David Barrie

Connections to the Land

, originally uploaded by murdochious.

MPhil student Edward Griffith-Jones has written a brilliant paper on the negative development impacts of a "food miles" approach to agriculture.

In his discrete and oh-so-gentle analysis of the current obsession with food miles and carbon emissions,  Ed launches a whole assault upon our response to climate  change.

While Ed's argument is powerful, it doesn't stop me from running a climate change project in the North East of England designed to engage people in a practical,  active way in the benefits and challenges of local food production.

For buried in the closing paragraph of Ed's paper is a great question, one that we never ask:

Do people want to stay connected (or be reconnected) to the land?

Do we?

There may be a land army out there who seek to return us to nature and the abundant and true harvest of the land. But ever since Edouard Manet's Dejeuner sur l'herbe, land has been the mis-en-scene for urban encounter and fantasy. Countless writers have exposed the myth and social exclusion of the countryside. And ever since political scientist Robert Putnam published  Bowling Alone, it's clear that questions of connectedness and identity have long since fled traditional civic society, yet alone the land.

I'd say that a majority of people don't give a toss about their connection (or not) to the land. And that the landed aristocracy and their clones should step off this soapbox.  Instead, they should engage with what Professor Tim Lang of City University London said in a recent edition of Observer Food Monthly:

In the next few years, the big issue will be food security, how we get what we need to eat.

Or what Debra Solomon of Culiblog has called food sovereignty.

In future,  we'll all be forced to engage with the land. And for that reason alone, we need to understand our distortion, abuse and ignorance of it and find new ways to connect people with that strange terrain beyond Edge City.

 

Collage

In one of his unpublished journals, according to a recent edition of the New Yorker,  the American actor and screenwriter Spalding Gray described himself as

a collagist taking bits and scraps from the growing heap of my life

Feels a lot like this blog and a great description of the net community. God help the Martians when they land and try to put the pieces together!

Thanks to ultrasparky at Flickr for the image of Gray's table and chair.

Guns of Athens

At the Benaki Museum in Athens last night, Eleni Portaliou of the School of Architecture made a powerful, withering attack on the regenerative value of the Athens 2004 Olympic Games and the end of place and public-space orientated city planning in Athens and the Attica basin. Eleni assaulted what she saw as the exploitative capitalism that had raped the city of its public realm and the lies told by the organisers of the Games.

I haven't witnessed or heard this kind of oppositional, anti-capitalist argument for a long time. No doubt I've become a bourgeois capitalist myself. Also I have blindly accepted ten years of New Labor social democracy and assumed that acceptance of ideas of equity, partnership and economic inclusion are widespread.

I found Greece exciting but perplexing. On the one hand the city is homogenous boutique-land. It's as if five luxury brand mangers got together and swept the city with minimalist Euro-chic. The nation's flag should be colored Prada black and green.

But then, on another side of town, students and their teachers are rioting against reforms of the education service, sending the middle classes and new capitalists in to a spin, following the recent election of the first non-Socialist government for decades.

There seems a paradox here. As part of a 'developed' European world, Greece  has assumed handles of a modern commodified global culture but still bears the political and structural challenges and struggles of another era.

On one level, I think it bears testimony to the ingenuity and acuity of the economic development of the U.K. in the 80s and 90s that our new consumer(ist) economy followed deregulation of financial services and a restructuring of the relationship between the state and the individual. 

Oppositional politics is one casualty. Also a direct, personal connection between culture, poverty and social inequality. But it does seem to have enabled the progress of a society which isn't haunted by spectre of internal collapse and does appear to have a sense of civic ownership of the public realm. I'd argue that it enables us also to value  the exotic and the local.

But In the rush to a virtual economy, it's important that we understand how that physical and social public realm is to fit in. Also that we try to keep a handle on what's going on. Since it's becoming increasingly unclear what's cooking beneath the surface of society and increasingly hard to keep track of how things relate to one another. Perhaps the first crash of  a private equity conglomerate will pull this in to focus.

What price the local?

Today the London Financial Times reports that the International Monetary Fund has urged U.K Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown to reign in public finances. The IMF warns that the public spending surge, 2001-04, has led to a sharp deterioration in the fiscal balance and rising net public debt - and by 08-09, net public debt would stand at more than 39% of national income.

This comes hot on the heels of a study by consultancy Oxford Economics - entitled London's Place in the UK Economy - that calculates that Londoners on average pay £1700.00 more to the Treasury than they receive in public expenditure, while people in Northern Ireland, Wales and the north-east of England get over £2500.00 more on average from the exchequer than they contribute.

The total subsidy Londoners paid to the rest of the country in 2004-05 was £13.1bn....In contrast, if the the north-east [of England] was an independent country, it would have a crippling budget deficit of almost 20% of economic activity in 2004-05, worse than any emerging or advanced market economy.

I am shell-shocked by this: the extent to which the north of England is reliant upon public subsidy - and the extent to which private investment and enterprise is failing to emerge or make a dent on balances of economic power.

It starts to pull in to focus an interesting report by the right-leaning think-tank Reform published in July 2006 and entitled Whitehall's last colonies.

The report underlined the extent of dependency in the North East, saying that nearly one in four households in the region contains one or more members on incapacity benefits. Over a quarter of households in the North East are on family tax credits or income support. The authors then lump these statistics in with figures for public employment workforces; in the North East, for instance, the state employs nearly a quarter of all workers. The authors are then able to conclude that the relative size of the state in a region such as the North East is nearly double that of the state in the South East.

Re-localization is an emerging anthem of political and economic development. It is a panacea for those economies who are not able to compete in a global market. It is also a seemingly correct response to the challenges of the new environmental economy.  Re-localization is manifesting itself in many different ways just now. For instance, in food production, to re-localize is to counter CO2 emissions and enable more sustainable communities by promoting self-sufficiency and reducing food miles.

But if local spending is increasingly divorced from local revenue-raising, what is the meaning of localism in areas such as the North East of England? Danger is that localism or re-localism becomes a smokescreen for larger public subsidy and in effect urban regeneration lies through its teeth when it expresses itself as renaissance, renewal and an uplift in true economic value.

Doors of Perception

At today's Doors of Perception Plenary on Food, Fuel and Meaning in Delhi, Anil Gupta of the Indian School of Business Management, Mumbai, said something remarkable:

Only when meanings are partial, the dialogue takes place.

Now you're wise enough to spot a snakeoil salesman at a hundred paces. Also, I hope all antenna are up for faux Bhagwan concrete poetry or haiku by which lives are supposed to be led.

Initially, I had thought that  Gutpa's comment was bullshit. Of course, it you don't understand something, you ask a question and dialogue follows. But I had thought that one of the tyrannies of the modern age is that meanings are not partial, positions are firm and it is because of the loggerhead of equally opposite, belligerent and powerful positions that parties are forced to engage in dialogue and negotiate.   Also, as much as my heart may wish to differ, my head says that the appeal, say, of a canvas of partial meaning by artist Mark Rothko doesn't induce dialogue but reflection and an enhanced sense of self, not contextual enquiry.

But Gupta's comment struck home - and I think that it's because of this.

When I was put in goal in Liberia, West Africa in 2000 for supposedly being a British spy, my arrest and what followed resulted from deep mutual misunderstanding. I was making a documentary film on the cycle of violence in Africa. The authorities believed that I was producing an investigation exclusively centered on the supply of arms to West Africa and its link to deforestation.

One trigger for our arrest was our manipulation by opponents of the Government and accidental recording of eyewitness evidence of the trade in guns-for-logs.  Another was a research document that my friend Sorious Samura carried in to the country and was found by the authorities that suggested we were producing a critical account of the regime of President Charles Taylor. 

What followed was a harrowing sequence of events founded upon either a true or false interpretation of intent and it induced the Pavlovian thrash of a snake under a threat or the willful manipulation of truth by an unstable authority in an anarchic state. There was no dialogue; even though the meaning of what we were up to was confusing and partial to the authorities and vice-versa. 

When Gupta made his comment, I thought of all of this.

Because in my experience, it seems that when meanings are partial, myths take hold. And  when myths take hold, people either believe in them forcefully or pursue enquiry. The former is blind faith. The latter, truly, an opportunity for dialogue.

New Commandments

This is John C. Whitehead, Chairman of the Goldman Sachs Foundation, of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, former Deputy Secretary of State under Ronald Reagan (1985-89), Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and until 1984, an investment banker at Goldman Sachs for no less than thirty-eight years.

The idea that Goldman insists on minimizing the use of the first-person pronoun and that this is a key route to the company's Midas Touch is more than hackneyed - and a slightly stretched point when bumper bonus angst spills out in to the headlines and people like Lloyd Blankfein wind up earning $53.4m in a year.

However, in his excellent analysis of the cracks in the facade of investment banking in the 1990s, author Jonathan Knee draws attention to Whitehead and brings some of his old school, supposedly selfless savvy to bear on the divalike behavior and star culture within banking that accompanied the net bubble.

Knee reminds readers that

At the end of the day, the key to effective sales is the ability to put oneself in the customer's shoes. Empathy is not consistent with the self-obsession that is characteristic of a star culture.

And he goes on to cite two of Whitehead's legendary ten commandments of investment banking that  seem to me to serve as wise insight in to our age:

Commandment No. 5: "The client's objective is more important than yours."

Commandment No. 8: "Important people like to deal with other important people. Are you one?"