Baby's on the road again

Saying adieu to my flat for the winter on a hot summery day, the first we have enjoyed in a week or so. My flat sitter flew back in from Greece at one am yesterday: twelve hours later I am packed and gone, heading south for the winter. The first two weeks of the trip are planned, the next three sketched out and the remainder is unknown territory.

Calais is my first port of call. Being here gives a real insight into some of the things going on in the world today. The last two kilometres of the road to the ferry terminus is lined with two lines of barbed wire fencing, two metres or so high. It's like entering a fortress or concentration camp. Beyond the barbed wire to the north is an enormous shanty town of makeshift shelters. If one didn't, read the papers one might think there was a festival going on. But it's 'The Jungle', a waiting place for thousands of refugees and migrants seeking asylum or a better life in the UK.  This summer the media has swamped with tragic and accusatory stories of the ever growing tide of refugees and migrants.  my flat sitter has been working on the coal face so to speak, documenting numbers and conditions in Greece,  a country racked with its own domestic problems. Now I am at another end of the chain, a closed sea border that these desperate people repeatedly try to cross,  often putting their lives in peril. It's worth reflecting how lucky I am to pass, without let or hindrance, a reflection that Isabella made on being free to get on a plane in Greece and fly home.

The other thing that being at a port brings to mind is the sheer volume of stuff being trucked across Europe.  There's more than a hundred articulated lorries, waiting to get on my ferry, from all parts of Europe,  from the Baltic states to Portugal,  from Ireland to Romania.  That's just for one ferry, these ferries cross the channel every hour, twenty four hours a day. That's an awful lot of goods being moved around the world. And you know  the juxtaposition of the two things really seems to say a lot about our society. Yes we want things, more things than we need, so many things that choosing between them can cause countless hours of indecision, or at least anxiety. But basically we don't want to find a place in our society for traumatised victims of terrorism, civil war or economic marginalisation. I'm not going to talk about rights or wrongs here. I'm just observing what is happening from a longer distance perspective. It doesn't paint a pretty picture of our society.

Rust in peace

The Iron Maiden has passed away, and quite predictably alongside all the eulogies for her leadership, some communities that were most affected by her divisive leadership (in Brixton, Toxteth, the West Midlands and the coal mining communities in Yorkshire, Wales and the North Eastay well have been quietly celebrating). It's hard to think of anyone has so polarised the country.

Maggie influenced my life, profoundly. She came to power shortly after I was old enough to vote. She stayed there until I was more than thirty years old. Collectively owned assets (council housing, national banks, utilities) – paid for by decades of tax payers’ contributions - were sold off at massive discounts. While there was a valid argument about their lack of competitiveness – the revenue was not reinvested, the money was just used to reduce tax rates. Untrammelled greed was politically smiled upon. And whole communities had their livelihoods wiped out (and many have still not recovered).

While the iron maiden may have left us - her legacy unfortunatley lives on. But I have to thank Maggie for something, she did politicise me.

Russell Brand caught my feelings quite well (but he got paid for his column).

Rust in peace

Fire, flood and pestilence

The new year begins with a raft of potential and actual horror stories. In Moordijk (near Rotterdam) a fire at a chemical plant last week was bought under control - but has left excessively high levels of lead and dioxins on surrounding farmlands - and farmers unable to sell their produce (milk and winter vegetables) until the actual levels have been established. While the root vegetables can be warehoused the dairy farmers could face real problems.

In Germany contamination of animal feed with oils used in industry and the automative industry has led to high levels of dioxin being detected in eggs, chicken and pork. As is always the case when the 'conventional' (read industrial) food system suffers from poor oversight and supply chain management, people turn to organic produce. Reports are that produce (especially meat products) are flying off the shelves of organic stores faster than they can be restocked.

And finally, the Rhine is at an unprecedently high level after the thaw over the past ten days. While nothing as severe as the floods that are ravaging Queensland - and the mudslides that have affected the favelas in Brazil - there are flood warnings over much of Germany and citizens have been sandbagging major cities like Frankfurt and Cologne. Here in Wageningen the entire 'uiterwaarden' - (the water meadows) are completely under water, which is lapping at the edges of the main protective dike around the town. (Photos to follow when I have re-enabled my bluetooth technology). In eight years of living here I have never seen the waters so high. From the top of the Wageningen mountain one can look out over a completely water covered landscape, stretching all the way to the dikes of the Betuwe.

In England recently there has been much discussion about undercover police operations in the climate change movement. Apparently the police have been maintaining at least two 'moles' within the movement - both of whom have played an active role in the campaign (one of whom went native). The discussions have focused around whether the movement poses such a threat to society as we know it (I thought climate change did- but there we go) and whether the police can justify the cost (and the moral authority) involved in spying on a legitimate civil society movement. The police spokesman claimed that the campaigners were planning to sit-in at - and try to lose down- a power station that supplies two million homes (+ businesses, hospitals etc.) with electricity, and that this was justification for their activities. In the same week we have the road hauliers making veiled threats about taking direct action to protest about rising fuel prices. Ten years ago they almost bought the country to its knees by blockading fuel refineries. They are hinting that they may do they same again. I'm just wondering whether the police also have moles inside the 'truckers camp' or whether, as has so often been the case in the past, surveillance operations are just reserved for lefties and other 'undesirable elements'.

The Road to Copenhagen continued

Here's a link to the conference in the Hague about adaptation to global warming that I went to last month (the plenary session report is written by yours truly). At this moment I am hoping and praying that world leaders will come to realise that the common cause is greater than narrow sectarian interests (see Sarah's comment on my last blog entry for what could so easily be achieved).

Much of my work in the past year has been focused on climate change and, to a lesser extent policy and scientific input into Copenhagen, and so I feel a strong emotional attachment to the outcome of these negotiations. I don't think that a global conference has ever attracted so much attention and I also have an intuitive feeling that if these talks break down (and there is no commitment to producing a plan b) that the legitimacy of the whole system of global governance will lose its legitimacy. This could have major knock-on repercussions.

Today I read readers' comments on the Guardian about the negotiations and realised how few readers of this, one of the UK's most progressive mainstream newspaper, have any sense of optimism in the possibilities of global governance. So many readers believe that the world system can't be changed. I agree with them that there are huge inequalities in the world - but unless we are prepared to start addressing them through responding to this common threat, then we have no future on this planet. A society that does not believe that it has a future rapidly falls apart and, as the best placard I saw from Copenhagen says, there is no planet b.

Chance took me took another conference in the Hague this week, this time in the press rooms of the Dutch Government. This one was to celebrate 25 years of LEISA an organisation I have had the pleasure to work with, on and off, for more than seven years. LEISA has been documenting practices in Low External Input Sustainable Agriculture for twenty five years and advocating the use of approaches that are locally relevant (culturally, ecologically and economically). Such approaches are often more productive, and acceptable to small scale farmers, than high-tech intensive farming methods, which are often unaffordable to small farmers, harm ecosystem functioning and often fail under sub-optimal productive conditions. After the ballyhoo at Copenhagen about emission targets and adaptation funding dies down, the real work of adapting the world's food systems to the effects of climate change will begin. Hopefully there will be some money to help this process. Agriculture is responsible for something like 30% of global CO2 emissions (when one takes upstream and downstream effects, such as fertiliser production and distribution into account) and is the economic sector that will have to make the biggest changes to adapt to climate change. In Uganda the 'coffee line' (the altitude at which it is economically feasible / possible to grow coffee) is moving upwards in response to increased temperatures). In Nepal the same true is true for apple trees. Such changes will bring about local resource conflicts and endanger world food supplies (similar stories could be told about staples such as rice, maize and wheat- though these are more related to the lack of agricultural biodiversity bought about by reliance on just a few hybrid varieties). Our civilisation, and its values, rely on agriculture - to feed all the fashion and web designers, counsellors and even firemen and doctors who make up our societies today. LEISA and its followers are a good starting point for establishing a people and planet friendly agriculture.

Possibly more on this topic to follow but I have a pressing deadline ahead.

The Road to Copemhagen

John Vidal sets out in search of the human consequences of global warming that are already being felt in the vast watershed that links Nepal and Bangaldesh

The Road to Copenhagen

Researching the background to the COP15 next month has led me to do an inordinate ammount of Googling (which I accept is not entirely carbon neutral) checking facts and figures, the various groupings involved and the gap between rhetoric and reality. One of the key sites is the COP15 home page . It has a good number of new articles from different sources, though perhaps not suprisingly little or nothing about Climategate .

One of the best articles I read there is by UN Climate chief Yvo de Boer who summarises the main challenges at Copenhagen as being
1. How much are the industrialized countries willing to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases?
2. How much are major developing countries such as China and India willing to do to limit the growth of their emissions?
3. How is the help needed by developing countries to engage in reducing their emissions and adapting to the impacts of climate change going to be financed?
4. How is that money going to be managed?

These last two questiosn were the ones driving the conference that I attended last week. The more you delve into these waters the murkier they become. More to follow on this topic when my article gets approved (factually rather than politically) and published.

Backroom negotiations?

Much of the news about the forthcoming Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change is a sort of "will they won't they" discussion about setting clear and binding targets for reducing carbon emissions in the foreseeable future. By now the science is pretty indisputable - so the discussions will come down to political and distributive effects. Who is going to bear the brunt of the cuts? And can the political leaders sell these targets to their electorates (and industrial lobby groups)? But there are other issues apart from emission reductions that also need addressing.

Countless communities in the world are already suffering the effects of climate change. These vary considerably. In the Southern Andes glaciers are massively retreating, leading communities to abandon age old settlements as they have an inadequate supply of fresh water. In sub-Saharan African extreme weather conditions threaten the livelihoods of pastoralists and farmers alike. In Bangladesh millions face increased incidence and severity of flooding. Some countries may disappear completely - as dramatically highlighted in this unusual location for a government cabinet meeting.

Much of the work that I have done in the past year has focused on documenting these issues, the responses at ground level and the need for the policy community to support such iniatives. In Africa farmers face the challenge of adapting their cropping or grazing systems to more intense weather conditions and prolonged periods of drought. In South East Asia the draining of peatlands (often for commercial plantations) has the potential to release millions of tons of CO2 (although re-wetting abandoned peatland has the potential to absorb large amounts). Elsewhere in the world grassroots and participatory initiatives are developing new techniques for coping with the increasing risk of hazards becoming disasters and for adapting to climate change. While the scale of the problems is enormous the inventiveness of local communities and social entrepreneurs is inspiring. Over the last year I have been honoured to work with Christian Aid, Drynet , Wetlands International and Cordaid in documenting these experiences and initiatives.

Helping countries and communities to meet these challenges has to be a priority at Copenhagen too. This can take the form of technical assistance in becoming more prepared for disasters and need to include compensatory mechanisms for things like carbon sequestration. This will be the subject of a conference to be held in The Hague on Thursday (26th November) which will be organised by Hier a Dutch 'platform' organisation (we call them umbrella organisations in the UK - so it shows I am starting to go a little bit native). Its part of the build up for Copenhagen - to get climate change adapation in developing countries firmly on the agenda. Speakers will include the Dutch Development Cooperation Minister and the lead negotiator from the G77 (who is the Director General of the Maldivian Ministry of the Environment, Energy and Water).

One of the reports that I edited this summer was commissioned for this conference. I received a hard copy in the post today (it is always nice if a client remembers you that way). I mailed her back to say thanks and asked how the conference went and was told it was this week. "Would I like to come?" Well why not I'm not overworked at the moment, have never seen the Peace Palace and have promised myself that I should get out and spend more time networking with my clients. While I am replanning my Wednesday and Friday, so as to absorb a lost working day, I get a phone call from the organisers of the conference (fifteen minutes after having subscribed) asking if I would be a rapporteur for their morning session - as they need someone to write up the events for their publicity and lobbying activities. So I get a 'front row seat' for the build up to the Copenhagen Conference! Doubtless I will have more to say on this topic over the next few days. For the rest of the evening I think I will just marvel at how my networks link up.

Changing of the guard?

The Netherlands is universally famous for its tolerance and pragmatism. Recent months have seen a wave of laws and decrees that threaten to undermine at least the former. Large swathes of the windows in the main red light district in Amsterdam have recently been shut down. Numerous coffee shops close to the German and Belgian borders have also suffered the same fate. The authorities think that they are attracting the 'wrong kind' of tourists. Maybe they should take a reality check - as one blogger recently asked: 'do most tourists come to this country to check out its cuisine, its scenery or its climate?'

Two weeks ago the Dutch government outlawed squatting - turning it from a civil to a criminal offence (this despite objections from the councils and majors of the four largest cities in the country). Squatting is an emotional subject. People imagine going on holiday to France for two weeks and finding a bunch of dread-locked anarchists having taken over their front room. The reality is very different. Most squats are of large institutional premises - warehouses, factories, administrative centres, that have no viable economic function any more and which will (in time) be redeveloped.

Dutch society, with its inimitable ability to negotiate and find compromises, has evolved a system called anti-kraak (anti-squat) through which (mostly institutional) property owners arrange for (mostly) young people to live in or run businesses from these properties until a new use is found for them. Its a system that seems to work well. It avoids large properties being left empty,possibly for years at a time, and becoming derelict - especially in times of recession. It provides temporary housing and work space to those at the bottom of the ladder. Quite how the new law will affect the anti-kraak movement remains to be seen. It was reassuring to see a protest against the new law in Wageningen last weekend - on a prime location that was bulldozed five years ago and has been left as a vacant eyesore ever since.

My friend, who has been part of the alternative scene in Wageningen for almost twenty years bemoaned the fact that ten years ago there would been hundreds rather than dozens of revellers /protesters. But I saw signs of hope: the large majority of people there were in their teens or early twenties. Disaffected youth who are a real hope for the future- because the longer they stay outside/alienated from the system the more they will fight to change it during the rest of lives.

The poster reads "squatting will go away when housing is a right". Right on bro'!

Feed the world, feed yourself

Blogging has fallen way by the wayside recently. There’s lots of reasons for that – but the main one has been that I’ve been out of my depth with a writing project. Last November I was commissioned to write a report about the huge challenges that climate change and the global food price spike pose for African smallholder farmers. The commission fit with my strategy of trying to do at least one intellectually challenging project a year- and one that directly contributed to the common weal.

It went pear-shaped from the very beginning. The week after I signed the contract the pound collapsed by about 30% against the Euro. Despite professing willingness my contractors couldn’t find the extra funding for me to attend a state of the art conference in Addis Abada (not a “jolly” – though I have never been to that part of the world- but a chance to get engaged with the networks of people engaged in these discussions). I also realised I was dealing with a group of stakeholders with quite divergent views about the opportunities for addressing these challenges and that it was important to see them all. So in middle of December I did a whistle stop tour, traveling the length and breadth of England, on cold, wet and windy days, to visit all the stakeholders to catch their takes, their experiences and key messages. We had a stakeholder meeting in March in which the terms of reference were rewritten and some additional funding offered.

I realized how out of my depth I was in terms of the nuances of emphasis of what the donor community should be doing, the role of NGOs and lobby groups, the extent to which African governments and international research and finance institutes are contributing to solutions or just perpetuating their own budget lines and legitimacy. The world of development aid is a complicated one, full of organizations innovating and /or trying to justify their existence. Add on to that the whole world of UN joint task forces, private philanthropists (e.g. the Gates Foundation whose African budget now exceeds that of USAID) and pan-African initiatives (which also often reflect very different views- with those of say South Africa and Nigeria being very different from those of, say, Chad or Mali) and the whole framework of organizations seeking to address climate change.

I hit information overload. For a few weeks I was unable to process all this information into a coherent set of arguments. And, because my livelihood is dependent on producing a coherent report, this created a second level of stress – about how to pay the bills this (last and next) month. At the insistence of my line manager I submitted a second draft today. It only contains 80% of what I think should be in it – but there is a huge sense of relief about getting another set of eyes to look at it – criticize it if need be –and getting the project finished. I feel I have gone well beyond what I was paid to do – but when I am doing something that I think is going to help save the planet (and/or maintain my intellectual reputation) I go well beyond the bounds of what is reasonable effort (possibly more about self exploitation and how to avoid it to follow later).

This past month I have canceled a lot (not all) of my social engagements because of the stress this project engendered. These next two weeks I am going to chill a bit- do some light editing work – catch up with some admin, some of those missed engagements and try to live up to my goal of spending at least an hour a day outside of buildings and urban spaces.
It's the end of semester here in Wageningen. it feels the same way for me too. Feel like I have submitted an (unfinished) PhD. It's a useful reminder of what many of my clients must go through before they submit texts to me.

I have a dream

I don't normally follow personality politics. I am more interested in policy than presentation. So I have avoided getting caught up in the Obama mania over the past year. But yesterday's Presidential inaugral ceremony was truly moving - particularly when the media coverage shifted to the South and showed old footage of young men and women civil rights campaigners from the 50s and 60s and interviewed the same people with tears in their eyes. Fifty years ago in the South the KKK was rampant and black people could not eat in the same restuarants, use the same washrooms, had third rate and segregated schooling and for a black person to attending university was beyond a dream. Today there is a (half) black president - with immediate African ancestry. How the world has moved.
The question most pundits are asking is whether he is up to the job - and of course it's a massive job. But before I fell asleep last night I had one worrying thought.
America has a tragic history of seeing its brightest and most progressive social reformers (of whatever colour) shot down in their prime. Let us pray that history will not repeat itself.

Cloud Cuckoo Land

Where is all that data that we click into every day stored? All the Google searches and Wikipedia hits? Using the internet and remote data sources and storage seems weightless -and geeks refer to virtual data storage as 'the cloud' - suggesting a fluffy and seemingly innocuous 'never-never' place. The reality is somewhat different - our hunger for remotely sourced data and entertainment is giving rise to huge data processing warehouses the size of football fields - where banks of servers, strung together by fat cables, need constant air conditioning. Jim Thomas paints a different picture in November's Ecologist: "Far from being weightless, the expanding digital cloud is really an enormous necklace of steel silicon and concrete. That necklace is now growing heavy as a global building bonanza in now underway". Google alone spent $2.4 Bn on data centres in 2007 and the demand for power from data centres in the San Francisco region increased from 70 MW to 500 MW in just eighteen months. It is estimated that a single search query to Google uses 11 Watts of energy- equivalent to keeping a fluorescent bulb switched on for an hour. If I think about how many hits I do in a week I am ashamed. Major date processors are looking at ways of reducing their carbon footprint (and electricity bills!) by using sustainable sources of energy - locating their facilities near cold and fast flowing rives. Google is even looking at putting them out to (cold) seas. Even if / when they manage to reduce their CO2 emissions, the data centres also generate vast amounts of e-waste - in the circuit boards and in the coolants used in the air-conditioning. I thought we were moving to a lighter post-industrial, information society. These findings suggest that we may once again just be dumping our wastes in someone else’s backyard. The moral is to think before you search for data that you might already have.

P.S. Thanks to Nick at Nick Here and Now - whose one liner on this topic reminded me that I had planned a blog on this some weeks ago

The information super lay-by

I've been disconnected from the global media circus for a week. No computers, no emails, no blogging, no TV. What a nice break. I went to Baarlo (in Limburg) for a week's Buddhist training course - (photos to follow when I get up to speed with my photo management software). For me it was triple course because Dutch was very definitely the lingua franca of most people there - so if I wanted to keep up with the conversations over coffee or around the dinner tables then I had to focus on my Dutch. And I had volunteered to be on the 'soka spirit' group - the 'housekeepers' for the course: making sure everything ran smoothly - from waking people in the morning to ensuring the microphones are working OK, that the coffee arrives on time - to serving drinks in the bar in the evening. As half of the soka spirit group did not speak good English most of our planning meetings were in Dutch - with me chiming in for a translation when I felt that I had missed something important. So a triple challenge to face up to. 18 hour days, studying and practising Buddhism, being a volunteer caretaker and most of this in my third language.

I came home inspired but exhausted. This weekend I have been a complete couch potato, sleeping and enjoying the pleasure of drinking tea made with boiling water rather than with water that had been boiled in the past hour and had been kept in a thermos flask since then.

My time clock went out of sync (probably all that tea). I woke in the middle of the night in time to watch live coverage of the women's marathon. Since my childhood I have always been a fan of the track and field events - and it is so fascinating to see how the medals are going this year. Of twelve events so far, the golds are split between nine countries - Jamaica, Russia and Ethiopia head the list with two each - but then you see small countries like Cameroon, Slovenia, Poland and Ukraine carrying off golds too (and so far nothing but a bronze for team USA). The most amazing performances I have seen so far have been Ussain Bolt in the men's 100m- the fastest man on earth setting a new world record and looking like he wasn't even trying, the Russian woman (I'm not even going to try to spell her name) who just ran away with the steeplechase (again a world record) and the Romanian who took the the women's marathon by the scruff of its neck half way in and ran away from the pack and left them all behind her.

I do remember when the Olympics were very much an ideological battlefield between the USA and the USSR for top spot with the GDR and DDR (East and West Germany) battling it out for third spot. This year Team GB is third in the medals table! Ahead of Australia, Germany and Japan. Unprecedented. Normally if Team GB finishes in the top 10 that could be considered a good result. But now less and less GB medals come from the track and field. The Africans completely dominate the long distance events, the Caribbean islands have taken over the sprints from the USA and the Eastern Europeans continue to be hugely successful in the jumping and throwing events. It would be nice to see a Brit come with a gold on the track - but I'm not going to hold my breathe for it.

08.08.08

A numerologist’s field day. The Olympic Committee had it sussed. Open the games on this day. But nothing remarkable happened in my life today - so I watched the highlights of the opening of the games. A spectacular ceremony to be sure. I have had doubts about supporting or following these games. As a Buddhist I find China's 40 year + occupation of Tibet completely unacceptable (see unseen Dharamsala to the right).

But what interests me more is the tension between the proclaimed internationalism of the games and the fact that they are used in a hugely nationalistic way. I can understand it (and almost cry) when one sees three athletes from Afghanistan or seven from Iraq carrying the banner for their war torn and much maligned countries and realise how much they have been through even to get there. Every national media talks about the internationalism of the games - but only focuses on their own heroes’ successes (and near successes). This was really highlighted for me twelve years ago – when I spent the summer in Copenhagen. I was looking forward to watching the track and field events – which I thought were the blue ribbon events of the Olympics - irrespective of your nationality. I didn't see one race or field event on Danish TV- apparently the Danes aren’t very good at them - so they didn’t show them, This was surprising because you would expect those tall and strong Danes to produce at least a few international track and field stars. Sadly that was not the case. There were hours and hours of replays of the handball contests (I know many are asking what is handball?), the women’s hockey, some shooting, swimming and archery. Its funny how previously obscure sports suddenly attract media attention when your country is in the running for gold. Here’s to a successful and peaceful games.

When did you last see your father?

A worrying article, although one with somewhat comic overtones, in the Guardian today shows that in one in five paternity claims handled by the Child Support Agency the mothers misidentified the father. The CSA does not know whether the mothers deliberately or inadvertantly misidentify the fathers. I wonder which is worse? Forgetting who the father is or deliberately deceiving a man about his role as a father? Or is it a combination of the two with the woman guessing who the father (probably) is and tempering this with a bit of calculation about who would make the better provider. Makes you wonder where we all really come from. Is this a specifically British and recent phenomeon or is it more global and long established?

Ghost town

Back to Wageningen - but it's not quite the town I am familiar with. The car parks and streets are empty and people in the shops are queueing up to serve you. My e-mail in-box is taking in about 60% less messages than usual. The Dutch holiday season has begun. Good time to book appointments with opticians and barbers. Not a good time to maintain social contacts - most of the social networks I belong to have closed down for two months.

Several of my acquaintances / friends (real time and virtual) are making rumbling noises about it being time for them to move on (leave the NL). I sympathise with their situation. Being single in a foreign culture is twice as hard work. Those I know with kids just put their noses to the grindstone and get on with it.

For my part I have spent half of the past two months in the "motherland". I fully expect that to be 25% of my time for the remainder of the year. Questions of holidays (I was looking at a trekking holiday in the Pyrenees or Croatia) are just not even on the agenda for reasons of time and money. I'm just trying to make the best of it.

Since I was away the Dutch government introduced the ban on smoking in bars and cafes. My local squat pub (which I haven't visited for about three months) has a notice posted on its window, regretting the fact that smoking tobacco is no longer permitted in their premises. They were hoping that as a private members club they might get away with it (you can still smoke pure grass there though). But the latest wave of health fascism (and this is not rhetorical - the German Nazi party were the first government to seek to ban smoking in public places) takes no prisoners. Why is it that our governments - who purport to believe in the market and freedom of choice - impose these things on their citizenry? I fully support the possibility of smoke free bars. I would just choose not to patronise them. In the UK the Wetherspoons chain went smoke free about three years ago - and found their custom down by 20%. In England everywhere you go now you see boarded-up pubs for sale. A combination of the locals not wanting to go any more, combined with their huge resale estate value.

This is nanny state writ large. And it doesn't work. Cocaine is illegal in the UK (and I think everywhere else in the EU). On my last visit to the UK I read that health and safety inspectors in Chelsea and Kensington - probably the UK's richest and most trend setting municipality - found traces of cocaine in the toilets of 98% of licenced premises that they surveyed. Prohibition doesn't work. I recognise that excessive cocaine, tobacco or marijuana use are not good things for society - or the individuals concerned. But how can governments control or cajole people, without infringing on their civil liberties or creating an underworld that feeds and grows prosperous on the very things the state is trying to control?

Answers on a postcard please

The politics of well-being

Economists are an easy subject of ridicule since they base what they claim to be an objective science on the dubious notion that greater wealth = greater happiness. (They use the term utility and assume an irrevocable link between the two). Because of the influence that this profession carries with policy makers this leads us towards a position in which the over riding social goal is to increase material wealth. For decades environmentalists have criticised this as destroying the panet on which we depend for our livelihoods. It continues to be so - but now the most visible manifestations of it have been out-sourced to factories in countries like China and palm oil and soya plantations in SE Asia and South America.
Yet in recent years awareness has grown that it is not just the environment that our high earning, high spending, acquistive lifestyles are destroying but our own sense of self worth and happiness.
In the 1990s the King of Bhutan turned down an loan offer from the World Bank to build a mega - paper mill to turn the contry's ample forest reserves into pulp. Famously he said that gross national happiness is more important than gross national product. Since that time more and more people have been exploring this idea. Oliver James' book Affluenza is a wonderful example. In one poigant part of it he talks about how the current UK government actually went so far as to set up a Happiness Working Group, and how their ideas got rubbished by the Treasury's economists.
Now it seems that the issue is back on the policy agenda agaian, with the appointment of a Happiness Tsar . It will be interesting to see how far this initiative and debate runs. I suspect that some of James Oliver's more radical prescriptions for affluenza might not make it onto the debate. He shows there is a clear relations between national happiness and income inequalities and also to the degree to which people watch TV and are subject to direct and sublimal advertising. He recommends limiting exposure to advertising and to American programmes that inculcate material lifetsyles and reducing inqualities in incomes. Wonder how far that will get with this or any other part of the political establishment? Of course there are many aspect to happiness that can be developed at the individual level and giving people these tools (or inoculants) whether as preventive or curative measures is a good start. For me it raises the old and seemingly unresolvable (in any intellectual sense at least) about whether one should seek to change the world or oneself.

To be insulted by these fascists is so degrading

Nearly every day now we read and hear stories about how Robert Mugabwe is tightening his iron fist around the chains of power in Zwimbabwe and the appaling brutal methods his supporters are using to do so. And I find it so depressing that I don't even want to read or listen to the news anymore. Certainly there is no role for any white skinned people to be peace brokers here. To him we are the devil incarnate. Neighboring African countries are trying to find solutions through diplomatic means (some, like South Africa, are directly feeling the effects of Zwimbabwe's economic and moral collpase). But how can you negotiate with someone with so much boood on their hands? In such situations are other forms of intervention acceptable? Should respect for national sovereignity always take priority over such human rights abuses? I ask myself these questions but don't know any answers. And I thank my stars that I live in a country where most aspects of democracy and respect for the dignity of human life are taken for granted.

On the buses

This is the longest time I have spent in Britain since I left these shores five and half years ago and I feel like a bit of a tourist "at home". Seeing how much some things have changed and how little others have. And of the things that seem to have changed wondering how much is down to the changes I have made myself in that time. People here seem more confident and open than I remember - but is that really them or me? There's a lot of Polish spoken on the streets and that is clearly independent of any changes I have made. And London's buses have got a whole lot better. They are frequent, clean, relatively graffiti free, have a simple and cheap fare and payment structure and many routes have real time information systems showing when the next bus is due. Also, some real thought seems to have gone into redesigning the routes so that instead of being like spokes of a wheel radiating from a central hub, there are also many radial services that link outlying suburbs. For example nearly all the suburbs around Kingston now have direct links to the hospital (1.5 km out of town) rather than requiring a trip into Kingston and then out on the bus that happens to pass the hospital. That requires real attention to user needs. When you cross the greater London border and try to use the buses there you can see the difference in quality and service. They cost twice as much, are infrequent and often don't turn up. My first day in London I was just outside the GLC boundary - I checked the bus times - one at 8.30, the next at 10.15 - (obviously meeting public demand for transport in the morning) and the 8.30 bus didn't show up until 9.20. What level of customer commitment does that show? What level of customer loyalty can they expect? No wonder the road was snarled up with single occupancy cars all the way into Kingston.

Much of the reason for the improvement in London's buses can be directly attributed to the commitment of Ken Livingstone. Londoners voted him out of office earlier this month-largely over allegations about cronyism, nepotism and corruption among the black community groups that were being financially supported by City Hall. Now London will be run by a Tory Mayor. Ironic in a sense since it was the Tories who abolished the GLC, claiming there was no need for a strategic city wide authority. British tribalism is hard to explain to foreigners. My Labour friends and acquaintances think Boris is going to destroy Ken's achievements in building a pluralistic and tolerant London with a much improved public transport system. I rather think he might he might have achieved a change in zeitgeist in London, rather like Thatcher did in Britain. A change that is so profound that Boris, like Blair will have no choice but to continue in the path of his predecessor. The colour of the party may have changed but I rather the main policies and discourses are set in stone 'till the next the crisis forces a fundamental rethink.

You're (not) a native New Yorker

A few days ago I did a post about the short stories of Ernest Hemmingway, mentioning his six word short story (later I found in Wikipedia that this style of writing was called nano-fiction). Imagine my surprise when yesterday I received a copy of the New Yorker that had a article about this story and style of writing. Synchronicity or what? OK. The NY article was dated late Feb – but I hadn’t seen it and had written my blog sometime before that date (and just not posted it).

So why, you may well ask, is a Brit living in the Netherlands a (regular) reader of the New Yorker? It’s kind of complicated. I have an ex-pat American friend here who has a subscription to keep in touch with his culture – and I get his hand-me-downs. He is no more a New Yorker than I am. He hails from Minneapolis – which is as far from New York as Naples is from Amsterdam. (Minneapolis’s most famous cultural exports are Prince and the Home Range Prairie Companion). But he values the magazine as a way to stay in touch with liberal-left zeitgeist in the USA and as a source of film reviews. (Both of us here suffer enormously from our lack of access to foreign language movies. Dutch movie distributors don’t consider it worthwhile to sub title films into Dutch and English - so our opportunities to go and see innovative Romanian movies are limited. And ticket sales at our local art house movie are probably down by 50% because of this stupid- and it should be said quite rare- illustration of Dutch xenophobia. I at least suffer a little less than W. as I can get by with French language movies – but I would like to see the Spanish, Chinese etc ones too).

I digress. If you ignore the “what’s on in New York” this week section – which can give you a feeling of missing out something- the New Yorker is great magazine. It blends current affairs, politics and the arts in a very unusual and balanced fashion. Sometimes the issues and individuals are not easily recognisable to a European and sometimes, because of this, they are of limited interest. But they provide a combination of solid, critical journalism with literary and artistic commentary.

The copy that W lent me this week has (aside from the short on Hemmingway): an eight page short story / extract from Salman Rushdie, an three page review of the film making career of the Cohn brothers, a ten page article about ecological footprints and carbon trading, a piece about the use of water torture by USA troops in the Philippines in the early 1900s (does that ring a contemporary bell?), and a piece about the newly emerging discipline of behavioural economics (which addresses some of the issues discussed in my last post).

In short it is a great magazine. I wish there were a European equivalent. Robert Maxwell – for all his faults- had the courage to try one in the late 1980s. I was an avid reader. It was ahead of its time and slowly went downhill. Twenty years later is there a business opportunity for any publishing house to produce a pan-European cultural and political magazine / broadsheet?

Other lives

A few weeks ago I name checked Dharamsala (in India) as a place where some important changes happened in my life. This week the tiny Himalayan town made world news as several hundred Tibetan monks left it to do a protest walk to the Chinese border to draw international attention to the 49 year long occupation of their country. They were promptly arrested by the Indian authorities fearing a break down in international relations with China. Today I came across a link to a site of Tibetan refugees living in Dharamsala who are training to be monks and nuns. Sometimes the world wide web opens new windows on the world.