We're not as screwed as David Suzuki thinks, but we're still pretty screwed.
This is a damn big book. I started it on a flight from Ottawa to Sydney, and just finished it. Diamond seems like a pretty rigorous researcher, and he's generally a pretty good writer.
(Very) long story short: there's lots of factors that contribute the demise of civilisations. The environment is a really important one, but it operates in concert with other things, not the least of which is the decisions made by the civilisation. That's why the Easter Islanders died off, but the Icelanders and Inuit managed to stick around.
Well worth reading, this one.
Sunday, August 28, 2005
Wednesday, August 24, 2005
Public Relations - A matter of spin: N E Renton
This is basically a little collection of how-to tips for the public relations practitioner in Australia, from planning press releases to spinning and timing stories so that the media covers it the way you want to.
Trouble is, I think people are too damn good at this sort of stuff, and the PR folks have a grand old time getting away with little massages of news and so on.
There's not a lot to this book - it's more of "another treasure of wisdom" from "a renowned leader in Australian PR" blah blah blah. It's just a manual.
Trouble is, I think people are too damn good at this sort of stuff, and the PR folks have a grand old time getting away with little massages of news and so on.
There's not a lot to this book - it's more of "another treasure of wisdom" from "a renowned leader in Australian PR" blah blah blah. It's just a manual.
Monday, August 22, 2005
Naked Ape to Superspecies - David Suzuki and Holly Dressel
We're screwed, folks.
Well, that may actually be a glib interpretation. There's a lot of things going wrong with the world, and David Suzuki is a heck of a guide through the dystopia that we're turning our planet into. You know, we're kind of like dogs that haven't learned not to pee in the house, or stupid kids who get their own place and just have fun and trash the joint. Actually, I think we're more like the kids than the dogs - we're supposed to have some sense, being human and all.
About the book. David Suzuki, in case you haven't heard of him, is a geneticist turned environmentalist, and he's pretty darn good at it. His story is that he was having a grand old time down at the genetics lab, and one day he found out about some worrying goin's on over in corporate genetics ville, and had a fundamental re-thing about what was going on.
Essentially, there's no argument that humans (and their ancestors, and all the other creatures great and small) have an effect on the environment. But to use this argument as a panacea against the doom and gloom of the enviro-lefties is disingenuous. Humans, as superspecies rather than naked ape of days gone by, is able to cause enormous environmental change in such short periods of time that ol' Mother Earth can't keep up with cleaning up after us.
Sometimes we're pretty clueless: I think it was this book (though it could be one of the other envirodoom books I've read lately) that tells the story of some wonderful bio-engineered microorganism that was supposed to do something particularly handy, like eat pollution and turn it into sunlight, or make loaves of bread appear on wheat stalks or something like that. Neat, and readily commercialisable. The way things worked, in order to get approval to release this into the wild in the States, the FDA said to the company "Make sure this gizmo won't do anything real bad, m'kay?" And the company said "Sure! We'll run some tests." So they sterilized some soil, put the gizmo in the lab in the soil, and lo and behold, it sat there kind of bored cos there was nothing to do. Some bright young grad student had an idea. Soil isn't sterile, he thought to himself. So he wandered out on his lunch break, grabbed a bucket of soil and brought it in to the lab. He put in some of the genetically engineered wonder, and nearly pooped himself when in short order there was nothing left alive in the 'natural' soil. The wonder-organism killed off every other biotic element in the sample. Ergo, release this into the wild and... it's gonna kill off all the microorganisms, upon which everything that grows in the soil depends... and that we depend on to, you know, live.
It was a fluke that there's still stuff growing in North America, dudes. One bright young fella with a bucket of dirt made a big difference.
That's the story that's stuck with me after finishing the book. The book's typically well written, and is rigourously researched. I can't fault Suzuki's motives or persuasion.
The only problem is, it's the enviro-left again. The folks making the money off GMOs and wrecking our house have control of the discourse, and the regulations. The arguments that their technological wizardry is going to save the earth is drowning out the little pesty voices suggesting that they're mucking up more than their fair share of it.
Righto, here's a whack of links from the back of the book. I've updated URLs that I've been able to find.
Well, that may actually be a glib interpretation. There's a lot of things going wrong with the world, and David Suzuki is a heck of a guide through the dystopia that we're turning our planet into. You know, we're kind of like dogs that haven't learned not to pee in the house, or stupid kids who get their own place and just have fun and trash the joint. Actually, I think we're more like the kids than the dogs - we're supposed to have some sense, being human and all.
About the book. David Suzuki, in case you haven't heard of him, is a geneticist turned environmentalist, and he's pretty darn good at it. His story is that he was having a grand old time down at the genetics lab, and one day he found out about some worrying goin's on over in corporate genetics ville, and had a fundamental re-thing about what was going on.
Essentially, there's no argument that humans (and their ancestors, and all the other creatures great and small) have an effect on the environment. But to use this argument as a panacea against the doom and gloom of the enviro-lefties is disingenuous. Humans, as superspecies rather than naked ape of days gone by, is able to cause enormous environmental change in such short periods of time that ol' Mother Earth can't keep up with cleaning up after us.
Sometimes we're pretty clueless: I think it was this book (though it could be one of the other envirodoom books I've read lately) that tells the story of some wonderful bio-engineered microorganism that was supposed to do something particularly handy, like eat pollution and turn it into sunlight, or make loaves of bread appear on wheat stalks or something like that. Neat, and readily commercialisable. The way things worked, in order to get approval to release this into the wild in the States, the FDA said to the company "Make sure this gizmo won't do anything real bad, m'kay?" And the company said "Sure! We'll run some tests." So they sterilized some soil, put the gizmo in the lab in the soil, and lo and behold, it sat there kind of bored cos there was nothing to do. Some bright young grad student had an idea. Soil isn't sterile, he thought to himself. So he wandered out on his lunch break, grabbed a bucket of soil and brought it in to the lab. He put in some of the genetically engineered wonder, and nearly pooped himself when in short order there was nothing left alive in the 'natural' soil. The wonder-organism killed off every other biotic element in the sample. Ergo, release this into the wild and... it's gonna kill off all the microorganisms, upon which everything that grows in the soil depends... and that we depend on to, you know, live.
It was a fluke that there's still stuff growing in North America, dudes. One bright young fella with a bucket of dirt made a big difference.
That's the story that's stuck with me after finishing the book. The book's typically well written, and is rigourously researched. I can't fault Suzuki's motives or persuasion.
The only problem is, it's the enviro-left again. The folks making the money off GMOs and wrecking our house have control of the discourse, and the regulations. The arguments that their technological wizardry is going to save the earth is drowning out the little pesty voices suggesting that they're mucking up more than their fair share of it.
Righto, here's a whack of links from the back of the book. I've updated URLs that I've been able to find.
- GreenNet
- Friends of the Earth
- GreenPeace (Canada)
- The Population Institute
- Sierra Club (Canada)
- TWN
- Adbusters
- Redefining Progress
- Quebec Public Interest Research Group at McGill (QPIRG-McGill)
- Organic Consumers Association (Old site) (New site)
- Biotechnology.org
- Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy
- International Centre for Technology Assessment
- Council of Canadians
- International Forum on Globalization
- Center for Media and Democracy - PRWatch
- CorpWatch
- David Suzuki Foundation
- Rainforest Action Network
- World Resources Institute
- Sea Sheperd Conservation Society
- Essential Information Encouraging Activism
- Health Care without Harm
- Environmental Rights Action
Saturday, August 20, 2005
Collateral language: A user's guide to America's new war - John Collins and Ross Glover, eds.
The trouble with lefty challenges to the way the world works is that for some reason, they can't get their position to be taken seriously either by the power elite nor the majority of the Joe and Jane Sixpacks. Heck, they can't even be heard. So what happens? A bunch of intelligent, concerned, and politically engaged people tell each other how misguided the people in charge are, how they're pulling the wool over the people's eyes, betraying the trust of democracy and freedom, and generally agreeing that something needs to be done.
Here we go again. This collection of essays, published shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001, are fairly cogent and reasonable arguments against the status quo of the War on Terror(ism), and all the other things the US power elite does in order to ensure its global hegemony, like sponsoring the 'disappearance' of social democratic figures in South America in favour of despotic arseholes who'd rather kill off their own citizens in exchange for money and weapons from Uncle Sam.
The problem, and several of the essays get it, is that the discourse has been so effectively framed to support the dominant world view - America as a beacon of freedom and democracy, ill-defined terrorists (generally, whomsoever the American executive doesn't like) are threats, therefore high ho, it's off to war we go.
I had a rather leftish university education, and two things led to my distance from the cause, as it were: First, saving the world and advancing the cause of the proletariat, unless one is a suitably well-regarded professor or populist writer, does not the mortgage pay. Second, this problem of actually getting anything done sort of is disillusioning. Answers to the problem of being heard, of having an effect, are few and far between. The discourse has been so coopted and controlled by the elites, that when the lefties make a statment or organise a march, it's really easy for them to be marginalised as the nutters in the way of progress. Only the left takes the left seriously, unfortunately.
After that rather cynical rant, I must admit having a soft sport for the arguments in the book. Hell yeah, I think our civil liberties are being eroded in favour of a false sense of security. Hell no, I don't think bombing the bejesus out of poor hungry people is the way to global security. Hell no, I don't think accelerating the consumption of natural resources is the manifest destiny of the 'developed world'. Hell yeah, I think a nation ought to be able to protect its global trading interests (does anyone else want their copyright laws remodeled in America's image? Most Aussies don't seem to remember this part of the Free Trade Agreement). Hell yeah, I think people are being fooled by the power elites. Yeah, I think that innocent Iraqis, Afghanis, and Nicaraguans get just as dead as innocent Americans, and their families weep in sorrow and in anger just as much.
I am aware of populist resistance to the machinations of the global groups - WTO et al - but the stuff that doesn't make the headlines is the scary stuff. Genetic engineering and genome patenting and so on - we don't hear so much about that.
There's a bunch of non-mainstream news sources listed at the end of the book - I'll put in links to them here in the hope that maybe one or two more people see one of the alternative realities. The left needs to figure out how to play the power and discourse framing game with the big boys, though.
Interesting links from the book (page 223):
Here we go again. This collection of essays, published shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001, are fairly cogent and reasonable arguments against the status quo of the War on Terror(ism), and all the other things the US power elite does in order to ensure its global hegemony, like sponsoring the 'disappearance' of social democratic figures in South America in favour of despotic arseholes who'd rather kill off their own citizens in exchange for money and weapons from Uncle Sam.
The problem, and several of the essays get it, is that the discourse has been so effectively framed to support the dominant world view - America as a beacon of freedom and democracy, ill-defined terrorists (generally, whomsoever the American executive doesn't like) are threats, therefore high ho, it's off to war we go.
I had a rather leftish university education, and two things led to my distance from the cause, as it were: First, saving the world and advancing the cause of the proletariat, unless one is a suitably well-regarded professor or populist writer, does not the mortgage pay. Second, this problem of actually getting anything done sort of is disillusioning. Answers to the problem of being heard, of having an effect, are few and far between. The discourse has been so coopted and controlled by the elites, that when the lefties make a statment or organise a march, it's really easy for them to be marginalised as the nutters in the way of progress. Only the left takes the left seriously, unfortunately.
After that rather cynical rant, I must admit having a soft sport for the arguments in the book. Hell yeah, I think our civil liberties are being eroded in favour of a false sense of security. Hell no, I don't think bombing the bejesus out of poor hungry people is the way to global security. Hell no, I don't think accelerating the consumption of natural resources is the manifest destiny of the 'developed world'. Hell yeah, I think a nation ought to be able to protect its global trading interests (does anyone else want their copyright laws remodeled in America's image? Most Aussies don't seem to remember this part of the Free Trade Agreement). Hell yeah, I think people are being fooled by the power elites. Yeah, I think that innocent Iraqis, Afghanis, and Nicaraguans get just as dead as innocent Americans, and their families weep in sorrow and in anger just as much.
I am aware of populist resistance to the machinations of the global groups - WTO et al - but the stuff that doesn't make the headlines is the scary stuff. Genetic engineering and genome patenting and so on - we don't hear so much about that.
There's a bunch of non-mainstream news sources listed at the end of the book - I'll put in links to them here in the hope that maybe one or two more people see one of the alternative realities. The left needs to figure out how to play the power and discourse framing game with the big boys, though.
Interesting links from the book (page 223):
- Alternet
- Amnesty International
- Common Dreams News Center
- Food First
- FreeSpeech Television
- Global Exchange
- Guardian Unlimited (Mainstream, but a little more critical)
- Human Rights Watch
- The Independent (Hey, a competitor to the Guardian?)
- Independent Media Center
- The MediaChannel
- Media Workers against War - ah, this appears to be no longer working.
- Media Working Group
- Middle East International
- Middle East Research and Information Project
- Mother Jones
- The Nation
- Posters for Peace
- The Progressive
- Re:constructions
- United for a Fair Economy
- War & Peace
- Z Magazine
Thursday, August 18, 2005
The Race - Tim Zimmerman
Well, I found me another 'extreme sailing' book - in the theme of the Vendee Globe, except with more people and fewer rules.
Zimmerman starts in true round-the-world sailing story tradition, by nailing the highlights of the various races that have marked milestones in sailing - Slocum's circumnavigation, the trans-atlantic solos, the Whitbread, the OSTAR, et cetera, et cetera. Not a particularly innovative start to the book, but what are the options, really? In any event, I kind of liked his summary, as it moved along the chronology pretty quickly - good for me as I've read a couple of versions of sailing history, perhaps not so good for someone for whom this is the first introduction. Then again, a quick introduction could be appreciated. In any event...
"The Race" is essentially a race around the world in crewed boats. Competitors take off, and first one to the finish wins. Stopping in port for repairs nets a time penalty. Since they sail around Antarctica, the boats have to be pretty tough to survive in the Southern Ocean - but not so tough that they fall apart in rough oceans.
Zimmerman's storytelling is competent, but I didn't get the same urgency to turn pages as I did in reading about the Vendee.
Zimmerman starts in true round-the-world sailing story tradition, by nailing the highlights of the various races that have marked milestones in sailing - Slocum's circumnavigation, the trans-atlantic solos, the Whitbread, the OSTAR, et cetera, et cetera. Not a particularly innovative start to the book, but what are the options, really? In any event, I kind of liked his summary, as it moved along the chronology pretty quickly - good for me as I've read a couple of versions of sailing history, perhaps not so good for someone for whom this is the first introduction. Then again, a quick introduction could be appreciated. In any event...
"The Race" is essentially a race around the world in crewed boats. Competitors take off, and first one to the finish wins. Stopping in port for repairs nets a time penalty. Since they sail around Antarctica, the boats have to be pretty tough to survive in the Southern Ocean - but not so tough that they fall apart in rough oceans.
Zimmerman's storytelling is competent, but I didn't get the same urgency to turn pages as I did in reading about the Vendee.
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