Environmental politics

Getting my South Downs trees straight

August 12, 2012 – 10:15 pm

Notes from a walk around the lovely Sustainability Centre on the South Downs, where I spent the weekend at the Little Green Gathering, led by David Hepper.

Outside the hostel is a lovely short avenue of sycamores (leaves shaped like maples’), which despite having been introduced from North America is the second-best for British insects (best oaks).

They grow and spread well, helped by their winged ‘helicopter’ seeds, and the wood is excellent for carving and firewood.

The centre boasts a glorious stand of copper beech – the copper colour being a ‘sunscreen’ for the leaves – it doesn’t appear in the shaded low leaves.

Beech is so effective in catching sunlight that there’s seldom any understory with a mature stand. Fungi often grows underneath and this is what breaks down the leaf litter so the trees can reuse the nutrients. Beech nuts (which have four seeds in each pod) were an important part of pannage, the common grazing for pigs. The wood is easy to work and inside will last more or less forever.

Beech was probably introduced by the Romans. It likes southeast England – and does well on chalk and limestone soils, which oaks aren’t keen on. Ash won’t grow without a decent loam.

Ash has a pinate leaf (this is just one leaf) and has sooty grey buds at the junction of leaves. It is reasonably quick growing and can get enormous – up to 13m in circumference around the base.

Silver birch also grows here but it isn’t common – this is the very southern end of its range. Trees here are basically relics left after the last ice age. On lowland heathland it is effectively a pest – hard to control. It co a huge areas of Scandanavia, Russia, and northern Canada.

Not a tree, but there’s lots of teasel growing here – as used in medieval times to comb wool. The leaves are arranged so as to collect water and it is rare in that flowering starts from the middle of the inflorescence, rather than the top or bottom, then spreads in both directions.

Many of the buildings here are roofed with chestnut shingles – it splits well but needs to be
correctly seasoned if it isn’t going to curl up over time.

There was lots more, but this was an excellent intro to the ecology of the area, which really is notably beautiful.

Cycling home I saw two roe deer running across fields near the above – they were fleeing a hay-mower, and leaping the piles of hay. One large, one smaller, possibly a well grown youngster…

No pics, but there are some lovely ones from the area here.

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Books London Politics

Powerful testimony on politics and architecture

August 2, 2012 – 5:51 pm

I haven’t time now to provide a full account of Owen Hatherley’s A New Kind of Bleak: Journeys Through Urban Britain, which is a pity, since his unique form of exploring politics through architecture, as shown in his previous A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, is well worth time.

But I will note a strong testimony to the Green Party, and particularly Caroline Lucas, in it. in his chapter on Brighton, noting that it is the first city to elect a Green MP, Hatherley says: “It would be churlish and sectarian for anyone on the left to object to this: as a parliamentarian, Lucas has proved herself far more of a Social Democrat – hell, far more of an Opposition – than practically anyone in the Labour Party.” (p. 150)

There’s also lots of personal interest to me, both about my own political work, and more broadly as a resident of Camden.

I often cycle past the dreadful Central St Giles in Holborn – or what the marketers are trying to awfully call “Midtown”. This is Hatherley’s take: “… an atrocious botch-job, a bunch of extremely dense, stocky and inelegant blocks crammed into the site, with a grim postage stamp of public space in the middle; in order to distract attention from this act of violence, Piano decided to colour the entire thing in lurid yellows, oranges and greens”. (p. 346) Couldn’t agree more!

He also draws attention to a (sadly lost) campaign to which I devoted a lot of time and energy, including testifying to the Commons Science and Technology Committee, against the then UKCMRI (UK Centre for Medical Research and Innovation), now Crick Institute, behind the British Library. He describes Somers Cross and King’s Cross as an area “undergoing severe gentrification”, noting that the Crick “was fiercely opposed by local campaigners who pointed out that the site was zoned as social housing”. (p. xxxvii) Yep – we were fiercely opposed indeed – and with it just getting out of the ground now, its full horrors have yet to be revealed.

But he’s vert positive, interestingly, about the new London headquarters of Unison, just around the corner from me. I agree with him in quite liking the office building that fronts Euston Road – it has a sense of calm, stability and permanence not found in most of the corporate, clearly temporary and cheap glass horrors being thrown up all around. And as he notes, it has “impeccable environmental credentials” – and it sounds as though, unlike another building labelled with that epithet, which it was my misfortune to briefly inhabit, the workers are enjoying the experience.
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Politics

Working time – let’s get it sorted for people, planet, and productivity…

July 23, 2012 – 8:49 pm

There were many fascinating session at the one day of the Green Economics Institute conference that I was able to attend last week – and quite a few I couldn’t get to (organic growing of dates in Saudi Arabia, which the conference paper suggests is an entirely new idea, at least in modern times, would have been interesting!)

I was taken by Charles Secrett’s “masterclass” on green campaigning, particularly his stress on the need to be terribly careful about accessible language (“don’t talk about biodiversity, but about nature”, and his passionate argument that “we have less than a decade to turn around the political economy of the planet”.

But I was also taken by the session I attended given by Enrico Tezza, a senior ILO official originally from Italy, who argued that changes to the concept of working time management can be key to delivering on economic, social and environmental objectives. (He also reminded us that Keynes had thought that by the 1990s standard working time would be 15 hours a week, and noted that there had been some progress – in 1913 the average working hours were 2,600/person/year, but the most sophisticated Finnish flexitime was now on 1,400 hours.)

At the core of this theory is that “working time” should consider not just time spent in paid work, but also time needed for unpaid responsibilities, such as caring, also for education and skill development, and for leisure and retirement – and that at the heart of the policy should be “self-regulation”.

To quote his paper: “Educational systems, labour market institutions, social protection systems should support the re-organisation of working and non-working time over the life course and take the entire life as the basic framework for their policy.”

He acknowledged the potential trap of individualism in threatening workers’ rights (I thought of a seven-day a week sports editor on a small Australian newspaper I once knew who was proud of the fact he’d negotiated a pay-rise for signing away his life), and also highlighted the productivity trap of the long-hours culture.

To make this work, employers needed to decouple working time from their operating hours he said, focus on upskilling their workers, and be prepared to focus on effective productivity, not presenteeism.

The aim overall is decent working time.

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Books Environmental politics History Science

A fascinating (pre)history of manure – no, really. And possibly some lessons for today…

June 23, 2012 – 11:15 pm

A shorter version was first published on Blogcritics

The “new books” section at the London Library throw up many weird, wonderful and exciting possibilities. Not many readers might have picked up Manure Matters: Historical, Archaeological and Ethnographic Perspectives, but since it combines my interest in soils and history, how could I resist?

And I found parts of this collection of academic essays by different authors absolutely fascinating – and even a reader without my special interest would, I think, also do so. (Although I’ll admit that “Organic geochemical signatures of ancient manure use” is probably only of specialist concern – although I did learn from it that elephants, hyraxes and manatees are the only major vertebrates that don’t produce bile acids. Now there’s a pub quiz killer answer…)

Even the introduction, with its brief skip through the 20th-century organics movement, told me things I didn’t know, particularly the debt that this Western knowledge owes to the East. It identified a key text, published in 1911, Farmers of Forty Centuries, by Franklin King, who had made a research trip to China, Japan and Korea. “Critically, King was able to demonstrate that organic manures in the East enabled more to be grown per hectar.. than contemporary methods used in the West which were becoming ever more reliant on artificials [fertilisers]“. (p. 3) And India also contributed through the work of Sir Albert Howard, who eventually established the Institute of Plant Industry in Indore, where he established a manuring method, the Indore Process, that involves mixing vegetable and animal waste with chalk, limestone, wood ash, earth or claked lime, to neutralise the acidity produced by fermentation. His An Agricultural Testament (1940) informed Soil Association work.

But mostly, we’re going an awful lot further back in history – or more correctly prehistory. “Middening and manuring in Neolithic Europe” sets out much of the ground – the fact that stall manure is rarely spread more than 500 metres from its source, even with animal transport available, greatly raising the value of land in immediate proximity of human/animal housing. And that manuring is a slow investment – only 5-25% of the nutrients being usually available in the year after its spreading – which immediately raises questions of land tenure and inheritance. There’s a tension if new households are added – if they are to be in close proximity to existing ones, then this land will be encroached. This may explain areas such as central and northern Europe where dispersed settlements tend to be the norm.
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Politics

Interesting protest ideas and plans from the Reclaim the NHS meeting

June 23, 2012 – 8:55 pm

I only managed to catch the afternoon session, after a morning on housing, but it certainly threw up some interesting ideas:

* One line of attack is on companies that are taking on privatised services, particularly those for which it is not the core part of their businesses. Highlighted was a planned protest against Sainsbury’s takeover of the St Guy’s and St Thomas’s pharmacy – a plan that has already led to a parliamentary question. The next one is planned for next week – I heard on Wednesday 12-2 on Borough High Street. Virgin was also identified as another possible target – and Richard Branson masks and protest balloons certainly seemed to be selling well.

* In Sheffield the local Keep Our NHS Public is organising a protest on Monday to coincide with the Olympic torch passing a major hospital. The aim is not to disrupt the passage of the torch but use the occasion to celebrate the NHS.

* It was suggested that patients ask their GPs to put on their notes for referrals ‘NPP’ – no private practice. (Unless there’s no alternative – we were told all blood tests now done by private providers.)

* But of course the TUC demo on October 20 is going to be big, and one speaker suggested concentrating efforts on that.

I think it was David Babbs from 38 Degrees who pointed out that it was hard to stop a government with a parliamentary majority from passing a law it wanted to pass, but that doesn’t mean they can implement it.

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Politics

An economist’s view of England’s (and particularly London’s) housing problem

June 23, 2012 – 7:27 pm

Today’s Camden housing strategy conference heard from LSE Professor of Economics Christine Whitehead, in a high-level and challenging, but very informative talk, which aimed, in her words, “to give an overview of the major tensions in the housing system and in housing policy” and “clarify why current policies are being put in place”. (She suggested it would be unpopular, but it was clear that what she was saying were observations of events, not views.)

She started by pointing out that everything in the end depended on macroeconomic conditions “but macroeconomists do not know what is going to happen and they do not even know how to analyse it”. But “the chances are that on the whole the future is like the past”.

It’s estimated there are now 1.5 million households across England who pre-crisis would by now have become owner-occupiers, but who are now renting, or living at home with parents. The government was “trying things”, in response to this she said. “If it doesn’t work, they’ll come out of it – it’s a variation of the traditional way of doing things, which was knowing what you want to do”.

The government’s main aims were to reduce welfare costs, target more, use existing assets more effectively, and using housing policy to support growth. It was seeking to move from “supply subsidies”, capital grants and lower rents, which help a narrow range of people and leave out many of those who are worse off, to providing income-related subsidies, more targeted and adjustable as household circumstances change – and which in some scenarios can be cheaper. The affordable rents model is a direct transfer from The Netherlands, but there there is better and more comprehensive social security, a better distribution of income and a stronger capital base.(There, rents of over 652 euros a month are market rents.)
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