The virus gave us a chance to change. Are we taking it?
This headline appeared today in the print edition of the Guardian Wednesday 30 December 2020 above the report by Jonathan Watts, and published on the world wide web (Tue 29 Dec 2020) in a section headed:
Jonathan Watts reports under the subheading and introductory paragraph:
Could Covid lockdown have helped save the planet?
Slowdown of human activity was too short to reverse years of destruction, but we saw a glimpse of post-fossil fuel worldWhen lockdown began, climate scientists were horrified at the unfolding tragedy, but also intrigued to observe what they called an “inadvertent experiment” on a global scale. To what extent, they asked, would the Earth system respond to the steepest slowdown in human activity since the second world war?Environmental activists put the question more succinctly: how much would it help to save the planet?Almost one year on from the first reported Covid case, the short answer is: not enough. In fact, experts say the pandemic may have made some environmental problems worse, though there is still a narrow window of opportunity for something good to come from something bad if governments use their economic stimulus packages to promote a green recovery.During the northern hemisphere spring, when restrictions were at their strictest, the human footprint softened to a level not seen in decades. Flights halved, road traffic in the UK fell by more than 70%. Industrial emissions in China, the world’s biggest source of carbon, were down about 18% between early February and mid-March – a cut of 250m tonnes. Car use in the United States declined by 40%. So light was humankind’s touch on the Earth that seismologists were able to detect lower vibrations from “cultural noise” than before the pandemic.The respite was too short to reverse decades of destruction, but it did provide a glimpse of what the world might feel like without fossil fuels and with more space for nature.Wildlife did not have time to reclaim lost territory but it had scope for exploration. Alongside apocalyptic images of deserted roads, the internet briefly buzzed with heartwarming clips of sheep in a deserted playground in Monmouthshire, Wales, coyotes on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, wild boar snuffling through the streets of Barcelona, and deer grazing not far from the White House in Washington DC. Wildflowers flourished on roadsides because verges were cut less frequently.In the global south, the picture was more mixed. Rhino poaching declined in Tanzania due to disruption of supply chains and restrictions on cross-border movements, but bushmeat hunting, illegal firewood collection and incursions into protected areas increased in India, Nepal and Kenya because local communities lost tourist income and sought other ways to care for their families.In Brazil, traditional guardians of the Amazon have been weakened. The Xavante and Yanomami indigenous groups have been strongly impacted by the disease, and the lockdown has kept forest rangers at home. Meanwhile, land grabbers, fire-starters and illegal miners were busier than ever. Deforestation in Brazil hit a 12-year high.Elsewhere, there were health gains, though probably not enough to offset the losses. Providing a little relief from rising Covid death tolls were projections in Europe of at least 11,000 fewer fatalities from air pollution. Breathing cleaner air also meant 6,000 fewer children developing asthma, 1,900 avoiding A&E visits and 600 fewer being born preterm.In the UK, 2 million people with respiratory conditions experienced reduced symptoms. The change was visible from space, where satellite picked up clear reductions of smog belts over Wuhan in China and Turin in Italy. Residents in many cities could also see the difference. In Kathmandu, Nepal, residents were astonished to make out Mount Everest for the first time in decades. In Manila, the Sierra Madre became visible again.But the gains were short-lived. Once lockdown eased, traffic surged back and so did air pollution. In a survey of 49 British towns and cities, 80% had contamination levels that were now the same or worse than before the pandemic. Elsewhere, sightings of distant mountain peaks and wild animals are fading in the memory.The story is equally disheartening when it comes to global carbon emissions, which fell steeply but not for long enough to dent climate fears. Months of empty roads and skies and sluggish economic activity reduced global greenhouse gas discharges by an estimated 7%, the sharpest annual fall ever recorded.That is a saving of 1.5 to 2.5bn metric tons of CO2 pollution, but it merely slowed the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere, leaving the world on course for more than 3.2C of warming by the end of this century. In its annual emissions gap report, the United Nations environment programme said the impact of the lockdown was “negligible”, equivalent to just 0.01Cdifference by 2030.On a more optimistic note, it said ambitious green recovery spending could put the world back on track for the Paris agreement target of less than 2C of warming.There is scant sign of that so far. Although China, the EU, the UK, Japan and South Korea have all recently announced carbon neutral targets by the mid-century, no nation is doing enough to achieve such a goal. Most stimulus spending is going to fossil fuel industries that are making the climate worse rather than to renewables that could make it better. These twisted priorities have raised concerns that the Covid lockdown may end up like the 2008-09 financial crisis, which led to a brief fall in emissions followed by a surge back to record highs.“Based on how little of the roughly $15tn in stimulus spending has gone to green energy and clean tech, I think Covid will delay the transition to a carbon-free future,” said Rob Jackson, the chair of Global Carbon Project. In China, he said, emissions were already back to 2019 levels, while other governments were using the pandemic as an excuse to delay climate action in the aviation sector.In the US, Donald Trump has gone further in his demonstration of crisis capitalism by rolling back a raft of environmental protections and ramping up support for fossil fuels.The situation is not entirely bleak. This exceptional year has strengthened the economic argument for renewable energy, which has proved a robust, cheap alternative during the lockdown. Analysts predict 2020 will confirm the terminal decline of coal, the dirtiest of fuels, and also heighten doubts about investments in oil. Crude prices at one point fell to minus dollars a barrel.By comparison, wind and solar power is stable and clean. “The virus has highlighted the health damage of oil-based transportation through air pollution. We caught a glimpse of a future with cleaner air in our cities without fossil fuel pollution from vehicles,” Jackson said.Whether this is a blip or a turning point depends on action at the national and international level. As the climate-limp stimulus packages have shown, national governments are reluctant to change direction alone. Global cooperation is therefore essential.But here too, coronavirus has proved an impediment. World leaders were supposed to meet in Glasgow this month for a UN climate summit that was designed to ramp up ambition, but that physical meeting had to be postponed until 2021. The virtual gathering that the UK hosts organised instead barely maintained the momentum. Very few of the participating nations came forward with concrete steps.It was a similar story with international biodiversity talks that were supposed to have taken place in Kunming. They have been pushed back until next May at the earliest and recalcitrant nations such as Brazil have been accused of impeding progress by throwing up questions about online processes. As with the climate, it would not be accurate to say this was a lost year in international decision-making, but schedules have definitely been set back even as world leaders warn that time is running out.The necessity for action was driven home by another year of horrifying climate news: 2020 saw record smoke plumes from bushfires in Australia, a freakishly protracted heatwave in Siberia, the most tropical storms ever registered in the Atlantic, devastating blazes in Brazil’s Pantanal wetlands, the highest flood levels recorded in east Africa, unusually devastating cyclones and typhoons in India, Indonesia and the Philippines, the hottest northern hemisphere summer in history, and temperature records in the Antarctic and the Arctic, where winter ice formation was delayed for longer than in any season in the satellite era.January and November registered all-time heat records, while 2020 as a whole is certain to ensure the last seven years are the hottest since measurements began.The interconnectedness of the world’s multiple crises is also increasingly apparent. Epidemiologists and conservationists have warned that outbreaks of coronavirus-like diseases are more likely in the future as a result of deforestation, global heating and humankind’s treatment of nature.“The emergence of the pandemic is not an accident, as there have been repeated warnings for years that we were exerting too much pressure on the natural world by our destructive practices. Habitat loss, intensive agriculture and the over-exploitation of wildlife are key drivers of the emergence of novel infectious diseases like Covid,” said Paul De Ornellas, chief wildlife adviser at WWF-UK.The secretary general of the UN, António Guterres, went further. In an impassioned state of the planet address this month, he declared making peace with nature the defining task of the 21st century. “Humanity is waging war on nature. This is suicidal,” he said. “Nature always strikes back – and it is already doing so with growing force and fury”Work on a truce will have a better chance of getting under way next year with a new vaccine, a new president in the White House, a newfound respect for science and a new awareness of how rapidly change can come. It remains to be seen whether that leads to transformative improvement of the Earth system or a resumption of tinkering around the edges.Reversing years of destruction?
The World Economic Forum headlines "global warming" in this article, reporting recent shocking research results in August this year, but this phrase needs to be replaced by the phrase "global heating. The amount of snow and ice that has melted on Earth in 23 years is:
28 trillion tons
This article by Sophia Ankel, Weekend News Reporter, for Business Insider, was published on the World Economic Forum's website (24 Aug 2020):
A "staggering" 28 trillion tonnes of ice has disappeared from the surface of the Earth since 1994, a group of UK scientists has found.Scientists from Leeds and Edinburgh universities and University College London analyzed satellite surveys of glaciers, mountains, and ice sheets between 1994 and 2017 to identify the impact of global warming. Their review paper was published in the journal Cryosphere Discussions.Describing the ice loss as "staggering," the group found that melting glaciers and ice sheets could cause sea levels to rise dramatically, possibly reaching a meter (3 feet) by the end of the century."To put that in context, every centimeter of sea-level rise means about a million people will be displaced from their low-lying homelands," Professor Andy Shepherd, director of Leeds University's Center for Polar Observation and Modelling, told the Guardian.The dramatic loss of ice could have other severe consequences, including major disruption to the biological health of Arctic and Antarctic waters and reducing the planet's ability to reflect solar radiation back into space.The findings match the worst-case-scenario predictions outlined by the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the scientists have confirmed."In the past researchers have studied individual areas – such as the Antarctic or Greenland – where ice is melting. But this is the first time anyone has looked at all the ice that is disappearing from the entire planet," said Shepherd, according to the Guardian. "What we have found has stunned us.""There can be little doubt that the vast majority of Earth's ice loss is a direct consequence of climate warming," the group wrote.The findings come a week after researchers at Ohio State University discovered that Greenland's ice sheet might have passed a point of no return.According to the researchers, snowfall that replenishes the country's glaciers each year can no longer keep up with the pace of ice melt, which means that the Greenland ice sheet will continue to lose ice even if global temperatures stop rising.
The Greenland ice sheet is the world's second-largest ice body.
"What we've found is that the ice that's discharging into the ocean is far surpassing the snow that's accumulating on the surface of the ice sheet," Michalea King, lead author and researcher at Ohio State University's Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center, said in a press release.
According to a NASA study, 2010-2019 was the hottest decade ever recorded.
A point of no return?
Wishing to reverse the irreversible is an existential part of the modern human condition. The stories we tell, the myths that are recounted, always in the voice of the many to an audience of the many, are full of such impossible hopes and desires. We have lost 28 trillion tons of now irreplaceable snow and ice, even if the fight for 1.5 is successful.
Fridays for Future
The irreversible loss of 28 trillion tons of ice and snow is a scientific finding, a "truth", to the extent that this scientific knowledge allows us to make sense of our present condition in the world.
Nevertheless, it requires psychological and emotional resources, and trust in the science, to enable people to accept the reality of where we are.
Where there is a lack of these resources, together with a tsunami of misinformation we find, especially on social media, the truth itself becomes a fragile and vulnerable element in so many people's lives.
Lack of snow to replenish the Greenland icecap results in . . .
Evidence based science, along with understanding the social function of art, is the one way to understand the challenge facing all societies and cultures. And it is art that has the capability to be an antidote to the global phenomenon of "tribal chit chat/conspiracy bubbles", and the environment of social media platforms that echo these "bubbles", in what James Joyce called "echoland" (HCE spelled backwards, and H.C.E being Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (HCE) the book's protagonist in Finnegans Wake), requires what Jim Al-Khalili (see below), and others, call "information literacy".Entr'acte
This entr'acte is by way of a cameo, of a cameo by a cameo, with Robert Gill making a cameo appearance as the Irish writer James Joyce in Martin Scorsese's film Hugo, seen wearing a hat and glasses, sitting at a table, in media res of a chase sequence . . .
James Joyce in a bar of the Gare Montparnasse, Paris, interrupted before enjoying . . .
The "H", "C", "E" capitalisation sequence leads us to James Joyce's warning concerning these "bubbles", and how to become "information literate" as much by pattern recognition as analysis. So, . . .
Hush! Caution! Echoland!
. . . also stands for Here Comes Everyone, immersed as we are in the bubbles of information, that to the extent they are bubbles, are variously but inevitably environments where becoming "informed" is increasingly a problem. Hence the value of art especially in the creation of anti-environments that allow for, and prepare for, new ways of seeing what's going on in the invisible immersive information environments we inhabit. The information environment is invisible because we are "in" the environment, we become used to the information environment, all we see is the content of what is being produced by the form, while the form that shapes what is happening is invisible. Invisible, that is, until we can translate into a "counter" or "anti" environment. This is one of Marshall McLuhan's key concepts about the way the arts provide a means to perception, especially in the highly charged situation of the electronic information environment.
"Familiarity" breeds "content"!
Helping his readers to an understanding of how artworks are capable of creating various means to perception of the "bigger picture", Marshall McLuhan cites a short story by Edgar Allen Poe:
Poe’s story provides McLuhan with a metaphor for saving ourselves from the maelstrom of electronic technologies and their hidden environments by using perceptional pattern recognition. The story describes how a deep sea fisherman saves himself from death, as he is sucked into a giant whirlpool or maelstrom, by observing which debris sinks or rises in the torrent of the whirlpool. Lashing himself to an old steamer trunk, the type of debris that he has seen to rise, he is lifted out of the whirlpool and is saved.
A strategy of evasion . . .
The way that the moving image documents aspects of reality is taken for granted, but the ways that cinema has transformed general consciousness as a communication follows the general rule. Cinema does more than represent realities, it substitutes itself for those realities, and even beyond, through cinema's "magic", into our dream lives.
Seeing and understanding natural processes is amplified by the strategy of freezing motion, as for instance to capture the actual configuration of horse hooves for a bet, as in Muybridge's The Horse in Motion (one of Time magazines 100 most influential photographs).
This was a photographic based transformation of perceptions of the way things are, although visual artists had used the technique before photography, as in the depiction of natural phenomena in Joseph Mallord William Turner's Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps, exhibited in 1812. The storm depicted is nature revealing its forces as the storm "speeds up" the processes of weather formation, and suddenly comprehensible to the mind of the human observer.
What Muybridge's photos of a horse in motion (1878) provide is the possibility of assembling the images in order, exploiting the property of "the persistence of vision", and thereby creating "the movies". the ture
Single images . . .
Entr'acte - Science fantasy and the "Paris houses of spectacle".Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès was a French illusionist, actor and film director who led many technical and narrative developments in the earliest days of cinema. Méliès was well known for the use of special effects, popularizing such techniques as substitution splices, multiple exposures, time-lapse photography, dissolves, and hand-painted colour. He was also one of the first filmmakers to use storyboards. His films include A Trip to the Moon (1902) and The Impossible Voyage (1904), both involving strange, surreal journeys somewhat in the style of Jules Verne, and are considered among the most important early science fiction films, though their approach is closer to fantasy.
However, it was the existential power of the moving image itself that provided Méliès with his initial inspiration.This was the experience of seeing the projected image of a moving image of a train arriving at a station, something that was as remarkable then as it is ordinary now.
On 28 December 1895, Méliès had attended a special private demonstration of the Lumière brothers' cinematograph, given for owners of Parisian houses of spectacle. Méliès immediately offered the Lumières 10,000₣ for one of their machines; the Lumières refused, anxious to keep a close control on their invention and to emphasize the scientific nature of the device. (For the same reasons, they refused the Musée Grévin's 20,000₣ bid and the Folies Bergère's 50,000₣ bid the same night.)
Méliès, intent on finding a film projector for his Théâtre Robert-Houdin, turned elsewhere; numerous other inventors in Europe and America were experimenting with machines similar to the Lumières' invention, albeit at a less technically sophisticated level.
Possibly acting on a tip from Jehanne d'Alcy, who may have seen Robert W. Paul's Animatograph film projector while on tour in England, Méliès traveled to London. He bought an Animatograph from Paul, as well as several short films sold by Paul and by the Edison Manufacturing Company. By April 1896, the Théâtre Robert-Houdin was showing films as part of its daily performances.
Méliès, after studying the design of the Animatograph, modified the machine so that it would serve as a film camera. As raw film stock and film processing labs were not yet available in Paris, Méliès purchased unperforated film in London, and personally developed and printed his films through trial and error.
In September 1896, Méliès, Lucien Korsten, and Lucien Reulos patented the Kinétographe Robert-Houdin, a cast iron camera-projector, which Méliès referred to as his "coffee grinder" and "machine gun" because of the noise that it made.
By 1897 technology had caught up and better cameras were put on sale in Paris, leading Méliès to discard his own camera and purchase several better cameras made by Gaumont, the Lumières, and Pathé.
In 1898 Méliès made his own contribution to the documentation of modern life with a film that is described as; a panorama from the top of a moving train. This project precedes, albeit in raw film footage, what the Russian avant-garde film maker Dziga Vertov termed "Cine-Eye"."Cine-Eye" was the montage method developed by Dziga Vertov and first formulated in his work "WE: Variant of a Manifesto" in 1919.Dziga Vertov believed his concept of Kino-Glaz, or "Cine Eye" in English, would help contemporary "man" evolve from a flawed creature into a higher, more precise form.
He compared man unfavourably to machines: "In the face of the machine we are ashamed of man’s inability to control himself, but what are we to do if we find the unerring ways of electricity more exciting than the disorderly haste of active people [...]"
As he put it in a 1923 credo, "I am the Cine-Eye. I am the mechanical eye. I the machine show you the world as only I can see it. I emancipate myself henceforth and forever from human immobility. I am in constant motion... My path leads towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world. I can thus decipher a world that you do not know."
This video montage begins with the Lumière brothers' film of "the arrival of a train at La Ciotat", more commonly known as Arrival of a Train at a Station. This is followed by the 1898 Méliès film documentation of; a panorama from the top of a moving train.
The montage then shows a sequence of clips from the Lumière brothers' first publicly shown moving images, images that had an immediate and significant influence on popular culture. Their actuality films, or actualités, are often cited as the first, primitive documentaries. They also made the first steps towards comedy film with the slapstick of L'Arroseur Arrosé (the sprinkler sprinkled).
The video montage ends with a segment from the 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi, also known as Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance, is a 1982 American experimental film produced and directed by Godfrey Reggio with music composed by Philip Glass and cinematography by Ron Fricke.The film consists primarily of slow motion and time-lapse footage of cities and many natural landscapes across the United States. The visual tone poem contains neither dialogue nor a vocalized narration: its tone is set by the juxtaposition of images and music. Reggio explained the lack of dialogue by stating "it's not for lack of love of the language that these films have no words. It's because, from my point of view, our language is in a state of vast humiliation. It no longer describes the world in which we live."
In the Hopi language, the word Koyaanisqatsi means;
"life out of balance".
After all . . .
Entr'acte
Hugo is a 2011 American adventure drama film directed and produced by Martin Scorsese, and adapted for the screen by John Logan. Based on Brian Selznick's 2007 book The Invention of Hugo Cabret, it tells the story of a boy who lives alone in the Gare Montparnasse railway station in Paris in the 1930s, only to become embroiled in a mystery surrounding his late father's automaton and the pioneering filmmaker Georges Méliès.
The plot . . .
In 1931 Paris, 12-year-old Hugo Cabret lives with his widowed, clockmaker father, who works at a museum. Hugo's father finds a broken automaton – a mechanical man created to write with a pen. He and try to repair it, documenting their work in a notebook. When his father dies in a fire, Hugo goes to live with his father's alcoholic brother, Uncle Claude, who maintains the clocks at Gare Montparnasse railway station. When Claude goes missing, Hugo continues maintaining the clocks, fearing that Station Inspector Gustave Dasté will send him away if Claude's absence is discovered. Hugo attempts to repair the automaton with stolen parts, believing it contains a message from his father, but the machine requires a . . .
. . . heart-shaped key.
Hugo is caught stealing parts from a toy store, and the owner, Georges, takes his notebook, threatening to destroy it. Georges's goddaughter Isabelle suggests to Hugo to confront Georges and demand the notebook back. Georges proposes that Hugo work at his toy store as recompense, and after sometime he might return the notebook. He accepts the offer and commences work, in addition to his job maintaining the clocks.
Caught stealing . . .
Isabelle and Hugo become fast friends, and Hugo is astonished to see Isabelle wears a heart-shaped key, given to her by Georges.
Hugo shows her the automaton, which they activate with the key, and the machine draws a scene from the film A Trip to the Moon, once described to Hugo by his father. Isabelle identifies the drawing's signature as that of "Georges Méliès", her godfather.
The automaton . . .
Several days later, at the Film Academy Library, Hugo and Isabelle find a book about the history of cinema that praises Méliès's contributions. They meet the book's author, René Tabard, a film expert who is surprised to hear Méliès is alive, as he disappeared after World War I along with the copies of his films. Excited at the chance to meet Méliès, René agrees to meet Isabelle and Hugo at Georges's home to show his copy of A Trip to the Moon.
A trip . . .
Finding the heart-shaped key on the station railway tracks, Hugo drops down to the track to retrieve it, and is run over by an uncontrollable train that smashes through the station. He wakes up, having only had a nightmare, but hears an ominous ticking emanating from himself, and discovers he has been turned into the automaton. Hugo wakes up again to discover this was only another nightmare.
Just . . .
At Georges’s home, his wife Jeanne allows them in after René compliments her as Jeanne d'Alcy, an actress in many of Méliès's films. They play the film, waking Georges, who is finally convinced to cherish his accomplishments rather than regret his lost dream. Georges recounts that, as a stage magician, he was fascinated by motion pictures and used film to create imaginative works through his Star Film Company. Forced into bankruptcy after the war, he closed his studio and sold his films. He laments that even an automaton he built and donated to a museum was lost, which Hugo realizes is the one he has repaired.
Hoping he . . .
Hugo races to the station to retrieve the automaton, but is caught by Gustave, who has learned that Uncle Claude is deceased. Gustave threatens to take Hugo to the orphanage. Hugo runs away but drops the automaton on the tracks. He jumps down to retrieve it and is almost run over by a train, but Gustave saves him and the automaton.
Georges tells Gustave, "Monsieur . . .
. . . this child belongs to me!
FIN . . .
Hugo's dream of a train crashing through the station is an echo of an event known as the Montparnasse derailment.
This disaster occurred at 16:00 on 22 October 1895 when the Granville–Paris Express overran the buffer stop at its Gare Montparnasse terminus. With the train several minutes late and the driver trying to make up for lost time, it approached the station too fast and there was a failure to apply the train air brake. After running through the buffer stop, the train crossed the station concourse and crashed through the station wall; the locomotive fell onto the Place de Rennes below, where it stood on its nose.
The photograph of the aftermath of this accident by Lévy and Sons, has become one of the most famous in transportation history.
The photograph, which is now in the public domain, is used as the cover page in the science textbook: An Introduction to Error Analysis by John Taylor. For many students of physics this study of Uncertainties in Physical Measurements, is remembered as the book with the train crash on the book's cover. The need for error analysis is captured in this book's arresting cover shot - of the 1895 Paris train disaster. The early chapters teach elementary techniques of error propagation and statistical analysis to enable students to produce successful lab reports.
"To err is human; to describe the error properly is sublime."
Cliff Swartz, Physics Today 37 (1999), 388.
Error analysis is, by definition, the process or activity of looking at errors in order to find out what they are, why they are happening and what can be done to prevent them.
From science fiction to science facts!
Scientists fought coronavirus, now they face the battle against disinformation
So writes Jim Al-Khalili in a headline for his Opinion piece for the Guardian (Mon 28 Dec 2020) under the introductory paragraph:The public’s appetite for science has never been stronger, but only openness can confound the deluge of fake narrativesJim Al-Khalili writes:
Way back, in those halcyon and innocent times pre-Covid, scientists’ roles in society seemed much simpler. We knew where we stood when it came to explaining our work to the public. It was either exciting, like reporting on the discovery of a new particle or exoplanet, or it was completely ignored by an uninterested world struggling to understand subjects too remote from everyday experience. It almost seems hard to believe now, but there was a time when epidemiologists, immunologists and virologists – today’s near-superheroes and villains – could only dream of being given airtime or column inches to talk about their areas of expertise.How the world has changed. The public’s appetite for science in 2020 has been insatiable as we have all looked to it for certainty in uncertain times; in fact, we have witnessed a major shift in the way the public views the role in society. The media and the wider public have wanted to know how scientific research is carried out and how its claims are tested, and there has been a scrutiny of how scientists conduct themselves and communicate their work like never before. So, if there are any positives to take forward from this most difficult of years, one may be that the race to understand the Sars-CoV-2 virus and to find ways of defeating it have also highlighted the worth of the wider enterprise of scientific research.Before the pandemic, there had been a period of a worrying culture of dismissing experts, people were supposedly sick of them: but this year, the public largely responded quickly to the call to “trust the science” and “follow the scientific advice”, whether it has been on matters of simple hygiene, social distancing, the wearing of face masks or vaccines. For the scientists themselves this has presented a new challenge: one that has been eagerly accepted by many who have stepped into the spotlight. Their job has been not so much to feed the public’s innocuous curiosity about exciting discoveries – that’s so last year – but rather to provide guidance to policymakers, justification to the wider public for those, often unpopular, policies enacted as a result of that advice, as well as updates on the progress of research in laboratories around the world trying to understand and defeat an invisible enemy.Over the past year, not only have so many scientists had to work faster and harder than ever in a race to save lives, but they have also been required to give a constant running commentary on their progress. Along the way, they realised they had to explain the processes of science itself and how scientific knowledge is gained: the importance of uncertainty, the reproducibility of results, the gradual buildup of a picture with the accumulation of data, and the inevitability of making mistakes when that picture is incomplete.Such has been the success of this call to arms, to feed a media and public ravenous for daily science news and advice, that it is tempting to think everyone must now have at least a basic understanding of exponential curves, false positives and R values. Such technical concepts are now discussed as freely and regularly as we talk about the weather. Even if much of the science remains obscure to many, the public’s trust in science and scientists is perhaps as high as it has ever been. And now, as this miserable year draws to a close, science is emerging victorious from its bumpy ride, having produced an impressive range of vaccines, each delivering in its own novel way the genetic instructions to make the molecular ammunition to fight back against the virus.Maybe now all these great scientific minds will return to the serenity of their research labs and pick up where they left off, with less media attention. Perhaps. But all this talk of the scientific method has highlighted the fact that not everyone is on message, with much still in dispute. And so, in 2021 we must all make use of the tools of science: a demand for reliable evidence, critical thinking, open debate and a willingness to revise our ideas in the light of new data, in order to tackle falsehoods and misinformation. This is going to be critical in the coming weeks and months.I fear that too many people, feeling a false sense of security thanks to the start of a mass immunisation programme, will drop their guard, having convinced themselves that the Covid-19 virus takes the Christmas holidays off too. Then there is that significant minority of people who will refuse the vaccine, whether nervous that it has been rushed through too quickly without the proper checks on its safety or, more foolishly, that vaccines in general should be avoided. How then should society respond to this kind of misinformation, especially when it can spread faster than the virus itself?Is this trend of people buying into preposterously false narratives, for example that Covid pandemic is all a hoax or that vaccines are means of mind control, a cause for genuine concern? Of course. But is it surprising? Not really – conspiracy theories are hardly a new phenomenon. It is human nature to gossip, fabricate, exaggerate, while those in power will always use propaganda or distortion of the truth for political or financial purposes. At a time when we are being bombarded with information it can be hard for many to tell truth from falsehood – far too many people have what we can call poor information literacy.We all want answers, but we need to know where to look and whom to trust. Take the new Covid vaccines, for example: scientists understand very well that randomised control trials involving tens of thousands of volunteers that are run to find out whether new vaccines are safe and effective are pretty much as good as it gets. They are the gold standard of evidence-based science. But is this reliable process of gathering knowledge well understood more widely by the public? There is a real risk that too many people will be taken in by the deluge of fake narratives about issues such as vaccines – many of which are ideologically driven and readily available online.The politicisation of scientific knowledge has come of age this year, but is probably inevitable when it has such a direct impact on our lives. Navigating this minefield of polarised opinions, particularly during the pandemic, has been a challenge for everyone, scientists and non-scientists alike. It should not, however, deter us from continuing to debate and discuss openly and honestly, the importance of thinking rationally and critically.All of this is important, not just to see us through the pandemic. Tackling misinformation and maintaining society’s trust in science is needed for the many battles that lie ahead. The continued ability of the scientific enterprise to tackle the biggest challenges facing humanity in the 21st century, be it the climate crisis or eradicating disease and poverty, the arrival of new pandemics, or simply learning more about ourselves and our place in the universe, all depends on openness and collaboration. It is clear that it cannot be left to scientists alone to shoulder the burden of ensuring humanity’s survival. Politicians, the media and the general public all have a role to play, just as we have collectively done this past year. Maybe these new lessons we have all learned throughout 2020 really can be a silver lining to the dark Covid cloud.
Biodiversity priority rank (%)
Hello world!
Science offers us the prospect of a continual discovery of the estimated 8.7 million life forms, of which barely 2 million have been identified and named. While the habitability of the planet is under threat the scientific knowledge of life on Earth is still in discovery mode. In todays Guardian (Wed 30 Dec 2020) Patrick Barkham reports on the spectacular discovery of a monkey in Myanmar among new species described this year by Natural History Museum scientists. In the print edition of the Guardian the headline runs:
Hundreds of new species identified in 2020
Patrick Barkham writes:
Scarab beetles from New Guinea, seaweed from the Falklands and a new species of monkey found on an extinct volcano in Myanmar are among 503 species newly identified by scientists at the Natural History Museum.
The museum’s work in 2020 describing species previously unknown to science includes naming new lichens, wasps, barnacles, miniature tarantulas and a lungless worm salamander.“In a year when the global mass of biodiversity is being outweighed by human-made mass it feels like a race to document what we are losing,” said Dr Tim Littlewood, executive director of science at the Natural History Museum. “Five hundred and three newly discovered species reminds us we represent a single, inquisitive, and immensely powerful species with the fate of many others in our hands.”Scientists have named nearly 2m different forms of life on Earth but there may be far more than the 8.7m species previously estimated, with DNA barcoding techniques revealing hitherto unsuspected diversity in ostensibly similar creatures.Implausible twists of fate have played a role in some discoveries. A new parasitic worm, Pseudoacanthocephalus goodmani, was found in the faeces of a guttural toad after the amphibian was accidentally flown from its native Mauritius to Cambridge in a tourist’s luggage, even surviving a cycle in a washing machine before being spotted.The museum’s collection of 80m specimens has also assisted some new discoveries. One new species, a lungless worm salamander, Oedipina ecuatoriana, is known only from a single specimen collected more than 100 years ago and kept by the museum. These amphibians burrow through rainforest soils and breathe through their skin.Ken Norris, head of life sciences at the Natural History Museum, said the collections helped scientists to be certain they were finding creatures that were new to science. “These discoveries go to show the vital role that natural history collections around the world continue to play in describing new species and the hidden diversity that is contained within the collections,” he said.
The most spectacular discovery of 2020 was the popa langur, Trachypithecus popa, a new species of monkey that was previously confused with another species.It lives on the side of an extinct volcano in Myanmar and was identified using skins and bones that have been in the museum’s collection for over 100 years. It is already considered to be critically endangered, with only 200 to 260 individuals left in the wild.
“We hope that the naming of the species will help in its conservation,” said Roberto Portela Miguez, senior mammal curator at the museum, who helped to describe the new species.
It has been a good year for discovering more amphibian and reptile species, with the museum’s scientists helping to identify a crested lizard from Borneo, two new species of frog and an impressive nine new snakes, including Trimeresurus davidi, a beautiful lime-green viper.
A new seaweed species discovered, Corallina chamberlainiae, a delicate-looking seaweed found in chilly south Atlantic waters off the Falkland Islands and Tristan da Cunha, reveals a connectivity between these places despite the islands being 2,500 miles (4,000km) apart.
The most numerous new discoveries were among the order of beetles, with 170 new species identified, including a cohort of scarab beetles from New Guinea, riffle beetles from Brazil and a minuscule marsh-loving beetle from Malawi.
The museum’s experts also identified 70 new wasp species and three new bees, including Bombus tibeticus, one of the highest-dwelling species of bumblebee in the world, discovered at 5,640 metres (18,500ft) above sea level on the Tibetan plateau in Mongolia. There have also been nine new species of moths, six new species of centipedes, nine flatworms, one butterfly and 10 bryozoans, tiny aquatic creatures sometimes known as “moss animals”.
The museum’s scientists have also this year named 122 new fossil species and 10 new minerals – which is significant given that there are only about 6,000 known species of mineral.
One of the new minerals, kernowite, is emerald green and so far found in just one location – down an old mine in Cornwall that has since been closed and built on.
"Changes to seasons can play havoc with wildlife, knocking nature out of kilter, with serious effects for us all"
Steven Morris reporting for the Guardian (Mon 28 Dec 2020), looks at the impact of:
A year of extreme weather in Britain creates confusion for flora and fauna
Steven Morris report follows this introductory paragraph:
National Trust review has warned that the climate emergency is clearly leading to more erratic conditions
It was a year of extremes as far as the weather was concerned: pounding rain, violent summer storms, some mild winter months and periods of searing sunshine.
An annual audit of how this year’s weather has affected flora and fauna in the UK has concluded that it was, to say the least, a challenging 12 months.
Warm winter months was good news for some moths and birds and it was a bumper spring for blossom and a “mast” year (a term for a bountiful season) for nuts and berries.
But it was not such a good 12 months for many seabirds, according to a survey from the conservation charity the National Trust, and many slopes that are usually bright with heather were duller than usual.
The trust, which each December looks back at how the weather has affected flora and fauna at its sites, warned that the climate emergency was clearly leading to more erratic weather patterns and hitting Britain’s animal and plant life.
It began well for birds such as the lovely Dartford warbler, which appears to have enjoyed the mild winter. Just 11 pairs survived after two particularly cold winters in the 1960s and its comeback was hit again by the “beast from the east” in 2018 but it had a good 2020 and one of the warblers was spotted on the Long Mynd in Shropshire for the first time in 20 years.
Dartford Warbler with a heath moth in its beak at Ibsley Common, in the New Forest.
The ring ouzel, a bird of the uplands, also thrived in the milder conditions. A relative of the blackbird, most spend winter in the Mediterranean but each year a few stay in the UK – and one was spotted at Cwm Idwal in north Wales.
The mild winter and early warm weather resulted in many fruit trees coming into blossom two weeks earlier than normal. At Ham House in south-west London, the blossom bloomed in a pleasingly regular sequence – the apricot in a very sheltered spot first, followed by peaches, cherry, then plum well into the spring.A warm spring led to sightings in the New Forest in southern England of silver-studded blue and small heath butterflies flying up to a month ahead of schedule. A marsh fritillary was also spotted at The Coombes in Wiltshire, a steep-sided dry stream valley on the edge of the Marlborough Downs, for the first time.Conservation under threat in Goa
Thousands are protesting in the Indian state, suspecting the coal lobby is behind construction plans in sanctuary, reports Hannah Ellis-Petersen in this piece for the Observer (Sun 27 Dec 2020) with the headline:
Fury as Goa's rare wildlife park faces invasion by rail and road
Hannah Ellis-Petersen writes:
Mollem national park has long been the emerald in Goa’s crown.
The verdant jungle which covers this steep area of India’s Western Ghats mountain range is home to leopards, Bengal tigers, pangolins, black panthers and hundreds of endemic species of flora and fauna found nowhere else on the planet. The muscular state animal of Goa – the gaur, or Indian bison – is often seen trudging through the forests, and the park’s Dudhsagar waterfall is among the highest in the country.
Yet Mollem and the adjoining Bhagwan Mahaveer Sanctuary, covering a protected area of 240 sq km, is set to be splintered and partially deforested by three invasive projects; the doubling of a railway line, road expansion and an electric power transmission line.“This is an area declared by Unesco to be one of the world’s eight biodiversity hotspots and which includes a proposed tiger reserve. This project will undo so much that can never be recovered again,” said Claude Alvares, an activist with the Goa Foundation who has taken up litigation against all three projects in the Bombay high court and before a committee of the supreme court.Indian law bans construction in wildlife sanctuaries but the government has approved them in the name of public interest and Goa’s future development. However, many believe these three projects are part of a masterplan to turn India’s smallest state into a corridor for a fivefold increase in coal imports by some of India’s biggest industrialists, known for their close ties to the ruling Bharatiya Janata party (BJP).Cumulatively it will involve diverting 378 hectares (934 acres) of forest in Goa, felling 40,000 protected trees and shifting more than 1.8m tonnes of mud and earth from inside the sanctuary.Activists and citizens claim these projects have been foisted on Goa by the central government without any public consultation or transparency. They are now subject to multiple legal challenges and have sparked a grassroots opposition movement unlike anything seen in Goa for decades, with thousands taking to the streets in protest. Students, artists, biologists, tourism bodies and 150 scientists have written to India’s environment minister Prakash Javadekar and the supreme court requesting the projects be halted, alleging environmental laws have been broken or ignored. More than 8,000 people took part in a recent demonstration and dozens have been booked by police or arrested.“We are not just saving Mollem forests for their beauty but for the very survival of life in Goa,” said artist Svabhu Kohli, who began the My Mollem campaign, which brought together artists, lawyers, researchers, biologists and local communities to raise awareness through art and action of the impact the projects could have on Mollem.“They say they are doing this to benefit the people of Goa. But everyone in Goa knows Mollem has a special magic, so how can cutting down irreplaceable forests be beneficial? And if it’s for us, why were we never consulted?”For the past three years, Goa’s main port, Mormugao Port Trust in the north of the state, has been on an expansion drive to become a hub for imported coal. Since 2018, two of India’s biggest coal importers, Adani and JSW, have set up multiple terminals at the port.In 2020, the environment ministry granted clearance for a third coal terminal and deep-water dredging to accommodate large coal vessels. Currently the port handles 12m tonnes of coal, but importers hope to increase that to 51m tonnes by 2035.Campaigners in Goa have connected coal imports to a reported increase in air pollution, lung diseases and more recently, a spike in Covid-19 deaths in villages near where the coal is unloaded and transported.The coal coming into Goa isn’t even used in the state, but is transported over the border to steel and power plants in neighbouring Karnataka and Maharashtra.
Yet, as the masterplan emphasised, in order for this long-term expansion plan to be feasible, Goa’s ancient single-line railway and winding road, which both cut through Mollem to get to neighbouring states, would need to be widened to cope with the heavyweight coal trucks and frequent freight trains necessary to carry the coal over the border. “This is the most important initiative and lifeline for the port operations in the future,” stated the masterplan regarding the doubling of the railway line.
The railway expansion was the first of the three controversial projects to gain the stamp of approval from the National Board for Wildlife (NBW), which sits under the Ministry of Environment, in December 2019. The project, which involves cutting deep tunnels into the sanctuary and the upheaval of 1.8m tonnes of soil, was justified to meet future customer demand. But locals say the line is rarely busy.The former head of the Goa Forest Department, Richard D’Souza, had originally refused to approve the railway project in 2013 as it was unnecessary and unjustifiably destructive to the delicate biodiversity of Mollem.“I did not find it appropriate that the railway should be doubled in the sanctuary because I have seen all these animals there with my own eyes, the black panther, bats, gaur and tigers, and biodiversity not found anywhere else,” said D’Souza. “Also it was not needed because there were not many passengers on that line.”The government commissioned an environmental impact assessment (EIA) for the project. However, it was carried out by an academic who also sits on the government NBW, which later approved the railway project in December 2019. “You can see how this is a complete conflict of interest,” said Alvares.“The doubling of the railway will be a disaster, there is no doubt about it,” added D’Souza. “The whole sanctuary is very steep and you will have to slice deep into the land and a huge amount of tree cutting will be required. The famous Dudhsagar waterfall is next to the tracks and it is bound to get damaged in the works. They should leave it as it is; that will save the sanctuary, that will save the wildlife, biodiversity, everything.”The other two projects to affect Mollem – the expansion of the road into a four-lane highway, and the initial stages of a new electric power line – were approved in April by the NBW.Central government’s green-lighting of the projects sparked outrage in Goa, with many unaware they were even in the pipeline due to what Nandini Velho, a Goa wildlife biologist, described as “a complete information deficit and lack of transparency”.Lawyer Sreeja Chakraborty has taken up a legal challenge against the highway project for what she called “clear discrepancies in the application”. She highlighted that the EIA done for the highway specified only one species of bird had been found in Mollem. “One bird, in the entire 200 sq km of a wildlife sanctuary, when anyone who walks through Mollem will see multiple species including the national bird of Goa, the yellow throated bulbul. This is just absurd and disgusting. But if you don’t record what is there, then nobody will know what is lost,” she said.“They cannot defend expanding the road on the basis of traffic data, it does not stand up,” said Chakraborty. “It’s part of a multifold attack on Goa to aid expansion of the port for coal and every step along the way we have found that due procedure was not followed.”The state and central government are justifying the new power line, which will see six pylons 22 metres high erected through Mollem, as necessary to bring electricity to remote areas of Goa and say it requires less than 0.25 hectares of land. The project has already begun and under the cover of lockdown in April, 20,000 trees on the edge of the sanctuary were cut down to make way for the power substation.Activists say the power line will conveniently serve the interests of coal imports, providing more power to the port and enabling the train engines to be switched to electric, so they can run more quickly, frequently and efficiently for future coal freight. “There is nothing in any documents which connect the transmission line to the railway, but the situation on the ground is very clear,” alleged Chakraborty.Subhash Chandra, the state government’s principal chief conservator of forests, said the new elevated road would halve the amount of time it took to drive through the sanctuary. “We are taking all the necessary measures so there will be hardly any conflict with the wildlife and to ensure minimal damage to the forests,” he said, emphasising that a series of animal crossings, underpasses and gates would be installed around the road and rail to prevent collisions. Environmentalists were scathing of this however. “This is a forest not a circus,” said Alvares. “Wild animals are not going to follow signs to safely cross a road.”Defending all three projects, Chandra said: “This is to meet human, commercial and business needs. India is a developing country and our role at the forest department is to balance conservation with development needs. The environment is not a static thing, nature has an incredible power to adapt and bounce back, and the status quo cannot continue for ever, Goa needs to progress.”Goa’s BJP chief minister, Pramod Sawant, has repeatedly denied any of these projects are to boost coal transportation capacity, describing them as a “nation-building exercise” with “no threat to Mollem”. In November, he promised that coal imports to Mormugao Port Trust would be reduced by 50% and said he had sought assurances from the centre that Goa would not become a coal hub. The Adani Group has denied any role in the projects affecting Mollem.Meanwhile, the protests and Save Mollem campaigns continue unabated in Goa’s villages and cities, inspiring a new generation of young Goans who have been confronting politicians and government officials for answers.John Countinho, an environmentalist who was recently booked by police for his involvement in the protests, said he feared that if the projects go ahead, it would “secure Goa as a coal corridor for years – it makes it unlikely they will shift from coal towards renewables, as they would want returns on their investment in coal infrastructure.”Kohli, the artist and activist, said the future of Goa’s ecology “hung by a thread”. “Goa had a beautiful ecologically diverse coast and because of greed and a lack of vision, we lost so much of our diversity,” he said. “We cannot let the same happen to Mollem.”
Young environmental campaigners wear masks to get their point across.Nothing is sacred as far as capitalism is concerned . . .
. . . and yet it turns out that when it comes to the struggle to conserve the biodiversity essential to a healthy planet, it is Indigenous People, with little vested power, apart from their cultural connection to the living planet, who choose to act to protect their ancestral environment and, by extension, our planet.
Earlier this year (Mon 10 Feb 2020), Brian Cassey put together text and his own images for The age of extinction Guardian section on Environment, documenting how the Gond Indigenous People are fighting a rearguard action against the mining giant Adani to protect their ancestral homelands and one of the sub-continent’s richest and most diverse regions.
Brian Cassey writes:
A rash of newly approved mines could destroy swathes of the Hasdeo Arand forest – and with it the biodiversity local villagers depend on for survival
Laksmi Shankar Porte emerged from the forest. In his hands were an axe, a small scythe and a large crop of grass. Like many of the Gond people living in India’s Hasdeo Arand forest, he will use the grass to make ropes, brooms and mats.The Hasdeo Arand is one of the largest contiguous stretches of dense forest in central India, covering about 170,000 hectares (420,080 acres) of the state of Chhattisgarh. It is rich in biodiversity, contains many threatened species and is home to elephants, leopards and sloth bears.It is also home to the Gond, one of India’s Adivasis, the name given to the country’s original indigenous peoples. Unfortunately for Porte, the Gond and other Adivasis forest dwellers, the Hasdeo Arand sits on top of more than a billion metric tonnes of coal reserves.Porte and his neighbours in the village of Ghatbarra are currently fighting a rearguard action against the mining giant Adani to protect their ancestral homelands and one of the sub-continent’s richest and most diverse regions. “If the coal mining comes we will lose everything,” he says.Despite at one time being declared offlimits to mining, a new government in 2011 granted mining permission for the first coal blocks in Hasdeo Arand. By 2013 the Parsa East and Kante Basan open cast mine operated by Adani – and which adjoins Porte’s village – was a reality. It currently produces 15m tons of coal per annum.Now more open cast mines have been approved by the government of Narenda Modi. An estimated 80% of the entire forest area – and 30 villages – may be lost, according to Bipasha Paul, programme officer for Chhattisgarh-based NGO Janabhivyakti, which is working with the Hasdeo Arand residents.To the Gond every feature of the forest has a spiritual significance and they rely on products collected there to sustain life: flowers, fruits, grains, seeds, tubers and roots for food and medicines; timber, leaves and grasses for ropes, mats, brooms, baskets, fires and building.
As well as relying on the forest’s plants for food, medicine and construction materials, villagers use the forest floor for grazing cattle.
Fearing their way of life is threatened by these mines, the Gond are fighting to stop them. Adani is one of India’s largest and most influential companies, run by the country’s second richest man, Gautam Adani, said by Forbes to be worth $15.7bn. The Adani group itself has an annual revenue of $13bn and is currently making the headlines in Australia where environmentalists and residents are fighting plans for the Carmichael mine in Queensland.
In India, a new mine – the Parsa open cast mine operated by Adani Enterprises through its subsidiary Rajasthan Collieries – has recently received approval and will cover over 841 hectares of the forest next to the Parsa East and Kante Basan. According to Adani, the new mine has a mineable reserve of 200m metric tons of coal and a lifespan of 42 years.
Last October, residents from 20 nearby villages set up a large tent in Fathepur village as a centre for their protests. Men, women and children gathered to argue that their village councils had never given permission for mining on their homelands – a right they say is enshrined in law. The protesters submitted a letter to Chhattisgarh state government authorities on October 21 demanding that land acquisition and clearance for mining be rescinded on that basis. Adani says that as these lands are “coal bearing”, permission was not needed.
On the wall of Janabhivyakti’s tiny local office hangs a large map of the Hasdeo Arand forest marked with the coal mines already operating and those soon to commence. There isn’t much room left on the map. Thirty surveyed open cut mine sites are due to go online in the Hasdeo Arand forest in the future.
Bipasha Paul argues that the local Adivasis peoples will not be the only ones to suffer. The proposed mines and an associated 75km coal rail line impact elephant habitat and inhibit migration routes in the forest. There are already a growing number of reports of incidences of human-elephant conflict as the elephants’ habitat diminishesIt is hard to see how the mines will not adversely affect elephants and other native wildlife. The Hasdeo Arand is home to 34 species of mammals, 14 species of reptiles, 111 species of birds and 29 species of fish; these live among the 86 species of trees, the 51 species of medicinal plants, 19 species of herbs and 12 species of grass.But a plan for a proposed elephant reserve in a small remaining unmined area of the Hasdeo Arand forest will mean villagers will be forced to leave there too.The government has promised compensation and resettlement to those Adivasis impacted by the mines and forced to leave their forest homes, but most indigenous residents know nothing of life outside the Hasdeo Arand. Many fear they will be forced to join the exodus to the suburbs and slums of India’s vast metropolises.Adani argues that it is helping the community, rather than hindering it. “While achieving energy security for India remains our larger goal, the project has begun touching millions of lives. From employing more than 400 tribals [sic] at Parsa East and Kanta Basan we have been working closely to improve education and healthcare facilities in India’s hinterlands,” the company says on its website.But Bhual Singh, who was chopping wood collected from the forest outside Ghatbarra village, failed to see the upside. “Mining will be our death,” he said.“It is going to devastate everything nature has given us. One-time compensation for the land is not enough – we need much more than money to survive. We need nature to be with us.”
The struggle continues . . .
. . . as Hannah Ellis-Petersen reported this last August in this story headlined:
India plans to fell ancient forest to create 40 new coalfields
. . . and with the sub heading:
Narendra Modi's dream of a 'self-reliant India' comes at a terrible price for its indigenous population
Hannah Ellis-Petersen writes:
Over the past decade, Umeshwar Singh Amra has witnessed his homeland descend into a battleground. The war being waged in Hasdeo Arand, a rich and biodiverse Indian forest, has pitted indigenous people, ancient trees, elephants and sloth bears against the might of bulldozers, trucks and hydraulic jacks, fighting with a single purpose: the extraction of coal.
Yet under a new “self-reliant India” plan by the prime minister, Narendra Modi, to boost the economy post-Covid-19 and reduce costly imports, 40 new coalfields in some of India’s most ecologically sensitive forests are to be opened up for commercial mining.
Among them are four huge blocks of Hasdeo Arand’s 420,000 acres of forest in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh, which sit above an estimated 5bn tonnes of coal.It marks a significant shift. The coal industry in India is state-owned, but this auction of 40 new coal blocks will see the creation of a privatised, commercial coal sector in India. Among those bidding for it are India’s rich and powerful industrial giants, including the $14bn (£11bn) Adani group run by the Indian billionaire Gautam Adani, who operates India’s largest coal power plants and has close ties to Modi.The coal auction has already proved controversial at both the local and political level. At least seven of the coal blocks up for auction were previously deemed “no go” areas for mining due to their environmentally valuable status and about 80% of the blocks are home to indigenous communities and thick forest cover. Four state governments – West Bengal, Maharashtra, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh – have written to Modi in opposition or raised legal objections to the auction, and one coal block, which overlapped with the Tadoba tiger reserve in Maharashtra, has already been removed.Amra, who is an Adivasi, a term used to describe India’s indigenous people, was one of nine local sarpanchs – village leaders – who recently wrote to Modi demanding a stop to the auction in Hasdeo Arand. He said: “If the government gave me the option to give up my life in exchange for no more mining happening in the forest, I would do it in a second.”
Amra has seen first-hand the environmental devastation wreaked by open-cast coal mines. In 2011, two vast open-cast mines were excavated on the forest’s peripheries, ripping up the fragile land and filling the surroundings with pollution, smoke, heat, noise and poison. Crime rose drastically in the area and the elephants that lived in the forest, disoriented by the new hostile conditions, became aggressive, leading to dozens of deaths.
The prospect of more significant blocks of the forest, the largest in India, being handed over to private mining operations was more than Amra could bear. Five villages will be destroyed and more than 6,000 mainly indigenous people displaced, as well as thousands of hectares of trees, torn down for mines and roads.
“If more mining happens everything will change; the natural resources will be gone, our way of life will disappear, everything will be under threat,” he said. “We are tribal people, we cannot go out and live in the cities and no amount of money can ever compensate us. There is no forest like this in the world – cut it down and it can never be replaced.”
While across the world governments have geared towards a “green recovery” post Covid-19 – the United Nations secretary general, António Guterres, said recently there was “no good reason for any country to include coal” in recovery plans – India is putting fossil fuel at the forefront of its strategy to turn the pandemic into economic opportunity.“Why cannot India be the world’s largest exporter of coal?” asked Modi as he announced the coal auction project.Yet with its 45% ash content, making it some of the most polluting coal in the world, there is unlikely to be an international market for Indian coal. In addition, many major factories in India cannot run on “dirty” domestic coal, meaning they will still need to import it from abroad.There is also a question of necessity. While India is the world’s second largest consumer of coal, and annually imports 247m tonnes, costing more than $20bn (£15bn), India’s electricity demand is forecast to fall by up to 15% over the next five years due to the economic reverberations of Covid-19. Meanwhile, a report this week by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air concluded that the current state-run coal mines of India already have capacity to produce 20% more coal than the expected demand in 2030.Environmental activists also question why India cannot be weaned off foreign coal through a gradual increase in investment in domestic renewable energy, such as solar. This month, Modi inaugurated Asia’s largest solar farm in the state of Madhya Pradesh. India is the world’s cheapest producer of solar power and the cost of constructing a new solar plant is 14% less than that of a building a new coal plant. With proper investment, it has been estimated that the solar energy industry could generate as many as 1.6m jobs in India by 2022, far more than would be generated by domestic coal.But India’s joint secretary for coal, Maddirala Nagaraju, said that all the country’s projections showed that demand for coal would increase and insisted that increased domestic coalmining was the “cheapest way of meeting the energy needs of the people”.“We are the country with the fourth largest coal reserves in the world and we need to provide energy security for over a billion people: coal is the only way,” said Nagaraju. He conceded that there would be “costly trade-offs” in opening up protected forest areas for mining, but said this had the support of local communities who “want the land to be acquired because they get high compensation packages”.He added: “Yes, some people have objected, but the mining will bring a lot of development, employment and money to these areas. How else will we develop these Adivasi people in central India?”Among the prominent opponents to the project is the former environment minister, Jairan Ramesh, who also wrote a letter to Modi condemning coal auctions. It was during his time in office that a survey was carried out in 2010 on India’s biggest coalfields and determined that 30% were “no-go areas” due to their biodiversity or resident tiger or elephant populations. Yet since Modi came to power in 2014, that 30% has been reduced to about 5%.Ramesh alleged this was a direct result of pressure from the powerful corporate coal lobby, Adani in particular. The Adani group is contracted to operate two of the mines currently open in Hasdeo Arand, and has been pushing to expand mining operations in the forest for years, even reportedly offering microloans to local tribal people in order to win their support.“Adani is behind this,” claims Ramesh. “He is one of the most influential forces on the government.”“Modi poses as a great environmental champion globally but his track record is one of complete loosening of environmental laws and regulations,” Ramesh added. “The corporate lobbies are just too powerful and in the name of ease for businesses, environment has become the biggest casualty.”The Adani group rejected the allegations as baseless and politically motivated. A spokesperson said the company: “Has always strived to provide balanced and affordable energy supply to an energy-deprived population of 1.3 billion people whose per capita energy consumption is less than half the world’s average and almost one-tenth of many of the developed economies.“The Adani Group has been a leading contributor to India’s vision for a balanced energy mix and an enabler of India’s leadership in meeting its [Paris agreement on climate change] target.”It said it aimed to become the world’s largest renewable energy company by 2025.
TERRITORIES AND AREAS CONSERVED BY INDIGENOUS PEOPLES AND LOCAL COMMUNITIES
Re:LODE Radio considers this to be among the most important and crucial issues facing humanity, and that everyone needs to understand in the context of the current climate emergency and pandemic disease. The connection of planetary environment and people, especially in the context of present and future mass extinctions, is an essential part of a knowledge base that societies across the world need to embrace.
Meanwhile "business as usual", delay and denial, is undermining the maintenance of a level of biological diversity that the future of human kind depends upon.
Indigenous and Community Conserved AreasThe term “ICCA” is an abbreviation for a phenomenon that has many diverse manifestations and names in cultures and locations around the world.
ICCA Consortium
Names include wilayah adat, himas, agdals, territorios de vida, territorios del buen vivir, tagal, qoroq-e bumi, yerli qorukh, faritra ifempivelomana, qoroq, ancestral domains, country, community conserved areas, territorios autonomos comunitarios, sacred natural sites, locally-managed marine areas, and many others. The ICCA abbreviation may encompass, but should never obscure, the diversity of such terms, which is a value in itself. Local / customary names should always be preferentially used, leaving the term ‘ICCA’ for general or inter-cultural communication…
In any case, for many custodian communities, the connection with their territories is much richer than any word or label can express. It is a bond of livelihood, energy and health. It is a source of identity and culture, autonomy and freedom. It is the connecting tie among generations, preserving memories from the past, and connecting those to the desired future. It is the ground on which communities learn, identify values and develop self-rule. For many it is also a connection between visible and invisible realities, material and spiritual wealth. With territory and nature go life, dignity and self-determination as peoples.
Introduction to ICCA's
The ICCA Consortium seeks to influence the process and politics of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. The last occasion was at COP 14.
The 14th ordinary meeting of the parties to the convention took place on 17–29 November 2018, in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt. The 2018 UN Biodiversity Conference closed on 29 November 2018 with the usual scenario. That is of a broad international agreement on reversing the global destruction of nature and biodiversity loss threatening all forms of life on Earth.
So far, delivery on these agreements has been underwhelming.
UN Convention on Biological Diversity
The current status of the date for the upcoming Conference of Parties on Biodiversity is to be determined:
The Conference of the Parties is the governing body of the Convention, and advances implementation of the Convention through the decisions it takes at its periodic meetings.
To date the Conference of the Parties has held 14 ordinary meetings, and one extraordinary meeting (the latter, to adopt the Biosafety Protocol, was held in two parts). From 1994 to 1996, the Conference of the Parties held its ordinary meetings annually. Since then these meetings have been held somewhat less frequently and, following a change in the rules of procedure in 2000, will now be held every two years.The Fifteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP 15) will be held in Kunming, China, date to be confirmed.
Prior to the last meeting, COP 14, the National Geographic magazine published this article by Gleb Raygorodetsky (Nov 16, 2018) with the headline:
Indigenous peoples defend Earth's biodiversity - but they're in danger
Gleb Raygorodetsky writes under this heading:
Comprising less than 5% of the world's population, indigenous people protect 80% of global biodiversity. Their role is under discussion by world leaders this week.
Re:LODE Radio selects this extensive passage from latter part of the article. He writes:
We are in one of the most biodiverse places on Earth—the Napo moist tropical forest in northeastern Ecuador, made famous by Yasuni National Park. According to Kelly Swing, the director of the Tiputini Biodiversity Station, there are about 600 species of birds, 200 species of mammals, 500 species of fish, and 150 species of frogs in the park. “One hectare of Yasuni forest may contain up to 600 species of trees and over 100,000 species of insects,” says Swing. “Microbial diversity is overwhelming.”Its estimated a million species, most still undiscovered, live in the New Hampshire-sized Yasuni, making it an icon of biodiversity. By way of comparison, only about 1.5 million species inhabiting our planet have been documented by science.But, we are not in Yasuni. We are about 80 miles south of its boundary, on the traditional territory of the Sápara people or, as they call themselves, children of Aritiaku, the red howler monkey. “Both the Yasuni park and Sápara territory are located at the intersection between the Andean uplands and the Amazonian lowlands, and this transitional zone creates an astounding abundance of distinct life-forms,” explains Swing.“The indigenous peoples of the Amazon have proven to be the best guardians of their traditional territories,” Swing adds. “The fact that the Amazon ecosystems are as rich as they are today is proof of how successful these cultures have been, in living in balance with their environment.”About 200 Sápara live in Ecuador, with approximately the same number across the border in Peru. Together, they are all that remain of a once thriving nation that totaled between 20,000 to 30,000 and comprised more than 200 peaceful tribes, who differed in name, but shared a common tongue. Following the Spanish conquest of the 16th century, the Sápara, like other indigenous groups in the region, were decimated by epidemics of measles, smallpox, and yellow fever, among other European “gifts.” At one point considered extinct, the Sápara were officially recognized by the Ecuadorian government in the 1990s. This included setting aside over 320,000 hectares of the Sápara’s sacred Naku, or rain forest—a mere eight percent of their historical range—as the Traditional Sápara Settlement Area. In 2001, UNESCO recognized the endangered Sápara language as an “Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.”Such recognition, however, has done little to acknowledge the Sápara’s role in biodiversity conservation and reduce the growing external threats to their ancestral territory, according to Kevin Koeing, climate and energy director of Amazon Watch, an environmental NGO working with indigenous peoples to protect the Amazon. “The government of Ecuador continues to view peoples as an obstacle to economic growth,” says Koeing. “It is pushing for oil development in the region by auctioning off blocks of the Sápara’s Naku that it considers under-populated and under-utilized wilderness that must be tamed. It is time to flip this dominant narrative and acknowledge the role of the Sápara and other indigenous peoples in doing the most critical thing that could be done under the imminent threat of biodiversity loss and climate change—and that is looking after their sacred Naku.”The story of the Sápara is not unique. Around the world, indigenous peoples have been displaced from their traditional territories in the name of ecotourism, like the Maasai in Tanzania, as well as conservation, as were the Sengwer and Ogiek peoples in Kenya. Indigenous peoples have had to abandon their livelihoods and ancestral lands because of large-scale development projects, such as Gibe III dam along Ethiopia’s Omo River; and, more recently, they have become climate refugees, like the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribe in Louisiana or the Inupiaq whaling community of Kivalina.But as our collective understanding of the imperilled state of our planet grows — the 6th extinction, escalating climate change, and exceeding planetary boundaries — the global discourse and actions are shifting toward a greater acknowledgement of the role of indigenous peoples and local communities and their traditional territories in biodiversity conservation and climate change resilience. Recent research demonstrates that while the world’s 370 million indigenous peoples make up less than five percent of the total human population, they manage or hold tenure over 25 percent of the world’s land surface and support about 80 percent of the global biodiversity.This week, world leaders have an opportunity to tackle these issues head on. The Fourteenth Conference of the Parties (COP14) to the Convention on Biodiversity, held between 17-29 November in Egypt, gives leaders a chance to further assert the role of indigenous peoples. Among other issues, COP14 will assess global progress toward achieving the Aichi Biodiversity Targets. In particular, Aichi Target 11 sets expectations for national governments to reach at least 17 percent of terrestrial and 10 percent of coastal and marine areas to be conserved through protected areas and other conservation measures by 2020. And experts say indigenous stewardship may be a critical way to meet those goals.A perfect stormThe evolution in thinking about the role of indigenous peoples as stewards of the Earth is the culmination of a number of trends. For one, the increasing sophistication of spatial analytical tools, such as the Global Platform of Indigenous and Community Lands or LandMark, the Protected Planet database, and the Indigenous and Community Conserved Areas Registry, has enabled a better documentation of the extent, as well as biodiversity and carbon storage values, of indigenous lands.Indigenous rights to self-determination, well-being, traditional knowledge, and a healthy environment—as articulated in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples — have also been increasingly recognized by national governments and the conservation community. Philanthropic and development organizations are also increasingly supporting indigenous conservation projects, in part because they often see them as a win-win to help people and the planet.Successful examples around the worldPatrick O’Leary, senior officer of the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Outback to Oceans Program, applauds the recent decision by the Australian government to extend its support for Indigenous Protected Areas (IPAs) and the Indigenous Rangers programs through 2023 and 2021, to enable Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to continue managing existing and creating new IPAs. Established in 1997, the IPA Program has contributed significantly to Australia’s efforts to protect and conserve its biodiversity, notes O’Leary. Currently, 75 IPAs cover approximately 68 million hectares, representing over 45 percent of Australia’s National Reserve System. Moreover, Australia’s IPAs provide many cultural, social, health, and economic benefits to local people, says O’Leary.In Namibia, the recognition of community-based natural resource management under the Nature Conservation Amendment Act of 1996 has resulted in the establishment of 82 conservancies and 32 community forests. Today, conservancies cover about 20 percent of the country’s surface area. Some animal populations have been restored, others are recovering, while living conditions for local people continue to improve.In Canada, the recent federal recognition of the Edéhzhíe Protected Area in the country’s northwest and support for the Indigenous Guardianship Program — in which indigenous communities are empowered to manage their territories according to traditional laws — are recent steps towards the acknowledgment of indigenous stewardship. “These important developments advance national biodiversity conservation goals,” says Eli Enns, co-chair of Canada’s Indigenous Circle of Experts. “This builds on the nearly three decades of indigenous-led efforts to assert their constitutionally protected rights to look after their traditional territories, beginning with the recognition of Gwaii Haanas and Tla-o-qui-aht Tribal Parks in the 1980s.”In Europe, this shift has led to the recognition of the Havukkavaara forest in North Karelia in Finland. For Tero Mustonen, director of the advocacy group Snowchange Cooperative, Havukkavaara is an example of “a new style of community-based conservation that includes culture, history, and people to help sustain traditional lifeways and conserve the last vestiges of the old-growth forests south of the Arctic Circle in Finland.”Defining indigenous stewardship on the global stageDespite their rising profile, the precise role of indigenous territories in the Convention on Biological Diversity remains unclear — although that could change after the meeting in Egypt this week. In order to help meet the global biodiversity targets, leaders are arguing that qualifying lands under the convention need to be expanded to include “a geographically defined area, other than a Protected Area, which is governed and managed in ways that achieve positive and sustained outcomes for the in-situ conservation of biodiversity, with associated ecosystem services and cultural and spiritual values.”In other words, many leaders hope to clarify that the global biodiversity goals be met not only with traditional protected areas like parks—which have conservation as the primary objective of management—but also with areas that show conservation outcomes, rather than objectives. These latter areas would include indigenous-managed territories, such as the Sápara lands in Ecuador.However, experts warn that recognizing the contributions of indigenous peoples is not as simple as drawing polygons on maps. It means going beyond traditional “fortress conservation,” of walling people away from nature. To work, such partnerships need to value holistic indigenous knowledge systems and ways of life.As Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, states in her report “Cornered by Protected Areas,” it means adopting rights-based approaches to conservation that bring justice for indigenous peoples and local communities, while enabling biodiversity conservation and climate action.“The future of our planet lies in indigenous ways of living on the Earth,” says Jon Waterhouse, Indigenous Peoples Scholar at the Oregon Health and Science University and a National Geographic Education Fellow Emeritus and Explorer. “As a global community, we have lost our way; we forgot what it means to have a relationship with the land.”To find it again, we have great guides, says Waterhouse. “Indigenous peoples have mastered the art of living on the Earth without destroying it. They continue to teach and lead by example, from the restoration of eel grass and salmon by the Samish Nation, to the bison reintroduction by the Kainai Nation of the Blackfoot Confederacy, to the restoration of traditional 800-year old Hawaiian fish ponds. We must heed these lessons and take on this challenging task, if we want our grandchildren to have a future.”
Jonathan Watts reporting for the Guardian, ahead of the COP 14 meeting UN Convention on Biological Diversity (Tue 6 Nov 2018) on a warning given by Cristiana Paşca Palmer, executive secretary of CBD. He writes under the headline:Stop biodiversity loss or we could face our own extinction, warns UNThe world has two years to secure a deal for nature to halt a ‘silent killer’ as dangerous as climate change, says biodiversity chief
The Guardian webpage uses this image at the head of the story that shows the consequences of industrial scale deforestation in Indonesia, an extreme level of destruction to make way for a palm oil concession.
Towards the end of 2020 we find ourselves not far along from when the 2020 "THE YEAR OF TRUTH" banner was first used by Re:LODE Radio, looking at the devastating consequences of palm oil production upon the primary forest environment. The two links provided in this first post of 2020 were to the Re:LODE Cargo of Questions Information Wrap for Pangandaran, Java, Indonesia. One LINK is titled:
FIRST: Some SCIENCE . . .
The other LINK is titled:
SECOND: Some POLITICS
Also featured is a LINK to the MONGABAY in-depth series on corruption, palm oil and rainforests, that is called:
"Indonesia for Sale".
Two years ago . . .
. . . in 2018, Jonathan Watts reported on Cristiana Paşca Palmer, executive secretary of Convention on Biological Diversity, delivering a stark warning in November 2018, made just prior to the CBD's COP 14 meeting in Egypt. He writes:
Ahead of a key international conference to discuss the collapse of ecosystems, Cristiana Pașca Palmer said people in all countries need to put pressure on their governments to draw up ambitious global targets by 2020 to protect the insects, birds, plants and mammals that are vital for global food production, clean water and carbon sequestration.
“The loss of biodiversity is a silent killer,” she told the Guardian. “It’s different from climate change, where people feel the impact in everyday life. With biodiversity, it is not so clear but by the time you feel what is happening, it may be too late.”Pașca Palmer is executive secretary of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity – the world body responsible for maintaining the natural life support systems on which humanity depends.Its members – 195 states and the EU – will meet in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, this month to start discussions on a new framework for managing the world’s ecosystems and wildlife. This will kick off two years of frenetic negotiations, which Pașca Palmer hopes will culminate in an ambitious new global deal at the next conference in Beijing in 2020.Conservationists are desperate for a biodiversity accord that will carry the same weight as the Paris climate agreement. But so far, this subject has received miserably little attention even though many scientists say it poses at least an equal threat to humanity.The last two major biodiversity agreements – in 2002 and 2010 – have failed to stem the worst loss of life on Earth since the demise of the dinosaurs.Eight years ago, under the Aichi Biodiversity Targets, nations promised to at least halve the loss of natural habitats, ensure sustainable fishing in all waters, and expand nature reserves from 10% to 17% of the world’s land by 2020. But many nations have fallen behind, and those that have created more protected areas have done little to police them. “Paper reserves” can now be found from Brazil to China.The issue is also low on the political agenda. Compared to climate summits, few heads of state attend biodiversity talks. Even before Donald Trump, the US refused to ratify the treaty and only sends an observer. Along with the Vatican, it is the only UN state not to participate.Pașca Palmer says there are glimmers of hope. Several species in Africa and Asia have recovered (though most are in decline) and forest cover in Asia has increased by 2.5% (though it has decreased elsewhere at a faster rate). Marine protected areas have also widened.But overall, she says, the picture is worrying. The already high rates of biodiversity loss from habitat destruction, chemical pollution and invasive species will accelerate in the coming 30 years as a result of climate change and growing human populations. By 2050, Africa is expected to lose 50% of its birds and mammals, and Asian fisheries to completely collapse. The loss of plants and sea life will reduce the Earth’s ability to absorb carbon, creating a vicious cycle.“The numbers are staggering,” says the former Romanian environment minister. “I hope we aren’t the first species to document our own extinction.”Despite the weak government response to such an existential threat, she said her optimism about what she called “the infrastructure of life” was undimmed.One cause for hope was a convergence of scientific concerns and growing interest from the business community. Last month, the UN’s top climate and biodiversity institutions and scientists held their first joint meeting. They found that nature-based solutions – such as forest protection, tree planting, land restoration and soil management – could provide up to a third of the carbon absorption needed to keep global warming within the Paris agreement parameters. In future the two UN arms of climate and biodiversity should issue joint assessments. She also noted that although politics in some countries were moving in the wrong direction, there were also positive developments such as French president, Emmanuel Macron, recently being the first world leader to note that the climate issue cannot be solved without a halt in biodiversity loss. This will be on the agenda of the next G7 summit in France.“Things are moving. There is a lot of goodwill,” she said. “We should be aware of the dangers but not paralysed by inaction. It’s still in our hands but the window for action is narrowing. We need higher levels of political and citizen will to support nature.”Again, two years ago . . .. . . in the weeks preceding the CBD COP 14 meeting, Damian Carrington, Environment editor for the Guardian, reported on the findings of a major report by the WWF (Tue 30 Oct 2018).
Damian Carrington writes under the headline and subheading:
Humanity has wiped out 60% of animal populations since 1970, report findsThe huge loss is a tragedy in itself but also threatens the survival of civilisation, say the world’s leading scientistsHumanity has wiped out 60% of mammals, birds, fish and reptiles since 1970, leading the world’s foremost experts to warn that the annihilation of wildlife is now an emergency that threatens civilisation.The new estimate of the massacre of wildlife is made in a major report produced by WWF and involving 59 scientists from across the globe. It finds that the vast and growing consumption of food and resources by the global population is destroying the web of life, billions of years in the making, upon which human society ultimately depends for clean air, water and everything else.“We are sleepwalking towards the edge of a cliff” said Mike Barrett, executive director of science and conservation at WWF. “If there was a 60% decline in the human population, that would be equivalent to emptying North America, South America, Africa, Europe, China and Oceania. That is the scale of what we have done.”“This is far more than just being about losing the wonders of nature, desperately sad though that is,” he said. “This is actually now jeopardising the future of people. Nature is not a ‘nice to have’ – it is our life-support system.”
“We are rapidly running out of time,” said Prof Johan Rockström, a global sustainability expert at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “Only by addressing both ecosystems and climate do we stand a chance of safeguarding a stable planet for humanity’s future on Earth.”
Many scientists believe the world has begun a sixth mass extinction, the first to be caused by a species – Homo sapiens. Other recent analyses have revealed that humankind has destroyed 83% of all mammals and half of plants since the dawn of civilisation and that, even if the destruction were to end now, it would take 5-7 million years for the natural world to recover.The Living Planet Index, produced for WWF by the Zoological Society of London, uses data on 16,704 populations of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians, representing more than 4,000 species, to track the decline of wildlife. Between 1970 and 2014, the latest data available, populations fell by an average of 60%. Four years ago, the decline was 52%. The “shocking truth”, said Barrett, is that the wildlife crash is continuing unabated.Wildlife and the ecosystems are vital to human life, said Prof Bob Watson, one of the world’s most eminent environmental scientists and currently chair of an intergovernmental panel on biodiversity that said in March that the destruction of nature is as dangerous as climate change.“Nature contributes to human wellbeing culturally and spiritually, as well as through the critical production of food, clean water, and energy, and through regulating the Earth’s climate, pollution, pollination and floods,” he said. “The Living Planet report clearly demonstrates that human activities are destroying nature at an unacceptable rate, threatening the wellbeing of current and future generations.”The biggest cause of wildlife losses is the destruction of natural habitats, much of it to create farmland. Three-quarters of all land on Earth is now significantly affected by human activities. Killing for food is the next biggest cause – 300 mammal species are being eaten into extinction – while the oceans are massively overfished, with more than half now being industrially fished.Chemical pollution is also significant: half the world’s killer whale populations are now doomed to die from PCB contamination. Global trade introduces invasive species and disease, with amphibians decimated by a fungal disease thought to be spread by the pet trade.The worst affected region is South and Central America, which has seen an 89% drop in vertebrate populations, largely driven by the felling of vast areas of wildlife-rich forest. In the tropical savannah called cerrado, an area the size of Greater London is cleared every two months, said Barrett.“It is a classic example of where the disappearance is the result of our own consumption, because the deforestation is being driven by ever expanding agriculture producing soy, which is being exported to countries including the UK to feed pigs and chickens,” he said. The UK itself has lost much of its wildlife, ranking 189th for biodiversity loss out of 218 nations in 2016.The habitats suffering the greatest damage are rivers and lakes, where wildlife populations have fallen 83%, due to the enormous thirst of agriculture and the large number of dams. “Again there is this direct link between the food system and the depletion of wildlife,” said Barrett. Eating less meat is an essential part of reversing losses, he said.The Living Planet Index has been criticised as being too broad a measure of wildlife losses and smoothing over crucial details. But all indicators, from extinction rates to intactness of ecosystems, show colossal losses. “They all tell you the same story,” said Barrett.Conservation efforts can work, with tiger numbers having risen 20% in India in six years as habitat is protected. Giant pandas in China and otters in the UK have also been doing well.But Marco Lambertini, director general of WWF International, said the fundamental issue was consumption: “We can no longer ignore the impact of current unsustainable production models and wasteful lifestyles.”The world’s nations are working towards a crunch meeting of the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity in 2020, when new commitments for the protection of nature will be made. “We need a new global deal for nature and people and we have this narrow window of less than two years to get it,” said Barrett. “This really is the last chance. We have to get it right this time.”Tanya Steele, chief executive at WWF, said: “We are the first generation to know we are destroying our planet and the last one that can do anything about it.”
The WWF explains:
The Convention on Biological Diversity COP 15 scheduled for 2020 in Beijing did not happen. The re-scheduled COP 15 to take place in Kunming, China, in 2021 is re-scheduled for the second quarter but a date has not, as yet, been decided. Re:LODE Radio suggests that one of the casualties of the coronavirus pandemic has been the way the news cycle has inadvertently, but inevitably, allowed the suppression of the volume when it comes to the decibel levels for the ringing warnings made down the line all the way back to 2018.
“We need a new global deal for nature and people and we have this narrow window of less than two years to get it”
Mike Barrett, executive director of science and conservation at WWF (Oct 2018).
That was then! This is NOW!
Earlier this year Patrick Greenfield in Rome, and reporting for the Guardian (Mon 2 Mar 2020), covered this story on the status of proceedings and meetings driving the Convention on Biological Diversity agenda.
Patrick Greenfield reports under the headline and subheading:
Rich countries could be asked to pay billions to protect biodiversity
NGOs express disappointment with ambition of UN talks on global nature agreementWealthy nations could be asked to make significant financial contributions to biodiverse countries such as Brazil under proposals put forward during talks on a global agreement to halt and reverse biodiversity decline.Paying countries with life-sustaining ecosystems such as the Amazon rainforest billions of pounds a year for the services those ecosystems provide for the world was proposed during negotiations on a Paris-style UN agreement on nature in Rome last week.Conservationists hope the eventual agreement will provide an accessible, science-based global goal on biodiversity loss, equivalent to targets to limit global heating, following warnings from scientists that humans are driving the sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s history.Delegates from more than 140 countries were responding for the first time to a draft 20-point agreement that includes proposals to protect almost a third of the world’s oceans and land and reduce pollution from plastic waste and excess nutrients by 50%.During the talks at the Food and Agriculture Organization headquarters in Rome, several African and Latin American countries expressed the need for financial support to protect life-supporting ecosystems and develop mechanisms to share profits from discoveries linked to their genetic resources, such as new drugs.The negotiating team for Brazil, led by Leonardo Cleaver de Athayde, was particularly robust about the need for financial payments for ecosystem services.Small-scale schemes to protect ecosystems already exist under the UN climate convention, with countries with large forests receiving payments to reduce emissions from deforestation and degradation.When asked whether obtaining sufficient financial backing from developed nations for so-called mega biodiverse countries would be the key sticking point in the agreement, senior UN officials cautioned that negotiations were ongoing but said the targets would not be implemented without resources.Francis Ogwal, a co-chair of the negotiations, said: “When you’re talking about biodiversity, it’s not just biodiversity, it’s our life on this planet. If the loss of biodiversity continues at this pace, human beings won’t be on this planet.“It’s about us assuring our survival here and for generations to come. So really, on that basis, why wouldn’t more money be put there? It’s for our own good.”Countries with high biodiversity include China, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and India, according to various definitions. The payments would support poorer countries with high biodiversity to help conserve life-supporting ecosystems.This week’s talks had been scheduled to be held in the Chinese city of Kunming, and governments are expected to adopt the agreement at a summit there in October, replacing targets for the previous decade that countries largely failed to meet.The negotiations were moved to Rome following the outbreak of the new coronavirus, and the Chinese delegation was not able to attend due to quarantine measures. The planned Kunming agreement has been highlighted as the first time China is taking the lead on environmental global issues, and UN officials said officials had been in contact from afar.Another co-chair, Basile van Havre, said: “In terms of China’s engagement with the discussions, I don’t know how many hundreds of WeChat messages I’ve exchanged with Beijing and the delegation here. Their team were up during our schedule, listening and engaging.”Despite warm words from some negotiators, many NGOs expressed disappointment with the ambition of the talks and the level of urgency following the first round of negotiations.Marco Lambertini, the director general of WWF International, said: “Our relationship with nature is dangerously unbalanced. One million species are threatened with extinction and the way we currently produce and consume is risking irreparable damage to the very natural systems that underpin human wellbeing and prosperity, from forests to oceans and river systems. With science and society calling for urgent action on nature, alongside climate, it is disappointing to see limited ambition and leadership displayed by countries in Rome.“The world must not miss the chance this year’s UN talks provide to secure a Paris-style agreement for nature that includes a clear 2030 set of science-based and measurable goals and targets. It will now be critical that countries step up to the challenge in the next round of negotiations and ensure the draft agreement arrives in Kunming with the necessary ambition to deliver a nature-positive world by the end of the decade.”At the World Economic Forum at the start of this year, biodiversity loss was highlighted as the third biggest risk to the world in terms of likelihood and severity.The next round of formal negotiations will be held in Cali, Colombia, in July.
Re:LODE Radio notes that this scheduled meeting in Cali is appropriate in the light of Colombia being among those countries with high biodiversity. Cali is situated along the LODE Zone Line. However . . .
The meeting was postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic
The mindset that runs with the idea that we have "all the time in the world" is "running out of time".
In these last weeks of 2020 the news cycle has been full of the ongoing "big lie" in Donald Trump's attempt to undermine confidence in the democratic process of the US election. The news cycle is no longer determined by the news, it is dominated in the US by the propensity of many to garner information from social media platforms.
This information is monetised! It is possible to make lots of money out of BIG LIES!
In this context "bubbles" of pernicious gossip and rumour become established as uncontested realities. This is another era where media forms amplify "unconscious bias", as previously seen with radio in Nazi Germany, becoming equivalent in its effect to a "tribal drum". This is ECHOLAND!
Hush! Caution! . . .
Meanwhile in Minsk . . .
. . . along the LODE Zone Line in Belarus, winter has driven widespread protests at the "stolen" election off the streets, but the protest movement continues. Many protesters violently arrested for demonstrating on the streets during the autumn remain in jail.
Spring, summer and fall . . .
REUTERS WORLD NEWS reported on October 22, 2020 that EU lawmakers awarded its annual human rights prize rights prize to the Belarus opposition. Robin Emmott writes:
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Parliament awarded Belarus’ democratic opposition on Thursday its annual human rights prize, in support of the country’s protests against the results of an August presidential election that the West and the opposition say was rigged.
“My message for you, dear laureates, is to stay strong and not to give up on your fight. Know that we are by your side,” European Parliament President David Sassoli said after announcing the prize to “brave women ... prominent political and civil society figures.”
The parliament cited 10 opposition figures in its award statement, including the main opposition candidate Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya and Nobel laureate author Svetlana Alexievich.
Come and See
When it comes to the political, and the economical, and the social, as with human made urban fabric, what has been destroyed can be restored, eventually.
In an earlier post, pointing to the the ongoing protest movement in Belarus and a re-kindling of the spirit of the wartime resistance of the population to the Nazi invasion and occupation of Belarus, Re:LODE Radio referenced the film Come and See.
Come and See (Russian: Иди и смотри, Idi i smotri; Belarusian: Ідзі і глядзі, Idzi i hliadzi) is a 1985 Soviet anti-war film directed by Elem Klimov, and is one of the greatest films ever made.
The film's plot focuses on the Nazi German occupation of Belarus, and the events as witnessed by a young Belarusian partisan teenager named Flyora, who—against his mother's wishes—joins the Belarusian resistance movement, and thereafter depicts the Nazi atrocities and human suffering inflicted upon the Belarusian villages' populations. The film mixes hyper-realism with an underlying surrealism, and philosophical existentialism with poetical, psychological, political and apocalyptic themes.
Apocalypse literally means 'an unveiling', 'a revelation'. But it is the description of the Book of Revelation of St. John as 'apocalyptic' that gives us the definition of the word which we use today: of or relating to the end of the world. In the book John relates a series of vivid, often frightening visions that he experienced on the Greek island of Patmos. They relate to the Second Coming of Christ and the Last Judgement. The title of the film is a reference to Verses 1-8 of chapter 6 and the episode in this text that relates to how John of Patmos "saw" four horsemen:
"And I saw when the lamb opened one of the seals, and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying, Come and see.
And I saw, and behold a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him; and he went forth conquering and to conquer.And when he had opened the second seal, I heard the second beast say, Come and see.And there went out another horse that was red: and power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth, and that they should kill one another: and there was given unto him a great sword.And when he had opened the third seal, I heard the third beast say, Come and see. And I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand.And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see though hurt not the oil and the wine.And when he had opened the fourth seal I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, come and see.And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat upon him was Death and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with the sword, and with hunger, and with death and with the beasts of the earth."These riders have been interpreted as Christ himself conquering the earth. But they are more usually seen as personifications of War, Famine, Plague and Death.The Apocalypse with Pictures, is the series of fifteen woodcuts by Albrecht Dürer published in 1498 depicting various scenes from the Book of Revelation, which rapidly brought him fame across Europe.This is the fourth woodcut of the Apocalypse cycle, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and depicts the first four of seven seals that must be opened in order for the Apocalypse to begin.
In Klimov's film Come and See the narrative ends with a sequence of scenes, beginning with Flyora returning to the village to find that his fellow partisans have captured eleven of the Germans and their collaborators, including the commander. While some of the captured men, including the commander, plead for their lives and deflect blame, a young fanatical officer is unapologetic and vows they will carry out their mission. Collaborators are then forced to douse the Germans with a can of petrol but the disgusted crowd shoot them all before they can be set on fire.
As the partisans leave, Flyora notices a framed portrait of Adolf Hitler in a puddle and proceeds to shoot it numerous times. As he does so, a montage of clips from Hitler's life play in reverse, but when Hitler is shown as a baby on his mother's lap, Flyora stops shooting and cries.
Using the technique of a reversal in the film sequence, time appears to be re-wound, to go backwards in this "reel" world. This is a psychological as well as a visual space for "acting out", and the triggering of a catharsis, through "going back in time" to confront, head on, the source of the horror.
This dramatic reversal of time through a cinematic movement, where an historical sequence of movie clips are wound backwards in time, and back to origins, to causes, is a powerful way of bringing together philosophical and existential themes with a highly affective poetical, psychological, political and apocalyptic method of "revelation". But, can it be that the source of the horror, and the blame, is a baby on a mother's knee?The reversal of cinematic time transforms images of destruction into images of creation, growth and fruition. This reversal of time features in the postmodern, meta-fictional novel Slaughterhouse-Five, also known, rather apocalyptically, as The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death. The novel uses the genre of science fiction, but it is infused with an anti-war ethos. This novel by Kurt Vonnegut, first published in 1969, at the height of the US imperialist and neo-colonialist Vietnam War, and follows the life and experiences of Billy Pilgrim, from his early years to his time as an American soldier and chaplain's assistant during World War II, to the post-war years, with Billy occasionally traveling through time. The text centres on Billy's capture by the German Army and his survival of the Allied firebombing of Dresden as a prisoner of war, an experience which Vonnegut himself lived through as an American serviceman. The work has been called an example of "unmatched moral clarity" and "one of the most enduring antiwar novels of all time".
Here is an excerpt from the novel that uses the technique of a cinematic reversal, of going backwards through time to get to where we would rather be instead of where we are actually headed.
“It was a movie about American bombers in World War II and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers , and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans though and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.”So this is what time reversal looks like "going forward"!
The penultimate scene of Come and See begins this video montage and is then followed by something of a video experiment that presents the song, "We Have All the Time in the World", connected to the idea that as we face the ongoing and irreparable extinction events and the destruction of global biodiversity . . .
. . . all the time in the world is something that we do NOT have!
The song formed part of a James Bond film soundtrack as well as a popular song sung by Louis Armstrong. The music was composed by John Barry with lyrics by Hal David. It was composed as a secondary musical theme for the 1969 Bond film On Her Majesty's Secret Service.
The song title is taken from Bond's final words in both the novel and the film, and spoken after the death of Tracy Bond, his wife. Barry says he chose Armstrong because he felt he could "deliver the title line with irony".
We do NOT . . .
For "business as usual" to continue, with unsustainable industrial agricultural practices, skewed to the "consumer tastes" of the wealthier societies on Earth, the notion of an inexhaustible reservoir of resources and time is an essential dimension of general understanding in those societies. This prevailing attitude reflects the basis of the capitalist project over the last 500 years or so.
An understanding of the finiteness of resources and time and to reverse the irreversible is the opposite type of understanding. So, in choosing material for this thought experiment, Re:LODE Radio takes and assembles film clips from the 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi, also known as Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance, and reverses the timeline so that the material hardware of a capitalist industrial society being destroyed is seen as being magically re-formed. One of the reversed film documentation sequences in this montage is of the un-demolition of the Wendell O. Pruitt Homes and William Igoe Apartments, known together as Pruitt–Igoe, joint urban housing projects first occupied in 1954 in the US city of St. Louis, Missouri. The transition from Modernism to Postmodernism is often said to have happened at 3:32pm on 15 July in 1972, when these Pruitt–Igoe housing blocks were blown up. Postmodern architectural historian Charles Jencks called its destruction "the day Modern architecture died." Its failure is often seen as a direct indictment of the society-changing aspirations of the International school of architecture. Jencks used Pruitt–Igoe as an example of modernists' intentions running contrary to real-world social development, though others argue that location, population density, cost constraints, and even specific number of floors were imposed by the federal and state authorities and therefore the failure of the project cannot be attributed entirely to architectural factors.
The process of showing film backwards works with nuclear explosions and the demolition of buildings, but when it comes to biodiversity . . .
. . . when it's gone, it's gone! Gone! Gone! Really gone!
Do we live in the Anthropocene era? Or, the Capitalocene? - the Video
Joseph Conrad and Paul Gauguin are referenced in the Re:LODE Methods & Purposes page:
Globalisation - before the word - and now!
Much referenced on these pages is the the text of Maya Jasanoff's book on the writer Joseph Conrad, "The Dawn Watch", a work that is divided into four sections:
PART ONE: NATIONPART TWO: OCEANPART THREE: CIVILIZATIONPART FOUR: EMPIREThe first chapter in Part One: Nation, is called NO HOME, NO COUNTRY and where she begins to tell the story of Conrad and his birth in the town of Berdychiv, that is now in a part of Ukraine, that was in its day, once a part of the independent Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania.Jasanoff begins writing about Conrad's birth, and the social, cultural and psychological environment that he was born into, and a family that reveals so much about the passion, and aspiration that is part of "being Polish" and the pain of not having a "nation", as well as the gentle pragmatism of acceptance that "that's just the way it is"."Send a letter to Berdychiv"There is an old Polish expression about the town where Konrad Korzeniowski was born on December 3, 1857. When you tell someone to "send a letter to Berdychiv," you mean "send a letter to nowhere" - you'll never reach me. The saying plays on Berdychiv's nineteenth-century position as a "somewhere," particularly for the town's then majority of Jews. Berdychiv hosted numerous trade fairs every year, making it a routine stop for peddlars with no permanent address. If they said "send a letter to Berdychiv," they meant send a letter to a place I'm going - you'll definitely reach me.The world is made up of "nowheres" and "somewheres" - but which counts as which depends on what "where" you look from. The story of Konrad's life, and the world in which he lived, was a story of nowheres colliding with somewheres. At the time of his birth, the failure of a bank in Ohio touched off a financial panic that toppled firms in Hamburg. British troops struggled to suppress a rebellion in India. Indian troops sailed to Canton to threaten Chinese imperial officials. Chinese settlers rebelled on a river in Borneo, in a Malay state ruled by a European. European cloth and guns were traded up the Congo basin for ivory by villagers who'd never seen a white person. An American filibuster was booted out of Nicaragua. American-made steamboats plowed up the rivers of South America, and a locomotive built in Leeds pulled the first train out of Buenos Aires.
For Re:LODE Radio Berdychiv is a "somewhere", as are all the "other places" along the LODE Zone Line!
Maya Jasanoff says in her introductory pages to "The Dawn Watch" that:
"History is like therapy for the present . . .
. . . it makes us talk about its parents. Because the term "globalization" was popularized in the 1980's, it's easy to assume that most of the things associated with it date from then or later: an interdependent economy, open borders,ethnically diverse and networked populations, international institutions and standards, shared cultural reference points. But it was in Conrad's youth, not mine, that "three great achievements of the present," as Walt Whitman called them, transformed the speed and range of global connections: "In the Old World, the east, the Suez canal,/The New by its mighty railroad spann'd,/The seas inlaid with eloquent, gentle wires." Conrad docked alongside the oceangoing steamers that transported emigrants from Europe and Asia on a scale never seen before or since. He cruised over the transoceanic telegraph cables that zapped news, for the frst time in history, faster than people.
Between voyages he made his home in London, the center of a global financial market that was more integrated during his lifetime than it would be again until the 1980's."
Pages 6-7, The Dawn Watch by Maya Jasanoff
What is this map all about? Freedom? Fraternity? Federation? OR, colonialist ideology?
Jasanoff continues:
Conrad wouldn't have known the word "globalization", but with his journey from the provinces of imperial Russia across the high seas to the British home counties, he embodied it. He channeled his global perspective into fiction based overwhelmingly on personal experience and real incidents. Henry James perfectly described Conrad's gift: "No-one has known - for intellectual use - the things you know, and you have, as the artist of the whole matter, an authority that no one has approached." That's why a map of Conrad's written world looks so different from that of his contemporaries. Conrad has often been compared to Rudyard Kipling, the informal poet laureate of the British Empire, whose fiction took place in the parts of the world that were colored red on maps, to show British rule. But Conrad didn't set a single novel in a British colony, and even the fiction he placed in Britain or on British ships generally featured non-British characters. Conrad cast his net across Europe, Africa, South America and the Indian Ocean. then he wandered through the holes. He took his readers to the places "beyond the end of telegraph cables and mail-boat lines," onto the sailing ships that crept alongside the swift steamers, and among the "human outcasts such as one finds in the lost corners of the world."
Page 7, The Dawn Watch by Maya Jasanoff
These lines of communication, these networks, are part of what it takes to "stitch the world together", as actor-network theory would have it. Perhaps it is in these flows of things and information that the essence of "modernity" emerges. And as Rudyard Kipling said:
Transportation is civilisation!
The shipping records of the past can now be used to produce a moving image of the flows of goods, people and information, as well as monitoring the patterns of trade in our age of containerisation. Maya Jasanoff continues her view that:
The British Empire vanished long ago, and not many people read Kipling anymore. But Conrad's world shimmers beneath the surface of our own. Today Internet cables run along the seafloor beside the old telegraph wires. Conrad's characters whisper in the ears of new generations of antiglobalization protesters and champions of free trade, liberal interventionists and radical terrorists, social justice activists and xenophobic nativists. And there is no better emblem of globalization today than the containership, which has made transport so cheap that it's more efficient to catch a fish in Scotland, send it to China to be filleted, then send it back to Europe for sale, than it is to hire laborers in situ. Ninety percent of world trade travels by sea, which makes ships and sailors more central to the world economy than ever before.
Pages 7-9, The Dawn Watch by Maya Jasanoff
This video montage assembles a number of video clips to present the idea of how a coercive power is exercised in so-called international waters. These international are now entering a new period of contention in the context of economic and political hegemony, most obviously being acted out through new forms of "gunboat diplomacy" between the rising power of China and the declining power of the United States. It is in the South China sea where we will find this "echoland" of earlier imperial and colonialist inspired conflicts. Another case of tragedy repeating itself as another tragedy and anything but a farce. The video begins with A year of ships. To quote Ben Schmidt:
A looped visualization of all the voyages in the Climatological database for the world's oceans (http://www.ucm.es/info/cliwoc/) as if they occurred in the same year, to show seasonal patterns in ship movements and predominant shipping lanes from 1750 to 1850. More info at http://sappingattention.blogspot.com/....
This is followed by Global ship traffic seen from space - FleetMon Satellite AIS and FleetMon Explorer. To quote FleetMonCom:
A week of ship traffic on the seven seas, seen from space. Get a glimpse of the vibrant lanes of goods transport that link the continents.
The vessel movements were captured using newest terrestrial and space-borne AIS technology from FleetMon and its partner Luxspace. The records cover the world's merchant fleet with some 100.000s of cargo ships, tankers, ferries, cruise ships, yachts and tugs. FleetMon provides advanced fleet monitoring services, software APIs, reports and analyses of maritime traffic data. The inset shows live monitoring with the FleetMon Explorer software.
Next . . .
. . . the Americanisation of the World . . .
. . . and what did we see?
We saw the sea!
A film clip follows from the film Follow the Fleet, a 1936 American RKO musical comedy film with a nautical theme starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. This was their fifth collaboration as dance partners. The film introduces Astaire with the song "We Saw The Sea", that is played out here in a popular cultural form, reflecting the American audience's assumption of the predominance of the United States as a naval power.
Next comes a number of clips from a dramatisation of the shocking defeat of U.S. forces by the Japanese in the Philippines, in the American war film directed by John Ford, They Were Expendable.
Made in a 1945, the last year of the conflict, the film is based on the 1942 book by William Lindsay White, relating the story of the exploits of Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron Three, a PT boat unit defending the Philippines against Japanese invasion during the Battle of the Philippines (1941–42) in World War II.
The film ends with a caption of this quote from Douglas MacArthur, and so it was in 1945 he was aboard the U.S. Battleship USS Missouri to accept the surrender of Japan, and shown next in the montage sequence. Missouri was prominently featured in the movie, Battleship. As Missouri has not moved under her own power since 1992, shots of the ship at sea were obtained with the help of three tugboats. This science fiction film fantasy appropriates the echo chamber of American exceptionalism, and a "right as might" scenario, to shore up the unravelling ideological constructs of a demonstrably waning super-power.
Hush! Caution! Waning super-powers are potentially more dangerous than rising super-powers!
The music video for Cher's "If I Could Turn Back Time" was also filmed aboard Missouri. The U.S. Navy, which had granted permission to shoot the video there, was unhappy with the sexual nature of the performance. The kitsch quality of Cher's official video for the song suggested the following clip in the montage sequence, the Sirens scene from Apocalypse Now in which Playboy Playmates descend from helicopters, perform briefly and then exit by helicopter.
How Playboy explains Vietnam and the Americanisation of the World
Across the gallery from the LODE installation in Hull (November 1992), at the Ferens Art Gallery, hangs this picture of Ulysses and the Sirens.
Ulysses and the Sirens is a 1909 oil painting by Herbert James Draper measuring 69.25 × 84 in. It is held at the Ferens Art Gallery in Kingston upon Hull, England. The gallery purchased the painting from Draper in 1910 for £600. The subject of the painting is an episode in the epic poem Odyssey by Homer in which Ulysses is tormented by the voices of Sirens, although there are only two Sirens in Homer's poem and they stay in a meadow. The painting depicts Ulysses tied to the mast and forcibly attendant to the Sirens' seductions. Although the Sirens were depicted in ancient Greek art as scary, ugly creatures, Draper maintains the spirit but not the content of the story by transferring the Sirens' seductiveness from their song to a visible form, depicting the Sirens as beautiful mermaids who invade Ulysses' ship. The Sirens are nude and their tails disappear as they board the ship. Draper's conflation of Sirens with mermaids and his sexualization of these figures are consistent with other artwork of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, and set against the contemporary background reality of British sea power and colonialism.
Apocalypse Now and Joseph Conrad
Apocalypse Now, made in 1979, is an epic post-colonial and psychological war film, directed and produced by Francis Ford Coppola, and is loosely based on the 1899 novella Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, with the setting changed from the situation, and "the horror", Conrad found in the late 19th-century Congo fiefdom of King Leopold of the Belgians, and translated to the Vietnam War.
The Anthropocene? Yes! But . . .
Taking a cue from the last sequence in this video montage, a video that shows all roads, air, and shipping routes on the entire planet and that ends with the fact that scientists are thinking about defining a new geological era with a new term: the Anthropocene, the period of geological, environmental and biological transformation of the planet by humans.
Cities, towns, shipping routes, global roads and air networks are all changing Earth, so the new era's name (anthropo- means human and -cene means new) refers to the effect of humans on Earth ecosystems, including the transformation of terrain and life all around us.
This visualization of Earth - made by anthropologist Felix Pharand-Deschenes - shows this effect. This video shows the extent of this change, but it is perhaps the case that an alternative to this new term, the Capitalocene, more accurately points to the systemic causes as associated with capitalism over the period of the last 500 years or so.
WIRED used this image for an article on the Capitalocene in 2019 (Sept 20 2019) under the heading:
Capitalism Made This Mess, and This Mess Will Ruin Capitalism
In this WIRED feature from 2019, Matt Simon is in conversation with Jason W. Moore, someone much referenced here at Re:LODE Radio during 2020 "THE YEAR OF TRUTH". Together with Raj Patel, Jason W. Moore published A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, and this is referenced on this Re:LODE Radio page:
A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things
The interview
YOU AND I have the unfortunate honor of facing down a crisis the likes of which our species has never before seen. Rapid climate change of our own making is transforming every bit of ocean and land, imperiling organisms clear across the tree of life. It’s killing people by way of stronger storms and hotter heat waves and unchecked pollution.We all can and should do our part— fly less if possible, buy local foods that haven’t been shipped thousands of miles, get solar panels and an electric car. But let’s not lose sight of the root cause of this crisis: rampant capitalism. Capitalism has steamrolled this planet and its organisms, gouging out mountains, overexploiting fish stocks, and burning fossil fuels to power the maniacal pursuit of growth and enrich a fraction of humanity. Since 1988, 100 corporations have been responsible for 70 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.Most of us have probably heard of the Anthropocene, humanity’s stain on the geological record through activities like land misuse and plastic pollution. Jason Moore, an environmental historian and sociologist at Binghamton University, calls the problem something else: the Capitalocene. WIRED sat down with Moore to talk about what got us into this mess, why capitalism won’t survive it, and what a brighter future might actually look like.WIRED: What is the Capitalocene you’re proposing?Jason Moore: Capitalocene is a kind of critical provocation to this sensibility of the Anthropocene, which is: We have met the enemy and he is us. So the idea that we're all going to cover our footprints, we're going to be more sustainable consumers, we're going to pay attention to population, are really consequences of a highly unequal system of power and wealth.There’s an assignment of blame here, which corporations love to do in particular with their workers—if you don't meet your goals as a company, it's not the people in the C-suites that are getting laid off, it's the laborers. The climate crisis strikes me as an extension of that, that 100 corporations are responsible for 70 percent of emissions, but they're the ones who will say, "Well, you as consumers could do a whole lot yourselves."That's right, and there's also a shift from looking at production to looking at consumption. Most carbon dioxide doesn’t come from people flying around the world, although that's a major contributor to it. It comes from production. For younger people there seems to be a kind of cognitive dissonance between yes, we are responsible, and at the same time we know that we are not responsible.Is capitalism compatible at all with any movement on climate change?That's the classic ecosocialist question. It's very clear that the problem is not technological—there are the technological means to decarbonize very rapidly. Still, if you solarize and go with wind, you have to store all the energy, you have to rebuild the electrical grids. It's usually costly, and finance capital is really wary of those long-term projects.What the venture capitalists want is a very narrow version of a technological application that can be used and put on the market right away. Out there in the culture, we think of capitalism as entrepreneurial and risk-taking and innovative, and that sometimes is the case but only within a very, very narrow frame. And we're talking about huge existential transformations of the earth.Is there historical precedent here? Have, for instance, natural climate fluctuations in the past threatened capitalism?Climate changes over the past 2,000 years have been extraordinarily destabilizing to ruling classes. This was the case for the Roman Empire in the West. So drought pushes the Huns, which pushes the Goths, they go into Western Europe. But more fundamentally, the changing climate after the year 400 creates all sorts of economic and political tensions, and in Western Europe the Roman Empire collapses. We now understand that wasn't a terrible thing, that in fact there was more equality, a lower birth rate. There were peasants reorganizing agriculture so that they depended on many different sources of food and had many different livelihood strategies, instead of just growing wheat for the Roman overlords.Moments of climate change become moments of climate crisis, and that's in the relatively milder climate shifts of the Holocene, which is now over. Capitalism is not going to survive, but it also depends on what we mean by capitalism. For me, Capitalocene is a critique of this idea that capitalism is just about economics. Because it's also a system of power and it's a system of culture.A difference this time with human-made climate change compared with past realignments of power is that capitalism has wrapped around the world. You have all these economically interconnected countries.It's interconnectedness in an imperial sense in terms of great powers, but also in terms of the overwhelming power of finance capital, which is of course kept afloat by the great powers. I think that it makes the global system much more volatile and much more vulnerable. In places like Dubai and Miami, they're already getting skittish. What happens when Miami has storm surges of 3 or 4 feet every year? What happens when Manhattan experiences a superstorm Sandy kind of reality every couple of years?So what would an ideal system look like? How might we politically and economically get along better with the planet?You would have to have a democratically controlled accumulation fund. I think that banking and finance have to be socialized because otherwise you're continually at the mercy of big capital deciding what's profitable or not.What would the ideal world be like? It would integrate town and country, it would have cheap and low-carbon public transportation. We also have to look at the actual history of huge destructive events in the 20th century and its relationship to the web of life. I think about the willingness of countries like the US to, for instance, destroy Vietnam in that ecocidal way. That great quotation during the Tet Offensive: "It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it." That will be the tendency of one or more great powers in the era of climate crisis, that as social justice politics and movements challenge the present regime, there will be an attempt to impose a devastating military solution on that.So given all that, are you optimistic about this future?It is going to be difficult. I would just remind everyone that climate change is bad for ruling classes. It's miserable for all the rest of us over the time spans of 10 and 20 and 30 years, that we're all going to be living through very difficult times. But there will also be times at which the 1 percent, in whatever form that takes, will be thoroughly and radically destabilized. I don't think ruling classes are at all prepared for the kinds of political and cultural transformations that will occur in this period.We're already seeing this in part around the generational shift and the fact that now we can talk about socialism. That's really the first time since maybe 1970 to '75 we could do it in a public way.
The final couple of sentences from the WIRED interview with Jason W. Moore Re:LODE Radio chooses to emphasise in bold and italic:
Capitalism is much less resilient than most people credit it. It had its social legitimacy, because in one way or another it could promise development. And I don't think anyone takes that idea seriously anymore.
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