Dismal, utterly dismal or moderately cheerful

As the extent of the devastation in Haiti was becoming clearer, I happened to be listening to Al Bartlett talking to Tim Harford and giving his own gloss on three theorems of Kenneth Boulding:

"The Dismal Theorem"- If the only ultimate check on the growth of population is misery, then the population will grow until it is miserable enough to stop its growth.

"The Utterly Dismal Theorem" - This theorem states that any technical improvement can only relieve misery for a while, for so long as misery is the only check on population, the [technical] improvement will enable population to grow, and will soon enable more people to live in misery than before. The final result of [technical] improvements, therefore, is to increase the equilibrium population which is to increase the total sum of human misery.

"The moderately cheerful form of the Dismal Theorem" - Fortunately, it is not too difficult to restate the Dismal Theorem in a moderately cheerful form, which states that if something else, other than misery and starvation, can be found which will keep a prosperous population in check, the population does not have to grow until it is miserable and starves, and it can be stably prosperous.

Haiti, of course, is relatively self-contained and the situation may be salvageable through the efforts and wisdom of its own people, together with concerted external support. A nightmare is that Haiti's cycles of vulnerability, misery and destruction are a small prefiguring the global future for a civilisation that does not evolve to realise the moderately cheerful theorem.

Bomber command

When someone gets near to one of the anecdotes I like to quote most from Freeman Dyson I sit up, and so it is with Menachem Kellner on five asymmetries in Israel’s Gaza war.

So it's disappointing to read that Kellner does not take Dyson's point to heart, but rather persists in a view which I think is mistaken. There is a basic superficiality in, for example, his third point ('green Israel bringing life' v. 'deathly Hamas in a desert'). Does he really not know that Israel has systematically made almost all economic activity in Gaza impossible? Does he not understand that the Israelis control and monopolise water supplies in both Israel proper and the occupied territories?

Arne Naess

Something like ten or twelve years ago I visited Arne Naess in his mountain cabin at Tvergastein. I remember, in particular, these things:

Getting off the train at a tiny stop in the middle of what seemed like nowhere, and walking, as if into nothing, across the rough moorland towards the shoulder of a mountain plateau where, I was had been assured, I would find his cabin. The landscape was magnificently bleak. (And it was near here, I think, that in World War Two Norwegian resistance and British operatives hid while preparing to strike a heavy water production facility. The Germans concluded that no one could survive for several weeks out in the open up here, and gave up their search.)

Naess pointing out to me the tiny flowers in rocks crevices, convincing me of the importance of their existence, and showing me his collection of minerals and elements in tiny glass jars: the purity of their colours.

Even though he was well into his 80s Naess was still an enthusiastic climber. He took me up a rock face, scaring the daylights out of a desk-based reporter. Later, after I had learned more about climbing, I think I understood a little better a part of what this was about: absolute concentration and presence in the moment.

Naess wanted me to understand his belief in what he called ‘beautiful action’ – a term he related to the work of Spinoza.

Naess, it's said, was pessimistic about the 21st century but optimistic about the 23rd. I have some hope for the 22nd or even a little sooner than that.

P.S. 16 Jan: Andy Revkin gathers some recollections and comments

Loving kindness

It is often said of small children now that they are naturally cruel, but it is less often said that they are naturally kind, instinctively concerned for the well-being of others, often disturbed by the suffering of others and keen to allay it. Nineteenth-century accounts of the "innocence" of children, distrusted today as overly sentimental, were also an attempt to speak up for children's spontaneous kind-heartedness. Loss of childhood innocence was, among other things, the loss of a more affectionately trusting nature. After Darwin and Freud we have more ways than ever before of describing our suspicions about our more benevolent feelings - and indeed, about children as innocent. But there is a crucial fact worth putting as simply as possible: the easy kindness of childhood, the reflex of engaged concern that children show for others, all too easily gets lost in growing up; and that this loss, when it occurs on a wide enough scale, is a cultural disaster.

-- from Love thy neighbour by Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor

Anatomy of evil

Paul Collier has been taken to task, perhaps rightly, on some matters; but his suggestion that Richard Fuld of Lehmans is symptomatic of political culture no less invidious than that of Angola, where Dos Santos got away with more than murder, is thought provoking.

What is man

Families offer shelter to victims of Congo war.

P.S. 8 Dec: A report on violence spreading to neighbouring CAR.

Jean Pierre Bemba is to be prosecuted by the ICC, which -- of course -- George W. Bush and his fellows refused to allow the U.S. to join. Earth to United States, will you join us now?

Shameless

The moral code of these Wall Street executives corresponds to stage one of Lawrence Kohlberg’s famous stages of morality: “The concern is with what authorities permit and punish.” Morally, they are very young children.

-- George Packer

A new and terrible weapon

After Hiroshima, the Japanese scientists concluded, correctly, that the United States must have labored long and hard to create enough U-235, the difficult-to-extract fissionable isotope of uranium used in atomic bombs, and that they probably did not have any left—the Hiroshima bomb was a one-time shot, at least for now. After Nagasaki, however, these scientists recognized the plutonium used in that bomb and understood that it must have come from a working reactor—and, therefore, there would be more where that bomb came from. The authors [of The Nuclear Express, Thomas C. Reed and Danny B. Stillman] surmise the scientists’ advice to the Japanese war cabinet after Nagasaki: “Better take this one seriously; better accede to American demands; there are probably more plutonium bombs.”

If this is accurate, it creates a different context for reflection on whether the United States should have delivered a warning shot. Of course, in one important sense, the moral equation remains unchanged—the U.S. decision-makers could only proceed from the knowledge they possessed; they could not factor in how well-educated Japanese nuclear-weapons scientists would react. Still, it does suggest that if the U.S. had conducted a demonstration bombing with its uranium-based weapon, it might not have made a decisive impression on the Japanese at all.

-- Steve Coll.

Discounting rhetoric

In a recent interview, Nicholas Stern turns a criticism of his team's use of discount rates in their report on the economics of climate change on its head:

Applying a 2 per cent pure time discount...means that you assign half the value to somebody born today to someone who is 35 years old. I would not discriminate against future generations like that.

It probably shows just how out of touch I am, but I hadn't seen the issue framed like this before. I'd be interested to know: would some serious thinkers see it as just a rhetorical trick? If they do, would they think it could still be useful?

P.S. 2 July: The comments to this post by Clive Bates, Ian Christie and Roger Levett are well worth reading. But the second of the three is an uncorrected duplicate of Clive Bates's first comment, and should be ignored. Read comments 1, 3 and 4.

Stop and think

Today we are living through the challenge of prevention, of looking twice before doing something, discussing twice before doing something. Because each thing that we alter can lead to ... dramatic consequences. Those who celebrated the industrial revolution never thought that we were injuring the planet, almost fatally. We didn't have this knowledge. Today we know.

-- Marina Silva

Violence: clan, sect, state and the individual

Yared Diamond writes:

Daniel explained to me that Handas are taught from early childhood to hate their enemies and to prepare themselves for a life of fighting. “If you die in a fight, you will be considered a hero, and people will remember you for a long time,” he said. “But if you die of a disease you will be remembered for only a day or a few weeks, and then you will be forgotten.” Daniel was proud both of the aggressiveness displayed by all the warring clans of his Nipa tribe and of their faultless recall of debts and grievances.

Mohammed Siddique Khan said:

Look after your mother, she needs looking after. Maryam be strong, learn to fight - fighting is good. Be mummy's best friend. Take care of mummy - you can both do things together like fighting and stuff.

Willi Schludecker, who flew 120 bombing sorties over Britain, says:

I had to come [back to say sorry]. The past is coming back to me and we should never forget all that. We did not realise what we had done at the time.

'Knowledge grows but...'

The problem with the secular narrative is not that it assumes progress is inevitable (in many versions, it does not). It is the belief that the sort of advance that has been achieved in science can be reproduced in ethics and politics. In fact, while scientific knowledge increases cumulatively, nothing of the kind happens in society. Slavery was abolished in much of the world during the 19th century, but it returned on a vast scale in nazism and communism, and still exists today. Torture was prohibited in international conventions after the second world war, only to be adopted as an instrument of policy by the world's pre-eminent liberal regime at the beginning of the 21st century. Wealth has increased, but it has been repeatedly destroyed in wars and revolutions. People live longer and kill one another in larger numbers. Knowledge grows, but human beings remain much the same.

As with much of John Gray's writing, The atheist delusion, from which this is taken, makes some good points. But while Gray may sometimes see further and deeper than some evangelical atheists, I am not convinced he delivers.

The increasing pace of scientific and technological development may not necessarily mean 'better' ethics and politics (and they may even be vain hopes - see, for example, Climate change, poetry and tragedy); but the huge scale and nature of the change and the challenges (including but by no means limited to changes in the biogeochemical cycle unprecedented in millions of years) points to at least two things: 1) it is necessary to try; 2) there may be discontinuities and surprises.

Useful poetry

In Something in nothing, Neil Astley asks whether poetry has any real agency in the world:

...[Seamus] Heaney's personal mantra is a phrase by an earlier Nobel prizewinner, the Greek poet George Seferis, who felt that poetry should be "strong enough to help"...

...David Constantine developed this theme in his essay The Usefulness of Poetry (2000), showing how Bertolt Brecht's dogmatic requirement that lyric poetry should be "useful" was subverted in his own work. The effect of Brecht's poems on the reader is not an engagement with his political ideas, says Constantine, but rather "a shock, a quickening of consciousness, a becoming alert to better possibilities, an extension, a liberation", for such poetry is, "to put it mildly, a useful thing if, when reading it, we sense a better way of being in the world"...

Others will disagree regarding Brecht and propaganda, but I think Constantine's analysis is also relevant to at least two of Brecht's greatest plays: Galileo, and Mother Courage. And I think the shock of the two moments identified in my comments on Burning Capital comes from how those moments help one sense both a better way of being, and also a very much worse one.

[Note: Three others including me are sharing a stage with Neil Astley on 29 Feb.]

Gandhi

Views differ. Randeep Ramesh quotes Rudrangshu Mukherjee, one of those who say that Gandhi's ideas have been irrelevant to modern India:

India today has repudiated everything he stood for. He did not want industrialisation, he did not want a strong centralised state, he did not want violence or religious intolerance. Yet this is India today. He is at best an icon, respected but not relevant.

But Ramin Jahanbegloo is more positive (The modern Gandhi):

Gandhi was very conscious of the fact that the cultivation of an "enlarged pluralism" requires the creation of institutions and practices where the voice and perspective of everyone can be articulated, tested and transformed. This indeed is a vision of modernity, offering fruitful insights that may help us to confront the dilemmas of the new century: among them how to create a sense of global citizenship, how to turn inter-faith dialogue into a means of civic and moral self-understanding, and how to realise the potential of non-violence to heal a torn world. To reap the harvest of these ideas, we must sow the seeds - and the seeds are in Gandhi. In this respect, this moral and intellectual figure - sixty years after his death on 30 January 1948 - retains the disturbing capacity to unsettle fixed categories, shake inherited conceptual habits, and challenge us to see the world in a fresh light.

Compassion and reason

"The woman and the man guilty of adultery or fornication, flog each of them with 100 stripes: Let no compassion move you in their case, in a matter prescribed by Allah, if you believe in Allah and the Last Day." (Koran 24:2)

...When a 'moderate' Muslim’s sense of compassion and conscience collides with matters prescribed by Allah, he should choose compassion. Unless that happens much more widely, a moderate Islam will remain wishful thinking.

-- from Islam’s Silent Moderates by Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Q. What would you say is the single biggest issue that needs addressing in Pakistan science and education?

A. I would say two things. First is the idea among our young people that knowledge is something that comes from above, or is something to be copied or memorised, rather than created through human endeavour. This needs to be tackled head-on. It is interesting that Urdu lacks a word or phrase for "creating knowledge". In our society, learning is taken to mean learning by rote. Secondly, teachers in our schools and colleges are utterly authoritarian: your teacher is not just the boss, he is seen as a father figure, someone you do not question. This forces students to accept information instead of thinking about it or questioning it.

-- from Pakistan's voice of reason Pervez Hoodbhoy interviewed by Ehsan Masood.

A beautiful idea

The Wilderness Society is a community-based environmental advocacy organisation whose mission is protecting, promoting and restoring wilderness and natural processes across Australia for the survival and ongoing evolution of life on Earth.

Puts me in mind of this from Philip Pullman:

[like religion] the stories of science have moral consequences too, but they convey them more subtly, by implication; we might say more democratically. They depend on our contribution, on our making the effort to understand and concur.

Climate change, imagination and culture, part 3

“KLAATU BARADA NIKTO" - CLIMATE CHANGE AND OTHER ACTS OF IMAGINATION (3)

This is the third part of a three part essay based on a talk given on 22 Oct in the series The Cultures of Climate Change at CRASSH in Cambridge. The first part is here. The second part is here.

THREE

In the last part of this talk I want to reflect on some questions raised, in my mind at least, by a recent protest involving venerated cultural objects. Conventional opinion seems to hold that this particular protest was beyond the bounds of what is culturally and politically acceptable.

On 14th October Martin Wyness, a forty-nine year old painter and father of two, crossed a barrier in the British Museum in London and put dust masks with “CO2” written on them over the mouths of two to the famous Terracotta Warriors on loan from China (Footnote 1). Wyness said, “I did it because I have got two children and I am very, very concerned about the global inaction over climate change, particularly what is happening in China.” It seems that no damage was done to the statues. It was reported that Wyness was banned from the museum for life.

There was some humour in response to the incident – The Sun talked about the Terracougher Warriors – but overwhelmingly the reaction was one of condemnation or placing oneself at a distance from the actions of the protestor.

I want to reflect on what the incident and reaction to it says about our current culture and politics regarding climate change. I should make it clear that my purpose today is not to defend what Wyness did. And I am not today advocating that others should go out and do anything like it.

According to press reports Wyness was “banned from the museum for life”. I wondered about that, and called the museum to learn their side of the story. Here is, roughly (2), what a spokesperson (3) told me:

Part of the point of this exhibition is that the public be able to get close [to the statues]. Wyness abused that privilege...Our primary motivation is to take care of the objects and protect the visitors. Wyness was potentially endangering both...He was given a verbal warning for inappropriate and irresponsible behaviour but the [British] Museum is not pressing charges... Press reports that he is 'banned for life' are overstating it. I suspect that phrase came from him. In practice [a lifetime ban] would be difficult to enforce. But without an apology or acceptance of responsibility from him we will not exactly welcome him back with open arms...We need to be very careful about giving any sort of precedent that this kind of action is in any way approved....No one denies Wyness’s right to make a point, but this was clearly taking it too far.

This is the sound of someone doing their job well and carefully. And I think one can absolutely see where the Museum are coming from.

At least one big environmental group also kept their distance from Mr Wyness. He called up them beforehand to ask if they would be involved, and they said no. According to a contact, there were two main reasons: people in the West shouldn’t be telling the Chinese what to do; and involvement might put at risk people from their organization who are working in China. Again, this will sound to many, perhaps most people like a well-judged and prudent decision.

I will say again, just to make is quite clear, that I am not trying try to mount a defense of what Wyness did. But please do consider the following provocations:

1. This is not the first time in recent years there have been illicit interventions at the British Museum. In 2005 the artist known as Banksy surreptitiously installed a painted rock at the British Museum. The rock depicts a primitive human pushing a shopping cart. Upon discovering the prank, the museum promptly added the artifact to its permanent collection. Could it be that comfortable, lucrative subversion is OK (4), but not protest that creatively and without damage calls attention to one of the gravest challenges facing the planet?

2. The amazing clay soldiers in the First Emperor exhibition sponsored by Morgan Stanley were made to honour an exceptionally ruthless and brutal tyrant responsible for vast numbers of deaths (5). Today their international display helps mark the re-emergence of China as a dominant global power. Ancient and modern China are, to state the bleedin’ obvious, vastly different in almost every way. But the country continues an almost unbroken record of environmental destruction at enormous human cost (6),(7).

3. To quote the New York Times, “Pollution has reached epidemic proportions in China in part because the ruling Communist Party still treats environmental advocates as bigger threats than the degradation of air, water and soil that prompts them to speak out” (8). Environmental activists in China risk serious abuse, jail and even murder. International action in solidarity must not endanger them, but it should say: ‘we are deeply concerned’. China needs more constructive critics and fewer conformists (9): a little more Chuang Tzu, and a little less Confucius.

4) When a small lifeboat boat is already lying low in rough seas water thanks to reckless behaviour by others in the past, it is unhelpful to make the boat even more unstable. China, now the largest polluter, is now among those doing exactly that to the global climate. China will carry growing its emissions very rapidly unless much richer countries take the challenge seriously. That very likely means that the rich countries will have to put up serious amounts of money to help the Chinese and other rapidly emerging economies deploy clean technology. And that looks a near political impossibility (10) even though it may be the only way to avoid dangerous climate change. In times like these what does it mean to ‘take it too far’?

OK, I’ll stop it at that for provocations, and finish with this:

There is a lot of talk about climate ‘denial’ as an obstacle to serious action (11). Denial may continue a big problem and should be fought, but I think there is a bigger and even more serious one: the spectre of indifference: indifference by those who calculate that privileges of wealth and power will protect them (12); indifference on the part of those who, like crack cocaine addicts, will go on destroying the future for immediate gratification; and the indifference of learned helplessness on the part of those who understand there is a massive problem but think there is no prospect of solution (13). The arts and critical thinking can help counter this threat when they make us both feel and think. It’s a slim hope but it is a real one (14) and we must hold on to it (15).

Footnotes

(1) Terracotta eco-warrior: protester breaches security to put masks on 2,200-year-old statues. Mail on Sunday, 15 Oct 07

(2) according to my notes - not verbatim

(3) British Museum Press Officer, 17 Oct 2007

(4) “He has found a visual style for self-congratulatory smugness and given a look to well-heeled soi-disant radicalism” – Jonathan Jones in The Guardian profile of Banksy, 2 Nov 07. Banksy’s work is ‘worth’ serious money.

(5) Yíng Zhèng, the man who became the first Emperor of China (Qin Shi Huang), "staged a palace coup at the age of 21 and assumed full power. Contrary to the accepted rules of war of the time, he ordered the execution of prisoners of war"… Late in life the emperor greatly feared and was obsessed with death, and desperately sought a fabled elixir of life. Reportedly, he died of swallowing mercury pills supposed by alchemists to make him immortal, but which were of course toxic. Qin Shi Huang did not like to talk about death and never wrote a will.

(6) Read, for example, The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China by Mark Elvin (2004)

(7) China’s present ‘Great Leap Forward’ may have even worse consequences than its famous socialist counterpart in the 1960s. Just because the payback this time is likely to be in decades rather than months or years does not mean it is unreal.

(8) In China, a Lake’s Champion Imperils Himself, 14 October 2007 – from the series New York Times series Choking on Growth

(9) There was language at the recent 17th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party Conference of a new ‘scientific’ basis for development which marries human security and environmental sustainability and does not necessarily put growth first at all costs. There is nothing like optimism.

(10) This, more or less, is the argument made by Paul J. Saunders and Vaughan Turekia in Why Climate Change Can't Be Stopped, Foreign Policy, Sept 07.

(11) See, for example, climatedenial.org.

(12) To hold that there is some universal right to "life", not to speak of liberty or the pursuit of happiness, is after all, to hold with something rather abstract, even socialist. As George W. Bush said about the provision in the Geneva conventions to protect human dignity, "That's very vague. What does it actually mean?" See, for example, Naomi Klein Rapture Rescue: “Like so many private disaster companies, Sovereign Deed is selling escape from climate change and the failed state” (See too Mike Davis on Who really set the California fires) and Experts say climate change threatens national security (ENN 5 Nov 07): "Rich countries could 'go through a 30-year process of kicking people away from the lifeboat' as the world's poorest face the worst environmental consequences", which...would be "extremely debilitating in moral terms."

(13) To many people helplessness and hopelessness can seem eminently rational. Tackling this effectively may include starting with techniques to teach people mindfulness, which (according to Michael Bond in a review of David Livingston Smith's The Most Dangerous Animal) Ellen Langer, a psychologist at Harvard University, has been exploring as a way to counteract violent impulses. The idea is that an intentionally heightened awareness of thoughts and actions minute-by-minute can help people to resist negative social pressures and break ingrained habits.

(14) An unpublished manifesto for "artists united by a conviction that the destabilisation of the climate now in progress creates fundamentally new conditions for the production of art and for the relationship between art and society", written by a senior international negotiator on climate change for a major country who remains anonymous, places great hope in the power of the arts to help bring about a global transformation in self- and planetary- awareness. This a lot to ask of the arts. Maybe it starts with compassion. Norman Mailer writes in the introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of The Naked and The Dead that “Tolstoy teaches us that compassion is of value and enriches our life only when compassion is severe, which is to say when we can perceive everything that is good and bad about a character but are still able to feel that the sum of us as human beings is probably a little more good than awful”.

(15) Because no one gets points for saying, as Robert Conquest supposedly did when asked what the revised title might be of his history of Stalin’s Great Terror, “I told you so, you fucking fools”.

Climate change, imagination and culture, part 2

“KLAATU BARADA NIKTO" - CLIMATE CHANGE AND OTHER ACTS OF IMAGINATION (2)

This is the second part of a three part essay based on a talk given on 22 Oct in the series The Cultures of Climate Change at CRASSH in Cambridge. Part one is here and part 3 is here.

OK, now the second point in this talk. In the introduction to this series it says:

…culture itself constitutes an indispensable form of knowledge that cannot be overlooked if the wider research community is to grapple with climate change in any robust way.

I’m not going to try tackle that statement, or at least not directly. But it does prompt me to think about – or at least talk about! – a type of cultural activity that many people think has become more important in the last thirty years (1) or so: the so-called ‘third culture’ (2) . Put simply, the third culture is supposed to be a new, undivided space where (or so it was claimed) before there were the ‘two cultures’ of ‘the humanities’ and ‘the sciences’. In the third culture people who study the humanities are expected to have more than a little basic scientific literacy and vica versa.

What kinds of activity with regard to climate change might we (3) hope to see in this new-ish (4) cultural space, and in the wider world as a result of developments and debate within that space? It’s a big question. Adequate answers to it may come from very different people, with some surprises down the road.

Mike Hulme, the founding director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, is among of those challenging the recent award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He writes (5):

I want to examine the thesis, this formula - implicit in the Nobel award - that good science + good communication = peace... The IPCC represents good science, Al Gore and his inconvenient truth represents great communication; put them together and they can change the world. If only it were as simple as this.

[But] this formula is reminiscent of the deficit model of science communication, popular in the 1970s and 1980s, but now largely abandoned…

Put simply, the ‘deficit model’, is the idea that a complex problem will be solved automatically when the gap in public understanding is filled. If you truly understand how much smoking increases the chances you will die prematurely and painfully you will stop smoking. Almost everyone now seems to think the model is too simplistic and past its sell-by date. But Hulme doesn’t actually dismiss it completely:

For sure, let us make sure that everyone understands that humans truly are altering climates around the world and that unfettered carbon-based material growth will lead to accelerated change ahead. This is what science is good at; this is what good science communication should be aimed at. This is lower-case "climate change"' if you will: climate change as physical reality.

No, his point is more complex. We need, he says, to understand the full significance of climate change in a different way:

At [the] point [where we have achieved clear and effective science communication] we have only just started on the task required. There is also an upper-case "Climate Change" phenomenon: Climate Change as a series of complex and constantly evolving cultural discourses. We next need to embark on the much more challenging activity of revealing and articulating the very many reasons why there is no one solution, not even one set of solutions, to (lower-case) climate change.

The novelist Ian McEwan made a similar argument in his contribution to the introduction to a debate on the politics of climate change two and a half years ago (6). 'Good science’ was essential, he said; but was only the start. Where Mike Hulme calls for more work on “the complex and constantly evolving cultural discourses” of “Climate Change” (upper case), Ian McEwan boils this down to “we need to talk”.

So where might we see some interesting conversations and debates in the third culture and what could be their impacts? I’ll give you three examples: two that I think are failures (routes to avoid), and one that sounds like an interesting experiment.

The first is Arts & Letters, an aggregating site that links to new articles, reviews, and essays and opinion ‘of note’ . My impression – admittedly anecdotal – is that A&L is, or at least used to be, quite widely read in academia and journalism by those looking for a quality filter and selector: a quick way to find what’s worth reading and what isn’t (7). But on the subject of climate change A&L doesn’t just fail to meet a quality threshold; it plummets through the quality floor. A correspondent (8) puts it well:

Arts & Letters commits a category mistake (to use the term loosely). It treats climate change as if it exists in the republic of letters and everyone has an equal claim to the truth (9) . But in this area the opinion of a clever journalist is irrelevant when compared with the research done by [thousands] of scientists. What annoys me in particular about the Arts & Letters position…is that it establishes some critical distance between itself and the majority opinion of scientists, without at any point offering justification for the existence of that gap.

The second example of failure is by a far more prominent player: the BBC.

How could I dare say something nasty about Auntie? (10) Only earlier today (11) an experienced activist at one of the most effective environmental groups in Britain told me he sometimes wondered whether The Blue Planet (2001), a BBC series about ocean life, had done more for awareness than thirty years of campaigning by all the green organisations. To be clear, he was wondering about this, not saying it was the case. But many of us may have had a similar thought. I have, anyway. Like almost everyone I know, I think The Blue Planet is fantastic. It is just one example of high quality nature and science programming from the BBC which many people find inspiring (12).

No, the failure is the decision to cancel Planet Relief, which those of you who were in Britain earlier this year will know was to have been a day-long marathon of documentaries, celebrities and what-not climaxing in a giant ‘switch-off’ event in which, it was hoped, millions of people across Britain would see how much difference they could make if they acted together.

Now I am probably in a minority on this one. The majority view is some form of “it is absolutely not the BBC’s job to save the planet”, as a senior figure at the BBC put it, or “I’m glad the BBC axed Planet Relief. Ricky Gervais preaching low-carbon lifestyles would have been celebrity bollocks”, as a Greenpeace activist put it. But since I am standing up and you are sitting down you have to indulge me for a minute – unless, of course, you walk out.

I think the BBC missed an important opportunity to take what the science and the science communicators are saying and (in Mike Hulme’s words), “embark on the much more challenging activity of revealing and articulating the very many reasons why there is no one solution, not even one set of solutions, to climate change”.

In defending the BBC stance, a spokesman said the organisation would “focus [its] energies on a range of factual programmes on the important and complex subject of climate change” (13).

But how far does the realm of relevant facts – and arguments – extend? If the science indicates (14) that even stabilisation of atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations at 450ppm by 2050 carries a large risk of a global average temperature rise of more than 2° C, then the world is facing huge ethical, political and developmental challenges – the planetary emergency mentioned earlier. And even for lesser levels of risk this is so. As is the case in wartime, a national broadcaster has a profound responsibility to address these challenges with tremendous energy, creativity and boldness, not just make informative science and nature documentaries (15). The BBC and other media organisations need to tackle at least the following issues in their investigations and programming, in addition to standard science and nature reporting:

• The nature of time delays between cause and effect, how stocks and flows work (17);
• Uncertainty in science and risk management (18);
• Ethical, political and economic choices, and their consequences;
• ‘Solutions’ including but not limited to sustainable development pathways, the costs of adaptation, investment in sustainable energy technology, energy-efficiency, low-carbon living and ecological restoration.

Strictly Come Dancing it ain’t, but something like it is part of the minimum necessary to fill the deficit in public understanding. Now filling the deficit doesn’t always lead to effective action, as Mike Hulme rightly says. But it can help. Quite a few people, though of course not all, stop smoking once they fully understand its effects. This in turn affects the perception of the ‘right’ of others to pollute-and-bugger-the-consequences. Look at what is the matter in Kansas: recently, proposals for a new coal-fired power plant there have been turned down on the grounds that it would contribute to climate change (19).

The third example is an event earlier this month near Berlin. Hans Joachim – ‘John’ – Schellnhuber, the Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Research, brought together 15 Nobel Prize winners (from many disciplines but most of them from the ‘hard’ sciences – physics, chemistry etc.) with the German Chancellor (20) and others distinguished figures including economists and writers (21). They signed a memorandum (pdf) with the ambitious title A Global Contract for the Great Transformation. I think it is worth reading, but the memorandum is not actually what I have in mind. My example – an experiment, I think – is the ongoing interaction between climate scientists like John Schellnhuber and artists, writers and others.

In the case of Schellnhuber himself, the first time I became aware of this was an event over a year ago at London’s Royal Court Theatre, where Schellnhuber and Chris Rapley, at that time head of the British Antarctic Survey, found themselves on stage in front of a couple of hundred people mostly from the London arts scene. Schellnhuber and Rapley talked about climate science but they used anecdote too. Schellnhuber recounted his experience when as a young student in the 1970s wandering round West Africa he found himself in the middle of famine. Being young and idealistic he wanted to help, and before long found himself protecting precious food supplies from an angry mob with a pistol. His point was simple: this was where we were heading with climate change if we didn’t change our behaviour, and he wanted to avoid it.

Now I wasn’t at the recent event in Potsdam, but I’ve read a little about it and talked to someone who was there. It seems that Schellnhuber and others continued their courtship of the arts. Ian McEwan read aloud his piece about the boot room on the Cape Farewell expedition boat Noorderlicht: a funny story about how good intentions to co-operate can collapse which you can take as a parable for our times, but which no one would claim to be great art. And I think I heard that Schellnhuber gently badgered Philip Pullman to write more about climate change, in reaction to which Pullman gently cringed.

If the account of Pullman cringing is correct this would be consistent with something he has said elsewhere – that it isn’t necessarily a good idea to try and bang out a novel or a play and convert people to a cause; you have to let imagination work indirectly (22). Maybe one has to go back to the nineteenth century to find novels-with-a-cause that people regard, or at least regarded for a long time, as major works of fiction – such as Charles Dickens on child labour and Harriet Beecher Stowe on slavery (23).

Still, I think the experiment by Schellnhuber and others is worth watching, even if we may never be able measure whether and how these issues get ‘into the gut’ of those who create great imaginative worlds and ideas. I wonder, for example, if Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel Laureate in physics who took part in the Potsdam symposium, has talked to Cormac McCarthy about this sort of thing, or will do so further down the road (24).

Footnotes

(1) Taking the success of The Selfish Gene (1976) as a marker of the emergence of the ‘third culture’. Set aside any judgements on the quality and durability of its science and implicit politics, this book was - arguably - the first in modern times that that no ‘cultured’ person, including those who previously professed very little interest in science, could not have read and still claim to be educated. [On the quality and durability of the science in The Selfish Gene see David Sloan Wilson and Edward O. Wilson on Survival of the selfless: "Accepting multilevel selection has profound implications. It means we can no longer regard the individual as a privileged level of the biological hierarchy. Adaptations can potentially evolve at any level, from genes to ecosystems. Moreover, the balance between levels of selection is not fixed but can itself evolve - and when between-group selection becomes sufficiently strong compared with within-group selection in a given population, a major transition occurs and the group becomes a higher-level organism in its own right."]

(2) One of the most interesting exemplars is probably edge.org

(3) The ‘we’ here means those of us who think that, as I said at the start of this talk, climate change is a first order planetary emergency. If you disagree with this view, fine, we can talk about it; but outside, and not today.

(4) ‘New’ up to a point: it is of course in part the revival of an old idea going back to the Renaissance in Europe, and some other traditions.

(5) Climate change: from issue to magnifier, openDemocracy, 19 October 2007

(6) Let’s talk about climate change, 20 April 2005. McEwan reserves his praise for ‘good science’, and is highly critical of the environmental movement: “Well-meaning intellectual movements, from communism to post-structuralism, have a poor history of absorbing inconvenient data or challenges to fundamental precepts. We should not ignore or suppress good indicators on the environment”. McEwan’s article formed part of the introduction to a debate on the politics of climate change from the British Council and openDemocracy, which ran from April to June 2005. The home page of the original debate is no longer available, but an overview of the debate can be found here.

(7) The site’s motto is ‘veritas odit moras’ (‘truth hates delay’) – from Seneca.

(8) In other words, A&L mistakes climate change (the science) for Climate Change (the cultural discourse) – CH.

(9) Robert Butler quoted in A&(WO)L, Grains of Sand, 20 Sep 07

(10) Disclosure: in the mid 1990s I worked for about a year at Costing the Earth, the flagship environment series on BBC Radio 4. At that time there was some struggle about presenting ‘both sides, not just the evidence’ on climate change. The BBC has moved on from that, but others make it their bread and butter.

(11) 22 Oct 07

(12) I was glad when David Attenborough finally fronted a film directly addressing climate change – Climate Change: Britain Under Threat (2007). (Incidentally, what was the first really powerful film or TV series about environmental degradation? Koyaanisqatsi (1983)? Was it a documentary?)

(13) It has been announced that two and a half thousand posts will go at the BBC, “many of them in the next nine months, with 1,800 redundancies overall and news and factual programming worst hit”. Crisis at the BBC: Is there a vision? The Guardian, 22 Oct 2007. (emphasis added)

(14) See The Certainty of Uncertainty, RealClimate.org, 26 Oct 07: “450 ppm is an oft-cited threshold since this keeps deltaT below 2°C using standard climate sensitivities. But the skewed nature of the distribution of possible sensitivities means that it is much more likely that 450 ppm will give us more than 4.5°C of global warming rather than less than 2°”

(15) Perhaps the BBC management, cowed by the pasting it received for allowing a reporter to suggest that the facts of the Iraq war had been fixed around the policy, rather than vica versa, has become excessively conservative. It has been argued elsewhere that most senior figures at the BBC and the regulator OFCOM have an arts and humanities education but little proper grounding in the sciences. In this sense they are not really citizens of the third culture and tend to fall into the same trap as the editors of Arts & Letters. One of the other factors in the decision to cancel Planet Relief may have been that TV audiences for Al Gore’s Live Earth concert in July were something like a quarter of those for the thanksgiving concert for the life of Diana.

(16) Obviously this list is far from perfect or comprehensive.

(17) See, for example, Why ‘wait and see’ won’t do by John Sterman and Linda Booth Sweeney, or my riff: “Imagine that you find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile tearing down a superhighway at high speed. Instead of a normal windscreen in front of you a video shows the view from where the car was a minute ago. The first thing you would probably do in such a situation is take your foot off the accelerator. Next, you might try work out where you actually are now, where you are heading, and what you can you do about it. In the case of anthropogenic climate change the time lag may be fifty or sixty years rather than sixty seconds, but the principle is the same. What we are seeing now are the consequences of what we did some time ago, and we cannot see directly the impact of what we are doing right now.” – from Six Caveats about Six Degrees, 26 Mar 07.

(18) One can do worse than start with How it all ends, a clip posted on YouTube by a high school teacher called Greg.

(19) Citing Global Warming, Kansas Denies Plant Permit, New York Times, 20 Oct 2007

(20) Global sustainability: 1st interdisciplinary symposium.

(21) Angela Merkel holds a doctorate in physics. She is the political leader of the world’s largest exporter.

(22) Referring to a recent Tipping Point conference in Oxford, Pullman wrote: “I detected a sense on the part of some people present that they felt that all the arts people needed to do was get some information in their heads and then go off and bang out a novel or a play and convert thousands of readers; and more than one of the artists had to make the point that you don't create with your will, but with your imagination, and you can't exactly direct that. Nor can you predict how the audience will react: you might think you'd written the most passionate denunciation of globalisation, and people read it for the love story.” (One week in SeptemberThe Guardian).

(23) An exception to that 'rule', perhaps, at least after World War One would be fierce, Swiftian works of satire like Brave New World, 1984, Catch 22 etc.

(24) According to Wikipedia, McCarthy and Gell-Mann are friends, and McCarthy quite often visits the Santa Fe Institute.

Climate change, imagination and culture, part 1

“KLAATU BARADA NIKTO" - CLIMATE CHANGE AND OTHER ACTS OF IMAGINATION

This is the first part of an essay based on a talk given on 22 Oct in the series The Cultures of Climate Change at CRASSH in Cambridge (footnote 1)

Unlike the film from which my title borrows a line, I cannot promise to “hold the world spellbound with new and startling powers from another planet” (2). But I will try to keep you amused for forty minutes or so, and float some ideas to help get a discussion going.

Let me preface my comments on climate change and culture by saying that my view – not original to me of course, and quite widely shared – is that manmade global warming is very likely a matter of first order urgency, a planetary emergency (3). As the alien says in The Day the Earth Stood Still, “If you threaten to extend your violence, this Earth of yours will be reduced to just a burned out cinder.”

My talk is in three parts. First, a challenge to what I understand to be an assumption framing this series. Second, a look at three examples that I think say interesting things about climate change and ‘culture’ in broad and narrow senses of that term. Third, some questions provoked by a recent protest involving venerated cultural objects which many people thought was beyond the bounds of cultural and political acceptability.

ONE

OK, first the challenge. Here’s a quote from the framing introduction to this series on The Cultures of Climate Change (4):

There is a conspicuous absence: with only a few exceptions, the artistic, literary and critical communities have so far been quiet on the issue [of climate change].

A similar observation was made by Bill McKibben in his contribution to the spring 2005 British Council/openDemocracy debate on the politics of climate change (5). He wrote:

…oddly, though we know about it [climate change], we don’t know about it. It hasn’t registered in our gut; it isn’t part of our culture. Where are the books? The poems? The plays? The goddamn operas?

McKibben is persuasive but is he right? Whatever the situation in 2005, things have changed substantially in the two and half years since he wrote that. There has been a substantial amount of interesting and useful work from these artistic, literary and critical communities – at least in the English-speaking countries that are the focus of my talk (and I acknowledge that this focus is parochial).

‘Culture’ is one of the most complicated words in the language. I won’t try to define it (6), but I will say that influential cultural productions and (not necessarily the same thing) ‘high’ culture – the artistic, literary and critical spheres which I understand to be our topic for today – exist in a broader continuum, not least popular/commodity culture, the media, and – even – ‘DIY culture’ (7). Where do you stop when talking about culture? Internet venues like YouTube offer a platform for individual creativity/agitprop (8). I won’t try to cover popular music in this talk.

But we shouldn’t forget our political and media/current affairs ‘culture’ – especially when it comes to such a highly politicised issues as climate change. In this regard you can get the feeling sometimes that, in Britain at least, climate change has ‘jumped the shark’. As has been said, “one sign of how far the debate has moved on is that politicians now use ‘climate change’ as a benchmark for establishing the seriousness of other issues. When the Health Secretary Alan Johnson spoke about obesity [last] week he said the threat was a ‘potential crisis on the scale of climate change’” (9).

[Seriousness, yes, but also trivialisation: climate change is the new black is the new rock’n’roll is the new stand-up is the new …]

Popular/commodity-culture products exploiting climate change are several years old. Examples include: The Day After Tomorrow (2004), a commercially successful but pretty clunky Hollywood blockbuster with major flaws in its presentation of the science (reportedly, it left viewers on average more sceptical about the issues than they had been before (10)); State of Fear (also 2004), a pernicious mindfuck; and Crimes of the Hot (2002/03), an episode in the Futurama series from the creators of The Simpsons featuring a satire on geo-engineering in a world ruled by the cryogenically preserved head of Richard Nixon. And there are any number of less known, would-be airport paperbacks out there focussing on climate change (11).

Moving ‘up-market’ (12), there are abundant references and representations in recent works of in photography and the visual arts that would probably be defined by their creators and critics as ‘serious’ work. Exhibitions and books such as Gary Braasch’s World View of Global Warming(1997? – 2007) and NorthSouthEastWest(2004) have been seen quite widely displayed. One fairly well-known focus for inspiration in Britain has been the Cape Farewell series of expeditions taking painters, sculptors, writers and others to the Arctic over the past four or five years(13). [Incidentally, one the organisers of this series asked me what it was like on a Cape Farewell trip. (I went in 2003). I told him there was a lot of getting sea sick and a lot of drinking. That is an accurate but incomplete description. I forgot to say: there was a lot of getting cold. (14)]

Another recent example is Mark Edwards’s Hard Rain (2007), a book and photographic exhibition partly inspired Bob Dylan’s 1963 song. This includes an explicit focus on anthropogenic climate change, alongside various forms of cruel destruction by and of humans. I happened to see the exhibition just a few days ago in the Botanic Gardens in Oxford where it is installed right next to The National Collection of Hardy Euphorbias. You can’t get much closer to a touchstone of the culture-heritage complex in this country than that!

And in Britain we have now had at least two works describing themselves as operas or oratorios about climate change (15).

Some well-regarded writers have also approached the issues in the extended non-fiction/literary essay form. Examples include Edward Hoagland’s Endgame (16), and articles in the LRB by John Lanchester (Warmer, warmer) and Neal Ascherson (Diary, 18 Oct 07). I think there are hints in the work of the late W G Sebald (17), and at least one poet has tried to tackle the issue head on (17.5)

As for full-length works of fiction in the age of anthropogenic climate change (18) that may still be read and seen in ten or twenty years time, here’s my starter list (19):

• Children of Men by P D James (1992), film version directed by Alfonso Cuarón (2006)
• His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman (1995 – 2000) with film scheduled for release in 2008
• Oryx & Crake by Margaret Atwood (2003)
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2006), with film version in development.

Clearly, these are not novels ‘about’ climate change. Sure, all four describe a global catastrophe, but (I think) only two of them – the Dark Materials series (20) and Oryx & Crake (21) – explicitly describe warmer worlds. You could say they are simply part of a long tradition of dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction that long predates awareness of man made, or anthropogenic climate change. Still, I think it’s hard to read these books now without thinking of the nexus of real issues that ineluctably include climate change and its consequences. And I for one can’t help thinking the creative process in these authors was informed, consciously or not, by global environmental change (22),(23). But please challenge me on this if you want to. My comments are, after all, supposed to help start a conversation (24).

This is the first of three parts of an essay about climate change, imagination and culture. Part two is here. Part three is here.

Footnotes

(1) Edits include expanded and updated references to 30 October.

(2) Quote from the trailer of The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951).

(3) Substantiating and defending this position would require another talk as long as this one. Here I take it as a given. (For a different view see, for example Climate Resistance or Benny Peiser on Stabilisation 2005). Let’s note in passing, however, that analysis and evidence reported over just the last few days continue to be consistent with and/or strengthen a coherent picture built up by many thousands of scientists over several decades. On 20 Oct it was reported that researchers at UEA have found uptake of CO2 in the North Atlantic halved between the mid 1990s and 2000 to 2005 (Oceans are ‘soaking up less CO2'). On 21 Oct Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Director Steven Chu was reported as saying that even on the most optimistic models for the second half of the century, 30 to 70 percent of California’s snowpack would disappear, jeopardising the water supply of tens of millions of people: “There’s a two-thirds chance there will be a disaster…and that’s in the best scenario.” (The Future is Drying Up). Also in California, we have witnessed the biggest fires in many years resulting in the evacuation of more than 800,000 people, and while these may not be directly attributable to anthropogenic global heating, future dry conditions as a result of climate change could make such evens increasingly frequent and serious.
All evidence needs to be rigorously scrutinized by first-rate scientists and mediated through a transparent process such as that undertaken by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But consensus documents such as the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report are the product of highly constricted political circumstances which typically require a higher standard of proof than is applied in almost any other set of circumstances where evidence-based policy decisions are made. As they say, even Saudi Arabia has to agree with every line. For example, the IPCC 4AR does not take account of most potential carbon cycle feedbacks because of the uncertainty surrounding the issue. Ignoring risks because you don’t fully understand them is not necessarily a good idea. See, for example: Rocketing CO2 prompts criticisms of the IPCC, New Scientist 24 Oct; CO2: Don't count on the trees New Scientist 27 Oct -- “We thought [reduced carbon uptake by tropical forests] wouldn’t happen until global temperature increased by 2 C. It would be terribly worrying if that feedback is already kicking in”; and James Lovelock: 'Humans at war with Earth on climate change'(Royal Society) and It’s too late for greenhouse gas cuts, says scientist. The draft for Lovelock's talk is now up on his site here.
Climate change is, of course, part of a wider nexus of environmental and development challenges – see GEO4, 25 Oct.

(4) Cultures of Climate Change

(5) Can you imagine it? A warming world needs art, 22 April 2005

(6) See, for example, the entry for 'Culture' in Key Words by Raymond Williams.

(7) Bill McKibben is among the believers in the value of locally-produced art, placing value on the fact that, for example, “A hundred years ago Iowa had 1,300 opera houses”. As some amateur musicians may agree, what matters in many cases is not necessarily the quality of the output but the fact we are doing it ourselves.

(8) e.g. a competition for one minute films about climate change organised by Friends of the Earth

(9) Robert Butler, Ashden Trust Editor’s Blog, 22 Oct 07. Among its activities, the Ashden Trust supports dramatists and other artists exploring climate and environmental change.

(10) The jumping the shark moment in the film is surely when the ferocious ravening WOLVES (Waaooooh!!!) escape from Central Park Zoo and pace the mean, frozen streets of Manhattan. And thanks to Marc Hudson for pointing to the following paper: Does tomorrow ever come? Disaster narrative and public perceptions of climate change by Thomas Lowe et al -- "while the film increased anxiety about environmental risks, viewers experienced difficulty in distinguishing science fact from dramatized science fiction. Their belief in the likelihood of extreme events as a result of climate change was actually reduced. Following the film, many viewers expressed strong motivation to act on climate change. However, although the film may have sensitized viewers and motivated them to act, the public do not have information on what action they can take to mitigate climate change".

(11) such as the thriller Sixty Days & Counting by Kim Stanley Robinson. See review by Fred Pearce in New Scientist, 25 August 07.

(12) The idea of hierarchy in cultural production is often challenged. Why shouldn’t 'high' culture include knitting as well as opera, as Ian MacMillan, presenter of The Verb on BBC Radio 3, almost puts it?

(13) The Cape Farewell project has published a book, Burning Ice: Art and Climate Change, and held some joint shows. Individual artists who have been on the expeditions have followed their inspiration in various directions. Cape Farewell is also heavily involved in educational work, among other things. Another enterprise, Tipping Point, brings together artists, writers and others in a conference-type setting to share ideas and inspiration.

(14) See Cape Farwell: An Arctic Diary May 03, and Arctic Dreams, May 05. For photographs from the 07 expedition see Nick Cobbing's Noorderlicht and landscapes.

(15) And While London Burns (2006) from Platform London, which I have reviewed here, and The Water Diviner’s Tale, performed at the BBC Proms, 27 Aug 07

(16) Endgame: Meditations on a Diminishing World, Harper’s Magazine, Jun 07

(17) In On the Natural History of Destruction (2001), for example, Sebald writes: “In contrast to the effect of the catastrophes insidiously creeping up on us today, nature’s ability to regenerate did not seem to have been impaired by the firestorms” (page 39, US hardback edition 2003). The Rings of Saturn (1999) does not contain explicit reference to climate change so far as I recall, but it is permeated with, among other things, the precarious nature of human existence, especially in coastal zones, and the capacity of people to destroy thanks to, among other things, psycho-pathological lack of imagination and care.

(18) Ruth Padel's "Slices of Toast" (thanks to Marc Hudson for alerting me to this).

(19) “Sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three”, Philip Larkin wrote. What about climate change? I suggest we settle for 1988, when James Hansen gave his dramatic testimony to the US Senate. This helped create a space for, among other things, at least two influential non-fiction polemics: The End of Nature by Bill McKibben (1989), and Earth in Balance by Al Gore (1992). Obviously human impact on the global climate change began long before 1988. Most take large scale burning of coal from the late 1700s as a starting point. One hypothesis, known as the early anthropocene, takes in the agricultural era as a whole, from (first) widespread forest burning and (second) methane release from rice paddy and livestock production, about ten and seven to five thousand years ago respectively. Most everyone agrees, though, that the rate of change in the biogeochemical cycle over the past few decades is unprecedented in millions of years.

(20) Others may have better examples. And there is writing from the period before widespread awareness of anthropogenic global warming which prefigure the issue or could be seen as in some way "prophetic". Philip Pullman, for example, recently referred to JG Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962) (One week in September). The work of Philip K Dick is probably another place to look.

(21) For example, “The climate’s been changing. The summers are hotter than they used to be. They say that people have been interfering with the atmosphere by putting chemicals in it and the weather’s going out of control” from the character Will Parry on page 322 of The Subtle Knife (Scholastic Press edition of 2001). The Subtle Knife was first published in 1997.

(22) [Find a quote from the novel]

(23) Children of Men vividly imagines what some environmentalists call ‘the death of birth’ – a notion going back to at least to Rachel Carson (1961). The Road depicts a world devastated by, most probably, nuclear war. You could argue the toss as to whether that destruction has come about as a result of destabilisation in which climate change played a role, and whether that’s relevant. Still, the reviewer who called it “a novel for the globally warmed generation” is on to something. Climate change is, obviously, not the only major global challenge, environmental or otherwise, facing a world of nearly seven billion soon to be nine billion people. See, for example, Our Final Century by Martin Rees (2003).

(24) None of the four novelists mentioned is a scientist. There is a lively field of scientists turned writers - see for example, Science and Art in the Novel: When extremes converge. Michael Crichton is a medical doctor, but then so was Harold Shipman.

(25) To be trite, metaphor is often but not always central to art, writing and film-making. Alien (1979) may not be ‘about’ cancer or some other horrible disease, but it resonates with concerns about those things.

Things can only get bitterer

All the surviving members of the twenty five most endangered primate species combined "would fit in a single football stadium" (BBC, IPS).

More widely, "there are no major issues raised in Our Common Future for which the foreseeable trends are favourable" (as quoted from GEO4).