RosieBell

Pushing back the tide

European and UK policies towards land management increase the likelihood of flooding, according to George Monbiot:-

The story begins with a group of visionary farmers at Pontbren, in the headwaters of Britain's longest river, the Severn. In the 1990s they realised that the usual hill-farming strategy – loading the land with more and bigger sheep, grubbing up the trees and hedges, digging more drains – wasn't working. It made no economic sense, the animals had nowhere to shelter, and the farmers were breaking their backs to wreck their own land.

So they devised something beautiful. They began planting shelter belts of trees along the contours. They stopped draining the wettest ground and built ponds to catch the water instead. They cut and chipped some of the wood they grew to make bedding for their animals, which meant that they no longer spent a fortune buying straw. Then they used the composted bedding, in a perfect closed loop, to cultivate more trees.

One day a government consultant was walking over their fields during a rainstorm. He noticed something that fascinated him. The water flashing off the land suddenly disappeared when it reached the belts of trees the farmers had planted. This prompted a major research programme, which produced the following astonishing results: water sinks into the soil under trees at 67 times the rate at which it sinks into the soil under grass. The roots of the trees provide channels down which the water flows, deep into the ground. The soil there becomes a sponge, a reservoir which sucks up water and then releases it slowly. In the pastures, by contrast, the small sharp hooves of the sheep puddle the ground, making it almost impermeable, a hard pan off which the rain gushes.

One of the research papers estimates that – even though only 5% of the Pontbren land has been reforested – if all the farmers in the catchment did the same thing, flooding peaks downstream would be reduced by about 29%. Full reforestation would reduce the peaks by about 50%. For the residents of Shrewsbury, Gloucester and the other towns ravaged by endless Severn floods, that means – more or less – problem solved.

Double the Budget

Hundreds of people will gather outside the St Andrews House government offices at  1.00-1.30pm on Weds 30 October to call on Finance Secretary John Swinney MSP, the man in charge of the 2014/15 Scottish budget, to double investment in walking and cycling.  Be there!!

The event is organised by Stop Climate Chaos Scotland, an umbrella body for over 60 Scottish organisations including environment, community, faith and international development groups, trades unions, student unions, and of course transport and cycling groups such as Spokes, Transform and Pedal on Parliament.

A similar SCCS event two years ago marked the turning point in a successful campaign by Spokes and many other organisations to reverse severe active travel cuts which the government had included in the draft 2012/13 budget.

This year the draft budget for 14/15 does include a welcome rise in active travel investment but it is nowhere near adequate to meet the government’s ambition of 10% of all trips in Scotland to be by bike in 2020.  There is growing cycle use in Edinburgh, but, for Scotland as a whole, only 1% of all trips are by bike (around 2% of work trips).  Furthermore, under the draft budget, cycling investment peaks in 14/15 and starts to fall back again in 15/16.

Location:
outside St Andrews House
Regent Road
EH1 3DG Edinburgh
United Kingdom

Date:
Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Time:
1 - 1.30pm

It's All About Oil

Saudi Arabia is a wretched place, what with its financing of Wahhabism abroad and its oppression at home.  Its can throw its weight around because it controls a big chunk of the oil we depend on - because of our car owning habits.

An article by Juan Cole about the cooling of the Saudi Arabia/USA relationship and how the USA should be able to shrug this degrading association by cutting back on the oil.

The Saudi royal family is looking for a different model of politics in the world, one where absolute monarchy and hard line Wahhabi fundamentalism wouldn’t look out of place. America is not it. They have been toying in Riyadh with a pivot to China. An unelected Communist Party that has taken the capitalist road and desperately needs Saudi petroleum has started to look good to the king. 

Not the capitalist road, but the internal combusting road, with its usual ramifications on the shape and ambience of the cities.

Despite the surge in US production, the price [of oil] is at a historic high, because China, India and other Asian countries are rapidly increasing their demand as they turn to having automobiles rather than riding bicycles.

And that is terrible news.  Indian brides used to have a sturdy roadster included in their dowries.  Now they want cars.

The United States uses roughly 18.7 million barrels of oil a day, mainly for transportation. [How much of that is for long-distance haulage and for social services like fire engines, ambulances and the police, and how much for commuting to work or driving to the supermarket, or, with the bitterest irony, to the gym?]

If the US wants to avoid being hostage to Saudi pique, and wants to avoid losing the game of musical chairs while China sits pretty, it needs to move quickly to electric cars fueled by solar panels and wind."

Or bicycles of course.

Comment on piece (don't know how accurate). "Most Americans drive 5 miles a day. "

To visit Mom? To the office? Anywhere that you could reasonably cycle?

The Cycle of Privilege

I should really agree with Brendan O’Neill so as to piss off a professional contrarian, but he‘s wrong yet again. Here he is whingeing that cycling for having so long been the Cinderella of transport policy, is actually allowed three minutes at the ball:-

 Ken Livingstone, invested £400million into improving the cycling infrastructure in London, in order to demonstrate  that ‘cycling is now associated with a modern cosmopolitan city that is in control and at ease with itself’, whatever that means. This might be bona fide bollocks, but you get the gist: cycling is modern, cosmo, good, pure, etc. Two years ago, the New Labour government announced a £47million funding pool for any city that willingly turned itself into a ‘cycling city’, where walking and cycling take precedence over driving and destroying the environment. Getting people into the saddle can make a ‘real difference to congestion and pollution in local communities’, said a minister.   [Well, it can, you internal combusting smarty.  Y‘know?    Put your gob against an exhaust pipe and start breathing in, if the stuff coming out is so harmless.]

The first notable thing about the beatification of the bicyclist is that it explains why some of them – not all, I know! – are insufferably arrogant. I can’t be the only walker who has encountered sneering cyclists who, when you try to cross the road, look at you as if you are a grubby-haired chimney sweep who has just stepped on to the manicured lawns at Balmoral. [That’s because you had decided you could dash in front of them against the lights, as after all, they aren’t a car.  People are always scurrying in front of you.  As for being looked at in a nasty way, if it had been me on the two wheels, there would be a lot of swearing as well.  Oy, are you colour blind?  Don‘t you know the difference between red and green?  Or do you think that lit up humanoid doesn‘t hold for you, you flabby, spatially challenged f’wit.]
 . .
Look, we’re never going to have ‘cycling cities’. Why not? Because people have children whom they don’t want to transport to school on a tandem thanks very much; because we do weekly shops which won’t fit into a wicker basket; because workmen need to deliver big things to businesses and building sites and that can’t be done on a BMX; and because some people like the speed and wind-through-the-hair feeling that comes with driving a Ferrari but not a Chopper.  [I’d agree we’d need delivery vans and the like, but why should cities turn into horrible suburban stretches or gridlocks because children can’t catch buses, and why should we end up destroying one part of the world (Louisiana at present) because the other part’s role model is Jeremy Clarkson?]

Anyway, O’Neill exposes himself as an over-privileged dickhead:-

Anything that makes London a bit more like Paris is a good idea in my books. So I’m quite excited about mayor Boris Johnson’s cycle-hire scheme. Having tried out Paris’s bikes-for-hire during recent trips there, I can confirm that they’re perfect for people who enjoy cycling but not so much that we would ever fork out £1,000 for two wheels

£1000 - WTF?  My cycle, a sturdy Dawes Colorado hybrid, fine for commuting and touring cost £399 brand new.  Habitat armchair revolutionary.  I bet he’d insist on wearing gloves if he ever came to hurling brickbats.

Oh Rose thou art sick

I know sod all about global warming.  I can’t do science and I don’t understand the statements of climatologists.  I read people who I think are clever and know a lot, and as they believe that global warming is man-made (please drop this “Anthopogenic”) I go along with it as well.  With this kind of thing, most of us have to find an authority of some kind.

I have noticed that in general it has got warmer and wetter in Edinburgh, and plants grow out of season.  What’s this rose doing blooming in mid December? 

My friend in New Zealand tells me how the frosts in the Waikato that we experienced when we were children no longer happen. However, spasmodic local observations don’t mean much.

Here are a couple of entries from The English Year, compiled by Geoffrey Grigson:-

December 13 1775

Ice bears: boys slide.

Gilbert White, Hampshire

December 14 1774

Dark and mild, spitting rain, great rain.  Earthworms are alert, and throw up their casts this mild weather.

Gilbert White, Hampshire

I’ve always led a green existence anyway, cycling and recycling, buying clothes second-hand, gardening and composting, so none of the present exhortations to save the planet makes any difference to how I live. 

Today’s Conspiracy Theory

From The Times

The death of Michael Crichton deprives us of a hugely entertaining and elegant writer, who infuriated people who should have loved him by becoming a prominent nay-sayer of global warming. Crichton's 2004 best-selling novel, State of Fear, portrayed climate change as a hoax. His eco-terrorist villains blew up Antarctica to convince the public that the glaciers were melting; then claimed that global warming could be averted only by writing fat cheques - to them. It is a testament to the power of his plot - and his copious footnotes - that many people read this as science, not science fiction.

(Or a testimony to the idle stupidity of the green-haters, showing the same kind of mentality that used to  believe that CND was financed by Moscow and that now believes that all terrorist attacks are carried out by Mossad.)

Michael Crichton supported the magazine Spiked “spiritually and financially”.   Spiked takes the offbeat view that global warming is a con and regards it as a plot by the self-righteous to deprive everyone in the world of access to 4x4s and long haul flights.

Some exercises for conspiracy theory beginners:-

Exercise 1 Follow the money

Why would a writer of AIRPORT novels make up absurd conspiracy theories about environmentalists who want to reduce the number of long haul flights?

Exercise 2 Cui bono

Why would a writer of AIRPORT novels support a group of media hacks who want to increase the number of long haul flights?

The Weir

Sitting in a pub drinking Lakeland Gold on a balcony above a roaring weir, I asked P. if there was anything that could be done with weirs these days.  “Funny you should ask that as the owners are applying for planning permission to use this one to generate electricity for the village.”  That sounded excellent to me, the power of that falling water being harnessed.  There’s a big one near Dean Village, which pounds like the Niagara.  This wet country must have weirs on every stream, burn and beck near a population, and the thought of them and the wind farms generating a proportion of the electricity is a hopeful one. 

 

Raking the lake

A weekend in the Lake District with my friend P. who is an ecologist at the National Park Authority.  He was doing a survey of Bassenthwaite Lake (the only lake in the Lake District – the rest are meres, tarns or waters), which is owned by the National Park and which is supervised by a water bailiff, a kind of policeman who makes sure that fishermen aren’t rowing through the no-boating zone and the like.

My friend P was doing a survey on a new foreign pest, which, he said, had first been fingered as New Zealand pigmy weed, (I bristled) but, he hastened to reassure me, was really Australian swamp stone crop (I nodded understandingly), crassula helmsii, which is forming mats in some of the meres, tarns or waters.  

So the water bailiff took us out in his outboard motor, stopping here and there, I threw a two headed rake overboard and raked the bottom of the lake, while P. checked each rakeful for the weed and for other plants, and recorded the results.  We did this for about five hours on this beautiful lake beneath Skiddaw, among the fells that were red and purple with bracken and heather.  The shores of the lake varied from crag, to swampy reed where ducks lived, to farmland, to activity centre, with plenty of trees. From the bottom of the lake sometimes I dragged up nothing but a few dead leaves, other times a shovelful of bright green Canadian pond weed, at one time a corroded fishing rod, and just a little of the Australian swamp stone crop, which had not made much inroad, we were glad to see.  House martins flashed over the water, swans sailed by in formation, cormorants perched on submerged branches, and the cloud sometimes wreathed and smoke-ringed the hills, or lowered over us and then cleared entirely leaving us in sunshine, changeability being the constant in British weather. 

The water bailiff chatted to passing fishermen, who boasted of catching a fifteen pound pike and chided the lads in rescue boats from the yacht club for doing wheelies, all in a pleasant way.  He knew the lake intimately, of course, P knew the vegetation, and I was happy in my role as lake-raker, which had a slight element of the treasure hunt in it.  Glad too, to be in a cool climate and under a changing sky after a week in hot Hungary.

It's Wet Outside

I went to The Outsider  Festival which was low key and had an environmental theme.  The environment in the form of rain was on us with a vengeance.  It chucked it down most of the weekend and you ended up going to see kids comedy because at least it was in a tent.  The Outsider Festival needed a roof.   

I was woken at 4am by some drunk voice saying, "Oh, I've just kicked over that tent" which was my tent and the sodden mass of it collapsed on my feet.

The result of being damp and tired was that when attending what were good events I would fall asleep.  I dozed off in a talk chaired by the excellent Kirsty Wark with four different guys of varying backgrounds, the most interesting being Will Whitehorn Director of Virgin Galactic, who was enthusiastic about space exploration on the cheap, pointing out that much information about the earth's climate was got from space.

And I nodded off through An Inconvenient Truth, but what I did catch I found convincing.  But with global warming most of us just have to accept authority, since we are few of us climatologists. I observe that the weather seems odd, with monsoon rain in a  wet summer and butterflies flitting about my north-west facing garden in November.  So I accept the authority of Al Gore but I would not trust myself as I am very taken with the clever patrician figure he cut and thinking how he looks as though he would have made a terrific President (and if he had become one we would have been complaining about him as his majesty of presence was compromised by the demands of office).

But I did see some good music, enjoying most of all The Complete Stone Roses who did a fine facsimile of that clean guitar sound on those great songs.  The lead singer did not get Ian Brown's inexpressive rather hollow voice right though.  He sang far too well to be Ian Brown.