The Fanonite

Last night I finished Cormac McCarthy’s harrowing The Road, and it has left me deeply disturbed. The moral dilemmas presented therein are highlighted in the following section from a review by Michael Chabo in the New York Review of Books (while the passage presents the dilemmas in the context of relations between the novel’s protagonists, an unnamed father and son, they are equally applicable to any loved one).

The Road is not a record of fatherly fidelity; it is a testament to the abyss of a parent’s greatest fears. The fear of leaving your child alone, of dying before your child has reached adulthood and learned to work the mechanisms and face the dangers of the world, or found a new partner to face them with. The fear of one day being obliged for your child’s own good, for his peace and comfort, to do violence to him or even end his life. And, above all, the fear of knowing—as every parent fears—that you have left your children a world more damaged, more poisoned, more base and violent and cheerless and toxic, more doomed, than the one you inherited. It is in the audacity and single-mindedness with which The Road extends the metaphor of a father’s guilt and heartbreak over abandoning his son to shift for himself in a ruined, friendless world that The Road finds its great power to move and horrify the reader.

While McCarthy is addressing the consequences of social breakdown, in the following article, George Monbiot looks developments in the present that may lead to the realization of the bleak future envisioned in the novel.

The Road Well Travelled

A powerful novel’s vision of a dystopian future shines a cold light on the dreadful consequences of our universal apathy. Are we already shutting our minds to the consequences of climate change?

By George Monbiot. The Guardian 30 October 2007

A few weeks ago I read what I believe is the most important environmental book ever written. It is not Silent Spring, Small is Beautiful or even Walden. It contains no graphs, no tables, no facts, figures, warnings, predictions or even arguments. Nor does it carry a single dreary sentence, which, sadly, distinguishes it from most environmental literature. It is a novel, first published a year ago, and it will change the way you see the world.

Cormac McCarthy’s book The Road considers what would happen if the world lost its biosphere, and the only living creatures were humans, hunting for food among the dead wood and soot. Some years before the action begins, the protagonist hears the last birds passing over, “their half-muted crankings miles above where they circled the earth as senselessly as insects trooping the rim of a bowl.”(1) McCarthy makes no claim that this is likely to occur, but merely speculates about the consequences.

All pre-existing social codes soon collapse and are replaced with organised butchery, then chaotic, blundering horror. What else are the survivors to do?: the only remaining resource is human. It is hard to see how this could happen during humanity’s time on earth, even by means of the nuclear winter McCarthy proposes. But his thought experiment exposes the one terrible fact to which our technological hubris blinds us: our dependence on biological production remains absolute. Civilisation is just a russeting on the skin of the biosphere, never immune from being rubbed against the sleeve of environmental change. Six weeks after finishing The Road, I remain haunted by it.

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This came out a while ago but I don’t think it was ever posted on the Fanonite. Its certainly worth a little look. Politics, consumerism, environmentalism and sustainability - some of the issues that make up the Story of Stuff.

Bush trashed the climate talks, everyone knows. But as George Monbiot reports, he is only following in the footsteps of the champion environmentalist, Al Gore.

“After eleven days of negotiations, governments have come up with a compromise deal that could … even lead to emission increases. … The highly compromised political deal … is largely attributable to the position of the United States which was heavily influenced by fossil fuel and automobile industry interests. The failure to reach agreement led to the talks spilling over into an all night session …”(1)

These are extracts from a press release by Friends of the Earth. So what? Well it was published on December 11th - I mean to say, December 11th 1997. The US had just put a wrecking ball through the Kyoto Protocol. George W Bush was innocent; he was busy executing prisoners in Texas. Its climate negotiators were led by Albert Arnold Gore.

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Australians have handed a glorious defeat to Bush’s poodle from down under. The new government is not only promising to pull troops from Iraq, it has, thanks to the election of former Midnight Oil singer and environmentalist Peter Garret, also vowed to sign the Kyoto Protocol.

To be fair,  Bush did successfully promote democracy around the world. He deserves the benefit of a doubt; perhaps his intent in invading Iraq was really to bring democracy to Spain, Italy, Poland, El Salvador, and Australia. Towards that end, he has been admirably effective.

Australia’s Prime Minister-elect Kevin Rudd has outlined his priorities after winning a sweeping general election victory over outgoing PM John Howard.

Mr Rudd said he would overturn a number of his predecessor’s policies and sign the Kyoto Protocol and pull Australian troops out of Iraq.

He also promised to attend next month’s UN climate change summit in Bali.

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While there is little that is being done to combat Climate Change, its business potential has not escaped Big Business. From airlines [!] to Hollywood, everyone seems to be jumping on the bandwagon. In the process, the issue risks being trivialized and reduced to a bumper sticker. It is rare, however, for activists to find the establishment on their side. For this reason one report has been making the rounds in activist circles — some even holding it up as a vindication of their views – as the source is an establishment think-tank: Institute of International and Strategic Studies. In doing so, everyone seems to have suspended scepticism and is helping propagate what is nothing more than a new attempt to ratchet up fear from an established terrormonger. Climate Change is merely the bait; the hook is the familiar pantheon of demons: al-Qaida and Iran. So the same think-tank, which warned you of them menacing Iraqi WMDs, now tells you “Al-Qaida has revived, extended its influence, and has the capacity to carry out a spectacular strike similar to the September 11 attacks on America“, and that “Iran could have a nuclear weapon by 2009 or 2010″. Did someone just cry wolf?

Both statements are of course patently false, hence I wouldn’t accord this propaganda outfit unnecessary credibility by repeating its claims on Climate Change. And I hope those who are giving free publicity to its propaganda would learn a thing or two about it before they click Send on their mass mails.

Background

Founded in 1958 the IISS has strong establishment links, with former US and British government officials among its members. The Foreign Office contributed £100,000 towards the setting up of its headquarters in central London, and the opening was attended by Thatcher and Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, then secretary general of Nato. Its early work focused on nuclear deterrence and arms control and was by its own account “hugely influential in setting the intellectual structures for managing the Cold War.”

Selling the Iraq War

IISS played a key role in furnishing the pretexts for the invasion of Iraq by publishing a dossier on Iraqi WMDs, on 9 September 2002, which was edited by Gary Samore, formerly of the US State Department, and presented by Dr John Chipman, a former Nato fellow.

The dossier was immediately seized on by Bush and Blair administrations as providing “proof” that Saddam was just months away from launching a chemical and biological, or even a nuclear attack. Large parts of the IISS document were subsequently recycled in the now notorious Downing Street dossier, published with a foreword by the Prime Minister, the following week.

Unlike the British Government, IISS later claimed it made mistakes in its dossier about the extent of the Iraqi threat. It commissioned an independent assessment by Rolf Ekeus, a former head of United Nations arms inspectors in Iraq. Samore and Chipman now claim their dossier had caveats about Iraq’s supposed WMD arsenal which the Government insisted on removing from intelligence assessments - leading to “sexing up” accusations. However, in his interview with BBC on the day of the publication of the report, such caveats are conspicuously absent.

Pushing the bombing of Iran

In April 2006 The Institute was involved in briefing the media in which the BBC reported that Iran was ‘on course’ to develop nuclear weapons in ‘three years’. On being challenged the Institute backed down slightly.

About the time when US-UK prepared to embark on an illegal invasion of Iraq, the BBC aired one of those rare pieces of critical journalism that have long since become extinct. When I first arrived in Glasgow, we ran a successful campaign to get Mordechai Vanunu elected as the Rector of the Glasgow University. More recently I had the pleasure of meeting Peter Hounam, the journalist who broke the Vanunu story. This documentary is an incisive look at Israel’s nuclear program, and the double standards of the West which have helped sustain it.

It appears some of Chavez’s defiance is rubbing off on Lula. For the first time since he singled out US citizens for strict visa controls in reponse to the harassment of Brazilian citizens at American airports, Lula is showing signs of a spine.

Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, has flatly rejected President Bush’s proposals for parallel global negotiations to combat climate change, insisting that countries come to agreement at the United Nations, and not under US leadership…

“The Brazilian position is clear cut,” Mr Lula said. “I cannot accept the idea that we have to build another group to discuss the same issues that were discussed in Kyoto and not fulfilled.

“If you have a multilateral forum [the UN] that makes a democratic decision … then we should work to abide by those rules [rather than] simply to say that I do not agree with Kyoto and that I will develop another institution,” said Mr Lula…

The Bush administration has sought to cultivate President Lula as an ally, seeing the former trade unionist as a centre-left alternative in Latin America to the more radical anti-American socialism espoused by Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez…

However, on overall climate change policy, President Lula was dismissive of the Bush approach, calling it “voluntarism”, meaning a reliance on “coalitions of the willing” rather than establish global institutions and the pursuit of voluntary goals rather than binding commitments. “We cannot let voluntarism override multilateralism,” he said…

But Mr Lula, Brazil’s president since 2003, rebuked Mr Bush for seemingly sidestepping the UN and not taking its global responsibilities seriously. “I am open-minded about talking to President Bush … I will never refuse to discuss any idea, but we should respect the decisions made in the multilateral forums. It is the only thing we have all agreed on in a democratic way,” he said. “If the US is the country that most contributes with greenhouse gases, in the world, it should assume more responsibility to reduce emissions.”

The German hosts of this week’s G8 summit at Heiligendamm have also flatly rejected the idea of creating a separate process to deal with climate change. Chancellor Angela Merkel called it “non-negotiable”.

A Yelp in the Corner

Meanwhile in the periphery, a muted yelp was heard.

Tony Blair has been a lonely voice on the world stage, hailing the Bush plan as an “important step forward”.

The Bio-fuel Debate

[Lula's] promotion of bio-fuels has brought criticism from Mr Chavez, the continent’s leading oil producer and Castro, who has argued that growing bio-fuels is equivalent to taking food crops from the mouths of the poor and putting it in the petrol tanks of the wealthy.

Mr Lula picked his words on his fellow presidents carefully. “Its normal that those countries that have oil feel a bit strange about this idea of bio-fuels,” he said, but he suggested it was time for the Latin American left to move beyond its instinctive anti-Americanism. “A long time ago I learned not to put the blame for backwardness in Brazil on the US,” he said. “We have to blame ourselves. Our backwardness is caused by an elite which for a century didn’t think about the majority and subordinated itself to foreign interests.” …

The only more important issue in the world than trade, President Lula said, is climate change, and both are nearing a potential turning point.

“In the Doha round, I want to solve the issues of today and tomorrow,” the Brazilian leader said. “On the climate issue I have to solve the problem of planet earth, the only one we know of on which we can survive … So for God’s sake, let’s take care of planet earth.”

While the 20th century mostly saw wars being fought around energy sources, especially oil, there are already indications that the focus of conflicts in the coming century would be water. Contrary to popular belief, water is a finite resource, and increasing population coupled with Climate Change will ensure that demand goes higher even as resources keep depleting. We are already into the fourth year of the 21st century’s first Climate Change war — Darfur — and Julian Borger of the Guardian deserves credit for highlighting this fact. (More on the Darfur)

Less than a generation ago, Arabs and Africans coexisted peacefully and productively in Darfur, Sudan’s arid western province which is more than twice the size of the United Kingdom. African farmers had allowed Arab herders to graze their camels and goats on the land, and the livestock had fertilised the soil.

The coexistence was so natural, in fact, the tribes of Darfur did not even think of themselves as Arab or African…Only a few years ago, it was just nomads and farmers…

Something fundamental has changed in this part of Africa, and it happened within a generation. From a state of sectarian innocence in which the dividing line between Arab and African was meaningless, something made people pick sides, and hardened their new sense of identity into ethnic hatred, all in the past two decades. What changed, the evidence suggests, was the climate.

The current conflict began in 2003. It was triggered when Darfurians launched a revolt against the central government, which fought back by unleashing the Janjaweed.

But the real roots of the disaster stretch back to the mid-1980s when a ferocious drought and famine transformed Sudan and the whole Horn of Africa. It killed more than a million people and laid waste livestock herds. Whether they maintained their way of life or tried to take up settled cultivation, the pastoralists of Darfur clashed repeatedly with its farmers. A string of conflicts broke out as both sides armed themselves, and those conflicts created the template for today’s disaster.

Alex de Waal, a researcher and writer on Darfur, tells the story of meeting a nomadic leader, Sheikh Hilal Musa, in 1985, at the height of the drought. The desert was visibly advancing as the Saharan winds blew sand into the more fertile hills where the sheikh’s clan, the Jalul, were grazing their camels. He tried hard to keep up appearances but it was clear his world was falling apart. Many Jalul who had lost their camels and goats tried their hands at farming, but as latecomers with no ancestral land rights, they had to make do with rocky semi-barren terrain, and could only look with envy towards the rich alluvial soil belonging to the long-established African tribe, an offshoot of the Fur people. Darfur means literally the Land of the Fur…

But Khartoum would never have found willing partners in Darfur if the conflict over land had not been made so acute by the drought. Tellingly, those Arab tribes who had land ownership rights - mostly in the south of Darfur - chose not to join the government’s counter-insurgency. Those who were prepared to kill, rape and pillage were drawn from the ranks of the desperate, ripped from their traditional way of life by a catastrophic change in the weather. Global warming created the dry tinder. Khartoum supplied the match.

Back in the 1980s, the failure of the rains was widely blamed on the people who lived in the region. Their over-grazing, it had been thought, had led to soil erosion, replaced green cover with bare rock and sand, reflecting more heat into the atmosphere and diminishing the chance of rain.

More recent computer modelling has suggested that rain patterns over Africa are influenced rather by ocean temperatures, and those in turn reflect global warming, and the rise of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. In other words, droughts in Africa may be caused less by its hapless inhabitants and more by oversize cars and cheap flights in Europe and the US…

There is endless potential for more climate-driven conflicts all across the broad Sahel region that stretches from Sudan to Senegal, where the competition between herder and farmer is often reinforced by more entrenched tribal differences, as well as the fault line between Muslim and Christian. In decades to come, Darfur may be seen as one of the first true climate-change wars, and those wars to come may be every bit as vicious because the adversaries will be fighting for their lives in a suddenly unfamiliar world.

It is a doom-laden scenario but it is not inevitable. Most scientists agree that climate change, of one degree or another, will happen, and that it will diminish the amount of fertile arable land and pasture across vulnerable regions like the Sahel. What is not inevitable is the descent from competition to armed conflict. That is a political leap. It requires that national governments choose to exacerbate conflicts rather than resolve them, and it requires that the international community fails to act when national governments do not protect their own citizens.

“The real problem here is moral, it is not a question of climate,” Said Ibrahim Mustafa, the sultan of the Chadian border region of Dar Sila, says. “It’s not just a lack of water that makes a man kill his brother.”

At the moment, people such as Mustafa are losing the battle. After criticising the N’Djamena government for handing out guns rather than attempting to defuse border tensions with Sudan, he was obliged to hand over formal authority to his less outspoken son…

The rebels and the government came close to a deal last year but by the time a deadline for the negotiations expired, only one rebel faction had accepted the terms Khartoum was offering. The Darfur groups are in disarray, but if they were to reassemble around a common platform they may find Khartoum - facing mounting sanctions - willing to make a better deal…

There are ways that Darfur’s tragedy can be contained and mitigated before its neighbours are pulled into the downward spiral. The alternative could be a chain of conflicts across the continent and beyond, in the struggle for survival on a changing planet.

My response to John Lanchester’s plug for nuclear energy is in the London Review of Books.

John Lanchester endorses James Lovelock’s enthusiasm for nuclear power (LRB, 22 March). I presume he feels, as Lovelock does, that nuclear waste is so safe he would be willing to store it in his garden shed. Perhaps he also finds ‘persuasive’ Lovelock’s claims that the death rates from cancer of Hiroshima survivors were lower than in comparable populations, and that Chernobyl killed only 45 people. Lanchester appears to have fallen for the PR campaign conducted by the nuclear industry and the Blair government over the past year. He overlooks the environmental costs of uranium mining, which will only increase as reserves are depleted and the industry is forced to rely on progressively lower-grade ore. He doesn’t tell us how we will dispose of nuclear waste, says very little about the risks associated with running nuclear power plants, and ignores the costs of decommissioning. Nor does he take into account the amount of money the industry has already taken from taxpayers in the form of state subsidies, money which could have been spent on developing less risky alternatives.

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad
Glasgow