going green means noticing there's someone else in the room

My latest "Going Green" column picks up on how Mary Wollstonecraft (left), author of “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”, explained what thinking was to her young daughter: it was about noticing there was someone else in the room.

For this reason, going green isn’t left-wing or right-wing. It isn’t a threat. It isn’t a conspiracy by scientists or a means of introducing socialism by the back door. It isn’t even anti anything much, except boorishness. (Though boorishness has many manifestations.) Its real enemy is not-thinking. If you poison the well, people can’t drink from it. If you overfish the ocean, you end up with no fish. If you burn coal, you warm the planet. more ...

where do your interests end?

After Hillary Clinton's announcement last week of $50 million for clean cookstoves, one New York Times reader wrote on the Dot Earth blog (comment 6)that he didn't think Americans had a moral obligation towards people living in other countries.

Dot Earth's Andrew Revkin replied

This is one of the fundamental issues of our time: Figuring out where borders of various kinds end. When your pants are made in Bangladesh, your cellphone components require minerals from gorilla habitat in Congo, your next deadly flu threat comes from a poultry/pig farm in China and your (and China’s) emissions (slowly) influence the climate and coastal future around the world, where do your interests — and responsibilities — end? more ...

green thought for the day

Andrew Dobson, author of Green Political Thought, responds to Paul Kingsnorth's Confessions of a recovering environmentalist:

"environmental justice” ... is not an optional extra but an absolutely necessary feature of any commitment to a progressive transition to a low-energy world. more ...

timely indictment

When the National's artistic director Nicholas Hytner announced the latest season, he said that playwright Mike Bartlett's new play Earthquakes was:

a timely indictment from a writer who is genuinely of the young generation at the generation older than him who he accuses - I’d say with some justification - of a form of debauchery. more ...

in or out of tune

The new Renault commercial called 'Drive The Change' aims to prepare the public for Renault's zero emission cars. Most car ads emphasise speed, freedom, comfort and sexiness. This one appeals to our sense of social justice.

It starts off by saying what an amazing invention the car has been and how it has revolutionised society. And then it takes an interesting direction. The voiceover asks if this amazing invention is still in tune with society today. (In the ad, we approach two road signs: one says 'yes', the other 'no'.)

The film footage juxtaposes images of wealth and poverty, as the voiceover goes on:

Is it still acceptable that some of us are able to drive while some of us barely have the means to get around? ... Does enjoyment for some have to cost the lives of others? Do you still have to be one of the lucky few to reap the benefits of progress?

(There are pictures now of alarm clocks going off.)

At Renault we think it's time to change things. For us the pleasure of driving doesn't just mean pleasure for the driver. It's a pleasure we share with everyone around us. For us global warming is an issue that goes beyond the emissions coming out of the exhaust ... more ...

confusion in the middle classes

When Dominic Cooke took over as the Royal Court's artistic director, he made some widely-reported remarks about wanting to represent the middle class audience on stage.

His comments were interpreted (semi-humourously) in terms of class and manners. But Cooke's point was that many plays concentrated on the dispossessed. He also wanted to see plays that explored the lives of those with wealth and power.

In yesterday's Observer, he went further in describing what it was he was after:

There's a deep, dangerous confusion in the middle classes at the moment ... How do you square the fact that you live this very comfortable life with the fact that we are destroying the planet? How do you square your life with the fact that you can only live like that if there's a whole load of people the other side of the world who have nothing? There's a huge problem in the project of liberalism, and I'm interested in probing that and its effect on the middle classes.

A play about the contradictions of liberalism, then, is also a play about climate change. more ...

every corner

In a Q&A with the New Statesman, the chair of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, is asked if his Hindu faith shapes his attitude towards his work. His answer sheds some light on how he approaches negotiations in Copenhagen:

Well, I believe that whatever one does has to be based on consensus, and that one should minimise conflict in all one's actions. And I believe that the universe is one family, and that you have to be sensitive to every corner of the globe and to every section of human society. more ...

trust me

Here's one small clue as to why the story about the hacked CRU emails, and the idea that there's a worldwide conspiracy of scientists foisting global warming onto an unsuspecting public, has taken off.

The Times online features about 30 blogs and there's a page that lists all the blogs with a line that describes what each blog is about. These blogs range from Faith Central ('guide to religion and thought') to Tech Central ('Offbeat analysis of the world of high technology').

The eco blog, Green Central, has the tagline 'intelligent, informed insights you can trust'. This is the only blog on Times online that has to advertise it can be trusted. more ...

also

The climate crisis is also an epistemological crisis.

The RSA blog links to RETHINKclimate. more ...

change of use

On R4's Today, there was a five-minute discussion about Thierry Henry's handball. The Times sportswriter Simon Barnes said:

Sport has gone through an extraordinary change of use. It was supposed to build character. It was why, in the 19th century, sport was codified and made much of in English education. These days we like sport because it reveals character and it's revealed a certain chunk of Thierry Henry's character. Sport is a fascinating form of entertainment. Sport has changed function.

There was another aspect to the discussion that mirrored other discussions about the credit crunch and MPs expenses. Many footballers, like many bankers and MPs, think it is the job of the officials, regulators or referees to ensure that people stick to the rules.

(The implications of this attitude for the environment are not hard to work out.) more ...

the short answer

In his lecture tonight at Gresham College, Professor Kenneth Costa, chairman of Lazard International, argues that Adam Smith is much misunderstood.

In a short version of the lecture that appears in today's FT he writes that Adam Smith believed that:

the economy could not function properly without ethical foundations. He did not believe that people should act with complete disregard for each other.

The Professor asks:

Why do we seem to think otherwise? Why do we seem to have lost the grammar of ethical discourse, at least in business?

He answers his own question with a single phrase: 'short-term gains'. more ...

thin, narrow and superficial

In this blogger's experience, it's all-too-easy for a commitment to green issues to become a quick way of making judgements about other people and their actions. In that respect, it's just another form of puritanism.

In his essay on the historian Thomas Carlyle, the Victorian writer John Morley captures the wrongheadedness of this approach:

Nowhere has Puritanism done us more harm than in ... leading us to take all breadth, and colour, and diversity, and fine discrimination, out of our judgements of men, reducing them to thin, narrow, and superficial pronouncements upon the letter of their morality, or the precise conformity of their opinions to accepted standards of truth, religious or other.

Among other evils which it has afflicted, this inability to conceive of conduct except as either right or wrong, and correspondingly in the intellectual order, of teaching except as either true or false, is at the bottom of that fatal spirit of parti-pris, which has led to the rooting of so much injustice, disorder, immobilty, and darkness in English intelligence.

'Carlyle', Critical Miscellanies, quoted in The Victorian Frame of Mind, p.172 more ...

two conflicting values

It's hard not to write about America - historically, the world's largest emitter of CO2 - when you're writing about climate change, and hard when writing about America not to write about America's sense of itself - its exceptionalism and spirit of individualism. Because at the heart of any debate on climate change lies the relationship and/or responsibilities that exist between the individual and the group. (Or between one country and other countries.) For any playwright, this would be the great theme.

A new book on marriage The Marriage Go Round by Andrew Cherlin offers a useful slant on this. It's well known that Americans treat marriage very seriously. But one of the details that jumps out from Cherlin's book is that a child in the U.S. has a greater chance of seeing his married parents break up than a child of unmarried parents in Sweden. The author explains this strange finding in this way:

I think Americans have two conflicting values in their heads: one is the high value placed on marriage and other is the high value placed on personal choice and individualism. more ...

distant tugs

Joshua Greene, cognitive neuroscientist and philosopher, explains why we care most about what is closest to hand.

'Nature endowed us with tuggable heartstrings, a crucial design feature for creatures whose survival depends on cooperation. But nature couldn't foresee that our survival might someday depend on cooperation across oceans and continents, and so neglected to outfit us with heartstrings that are readily tugged from a distance.' (Ht: A&L) more ...

minimal requirement

The philosopher Peter Singer speaks about climate change and our obligation to future generations:

'I'm interested in changing the culture of what we regard as a requirement for living a minimally decent, minimally ethical life.'

(11 mins in) more ...

not entirely bad

In his In Our Time newsletter, Melvyn Bragg develops the idea in this week's programme (blogged here) that Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is as much utopia as dystopia.

'The notion of a life without physical pain, the notion of death made painless, the notion of being employed in an area where you were secure even though you were confined to that area, the notion that pleasure of certain sorts was always readily available. For many I think that would not be considered an entirely bad deal.' more ...

definite article

Spain is moving to grant basic legal rights to apes. American law schools are offering courses on animal rights. In California it will be illegal to keep a calf, pregnant hog or egg-laying hen in a pen or cage in which the animal can't stretch or turn round.

In the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof argues that these attitudinal shifts stem from the 'deep intellectual ferment' that began with one article by Peter Singer that was published in 1973 in the New York Review of Books. more ...

smoke screen

The New York Times reports that in the mid-1990s, Kirsten Gillibrand, the New York senator who has replaced Hillary Clinton,

'played a significant role on behalf of the tobacco industry in battling the government’s attempts to prove wrongdoing by cigarette makers'.

Within its report, the Times reproduces this - almost comical - picture of tobacco executives telling Congress in 1994 that they did not believe there was a proven link between smoking and cancer.

Nancy Oreskes, George Monbiot, and others, have detailed the links between Big Tobacco and climate-change denial. more ...

tackling demand

Emma Thompson, Oscar-winning actor and screenwriter and last week's most high-profile opponent of Heathrow's expansion, says about the third runway:

'They say they're doing it because there's a demand. There might be a demand for child prostitution, but that doesn't make it moral! The demand for more cars and planes is immoral.' more ...

left or right isn't the question

The New York Times ran a piece last month which said that nearly all Broadway plays were liberal or left-wing. Last Sunday the Wall Street Journal's theatre critic, Terry Teachout, joined the debate

the problem with today's political theater is that its practitioners see their plays not as works of art but as means to an end. In such tedious exercises in left-wing agitprop as Sam Shepard's The God of Hell, Caryl Churchill's Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? and Tim Robbins's Embedded, we are presented with a black-and-white universe of victims and villains, a place where every deck is stacked and never is heard a surprising word.

Teachout didn't welcome the prospect of right-wing versions of issue-driven plays. He quoted Chekhov,

Anyone who says the artist's field is all answers and no questions has never done any writing. . . . It is the duty of the court to formulate the questions correctly, but it is up to each member of the jury to answer them according to his own preference.

The issue today is not whether playwrights are left-wing or right-wing (the terms are too broad to have any real use in this context), but whether playwrights are formulating the right questions correctly.

Climate change has ushered in pressing new ethical dilemmas about our responsibilities to people that we will never meet. These relationships are spatial and temporal: what A does in one country effects B in another; what C does in one century will effect D in another. These aren't easy issues to put on stage.

It's one reason why a major play has still to be written about it.

Teachout's article attacked here. (Ht. Theatre Ideas and Poor Player.) more ...