A New Kind of Battle Bus

The approach of the British General Election has reminded me of the political battle bus, and I’m wondering whether the “amphi-bus” – seen here in Montreal – might have a role to play in future campaigns.

As their name suggests, these vehicles can travel on land or water, thereby providing the necessary adaptation to political, as well as physical, climate change with which future governments may have to contend.

I would emphasize, however, that the colour of the vehicle shown in this post is not intended to offer any prediction of the likely composition of the next administration.

Incidentally, when I last discussed the subject of amphibious public transport with a leading politician – the more reptilian Ken Livingstone as it happens – I sensed some deep, unfathomable, hostility.

The Stalwart Knights

I have just relaunched EPONA – www.epona-land.co.uk - a business whose special interest is equestrian heritage. Epona was celebrated by the Celtic and Roman civilisations, and had important associations with cavalry, and, therefore, success in battle.

In the light of my previous blog – and  posts of today @ http://janetmackinnon.blogspot.com - this picture of “Renaissance knight astride war horse” (from Wikipedia Commons) seems like an appropriate symbol for those of us seeking to be “ever-stalwart” in pursuit of professional and more personal aspirations.

Please see also – http://eponaland.wordpress.com

Environmentalists & The BBC – In Need of Deeper “Analysis”

On 2 August 2007 – shortly after “The Great Floods” of that Summer – I blogged on the subject of ” Common Sense and The New Environmentalists”  @ http://witchofworcester.wordpress.com  My post was prompted by an episode of BBC Radio 4’s current affairs programme “Analysis”, hosted by Camilla Cavendish and featuring one Solitaire Townsend.

Ms Townsend was recycled by another “Analysis” programme last week, repeated yesterday evening, this time hosted by the BBC’s so-called “Ethical Man” Justin Rowlatt.

My last ecounter with Mr Rowlatt was on his United States media tour last year, which dealt with environmental and climate change themes, and in which he unintentionally caused a machine converting human food waste into big swill to malfunction, thereby covering himself in gunk !

This episode should have served as a lesson to Mr Rowlatt, for his “Analysis” programme tended to illustrate that pre-ecological age saying : “Garbage in, Garbage out”.

The premise of his programme was, nevertheless, interesting and important : the environmental movement may now be doing more harm to the planet than some of the things against which it campaigns. Unfortunately, Mr Rowlatt’s choice of Ms Townsend to illustrate this point was a mistake from the start.

The subject was climate change and Ms Townsend, introduced as the head of “a City PR firm” concernd with promoting “sustainability”, had suggested to an audience of 200 or so environmentalists that if she could wave a magic wand, and cut carbon emissions without changing consumption patterns, would they support her.  About 1% did.

Now, I would describe people like Mr Rowlatt and Ms Townend as “The New Environmentalists”, for whom climate change is “The Big Issue”. However, for people who have been involved in the environmental movement  for many years, like myself, it is just one of a number of “big issues”.

As it happens, I’ve also featured on “Analysis”. The year was 1986 (? September), and I was at the time a young environmental activist helping to co-ordinate objections to a major government road-building project in London. For the record, this – and similar initiatives – were within the next few years successful !

However, the then host of “Analysis” – a fearsome middle-aged woman of the kind the BBC no longer employs – was deeply hostile to me. Indeed I was treated as some kind of enemy combatant, interrogated in the basement of Broadcasting House, and excerpts of my interview transmitted in a way intended to undermine what I’d said.

When the programme producer – a rather pleasant man – later telephoned me to ask me what I thought of the episode in which I’d just featured, I told him in no uncertain terms ! To which comments he responded “All’s Fair in Love and War” !. Later, he became the BBC’s “War Correspondent” himself in, among other hostilities, The First Gulf Conflict.

I, meanwhile, have continued to wage “The War on Traffic”, growing more radical in recent years as a consequence of all too regular reality checks with new “Motorway Man” etc. However, my radicalization has also been internal, and the consequence of self-analysis as much as external motivation.

For my problem with the environmental movement – and I do have one,  hence my interest in the premise of last week’s “Analysis” – is that much of  this is neither radical nor reflective enough on most of the “big issues”, which for me are about natural resource (namely of habitat, biodiversity) depletion and degradation (eg of air and water quality).

In recent years, most mainstream environmentalists have become far too antropocentric : one thing the movement is not short of is big human egos, new and old.  As for the BBC’s “Analysis” programme, might I suggest that this widens its “gene pool” of talent, which also seems to have become depleted.

“THE WORLD IS COMING TO AN END !”

I’m not referring to the period of cold weather recently experienced in this country, but to events in Haiti and the words of a young observer filming the devastating earthquake there on her mobile phone.

THE BANALITY OF EVIL UNDER WESTERN EYES

Yesterday’s BBC Radio 4’s “Great Lives” Series featured the Mayor of London’s Arts Advisor, Munira Mirza, who had selected Hannah Arendt as her “Great Life”. Arendt’s book on the trial of Nazi Eichmann, who defended himself on the grounds that he had just been  ”doing his job” was subtitled “A Report on the Banality of Evil”.

Later in the evening, Peter White interviewed the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, who in her youth had taken tea with Adolf Hitler, because her sister was a great admirer of him.

By the time the final episode of “Defining the Decade” – the Noughties that is – came on at 9.30pm, I was starting to feel drowsy and fell asleep before the end. However, this was in part because the series, of which I had great expectations, turned out to be a disappointment, or rather seemed to have missed the point. For I would suggest that “The Banality of Evil” has defined the last decade for the majority of Western countries.

I am referring to our addiction to cheap consumer goods – particularly fashion, personal gadgetry and homeware – made largely in China, but also in other major Asian countries. These goods have become “The Opium of the People”. Thus the present criticism of China for executing a British citizen charged with drug smuggling smacks of double standards.

Human rights, in the case of China, and child labour in respect of other Asian countries, don’t seem to have been high on the agenda of British or other Western politicians in recent years. The reason for this is simple. Economic growth in China and other Asian Tiger Economies has buoyed prosperity in countries like our own, and continues to buffer us during the present recession.

Is this pattern of globalisation sustainable ? I would suggest not, and the reasons are not just environmental. In short, western consumerism has increasingly made countries like Britain pawns in an emerging geopolitics dominated by the new “workshops of the world”, notably China, and nations possessing essential natural resources, like Russia. This is not a happy state of affairs for the West, but  ”The Banality of Evil”  has happened “Under Western Eyes”.*

* The title of a novel also on the theme of evil by Joseph Conrad.

RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE & THE WAR ON TRAFFIC

The title of the UK Christmas No 1 pop music single seems particularly appropriate this year, and we may be grateful for the web-based campaign which led to “Rage Against The Machine” beating a bland  X Factor songster.

However, “Rage Against The Machine” also seems to sum up equally well post-Copenhagen sentiments about China, although I happen not to share these.

As someone it seems born to “Rage Against The Machine”, I’ve felt angry about what human technology  is doing to the environment all my conscious life, and long before China embarked upon exponential growth in the late C20th.

We now know that this growth has in fact “off-shored” much of the CO2 emissions created by developed countries like Britain, so if we want to change China we need to change our own patterns of consumption first.

So my own personal Public Enemy Number 1 over the Festive Season remains travel miles dependency, and “The War on Traffic” seems to have Nature on its side just now !

LESSONS FROM COPENHAGEN & THE NEW WORLD ORDER

Barack Obama & Wangari Maathai in 2006.  The contribution of Green Belt Movement founder and fellow Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai to the cause of the environment may well be judged by posterity to be more significant than that of the man with whom she also shares  her Kenyan ancestry, United States President Obama. Maathai’s work has contributed to the planting of some 1 billion trees, and – as our own Prince Charles told Copenhagen delegates – trees may be the world’s most important allies in managing climate change and its effects.

However, whilst the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit may not have succeeded in its main aim of achieving an environmentally sustainable agreement on reducing green house gas emissions, the “Accord” produced by the United States, China, India, Brazil and South Africa does reveal a new world geopolitical order, of which Britain, Europe, other developed and less developed countries must take note. Also apparently significant for the Summit was the opportunity it provided to the US and Russia to discuss mutual arrangements for reducing nuclear armaments, perhaps one of the main factors in President Obama’s own Nobel nomination, and a positive development for which we should all be grateful.

Environmentalists disappointed by the outcome of Copenhagen must, nevertheless, reflect upon the strategies they have adopted in recent years. For the climate change agenda has become a bandwagon for all sorts of interests who are far from green, like the nuclear industry.

WEBSITE UPDATE

Please see http://janetmackinnon.blogspot.com

The Cycle Lane to Copenhagen – Energy, Transport & the Environment

In my other blog - http://janetmackinnon.blogspot.com - I’ve dealt with the need for a comprehensive UK strategy  for enterprise and industry in the context of climate change and other policy imperatives, using the analogy of the mid-1980s Greater London Industrial Strategy.

This strategy advocated harnessing industrial innovation to meet social and environmental objectives, and I had the good fortune to do some work for one of its spin-offs : the London Transport and Technology Network (TRANSNET) in the late 1980s. TRANSNET commissioned me to provide some spatial planning and wider research input into a project looking at the relationship between energy, transport and the environment, themes I also took up in a dissertation for my MSc in Urban and Regional Studies around the same time.

I mention these things because many of the policy pre-occupations thrown up by the issue of climate change, the subject of discussions this week in Copenhagen, have been around for a long time, and pre-date the current controversy about the precise role of “man-made” carbon emissions in global warming.

In short, many people have long regarded the reduction of human impacts on the natural environment as essential, and, in particular, the need to curtail resource consumption and pollution associated with energy and transport demands. It is “demand management” which is the key to this reduction, rather than technological solutions, although these have an important role to play. Over-emphasis on the science of climate change is a distraction from the practical measures needed to tackle over-consumption of energy, and the pollution and other problems to which this gives rise.

Cyclist and Pedestrian Safety in Britain

A report published yesterday suggests that a cyclist in Britain is 3 times more likely to be killed on the roads than in Denmark or the Netherlands. Inadequate facilities in this country have been cited as one of the causes for the greater dangers of cycling. However, this is just part of the story.

This Wikipedia Commons image for Copenhagen in Denmark shows rush hour cycling. Copenhagen is regarded as one of the world’s most cyclist-friendly cities. The city has developed an urban planning and design philosophy – see www.copenhagenize.com - which has the safety and well-being of cyclists and pedestrians at its heart. This is in addition to having excellent public transport.

In short, Copenhagen has integrated transport planning, as do cities in the Netherlands, whereas most of Britain, outside London, does not. Moreover, I would suggest that in many parts of this country transport planning and urban design for the pedestrian and cyclist is a generation behind best practice, and this is a problem which shows no real signs of being tackled by central and local government.