We’re all going to die – but probably not of swine flu

IF THERE is one thing that has spread far faster than swine flu in recent weeks, it is fear of swine flu. The newspapers are full of it, governments are working themselves into a frenzy over it and Mexico’s tourist industry is collapsing under the strain. Meanwhile, people are dying – but not nearly as many as you might think.

Last week, craving a dose of the entertaining bombast of American TV news reporting, I tuned in to CNN’s Situation Room politics show. I wasn’t disappointed. Greeting me on the screen was a bloodcurdling banner proclaiming the “breaking news” of the moment: “Humanity under threat”. CNN’s team of political commentators, quite clearly out of their depths, were doing their best to mask their ignorance while offering sombre platitudes about the seriousness of humankind’s predicament.

At that stage, just one American had died of the disease.

Lack of knowledge breeds fear. When new diseases arise – which happens more often than you might think – we inevitably prepare for the worst because we don’t know what to expect. It’s not an irrational reaction – AIDS, which appeared, to all intents and purposes, out of nowhere, spread like wildfire and killed millions. SARS, the pneumonia-like disease which emerged in China in 2003, came perilously close to spreading uncontrollably across the world – although it eventually petered out after causing about 800 deaths.

However, new diseases, or new strains of existing diseases, are not necessarily all that serious even if they do infect many people. The word “pandemic” is widely misunderstood, perhaps because of its associations with HIV and with the 1918 Spanish flu. But the word is not an expression of how deadly a disease is, but of how widespread it is – the World Health Organisation’s definition is merely that there is sustained person-to-person infection of a particular strain in more than one country. It is actually quite possible for a flu pandemic to cause fewer deaths than the normal seasonal flu that hits every winter.

Whether this outbreak of flu will be a bad one is, to quote Donald Rumsfeld, a known unknown. We don’t yet know enough about the behaviour of the virus or its spread to make a proper assessment. For a disease that has only been on the radar for a few weeks, this is hardly surprising – we should be surprised that we know so much about it, not that we know so little. But what we can predict is that the outlook, at least for citizens of rich countries in the northern hemisphere, is not a cause for serious concern. This is down to a little good planning and a great deal of luck.

In terms of government responses, Britain’s has been, whisper it, not too bad. While there has unquestionably been some degree of overreaction, the basics of British Government policy towards swine flu are sound: to prevent the spread of the disease by closing down affected schools and institutions, warning against travel to affected areas, and using anti-viral drugs like Tamiflu where they are needed. Contingency measures – such as planning for A-levels to be awarded based on coursework in the case of widespread school closures – have been mostly just a matter of common sense forward planning.

In terms of sheer luck, Britain hasn’t done too badly either. Our stocks of Tamiflu are high not because Department of Health mandarins predicted the outbreak and acted accordingly, but because of previous scares about Asian bird flu that came to nothing. And we have plenty of time to prepare for the winter flu season simply because of the time of year at which the virus emerged (the southern hemisphere, now at the start of winter, is not so lucky). With a bit more good fortune, we should have time to prepare vaccines in time for the northern hemisphere winter.

On top of all this we have a well functioning health service with no barriers to access due to doctors’ fees or scarce facilities. Mexico’s health system has struggled to respond to the epidemic and has undoubtedly worsened the disease’s impact as a result.

Besides, the early signs are that the disease is not particularly virulent, and outside of Mexico, only two people have died. Even in Mexico, which is struggling to cope with the outbreak, an estimated 99 per cent of people infected have survived. The accounts of British survivors – or at least those who haven’t sold their stories to Max Clifford – suggest that for many patients, it’s not much worse than a cold.

All of this suggests that, even if the strain is more virulent than we expect, fears of a 1918-style catastrophe are wide of the mark. We are far better prepared than our forebears were and it would take a great deal of bad luck for this to cause more than a moderate spike in deaths in Britain. If tens of millions die like they did 90 years ago – assuming I am not among them – I will eat this page. And I will never again mock CNN.

His royal barminess: the Dr Dolittle of the plant kingdom

Published in Tribune, 10 April 2009

IS THERE any prominent person in Britain today more ignorant about science than Prince Charles? I ask the question because his laughable contributions to public understanding of science have become as regular as his father’s gifts to race relations. By dint of their being so relentless, most of us learn to ignore them to the extent that they become a sort of annoying background noise we’re only half-aware of – a sort of scientific tinnitus: irritating, inexplicable and surprisingly hard to deal with. Should we ignore him in the hope he’ll go away, should we engage with him or should we just laugh?

It’s impressive how much nonsense the Prince of Wales believes in. Adverts for his Duchy Originals detox cures were recently banned because they were so full of lies about their supposed health benefits. He supports homeopathy, despite it having no merit whatsoever. He has made a habit of scaremongering about genetic modification and nanotechnology with claims so lurid they drown out any legitimate concern people might have about these innovations.

And, my personal favourite, Charles has introduced “bio-dynamic” agriculture to his farms – a bizarre and hilarious cross between organic farming and astrology, with a good dose of new age mysticism and bullshit (literally – cows’ horns full of the stuff apparently have to be buried in auspicious locations around the farm) thrown in for good measure.

And he likes talking to plants. Really, he does. He says they grow better when he gives them words of encouragement.

One organisation – credulous or perhaps simply obsequious – has decided to “test” this theory. In news reports last Tuesday (March 31), which might have been dismissed as a joke had they been published a day later, staff at the Royal Horticultural Society announced that they would carry out a trial by reading John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids to some tomatoes to see if the inspirational tale of mutant flesh-eating plants taking over the world chivvies them into growing faster.

In the spirit of sceptical inquiry, I won’t completely dismiss this out of hand. If the tomatoes are indeed inspired by the novel to up roots, hunt down and kill RHS gardeners and proceed to empty London of its terrified population then I’ll reluctantly reconsider my judgment. But much less than that and I won’t.

Here’s why. The experiment, I predict, will be “successful”. This is nothing to do with whether tomatoes genuinely like Wyndham’s prose or not: the way the RHS is apparently setting up the experiment means the chance of a false positive – a result that appears to support the theory even if it doesn’t really – is very high.

There are two problems with what they are doing. First is that they’re not carrying out a proper controlled trial. Half their tomato plants will be fitted with iPods playing an audio-book of Day of the Triffids; half won’t. But if the experiment is to be serious, where are the plants being played other novels, or music, or just random vibrations? What if the vibrations caused by the sound of an exciting book are substantially different from those produced by an interminably boring one like, say, A Vision of Britain: A Personal View of Architecture by Prince Charles? We won’t discover any of that from the trial.

The other problem is more intractable. The people carrying out the experiment have already said they expect it to succeed and that they believe Charles is right. In psychology, this problem is called confirmation bias, or in lay terms, people’s minds are primed to see what they want to see and ignore what they don’t.

The experimenters will be more likely to notice any evidence which might support their theory, while explaining away anything which doesn’t. This can be a big problem in science even when experiments are designed to minimise it – let alone here where they don’t seem to even be aware of the problem.

So what the RHS has said it’s doing might look like a scientific trial, but it’s really nothing of the sort. What the gardeners are doing bears about as much resemblance to a properly designed experiment as a Melanesian cargo cult does to Heathrow Airport.

If all this sounds inexplicable, then a quick look at what the society is all about can explain things a little. The hint as to why its members might be so supportive (or indulgent) of Charles isn’t just in the “R” of their name; it’s also in the “H”. The RHS is the illustrious organiser of such renowned scientific conferences as the Chelsea Flower Show, prestigious scientific prizes such as the Britain in Bloom Award, and publisher of that august scientific journal, The Garden. It’s a glorified gardening club far more than it is a learned society – and it is clearly not equipped to test Charles’ theory.

It’s also pretty clear that Charles is not equipped to reign over us. In the grand scheme of things, that’s perhaps a bigger worry than harassing a few tomatoes – although it’s not nearly as funny.

Barrage of concerns over the Severn

Published in Tribune, 13 March 2009

PLANS for Britain’s biggest-ever civil engineering project are starting to take shape, amid muted disquiet from environmentalists. The Government has recently published plans to build a massive hydro-electric scheme to harness the tides in the Severn Estuary and is seeking responses from the public to the proposals it has shortlisted.

The Severn Estuary has the highest tides in Europe at around 15 metres (49 feet), and the long, narrow estuary has long been recognised as a possible site for energy production. The last serious proposals to develop the estuary were in the 1980s, although these were dropped for economic reasons. Now climate change and concerns about dwindling oil reserves have revived Government enthusiasm for a massive renewable energy scheme.

Proposed tidal power schemes have usually involved one of two possible mechanisms for generating power. Either a dam can be built across all or part of the estuary, allowing the water to flow in at high tide, then holding it back and running it through turbines once the tide drops. Another more experimental approach is to build a reef or fence of turbines across the estuary, harnessing the ebb and flow of the tides without dramatically changing water levels in the Severn and flooding the estuary’s scientifically important mud flats.

All the proposals retained by the Government on its shortlist involve dams holding back water, which worries environmental groups – although the Department of Energy and Climate Change’s Philippa Heap stresses that the consultation process is still open to hearing responses about other proposals not shortlisted.

But, there is still some disquiet about how and why the shortlist has been drawn up. Five proposals are under active consideration, and all have caused some concern to environmental groups.

The first, biggest and most controversial is a proposed five-mile barrage running from Lavernock Point, near Cardiff, to Weston-super-Mare in Somerset. This could produce around 17 terawatt-hours per year of power – more than any nuclear power station in Britain today, although less than Drax, the country’s biggest coal-fired power plant.

Other proposals include a barrage further upstream near the Severn Bridge, another upstream of the River Wye and two tidal lagoons – large bodies of water along the Welsh or English coast that would be held back as the tide rises, but which would not completely block the flow of the river.

The inclusion of the Cardiff-Weston barrage in the Government’s proposals has caused serious concern in groups as diverse as the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England and Plaid Cymru – which as a coalition partner in the Welsh Assembly government is a key stakeholder in the development of the tidal schemes.

The RSPB, in particular, is concerned that all the schemes which have been retained on the shortlist feature barrages that would permanently submerge mud flats where birds feed, some of which are recognised as sites of scientific interest. A 2007 report for the RSPB determined that the Cardiff-Weston barrage would essentially destroy the Severn Estuary as we know it. Martin Harper, the charity’s head of sustainable development says he is “extremely concerned” at the prospect.

Harper argues that the other schemes proposed also pose serious threats to wildlife. The two proposals for lagoons would still drown the mud flats, while a barrage, even if it was built much further upstream, would still block the flow of the river and prevent migrating fish such as salmon from swimming upstream. The River Severn, he says, is home to a quarter of the salmon stocks in Britain and their migration routes would be completely blocked by either of the barrage schemes.

The problem with the shortlist, Harper argues, is that it is “skewed heavily towards technical feasibility and cost, and it hasn’t ruled out projects which cause environmental harm”.

The RSPB is concerned that other proposals which could produce as much or even more energy, but which still need further technical development, have been ruled out. In particular, schemes involving a tidal reef and a series of smaller projects along the Severn, he says, could actually produce more power while causing far less damage to fragile habitats. Referring to a recent study by engineering consultancy Atkins, Harper says that the report “found that the principle of generating energy from a smaller size of impounded water is correct”.

Other groups are less strident in their criticisms, but still show some concern. The CPRE is currently preparing its response to the Government consultation and so has not fully determined its position. “It’s a bit early yet”, says Richard Lloyd of the Gloucestershire CPRE. Nevertheless, he already identifies clear problems with the Cardiff-Weston scheme, although he insists that the organisation is going to look at all the proposals seriously and ask: “Could these go to the next stage, are there ones to reject at this stage?”

Encouragingly, the consultation process for the tidal schemes seems to be progressing far more smoothly than the widely panned nuclear power consultation in 2007, and pressure groups remain engaged with the process. The DECC has made serious efforts to reach out to stakeholder groups and provide a forum in which real responses are encouraged – a clear contrast with the skewed consultation over nuclear power which was boycotted by groups including Greenpeace.

“The DECC team have engaged very well with stakeholders”, says Martin Harper. “Officials have done a really good job of engaging with people.” The DECC’s consultation website has attracted wide interest. And the department’s Philippa Heap says it has made strenuous efforts to contact relevant stakeholders and interest groups, and has organised web-chats with ministers in order to invite further responses.

The real concern that stakeholder groups have with the consultation isn’t the process, which appears to have been running smoothly, but with the shortlist itself. “The reef should be on”, Harper says, “the barrage should be off.”

Once the consultation closes in late April, the DECC will collate the responses and publish them, leading to a final preferred option being presented in 2010. Depending on which scheme is chosen, a tidal power station could be operating in 2018 at the earliest, or 2022 if the massive Cardiff-Weston barrage is chosen.

If it is, we can expect today’s quiet concern to erupt into serious opposition in the future.

Kicking against the pricks

Published in Tribune, 13 February 2009

LIKE a nasty case of genital herpes, the controversy over the MMR vaccine just keeps coming back. Every time it seems to have been brought under control, bang, another outbreak of denial comes along to ruin everything. With every outbreak of scepticism comes the risk of an outbreak of disease. Let’s not forget, measles can kill or cause brain damage, mumps causes male sterility and rubella leads to birth defects.

I genuinely thought that the allegations about MMR causing autism were on the wane. It’s not just that there was never any evidence for it, nor even that every single one of the many studies scientists have carried out since Andrew Wakefield’s controversial 1997 paper have disproved the supposed link. These all carry weight within the scientific community, although they don’t get all that much airtime in the media.

But Wakefield himself has been totally, utterly and publicly discredited, with a cloud of allegations about unethical conduct, conflicts of interest, impropriety, incompetence and faked results hanging around him. Only this week, the Sunday Times’ Brian Deer, whose admirable work has uncovered much of the shenanigans around Wakefield’s work, revealed that the original study which launched the whole scare a decade ago was based on manipulated and fabricated data.

Any scientific credibility Wakefield’s claims about MMR might ever had has now been completely refuted, and any personal credibility he had is long gone. The media finally seemed to be losing interest. Most people, faced with that sort of refutation, might accept that they were wrong and abandon their views. No doubt some have, as the vaccination rates are edging up again.

But the anti-MMR movement, instead of giving up and moving on, has decided en masse to reject knowledge and evidence, and instead to embrace ignorance and anecdote. And they show no sign of going away.

The Guardian’s “Bad Science” columnist Ben Goldacre – who, like Richard Dawkins can usually be relied upon to be both right and infuriatingly confrontational at the same time – has made a point of attacking the MMR-sceptics in print and on his website. Although he’s a good and clever writer, I don’t always agree with his style. When dealing with lay people sceptical about scientific fact, it’s a lot more helpful to engage with them than to insult them. Far better to convince than to ridicule, even if ridicule is fun.

However, I can make an exception in this case. The ignorance here is wilful and the damage real, and it needs to be rooted out once and for all.

Goldacre’s latest spat is with Jeni Barnett, a presenter on LBC 97.3 FM, a London radio station with more than 800,000 weekly listeners who tune in for an average of 11 hours a week. On her January 7 talkshow, she dedicated the better part of an hour of public airtime to possibly the most brazenly idiotic, most proudly ignorant and most crassly offensive “discussion” of MMR I have ever come across. There is far too much in the show to summarise – Goldacre described the programme as “bad science bingo” because it was so thorough in its recital of all the pseudoscientific tripe that the anti-vaccination camp comes up with.

So far, so disgraceful (even if it makes for morbidly amusing listening). But LBC has threatened legal action against Goldacre for having reproduced an audio clip of part of Barnett’s show on his website. The station claims breach of copyright – even though the law explicitly allows reproduction for the purposes of criticism and news reporting.

The prospect of a massive media company with hundreds of thousands of loyal listeners threatening a lone voice of opposition is bad enough. When LBC is doing so to protect its irresponsible presenter, it’s more serious still.

Fortunately, the rise of blogging makes such ham-fisted efforts at censorship rather less effective than they once were. A network of supportive bloggers has published transcripts of the show. The whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.org has posted the full audio file of the programme for anyone to download. And there is a growing campaign on the internet to encourage readers to complain to Ofcom about LBC’s misuse of their broadcasting license.

I hope their complaints are upheld. This programme – and countless others like it – recklessly endangers public health and spreads ignorance about health and science. This is not what commercial broadcasters are granted permission to use the airwaves for. The drop in MMR vaccination rates over the past decade has led to a staggering 2300 per cent rise in measles infections between 1998 and 2008. A disease that was once so rare that doctors hardly ever saw it has become endemic again. Children have died because of the MMR hoax, and the media – LBC in particular – needs to face up to what it has done.

* * *

ON THE subject of wilful ignorance and pseudoscience, Northern Ireland’s environment minister, the DUP’s Sammy Wilson, has banned British Government climate change advertising from Northern Ireland. Against all the evidence, Wilson – an economist by training – claims the planet is cooling. If it’s not cooling, he says that warming is caused by the sun – or God. If he’s not too busy, perhaps God could drop him a line and tell him what an idiot he is.

Environmentalists vs mentalists

I recently wrote an article on the "deep ecology" movement and the recently deceased philosopher Arne Naess. While writing it became clear that the topic I had proposed for the article wasn't really what I was interested in. The American environmentalist Edward Abbey, whose novel The Monkey Wrench Gang first introduced me to deep environmentalism, is actually far more interesting to me than the slightly odd philosophy Naess proposed.

The the article I eventually submitted is more suited to the philosophy magazine it was written for. But this version of the article is far closer to what I find interesting.

“Abbey liked to say that he was born on a farm in Home, Pennsylvania. But he wasn’t. He was born in 1927 at a hospital in the town of Indiana, about a dozen miles away. He just liked the idea of an epic life beginning in a place called Home.”

-- Eric Schlosser

It wasn’t just Edward Abbey – novelist, essayist, environmentalist, anarchist – who was born in Indiana, Pennsylvania in January 1929. In a very real sense, radical environmentalism, the movement that encompasses direct action groups like Earth First as well as a branch of philosophy founded by Arne Naess, was born there too.

No single person has had a greater impact on the methods and the message of the radical environmentalists than Abbey did. And yet, just like Abbey wasn’t really born where he said he was, his contribution to the movement raises all sorts of questions about its origins and motivations that its sympathisers might prefer to keep under wraps. Many of the foundation myths of the radical environmental movement, in short, are just that – myths; every bit as phoney as the story of Abbey’s birth.

Abbey shot to prominence in the late 1960s and early 1970s with the publication of two of his books. Desert Solitaire (1968) is an edited version of the journals he wrote as a young man, working as a US park ranger in the Arches National Monument; The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975) is a darkly comical novel charting the criminal escapades of a group of four environmental activists as they travel around the Western states, sabotaging everything in their path. The culmination of his novel is a conspiracy to destroy the Glen Canyon Dam in Arizona, thus draining Lake Powell and restoring the drowned canyon – something of a cause celebre in American environmentalism.

The methods of protest Abbey imagined in The Monkey Wrench Gang were and are hugely influential on the radical fringes of the environmental movement. Earth First, a group Abbey was close to (though he was by no means its leader) is the most obvious user of his imagery. Founded four years after the publication of his novel, Earth First quickly became famous for its direct action – acts of sabotage which they call “monkeywrenching”, many of which read like they came straight from Abbey’s book.

Moreover, the language and imagery used in Abbey’s novel pop up again and again when browsing Earth First’s literature. The organisation’s logo is a monkey wrench crossed with an axe; their journal features a how-to column on sabotage called “Dear Nedd Ludd” (Luddism is frequently and approvingly referred to by the characters in The Monkey Wrench Gang); Earth First’s publishing arm (the Abbzug Press) is named after one of the novel’s characters.

An even more radical splinter group, the Earth Liberation Front, which is classed as a terrorist group by the US government, has even taken to spraypainting “Hayduke Lives!” on walls at the scenes of their crimes. (Hayduke is the most radical of the characters in Abbey’s novel – and Hayduke Lives! is the title of the 1989 sequel to The Monkey Wrench Gang).

Given Abbey’s friendship with Dave Foreman (Earth First’s founder) these parallels are perhaps not surprising. Abbey was, indeed, involved to an extent with Earth First, not least taking part in a 1981 protest which saw the group create a fake crack down the concrete facade of the Glen Canyon Dam, yet another case of life imitating Abbey’s art. But dig a little deeper and the philosophical gap between Abbey and the movement that claims to follow him becomes stark and perplexing.

These differences cannot be explained away as academic overinterpretation of small differences in dogma between a few simple activists. Abbey, for all the crude cowboy image he cultivated, had a Masters in Philosophy, and the radical environmentalists, for all their focus on direct action, have a strong and coherent intellectual underpinning. The differences, in other words, are real, and hard to explain away.

If Abbey influences Earth First’s methods and message, then the Norwegian philosopher and environmentalist Arne Naess surely provides its intellectual backbone. Naess coined the phrase “deep ecology” (in contrast to what he saw as the “shallow” ecology of mainstream conservationists and biological scientists) and expounded its basic tenets in 1973, just two years before The Monkey Wrench Gang was published.

But though his seminal work, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle would only finally be translated into English in the 1980s, his philosophy nevertheless serves as a definition, both descriptive and prescriptive of the movement’s ideology. Consider the eight tenets of deep ecology he sets out in that book:

1. The flourishing of human and non-human life on Earth has intrinsic value. […]
2. Richness and diversity of life forms are values in themselves […].
3. Humans have no right to reduce this richness or diversity except to satisfy vital needs.
4. Present human interference with the non-human world is excessive […].
5. The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a substantial decrease of the human population. The flourishing of non-human life requires such a decrease.
6. Significant change of life conditions for the better requires [fundamental] change in policies. […]
7. The ideological change is mainly that of appreciating life quality (dwelling in situations of intrinsic value) rather than adhering to a high standard of living. […]
8. Those who subscribe to the foregoing points have an obligation […] to participate in the attempt to implement the necessary changes.

(p29)

And consider how closely these reflect how groups like Earth First think. Apart from their penchant for sabotage, Earth First do take the time to mull over, debate and discuss why they act and what they want. They have a bimonthly journal in which their thinking is laid bare – and it closely fits Naess’ definition of deep ecology, particularly in its insistence that ecosystems and the preservation of wild spaces are an intrinsic good, rather than being contingent on human enjoyment of them, as well as in its predictable focus on action.

Foreman at one stage apparently backed forced sterilisation and the end of food aid to famine-stricken regions as a way of reducing humans’ ecological footprint – a clear indication of his view that the preservation of the environment is more important than the preservation of human life. (Indeed, he is on record as saying that “the human race could go extinct, and I for one would not shed any tears.”) These are hardly isolated examples – Earth First Journal has also published letters welcoming AIDS as a necessary curb on the world population. And Naess’ eighth point – that subscribing to these views gives a moral imperative to act closely mirrors both prominent Earth Firster Judi Bari’s insistence as she was dying of cancer that her profession be listed as “revolutionary” as well as – and here we come back to Edward Abbey – the group’s focus on direct action.

And yet, Abbey’s characters aren’t acting because they want to make “no compromise in defence of mother earth”, as Earth First’s slogan would have it. Nor are they all that interested in the flourishing of life or indeed any ideological foundation other than a sort of basic, contrarian anarchism (the theme of revenge, rather than defence of nature, is pervasive in the novel). Indeed, Abbey’s characters promise early in the novel to “let our practice form our doctrine, thus assuring precise theoretical coherence,” (p69) which is about as far from Arne Naess’ prescriptions as is possible. Was he subtly ridiculing his comrades in the movement?

It’s easy to read too much into the subtext of a novel, of course, even if this one is fairly transparent. But Abbey’s other famous book, Desert Solitaire (1968), a work of non-fiction, expounds the same sort of views as he ascribes to his characters – a down-to-earth rejection of ideology and – in stark contrast with people like Earth First – a clear commitment to an egocentric, rather than ecocentric view of conservation. Abbey enjoyed the West, and though he abhorred car parks and 4x4s long before it was trendy to do so, he actually wanted people to visit the great wildernesses. Abbey’s opposition to the development of the West was not that it meant people coming in – it was that it destroyed the reason for going there in the first place.

Throughout Desert Solitaire, Abbey’s opposition to the development of the West is couched in terms of aesthetic damage (roads going “against the grain of the landscape”, for example) and in terms of the wilderness being tamed. In The Monkey Wrench Gang, opposition to the Glen Canyon Dam is presented as being because of the beauty it destroyed, not the ecosystems it damaged. Indeed, the only reference, however oblique, to the massive ecological damage dam has caused downstream in the Grand Canyon is the throwaway observation that the Colorado River is no longer red with silt.

Abbey did not want to exclude people from the West, he wanted them to come, see and enjoy it in its pristine form, precisely the sort of attitude denounced by the likes of Naess.

In fact, a whole series of deep contradictions exist in Abbey’s relationship with deep ecology. Abbey’s individualism contrasts with their communitarianism; his egocentrism with their ecocentrism; his anarchism versus their authoritarianism. And perhaps most importantly of all, his anthropocentric wish for human enjoyment of the west contrasts with the deep ecologists' occasional spells of sinister misanthropy.

Abbey’s enthusiasm for the wild West is life affirming and human, and represents the rugged individualism of the West he adopted when he moved there as a young man. The deep ecologists’ morbid obsession with genocide, starvation and the apparent fragility of an ecosystem which must be defended at all costs is a quite different proposition. Abbey’s was the environmentalism of endless possibility; Naess's is the environmentalism of prohibition.

There is always the possibility that Abbey’s views changed with time. His most influential books were written before Earth First got going, and before Naess’ Ecology, Community and Lifestyle was translated into English. The development of the radical environmental movement, as well as the expounding of its philosophy, followed the publication of the two books that define his life and career, they did not precede it. But there is actually pretty strong evidence that his views stayed quite constant throughout his life.

Desert Solitaire was published in 1968, but written in the 1950s when Abbey worked at the Arches, and he was comfortable enough with his views as a young man to publish them years later. Abbey wrote The Monkey Wrench Gang in the 1970s, again, betraying no change in opinion. And in 1989 – ten years after the foundation of Earth First, Abbey’s wrote his final novel, Hayduke Lives! (which was published after his death in 1990). And far from recanting his previous views, this novel is a sequel to The Monkey Wrench Gang.

Going back before his earliest publications (and into the realm of speculation) we see the same mischievous attitude at work in The Monkey Wrench Gang in the way Abbey lived his life – getting his college newspaper banned when he was at university, deserting when he was in the army and committing a litany of minor crimes everywhere he went.

Abbey showed remarkable consistency throughout his life, and was no fool. He must have realised that even if he shared a great deal with his comrades in Earth First, he did not share a philosophy.

So what on earth is going on? Abbey seems to have been uninterested in dogma and ideology. Most probably he realised that his friends’ motivations were different, but simply shared their enthusiasm and agreed with their objectives. We’ll never know for sure, as Edward Abbey died twenty years ago and Naess died in January.

But in his last wishes Abbey perhaps left a good-humoured nudge to his comrades that he wasn’t quite the man they thought. At his request, his friends (illegally) buried him at a secret location somewhere in Arizona’s Cabeza Prieta Desert, wrapped in his sleeping bag, his grave watered with whiskey – a final (and very human) act of self-indulgence and enjoyment of the wilderness his comrades wanted to keep off-limits.

Let’s hope Obama’s team of teachers can also do

Published in Tribune, 19 December 2008

AS WAS predictable, the American left has already started moaning about Barack Obama and the choices he has made staffing his administration. The media has played along, pointing out how many establishment figures he has appointed to his cabinet – Hillary Clinton being the most obvious but by no means the only one. The cries of “sell out” have started and Obama hasn’t even had a chance to pick the new carpet for the Oval Office.

Given the media’s single-track mind, it’s not surprising that they have obsessed on one non-story (“President appoints politicians to his cabinet”) while ignoring another – the appointment to major government jobs of academic experts – which will likely have a major impact on the tone and style of his administration. Given a bit of luck, it might affect the policies, too.

Where George Bush’s administration was full of oil tycoons and businessmen, Obama’s is packed with professors – starting with the man at the top, Obama himself. His campaign made a big deal of the three years he spent as a community organiser in Chicago’s South Side. But, perhaps afraid of validating accusations of elitism from the John McCain camp, Obama rarely mentioned the 12 years he spent teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago – even though that would have nixed the constant refrain from the Republicans that he was not ready to be President.

Of course, lawyers are hardly a rarity in politics – Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton all practised law before becoming President, although none of them taught it. But the details of appointments that have emerged from Obama’s transition team show a large infusion of talent from academia into all levels of government, both advisory and executive – and not just lawyers.
Among the new faces, the most impressive is Steve Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who will, Senate confirmation hearings permitting, be Obama’s Energy Secretary.

Professor Chu’s scientific credentials speak for themselves – a Nobel Prize in particle physics, important work in molecular biology and, more recently, the directorship of the Berkeley Lab in California. More than just being a brilliant scientist in his field, though, he has shown political nous and has directed the lab towards valuable research into low-carbon energy. He has also had the pragmatic common sense to involve oil companies in the lab’s work, giving them a stake in new technologies, rather than freezing them out – essential if their commercial clout is one day to support, rather than undermine, alternative fuels. It remains to be seen whether Chu is ready for the rough and tumble of national politics, but he should bring a clarity of thought to the cabinet table that has been lacking in recent years.

Other appointments of experts by Obama have been more predictably focused on experts in economics. But here, too, Obama is showing faith in scholarship and learning where his predecessors placed trust in tycoons. Lawrence Summers, who will head Obama’s National Economics Council was Treasury Secretary under Clinton – but he is also a former economics professor and served as president of Harvard University. Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors is headed by another professor – UC Berkeley’s Christina Romer.

In his appointment of experts, particularly in advisory roles in economics, Obama may be trying to mirror Franklin D Roosevelt, a president he has studied in detail. FDR’s “Brain Trust” of expert advisors played a major role in developing his policies for combating the Great Depression, and looked a lot like Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors does. But the similarity ends there: Roosevelt did not have a Steve Chu; he did not rush to appoint any academics to his cabinet when he became president. FDR took the sages’ advice, but he didn’t hand them the reins of power.

So is all this going to work? We must hope so – and in any case, the incoming administration can hardly be worse than the outgoing one. But experts and academics don’t have an unblemished record at putting theory into practice and aren’t, to put things mildly, always the best people for the job. Just ask Portugal, run by professors for much of the 20th century.

In 1932, the country’s ruling junta handed the job of prime minister to António Salazar– who, among his many distinctions had been professor of economics at the prestigious University of Coimbra. Thirty-six years of repressive dictatorship and rigged elections later, when Salazar suffered a stroke, his replacement was Marcello Caetano – another professor, this time of law, and a former rector of the University of Lisbon. The dictatorship staggered on for another five painful years before he was finally overthrown. Perhaps they should have stuck to teaching.

But things are rarely that simple. When Caetano’s dictatorship finally collapsed in the Carnation Revolution, the first elected leader of the new Portuguese Republic, Mário Soares, guided his country back to democracy, into the EU and established his Socialist Party as the standard-bearer of the Portuguese left. And his previous job?

A professor at the University of Paris.

There is hope yet for Obama’s new team.

How Darwin evolved into the pound in your pocket

Published in Tribune, 21 November 2008

SOME people carry symbols of Christ around with them everywhere they go, as a profession of their faith. Most of us, even if we are only dimly aware of it, carry around images of Charles Darwin with us – his portrait gracing the £10 note. Many will use these £10 notes to pay the entrance fee to the Natural History Museum’s Darwin exhibition that opened last Friday and closes on April 19 next year, which is, no coincidence, his 200th birthday.

But there was a strange note of dissent at the exhibition’s opening. Steve Jones, a worldwide authority on genetics and a rather good writer of popular science, pointed out that the picture on the £10 note is bogus. Darwin’s eyes, and the magnifying glass that appears in the artwork, focus on a hummingbird, even though Darwin never studied them.

A more interesting question is why Jones, a professor of genetics, is an expert on Darwin at all. Not only did Darwin not know the laws of genetics, he actually wrote a long volume, now forgotten, proposing an alternative theory of heredity.

The laws of heredity, the foundation stone of genetics, were discovered by Darwin’s contemporary, Gregor Mendel, and largely ignored until long after both men were dead. When they were rediscovered at the turn of the 20th century, far from being seen as a confirmation of Darwinian evolution, Mendel’s laws were thought to contradict it.

Only much later were evolution and genetics reconciled in the new field of population genetics. In truth, modern biology owes as much to Ronald Fisher, Sergey Chetverikov, Theodosius Dobzhansky and other biologists of the early 20th century as it does to Darwin and Mendel – yet their faces don’t appear on bank notes.

The fascinating question is just why Darwin’s name and reputation has continued to be attached to our theories of life, even though modern theories are only distantly related to Darwin’s work. It’s not enough to say that our current understanding has, to coin an unfortunate phrase, evolved from Darwin’s Origin of Species. Apart from anything, it’s not strictly true. Nor does the argument that modern theories are essentially the same as Darwin’s work – and Jones’ Almost Like A Whale proves it.

Jones’s book is ostensibly based on Darwin’s Origin. It uses the same chapter titles, the same table of contents, reproduces the conclusions from each of Darwin’s chapters and even takes its odd-sounding title from Darwin’s work (the Origin describes a bear swimming in a lake with its mouth wide open “thus catching, almost like a whale, insects in the water” – his point being that apparently unrelated species can evolve similar behaviour, and, perhaps evolve into similar forms). The book is marketed as “The Origin of Species, Updated”.

However, the most curious thing about Jones’s book isn’t how similar it is to the Origin, but, given the conscious mirroring of Darwin’s structure and subject, just how different it is. It’s not only a matter of the style being separated by 150 years of change in English usage, nor is it that the intended readership is different (Darwin’s book, in common with much science writing at the time, was directed at a general audience as much as a scientific one). It’s that the content itself is so totally different. Most of Jones’s book is on genetics (for my money, it’s one of the best popular works on the subject), and a great deal of it is on viruses, neither of which had even been discovered when the Origin was published.

Steve Jones uses Darwin’s work and reputation as a starting point for his book, even though it isn’t that similar. The £10 note uses Darwin as an excuse for the designer’s taste for hummingbirds, even though Darwin didn’t study them. Businessmen use Darwin as a metaphor for the free market, even though Darwin was inspired by economic theory, not vice versa. Biologists to this day still argue over which theory is the truer reflection of Darwin’s theory, even though 150 years of discoveries mean the science is a very different beast from that of 1859. And, of course, the Natural History Museum is using Darwin’s birthday as a marketing tool for its exhibition.

Science, like every discipline, has its foundation myths and heroes. It all starts to make sense when seen in the light suggested by one of my old lecturers when I was at university. He proposed that the constant reference back to Darwin today could be explained in terms of competing claims on Darwin’s legacy. The benefit of being the keeper of the Darwinian flame is, he argued, useful partly as a prestigious link back to a scientific hero, and partly as a way of suppressing unseemly disputes in the present. Why argue over who has discovered a new phenomenon if everyone can agree that it goes back, however tenuously, to Darwin?

And so it is that the theory which has done more than any other to undermine religious myths of creation has ended up with a creation myth of its own – and the apotheosis of its founder. Nice work.

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J0hn S Wilkins comments:

Darwin did not study hummingbirds… much. But he did study them. He collected several specimens (which I have seen in the Melbourne museum) and both his field notebook and his “big species book” refer to them. Granted, it was not one of the main topics of his work, but it is not true that he didn’t work on them at all.

My response:

I stand corrected, I wasn’t aware of that.

To be fair, though he barely talks about them - they’re mentioned just once in the Origin and once in the Variation (neither time as anything more than a passing reference).

For comparison, pigeons (which he did base his theories on) get 112 mentions in the Origin and a further 934 mentions in the Variation.

Even if I wasn’t quite right on the detail, I think my point about the appropriation of Darwin’s legacy and his elevation into a symbol of something much broader than he would have recognised stands. You’re welcome to disagree with that too of course!