Harry Kills Harrier?

The legally-protected hen-harrier is a rare and endangered bird in England, two of which were killed on the Royal Estate of Sandringham last week. Prince Harry and a friend were the only two people out shooting on the estate at the time in question which means, as to finding the culprits, we can probably file Sherlock Holmes' and Hercule Poirot's business cards back into the drawer.

I have always liked Harry, enough to forgive him his endorsement of that idiot Kanye West at the concert he arranged for the memory of his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales. I admire him for his determination to be deployed in Iraq and he did have a certain down-to-earth consternation about him when England were denied a cast-iron try against South Africa at the Rugby World Cup final (even if his bar-tabs are less earth-bound and more stratospheric).

Still - and whether guilty or not of killing the hen-harriers - 'gaming' is atavistic and, no matter how much of a bubble the Royals may live in (and it can't be so much of a bubble that it prevents a white British Royal's exposure to black American street culture) there is nothing about gaming that can be justified in this day and age. It's atavistic, pure and simple.

The diversity of Britain's wildlife is already depleted enough that these - surely sensitive and educated - members of the upper-echelons can curb their preoccupation with shooting stags, hunting foxes and taking aim the odd rare bird.

Is Twelve Monkeys The Solution For 25 Primates?

I am thinking of the Terry Gilliam film Twelve Monkeys. I watched it maybe a half or whole year ago on VHS with bad audio, which made the gripping-if-convoluted plot difficult to follow. Like most of ex-Monty Python Terry Gilliam's films (the dystopian Brazil, the insidious fantasy of Piano Tuner of Earthquakes), Twelve Monkeys requires - and deserves - to be revisited.

Although I have still seen the film only once, I have nonetheless revisited it in my head increasingly of late because of its environmental subtexts.

Never a fan of Brad Pitt, I nonetheless admire his portrayal of psychiatric patient Jeffrey Goines, an animal rights activist and anti-consumerist. It is a confluence of two events - the release of humankind cleansing virus and the release of animals from captivity - that enabled (non-human) animals to once again live in freedom and prosperity.

Whether The Army of the Twelve Monkeys were responsible for releasing the virus is doubted, but they definitely claim responsibility for liberating animals from the zoo.

The question the movie has forced me to address - for I have been acknowledging it for a good duration - is if (non human) animals can only thrive once again if humans are removed from the equation of life?

It saddens me to hear that conservationists have newly publicised a list of 25 primates on the edge of extinction.

These include the Sumatran Orang-Utan, the Peruvian yellow-tailed woolly monkey, and the Hainan black-crested gibbon and the Cross River gorilla. I have names only four of the twenty-five because three are enough to serve a purpose: One is native to Sumatra, one to Peru, one to China, one to Nigeria. Four completely distinct geographical regions.

Natural geographies the world over are being razed and our closest relatives in the animal kingdom are being wiped out. Not that their genetic proximity to humans should matter. All animals should be conserved, no matter how distinct they are from mankind.

Or should that be all animals must be conserved except the human animal? Is it time we start considering that, for the sake of the sanctity of all life, it is humans who must be sacrificed?

Without humans there would no longer be the drain on natural resources because of material greed, there would be no destruction of nature, no living in disharmony with Gaia (if one is inclined to personify the Earth).

Humans are the only life-form on the planet that has the capability of subverting nature with such disastrous effects.

In the current fear-induced climate of terrorism, eco-terrorism is never going to be thought of as a sane option, even if limited to philosophical pondering. Thus I find myself occupying a padded cell with Jeffrey Goines, deemed mad by society for being anti-consumerism and pro animal rights, unable to make the world look at itself in the mirror to see how absurd it has become. Animals are dying and the ones who care, who would counteract, are divested of power.


Without eco-terrorism as a viable option, all I can do is ask anyone who might chance upon this blog to look at the photo (left), of an Sumatran Orang-Utan cradling her infant, and ask yourself what you can do to stop this animal from being erased forever. And do something about it.

Let the tennis-playing puffins be or How to stay faithful to your mobile phone

As I was driving to work this autumn morning - daylight in retreat, fog on the grasslands - I was listening, as one is wont to do on such drives, to the radio. (My station of choice is Magic FM, as I grew up in the 80s and there is a lot of nostalgia value on 105.4).

Between a segue of three songs are the adverts. The usual ones warning me that the chip in my windscreen needs to be inspected (I may have a chip on my shoulder but not my windscreen, boys), the TGI Friday one advertising Jack Daniel's Sesame Chicken and a travel agency that puns its destinations, such as "business Tripoli".

But to break the routine a little there was a new advert for a mobile phone which has the latest doo-da that replaces the old oojamafluke and it's absolutely essential that we upgrade.

Mobile phones have come along way since they resembled a brick. With every gadget and gizmo added, mobile phones become harder to recycle. They are one of the most environmentally-unfriendly technological products because they use so may different components, that it is no simple feat to break it down and recycle it.

Sure, mobile phones are useful devices, but they are a nuisance also. Many is the time I've sat on public transport and had to listen some loudmouth's inane drivel. I remember once being seated on a train in front of some woman who bellowed her medical ailments more as if she were talking to someone three carriages down rather than on her phone.

But that's noise pollution. That's a different kettle of evil (it is also a reason why I no longer use public transport - something the Mayor of London might like to address before encouraging us to go green and use the bus).

Yes, Mobile phones are hard to recycle primarily because of how complex they are becoming. I have often failed to see the point of having a camera installed on my phone. I've never used it. Okay, okay I have used it but no matter what I photograph the end result always looks like a puffin on a gravel tennis court.

Maybe I shouldn't say that. Maybe the head honchos at Samsung and Erickson are developing the latest super-resolution camera for your phone so you can conveniently photograph your favourite celebrity when you see him slipping over spilled rocket leaves at your local Waitrose.

Or probably they already have. I just wouldn't know because I don't change mobile phones until one is dead. In many ways I am serially monogamous to my mobile phones.

Not that I am being holier-than-thou (oh you who upgrade your phone twice a year), indeed I was the one driving to work this morning. No, I just have no need to upgrade my phone. I don't need a camera or games, I don't need bluetooth (unless in the event that I must urgently send a photograph of a puffin on a gravel tennis court to Bill Oddy), I don't need Internet access.

All I require from a phone is the ability to call other phones and to text other phones.

Do not covet thy neighbour's Erickson. Your own phone is good enough. Forget bluetooth. Nature is red in denture and talon, not aquamarine or azure.

Don't go through serial, expensive divorces to your phones. Stay faithful, enter into a long-term commitment to your phone.

By making as much use of your current mobile phone as possible, we can help minimise the effects of pollution and environmental destruction caused by mobile phone technology.


Top right photo: A puffin, neither on a gravel tennis court nor captured by mobile phone camera.

Cool Earth

I am currently reading about the charity Cool Earth which advocates protecting the South American rainforests by allowing charitable donors to give money to Cool Earth so that they can secure large parts of endangered rainforest and keep the loggers at bay.

On the surface it sounds like a noble idea, though I will do some thorough research on the Cool Earth project before endorsing it. The result of my research shall be reported later on this blog.

One point that has already been mooted is that the indigenous rainforest peoples should be allowed to administer the rainforests - their homeland - for themselves.

Capitalism & The Misconstrual of Death

In a previous post I speculated that capitalism is grey. From empirical observations, I have predicted that the increase in capitalism will increase the canvas of grey around the planet.

Now I would like to propose that capitalism breeds a misunderstanding of death:

It is said that when you expire you can't take wealth with you. The main objective of capitalism is to earn money, this cannot be disputed.

Therefore, the capitalist who hoards his monetary wealth must be ill-at-ease with the concept of death, for his own mortality forces him to acknowledge a cut-off point at which the treasures that he has expended so much effort in acquiring - that he has considered so useful and central to his raison-d'etre - suddenly becomes useless.

Mortality, with great severity, contradicts the philosophy of the capitalist.

The exclusive pursuit of money is self-limiting, literally. It requires that one focuses one's energies on constructing an empire of monetary self-gratification, perpetually mollycoddling the ego. Thus in the wake of mortality the loss - and disuse - of that empire, forces the capitalist to witness, with his eyelids jammed open, his meaningful universe, as if by magic, is rendered into a meaningless one.

We can also ascribe the capitalists' mis-computation of death to the geometry of capitalism:

The capitalist builds wide and high. The physical spaces of capitalism limit the mental spaces of all those who inhabit capitalism. That is, these high and wide buildings occlude our horizons, the smoke from the factories cloak the stars.

The absence of a horizon or of the stars, or even the absence of trees or flowers, begets an inability to verify the poetic, or spiritual, truths about existence, or the birth-death cycle. There is something about gazing up into the stars that reminds us that we are part of something grander than ourselves. Without stars, horizons or expanses of nature, we have fewer occasions to consider our (in)significance in the greater picture.

The capitalist, through his self-limiting geometries and philosophies, lacks the access to the poetical/spiritual truths about the universe that would otherwise enable him to override the paroxysms of his latent death-instinct.

The ever-dwindling non-capitalist cultures of our planet acknowledge the correlation between capitalism and death. Davi Kopenawa, Shaman of the Amazonian Yanomami tribe, states:

'You napepe (whites) talk about what you call development and tell us to become the same as you. But we know that this brings only disease and death."

Tibetan culture traditional holds death as a between-state, not as a punctuation mark that signifies termination.

As capitalist China continues its expansion into Tibetan land and replaces Tibetan culture with the dominator capitalist ethos, and consumes the Tibetan identity, the association between death and capitalism must once again be made.

Not only will Tibetan culture die, but its spiritual understanding of the nature of death will perish with it.

My conclusion is that capitalism is a sickness that limits humanity to its own presumed lifespan. As such it acts as a stressor to humans to force them to achieve, by unhealthy competition, the lion's share of scant material resources. Thus restricting human endeavour to the presumed lifespan is the first act of misconstruing death.

The second act is a more violent act. It is the dissemination of capitalism throughout the world at the expense of other, non-capitalist cultures. If - or as - these fading cultures have a greater understanding of the poetic-truths of the birth-death cycles of our existence, then capitalism aggressively deprives us a peaceful passing from life into death.

You Can't Own The Desert

There is a scene in the English Patient, where Almasy and his best-friend Madox discuss the urgency of securing the Saharan desert.

"What do we find in the desert?" Asks Madox "Arrowheads, spears. In a war if you own the desert, you own North Africa."

Almasy scoffs disdainfully "Own the desert?"

The idea of property and ownership - of land, of people - was a central theme of Anthony Minghella's award-winning film The English Patient.

Almasy - played by an on-form Ralph Fiennes, alongside an otherwordly Kristin Scott-Thomas (pictured) - abhorred the notion that reserves of nature could be owned for martial, strategic, financial or Imperial gain.

It is our turn to scoff disdainfully as Britain divulges its plan to carve a piece of the Antarctic desert for itself.

The claim for propriety of a slice of the Atlantic would give Britain exploratory rights for gas, oil and minerals.

Mining and drilling for oil would disrupt the fragile eco-system of the Antarctic, one of the few remaining wildernesses of our planet.

Many of the fascinating creatures that belong to the Antarctic eco-system would be killed by such human endeavours.

This is an exercise in greed and shamefaces Britain who, in 1959 became a signatory of the Antarctic treaty that no new claims should be made upon the Antarctic.

The Antarctic, as with many other parts of our natural world, needs to have its status asserted as an exclusively protected area. What this means is that no form of human expansion, construction, mining etc. may take place in such regions.

Whatever UN treaties currently exist to that effect - and these will be too few - they are evidently not sacrosanct so that nations like Britain dare not violate them.

Own the ice desert?

The Colour of Capitalism

By default the earth is green and blue and I would guess, although I have no scientific proof, that these are the colours that make us happiest. After all, we tend to associate the blueness of skies and of seas and the greenness of grass with a Paradisial idyll.

As I observed in a previous entry, Capitalism is diametrically opposed to nature. I believe that the war - if you will - between the opposing forces of nature and of capitalism can be symbolised by the consumption of green by grey.

That is, capitalism is inherently grey and, because of capitalism, the world can only become greyer until it is overwhelmed by greyness.

How can capitalism be grey? Capitalism renders the world to grey because its ultimate goal is to expand as quickly and as cheaply as possible. As such, when capitalism builds its edifices - its offices, its industrial parks - it will built them cuboid and concrete, until the skyline is obfuscated with grey cubes. In the mind of capitalism there serves no purpose in decorating these buildings, or colouring their facades. Grey breeze-blocks are sufficient to its purpose. Even its interiors shall coated in greyscale. Walls shall be painted white or grey because these are the cheapest colours of paint.

Carpets will be block grey because block grey is the cheapest colour of carpet.

You could even say that grey weather is - by some stretch of the imagination - though not too great a stretch - a collateral effect of capitalism. Factories that spew their emissions into the skies, or lorries that fill motorways to transport wares from from seaport to inland warehouse, create a gauze of cloud that make our days less bright. Many of the worlds most polluted cities - in the US and in China - can attest to this.

Capitalism requires wider roads so that it can move quicker, more freely. Roads are grey and without any of the cobblestone charm of days-of-yore.

Bridges are grey, housing estates are grey, supermarket car-parks are grey.

And at the expense of this burgeoning greyness is the natural world. For bland, grey things to be lain, erected, constructed and produced, the amount of green and blue things must decrease. And not only the greens and the blues of nature, but the spectrum.

Red and yellow flowers are uprooted for a new parking lot. The golden Sumerian tiger is taken to the brink of extinction for the sake of building grey factories in the Sumerian rain forest. Some cities seldom see a truly blue sky because of the grey cataract in the atmosphere.

This constant greying will finish-off a lot of colourful flora and fauna. And even if it doesn't kill off plants and wildlife, natural selection will cause them to adapt to the greyness and they themselves will in turn evolve grey.

There is a website about the psychology of colour and the different affects inherent to each of the different colours. Every colour listed has positive and negative attributes, though often the positive attributes outweigh the negative. This is true for every colour except grey, whose only positive attribute is "psychological neutrality" (and that itself is self-contradictory, given that neutral is neurtral, not positive) and whose list of negative attributes are as follows:

Lack of confidence, dampness, depression, hibernation, lack of energy.

It is not inconceivable that the colours of the natural world will be rendered grey by capitalism. Given the cheap 'n' quick drives of capitalism, this is most likely. If capitalism is to persevere it needs to account for man's reliance on the aesthetics of nature for his happiness. Capitalism needs to be less out-and-out and synthesised with environmental urgencies and man's need for nature's beauty.

Al Gore Wins Peace Prize

Al Gore has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for disseminating greater knowledge about man-made climate change.

In my opinion it was a deserved award. In the documentary An Inconvenient Truth (buy), Gore presented the science behind man-made climate change with both eloquence and transparency.

The documentary is a necessary education and - perhaps it shouldn't be so - great entertainment: My wife and I were compelled to watch the DVD from beginning to end without pause for break (we seldom get through a feature-length without respite).

I know from reading various subscriptions that there are those who will never accept the man-made catastrophe of climate change as reality - that it is merely scaremongering, but whether you believe Gore's claims or not, it is undeniable that there is more rubbish on the street, increasingly diminished bio-diversity, more animals on the brink of extinction (such as the polar bears, pictured), more factories coughing toxic fumes into the atmosphere, dirtier rivers and seas, so-on-and-so-on-and-so-on.

If these are facts, then even he who disagrees with the overall system of man-made climate change, cannot oppose these facts. That is, the yay-sayer and the nay-sayer can merely have views of the same thing:

The former sees the pieces of the puzzle all fitted together and the latter sees - not the complete puzzle, but - it's fragments. Either way it is not a pretty picture.

The Greener Office

As David Brent in The Office warned about squandering paper "It doesn't grow on trees".

Such were the days when that saying was not oxymoronic, that the implied abundance of trees was fact.

The theory goes that capitalism is anti-nature because everything natural recycles or regenerates. Capitalism, by-and-by, does not recycle (though see earlier posts of carbon trading here and here).

Indeed, it is in the office, a sort of epicenter for capitalism, where a great deal of paper wasting / non-recycling occurs.

Paper is essential to the office - things are ordered on paper, put into order on paper, indemnified by paper, memorised on paper, copied onto paper, printed onto paper, so forth and so on.

One of the biggest wastes of paper in the office, I think, is this form of socialising where someone prints out something they read on the Internet for someone else. It is done with the best pro-social intentions, your colleague sees something on the 'net they think you will be interested in, they print it out for you and hand it to you.

This happens quite a lot to me in my office hours, but the literature that is palmed to me I seldom read - hence the waste. I know I shouldn't be churlish about such overtures, but I think there is a much greener alternative to this waste of paper: Talking.

Yes, if you see an article on the 'net that you think your colleague will like, talk to him or her about it. Strike up a conversation about the article.

If I may be critical, I think there is a certain laziness to printing out an article for someone else to read. It permits socialising at the same time bypassing any need to engage the person with whom we are socialising.

It's win-win situation. There is no paper waste and you are guaranteed to engage the other person, whereas - as I myself prove - with a print-out you may not.

Of course I am aware there is literature that cannot be discussed without being printed and read, such as heavy-going academic articles, or jokes that only work in print, but by and large a lot of the "social" paper that is printed out is just as good - or better - discussed rather than printed.

Carbon-Trading: Too Much For the Human Mind?

Further to my assertion of neutrality with regards to the neutralisation of greenhouse gases through carbon trading:

If I have a reservation it's that carbon-trading will be a further abstraction of money and of the economy. I believe that the more abstracted the economy, the more we humans are afflicted by material greed.

The simplest economy was when a commodity was itself: water as water, food as food, shelter as shelter etc.

As economy and trade complicated, money became a convenient token. The first coins were developed by Lydian king Croesus (pictured), around 560 BC.

Coins were used an abstracted representation of what could be bought. So the coin was - and is - the abstraction of food, water, and shelter and whatever else can be bought.

As we progress even further into the digital age, coins themselves become abstracted into electronic representations of themselves. A double abstraction, if you like. And so we are taken another step further away from whatever it is the monetary value represents.

I believe that these continual abstractions of economy have made humans avaricious because they lose sight of what these abstractions represent: This money in my hand could represent the food which is essential for my survival, but it could also represent all the soulless, needless trinkets, baubles and bangles that the commercials are seducing me with.

My faculty to barter for what is essential for my existence (food, water, shelter) can, by way of money, be subverted into a desire for non-essentials. The human quest for some non-essentials is one of the biggest wastes of productivity and endeavour.

So, I am cautious about abstracting concern for the environment into a carbon-credit which is the abstraction of electronic money which is the abstraction of paper and metal money which is an abstraction of the thing itself.

Not because carbon-trading is a bad or good idea as yet - the evidence being in the dessert - but because I'm not sure the human mind can successfully compute abstraction upon abstraction without usurping its own nature.