The Irony of Plasticity

I have always been in favour of plastic Christmas trees over real, fresh ones. My parents bought one when my sister and I were really small – I don’t remember not having it – and we are still using it 30-odd years later. That means we contribute a bit less to climate change than those who opt for a fresh tree every year and we save money by being able to reuse the same tree (although, technically, fresh Christmas trees tend to be of the evergreen variety so could be reused if cared for). As the short film, Gloop, points out below, plastic is a fantastic material because it can be formed into any shape and, once shaped, resist deformation. French philosopher Catherine Malabou adopts the metaphor of plasticity to describe the dialectic or relationship between different entities.

Byproduct of oil production notwithstanding, plastic’s adaptability has led to somewhat of an environmental revolution in that products could be made without extracting finite natural resources. However, in an economy driven by capital, the resistability of plastic has had the unfortunate, unenvironmental effect of plastic mountains on land and sea. Furthermore, in the long term, it does break down, with smaller pieces ending up as part of the food chain. The irony is that this contradiction in plasticity fits with Malabou’s description of an underlying relationship between entities that influence each other who also resist the influence.

How do we feel about recycling?

What more do I need to say?

Energy crisis: Make more, borrow or just cut back

I find that the debate about renewable and non-renewable energy quite simplistic. All of the proponents of either type of energy, or journalists, don’t really challenge any underlying assumptions about economic growth.

Those underlying assumptions are that our current energy consumption is sustainable.

The neo-liberal argument, as espoused by the Adam Smith Institute,  is that renewable sources, such as wind, solar and water, is not as reliable as fossil fuels and cannot generate nearly as much. In its report ‘Renewable Energy: Vision or Mirage?’, it said that the intermittency of renewable sources need large scale-back up back up generators and so, on their own, cannot provide all the secure energy we need.

Renewables UK, the lobby group for the renewables industry, criticises the report for not recognising that wind turbines already provide “more than 3,200,000 homes in the UK, displacing more than six and half million tones of carbon dioxide every year’. Furthermore, ‘wholesale gas prices have risen by 40% over the last year…depending on expensive imports of gas leaves us at the mercy of market forces we cannot control’. It is impossible to build a nuclear power complex quickly and dispose of radioactive waste cheaply. Renewables UK also claim that wind turbines generate energy 80-85% of the time.

Just like the debate about how to deal with the financial crisis revolves around how to get the economy growing, the debate about the energy crisis revolves around how we can maintain our current energy consumption levels. The Adam Smith Institute  and Renewables UK may disagree about renewable energy but they do both agree on one thing: if we adopt the opposite solution to what they propose, we won’t have enough energy and to make sure we have enough we have to pay more.

Will renewable energy such as wind mean a cut in energy needs?

Personally, I prefer the renewable energy solution because we know that it is much cleaner. Let’s just say, for argument’s sake, that the Adam Smith Institute are right about renewable energy. This raises an interesting question: if we cannot maintain our current energy needs on renewable energy, is the solution to find another way to make up the difference (borrow from other countries, use non-renewables sources, etc) or cut back.

Some economists have started arguing that we may have reached the end for economic growth. At the very least, it is bad for the environment and the health of societies. Indeed, if a neoliberal thinktank argues that renewable energy is not sufficient to meet our energy needs, then the logical next step is to reduce our energy requirements if we don’t want to continue degrading the environment. With less energy to fuel the economy, we can kiss goodbye to globalisation (hmmm, mixed feelings about that) and start producing and sourcing more locally and rebalancing from the economy from one that is mostly service-orientated to one where manufacturing plays a significant role. Of course, as systems get smaller, it becomes much easier to make them more environmentally friendly and deal with issues of income inequality, corruption and human rights.

But, wherever we stand in relation to the green movement, from tree huggers to sceptics, there is a certain discomfort too. I’ve also believed in protecting the environment, but I like tea and my cappuccino, especially from Starbucks. Are these good going to become more expensive or will we be able grow tea and coffee over here? We have come to rely on computers and mobile phones, but much of the manufacturing is done abroad. Will we be able to make as much and will they be any good? It seems that our lives are about to become a whole lot more inconvenient.

 

 

Reading the Riots: An Environmental Problem

Clearing away the waste

The UK riots during the summer were the result of people who perpetually felt outside the law, according the research by The Guardian and London School of Economics and contrary to the government’s assertion that it was solely down to criminals.

One of the starker statistics of the newspaper’s ‘Reading the Riot’ series is that 85% of 270 people who took part in the riots attributed policing as a “significant cause”. Indeed, 75% said that they had been repeatedly stopped and searched but there was also a less tangible general anger towards the lack of respect shown by the police. In other words, for the vast majority of rioters  - and perhaps they represent an even larger silent group – law and the state were not about their protection but about their oppression and alienation.

If we take the riots as a series of crimes, then the first instinct is to condemn them. But, in his reading of Hegel, The end of human rights: Critical Legal Thought at the Turn of the Century, Costas Douzinas suggests that crime is in fact a cry for help by the offender. ‘The essence of crime is the criminal’s demand to be recognised and to be respected as a concrete and unique individual against the uniform coercion of the legal system.’ (p277). It is the failure to recognise people as beings who deserve respect and dignity that ultimately pushes them  into alienation and then to trangress the law. (I don’t want to say this true of all criminals but certainly this could be said for many of them.) Of course, a thief often steals to meet unfulfilled needs but the law has a tendency to force people to fit into a certain mould. Crime then becomes a way for the individual to have a voice. Given the link between identity and property, it is surely not surprising that many of the crimes were acquisitive in nature (even if they did verge on the bizarre in some cases).

This lack of recognition or respect by the law can be seen clearly in the way that stop and search powers are applied disproportionately to black people and how the whole ‘War on Terror’ discourse has targetted Muslims (and arguably people who look as if they are Muslim). But the Guardian/LSE research shows that race was just one of a number of contributing factors, including poverty, unemployment and lack of education. What they all shared was a general sense of alienation and of not being a ‘part of British society’.

What happened is that whole swathes of the population have been pushed out into the environment (so to speak) of British society. There are a core group of decision-makers and direct beneficiaries at the centre and everyone else around the edges. Perhaps the Occupy movement captures this thought best with the distinction between the 99% and the 1%. (I think it’s probably more than 1% who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo but as a slogan it’s pretty catchy.)

It was interesting that phase 1 of the ‘Reading the Riots’ research was published in the same week as the end of the climate change conference in Durban. One could argue that when the riots happened, like climate change, the environment came back to bite society on the arse. And, like climate change, it wasn’t those in power who were the victims but other parts of the environment.

In the battle against climate change, recycling and renewable energy are seen as the solutions and creating waste the problem. Perhaps the problem that led up to the riots (and other forms of alienation) is that people are treated as waste and not valued as a ‘part of British Society’. When we throw things away, the state (in the form of the local authority) collects it and disposes of it at landfills or buries it. Out of sight, out of mind, so to speak. The problem with waste is that it is never cut off from society. Pollutants will still get into the soil and the air and affect us. That’s why the law imposes an obligation on local authorities to provide recycling services. Whilst the analogy isn’t perfect, perhaps this is how the 1% sees the 99%: resources and waste of their money and power.

It was interesting that the David Cameron claimed he used his veto against the plan amend the Lisbon Treaty to solidify closer fiscal union in the Eurozone in the interests of Britain. What he considered British interests was in fact the interests of (not even the whole of) the Conservative Party and its backers and, more debatabely, the City. He even told Angela Merkel and Nicholas Sarchozy that the EU and the ECJ do not belong to them, suggesting possible legal action. So, once again, the power elite in Britain sees law as a way to maintain the status quo. The irony, according to many commentators and politicians,  is that maybe Britain itself got pushed into the environment.

Protests, plastic bullets and plasticity

As I write, there is a possibility that we won’t get through today without London police using plastic bullets on students and protesters. But, of course, being someone pretty immersed in the works of Hegel and Catherine Malabou, I just had to give some thought to the plasticity of those bullets.

By way of a disclaimer, I would like state that I am wholly anti-weapons of any kind, particularly in the hands of people in authority and as instruments of fear, power and security. So plastic bullets and baton rounds are no more justifiable than guns and metal bullets. (When I tweeted on the subject of this post, I found myself in a hole.)

In Hegelian thought, plasticity is the character of the dialectic. Something is plastic if, on the one hand, it gives form (shapes) and, on the other hand, receives form (is shaped). But it also points to the contradiction between resistance and change. One the one hand, something is plastic if it can be moulded (receive form) but, having been moulded, it resists deformation.

Plastic bullets have obviously been shaped, that is unfolded from a universal concept of plastic into something determinant (bullet-shaped). But what is it that they shape? Their purpose, apparently, is to disperse crowds (i.e. protests), or at least, to influence their direction in which the crowd is going (i.e. away from the bullets, police and protected areas). But the protest is arguably more plastic than the bullet. It can be unfolded out of the universal crowd into a determinant group of people and, in response to environmental factors, it can change form, disperse and come together and still be a protest. Indeed, it is has been observed in previous protests that ordinary members of the universal crowd can get caught up in someway with the protest and police have not always been able to distinguish between the two.

But plastic bullets are plastic because their whole raison d’etre is that they resist deformation. Indeed, it is the basis for the fear of pain that they engender. Unfortunately, it is this apparent plasticity that also gives them the capacity to do more than just hurt, which is why there is a concern. They have been known to kill and maim.

There is also a certain plasticity in their function. When they are in the baton round, they are plastic bullets, at least potentially. After they are fired, they become actual bullets. But once they have either hit or missed their target, it is no longer a bullet. Its purpose loses form and dissolves into the universal detritus (waste). But their capacity to resist deformation means that they can be recovered by the police and reused by the bullets either at different protesters or at a different protest. So plastic bullets are, in a sense, reusable and recyclable.

I have to be honest, as a researcher in environmental law, it’s nice to see the police taking their environmental responsibilities seriously. But at what cost? Recycling in general is important for the environment and there is a certain plasticity to it – the continuous formation and deformation and formation. But just as recycling feeds into a culture of consumption, surely plastic bullets, despite claims of responsible use, will make it easier for the police to be more casual in their deployment, knowing that one plastic bullet can be used many more times than a metal bullet. How many times are the police looking to use it? It’s difficult to conceive of British authorities going the way of the Syrians but I don’t really want to finish the sentence.

 

Revolting Arabs good for the environment

It’s finally happened. The government has decided to take serious action to wean the UK of its dependency on oil. And it’s only taken the Arabs rising up against the tyrants that rule them, even though the an environmental movement have been warning of the urgency for years, decades even. I can see Greenpeace et al waving a big sign, saying “We told you so!”

And, as if the rising costs of petrol and car use hasn’t been enough of a trigger to red-blooded rightwingers, Energy secretary Chris Huhne baits them even further with the prospects of ‘foreigners getting one over on us’:

“China will build 24 nuclear power stations in the time it takes us to build one. By 2020, their nuclear capacity will have increased tenfold…They will lay 16,000km of high-speed rail track in the time it takes us to go from London to Birmingham.

“They have the highest installed hydro-capacity and the most solar water heaters in the world. And they are forging ahead on wind power. So China knows what’s coming.”

So the government has speeded up the implementation of  its Carbon Plan. Maybe it could be the greenest government ever! And who knows, a Tory majority coalition government could also be the most socialist!

Ecoterrorism

It is understandable that the police would want to place place police undercover in groups in order to prevent and investigate terrorism. But, as George Monbiot wrote in the Guardian yesterday, it seems completely over the top to place officers in environmental groups for seven years to be agent provacateurs. Indeed, it is a complete waste of money since, unlike the aniimal rights movement, there is no record of environmental activists resorting to ecoterrorism to get their message across. (I suspect that the fact people who care about the environment tend to also care about animal rights has somehow led the police to become confused on the issue.)

But it could be argued that ecoterrorism is not a specific form of terrrorism but that all terrorism is ecoterrorism. One of my favourite philosophers, Peter Sloterdijk, has said in his article Airquakes that the essence of a terrorist is someone who attacks the ‘environment’ of a person or people in order to do harm to them.

Terrorism “presupposes…an explicit concept for the environment since terrorism represents the displacement of destructive action from the ‘system’ to its ‘environment’. From the beginning, it includes the “malignant expoitation of the life habits of the victim“. The need to breathe is ultimate turned against the breather. But the environment is not only the air. Sloterdijk draws on historical analogies of the “poisoning of potable water”, “medieval infectious attacks against defensive forts”, “burning and smoking of cities and refugee caves” through sieges and the “spreading of horrifying rumours or demoralising news”.

In a sense, the terrorists of 9/11 or 7/7 used the liberty and the opportunities that not only available in the West but are its environment to attack the West. So, when we respond by curbing those same liberties and opportunities, we are doing what the terrorists’ are doing.

For Sloterdijk, the first example of terrorism as ecoterrorism actually occurred during the First World War. It concerned the first significant use of chemical warfare. On 22 April 1915, the Germans deployed 150 tonnes of chlorine gas against Franco-Canadian infantry positions in the Ypres area. This became a cloud of gas about 6km wide and up to 900m deep, which was pushed towards the French positions by a favourable wind. Prolonged exposure to the gas produced intense damage to the lungs and respiratory systems.T

The use of the chlorine gas was different to traditional methods of combat, such as artillery and bayonets. From the Middle Ages right up to the First World War, it was the “role of defenders and warlords to direct themselves towards the enemy and the enemy’s protective shields with direct shots.” On 22 April 1915, and henceforth whenever chemical weapons have been used, a German soldier did not require direct contact with a French soldier in order to hurt him. The weapon only had to be released into the environment and often the environment takes it from there. As Shakespeare prophesied through Shylock in the Merchant of Venice: “You take my life/When you do take the means whereby I live”.

However, the expertise that developed chemical warfare was later used to develop the use of chemicals for peaceful means. Initially, German chemists turned their attention to the “bed bugs, flour moths, ticks and…cloth lice”. This in turn led to the introduction of hydrocyanic acid as a form of pesticide in agriculture. According to a specialist journal, by 1920, around 20 million cubic metres of built space had been gassed in order to deal with insect infestations. Hydrocyanic acid was developed further into a gaseous product called Zyklon A. The use of chemicals to attack the environment of an enemy has continued ever since.

Most recently, in Down v Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the applicant applied for a judicial review of a decision to approve the use of a pesticide without a no-spray buffer zone, despite recommendations from the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. The applicant was a local resident who lived next door to the farm. She claimed that her health problems were as a result of being sprayed by pesticides and that the Government had not made an adequate risk assessment. While the court of first instance granted the review, the Court of Appeal upheld the Secretary of State’s appeal.

Sloterdijk made the observation in “Airquakes” that terrorism is a modus operandi and not a reference to a particular group and thus can be carried out by governments as much as non-state parties. Indeed, as our response to Islamic and Irish terrorism has shown, governments can become terrorists in their attempt to defeat the terrorists.  With this in mind, there is arguable very little difference between the chemical agents used during a war and the use of a pesticide that unintentionally cause harm to human beings. Adequacy of the Secretary of State’s decision in Down notwithstanding, one could argue that the use of the pesticide without a no-spray zone was state-sponsored terrorism and Down, though not an enemy combatant, was collateral damage.

As Down shows, chemicals are being released into the environment every day, where there is no human enemy as such, in the name of industrialisation, economic progress and human convenience. Factories or power plants are pouring waste into the air and water. Farmers are using fertilizers and pesticides to meet the demands of consumers. And carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere with every vehicle drive, aeroplane flown and light switched on. In many ways, therefore, if we are not working to protect the environment, we are all complicit in terrorism. To misquote George Bush, we are with with the environment or against it.

If  environmental pollution is a form of terrorism, then this raises the question whether methods used to tackle terrorism can be used to protect the environment. For example, should organisations that pollute the environment have their assets frozen? Should the remit of the “War on Terror” be expanded to the “War on Climate Change”? Would it be just to take military action against a country suspected having lax or ineffective pollution laws? Does a country like the Maldives have every right to bomb the US or Europe or Chine on the grounds of self-defence?

Of course, if anti-terrorism laws are to be considered in this way, then there should be some sort of assessment of their traditional effectiveness. After all, Sloterdijk noted that the use of chlorine gas in the First World War was “in conspicuous violation of Article 23a of the Hague War Convention of 1907, which explicitly forbade the use of poisons and weapons of any kind, that increase the suffering of the enemy, and…their deployment against non-combatant populations.”

Success or failure

I have just heard from a friend on Facebook that our local branch of Tesco’s ran out plastic bags and were actually handing out bin liners for people to use to carry their shopping in.  Now, from an environmental point of view, we should think about our usage of plastic bags and use only if we really need to, because manufacturing them causes pollution and disposing of them causes waste. So the question is, did Tesco’s run out because they didn’t have enough to meet demand (failure) or was my friend just unlucky and shopped at the wrong time (success)?

Around 12 months ago, Tesco claimed to have halved the number of plastic bags handed out over three years and Professor Mohan Munasinghe credited Tesco’s success to its scheme to reward customers who reuse bags with Clubcard points.

This raises a further question: do incentives encourage social responsibility?

Incentivisation prioritises financial gain over social responsibility, riches over love. It makes the performance of virtue dependent on circumstances. There is no room for a complete life because life is conditioned by something outside of itself (the Clubcard point). As Jesus – in Hegel’s own words – said: “Your reward (if you have need of the notion of a reward as incentive) is the quiet thought of having done well. For although the world may little know the author of your action, even what you do on a small scale…has an effect whose bounty is eternally rich.” (The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate, 1799, p113)

Human rights and the environment: the dilemma

I went to a debate last night to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Capacity Global, an organisation which works to ensure that everyone has access to environmental justice, self-defined as: “Living in a clean and healthy environment is everyone’s right”.

Now I have always believed that environment protection was a social justice issue. After all, if we can’t look after our own (species), how the hell are we going to look after other species? (Just to clarify, that doesn’t mean conservation isn’t just as important – it is – but one has to question the ethics of protecting the non-human world when human beings are suffering.)

But, in last night’s debate, Phillip Sands QC, a professor of law at UCL, said that it created a disturbing tension between the twin strands of environmental law.

Maria Adebowale, the founder and director of Capacity Global, commented that, just ten years ago, environmental protection was primarily about conservation and that human rights and people – particularly those on the front line – were part of the problem.  The view was that the poor, the marginal communities, needed to be educated. Even more so, it was seen a white, middle class thing and Adebowale remembers the surprise in others when she turned up at events (she is black).

Now, it is not surprising that environmental protection was seen in this very narrow way. Oppression of nature has always gone hand in hand with oppression of marginal communities, whether that be women, ethnic minorities, the poor, gays, the disabled, etc. So it is only right that environmental justice is a social justice issue and is about helping people to protect their own environment, their communities and their lives. However, Sands, talking of his own experience as a barrister bringing legal cases to court, that he saw a marked difference in the way that judges dealt with environmental cases based on the human rights argument and environmental cases based on the conservation argument. His point was that the more environmental justice movement adopt the human rights agenda, it is likely that there will be cost.  The human rights agenda only perpetuates the separation humanity and the non-human environment, which is the cause not only of human pollution of the environment but human oppression of human communities.

At the heart of all social justice movements is the desire for all humans to be treated equally. The problem is that the definition of humanity has always been set by the dominant group – oppression was justified precisely because  the victims were not considered human. So when we talk about equality, equal treatment and human rights, we are effectively fighting for the marginal groups to be like the dominant groups. Raising up the marginal community inevitably means separating it from other marginal communities.

This doesn’t mean that the social justice is wrong. Of course not.  But for it to work, we need to come up with a meaning for humanity that does not favour just one part of it. The problem is that, as long as we try to see humanity from humanity’s point of view, there will always be areas that we cannot see – the nooks and crannies and beyond the limitless horizon. The only way that we can have a comprehensive understanding of what it means to be human is if we refer to someone or something from outside of humanity – someone like God, perhaps.