"Civil resistance", science and ethics
We are in for a season of civil disobedience. The Save Vestas campaign has gone national. Kingsnorth rumbles on, as does the Heathrow protest – which is likely to be the focus of the next Climate Camp at the end of August. Next month also sees Wales‘ and Scotland‘s first Climate Camps. As COP15 focusses minds, there are even plans to disrupt the Copenhagen meeting.
A generation of jobless students will now swell numbers. But should those less used to participating in civil action also be getting stuck in?
In a recent newsletter [PDF 147KB], climate scientist/activist James Hansen concludes with a short section titled “Civil Resistance: Is the Sundance Kid a Criminal?”, suggesting the urgent need for what Gandhi called “civil resistance” rather than “civil disobedience”, especially directed towards companies who are guilty of passing the bill for carbon clean up to future generations. Even though his choice of gun-slinging Western hero rather shows which era he’s coming from, I guess he’s qualified to talk, because James Hansen himself was arrested alongside Daryl Hannah last month for his part in the West Virginia coal mining protests.
The excellent climate science blogger Jo Abbess has just raised his arrest in a post which argues that such action by scientists is vital because, as George Marshall of the New Scientist has been saying, the public as a whole are not changing their behaviour in the way that those scientists know they should be .
This argument implies that scientists, as the people who really understand the bottom line, are now ethically bound to start to do more than produce data. They must join with scientists like Hansen. But if scientists remain hesitant to get start linking arms and chaining themselves to fences, Hansen’s own reputation as a leading climate scientist is an example of why. The man warned Congress back in 1988 about the perils of global warming has been under assault ever since he turned activist. Despite his role as a leading scientist and head of the NASA Gordon Institute for Space Studies, his name has been dragged through the mud by global warming sceptics. His arrest last month prompted the New York Times headline “Does NASA’s James Hansen Still Matter?”
What are the responsibilities of those who know to act? And what are the consequences if they do?
“Well done ThWART” photo by darrangange
Vestas: what is the protest about?
This morning I was handed a flier by a nice man standing outside Brighton station: “Vestas Workers fight to defend their jobs and the environment.” Featured on it, that photo of the two workers clenching fists above the banner that reads, “Forced to occupy to save our jobs.” An old blogging colleague of mine Justin aka Chicken Yoghurt was at the Isle of Wight yesterday and took the photo above.
Three points to make:
One. This is a pivotal protest that’s not going to go away in a hurry. It’s about the gap in what the government say they’re going to do – Ed Miliband’s fine white paper and the 2008 Climate Bill – and the absence of any real infrastructure to achieve those carbon goals. It’s about how the most substantial part of Gordon Brown’s “green recovery” plan has been the looking-glass scheme to scrap cars before they need to be scrapped. Vestas is closing because of “lack of demand”. It is absurd that, at this late stage, there is lack of demand. To blame that lack of demand on Conservative councils turning down planning applications for wind turbines as Ed Miliband does in his response to LabourList’s Alex Smith is the “dog ate my homework excuse” – a silly attempt to turn this into a divisive party political issue.
Two. This protest has to watch out it doesn’t unfold to a dangerous script. The lockout has quickly turned it into a workers versus employers dispute, in the mould of Grunwick and Wapping. Not only do those disputes traditionally end very badly, but this script kind of misses the point. However poorly the employers may have acted towards the workers, and their contradictory statements that they’re closing for “lack of demand” and that the factory makes “the wrong type of blade” for Britain indicates a certain slipperiness, they too are victims of the government’s failure to support demand for renewables. This should be about how the goverment needs to pull its finger out.
Three. Last year’s meeting between the National Union of Miners and Climate Camp protestors showed how far adrift most eco-protestors were from workplace politics and how little they understood the more old-school union levers of power. This is a chance to learn how to build bridges instead of burning them.
Guerilla gardening, meet the advertising downturn
Interesting use found for the downturn in consumerism. Via Eyeteeth who writes:
Toronto residents Eric Cheung and Sean Martindale have devised a way to cut advertising posterboards to make cone-shaped, in situ flowerpots. Martindale tells Torontoist that the duo is “activating public space,” introducing nature “to the urban environment in ways that might encourage others to do the same, or to at least consider such possibilities.” To that end, they’ve made the design of their templates available under Creative Commons license.
Video | Feral trade cafe: buying a narrative with your coffee.
Feral Trade Cafe, London from RSA Arts & Ecology on Vimeo.
A Flip camera video.
It’s interesting to see how the best media art moved on from the idea of creating networks in the virtual world, to seeing how those networks could affect the real world. Early net communities were full of idealism; how far does that ability to change the way we interact with each other spill over into the physical?
Earlier this year I talked to Amy Francheschini about the way ideas from her art practice as Futurefarmers informed the creation of Victory Gardens 2008+ in San Francisco. On Friday I dropped into North London’s HTTP Gallery, where media artists/gallerists Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett have created the Feral Trade Cafe implemeting artist Kate Rich’s Feral Trade network in their gallery space.
The cafe is sourced by real personal trade networks – artists bringing back Turkish Delight from Montenegro or discovering a source of honey in Rotherhithe. By using virtual space to record each trade route, every item you consume in the cafe comes with a narrative. the bland, impersonal act of trade can suddenly come alive with stories, showing us how the items we buy under the normal rules of trade disconnect us from the world in which we live.
"You know more than you think you do"
Last night at the RSA, the RSA’s Design & Society project launched its new project on resourcefulness, self-reliance and design with a essay by Emily Campbell: The challenge posed to design by today’s social and political agenda of inclusiveness is to ease the distinction between the professional skill of designers and the insights of users; to make these complementary and integral to the solving of problems. But the popular narrative of design history stands in marked contrast to the agenda of inclusive process. The Designer – in fiction and often in reality – is famed for his or her passionately pursued, authentic and unique visual language. The designer is known by his or her mediated icons. The designer is famously unbending in his or her choices and only ever wears black. Despite its own rhetoric, design often disempowers us. How can it be made to do the opposite? The RSA’s Design & Society team suggests that instead of designing for us, design should start from the assumption that we are not just consumers of design, we are all potential designers too. Read about this project. [PDF 95KB]
Competition | The “You Know More Than You Think You Do” poster, given away at the launch, is designed by Anthony Burrill, and printed by hand from antique blocks in Rye. I have a signed copy to give away along with other goodies. Go to the Arts & Ecology ning site to find out how you can get it.
Wind turbines and the failure of markets
Monometer by Michael Pinsky, July 2009, Kortrijk
The Vestas wind turbine factory on the Isle of Wight, under occupation by a handful of workers, is set for closure at the end of this month, citing “lack of demand”; that this happened in the immediate aftermath of Ed Miliband’s Energy Transition White Paper is ironic, to say the least. Three years ago, as Seamus Milne points out, Nicholas Stern nailed climate change as “the greatest market failure the world has ever seen”. It’s time to nail the myth that “lack of demand” is a natural state, to which everything must submit.
The illustration is from an installation by the British artist Michael Pinsky at this July’s Kortrijk annual all-night arts festival. The four supporting columns of Belgium’s tallest wind turbines were transformed into giant meters, monitoring the ecological impact of Kortrijk’s all-night event. The consumption of energy and water, the production waste, and noise levels were all metered by two rings of projectect light moving up and down the turbines, as if, to quote the artists’s statement, the festival was “feeding” Monometer.
Bloggerscircle: why we need a plastic bag tax
Rob Greenland at The Social Business blog wrote, a couple of days ago:
It’s in the news today that supermarkets just missed their target of 50% reduction in plastic bag use (they got to 48%). I’m not a big fan of supermarkets but I think on this one they need to be congratulated. Remember the reaction against proposals to tax plastic bags, and how, many believed, people would never change their habits.
Far too many bags are still used but a 48% reduction is a massive improvement. If businesses and the public can get their act together on this issue, what other seemingly impossible environmental problems might we solve? It may also suggest that it’s better to nudge people into doing the right thing (like the clever question the checkout assistant was trained to ask), rather than taxing them into behavioural change.
50% sounds great, doesn’t it?
But in Ireland the introduction of a plastic bag tax in 2002 cut the use of plastic bags immediately by 90%, and created millions of Euros in government revenues which were pledged for use in environmental projects. Cutting ours by 50% is nothing to be proud of in comparison to that figure, especially as much of that 50% is people like Rob, me, and you, dear reader. The remaining 50% are inevitably going to be much harder to reach. Even with Tesco offering the carrot of Nectar card points for every bag reused, this is still too slow. It’s time to get out the sticks.
Like it or not, taxation is the most effective behaviour change lever government has. As Anthony Giddens suggests is in The Politics of Climate Change these are levers we’re going to have to use, and not be afraid of using. But the revenue used from these taxes must be used creatively and positively if we’re going to trust the system. Denmark’s carbon taxes, introduced in the 90s, have created an absolute fall in Co2 emissions from that country not only because they disincentivise carbon use, but because the revenue created by the fed directly back into subsidising energy-saving measures.
This post is part of a collaborative initiative at bloggerscircle.net
Putting the rich in their place
Sunday Times Rich List, 2008, by Ben Branagan and Gareth Holt
From the touring exhibition Rank, Picturing the social order 1516 – 2009, opening at Blackpool Grundy Art Gallery this weekend.
Hat tip Thrivingtoo
Bill Viola videos God
Like Brian Sewell at a Jeff Koons show, BBC Radio 4′s John Humphrys seemed baffled by the idea of Bill Viola creating a video installation altarpiece for St Paul’s cathedral when he interviewed him a couple of weeks ago.
It’s interesting, in this secular age, that art keeps its privileged position to engage with the spiritual. Religion makes the British twitchy. Increasingly, we’re more at ease with Richard Dawkins’ shouty there-is-no-God-and-anyone-who-suggests-there-is-is-an-idiot line. I am a nullifidian to the bone, but 10,000 years and more of human culture suggests Pascal’s God Shaped Hole may well exist, as some neuroscientists seem to be saying, and this uncertainty is territory that art has always been perfectly at ease in.
Art has always represented the shape religion takes but at the moment it appears we’re not too sure what that shape is. The Romantic-era God, glimpsed in the sublime of the perfect landscape has taken a hike, gasping for breath. The foot-stamping God of vengence is making a come-back, true, but here is plenty of space for art to build a new God.
Bill Viola’s installation should be complete by 2011.
PostNatural history: organism of the month
PostNatural Organism of the Month: American Chestnut Tree July 2009
From a series of artworks from the Center for PostNatural History. The caption reads:
This variety of American Chestnut Tree is engineered by a small team of researchers at the SUNY Environmental Science and Forestry program to be resistant to the chestnut blight that is responsible for reducing this American icon to a shrub. In selecting the genes to create a blight-resistant tree, researchers paid unusual attention to selecting genes from organisms that would not be seen by the public as controversial. For example, researchers chose a blight-resistant gene from wheat rather than a more commonly used toxin gene from frogs. This consideration of public perception as well as the environmental ecology is significant as this tree is among the first transgenic organisms to be designed with the intent to proliferate in the ‘wild’.
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Future RSA Events- RSA at the Birmingham Book Festival - State of Emergency October 20, 2010
- RSA at the Birmingham Book Festival - Reporting Live From The End of the World October 15, 2010
- The Flaw October 11, 2010
- RSA at the Birmingham Book Festival - Dispatches from the Dark Side -The Death Of Justice October 8, 2010
- RSA at the Birmingham Book Festival - Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No-One Can Pay October 7, 2010