life on the bin

In a blog for the LRB, Robert Hanks notes that grey squirrels round Hackney used to be timid, but now are evolving:

into larger, more aggressive animals, spurred on by a diet rich in our discarded protein. I watch one squatting on a bin, food clutched in its little hands, glaring back at me, and it hardly feels like nature at all. more ...

same guy did both

We all know that some of the worst plays ever written were written by William Shakespeare. That doesn't affect the fact that he's the greatest writer who ever lived.

William Goldman, screenwriter more ...

coal's enduring claim to fame

A few weeks ago, I suggested to a friend that it would be impossible for a revival of one of D. H. Lawrence's plays to have the same impact today that it did when Peter Gill directed A Collier's Friday Night, The Daughter-in-Law and The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd at the Royal Court in 1968. An audience now might well look at the whole business of coal-mining in an ironic light.

This month the BFI presents a series of movies about coal. In yesterday's Guardian, Ian Jack perfectly summarises the change in our attitude that has taken place:

Until the 1990s the history of the British coal industry could be seen in different ways – socially (greyhounds, comradeship), sentimentally (granddad), politically (struggle and strikes), geologically, economically, even aesthetically.

But from a far higher elevation, perhaps that of eternity, all these interpretations will seem like whisperings in Lilliput. The coal industry's most enduring claim to fame, should history endure, is its vanguard position among the causes of global warming.
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that was the year that was

Which was the most important year in history? Andrew Marr nominated 1776. This blogger has jumped in and argued for 1712. more ...

glass half full, ctd.

A reader points out that neither the free-market magazine reason online, which featured the Matt Ridley interview, nor this blog, which quoted from it, mentioned that Ridley is the former chairman of Northern Rock.

As such, of course, he might be considered to have done his bit to precipitate the credit crunch and help lower carbon emissions. more ...

the glass half full

After Wendell Berry's glum pic and pronouncement over the weekend, this blog offers three reasons to see the glass half full:

Science writer Matt Ridley refuses to be downhearted quoting Lord Macaulay in 1830: 'Why is it that with nothing but improvement behind us we anticipate nothing but disaster before us?' (Hat-tip: A&L)

The New Yorker's David Owen says 'One beneficial consequence of the ongoing global economic crisis is that it has put a little time back on the carbon clock ...'

My editor at Intelligent Life wins the motion that 'in its appetite for culture the world is wising up more than it is dumbing down.' more ...

weather, not climate, cancels launch

As more snow sweeps across Britain, Tipping Point is forced to cancel the razzamatazz launch of its commissions for plays about climate change. Today's heavy snowfall, students of irony should note, is a weather event, not a climatic one. You can download the criteria and application form for the commissions here. Closing date: 4 May 2009. more ...

pitchfork remedies

naturam expelles furca, tamen usque recurret

'You can drive out nature with a pitchfork, but she will always return'.

Horace, Epistles i. x. 24 more ...

exit strategy

The Guardian's hostile review of Amazonia includes this fairly remarkable sentence: 'But it is the sheer po-faced earnestness of the turgid script that scuppers any joy, as if those making it thought that watching it would make us better people, when actually the preachiness makes you long to rush out and lop down a tree.' more ...

now or later

The most arresting line in David Hare's Gethsemane is a piece of reported speech. The Home Secretary, Meredith, is discussing her daughter Suzette's views, about asylum seekers and refugees, with her political advisor, Lori.

MEREDITH. Suzette says, 'Mum, it isn't a question of "They're poor and we're rich." It's "They're poor because we're rich." And if you can't see that, you can't see anything.'

Meredith doesn't see this, she says she can't see this (she doesn't have time), and the play doesn't pursue the point. But it's this area, the connection between our lives, here, and other lives, elsewhere, that would also be central to any drama that dealt with climate change.

A playwright who has a thrilling sense of how the world is connected is Christopher Shinn . His latest play Now or Later takes place on election night. The central character is John ('20, white') and his father is about to become President of the United States. A story has surfaced on several obscure blogs that John went to a student party dressed as Muhammad. (There were reasons for this.) As the play develops, this gossip spreads across the internet and John's father and his campaign team become increasingly fearful about the backlash in other countries (riots, death threats).

The play takes place in a hotel room, in real time, but it conveys a strong sense of the causal links (the because) that connect actions in one place with consequences in another. In that respect, it offers something of a model.

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the real thing

The Columbian vice president, Francisco Santos Calderon (left), says anyone who takes cocaine in the UK is responsible for the harm caused by landmines to the Colombian people and for breathtaking damage to the rainforest.

Related. Helen Mirren - Why I stopped taking cocaine. ('I had never grasped the full horrifying structure of what brings coke to our parties in Britain.')

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lawless

Among other things, 9/11 turned out to be bad for the rule of law. Which was bad for the environment. more ...

petrol heads

A timely parable on everything from the Iraq War to global warming.

There Will Be Blood. (Now out on DVD.) more ...

where it ends

'First, many of the trees turned a strange brownish-yellow colour and rotted. Then the rice paddies stopped growing and festered in the water. Then the fish floated to the surface of the rivers, gasping. Then many of the animals began to die. Then many of the children began to die.'

Johann Hari reports from Bangladesh on the causes and the impacts of saline inundation.

'It is happening because of us. Every flight, every hamburger, every coal power plant, ends here, with this.' more ...

close, but no cigar

In Havana, the Robert Redford character says that 'A butterfly can flutter its wings over a flower in China and cause a hurricane in the Caribbean. They can even calculate the odds.' But apparently that's not what Edward Lorenz, who came up with the idea of the butterfly effect, meant at all.

'It is probability, not certain cause and effect,' writes science journalist Peter Dzikes, 'that now dictates how scientists understand many systems, from subatomic particles to storms.' (H-t: A&L) more ...

if the shoe fits

In his day job as chief policy adviser for Greenpeace, says Charlie Kronick, he works on the basis that 'if I know more than the other guy it will somehow change his behaviour.' But he's also a trustee of Cape Farewell, and the arts are different. 'It's not what you know, or who you know, but what you feel.'

Kronick was speaking on Thursday evening at the RSA's launch for its Arts and Ecology Day next year. There's a neat example of the point he's making that involves Kronick himself. A couple of years ago, he went on the same Cape Farewell expedition to the Arctic as the novelist Ian McEwan. On the trip he discovered they have the same shoe size.

As this blog reported, a certain amount of chaos developed in the bootroom and it became hard to find your own boots. The frustrations that emerged from this has become a vivid part of the climate-change theme in McEwan's next novel. Since they share shoe size, the chief policy adviser for Greenpeace may well be the one who provided the novelist with the spur for his next big subject.

Also at the launch, and also sticking to the five-minutes-only rule,
were the President of RIBA, Sunand Prasad. He spoke about the steps we take to mitigate climate change. 'In this area no action is too small.' John Hartley, from the Arts Council, England, launched a web-based energy management tool, artsenergy.org.uk. And Joe Oliver, from the eco-entertainment company Bash, read out the homiletic poem, attributed to William Penn, 'I shall pass this way but once ....'


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fail again. fail better.

'At your next staff meeting, raise a coffee mug to a recent project that went horribly wrong. Someone should be congratulated.'

The Artful Manager on risk and innovation in the arts. more ...

butterfly flaps wings

The meteorologist Edward Lorenz (obit here) studied how small actions could have large impacts:

'The idea that a small event can produce large changes in the atmosphere dates back at least to Edgar Allan Poe, who discussed the growing impact a wave of the hand would have on the future. In the 1920s the British astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington focused on a match idly thrown from the window of a train, and in the early 1960s Lorenz considered the flap of a seagull's wings.'

It was a colleague of Lorenz's who shifted the image from the seagull to the butterfly:

'the move from seagull to butterfly came about when his friend Philip Meriless, unable to reach him as a meeting deadline passed, submitted the title "Predictability: does the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?" for a talk Lorenz was to give in 1972.' more ...

last night's curry

Theatre, as one playwright put it very simply to me, is about relationships. True. But these relationships are often now far more complex and varied than the ones traditionally represented on stage.

The Guardian review of Fred Pearce's Confessions of an Eco Sinner: Travels to Find Where My Stuff Comes From shows there's a story of relationships, for instance, in last night's curry:

'[Fred] Pearce likes eating curry. "I have often wondered"' he says, "where the prawns in my Saturday night curry come from, but I have never got a straight answer." It turns out they come from a part of Bangladesh near the Bay of Bengal. So he goes there, and finds a whole area that has been devastated by prawns. Or rather, by our appetite for prawns. The old landscape of small farms and mangrove swamps has been replaced by a vast monoculture of prawn farms. As Pearce points out, this is bad for wildlife - tigers, he says, are being replaced by tiger prawns.'

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consequences

The explosion of logging in central Africa is threatening ... sea turtles. The logs are transported downriver to timber yards, but on the way 1000s of logs are lost. These logs float out to sea. Many of them get washed ashore, where they force turtles either to abandon their nesting attempts or to nest too close to the waterline.

It's one of half-a-dozen examples rainforest biologist William Laurance gives in his New Scientist article (subscription only) of 'the perils of trying to make linear decisions in a non-linear world' or the law of unintended consequences. 'In a complex, interconnected world, yanking on a string in one location can cause painful jolts in far-flung and unpredictable places.' more ...