Saturday 30 January 2010

codswallop

Up, Down.

Apple iPadApple iPadApple iPad
a-and Honourable Mention goes to Will it blend?, on YouTube.

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Appendices:
1-1. Tablet of great promise, Editorial, Jan 29 2010.
1-2. The iPad’s Name Makes Some Women Cringe, Claire Cain Miller, Jan 27 2010.
1-3. For Apple, iPad Said More Than Intended, Brad Stone, Jan 28 2010.
1-4. Lesser-known iPad apps: bra inserts, shoulder pads, Susan Krashinsky, Jan 28 2010.
     1a. iPad on Mad TV, YouTube.
     1b. Will it blend?, YouTube.

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Tablet of great promise, Editorial, Jan 29 2010.

The web world is aflutter with the announcement of Apple's new touch-screen, wireless tablet computer, the iPad. Forget about what the iPad means for Apple's bottom line; screen out the detractors who complain about its price or what it can't do. What matters are the opportunities the iPad, and its inevitable successors, will give to artists to imagine new forms of creation, and to citizens and workplaces to imagine new ways of collaborating.

The creative world is already primed to use the new device. Take the website FLYP: part conventional magazine (with feature articles), part TV magazine (with embedded videos), part photography showcase and part blog (with links to related content). It functions well on a regular desktop or laptop computer. But on an easily portable tablet, where pages can be turned with the flick of the wrist, multimedia magazines such as FLYP will find new audiences.

Tablet computing could herald the interactive e-book, inspiring authors to change the way they write, and spurring them to collaborate with other artists. Fan readers will be able to customize e-book "jackets" using paint software; well sourced non-fiction could include links to the original documents or come out in frequently updated editions, based on new research and stories provided by the audience.

With imagination, a tablet's reach could be stretched still further, helping medical professionals share charts safely, allowing architects and engineers to work better on construction projects in the field, and helping creative educators to attend more easily to visual learners. Workers who are not desk-bound currently have their computing potential constrained. The tablet will change that.

For all the advances in processing power and connectivity and the explosion of online data, computers are a pain. They crash too often, run too hot and, beyond the basics, are hard to use and customize. Phones can do a lot, but even the smartest ones have screens that are too small.

Tablets, on the other hand, will have intuitive interfaces, respond to the touch and are big enough to permit a lot of information to be taken in. That is why they matter, and why their promise is about more than just one company's immediate potential to realize windfall profits. A device that is easy to use, helps people enjoy artistic works anywhere, lets them assist in artistic creation and enables them to work together in new ways is more than an expensive toy; it is a tool that will play as democratizing a role as cellular phones, computers and the Internet already have. Now it is up to us all to take full advantage.

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The iPad’s Name Makes Some Women Cringe, Claire Cain Miller, Jan 27 2010.

When Apple announced the name of its tablet computer today — the iPad — my mind immediately went to the feminine hygiene aisle of the drugstore. It turns out I wasn’t alone.

The term “iTampon” quickly became a trending topic on Twitter because of Tweets like this one: “Heavy flow? There’s an app for that!” A CNBC anchor, Michelle Caruso-Cabrera, said the iPad was a “terrible name” for the tablet. “It reminds me of feminine products,” she said.

“Are there any women in Apple marketing?” asked Brooke Hammerling, founder of Brew Media Relations, a technology public relations firm. “The first impression of every single woman I’ve spoken to is that it’s cringe-inducing. It indicates to me that there wasn’t a lot of testing or feedback.”

It is not just women who were surprised. When Peter Shankman, a public relations and social media expert, saw the name on television, he was taken aback. “I’m waiting for the second version that comes with wings,” he said.

Mr. Shankman was surprised that Apple, with its meticulous attention to detail, missed the significance. He cited a piece of company lore — when its naming conventions called for a new computer to be called the Macintosh SEx, Apple went with the name Macintosh SE/30 instead.

So if the name is a bit tone-deaf, at least to half the population, will it hurt sales of the iPad?

“In three months’ time, if it delivers on its promise, no one’s going to remember that they chuckled about it,” said Hayes Roth, chief marketing officer at Landor Associates, a brand consulting firm that has introduced new names for many products and services. (Like many men, he said that he did not make the menstruation connection at first.)

The women I interviewed said that if the iPad is a must-have, they will buy it, even if their first reaction was to wince at the name.

Apple probably vetted the name and knew the risk it was taking, Mr. Roth said, but used the name anyway because it was so fitting. I e-mailed Apple to ask, but haven’t heard back yet. (Some critics, including a few commenters on the Bits blog, noted that Apple currently lists no women in its top executive positions.)

Mr. Roth said that whatever its drawbacks, the iPad name was effective.

“The minute you heard the name, did you know exactly who it was and who brought it to you?” he said. “Yes. Because they followed the naming convention that they created and have used very cleverly, and it’s a name that actually is very descriptive.”

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For Apple, iPad Said More Than Intended, Brad Stone, Jan 28 2010.

SAN FRANCISCO — Apple has generated a lot of chatter with its new iPad tablet. But it may not be quite the conversation it wanted.

Many women are saying the name evokes awkward associations with feminine hygiene products. People from Boston to Ireland are complaining that “iPad,” in their regional brogue, sounds almost indistinguishable from “iPod,” Apple’s music player.

Then there are more serious conflicts. Two other high-tech companies already market products called iPad and are laying claim to the trademark.

In the hours after the iPad announcement on Wednesday, “iTampon” became one of the most popular trending topics on Twitter. Apple’s communication team fielded a wave of queries on the subject but characteristically declined to comment.

“I care about words and their connotations, but you don’t have to be in junior high to make this leap,” said Robin Bernstein, a corporate speech writer on Long Island, who addressed the issue on her Facebook page on Wednesday. “A lot of women when they hear the word ‘pad’ are going to think about feminine hygiene.”

Michael Cronan, a naming consultant in Berkeley, Calif., whose company has helped come up with brands like TiVo and Kindle, said many naming experiments show that women tend to reflexively relate words like “pad” and “flow” to bodily concerns.

He is not sure Apple could have found an alternative that ties in as perfectly to its famous brands. “I think we’re going to get over this fairly quickly and we’ll get on with enjoying the experience.”

But the folks at Fujitsu, the Japanese technology firm, may not be quite so eager to forgive and forget. The company has applied for the iPad trademark in the United States and already sells an iPad — a $2,000 hand-held device that shop clerks use to check inventory.

STMicroelectronics, the Swiss semiconductor company, owns the iPad trademark in Europe and uses it as an acronym for integrated passive and active devices — which sounds less fun than playing games on a tablet. (A third company, MagTek of Seal Beach, Calif., makes a portable magnetic card reader of the same name.)

These kinds of naming conflicts have not stopped Apple before. In 2007, on the eve of the introduction of the iPhone, the technology giant Cisco Systems pointed out that it already sold an Internet handset called the iPhone. Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, led the negotiation for the name, peppering Cisco executives with calls at all hours, and telling them he was prepared to claim that Cisco was underutilizing the trademark.

Mr. Jobs finally persuaded Cisco to surrender the trademark with a vague promise to market their products jointly — a partnership that never materialized.

“He’s a very tough businessman and tough negotiator,” said Charles Giancarlo, a former Cisco executive who dealt directly with Mr. Jobs on the issue. “I feel sorry for the poor guy at Fujitsu who is going to be negotiating with Steve directly.”

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Lesser-known iPad apps: bra inserts, shoulder pads, Susan Krashinsky, Jan 28 2010.

Canadian maker of polyurethane devices gets boost from brouhaha over Apple iPad name

The iPad is one handy little device. It plays music. It surfs the Web. It enhances your bust line.

So Steve Jobs didn't think of everything. But there is an iPad made just for Victoria and her secrets. A small Canadian company called Coconut Grove Pads Inc. has been making a line of polyurethane bra inserts and shoulder pads registered as the iPad, since 2007.

Coconut Grove's president, Hylton Karon, described the products as “you know, little quickies you ladies use to enhance.”

The Markham, Ont.-based company, which manufactures bras under the brand name The Natural, owns the iPad trademark in the United States. “Unfortunately, we didn't register it for electronics or we'd all be retired,” Mr. Karon said Thursday.

Unfortunately for Apple Inc., (AAPL-Q192.06-7.23-3.63%) some critics are making an association between the iPad and another intimate accessory.

After the new Apple gadget made its debut Wednesday, Twitter feeds and blogs flooded with people mocking the name because it evoked a certain feminine hygiene product. A MadTV sketch on that theme from 2006 enjoyed an Internet renaissance. The imagined tagline? “The new Apple iPad! Please don't make us explain how it works.”

The brouhaha over the name, which made headlines in major publications across the globe, threatens to sap some of the hype from the heavily orchestrated launch of the iPad by Apple.

There also may be a more serious issue. Japanese computer company Fujitsu Ltd. also markets a device called the iPad. The handheld device is made for retail stores to help them manage inventory, do checkouts on the spot and communicate with co-workers. The Fujitsu iPad has been in use since 2002. The company applied for a trademark on the name in 2003, according to U.S. Patent and Trademark Office records. The trademark was never granted to Fujitsu, however, and a fight is now brewing as Apple considers whether to file an objection with the agency to claim its right to the name.

Apple has had these types of hiccups before: After the company debuted its now wildly popular iPhone in January, 2007, Cisco Systems Inc. sued for trademark infringement. The two companies later settled.

For its part, Coconut Grove has no ambitions to go up against Apple in court. If anything, Mr. Karon said the publicity is good.

While his company “never made any intimation of being related to the big Apple,” Mr. Karon said he did want to capitalize on the awareness of the i-brand.

“It's i-everything these days,” he said. “It's just a play on what's become so familiar.”

Mr. Karon has started a new company called Intelligent Fabrics, which will market a new brand, iFabrics.

For now he'll continue marketing his iPads, which come in sizes B to DD, to insert in bras to give a woman's figure a bit of boost. Mr. Karon is also enthusiastic about his non-slip foam shoulder pads, which were featured on the Today Show yesterday morning.“Shoulder pads, which were out for many years, have come back in vogue,” he said.

The shoulder pads were shown on TV under the Natural brand, but Mr. Karon hinted yesterday that now that the name has gotten some attention, he might market his own iPad a bit more actively.

While the Apple iPad has been hailed as the next big thing, iPads aren't Coconut Grove's premier product.

“It's still small. The bras are clearly a bigger part of our business,” Mr. Karon said. Could the publicity change that?

“Who knows?” he said. “We'll certainly run with it!”

Tuesday 26 January 2010

growth isn't working

Up, Down.

nef - new economics foundation economics as if people and the planet mattered.
     Growth isn’t Working, 23 January 2006, (pdf download).
     Growth isn't Possible, 25 January 2010, (pdf download).

as usual when it comes to finding good news, this came to me via a Brazilian connection, who had it from O Globo, who had it from BBC Brasil ... and there the trail goes a bit cold because the english BBC has a different story in which an 'expert' pans the report, I think the original english story may simply have changed in the meantime, this seems likely to me because normally what is on BBC Brasil is just-about-verbatim translation, the english BBC decided to hedge their bets, who cares?

so, in a word ...
                 Eureka(!?)
even if the thesis, "growth isn't possible," is slightly muddled, growth is possible of course, maybe it needs qualification, re-phrasing, whatever, but quibbles aside, this morning I am rejoicing.

... some of the authors:
nef Andrew Simmsnef Andrew Simmsnef Andrew Simmsnef David Woodwardnef Eilis Lawlornef Eilis Lawlornef Eilis Lawlornef Peter Chowlanef Peter Chowlanef Peter Chowlanef Peter Chowlanef Victoria Johnsonnef Victoria Johnson

so, maybe it should have been more like:
Eureka!   Eureka (not!)

unfortunately I don't actually get much when I read pdf's on-line, partly that I hate Adobe software, partly something physiological maybe, something McLuhan-esque too hot, too cool, or maybe as I sometimes joke it is just early-onset Alzheimer's, doesn't matter, whatever the reason - stuff doesn't stick

so when it became clear that these bunglers could not actually provide the hard-copies I ordered from their website ... the bloom went off the rose

okokok, I could print the damned pdf's - that would expend the ink in my shitbox printer, complications ... given that it now takes a full week and more for me to decide to buy something, and then another week to risk actually going ouotside to see about doing the deed (y'unnerstan') ... some kind of creeping anhedonia

which brings me round to something I found in the New York Times this morning: Is There an Ecological Unconscious? ... being as I am - a refugee from places like Garden Cove & Little Heart's Ease & Great Paradise (y'unnerstan') ...

a-and maybe some more books to read:
     Glenn Albrecht: 'Solastalgia'. A New Concept in Health and Identity, 2005.
     American Psychological Association: Interface Between Psychology and Global Climate Change.
     Theodore Roszak: “The Voice of the Earth” 1992.
     E. O. Wilson: biophilia, 1984
     Thomas Doherty: Ecopsychology journal
     M.I.T. Press: Ecopsychology, edited by Patricia Hasbach, Peter Kahn, and Jolina Ruckert - forthcoming
     Gregory Bateson: Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 1972.



Appendices:
1-1. Só estagnação econômica pode reduzir aquecimento global, diz estudo, Ambiente Brasil, 26/01/2010.
1-2. Só estagnação econômica pode reduzir aquecimento global, diz estudo, O Globo, 25/01.
1-3. Só estagnação econômica pode reduzir aquecimento global, diz estudo, BBC Brasil, 25 de janeiro, 2010.
1-4. Economic growth 'cannot continue', BBC, Monday, 25 January 2010.

2. Is There an Ecological Unconscious?Daniel B. Smith, Jan 27 2010.


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Só estagnação econômica pode reduzir aquecimento global, diz estudo, Ambiente Brasil, 26/01/2010.

Um estudo de uma entidade britânica, divulgado nesta segunda-feira (25), defende que a única forma de controlar o aquecimento global é que os países ricos interrompam seu crescimento econômico.

A tese defendida pela Fundação Nova Economia (NEF, na sigla em inglês) é de que, mesmo com expansão econômica reduzida, não será possível atingir a meta de aquecimento global abaixo dos 2°C, como almejado pela comunidade internacional.

No relatório "Crescimento não é possível: por que as nações ricas precisam de uma nova direção econômica", Andrew Simms, diretor da NEF, explica que "o crescimento econômico incessante está consumindo a biosfera do planeta além de seus limites".

Em sua visão, o custo dessa expansão aparece no "comprometimento da segurança alimentar global, nas mudanças drásticas do clima, na instabilidade econômica e nas ameaças ao bem-estar social".

Por isso, o mundo precisa de uma nova economia que respeite o orçamento ambiental, diz o estudo.

"Não há um banco central global do meio ambiente para nos salvar se formos à falência ecológica", conclui.

Gases causadores do efeito estufa - O relatório da NEF explica que a concentração máxima de gás carbônico na atmosfera para manter o aquecimento global dentro dos 2°C deveria ser de 350 ppm (partículas por milhão).

Para atingir essa meta até 2050, porém, a humanidade teria de reduzir sua intensidade de carbono na economia (quantidade de CO2 necessária para gerar expansão econômica) em 95%.

O problema é que a intensidade vem aumentando ao longo desta década.

Para reverter essa tendência, o estudo destaca que seria necessário um esforço político muito superior ao apresentado durante a Conferência de Mudança Climática em Copenhague, em dezembro do ano passado.

Justamente por isso o estudo classifica essa drástica redução na intensidade de carbono na economia como "sem precedente e, provavelmente, impossível", reforçando a defesa da estagnação econômica.

Alternativas inviáveis - O estudo também confronta a posição de muitos líderes globais de que o uso de biocombustíveis é uma opção viável para controlar o aquecimento global.

O primeiro problema é que esses combustíveis consomem uma área agrícola essencial para a produção de alimentos.

Se o Reino Unido, por exemplo, quisesse substituir seu consumo de petróleo por biocombustíveis à base de soja ou milho, precisaria de 36 milhões de hectares, ou seja, uma área 650% superior às terras aráveis do país, diz o estudo.

No caso do etanol produzido à base de cana-de-açúcar, o relatório admite que é possível produzir o combustível com o bagaço da cana, mantendo o suco voltado para a produção de alimentos.

Mas o etanol à base do bagaço "ainda precisa de substancial pesquisa e ainda não é comercialmente viável", diz o estudo.

Com base em todas as possíveis alternativas analisadas pela NEF, o estudo concluiu que não pode haver controle do aquecimento global sem controle do crescimento econômico.

"Isso significa que, para permitir um crescimento econômico em países com baixa renda per capita (...), será necessária uma redução na expansão econômica dos países ricos", conclui o relatório.



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Só estagnação econômica pode reduzir aquecimento global, diz estudo, O Globo, 25/01.

Um estudo de uma entidade britânica, divulgado nesta segunda-feira, defende que a única forma de controlar o aquecimento global é que os países ricos interrompam seu crescimento econômico.

A tese defendida pela Fundação Nova Economia (NEF, na sigla em inglês) é de que, mesmo com expansão econômica reduzida, não será possível atingir a meta de aquecimento global abaixo dos 2º C, como almejado pela comunidade internacional.

No relatório Crescimento não é possível: porque as nações ricas precisam de uma nova direção econômica, Andrew Simms, diretor da NEF, explica que "o crescimento econômico incessante está consumindo a biosfera do planeta além de seus limites".

Em sua visão, o custo dessa expansão aparece no "comprometimento da segurança alimentar global, nas mudanças drásticas do clima, na instabilidade econômica e nas ameaças ao bem-estar social".

Por isso, o mundo precisa de uma nova economia que respeite o orçamento ambiental, diz o estudo.

"Não há um banco central global do meio ambiente para nos salvar se formos à falência ecológica", conclui.

Gases causadores do efeito estufa

O relatório da NEF explica que, segundo a Nasa, a agência espacial americana, a concentração máxima de gás carbônico na atmosfera para manter o aquecimento global dentro dos 2º C deveria ser de 350 ppm (partículas por milhão).

Para atingir essa meta até 2050, porém, a humanidade teria de reduzir sua intensidade de carbono na economia (quantidade de CO2 necessária para gerar expansão econômica) em 95%.

O problema é que a intensidade vem aumentando ao longo desta década.

Para reverter essa tendência, o estudo destaca que seria necessário um esforço político muito superior ao apresentado durante a Conferência de Mudança Climática em Copenhague, em dezembro do ano passado.

Justamente por isso o estudo classifica essa drástica redução na intensidade de carbono na economia como "sem precedente e, provavelmente, impossível", reforçando a defesa pela estagnação econômica.

Alternativas inviáveis

O estudo também confronta a posição de muitos líderes globais de que o uso de biocombustíveis é uma opção viável para controlar o aquecimento global.

O primeiro problema é que esses combustíveis consomem uma área agrícola essencial para a produção de alimentos.

Se o Reino Unido, por exemplo, quisesse substituir seu consumo de petróleo por biocombustíveis à base de soja ou milho, precisaria de 36 milhões de hectares, ou seja, uma área 650% superior às terras aráveis do país, diz o estudo.

No caso do etanol produzido à base de cana-de-açúcar, o relatório admite que é possível produzir o combustível com o bagaço da cana, mantendo o suco voltado para a produção de alimentos.

Mas o etanol à base do bagaço "ainda precisa de substancial pesquisa e ainda não é comercialmente viável", diz o estudo.

Com base em todas as possíveis alternativas analisadas pela NEF, o estudo concluiu que não pode haver controle do aquecimento global sem controle do crescimento econômico.

"Isso significa que, para permitir um crescimento econômico em países com baixa renda per capita (...), será necessária uma redução na expansão econômica dos países ricos", conclui o relatório.



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Só estagnação econômica pode reduzir aquecimento global, diz estudo, BBC Brasil, 25 de janeiro, 2010.

Um estudo de uma entidade britânica, divulgado nesta segunda-feira, defende que a única forma de controlar o aquecimento global é que os países ricos interrompam seu crescimento econômico.

A tese defendida pela Fundação Nova Economia (NEF, na sigla em inglês) é de que, mesmo com expansão econômica reduzida, não será possível atingir a meta de aquecimento global abaixo dos 2º C, como almejado pela comunidade internacional.

No relatório Crescimento não é possível: porque as nações ricas precisam de uma nova direção econômica, Andrew Simms, diretor da NEF, explica que “o crescimento econômico incessante está consumindo a biosfera do planeta além de seus limites”.

Em sua visão, o custo dessa expansão aparece no “comprometimento da segurança alimentar global, nas mudanças drásticas do clima, na instabilidade econômica e nas ameaças ao bem-estar social”.

Por isso, o mundo precisa de uma nova economia que respeite o orçamento ambiental, diz o estudo.

“Não há um banco central global do meio ambiente para nos salvar se formos à falência ecológica”, conclui.

Gases causadores do efeito estufa

O relatório da NEF explica que, segundo a Nasa, a agência espacial americana, a concentração máxima de gás carbônico na atmosfera para manter o aquecimento global dentro dos 2º C deveria ser de 350 ppm (partículas por milhão).

Para atingir essa meta até 2050, porém, a humanidade teria de reduzir sua intensidade de carbono na economia (quantidade de CO2 necessária para gerar expansão econômica) em 95%.

O problema é que a intensidade vem aumentando ao longo desta década.

Para reverter essa tendência, o estudo destaca que seria necessário um esforço político muito superior ao apresentado durante a Conferência de Mudança Climática em Copenhague, em dezembro do ano passado.

Justamente por isso o estudo classifica essa drástica redução na intensidade de carbono na economia como “sem precedente e, provavelmente, impossível”, reforçando a defesa pela estagnação econômica.

Alternativas inviáveis

O estudo também confronta a posição de muitos líderes globais de que o uso de biocombustíveis é uma opção viável para controlar o aquecimento global.

O primeiro problema é que esses combustíveis consomem uma área agrícola essencial para a produção de alimentos.

Se o Reino Unido, por exemplo, quisesse substituir seu consumo de petróleo por biocombustíveis à base de soja ou milho, precisaria de 36 milhões de hectares, ou seja, uma área 650% superior às terras aráveis do país, diz o estudo.

No caso do etanol produzido à base de cana-de-açúcar, o relatório admite que é possível produzir o combustível com o bagaço da cana, mantendo o suco voltado para a produção de alimentos.

Mas o etanol à base do bagaço “ainda precisa de substancial pesquisa e ainda não é comercialmente viável”, diz o estudo.

Com base em todas as possíveis alternativas analisadas pela NEF, o estudo concluiu que não pode haver controle do aquecimento global sem controle do crescimento econômico.

“Isso significa que, para permitir um crescimento econômico em países com baixa renda per capita (...), será necessária uma redução na expansão econômica dos países ricos”, conclui o relatório.



***************************************************************************
Economic growth 'cannot continue', BBC, Monday, 25 January 2010.

Continuing global economic growth "is not possible" if nations are to tackle climate change, a report by an environmental think-tank has warned.

The New Economics Foundation (Nef) said "unprecedented and probably impossible" carbon reductions would be needed to hold temperature rises below 2C (3.6F).

Scientists say exceeding this limit could lead to dangerous global warming.

"We urgently need to change our economy to live within its environmental budget," said Nef's policy director.

Andrew Simms added: "There is no global, environmental central bank to bail us out if we become ecologically bankrupt."

None of the existing models or policies could "square the circle" of economic growth with climate safety, Nef added.

'No magic bullets'

In the report, Growth Isn't Possible, the authors looked at the main models for climate change and energy use in the global economy.

They then considered whether economic growth could be maintained while "retaining a good likelihood" of limiting the global average temperature to within 2C of pre-industrial levels.

The report concluded that a growth rate of just 3%, the "carbon intensity" of the global economy would need to fall by 95% by 2050 from 2002 levels. This would require an average annual reduction of 6.5%.

However, the authors said that the world's carbon intensity had "flatlined" between 2000 and 2007.

"For each year the target was missed, the necessary improvements would grow higher still," they observed.

The findings also suggested that there was no proven technological advance that would allow "business as usual" to continue.

"Magic bullets - such as carbon capture and storage, nuclear or even geo-engineering - are potentially dangerous distractions from more human-scale solutions," said co-author Victoria Johnson, Nef's lead researcher for the climate change and energy programme.

She added that there was growing support for community-scale projects, such as decentralised energy systems, but support from governments was needed.

"At the moment, magic bullets... are getting much of the funding and political attention, but are missing the targets," Dr Johnson said.

"Our research shows that to prevent runaway climate change, this needs to change."

The report concluded that an economy that respected environmental thresholds, which include biodiversity and the finite availability of natural resources, would be better placed to deliver human well-being in the long run.

Tom Clougherty, executive director of the Adam Smith Institute, a free-market think-thank, said Nef's report exhibited "a complete lack of understanding of economics and, indeed, human development".

"It is precisely this economic growth which will lift the poor out of poverty and improve the environmental standards that really matter to people - like clean air and water - in the process, as it has done throughout human history," he told BBC News.

"There's only one good thing I can say for the Nef's report, and that's that it is honest. Its authors admit that they want us to be poorer and to lead more restricted lives for the sake of their faddish beliefs."



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Is There an Ecological Unconscious?Daniel B. Smith, Jan 27 2010.

About eight years ago, Glenn Albrecht began receiving frantic calls from residents of the Upper Hunter Valley, a 6,000-square-mile region in southeastern Australia. For generations the Upper Hunter was known as the “Tuscany of the South” — an oasis of alfalfa fields, dairy farms and lush English-style shires on a notoriously hot, parched continent. “The calls were like desperate pleas,” Albrecht, a philosopher and professor of sustainability at Murdoch University in Perth, recalled in June. “They said: ‘Can you help us? We’ve tried everyone else. Is there anything you can do about this?’ ”

Residents were distraught over the spread of coal mining in the Upper Hunter. Coal was discovered in eastern Australia more than 200 years ago, but only in the last two decades did the industry begin its exponential rise. Today, more than 100 million tons of black coal are extracted from the valley each year, primarily by open-pit mining, which uses chemical explosives to blast away soil, sediment and rock. The blasts occur several times a day, sending plumes of gray dust over ridges to settle thickly onto roofs, crops and the hides of livestock. Klieg lights provide a constant illumination. Trucks, draglines and idling coal trains emit a constant low-frequency rumble. Rivers and streams have been polluted.

Albrecht, a dark, ebullient man with a crooked aquiline nose, was known locally for his activism. He participated in blockades of ships entering Newcastle (near the Upper Hunter), the largest coal-exporting port in the world, and published opinion articles excoriating the Australian fossil-fuel industries. But Albrecht didn’t see what he could offer besides a sympathetic ear and some tactical advice. Then, in late 2002, he decided to see the transformation of the Upper Hunter firsthand.

“There’s a scholar who talks about ‘heart’s ease,’ ” Albrecht told me as we sat in his car on a cliff above the Newcastle shore, overlooking the Pacific. In the distance, just before the earth curved out of sight, 40 coal tankers were lined up single file. “People have heart’s ease when they’re on their own country. If you force them off that country, if you take them away from their land, they feel the loss of heart’s ease as a kind of vertigo, a disintegration of their whole life.” Australian aborigines, Navajos and any number of indigenous peoples have reported this sense of mournful disorientation after being displaced from their land. What Albrecht realized during his trip to the Upper Valley was that this “place pathology,” as one philosopher has called it, wasn’t limited to natives. Albrecht’s petitioners were anxious, unsettled, despairing, depressed — just as if they had been forcibly removed from the valley. Only they hadn’t; the valley changed around them.

In Albrecht’s view, the residents of the Upper Hunter were suffering not just from the strain of living in difficult conditions but also from something more fundamental: a hitherto unrecognized psychological condition. In a 2004 essay, he coined a term to describe it: “solastalgia,” a combination of the Latin word solacium (comfort) and the Greek root –algia (pain), which he defined as “the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault . . . a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at ‘home.’ ” A neologism wasn’t destined to stop the mines; they continued to spread. But so did Albrecht’s idea. In the past five years, the word “solastalgia” has appeared in media outlets as disparate as Wired, The Daily News in Sri Lanka and Andrew Sullivan’s popular political blog, The Daily Dish. In September, the British trip-hop duo Zero 7 released an instrumental track titled “Solastalgia,” and in 2008 Jukeen, a Slovenian recording artist, used the word as an album title. “Solastalgia” has been used to describe the experiences of Canadian Inuit communities coping with the effects of rising temperatures; Ghanaian subsistence farmers faced with changes in rainfall patterns; and refugees returning to New Orleans after Katrina.

The broad appeal of solastalgia pleases Albrecht; it has helped earn him hundreds of thousands of dollars in research grants as well as his position at Murdoch. But he is not particularly surprised that it has caught on. “Take a look out there,” he said, gesturing to the line of coal ships. “What you’re looking at is climate change queued up. You can’t get away from it. Not in the Upper Hunter, not in Newcastle, not anywhere. And that’s exactly the point of solastalgia.” Just as the loss of “heart’s ease” is not limited to displaced native populations, solastalgia is not limited to those living beside quarries — or oil spills or power plants or Superfund sites. Solastalgia, in Albrecht’s estimation, is a global condition, felt to a greater or lesser degree by different people in different locations but felt increasingly, given the ongoing degradation of the environment. As our environment continues to change around us, the question Albrecht would like answered is, how deeply are our minds suffering in return?

Albrecht’s philosophical attempt to trace a direct line between the health of the natural world and the health of the mind has a growing partner in a subfield of psychology. Last August, the American Psychological Association released a 230-page report titled “Interface Between Psychology and Global Climate Change.” News-media coverage of the report concentrated on the habits of human behavior and the habits of thought that contribute to global warming. This emphasis reflected the intellectual dispositions of the task-force members who wrote the document — seven out of eight were scientists who specialize in decision research and environmental-risk management — as well as the document’s stated purpose. “We must look at the reasons people are not acting,” Janet Swim, a Penn State psychologist and the chairwoman of the task force, said, “in order to understand how to get people to act.”

Yet all the attention paid to the behavioral and cognitive barriers to safeguarding the environment — topics of acute interest to policy makers and activists — disguised the fact that a significant portion of the document addressed the supposed emotional costs of ecological decline: anxiety, despair, numbness, “a sense of being overwhelmed or powerless,” grief. It also disguised the unusual background of the eighth member of the task force, Thomas Doherty, a clinical psychologist in Portland, Ore. Doherty runs a private therapeutic practice called Sustainable Self and is the most prominent American advocate of a growing discipline known as “ecopsychology.”

There are numerous psychological subfields that, to one degree or another, look at the interplay between human beings and their natural environment. But ecopsychology embraces a more revolutionary paradigm: just as Freud believed that neuroses were the consequences of dismissing our deep-rooted sexual and aggressive instincts, ecopsychologists believe that grief, despair and anxiety are the consequences of dismissing equally deep-rooted ecological instincts.

“If you look at the beginnings of clinical psychology,” Patricia Hasbach, a psychotherapist and prominent ecopsychologist based in Eugene, told me, “the focus was on intrapsychic forces” — the mind-bound interplay of ego, id and superego. “Then the field broadened to take into account interpersonal forces such as relationships and interactions between people. Then it took a huge leap to look at whole families and systems of people. Then it broadened even further to take into account social systems” and the importance of social identities like race, gender and class. “Ecopsychology wants to broaden the field again to look at ecological systems,” she said. “It wants to take the entire planet into account.”

The terms in which ecopsychology pursues this admittedly ambitious goal are steeped in the field’s countercultural beginnings. Ecopsychology emerged in the early 1960s, just as the modern environmental movement was gathering strength, when a group of Boston-area graduate students gathered to discuss what they saw as the isolation and malaise infecting modern life. It had another brief period of efflorescence, particularly on the West Coast and among practitioners of alternative therapies, in the early ’90s, when Theodore Roszak, a professor of history (he coined the word “counterculture”) published a manifesto, “The Voice of the Earth,” in which he criticized modern psychology for neglecting the primal bond between man and nature. “Mainstream Western psychology has limited the definition of mental health to the interpersonal context of an urban-industrial society,” he later wrote. “All that lies beyond the citified psyche has seemed of no human relevance — or perhaps too frightening to think about.” Ecopsychology’s eclectic following, which includes therapists, researchers, ecologists and activists, still reflects these earlier foundations. So does its rhetoric. Practitioners are as apt, if not more apt, to cite Native American folk tales as they are empirical data to make their points.

Yet even as it remains committed to its origins, ecopsychology has begun in recent years to enter mainstream academic circles. Last April, Doherty published the first issue of Ecopsychology, the first peer-reviewed journal dedicated to “the relationship between environmental issues and mental health and well-being.” Next year, M.I.T. Press will publish a book of the same name, edited by Hasbach and Peter Kahn, a developmental psychologist, and Jolina Ruckert, a Ph.D. candidate, both at the University of Washington. The volume brings together scholars from a range of disciplines, among them the award-winning biologist Lynn Margulis and the anthropologist Wade Davis, as it delves into such areas as “technological nature” and how the environment affects human perception. Ecopsychology is taught at Oberlin College, Lewis & Clark College and the University of Wisconsin, among other institutions.

Ecopsychologists are not the first to embrace a vital link between mind and nature. They themselves admit as much, emphasizing the field’s roots in traditions like Buddhism, Romanticism and Transcendentalism. They point to affinities with evolutionary psychology — to the idea that our responses to the environment are hard-wired because of how we evolved as a species. They also point to biophilia, a hypothesis put forward by the eminent Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson, in 1984, that human beings have an “innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes.” Though Wilson’s idea has been criticized as both deterministic and so broad as to be untestable, the notion that evolution endowed humans with a craving for nature struck a lasting chord in many sectors of the scientific community. Over the past quarter-century, Wilson’s hypothesis has inspired a steady flow of articles, books, conferences and, last year, the E. O. Wilson Biophilia Center in northwest Florida.

But unlike Wilson and his followers, ecopsychologists tend to focus on the pathological aspect of the mind-nature relationship: its brokenness. In this respect, their project finds echoes in the culture at large. Recently, a number of psychiatrically inflected coinages have sprung up to represent people’s growing unease over the state of the planet — “nature-deficit disorder,” “ecoanxiety,” “ecoparalysis.” The terms have multiplied so quickly that Albrecht has proposed instituting an entire class of “psycho­terratic syndromes”: mental-health issues attributable to the degraded state of one’s physical surroundings. Ecopsychologists, many of whom are licensed clinicians, remain wary of attributing specific illnesses to environmental decline or of arguing that more-established disorders have exclusively environmental causes. Rather, they propose a new clinical approach based on the idea that treating patients in an age of ecological crisis requires more than current therapeutic approaches offer. It requires tapping into what Roszak called our “ecological unconscious.”

LAST JUNE, I PAID a visit to Doherty, who works in a stone-fronted building in northeast Portland, in an office decorated with a sweeping topographical map of Oregon and a fountain that trickles water onto a pile of stones. He has receding red hair and a red mustache and beard; a small silver hoop dangles from the cartilage of his left ear. Doherty was raised in a working-class neighborhood in Buffalo and then went to Columbia University, where he majored in English. Afterward, he worked in a variety of jobs that reflected his interest in the environment: fisherman, wilderness counselor, river-rafting guide, door-to-door fund-raiser for Greenpeace.

As a therapist with activist credentials in a “green” city on the West Coast, Doherty is fairly representative of ecopsychologists today. He is also typical in that he was inspired to enter the field by Roszak’s “Voice of the Earth.” To some extent Doherty remains under Roszak’s spell. When we met, he talked about “an appropriate distrust of science,” and the “dualistic” character of empiricism — the mind/body split — which gives society “free rein to destroy the world.” But he recognizes that ecopsychology endorses a few dualisms of its own. “A more simplistic, first-generation ecopsychology position simplifies the world,” he said. “Either you’re green or you’re not. Either you’re sane or you’re not. It conflates mental health and/or lack of mental health with values and choices and the culture.” His mission, he said, is to spearhead a “second-generation ecopsychology” that leaves these binaries behind.

The bulk of his work is therapeutic. Like any therapist, Doherty, who has a doctorate in clinical psychology, sees patients and discusses routine concerns like sex and family dynamics. Unlike most therapists, he asks about patients’ relationships with the natural world — how often they get outdoors, their anxieties about the state of the environment. He recently developed a “sustainability inventory,” a questionnaire that measures, among typical therapeutic concerns like mood, attitudes and the health of intimate relationships, “comfort with your level of consumption and ecological footprint.”

The ways in which clinicians perform ecotherapy vary widely. Patricia Hasbach often conducts sessions outdoors; she finds that a natural setting helps to broaden a client’s perspective, has restorative benefits and can serve as a source of powerful metaphors. “Ecotherapy stretches the boundaries of the traditional urban, indoor setting,” she told me. “Nature provides a live and dynamic environment not under the control of the therapist or client.” Often this leads to revelatory sensory experiences, as in the case of one client who struggled with a sense of emotional numbness. The feeling dissipated after he put his feet in an icy mountain stream.

Doherty, who teaches a class on ecotherapy with Hasbach at Lewis & Clark, places less emphasis on the outdoors — not only because his office is located in an especially urban section of Portland but also because he worries about perpetuating a false dichotomy between the wilderness and the city. His Sustainable Self practice attracts a clientele that is typically self-selecting and eager to inject an ecological perspective into their sessions. Usually, his clients don’t come to him with symptoms or complaints that are directly attributable to environmental concerns, but every so often he has to engage in what he calls “grief and despair work.” For example, one client, Richard Brenne, a climate-change activist and an avid outdoorsman, came to Doherty because he was so despondent about the state of the planet and so dedicated to doing something to help that it was damaging his relationship with his family. In an e-mail message to me, Brenne praised Doherty for helping him face the magnitude of the problem without becoming despairing or overwrought. Some would argue that treating Brenne’s anxiety about the environment and the negative effect it had on his family life is no different from treating a patient whose anxieties about work cause problems at home. But for Doherty, treating an obsession with ecological decline requires understanding how the bond between the patient and the natural world may have been disrupted or pathologized. Doherty is currently working on a theoretical model in which a person’s stance toward environmental concerns can be categorized as “complicated or acute,” “inhibited or conflicted” or “healthy and normative.”

Doherty is eager to test his therapeutic ideas in a broader arena by urging the field to back up its claims with empirical data. Many subfields of clinical psychology have had to make this transformation in the past decade as calls have grown louder and louder for therapeutic systems to prove their efficacy in quantifiable ways. This shift is arguably harder on ecopsychology than it is on others: in the past, the field hasn’t just sidestepped science; it has denigrated it as a system of inquiry that objectifies the natural world.

Doherty’s journal, Ecopsychology, sometimes feels like an awkward marriage of Orion Magazine and The American Journal of Psychology, combining personal essays about communing with nature with more theoretical articles. In the first issue, Martin Jordan, a psychologist at the University of Brighton in Britain, evoked Kleinian attachment theory to warn against the “naïve” mind-set that sees the natural world as some “perfect . . . benevolent parent.” Such an outlook, he argues, isn’t just untruthful — nature is as harsh and inhospitable as it is salubrious and inviting — it’s a form of escapism, a sign that someone is less in love with nature than out of love with society.

It is not that Doherty is unfriendly to the spiritual thrust of ecopsychology; the shelves in his office are filled with volumes of nature poetry and mythology. But he hopes to press his colleagues to realize that “tending data sets and tending souls are not mutually exclusive,” as he writes in his inaugural editorial. “The idea that personal health and planetary health are connected, that’s not just an idea,” Doherty told me. It is a proposition, he said, and that proposition can and should be tested.

SUPPORT FOR ecopsychology’s premise that an imperiled environment creates an imperiled mind can be found in more established branches of psychology. In a recent study, Marc Berman, a researcher in cognitive psychology and industrial engineering at the University of Michigan, assigned 38 students to take a nearly three-mile walk — half in the Nichols Arboretum in Ann Arbor and half along a busy street. His purpose was to validate attention-restoration theory (A.R.T.), a 20-year-old idea that posits a stark difference in the ability of natural and urban settings to improve cognition. Nature, A.R.T. holds, increases focus and memory because it is filled with “soft fascinations” (rustling trees, bubbling water) that give those high-level functions the leisure to replenish, whereas urban life is filled with harsh stimuli (car horns, billboards) that can cause a kind of cognitive overload. In Berman’s study, the nature-walkers showed a dramatic improvement while the city-walkers did not, demonstrating nature’s significant restorative effects on cognition.

Peter Kahn, the developmental psychologist and a member of Ecopsychology’s editorial board, has been more explicitly testing some of ecopsychology’s underlying principles. “If you look at psychology today,” Kahn told me recently, “it still often focuses on behavior” — understanding and changing how people act toward their environments. This is an explicit aim of a branch of psychology known as conservation psychology, and it has obvious practical value. Ecopsychology, Kahn said, asks a different question: how does nature optimize the mind?

Recently, Kahn set out to study how we respond to real versus digital representations of nature. In an experiment reported in The Journal of Environmental Psychology, Kahn and his colleagues subjected 90 adults to mild stress and monitored their heart rates while they were exposed to one of three views: a glass window overlooking an expanse of grass and a stand of trees; a 50-inch plasma television screen showing the same scene in real time; and a blank wall. Kahn found that the heart rates of those exposed to the sight of real nature decreased more quickly than those of subjects looking at the TV image. The subjects exposed to a TV screen fared just the same as those facing drywall.

In themselves, these findings may seem merely to support what many already hold to be true: the authentic is better than the artificial. Nature is more healthful than television. But for Kahn, the plasma-screen study speaks to two powerful historical trends: the degradation of large parts of the environment and the increasingly common use of technology (TV, video games, the Internet, etc.) to experience nature secondhand. “More and more,” Kahn writes, “the human experience of nature will be mediated by technological systems.” We will, as a matter of mere survival, adapt to these changes. The question is whether our new, nature-reduced lives will be “impoverished from the standpoint of human functioning and flourishing.”

Like Doherty, Kahn is aware that many scientists in the profession are apt to disapprove of concepts as seemingly unquantifiable as “human flourishing.” Several months ago, I called Alan Kazdin, a former president of the American Psychological Association and a professor of psychology and child psychiatry at Yale, to ask his opinion of ecopsychology. Kazdin mentioned the discipline in a 2008 column, but when we spoke he was hazy and had to look it up. “Modern psychology is about what can be studied scientifically and verified,” he finally said. “There’s a real spiritual looseness to what I’m seeing here.”

Second-generation ecopsychologists would not necessarily disagree with this judgment. But they would dispute that “spiritual looseness” has no place in modern psychology. “Have you ever heard of rewilding?” Kahn asked me. Rewilding is a popular concept in conservation biology that was developed in the mid-1990s by Michael Soulé, an emeritus professor of environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The idea is that the best way to restore and maximize the resilience of ecosystems is from the top down, by reintroducing and nourishing predatory “keystone” species like bears, wolves and otters. “We want to do the same thing,” Kahn said, “but from the psychological side — from the inside out. We want to rewild the psyche.”

As with much of second-generation ecopsychology, Kahn’s research into rewilding the psyche is still in its early stages; he has been exploring the idea on a blog he writes for the Web site of Psychology Today. But it rubs up against a fundamental problem of ecopsychology: even if we can establish that as we move further into an urban, technological future, we move further away from the elemental forces that shaped our minds, how do we get back in touch with them?

That question preoccupied Gregory Bateson, a major influence on eco­psychologists and something of a lost giant of 20th-century intellectual history. Bateson, an anthropologist by training, conducted fieldwork in Bali with Margaret Mead, his wife of 14 years, in the 1930s, but in midcareer he moved away from conventional ethnology and began conducting studies in areas like animal communication, social psychology, comparative anatomy, aesthetics and psychiatry. But what most interested Bateson, as the title of his 1972 book “Steps to an Ecology of Mind” suggests, were complex systems.

It was Bateson’s belief that the tendency to think of mind and nature as separate indicated a flaw at the core of human consciousness. Writing several years after Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” at a time when the budding environmental movement was focused on the practical work of curbing DDT and other chemical pollutants, Bateson argued that the essential environmental crisis of the modern age lay in the realm of ideas. Humankind suffered from an “epistemological fallacy”: we believed, wrongly, that mind and nature operated independently of each other. In fact, nature was a recursive, mindlike system; its unit of exchange wasn’t energy, as most ecologists argued, but information. The way we thought about the world could change that world, and the world could in turn change us.

“When you narrow down your epistemology and act on the premise ‘what interests me is me or my organization or my species,’ you chop off consideration of other loops of the loop structure,” Bateson wrote. “You decide that you want to get rid of the byproducts of human life and that Lake Erie will be a good place to put them. You forget that the ecomental system called Lake Erie is a part of your wider ecomental system — and that if Lake Erie is driven insane, its insanity is incorporated in the larger system of your thought and experience.” Our inability to see this truth, Bateson maintained, was becoming monstrously apparent. Human consciousness evolved to privilege “purposiveness” — to get us what we want, whether what we want is a steak dinner or sex. Expand that tendency on a mass scale, and it is inevitable that you’re going to see some disturbing effects: red tides, vanishing forests, smog, global warming. “There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds,” Bateson wrote, “and it is characteristic of the system that basic error propagates itself.”

So what to do? How do you go about rebooting human consciousness? Bateson’s prescription for action was vague. We needed to correct our errors of thought by achieving clarity in ourselves and encouraging it in others — reinforcing “whatever is sane in them.” In other words, to be ecological, we needed to feel ecological. It isn’t hard to see why Bateson’s ideas might appeal to ecopsychologists. His emphasis on the interdependence of the mind and nature is the foundation of ecotherapy. It is also at the root of Kahn’s notion that “rewilding” the mind could have significant psychological benefits. But it also isn’t hard to see how the seeming circularity of Bateson’s solution — in order to be more ecological, feel more ecological — continues to bedevil the field and those who share its interests.

Last year, Glenn Albrecht, the Australian philosopher and an admirer of Bateson, began an investigation into what psychological elements might protect a given environment from degradation. In popularizing “solastalgia,” he drew widespread attention to the mental-health costs of environmental destruction; but like scientists who document the melting of the polar ice caps or mass extinction, Albrecht was studying decline. He wanted to study environmental success.

Albrecht began interviewing residents of the Cape to Cape region, a 60-mile-long stretch of land in southwestern Australia — a wine-country Eden, lush and bucolic and rife with sustainable industries, from organic agriculture to ecotourism. Numerous factors — geographic, political, historical, economic — most likely allowed the Cape to Cape region to remain relatively unsullied. But Albrecht proposes that the main factor is psychological. The people of the region, he told me, display an unusually strong “sense of interconnectedness” — an awareness of the myriad interacting components that make up a healthy environment. True to form, Albrecht has come up with a concept to encapsulate this idea. He has begun describing the Cape to Cape region as a study in “soliphilia”: “the love of and responsibility for a place, bioregion, planet and the unity of interrelated interests within it.” He says he hopes that, like “solastalgia,” this neologism will spread and that it will change how people think about their relationship to the environment.

Will “soliphilia” have the broad appeal of “solastalgia”? It seems unlikely. “Solastalgia” described an emotional response to environmental degradation that, in the age of global climate change — not to mention in the age of such cultural touchstones as “Wall-E,” “The Road” and “Avatar” — feels universal. “Soliphilia” describes a psychological foundation for sustainability that seems to depend on already having the values that make sustainability possible: the residents of the Cape to Cape might have a “sense of interconnectedness,” but how do the rest of us gain, or regain, that sense?

At present, ecopsychology seems to be struggling with this question. Philosophically, the field depends on an ideal of ecological awareness or communion against which deficits can then be measured. And so it often seems to rest on assuming as true what it is trying to prove to be true: being mentally healthy requires being ecologically attuned, but being ecologically attuned requires being mentally healthy. And yet, in its ongoing effort to gain legitimacy, ecopsychology is at least looking for ways to establish standards. Recently, The American Psychologist, the journal of the American Psychological Association, invited the members of the organization’s climate-change task force to submit individual papers; Thomas Doherty is taking the opportunity to develop his categorization of responses to environmental problems. His model, which he showed me an early draft of, makes distinctions that are bound to be controversial: at the pathological end of the spectrum, for example, after psychotic delusions, he places “frank denial” of environmental issues. The most telling feature of the model, however, may be how strongly it equates mental health with the impulse to “promote connection with nature” — in other words, with a deeply ingrained ecological outlook. Critics would likely point out that ecopsychologists smuggle a worldview into what should be the value-neutral realm of therapy. Supporters would likely reply that, like Bateson, ecopsychologists are not sneaking in values but correcting a fundamental error in how we conceive of the mind: to understand what it is to be whole, we must first explain what is broken.

Daniel B. Smith holds the Critchlow Chair in English at the College of New Rochelle. His last article for the magazine was on the writer Lewis Hyde.

Sunday 24 January 2010

as dumb as we wanna be

or: Spiritual Tar - Strip Mining the Human Soul
Up, Down.

my understanding is that peaking carbon emissions in 2009 would have given us a 50/50 shot at keeping the average global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees C, and that peaking by 2015 would give the same chance of keeping it to 2 degrees.

what do you think of that? please tell me.

Rudyard Kipling Just So Storiesa dream of broken glasses & lost lenses, of being unable to exchange currency, of trying to buy cigarettes with no proper money, of a skinny girl I knew in highschool, anonymous flowers & mistaken motives, of meeting my old boss somewhere & he brings along his own curtain rod, a dream of pledging my heart, of tight shoes that somehow terrify me into wakefulness

Haiti Michaelle JeanHaiti Michaelle JeanHaiti Michaelle JeanHaiti Michaelle JeanHaiti Michaelle Jean

"as dumb as we wanna be" is from a book by Thomas Friedman, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, where he pretty well proves exactly that, Spiritual Tar - Strip Mining the Human Soul is a book I would write except that it is a sort-of oxymoron :-)

Michael Deibert - Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti, from Seven Stories Press, not properly proof-read, not very well thought out or put together - you would have to call it 'cobbled,' or sketchy, or, hey! I know! We'll call it 'Notes ...' whatever - nonetheless worth 'noting' :-)

Stephen Harper EffigyPearls Before Swine Spiritual DonkeyWe Can't Prorogue Climate Change

Malvados Papa Não Sabe
Comics from the 10's
I'm going to bed soon Dad, I'm just finishing up buying a yacht ...
It's good to see you and Vivi working together, but how did you get so much money?
Hello there friends of Daddy-Doesn't-Know dot com!

The cat's in the well and grief is showing its face.
     Bob Dylan - Cat's In The Well.

Monday 18 January 2010

2 x 2

Up, Down.

One by one, they followed the sun.
One by one, until there where none.
Two by two, to their lovers they flew.
Two by two, into the foggy dew.
Three by three, they danced on the sea.
Four by four, they danced on the shore.
Five by five, they tried to survive.
Six by six, they were playin' with tricks.

How many paths did they try and fail?
How many of their brothers and sisters lingered in jail?
How much poison did their inhale?
How many black cats crossed their trail?

Seven by seven, they headed for heaven.
Eight by eight, they got to the gate.
Nine by nine, they drank the wine,
Ten by ten, they drank it again.

How many tomorrows have they given away?
How many compared to yesterday?
How many more without any reward?
How many more can they afford?

Two by two, they step into the ark.
Two by two, they step in the dark.
Three by three, they're turning the key,
Four by four, they turn it some more.

One by one, they followed the sun,
Two by two, to another rendezvous.
Three by three, don't tread on me.
Four by four, they're losing the war.
Five by five, can't stay alive ...


Bob Dylan, 1990.

Tuesday 12 January 2010

l'allée

Up, Down.

simple really, a line from Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North:
"All of us, my son, are in the last resort travelling alone,"
in the section copied below, and remembered because of Salih's trick of saving what the priest said for a few pages before revealing it, arguments on this subject many years ago with a friend now dead ... and having stumbled over Chris Simpson's images from Madagascar a few weeks ago, and today finding George Rodger's photograph of Bergen-Belsen ... not complicated

Allée des Baobabs Chris SimpsonAllée des Baobabs Chris SimpsonGeorge Rodger Bergen-Belsen 1945

Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North:

     I remember that in the train I sat opposite a man wearing clerical garb and with a large golden cross round his neck. The man smiled at me and spoke in English, in which I answered. I remember well that amazement expressed itself on his face, his eyes opening wide directly he heard my voice. He examined my face closely, then said: "How old are you?" I told him I was fifteen, though actually I was twelve, but I was afraid he might not take me seriously. "Where are you going?" said the man. "Fm going to a secondary school in Cairo." "Alone?" he said. "Yes," I said. Again he gave me a long searching look. Before he spoke I said, "I like travelling alone. What's there to be afraid of?" At this he uttered a sentence to which at the time I did not pay much attention. Then, with a large smile lighting up his face, he said: "You speak English with astonishing fluency."

     'When I arrived in Cairo I found Mr Robinson and his wife awaiting me, Mr Stockwell (the head-master in Khartoum) having informed them I was coming. The man shook me by the hand and said, "How are you, Mr Sa'eed?" "Very well thank you, Mr Robinson," I told him. Then the man introduced me to his wife, and all of a sudden I felt the woman's arms embracing me and her lips on my cheek. At that moment, as I stood on the station platform amidst a welter of sounds and sensations, with the woman's arms round my neck, her mouth on my cheek, the smell of her body - a strange, European smell - tickling my nose, her breast touching my chest, I felt - I, a boy of twelve - a vague sexual yearning I had never previously experienced. I felt as though Cairo, that large mountain to which my camel had carried me, was a European woman just like Mrs Robinson, its arms embracing me, its perfume and the odour of its body filling my nostrils. In my mind her eyes were the colour of Cairo: grey-green, turning at night to a twinkling like that of a firefly. "Mr Sa'eed, you're a person quite devoid of a sense of fun," Mrs Robinson used to say to me and it was true that I never used to laugh. "Can't you ever forget your intellect?" she would say, laughing, and on the day they sentenced me at the Old Bailey to seven years' imprisonment, I found no bosom except hers on which to rest my head. "Don't cry, dear child," she had said to me, patting my head. They had no children. Mr Robinson knew Arabic well and was interested in Islamic thought and architecture, and it was with them that I visited Cairo's mosques, its museums and antiquities. The district of Cairo they loved best was al-Azhar. When our feet wearied of walking about we'd take ourselves off to a café close by the al-Azhar Mosque where we would drink tamarind juice and Mr Robinson would recite the poetry of al-Ma'arri. At that time I was wrapped up in myself and paid no attention to the love they showered on me. Mrs Robinson was a buxom woman and with a bronze complexion that harmonized with Cairo, as though she were a picture tastefully chosen to go with the colour of the walls in a room. I would look at the hair of her armpits and would have a sensation of panic. Perhaps she knew I desired her. But she was sweet, the sweetest woman I've known; she used to laugh gaily and was as tender to me as a mother to her own son.

     'They were on the quayside when the ship set sail with me from Alexandria. I saw her far-away waving to me with her handkerchief, then drying her tears with it, her husband at her side, his hands on his hips; even at that distance I could almost see the limpid blueness of his eyes. However I was not sad. My sole concern was to reach London, another mountain, larger than Cairo, where I knew not how many nights I would stay. Though I was then fifteen, I looked nearer twenty, for I was as taut and firm-looking as an inflated waterskin. Behind me was a story of spectacular success at school, my sole weapon being that sharp knife inside my skull, while within my breast was a hard, cold feeling - as if it had been cast in rock. And when the sea swallowed up the shore and the waves heaved under the ship and the blue horizon encircled us, I immediately felt an overwhelming intimacy with the sea. I knew this green, infinite giant, as though it were roving back and forth within my ribs. The whole of the journey I savoured that feeling of being nowhere, alone, before and behind me either eternity or nothingness. The surface of the sea when calm is another mirage, ever changing and shifting, like the mask on my mother's face. Here, too, was a desert laid out in blue-green, calling me, calling me. The mysterious call led me to the coast of Dover, to London and tragedy.

     'Later I followed the same road on my return, asking myself during the whole journey whether it would have been possible to have avoided any of what happened. The string of the bow is drawn taut and the arrow must needs shoot forth. I look to right and left, at the dark greenness, at the Saxon villages standing on the fringes of hills. The red roofs of houses vaulted like the backs of cows. A transparent veil of mist is spread above the valleys. What a great amount of water there is here, how vast the greenness! And ali those colours! The smell of the place is strange, like that of Mrs Robinson's body. The sounds have a crisp impact on the ear, like the rustle of birds' wings. This is an ordered world; its houses, fields, and trees are ranged in accordance with a plan. The streams too do not follow a zigzag course but flow between artificial banks. The train stops at a station for a few minutes; hurriedly people get off, hurriedly others get on, then the train moves off again. No fuss.

     'I thought of my life in Cairo. Nothing untoward had occurred. My knowledge had increased and several minor incidents had happened to me; a fellow student had fallen ín love with me and had then hated me. "You're not a human being," she had said to me. "You're a heartless machine." I had loafed around the streets of Cairo, visited the opera, gone to the theatre, and once I had swum across the Nile. Nothing whatsoever had happened except that the waterskin had distended further, the bowstring had become more taut. The arrow will shoot forth towards other unknown horizons.

     'I looked at the smoke from the engine vanishing to where it is dispersed by the wind and merges into the veil of mist spread across the valleys. Falling into a short sleep, I dreamt I was praying alone at the Citadel Mosque. It was illuminated with thousands of chandeliers, and the red marble glowed as I prayed alone. When I woke up there was the smell of incense in my nose and I found that the train was approaching London. Cairo was a city of laughter, just as Mrs Robinson was a woman of laughter. She had wanted me to call her by her first name - Elizabeth - but I always used to call her by her married name. From her I learnt to love Bach's music, Keats's poetry, and from her I heard for the first time of Mark Twain. And yet I enjoyed nothing. Mrs Robinson would laugh and say to me, "Can't you ever forget your intellect?" Would it have been possible to have avoided any of what happened? At that time I was on the way back. I remembered what the priest had said to me when I was on my way to Cairo: "All of us, my son, are in the last resort travelling alone." He was fingering the cross on his chest and his face lit up in a big smile as he added: "You speak English with astonishing fluency." The language, though, which I now heard for the first time is not like the language I had learnt at school. These are living voices and have another ring. My mind was like a keen knife. But the language is not my language; I had learnt to be eloquent in it through perseverance. And the train carried me to Victoria Station and to the world of Jean Morris.


(from Lynne Rienner Publishers' 1997 edition translated by Denys Johnson-Davies, starting on page 24, to page 29)

it goes on of course, if you look carefully at Rodger's picture you see the calculating squint of the boy, and then maybe notice the two other people walking behind him on the road ...

George Rodger Bergen-Belsen SSGeorge Rodger Bergen-Belsen SS Annalese KohlmannGeorge Rodger Bergen-Belsen SS Frieda WalterGeorge Rodger Bergen-Belsen SSGeorge Rodger Bergen-Belsen SS Magdalene KessalGeorge Rodger Bergen-Belsen SS Elizabeth Volkenrath

why he should have focussed on female SS guards? if he did indeed or if it is just an accident of editors & time? but he wanted no more or war and spent years with his wife Jinx in Africa, as an antidote? as a consolation? I have no idea

what’s in a face? from Patrick Cahill's blog.

George RodgerGeorge RodgerGeorge RodgerGeorge RodgerGeorge RodgerGeorge Rodger