you can easily get around the golf course on foot. The new Mini-E, according to BMW, will do 150 miles between charges. I expect this doesn't correspond to either 0-60 in 4 seconds or driving at maximum speed but that's a good thing too, isn't it? Not so good is it'll be just a two-seater - the back seats are lost to make space for the enormous batteries.

The downside to this story, the first models aren't expected to be available to us until 2011. Ample time for the recharging infrastructure to be put in place but possibly too late for the climate. In the meantime we have to use our cars more mindfully and less often.

peter funch

Art has always had a mongrel cousin in photography. This is almost certainly down to the latter's provenance in technology; it has been its millstone all along. People who take photographs can't help discussing cameras and lenses, photographers can't keep f-stops, focal lengths, and illumination to themselves. In contrast, artists and art pundits hardly bother in the slightest about brush bristles, the tooth, or what paints they have and what they cost. It's all about the expression.

The flood of cheap digital cameras and the rise of the world wide web hasn't done the cause much good. Sure, it has made photography incredibly accessible and democratic, which must be good. But it's also made it homogeneous and insipid, unconscious prescriptive expression. Few try; I wonder how many Flickr members know about Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ansel Adams, Peter Keetman, and others, or have checked them out.

I still like photography though it's almost too frustrating to actively search out good work. Occasionally by chance, you can stumble across someone who's looking for a new angle on expression or experimenting further with old concepts. Yesterday, while following a series of links about ecology, I found the work of Danish photographer, Peter Funch mentioned on one of the sites. I love his subtle montages of urban street life collectively called Babel Tales; they are fun, some are hilarious and a few quite surreal. It's a simple idea - why didn't I think of that? - but expressed with a certain genius. Worth checking out.

a junk food future

Further to the thoughts on the population crisis, I've just read Lovelock's idea (Revenge of Gaia) that 9 billion people could just possibly be sustained on synthetic food, a industrial concoction of essential nutrients in a suitable base, like junk food. This will relieve the burden of the biosphere to provide agriculturally sourced food, farmland which would be allowed to revert back to nature and return to Gaia's regulatory system.

I get the point: we adapt with sacrifices or perish. But such a relationship with our food is too much sacrifice for me to contemplate and I'm glad I won't have to. It is a bitter irony that those who choose to eat as naturally as possible will contribute to the stress on the natural environment but there it is. Can we afford to make individual choices on global matters? Not with these numbers.

the crowd

Lovelock's, Revenge Of Gaia, introduced me to a new word yesterday, iatrogenic. I shall endeavour to use it obsessively before it slips from memory. If there's one thing I've gotten from reading this book it's clarity and affirmation of what I felt for a while. Basically, human development, though done mainly with good intents, has been a catalogue of mistakes, the worst of which has evolved into an intractable compound of serious errors.

Most of the fears we hear about now - climate change, peak oil, economic failure, disease, poverty, and famine etc. - are all a result of one fundamental cause - the vast and increasing human population. Currently there are about 6 billion human inhabitants on Earth and before this century ends, the projected figure is estimated at 9 billion - half as much again. It doesn't take much imagination to see this as a serious burden both on the planet's ability to sustain that level of human life, and mankind's conscientious drive to ensure prosperity, equality of lifestyle, extended longevity, and growth for each citizen of Earth. We improve our lot to our detriment, it seems.

It can't be the easiest thing to work out but some have come up with the optimum population for a sustainable human existence on a pleasant Earth. Lovelock, for instance, mentions a figure of 1 billion. The Optimum Population Trust gives several figures based on different ''biocapacity'' criteria and further breaks these figures down into different global regions. At a glance, these values are much higher than Lovelock's 1 billion but still much, much lower than present trends. With their new patron, Sir David Attenborough, they have launched a campaign to stabilise the UK population under the slogan, Stop At Two. I don't know why, perhaps it's political correctness, but I can't help thinking it should be, Stop At One. Or even, We Can't Handle No More Kids! Given that the majority of people will ignore this campaign, and even if say 90% went along with it, the population will stay at its current level which is about 4 times their calculated optimum for sustainability. Therefore the campaign appears to favour unsustainability even if enough people take notice and go along with it. Which they won't. Better to stir it up and just say NO.

dabbling

I do like to dabble. I think dabbling is the key to my happy state. Sadness can't hit a moving target so easily.

On at least four separate occasions I have dabbled with a guitar. The first was when, as a 13 year old, a neighbour gave me an old guitar he found in his loft, complete with a play-in-a-day tutorial book. It was a three-quarter size acoustic with a split from the sound hole to the bridge, and I didn't know a single tune in that book.

Seven years later I moved in with a couple of musicians and the guitarist inspired me to buy a guitar. I still have it, a Yamaha acoustic, and have dabbled with it religiously, once every decade for about six weeks a time. I love that guitar. So much so that I'm determined to learn to play at least one song on it before my time is up. And yesterday I decided that song shall be, Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You. It's apt for a dabbler. Also, it's picking rather than strumming but the chords seem easy enough, so it sounds impressive without being impossibly difficult. That's the theory, anyway.

I feel I must do this to honour the instrument, to be whole in myself, and just being happy doing it for the hell of the thing.

life, art & everything

Browsing in Waterstone's recently, I discovered a book on the works of local artist, Ray Hedger. Ray taught me Life Drawing for three terms at the local college and I learned a great deal about observation, anatomy, and art. I understand he was recently disqualified from teaching in schools and colleges because he didn't have all the right teaching certificates, presumably because he's an artist who teaches rather than an art teacher. It's absurd and a real shame. Having had more teachers than I can possibly list, most of whom probably held all the necessary papers, I can say with enough authority that certificates do not make teachers, and I can't understand how a retrograde ruling disqualifying experienced teachers makes any sense. It concerns me that these rules are being set by the myriad of politicians who have little or no experience of the world outside of politics.

Enough of politicians. I copied these following words from the back of Ray's book - I hope they're his though it doesn't actually say - enjoy,

"Life between birth and death is too short for running. One must experience every step, spending time in seeing, hearing, and absorbing. Each hour and each day is unique and should become richer as we get older, through a better understanding of values and a more philosophical outlook. The past is part of the present and part of the future, but one should always be present. The richness of each day depends on our attention to it. To be quiet, gentle, attentive, and to hold to one's path and unique gift of life are ways towards a life that is whole. The meaning of life is in the living. The purpose of art is to compensate for the mortality of the flesh and sustain the immortality of the spirit. The light inside illuminating the darkness outside."

tilting

I don't remember ever liking the idea of wind farms and now I've seen the turbine on Green Park, beside the motorway near Reading, several times I realise I hate the things. There it stands incongruous and arrogant, dwarfing the multi-storey glass office blocks surrounding it, turning its heavy blades indolently though deceptively fast, its tip speed over twice the national legal limit of the motorway below. Coming across it never fails to shock me and the sight of it makes me crazy and like Quixote I feel an urge to tilt at it.

Of course, these feelings were almost entirely motivated by a sense of aesthetics and scale. Out of its sight, I would concede that we would have to bite the bullet and tolerate them in the cause of reducing carbon emissions. Like it's better to cut out a diseased lung than die of cancer, if it must be done for the best then let's do it.

But then I started picking up on voices claiming wind power was a big mistake. Not purely aesthetes or nimby types like me but serious, sound-headed thinkers - reasonable people like John Etherington and James Lovelock. Worse than a mistake, the whole enterprise sounds like a government and business scam. They're being rushed through because there's easy money to be made building them and the government can claim to be green, even though in real terms and in the long run, they cost the consumer more in bills - three times more! - and make insignificant impact on reducing carbon emissions - there is even a good case to suggest they actually increase emissions when factoring in the standby conventional generation needed to compensate for wind intermittency, not to mention the concrete needed in their foundations, and the number needed to make any meaningful contribution to national energy requirements. These things are real and far worse monsters than Cervantes would have dreamed!

I still hold that however horrific a solution may appear, if it achieves overall good and prevents ultimate harm then it should be done. But the more I look into it the more it seems like being a horrible error. I don't want to see what's left of our green and pleasant land turned into dark, satanic mills purely for the benefit of careless urbanites lining their pockets with easy subsidies and governments ticking spurious quick solution boxes. So, for now, and for good reasons;

I'm against ''wind farms''!

note, the image is not Green Park but gives a sense of the inhuman scale of standard aerogenerators. I would have used an image of Green Park but found only ones which deliberately show it in a good angle, either in profile to avoid showing its full span or by selecting a view point which appears to diminish its real size in relation to its neighbouring structures. Being keen enough on photography, I've half a mind to jump in the car and do an honest job of the thing, but maybe it's something you need to see in the flesh to understand.

cold callers

Jehovah's Witnesses are like buses; you never see one for ages and then two come at once. Actually, while I lived in Sydney, one came knocking alone, but he did turn up twice, presumably to make up the average. Smaller population there, it's all relative see.

This morning two young women knock; it's usually solemn suited men. They don't stay to chat - that's remarkable in itself; they admire the astonishing view from my door, hand me the flysheet, tell me I'm welcome to attend a meeting if I want, at Easter!, and promptly leave.

I half want to ask them about global warming but I don't want to discuss Jesus as I know more about Jesus than I do about climate change. However, their good manners make me cautious and I've been conditioned to believe they only ever want to talk about Jesus, but I'm equally aware this might not be true. Are they allowed to talk beyond the safety of their gospels?

The younger one doesn't say anything - they often don't, and I feel sorry for her though I've no cause to do so. She looks trapped in the situation like a... well, like a witness - I never thought of it like that before - and she looks sideways and, her head tilted fractionally down, slightly upwards at her elder sister. It looks like shyness but could equally be deference to her superior, I don't know. One day she may be the one knocking, and talking about Jesus but this morning she is the witness and I wonder what it is she sees.

a transient grace

By chance, as you do, I found myself switching part-way through a BBC Four documentary, Fish! A Japanese Obsession. Four middle-class gentlemen were standing in a shallow river fishing for an 'uncatchable' fish by challenging its territory with a similar fish on a line. When the incumbent fish comes to see the intruder off, it gets caught in a trail of hooks. The fish cannot be baited by normal means as it feeds entirely on rock algae and you can't bait a hook with that. The fish, an ayu, is a delicacy not least, I expect, because the season for catching it is short. Following tradition, the men then sat gathered around a fire on the riverbank to cook and eat their ayu fresh, and chatted.

Asked what appealed to them about this activity, one man said it was like the cherry blossom: it flowers quickly and quickly dies, a transient grace, it appeals to the Japanese. A transient grace, I liked the sound of that...