It’s not because I’m scared or because I don’t like looking at the clouds from above (in fact I do): it is just unfortunately the case that flying by air is just an incredibly quick way to blow all of the good karma you built up by cycling and reusing plastic bags. After space travel and splitting the atom it’s probably the fastest way you could burn fuel and create pollution. You’d have to cross the Atlantic by jet ski in order to be more environmentally unfriendly.

Everywhere I go however (by bus, boat and train) from Toronto to Mexico, from La Paz to Rio de Janeiro, I hear the exact same words, from different people, repeated with eeiree similarity: “But the plane will be going anyway. So why not be on it?”.

It’s fascinating to me that humans can trick ourselves with statements such as this when we know it would be morally reprehensible to respond to “look, we’re gonna gang-rape this girl anyway, so you might as well join in”. Rape is a very clear example of an active, directly immoral act. But many of us find it more difficult to imagine immoral consequences that come passively out of indirect actions with an unclear moral motivation. It’s the equivalent of saying to a vegetarian “look, the cow is dead anyway, you might as well eat it”: meat-eaters often see the meat as simply “food” in front of them to be eaten, with the “immoral” action of killing the animal already having happened and somebody else bearing the responsibility for it, where vegetarians understand perfectly-well that animals are not killed “anyway” but directly because they’re being sold for people to eat. If you eat meat you are, largely, although not completely, responsible for animals being killed. Although awkward, that should be obvious and undeniable to all but the most unimaginative, unsympathetic meat-eater, especially since the average meateater in their life will eat 36 pigs, 36 sheep and 750 chickens and turkeys. They used to be walking around and then at some point they arrive on your plate, you put them in your mouth, they come through the other end. What did you think was happening? The link, however unsavoury, is there, it’s tangible. Yet maybe because the effects of climate-related damage are even more “abstract” to most people than the fate of farm animals, even less tangible, not enough people change their behaviour around flying.

In the last year while travelling through Latin America I’ve seen many instances where the plane was “going anyway”. Each of these plane journeys – which I did by bus or boat instead- would have saved me an overnight journey or more, and would have cost less or not very much more (partly due to the false price advantages air travel is given by government tax regimes):

Cancun to Flores 556km 0.2 tonnes
Guatemala City to Managua 544km 0.1 tonnes
Managua to Big Corn return ~400km 0.2 tonnes
Panama City to Cartagena 450km 0.2 tonnes
Cartagena to Bogatá 657km 0.2 tonnes
Guayaquil to Lima 1139km 0.3 tonnes
Lima to Iquitos 1006km 0.3 tonnes
Iquitos to Cusco 1006km 0.3 tonnes
Santa Cruz to São Paulo 1836km 0.5 tonnes
São Paulo to Rio 361km 0.2 tonnes
Rio to Salvador da Bahía return 2430km 0.7 tonnes
Rio to Montevideo 1826km 0.5 tonnes

14 flights, 3.7 tonnes C02e total

In the end I only took a one-way of one of these flights, and only then at the insistence of my travel buddy (ironically a Green Party member short of time).

The figures next to each flight show the amount of pollution each flight would have created solely on my behalf, in carbon dioxide equivalent. The total equals 3.7 tons. That’s nearly twice as much CO2e than one person should be responsible for in a year, if global responsibility was divvied-up fairly and we set ourselves on a path to not ruin the planet.

Adding these flights to all the other assorted greenhouse gas pollution that I would be responsible for in a year means that with these flights I would have probably used up not only all of my own yearly total sustainable allotment but that of two or three other people as well.

At least I didn’t take a holiday from say, London to Chicago (12688km, 3 tonnes. That’s one and half times your yearly quota right there). Or London to Sydney (34037km, 8 tonnes).

Flying Business Class is even worse (because you take-up relatively so much more of the plane). Britain to Australia in Business Class is 23.4 tonnes: over 11 times your yearly fair quota used up in one day.  First Class is an incredible 32 tonnes. Even DC to LA in Premium Economy is around 3 tonnes for the return flight.

This is how we aggrandise ourselves when we fly. We put ourselves so many times above most other people in the world, as well as in our own countries, who, needless to say, don’t even have the money to fly. We become mega world citizens. But only in a negative way: that we are many many times more responsible for global catastrophic climate change than most people.

And because flying is unfortunately so uniquely destructive, it’s very easy (and for us cheap) to create a relatively very large amount of damage in a short few hours. And to wipe-away all of the environmentally beneficial things we’ve spent months doing in the rest of the year.

As Andrew Steele calculates, flying is so environmentally destructive that, assuming your apartment has energy-saving lightbulbs, you would have to use them every day for 33 years before they were responsible for as much pollution as one trip from England to Spain. Or, you’d have to do an average daily commute in the car for 2 months before the car was responsible for as much pollution as the flight to Spain. That’s how bad flying is.

I don’t want to be a part of that. By refusing to fly I’m choosing to not be the cause of that amount of environmental damage, and as Steele points out, the human damage that comes from that. Steele puts it bluntly: “your holiday is killing African children”.

But refusing to fly is more than just me ducking out of blame’s way. I’m effectively making the claim “Everybody should act like me” or at least “Everybody should act more like me… and the world would be a better place”.

I don’t want to say so too loudly because nobody likes being told that what somebody else is doing is better. But there is a moral claim here. And it’s a moral claim because I believe our actions – certainly together, if not one-by-one – do make a positive and critical difference to our shared global environment. And what that moral claim is doing is showing leadership – leading by example. It is the most honest way I can find to advocate a low-carbon way of living. After all if we cannot do something ourselves how do we expect others to take what we advocate seriously if it’s “do what I say not as I do”? Demonstrating it shows it can be done, as well as honestly finding its real-world limitations.

Every time you accept defeat and fly it’s saying “my dreams of a better world where we don’t destroy our own planet are just that – dreams, that are ideal and theoretical and not real”. Conversely every time we manage to not fly we’re saying “I did this! My dreams are real, a better world is possible! I’ve just created it”. Sometimes we might have to admit defeat, sometimes we might have to admit to compromise, like my journey by ship across the Atlantic. After all we’re seldom in charge of every aspect of our lives or the way the world works, and often we have to incorporate the needs of others.

Or maybe we don’t all want to be leaders. But let’s not admit defeat just yet. Let’s not let the corporations who profit from destroying Earth’s atmosphere win. Let’s say no to the governments who tax us to the hilt for drinking beer yet don’t tax corporations anything on airliner fuel. Let’s show that another world is possible whenever we can, and instead of losing, let’s start showing how we can win.

How many people on a flight? 150? 300? 400? If only a small fraction of the flying public made the choice not to fly or not to fly less, then there really would be some planes that wouldn’t be “going anyway”.

Individual actions make a difference when lots of people make them. 712 million people flew with American scheduled airlines last year. That means that even based on a capacity of 300 seats, if just one-tenth of one percent of those Americans did not fly, there would be 2372 whole planes that wouldn’t be going away. Things add up. Actions add up. People can make a difference. To think that everything that we do would just “happen anyway” is not simply unimaginative… it’s possibly an abdication of moral responsibility.

We just have to all make the leap of understanding that actions have consequences, both positive and negative, and it’s possible to have a negative effect with a seemingly innocent action. When taken together, our positive choices can make a difference.

I visited Machu Picchu a couple of days before its anniversary; it was glorious. A sublime city in a sublime location; the hundreds of tourists walking around could not detract from its wonderfulness. I was back in nearby Cusco, “the heart of America” for Che Guevara, and capital of the Inca empire, for the anniversary itself. To celebrate, Cusco’s main plaza saw parades, a stage with big screens, and a Peruvian folk/rock band in the evening. It also saw low-key protests, including one banner that particularly caught my eye: “100 años de la prostitución de la cultura andina”.

Elsewhere on the streets, the Incas’ conquered descendants mainly went about their business; selling chewing gum and proffering beautiful and often hand-made gloves and ch’ullus (traditional hats made from alpaca wool) to the hoards of foreign tourists, at knock down prices.

Indeed, the market for “traditional” handicrafs seems to me so saturated that it’s unlikely most of the participants make a profit from it. Many streets are lined with fairly elderly women, selling largely similar goods, and given such a large supply the natural outcome is very low prices. I bought a local factory-made alpaca ch’ullu for 10 neuvos soles (just over 3 US dollars), and a pair of handmade alpaca gloves for the same price. I resisted any temptation to haggle down from the price I was offered.

Since then I’ve made enquiries as to how long it takes a woman to make a pair of handmade gloves. The responses, from all over the Peruvian and Bolivian Andes, have varied from 1 day to 3 days, with the average response being two days. Here in Bolivia, the same type of gloves sell for 20 bolivianos, almost exactly the same price as in Peru. That means, in either country, if we optimistically hope the time of manufacture is only one day, that’s a daily income of $3, assuming (impossibly) that no time is taken to actually sell the gloves, and (impossibly) that the sale is pure profit. What’s that I hear you say? Things cost less in those sorts of countries, so $3 income a day is PLENTY. Well, maybe. But a set lunch here in Sucre’s market costs 10 bolivianos (5 neuvos soles) or $1.50, so that’s half of the day’s money gone on lunch. And we’re not talking lunch for tourists. This is the market. A bag of pasta costs 5 bolivianos. A small avocado costs another 5. A big avocado might cost 10. And that’s your income gone. You’ve had lunch. You’ve got an avocado and some pasta for dinner. Shame there’s nothing left to fund a cooking stove, fuel, crockery and cutlery, or perhaps a house.

Of course, I hear your say, the person making the gloves is just a woman, and she’ll be supported by her husband. Well, perhaps. Her husband, if not on the street with her, is probably out tending the animals from where the wool comes. He’s not down the phone shop talking to his stock broker, or moonlighting as a waiter at El Gato Rojo. In fact he might not be bringing in any cash at all, simply goods in kind. And he probably doesn’t own the land he’s farming.

All in all, the picture is one of poverty, and destructive competition between local producers that they bear with solidarity and dignity, if not good humour. And the difference between poverty and sustainability is the price that the Western consumer (tourist) pays. And that price cannot possibly be a fair one. What can be fair about paying someone $3 for one, maybe two or three days’ work? And here we arrive at the claim of the “prostitution” of the Andean culture. Because the quiet, respectable Aymara and Quechua locals are not simply selling their wares, they are flogging them to the lowest bidder in return for survival. Tokens of what is left of their culture, modified in style for Western consumption, become a direct drain on their minuscule wealth, flowing from their lands and their animals, through their manufacturing labour, to their labour as street-sellers, with the foreign tourist getting a nice authentic handicraft item as well as extra beer money, and the indigenous local getting the right to continue living, with exploitation occurring at every stage of the process. To add insult to injury the product is not even manufactured any longer as part of the culture itself, but for these strange outsiders who fetishise “traditional” things.

The role Machu Picchu plays in this is just different in a matter of scale. Machu Picchu is not being physically consumed (although there are reports of the mountain suffering subsidence from so many trampling feet, and recently an ad firm smashed a piece off of the sacred Inti Watana centrepiece stone when they dropped a half-ton crane on it whilst filming a beer commercial. The same beer company, I suspect, as sponsored the 100 year anniversary). But if Machu Picchu is not being physically damaged, its allure and image are being promoted the world over as part of a mystical forgotten traditional culture. But before Hingam’s re-discovery, Machu Picchu was not really forgotten. It was hiding. It was abandoned in the first place by the terrified Incas when the Spanish arrived at Cusco and built their church “El Triunfo”, the Triumph) on top of the razed rubble of the Inca emperor’s palace. Conquistador Francisco Pizarro ended up having the emperor himself strangled. Although, his first choice had been to have him burned alive.

Machu Picchu then spent several hundred years, overgrown with forest, as one piece of Inca culture that the Spaniards had not yet found, destroyed or exploited. But then it emerged suddenly and unwillingly one day into the 20th century as an instant walkable museum, at the hands of an American (an American who stole many relics from the site and took them back to Yale; even now the university is still quibbling about giving them back). Few tourists wandering around the ruins are really alive to the horror of the arrival of the Europeans. Few connect the Incas with the poor people on the streets selling cheap Nestlé crap, few get the idea that the people who lived here before the Spanish never went away, despite mass exterminations, they were just moved down a rung on the ladder, or, rather, thrown down to the bottom. But the hierarchical relationship between native Andean and latter-day criollo is very clear. Especially in Peru.

Peru, a country where the newscasters are almost all white, some even blond, while the majority of the country is an unmistakable brown to dark-brown. The reality is that little has changed, socially, since the 1530s when Atahualpa was garroted. The descendants of the Incas, usurped in the heart of their own empire, are not only now serving the dominant (white) class of their own imposed-country of Peru, but a new white class of annoying 18-year-old girls from Milwaukee, beer-swilling English students, preppy French chain-smokers, German walking enthusiasts and Japanese image-stealers. And these people, who might be expected to know better since they have come to the place mainly to revel in its “traditional” culture and history, are the cheerleaders of a race-to-the-bottom that is bleeding dry the meagre resources that indigenous people still possess.

What is the dividing line between free market exchange and prostitution? I would say when the people doing the selling don’t have any real choice, in their type of work or in setting the price. And it is such a position that the indigenous people of the Andes now find themselves in, in agriculture, manufacturing, services; in vegetable selling, road-building, silver-mining as much as in ch’ullo-making. Their role as labourers, textile-workers, farmers and miners in the globalised free market, and the white Westerners who benefit from their bargain-basement wage levels, is mirrored on the small scale by the white Western tourists who patronise their cottage industries.

Let’s celebrate Inca culture, let’s celebrate Andean culture. But let’s be clear what cute and traditional means. Even their “traditional” dress is not traditional at all. They were costumes imposed on them by the Spanish, modelled on the dress of Spanish Andalusian peasants, a kind of “let’s dress up the poor people to look all pretty for us in the way we like”. Here is Bolivia the bowler hat is a “traditional” dress item, a fashion statement shared by the Edwardian London banker and the Bolivian rural peasant. Ridiculous really: no doubt the trade in bowler hats made many British manufacturers very rich. But the tradition, again, is an imposed one. At least the chu’llu itself existed before the white men arrived.

It’s certainly a “tradition” now for indigenous people to be poor and stepped upon. But let’s not pretend this is a cute reflection of their real culture. The same forces that have been keeping them down since the 16th century are still keeping them down today, and Western tourism, and more importantly Western capitalism, are now playing the “traditional” role of the conquistadors of old.

We like to think of history and of human civilisation as progressing, and that we “couldn’t” go back to those sorts of times (even though some parts of the world, which we largely ignore, never left them). But the main advantage and difference of these times now has been a huge growth in physical wealth, which has sustained, in the West, a generation of peace. We know in our heart of hearts that such material growth cannot be held onto for much longer, and we already see signs of it faltering due to its own inherent unsustainability. So, I ask, if the contrast of 60 years can be as strong as that between the time of Jimmy Carter, Margaret Thatcher and my birth, and the signing of the Armistice with Imperial Germany, what do the flipside 60 years have in store? We have less than 30 years before we find out. If you extend the length of your life into the past, where in history does that take you…?

Tomorrow Peruvians go to the polls to decide how to vote in their Presidential election. There are only two candidates left: Ollanta Humala, a left-wing military officer and previous presidential candidate, and “Keiko”.

Keiko propaganda - below is grafited "corruption" and "murderer"

“Keiko” is now such a household brand in Peru that nobody need say her family name: Fujimori. A name that could – or at least should – strike fear into many Peruvians. As President of Peru throughout the 1990s, Keiko’s father Alberto Fujimori first enacted wide-ranging neoliberal reforms, called the Fujishock. Electricity costs quintupled, water prices rose eightfold, and gasoline prices rose 3000%. Yet Peru was made safe for international capitalism. Then, feeling that Congress was holding him back, with the support of the military he carried out a presidential coup, which was roundly condemned by the international community. Strangely – and this is the worrying thing about the Peruvian national mindset – the coup was welcomed by the public, according to numerous polls.

Fujimori can be “credited” with ridding Peru of the Shining Path Maoist rebels. But that goal was achieved by killing them and anyone remotely in the way. And so a generation of Peruvians were scarred by violence, at least half of it committed by the military. As a consequence, Fujimori is now in prison on human rights abuse charges.
But that’s not how his presidency ended. He resigned in 2000 by fax from a hotel room in Tokyo after he was embroiled in a bribery scandal.

A few years before, Fujimori had separated from his wife Susana Higuchi in a noisy, public divorce where he formally stripped her of the title First Lady and gave it to Keiko instead. Higuchi publicly denounced Fujimori as a “tyrant” and claimed that his administration was corrupt. There were intimations that she herself had been tortured.

And one issue that stays with many people, especially the many scarred for life, is the Fujimori government’s coerced sterilisations of 100s of thousands of rural (mainly indigenous) people.

So, this is the legacy that Keiko defends when she calls her father “Peru’s best president ever”, a remark she was forced to back-track on.

Ms. Fujimori’s spokesman Jorge Trelles didn’t help matters when he said of Mr. Fujimori’s record. “We killed fewer people than the two prior governments”. Trelles was subsequently removed from his post, but the fact is that Keiko’s popularity rides on the back of her father’s perceived strength and toughness. More popular appeal comes from her being perceived as a sympathetic, young, perhaps slightly exotic movie-star-like female figure, and a faithful daughter. Propaganda is full of her hugging indigenous old women, kissing indigenous babies and wearing indigenous costume. But this can all be put down to marketing spin (which Keiko’s campaign, funded by huge business interests, can clearly afford, where her rival Humala’s cannot). The fact is that Keiko, despite her cuddly side, is a tough moralist on the side of punishment and crackdowns, and will use those values to effect political crackdown on anyone opposed to big business exploitation of the Peruvian Amazon. British Green Socialist Derek Wall is convinced that the election of Fujimori will mean killings – specifically of indigenous peoples opposing resource exploitation.

It’s true that from where I am (currently Iquitos, in the Peruvian Amazon), Keiko’s left-wing opponent Ollanta Humala hasn’t made very much of a running. He has hardly any street presence, and seems to have no real messages, except perhaps a vague claim of honesty (which in itself is only a reference aimed negatively at the Fujimori family). But he has been de-clawed. This is largely the fault of the prevailing global economic consensus (i.e. neo-liberalism). Any politician that doesn’t fit into that becomes “a threat to growth” and therefore “the wrong choice”. It’s not directly Humala’s fault; his freedom of movement (i.e. to the left) is constrained, and he has been obliged to make statements affirming his commitment to economic business-as-usual. Cement sales started falling in April when Mr. Humala began to gain momentum. Housing starts are off 15% this year due to political uncertainty, says a construction trade group. The economy ministry recently downgraded this year’s growth forecast by one percentage point to 6.5%, after growth of 9% last year, amid uncertainty over a possible victory by Humala. This is what he’s up against.

a flyer from Keiko's campaign, handed out in a working class area. The flyer opens with her free school meals pledge.

But on the other hand, the thought of that woman (Keiko Fujimori) running this country sends shivers up my spine. Keiko’s campaign is a million times more slick than Ollanta Humala’s. You see, she even tricks me into calling her “Keiko”. The political party she’s created for this campaign is just the letter “K”. Everybody loves her. Everybody thinks she’s part of their family. I asked my hostelier in the working class riverport town of Yurimaguas why she was attending a party for Keiko supporters: “Because Keiko is for everyone” she replied, echoing a slogan. I pressed “but is Keiko on the left, on the right?”. She repeated “Keiko es para todos”. And then added as either a guess or an afterthought: “So… right”. With her clear populist bribes such as free school dinners, Keiko’s politics are kind of Jamie Oliver meets Pol Pot. But there’s going to be plenty of people not invited to the party.

Interestingly, the contest between the two “extremes” of Humala and Fujimori is a consequence of Peru’s First Past the Post/Winner Takes All voting system. In the first voting round in April, about half the Peruvian electorate chose one of the three centrists—but they cannibalized each other’s support. That opened the door for the two rivals representing ideological extremes.

Today, the day before the election, the two candidates are neck-and-neck. We can only hope that memory triumphs over forget.

Sources: Wikipedia, Wall Street Journal

The dreaded sit-com was on in the corner of a hostel where I stayed for an afternoon in the Colombian city of Cali a few days ago. I asked casually of a young English tourist whether anybody actually found “Two and a Half Men” funny. “Are you kidding?” she asked. “It’s like the best thing on telly. It’s hilarious!”. I was put on the back foot, clearly the ‘uncool’ one in the room, and when I protested that “it doesn’t really seem to be about anything” she explained “it’s about having sex, drinking, taking drugs and getting fucked up. If you don’t like any of those things, then yeah, you won’t enjoy it”. Which made me feel even more on the back foot, obviously. To make me feel better an intelligent Israeli traveller broadly sided with my take on things. I observed to the English girl that she didn’t seem to be laughing very much at it, to which she claimed she just wasn’t paying attention. But I did pay attention to it, and, like all the other times I’ve ever seen it, I found it spectacularly unfunny, and after a few minutes clichéd, repetitive and depressing. I agree with the critic in The Australian who called it a “sometimes creepy, misogynistic comedy”, and in the New York Daily News who called it “occasionally funny”. It might be about sex, but it seems to be about having unfulfilling, predictable, boring sex. It might be about drugs and drinking but there doesn’t seem to be much fun involved. There instead seems to be lots of dissatisfaction, rather a lot of arrogance, and repeated trips to the shrink.

That English girl’s comments obviously got under my skin because I found myself thinking about “Two and a Half Men” again today, eating a veggie burger in a highland town in Ecuador. I also got to thinking, prompted by a song lyric on the radio of all things, what Charlie’s father Martin must think of his son’s exploits, which seem to be fairly similar off-screen to on. Can it even be called acting when your character has the same personality, same behaviour and even the same name as you…? Now Martin Sheen was – and still is – an actor, and a pretty great one at that. In strong roles such as in Badlands, Wall Street and in Apocalypse Now opposite Marlon Brando he became a heart-throb for a generation (so I’m told). As President Bartlet in “The West Wing”, every week for seven years he strode across the small screen as one of America’s greatest – albeit fictional- presidents. Martin Sheen, who is part of a tradition of Hollywood political agitators, was too politically savvy not to warn fans in interviews that “The West Wing” was a fairytale version of Washington, but he clearly enjoyed personifying the Democratic principles he holds dear and “The West Wing” dealt over the years with some of the highest and most profound issues that humanity ever has to consider.

And then we have Charlie. Getting drunk, getting laid, getting violent, and getting put back into rehab. To be fair Charlie Sheen used to be an actor too. In films such as Platoon and Wall Street he was his father’s son. He has even made political contributions, helping charities, and weighing-in, perhaps unwisely, on the side of the 911 Truth movement. But what happened? And is Charlie Sheen who he is because of a perhaps overly liberal (and decidedly not impoverished) upbringing, or because that’s what America wants him to be? After all, if America (and Britain it seems), did not want to see Charlie being Charlie, then the show wouldn’t have such high ratings. So what does it mean for Western culture that this show is even popular? I don’t doubt that “Two and a Half Men” can provide mild distraction and entertainment. But does it deserve to be so popular? And did Charlie deserve his monumental salary? And what does it say about the man that his reaction to having the highest ever salary on TV was, like a spoilt toddler, to demand more?

What “Two and a Half Men” represents to me is The End of History, what US philosopher Francis Fukuyama believed would be the culmination and plateau of Western democracy and culture, where all meaningful art that could be created had been created already, and where consumer capitalism and Western “democracy” as an economic force, an ideology and a culture had won out supreme. At the End of History, as with being Charlie Sheen, when you have millions of dollars that you spend on booze, drugs and uninteresting women, all you can think of to do is to get millions more for more of the same. It’s a kind of Groundhog Day loop of static silent terror, caught in the boredom of one’s own limitations and lack of imagination. But I don’t believe in The End of History. I believe there are still things to do. Maybe TV viewers in Western culture, thinking we are at the end of history, derive pleasure from the utter ordinariness of Charlie Sheen’s stunted life, a life in which he never grows, never learns and never contributes. But like Western society in general, Charlie Sheen is locked in a high-consumption, low-satisfaction nightmarish pleasure-loop, where the chasing of superficial sensation provides ever diminishing returns, and where the collateral damage is not just his liver and millions of wasted dollars but his viewers’ slowly mummifying minds.

Martin Sheen would know what to do. Tackle catastrophic global climate change, stop the growth of weapons of war, feed the hungry and cold of the world. Speak out against corporate domination and injustice. But his son, alas a sign of the times, is too busy laying around in a pool of his own over-indulgence. Or threatening those close to him with physical violence. For, contrary to the desperate slogan of his website “Winners Only”, Charlie Sheen is a loser. Despite the fact that he’s had sex (yes, hurrah) and drunk quite a lot (whoopee doo) and pretends he’s a huge winner, he’s a loser, a loser who keeps on losing, who can’t even seem to stay on his own show and keep earning $1.8million a time because he’s just so much of a greedy tantrum-throwing loser. A loser who has, yes, made more money per episode then anybody in history, which just shows how much Western culture values the wrong things and which underlines what a pointless loser he is, as well as what losers the people who’ve been paying him are. And in making him a role model, even in normalising his boring behaviour, Western civilisation is losing too. Both we and him need to pick ourselves up off the mat, dust ourselves off and live up to the legacy of Western civilisation that our fathers have given us.

Even so, my travelling must have had a big impact on the environment that we all have a stake in, and over the New Year I’ve been trying to figure out to my satisfaction what that might be, and how good an idea (for everybody else and our shared global environment) me travelling around having a good time is.

To give you an idea of why I think this is important, have a look at my recent article that details how the world’s politicians have failed us when it comes to combatting climate change, and how we are, unfortunately to say the least, heading for an all-out global catastrophe.

I’ve worked out a very approximate answer in terms of a “carbon footprint”, measured in metric tonnes of carbon dioxide (* see note 1).

But rather than first list a bunch of figures I want to look back on exactly how far I’ve come, compare that to my “carbon budget”, and consider the choices I made and what I got out of it.

I arrived in New York City at the beginning of January on a ship from Southampton, England. After visiting Philadelphia, Boston, Washington D.C., Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal by long-distance bus and train, in April I moved to Chicago (by train) and spent 3 nice weeks there. I then hired a car (a hybrid electric Toyota Prius) and drove 5000 miles across the West through Seattle and down through Portland and Eugene to San Francisco, where I left the car.

13 000 miles around the USA

I then got a train to L.A., took a campervan around wine country for a few days, and then took a 3-night train ride to New Orleans (these are big distances…). I then took bus and car (with my parents) to Florida, and then finally visited New York City by train again very briefly for the 4th of July before returning by train to Florida. Up against my visa time limit, I flew out of the country to Nassau, The Bahamas, where I stayed for a month and a half. I then flew (there is no other option) to Cuba, and then from Cuba to Cancun (the closest exit). I only took buses after that.

Just taking the carbon cost of the first 6 months in the USA, the obvious big costs are the ship to the Americas, the private car road-trip across the West, the campervan (surprisingly bad) and the flight out of the country. The ship accounts for a huge 1816.1kg of CO2 (nearly two tonnes… although I calculated at the time, marginally less than a transatlantic flight (* see note 2).

The car was the next biggest carbon cost, causing 888kg of CO2 to be released to the atmosphere, contributing to dangerous global climate change. A hybrid-electric car was of course a good choice, and the same journey in an average US car would have created over double the amount of carbon dioxide (1700kg). 888kg of CO2 is a lot to emit in just a month. The global average carbon footprint is “only” 4 tonnes of CO2, so my little road trip created nearly the same amount of CO2 by itself as the average world citizen creates in 4 months from everything they do. By world standards, such a roadtrip is selfish and indulgent. Especially since a sustainable level for each person to emit would be about 2 tonnes. But then that road trip is nothing compared to frequent flying, which I’ll get to in a moment…. The campervan, even though for only 500 miles and several days, with its lower mpg was responsible for 110kg of CO2 (and that’s sharing the cost between my friend and me).

The short flights I took (each less than 350 miles, and one by lower-altitude propeller plane) were actually of relatively small impact, even measuring them using the most rigorous test I could find, the one provided by WWF: https://climatefriendly.com/flight

They created approximately 0.2, 0.2 and 0.1 tonnes of CO2e respectively.

So really, apart from getting across the Atlantic in the first place, my big splurge which most damaged our shared environment was the car, at nearly a tonne of CO2 for a month-long road trip. But at this stage I want to defend the (hybrid) car in relation to the alternative of flying. I “spent” a lot of our shared natural capital on that trip, and a significant proportion of my “fair” yearly share. But I did get a lot out of it. For starters I got to see not just the start and the destination, as in a plane, but all the places along the way: Illinois, Iowa, South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Washington state, Oregon and California. I visited abandoned Amana colonies, original prairie, the Badlands, Mount Rushmore, Yellowstone Park, Puget Sound, Crater Lake and drove down winding Lombard Street in San Francisco.

My Toyota Prius in the Badlands of South Dakota

I met queer poets, Amish travellers, cowgirls and fightclubbers. Just to highlight how bad flights are, if I had flown from NY to San Francisco it would have been at least 1 tonne of CO2 just in one day. If I had then flown straight to Nassau then that would have added another 2.5 tonnes of CO2. If I’d also flown from London to NY (1.3 to 1.9 tonnes) then I would have used up more CO2 than the average world citizen uses in one year, just on those three flights. It would have been quick. But I would have seen nothing in between, and felt no benefit from it.

Of course, our patterns of year-long-work and 2-weeks-holiday prompt many people to travel this way. But that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. A consumer economy run for the benefit of the super-rich does many things that aren’t a good idea.

You might have spotted that I haven’t accounted yet for the bus and train travel I did, which is how I did get from San Francisco to Florida. I could attempt to do that, but I’m not going to for a very simple reason: trains and buses are the kind of public transport we should be encouraging people to use, and hoping they do, as alternatives to flights and the private car. At this stage you could accuse me of double standards for pulling the old “but I don’t need to count it because the train/plane/bus would have gone without me on it anyway!” argument. And for the record, I think that argument sucks. Here’s why: yes, the plane would have gone without you on it, but if 300 other people out of the millions that fly each year are making the same choice to not fly, then there would certainly be one less plane in the sky. In this way individual action really clearly does matter, because, even if unseen, individual action can be collective action; we just need some imagination to see that it is. So individuals choosing to not use a certain form of transport does morally credit them, and conversely, choosing to fly does mean that you are responsible for your portion of that pollution. There’s no way of wriggling out of your moral responsibility by blaming the system. So, am I responsible for a portion of the pollution of the buses and trains that I got? Yes of course. But since I want the buses and trains to go, I’m happy to be a part of that. I’m not going to blame myself for being a (practically very-hard-to-measure) small part of a more sustainable world of transport. When all’s said and done, I’m compiling a carbon footprint to find out how damaging the damaging aspects of my travel are, not to arrive at a perfect theoretical figure that makes me feel worse about the good bits. Besides, we do know that buses and trains generally use at least a fifth of the energy of a passenger airplane for the same distance (http://www.withouthotair.com), and without the additional damaging effects of releasing greenhouse gases at altitude. We can therefore be sure that however impactful my bus and train travel, it has been many times less bad than if I had flown those distances. I’m therefore happy to not try to count it.

The paddle of the Mississippi steamboat "Natchez"

So, for what it’s worth, the carbon cost of my private travel in 2010 was 3259kg. For a year where I’ve done an awful lot, and theoretically haven’t been responsible for the emissions of government services in the UK, I think that’s pretty good going, considering that when I last estimated my carbon footprint in the UK a couple of years ago I got answers ranging from 2.56 tonnes to 5.31 tonnes and 5.47 tonnes, depending on which website I asked (including http://footprint.wwf.org.uk, Direct Gov, and www.carbonfootprint.com; I think it’s almost certainly the higher numbers). Given that the global average is 4 tonnes, the UK average is 10 tonnes, the industrial country average is 11 tonnes, and the US average is 18 tonnes, I reckon I’m not doing too badly.

Of course my travel figure doesn’t include electricity and heating that I’ve used (practically impossible to find a figure for, given the different places and environments I’ve stayed in). But at least I haven’t bought very many consumer goods or clothes in 2010! And my food footprint remains far lower than average due to my being vegetarian.

Tuk-Tuk, Vedado, Havana, Cuba

The main thing this shows me – with relief – is that it is possible to do a large amount of travelling and not trash the planet. I could have done much better if I’d hitchhiked, or even cycled, across the West. But never of those seemed very practical at the time. More realistically, taking train and bus rather than splurging on the car would have been much better for the environment. And if I’d managed to find a freighter across the Atlantic then that would have saved a whopping two tonnes (I couldn’t find one, and they are generally, strangely, extremely expensive).

Even though I have clearly exceeded what should be my – and your – target limit of about 2 tonnes of CO2 per year, I can feel better about two things: firstly, I had always planned for 2010 to be an exceptional year and I’ve built up some credit through other years of walking and cycling to work and being vegan, and secondly, that you, I, and pretty much everybody else in the industrialised world, is in the same boat. In the US even homeless people cannot drop below a floor of 8.5 tonnes of CO2 per year, to account for their theoretical share of America’s energy-intensive government services (including its ridiculously huge military (bigger than all the other military forces of the world combined…).

All in all, I’m relatively happy that I’m not a first-class climate criminal. My modes of transport have certainly been quite diverse. At last count, this was the whole list… It’s been a fun year:

- – -

footnotes:

*1 (or strictly speaking “carbon dioxide equivalent” (which translates other Greenhouse Gases onto a par with CO2, for sake of examination).

*2 That figure is debateable however, firstly because I had to arrive at the figure of 1.8 tonnes myself (websites don’t tend to offer a calculator for ships) and because one of the websites I now trust most (https://climatefriendly.com/flight) gives a figure of 1.3 tonnes of CO2 equvialent for a London to NY flight, not 1.9 tonnes. It is clear however that sites such as http://www.jpmorganclimatecare.com (which gives a figure of 0.77 tonnes) are underestimating the carbon impact, partly by failing to take into account the effect of “radiative forcing” that I mention in my article about the ship.

Catamaran dwarfs 3 children on surfboard, Eleuthera, The Bahamas

Green MP Caroline Lucas used very similar wording: “It’s a very weak deal – enough to keep the ongoing negotiation process alive, but not enough to save the climate.”

And although both organisations have given encouragement to governments for the little that has been done, when it comes down to it, all that matters is the bottom line, and the bottom line is “What kind of world will this agreement create?”

Unfortunately, according to scientific commentators such as those at Climate Tracker Action, the agreement will deliver 3.2 degrees Celsius of overall global warming. The Bolivian government was more pessimistic, estimating 4 degrees. While the difference between 2 or 4 degrees on a summer’s day doesn’t mean much, averaged out all over the world, it’s disastrous.

In his recently updated work explaining the outcome of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 3rd Assessment Report, British author Mark Lynas makes it very clear what the consequences of a 2 to 3 degree world would be:

2C-3C

Summer heatwaves such as that in Europe in 2003, which killed 30,000 people, become annual events. Extreme heat sees temperatures reaching the low 40s Celsius in southern England.

Amazon rainforest crosses a “tipping point” where extreme heat and lower rainfall makes the forest unviable – much of it burns and is replaced by desert and savannah.

Dissolved CO2 turns the oceans increasingly acidic, destroying remaining coral reefs and wiping out many species of plankton which are the basis of the marine food chain. Several metres of sea level rise is now inevitable as the Greenland ice sheet disappears.

Previous climate change agreements had aimed to keep overall global warming below 2 degrees C. Going any further, into 2 degrees and above, means that vital feedbacks such as the burning of the Amazon occur, and reinforce the warming, taking us straight into a 3 degree world:

3C-4C

Glacier and snow-melt in the world’s mountain chains depletes freshwater flows to downstream cities and agricultural land. Most affected are California, Peru, Pakistan and China. Global food production is under threat as key breadbaskets in Europe, Asia and the United States suffer drought, and heatwaves outstrip the tolerance of crops.

The Gulf Stream current declines significantly. Cooling in Europe is unlikely due to global warming, but oceanic changes alter weather patterns and lead to higher than average sea level rise in the eastern US and UK.

Once in a 3 degree world, then further feedbacks occur. Methane is released from permafrost at 4 degrees and above, and when that happens there is literally nothing to stop the Earth from being almost completely uninhabitable to humans. I’m going to quote you the whole scenario, because it’s important that you know:

4C-5C

Another tipping point sees massive amounts of methane – a potent greenhouse gas – released by melting Siberian permafrost, further boosting global warming. Much human habitation in southern Europe, north Africa, the Middle East and other sub-tropical areas is rendered unviable due to excessive heat and drought. The focus of civilisation moves towards the poles, where temperatures remain cool enough for crops, and rainfall – albeit with severe floods – persists. All sea ice is gone from both poles; mountain glaciers are gone from the Andes, Alps and Rockies.

5C-6C

Global average temperatures are now hotter than for 50m years. The Arctic region sees temperatures rise much higher than average – up to 20C – meaning the entire Arctic is now ice-free all year round. Most of the topics, sub-tropics and even lower mid-latitudes are too hot to be inhabitable. Sea level rise is now sufficiently rapid that coastal cities across the world are largely abandoned.

6C and above

Danger of “runaway warming”, perhaps spurred by release of oceanic methane hydrates. Could the surface of the Earth become like Venus, entirely uninhabitable? Most sea life is dead. Human refuges now confined entirely to highland areas and the polar regions. Human population is drastically reduced. Perhaps 90% of species become extinct, rivalling the worst mass extinctions in the Earth’s 4.5 billion-year history.

So. The politicians are now aiming to fail. Their best efforts take us within the disastrous territory of snowballing feedback loops. The Climate Tracker Action thermometer now rests at 3.2 degrees, with a margin of error of between 2.6 and an obviously disastrous 4 degrees.

So, the only thing to do for us all now is to hope for the best, to hope that the estimates are somehow on the pessimistic side, and to close our eyes and pray that we come out nearer 2.6 and not 3.2 degrees and somehow just avoid the snowballing feedbacks. Right?

Well, unfortunately not. Climate Tracker Action’s 2.6 degrees estimate is correct “If countries would implement the most stringent reductions they have proposed with most stringent accounting, the remaining ‘reduction gap’ would shrink to 8 billion tonnes CO2eq/yr”. But with current political will, that is clearly not going to happen. It’s politically highly unlikely that the governments who have so narrowly managed to cobble together any agreement at all will suddenly go hell for leather in enforcing it in the most stringent way. And one reason is, as Caroline Lucas mentions, the agreement itself is not even binding! And of course it isn’t. Governments including, notably, the United States, have been trying to avoid renewing the sensible and fair Kyoto protocol in favour of a more voluntary system. The US government’s manipulations, threats and bribes to other countries during last year’s Copenhagen process have been well documented by Wikileaks. And all to have a more voluntary process that would better suit the imperatives of the US economy.

Now in Cancún it has become obvious on which side the governments consider their bread to be buttered, and it seems to be the side of corporate consumer capitalism and the status quo, rather than of taking a responsible attitude to protecting the future of everyone and everything in the world. The World Development Movement’s Kate Blagojevic sums it up in a tweet from Cancun: “a ‘deal’ wasn’t reached- text’s not binding anyone to anything.That’s why they can agree it, which is of course pointless +a betrayal”.

So, I guess we have to hope that the science in general in wrong and climate change isn’t really happening at all? Again, unfortunately, the 100 year history of the science of climate change represents the greatest collective scientific effort of the human race, ever. We’ve never had so many computers, so many satellites, so many scientists, drilling holes deep in the Arctic core, measuring weather patterns, analysing and checking data. The likelihood that these thousands and thousands of scientists, funded from different sources, for different reasons, working in many languages in different nations, are wrong, is, sadly, staggeringly unlikely.

We’re all going to have to come to terms with the fact that climate change is real, and – thanks to our “leaders” aiming to fail at Cancún – on its way.

So, what do we do now? Knowing that the worst, or at least some incredibly bad things, are likely to happen, how should we change what we’re doing? Is the whole green movement a bit of a waste of time, and have we essentially failed? Well, yes and no. We still need to be doing most of the same things. Greens have always tried to focus people’s attention on the economy as the main root of problems, specifically a globalised corporate-owned consumer economy highly-dependent on fossil fuels. This (and the values and motives behind it) is largely what has created the problem of climate change in the first place. But transforming our economy is still the most important thing we need to do. For just as the global economy is causing climate change, so we still need to limit the worst that happens; there is still a spectrum of better and worse. And a globalised consumer economy is the kind that is most vulnerable to the economic shocks that environmental disruption will bring. We need to localise our economies not just because it will help prevent the worst excesses of the disaster of climate change, but because localised economies will be the ones that are most resilient.

If your food comes from overseas, you are going to suffer with increased oil prices, or droughts in some far off region of the world where you’ve never even been but where your vegetables come from. At its extreme, when supermarket supply chains (which are arranged around this kind of globalised trade) collapse, you might go hungry. And yes, when it gets bad enough (and, now, sadly, in a 3 degree world, there is no reason why it wouldn’t), you’ll starve and die. And not without a lot of crime and societal chaos in the mean time.

But, with localised economies, with local food production, with a bit of land set aside for growing vegetables, you might be OK. I don’t want to have to tell people this, but this is the reality that our governments have left us with. As I say, the only two ways out is for our governments to suddenly all change their attitude completely (unlikely) or for the science of climate change to be somehow wrong (very unlikely). If you don’t want to be defending your field of carrots with a shotgun in 40 years time, the time for political action – and transforming the world economy – is now.

This is perhaps a pivotal moment for humanity. For me, it’s the first time that I’ve been certain that the worst is going to happen. Our case has been proven, in the worst possible way, and we are still largely powerless to call to account the financial powers-that-be. But we must try, because now more than ever we are not just fighting for our principles, or fighting for a “greener” world, we are fighting for the world, for our world. Everything we’ve ever known; all of human culture, society, history and civilisation. It all stands at risk from the path our governments have so ignorantly put us on. So, if you like human beings, if you like your life, if you like your family, your home, your country, your ability to live a full and wonderful life with all the incredible things the world has to offer, and you don’t want to see almost everything you have snatched away from you by economic collapse, chaos, selfishness and violence, then fight. Fight to limit the disaster of climate change, fight to make your government change its ways, fight to change how big business operates, fight to grow the alternatives, and fight for the world you know. Fight for your life.

]]> http://www.dailyplanet.org.uk/12/12/2010/climate-change-and-cancun-the-politicians-have-failed-now-its-up-to-us/feed/ 0 http://www.dailyplanet.org.uk/23/11/2010/whats-the-big-deal-with-climate-change/ http://www.dailyplanet.org.uk/23/11/2010/whats-the-big-deal-with-climate-change/#comments Tue, 23 Nov 2010 20:35:09 +0000 Matt Wootton http://www.dailyplanet.org.uk/?p=250 I didn’t think I’d have to ask myself that question, but I do find that questioning one’s own beliefs is the first step towards being able to communicate them to others. And here in Guatemala it’s become obvious to me that I need to have a good answer to the question “what’s the big deal with Climate Change?”, just as I’ve had to refine my answer to the question “why are you vegetarian?“.

Not that most people of course have even asked me that question. Normally I’ll realise the need to explain myself simply by a sceptical look or a blank stare or a feeling that I’m being humoured in a conversation. And in case you think this is something to do with Guatemalans, it’s a situation I’ve encountered with Brits, Europeans and Americans when I’ve mentioned climate change, even casually or in passing.

Part of my failure to always communicate effectively with people is no doubt due to my own beliefs and convinctions. I do understand that almost everybody will not feel as strongly about climate change as I do, although I assume most people – especially Westerners – will have a basic understanding of the issues through newspapers and TV news. Unfortunately, to me the existence of people-created climate change is virtually a rock-solid hard fact: have a look at the amazing website The Discovery of Global Warming for an explanation of the 100-year history of climate change science. In a nutshell, the existence of people-created climate change, hypothesised and documented over more than 100 years, is so scientifically unquestionable to me that to do so would be practically to reject science itself. Which is even more curious how – in a global society that looks up so much to science and technology -  so few people feel the same way I do about this scientific fact. Of course, we know through the work of scientists George Lakoff, Drew Westen and others that the human brain does not function essentially on reason, it functions on patterns, emotions and preconceptions. But I just want to be able to communicate to the people I meet, in a few sentences, why climate change is important, and to justify to them why I personally place such importance on fighting it.

And I do place a lot of importance on it. While some self-styled “climate sceptics” muddle the issue by admitting to the existence of climate change but contesting that humans are creating it, in contrast I would bet my life that climate change is being caused by us. What’s more, if all I had to do was to sacrifice my own life in order to magically stop climate change from happening, I would do that, with a sigh of relief. To many this would seem an extreme position, but it’s really not when you understand the stakes:  the stakes are very clearly (in this (sadly theoretical) example) one life versus literally billions of lives. And that’s just human lives. Add into that the extinction of thousands of species (not individual animals or plants, but all the millions or billions of individuals in thousands of species). And to that, the disappearance of the diverse habitats that they live in. Add to that the disapperance of human civilisation as we know it (no more TV (oh no), no more internet, no more movies, no more electricity, no more Facebook, no more Mars bars, no more holidays to Spain. And very little art, music, literature, architecture, education, culture or history. In the “worst case scenario” given by the (in fact rather conservative) International Panel on Climate Change, human beings will be almost wiped off the planet within 100 years. And here’s the thing: the worst case scenario (6 or more degrees Celsius of global temperature rise) is far more likely than the best case scenario. As you can imagine, the middle scenario (which is now almost certain to happen), is not as bad, but halfway to absolute wipe-out is still pretty bad.

Or am I just scare-mongering, or believing my own hype? Because I know a bit about how the human brain works according to scientists like Lakoff and Westen, I know that I am pre-disposed to believe the worst about climate change, whether it’s true or not. All the “facts” I hear about climate change interract with all my “liberal” and “left-wing” and green beliefs & preconceptions to form a tightly-knit and self-reinforcing web that would pre-dispose me to believe the facts even if they were not true. And that is indeed how some people have treated me on my journey down the Americas. As someone convinced of their own quaint little beliefs in their own head who has to be humoured or avoided, defended against, or at least treated with a pinch of salt. I watched a Mexican girl tease a German traveller with the taunt “ecoloco!” (a mix of ecólogo [ecologist] and loco [crazy]. And that wasn’t because he was an ecologist or had said anything at all environmental – he just had slightly-longer than usual hair. She evidently found this name-calling hilarious. I, an ecologist with short hair, kept my mouth shut.

My friend, a smart and expensively-educated human rights activist in New York City, asked me whether there wasn’t lots of doubt about climate change being caused by human activity. And another American human rights activist here in Guatemala got offended when I included climate change in a conversation about human rights. A Brit, soon to graduate into the field of “global economic development” told me that there is “no way” we can ever ask people to consume less, or to stop new people consuming more. While advocating this “development” he admitted to having no idea what the (inevitably catastrophic) impact on this planet might be.

So there is clearly a lack of real knowledge of the realities of climate change. I can certainly say that very very few people I’ve met have anything like a commitment to fighting climate change. I’m talking about any commitment at all. Only a few people even have the language of thinking that there is a vaguely a problem and that they occasionally have a role to play in countering it, for example by watching what they buy, driving or flying less, boycotting extreme products or corporations, and casually sharing that view with others. But even among well-educated, politically progressive and “liberal”, young and well-off Westerners, this view is not at universal, it is definitely a minority.

So. How I can communicate to people like this, and people with even less experience of the issue, my perspective, my truths, my motivations and my urgency about climate change? I need something that is short, to the point, not overly scientific and that reaches across values-systems and experiences.

I guess I need to remember the core ways I would communicate anything difficult: keep a sympathetic connection, talk on a personal everyday level, talk in terms of needs not of “musts” or “shoulds”, don’t assume a superior role, keep it believable and bite-sized, be aware of the feelings I’m creating, concentrate on creating empathy and motivation not imparting a volume of information.

With that in mind, perhaps something like “I’m really worried though about climate change and global warming. A book I was reading recently was showing how where I live in Britain won’t exist by the end of my lifetime because it’ll be completely under the sea, and the country’s going to be changed completely because we won’t be able to import or grow enough food. It’s going to be horrible, I just wish there wasn’t so much propaganda in the way from the powers-that-be, because I think there are ways to avoid the worst happening”.

This is only one possible paragraph out of hundreds, but I’m hoping it serves several purposes: it sincerely and personally communicates my concern, it is sympathetic, and it will hopefully make people think. Nobody wants to be put in a horrible position or see bits of Britain go underwater. And crucially it pre-empts any climate-change-as-conspiracy nonsense by reframing the powers-that-be (and they, in detail, will be different for everyone) as the people causing the problem, not the scientists. It allows the discussion to then spring off with a question about who the powers-that-be are, what the scientific findings are, how I feel, what might happen, what I’m thinking of doing to handle it, and so.

And for the record, “much of Britain made uninhabitable by severe flooding” is exactly what we’re in store for with even a middle-case scenario of global warming, as Mark Lynas (interviewed here in The Times newspaper) showed in his dramatic but sadly completely factually-based book 6 Degrees.

I’ve tried innudating people with information, I’ve tried scaring the shit out of them with the factual projections. I’ve come to the conclusion neither approaches produces action. If anyone has more experiences and ideas about how to communicate climate change to people not familiar with it, and to make them act on it, I really want to know.

      It’s obvious that I will need to know very clearly why and how I am vegetarian if I am to have any hope of making clear food choices in Latin America that don’t stress me out on a daily basis. I had a great chance to re-examine my commitment to being vegetarian when a friend in New York City lent me the new book “Eating Animals” by Jonathan Safran Foer. Safran Foer is a youngish Jewish novelist, living in Brooklyn with his wife and young son. He says he began researching the book as a way to explore his own on-off dabbling with vegetarianism and to discover what would be the best way to raise his new baby. Safran Foer begins the book as a meat-eater, and a fairly committed one at that, listing many good reasons why everyday human connections contribute to us sharing a culture of meat eating. After all, what would Christmas be without a roast? Or an English breakfast be without sausages and bacon? Safran Foer’s initial concerns play into what is certainly a trendy new lifestyle choice in his home of Brooklyn, that of buying and eating organic meat, from animals that have been brought up well and slaughtered humanely. One outlet for such products is the Meat Hook butchery, part of the Brooklyn Kitchen store at the edge of hip Williamsburg. I was immediately excited by the Brooklyn Kitchen: gourmet food products, everything a cook could ever need, homebrew starter kits, intriguing tools and food you would find nowhere else, an array of stoves and cooking equipment upstairs for educational courses held for the local community…. and a beautiful tattooed Jewish baker. At the back of the store is the Meat Hook butchers. I soon realised that everyone who worked there, including the butchers, knew about and loved food. After spending a couple of evenings sharing excellent locally-baked bread dipped in organic oils that were beyond words, and drinking good bourbon and Brooklyn Beer with the store workers, I was in a position to interview the head butcher, Tom, about his work. Not only did he tell me all about his ethical approach to meat but he took me on an eerie and somewhat disturbing tour of the chilly meat locker. Tom genuinely loves food and cares about animals. He told me he had been a vegetarian for years out of humane concern for animals before discovering organic meat. The passion and sensitivity with which Tom describes animal husbandry is beyond reproach. He told me how he and his colleagues travel up to the local (for New York) farm and choose the animals personally. At the butchers, they are pioneering a new approach, using every bit of the animal, as if to honour its sacrifice. Every piece of meat that is not sold in good time gets turned into stock, stew or paté. And they are making an effort to re-educate their customers: “no, you can’t have chicken breast. Why not? Because a chicken only has one breast and we’ve sold that already because we only had one chicken. Can I interest you in another part of this fine animal?”.

      The organic meat sector is something that Jonathan Safran Foer investigates thoroughly, from his point of view of hoping to find meat that he and his family can eat in good conscience. In doing so he manages to explode certain myths about the farming industry in general. One is – to put straight any doubts for people who are unsure how ethical their supermarket meat is – that unless you deliberately seek out an alternative, you can be all but certain that your food was factory farmed, and therefore exceedingly un-ethical. That is, operations like the Meat Hook and its suppliers are an exception. A big exception. And you are not going to accidentally purchase or eat organic, compassionately-farmed meat. You will know when you do, because you will have sought it out, and it will taste better, be better for you and cost more. All farming used to be like this. Before 1923 there were precisely zero factory farmed birds. The transition from ‘sustainable’ and more compassionate family farm to mass-production factory started in America. Unfortunately the story of organic, ethical meat today is a short one. While factory farming in the 1920s comprised 1% of production, it now comprises over 99%. Exceptions like the suppliers of the Meat Hook do exist, but are extremely few and far between, and are under constant pressure. One of the strengths of Safran Foer’s book, and why it is not merely a collection of facts, is that as a novelist he writes in narratives – narratives about his family, about himself and his hopes for his child, and narratives about the people he encounters and interviews as part of his research. He gives the example of Niman Ranch, an American organic meat outfit that he decides has some of the best pig husbandry possible, although he finds their treatment of cattle to be still less than ideal (the cattle are fed unnaturally on corn rather than grass in their last few months, to accommodate skewed consumer tastes). Unfortunately by the time it came to publish the book Safran Foer hears that founder Bill Niman had been driven out of his namesake company because his own board wanted to do things more profitably and less ethically than he wanted them to.

      With market pressures like these, “ethical meat” is something very close to a mirage; existing but not quite. And even humanely-raised meat does not remove concerns about the method of slaughter (better but still a violent death), the whole issue of animal rights (e.g. the right not to be kept in a pen your whole life in order to be used in someone’s meal), and environmental concerns such as land/water use, waste products and transportation impacts. But if there are still problems with organic farming, they are nothing compared to the problems created by the far far larger mainstream animal-eating industry. Safran Foer’s research covers areas that are less well known as vegetarian issues, for example the fact that animal exploitation is almost wholly responsible for flu pandemics: we all know that overuse of antibiotics leads to increased resilience by viruses, creating new more virulent strains. Well, in the USA 3 million pounds of antibiotics are given to humans each year, but a whopping 17.8 million pounds are fed to livestock. And that’s for non-therapeutic use. Where the humans are of course only taking antibiotics for therapeutic use, the animals are fed them as a matter of routine. This is because animal exploitation is a nasty and disgusting dirty business. In the US, definitions of Free Range can include a shed containing thirty thousand chickens, with a small door at one end that opens to a five-by-five dirt patch – and the door is closed all but occasionally. American chickens are fed antibiotics just to stop them sickening from their environment.

      The same goes for all farm animals, and disease, filth and waste are a major issue. Individual pig farms can each generate more raw waste than the populations of some US cities. Just think of it. As Safran Foer writes: “farmed animals in the US generate 130 times as much waste as the human population – roughly 87 000 pound of shit per second. The polluting strength of this shit is 160 times greater than raw municipal sewage. And yet there is almost no waste-treatment infrastructure for farmed animals… (whereas of course there is for humans)… and almost no federal guidelines regulating what happens to it”.

      In one year, Smithfield – the USA’s largest hog producer – was “penalized for a mind-blowing seven thousand violations of the Clean Water Act – that’s about twenty violations a day”. “In just one incident, Smithfield spilled more than twenty million gallons of lagoon waste into the New River in North Carolina. The spill remains the largest environmental disaster of its kind and is twice as big as the iconic Exxon Valdez spill”. Yet the easy solution for these companies, due to insufficient regulation, is to pay the fines and just keep on polluting.

      And if what the animals are doing to us and to the environment wasn’t bad enough, that’s nothing compared to what we’re doing to them. Safran Foer reports that piglets that don’t grow fast enough are “thumped” – a common and normal practice – that involves picking the baby pigs up by their hind legs and bashing their heads against the concrete floor until dead, a dozen in one session. 180 million chickens in the US are improperly slaughtered each year, and that’s by the industry’s own (ultra conservative) reckoning. It’s common on a normal day for farm workers to be found stomping on chickens to watch them “pop”, hitting baby turkeys with poles, beating lame pigs with metal pipes, scalding chickens alive, and knowingly dismembering fully-conscious cattle. The traumatised workers themselves endure what Human Rights Watch calls “systematic human rights violations”. And American farmers are four times more likely to commit suicide than the general population.

      And rather than the world moving towards eating less but better quality meat raised in a humane way, like from the Meat Hook at the Brooklyn Kitchen, the world is moving far faster to expand factory farming, with all its disastrous environmental and inhumane consequences: more than 10 billion land animals are now killed each year in the USA, and on average, Americans eat the equivalent of 21,000 entire animals in a lifetime. Each. Globally, over 6 billion chickens are raised in factory farms in the EU, 9 billion in America, and more than 7 billion in China. A worldwide total of 50 billion chickens. Every year.

      If we’re concerned about world development then meat-eating should be a top-level priority: by 2050 the world’s livestock will consume as much food as four billion people do. Farmed animals already account for nearly 50 percent of China’s water consumption, and demand for meat is still rapidly growing.

      In short, meat-eating is laying waste to the world. And the carnage of factory farming is not contained to the land either. Consider shrimp: 26 pounds of other sea animals are killed and tossed back into the ocean for every 1 pound of shrimp caught. Or tuna: among the other 145 species regularly killed are sharks, rays, marlins, dolphins, even humpback whales. Safran Foer has a striking image: “Imagine being served a plate of sushi. But this plate also holds all of the other animals [needlessly] killed for your serving of sushi. The plate might have to be five feet across.”

      I won’t be eating meat or fish anytime soon. In fact, reading Safran Foer’s book has cemented my commitment to vegetarianism for perhaps another ten years. And as much as I would like to believe that organic meat could be an ethical alternative for some people, there are still too many issues for me that even humanely-raised dead animals cannot solve. I still have the question: do I avoid all food cooked for me in foreign countries (on the off-chance that they’ve used lard) in favour of shop-bought items where I can see the exact ingredients? For me the answer is that only eating cold food from shops while travelling for months on end is undesirable as well as unrealistic. Even if I could separate myself from the rest of human culture, would, as Safran Foer asks, I want to?

      Instead, the reason why I slip too often into vegetarianism rather than veganism is the same reason that will keep me vegetarian: I am not doing it to follow a strict ‘rule’. I am not a vegetarian because I am dogmatic, stubborn, weird or proud. I’m not vegetarian because I can’t stand the idea of eating meat (although as it happens, I can’t stand the idea of eating meat). I am not vegetarian because it is cool, or even for my health. I am vegetarian because I want to minimise suffering and harm to animals and to our environment. And there is an awful lot of harm and suffering to be minimised.

This island and its family islands of the Commonwealth of the Bahamas share alot of history in common with the Caribbean as whole; the region was home to several million peaceful native Americans, who were almost completely wiped out by the Spanish and then by the English, through slavery, outright murder and disease. Both countries then imported black slaves stolen from Africa, depopulating some areas by between 60 and 90 per cent. For a time in the 17th century the Bahamas was administered from the Carolinas, and from 1718 directly by the British. These are young cultures, with their populations all from somewhere else – most of them moved here by force.

One of the most moving things I’ve experienced on the island so far is an artwork “Sacred Space” by Bahamian artist Antonious Roberts; figures of slave women carved out of casuarina trees, still rooted in the ground; they look out over the ocean, towards Africa. Even more moving, a few yards away are the “Pirate Steps”, more accurately called the Slave Steps because up them from about 1785 onwards were marched thousands of African slaves who were brought here to work for the ruling white people on the island. At the bottom of the steps I found a young white American couple from the South, larking about and taking photos of eachother on the rocks, unaware or uncaring of how their predecessors had driven thousands of other human beings across those rocks like cattle. A few yards further along, the same harbour that berthed the slave ships now accommodates Esso oil and gas tankers.

So most people in these countries like the Bahamas have been the working class, working for someone else’s benefit, for not just decades but centuries. Since I’ve been here I’ve met black Bahamians who are film-makers, business people, university staff and professors, poets and authors. People who are well-travelled, highly intelligent, thoughtful, conscientious and considerate. But black society in general – in the US (which had crazy racist segregation laws even as late as the 60s) as well as in the Caribbean and Africa – has hardly had a chance to develop a well-rounded, mature culture; it is still recovering from centuries of being broken apart in order to build nice big stone houses for the rich of Lancaster and London, both British cities I’ve lived in that directly and hugely benefitted from – literally – slave labour.

At least unlike Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba (most obviously), Puerto Rico, Grenada and even Jamaica, the Bahamas has escaped military and/or spook intervention by the modern United States (I’m talking post-WWII). But that’s only because it was kept in line quite effectively by the British anyway.

Pirate Steps at Clifton Pier

Today, the Bahamian people are trying to forge their own independent culture and identity as a young nation, but I can’t help but shake the impression that this island is very much a playground for rich Americans (very little of which wealth “trickles down” to the average Bahamian) and the Bahamian government – despite a lack of public enthusiasm – is very good at doing exactly what Washington tells them, including their impending joining of the World Trade Organisation.

There are plenty of examples of the Bahamas not being an empowered nation in control of itself. The brain drain is one sad example. There is one tertiary education institution in the whole of the Bahamas, the College of the Bahamas. Only this year are they starting to offer a Masters program. Many politicians do not even believe that the college is needed at all. They are happy to see the most promising and cultured, intelligent young people go away to the USA, Canada or Europe for their education. Many will not return to their home, where intellectual enquiry is not encouraged or rewarded. Yet then politicians and the media complain of the “Brain Drain”, and criticise individuals for “abandoning” their country. Clearly, their country abandoned them first by failing to have a thorough educational infrastructure. There is still a clear pattern of ex-pats being given work that no Bahamian can be found to do, because no Bahamian has been given the training and opportunity to do it. I met a European who is a new senior civil servant; he has been imported directly into a top job because there is insufficient home-grown talent (a law preferences Bahamian applicants over foreign ones where possible). He told me how he is overseeing major works, carried out by a foreign contractor. Nearby, the Chinese are building a new sports stadium. One of the most important public works at the moment is to dredge the harbour so even bigger cruise ships can be accommodated.

Investment into the Bahamas comes in terms of banking, tourism, cruise ships and mega-hotel complexes like the offensive gigantic and pink Atlantis resort (an exact copy of the one in Dubai, both owned by a multi-billionaire). Tourists, mainly American, and British, of course flock to these casinos and mickey-mouse restaurants (that reminds me, the Disney cruise ships also come here).

A large percentage of Bahamians are dependent – increasingly – on these services and tourists, for their jobs as maids, waitresses, shop assistants, cleaners… And Bahamians are not exactly respected in their own country; apparently companies that take tour groups into Atlantis have a policy not to employ any person with dreadlocks. Bahamians – at least black Bahamians – are not expected to go there. I know someone who was questioned repeatedly and nearly asked to leave a coffee shop for not being a tourist. Some bars and clubs in the Bahamas are essentially openly racist, not letting in Bahamians – unless they are the rich white ones.

Pirate Steps at Clifton Pier

The Bahamian dollar being tied to the US allows perfect facility for Americans to come and go as they please.  The airport is being expanded – at huge cost – to make way for even more of them. All in all, a culture of impoverishment and dependency prevails – dependency on foreign investment, both infrastructural and daily – and dependency because Bahamian’s life goals are too often reduced to the lowest common denominator, becoming tied to how they can best serve the “other” people, the people with the money, the people who are in charge, the people who come here for the sun and sand and sea but expect to be insulated from the crime, poverty and pollution. Bahamians are not readily able to develop an independent destiny for themselves and their country.

And that’s before we consider fundamentalist Christianity – another “gift” that America and Britain have given the Caribbean… and one that will continue for decades to come, before people question whether it is in their own best interests. Although not as bad as in Jamaica, homosexuality – for example – is not just frowned upon but attracts physical violence. In the 90s a cruise ship with mainly gay passengers was turned away by the Bahamian government, such was the public hysteria. Thanks to the “Christian Council” Brokeback Mountain was not screened in Bahamian cinemas. Neither was the South Park movie.

But opposing homosexuality has very little to do with emancipating native Bahamians. It still has everything to do with Bahamians having internalised someone else’s set of largely disciplinarian and pro-individualist/anti-community moral values; ironically when most of the Western nations who are imposed that religion on them are now relaxed about homosexuality, and have far better, more compassionate welfare provisions.

The Bahamas continues to import bad ideas from outside, rather than finding its own solutions. As part of the kow-towing to rich foreigners, the government allowed the building of a large new housing development on top of the only fresh water table left on this island. Fresh water comes to the capital by barge. Yes, barge, across the sea, from another island. What kind of government paves over the only fresh water left and brings water to its citizens by boat? More than once apparently the barge has had problems, and there have been water shortages. But then hardly anybody drinks the water anyway (it’s too high in calcium). Most people drink water from barrels (although there is hardly an endless supply of that, either, and of course, it costs $5 a time).

Everybody loves conch

The national dish is conch, a small snail-like sea creature enclosed in its beautiful white and pink shell. Conch salad, conch fritters, conch chowder, cracked conch; it’s a big thing here. But because of the demand from natives and tourists combined the conch are getting smaller as fishermen don’t want to wait for juveniles to mature. Conch is becoming more and more scarce, and the price has risen by 50% in the last couple of years. Given that conch is as inseparable from the Bahamian mentality as tea is from the British, or coffee from the American, I can’t help thinking this particular environmental crisis is going to hit hard. But it’s not all bad since there is plenty of imported food…. in fact, almost all of it. There seems to be hardly any agriculture left, certainly not here on New Providence island, with the nation’s capital Nassau, and precious little on the surrounding family islands. Certainly very little that is on a commercially viable scale. Yet the government is continuing to support policies that mitigate against local food, and the culture is increasingly the poverty diet that most of America would recognise: too much meat, too much diary, too much high fructose corn syrup; in short too much fat, crap and processed sugar and not enough exercise. But the corporations of course (Coke and Pepsi have their own brands here such as Goombay Punch (parent company Pepsi is not even mentioned on the tin)) are laughing.

In order to deal with the prodigious amount of waste created by a culture of high-sugar intake, soda drinking, beer drinking and bottled water, the government is considering incinerating its waste in an almost certainly toxic fashion (advised on this by American consultants). But then the dump is freely burning away anyway. Some nights the air reeks of poisonous burning plastic.

Yet the government’s main ambition seems to be to participate more fully in neo-liberal globalisation, which is bound to wipe out whatever agriculture and domestic manufacturing are left. In the last decade Bahamians have objected to CSME (the Caribbean Single Market and Economy) and the EPA (the European Partnership Agreement). Unfortunately though the main reasons seem to have been a partly irrational and racist fear of Haitian immigrants. Now that “accession” to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) is near, the government seems to have taken a different approach: just don’t tell anybody it. So, very soon, with almost no public debate, the Bahamas will be subjected to all the free-market discipline and expectations that the WTO puts on small countries, with none of the ability of an America or a France to hypocritically subsidise their own domestic industry while devastating those of other nations.

America corporations will love it, since the Bahamas has no income tax at all, and no corporation tax at all (yet, as most countries are, is saddled with debt).

In short, even with Independence in 1973, the Bahamas has not achieved any huge real independence; it is now just caught up in another type of exploitative merry-go-round in globalisation. Like any place that has a low opinion of its own worth, and a lack of experience and clout, the politicians look to other bigger people for guidance, because they lack real confidence in themselves. So they will follow America down a path where they will continue to not be in control of themselves as a country and a democracy, and lose even more power over how they live their lives.

There IS an alternative: economic localisation; stimulating domestic agriculture, diversifying fishing, putting in some public transport infrastructure (non-existent), more heavily taxing imports and practices that damage Bahamian society or Bahamians, investing seriously in education and public health (rather than an awful and deadly system of private health insurance (most people don’t have any at all)). While they’re at it they could make sure that corporations pay their way rather than actually free-riding on the taxes that ordinary citizens pay. And with the amount of sun here, consultants have shown that the Bahamas could run itself completely on solar energy, ending part of its dependence on foreign and polluting oil.

All these things would be a sign of a government of the people, operating for the people.

But for now, celebrating Emancipation – freedom from physical slavery – one has to ask, what about freedom from the slavery of other people’s ideas, ideologies, markets, religions, instructions, bullying and demands?

Real independence comes slowly, but without it, there can be no real democracy.