Month: January 2011

There is no ‘Away’ in ‘Throwaway’

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

You can see it towering up like a kind of colossal ark against the backdrop of the sea. Cranes stoop around it like some kind of gang of gangling ministers. It is already now a living symbol of failure of vision, or something more complicit. Soon a fleet of lorries will transport daily more than 500 tonnes of waste to be burnt up in Newhaven’s new incinerator. The ash produced and the toxins it contains – whether caught in the filters or the bottom ash that constitutes around a third of that which has just been burnt – is to be deposited in ‘land raise’ sites around the county.

Here, that means that out on the flat land that runs down to the Pevensey levels, previously tranquil country lanes will be full of dumper trucks and the ash – rich among other things in heavy metals – will sit, semi airbourne, mountains in the making as a toxic realisation of what miopic local government can look like. The truly disturbing thing is that they want to use the stuff as a construction material, thereby increasing the danger of the stuff seaping into groundwater, never mind the health effect for anybody living and working in the buildings they intend to build with it.

Officials insist the risk to health is minimal, that incineration is a valuable source of power as well as a solution to the problem of our running out of landfill sites. And there is no doubt that the problem of the amount of waste produced in the UK is huge – some 434 million tonnes every year – enough to fill the Albert Hall every two hours. Some 30 million of these tonnes are produced by domestic rubbish.

But there have been great changes, not least an increase in recycling from 4% to 40% since 2000, with a target of 50% by 2020. The tragedy of the proposed move towards more incineration is that such changes are halted if not put into reverse. In fact, local authorities who’ve forked out for incinerators will be induced financially to source waste from outside their area, particularly if the incinerators are linked to providing a set amount of power. This creates the use of more trucks on the road and erodes the growing aspiration that we should be getting away from waste per se, should be encouraging more compostable products, better collection of compost itself and greater use of anaerobic digestion. Incinerators lock us in to the mentality whereby we do not think of what we throw away. The binmen do their rounds and we are all conditioned to forget.

In her recent book ‘The Secret Life of Stuff‘ – Julie Hill spells out the nature of the problems of our relationship to the stuff we consume and throw out. A large part of what we’re faced with is the effect of the ‘linear economy’ whereby we make stuff, use it, then throw it away – reintegrating any of it back into the system still takes place much less frequently. Just look at aluminium – ubiquitous because it’s so useful; light, flexible, even barely toxic when used as packaging, it is smelted in inferno-like conditions whereby a single plant can use as much electricity as a city of a million people. Transported huge distances during its manufacture we use 900,000 tonnes of the stuff in the UK every year. While around half of that used in packaging is recycled every year, that still leaves a vast amount going to waste.

Or take a look at the half a million tonnes of clothes and textiles buried in landfill each year, along with an extra half a million tonnes of carpet, 8,000 tonnes of which are laid for events lasting only hours or days. Changing our clothes and furnishings regularly irrespective of whether they still have life in them has become symptomatic of modern life – once people made patchwork quilts and rag rugs, repaired things, bought them in the expectation they would last. A hundred years ago, household rubbish mainly consisted of ash and cinders and maybe food waste if there wasn’t a dog or pig around, back in a prewar world before consumption gathered pace and where salvage was still part of the scenery.

We need to start a greater shift back to such sensibilities along with working towards solutions such as designing products for durability and for recovery of their constituent materials along with returning nutrients from food and human waste to the soil. Reforming how we reduce waste and set about its management is undoubtedly a long, hard grind and incinerators hold out the promise of a seemingly quick fix. The environmental cost of the production of the waste that they burn, to say nothing of putting elements of it back into the atmosphere shines an uncomfortable light on such a promise, or policies of here-and-now convenience.

There are now 81 incinerators planned around the country. It has been calculated they produce twice as much CO2 as fossil fuelled power stations, making the plan for more incinerators look doubly perverse. Meanwhile those living under the prevailing wind will have to deal with a legacy of increased likelihood of cancers. The extent to which dioxins produced represent a significant risk is still controversial, though their output during the start up and shutting down of the furnace has not been properly monitored in the UK. Meanwhile the filters do not catch nano particles which can infiltrate the lining of the lung and cause internal inflamation, damaging organs and even unborn children.

At Newhaven now and anywhere downwind we have to live with a leviathan that may well set the county back by decades. The building looms as a testament of how not to do things, of what can happen when councils bite the bullet of an out-of-sight-and-mind mentality that sums up our modern problem of waste production itself. The facts that the way in which the councils involved have acted here has been described by the local MP, Norman Baker, as ‘amateurish and slipshod’, that the very legality of the deal with the construction firm has been called into question are somehow depressingly unsurprising. If anything can be drawn from such a sorry story, it should be that many other places in the country still have a choice about whether to meet the future of waste management with an attitude fit for this century, not some all too easy, corporately financed non-solution that creates more problems than it claims to bring an answer to.

“Our Richest and Most Fragile Habitat”

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

At first there was the by now usual sense of stunned disbelief: the government – not content with dispatching any public body with a goal of serving the greater public good or attempting to provide some kind of environmental balance from on high – was coming for the Forestry Commission. But beyond the justified chorus of concern, the petition that has already gathered 150,000 signatories, the score of campaign groups that has sprung up, is the idea really as bad as it sounds?

After all, The Forestry Commission itself was set up after the First World War during which the importance of a domestic supply of timber had been made acutely relevant by the interfering effect of German u-boats. Our previous habit, formed in the previous century, had been to simply strip other unsuspecting countries of their wildwood. In a short space of time after the founding of the Commission in 1919, vast tracts of upland hillsides, moorlands and heaths had been planted up.

The effect on these habitats in our backyards was obviously less than brilliant but at least we weren’t denuding the pristine forests from so much of the rest of the empire. And here, even at this first inception of the Commission, there lies the rub of how we provide for our appetite of timber without undue damage to the natural environment. Is it so bad if so much of the Commission land has now come up for sale? Weren’t these trees planted to be harvested at some stage down the line? With our current deficit isn’t now as good a time as any to call in our debts? We might even stand to reclaim some of those moors and heaths and barren but beautiful hillsides that were lost beneath the blanket of dark spruce.

One very large problem with this is that large areas of ancient woodland have been cut down and grubbed up and planted with conifers this century, seen as they were after the collapse of their age-old management pattern as somehow extraneous, unproductive patches to be tidied up. About half of our ancient woodland has been lost since the end of the Second World War and replanting with conifers accounts for by far the largest share of this. At least, such a proportion would have been lost if these woodlands had not proved so unexpectedly durable – they can revive after a considerable time with the right conditions and even decades of the heavy shade of conifers have not removed them entirely.

Infact, since the 80’s there has been a growing recognition of the need to thin out conifers where they have been planted over ancient woodland and revive the latter in all its beautiful and species-enriched glory. Which is exactly what stands to make the proposed sell off so tragic – the Commission was planning to pursue such restoration on a massive scale. A vast amount of recoverable ancient woodland stands at risk of being lost, forever.

So even if the concept of selling off an asset once held firmly for the public does not raise hackles in and of itself, even if the thought of tracts of forest losing the excellent level of upkeep of paths and rides that the Commission currently provides does not sit uncomfortably then perhaps the proposed pawning of this most precious asset – the 20,000 hectares of woodland as close to wildwood as anything we are ever likely to possess might just wake us up to what we stand to lose in this proposed sell off.

The sorry star upon a proposal which has long since shed its needles and should be removed from both houses with all speed is that the mechanism drafted to facilitate the sell off is not even constitutional. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, we’re glibly told that this is an opportunity for community groups to acquire their local woodland – even if such groups gather the money, where exactly do their members hope to find the time to manage forests with any thing like the level of dedication the Commission currently provides?

There will always be a need for sustainable forestry. But brokerages as hasty as this one appears to be, running the risk of selling off to firms who only have profits in mind and little or no sense of what husbandry can look like don’t do the country any favours by any yardstick. The Commission maintains 100% of its woodland to Forestry Stewardship standard – there will be no such requirement for future owners. To make a former point again, even the economics is dubious; the FC making sizeable returns on their estates to the point where the body costs the public only 30 pence per taxpayer per year. But this government has no sense of value, of what a thing is worth, of what generations past have held dear and fought for. They paint themselves as bitter medicine, as the cruel but kindly short sharp shock. Really though they are just libertarians, about as respecting of institutions as their far left mirror images. Whether semi-crazed by ideology, or simply guilty of an amauterish gambling in the face of the crisis we face, they seem set to discover the limits of the population’s tolerance.

Cruel and False Economies

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

Last year, October’s spending review ushered in a sense of disbelief akin to a thing like freefall: Doomsday had apparently come early for so many in the public sector, for so many of the inner city poor. If there had been any question about it before, now it was only too clear. The crunch had bitten deep, the shit had hit the fan and the government were, maybe if only for the space of a few days, seemingly made only too credible to many by the strength of something like conviction, something that passed for it, something sufficient to make people mistake it for genuine force of feeling. Though to their way of thinking, Cameron and IDS probably still believe that they are right, as for them to be right equates with a dismantling of the state, where the deficit may be unfortunate but dovetails neatly with their ideology. The true blue values of many Tories are both masked and miles away from endless touchy feely PR wooing of the swinging votes.

Nine months on from the election, the ground has been well primed with months of saturation in the press of stories of benefits scroungers, a national vilification that few have seen fit to deny. The climate is set and the sound of belts being tightened en masse hardens feelings to those who may be neither strong nor productive, who simply do not have a bus or bike to get on, who are set to be brushed beneath a rug of touted necessity, of a new and harsher colder world.

A kind of glee in many quarters sets the picture further down a deeply unsettling road. There was a sense of vindication which Cameron did not restrain from whipping up. “Think of how many nurses that money could employ,” he spouted, clear enough that you could almost hear the spittle on the mic as he talked about benefit cuts. “Think how many schools and hospitals it could help to keep running.” It was a denouncement so enthusiastic, that pandered so unapologetically to the most predictable and emotive lines of reasoning it sent a bolt of warning down my spine.

So London held its breath and even months on from the touted claims of “sociological cleansing”, the sense of shock, of something bitter sinking in has not entirely gone, even as the students vented the rage of a nation, even as that shock has been transformed to a kind of fire of the spirit and vindication that this cannot be allowed. Perhaps it is partly a reflection of this change of public mood that the proposed housing benefit cap has been postponed till this time next year. What’s clear is that if these measures are not moderated or overturned there will be very real misery. There will be greater homelessness. There is already stress in countless thousands of houses and on the estates.

What was shocking in reading some of the early comments on the web, the product of the vanguard of the loyal libertarians perhaps, or an indication of the power of Cameron’s crude popularism, was the drawing up of a thousand proverbial bridges. The poor are undeserving after all. Let single mothers be moved into bunkhouses. Let immigrants now find their own way home. This stunned and all too nearly broken Isle, this shocked and awed and deferential country; is this really now how it will stand; a shrugging of our shoulders and wallowing, complicit, in a lie that says it cannot be another way, that only the strong can survive, that only the virtuous prosper, that it is not for a government to be compassionate and the people all must fill the breach because the state has no greater role than sweeping the board clean to let the markets do how they see fit.

Such rushed and savage cuts in many quarters stand to only bring out cruel and false economies, the bills from block-booked B and B’s for the displaced being just one. Even the vaunted ideals of a move away from New Labour’s totalitarian streak are looking little more like cynical window dressing for what was an almost mandatory piece of mendacity for the elections.

It’s worth remembering that the current deficit, while it has risen sharply since 2008 is still just over half of what we faced after World War Two when it is placed in line with GDP. Admittedly that’s an extreme example; we had just come through a full scale global war, the years following 1945 brought with them a sharp decline in what we owed, our credit as a nation was still good and the role of a still bouyant US was no small factor. But it helps to show there are good grounds for reducing the deficit more gradually, if such a possibility can only be articulated to greater effect. But whatever the necessity, however undeniable the crisis, these cuts are being ushered in at their present speed and on their current scale because of Cameron’s view of what the government should look like, irrespective of what we stand to lose as a nation. And the cuts’ nature all too often seems to fly in the face of good sense, as the changes to the way tax is to be collected exemplifies.

Meanwhile, the poor have simply to pull up their own breeches and get on with it. It is will and work that make a person rich in his society, not chances dealt at birth or through health or education. The fact that there are now 2.5 million unemployed and only 500,000 jobs is an inconvenience that those in his circles will not have to suffer. It amounts to more than minimal government; it is effectively Social Darwinism, a return to the worst facets of nineteenth century attitudes to society at large. Factor in that, whether through design or accident, cities like Liverpool will be disproportionately hit and the whole thing takes on the pallor of a monumental sick joke. Except there is no joke, no waking up from the nightmare, no sudden admission from Downing Street that this has all been some mistake or monumental wind up from the start.

Across the South, in many coastal towns there looks set to be new ghettos for the poor; Hastings, in North Kent, in all the conurbations stretched out as a kind of commuter country nineteen thirties afterthought along the Sussex coast. If the caps continue, in fifteen years vast tracts of the South East will be made unaffordable to an equally vast tract of people, an ensuing migration to the far more jobless North only exacerbating the situation.

This could be avoidable if people are willing to conceive we have a choice and that it does not include another four and a half years of a coalition with such a shaky mandate from the start. The crisis is real, but this kind of short, sharp shock is exactly what neoliberals espouse as the best way to respond to it. The tragedy is that this may well lock the UK into a spiral of decline from which only the very richest stand to benefit. Economically, even when dealing with a deficit in a recession, these cuts represent an absence of clear thought.

Meanwhile everything that generations passed have fought for in the name of equality and freedom is being swept aside. The result may be a breeding ground for the kind of conditions that brought about an interwar interim of massive turbulence, which eventually necessitated the creation of a fully fledged welfare state as a way of ensuring a fairer society and more stable political climate. As Karl Mannheim wrote in 1943:

“All of us know by now that from this war there is no way back to a laissez-faire order of society, that war as such is the maker of a silent revolution by preparing the road to a new type of planned order.”

However we choose to do so (and this is worth a read for anyone taking to the streets), it is imperative that more and more of us continue to articulate our discontent. What stands in the balance is not just our own fate over the following months and years or the fate of generations down the line; it is an honouring of a tradition that goes back to at least the mid nineteenth century. It is an honouring of those who sought to reform a Poor Law that condemned the unemployed in a world of finite opportunities to brutal and degrading conditions in the workhouses. It is an honouring of those who fought for the notion that the poor have a right as a matter of course to a greater share of society’s wealth and who, while a culture of hard work should always be maintained, should not be subjected to humiliating means testing. It is an honouring of those who believed that the state had a greater role than fiscal maintenance or passing laws; that it could be an instrument in the building of a fairer and more egalitarian world.

Men and women have suffered and died for such dreams. Don’t let us fail to serve their memory because we have forgotten as a nation that such things were hard won, that we have been handed down unparalleled opportunities, damaged a little on the way perhaps by a thirty-year-long slumber Thatcher set the way for. But we must still be willing to believe that we have it in our hands to shape the kind of world we would see fit, as surely as a generation did sixty five years ago, blinking from the rubble of a global total war, sure of only one thing in a time of unprecedented uncertainty; that they had fought for a better world and would not see the chance for its creation snatched away by the duplicity of a party of privilege with no right to sell this country down the river. It was Ghandi of course who said that each generation must re-enact the struggle for its rights, or lose them. Be under no illusions; that time has come again, there is as much at stake today as there ever was in 1945.