Environmental Decline: The Culprit

By Thomas O. Scarborough

On 20 March 2025, I delivered the Annual Philosophy Lecture in Malta. This was a wide-ranging talk on Holism. However, one aspect in particular received close attention afterwards. How our view of the whole touches on environmental decline. Here, I draw out this aspect of my lecture:

I proposed, in my lecture, that there is a “nameless Whole”. This lies beyond everything that we name and define. I capitalise this Whole, so as to distinguish it from finite wholes, which we do name and define. For instance, watermelons, molecules, or engines.*

Now suppose that I name a term ”mass”—and define mass. As soon as I define it, I exclude from its definition everything that it is not. Typically, I do so quite rigorously. 

Now let us expand on this. Suppose that I name and define many terms at the same time. Acceleration, momentum, and so on. These terms may belong, for examaple, to a theory, a model, or an algorithm. I now exclude everything that all of these terms are not. 

The same is true of words. I may use one or many words. As soon as I define them, I exclude everything that they are not. In fact, merely by speaking some words, I cut off vast aspects of reality.

We could say that we “define things out”. And as we define terms or words, we “define out” uncountably many things. They are off the charts—out of the discussion. They belong, not to finite wholes, but the nameless Whole beyond. And these may now become extremely dangerous to our environment. 

Take the example of big data. This is extremely large data sets which we analyse computationally. Big data excludes all that it does not include. Thus we make billions (far more than billions) of computations per second which exclude all that they do not include. 

Such computations include public data, business data, and personal data, among other things. Yet environmental data is largely missing. Billions (and billions) of times a second, across the globe, in nearly every town and city—indeed, in the devices in our very own hands—the environment is thus passed over.

Now let us consider science. By definition, science excludes unwanted influences on independent variables. It, too, “defines things out”. In the words of philosophers Kamlah and Lorenzen, "Physics investigates processes ... by progressively screening things out." 

This is the scientific method. And this “screening out” happens not only in the laboratory. It happens every time we apply the science to the world. 

Take, for instance, the internal combustion engine. When this was first tested, its emissions were not only overlooked in the laboratory. They were overlooked every time an internal combustion engine was built. The same for fridges which released CFC’s. One could name thousands, if not millions, of examples besides.

The concept of the nameless Whole enables us to see that, beyond our finite wholes, uncountable things lie. They lie beyond the things which we define and describe. Due to the things that we “define out”, therefore, our whole planet is overlooked in one way or another—and is in deep trouble today. 

Ian Rizzo of the Philosophy Sharing Foundation wrote up an excellent summary of my Annual Philosophy Lecture. He noted there that I put forward “the ultimate culprit” behind environmental crises. This is our blindness to the nameless Whole.

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* I have simplified the discussion of finite and nameless Wholes, but that does not matter here. Most importantly, finite wholes may be considered a subset of the nameless Whole. As in Lao Tzu: “The Nameless is the beginning of the ten thousand things.” Or Anaximander: “That which is infinite is other than the elements, yet from it the elements arise.” 

Replacing Nature

by Thomas Scarborough

Koeberg Nuclear Power Station, Cape Town

The 2017 film Blade Runner 49 was ‘visually amazing’, receiving eight nominations and two awards at the 71st British Academy Film Awards, among other important accolades. But beyond the visuals, there was some serious philosophy. Blade Runner 49 portrays a world which, according to Laura Holt of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, cuts the ‘umbilical cord’ which connects human survival with the biosphere.

Today, this cutting of the umbilical cord would seem to be a slow but relentless process. The more organised we become, the more there is to go wrong. The more there is to go wrong, the more we need to insure life against it. The ‘progress’ of the Enlightenment has become the progress of human domination. This has come at the cost, according to the World Wildlife Fund, of the massive retreat of nature: an average 68% drop in biodiversity since 1970.

The theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, before his execution by the Nazi regime in 1945, wrote a synopsis of an enivsaged book. His notes were published posthumously in English in 1953, in Prisoner of God. Since these were abbreviated, I paraphrase here (the original translation appears below):

‘The Coming of Age of Humanity.

‘Humanity will seek to insure life against accident and ill-fortune. If the elimination of danger proves to be impossible, they will seek at least to minimise it. Insurance, while it thrives upon accidents, seeks also to mitigate their effects. This is a Western phenomenon. The goal is ultimately to be independent of nature. Our immediate environment is destined, not to be nature as before, but organisation. Yet this immunity from nature will produce a new crop of dangers, which is the very organisation.’

This was a prescient observation by a man who wrote nearly eighty years ago. At a glance, one might suppose that he was speaking of totalitarianism. It is, however, not the totalinarianism of the state, but what we now call ‘the science of scarcity’. How to provide more, and more, with less, across all lands and seas, for a global population.

Apart from being a relentless process, this becomes more and more dangerous to human stability. Close to my home in Cape Town, there is a nuclear power station. On some days, its twin domes rise hauntingly above the mists on the shore. In 2006, apparently, a single bolt broke loose in a generator, so disabling half the nuclear plant. It went into a controlled shutdown, and could not be raised to life for months. The reason for this was that replacement parts needed to be imported from France.

The incident showed how perilously close human organisation may sometimes be to disintegration. Fuel distribution, desalination plants, food production, transportation, communications, and any number of things besides, may be laid lame through fairly small and localised problems. The war in Ukraine, while not small, has revealed how a localised catastrophe can now destabilise the whole world. Too often, where we engineer things to create a more predictable and dependable world than nature provides, we come another step closer to the edge.

While we have applied much attention to the problems, we seem to find no reason to stop the latent and relentless process of separating ourselves from nature. And those who perhaps see clearly, do not have the power to prevent it. It is not ‘as before’, wrote Bonhoeffer. ‘Before’ (in his continuing notes), humankind had the spiritual vitality to defeat ‘the blasphemies of hybris’. He wrote, ‘Man is once more faced with the problem of himself. He can cope with every danger except the danger of human nature itself.’

Prominent thinkers have said no, wait, stop. Let go of the steering wheel. We are headed for, as it were, Blade Runner 49. The late biologist and naturalist Edward O. Wilson proposed that half the earth should be rewilded. Most recently, Laura Holt called for ‘relinquished areas’ of nature. I myself have proposed that large areas of the planet be prohibitos autem terra: under a ban. I propose that we are not capable of stopping ourselves in any other way.

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* Original translation: ‘The coming of age of humanity (along the lines already suggested). The insuring of life against accident, ill-fortune. If elimination of danger impossible, at least its minimisation. Insurance (which although it thrives upon accidents, seeks to mitigate their effects) a western phenomenon. The goal, to be independent of nature. Our immediate environment not nature, as formerly, but organization. But this immunity produces a new crop of dangers, i.e. the very organisation.’

New Critical Theory

by Thomas Scarborough

Critical theory has been all in the news of late. In fact it goes back a long way. First developed in the 1930s, I myself studied critical theory in the 1970s. I may own the first paperback edition, too, of a dictionary of critical theory, published in 2001.

Critical Theory has become increasingly important. This is theory which ‘reveals and challenges power structures’, which is oppression. It is ‘critical’ because it is not neutral. It is normative. Professor Robert M. Seiler of the University of Calgary writes that ‘criticism involves ... judgments for the purpose of bringing about positive change’.

I here propose that critical theory, in fact, goes back to the ancients, in its core characteristics—and to something both deeper and broader than we have supposed.

Socrates, in defining the virtuous life, said, ‘Choose the mean, and avoid the extremes on either side, as far as possible,’ while Aristotle thought of ethics as ‘the golden mean’—the balanced life. Thus ethics represents the achievement of balance in the human person—and, of course, in society. Balance between unity and diversity, novelty and tradition, thought and feeling, economy and community, and so much more. It is not hard to see how this coincides with critical theory—which seeks to bring balance to social inequalities of various kinds.

What is this balance, so beloved of the ancients? It stands to reason that, as we seek to balance all things, we have knowledge of those things. We are informed of them before we begin. In fact, if information is lacking, as we make judgements about our society, our resulting balance must be askew. While imbalances may come about simply through apathy, they may come about deliberately, too. In the case of lies, deceit, and propaganda, one simply removes information from the balance—or adds it. Or, worse, if one cannot get one’s way, one turns to violence and oppression, eliminating unwanted individuals, or seizing control of systems, to neutralise the information which is not wanted.

Oppression therefore rests on the suppression of information. Alternatively, it rests on the failure of an uptake of information. One may have systems which seem perfectly friendly towards all information, yet in practice fail to take it up. Information itself goes hand in hand with its reception, incorporation, and, of course, pursuant action.

This has three implications for critical theory.

• Firstly, where information is suppressed, this may not in every case happen along recognised class lines—or lines of race, gender, privilege, and so on. This is my first reservation concerning critical theory today. In reality, information is suppressed along all kinds of lines, which critical theory may fail to identify—because it fails to identify and analyse the suppression of information. It may miss oppression which we had not imagined, or which lies beyond familiar categories. This should not be understood as a rejection of critical theory. Rather, critical theory as we know it does not drive deep enough.

• Secondly, when one speaks in terms of the suppression of information, one broadens the scope of critical theory. One may also speak of such suppression—therefore oppression—in connection with the environment. Where we fail to include the environment in our thinking, we oppress wetlands, insects, elephants, forests, fish, and so much more. Critical theory today is not equal to such forms of oppression, precisely at a time where they threaten the ruination of our world. Again, this should not be understood as a rejection of critical theory. Far from it. Current critical theory, I maintain, does not go broad enough.

• Thirdly, critical theory has often been associated with ‘cancel culture’. The purpose here is not to discuss the merits or demerits of cancel culture, but to note that one should be careful that cancel culture does not limit the freedom of information. The loss of such information to the system could signal oppression.

Let us now notice: in terms of philosophical categories, my view goes down to bedrock. It goes down to the things-relations distinction, which originated with the ancient Greeks. This is a distinction which philosophers have accepted almost universally, among them Aristotle, Hume, and Wittgenstein—with some exceptions.* According to such philosophers, philosophy deals with things and the relations between them—at best, expansively and holistically. Therefore we oppose the suppression of information.

Oppression may now be defined as a loss of information to the system, through various kinds of pressure, including physical coercion. In short, this describes critical theory, which exposes oppression—yet more than critical theory, it goes to the very heart of reality, which is the relatedness of all things. It goes beyond human oppression, too, and includes our long and sorry oppression of the environment, where we failed to take into account all the information we should have done. I shall call this New Critical Theory. 

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An important exception is F.H. Bradley, perhaps the foremost philosopher of the 19th Century. 

Environmental Ethics and Climate Change

Posted by Keith Tidman

The signals of a degrading environment are many and on an existential scale, imperilling the world’s ecosystems. Rising surface temperature. Warming oceans. Sinking Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. Glacial retreat. Decreased snow cover. Sea-level rise. Declining Arctic sea ice. Increased atmospheric water vapour. Permafrost thawing. Ocean acidification. And not least, supercharged weather events (more often, longer lasting, more intense).

Proxy (indirect) measurements — ice cores, tree rings, corals, ocean sediment — of carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping gas that plays an important role in creating the greenhouse effect on Earth, have spiked dramatically since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The measurements underscore that the recent increase far exceeds the natural ups and downs of the previous several hundred thousand years. Human activity — use of fossil fuels to generate energy and run industry, deforestation, cement production, land use changes, modes of travel, and much more — continues to be the accelerant.

The reports of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, contributed to by some 1,300 independent scientists and other researchers from more than 190 countries worldwide, reported that concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxides ‘have increased to levels unprecedented in at least 800,000 years’. The level of certainty of human activity being the leading cause, referred to as anthropogenic cause, has been placed at more than 95 percent.

That probability figure has legs, in terms of scientific method. Early logical positivists like A.J. Ayer had asserted that for validity, a scientific proposition must be capable of proof — that is, ‘verification’. Later, however, Karl Popper, in his The Logic of Scientific Discovery, argued that in the case of verification, no number of observations can be conclusive. As Popper said, no matter how many instances of white swans we may have observed, this does not justify the conclusion that all swans are white. (Lo and behold, a black swan shows up.) Instead, Popper said, the scientific test must be whether in principle the proposition can be disproved — referred to as ‘falsification’. Perhaps, then, the appropriate test is not ability to prove that mankind has affected the Earth’s climate; rather, it’s incumbent upon challengers to disprove (falsify) such claims. Something that  hasn’t happened and likely never will.

As for the ethics of human intervention into the environment, utilitarianism is the usual measure. That is to say, the consequences of human activity upon the environment govern the ethical judgments one makes of behavioural outcomes to nature. However, we must be cautious not to translate consequences solely in terms of benefits or disadvantages to humankind’s welfare; our welfare appropriately matters, of course, but not to the exclusion of all else in our environment. A bias to which we have often repeatedly succumbed.

The danger of such skewed calculations may be in sliding into what the philosopher Peter Singer coined ‘speciesism’. This is where, hierarchically, we place the worth of humans above all else in nature, as if the latter is solely at our beck and call. This anthropocentric favouring of ourselves is, I suggest, arbitrary and too narrow. The bias is also arguably misguided, especially if it disregards other species — depriving them of autonomy and inherent rights — irrespective of the sophistication of their consciousness. To this point, the 18th/19th-century utilitarian Jeremy Bentham asserted, ‘Can [animals] feel? If they can, then they deserve moral consideration’.

Assuredly, human beings are endowed with cognition that’s in many ways vastly more sophisticated than that of other species. Yet, without lapsing into speciesism, there seem to be distinct limits to the comparison, to avoid committing what’s referred to as a ‘category mistake’ — in this instance, assigning qualities to species (from orangutans and porpoises to snails and amoebas) that belong only to humans. In other words, an overwrought egalitarianism. Importantly, however, that’s not the be-all of the issue. Our planet is teeming not just with life, but with other features — from mountains to oceans to rainforest — that are arguably more than mere accouterments for simply enriching our existence. Such features have ‘intrinsic’ or inherent value — that is, they have independent value, apart from the utilitarianism of satisfying our needs and wants.

For perspective, perhaps it would be better to regard humans as nodes in what we consider a complex ‘bionet’. We are integral to nature; nature is integral to us; in their entirety, the two are indissoluble. Hence, while skirting implications of panpsychism — where everything material is thought to have at least an element of consciousness — there should be prima facie respect for all creation: from animate to inanimate. These elements have more than just the ‘instrumental’ value of satisfying the purposes of humans; all of nature is itself intrinsically the ends, not merely the means. Considerations of aesthetics, culture, and science, though important and necessary, aren’t sufficient.

As such, there is an intrinsic moral imperative not only to preserve Earth, but for it and us jointly to flourish — per Aristotle’s notion of ‘virtue’, with respect and care, including for the natural world. It’s a holistic view that concedes, on both the utilitarian and intrinsic sides of the moral equation, mutually serving roles. This position accordingly pushes back against the hubristic idea that human-centricism makes sense if the rest of nature collectively amounts only to a backstage for our purposes. That is, a backstage that provides us with a handy venue where we act out our roles, whose circumstances we try to manage (sometimes ham-fistedly) for self-satisfying purposes, where we tinker ostensibly to improve, and whose worth (virtue) we believe we’re in a position to judge rationally and bias-free.

It’s worth reflecting on a thought experiment, dubbed ‘the last man’, that the Australian philosopher Richard Routley introduced in the 1970s. He envisioned a single person surviving ‘the collapse of the world system’, choosing to go about eliminating ‘every living thing, animal and plant’, knowing that there’s no other person alive to be affected. Routley concluded that ‘one does not have to be committed to esoteric values to regard Mr. Last Man as behaving badly’. Whether Last Man was, or wasn’t, behaving unethically goes to the heart of intrinsic versus utilitarian values regarding nature —and presumptions about human supremacy in that larger calculus.

Groups like the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have laid down markers as to tipping points beyond which extreme weather events might lead to disastrously runaway effects on the environment and humanity. Instincts related to the ‘tragedy of the commons’ — where people rapaciously consume natural resources and pollute, disregarding the good of humanity at large — have not yet been surmounted. That some other person, or other community, or other country will shoulder accountability for turning back the wave of environmental destruction and the upward-spiking curve of climate extremes has hampered the adequacy of attempted progress. Nature has thrown down the gauntlet. Will humanity pick it up in time?

Picture Post #48: Philosophic Reflections on a Lunar View of Earth

Image Credit: NASA/JSC  This view taken  July 20, 1969,  from the Apollo 11 spacecraft shows the Earth rising above the moon's horizon. 

Posted by Keith Tidman

Half a century after the Apollo 11 astronauts stepped onto the heavily pockmarked moon, a quarter of a million miles away, much of the world has recently been savoring again the grandeur of the achievement. 

The feat symbolized humankind’s intrepid instincts. To venture into space as explorers once riskily did across Earth’s threatening oceans and landmasses. To satisfy a gnawing curiosity, placing footprints, as those astronauts did, onto unknown and little-known shores.

From this comparatively short distance, Earth still looks startlingly small and lonely — even humble, given its cloaking by the atmosphere. How might the image of our planet change, then, as cameras peel back even farther: from elsewhere in the Milky Way and well beyond? After all, distances in space eventually become light-years.

As Earth shrinks with distance, does the meaningfulness of our planet and its inhabitants shrink in parallel, in the vast cosmic backdrop? Or do, say, the ‘volume and mass’ of what fundamentally matters about us rebelliously remain the same, no matter Earth’s size in the surrounding expanse? 

A rebelliousness that, one might submit, emerges from a web of human ‘consciousness’ that stretches around the planet — the collective synapses of seven billion people ceaselessly firing: the churn of dreams, imaginings, creations.

The seeming peacefulness here is just that: ‘seeming’. The pacific panorama masks the authentic nature of Earth: roiling with both natural and human activity. The phantom tranquility conceals one particular instinctual human behaviour: successive wars filling millennia of history. One has to wonder what in the human genome leads mankind to war to remedy differences and quench hegemonic cravings.

As we gaze, from moon’s vantage point, upon the orb of Earth, with its thin coating of air and water, we are starkly reminded of how vulnerably brittle the Earth’s environment is. And the responsibility humanity has as active guardians, to nurture the planet as the planet symbiotically nurtures us. Critical to the survival of our species.

What happens if we poison or exhaust the planet? Or will nature itself, being perhaps indifferent to humanity and coolly subjecting us to its whim, thereby render the planet uninhabitable, leading to another major extinction event? Are we only renters, not owners? Has the lunar walk deceived us into thinking we can leave Earth behind and inhabit somewhere else? Is that humanity’s imperative?

Is there a solemnity about the rearward-looking scene of a distanced Earth — an evocation of awe, prompting reflection? Is there ‘an aloneness’, too? The silence of space contrasts with the known cacophony of Earth, the latter a buzzing hive of devices that magnify our voices and boisterously shout our presence. Will that cacophony continue or ultimately end?

Anyone whose culture might have included the pre-digital-age children’s game of marbles might nostalgically recognise, from this lunar distance, the surface appearance of Earth, with the gauzy, seemingly chaotic swirling patterns on Earth’s surface. Our mind’s eye might give recognisable form to those patterns.

Future generations will grasp, better than us, how this one step on another cosmic body, however craggy and nearby it is, served to spur far more ambitious tours through space, whether by human beings or sophisticated thinking apparatuses — to face down the harsh environment of space as we  scratch our exploratory itch.

PP #48: Philosophic Reflections on a Lunar View of Earth

This view taken  July 20, 1969,  from the Apollo 11 spacecraft shows the Earth rising
above the moon's horizon. (Image credit: NASA/JSC)

Posted by Keith Tidman

Half a century after the Apollo 11 astronauts stepped onto the heavily pockmarked moon, a quarter of a million miles away, much of the world has recently been savoring again the grandeur of the achievement. Reaffirmation of the ‘giant leap for mankind’ legendarily beamed back to Earth, and the ambitious revisualisation of our space-based destiny and vistas.

The feat symbolised humankind’s intrepid instincts. To venture into space, as Earth-bound explorers once riskily did across threatening oceans and landmasses. To satisfy a gnawing curiosity, placing footprints, as these resilient astronauts did, onto unknown and little-known shores. And in the doing, be in awe of the oneness and most-fundamental architecture of humanity — the very nature of our being.

From this comparatively short distance, Earth still looks startlingly small and lonely — even humble, given its cloaking by the atmosphere. Yet, humankind might discover it isn’t alone; the cosmos brims with habitable planets. In that endeavour, how might the image of our planet change, then, as cameras peel back even farther: from elsewhere in the Milky Way and well beyond? As distances in space turn into light-years.

As Earth shrinks with distance, does the meaningfulness of our planet and its inhabitants shrink in parallel, in the vast cosmic backdrop, contesting humankind’s immodestly self-styled honorific of ‘exceptional’? Does our reality change? Or do, say, the ‘volume and mass’ of what fundamentally matters about us — our purpose — rebelliously remain unaffected, defining our place in the larger scheme, no matter Earth’s size in the surrounding cold expanse? 

A rebelliousness that, one might submit, emerges from a web of human ‘consciousness’ that stretches around the planet — the neurons and synapses (connectomes) of seven-and-a-half billion people ceaselessly firing: the stuff of dreams, imaginings, creations. Integral, perhaps, to a larger cosmic consciousness: and again, the stuff of dreams, imaginings, creations.

The seeming peacefulness in the image at top is just that: ‘seeming’. The pacific panorama masks the true nature of Earth: roiling with both natural and human activity. The phantom tranquility conceals one of our instinctual human behaviours: successive wars filling millennia of history. One wonders what idiosyncratically in the human genome leads mankind to war to remedy differences and trifling grievances, as well as quench hegemonic cravings. All the while paradoxically juxtaposed with the astounding complexities of humankind’s diverse civilisations and cultures.

As we gaze, from moon’s vantage point, upon the orb of Earth, with its thin coating of air and water, we are reminded of how vulnerably brittle the Earth’s environment is. Especially at the environment’s intersections with not-uncommonly remorseless technology. Existential risks abound. We’re reminded of the responsibility humanity has as active (proactive) guardians, to nurture the planet as the planet symbiotically nurtures us. Critical, we might agree, to the survival and continued evolution of our species.

What happens if we misguidedly, even disinterestedly, poison or exhaust the planet, as it hangs precariously in space? Or might nature, perhaps indifferent to humanity and coolly subjecting us to its whim, itself render the planet uninhabitable — leading to another major extinction event? Are we only renters, not owners? Did the lunar visit introduce a new imperative: to leave Earth behind and inhabit somewhere else?

Is there a solemnity about the rearward-looking scene of a distanced Earth — an awe that prompts reflection? A scene made all the more evocative by our believing that Earth is immersed in a sort of cosmic sea — of dark matter, dark energy, quantum fluctuations, and more. Is there the perception of ‘aloneness’, too, our seemingly distanced from everyone and everything else in that cosmic sea? The silence of the gaping, inky space contrasts with the cacophony of Earth, the latter a hive of devices that magnify our voices and echo our presence. Will that cacophony continue, or ultimately go silent?

In that presence, we marvel that humankind, dwelling on the comparatively tiny planet seen from the lunar perspective, nevertheless has the cognitive wherewithal to ponder and increasingly understand the cosmology of the whole universe: its beginning, its evolution, its current circumstances, its future. A study in the making, propelled by an irresistible impulse to know.

Anyone whose culture might have included the pre-digital-age children’s game of marbles may nostalgically recognise, from this lunar distance, the surface appearance of Earth, with its gauzy, chaotically swirling patterns. We admire its familiarly abstract beauty. All the while suspecting that there’s order interweaving the deception of chaos. Surrounding this marble-like Earth is a bewildering stillness and blackness — a blackness majestically interrupted, however, by galaxies and stunning phenomena like the Pillars of Creation.

Future generations will grasp, better than us, how this one step on another cosmic body, however craggy and nearby the moon is, served to spur far more ambitious tours through space, whether by human beings or sophisticated thinking apparatuses — to face down the harsh environment of space as we inexorably scratch our exploratory itch.

Our Destined Date

Posted by Jeremy Dyer *

Red Sky at Night II by Kimberly Conrad

The rivers run, the leaves do fall
The earth still turns its trick
The oceans and the prairies roar
But we are very sick.

Blasted earth, the toxins run
The blood is poisoned well
We cannot survive the fun
Of our consumer hell.

Garbage, plastic, rusted bike
It all runs to the sea
Killing man and beast alike
That poison's killing me.

When will we wake, alas too late
It's past the point of fixing
There is a destined, horror date
That no-one will be missing.

I have the hope that birds will sing
Kind winds will blow again
Stopping our destructioning
Healing up our pain.

But will we wake and heal the earth
Get rid of all the 'leaders'?
Reduce the greed, respect the hearth
Deal with all the breeders?

The earth will die, I think it's done
We're in the final hour
What's over when the song is sung
Is the funeral bower.

The rivers run, black as hell
They're dying as we speak
The urgent answers that we seek
Won't be on tv this week.

* Jeremy Dyer is an acclaimed Cape Town artist.

Turkey, Nuclear Energy and the Remarkable Power of Money

All friends again. Recep Erdogan and Vladimir Putin at the Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant ground-breaking ceremony this month

By Martin Cohen

This week saw Turkey officially 'launching' it's first nuclear reactor, Russian-designed, with specailly invited guest, that country's president, Mr Putin. Which in itself is quite a turn-around since it was only on the 24 November 2015 that a Turkish combat aircraft shot down a Russian jet on the Turkish-Syrian border. After this incident, President Putin spoke of  'a stab in the back by the accomplices of terrorists' and warned that it would have 'significant consequences including for relations between Russia and Turkey. And yet, and yet...  two and a bit years on all is smiles and sunshine again in the relationship.

What could have created such harmony from discord? And the answer, as ever in international and domestic politics alike, is money. For the Russians, the rapprochment has other strategic benefits too, yet for Turkey, the nuclear deal looks at first glance odd. But I wrote a book* a few years back about nuclear energy and in the process of researching it, I realised that with nuclear power nothing is as it seems.

And in Turkey, nuclear politics is really about money. Or perhaps we should say the lack of it. Because Turkey has made four attempts to start a nuclear power program, beginning in the 1960s, and still is nowhere near to generating any nuclear electricity.

The problem is not about the political will - Turkish governments whether civilian led or military-led have long hankered after the idea of being a 'nuclear power', and it certainly is not due to any respect for safety or the environment. The complete deafness to safety considerations is shown very clearly by the fact that the signed and sealed plan for Turkey's first nuclear reactor at Akkuyu Bay on the Mediterranean coast is located smack bang in the middle of an earthquake danger zone. If the plant is built (see below) and if it ever starts operating, then it is highly likely to be the first one destroyed by an earthquake.

Should the Turkish government care? Yet environmental factors have always counted for little in that country's drive for hydro-electric power.. Thus, the massive Ilisu dam project on the Tigris river, was after an international outcry over the flooding of the ancient city of Hasankeyf and yet the Ilisu dam is dwarfed by the Beyhan project on the Euphrates, also in the Kurdish south-east, where fears of the forced evacuation of the local population evoke particularly bitter memories. Here an energy project is in reality part of amore sinster destruction of that much-oppressed stateless people.

No, the big questionmark and problem that dogs the nuclear industry in Turkey is simply that (behind the smokescreen) both the reactors and the electricity produced are very, very expensive. Thus the only way the Turkish government can afford nuclear plants is to get outside countries to pay for them - and then let the foreign investors charge premium prices to the power consumers for years to come. A similar foolish contract has recently been entered into by the British in order to persuade someone to fund a new nuclear reactor for the UK.

The UK had great difficulty persuading anyone to sink money into nuclear - but got around the doubts by making the taxpayers ultimately liable for all the risks. Alas, from the perspective of the nuclear industry, Turkey does not provide what the professionals like to call 'a secure environment' for risky, multi-billion dollar, investment. Inflation is high, the economy is in deficit each year, about half of it due to energy imports, and the country's debt is well over $100 billion. 

In Western countries governments change, but contracts once signed are sacrosanct. However, in Turkey, political change is more violent. There is the history of military coups d'état in recent years - in 1960, 1971, and 1980 - while the forced resignation of Necmettin Erbakan in 1997 did not do much to reassure investors either. On the other hand, the Turkish electricity sector is effectively a state monopoly,  and  the possibility of Turkey being allowed to join the European Union, remote though it ever seemed, barely threatens that these days, even over a timescale of 40 years which is the time-scale necessary for the moneymen who fund nuclear plants to feel confident they can make their profits.

All of which is to say again that Turkey's nuclear program is about cash, not to say wheeling and dealing. The energy minister, Berat Albayrak, who is also Erdogan's son-in-law, just fancy that! called the start of work on Akkuyu the realisation of a national dream. Not to say that the vast sums of money involved in unuclear projects tend to stick to the hands of all those involved.

Turkey is located at the centre of transport routes between the vast oil and gas reserves of the Middle East and Central Asia, and the markets of Europe. Logically speaking then, it would seem that the country would is in a unique position to benefit from low-cost fossil fuels, without even mentioning its own hydroelectric, fossil, and renewable energy resources. Yet somehow Turkey has ended up being dependent on cheap gas imports from Russia and Iran, the arrangements with whom (in the manner of all bargain basement deals) have in recent years proved 'unreliable'. At one point Turkey even broke off one contract with Russia, its biggest gas supplier. If the plant is ever built, Turkey will be dependent on Russian support to fuel and run it.



At least there seems to be no real sense that Turkey is still working towards a nuclear bomb. Indeed, there is the strange historic role of Turkey as a conduit of nuclear secrets from the US to Pakistan and - of all people - Israel, a country which the government regularly rails against for having driven the proverbial truck through the principles of non-proliferation. Commenting on this, one CIA operative told the London newspaper, The Sunday Times:

"We have no indication that Turkey has its own nuclear ambitions. But the Turks are traders. To my knowledge they became big players in the late 1990s,"

More 'wheeling and dealing' has resulted in several cases of highly toxic nuclear waste turning up in Turkish industrial zones, apparently brought in surreptitiously in return for corrupt payments.

Over the years, Turkish nuclear power projects (as with nuclear projects in many countries) have come and gone, announced with a fanfare only to disappear without trace. Yet it looks like things are more serious now. Russia’s President has promised to back the project with more than $20 billion, while Turkey’s prime minister planned to borrow another $2.5 billion on the financial markets.

How can such extraordinary sums be repaid? The project represents a ball and chain being tied to the Turkish economy, a burden on the many that likewise will make the governing clique fantastically wealthy.

The Turkish public are apprehensive about nuclear, looking warily over their shoulders at the plants run in Armenia and Bulgaria which are generally thought of as dangerous. And Turkey is the one of the countries which was affected by the disaster of Chernobyl, even if the accident has always been kept out of the public debate about energy policy. Instead, the discussion has been focussed on the economic arguments. But here too, nuclear power has a lot of explaining to do.

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* The Doomsday Machine: The High Price of Nuclear Energy, the World's Most Dangerous Fuel

Picture Post #34: Watching the Tide

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'


Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

Photo credit: students of  A Mundzuku Ka Hina, communications workshop. Mozambique

From the plastic on the lower right corner, moving to the left, arise a man and woman, both with one hand touching their face and each with one arm posing on their leg, the diagonal movement flows into the blankets behind them out of the picture. This ‘line’ creates a certain ‘zone’ in which we seem to stand in front of a threshold.

Our eyes may enter ‘the gate’ ‘guarded’ between the two seated persons and the boy standing on the right, to look into a ‘dark’ space where people gather in a circle and diagonally expand to the left into another lateral diagonal line. The composition is as if we are introduced carefully in a gathering, ‘a zone’ we cannot truly enter, we glance at something that is far from us, almost secret.

The picture invites us to regard it from a distant point of view where, at first sight, a kind of picnic, a déjeuner sur l’herbe, slowly changes into something that is far more remote. And yet, this is how some people survive, these rubbish dumps are their home and their daily reality -- along with intoxication and poverty and helplessness as the other side of the coin.

And yet, there is something inspiring about the picture in the posture of the two person’s in the foreground and the boy: the impression is that of creating a ‘gate’ in which the ambiguity of contraries, that in ancient times was certainly seen as an essential element in speaking truth, yields to a logic of the inevitable raising problems that come with more recent social, industrial and political conditions, one in which words have to search for an adaption between truth and oblivion.

Thus as with many such terrible events that happen in the world, we hear about them, we see images, but it is not our skin. The observer, the spectator has a very protected stance

Last week in il Bairro di Hulene, which is the neighborhood of shanty homes raised around the lixeira (dump), seventeen people died under a mass of refuse that detached itself and slid down from the dump pile. Six houses and seven shacks were destroyed including a small ‘press’ that was there to crush the plastic and cans.

The Man who Invented Climate Change (and then disowned it)

Posted by Martin Cohen

The man who started it all off - Herbert Lamb. Source WP:NFCC#4

History, as ever gives an insight into the Climate Change debate. The historian of science, Bernie Lewin, has researched the views of the British scientist who for many years struggled to persuade governments that actually, yes, climate did change. Hubert Lamb, an academic and the founder of the influential Climatic Research Unit (better known by its acronym ‘CRU’) at the University of East Anglia in the UK, is conventionally credited with putting manmade Climate Change on the world agenda. He doesn't get many mentions though - because he came to detest the poltical abuses of his ideas.

Lamb was once described by one of his successors at the CRU, Trevor Davies ( probably self-servingly) as ‘the greatest climatologist of his time’. Davies credits him with ‘convincing the remaining doubters of the reality of climate variation on time-scales of decades and centuries’ and an obituary in Nature offers his great achievement as overturning the ‘old orthodoxy’ of climate stability. Other scientific admirers suggest that it was Lamb who first introduced the idea that climatic change has happened, and is still happening, on human time scales. But Bernie Lewin has no doubt that much of this is political fiction, noting that Lamb was far from the first to introduce the idea of a constantly changing climate. And where Lamb’s successor at his climate research centre found it, ‘ironic’ that even as the world became ‘acutely aware of global climate change’, Lamb maintained a guarded attitude to the importance of greenhouse warming, Lewin sees nothing odd in the position of a scientist advocating the idea of natural climate change being ‘guarded’ about the evidence of a global human influence. Awareness of past variability would rather tend towards scepticism of claims to have identified a single, new and extraordinary cause of climate change.

Hubert Lamb, in fact, was an old-school meteorologist, and there was something of a clash of cultures between those like him brought up on geology and weather records, and the new kinds of ‘climate scientists’ only recently tempted by research money into applying their mathematical skills to the natural world. Lamb expressed open scepticism of the theoretical physics used now to predict future climate trends noting that often the models failed to match reality. He argued for:

* the existence of negative feedbacks dampening warming trends where the climate modellers allowed only positive feedbacks amplifying them;
* that 20th century climate variation was better explained by natural factors (such as solar and volcanic effects);
* wonders how accurate the figures relied on for identifying relatively tiny temperature trends even were.

Such doubts led him to spend time analysing the political impetus for the new climate science, including vested interests, and the reasons why climate modelling in particular received so much support. Lamb completed his memoirs in 1997, just a few months before Kyoto, the international summit in which man-made Climate Change was given it preeminent role. In these memoirs he laments:

‘It is unfortunate that studies produced nowadays treat these and other matters related to changes of climate as if they are always, and only, attributable to the activities of Man and side-effects on the climate.’

This post is lightly adapted from Martin Cohen's book:
Paradigm Shift: How expert opinions keep changing on life, the universe, and everything

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Diet Tips of the Great Philosophers ≠92: Henry Thoreau and Green Beans

Posted by Martin Cohen

Many of the philosophers whom we rely on to represent little oases of good sense and rationality in a disorganised world, disappointingly turnout, on closer inspection, to be not only rather eccentric, but downright irrational. David Henry Thoreau, an anarchist who eked out a living by making pencils while living in a shed by a pond, on the other hand, appears even at first glance to be rather eccentric. Short, shabby, wild-haired and generally rather unprepossessing, he nonetheless seems to have anticipated much of the ecological renaissance that today’s philosophers (and diet gurus) have only just begun to talk about. Oh, and yes, he was always rather thin.

In his Journal entry for January 7, 1857, Thoreau says of himself: 

'In the streets and in society I am almost invariably cheap and dissipated, my life is unspeakably mean. No amount of gold or respectability would in the least redeem it - dining with the Governor or a member of Congress! But alone in the distant woods or fields, in unpretending sprout-lands or pastures tracked by rabbits, even in a bleak and, to most, cheerless day, like this, when a villager would be thinking of his inn, I come to myself, I once more feel myself grandly related, and that cold and solitude are friends of mine.

I suppose that this value, in my case, is equivalent to what others get by churchgoing and prayer. I come home to my solitary woodland walk as the homesick go home. I thus dispose of the superfluous and see things as they are, grand and beautiful. . . I wish to . . . be sane a part of every day.'

He is famous for having spent two years living in a small wood cabin by a pond, and living off, not so much three fruits of the woods, but his own allotment. Naturally, Thoreau was a vegetarian. He remarks how one farmer said to him: ‘You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make the bones with;’ even as the farmer:

‘... religiously devoted a part of his day to supplying himself with the raw material of bones, walking all the while behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.’

Thoreau himself cultivated, not so much an allotment, as a small bean farm, of two and a half acres, which provided for himself the bulk of the food he ate –peas, corn, turnips, potatoes and above all green beans, the last of which crop he sold for extra cash. During the second year, he reduced his crops, if anything, writing:

‘ … that if one would live simply and eat only the crop which he raised, and raise no more than he ate, and not exchange it for an insufficient quantity of more luxurious and expensive things, he would need to cultivate only a few rods of ground, and that it would be cheaper to spade up that than to use oxen to plow it, and to select a fresh spot from time to time than to manure the old, and he could do all his necessary farm work as it were with his left hand at odd hours in the summer.’

He drank mainly water, writing that it was ‘the only drink for a wise man; wine is not so noble a liquor’ and worrying about the temptations of a cup of warm coffee, or of an evening with a dish of tea!

From life in the woods he learned, among other things, that it ‘cost incredibly little trouble to obtain one’s necessary food’ and that ‘a man may use as simple a diet as the animals, and yet retain health and strength.’

In a chapter of his most famous book, Walden, entitled simply, ‘The Bean Field,’ Thoreau records how:

‘I came to love my rows, my beans… They attached me to the earth, and so I got strength like Antæus. But why should I raise them? Only Heaven knows. This was my curious labor all summer — to make this portion of the earth’s surface, which had yielded only cinquefoil, blackberries, johnswort, and the like, before, sweet wild fruits and pleasant flowers, produce instead this pulse. What shall I learn of beans or beans of me? I cherish them, I hoe them, early and late I have an eye to them; and this is my day’s work.’

For Thoreau, buying food, allowing others to grow food for him, would have disconnected him from the land, from direct contact with Nature, the source of both his bodily and spiritual nourishment. It was not enough to just have something to eat; he also wanted the experience of growing it.

Diet tips:

Food that you’ve grown has a special quality
You don’t need to eat a huge range of things to be healthy 

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