Naturally I’ll post updates here as publication approaches (early 2012 a good estimate), but I’ve also kicked off a website for the project with a sign-up for a special mailing list dedicated to the book. The book’s title isn’t confirmed, but the site is named with rough aptness ‘Polar Cosmology‘.

Firstly, George Monbiot’s ‘The Real Domestic Extremists’ is important because it reveals the disturbing backdrop to this sorry saga.

The National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU) employed the undercover officer Mark Kennedy, who was embedded and bedded for seven years among peaceful green activists. Kennedy claims that it has supervised 15 other undercover agents on the same mission. But what is the mission? Sorry, can’t tell you. NPOIU is run by the Association of Chief Police Officers. As Simon Jenkins pointed out last week, ACPO is not a police force but a private limited company, beyond democratic scrutiny, not subject to freedom of information laws. (Read more »)

Secondly, anyone who’s followed the debate around this story will no doubt have heard someone (perhaps themselves) justifying the Mark Kennedy’s “mission” on the grounds that the people he was spying on were planning to shut down a power station—surely a grossly dangerous act that should indeed be treated as terrorism. Merrick’s ‘Lock Up Your Grannies’ demonstrates this argument to be high-grade bullshit, still being peddled by ACPO and anyone else irrationally desperate to demonize people fighting for society’s future.

Being smart human beings, the activists knew full well that the way the National Grid works “meant that there was no chance of anyone’s electricity supply being disrupted. Rather, it meant cleaner-burning gas stations would come onstream.” The judge sentencing them said:

It is right to emphasise that this the planned action would have had no practical effect on the electricity supply … It was your intention that this invasion would have been peaceable and safe. Violence was to be avoided, and the safety of the workers at the power station was paramount. You were fully equipped to carry out your roles safely.

But yesterday, ACPO spokesman Jon Murphy said that some of the people they were monitoring

are intent on causing harm, committing crime and on occasions disabling parts of the national critical infrastructure. That has the potential to deny utilities to hospitals, schools, businesses and your granny. [My emphasis; but you get the impression that it may as well have been his, in a stern, patronizing tone.]

As one of the activist defendants said:

I find it deeply disturbing that a senior police officer with a responsibility for the country’s national security doesn’t seem to comprehend how his own National Grid works.

We need to mature into a post-growth adulthood, in which we can find comfort and grace in a long slow recession—otherwise we will be the only species to move from adolescence to senescence with no maturity in between.

Trust Dale Pendell to forge a metaphor that’s both obvious and unexpected… revelatory common sense. Could the maturity of the species, the only alternative to live-fast-die-young, be anything different from the maturity of the individual? A long slow recession…

Obviously, in the face of the urgent need for action on climate change, this is lunacy, on the part of E.ON and everyone supporting them. What’s more, I’m more convinced each day that the current economic crisis has to be taken as a cue to stop listening to the pro-growth voices in society—which are either almost silent, as we take the benefits of growth as gospel, or loud and rabid, in defence against the increasing awareness that growth enriches the few, impoverishes the many, and endangers the planet (to paraphrase Richard Douthwaite). Equating growth with better quality of life is a delusion that will go down in history as a far greater disaster than the belief that a guy with a beard in the sky controls everything.

What to do? Well, one current bit of online activism put forward by Merrick on Head Heritage is to Google bomb E.ON‘s website. Check out Merrick’s article for details.

This post is my contribution. All the links to E.ON here are pointing somewhere other than their website—click to find out. If you’ve got a blog or website, join in and add your little spanner to the works.

Anyway, if you’ve not decided to be completely numb to the perils of climate change, this post by Alex Steffen is worth a read. Coming from such an avowedly positive-thinking source, this sort of news makes it crystal clear exactly how dangerously in denial politicians and the culture at large is.

Two important points. Firstly, there’s no easy way out:

There’s enormous pressure here in the U.S. on environmental groups, scientists and public officials; pressure to play ball, to support targets that are politically safe, to be moderate. But this is not a situation where such gamesmanship will help our cause. Incremental and limited gains in this situation are in fact disastrous losses.

Secondly—and this is mostly why I’ve posted this here—a call to all “cultural workers”. I’m sure I’m mostly preaching to the converted here, but it’s clear that there’s a vast responsibility on the shoulders of anyone communicating with larger, currently less engaged demographics.

We need to talk with people where they’re at on the issue, not where we wish they were. Somehow we need, in the next couple years, to guide millions of Americans through the progress of emotions—awareness, horror, despair, resignation, engagement, chosen optimism—that most of the people reading this site have gone through… and we have to do it in the next few years.

Such counselling or therapy is a mercurial prospect even on an individual level. We’ve got to do it en masse, quickly. And I’d expand on Alex’s optimism by adding that such wide-scale cultural action will be necessary even if we don’t turn this ecology-destroying economic juggernaut of ours around in time. Most things short of the miraculous aren’t going to be pretty, and we need to mitigate the ugliness with bold thinking, courage, and compassion.

Pedantically speaking, it’s hard to deny that this sudden change in the climate is due to climate change. Duh! The real argument is whether this climate change has been influenced by humans or not. And it’s virtually impossible to find a sane, uncorrupted scientist left who will deny this.

Still, Jim Dale (no relation to the twitchy Carry On star, we assume), a risk meteorologist at British Weather Services, says “it’s down to bad luck, not global warming.” He continues:

It’s a sexy subject and people like to stick labels on things. Global warming is the latest bandwagon going past so whenever we get a heatwave or floods they blame it on that.

Yeah, baby, sexy! Aren’t you getting hard already at the thought of millions dying?

And – bandwagon? It might be currently being chewed and digested by mainstream capitalism, absorbed into fashion and lifestyle. But that seems to be kind of what the market economy does, Jim. Leave your complaints on the grave of Milton Friedman.

Personally, I remember joining Greenpeace in the mid-’80s on the strength of documentaries I watched about the seriousness of the challenge faced by global warming. Well over 20 years is a long-running bandwagon.

On a brighter note, Chris Rapley, the incoming head of the Science Museum, has called for discussion of the obvious: cutting birthrates.

A manifestly simple and easy to follow idea – that less humans means less human-created environmental impact – is of course made immensely complex once inter-national pettiness and faith in unbridled growth (as long as we don’t call it cancer) are taken into account. But the debate, complex or not, is important and conspicuously absent from public life; Rapley deserves credit for braving the inevitable “What have you got against the Third World?” and “So you’re advocating genocide, then?” overreactions.

Either we manage our population and habits, quickly, or nature will manage them for us. You’re free to choose; but denying that these are the options is rapidly becoming the most popular way of choosing the latter.

First off, why no air travel? Carbon emissions, of course. Jim Bliss, my ex-engineer friend whose head for maths makes me dizzy, on moving to Dublin last year, sat down to work out how much worse it would be if he flew to London rather than taking a coach. Turns out it’s about 31 times worse.

Merrick just did some more DIY carbon calculations, and worked out that – using aviation-friendly estimates – “every minute you’re on a plane is the same as a day’s worth of your electricity”.

If we can make our way briskly past the noxious climate change denial industry (and associated amateurs), accepting that this stuff is actually happening and that our actions have consequences, we usually come to the arguments for “tech fixes”. In many arenas, this is a fair argument – at least, it’s worth engaging with, even if you disagree with it.

Not so, unfortunately, with air travel:

… every other source of global warming can be reduced or replaced [...] without a serious reduction in our freedoms. But there is no means of sustaining long-distance, high-speed travel.

The industry claims it can reduce its emissions by means of new technological developments. But as the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution points out, its targets “are clearly aspirations rather than projections”. There are some basic technological constraints which make major improvements impossible to envisage.

George Monbiot

The singular nature of air travel in this respect means that we just have to travel less by air. Personal sacrifices in a matter like this, some may argue, are as nothing without widespread limits enforced for all. There’s a truth in that. Yet my general experience is that this argument is usually trotted out by people who (1) would be the last to support widespread enforced limitations, and (2) use it as a rationalization for totally disregarding personal morality.

The people I know who dedicate a great portion of their waking lives to campaigning for such limits also apply this sense of collective morality to their own actions. I think this is known as “integrity”. (Of course, no one’s perfect, and hypocrisy is the result of high ideals as well as a lack of integrity.)

What about offsetting? Surely if there’s no other way we can buy our way out of this one? Well, due to several important practical considerations, the short answer to that is, “No – deal with it”.

My trip to Malta may inevitably end up entailing air flight, if for no other reason than no ferry services seem to operate in November (I’m a good swimmer, but not exceptional). But it may be possible to include a pleasant jaunt through Italy as part of train travel most of the way, and discovering the best way to do this is made all the easier by this brilliant website:

The Man in Seat Sixty-One

The hobby site of “career railwayman” Mark Smith, it details concise and helpful information for anyone who – for whatever reason – wants to travel without flying. It’s geared towards British travellers, but does include information on travel within other countries that people originating elsewhere may find crucial. Most travel agents and other sources of information are insanely biased towards air travel, so sites like this are hugely valuable.

Mark is clearly someone who would be doing this with or without an impending climate crisis: “Many people would rather not fly, or like me, simply prefer a more civilised, comfortable, interesting, adventurous, romantic, scenic, historic, exciting and environmentally-friendly way to travel.”

Yet again, the philosophy of reduction, of intelligently scaling back some of the excesses of capitalist industrialism, is often more than it appears when forced through the growth- and speed-fixated filters of consumer economics. Frequently painted as a passé form of hippy “hair-shirt” self-mortification, reduction is often the path of choice for the true sensualist.

The fact that this philosophy’s most famed branch, the Slow Food movement, itself began in Italy as a reaction to fast food makes me even more inspired to take my time getting to Malta. See if I can find the perfect Pizza Napoletana…

Today I went to cast some offerings into the River Avon as part of some ritual work I’m doing. I eyed my umbrella on the way out, but it seemed like a bright, placid day, so I left it hanging there (rarely a good idea in a West Country winter). Down by the river, I watched from a footbridge as some people walked round the jetty I work on. Some little fish seemed to be jumping in the water; or at least, that’s what it looked like until I saw how prevalent the ripples were…

I held my palm out and felt no drops of rain. Could it really be raining just over there and not here? Indeed, a bank of light drizzle was moving towards me, at such a slow rate that it took about 30 seconds to traverse the 10 feet or so between me and the bank. Noticing that the people I’d seen had moved along, I walked down to my spot.

It started getting a little heavier as I sat there, so after I’d done my thing, I walked off before I started getting drenched. By the time I was walking along the road towards the Clifton suspension bridge, the rain was abating, and had stopped by the time I was walking up the Zig Zag path. A vast rainbow arced over Clifton, from the Observatory on the downs over to the city centre.

It’s happened before for me, this synchronicity between outdoor ritual work and the weather. I suspect it’s common. Sometimes it doesn’t need ritual, it’s just an unfolding interaction between the flow of consciousness and emotion and the elements. Nothing that could be charted to satisfy the scientific urge; even so, something that strikes the attentive mind and heart as stepping out of the private realm in a way that renders terms like “fancy” and “projection” naggingly redundant.

Weather magic, often in the form of the “rain dance”, is one of the more common forms of magic to have penetrated the popular Western imagination. Like love spells, it deals with a system so complex that modern science genuinely seems to have hit the limits of its predictive and manipulative power, leaving it shrouded in a cloak of irreducible mystery, and thus ripe for a magical approach.

But it’s something less specific I’m getting at here; none of my experiences of weather changes accompanying rituals have involved any intent to affect the weather. Rather, the weather seems to have played a role in reflecting the energy of the ritual itself, an affirmative dance between the two.

I once headed to the Badger Stone on Ilkley Moor to offer some blood (my own) to the river goddess Verbeia. My sense was that she was connected somehow to the moors as well as the river, and I decided to petition the goddess herself for help in uncovering the connection. As I approached the stone, rain started to fall. By the time I got there, it became sleety. As the ritual peaked, it started hailing, and the wind from behind me (from the south) became so strong that as I looked at the cup-mark on the stone where I’d dripped blood, hail was hitting the back of my head and creating an intense tunnel effect in my vision. I wound things down, and the hail softened. As I walked away from the stone, the rain stopped altogether.

(I later discovered that the weather was more tightly bound to this ad hoc rite than I suspected. In Scotland, similar cup-marked stones are sites where libations—usually milk—were frequently offered to gruagach, elemental spirits. One rock in Colonsay was called “the well of the south wind”, referring to the power it gave the chief of the MacPhees to summon this wind at will.)

In art, when an expression imputes attributes like feeling and intent to non-human phenomena, it is known as a “pathetic fallacy”. Coined by John Ruskin in an 1856 volume of his Modern Painters, this term has sat in a corner of my mind, ever since it found its way in there in some English lesson, as a withering condemnation of anthropomorphism in general, not just in art. (And no, I couldn’t resist anthropomorphising the term itself.) It’s been an education to look more deeply at it in order to write this.

Even though a certain university’s “glossary of literary theory” bills it as “a term used by John Ruskin to decry the ascription of human attributes, traits, feelings, and so forth to nonhuman objects”, Ruskin himself is less simplistic. As an artistic device, he knows it makes no sense to decry it outright. However, both informed and slightly befuddled by his strong Victorian dualism between intellect and feeling, he distinguishes several classes of poet according to how they are able to negotiate this rather dubious exchange of feeling between the human and the environment:

So, then, we have the three ranks: the man who perceives rightly, because he does not feel, and to whom the primrose is very accurately the primrose, because he does not love it. Then, secondly, the man who perceives wrongly, because he feels, and to whom the primrose is anything else than a primrose: a star, or a sun, or a fairy’s shield, or a forsaken maiden. And then, lastly, there is the man who perceives rightly in spite of his feelings, and to whom the primrose is for ever nothing else than itself—a little flower, apprehended in the very plain and leafy fact of it, whatever and how many soever the associations and passions may be, that crowd around it.

There’s a certain three-step resonance with one of those hard-to-source Oriental sayings: “Before I studied Zen, a mountain was just a mountain. After I began to study Zen, a mountain was no longer just a mountain. Then, when I completed my studies, the mountain became a mountain again.” The pathetic fallacy is only decried by Ruskin when it’s insincere or when it seems to be overwhelming the poet, i.e. when the emotion involved is either absent or fumbled.

The greatness of a poet depends upon the two faculties, acuteness of feeling, and command of it.

Yet if Ruskin intended to coin a potentially positive, or at least neutral term, why “pathetic”, and why “fallacy”?

In Ruskin’s day, “pathetic” mostly held to its Greek origins in pathos, and meant “relating to the emotions”. The fact that pathos also seems to refer to suffering as well as feeling in general could probably inspire several psychohistorical studies. For now, it’s interesting to note the modern evolution of the word “pathetic“:

Meaning “arousing pity, pitiful” is first recorded 1737. Colloquial sense of “so miserable as to be ridiculous” is attested from 1937.

My Concise Oxford Dictionary (1990) lists it as a “British colloquialism” meaning “miserably inadequate”. It would be glib, but not entirely without grounds, to see here the cumulative influence of the notorious English contempt for strong emotions—nurtured by puritanical religion, science’s lust for impassive “objectivity”, and the Industrial Revolution’s demands on everyday life.

One suspects that despite his obvious intelligence, Ruskin was very much a man of his times, and of his country. While he chose “pathetic” as a technically correct term, his age’s growing distrust of emotional truth and dismissal of animism (outside the patrolled confines of art) found an outlet in his choice of this word, which was carrying more and more negative baggage in the popular mind.

So, why “fallacy”? Simply, Ruskin thought that any feelings, intentions, or other attributes reserved for humans can only be imputed by us to non-human phenomena. Even though the artistic use of this imputation may be praised as the work of genius, it is nevertheless false.

Ramsey Dukes, in S.S.O.T.B.M.E. and elsewhere, has written of the four “cultures”, or modes of apprehending the world: Art, Religion, Science and Magic. To simplify the work of a very subtle writer, he sees them as being discreet, to an extent. They’re not (or needn’t be) in competition with each other: they’re like apples and oranges (and pears and kumquats). However, he does see them as successive reigning principles in a cyclic process, at least in Western culture.

That we have recently been living through a scientific phase needs little debate, and it is clearly Ruskin’s place in the early part of this phase that leads him to use the word “fallacy”. Anthropomorphism is scientifically invalid; so much so, that we may as well drop the “scientifically” bit. Science is “common sense”, the triumphant arbiter of truth itself.

In talking of the classes of poet he feels he has discerned in examining the pathetic fallacy, Ruskin says:

I separate these classes, in order that their character may be clearly understood; but of course they are united each to the other by imperceptible transitions, and the same mind, according to the influences to which it is subjected, passes at different times into the various states. Still, the difference between the great and less man is, on the whole, chiefly in this point of alterability. (emphasis in original)

To me this has clear resonance with Dukes’ concept of the magician as one who integrates in himself all four “cultures” (Art, Religion, Science & Magic) or elements (Earth, Air, Fire & Water—but do note that Dukes does not equate particular “cultures” with particular elements). The point is to be flexible.

This emphasis on “alterability”, for me, exists in a certain tension with Ruskin’s final conclusion, which largely amounts to distinguishing between the pathetic fallacy with and without the distancing use of “as if” or “like”—similar to what we’re taught as the difference between a simile and metaphor. For Ruskin, forgoing “as if” testifies to a weakness of character that is unable to resist being engulfed by the emotions that suffuse both the body and the perceived environment.

So much for “alterability”; the lines are clearly drawn, and giving in to the full force of emotions is a one-way trip for morbid romantics.

While science teachers may worry about animism creeping into their lessons, they may not fully appreciate that their fear is not of an alien intruder. Anthropology has taught us that the psyche of Homo sapiens is naturally animist, and fear of animism in modern science is fear of a weakening of the rational structure hastily erected on top of this sturdy baseline granted us by evolution. Only feebly integrated with its psychobiological foundations, it creaks in the wind and bolsters itself with paranoia.

Modern linguistics and philosophy also teaches us that some things that science has been fearful of are actually hard-wired into our foundations:

Metaphor is for most people a device of the poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish—a matter of extraordinary rather than ordinary language. Moreover, metaphor is typically viewed as characteristic of language alone, a matter of words rather than thought or action. For this reason, most people think they can get along perfectly well without metaphor. We have found, on the contrary, that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.

Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By

“Air” and “spirit” are synonymous in most ancient languages, so perhaps it is no surprise that the weather attends to, reflects and participates in our magico-spiritual acts. And in perceiving this as such, in accepting our direct experience of these phenomena, in recognising our rational apprehension of them as an abstracted superimposition—valid only in a limited sense—we connect with what it means to be human.

As we become conscious of the unseen depths that surround us, the inwardness or interiority that we have come to associate with the personal psyche begins to be encountered in the world at large; we feel ourselves enveloped, immersed, caught up within the sensuous world. This breathing landscape is no longer just a passive backdrop against which human history unfolds, but a potentized field of intelligence in which our actions participate.

David Abrams, The Spell of the Sensuous

I wonder where climate change will leave our conception of ourselves and the world?

The Apocalypse has Four Horsemen: climate change, habitat destruction, industrial agriculture, and poverty. Each Horseman holds a whip called Growth in his hand. None can be stopped unless all are stopped.

David Foley

A quote from the comments of a must-read WorldChanging.com post by Alex Steffen. I have my disagreements with some of his attitudes, but reading this I realize the disagreements are minor compared to the common ground. Alex is right on the mark here.

We look at the current debate on climate change and find a little relief in the fact that the scientific basis for it, the reality of the matter at hand, is no longer a debate; all that is debated now is how to tackle it. Steffen points out that this is just one aspect of the problem we face, and too narrow a focus on it—however important it is in itself—will leave us prey to the kind of thinking that got us into this mess in the first place.

We still need to build another consensus; one that will inevitably entail subsequent debates about how we approach the issue, but as with climate change, we need to reach a basic agreement about the reality of the matter. This reality is the complexity, subtlety, dense interconnectedness, and multiplicity of the world we live in. Ecological thinking, where any narrow focus is merely a temporary expedient, and where appreciation of delicately interwoven, mutually influential patterns is the core, needs to become widespread, quickly.

Any regulars here will know that I feel the root of our blindness in this matter is found in the suppression of polytheistic animism by monotheism, and that, without “going back”, we need to re-awaken this archaic heritage, to pour this aged wine into the skins we wield these days, in order to dissolve the hardened, blinkered inheritance of the One God. This reduction of the world has been perpetuated by the linear causality models of science. Endless, pointless debates about whether X or Y or Z causes something… with a quiet voice somewhere trying to suggest that each is a factor.

It’s time for that quiet voice to become louder.

I’ve just posted a new review, of John Gray’s brief study, Al Qaeda and What It Means to be Modern. The title seems to have been moulded a little by publishing opportunism; fair enough. The meat of the matter is the delusions that modern political currents, such as Marxism and free-market economics, have inherited from Christianity. Essential reading.

I picked it up in a nice little second-hand bookshop in Cromer, on the Norfolk coast, while attending the wonderful Cwm To The Valley festival.

In other news…

Do check out Jason Godesky’s review of The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram—looks like a must-read to me.

While in London with a few hours to kill, I moseyed down to the Prince Charles cinema to see what could be seen for three pounds. The film waiting for me turned out to be the slow, charming drama-documentary, The Cave of the Yellow Dog. Observations of daily life for a Mongolian herding family are threaded through a minimal plot to great effect. An absorbing, delightful, and somewhat melancholy experience.

Beyond that, I’m immersed in getting the first Dreamflesh journal to the printers, and ploughing through the perpetually inventive and moving series Six Feet Under on DVD.

Meanwhile, in Yorkshire, some good friends of mine, and about 600 others, have been trying to raise awareness about climate change by protesting at the huge Drax power station. I wonder about the effectiveness of the tactic of trying to shut the power station down. It’s obviously symbolic, the station being the biggest single carbon emissions culprit in the UK. But even though this is the first anti-climate change direct action event, public awareness of the issue is already relatively widespread. Public and political action in response to the issue is very much “too little too late” at the moment. But in the media war that the protest is fighting, some of the effect is lost when people are clued up enough to say to themselves, “Well, just shutting a power station down for a day isn’t going to change anything is it?” Of course, this misses the symbolic impact of the event. As the Independent quotes from protestors show, none of the people involved see the action in itself as anything but a limited dent in the generally passive, mediated cultural attitude to this gargantuan issue. As ever, the protestors will most likely be dismissed—by the establishment and the neo-greens alike—as ineffective, antagonistic nuisances. But the issue has been raised, and many will have a basic human response to seeing other humans doing something about it. And this will inspire action, even as the source of inspiration is dismissed.