Archive for the 'Environment' Category

How Nicholas Stern will save the world

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on June 26, 2008
in Environment
. 1 Comment

When Nicholas Stern’s review on the economics of climate change came out in late 2006, it changed the terms of the climate debate. The warnings from scientists and environmental campaigners about the dangers posed by global warming had been growing increasingly loud, but here, for the first time, was a detailed and hard-headed examination of the economics of the subject. Stern demonstrated to many people’s satisfaction that without drastic global action to cut emissions of greenhouse gases, the world faced the risk of economic meltdown.

Now Stern has a political plan to add to his economic review: a six-point manifesto for a global deal on climate change that he says will take in both the rich and poor worlds, and exploit the power of technology and markets to reduce carbon emissions as effectively and efficiently as possible.

What are the plan’s chances of success? Alun Anderson interviewed Stern for the current issue of Prospect to find out.

Tightening your commuter belt

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on February 12, 2008
in Environment
. 0 Comments

This morning, in a radical experiment that’s set to make my life both better and more expensive, I took a different route to work. I live in Brighton (where my wife works) and work in leafy Bloomsbury, so a reasonable amount of my week is spent in transit: about four hours a day by the “old” route, of which three hours pass within one of the crowded, decrepit trains that service the railway between Brighton and Farringdon. This morning, however, I alighted onto one of the shiny machines that service the line between Brighton and Victoria and, 59 minutes later, hopped off onto the Tube, and was at work on time some 20 minutes after that. I have bitten the bullet, put comfort above cost, and feel better for it.

Travelling to and from work like this is deadening but hardly dreadful in the grand scheme of schemes—a safe, warm few hours of unpaid, unpleasurable time. Yet the toll it takes is hard to quantify. I was, for a while, employed as a reader of the manuscripts of would-be novelists for a publisher’s in London, and remember the whiff of hate that rose from numberless pages as soon as commuting was mentioned—which it was astonishingly often. Manuscript after manuscript of thinly-disguised autobiography landed on my desk, within which a protagonist would spend up to fifty sides (in one bewildering case) lambasting the soul-destroying inferno of their journey to and from work. Here was a demon receiving plenty of exercise.

Less anecdotally, commuting is gaining more and more of a grip on more lives across the world—an inevitable product of population growth, urbanisation and development. Many developing world cities exist in a state of near-continual gridlock; many first-world cities exist in a state of such eye-watering expensiveness that ordinary employees need to live at least an hour’s travel outside of them. Wasn’t technology supposed to enable us all to work from the comfort of whatever homes we choose to live in? Yet, at the moment, almost everyone who can least afford it is being sucked towards the urban centres for work, and towards the dim peripheries for life. Cities, one of humanity’s most remarkable creations, are doing remarkable things right back to us.

As I learn from Phaidon’s grimly handsome new tome The Endless City, based on the findings of the Urban Age Project, ten per cent of the world lived in cities in 1900. 50 per cent lived in cities in 2007. 75 per cent will live in cities by 2050—and this 75 per cent will be more than equal to the world’s entire current population of six billion. By 2015, there will be 33 “mega-cities,” with more than 10 million inhabitants each. 27 of these will be in the developing world. Have you ever tried travelling across Beijing in rush hour, starting outside the distant fifth ring road and heading inwards; or across Accra, Chennai or New Delhi? These are journeys I’ve made only once or twice each, but I hold them close to my chest as I glide through green southern England each morning, thinking how lucky I am, and wondering how long it can last.

Morality and Mortality: our views of animal others

Published
by
Alexander Fiske-Harrison
on December 28, 2007
in Environment, Philosophy, Psychology and Science and technology
. 8 Comments

Whilst working on a long essay for Prospect on bullfighting, I caught a Natural History programme double-bill on BBC Radio 4 devoted to the issue of whaling which has recently returned to the news agenda as Japan has increased both the numbers of whales it is hunting and the number of species, including the ultra-charismatic humpback whale. One of the many things that struck me during the composition of the tauromachia piece was how so many of our views of and dealings with animals (and this goes for both sides of the arguments in this area) are based on an almost incoherent mix of raw emotion, flawed logical steps, ignorance of the facts and a lack of direct experience. However, what struck me even more during the programme’s discussion of whaling by an impressive array of international scientists, conservationists, diplomats and politicians was that whilst it is easy to point out some of the logical inconsistencies, become aware of some of the facts, there is an impossibility – a metaphysical one I would argue – in removing emotion and the need for direct experience of the animals in question and our dealings with them in order to formulate a more correct position in this essentially ethical debate. I thought that I would take advantage of the Prospect blog to expand on this idea that I have, for reasons of concision, left merely gestured at in my essay.

By way of preamble: in 1982 the International Whaling Commission decided to reduce the whaling quotas of the signatory nations to zero – they could neither agree to an outright ban nor even the use of the term ‘moratorium’ – with a view to allowing the populations of these overly hunted species to return to a sustainable level and to review the whaling industry in general to improve its methods so that it would not again put this small but important area of biodiversity in jeopardy. However, the motivating force in this policy shift was the post 1960s rise in profile of both animal welfare and conservation.Public attention was focused on whales by welfare and conservation groups by the simple means of pointing out that whales were not fish but “mammals like us” (of course, fish are ‘animals like us’, but let us leave the emotive, yet biologically vacuous nature of such phrasing to one side). It was further pointed out, with better justification, that the intelligence and sociability of these animals had been hitherto ignored in our attribution of prey-status to them. This was particularly brought home, quite deliberately, with the use of the beautiful and haunting sounds of the humpback whale by the biologists who had first classified them as ‘songs’, Roger Payne and Scott McVay. As Roger Payne acknowledges in the programmes, this provided a suitable audio-reinforcement to the images of Greenpeace’s small, semi-dirigible boats blocking the path of the comparatively vast whaling vessels.

The question which is so seldom met head on in this debate is by what criteria do we, and by we I mean the non-vegetarian/vegan majority, decide that a fellow member of the animal kingdom is fit to be treated in the way we do. To speak in broad generalities, the unspoken consensus certainly used to be, and remains for the vast majority of the developing world, that if it is isn’t human, we can do what we want with an animal. Undoubtedly in the Christian tradition this thinking had a neat theological echo in the division of those beings with souls – i.e. us – and those beings without, although that position has since been mediated. Although I cannot claim any great expertise on Muslim theology, in my travels in Morocco where the treatment of, for example, donkeys is so visibly cruel, I was often confronted with the opinion that not only did Allah give us the right to treat animals as we wish, but that the “Western” habits of keeping animals as pets, allowing them to sleep in our beds (something often brought up) and other attributions of what one might calls traits of ‘personhood’ to animals was a form of idolatory – a rational enough stance, given their views on animals, if you consider how we might view a people who made a bed for their vacuum cleaners, took them for walks, stroked them etc. However, with the withering of religion in ‘the West’, especially in the sphere of policy, our ethics have latched onto other criteria of moral importance, such as sentience and consciousness.

Of course, it was not science that told us that some animals are sentient, e.g. can feel pain. Anyone who has had dealings with dogs or cats, which is most people, is well aware that they are capable of feeling pain. The anatomical discovery that dogs have a central nervous system not wildly different to our own may have helped confirm this in a scientific sense but only in the same pedantic way that knowledge of atomic structure confirms that diamond is hard. However, our knowledge of animals was genuinely increased when the more troublesome question of consciousness, more specifically self-consciousness, was approached by Gordon G. Gallup, Jr., et al (1970), who designed various ‘mirror tests’. The simplest of these involved anaesthetising a subject, placing a dot of coloured, odourless dye somewhere invisible to the animal, e.g. its forehead, and then using this marker as a way to gauge whether the subject could recognise itself in the mirror. Dogs and cats cannot; they are at first disturbed by mirrors, suspecting another animal’s presence, but soon learn to ignore them. Great apes such as the chimpanzee immediately use the mirror to perceive where the dot is on their bodies and then use their hands to try to remove it. Of course, anyone who has spent any time with chimpanzees, as I did at the Language Research Centre of Georgia State University in 2001, knows that you just have to give a chimp lipstick and a mirror to prove with less rigorous but more humorous results. It should be noted that the same has been shown for dolphins, although in a less dramatic, and perhaps consequently more disputed manner (see, e.g. the psychologist Clive Wynne’s essay in Nature in 2004). Lacking the necessary limbs, the significant behavioural change is how long they spend in front of a mirror showing the marked portion of their bodies rather than other mirrors in the same array which do not. I think that a very important point can be taken out from this. Scientific results can be so dry as to have little effect on our views and most especially what philosophers would call our moral intuitions. Seeing an animal hover motionless in the water in front of one mirror rather than another does little to effect my views of it, whereas seeing one putting on makeup, and being as visibly amused by the results as the observers, is an entirely different matter. For science, although it can be used to confirm our rougher, readier but essentially fuller and more human interactions with animals, cannot override nor replace them. One area in particular that this strikes me is in how animals treat their dead. There is something that happened within me with regards to my view of lions when I observed a lion eating another lion that I had seen it lick in greeting a few days before. Just as there was something in the opposite direction when I read the following passage in In the Kingdom of Gorillas (2001), by the social scientist Bill Weber and the biologist Amy Vedder:

“The day of Quince’s death . . . [the group] made a 180-degree turn and headed rapidly in a direct line toward where they had last seen Quince . . . [we were then] rewarded with an exceptional sight. First Icarus, then Puck, went straight to her nest and placed their faces on the exact spot where Quince had breathed her last. Each then sat back and stared off into space. The two sat side by side as others passed near the nest site. Then the entire family moved off silently into the surrounding forest.”

There can be no denying that the choice of language is unscientific, emotive even, and yet evocative of the sorts of truths which fuel the engine of our ethical judgements which simply will not turn over on cold scientific truths unless they are suitably dramatic. It is the description, as fact-based and unclouded, as is possible, of an emotional being living an experience with these animals – things which are utterly intrinsic to how we judge how we will treat an animal, and it is only in the acceptance of that that any sort of clarity can be brought to the argument of whether or not we should be hunting whales. Although I have not set out to write a piece on whaling, rather a piece going over some of the sources of our moral stance with regards to it, it would be remiss of me not to briefly state my own views.I have spent far too little time with cetacean species to claim sufficient amounts of the sort of direct contact I regard as so necessary - with the one exception of endless, joyful (for me) hours spent as a child entertaining a very bored captive bottlenose dolphin during a week’s stay on an island off the Great Barrier Reef. However, I have picked up more from that surrogate for direct contact: the well-made and honest nature documentary, which is not as easy to find as one might think (I have written on this in a lighter vein in Freize magazine). In theory, these could provide the population at large with the sort of experience in the fuller sense which I regard as a sine qua non for moral judgement, especially when this is backed up by the prima facie morally-neutral, but scrupulously honest scientific data (I highly recommend Cetacean Societies, edited by Janet Mann et al [1999] – although it is a little out of date now missing such fascinating recent research as the 2005 discovery of the transmission of tool-use across generations in dolphins from mother to child [see Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences]).In the light of this, it would seem to me that the intrinsic cruelty of the practice of commercial whaling - the means of death for an animal of that size killed in the high seas whilst leaving a commercially viable carcass is necessarily prolonged and agonising - and the clear intelligence, sociability, and sensitivity of the animals in question simply outweighs whatever miniscule benefit to humanity in terms of whale-meat or other products there may be in the modern world, although this may not always have been the case.Two caveats: I am aware that many of the examples of intelligence above actually refer specifically to bottlenose dolphins, and that these decisions should be made on a species-by-species basis. Also, arguments from the point of view of sustainable populations and that great engine of conservation, aesthetics (phrases like “majestic” and “largest mammal ever to have lived” spring to mind) are entirely independent of this.

P.S. Joshua Plotnik’s team at Emory showed elephants pass the mirror test late last year (in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), whilst the year before Karen McComb’s team observed (in Biology Letters) that elephants not only pay strange and touching attention to their dead but even to the clean skeletons of dead elephants – although the elephants’ graveyard is undeniably a myth. It is worth adding that an excellent description of what these facts translate as in our actual dealings with actual animals is, paradoxically, to be found Ernest Hemingway’s anti-Big Game hunting short fiction, ‘An African Story’.

What went wrong

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on December 12, 2007
in Environment and United States
. 5 Comments

Some of the most memorable, appalling statistics in history are those of the accidental genocides wrought by human exploration. After its introduction to Central America by the conquistadors in 1520, for example, smallpox had by 1527 killed millions in Mexico and precipitated the collapse of the Inca empire. The same disease, introduced by Europeans to north America, killed 90% of the Massachusetts Bay Indians between 1617 and 1619. By the end of the 18th century, European diseases—of which smallpox was the worst—had managed to kill 90-95% of the native population of the Americas (Roy Foster gives a brief, haunting account of this process in the first section of his masterpiece, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind).

In the 10th December edition of The New Yorker, there’s a piece by the writer Richard Preston, “A Death in the Forest,” that describes something alarmingly similar currently taking place in the plant kingdom. Preston focuses on the plight of the eastern hemlock, a tree native to north America, which is now threatened by the spread of an Asian insect known as the hemlock woolly adelgid. Just like humans, plants have evolved immune mechanisms that protect them from pests and infections; and, just like humans, plants are almost totally unprotected by these mechanisms against threats that are “exotic”—that come from distant places with which, until recently, they had no possibility of contact.

We’ve all heard about this kind of thing before, but the examples Preston produces—combined with the quality of his expert, restrained, appalled narrative—prove truly astonishing. Since 1904, the fungal disease chestnut blight has killed almost every American chestnut tree. Since the 1930s, the American elm has virtually disappeared thanks to an Asian fungus and a European beetle. Sudden oak death disease has now killed hundreds of thousands of oaks in California, and may soon reach eastern oaks. The American beech has lately been dying in its tens of thousands due to a European fungus, while the arrival of an Asian beetle in packing wood from China in 2001 has begun to devastate a number of species of American ash. The sugar maple could also be almost wiped out by the invasion of the Asian long-horned beetle. And the list goes on.

What can we do? Preston lists measures that can be taken for individual trees, but acknowledges that little so far has stopped the waves of dying, and he closes with an account that has an air of horrible historical familiarity—a few people, belatedly, picking up the pieces and trying to preserve the memory of what has been lost:

When it became apparent that the eastern hemlock might nearly cease to exist, Blozan [president of the Eastern Native Tree Society] and his partners founded the Tsuga Search Project, an effort to identify and measure the world’s tallest and largest eastern hemlocks before they were gone… In the Cataloochee Valley, Blozan walked into groves where he found what had been the world’s tallest hemlocks. They were already dead, but he climbed the skeletons and measured them anyway. “The data are for someone someday,” he said.

Prospect’s new issue—the real GM food scandal

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on October 24, 2007
in Environment and Inside the magazine
. 81 Comments

cover-large.gif In 1999, Dick Taverne wrote an article for Prospect in which he passionately denounced the “anti-science” of a public culture indifferent to evidence and research, above all in the case of GM foods, which “act as a kind of lightning rod for the public malaise with science.” Eight years later, in our November cover story, he returns to the fray with an extended account of the ways in which public ignorance and a lack of foresight on the part of corporations have meant the proven benefits of GM food are still largely failing to reach those most in need of them.

Taverne’s is not a conciliatory tone, and his message is stark: Britain and Europe have lost the opportunity to lead the world in GM technology, and millions of lives have already been lost for no good scientific reason. In a world that will have to more than double its food production over the next half century, Taverne sees the need for GM crops as indisputable and the cult of “back to nature” as a misguidedly moralistic anachronism. Hard evidence, in other words, is the bottom line, and there is no need to dignify irrational arguments by taking them seriously. Let us know what you think here.

Welcome to post-panamax

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on September 3, 2007
in Economics, Energy, Environment and Latin America and Caribbean
. 0 Comments

Logically enough, the maximum possible size of ship it is possible to fit through the Panama canal is called a “panamax”—which happens to be 294.1 metres in length, 32.3 metres in width, 12.0 metres in draft and 57.91 metres in height, or around 65,000 tonnes displacement (if you’re planning on taking cargo through the canal any time soon, you can read about the exact vessel requirements here).

Today, however, the buzzword for shipping is “post-panamax” (PPMX), which describes ships larger than at least one of these dimensions. And there are more and more of these around. Oil supertankers have existed since the Suez canal was closed between 1967 and 1975, a result of the Six Days War, but it wasn’t until 1988 that container ships of PPMX dimensions first appeared, when five were built by American President Lines (APL). Now there are around 200 PPMX container ships in the world, and the number continues to grow. It was to the great relief of the shipping industry, then, that work finally began today on a long-awaited $5bn project to widen the Panama canal.

Shipping is big business—but you may be surprised at just how big it is, and how fast it’s growing. As John Vidal recently noted in The Guardian, it is now responsible for transporting 90% of world trade; while carbon dioxide emissions from ships, which do not come under the Kyoto agreement or any proposed European legislation, could rise by as much as 75% in the next 15 to 20 years if current trends continue.

And it’s very much “our” problem. According to the 2006 figures, European countries account for over 20% of world shipping tonnage, compared to a measly 1.4% by the United States. Tonne-for-tonne, shipping compares favourably to air and road transport; but the real debate centres on just how sustainable the transportation of such huge volumes of product across the world is in the long term. With almost every shipyard in the world currently working at maximum capacity, the move towards larger and larger vessels has something of a double edge.

And don’t forget the Northwest passage, a potentially major linking route for shipping that’s widening all by itself …

Canada’s Arctic assertiveness

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on July 11, 2007
in Environment
. 0 Comments

Back in the January 2007 issue of Prospect, Peter Shawn Taylor wrote about Canada’s muscular foreign policy under its new conservative prime minister Stephen Harper. One example Taylor gave was Harper’s hawkish stance on the Northwest Passage, the Arctic sea route that connects the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. For most of the year, the route is unusable, which means that Canada, while formally claiming sovereignty over the passage, has been happy to turn a blind eye to American ships using it for the few days in summer during which it was navigable.

But now global warming and the melting of Arctic ice have raised the possibility that the passage could become a genuine alternative to the Panama canal—the route cuts almost 2,500 miles from the journey, and nearly halves the distance between Tokyo and London. And so Harper’s assertions of Canadian sovereignty over the passage, reported Taylor, were becoming increasingly outspoken.

Now it seems Harper is putting his warships where his mouth is. Earlier this week he announced plans to move six to eight patrol ships into the passage, saying that “the need to assert our sovereignty and protect our territorial integrity in the north on our terms have never been more urgent.” The US, which claims that the passage should be considered an international waterway, is unsurprisingly crying foul.

But Canada’s new Arctic assertiveness may lead to enemies on further fronts. Harper is keen to assert Canadian sovereignty over the tiny Hans island, which lies at the eastern entrance to the passage. The island is near Greenland, over which Denmark exercises control, and a minor spat between the two countries over control of Hans island a few years ago led to some Canadians calling for a boycott of Danish pastries, in a bizarre forerunner of the mass boycott of Danish products in the Muslim world last year after the Muhammad cartoon scandal.

If you were looking for an example of the unpredictable effects of climate change, they don’t come much better than this.

Critic watch 1: Adam Mars-Jones

Published
by
William Skidelsky
on June 4, 2007
in Books, Environment and Media
. 1 Comment

Adam Mars-Jones is a lively critic, who usually makes sensible judgments. But he momentarily took leave of his senses in his review of Adam Thorpe’s new novel, Between Each Breath, in yesterday’s Observer. Mars-Jones criticised the novel on the grounds that it has an ecological theme. “It’s surprisingly hard to bring green issues into fiction,” he wrote. Fair enough, perhaps. But his next move was truly bizarre: “For one thing, a book isn’t in itself a planet-friendly object, requiring all sorts of materials and processes. Very few British books include recycled paper, and this doesn’t seem to be one of them.” Eh? Does this mean that all book authors (who, after all, probably have no say as to whether their publishers use recycled paper) should avoid commenting on green issues? And what about newspapers? Though the Observer, very impressively, is printed on 100 per cent recycled paper these days, it could hardly claim to be 100 per cent “planet-friendly.” Think of all the carbon emitted by the lorries that distribute it. Think of all those tempting holiday offers in the travel section. Does Mars-Jones think it is “hard” for newspapers to comment on green issues too?

Prospect reference library - Stern review

Published
by
Ayanna Prevatt-Goldstein
on June 4, 2007
in British politics, Business and Environment
. 0 Comments

We will be posting key primary documents that have shifted the parameters of public debate, so that you can read the real thing here. First up is the Stern review on the economics of climate change, published in October 2006. The review showed how little it would cost to cut emissions sharply, and made the business case for acting now. The full executive summary is here. For the review, background and commissioned research, and reflections and responses since its publication, visit the treasury website.

For more analysis, read Adair Turner’s article which argues that the Kyoto protocol remains the best way to address climate change. And David Strahan on what Stern got wrong.

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