Guides
Week reflections on a divided world Images: Bill Gunyon/Peter Armstrong
week ending November 14th Climate and sanitation: partners in shame The connection between Winchester and the village of Dabena in the state of Chhattisgarh is not exactly self-evident. Central India is out of range of those feel-good twinning schemes so popular in Europe. We are instead united in shame, the shame of anti-social behaviour.
The fawning villagers who tag along on such occasions were so humiliated that almost overnight their insanitary habit of open defecation was abandoned. In development circles this event has become known as the Walk of Shame, symbolic of new ideas for community-led change in poor hygiene practices in India and beyond. Thankfully there are no defecation fields in Winchester, although some dog owners do their best. Our history of shame started in October 2007 when a WWF report pronounced the city’s residents to have Britain’s largest ecological footprint. The Stockholm Environment Institute, which contributed figures for WWF, continues to publish reports castigating Winchester’s households for their average annual carbon dioxide emissions of more than 25 tonnes. Our parallels with Dabena go much deeper than the language of headlines. We have both been frustrated that long-established ways of life are resistant to appeals for the common good. Those villagers were behaving irrationally in using the fields. Their backyards had been equipped with state-of-the-art pit latrines at government expense. This has been a problem in India for years; day-to-day hygiene behaviour won’t respond to the crude weapon of financial subsidy. The sarpanch managed to tap deeper forces of shame and peer pressure.
Nonetheless, as in Dabena, something of a transformation may be under way. From the low point of that WWF report, Winchester may be on the brink of applying for Transition Town status, the ultimate badge of approval for eco-friendly intent. This is largely thanks to the efforts of an unusually incisive pressure group, Winchester Action on Climate Change, founded in the same month as the WWF report was published. A condition of membership is registration of your carbon footprint and an action plan to reduce it. Progress is then published on the website (with permission). I imagine the approach has something in common with the shaming philosophy of Weightwatchers, the periodic disclosure being in tonnes rather than kilos. Certainly, I’d like to see the lady who admits to over 11 tonnes trying a little harder. I hope it works because environmentalists are greatly in need of good news stories. With the Copenhagen conference relegated to a staging post, we must look even more to individuals to take control of our futures. The problem with carbon dioxide is that it doesn’t smell and you can’t tread in it. Its harmful impact is found not in the back field but on the other side of the world. No wonder we’re struggling to get the message across. ****** Walk of Shame Triggers Toilet Consciousness from Unicef City among worst polluters in UK from Hampshire Chronicle Ecological Footprint of British City Residents (pdf file) from WWF, October 2007 Carbon Footprints for Individuals from Winchester Action on Climate Change OneWorld Guide for reference: Environmental Activism OneWorld Guide updated this week: Water and Sanitation
****** week ending November 7th Deforestation: to be or not to be? In 1987 I was terribly busy trying to be one of those self-important people who are too busy to be doing anything else. It’s no surprise that I disdained to see a new film billed as student humour, with the unpromising title Withnail and I. Last Sunday, a cult generation later, my oversight was remedied. I don't know why the film should resurface in Winchester at this particular moment, especially as the Everyman Cinema chain has a rather unkind pricing policy towards students.
Only the most diehard followers of the cult might glimpse any link between this idle speculation and my serious business of the week, the updating of our Tropical Forests Guide. It all lies in that final scene whose startling gear-change invites more serious interpretation of the film than it otherwise deserves. Having staggered across Regent’s Park in the pouring rain, increasingly deranged by swigs from Uncle Monty’s bottle of Margaux ’53, Withnail summons up his longest oration of the film in word perfect lines of Hamlet: ....indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory. This most excellent canopy....why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.
No wonder that this language resonated with my subject and mood. I see little hope for the protection of large mammals in the wild and fish stocks are on the brink. The capacity of technology to overwhelm the so-called lesser life forms and their habitats has simply outpaced our ability to manage it wisely. Nonetheless, in the nick of time a potential saviour for the tropical forests has emerged in the improbable guise of climate change. Since the IPCC 2007 Assessment estimated that deforestation contributes 17.4% of greenhouse gas emissions, the movement to save the rainforest has a new spring in its step. One dimension of our ecological mass suicide holds a knife over the other. Few argue with Lord Stern’s conclusion that protection of the forests is the most cost effective mitigation strategy on the table. Of all the principal sources of greenhouse gases, deforestation offers least harm from the optimum solution – to stop doing it outright and soon. Global targets of 25% reduction by 2015 are banded about and Brazil has offered 50% by 2020 on its vital Amazonian patch. The devil lies in the detail. The more I understand about proposals for REDD (reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation), the more I find it hard to believe that it can function on any scale in the short term. How can countries as massive, multi-ethnic and biologically diverse as Brazil, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo be held accountable for payments to cease deforestation, this year, next year and indefinitely? Is there indeed a philosophical flaw in creating monetary value for not doing something? This is confusing territory and leads swiftly back to the introspective mood of the Prince of Denmark. Let’s refer instead to As You Like It, an ever-reliable source of cheer. When the characters assemble for the first time in the Forest of Arden, the Duke sums up its value... Are not these woods More free from peril than the envious court? … And this our life exempt from public haunt Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones and good in everything. I would not change it. ****** OneWorld Guide updated this week: Tropical Forests
****** week ending October 31st What if there had been no banking crisis? I began these GuidesWeek articles just over a year ago, when our beloved banks were scaring the daylights out of those parts of the world that depend on their services.
My view has always been that the banking system should have been shut down at that point and rebooted under total government control rather than the phoney public-private partnership now in place. My first piece questioned the mantra of “doing whatever is necessary” – for whose benefit? Instead Gordon Brown seized the hour and “saved the world” with his recapitalisation strategy, a plan to throw so much public money at the banks that they could not fail.
Although politicians avoid the subject, state finances will take a generation to recover. Faced with chronic global insecurities over food, water and energy, plagued by climate change, governments have nothing in the kitty. Rich countries have mortgaged their exchequers for a turkey. I often wonder what would have happened if all those financial risk management systems and banking regulations had functioned properly. The industrialised world would approach 2010 bathed in solvency but, for the poorest countries, the consequences of long years of economic injustice and environmental abuse would be there just the same.... ...eventually, as successive crop failures, extreme weather events and forced migration take their increasing toll, world leaders pronounce that poor sovereign states are “too big to fail” and that we must do “whatever it takes” to bail them out. Analysts draw attention to “sub-prime” assets of small farms, prone to accepting loans beyond their means. And regulatory bodies responsible for stabilising the climate are exposed as useless. Successive attempts to revive these economies with aid and poverty reduction programmes fail. Then it’s discovered that the toxic agriculture assets are impossible to value. No one can agree on a price for adapting to climate change. The opportunity cost of saving tropical forests is disputed, indeed scientists don’t even know how to measure the carbon content of a forest. In desperation, the world turns to Gordon Brown, the only leader with a grasp of international development issues. They accept his decisive remedy to recapitalise the least developed countries, a Marshall Plan for world poverty. The funding is raised effortlessly in a global justice bond issue, skilfully brokered by Lehman Brothers.... Elements of this whimsy may increasingly haunt the debt-laden years that lie ahead. Even the most extravagant of NGO estimates for addressing the troubles of the developing world – food security, education, health, AIDS, climate adaptation, safe water, sanitation, electricity – would cost a fraction of all those bank rescues and recession-busting stimulus packages. That Gordon Brown missed his real chance to “save the world” has been a personal tragedy for him, and for the cause of sustainable development. ****** Whatever is necessary for the economy from GuidesWeek archive Latest Goldman Sachs profits swell billion-dollar bonus pool from the Guardian. Hungry get Hungrier as Funding for Food Aid Stutters from World Food Programme OneWorld Guide for reference: Global Poverty
****** week ending October 24th Population and consumption: two sides of the coin Cycling home along the lanes just outside Winchester on Friday evening, I was confronted by an unattended horse. This sleek, black monster had a distinctly shifty look about him so I deemed it prudent to whizz by. Sure enough I soon encountered the panicky owners, running up and down screaming into their phones. Behind them, the paddock gate swung leisurely on its hinges.
Our superiority over the animal kingdom has proved so emphatic that every corner of the earth has opened its doors to accommodate 6.8 billion of us. Closing the doors will not prevent the irreversible consequences that the biosphere already suffers. Universal access to family planning is of course an essential goal, but as much for the sake of the 200 million women who are denied it as in hope of turning the tide of ecological calamity. This requires something much more fundamental in our lifestyle choices, more painfully described as cutting consumption. The divorce between population and consumption debates was betrayed in the alarmist reaction to the latest UK population projections published just last week. The estimated increase of just over 15% in the next 24 years to a figure of over 71.6 million prompted the Optimum Population Trust, amongst others, to declare that things are “out of control”, taking the country “nearer to a position of extreme environmental precariousness.” These extra numbers will indeed exert pressure on our food, water and energy needs. But there are two elephants in the room of our little country and population is the baby elephant. The big daddy is the behaviour of the 61.8 million people that we already have. I don’t have the resources to calculate the change in real GDP per capita over the last 24 years and will have to appeal to intuition. Imagine how the standard of living of the average British family has changed since 1985 – the boom in overseas holidays, the throughput of household goods and digital equipment, the wider range of packaged food, the additional car for the children. We all love these things but another 24 years of that pace of change will trample over the impact of population when it comes to environmental limits. The OPT explains that it focuses on population-related pressures on the environment rather than “wasteful consumption” because green groups are guilty of the reverse. That’s fair enough, but two wrongs don’t make a right, especially on such a vital issue. And by slipping in populist references to tougher migration policies, the OPT comes across as just another anti-immigration lobby.
This has been the trouble with population. It prods a hornets’ nest of family planning, religious dogma, immigration and consumer sacrifice. No wonder campaigners and politicians steer clear. I already sense that I may have said too much, with the wrong emphasis. Time to stop. ****** UK population “to rise to 71.6m” from BBC News UK Population Increase “Out of Control” from Optimum Population Trust. Jonathon Porritt on population - interview from AOL Video OneWorld Guide for reference: Population Guide
****** GuidesWeek Archive from October 2008 |
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