The Pope can see what many atheist greens will not

George Monbiot in The Guardian



Who wants to see the living world destroyed? Who wants an end to birdsong, bees and coral reefs, the falcon’s stoop, the salmon’s leap? Who wants to see the soil stripped from the land, the sea rimed with rubbish?

No one. And yet it happens. Seven billion of us allow fossil fuel companies to push shut the narrow atmospheric door through which humanity stepped. We permit industrial farming to tear away the soil, banish trees from the hills, engineer another silent spring. We let the owners of grouse moors, 1% of the 1%, shoot and poison hen harriers, peregrines and eagles. We watch mutely as a small fleet of monster fishing ships trashes the oceans.

Why are the defenders of the living world so ineffective? It is partly, of course, that everyone is complicit; we have all been swept off our feet by the tide of hyperconsumption, our natural greed excited, corporate propaganda chiming with a will to believe that there is no cost. But perhaps environmentalism is also afflicted by a deeper failure: arising possibly from embarrassment or fear, a failure of emotional honesty






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FacebookTwitterPinterest ‘We have all been swept off our feet by the tide of hyperconsumption, our natural greed excited, corporate propaganda chiming with a will to believe that there is no cost’.

I have asked meetings of green-minded people to raise their hands if they became defenders of nature because they were worried about the state of their bank accounts. Never has one hand appeared. Yet I see the same people base their appeal to others on the argument that they will lose money if we don’t protect the natural world.

Such claims are factual, but they are also dishonest: we pretend that this is what animates us, when in most cases it does not. The reality is that we care because we love. Nature appealed to our hearts, when we were children, long before it appealed to our heads, let alone our pockets. Yet we seem to believe we can persuade people to change their lives through the cold, mechanical power of reason, supported by statistics.

I see the encyclical by Pope Francis, which will be published on Thursday, as a potential turning point. He will argue that not only the physical survival of the poor, but also our spiritual welfare depends on the protection of the natural world; and in both respects he is right.

I don’t mean that a belief in God is the answer to our environmental crisis. Among Pope Francis’s opponents is the evangelical US-based Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, which has written to him arguing that we have a holy duty to keep burning fossil fuel, as “the heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork”. It also insists that exercising the dominion granted to humankind in Genesis means tilling “the whole Earth”, transforming it “from wilderness to garden and ultimately to garden city”.

There are similar tendencies within the Vatican. Cardinal George Pell, its head of finance, currently immersed in a scandal involving paedophile priests in Australia, is a prominent climate change denier. His lecture to the Global Warming Policy Foundation was the usual catalogue of zombie myths (discredited claims that keep resurfacing), nonsequiturs and outright garbage championing, for example, the groundless claim that undersea volcanoes could be responsible for global warming. There are plenty of senior Catholics seeking to undermine the pope’s defence of the living world, which could explain why a draft of his encyclical was leaked. What I mean is that Pope Francis, a man with whom I disagree profoundly on matters such as equal marriage and contraception, reminds us that the living world provides not only material goods and tangible services, but is also essential to other aspects of our wellbeing. And you don’t have to believe in God to endorse that view.

In his beautiful book The Moth Snowstorm, Michael McCarthy suggests that a capacity to love the natural world, rather than merely to exist within it, might be a uniquely human trait. When we are close to nature, we sometimes find ourselves, as Christians put it, surprised by joy: “A happiness with an overtone of something more, which we might term an elevated or, indeed, a spiritual quality.”

He believes we are wired to develop a rich emotional relationship with nature. A large body of research suggests that contact with the living world is essential to our psychological and physiological wellbeing. (A paper published this week, for example, claims that green spaces around city schools improve children’s mental performance.)

This does not mean that all people love nature; what it means, McCarthy proposes, is that there is a universal propensity to love it, which may be drowned out by the noise that assails our minds. As I’ve found while volunteering with the outdoor education charity Wide Horizons, this love can be provoked almost immediately, even among children who have never visited the countryside before. Nature, McCarthy argues, remains our home, “the true haven for our psyches”, and retains an astonishing capacity to bring peace to troubled minds.

Acknowledging our love for the living world does something that a library full of papers on sustainable development and ecosystem services cannot: it engages the imagination as well as the intellect. It inspires belief; and this is essential to the lasting success of any movement.

Is this a version of the religious conviction from which Pope Francis speaks? Or could his religion be a version of a much deeper and older love? Could a belief in God be a way of explaining and channelling the joy, the burst of love that nature sometimes inspires in us? Conversely, could the hyperconsumption that both religious and secular environmentalists lament be a response to ecological boredom: the void that a loss of contact with the natural world leaves in our psyches?

Of course, this doesn’t answer the whole problem. If the acknowledgement of love becomes the means by which we inspire environmentalism in others, how do we translate it into political change? But I believe it’s a better grounding for action than pretending that what really matters to us is the state of the economy. By being honest about our motivation we can inspire in others the passions that inspire us.

Perhaps the world's conspiracy theorists have been right all along

Alex Proud in The Telegraph
 
We used to laugh at conspiracy theorists, but from Fifa to banking scandals and the Iraq War, it seems they might have been on to something after all, says Alex Proud


'I want to believe': Mulder and Scully (David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson) in The X Files Photo: 20th Century Fox
 

Conspiracy theories used to be so easy.

You’d have your mate who, after a few beers, would tell you that the moon landings were faked or that the Illuminati controlled everything or that the US government was holding alien autopsies in Area 51. And you’d be able to dismiss this because it was all rubbish.

Look, you’d say, we have moon rock samples and pictures and we left laser reflectors on the surface and... basically you still don’t believe me but that’s because you’re mad and no proof on earth (or the moon) would satisfy you.

It’s true that there was always the big one which wasn’t quite so easily dismissed. This was the Kennedy assassination - but here you could be fairly sure that the whole thing was a terrible, impenetrable murky morass. You knew that some things never would be known (or would be released, partially redacted by the CIA, 200 years in the future). And you knew that whatever the truth was it was probably a bit dull compared to your mate’s flights of fantasy involving the KGB, the Mafia and the military-industrial complex. Besides, it all made for a lot of very entertaining films and books.

Photo: Reuters

This nice, cozy state of affairs lasted until the early 2000s. But then something changed. These days conspiracy theories don’t look so crazy and conspiracy theorists don’t look like crackpots. In fact, today’s conspiracy theory is tomorrow’s news headlines. It’s tempting, I suppose, to say we live in a golden age of conspiracy theories, although it’s only really golden for the architects of the conspiracies. From the Iraq war to Fifa to the banking crisis, the truth is not only out there, but it’s more outlandish than anything we could have made up.
 
Of course, our real-life conspiracies aren’t much like The X-Files – they’re disappointingly short on aliens and the supernatural. Rather, they’re more like John Le Carre books. Shady dealings by powerful people who want nothing more than to line their profits at the expense of others. The abuse of power. Crazy ideologues who try and create their own facts for fun and profit. Corporations supplanting governments via regulatory capture.

So, what are some of our biggest conspiracies?

The Iraq War

The most disgusting abuse of power in a generation and a moral quagmire that never ends. America is attacked by terrorists and so, declares war on a country that had nothing whatsoever to do with the attacks, while ignoring an oil rich ally which had everything to do with them. The justification for war is based on some witches’ brew of faulty intelligence, concocted intelligence and ignored good intelligence. Decent people are forced to lie on an international stage. All sensible advice is ignored and rabid neo-con draft dodgers hold sway on military matters. The UK joins this fool’s errand for no good reason. Blood is spilled and treasure is spent.

The result is a disaster that was predicted only by Middle Eastern experts, post-conflict planners and several million members of the public. Thousands of allied troops and hundreds of thousands of blameless Iraqis are killed, although plenty of companies and individuals benefit from the US dollars that were shipped out, literally, by the ton. More recently, Iraq, now in a far worse state than it ever was under any dictator, has become an incubator for more terrorists, which is a special kind of geopolitical irony lost entirely on the war’s supporters.

And yet, we can’t really bring ourselves to hold anyone accountable. Apportioning responsibility would be difficult, painful and inconvenient, so we shrug as the men behind all this enjoy their well-upholstered retirements despite being directly and personally responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths and trillions of wasted dollars. And the slow drip, drip of revelations continues, largely ignored by the public, despite the horrendous costs which (in the UK) could have been spent on things like the NHS or properly equipping our armed forces.

Fifa

The conspiracy du jour. We always knew Fifa was shonky and bribey, but most of us thought the more outlandish claims were just that. Not so. As it turns out, Fifa is a giant corruption machine and it now looks like every World Cup in the last three decades, even the ones we were cool about, like South Africa, could have been fixes.

Photo: AFP

On the plus side, it seems that something may be done, but it’ll be far too late to help honest footballing nations who missed their moment in the sun. For those who say "it’s only a stupid sport", well, recently we’ve heard accusations of arms deals for votes involving... wait for it... Saudi Arabia. The Saudi connection makes me wonder if, soon, we’ll be looking a grand unified conspiracy theory which brings together lots of other conspiracy theories under one corrupt, grubby roof.

The banking crisis

A nice financial counterpoint to Iraq. Virtually destroy the western financial system in the name of greed. Get bailed out by the taxpayers who you’ve been ripping off. And then carry on as if nothing whatsoever has happened. No jail, no meaningful extra regulation, the idea of being too big to fail as much of a joke as it was in 2005. Not even an apology. In fact, since the crisis you caused, things have got much better for you – and worse for everyone else. Much like Iraq, no-one has been held responsible or even acknowledged any wrongdoing. Again, this is partially because it’s so complicated and hard – but mainly because those who caused the crisis are so well represented in the governments of the countries who bailed them out. Oh, and while we’re at it, the banks played a part in the Fifa scandal. As conspiracy theorists will tell you, everything is connected.

Paedophiles

This one seems like a particularly dark and grisly thriller. At first it was just a few rubbish light entertainers. Then it was a lot more entertainers. Then we had people muttering about the political establishment – and others counter-muttering don’t be ridiculous, that’s a conspiracy theory. But it wasn’t. Now,it’s a slow-motion train crash and an endless series of glacial government inquiries. The conspiracy theorists point out that a lot of real stuff only seems to come out after the alleged perpetrators are dead or so senile it no longer matters. It’s hard to disagree with them. It’s also hard to imagine what kind of person would be so in thrall to power that they’d cover up child abuse.

And the rest

Where do you start? We could look at the EU and pick anything from its rarely signed-off accounts to the giant sham that let Greece join the Euro in the first place. We could look at UK defence procurement – and how we get so much less bang for our buck than France. We could peer at the cloying, incestuous relationship between the UK’s political class and its media moguls and how our leaders still fawn over a man whose poisonous control over so much of our media dates back to dodgy deal in 1981 that was denied for 30 years. We could look at the NSA and its intimate/ bullying relationship with tech companies. And we could go on and on and on.

But actually what we should be thinking is that a lot of this is what happens what you dismantle regulatory frameworks. This is what happens when you let money run riot and you allow industries to police themselves. This is what happens when the rich and powerful are endlessly granted special privileges, celebrated and permitted or even encouraged to place themselves above the law. And this is what happens when ordinary people feel bored by and excluded from politics, largely because their voices matter so little for the reasons above. Effectively, we are all living in Italy under Silvio Berlusconi. What’s the point in anything?

But actually, there is some hope. While the number of rich and powerful people who think they can get away with anything has undoubtedly grown, technology has made leaking much easier. Wikileaks may not be perfect, but it’s a lot better than no leaks at all. The other thing that gives me succour is the public’s view of the bankers. We still hate them, which is absolutely as it should be. And slowly this contempt is starting to hurt the masters of the universe. It’s notable that, recently, banking has started tumbling down the down the list of desirable careers. So, I suppose the solution is simple: we need more regulation, we need more transparency and we need more public shame and disgust. We might even get the last two; I’m less hopeful about the first.

In the X-Files, Fox Mulder’s famous catchphrase was, “I want to believe” but that’s because the conspiracy theories he dealt with were rather good fun. Ours, by contrast, tend to involve an endless procession of wealthy old men abusing their power. So I don’t want to believe any more. I want my kids to grow up in a world where conspiracy theories are something you laugh at.

The menace of the last-wicket stand: Come in, No. 11!

Simon Barnes in Wisden India

It’s time to resurrect the Campaign for Real Number Elevens. We are in danger of losing touch with one of cricket’s most ancient traditions. One of the last Test series in England in which both teams included a classic No. 11 involved India, in 1990. And it was all the more inspiring for the contrast between them.

India had the leg-spinner Narendra Hirwani – a wee sleekit cow’rin tim’rous beastie of a batter, convinced that every ball was an explosive device best negotiated from square leg. In 17 Tests he scored 54 runs at 5.40. During that series, when India required 24 to save the follow-on at Lord’s, Kapil Dev launched Eddie Hemmings for four sixes in a row, rather than trust Hirwani to face a delivery. He was right, too: Hirwani fell first ball next over.

England countered with Devon Malcolm, a fast bowler convinced of his own immortality: a mighty, wide-shouldered swiper who never let his own poor eyesight – in his early days he played in Hank Marvin horn-rims – get in the way of his belief that every ball bowled to him belonged on the far side of the boundary. This approach brought him 236 runs in 40 Tests at 6.05.

But these guys are history. The contemporary No. 11 can bat. It’s not that every clown now wants to play Hamlet; they always did. These days, every clown can play the attendant lord, infinitely capable of swelling a progress, or starting a scene or two as circumstances require. As a result, the fall of the ninth wicket is no longer the signal to put the kettle on. The last-wicket stand used to be one of cricket’s brilliant jokes. Now it’s got serious.

In the First Test at Trent Bridge last summer, the Indian first innings concluded with a last-wicket stand worth 111, between Bhuvneshwar Kumar and Mohammed Shami. These days, though, substantial last-wicket stands come along like the No. 49 bus, and the next arrived one innings later, as Joe Root and Jimmy Anderson put on a Test-record 198; Anderson was disappointed when he got out for 81.

The previous year the Ashes had begun with Australia’s last-wicket stand of 163 – also at Trent Bridge, also a Test record – between Phillip Hughes and Ashton Agar. Agar, the No. 11, was out for 98; it turned out he was a far better batsman than bowler. And, in 2012, Denesh Ramdin and Tino Best hit 143 for the tenth wicket for West Indies at Edgbaston.

So let’s savour a few stats. In last summer’s England–India series, the average tenth-wicket stand was 38, higher than for any series of more than three matches. The previous-best was 33 – for the 2013 Ashes. The last wickets of England and India contributed 499 runs, another record; third, with 432, is the 2013 Ashes. Second and fourth in the list are the 1924-25 and 1894-95 Ashes, outliers from pre-history. The current numbers appear to indicate a trend – and 13 of the 26 last-wicket hundred stands have come this century.

A decent last-wicket stand is less of a surprise than it used to be. But its increasing regularity makes it even more irritating for the fielding side. It’s a combination of free runs and derisive mockery of the opposition. It’s a classic win double: the batting side feels better and better, while the bowling side feels ghastlier and ghastlier. It’s not as if someone has stolen an advantage: it’s more as if God Himself has taken sides.

It’s a time when the team that are more batted against than batting tend to lose their head. They start a bumper war; since these stands usually happen on flat pitches, that tends to be a doomed project. Or they try to get only one batsman out, which means that the man higher up the order can focus freely on scoring runs. And the longer the No. 11 stays in, the more capable he feels about looking after himself, and the more he can take annoying singles.

A terrible feeling gathers in the bowling side: this ought not to be happening. It’s a freak, and it’s freakishly unfair. In truth, it’s a freak no longer. The spectacle of tired bowlers running in on flat pitches to jubilant tailenders while infuriated fielders dive about in vain is becoming one of cricket’s staples.

This can be doubly difficult for the bowling side if the captain is an opening batsman, such as Alastair Cook for England: mentally preparing to bat at the drop of the next wicket, but unable to take that wicket, and unable to think with absolute clarity about how best to do so. It’s captaincy as a classic frustration dream: on a par with running for the train through a sea of treacle, or opening the exam paper and realising you don’t understand the questions, still less know the answers.

It’s not hard to work out how this has come about. Ever since the one-day game became part of cricket, bowlers regularly bat in important match situations. They know that, when it comes to selection between two bowlers of apparently equal merit, the nod goes to the better batsman. Bowlers work at batting. They have nets, they have coaches, they have batting buddies.

Meanwhile, protective equipment, especially the helmet, has made it much easier to be brave against fast bowling, while modern bat technology means that even mis-hits reach the boundary. And if this were not enough to tip things in favour of more and bigger last-wicket stands, the tendency to produce chief executives’ wickets has made these former oddities into statistical certainties. Three of those recent monster stands were at Trent Bridge; their pitch for the India match was rated “poor” by the ICC.

So among the general hilarity of the last-wicket stand – and they are gloriously funny to everyone not bowling or fielding at the time – there is a point that is serious, not to say sinister. It’s not just that tailenders have learned how to bat: it’s that the essential balance between bat and ball has made a significant shift.

It’s easier to bat and score runs than it has been at any time in the history of cricket. The proliferation of huge last-wicket stands indicates that something has gone seriously amiss. Take that England–India game at Trent Bridge. One can be regarded as good fortune. Two looks like misgovernment on a global scale.

From Fifa to Tony Blair — I’ve tried to understand the rich, but I just can't

Yasmin Alibhai Brown in the Independent

Tony Blair is a very busy man – so many calling on him, so little time. He had, apparently, agreed to speak at a conference on world hunger in Stockholm. Last year his very good friend Bill Clinton spoke at this same gathering, organised by Eat, a non-profit organisation set up by Swedish philanthropists. But a slight hitch came up with the Blair booking: reports suggest our erstwhile PM allegedly wanted £330,000 for a 20-minute sermon. (Clinton got £327,000 for 30 minutes.) Eat thought the fee too high, although Blair’s office insists money wasn’t spoken of and he simply had a previous engagement.

For whatever reason, Blair will not now orate stirringly on how to save the millions who live on less than 82 pence per day. Tony’s office says the money was to go to the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women. But like cheap room deodorisers, that late fragrance of good intent cannot overpower the bad smell coming from this story.

The Fifa drama is also all about money. Football does not even have a bit part. All the top men drive fast in the fog of power and wealth, without a moral compass, and still pretend that they are maligned heroes. Prince William lectures them about probity and corruption without so much as a second thought for the royal finances and tax secrecy.

This week also had Iain Duncan Smith, a fervent Catholic and man of some wealth, considering draconian child benefit restrictions. To save £2.5bn per year he wants to cut the payment from £20.70 for the first child to £13.70 – and is also looking at restricting benefits to two children. To this quiet man, poverty must be as hard to understand as godlessness.

Meanwhile, well-heeled George Osborne is to meet the Queen to review grants given to the royals. The boilers are too old, the energy bills for all those palaces too high. Unlike other pensioners, our monarch will not have to resort to hot water bottles, of that we can be sure. Nor will she visit those in her kingdom who shiver day and night, have barely enough to eat and live in rat-infested rooms.

This was also the week when Thomas Cook was humbled after failing to respond with basic humanity to the parents of two young children who died of carbon monoxide poisoning in a Corfu hotel.

I find all this alien and deeply baffling. How do the rich think? How are they so solipsistic, so self-serving and self-promoting? Are they born that way or are they raised as members of a particularly hard tribe? We must try to understand people who have it all, now that we are to be governed by a clique of the very privileged.

And so, in that spirit, I made myself read a column penned by entrepreneur Luke Johnson, son of Paul Johnson, the former editor of the New Statesman who walked briskly rightwards to become an ardent Tory.

To be successful, you need a dream team, sayest Luke, a blue-eyed dynamo and chairman of Risk Capital Partners: “First and foremost is the spouse... to provide emotional and practical backing. Self-employment can be desolate. Most entrepreneurs are obsessives, and often selfish in the pursuit of their ambitions. They require a tolerant spouse to provide relief...” Also a devoted “Super PA”. I gave up reading halfway through, because the man was so unutterably self-satisfied. Getting into these mindsets is harder than I thought.

Now, most Ugandan Asians are natural-born moneymakers. The exiles who were resented and unwanted in 1972 have made good. Many are millionaires and right wing. Like the Tory minister Priti Patel, too many of my ex-compatriots believe in self-reliance, low taxes, hard punishment and a social Darwinism. Benefits, in their view, only encourage layabouts and wastrels.

I had relatives back in Uganda who lived in grand houses, paid no tax and expected deference. Among my classmates, a few became doctors, the rest went into business and, yes, made bucks. I think I was born with a mutant gene.

Two guys with big money offered to marry me. One still hoots when he sees my Nissan Micra and always follows up with some unsolicited advice: “You are clever and very stupid. Money would make you powerful.

“All these politicians come to us. They don’t read your words – who cares about what you say? We make the world go round. You, your type, and lazy bastards on benefits make it slow down. You should be worshipping us.” So glad I didn’t marry the bald, fat scumbag.

These capitalists really do see themselves as redeemers, even those who pay their staff the lowest wages and do little to make the world a better place. Men such as Bill Gates do use their money to alleviate poverty, but they are rare.

The rest, even when they give cash, want something in return – an honour, a name on some grand wall, a PR victory. Sure, if they help the arts or the unemployed, give them the accolades and respect they crave. But what of the CEOs and shareholders who feel no social obligations, yet want more gratitude or see themselves as victims of deep ingratitude?

Tom Perkins, a US venture capitalist, complained that the recent war on the rich was like “the Holocaust”. (He later apologised.) Sam Zell, the American chief executive of an equity company – and a zealous defender of the top one per cent of global earners – says “subsidising people and disincentivising [the poor]” through benefits is the problem. Those who don’t succeed don’t want to try.

I read books on the minds and methods of the rich. They think selfishness is a virtue and that poverty (not money) is the root of all evil, that it is the end not the means which matter and that welfare for failure leads to more failure. They belong only to each other. The wider good does not exist. I see that now.

The future – political and economic – belongs to these masters of the universe. There is no alternative, no fight back. Even Labour now sucks up to them. Bleak times.