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Capital gains
David Halpern, Senscot
Ask yourself this question: do you think most people can be trusted? Don’t dwell on it for too long – just offer a general sense. Would you say ‘yes’, or would you say ‘no, you can’t be too careful’? The chances are that, if you are from a professional background, relatively politically engaged and with a university degree – a typical RSA Fellow – you would answer ‘yes’. If so, you would be among a minority of Britons today.

This wasn’t always the case. In the late 1950s, about 60 percent of Britons said they thought most other people could be trusted. The figure had fallen to 43 percent by the early 1980s and to 29 percent by the mid- to late 1990s. This question helps measure what sociologists and political scientists call ‘social capital’. It gives a sense of the extent to which individuals and communities trust each other, reciprocate helpfully and are connected to other people.

Robert Putnam first brought this declining trend to wider public attention using US data in the mid-1990s and subsequently published his findings in Bowling Alone (2000). He found that Americans seemed to have become less engaged with one another from the late 1960s – as demonstrated by falling memberships in Parent-Teacher Associations, fewer family picnics, a decline in churchgoing, less political engagement and less social trust.

Yet Putnam – a friend and colleague with whom I have worked for more than a decade – got his initial account wrong in one important respect. The story he told so comprehensively using US data turned out not to be true for all countries. While a broadly similar decline occurred in the UK and some other Anglo-Saxon countries, as well as in France, subsequent analysis has shown that this was not the case in all countries. Evidence suggests that in the already high-trust Scandinavian nations, social trust has actually increased over the past two decades. The World Values Survey for 1981-2005 put it at 59 percent in Finland, 68 percent in Sweden and 74 percent in Norway...
(1 Oct 2009)

Post-human Earth: How the planet will recover from us
Bob Holmes, New Scientist
The Anthropocene has yet to be accepted as a geological time period, but if it is, it may turn out to be the shortest - and the last. It is not hard to imagine the epoch ending just a few hundred years after it started, in an orgy of global warming and overconsumption.

Let's suppose that happens. Humanity's ever-expanding footprint on the natural world leads, in two or three hundred years, to ecological collapse and a mass extinction. Without fossil fuels to support agriculture, humanity would be in trouble. "A lot of things have to die, and a lot of those things are going to be people," says Tony Barnosky, a palaeontologist at the University of California, Berkeley. In this most pessimistic of scenarios, society would collapse, leaving just a few hundred thousand eking out a meagre existence in a new Stone Age.

Whether our species would survive is hard to predict, but what of the fate of the Earth itself? It is often said that when we talk about "saving the planet" we are really talking about saving ourselves: the planet will be just fine without us. But would it? Or would an end-Anthropocene cataclysm damage it so badly that it becomes a sterile wasteland?...
(30 Sept 2009)

Rereading: Robert Macfarlane on The Monkey Wrench Gang
Robert Macfarlane, The Guardian
'My job is to save the fucking wilderness. I don't know anything else worth saving." Thus the career plan of George Washington Hayduke, hard-nut hero of Edward Abbey's 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang. Pro-conservation, pro-guns and extremely pro-booze, anti-mining, anti-tourism and extremely anti-dams, Hayduke appoints himself protector of the remaining desert regions of the American southwest, and becomes a pioneer in the art of "eco-tage", also known as "monkey wrenching" – using the tools of industry to demolish the infrastructure of industry in the name of the biosphere.

Hayduke is joined by three other activists – an anarchist doctor, a revolutionary feminist and a polygamist river guide – and this quartet of Quixotes heads out into red-rock country to wage war on techno-industry. They pour sand into the fuel tanks of bulldozers. They drive quarry lorries over canyon rims. They blast power lines and disrupt strip mines. Their weapons are audacity, wit and gelignite. Their grail is the destruction of the Glen Canyon Dam that blocks the Colorado river (and, it should be noted, still does).

Crunch! Kapow! Crash! Bang! The Monkey Wrench Gang is the wish-fulfilment dream of eco-Luddites everywhere. Civilisation violates the land, so Hayduke ("a good, healthy psychopath") and his pals violate civilisation. Crucially, people go unharmed in Abbey's novel. Machinery is smashed and split, exploded and eviscerated; but drivers and technicians escape. The only vital fluids that get spilt are oil, coolant and petrol. In this way, activism remains ethically distinct from terrorism. The beef of the Monkey Wrench Gang is not with the personnel of the "megalomaniacal megamachine", but with its material and ideological manifestations. The battle they fight is against developments and double-lane highways, and against the economic principle of maximised shareholder profit and the economic delusion of unlimited growth.

...Perhaps the key ethical principle of British environmental literature has been that making us see differently is an essential precursor to making us act differently. So it is that each new generation of British environmental writers finds itself trying to design the literary equivalent of the "killer app": the glittering argument or stylistic turn that will produce an epiphany in sceptical readers, and so persuade them to change their behaviour. I used to believe in the possibility of this killer app, both as a reader and a writer. But I'm increasingly unsure of its existence. Or, if it exists, of its worth. At least in my experience, environmental literature in Britain gets read almost exclusively by the converted to the converted, and its meaningful ethical impact is minimal tending to zero. As Vernon Klinkenbourg noted with glum elegance last year, most documents of environmental literature are "minority reports – sometimes a minority of one. The assumptions, the hopes, the arguments [of such literature] are contradicted by the way the vast majority of us live, and by the political and economic structures that determine that lifestyle ... sceptical readers so seldom pick up this kind of writing, or submit to its evidence."

And yet. There are the examples of Abbey, Carson, Leopold, Snyder, McCarthy to bear in mind, American in origin but global in consequence. And I remain drawn to the idea that, as Wendell Berry put it, environmentally we require not "the piecemeal technological solutions that our society now offers, but ... a change of cultural (and economic) values that will encourage in the whole population the necessary respect, restraint, and care." In my experience, Berry – a farmer and a writer – speaks only the crash-tested truth, and I suspect he has got it right again in this case.
(26 Sept 2009)
related: EB contributor Toban Black sent in these climate activist updates from the UK:
Action updates from Climate Camps around the world...-KS