the stuff of dreams

The following article is Chapter Two of a book entitled Finishing The Rat Race.

All previously uploaded chapters are available (in sequence) by following the link above or from category link in the main menu, where you will also find a table of contents and a preface on why I started writing it.

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Oats and beans and barley grow,

Oats and beans and barley grow,

Do you or I or anyone know,

How oats and beans and barley grow?

— Traditional children’s rhyme

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One of my earliest memories at school was being told that rabbits became quick to escape foxes, and likewise, foxes had become quicker to catch rabbits. This, the teacher said, is how one type of animal can slowly change into a new type through a process known as evolution. Well, I didn’t believe that for a minute. Such dramatic outcomes from such unremarkable causes. And why, I wondered, would something change simply because it had to – having to isn’t any reason.

Of course in many ways my teacher had missed the point (though in fairness, perhaps it was I who missed his point, off in a daydream, or curiously intent on the inconstant fluttering of a leaf against the window, or otherwise lost to the innocent pleasures of childhood reveries). Either way it doesn’t matter much. Importantly, my teacher had done his job – and done it well! He had planted a seed, which made this a most valuable lesson. But in his necessarily simplified account of evolution there was a flaw (and his version would by virtue of necessity have been a simple one, because however much I may have been distracted, the subtleties of evolution were beyond the grasp of our young minds). For what he had missed out is not why the rabbits became faster but how. The question being what “adaptive mechanism” could have driven any useful sequence of changes we might call ‘evolution’. And this is really the key point. Leaving out mention of any kind of adaptive mechanism, he was leaving open all sorts of possibilities. For instance, Lamarckism and Darwinism, though both theories of evolution, paint very different accounts of how life has developed, for they presume quite different adaptive mechanisms. I will try to explain the matter more carefully and in terms of giraffes.

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You might ask a great many questions about giraffes. For instance, how on earth their extraordinary and striking markings could ever provide useful camouflage, though if you’re ever lucky enough to see one step almost invisibly out of dappled foliage into full light, you will certainly be sure that the effect is near perfect. Alternatively, you might ask why it is that they walk with both legs on the same side moving together. A very elegant form of locomotion. However, by far and away the most frequently asked question about giraffes is this: why do they have such long necks?

Well, here’s what Lamarck would have said. Giraffes began as ordinary antelope. Some of the antelope preferred grass and others preferred leaves. The ones that preferred leaves had an advantage if they could reach higher. To achieve this they would stretch their necks a little longer. As a direct result of acquiring this new characteristic, the foals of those slightly longer necked antelope would be also be born with slightly longer necks. They too would stretch that little bit higher. Over generations some types of the antelope would develop extremely long necks and the descendants of these eventually developed into a new species called giraffes.

The basis for Lamarck’s reasoning lies in a perfectly rational misunderstanding about genetics. He assumes that the “acquired characteristics” (i.e., those characteristics developed or acquired during life) of the parents will somehow be passed through to their offspring. It turns out however that this isn’t actually the case. He might have guessed as much I suppose. One of the oft-cited criticisms against Lamarck’s theory has been the case of Jewish boys. Why, his opponents would ask, do they ever grow foreskins in the first place?

Darwin offered an alternative hypothesis. Perhaps it goes like this, he thought: there are already differences within the population of antelope; some will have shorter necks than others to start with. Or in other words, there is already a “natural variation”. In times of plenty this may not be of significance, but in times of scarcity it could be that the antelope with longer necks have a slight advantage. This idea of course applies to any antelopes with other accidentally favourable characteristics, for example those that run faster, are better camouflaged, or have more efficient digestive systems; but let’s not go there – let’s stick to necks for a moment. The longer necked adults can reach higher and so get to those few extra leaves that will help them to survive. Having a slightly higher chance of survival means (all other factors being equal) that they are more likely to pass on their characteristics. Within a few generations there will be an inevitable increase in the population of the long-necked variety until eventually, the long-necked population might plausibly have evolved into a separate species.

What had Darwin achieved in this alternative explanation? Well, he had abolished any requirement for an heredity that depended on the transmission of “acquired characteristics.” He’d not entirely proved Lamarck wrong but only shown his ideas aren’t necessary. And although in actual fact Darwin never acknowledged Lamarck’s contribution, purely in terms of theories of heredity his own version was little better than Lamarck’s (basically, by introducing the equally flawed concept of pangenes he had finally got around the issue of Jewish foreskins). But it is not what Darwin had undermined, so much as what he had set up, that preserves his legacy. That the true driving force of evolution depends on variation and competition, in dynamic relationship that he called “natural selection”.

According to Darwin’s new vision then, the evolution of species depends upon how individuals within that species interact with their environment. Those that are best adapted will survive longer and pass on their winning characteristics, and the rest will perish without reproducing. In short, it is “the survival of the fittest” that ensures evolutionary progress; though this catchy summary was not Darwin’s own, but one that Darwin slowly adopted. (It was actually first coined by the philosopher Herbert Spencer, whose ideas I wish to return to later.)

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Darwin still attracts a lot of criticism and much of this criticism comes from religious sections intent on promulgating the view that “it was God what done it all” –  the Creationists who refuse to acknowledge any of the overwhelming evidence whether from zoology, botany, geology, palaeontology, or embryology; rejecting reason in deference to “the word of God”. However, there are also more considered critiques.

Perhaps the most interesting of these is that Darwin’s evolutionary theory of natural selection is unscientific because it is founded on a tautology. It is after all self-evident that the fittest will survive, given that by fitness you must really be meaning “fitness for survival”. After all, it has to be admitted that sloths have survived, and in what sense can a sloth be said to “be fit” other than in its undoubted fitness to be a sloth. The assumption then is that Darwin’s idea of natural selection has added nothing that wasn’t already glaring obvious. Yet this is an unfair dismissal.

Firstly, it is unfair, because as I have said above, “the survival of the fittest” is Spenser’s contribution – one that leads rapidly into dangerous waters – but it is also unfair because it misses the way in which Darwin’s hypothesis is not only predictive, but also (as Karl Popper was so keenly aware) testable. If Darwin’s theory was a mere tautology then nothing on earth could ever disprove his claims, and yet there is room here for evidence that might truly test his theory to destruction.

How? Well, Darwin, it must be understood, had put forward a theory of gradual adaptation, so there is no accounting for any sudden leaps within his slowly branching history of life – so if, for instance, a complex new order of species suddenly arose in the fossil record without ancestry, then Darwin’s theory would need a radical rethink. Or let’s say some fossil was found with characteristics uncommon to any discovered ancestor. Here again Darwin’s theory would be seriously challenged. On the other hand, embryologists might discover discrepancies in the way eggs develop, and likewise, following the discovery of DNA and advent of modern genetics, we might find sudden abrupt shifts in the patterns of genes between species instead of gradual changes. Each of these cases would powerful evidence to challenge Darwinian theory.

But, instead of this (at least until now), these wide and varied disciplines have heaped up the supporting evidence. For example, people used to talk a lot about “the missing link”, by which they generally meant the missing link between humans and apes when scientists have in fact discovered a whole host of “missing links” in the guise of close cousins from the Neanderthals to the strange and more ancient australopithecines. For more exciting missing links, how about the fact that the jaw bone of reptiles exists in four parts and that three of those bones have slowly evolved in humans to form parts of the inner ear. How do we know? Well, there is evidence in the development of mammalian and reptilian embryos and more recently the discovery of an intermediate creature in which the bones were clearly used concomitantly for both chewing and listening. This is one of many discovered creatures that Darwin’s theory has predicted – whilst the most famous is surely the bird-lizard known as Archaeopteryx. Where, by way of comparison, are the remains of, say, Noah’s Ark?

But Darwin’s theory was not correct in all details. As I have already mentioned, his notion of pangenes was in some ways little better than Lamarck’s theory of acquired characteristics, and so it is perhaps still more remarkable that whilst he looked through a wonky glass, what he gleaned was broadly correct. Although, surprisingly perhaps, it took a monk (and one trained in physics more than in biology) to begin setting the glass properly straight. Enter Gregor Mendel.

Richard Dawkins shows how whales evolved from a cloven-hoofed ancestor, and reveals whales’ closest modern-day cousin:

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If we think back to what people knew about the world (scientifically speaking) prior to the turn of the twentieth century, it seems astonishing what was about to be discovered within just a few decades. For instance, back in 1900 physicists were still in dispute about the existence of atoms, and meanwhile, astronomers were as then unaware of the existence of independent galaxies beyond the Milky Way. But then, in 1905, Einstein suddenly published three extraordinary papers. In the least well known of these, he proved mathematically how the jiggling Brownian motion of pollen grains on water (observed by Robert Brown almost a hundred years earlier) was caused by collisions of water molecules, and doing this, he finally validated the concept of matter being formed out of particles, and so by extension, thereby proven the existence of atoms, which finally settled a debate regarding the nature of matter that had begun more than two thousand years earlier in Greece.

Moreover, it wasn’t until the early 1920s, when Edwin Hubble (now better known as the father of the idea of the expanding universe) had succeeded in resolving the outer parts of other galaxies (previously called nebulae), detecting within their composition the collections of billions of individual stars. At last we knew that there were other galaxies just like our own Milky Way.

So in just twenty years, our universe had simultaneously grown and shrunk by a great many orders of magnitude. Nowadays, of course, we know that atoms are themselves composed of smaller particles: electrons, protons and neutrons, which are in turn fashioned from quarks 1; while the galaxies above and beyond congregate within further clusters (the Milky Way being one of the so-called Local Group, which is surely the most understated name for any known object in the whole of science).

The universe we have discovered is structured in multiple layers – though the boundaries between these layers are only boundaries of incomprehension. Looking upwards we encounter objects inconceivably large are in turn the building blocks of objects much larger again, whilst investigating the finest details of the particle world, we’ve learnt how little fleas have ever smaller fleas…

Our first stabs at understanding the origins of the trillions of galaxies in our visible universe, and of comprehending the nature of the matter and energy that comprises them, has lead to speculations based upon solid empirical findings that allow us to construct models of how the physical universe as a whole may have begun. Thus, via a joint collaboration between physicists searching on the macro- and micro-scales, we have finished up with the study of cosmology; the rigorous scientific study of the cosmos no less! (And to most physicists working at the turn of the twentieth century, the idea of a branch of physics solely devoted to the understanding of creation would surely have seemed like pure science fiction). I hope my digression has helped to set the scene a little…

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Around the turn of the twentieth century, there also remained a mystery surrounding the science of heredity and the origin of genes. It was of course common sense that children tended to have characteristics reminiscent of their parents, but in precisely what manner those parental characteristics were hybridised had remained a matter of tremendous speculation. It was still widely believed that some kind of fluid-like mingling of genes occurred, little substantial scientific progress having been made on the older ideas about bloodlines.

But those early theories of blended inheritance, which imagined the infusing together of the two gene pools, as two liquids might mix, were mistaken. If genes really behaved this way then surely the characteristics of people would also blend together. Just as we add hot water to cold to make it warm, so a white man and a black woman would surely together procreate medium brown infants, becoming darker or lighter by generations depending on whether further black or white genes were added. Which is indeed true, up to a point, but it is not strictly true. And if it really were so simple, then the range of human characteristics might (as some racial purists had feared) gradually blend to uniformity. But the real truth about inheritance, as Mendel was quietly discovering during the middle of the 19th century, is that genes have an altogether more intriguing method of combination.

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Mendel was a monk, who aside from observing the everyday monastic duties also taught natural science, principally physics. The work that eventually made him world-renowned, however, involved studies on peas; this was Mendel’s hobby.

He spent many years cross-fertilising varieties and making detailed observations of the succeeding generations. He compared the height of plants. He compared the positioning of flowers and pods on the stem. And he noted subtle differences in shape and colour of seeds, pods and flowers. By comparing generations, Mendel found that offspring showed traits of their parents in predictable ratios. More surprisingly, he noticed that a trait lost in one generation might suddenly re-emerge in the next. So he devised a theory to explain his findings. Like a great many scientific theories, it was ingenious in its simplicity.

Within every organism, he said, genes for each inheritable trait must occur not individually, but in pairs, and in such a way that each of these “gene-pairs” is either “dominant” or “recessive” to its partner. In this way, a gene could sometimes be expressed in the individual whilst in different circumstances it might lay dormant for a generation. But please allow me a brief paragraph to explain this modern concept of inheritance more completely and coherently.

The usual way to explain Mendelian Inheritance is in terms of human eye colours. It goes like this: There is one gene for eye colour, but two gene types. These are called “alleles”, meaning “each other”. In this case, one allele produces brown eyes (let’s call this Br), and the other produces blue eyes (Bl). You inherit one of these gene types from your mother and one from your father. So let’s say you get a brown allele from each. That means you have Br-Br and will have brown eyes. Alternatively you may get a blue allele from each, and then you’ll have Bl-Bl and so have blue eyes. So far so simple. But let’s say you get a brown from one parent and a blue from the other. What happens then? Well, Mendel says, they don’t mix, and produce green eyes or something, but that one of the genes, the brown one as it happens, will be “dominant”, which means you will have brown eyes. But here’s the interesting bit, since although you have brown eyes you will nevertheless carry an allele for blue eyes – the “recessive” allele. Now let’s say you happen to meet a beautiful brown-eyed girl, who is also carrying the combined Br-Bl genes. What will your beautiful children look like? Well, all things being equal in terms of gene combination – so assuming that you are both equally likely to contribute a Bl allele as a Br allele (i.e., that this is a purely random event) then there are only four equal possibilities: Br-Br, Br-Bl, Bl-Br, or Bl-Bl. The first three of these pairs will produce dominant brown, whilst the two recessive Bl alleles in the last pair produce blue. So if you happen to have four children, then statistically speaking, you are most like to produce three with honey brown eyes, and one imbued with eyes like sapphires. And the milkman need never have been involved.

Mendel had realised that instead of the old fashioned “analogue” system, in which our genes added together in some kind of satisfactory proportions – like two voices forming a new harmony – genes actually mix in an altogether more “digital” fashion, where sometimes, the gene type is on and sometimes it is off. Inevitably, the full truth is more complicated than this, with alleles for different genes sometimes combining in other ways, which will indeed lead to blending of some kinds of inherited traits. Yet even here, it is not the genes (in the form of the alleles) that are blended, but only the “expressed characteristics” of that pair of alleles – something called the phenotype. Thus, for generation after generation these gene types are merely shuffled and passed on. Indeed the genes themselves have a kind of immortality, constantly surviving, just as the bits and bytes in computer code are unaltered in reproductions. Of course, errors in their copying do eventually occur (and we now know that it is precisely such accidental “mutations” which, by adding increased variety to the gene pool, have served to accelerate the process of evolution). 2

Mendel’s inspired work was somehow lost to science for nearly half a century, and so although he was a contemporary of Darwin and knew of Darwin’s theory – indeed, Mendel owned a German translation of “On the Origin of Species”, in which he had underlined many passages – there is absolutely no reason to suppose that Darwin knew anything at all of Mendel’s ideas.

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When Mendel’s papers were finally recovered in 1900, they helped set in motion a search for a molecular solution to the question of biological inheritance; a search that would eventually lead to Crick and Watson’s dawning realisation that the structure of DNA must take the form of an intertwined double-helix. Such an extraordinary molecule could peel apart and reform identical copies of itself. DNA, the immortal coil, the self-replicating molecule that lay behind all the reproductive processes of life, sent biologists (not least Crick and Watson) into whirls of excitement. It was 1953 and here was the biological equivalent to Rutherford’s momentous discovery of an inner structure to atoms, almost half a century earlier. Here was the founding of yet another new science. Whilst nuclear and particle physicists were finding more powerful ways to break matter apart, biologists would soon begin dissecting genes.

Aside from the direct consequences of current and future developments in biotechnology (a subject I touch on in the addendum below), the rapid developments in the field of genetics, have led to another significant outcome, for biologists have also slowly been proving Darwin’s basic hypothesis. Genes really do adapt from one species to another – and we are beginning to see just precisely how. Yet in complete disregard to the mounting evidence, evolutionary theory still comes under more ferocious attack than any other established theory in science. Why does Darwinism generate such furore amongst orthodox religious groups compared say to today’s equally challenging theories of modern geology? Why aren’t creationists so eager to find the fault with the field of Plate Tectonics? (Pardon the pun.) For here is a science in its comparative infancy – only formulated in the 1960s – that no less resolutely undermines the Biblical time-scale for creation, and yet it reaps no comparable pious fury. Rocks just aren’t that interesting apparently, whereas, anyone with the temerity to suggest that human beings quite literally evolved from apes… boy, did that take some courage! 3

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Now at last, I will get to my main point, which is this: given that the question of our true origins has now been formally settled, what are we to conclude and what are the consequences to be? Or put another way, what’s the significance of discovering that just a million years ago – a heartbeat when gauged against the estimated four billion years of the full history of life on Earth – our own ancestors branched off to form a distinct new species of ape?

Well, first and foremost, I think we ought to be clear on the fact that being such relative terrestrial latecomers gives us no grounds for special pleading. We are not in fact perched atop the highest branch of some great evolutionary tree, or put differently, all creation was not somehow waiting on our tardy arrival. After all, if evolution is blind and not goal-orientated, as Darwinism proposes, then all avenues must be equally valid, even those that were never taken. So it follows that all creatures must be evolutionarily equal. Apes, dogs, cats, ants, beetles (which Darwin during his own Christian youth had noted God’s special fondness for, if judged only by their prodigious profusion), slugs, trees, lettuces, mushrooms, and even viruses; his theory makes no preference. All life has developed in parallel, and every species that is alive today, evolved from the same evolutionary roots and over the same duration simply to reach the tips of different branches. The only hierarchy here is a hierarchy of succession – of the living over the dead.

In short then, Darwinism teaches that we are just part of the great nexus of life, and no more central or paramount than our planet is central to the universe. To claim otherwise is to be unscientific, and, as Richard Dawkins has pointed out, depends entirely upon anthropocentrism and the “conceit of hindsight”.

Darwin too, quietly recognised that his theory provided no justification for any such pride in human supremacy. Likewise, he refused to draw any clear distinction between human races, correctly recognising all as a single species; an admission that says much for his intellectual courage and honesty, challenging as it did, his otherwise deeply conservative beliefs. For Darwin was a Victorian Englishman, and although not a tremendously bigoted one, it must have been hard for him to accept, that amongst many other things, his own theory of evolution meant that all races of men were of equal birth.

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But if we agree that humans are a specialised kind of ape, then we need to be fair in all respects. We have got in a habit of presuming that mankind, or homo sapiens – “the wise man” – to apply our own vainglorious scientific denomination – of all the countless species on Earth, is the special one. Unique because, as it used often to be claimed, we alone developed the skill to use tools. Or because we have a unique capacity for complex communication. Or because we are unparalleled creators of wonderful music and poetry. Or because we are just supremely great thinkers – analytical to the point of seeking a meaning in the existence of existence itself. Or more simply, because we are self-aware, whereas most animals seem childishly oblivious even to their own reflected images. Or, most currently fashionable, because as a species we are uniquely sophisticated in an entirely cultural sense – that is, we pass on complex patterns of behaviour to one-another like no other critters.

All of our uniqueness, we owe, so it goes, to the extraordinary grey matter between our ears, with everything boiling down eventually to this: we are special because we are such brainy creatures – the cleverest around. But think about it: how can we actually be sure even in this conviction? For what solid proof have we that no other creatures on Earth can match our intellectual prowess?

Well, we might think to look immediately to brain size, but there’s a catch, as it turns out that bigger animals have bigger brain-needs merely to function. Breathing, regulating blood temperature, coping with sensory input, and so on, all require more neural processing the larger a creature becomes. So we must factor this into our equations, or else, to cite a singular example, we must concede that we are much dumber than elephants.

Okay then, let’s divide the weight of a brain by the weight of the animal it belongs to. We might even give this ratio an impressive label such as “the encephalisation quotient” or whatever. Right then, having recalibrated accordingly, we can repeat the measures and get somewhat better results this time round. Here goes: river dolphins have an EQ of 1.5; gorillas 1.76; chimpanzees 2.48; bottlenose dolphins 5.6; and humans an altogether more impressive 7.4. So proof at last that we’re streets ahead of the rest of life’s grazers. But hang on a minute, can we really trust such an arbitrary calculus? Take, for example, the case of fatter humans. Obviously they must have a lower average EQ than their thinner counterparts. So this means fatter people are stupider?

No, measurements of EQ might better be regarded as an altogether rougher indication of intelligence: a method to sort the sheep from the apes. But then, can you actually imagine for a minute, that if say, EQ gave higher results for dolphins than humans, we would ever have adopted it as a yardstick in the first place? Would we not have more likely concluded that there must be something else we’d overlooked besides body-mass? The fact that dolphins live in water and so don’t need to waste so much brain energy when standing still, or some such. For if we weren’t top of the class then we’d be sure to find that our method was flawed – and this becomes a problem when you’re trying to be rigorously scientific. So either we need more refinement in our tests for animal intelligence, with emphasis placed on being fully objective, or else we must concede that intelligence is too subtle a thing even to be usefully defined, let alone accurately scored.

However, a more bullish approach to our claims of greatness goes as follows: look around, do you see any other creatures that can manipulate their environment to such astonishing effects? None has developed the means to generate heat or refrigeration, to make medicines, or to adapt to survive in the most inhospitable of realms, or any of our other monumental achievements. Dolphins have no super-aqua equipment for exploring on land, let alone rockets to carry them to the Sea of Tranquility. Chimpanzees have never written sonnets or symphonies – and never will no matter how infinite the availability of typewriters. So the final proof of our superiority then is this, whether we call it intelligence or give it any other endorsement: technological achievement, artistic awareness, and imagination of every kind.

But what then of our very early ancestors, those living even before the rise of Cro-magnon 4, and that first great renaissance which happened more than 40,000 years ago. Cro-magnon people made tools, wore clothes, lived in huts, and painted the wonderful murals at Lascaux in France and at Altamira in Spain. They did things that are strikingly similar to the kinds of things that humans still do today. Homo sapiens of earlier times than these, however, left behind no comparable human artifacts, and yet, physiologically-speaking, were little different from you or I. Given their seeming lack of cultural development then, do we have justification for believing them intellectually inferior, or could it be that they simply exercised their wondrous imaginations in more ephemeral ways?

Or let’s take whales, as another example. Whales, once feared and loathed as little more than gigantic fish, are nowadays given a special privilege. Promoted to the ranks of the highly intelligent (after humans obviously), we have mostly stopped brutalising them. Some of us have gone further again, not merely recognising them as emotionally aware and uncommonly sensitive creatures, but ‘communing with them’. Swimming with dolphins is nowadays rated as one of the must-have life experiences along with white-water rafting and bungee jumping. So somehow, and in spite of the fact that whales have never mastered the ability to control or manipulate anything much – tool-use being a tricky business, of course, if you’re stuck with flippers – nevertheless, whales have joined an elite class: the “almost human”. We have managed to see beyond their unbridgeable lack of dexterity, because whales satisfy a great many of our other supposedly defining human abilities – ones that I outlined above.

Dolphins, we learn, can recognise their own reflections. And they use sounds, equivalent to names, as a way to distinguish one another – so do they gossip? How very anthropomorphic of me to ask! Also, and in common with many other species of cetaceans, they sing, or at least communicate by means of something we hear as song. Indeed, quite recent research based on information theory has been revealing; mathematical analysis of the song of the humpbacked whale indicates that it may be astonishingly rich in informational content – so presumably then they do gossip! And not only that, but humpbacked whales (and others of the larger whale species) share a special kind of neural cell with humans, called spindle cells. So might we gradually discover that humpbacked whales are equally as smart as humans? Oh come, come – let’s not get too carried away!

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Do you remember a story about the little boy who fell into a zoo enclosure, whereupon he was rescued and nursed by one of the gorillas? It was all filmed, and not once but twice in fact – on different occasions and involving different gorillas, Jambo 5 and Binti Jua. 6 After these events, some in the scientific community sought to discount the evidence of their own eyes (even though others who’d worked closely with great apes saw nothing which surprised them at all). The gorillas in question, these experts asserted, evidently mistook the human child for a baby gorilla. Stupidity rather than empathy explained the whole thing. 7

Scientists are rightly cautious, of course, when attributing human motives and feelings to explain animal behaviour, however, strict denial of parallels which precludes all recognition of motives and feelings aside from those of humans becomes reductio ad absurdum. Such an overemphasis on the avoidance of anthropomorphism is no measure of objectivity and leads us just as assuredly to willful blindness as naïve sentimentality can. Indeed, to arrogantly presume that our closest evolutionary relatives, with whom we share the vast bulk of our DNA, are so utterly different that we must deny the most straightforward evidence of complex feelings and emotions reflects very badly upon us.

But then why stop with the apes? Dolphins are notoriously good at rescuing stranded swimmers, and if it wasn’t so terribly anthropomorphising I’d be tempted to say that they sometimes seem to go out of their way to help. Could it be that they find us intriguing, or perhaps laughable, or even pathetic (possibly in both senses)? – Adrift in the sea and barely able to flap around. “Why do humans decide to strand themselves?” they may legitimately wonder.

Dogs too display all the signs of liking us, or fearing us, and, at other times, of experiencing pleasure and pain, so here again what justification do those same scientists have to assume their expressions are mere simulacra? And do the birds really sing solely to attract potential mates and to guard their territory? Is the ecstatic trilling of the lark nothing more than a pre-programmed reflex? Here is what the eminent Dutch psychologist, primatologist and ethologist, Frans B.M. de Waal, has to say:

“I’ve argued that many of what philosophers call moral sentiments can be seen in other species. In chimpanzees and other animals, you see examples of sympathy, empathy, reciprocity, a willingness to follow social rules. Dogs are a good example of a species that have and obey social rules; that’s why we like them so much, even though they’re large carnivores.” 8

Here’s an entertaining youtube clip showing how goats too sometimes like to have a good time:

Rather than investigating the ample evidence of animal emotions, for too long the scientific view has been focused on the other end of the telescope. So we’ve had the behaviourists figuring that if dogs can be conditioned to salivate to the sound of bells then maybe children can be similarly trained, even to the extent of learning such unnecessary facts and skills (at least from a survival point of view) as history and algebra. Whilst more recently, with the behaviourists having exited the main stage (bells ringing loudly behind) a new wave of evolutionary psychologists has entered, and research is on-going; a search for genetic propensities for all traits from homosexuality and obesity, to anger and delinquency. Yes, genes for even the most evidently social problems, such as criminality, are being earnestly sought after, so desperate is the need of some to prove we too are nothing more than complex reflex machines; dumb robots governed by our gene-creators, much as Davros operates the controls of the Daleks. In these ways we have demoted our own species to the same base level as the supposedly automata beasts.

Moreover, simply to regard every non-human animal as a being without sentience is scientifically unfounded. If anything it is indeed based on a ‘religious’ prejudice; one derived either directly from orthodox faith, or as a distorted refraction via our modern faith in humanism. But it is also a prejudice that leads inexorably into a philosophical pickle, inspiring us to draw equally dopey mechanical caricatures of ourselves.

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So what is Darwin’s final legacy? Well, that of course remains unclear, and though it is established that his conjectured mechanism for the development and diversity of species is broadly correct, this is no reason to believe that the whole debate is completely done and dusted. And since Darwin’s theory of evolution has an in-built bearing on our relationship to the natural world, and by interpolation, to ourselves, we would be wise to recognise its limitations.

Darwinism offers satisfactory explanations to a great many questions. How animals became camouflaged. Why they took to mimicry. What causes peacocks to grow such fabulous tails – or at least why their fabulous tails grow so prodigiously large. It also helps us to understand a certain amount of animal behaviour. Why male fish more often look after the young than males of other phylum. Why cuckoos lay their eggs in the nests of other birds. And why the creatures that produce the largest broods are most often the worst parents.

Darwinism also makes a good account of a wide range of complex and sophisticated human emotions. It copes admirably with nearly all of the seven deadly sins. Gluttony, wrath, avarice and lust present no problems at all. Sloth is a little trickier, though once we understand the benefits of conserving energy, it soon fits into place, whilst envy presumably encourages us to strive harder. Pride is perhaps the hardest to fathom, since it involves an object of affection that hardly needs inventing, at least from a Darwinian perspective. But I wish to leave aside questions of selfhood for later.

So much for the vices then, but what of the virtues. How, for example are Darwinians able to account for rise of more altruistic behaviour? And for Darwinian purists, altruism arrives as a bit of a hot potato. Not that altruism is a problem in and of itself, for this is most assuredly not the case. Acts of altruism between related individuals are to be expected. Mothers that did not carry genes to make them devoted toward their own children would be less likely to successfully pass on their genes. The same may be said for natural fathers, and this approach can be intelligently elaborated and extended to include altruism within larger, and less gene-related groups. It is a clever idea, one that can be usefully applied to understanding the organisation of various communities, including those of social insects such as bees, ants, termites and, of course, naked mole rats…! Yes, as strange as it may sound, one special species of subterranean rodents, the naked mole rats, have social structures closely related to those of the social insects, and the Darwinian approach explains this too, as Dawkins brilliantly elucidates in a chapter of his book The Selfish Gene. Yet there remains one puzzle that refuses such insightful treatment.

When I was seventeen I went off cycling with a friend. On the first day of our adventures into the wilderness that is North Wales, we hit a snag. Well, actually I hit a kerb, coming off my bike along a fast stretch of the A5 that drops steeply down into Betws-y-Coed – a route that my parents had expressly cautioned me not to take, but then as you know, boys will be boys. Anyway, as I came to a long sliding halt along the pavement (and not the road itself, as luck would have it), I noticed that a car on the opposite side had pulled up. Soon afterwards, I was being tended to by a very kindly lady. Improvising first aid using tissues from a convenient packet of wet-wipes, she gently stroked as much of the gravel from my wounds as she could. She calmed me, and she got me back on my feet, and without all her generous support we may not have got much further on our travels. I remain very grateful to this lady, a person who I am very unlikely to meet ever again. She helped me very directly, and she also helped me in another way, by teaching me one of those lessons of life that stick. For there are occasions when we all rely on the kindness of strangers, kindness that is, more often than not, as freely given as it is warmly received. Yet even such small acts of kindness pose a serious problem for Darwinian theory, at least, if it is to successfully explain all forms of animal and human behaviour. The question is simply this: when there is no reward for helping, why should anyone bother to stop?

Dawkins’ devotes an entire chapter of The Selfish Gene to precisely this subject. Taking an idea from “game theory” called “the prisoner’s dilemma”, he sets out to demonstrate that certain strategies of life that aim toward niceness are actually more likely to succeed than other more cunning and self-interested alternatives. His aim is to prove that contrary to much popular opinion “nice guys finish first”. But here is a computer game (and a relatively simple one at that), whereas life, as Dawkins knows full well, is neither simple nor a game. In consequence, Dawkins then grasps hold of another twig. Pointing out how humans are a special case – as if we needed telling…

As a species, he says, we have the unique advantage of being able to disrespect the programming of our own selfish genes. For supporting evidence he cites the use of contraception, which is certainly not the sort of thing that genes would approve of. But then why are we apparently unique in having this ability to break free of our instinctual drives? Dawkins doesn’t say. There is no explanation other than that same old recourse to just how extraordinarily clever we are – yes, we know, we know! Yet the underlying intimation is really quite staggering: that human beings have evolved to be so very, very, very clever, that we have finally surpassed even ourselves.

As for such disinterested acts of altruism, the kind of instance exemplified by the Samaritanism of my accidental friend, these, according to strict Darwinians such as Dawkins, must be accidents of design. A happy bi-product of evolution. A spillover. For this is the only explanation that evolutionary theory in its current form could ever permit.

Embedded below is one of a series of lectures given by distinguished geneticist and evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin in 1990. The minutely detailed case he makes against the excesses of a Darwinian approach to human behaviour, as well as the latent ideology of socio-biology, is both lucid and persuasive:

*

Allow me now to drop a scientific clanger. My intention is to broaden the discussion and tackle issues about what Darwinism has to say about being human, and no less importantly, about being animal or plant. To this end then, I now wish to re-evaluate the superficially religious notion of “souls”; for more or less everything I wish to say follows from consideration of this apparently archaic concept.

So let me begin by making the seemingly preposterous and overtly contentious statement that just as Darwin’s theory in no way counters a belief in the existence of God, or gods as such, likewise, it does not entirely discredit the idea of souls. Instead, Darwin has eliminated the apparent need for belief in the existence of either souls or gods. But this is in no means the same as proving they do not exist.

Now, by taking a more Deistic view of Creation (as Darwin more or less maintained until late in his own life), one may accept the point about some kind of godly presence, for there is certainly room for God as an original creative force, and of some ultimately inscrutable kind, and yet it may still be contended that the idea of souls has altogether perished. For evolutionary theory establishes beyond all reasonable doubt that we are fundamentally no different from the other animals, or in essence from plants and bacteria. So isn’t it a bit rich then, clinging to an idea like human souls? Well, yes, if you put it that way, though we may choose to approach the same question differently.

My contention is that ordinary human relations already involves the notion of souls, only that we generally choose not to use the word soul in these contexts, presuming it to be outmoded and redundant. But perhaps given the religious weight of the word this will seem a scandalous contention, so allow me to elucidate. Everyday engagement between human beings (and no doubt other sentient animals), especially if one is suffering or in pain, automatically involves the feeling of empathy. So what then is the underlying cause of our feelings of empathy? – Only the most hard-nosed of behaviourists would dismiss it as a merely pre-programmed knee-jerk response.

Well, empathy, almost by definition, must mean that, in the other, we recognise a reflection of something found within ourselves. But then, what is it that we are seeing reflected? Do we have any name for it? And is not soul just as valid a word as any other? Or, to consider a more negative context, if someone commits an atrocity against others, then we are likely to regard this person as wicked. We might very probably wish to see this person punished. But how can anyone be wicked unless they had freedom to choose otherwise? So then, what part of this person was actually free? Was it the chemical interactions in their brain, or the electrical impulses between the neurons, or was it something altogether less tangible? And whatever the cause, we cannot punish the mass of molecular interactions that comprises their material being, because punishment involves suffering and molecules are not equipped to suffer. So ultimately we can only punish “the person within the body”, and what is “the person within the body” if not their soul?

But why is it, you may be wondering, that I want to rescue the idea of souls at all. For assuredly you may argue – and not without sound reason – that you have no want nor need for any woolly notions such as soul or spirit to encourage you to become an empathetic and loving person. You might even add that many of the cruellest people in history believed in the existence of the human soul. And I cannot counter you on either charge.

But let’s suppose that finally we have banished all notions of soul or spirit completely and forever – what have we actually achieved? And how do we give a fair account for that other quite extraordinary thing which is ordinary sentience. For quite aside from the subtle complexity of our moods and our feelings of beauty, of sympathy, of love, we must first account for our senses. Those most primary sensory impressions that form the world we experience – the redness of red objects, the warmth of fire, the saltiness of tears – the inexpressible, immediate, and ever-present streaming experience of conscious awareness that philosophers have called qualia. If there are no souls then what is actually doing the experiencing? And we should remember that here “the mind” is really nothing more or less, given our current ignorance, than a quasi-scientific synonym for soul. It is another name for the unnailable spook.

Might we have developed no less successfully as dumb automata? There is nothing in Darwin or the rest of science that calls on any requirement for self-conscious awareness to ensure our survival and reproduction. Nothing to prevent us negotiating our environment purely with sensors connected to limbs, via programmed instructions vastly more complex yet inherently no different from the ones that control this word processor, and optimised as super-machines that have no use for hesitant, stumbling, bumblingly incompetent consciousness. So what use is qualia in any case?

In purely evolutionary terms, I don’t need to experience the sensation of red to deal with red objects, any more than I need to see air in order to breathe. Given complex enough programs and a few cameras, future robots can (and presumably will) negotiate the world without need of actual sensations, let alone emotions. And how indeed could the blind mechanisms of dumb molecules have accidentally arranged into such elaborate forms to enable cognitive awareness at all? Darwin does not answer these questions – they fall beyond his remit. But then no one can answer these questions (and those who claim reasons to dismiss qualia on philosophical grounds, can in truth only dismiss the inevitably vague descriptions, rather than the ever-present phenomenon itself – or have they never experienced warmth, touched roughness nor seen red?).

And so the most ardent of today’s materialists wish to go further again. They want to rid the world of all speculation regarding the nature of mind. They say it isn’t a thing at all, but a process of the brain, which is conceivably true. (Although I’d add why stop at the brain?)

One fashionable idea goes that really we are “minding”, which is interesting enough given our accustomed error of construing the world in terms of objects rather actions; nouns coming easier than verbs to most of us. But then, whether the mind might be best represented by a noun or a verb seems for now, and given that we still know next to nothing in any neurological sense, to be purely a matter of taste.

The modern reductionism that reduces mind to brain, often throws up an additional claim. Such material processes, it claims, will one day be reproduced artificially in the form of some kind of highly advanced computer brain. Well, perhaps this will indeed happen, and perhaps one day we really will have “computers” that actually experience the world, rather than the sorts of machines today that simply respond to sensors in increasingly complex ways. I am speculating about machines with qualia: true artificial brains that are in essence just as aware as we are. But then how will we know?

Well, that’s a surprisingly tricky question and it’s one that certainly isn’t solved by the famous Turing Test, named after the father of modern computing, Alan Turing. For the Turing Test is merely a test of mimicry, claiming that if one day a computer is so cunningly programmed that it has become indistinguishable from a human intelligence then it is also equivalent. But that of course is nonsense. It is nonsense that reminds me of a very cunning mechanical duck someone once made: one that could walk like a duck, quack like a duck, and if rumours are to be believed, even to crap like a duck. A duck, however, it was not, and nor could it ever become one no matter how elaborate its clockwork innards. And as with ducks so with minds.

But let’s say we really will produce an artificial mind, and somehow we can be quite certain that we really have invented just such an incredible, epoch-changing machine. Does this mean that in the process of conceiving and manufacturing our newly conscious device, we must inevitably learn what sentience is of itself? This is not a ridiculous question. Think about it: do you need to understand the nature of light in order to manufacture a light bulb? No. The actual invention of light bulbs precedes the modern physical understanding. And do we yet have a full understanding of what light truly is, and is such a full understanding finally possible at all?

Yet there are a few scientists earnestly grappling with questions of precisely this kind, venturing dangerously near the forests and swamps of metaphysics, in search of answers that will require far better knowledge and understanding of principles of the mind. Maybe they’ll even uncover something like “the seat of the soul”, figuring out from whence consciousness springs. Though I trust that you will not misunderstand me here, for it is not that I advocate some new kind of reductionist search for the soul within, by means of dissection or the application of psychical centrifuges using high strength magnetic fields or some such. As late as the turn of the twentieth century, there was indeed a man called Dr. Duncan MacDougall, who had embarked on just such a scheme: weighing people at the point of death, in experiments to determine the mass of the human soul. 9 A futile search, of course, for soul – or mind – is unlikely to be in, at least in the usual sense, a substantial thing. And though contingent with life, we have no established evidence for its survival into death.

My own feeling is that the soul is no less mortal than our brains and nervous systems, on which it seemingly depends. But whatsoever it turns out to be, it is quite likely to be remain immeasurable – especially if we choose such rudimentary apparatus as a set of weighing scales for testing it. The truth is that we know nothing as yet, for the science of souls (or minds if you prefer) is still without its first principle. So the jury is out on whether or not science will ever explain what makes a human being a being at all, or whether is it another one of those features of existence that all philosophy is better served to “pass over in silence”.

Here is what respected cognitive scientist Steven Pinker has to say of sentience in his entertainingly presented and detailed overview of our present understanding of How the Mind Works:

“But saying that we have no scientific explanation of sentience is not the same as saying that sentience does not exist at all. I am as certain that I am sentient as I am certain of anything, and I bet you feel the same. Though I concede that my curiosity about sentience may never be satisfied, I refuse to believe that I am just confused when I think I am sentient at all! … And we cannot banish sentience from our discourse or reduce it to information access, because moral reasoning depends on it. The concept of sentience underlies our certainty that torture is wrong and that disabling a robot is the destruction of property but disabling a person is murder.” 10

*

There is a belief that is common to a camp of less fastidious professional scientists than Pinker, which, for the sake of simplicity, holds that consciousness, if it was ever attached at all, was supplied by Nature as a sort of optional add-on, in which every human experience is fully reducible to an interconnected array of sensory mechanisms and data-processing systems. Adherents to this view tend not to think too much about sentience, of course, and in rejecting their own central human experience, thereby commit a curiously deliberate act of self-mutilation that leaves only zombies fit for ever more elaborate Skinner boxes 11, even when, beyond their often clever rationalisations, we all share a profound realisation that there is far more to life than mere stimulus and response.

Orwell, wily as ever, was alert to such dangers in modern thinking, and reworking a personal anecdote into grim metaphor, he neatly presented our condition:

“… I thought of a rather cruel trick I once played on a wasp. He was sucking jam on my plate, and I cut him in half. He paid no attention, merely went on with his meal, while a tiny stream of jam trickled out of his severed œsophagus. Only when he tried to fly away did he grasp the dreadful thing that had happened to him. It is the same with modern man. The thing that has been cut away is his soul, and there was a period — twenty years, perhaps — during which he did not notice it.”

Whilst Orwell regards this loss as deeply regrettable, he also recognises that it was a very necessary evil. Given the circumstances, giving heed to how nineteenth century religious belief was “…in essence a lie, a semi-conscious device for keeping the rich rich and the poor poor…” he is nevertheless dismayed how all too hastily we’ve thrown out the baby with the holy bathwater. Thus he continues:

“Consequently there was a long period during which nearly every thinking man was in some sense a rebel, and usually a quite irresponsible rebel. Literature was largely the literature of revolt or of disintegration. Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau, Shelley, Byron, Dickens, Stendhal, Samuel Butler, Ibsen, Zola, Flaubert, Shaw, Joyce — in one way or another they are all of them destroyers, wreckers, saboteurs. For two hundred years we had sawed and sawed and sawed at the branch we were sitting on. And in the end, much more suddenly than anyone had foreseen, our efforts were rewarded, and down we came. But unfortunately there had been a little mistake. The thing at the bottom was not a bed of roses after all, it was a cesspool full of barbed wire.” 12

On what purely materialistic grounds can we construct any system of agreed morality? Do we settle for hedonism, living our lives on the unswerving pursuit of personal pleasure; or else insist upon the rather more palatable, though hardly more edifying alternative of eudaemonism, with its eternal pursuit of individual happiness? Our desires for pleasure and happiness are evolutionarily in-built, and it is probably fair to judge that most, if not all, find great need of both to proceed through life with any healthy kind of disposition. Pleasure and happiness are wonderful gifts, to be cherished when fortune blows them to our shore. Yet pleasure is more often short-lived, whilst happiness too is hard to maintain. So they hardly stand as rocks, providing little in the way of stability if we are to build solidly from their foundations. Moreover, they are not, as we are accustomed to imagine, objects to be sought after at all. If we chase either one then it is perfectly likely that it will recede ever further from our reach. So it is better, I believe, to look upon these true gifts as we find them, or rather, as they find us: evanescent and only ever now. Our preferred expressions of the unfolding moment of life. To measure our existence solely against them is however, to miss the far bigger picture of life, the universe and everything. 13

We might decide, of course, to raise the social above these more individualistic pursuits: settling on the Utilitarian calculus of increased happiness (or else reduced unhappiness) for the greatest number. But here’s a rough calculation, and one that, however subtly conceived, never finally escapes from its own deep moral morass. For Utilitarianism, though seeking to secure the greatest collective good, is by construction, blind to all evils as such, being concerned always and only in determining better or worse outcomes. The worst habit of Utilitarianism is to preference ends always above means. Lacking moral principle, it grants licence for “necessary evils” of every prescription: all wrongs being weighed (somehow) against perceived benefits.

We have swallowed a great deal of this kind of poison, so much that we feel uncomfortable in these secular times to speak of “acts of evil” or of “wickedness”. As if these archaic terms might soon be properly expurgated from our language. Yet still we feel the prick of our own conscience. A hard-wired sense of what is most abhorrent, combined with an innate notion of justice that once caused the child to complain “but it isn’t fair… it isn’t fair!”  Meanwhile, the “sickness” in the minds of others makes us feel sick in turn.

On what grounds can the staunchest advocates of materialism finally challenge those who might turn and say: this baby with Down’s Syndrome, this infant with polio, this old woman with Parkinson’s Disease, this schizophrenic, these otherwise healthy but unwanted babies or young children, haven’t they already suffered enough? And if they justify a little cruelty now in order to stave off greater sufferings to come, or more savagely still, claim that the greater good is served by the painless elimination of a less deserving few. What form should our prosecution take? By adopting a purely materialistic outlook then, we are collectively drawn, whether we wish it or not, toward the pit of nihilism. Even the existentialists, setting off determined to find meaning in the here and now, sooner or later recognised the need for some kind of transcendence, or else abandoned all hope.

*

Kurt Vonnegut was undoubtedly one of the most idiosyncratic of twentieth century writers. 14 During his lifetime, Vonnegut was often pigeonholed as a science fiction writer, and this was no doubt because his settings are very frequently in some way futuristic, because as science fiction goes, his stories are generally rather earth-bound. In general, Vonnegut seems more preoccupied with the unlikely interactions between his variety of freakish characters (many of whom reappear in different novels), than in using his stories as a vehicle to project his vision of the future itself. Deliberately straightforward, his writing is ungarnished and propelled by sharp, snappy sentences. He hated semi-colons, calling them grammatical hermaphrodites.

Vonnegut often used his talented imagination to tackle the gravest of subjects, clowning around with dangerous ideas, and employing the literary equivalent of slapstick comedy to puncture human vanity and to make fun of our grossest stupidities. He liked to sign off chapters with a hand-drawn asterisk, because he said it represented his own arsehole. As a satirist then, he treads a path that was pioneered by Swift and Voltaire; of saying the unsayable but disguising his contempt under the cover of phantasy. He has become a favourite author of mine.

In 1996, he was awarded the title of American Humanist of the Year. In his acceptance speech, he took the opportunity to connect together ideas that had contributed to his own understanding of what it meant to be a humanist; ideas that ranged over a characteristically shifting and diverse terrain. Here were his concluding remarks:

“When I was a little boy in Indianapolis, I used to be thankful that there were no longer torture chambers with iron maidens and racks and thumbscrews and Spanish boots and so on. But there may be more of them now than ever – not in this country but elsewhere, often in countries we call our friends. Ask the Human Rights Watch. Ask Amnesty International if this isn’t so. Don’t ask the U.S. State Department.

And the horrors of those torture chambers – their powers of persuasion – have been upgraded, like those of warfare, by applied science, by the domestication of electricity and the detailed understanding of the human nervous system, and so on. Napalm, incidentally, is a gift to civilization from the chemistry department of Harvard University.

So science is yet another human-made God to which I, unless in a satirical mood, an ironical mood, a lampooning mood, need not genuflect.” 15

*

Rene Descartes is now most famous for having declared, “cogito ergo sum”, which means of course “I think therefore I am”. It was a necessary first step, or so he felt, to escape from the paradox of absolute skepticism, which was the place he had chosen to set out at the beginning of his metaphysical meditations. What Descartes was basically saying was this: look here, I’ve been wondering whether I exist or not, but now having caught myself in the act, I can be sure that I do – for even if I still must remain unsure of everything else besides, I cannot doubt that I am doubting. It is important to realise here that Descartes’ proposition says more than perhaps first meets the eye. After all, he intends it as a stand-alone proof and thus to be logically self-consistent, and the key to understanding how is in his use of the word “therefore”. “Therefore” automatically implying his original act of thinking. If challenged then, to say how he can be certain even in that he is thinking, Descartes’ defence relies upon the very act of thinking (or doubting, as he later put it 16) described in the proposition. Thinking is undeniable, Descartes is saying, and my being depends on this. Yet this first step is already in error, and importantly, the consequences of this error are resonant still throughout modern western thought.

Rene Descartes, a Christian brought up to believe that animals had no soul (as Christians are wont to do), readily persuaded himself that they therefore felt no pain. It was a belief that permitted him to routinely perform horrific experiments in vivisection (he was a pioneer in the field). I mention this because strangely, and in spite of Darwin’s solid refutation of man’s pre-eminence over beasts, animal suffering is still regarded as entirely different in kind to human suffering, even in our post-Christian society. And I am sorry to say that scientists are hugely to blame for this double standard. Barbaric experimentation, most notoriously in the field of psychology, alongside unnecessary tests for new products and new weapons, are still performed on every species aside from ours, whilst in more terrible (and shamefully recent) times, when scientists were afforded licence to redraw the line above the species level, their subsequent demarcations made on grounds of fitness and race, the same cool-headed objectivity was applied to the handicapped, to prisoners of war, and to the Jews. It is better that we never forget how heinous atrocities have too often been committed in the name and pursuit of coldly rational science.

Rene Descartes still has a role to play in this. For by prioritising reason in order to persuade himself of his own existence, he encouraged us to follow him into error. To mix up our thinking with our being. To presume that existence is somehow predicated on reasoning, and not, at least not directly, because we feel, or because we sense, or most fundamentally, because we are.  If it is rationality that sets us apart from the beasts, then we exist in a fuller sense than the beasts ever can.

To be absolutely certain of the reality of a world beyond his mind, however, Descartes needed the help of God.  Of a living God of Truth and Love. For if were it not for the certainty of God’s existence, Descartes argued, his mind – though irrefutably extant – might yet be prey to the illusions of some kind of a “deceitful daemon”. Being nothing more than a brain in a tank, to give his idea a modern slant, and plugged into what today would most probably be called The Matrix.

Thus realising that everything he sensed and felt might conceivably be an elaborately constructed illusion, only Descartes’ profound knowledge of a God of Truth – a God who made the world as true and honest as it appeared to be – could save his philosophy from descent into pure solipsism. But this primary dualism of mind and world is itself the division of mind and body – a division of self – while to regard Reason as the primary and most perfect attribute of being, obviously established the mind above the body, and, more generally, spirit above matter. This is the lasting lesson Descartes taught and it is a lesson we have committed so deeply to our Western consciousness that we have forgotten we ever learnt it in the first place.

The significant difference in today’s world of science, with God now entirely outside of the picture, is that Descartes’ hierarchy has been totally up-ended. Matter is the new boss, and mind, its servant. 17

*

But we might also turn this whole issue on its head. We might admit the obvious. Concede that although we don’t know what it is exactly, there is some decidedly strange and immaterial part to ourselves. That it is indeed the part we most identify with – the part we refer to so lovingly as “I”. And that it is this oh-so mysterious part of us which provides all our prima facie evidence for existence itself. Though in admitting this, the question simply alters. It becomes: how to account for the presence of such a ghost inside our machines? For what outlandish contrivance would we need to reconnect the matter of our brains with any such apparently in-dwelling spirit? And whereas Rene Descartes once proposed that mind and body might be conjoined within the mysterious apparatus of our pineal gland (presumably on the grounds that the pineal gland is an oddly singular organ), we know better and so must look for less localised solutions. In short then, we may finally need to make a re-evaluation of ourselves, not merely as creatures, but as manifestations of matter itself.

Yet, in truth, all of this is really a Judeo-Christian problem; a deep bisection where other traditions never made any first incision. For what is “matter” in any case? Saying it’s all atoms and energy doesn’t give a final and complete understanding. Perhaps our original error was to force such an irreconcilable divorce between nebulous soul (or mind) and hard matter, when they are so indivisibly and gloriously codependent, for though Science draws a marked distinction between the disciplines of physics and psychology, it only stands for sake of convenience; for sake, indeed, of ignorance.

To begin then, let’s try to re-establish some sense of mystery regarding the nature of matter itself – such everyday stuff that we have long taken for granted that through careful measurements and mathematical projections its behaviour can be understood and predicted. Here indeed, Freeman Dyson brings his own expertise in quantum theory, combined with his genius for speculation, to consider the fascinating subject of mind and its relationship to matter:

“Atoms in the laboratory are weird stuff, behaving like active agents rather than inert substances. They make unpredictable choices between alternative possibilities according to the laws of quantum mechanics. It appears that mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent inherent in every atom. The universe as a whole is also weird, with laws of nature that make it hospitable to the growth of mind.”

Dyson is drawing upon his very deep understanding of quantum physics, and yet already he has really said too much. Quantum choice is not the same as human choice. Quantum choice depends on random chance, which is the reason Einstein famously asserted, “God does not play dice”. Indeed I’m not sure how quantum theory, as it is currently understood, could ever account for the existence of free will and volition, quite aside from the overriding mystery of sentience itself. So Dyson’s more important point is perhaps his last one: that the universe is “hospitable for the growth of mind”. This is too often overlooked. And for Dyson, it offers reason enough for religious contemplation:

“I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension. God may be either a world-soul or a collection of world-souls. So I am thinking that atoms and humans and God may have minds that differ in degree but not in kind.” 18

I share with Dyson the opinion that it is better to relish these mysteries rather than to retreat to the dry deception of material certainty. For, as Shakespeare summed up so marvelously in his final play The Tempest: “we are such stuff as dreams are made on…”19 And perhaps this is still the best description we have of ourselves, even though we have no idea whatsoever, how as dream-machines, our dreams are woven.

A toast then! Feel free to join me in raising your glass… to your own mind, your psyche, your soul, call it what you will – a rose by any other name and all that. Three cheers! And to consciousness! To sentience! To uncanny awareness! That same stuff all our dreams are made on…

So with great appreciation and warm affection, here’s to that strangest of things: that thing I so very casually call my-self! But even more than this. To the actual stuff of our lives, to the brain, the entire central nervous system and far beyond. To the eyes and ears and fingertips; to the whole apparatus of our conscious awareness; and to the sentience of all our fellows, whether taking human or other forms! To the strangeness of the material world itself, from which all sentience has miraculously sparked! To the vast and incomprehensible Universe no less, whether manifestly inward or outward, for the distinction may be a finer one than we are in the habit to presume! Here’s to wondering what we are… Drink up!

Next chapter…

*

John Searle is a philosopher who has closely studied the nature of consciousness and concludes that although unique amongst biological phenomena, mind, though mysterious, is obviously a natural function of brain activity. In this lecture he summarises the many failures of the current “scientific” approach to questions of consciousness:

In the interview below Searle discusses why he rejects both the hard-line materialist dismissal of consciousness as an illusion (which is actually nonsensical) and dualist alternatives that rely upon a false division between mind and matter:

And finally, Searle outlines the main difficulties surrounding the unresolved philosophical paradox of free will – put succinctly he says although it is impossible to prove human beings have free will and any capacity for free will also seems to defy physical causality, we are compelled to experience conscious rational decision-making on a daily basis:

*

Addendum: the return of Frankenstein!

The issues surrounding the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are many and complex, but it is perfectly clear that new developments in genetics, like those in nuclear physics more than half a century ago, have automatically opened the door to some quite extraordinary possibilities. Possibilities that will most assuredly impact our future no less dramatically than the advent of atomic reactors and the hydrogen bomb impacted our very recent past – and still continue to affect us today.

The need for a proper debate is long overdue but, hardly surprisingly, the huge bio-tech corporations prefer to keep the debate closed down. Monsanto, for instance, who claim that its perfectly safe to release their GMOs directly into our environment, were also in the habit of claiming that their herbicide Roundup is so harmless you can drink it! 20 But then why on earth would anyone (or at least anyone not in their pocket) trust such self-interested and deliberately compromised risk assessments? The short answer is that the precautionary principle has once again been overridden by money and influence.

What we really need, of course, is a proper debate about the use of genetic modification. A debate that is open and public: a forum for discussion amongst leading experts (and especially those not associated with the powerful bio-tech firms); scientists from other fields, who though ignorant on specifics, might bring a detached expertise by virtue of familiarity with scientific procedures; alongside representatives from other interested parties such as ‘consumers’ (that’s the rest of us by the way – we all consume, and though I hate the word too, it at least offers a little better perspective on our role without the current system, since this is how the system itself defines us).

This great debate needs to be fully inclusive, welcoming intelligent opinion, whether concordant or dissenting. No reasoned objections from any quarters being summarily dismissed as unscientific or anti-scientific, as is so often the case, because we must never leave it for technicians alone to decide on issues that so directly affect our common future. Relying on highly specialised experts alone – even when those experts are fully independent (as they so rarely are these days) –  would be as unwise as it is anti-democratic.

Genetic manipulation is already upon us. It is already helping in the prevention and treatment of diseases, and in the production of medicines such as insulin (although even here serious questions are arising with regards to the potentially harmful side-effects of using a genetically modified product). More controversial again is the development of pest- and drought-resistant strains of crops; developments that are claimed by their producers to have alleviated a great deal of human suffering already, but which seem to have brought misery of new kinds – I will come back to this later.

And then we come to the development of Genetic Use Restriction Technology (Gurt), better known as ‘suicide’ or ‘Terminator’ (to use the industry term) seeds, which are promoted by the industry as a ‘biosafety’ solution. Engineered sterility being a clever way of preventing their own genetically modified plants from causing unwanted genetic contamination – which we might think of as a new form of pollution. The argument being that if modified genes (whether pharmaceutical, herbicide resistance or ‘Terminator’ genes) from a ‘Terminator’ crop get transferred to related plants via cross-pollination, the seed produced from such pollination will be sterile. End of problem.

But this is merely an excuse, of course, and if used in this way, the new technology will ultimately prevent over a billion of the poorest people in the world from continuing in their age-old practice of saving seeds for resowing, which will, as a consequence, make these same farmers totally dependent on a few multinational bio-tech companies. All of which serves as an excellent means for monopolising the world’s food supplies, and offers a satisfactory solution only for the owners of companies like Monsanto. 21

In any case, do we really wish to allow patents on specific genes, opening the door to the corporate ownership of the building blocks to life itself? The world renowned physicist and futurist visionary Freeman Dyson draws a direct comparison to earlier forms of slavery:

“The institution of slavery was based on the legal right of slave-owners to buy and sell their property in a free market. Only in the nineteenth century did the abolitionist movement, with Quakers and other religious believers in the lead, succeed in establishing the principle that the free market does not extend to human bodies. The human body is God’s temple and not a commercial commodity. And now in the twenty-first century, for the sake of equity and human brotherhood, we must maintain the principle that the free market does not extend to human genes.” 22

Nor, I would quickly add, should it extend to the ownership of genes of other higher species of animal or plant life. Moreover, I personally have no wish whatsoever for apples, tomatoes, potatoes (or even tobacco) that provides the RDA for all my nutritional needs, or any other supposed improvement on the original designs – preferring to trust to apples, tomatoes and potatoes that evolved alongside my own human digestive system. And this ought not to be treated as merely a preference, but established as a human right, since we all have the right not to eat GMO just as we have the right to be vegan (not that I’m a vegan, by the way).

Beyond this, we also need to consider the many perfectly serious and inescapable ethical issues that arise once you are tinkering with the primary source code of life itself. Take cloning as an interesting example.

Identical twins are essentially clones, having both developed from the same fertilised egg, and thus sharing the same DNA. But then nature sometimes goes one step further again:

A form of virgin birth has been found in wild vertebrates for the first time.

Researchers in the US caught pregnant females from two snake species and genetically analysed the litters.

That proved the North American pit vipers reproduced without a male, a phenomenon called facultative parthenogenesis that has previously been found only in captive species. 23

I have since learned that parthenogenesis (reproduction without fertilisation or “virgin birth”) is surprisingly common throughout the plant and animal kingdoms. Birds do it, bees do it… and even mammals have been induced to do it. So cloning is not inherently unnatural, and if carried out successfully (as it frequently is in nature), it may one day be no more harmful nor fraught with latent dangers to be a cloned individual than an individual produced by other forms of artificial reproduction. Furthermore, since we already know what human twins are like, we already know what human clones will be like. Yet many ethical questions still hang.

For instance, should anyone be allowed to clone themselves? Or more generally, who chooses which of us are to be cloned? Do we just leave it to the market to decide? And why would we ever want a world populated by identical (or rather, approximately identical – since no two twins are truly identical and there are sound biological reasons for believing clones will never be perfectly reproduced either) human beings? Such ethical questions are forced by the new biotechnologies. And there are many further reasons for why ordinary, intelligent public opinion needs to be included in the debate.

Here is Freeman Dyson again, summarising his own cautious optimism as we enter the age of the new ‘green technologies’:

“I see two tremendous goods coming from biotechnology in the next century, first the alleviation of human misery through progress in medicine, and second the transformation of the global economy through green technology spreading wealth more equitably around the world. The two great evils to be avoided are the use of biological weapons and the corruption of human nature by buying and selling genes. I see no scientific reason why we should not achieve the good and avoid the evil.

The obstacles to achieving the good are political rather than technical. Unfortunately a large number of people in many countries are strongly opposed to green technology, for reasons having little to do with the real dangers. It is important to treat the opponents with respect, to pay attention to their fears, to go gently into the new world of green technology so that neither human dignity nor religious conviction is violated. If we can go gently, we have a good chance of achieving within a hundred years the goals of ecological sustainability and social justice that green technology brings within our reach.” 24

Dyson is being too optimistic no doubt with many of the dangers of GMOs slowly coming to light more two decades after Dyson uttered these words as part of his acceptance speech for the award of the Templeton Prize in 2000.

Meanwhile in 2012, Greenpeace issued the following press release. It contains the summary of an open letter sent by nearly a hundred Indian scientists to the Supreme Court of India:

An official report submitted by the technical Expert committee set up by the Supreme Court of India comprising of India’s leading experts in molecular biology, toxicology and biodiversity – unanimously recommends a 10-year moratorium on all field trials of GM Bt [insecticide producing due to genes from Bacillus thuringiensis] food crops, due to serious safety concerns. The committee has also recommended a moratorium on field trials of herbicide tolerant crops until independent assessment of impact and suitability, and a ban on field trials of GM crops for which India is center of origin and diversity.

The report’s recommendations are expected put a stop to all field releases of GM food crops in India, including the controversial Bt eggplant, whose commercial release was put under an indefinite moratorium there last February 2010. Contrarily, the same Bt eggplant is currently being evaluated for approval in the Philippines.

“This official unanimous declaration on the risks of GMOs, by India’s leading biotech scientists is the latest nail on the coffin for GMOs around the world,” said Daniel M. Ocampo, Sustainable Agriculture Campaigner of Greenpeace Southeast Asia. “It is yet another proof that GMOs are bad for the health, bad for the environment, bad for farmers and bad for the economy.” 25

For though it would be foolish to fail to recognise the enormous potential benefits of some of the new ‘green technologies’, any underestimate of the hazards is sheer recklessness. And this is where my own opinion differs significantly from enthusiasts like Dyson. This science is just so brilliantly new, and so staggeringly complex. The dangers are real and very difficult to over-estimate and so public concern is fully justified whether over health and safety issues, over the politico-economic repercussions, or due to anxieties of a more purely ethical kind.

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Please note that for the purposes of ‘publishing’ here I have taken advantage of the option to incorporate hypertext links and embed videos – in order to distinguish additional commentary from the original text all newly incorporated text has been italised.

1 There is sound evidence for believing that protons and neutrons are made of quarks, whereas electrons it seems are a type of fundamental particle which has no component parts.

2 My use of the analogue/digital comparison is simplistic, of course, but then it is only intended as a loose analogy, nothing more.

3 Since writing this I have come upon a range of so-called Young Earth Theories of Geology that contradict my former opinion. Apparently there are indeed groups of Creationists intent on disproving ideas of a 4.5 billion year old planet in favour of a ten thousand year prehistory. Needless to say there is no supporting evidence for this contention.

4

“Cro-magnons are, in informal usage, a group among the late Ice Age peoples of Europe. The Cro-Magnons are identified with Homo sapiens sapiens of modern form, in the time range ca. 35,000-10,000 b.p. […] The term “Cro-Magnon” has no formal taxonomic status, since it refers neither to a species or subspecies nor to an archaeological phase or culture. The name is not commonly encountered in modern professional literature in English, since authors prefer to talk more generally of anatomically modern humans (AMH). They thus avoid a certain ambiguity in the label “Cro-Magnon”, which is sometimes used to refer to all early moderns in Europe (as opposed to the preceding Neanderthals), and sometimes to refer to a specific human group that can be distinguished from other Upper Paleolithic humans in the region. Nevertheless, the term “Cro-Magnon” is still very commonly used in popular texts because it makes an obvious distinction with the Neanderthals, and also refers directly to people rather than to the complicated succession of archaeological phases that make up the Upper Paleolithic. This evident practical value has prevented archaeologists and human paleontologists – especially in continental Europe – from dispensing entirely with the idea of Cro-Magnons.”

Taken from The Oxford Companion to Archaeology. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. p. 864.

5

“Jambo, Jersey Zoos world famous and much loved silverback gorilla had a truly remarkable life. He was born in Basel Zoo in Switzerland in 1961. He arrived at Jersey Zoo on the 27th April 1972. Jambo, Swahili for Hello, is perhaps better known to the public for the gentleness he displayed towards the little boy who fell into the gorilla enclosure at Jersey Zoo one afternoon in 1986. The dramatic event hit the headlines and helped dispel the myth of gorillas as fearsome and ferocious. It was a busy Sunday afternoon in August 1986 when an incredulous public witnessed Levan Merritt a small boy from Luton UK fall into the Gorilla enclosure at Jersey Zoo. “

Extract taken from “The Hero Jambo”, a tribute to Jambo written by the founder of Jersey Zoo, Gerald Durrell.

6

“LAST SUMMER, AN APE SAVED a three-year-old boy. The child, who had fallen 20 feet into the primate exhibit at Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo, was scooped up and carried to safety by Binti Jua, an eight-year-old western lowland female gorilla. The gorilla sat down on a log in a stream, cradling the boy in her lap and patting his back, and then carried him to one of the exhibit doorways before laying him down and continuing on her way.”

Extract taken from article by F. B. M. de Waal (1997) entitled “Are we in anthropodenial? Discover 18 (7): 50-53.”

7   

“Binti became a celebrity overnight, figuring in the speeches of leading politicians who held her up as an example of much-needed compassion. Some scientists were less lyrical, however. They cautioned that Binti’s motives might have been less noble than they appeared, pointing out that this gorilla had been raised by people and had been taught parental skills with a stuffed animal. The whole affair might have been one of a confused maternal instinct, they claimed.”

Ibid.

8 Quoted in an article entitled: “Confessions of a Lonely Atheist: At a time when religion pervades every aspect of public life, there’s something to be said for a revival of pagan peevishness”, written by Natalie Angier for The New York Times Magazine, from January 14, 2001.

9 In 1907, MacDougall weighed six patients who were in the process of dying (accounts of MacDougall’s experiments were published in the New York Times and the medical journal American Medicine). He used the results of his experiment to support the hypothesis that the soul had mass (21 grams to be precise), and that as the soul departed the body, so did its mass. He also measured fifteen dogs under similar conditions and reported the results as “uniformly negative”. He thus concluded that dogs did not have souls. MacDougall’s complaints about not being able to find dogs dying of the natural causes have led at least one author to conjecture that he was in fact poisoning dogs to conduct these experiments.

10 Extract taken from Chapter 2, “Thinking Machines” of Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works, published by Penguin Science, 1997, p 148. Italics in the original.

11 An operant conditioning chamber (sometimes known as a Skinner box) is a laboratory apparatus developed by BF Skinner, founding father of “Radical Behaviourism”, during his time as a graduate student at Harvard University. It is used to study animal behaviour and investigate the effects of psychological conditioning using programmes of punishment and reward.

12 Extract taken from Notes on the Way by George Orwell, first published in Time and Tide, London, 1940.

13  I received a very long and frank objection to this paragraph from one of my friends when they read through a draft version, which I think is worth including here in the way of balance:

“I must explain that I’m a hedonist to a ridiculous degree, so much so that my “eudaemonism” (sounds dreadful –not like happiness-seeking at all!) is almost completely bound up with the pursuit of pleasure, as for me there is little difference between a life full of pleasures and a happy life.  Mind you, pleasure in my definition (as in most people’s, I guess) covers a wide array of things: from the gluttonous through to the sensuous, the aesthetic, the intellectual and even the spiritual; and I would also say that true pleasure is not a greedy piling up of things that please, but a judicious and even artistic selection of the very best, the most refined and the least likely to cause pain as a side effect  (I think this approach to pleasure is called “Epicureanism”).

Love, of course, is the biggest source of pleasure for most, and quite remarkably, it’s not only the receiving but the giving of it that makes one truly happy, even when some pain or sacrifice is involved.  This is how I explain acts of generosity like the one you describe, by the woman who helped you when you fell off your bike as a teenager: I think she must have done it because, despite the bother and the hassle of the moment, deep down it made her happy to help a fellow human being. We have all felt this way at some point or other, and as a result I believe that pleasure is not antithetical to morality, because in fact we can enjoy being kind and it makes us unhappy to see suffering around us. This doesn’t mean that we always act accordingly, and we certainly have the opposite tendency, too: there is a streak of cruelty in every human that means under some circumstances, we’ll enjoy hurting even those we love. But my point is, hedonism and a concern for others are not incompatible. The evolutionary reason for this must be that we are a social animal, so empathy is conducive to our survival as much as aggression and competitiveness may be in some environments. In our present environment, i.e. a crowded planet where survival doesn’t depend on killing lions but on getting on with each other, empathy should be promoted as the more useful of the two impulses. This isn’t going to happen, of course, but in my opinion empathy is the one more likely to make us happy in the long run.

Having attempted to clean up the name of pleasure a bit, I’ll try to address your other complaints against a life based on such principles: “Yet pleasure is more often short-lived, whilst happiness too is hard to maintain.” I agree, and this is indeed the Achilles heel of my position: I’m the most hypochondriac and anxiety-prone person I know, because as a pleasure-a-holic and happiness junkie I dread losing the things I enjoy most. The idea of ever losing [my partner], for example, is enough to give me nightmares, and I’m constantly terrified of illness as it might stop me having my fun. Death is the biggest bogie. I’m not blessed with a belief in the afterlife, or even in the cosmic harmony of all things. This is [my partner]’s belief as far as I can tell, and I’d like to share it, but I’ve always been an irrational atheist – I haven’t arrived at atheism after careful thinking, but quite the opposite, I’ve always been an atheist because I can’t feel the godliness of things, so it is more of a gut reaction with me. The closest thing to the divine for me is in beauty, the beauty of nature and art, but whether Beauty is Truth, I really don’t know, and in any case beauty, however cosmic, won’t make me immortal in any personal or individual sense. I’m horrified at the idea of ceasing to exist, and almost as much at the almost certain prospect of suffering while in the process of dying. This extreme fear is probably the consequence of my hedonist-epicurean-eudaemonism.

On the other hand, since everyone, including the most religious and ascetic people, is to some extent afraid of dying, is it really such a big disadvantage to base one’s life on the pursuit of pleasure and happiness? I guess not, although I must admit that I’d quite like to have faith in the Beyond. I suppose that I do have some of the agnostic’s openness to the mystery of the universe – as there are so many things that we don’t understand, and perhaps we aren’t even equipped to ever understand, it’s very possible that life and death have a meaning that escapes us. This is not enough to get rid of my fears, but it is a consolation at times.

Finally, I also disagree with you when you say that pleasure and happiness “are not, as we are accustomed to imagine, objects to be sought after at all. If we chase either one then it is perfectly likely that it will recede ever further from our reach.” There’s truth in this, but I think it’s also true that unless one turns these things into a priority, it is very difficult to ever achieve them. I for one find that more and more, many circumstances in my life conspire to stop me having any fun: there are painful duties to perform, ailments to cope with, bad news on a daily basis and many other kinds of difficulties, so if I didn’t insist on being happy at least a little every day, I’d soon forget how to do it. I’m rather militant about it, in fact. I’m always treating myself in some way, though to be fair to myself, a coffee and a croissant can be enough to reconcile me to a bad day at work, for example, so I’m not really very demanding. But a treat of some sort there has to be to keep me going. Otherwise, I don’t see the point.”

14  Kurt Vonnegut had originally trained to be a scientist, but says he wasn’t good enough. His older brother Bernard trained as a chemist and is credited with the discovery that sodium iodide could be used to force precipitation through “cloud seeding”. If you ask for Vonnegut in a library, you’ll probably be directed toward the Science Fiction section, since many of his books are set in strangely twisted future worlds. However, his most famous and most widely acclaimed work draws on experiences during the Second World War, and in particular on the Allied fire-bombing of Dresden. Vonnegut had personally survived the attack by virtue of being held as prisoner of war in an underground meat locker, and the irony of this forms the title of the novel, Slaughterhouse-five.

15  Extract taken from “Why My Dog Is Not a Humanist” by Kurt Vonnegut, published in Humanist, Nov 92, Vol. 52:6.5-6.

16 “We cannot doubt existence without existing while we doubt…” So begins Descartes seventh proposition from his 76 “Principles of Human Knowledge” which forms Part 1 of Principia philosophiae (Principles of Philosophy) published in Latin in 1644 and reprinted in French in 1647 – ten years after his groundbreaking treatise Discourse on the Method in which “Je pense, donc je suis” (“I think, therefore I am”) had first appeared.

http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4391/pg4391.html

17 A more poetic version of Descartes’ proof had already been constructed centuries earlier by early Islamic scholar, Avicenna, who proposed a rather beautiful thought experiment in which we imagine ourselves falling or else suspended, and thus isolated and devoid of all sensory input including any sense of our own body. The “floating man”, Avicenna says, in spite of complete absence of any perceptions of a world beyond, would nevertheless possess self-awareness. That he can still say “I am” proves that he is self-aware and that the soul exists. In consequence, Avicenna also places soul above material, although no priority is granted to reason above our other forms of cognition.

18  Further extracts from Freeman Dyson ‘s acceptance speech for the award of the Templeton Prize, delivered on May 16, 2000 at the Washington National Cathedral.

19  Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Act IV, Scene 1.

20 In 1996, the New York Times reported that: “Dennis C. Vacco, the Attorney General of New York, ordered the company to pull ads that said Roundup was ‘safer than table salt’ and ‘practically nontoxic’ to mammals, birds and fish. The company withdrew the spots, but also said that the phrase in question was permissible under E.P.A. guidelines.”

Extract taken from wikipedia with original reference retained. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto#False_advertising

21 For further arguments against “Terminator Technology”, I recommend the following website: http://www.banterminator.org/content/view/full/233

22 From Freeman Dyson’s acceptance speech for the award of the Templeton Prize, delivered on May 16, 2000 at the Washington  National Cathedral.

23  From an article entitled “Virgin births discovered in wild snakes” written by Jeremy Coles, published by BBC nature on September 12, 2012. http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/19555550

24  Also from Freeman Dyson’s acceptance speech for the award of the Templeton Prize.

25 http://www.greenpeace.org/seasia/ph/press/releases/GMOs-declared-unsafe-in-India-Greenpeace-calls-on-PH-to-follow-suit/

This original link has since been removed but the same article can be read here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20130607155209/http://www.greenpeace.org/seasia/ph/press/releases/GMOs-declared-unsafe-in-India Greenpeace-calls-on-PH-to-follow-suit/

black ops in the Black Sea: Johnson’s dangerous provocation in the ‘New Cold War’

In light of yesterday’s outlandish provocation in the Black Sea, when British Navy destroyer, HMS Defender, weapons loaded and with a BBC correspondent conveniently aboard, quite deliberately sailed into Crimean territorial waters close to the Russian base at Sevastopol, Craig Murray posted two articles which I have reprinted unabridged below – in the second, Murray explains in detail how the UK action was in clear breach of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.

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Sometimes it is worth stating the obvious. The United Kingdom does not have a coast in the Black Sea. British warships are not infesting the Black Sea out of a peaceful intent, and there is no cause for them to be entering disputed waters close to anybody’s coast. This is not a question of freedom of navigation under the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea. There is nowhere that a British warship can be heading from the UK under the right of innocent passage that would require it to pass through coastal waters by Crimea. The Black Sea is famously a cul-de-sac.

There is certainly a right to pass to the Ukrainian port of Odessa – but that in now way requires passing close to Crimea. This is therefore not “innocent passage”. There is a right of passage through the Kerch strait, which Russia has to date respected. Russia has not just a right but a duty to enforce sea lanes for safe navigation through the strait, exactly as the UK does off Dover.

I expect we will now be in for a mad frenzy of Russophobia, yet again. I shall comment further once I have more details of why and exactly where Russia was firing warning shots. But just remember this, it was not Russian warships near the British coast, it was British warships in an area where they had no business other than ludicrous, British nationalist, sabre-rattling.

The UK needs to lose its imperial delusions. Sending gunboats to the Crimea is as mad as – well, sailing an aircraft carrier expressly to threaten the Chinese. There are those who see this activity as evidence of the UK’s continued great power status. I see it as evidence of lunacy.

Click here to read the original article entitled “Black Ops in the Black Sea” published yesterday by Craig Murray.

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The pre-positioning of the BBC correspondent on HMS Defender shatters the pretence that the BBC is something different to a state propaganda broadcaster. It also makes plain that this propaganda exercise to provoke the Russian military was calculated and deliberate. Indeed that was confirmed by that BBC correspondent’s TV news report last night when he broadcast that the Defender’s route “had been approved at the very highest levels of the British government.”

The Prime Minister does not normally look at the precise positions of British ships. This was a deliberate act of dangerous belligerence.

The presence of a BBC correspondent is more than a political point. In fact it has important legal consequences. One thing that is plain is that the Defender cannot possible claim it was engaged in “innocent passage” through territorial waters, between Odessa and Georgia. Let me for now leave aside the fact that there is absolutely no necessity to pass within 12 miles of Cape Fiolent on such passage, and the designated sea lane (originally designated by Ukraine) stays just out of the territorial sea. Look at the definition of innocent passage in Article 19 of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea:

Very plainly this was not innocent passage. It was certainly 2 (d) an act of propaganda, and equally certainly 2 (c), an exercise in collecting information on military defences. I would argue it is also 2 (a), a threat of force.

So far as I can establish, the British are not claiming they were engaged in innocent passage, which is plainly nonsense, but that they were entering territorial waters off Crimea at the invitation of the government of Ukraine, and that they regard Crimea as the territory of Ukraine and Crimean territorial waters as Ukrainian territorial waters.

I want to impress on you how mad this is. The whole point of “territorial sea” is that, legally, it is an integral part of the state and that the state’s full domestic law applies within the territorial sea. That is not the case with the much larger 200 mile exclusive economic zone or sometimes even larger continental shelf, where the coastal state’s legal jurisdiction only applies to specific marine or mineral resources rights.

Let me put it this way. If somebody is murdered on a ship within twelve nautical miles of the coast, the coastal state has jurisdiction and its law applies. If somebody is murdered on a ship more than twelve miles off the coast, the jurisdiction and law of the flag state of the ship applies, not the law of any coastal state in whose exclusive economic zone the ship is.

In international law, the twelve mile territorial sea is as much part of the state as its land. So to sail a warship into Crimean territorial seas is exactly the same act as to land a regiment of paratroops in the Crimea and declare you are doing so at the invitation of the Government of Ukraine.

There is no dispute that Russia is in de facto control of the Crimea, irrespective of British support for the government of Ukraine’s claim to the region. It is also true that Russian annexation of the Crimea was not carried out in an accordance with international law. However, it is not, in practice, likely to be reversed and the situation needs to be resolved by treaty or by the International Court of Justice. In the interim, the UK government legal position can only be that Russia is an “occupying power”. It is impossible that the UK government legal position is that Ukraine is in “effective control” of the territory.

We need to see the legal advice provided by FCO legal advisers. It is simply not the practice in international law to ignore the existence of an occupying power which is a recognised state, and act with armed forces on the authority of a government not in effective control. The difference in British attitude towards Russia as an occupying power and towards Israel is tellingly different.

The legality of the British action is, at very best, moot. In realpolitik, it is an act of brinkmanship with a nuclear power and further effort to ramp up the new Cold War with Russia, to the benefit of the military, security services and armaments companies and the disbenefit of those who need more socially useful government spending. It is further an act of jingoist populism for the neo-liberal elite to distract the masses, as the billionaires’ incredible wealth continues to boom.

NATO will shortly commence a naval exercise in the Black Sea. As not all the member states of NATO are quite as unhinged as Johnson, it is to be hoped it will refrain from this kind of extra layer of provocation. There is a large part of me that says they cannot possibly be mad enough to attempt to intervene in Ukraine with military force, or at least its threat. But then I look at Johnson and Biden, and worry. This can all go horribly wrong.

Click here to read the same post entitled “Warmongering British Actions in the Black Sea” as it originally appeared today on Craig Murray’s official website.

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To mark ten year’s blogging, this is the fifth of my re-uploads from the WoC archive. Originally posted on April 22^nd 2014, never let a good Ukrainian crisis go to waste… was one of a number of articles in which I reported on how the Ukrainian crisis had been deliberately provoked on behalf of western corporate interests, leading us into what the late Stephen Cohen, Professor Emeritus of Russian Studies and Politics, warned was already becoming a “New Cold War”.

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On Thursday [April 17th] Democracy Now! welcomed back Stephen Cohen, Professor Emeritus of Russian Studies and Politics at New York University and Princeton University, to discuss the deepening crisis in Ukraine. Cohen, a specialist on Russia and the Soviet Union, is the author of numerous books on the subject including his latest Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War. He was asked “Are we seeing the beginning of a new Cold War?” and “what exactly is happening right now in Ukraine?” Cohen’s response began as follows:

Those are big questions. We are not at the beginning of the Cold War, a new one; we are well into it—which alerts us to the fact, just watching what you showed up there, that hot war is imaginable now, for the first time in my lifetime, my adult lifetime, since the Cuban missile crisis, hot war with Russia. It’s unlikely, but it’s conceivable. And if it’s conceivable, something has to be done about it.

You did two things on your introduction which were very important. Almost alone among American media, you actually allowed Putin to speak for himself. He’s being filtered through the interpretation of the mass media here, allegedly, what he said, and it’s not representative. The second thing is, let us look just what’s happening at this moment, or at least yesterday. The political head of NATO just announced a major escalation of NATO forces in Europe. He did a Churchillian riff: “We will increase our power in the air, in the sea, on the land.” Meanwhile, as negotiations today begin in Geneva, we’re demanding that Russians de-escalate. And yet, we, NATO, are escalating as these negotiations begin.

So, if you were to say what is going on in Ukraine today—and, unfortunately, the focus is entirely on eastern Ukraine. We don’t have any Western media—in eastern Ukraine. We don’t have any Western—any Western media in western Ukraine, the other half of the country. We’re not clear what’s going on there. But clearly, things are getting worse and worse. Each side has a story that totally conflicts with the other side’s story. There seems to be no middle ground. And if there’s no middle ground in the public discourse, in the Russian media or the American media, it’s not clear what middle ground they can find in these negotiations, though personally, I think—and people will say, “Oh, Cohen’s a Putin apologist”—but it seemed to me that the proposals the Russians made a month ago for resolving the conflict are at least a good starting point. But it’s not clear the United States is >going to accept them.

I will come back to some of Cohen’s further points in a moment, but first I’d like to just try to understand why, as Cohen points out, there is such a lack of media coverage across Ukraine and in particular in the western half of the country.

Below is a video (I can’t find a still frame) recorded in mid-March featuring a statement by Vitali Klitschko as he warned of an impending catastrophe in Crimea should it vote to join Russia in the recent referendum. Klitschko has since been sidelined, of course, but what strikes me as odd is that he was standing in front of a board much like the kind of sponsorship boards we see behind interviews of Premier League footballers. Similar except that the ex-sportsman here was backed by just one logo. You can see that it reads “Ukraine Crisis Media Center”:

Now if you type “Ukraine Crisis Media Center” into the Google image search you will find many other Ukrainian political figures giving statements in front of that same logo board. So just who are the “Ukraine Crisis Media Center”?

Well, they have a website and you can search for details there, but in fact you will find very few and none at all about their own sponsors. Instead, what you will read is this:

Ukrainian Crisis Media Center is launched to provide the international community with objective information about events in Ukraine and threats to national security, particularly in the military, political, economic, energy and humanitarian spheres. During this crisis period, the Center on a 24/7 basis will provide support to all the media who cover events in Ukraine.

Having failed to find further information on their website, I decided to email the organisation [on Thursday April 3rd] and asked the following:

I cannot find any information on your site about where financial support for the media center comes from. Without information on who is backing the venture how can we be sure that your coverage is wholly impartial?

I have not received a reply.

In the meantime, I also searched the web for insight from other places – and came across a glowing report published in Kyiv Post which began as follows:

Much like the EuroMaidan Revolution itself, the Ukraine Crisis Media Center sprang to life with speed, spontaneity, creativity, competence – and a strong sense of mission.

Although the center has been open only since March 4, its third floor headquarters in the Hotel Ukraine on 4 Institutska St. is already a required daily stop for dozens of Ukrainian and foreign journalists.

Continuing:

The group came together at Razumkov Center in Kyiv on March 2.

Nataliya Popovych, the president of Kyiv’s PRP Group, an affiliate of the global Webber Shandwick company, is among the founders.

Popovych said that the Kremlin is fast on its feet in spreading lies about Ukraine, whose government is often slow to respond to allegations and counter untruths.

Well, here’s one of the details I was searching for – so who is Nataliya Popovych?

Nataliya started career in Leo Burnett, one of the leading advertising agencies in the world, and continued in Romyr & Associates, Canadian government and public relations firm. After getting Master degree and probation in USA, Nataliya has become a head of PRP Ukraine, a Weber Shandwick Affiliate Company in Ukraine, and in a year became the President of PRP Group, Weber Shandwick partner on CIS markets.

And PRP? You probably won’t be surprised to learn that they are a PR company:

PRP is more than an integrated solutions agency. It is a creative concept. It is a strategy. It is the management of reputations in a new era. It is the ability to communicate and create goodwill. It is integrated solutions which engage audiences into the lives of companies and brands.

That’s taken from their current LinkedIn profile and the profile of Nataliya Popovych is from PR Congress.

But back to the article in the Kyiv Post:

She [Nataliya Popovych] considers Ukrainians to be loving, peaceful and tolerant people and, while she didn’t consider herself a follower of iconic and controversial nationalist hero Stepan Bandera (1909-1959), she is now “proud to be called a Banderite.”¹

And for those who don’t know who Stepan Bandera was, then here are a few extracts taken from a detailed and rather generous biography written by Professor of History at Yale University, Timothy Snyder, and published by The New York Review of Books around the time Viktor Yushchenko (President after the “Orange Revolution”) was voted out of office in 2010:

The incoming Ukrainian president will have to turn some attention to history, because the outgoing one has just made a hero of a long-dead Ukrainian fascist. By conferring the highest state honor of “Hero of Ukraine” upon Stepan Bandera (1909-1959) on January 22, Viktor Yushchenko provoked protests from the chief rabbi of Ukraine, the president of Poland, and many of his own citizens. It is no wonder. Bandera aimed to make of Ukraine a one-party fascist dictatorship without national minorities. During World War II, his followers killed many Poles and Jews. Why would President Yushchenko, the leader of the democratic Orange Revolution, wish to rehabilitate such a figure? Bandera, who spent years in Polish and Nazi confinement, and died at the hands of the Soviet KGB, is for some Ukrainians a symbol of the struggle for independence during the twentieth century. […]

Consistent as the rehabilitation of Bandera might be with the ideological competition of the mid-twentieth century, it makes little ethical sense today. Yushchenko, who praised the recent Kiev court verdict condemning Stalin for genocide, regards as a hero a man whose political program called for ethnic purity and whose followers took part in the ethnic cleansing of Poles and, in some cases, in the Holocaust. Bandera opposed Stalin, but that does not mean that the two men were entirely different. In their struggle for Ukraine, we see the triumph of the principle, common to fascists and communists, that political transformation sanctifies violence. It was precisely this legacy that east European revolutionaries seemed to have overcome in the past thirty years, from the Solidarity movement in Poland of 1980 through the Ukrainian presidential elections of 2005. It was then, during the Orange Revolution, that peaceful demonstrations for free and fair elections brought Yushchenko the presidency. In embracing Bandera as he leaves office, Yushchenko has cast a shadow over his own political legacy.²

All of which helps to explain something else that has been puzzling me… why every other story about what’s happening in Ukraine is entitled “Ukraine Crisis: something or other” – the reason being that “Ukraine Crisis” is more or less the brand name that Nataliya Popovych and other “Ukrainian nationalists” have adopted — a list of the founders of the “Ukraine Crisis Media Center” is available at the end of the same Kyiv Post article.³

So what is this new political brand promoting?

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The “war on terror” is dead, long live the new cold war!

Returning to Stephen Cohen, here is what he had to say about the rise of this new cold war:

As a historian, I would say that this conflict began 300 years ago, but we can’t do that. As a contemporary observer, it certainly began in November 2013 when the European Union issued an ultimatum, really, to the then-president, elected president, of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, that “Sign an agreement with us, but you can’t have one with Russia, too.” In my mind, that precipitated this crisis, because why give a country that has been profoundly divided for centuries, and certainly in recent decades, an ultimatum—an elected president: “Choose, and divide your country further”? So when we say today Putin initiated this chaos, this danger of war, this confrontation, the answer is, no, that narrative is wrong from the beginning. It was triggered by the European Union’s unwise ultimatum.

Now flash forward to just one month ago, about the time I was with you before. Remember that the European foreign ministers—three of them, I think—went to Kiev and negotiated with Yanukovych, who was still the president, an agreement. Now, the Russians were present at the negotiation, but they didn’t sign it. But they signed off on it. They said, “OK.” What did that agreement call for? Yanukovych would remain president until December—not May, when elections are now scheduled, but December of this year. Then there would be a presidential election. He could run in them, or not. Meanwhile, there would be a kind of government of national accord trying to pull the government together. And, importantly, Russia would chip in, in trying to save the Ukrainian economy. But there would also be parliamentary elections. That made a lot of sense. And it lasted six hours.

The next day, the street, which was now a mob—let’s—it was no longer peaceful protesters as it had been in November. It now becomes something else, controlled by very ultra-nationalist forces; overthrew Yanukovych, who fled to Russia; burned up the agreement. So who initiated the next stage of the crisis? It wasn’t Russia. They wanted that agreement of February, a month ago, to hold. And they’re still saying, “Why don’t we go back to it?” You can’t go back to it, though there is a report this morning that Yanukovych, who is in exile in Russia, may fly to eastern Ukraine today or tomorrow, which will be a whole new dimension.

But the point of it is, is that Putin didn’t want—and this is reality, this is not pro-Putin or pro-Washington, this is just a fact—Putin did not want this crisis. He didn’t initiate it. But with Putin, once you get something like that, you get Mr. Pushback. And that’s what you’re now seeing. And the reality is, as even the Americans admit, he holds all the good options. We have none. That’s not good policymaking, is it?

Click here to read a full transcript or watch the latest interview with Stephen Cohen on the Democracy Now! website.

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The United States spent over a decade hunting down Osama Bin Laden at financial a cost running into multiple trillions and a human cost of more than a million lives, yet since his demise the jihadist cause that Bin Laden once spearheaded is stronger than ever. Forces of al-Qaeda and other near identical jihadist factions now hold control of a large region of Iraq and Syria that exceeds the area of Britain, whilst other Islamist gangs run amok throughout Libya. Thus, after a decade of dirty wars executed by means of “shock and awe” air strikes, the perpetual overhead threat of drones and the knock at the door that ends with secret rendition to faraway torture sites, the “war on terror” has been lost. “Terror” reigns supreme as the victor: terror from all sides that is.

But then, it is hard to imagine any foreign policy that could have manufactured and spread terrorism more effectively than the policies enacted during this decade-long “war on terror”. Blowback? Up to a point. But, we must not forget that all of the many al-Qaeda factions that have gained so much territory could never have done so without our help. Whether indirectly, with the establishment of the power vacuum in Iraq, or more purposefully, with Nato bombers opening the way for the Islamist insurgency in Libya. But mostly, the gains of al-Qaeda are thanks to the very generous funding of one of America and Britain’s closest allies, that bastion of freedom and democracy, Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Bin Laden, and the nation known to have the closest ties to those accused of the 9/11 attacks. Attacks that provided the very springboard from which the “war on terror” was launched all those years ago. These are the facts and none can be refuted, so make of them what you will – if it was a plot for a film it would seem ludicrously far-fetched.

Of course, the “war on terror” lost a great deal of its public appeal with the bludgeoning of Iraq, and so under Obama we’ve had “humanitarian interventions”. But this new gloss has also flaked away, with the majority of people in the West absolutely sick of war. That said, the wars go on regardless – wreaking havoc but still satisfying the insatiable thirst for blood demanded by our military-industrial-financial complex.

None of these wars have had anything to do with stamping out terrorism or, surely more laughably, the West’s desire to bring “freedom and democracy”. The United States’ covert backing of al-Qaeda is nothing new and neither is the West’s more brazen support of al-Qaeda’s primary sponsor Saudi Arabia? If the wars were about either terrorism or “freedom and democracy”, then the Saudi regime would surely have topped the charts of “the axis of evil”.

In truth, the game never changed. And sadly it is a game (at least to those currently holding power) – as Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of America’s leading geopolitical strategists, makes clear not least with the title of his notorious book on Eurasian geostrategy, “The Grand Chessboard”. In it he wrote:

In brief, for the United States, Eurasian geostrategy involves the purposeful management of geostrategically dynamic states and the careful handling of geopolitically catalytic states, in keeping with the twin interests of America in the short-term: preservation of its unique global power and in the long-run transformation of it into increasingly institutionalized global cooperation. To put it in a terminology that hearkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.⁴

This neo-imperialist game is much the same as the older imperialist game, in which only the strategies have been updated. It is about control of territory, of energy resources, of financial systems, and it has (and always did) amount to a series of proxy wars against the competing interests of competing powers. Traditionally Russia have been the great adversary, but now there is China too. So the Cold War that officially concluded with the fall of the Berlin Wall in October 1989… ended only in name. With the Ukrainian crisis (or should that be “Ukraine Crisis”) the chill that remained has become considerably icier. Treacherously so. But our military-industrial-financial complex needs perpetual war just to keep the racket going, or, when that ceases to be an option (as it now has), to maintain the illusion of an imminent threat against us. Bin Laden is dead, so a new Cold War is just the ticket. On top of which, as Brzezinski also explained in his book:

“Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.”

Here’s Stephen Cohen again:

The real debate going on in NATO—the real debate, because this is a distraction—is what Rasmussen said in your earlier clip—he’s the political head of NATO—that we’re building up, as we talk, our forces in eastern Europe. Now, understand what’s going on here. When we took in—”we” meaning the United States and NATO—all these countries in eastern Europe into NATO, we did not—we agreed with the Russians we would not put forward military installations there. We built some infrastructure—air strips, there’s some barracks, stuff like that. But we didn’t station troops that could march toward Russia there. Now what NATO is saying, it is time to do that. Now, Russia already felt encircled by NATO member states on its borders. The Baltics are on its borders. If we move the forces, NATO forces, including American troops, to—toward Russia’s borders, where will we be then? I mean, it’s obviously going to militarize the situation, and therefore raise the danger of war.

And I think it’s important to emphasize, though I regret saying this, Russia will not back off. This is existential. Too much has happened. Putin—and it’s not just Putin. We seem to think Putin runs the whole of the universe. He has a political class. That political class has opinions. Public support is running overwhelmingly in favor of Russian policy. Putin will compromise at these negotiations, but he will not back off if confronted militarily. He will not.

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A trade war opens the way for new trade deals

The new cold war isn’t only a military escalation, it also potentially marks the beginning of a new trade war. But due to reliance on Russia imports (especially when it comes to energy) EU sanctions on Russia will be difficult, and so one way forward could involve loosening trade restrictions between the EU and the US.

The following passages are taken from a press release by the European Council following the recent EU-US Summit in Brussels. It begins:

Recent events in Ukraine have confirmed that strong cooperation between the European Union and the United States on peace and security is of critical importance.

Continuing under the next heading “Economy and global challenges” as follows:

Reinforcing economic growth and job creation remains central on both sides of the Atlantic. The EU and the United States have taken important steps to stabilise financial conditions and overcome the crisis. The EU remains committed to building a deep and genuine economic and monetary union, including a banking union. […]

The EU and US leaders renewed their commitment to a strong Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). this should go beyond a free trade agreement and reaffirm Europe and the United States’ shared values of democracy, individual freedom, the rule of law and human rights, and a common commitment to open societies and economies. [bold highlights maintained from original source]

And what is TTIP? Here are additional notes at the end of the same press release:

The EU and US have decided to take their economic relationship to a higher level by agreeing to launch negotiations on a comprehensive trade and investment agreement. It aims to remove trade barriers in a wide range of economic sectors to make it easier to buy and sell goods and services between the EU and the US.

In fact, I have already touched on the subject of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) as well as its sister treaty the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) . Both of these “free-trade agreements” appear to have alternative and conflicting names and acronyms and in the case of TTIP it is also known as the Transatlantic Free Trade Area, abbreviated as TAFTA, which is how it appeared in that earlier post. Why trade agreements need to have multiple names becomes more apparent when you realise what this commitment to “freeing up regulations” will mean. Here are a few extracts from a detailed analysis published by Der Spiegel International and entitled “Corporation Carte Blanche: Will US-EU Trade Become Too Free?”:

Lori Wallach had but 10 minutes to speak when she stepped up to podium inside Room 405 at George Washington University, located not too far away from the White House. Her audience was made up of delegates currently negotiating the trans-Atlantic free trade agreement between the United States and the European Union.

They had already spent hours listening to presentations by every possible lobbying group — duty bound to hear myriad opinions. But when Wallach, a trade expert for the consumer protection group Public Citizen, took the stage, people suddenly started paying attention. The 49-year-old Harvard lawyer, after all, is a key figure in international trade debates.

“The planned deal will transfer power from elected governments and civil society to private corporations,” she said, warning that the project presents a threat of entirely new dimensions. [bold emphasis added]

How will TTIP help to transfer even more power out of democratic control and into the hands of the major corporations? Well, let us count the ways:

After the third round of negotiations, an unusually broad alliance of anti-globalization groups, NGOs, environmental and consumer protection groups, civil rights groups and organized labor is joining forces to campaign against TTIP.

These critics have numerous concerns about the treaty – including their collective fear that the convergence of standards will destroy important gains made over the years in health and nutrition policy, environmental protection and employee rights. They argue the treaty will make it easier for corporations to turn profits at the public’s expense in areas like water supply, health or education. It would also clear the path for controversial technologies like fracking or for undesired food products like growth hormone-treated meat to make their way to Europe. Broadly worded copyrights would also restrict access to culture, education and science. They also believe it could open the door to comprehensive surveillance.⁵

Click here to read the full article in Der Spiegel.

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Fracking for freedom (and digging for victory)

I have already highlighted at the end of an earlier and rather more extended post how energy giants Chevron and Exxon Mobil have been getting ready to move their operations to Ukraine with the intention of exploring both conventional and “unconventional” resources (otherwise known as “fracking”). On Saturday’s Keiser Report, Max Keiser spoke to freelance journalist JP Sottile of Newsvandal.com, who also occasionally writes for the Guardian, about not only how Big Oil, but also Big Agra, have their eyes fixed on Ukraine. Sottile names the people and corporations hoping to take advantage of Ukraine’s exceptional fertile lands. Here are some excerpts of what he had to say [from about 13 mins in]:

“One of the bones of contention with Russia, Europe, and its transit point Ukraine, is Russia’s domination of the natural gas market in Europe. So I thought it was very interesting when the deal was announced that Chevron was involved in developing shale gas in Ukraine. Now that would have been with the previous government of Yanukovych – and I believe that that led to a lot of the pressure coming out of Moscow for Yanukovych to reject the economic deal between Ukraine and Europe, and that then of course led to a cascading number of events, which led to the deposing of Yanukovych and the ‘crisis in Ukraine’ as it is now called.”

Beyond the oil and gas, Sottile has also looked closely into the interests of agricultural giants Cargill and Monsanto, who are keen to exploit Ukraine’s riches closer to the surface:

US-Ukraine Business Council is an investor in the US-Ukraine Foundation where Ms [Victoria] Nuland was speaking on December 13th [about how the US had already spent $5 billion helping Ukraine realise its “European aspirations”] and also on December 13th, that was the day that Cargill invested in a Black Sea port to help open the Russian market to its agriculture. Well, Cargill is also heavily invested in Ukraine in a company called Ukrlandfarming. The just bought a two hundred thousand dollar stake in Ukrlandfarming. In fact they bought that stake – or it was announced – on the very day, January 12th of this year, that fifty thousand Ukrainians flooded Kiev to protest the government of Yanukovych.

They are all connected through Freedom House – a guy there who worked with Ms Nuland, who is Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, she had a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, a guy named David Kramer. David Kramer serves on – he’s actually head of Freedom House – Freedom House is one of the organisations that the United States uses to stoke democracy movements around the world. It is actually responsible, along with the National Endowment for Democracy, for funding many of the opposition forces there in Ukraine. And David Kramer also serves on the US-Ukraine Business Council. If you go the US-Ukraine Business Council – which is a very interesting organisation – on the executive board of the US-Ukraine Business Council you’ll find Cargill, Monsanto, John Deere, CNH International (which is a farming equipment and tractor-making company), Eli Lilly and DuPont Pioneer – DuPont Pioneer being the genetically modified organisms and agricultural wing of DuPont. And they all serve together under the guidance of a guy named Morgan Williams. Morgan Williams is CEO and President of US-Ukraine Business Council, and he has been a fixer for Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, [and] other big agricultural companies in Ukraine for the last fifteen to twenty years.

There is an expression from my part of the world that goes: “where there’s muck, there’s brass”. Well, as Sottile’s investigations reveal, there’s loads of muck in Ukraine and not just in oil and gas deposits. Perhaps, as he suspects, the bigger prize is the land itself. Either way, the vultures are already circling. Except that they are more predatory than the much maligned vulture. Rather than waiting for a crisis to happen they have been directly involved in fomenting one, and now, as their “Ukraine Crisis” escalates, they won’t be planning to let it to go to waste.

Click here to read more about this in JP Sottile’s article entitled “Ukraine, Chevron, Condi Rice and Shale Gas… join the dots” published by The Ecologist magazine on March 18th.

the united colours of Bilderberg — a late review of Montreux 2019: #6 the eco-industrial complex

Important note: It is well past the period spanning the end of May and beginning of June when Bilderberg meetings are ordinarily scheduled, so it should be observed that the home page of the official Bilderberg website still declares in bold capitals:

THE MEETING 2020 IS POSTPONED.

It does not say for how long.

*

The effectiveness of political and religious propaganda depends upon the methods employed, not upon the doctrines taught. These doctrines may be true or false, wholesome or pernicious—it makes little or no difference.

— Aldous Huxley 1

This is the sixth of a sequence of articles based around the ‘key topics’ at last year’s Bilderberg conference discussed here in relation to the prevailing political agenda and placed within the immediate historical context.

This piece focuses on issues relating to climate change, ‘sustainability’ and the future of Capitalism:

A schematically enhanced version of last year’s ‘key topics’

*

“Suddenly, saving our planet is within reach. We have a plan. We know what to do. Stop the damaging stuff, roll out the new green tech, stabilise the human population as low as we fairly can, keep hold of the natural wealth we have currently got and we’ll have built a stable, healthy world that we can benefit from forever. We now have the choice to create a planet that we can all be proud of, our planet, the perfect home for ourselves and the rest of life on earth.”

— narrative spoken by Sir David Attenborough on World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) promo

https://twitter.com/Survival/status/1268935324232814592

*

WWF recently released (June 5^th, 2020) a short video 2 of British “national treasure” and conservation icon, Sir David Attenborough, telling us that “suddenly” saving the world is within reach. He says they know what to do and have a plan to build a stable, healthy world that we can benefit from forever. What’s not to like? Well, a lot! WWF’s plan regurgitates a 19^th century racist assumption: That too many of the wrong kind of people threaten us all.

Their “plan” has four commandments: 1) “stop the damaging stuff”; 2) “new green tech”; 3) get population down, and; 4) keep hold of “natural wealth we have currently got.” Let’s begin by removing the two “no-brainer” outliers, the first and last in the plan, stopping doing damage and keeping existing advantages. Both are self-evident approaches to pretty much anything. What we’re left with then is just two answers to the planet’s problems – new green tech and reducing population.

So begins a damning critique of the ‘Big Green’ agenda and a recent WWF promotional film to “save the planet” written by Stephen Corry, an activist and campaigner who has worked since 1972 with Survival International, the global movement for tribal peoples’ rights. 3

Corry continues [all footnotes retained from the original]:

[I]t’s in the other “solution” – getting the population down – where both Attenborough and WWF really plumb the depths of their elitist ideology. One can visualize the meetings of writers who struggled to express this without attracting attacks from those like me who think the 200-year old cry of “overpopulation” is ideological, fundamentally racist, certainly eugenic, and nothing to do with science.

The writers finally came up with, “stabilize the human population as low as we fairly can.” They presumably thought that using “stabilize” rather than “reduce” (which is what they mean), and that inserting “fairly,” would satisfy the critics. That only goes to show just how little they understand what the problems with their “overpopulation” dirge actually are!

The inconvenient truth, never mentioned by the ideologues, is that the Global North’s population has been dropping for generations. Overall numbers are still growing there only because they’re boosted by newcomers from the Global South. 4 The largest growth area is sub-Saharan Africa, where the population density remains extremely low and where they use very little of the world’s resources themselves. 5 That’s because the “natural wealth they have currently got” is largely stolen from them by the North. 6 Have a look at the area at night from a satellite to see just how little energy is used in Africa compared to Europe, or get the view from a plane, as Attenborough will have done hundreds of times.

In other words, if you’re worried about overpopulation threatening the environment, then you’re blind to the real menace: It’s not the growing number of “have nots” in the South, but growing overconsumption by the “haves” in the North.

Adding:

The story reminds me of WWF fundraising from 1994, which posed the very odd question: whether to send in the army or an anthropologist to stop indigenous people destroying the Amazon (its proposed answer, needless to say, was to give WWF yet more money). Yes, WWF actually suggested that indigenous people, not the industry bigwigs 7 it invites to sit on its boards are the destroyers of the world’s largest rainforest, an ecosystem which those same indigenous people are both responsible for creating and by far the best at protecting. That can now be proven from satellite pictures and data about the higher biodiversity in indigenous-controlled territories.

The real tragedy here is not what Attenborough and WWF believe – that won’t change unless and until savvier folk get a controlling hand – it’s that they are able to foist their propaganda on so large a sector of the Global North, including on many progressives. Perhaps many white environmentally-aware people really do believe that “overbreeding” will overrun the Earth and see it as a duty, even “sacred” duty, to defend the planet from the barbarian hordes. That’s been the really big lie drummed into us for over a century, it’s a key component of racism and anti-immigration. It has financial support from corporations and big foundations, and enormous backing from governments which dedicate massive amounts of our money to foment it. Worst of all, those who promulgate this lie are now planning on getting billions more dollars through their terrible “new deal for nature,” which is warming up to be the biggest land grab in history. They want control of no less than one-third of the globe for their “Protected Areas,” and yes, they are sending in the army, often private militias, to get local people out. 8

Click here to read the Stephen Corry’s full article entitled “The Big Green Lie” published by Counterpunch on June 26^th, 2020.

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In the short clip embedded above, recorded in November 2014, Baka from Ndongo, a village where WWF has a regional base, call upon WWF to stop funding the anti-poaching squads that have persecuted them for years. A slighter longer report is embedded below featuring the Baka at Yenga, Cameroon:

Many Baka refer to both WWF and the anti-poaching squads it funds as “dobi-dobi” or ‘dobi-dobiyu’ (WWF). Here, they are referring to WWF itself.

Click here to learn more at Survival International.

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Big Green

The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying, “This is mine”, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: “Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau 9

*

Whenever I peruse the list of participants for any forthcoming Bilderberg meeting, the names that really stand out are not those of the bankers, hedge fund bosses and major industrialists; and nor are my eyes especially drawn to the inclusion of usual suspects from journalism, academia (especially economics departments) and the major political parties, or with high ranking attachment to the military and intelligence agencies, nor even the occasional monarch; last year it happened to be His Majesty the King of the Netherlands – Funny how they include NLD after his title presumably as a token to their inherent egalitarianism!

But the names that always grab my attention are instead those I’m just not expecting to see at all. For instance last year:

Henry, Mary Kay (USA), International President, Service Employees International Union

Hers was certainly amongst the names stood apart. These are a few of the others:

Solhjell, Bård Vegar (NOR), CEO, WWF – Norway

Rockström, Johan (SWE), Director, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research

Buitenweg, Kathalijne (NLD), MP, Green Party

With sincere apologies to Oscar Wilde: to invite one environmentalist may be regarded as a misfortune; to invite three looks like a plan of action. Not that environmentalist ties to Bilderberg are as novel as they may first appear.

#BP at #Bilderberg: the chairman, Helge Lund, arrived in Montreux in his travel sneakers. I just hope he brought some headphones, so he can tune out during the session on 'Climate Change & Sustainability'. Also at #Bilderberg is BP board member & ex-MI6 boss Sir John Sawers. pic.twitter.com/BvqxBsfOAo

— Charlie Skelton (@deYook) May 31, 2019

In fact, anyone familiar with the history of Bilderberg knows that the attendance of the King of the Netherlands is also in keeping with the origins of the meeting, which had been co-founded by Prince Bernhard, consort of Queen Juliana of the Netherlands. And those familiar with the generally unspoken history of modern environmentalism will recall that Prince Bernhard is one of the co-founders of the World Wildlife Fund (as WWF was originally known); becoming its first President in 1961.

nothing to see here, just the King & Prime Minister of the Netherlands arriving at #Bilderberg to meet with the heads of #NATO, Davos, the Bank of England, HSBC, Microsoft, AXA, Total, Thales, Santander, the German defence minister, the Irish finance minister & the PM of Estonia. pic.twitter.com/Dv3JOcuhr9

— Charlie Skelton (@deYook) May 31, 2019

Moreover, when Bernhard was forced to step down as WWF President in 1976 because his involvement in the Lockheed Bribery Scandal came to light, he was immediately succeeded by John Loudon, the former CEO of Royal Dutch Shell (called “Royal Dutch” for very good reason) And there was more to Loudon’s network of interests:

After [John Loudon] stepped down as chairman in 1965, he continued to be active in the company as chairman of the board of supervisory directors for 11 more years.

When David Rockfeller, the president of Chase Manhattan Bank, set up an advisory committee in 1965 to counsel the bank on its growing international business, Mr. Loudon was named as chairman. He retired from the group in 1977. 10

From an obituary published by The New York Times on February 9^th, 1996.

What the NYT fails to mention here is that once Loudon became WWF President in 1976, his appointment also crossed over with tenure on that advisory committee of Chase Manhattan. Noteworthy too is the fact that President of Chase Manhattan, David Rockefeller, has sat alongside Prince Bernhard as a fellow member of Bilderberg since its inception in 1954. Afterwards he became co-founder of closely-allied globalist body, the Trilateral Commission.

These unseemly beginnings of WWF ought to serve as a caution, and especially to those on the left, that the environmental movement is not all it seems. That Bilderberg is back to greening itself ought to come as no surprise either.

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On 22 June 2011, German public broadcaster ARD aired a documentary by Wilfried Huismann in which WWF was directly accused of contributing to the willful destruction of habitat and species it claims to protect and of harming indigenous peoples. The documentary entitled “Silence of the Pandas – what the WWF does not tell us” [In German: Pakt mit dem Panda – was uns der WWF verschweigt] (which is embedded below) calls into question the WWF’s close associations with major corporations including Monsanto:

In it [Wilfried Huismann] complained above all about the proximity [of WWF] to the agricultural industry. One of the problems is that the WWF is sitting with so-called round tables for soybean (RTRS) and palm oil (RSPO) producers together with large agricultural groups such as Monsanto. 11

From a review of the documentary by Der Spiegel.

The excerpt below is from an earlier report by Der Spiegel that was similarly critical of the WWF’s soy and palm oil policies at this time:

SPIEGEL has traveled through South America and the Indonesian island of Sumatra to test this. In Brazil, an agro manager talked about the first shipload of sustainable soy that was certified according to the WWF standard and reached Rotterdam with a lot of PR noise last year. The manager conceded that the origin of the cargo was not exactly known. In Sumatra, members of a tribe reported how hired troops from WWF partner Wilmar [International Limited is Asia’s leading agribusiness group] had destroyed their homes. They had been in the way of undisturbed palm oil production.

Representatives of independent non-governmental organizations such as Rettet den Regenwald [trans: Rainforest Rescue] and Robin Wood no longer see the aid organization as just the trustee of the animals. To many, the WWF seems more like an accomplice of the corporations to whom it grants the license to destroy nature in exchange for large donations and small concessions. 12

Click here to read the full Der Spiegel article entitled “Kumpel der Konzerne” which translates as “Buddy of the corporations”

Huismann was subsequently sued by WWF over the documentary and the book he based on it, and in an out of court settlement agreed to remove or else revise some of the claims.

As the Der Spiegel review explains:

In fact, the “black book” was not available for a long time from providers such as Amazon or Thalia – for fear of legal disputes. “Rarely has the book trade been so intimidated after the publication and deterred by the distribution of the book,” complained Random House lawyer Rainer Dresen. The German Journalists’ Union (DJU) also criticized the environmentalists’ “legally questionable attempts at intimidation” and the “anticipatory obedience” of the dealers in a statement. 13

 

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‘Natural Capital’ and ‘Green Growth’

“We must adapt our ways to the carrying-capacities of this planet and distribute the resources more fairly. And the only way to achieve that is to move toward a model of economic growth where the value of natural capital is fully integrated in economic and political decision-making by governments and by businesses and citizens alike. This to me is the essence of green growth, which of course means that the dichotomy between green growth and just growth is a false one. Just as you cannot take on a larger financial debt you can handle, you cannot use natural resources, which is like taking up a loan from nature, beyond nature’s capacity to renew itself. However, done properly, green growth means prosperity and a better future.” [from 7:40 mins]

From then-Norwegian Minister of the Environment, Bård Vegar Solhjell’s keynote speech during Forests: the 8th Roundtable at Rio+20, a CIFOR-hosted event, which brought together over 550 scientists, policy makers and members of civil society to discuss the role of forests in providing the world with food, energy, income and clean water:

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“Natural capital” has become a buzzword in the sphere of environmentalism. It means literally putting a price tag on nature or as the World Forum on Natural Capital puts it:

Natural capital can be defined as the world’s stocks of natural assets which include geology, soil, air, water and all living things.

It is from this natural capital that humans derive a wide range of services, often called ecosystem services, which make human life possible.

The most obvious ecosystem services include the food we eat, the water we drink and the plant materials we use for fuel, building materials and medicines. There are also many less visible ecosystem services such as the climate regulation and natural flood defences provided by forests, the billions of tonnes of carbon stored by peatlands, or the pollination of crops by insects. Even less visible are cultural ecosystem services such as the inspiration we take from wildlife and the natural environment 14

This is the top result from a Google search on the topic. The next result brings up the Natural Capital Coalition which “was launched in January 2020 and hosts over 370 leading organizations to accelerate the use of capitals thinking”. The blurb on their website continues:

Originally established in 2012 as the TEEB For Business Coalition and hosted by ICAEW, the Natural Capital Coalition quickly became the global leader in mainstreaming natural capital approaches in the private sector, and released the internationally recognized Natural Capital Protocol in 2016.

The ICAEW for those not fully literate in contemporary acronyms is the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales, which perhaps doesn’t need further comment, while TEEB is a group whose title in full is The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity. The opening statement on their official website begins:

The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) is a global initiative focused on “making nature’s values visible”.

Interestingly, one of their listed partners is the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, another is Pricewaterhouse Coopers. I think the picture is becoming clearer, arguably all the more so when we discover the World Bank has its own entry that is again ranked on page one of any Google search. Here’s how the World Bank lists “natural capital” with commendable frankness as just another “asset”:

Long‐term development is a process of accumulation and sound management of a portfolio of assets—manufactured capital, natural capital, and human and social capital. 15

A decade ago, Forbes magazine ran an article entitled “Names You Need to Know In 2011: Natural Capital Project”. It explains:

[U]ntil recently it’s been difficult to put a truly measurable value on what are often threatened natural resources. The Natural Capital Project, a non-profit venture led in part by scientists from Stanford University, has changed that. Its software tool, called InVEST, helps to map out the value of natural land or seascapes—assets the group calls “natural capital.” 16

The same Natural Capital Project is still going strong and back in March 2019 they had teamed up with Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC) in an official partnership. Prior to his invitation from Bilderberg, Professor Johan Rockström had been the Executive Director of SRC for twelve years (2004–2012) where he led a team of scientists in developing a scientifically debatable, neo-Malthusian Planetary Boundaries framework.

Alongside Rockström’s SRC, the National Capital Project also proudly lists three more “world-class academic institutions – Stanford University [its host], the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the University of Minnesota” and amongst its six core partners, two of the world’s largest NGOs, The Nature Conservancy and Bård Solhjell’s World Wide Fund for Nature. 17 In short, last year’s Bilderberg meeting brought together two attendees who are both deeply embedded within this ‘natural capital’ matrix, which aims to set a price on everything in nature.

As Bram Büscher and Robert Fletcher write in an excellent rebuttal of this new environmental accountancy:

The fact that the food we eat and the water we drink apparently need to be labeled “natural capital” only becomes meaningful in the context of capitalist growth. In this context everything should, in principle, become “capital”.

It is therefore vital to be clear on what “capital” really means. In daily conversations and some economic theory, the term is frequently defined as a “stock” or as “assets”. More accurate, however, is to see capital as a process, a dynamic. It is about investing money (or value) in order to make more money (or value). In short, capital is “value in motion”.

Capital in a capitalist economy is therefore never invested for the sake of it. The aim is to extract more money or value than had been invested. Otherwise it would not be capital.

It follows that the move from “nature” to “natural capital” is not an innocent change in terminology, another word for the same thing. Rather, it constitutes a fundamental reconceptualisation and revaluation of nature. Natural capital is about putting nature to work for capitalist growth – euphemistically referred to as green growth.

The same piece entitled “Nature is Priceless, Which is Why Turning it into ‘Natural Capital’ is Wrong”, continues:

The move from nature to natural capital is problematic because it assumes that different forms of capital – human, financial, natural – can be made equivalent and exchanged. In practice – and despite proponents’s insistence to the contrary – this means that everything must potentially be expressed through a common, quantitative unit: money. But complex, qualitative, heterogeneous natures, as these same proponents acknowledge, can never adequately be represented in quantitative, homogenous money-units.

And even if we try, there is an untenable tension between the limitlessness of money (we can always generate more money) and the limits of natural capital (we cannot exchange evermore money-capital into natural capital, for all eternity).

Natural capital is therefore inherently anti-ecological and has little to do with giving value to nature, or rendering this value visible. It is the exploitation of nature to inject more value, and seeming legitimacy, into a faltering capitalist growth economy.18

Click here to read the full article published by Wrong Kind of Green in September 2016.

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It’s not the end of the world

In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.

— The First Global Revolution: A Report by the Council of the Club of Rome 19

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On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem.

Michael Shellenberger, quoted above, has credentials that give weight to these contentions. He was named a Time magazine Heroes of the Environment in 2008 – the same year he won the Green Book Award – has provided expert testimony to US Congress and was invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to serve as Expert Reviewer of its next Assessment Report. Just as importantly, Shellenberger is able to draw upon his wealth of experience as an environmental activist as the next statement in this recently published mea culpa entitled “On Behalf of Environmentalists, I Apologize For the Climate Scare” (soon afterwards retracted by Forbes magazine), goes on to add:

I may seem like a strange person to be saying all of this. I have been a climate activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30.

Unsurprisingly then, Shellenberger’s piece (which is still available online at other sites) has caused a bit of a stink. In response, for instance, the Guardian ran a long item which criticises some of the claims but mostly highlights Shellenberger’s close links to the nuclear trade association Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI). My purpose here is not to defend or promote Shellenberger and I certainly do not share his opinions about the need to expand nuclear power (as many previous articles testify) however, it is worthwhile reminding ourselves that the Guardian’s chief environmental columnist, George Monbiot, is another well-known and outspoken advocate for nuclear power (read my previous criticism here).

In any case, the most significant issue Shellenberger raises goes beyond such particular concerns as the dangers of ‘climate change’ and our best response to it (including nuclear); points which remain highly contested. The point is that we are no longer allowed to contest any of this – the constant demand being that we must “get with the programme”. As he says:

Until last year, I mostly avoided speaking out against the climate scare. Partly that’s because I was embarrassed. After all, I am as guilty of alarmism as any other environmentalist. For years, I referred to climate change as an “existential” threat to human civilization, and called it a “crisis.”

But mostly I was scared. I remained quiet about the climate disinformation campaign because I was afraid of losing friends and funding. The few times I summoned the courage to defend climate science from those who misrepresent it I suffered harsh consequences. And so I mostly stood by and did next to nothing as my fellow environmentalists terrified the public.

I even stood by as people in the White House and many in the news media tried to destroy the reputation and career of an outstanding scientist, good man, and friend of mine, Roger Pielke, Jr., a life long progressive Democrat and environmentalist who testified in favor of carbon regulations. Why did they do that? Because his research proves natural disasters aren’t getting worse.

But then, last year, things spiraled out of control.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said “The world is going to end in twelve years if we don’t address climate change.” Britain’s most high-profile environmental group claimed “Climate Change Kills Children.”

The world’s most influential green journalist, Bill McKibben, called climate change the “greatest challenge humans have ever faced” and said it would “wipe out civilizations.”

Mainstream journalists reported, repeatedly, that the Amazon was “the lungs of the world,” and that deforestation was like a nuclear bomb going off.

As a result, half of the people surveyed around the world last year said they thought climate change would make humanity extinct.

And in January, one out of five British children told pollsters they were having nightmares about climate change.

Whether or not you have children you must see how wrong this is. I admit I may be sensitive because I have a teenage daughter. After we talked about the science she was reassured. But her friends are deeply misinformed and thus, understandably, frightened.

Click here to read Michael Shellenberger’s full article.

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Final thoughts: XR and the ‘Fourth Industrial Repression’

 “I don’t want you to be hopeful, I want you to panic”

— Greta Thunberg 20

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These days you will often find grown men dressed in polar bear costumes parading outside the entrances to the G20 or COP, rubbing their eyes to brush away fake tears. The TV companies flock to it. They love every kind of manipulative theatrics. Not that we are supposed to believe the polar bears are truly sad of course; that’s just for the children. No, this otherwise quite blatant appeal to sentimentality – well, polar bears are cute, let’s face it – is deliberately tempered. They are crying dry self-conscious tears that are laced with postmodern irony: crocodile tears shed for the presumed fate of the human race.

And I wonder what they really want, sweating beneath those layers of Mickey Mouse costuming. What do modern environmentalists want in general? Most of ones I know (many are friends) actually consume a great deal more than I do, and whenever I propose modest solutions of my own, the response is highly predictable.

Here is one challenge I sometimes like to set them. If you really wish to put a stop to overconsumption – as in principle I do too – then let’s begin with a straightforward ban on advertising, I will say. After all the primary purpose of such ubiquitous mass psychological manipulation is in driving our desire to consume – and I don’t even bother mentioning the unseen role advertising plays both in weakening our personal sense of self and buttressing the extant free market system (There are a whole host of good reasons to place a ban on advertising – read this for my fuller thoughts).

A ban can be rolled out in stages, I propose (maintaining the inherent modesty of my proposition and reminding them of the successful restrictions that now prohibit advertisements for cigarettes and other tobacco products), and the first step might simply introduce bans on commercials for SUVs or airlines or oil companies or something else that is considered especially polluting.

It’s then that the eye-rolling generally begins. Excuses are sought for why a ban of this kind would make no real difference and the conversation moves on. Thus, although, they say they dream of radically changing the world, my experience is that even such a simple and workable idea is likely to be rejected out of hand. This response is telling don’t you think?

Do they want to allow corporate providers to go on lying to us all on a daily basis, cajoling us to buy their unnecessary products? Or are they just afraid of the economic repercussions such a ban might have? In fact I believe both answers apply, and the reasoning is quite straightforward and understandable. The environmental movement is itself inherently consumerist: beset with ingrained market-led values of a system it claims to oppose; and all the environmentalists I know are happy consumers of eco-friendly brands.

Yet, and though modern environmentalism seeks inherently materialist solutions including, if it is deemed necessary, the final commodification of the entirety of the natural world, it habitually confuses all of this with spiritual ends. Even the word ‘ethical’ is becoming narrowly redefined in some quarters. In the future it may simply mean obeying controls on how much one consumes and observing the proper restrictions on provision and/or access to ‘natural resources’. Being a good consumer will finally equate to being a good person.

Unlike the old-style conservationism it supplanted (which had serious issues too as described in sections above), a darker side to the new environmentalism has gradually evolved as focus was shifted from preservation of our natural environment by acting primarily on a local scale to calls for the prevention of an impending global catastrophe. The threat of a terror it evokes is of such magnitude that it seems nearly impossible to surmount: an existential crisis that arguably calls for miraculous or semi-miraculous modes of intervention.

“The end of the world” is of course attractive to some, if only because of its unique power to diminish all other problems and fears by rolling them up into a single ball of quintessential evil. Old-style religious zealots, chastising sinners or else parading their own sinfulness under the burden of heavy banners that declare “The End is Nigh” are seldom seen on our high streets nowadays. Their self-inflicted mournfulness intensified all the more by the derision of the average passerby and unintentionally sanctified: “for blessed are ye, when men shall hate you” 21

But many of today’s eco-prophets of doom have picked up the same banners to parade in their stead. Enter the ‘Red Rebel Brigade’ furies (not to be confused with Mao’s Red Guards!) dressed in scarlet gowns and veils, weeping blood over funereal face-paint:

Other emblems of the new faith are the death’s head and the increasingly familiar and starkly angular XR hourglass, which always looks to me like a neatly folded swastika:

Screenshot from Guildford Extinction Rebellion website

Aspects of these performances are presumably intended to give you the creeps, at least if you take them seriously, though it’s hard to see beyond the amateur dramatics and cappuccino angst. As death cults go, this has to be one of the most convivial – most greenies I know wouldn’t hurt a fly (some literally).

And what plans do they have to save the planet, besides new bicycle lanes, shopping ‘bags for life’, bamboo toothbrushes and veganism? To judge by the literature on affiliated websites whatever this envisioned transformation involves, its goals are remarkably vague – waking people up to the ‘climate emergency’ is enough for now basically.

Meanwhile, the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ (4IR) or ‘Industry 4.0’ constructed around 5G and the Internet of Things (IoT) is awaiting implementation – a development I discussed in greater length in a previous article within this series. As Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, writes in his book of the same title:

“The changes are so profound that, from the perspective of human history, there has never been a time of greater promise or potential peril.” 22

And behind the overarching 4IR hi-tech rollout that combines artificial intelligence, gene editing and advanced robotics – “blurring the lines between the physical, digital and biological worlds” to quote the current UK government website 23– there are other gilded labels like ‘smart growth’ and ‘sustainable development’ that disguise more insidious intent: translated it will mean the microscopic monitoring of our personal lives and household activities with attendant regulations and social controls allied closely to an incrementally tightening regime of ‘austerity measures’. Economic hardship applied not only to our western economies, but stifling development across the third world. (Rest assured that the billionaire class with their private jets, private yachts and private islands, whose agenda is being inadvertently pushed, will not be subjected to the same privations and exclusions).

As anarchist author Paul Cudenec outlines in a short essay published by Wrong Kind of Green, “The Fourth Industrial Repression wants to replace everything true and authentic with its replicas, with a reality not so much virtual as entirely fake”:

The 4IR wants us all to be on our own, online and in line.

The 4IR empties everything of meaning, particularly words. It says “sustainable” when it means ecocidal. It says “development” when it means destruction. It says “basic universal income” when it means slavery.

When the 4IR talks about “social impact investing” it really means it wants to turn human beings into lucrative investment opportunities.

When the 4IR talks about “a new deal for nature” it really means it wants to privatise the whole living world so as to make the billionaire class even richer than it already is.

Concluding:

The 4IR employs huge armies of professional liars and gullible fools to spread its propaganda and scream abuse at all who dare challenge its fearmongering falsehoods.

The 4IR is a death cult which dreams of wiping out everything that is natural, everything that is wild, everything that is free.

Resist the Fourth Industrial Repression!

Fight the 4IR! 24

Click here to read the full article entitled “Resist the Fourth Industrial Repression!”

Finally, should any of these demands require the further hollowing out of western democracies in order to put greater powers into the hands of technocratic administrators, then so be it. For what sacrifice is too great when you believe the fate of the whole planet hangs in the balance, and worse, when we are so swiftly “running out of time”?

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It is interesting to note that in 2018 Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Vatican Secretary of State, was invited and attended the Bilderberg Conference when it convened in Turin. What is relevance? Well, almost precisely twelve months later, in the wake of an audience with chief executives and chairs from global finance and multinational energy companies, Pope Francis officially declared a global “climate emergency”:

“Future generations stand to inherit a greatly spoiled world. Our children and grandchildren should not have to pay the cost of our generation’s irresponsibility,” he said, in his strongest and most direct intervention yet on the climate crisis. “Indeed, as is becoming increasingly clear, young people are calling for a change.”

The Pope’s impassioned plea came as he met the leaders of some of the world’s biggest multinational oil companies in the Vatican on Friday to impress upon them the urgency and scale of the challenge, and their central role in tackling the emissions crisis. It followed a similar meeting last year, but this time the Pope’s stance was tougher as he warned that time was running out and urged them to hear “the increasingly desperate cries of the earth and its poor”.

From a Guardian article published last year entitled “Pope Francis declares ‘climate emergency’ and urges action”.

The same report continues:

The chief executives or chairs of BP, ExxonMobil, Shell, Total, ConocoPhilips, Chevron and several major investors including BlackRock and Hermes, responded by calling on governments to put in place carbon pricing to encourage low-carbon innovation, and called for greater financial transparency to aid investors.

However, they made no pledges to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, and set no timetable for action.

But, as the article goes on to say, carbon indulgences may be offered in lieu…

In two statements, which came at the end of a two-day meeting in the Vatican that was addressed by the pope and led by senior Vatican churchmen, the signatories called for a “combination of policies and carbon pricing mechanisms … designed in a way that simultaneously delivers innovation and investment in low-carbon solutions while assisting those least able to pay”. 25

Click here to read the full Guardian report published in June 2019.

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Additional: The technocratic society

“UN Agenda 21/Sustainable Development is the action plan implemented worldwide to inventory and control all land, all water, all minerals, all plants, all animals, all construction, all means of production, all energy, all education, all information, and all human beings in the world.  INVENTORY AND CONTROL.

“Have you wondered where these terms ‘sustainability’ and ‘smart growth’ and ‘high density urban mixed-use development’ came from? Doesn’t it seem like about 10 years ago you’d never heard of them and now everything seems to include these concepts? Is that just a coincidence? That every town and county and state and nation in the world would be changing their land use/planning codes and government policies to align themselves with…what?

“Far from being a ‘conspiracy theory’ or a ‘tin-foil hat’ fantasy, this is an actual United Nations plan, signed onto in 1992 by President George HW Bush along with 178 other world leaders. The UN called it Agenda 21 because it is the Agenda for the 21^st century. According to UN Secretary General Maurice Strong, the ‘affluent middle-class American lifestyle is unsustainable.’ That includes single family homes, private vehicles, appliances, air-conditioning, & meat-eating. They are a threat to the planet” — Rosa Koire 26

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Embedded below is Rosa Koire’s special presentation to the New Hampshire Legislature. It took place in the Legislative Office Building just behind the Capital in Concord on June 25, 2012. She shared with concerned legislators what she has learned about the true nature of Sustainable Development:

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1 Quote taken from Brave New World Revisited (1958), Chapter 7, by Aldous Huxley.

2 Link to the original film: (https://twitter.com/Survival/status/1268935324232814592)

3 From an article entitled “The Big Green Lie” written by Stephen Corry, published in Counterpunch on June 26, 2020. https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/06/26/the-big-green-lie/

4 The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. “Migration and population change – drivers and impacts”. Population Facts, no 2017/8 (2017).

5 The World Bank. “Population growth (annual%)”. 2018. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.GROW?locations=EU-ZG-US-AU-CA-NZ&name_desc=false (accessed June 23, 2020)

6 McVeigh, Karen. “World is plundering Africa’s wealth of ‘billions of dollars a year’”. The Guardian, May 24, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/may/24/world-is-plundering-africa-wealth-billions-of-dollars-a-year (accessed June 23, 2020)

7 Eg. Coca-Cola, Tata, KPMG, Adamjee, AES, Indus Basin etc.

8 Further information can be found here:

Survival International, Rainforest Foundation UK and Minority Rights Group International. The ‘Post-2-2- Global Biodiversity Framework’ – a new threat to indigenous people and local communities?. London: Survival International, 2020. https://assets.survivalinternational.org/documents/1908/post-2020-biodiversity-framework-briefing-final-survival-rfuk-mrg.pdf (accessed June 23, 2020)

9 Quote from philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Discourse on Inequality” (1754) which has the formal title, Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men (Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes), also commonly known as the “Second Discourse”.

Before translation, the original passage reads:

“Le premier qui, ayant enclos un terrain, s’avisa de dire: Ceci est à moi, et trouva des gens assez simples pour le croire, fut le vrai fondateur de la société civile. Que de crimes, de guerres, de meurtres, que de misères et d’horreurs n’eût point épargnés au genre humain celui qui, arrachant les pieux ou comblant le fossé, eût crié à ses semblables: Gardez-vous d’écouter cet imposteur; vous êtes perdus, si vous oubliez que les fruits sont à tous, et que la terre n’est à personne.”

10 From an article entitled “John Loudon, 90, Ex-Head Of Royal Dutch/Shell Group” written by Agis Salpukas, published in The New York Times on February 9, 1996. https://www.nytimes.com/1996/02/09/business/john-loudon-90-ex-head-of-royal-dutch-shell-group.html

11 From an article entitled “Umweltorganisation und Kritiker vor Einigung” written by Christoph Seidler, published in Der Spiegel on July 20, 2012. https://www.spiegel.de/kultur/literatur/schwarzbuch-wwf-einigung-zwischen-wwf-und-huismann-steht-bevor-a-844243.html

The section was translated by Google translate. The original text is below:

Darin beklagte er vor allem die Nähe zur Agrarindustrie. Problematisch sei unter anderem, dass der WWF zusammen mit großen Agrarkonzernen wie Monsanto an sogenannten Runden Tischen für Soja- (RTRS) und Palmölproduzenten (RSPO) sitzt. Auch der SPIEGEL hatte kritisch über die Soja- und Palmöl-Politik des WWF berichtet.

12 From an article entitled “Kumpel der Konzerne” written by Von Jens Glüsing und Nils Klawitter published in Der Spiegel on May 26, 2012. https://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-85913035.html

The section was translated by Google translate. The original text is below:

Der SPIEGEL ist durch Südamerika und auf die indonesische Insel Sumatra gereist, um das zu prüfen. In Brasilien erzählte ein Agro-Manager von der ersten Schiffsladung nachhaltigen Sojas, die nach WWF-Standard zertifiziert wurde und im vergangenen Jahr mit viel PR-Getöse Rotterdam erreichte. Die Herkunft der Ladung, räumte der Manager ein, kenne er gar nicht genau. Auf Sumatra berichteten Angehörige eines Stamms, wie angeheuerte Trupps des WWF-Partners Wilmar ihre Häuser zerstört hatten. Sie waren der ungestörten Palmöl-Produktion im Weg gewesen.

Auch Vertreter unabhängiger Nichtregierungsorganisationen wie Rettet den Regenwald und Robin Wood sehen in der Hilfsorganisation längst nicht mehr nur den Treuhänder der Tiere. Vielen kommt der WWF eher wie ein Komplize der Konzerne vor, denen er gegen große Spenden und kleine Zugeständnisse die Lizenz zur Zerstörung der Natur erteilt.

13 From an article entitled “Umweltorganisation und Kritiker vor Einigung” written by Christoph Seidler, published in Der Spiegel on July 20, 2012. https://www.spiegel.de/kultur/literatur/schwarzbuch-wwf-einigung-zwischen-wwf-und-huismann-steht-bevor-a-844243.html

The section was translated by Google translate. The original text is below:

Tatsächlich war das “Schwarzbuch” längere Zeit über Anbieter wie Amazon oder Thalia nicht zu beziehen – aus Angst vor Rechtsstreitigkeiten. “Selten wurde der Buchhandel nach der Veröffentlichung derart flächendeckend eingeschüchtert und vom Vertrieb des Buchs abgeschreckt”, beklagte Random-House-Jusitiar Rainer Dresen. Auch die Deutsche Journalistinnen- und Journalisten-Union (DJU) kritisierte in einer Erklärung die “rechtlich zweifelhaften Einschüchterungsversuche” der Umweltschützer und den “vorauseilenden Gehorsam” der Händler.

14 https://naturalcapitalforum.com/about/ 

15 https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/natural-capital

16 From an article entitled “Names You Need To Know In 2011: Natural Capital Project” written by Kerry A. Dolan, published in Forbes magazine on October 29, 2010. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kerryadolan/2010/10/29/name-you-need-to-know-natural-capital-project/#7a4501aa1f57

17

NatCap is a partnership of four world-class academic institutions – Stanford University, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the University of Minnesota, and the Stockholm Resilience Centre – advancing new science together with, inspired by, and implemented through two of the world’s largest NGOs, The Nature Conservancy and World Wildlife Fund.

https://naturalcapitalproject.stanford.edu/who-we-are/partners

18 From an article entitled “Nature is Priceless, Which is Why Turning it into ‘Natural Capital’ is Wrong” written by Bram Büscher and Robert Fletcher, published in Wrong Kind of Green on September 21, 2016. http://www.wrongkindofgreen.org/2017/03/01/nature-is-priceless-which-is-why-turning-it-into-natural-capital-is-wrong/

19 Quote from The First Global Revolution: A Report by the Council of the Club of Rome, Part I “The Problematique”, Ch 5, “The vacuum”, p 75, written by Alexander King & Bertrand Schenider, published by Pantheon Books in 1991. https://archive.org/details/TheFirstGlobalRevolution/page/n85

Here are some further extracts:

In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”

A few pages earlier

“The old democracies have functioned reasonably well over the last 200 years, but they appear now to be in a phase of complacent stagnation with little evidence of real leadership and innovation. It is to be hoped, with a new found enthusiasm for democracy in the liberated countries today, that people will not reproduce slavish copies of existing models that are unable to meet contemporary needs.”

Which leads us to a different subheading “The limits of democracy”, following which the text continues:

“Democracy is not a panacea. It cannot organize everything and it is unaware of its own limits. These facts must be faced squarely, sacrilegious although as this may sound. In its present form, democracy is no longer well suited for the tasks ahead. The complexity and the technical nature of many of today’s problems do not always allow elected representatives to make competent decisions at the right time. Few politicians in office are sufficiently aware of the global nature of the problems facing them and little, if any, awareness of the interactions between the problems. Generally speaking, informed discussion on the main political, economic and social issues takes place on radio and television, rather than in Parliament, to the detriment of the latter. Political party activities are so intensely focused on election deadlines and party rivalries that they end up weakening the democracy they’re supposed to serve. This confrontational approach gives an impression that party needs come before national interests. Strategies and tactics seem more important than objectives, and often a constituency is neglected as soon as it is gained. With the current mode of operation, Western democracies are seeing their former role decline and public opinion drifting away from elected representatives. However, the crisis in the contemporary democratic system must not be allowed to serve as an excuse for rejecting democracy.

Adding:

In the countries now opening up to freedom, Democracy is being introduced in a situation which demands greatly changed attitudes and patterns of behavior demands from citizens. The inevitable problems of phasing in democracy are difficult to solve. But there is another, still more serious question. Democracy does not necessarily build a bridge between a colonial or neo-colonial economy or a centralized bureaucratic economy towards a market economy based on competition and producing growth. In a transitional situation such as the present which because of sudden and unforeseen change has been neither planned nor prepared for. The necessary structures attitudes market relations and managerial styles simply do not exist.  If such a situation is allowed to go on too long, it is probable that democracy will be made to seem responsible for the lagging economy, the scarcity and uncertainties. The very concept of democracy could then be brought into question and allow for the seizure of power by extremists of one brand or the other.

20 From a speech delivered by 16-year-old Greta Thunberg to the World Economic Forum at Davos on January 25, 2019 [from 2:20 mins]:

21 Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of man’s sake. Luke 6:22.

22 Quoted in an article entitled “The 4^th Industrial Revolution Is Here – Are You Ready?” written by Bernard Marr, published in Forbes magazine on August 13, 2018. https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2018/08/13/the-4th-industrial-revolution-is-here-are-you-ready/ 

23 https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/regulation-for-the-fourth-industrial-revolution/regulation-for-the-fourth-industrial-revolution

24 From an article entitled “Resist the Fourth Industrial Repression!” written by Paul Cudenec, published in Wrong Kind of Green on April 17, 2020. http://www.wrongkindofgreen.org/2020/04/17/resist-the-fourth-industrial-repression/ 

25 From an article entitled “Pope Francis declares ‘climate emergency’ and urges action” written by Fiona Harvey & Jillian Ambrose, published in the Guardian on June 14, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/14/pope-francis-declares-climate-emergency-and-urges-action

26 “Why is Everyone Talking About UN Agenda 21?” flyer written by Rosa Koire. https://www.democratsagainstunagenda21.com/uploads/4/4/6/6/4466371/why_is_everyone_talking_about_un_agenda_21.pdf

never let a good Ukrainian crisis go to waste…

On Thursday [April 17th] Democracy Now! welcomed back Stephen Cohen, Professor Emeritus of Russian Studies and Politics at New York University and Princeton University, to discuss the deepening crisis in Ukraine. Cohen, a specialist on Russia and the Soviet Union, is the author of numerous books on the subject including his latest Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War. He was asked “Are we seeing the beginning of a new Cold War?” and “what exactly is happening right now in Ukraine?” Cohen’s response began as follows:

Those are big questions. We are not at the beginning of the Cold War, a new one; we are well into it—which alerts us to the fact, just watching what you showed up there, that hot war is imaginable now, for the first time in my lifetime, my adult lifetime, since the Cuban missile crisis, hot war with Russia. It’s unlikely, but it’s conceivable. And if it’s conceivable, something has to be done about it.

You did two things on your introduction which were very important. Almost alone among American media, you actually allowed Putin to speak for himself. He’s being filtered through the interpretation of the mass media here, allegedly, what he said, and it’s not representative. The second thing is, let us look just what’s happening at this moment, or at least yesterday. The political head of NATO just announced a major escalation of NATO forces in Europe. He did a Churchillian riff: “We will increase our power in the air, in the sea, on the land.” Meanwhile, as negotiations today begin in Geneva, we’re demanding that Russians de-escalate. And yet, we, NATO, are escalating as these negotiations begin.

So, if you were to say what is going on in Ukraine today—and, unfortunately, the focus is entirely on eastern Ukraine. We don’t have any Western media—in eastern Ukraine. We don’t have any Western—any Western media in western Ukraine, the other half of the country. We’re not clear what’s going on there. But clearly, things are getting worse and worse. Each side has a story that totally conflicts with the other side’s story. There seems to be no middle ground. And if there’s no middle ground in the public discourse, in the Russian media or the American media, it’s not clear what middle ground they can find in these negotiations, though personally, I think—and people will say, “Oh, Cohen’s a Putin apologist”—but it seemed to me that the proposals the Russians made a month ago for resolving the conflict are at least a good starting point. But it’s not clear the United States is going to accept them.

I will come back to some of Cohen’s further points in a moment, but first I’d like to just try to understand why, as Cohen points out, there is such a lack of media coverage across Ukraine and in particular in the western half of the country.

Below is a video (I can’t find a still frame) recorded in mid-March featuring a statement by Vitali Klitschko as he warned of an impending catastrophe in Crimea should it vote to join Russia in the recent referendum. Klitschko has since been sidelined, of course, but what strikes me as odd is that he was standing in front of a board much like the kind of sponsorship boards we see behind interviews of Premier League footballers. Similar except that the ex-sportsman here was backed by just one logo. You can see that it reads “Ukraine Crisis Media Center”:

Now if you type “Ukraine Crisis Media Center” into the Google image search you will find many other Ukrainian political figures giving statements in front of that same logo board. So just who are the “Ukraine Crisis Media Center”?

Well, they have a website and you can search for details there, but in fact you will find very few and none at all about their own sponsors. Instead, what you will read is this:

Ukrainian Crisis Media Center is launched to provide the international community with objective information about events in Ukraine and threats to national security, particularly in the military, political, economic, energy and humanitarian spheres. During this crisis period, the Center on a 24/7 basis will provide support to all the media who cover events in Ukraine.

Having failed to find further information on their website, I decided to email the organisation [on Thursday April 3rd] and asked the following:

I cannot find any information on your site about where financial support for the media center comes from. Without information on who is backing the venture how can we be sure that your coverage is wholly impartial?

I have not received a reply.

In the meantime, I also searched the web for insight from other places – and came across a glowing report published in Kyiv Post which began as follows:

Much like the EuroMaidan Revolution itself, the Ukraine Crisis Media Center sprang to life with speed, spontaneity, creativity, competence – and a strong sense of mission.

Although the center has been open only since March 4, its third floor headquarters in the Hotel Ukraine on 4 Institutska St. is already a required daily stop for dozens of Ukrainian and foreign journalists.

Continuing:

The group came together at Razumkov Center in Kyiv on March 2.

Nataliya Popovych, the president of Kyiv’s PRP Group, an affiliate of the global Webber Shandwick company, is among the founders.

Popovych said that the Kremlin is fast on its feet in spreading lies about Ukraine, whose government is often slow to respond to allegations and counter untruths.

Well, here’s one of the details I was searching for – so who is Nataliya Popovych?

Nataliya started career in Leo Burnett, one of the leading advertising agencies in the world, and continued in Romyr & Associates, Canadian government and public relations firm. After getting Master degree and probation in USA, Nataliya has become a head of PRP Ukraine, a Weber Shandwick Affiliate Company in Ukraine, and in a year became the President of PRP Group, Weber Shandwick partner on CIS markets.

And PRP? You probably won’t be surprised to learn that they are a PR company:

PRP is more than an integrated solutions agency. It is a creative concept. It is a strategy. It is the management of reputations in a new era. It is the ability to communicate and create goodwill. It is integrated solutions which engage audiences into the lives of companies and brands.

That’s taken from their current LinkedIn profile and the profile of Nataliya Popovych is from PR Congress.

But back to the article in the Kyiv Post:

She [Nataliya Popovych] considers Ukrainians to be loving, peaceful and tolerant people and, while she didn’t consider herself a follower of iconic and controversial nationalist hero Stepan Bandera (1909-1959), she is now “proud to be called a Banderite.”¹

And for those who don’t know who Stepan Bandera was, then here are a few extracts taken from a detailed and rather generous biography written by Professor of History at Yale University, Timothy Snyder, and published by The New York Review of Books around the time Viktor Yushchenko (President after the “Orange Revolution”) was voted out of office in 2010:

The incoming Ukrainian president will have to turn some attention to history, because the outgoing one has just made a hero of a long-dead Ukrainian fascist. By conferring the highest state honor of “Hero of Ukraine” upon Stepan Bandera (1909-1959) on January 22, Viktor Yushchenko provoked protests from the chief rabbi of Ukraine, the president of Poland, and many of his own citizens. It is no wonder. Bandera aimed to make of Ukraine a one-party fascist dictatorship without national minorities. During World War II, his followers killed many Poles and Jews. Why would President Yushchenko, the leader of the democratic Orange Revolution, wish to rehabilitate such a figure? Bandera, who spent years in Polish and Nazi confinement, and died at the hands of the Soviet KGB, is for some Ukrainians a symbol of the struggle for independence during the twentieth century. […]

Consistent as the rehabilitation of Bandera might be with the ideological competition of the mid-twentieth century, it makes little ethical sense today. Yushchenko, who praised the recent Kiev court verdict condemning Stalin for genocide, regards as a hero a man whose political program called for ethnic purity and whose followers took part in the ethnic cleansing of Poles and, in some cases, in the Holocaust. Bandera opposed Stalin, but that does not mean that the two men were entirely different. In their struggle for Ukraine, we see the triumph of the principle, common to fascists and communists, that political transformation sanctifies violence. It was precisely this legacy that east European revolutionaries seemed to have overcome in the past thirty years, from the Solidarity movement in Poland of 1980 through the Ukrainian presidential elections of 2005. It was then, during the Orange Revolution, that peaceful demonstrations for free and fair elections brought Yushchenko the presidency. In embracing Bandera as he leaves office, Yushchenko has cast a shadow over his own political legacy.²

All of which helps to explain something else that has been puzzling me… why every other story about what’s happening in Ukraine is entitled “Ukraine Crisis: something or other” – the reason being that “Ukraine Crisis” is more or less the brand name that Nataliya Popovych and other “Ukrainian nationalists” have adopted — a list of the founders of the “Ukraine Crisis Media Center” is available at the end of the same Kyiv Post article.³

So what is this new political brand promoting?

*

The “war on terror” is dead, long live the new cold war!

Returning to Stephen Cohen, here is what he had to say about the rise of this new cold war:

As a historian, I would say that this conflict began 300 years ago, but we can’t do that. As a contemporary observer, it certainly began in November 2013 when the European Union issued an ultimatum, really, to the then-president, elected president, of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, that “Sign an agreement with us, but you can’t have one with Russia, too.” In my mind, that precipitated this crisis, because why give a country that has been profoundly divided for centuries, and certainly in recent decades, an ultimatum—an elected president: “Choose, and divide your country further”? So when we say today Putin initiated this chaos, this danger of war, this confrontation, the answer is, no, that narrative is wrong from the beginning. It was triggered by the European Union’s unwise ultimatum.

Now flash forward to just one month ago, about the time I was with you before. Remember that the European foreign ministers—three of them, I think—went to Kiev and negotiated with Yanukovych, who was still the president, an agreement. Now, the Russians were present at the negotiation, but they didn’t sign it. But they signed off on it. They said, “OK.” What did that agreement call for? Yanukovych would remain president until December—not May, when elections are now scheduled, but December of this year. Then there would be a presidential election. He could run in them, or not. Meanwhile, there would be a kind of government of national accord trying to pull the government together. And, importantly, Russia would chip in, in trying to save the Ukrainian economy. But there would also be parliamentary elections. That made a lot of sense. And it lasted six hours.

The next day, the street, which was now a mob—let’s—it was no longer peaceful protesters as it had been in November. It now becomes something else, controlled by very ultra-nationalist forces; overthrew Yanukovych, who fled to Russia; burned up the agreement. So who initiated the next stage of the crisis? It wasn’t Russia. They wanted that agreement of February, a month ago, to hold. And they’re still saying, “Why don’t we go back to it?” You can’t go back to it, though there is a report this morning that Yanukovych, who is in exile in Russia, may fly to eastern Ukraine today or tomorrow, which will be a whole new dimension.

But the point of it is, is that Putin didn’t want—and this is reality, this is not pro-Putin or pro-Washington, this is just a fact—Putin did not want this crisis. He didn’t initiate it. But with Putin, once you get something like that, you get Mr. Pushback. And that’s what you’re now seeing. And the reality is, as even the Americans admit, he holds all the good options. We have none. That’s not good policymaking, is it?

Click here to read a full transcript or watch the latest interview with Stephen Cohen on the Democracy Now! website.

*

The United States spent over a decade hunting down Osama Bin Laden at financial a cost running into multiple trillions and a human cost of more than a million lives, yet since his demise the jihadist cause that Bin Laden once spearheaded is stronger than ever. Forces of al-Qaeda and other near identical jihadist factions now hold control of a large region of Iraq and Syria that exceeds the area of Britain, whilst other Islamist gangs run amok throughout Libya. Thus, after a decade of dirty wars executed by means of “shock and awe” air strikes, the perpetual overhead threat of drones and the knock at the door that ends with secret rendition to faraway torture sites, the “war on terror” has been lost. “Terror” reigns supreme as the victor: terror from all sides that is.

But then, it is hard to imagine any foreign policy that could have manufactured and spread terrorism more effectively than the policies enacted during this decade-long “war on terror”. Blowback? Up to a point. But, we must not forget that all of the many al-Qaeda factions that have gained so much territory could never have done so without our help. Whether indirectly, with the establishment of the power vacuum in Iraq, or more purposefully, with Nato bombers opening the way for the Islamist insurgency in Libya. But mostly, the gains of al-Qaeda are thanks to the very generous funding of one of America and Britain’s closest allies, that bastion of freedom and democracy, Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Bin Laden, and the nation known to have the closest ties to those accused of the 9/11 attacks. Attacks that provided the very springboard from which the “war on terror” was launched all those years ago. These are the facts and none can be refuted, so make of them what you will – if it was a plot for a film it would seem ludicrously far-fetched.

Of course, the “war on terror” lost a great deal of its public appeal with the bludgeoning of Iraq, and so under Obama we’ve had “humanitarian interventions”. But this new gloss has also flaked away, with the majority of people in the West absolutely sick of war. That said, the wars go on regardless – wreaking havoc but still satisfying the insatiable thirst for blood demanded by our military-industrial-financial complex.

None of these wars have had anything to do with stamping out terrorism or, surely more laughably, the West’s desire to bring “freedom and democracy”. The United States’ covert backing of al-Qaeda is nothing new and neither is the West’s more brazen support of al-Qaeda’s primary sponsor Saudi Arabia? If the wars were about either terrorism or “freedom and democracy”, then the Saudi regime would surely have topped the charts of “the axis of evil”.

In truth, the game never changed. And sadly it is a game (at least to those currently holding power) – as Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of America’s leading geopolitical strategists, makes clear not least with the title of his notorious book on Eurasian geostrategy, “The Grand Chessboard”. In it he wrote:

In brief, for the United States, Eurasian geostrategy involves the purposeful management of geostrategically dynamic states and the careful handling of geopolitically catalytic states, in keeping with the twin interests of America in the short-term: preservation of its unique global power and in the long-run transformation of it into increasingly institutionalized global cooperation. To put it in a terminology that hearkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.⁴

This neo-imperialist game is much the same as the older imperialist game, in which only the strategies have been updated. It is about control of territory, of energy resources, of financial systems, and it has (and always did) amount to a series of proxy wars against the competing interests of competing powers. Traditionally Russia have been the great adversary, but now there is China too. So the Cold War that officially concluded with the fall of the Berlin Wall in October 1989… ended only in name. With the Ukrainian crisis (or should that be “Ukraine Crisis”) the chill that remained has become considerably icier. Treacherously so. But our military-industrial-financial complex needs perpetual war just to keep the racket going, or, when that ceases to be an option (as it now has), to maintain the illusion of an imminent threat against us. Bin Laden is dead, so a new Cold War is just the ticket. On top of which, as Brzezinski also explained in his book:

“Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.”

Here’s Stephen Cohen again:

The real debate going on in NATO—the real debate, because this is a distraction—is what Rasmussen said in your earlier clip—he’s the political head of NATO—that we’re building up, as we talk, our forces in eastern Europe. Now, understand what’s going on here. When we took in—”we” meaning the United States and NATO—all these countries in eastern Europe into NATO, we did not—we agreed with the Russians we would not put forward military installations there. We built some infrastructure—air strips, there’s some barracks, stuff like that. But we didn’t station troops that could march toward Russia there. Now what NATO is saying, it is time to do that. Now, Russia already felt encircled by NATO member states on its borders. The Baltics are on its borders. If we move the forces, NATO forces, including American troops, to—toward Russia’s borders, where will we be then? I mean, it’s obviously going to militarize the situation, and therefore raise the danger of war.

And I think it’s important to emphasize, though I regret saying this, Russia will not back off. This is existential. Too much has happened. Putin—and it’s not just Putin. We seem to think Putin runs the whole of the universe. He has a political class. That political class has opinions. Public support is running overwhelmingly in favor of Russian policy. Putin will compromise at these negotiations, but he will not back off if confronted militarily. He will not.

*

A trade war opens the way for new trade deals

The new cold war isn’t only a military escalation, it also potentially marks the beginning of a new trade war. But due to reliance on Russia imports (especially when it comes to energy) EU sanctions on Russia will be difficult, and so one way forward could involve loosening trade restrictions between the EU and the US.

The following passages are taken from a press release by the European Council following the recent EU-US Summit in Brussels. It begins:

Recent events in Ukraine have confirmed that strong cooperation between the European Union and the United States on peace and security is of critical importance.

Continuing under the next heading “Economy and global challenges” as follows:

Reinforcing economic growth and job creation remains central on both sides of the Atlantic. The EU and the United States have taken important steps to stabilise financial conditions and overcome the crisis. The EU remains committed to building a deep and genuine economic and monetary union, including a banking union. […]

The EU and US leaders renewed their commitment to a strong Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). this should go beyond a free trade agreement and reaffirm Europe and the United States’ shared values of democracy, individual freedom, the rule of law and human rights, and a common commitment to open societies and economies. [bold highlights maintained from original source]

And what is TTIP? Here are additional notes at the end of the same press release:

The EU and US have decided to take their economic relationship to a higher level by agreeing to launch negotiations on a comprehensive trade and investment agreement. It aims to remove trade barriers in a wide range of economic sectors to make it easier to buy and sell goods and services between the EU and the US.

In fact, I have already touched on the subject of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) as well as its sister treaty the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) . Both of these “free-trade agreements” appear to have alternative and conflicting names and acronyms and in the case of TTIP it is also known as the Transatlantic Free Trade Area, abbreviated as TAFTA, which is how it appeared in that earlier post. Why trade agreements need to have multiple names becomes more apparent when you realise what this commitment to “freeing up regulations” will mean. Here are a few extracts from a detailed analysis published by Der Spiegel International and entitled “Corporation Carte Blanche: Will US-EU Trade Become Too Free?”:

Lori Wallach had but 10 minutes to speak when she stepped up to podium inside Room 405 at George Washington University, located not too far away from the White House. Her audience was made up of delegates currently negotiating the trans-Atlantic free trade agreement between the United States and the European Union.

They had already spent hours listening to presentations by every possible lobbying group — duty bound to hear myriad opinions. But when Wallach, a trade expert for the consumer protection group Public Citizen, took the stage, people suddenly started paying attention. The 49-year-old Harvard lawyer, after all, is a key figure in international trade debates.

“The planned deal will transfer power from elected governments and civil society to private corporations,” she said, warning that the project presents a threat of entirely new dimensions. [bold emphasis added]

How will TTIP help to transfer even more power out of democratic control and into the hands of the major corporations? Well, let us count the ways:

After the third round of negotiations, an unusually broad alliance of anti-globalization groups, NGOs, environmental and consumer protection groups, civil rights groups and organized labor is joining forces to campaign against TTIP.

These critics have numerous concerns about the treaty – including their collective fear that the convergence of standards will destroy important gains made over the years in health and nutrition policy, environmental protection and employee rights. They argue the treaty will make it easier for corporations to turn profits at the public’s expense in areas like water supply, health or education. It would also clear the path for controversial technologies like fracking or for undesired food products like growth hormone-treated meat to make their way to Europe. Broadly worded copyrights would also restrict access to culture, education and science. They also believe it could open the door to comprehensive surveillance.⁵

Click here to read the full article in Der Spiegel.

*

Fracking for freedom (and digging for victory)

I have already highlighted at the end of an earlier and rather more extended post how energy giants Chevron and Exxon Mobil have been getting ready to move their operations to Ukraine with the intention of exploring both conventional and “unconventional” resources (otherwise known as “fracking”). On Saturday’s Keiser Report, Max Keiser spoke to freelance journalist JP Sottile of Newsvandal.com, who also occasionally writes for the Guardian, about not only how Big Oil, but also Big Agra, have their eyes fixed on Ukraine. Sottile names the people and corporations hoping to take advantage of Ukraine’s exceptional fertile lands. Here are some excerpts of what he had to say [from about 13 mins in]:

“One of the bones of contention with Russia, Europe, and its transit point Ukraine, is Russia’s domination of the natural gas market in Europe. So I thought it was very interesting when the deal was announced that Chevron was involved in developing shale gas in Ukraine. Now that would have been with the previous government of Yanukovych – and I believe that that led to a lot of the pressure coming out of Moscow for Yanukovych to reject the economic deal between Ukraine and Europe, and that then of course led to a cascading number of events, which led to the deposing of Yanukovych and the ‘crisis in Ukraine’ as it is now called.”

Beyond the oil and gas, Sottile has also looked closely into the interests of agricultural giants Cargill and Monsanto, who are keen to exploit Ukraine’s riches closer to the surface:

US-Ukraine Business Council is an investor in the US-Ukraine Foundation where Ms [Victoria] Nuland was speaking on December 13th [about how the US had already spent $5 billion helping Ukraine realise its “European aspirations”] and also on December 13th, that was the day that Cargill invested in a Black Sea port to help open the Russian market to its agriculture. Well, Cargill is also heavily invested in Ukraine in a company called Ukrlandfarming. The just bought a two hundred thousand dollar stake in Ukrlandfarming. In fact they bought that stake – or it was announced – on the very day, January 12th of this year, that fifty thousand Ukrainians flooded Kiev to protest the government of Yanukovych.

They are all connected through Freedom House – a guy there who worked with Ms Nuland, who is Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, she had a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, a guy named David Kramer. David Kramer serves on – he’s actually head of Freedom House – Freedom House is one of the organisations that the United States uses to stoke democracy movements around the world. It is actually responsible, along with the National Endowment for Democracy, for funding many of the opposition forces there in Ukraine. And David Kramer also serves on the US-Ukraine Business Council. If you go the US-Ukraine Business Council – which is a very interesting organisation – on the executive board of the US-Ukraine Business Council you’ll find Cargill, Monsanto, John Deere, CNH International (which is a farming equipment and tractor-making company), Eli Lilly and DuPont Pioneer – DuPont Pioneer being the genetically modified organisms and agricultural wing of DuPont. And they all serve together under the guidance of a guy named Morgan Williams. Morgan Williams is CEO and President of US-Ukraine Business Council, and he has been a fixer for Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, [and] other big agricultural companies in Ukraine for the last fifteen to twenty years.

There is an expression from my part of the world that goes: “where there’s muck, there’s brass”. Well, as Sottile’s investigations reveal, there’s loads of muck in Ukraine and not just in oil and gas deposits. Perhaps, as he suspects, the bigger prize is the land itself. Either way, the vultures are already circling. Except that they are more predatory than the much maligned vulture. Rather than waiting for a crisis to happen they have been directly involved in fomenting one, and now, as their “Ukraine Crisis” escalates, they won’t be planning to let it to go to waste.

Click here to read more about this in JP Sottile’s article entitled “Ukraine, Chevron, Condi Rice and Shale Gas… join the dots” published by The Ecologist magazine on March 18th.

1 From an article entitled “Crisis Media Center springs into action” written by Brian Bonner, published by Kyiv Post on March 14, 2014. https://www.kyivpost.com/guide/about-kyiv/crisis-media-center-springs-into-action-339299.html 

2 From an article entitled “A Fascist Hero in Democratic Kiev” written by Timothy Snyder, published by The New York Review of Books on February 24, 2010. http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2010/feb/24/a-fascist-hero-in-democratic-kiev/

3Founders of Ukraine Crisis Media Center include:

Valeriy Chaly, Razumkov Centre, deputy foreign minister of Ukraine (2009-2010)
Ivanna Klympush-Tsyntsadze, Yalta European Strategy, director
Nataliya Popovych, PRP, president
Natalia Olbert-Sinko, PRP in Ukraine, executive director
Yaryna Klyuchkovska, independent communications consultant
Gennadiy Kurochka, CFC, founder and managing partner
Vasyl Myroshnychenko, CFC, partner
Alina Frolova, R.A.M. 360, CEO
Volodymyr Degtyaryov, NewsFront PR agency, director
Ivetta Delikatnaya, AGL, director of development
Maxim Savanevskyi, PlusOne DA, managing partner
Andriy Zagorodskiy, Newsplot, director

From the same article entitled “Crisis Media Center springs into action” written by Brian Bonner, published by Kyiv Post on March 14, 2014. https://www.kyivpost.com/guide/about-kyiv/crisis-media-center-springs-into-action-339299.html 

4 Extract from The Grand Chessboard, Chapter 2 “The Eurasian Chessboard”, p. 40, written by Zbigniew Brzezinski, published in 1997. It is available at http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Zbigniew_Brzezinski 

5 From an article entitled “Corporation Carte Blanche: Will US-EU Trade Become Too Free?” written by Michaela Schiessl, published by Der Spiegel International on January 23, 2014. http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/criticism-grows-over-investor-protections-in-transatlantic-trade-deal-a-945107.html

time for an open debate about the ‘green technologies’

Let’s imagine you have a virus on your computer. You didn’t know you had it until someone phoned you up out of the blue. However, it turns out that this isn’t a prelude to the usual scam: – no, on this occasion your computer really has contracted a virus. The person on the other end of the phone going on to explain how they have ample evidence to prove their case because, after all, they created the virus in question. Adding that they have phoned you to demand legitimate compensation. Compensation…?

Well, after all, you have stolen their proprietary software, haven’t you? Software that they had personally spent years developing in order to make computers run faster and more efficiently, or so they say. Obviously you protest your innocence. You didn’t ask for their software and in any case you haven’t noticed any improvement. In fact, you feel like the victim, since your computer had been rather less reliable and more sluggish, if anything. But it’s to no avail. They are intent on suing for patent infringement, and that’s that. Such a case would never stand up in court, of course…

Unless…, unless the product in question belonged perhaps to a huge multinational corporation. An organisation that has highly paid legal teams, and armed with the political clout to change patent laws altogether. And say it wasn’t software that was being spread this way, but something altogether more fundamental to your existence. The viral code having been embedded not in computers, but in the food supply, and the question becoming why you didn’t sign a licence needed to grow their invasive but patented crops.

Now obviously the seed from these patented crops might have accidentally drifted into many unlicensed fields. Whilst, on top of this, there is nothing to prevent the patented varieties from pollinating other crops, thereby reproducing further patented hybrids in turn. So if this corporation were to have its own teams of inspectors with powers to search, then it would be more than profitable to send them off to scout the whole land looking for patent violations. How could the farmers prove their innocence? With the patented crops now growing all across their land, they are caught red-handed.

Such an aggressive modus operandi sounds like a product itself of an overly fertile and altogether deranged imagination, yet sadly the scenario I have sketched is literally the product of an increasingly deranged world:

Percy Schmeiser, a canola breeder and grower in Bruno, Saskatchewan, first discovered Roundup-resistant canola in his crops in 1997.[4] He had used Roundup herbicide to clear weeds around power poles and in ditches adjacent to a public road running beside one of his fields, and noticed that some of the canola which had been sprayed had survived. […]

At the time, Roundup Ready canola was in use by several farmers in the area. Schmeiser claimed that he did not plant the initial Roundup Ready canola in 1997, and that his field of custom-bred canola had been accidentally contaminated. While the origin of the plants on Schmeiser’s farm in 1997 remains unclear, the trial judge found that with respect to the 1998 crop, “none of the suggested sources [proposed by Schmeiser] could reasonably explain the concentration or extent of Roundup Ready canola of a commercial quality” ultimately present in Schmeiser’s 1998 crop.[5]

This is taken directly from the wikipedia entry (with original references retained) about a Canadian court case between Monsanto (who else!) and a canola (or rapeseed) farmer called Percy Schmeiser. The same article continues:

In 1998, Monsanto learned that Schmeiser was growing a Roundup-resistant crop and approached him to sign a license agreement to their patents and to pay a license fee. Schmeiser refused, maintaining that the 1997 contamination was accidental and that he owned the seed he harvested, and he could use the harvested seed as he wished because it was his physical property. Monsanto then sued Schmeiser for patent infringement. Patents being in federal jurisdiction, the case went to federal court.

In 2009, Percy Schmeiser featured in a documentary film based around the case and entitled David Versus Monsanto:

Note that I will come back to review some of the later verdicts in the long-running Monsanto v. Schmeiser case at the end of the article.

*

The issues surrounding the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are many and complex, but it is perfectly clear that new developments in genetics, like those in nuclear physics more than half a century ago, have automatically opened the door to some quite extraordinary possibilities. Possibilities that will most assuredly impact our future no less dramatically than the advent of atomic reactors and the hydrogen bomb impacted our very recent past – and still continue to affect us today.

The need for a proper debate is long overdue but, hardly surprisingly, the huge bio-tech corporations prefer to keep the debate closed down. Monsanto, for instance, who say that it is perfectly safe to release their GMOs directly into our environment, are also in the habit of claiming that their herbicide Roundup is so harmless you can drink it!¹ But then why on earth would anyone (or at least anyone not in their pocket) trust such self-interested and deliberately compromised low risk assessments? The quick answer being that the precautionary principle has once again been overridden by money and influence.

This great debate about the use of genetic modification needs to be both open and public: a forum for discussion amongst leading experts (and especially those not associated with the powerful bio-tech firms); scientists from other fields, who though ignorant on specifics, might bring a detached expertise by virtue of familiarity with scientific procedures; alongside representatives from other interested parties such as ‘consumers’ (that’s the rest of us by the way – we all consume, and though I hate the word too, it at least offers a little better perspective on our role without the current system, since this is how the system itself defines us).

It also needs to be fully inclusive, welcoming all intelligent opinion, whether concordant or dissenting. No reasoned objections from any quarters being summarily dismissed as unscientific or anti-scientific, as is so often the case, because we must never leave it for technicians alone to decide on issues that so directly affect our common future. Relying on highly specialised experts alone – even when those experts are fully independent (as they so rarely are these days) – being as unwise as it is anti-democratic.

Genetic manipulation is already upon us. It is already helping in the prevention and treatment of diseases, and in the production of medicines such as insulin (although even here serious questions are arising with regards to the potentially harmful side-effects of using a genetically modified product). More controversial again is the development of pest- and drought-resistant strains of crops (such as the Roundup Ready canola that contaminated Schmeiser’s fields), developments that are claimed by their producers to have alleviated a great deal of human suffering already, but which seem to have brought misery of new kinds – I will come back to this later.

And then we come to the development of Genetic Use Restriction Technology (Gurt), better known as ‘suicide’ or ‘Terminator’ (to use the industry term) seeds, which are promoted by the industry as a ‘biosafety’ solution. Engineered sterility being a clever way of preventing their own genetically modified plants from causing unwanted genetic contamination – which we might think of as a new form of pollution. The argument goes that if modified genes (whether pharmaceutical, herbicide resistance or ‘Terminator’ genes) from a ‘Terminator’ crop get transferred to related plants via cross-pollination, the seed produced from such pollination will be sterile. End of problem.

But this is merely an excuse, of course, and if used in this way, the new technology will ultimately prevent over a billion of the poorest people in the world from continuing in their age-old practice of saving seeds for resowing, which will, as a consequence, make these same farmers totally dependent on a few multinational bio-tech companies. An excellent means for monopolising the world’s food, and a satisfactory solution only for the owners of companies like Monsanto.²

In any case, do we really wish to allow patents on specific genes, opening the door to the corporate ownership of the building blocks to life itself? The world renowned physicist and futurist visionary Freeman Dyson draws a direct comparison to earlier forms of slavery:

“The institution of slavery was based on the legal right of slave-owners to buy and sell their property in a free market. Only in the nineteenth century did the abolitionist movement, with Quakers and other religious believers in the lead, succeed in establishing the principle that the free market does not extend to human bodies. The human body is God’s temple and not a commercial commodity. And now in the twenty-first century, for the sake of equity and human brotherhood, we must maintain the principle that the free market does not extend to human genes.”³

Nor, I would quickly add, should it extend to the ownership of genes of other higher species of animal or plant life. Moreover, I personally have no wish whatsoever for apples, tomatoes, potatoes (or even tobacco) that provides the RDA of all my nutritional needs, or any other supposed improvement on the original designs – preferring to trust to apples, tomatoes and potatoes that evolved alongside my own human digestive system. Which is not merely a preference, but a human right. Since we all have the right not to eat GMO just as we have the right to be vegan (not that I’m a vegan, by the way).

Beyond this, we also need to consider the many perfectly serious and inescapable ethical issues that arise once you are tinkering with the primary source code of life itself. Take cloning as an interesting example.

Identical twins are essentially clones, having both developed from the same fertilised egg, and thus sharing the same DNA. But then nature sometimes goes one step further again:

A form of virgin birth has been found in wild vertebrates for the first time.

Researchers in the US caught pregnant females from two snake species and genetically analysed the litters.

That proved the North American pit vipers reproduced without a male, a phenomenon called facultative parthenogenesis that has previously been found only in captive species.⁴

Taken from a BBC article I accidentally came across only yesterday.

I have since learned that parthenogenesis (reproduction without fertilisation or “virgin birth”) is surprisingly common throughout the plant and animal kingdoms. Birds do it, bees do it… and even mammals have been induced to do it. So cloning is not inherently unnatural, and if carried out successfully (as it frequently is in nature), it may one day be no more harmful nor fraught with latent dangers to be a cloned individual than an individual produced by other forms of artificial reproduction. Furthermore, since we already know what human twins are like, then we already know what human clones will be like. Yet many ethical questions still hang.

Should anyone be allowed to clone themselves? Or more generally, who chooses which of us are to be cloned? Do we just leave it to the market to decide? And why would we ever want a world populated by identical (or rather, approximately identical – since no two twins are truly identical and there are sound biological reasons for believing clones will never be perfectly reproduced either) human beings? Such ethical questions are forced by the new biotechnologies. And there are many further reasons for why ordinary, intelligent public opinion needs to be included in the debate.

Here is Freeman Dyson again, summarising his own cautious optimism as we enter the age of the new ‘green technologies’:

“I see two tremendous goods coming from biotechnology in the next century, first the alleviation of human misery through progress in medicine, and second the transformation of the global economy through green technology spreading wealth more equitably around the world. The two great evils to be avoided are the use of biological weapons and the corruption of human nature by buying and selling genes. I see no scientific reason why we should not achieve the good and avoid the evil.

The obstacles to achieving the good are political rather than technical. Unfortunately a large number of people in many countries are strongly opposed to green technology, for reasons having little to do with the real dangers. It is important to treat the opponents with respect, to pay attention to their fears, to go gently into the new world of green technology so that neither human dignity nor religious conviction is violated. If we can go gently, we have a good chance of achieving within a hundred years the goals of ecological sustainability and social justice that green technology brings within our reach.”⁵

Dyson is being too optimistic no doubt. Many of the dangers of genetic modification are only now coming to light; more than a decade after Dyson uttered these words as part of his acceptance speech for the award of the Templeton Prize in 2000.

Meanwhile, last month, Greenpeace issued the following press release. It contains the summary of an open letter sent by nearly a hundred Indian scientists to the Supreme Court of India:

An official report submitted by the technical Expert committee set up by the Supreme Court of India comprising of India’s leading experts in molecular biology, toxicology and biodiversity – unanimously recommends a 10-year moratorium on all field trials of GM Bt [insecticide producing due to genes from Bacillus thuringiensis] food crops, due to serious safety concerns. The committee has also recommended a moratorium on field trials of herbicide tolerant crops until independent assessment of impact and suitability, and a ban on field trials of GM crops for which India is center of origin and diversity.

The report’s recommendations are expected put a stop to all field releases of GM food crops in India, including the controversial Bt eggplant, whose commercial release was put under an indefinite moratorium there last February 2010. Contrarily, the same Bt eggplant is currently being evaluated for approval in the Philippines.

“This official unanimous declaration on the risks of GMOs, by India’s leading biotech scientists is the latest nail on the coffin for GMOs around the world,” said Daniel M. Ocampo, Sustainable Agriculture Campaigner of Greenpeace Southeast Asia. “It is yet another proof that GMOs are bad for the health, bad for the environment, bad for farmers and bad for the economy.”

Click here to read the full Greenpeace press release.

For though it would be foolish to fail to recognise the enormous potential benefits of some of the new ‘green technologies’, underestimating the hazards is sheer recklessness. And this is really where my own opinion differs significantly from enthusiasts like Dyson. This science is just so brilliantly new, and so staggeringly complex. The dangers are very real and our concerns entirely justified: whether these are concerns over safety, over the political implications, or anxieties of a more purely ethical kind.

But allow me to finish for once on a more positive note. Against all the odds and at considerable cost, financially and in terms of personal trauma, Percy Schmeiser, with the support of his wife Louise, eventually succeeded in their long-running legal battle against Monsanto. Beginning with the Federal Court judgement in March 2001:

Justice Andrew McKay upheld the validity of Monsanto’s patented gene which it inserts into canola varieties to make them resistant to their herbicide Round Up.

McKay dismissed Schmeiser’s challenge to the patent based on the claim Monsanto could not control how the gene was dispersed through the countryside.

In a key part of the ruling, the judge agreed a farmer can generally own the seeds or plants grown on his land if they blow in or are carried there by pollen — but the judge says this is not true in the case of genetically modified seed.

It was that part of the ruling that most upsets Percy Schmeiser. The implications are wide ranging and Schmeiser has launched an appeal that was heard on May 15 & 16, 2002 in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. The Federal Court of Appeal subsequently rejected Schmeiser’s appeal. Schmeiser then asked for leave from Canada’s Supreme Court to hear the case. Leave was granted in May 2003 and the case was heard on January 20, 2004.

The Supreme Court issued their decision in May 2004 and one can view the decision as a draw. The Court determined that Monsanto’s patent is valid, but Schmeiser is not forced to pay Monsanto anything as he did not profit from the presence of Roundup Ready canola in his fields. This issue started with Monsanto demanding Schmeiser pay the $15/acre technology fee and in the end, Schmeiser did not have to pay. The Schmeiser family and supporters are pleased with this decision, however disappointed that the other areas of appeal were not overturned.

And then, seven years on:

In an out of court settlement finalized on March 19, 2008, Percy Schmeiser has settled his lawsuit with Monsanto. Monsanto has agreed to pay all the clean-up costs of the Roundup Ready canola that contaminated Schmeiser’s fields. Also part of the agreement was that there was no gag-order on the settlement and that Monsanto could be sued again if further contamination occurred. Schmeiser believes this precedent setting agreement ensures that farmers will be entitled to reimbursement when their fields become contaminated with unwanted Roundup Ready canola or any other unwanted GMO plants.

On this occasion then, David didn’t kill Goliath, and in spite of huge personal effort and sacrifice. But he has undoubtedly helped to rein him in a bit, and Percy Schmeiser is just one of many Davids battling against the same Goliath. Collective actions that are also helping to open up the long overdue debate about the ‘green technologies’ and the future of life on our planet.

Both extracts above are quoted from Percy Schmeiser’s own website where you can find out more about his continuing fight against Big Agro.

*

Update:

A more recent Bloomberg article from November 28^th reveals how another agro-giant DuPont is now employing the same strategy used by Monsanto:

DuPont Co. (DD), the world’s second- biggest seed company, is sending dozens of former police officers across North America to prevent a practice generations of farmers once took for granted.

The provider of the best-selling genetically modified soybean seed is looking for evidence of farmers illegally saving them from harvests for replanting next season, which is not allowed under sales contracts. The Wilmington, Delaware-based company is inspecting Canadian fields and will begin in the U.S. next year, said Randy Schlatter, a DuPont senior manager.

DuPont is protecting its sales of Roundup Ready soybeans, so called because they tolerate being sprayed by Monsanto Co. (MON)’s Roundup herbicide. For years enforcement was done by Monsanto, which created Roundup Ready and dominates the $13.3 billion biotech seed industry, though it’s moving on to a new line of seeds now that patents are expiring. That leaves DuPont to play the bad guy, enforcing alternative patents so cheaper “illegal beans” don’t get planted.

Click here to read the full article written by Jack Kaskey and entitled “DuPont Sends in Former Cops to Enforce Seed Patents”.

1 In 1996, the New York Times reported that: “Dennis C. Vacco, the Attorney General of New York, ordered the company to pull ads that said Roundup was “safer than table salt” and “practically nontoxic” to mammals, birds and fish. The company withdrew the spots, but also said that the phrase in question was permissible under E.P.A. guidelines.”[237]

Extract taken from wikipedia with original reference retained. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto#False_advertising

2 For further arguments against “Terminator Technology”, I recommend the following website: http://www.banterminator.org/content/view/full/233

3 From Freeman Dyson’s acceptance speech for the award of the Templeton Prize, delivered on May 16, 2000 at the Washington National Cathedral.

4 From an article entitled “Virgin births discovered in wild snakes” written by Jeremy Coles, published by BBC nature on September 12, 2012. http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/19555550

5 Also taken from Freeman Dyson’s acceptance speech for the award of the Templeton Prize.

from Monsanto with love… lessons on how to rule the world

The trouble with Bond villains is they are all lousy megalomaniacs. They hide out in volcanoes protected only by freakish goons and second-rate ninjas, and there fritter away all hopes of world domination on totally hare-brained schemes. Before attempting to irradiate all the gold in the vaults at Fort Knox or constructing the ultimate death ray or whatever it is, they ought to just take a few steps back and concentrate on what really matters. Just how might they maximise control with the least amount of effort or force? Well they might like to try a more viable and, as it happens, visible approach.

Indeed, they might very well look to some of our leading corporate players as role models. For instance, it has long seemed to me that Monsanto ought to have been cast as a Bond villain, except, of course, that Monsanto is far too villainous even for Bond to take on. But I have ofttimes imagined Monsanto, incarnate, back turned in a leather-upholstered chair, stroking his obligatory cat, and drooling over thoughts of the culmination of his latest and most fiendish scheme. Nothing less than a plan to take control of all of the food production on Earth:

“Have you ever heard of Gurt, Mr Bond? Genetic use restriction technology. Terminator technology. Suicide seeds. Artificial lifeforms that crave for their own extinction. We have broken the circle of life itself, Mr Bond. Want food…? Come to Papa. Beautiful, wouldn’t you agree, Mr Bond? Just a few regulations in our way. But that will change. When the people are ready, and they will be, we shall be ready too – with Terminator 2.¹ ‘I’ll be back’, Mr Bond!”

Bond remains impassive. Surreptitiously, he wriggles his hands a little to loosen the shackles, as Monsanto continues to prowl his penthouse suite HQ (since he hardly needs to hide out in a bunker).

“Do you remember Agent Orange, Mr Bond? Half a million deaths and another half a million birth defeats. Vast tracts of Vietnam are still contaminated thanks to Agent Orange. One of mine, Mr Bond, one of mine… Oh yes, Mr Bond, so much already laid waste and yet so much that remains to be contaminated. Inside the borders of that miserable little green speck you are so proud to call home, you can even find my own inimical calling-card. Thousands of tons of the most deadly toxins but just a taste of what will soon come.² For this game is now drawing to its inevitable conclusion, Mr Bond. Soon I will have the whole world dependent on my patented GMOs and the pesticides required to keep them healthy. Welcome to the vanguard of this gangrene revolution, Mr Bond. Just a pity you won’t be here to see the reign of darkness that is to come when we have complete control your beautiful planet.”

I could be mistaken, of course, casting Monsanto purely in the light of its wretched and deplorable environmental record, whilst judging longer term intent solely on the basis of its stealth monopolisation of worldwide seed production. Indeed, there are others who see Monsanto as a manufacturer of the means to banish famine, and of thus opening the way for a much fairer, less impoverished world. This is certainly what well-known mega-billionaire and nice guy philanthropist Bill Gates thinks, although he tends not to advertise the fact:

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which is sponsoring the Guardian’s Global development site is being heavily criticised in Africa and the US for getting into bed not just with notorious GM company Monsanto, but also with agribusiness commodity giant Cargill.

Trouble began when a US financial website published the foundation’s annual investment portfolio, which showed it had bought 500,000 Monsanto shares worth around $23m. This was a substantial increase in the last six months and while it is just small change for Bill and Melinda, it has been enough to let loose their fiercest critics.³

The article written by John Vidal, and entitled “Why is the Gates foundation investing in GM giant Monsanto”, was posted more than a year ago on the Guardian‘s “povertymatters” blog, which is itself sponsored by none other than the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation!

“The Foundation’s direct investment in Monsanto is problematic on two primary levels,” said Dr. Phil Bereano, University of Washington Professor Emeritus and recognized expert on genetic engineering. “First, Monsanto has a history of blatant disregard for the interests and well-being of small farmers around the world, as well as an appalling environmental track record. The strong connections to Monsanto cast serious doubt on the Foundation’s heavy funding of agricultural development in Africa and purported goal of alleviating poverty and hunger among small-scale farmers. Second, this investment represents an enormous conflict of interests.”⁴

From one of the reports cited in the same Guardian article, that was released in August 2010 by Seattle-based Agra Watch – a project of the Community Alliance for Global Justice.

Another report from the South Africa-based watchdog the African Centre for Biosafety uncovered how the Gates Foundation was also teaming up with Cargill in a $10m project to “develop the soya value chain” in Mozambique and elsewhere. Unfortunately the link from the article (copied above) is now dead, but not to worry here’s another report:

The Water Efficient Maize for Africa (WEMA) program was launched in 2008 with a $47 million grant from mega-rich philanthropists Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. The program is supposed to help farmers in several African countries increase their yields with drought- and heat-tolerant corn varieties, but a report released last month by the African Centre for Biosafety claims WEMA is threatening Africa’s food sovereignty and opening new markets for agribusiness giants like Monsanto.⁵

Vidal’s article continues:

The two incidents raise a host of questions for the foundation. Few people doubt that GM has a place in Africa, but is Gates being hopelessly naïve by backing two of the world’s most aggressive agri-giants? There is, after all, genuine concern at governmental and community level that the United State’s model of extensive hi-tech farming is inappropriate for most of Africa and should not be foist on the poorest farmers in the name of “feeding the world”.

The fact is that Cargill is a faceless agri-giant that controls most of the world’s food commodities and Monsanto has been blundering around poor Asian countries for a decade giving itself and the US a lousy name for corporate bullying. Does Gates know it is in danger of being caught up in their reputations, or does the foundation actually share their corporate vision of farming and intend to work with them more in future?

A year ago, the New York Times described the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as “the world’s principal private funder of agricultural research”⁶. Nothing so far as I’m aware has changed since, which, reading between the lines, means that it is difficult to draw any clear-cut distinction between the interests of the Gates Foundations and those of Big Agra.

Click here to read John Vidal’s full report.

Now, as I was in the middle of writing this, and wondering if I wasn’t coming down too hard on the saintly Bill Gates, I came across another piece of news [Feb 6^th] about Bill Gates ambitions for bringing change to the world. It was also written by the excellent John Vidal:

A small group of leading climate scientists, financially supported by billionaires including Bill Gates, are lobbying governments and international bodies to back experiments into manipulating the climate on a global scale to avoid catastrophic climate change.

The scientists, who advocate geoengineering methods such as spraying millions of tonnes of reflective particles of sulphur dioxide 30 miles above earth, argue that a “plan B” for climate change will be needed if the UN and politicians cannot agree to making the necessary cuts in greenhouse gases, and say the US government and others should pay for a major programme of international research.

Solar geoengineering techniques are highly controversial: while some climate scientists believe they may prove a quick and relatively cheap way to slow global warming, others fear that when conducted in the upper atmosphere, they could irrevocably alter rainfall patterns and interfere with the earth’s climate.⁷

Click here to read John Vidal’s latest report on Bill Gates’ environmental lobbying.

Geoengineering. Such a grand sounding name for a subject. Engineering, however, is generally applied to very, very well understood systems – usually ones that we ourselves designed in fact. And it is a subject that always builds safety tolerances into its solutions. What weight does that beam need to withstand? Okay, let’s double it just in case. Why? Because in the real world of engineering, unlike the idealised worlds of pure science, you are expected to expect the unexpected.

So what of geoengineering, which is the preferred shorthand for schemes designed for ‘re-engineering the world’s climate’. Well firstly, the climate system is extremely complex. It involves the movement of two different fluids, air and water, around convoluted islands and basins, and the exchange of energy and material between them. Before ‘re-engineering’ it then, we need first to fully understand the movement of those fluids and at all levels: up to the high altitude jet streams and down to the deep ocean currents. We also need to understand how the composition of those fluids varies, the concentrations of salt in the ocean and of the gases (and, most importantly, of water vapour) in the atmosphere, not to mention the distribution and structures of clouds and even the reflectivity of the Earth’s surface (or its albedo).

Whilst all of this is happening on Earth, the energy available to drive these interconnected feedback systems arrives only from the Sun. So we must know how the output of the Sun varies, but not only in terms of radiative output (or ‘sunlight’), which is helpfully constant (at least over the short term) but in other ways that might influence the Earth’s climate. We need to understand how a constant stream of plasma called the solar wind interacts with the upper atmosphere, and what effects changes there might have at lower altitudes.⁸ To understand long term variations (such as ice ages), we also need to precisely factor all effects due to changes in the Earth’s position relative to the Sun. Steady changes in the orientation of the Earth’s orbit and spin axis, and more subtle changes in the shape of our orbit around the Sun⁹.

‘Extremely complex’ simply doesn’t do justice to the enormity of the task involved in fully understanding our climate systems, especially when we remind ourselves that beyond all the physics and chemistry, there is also biology to take into account. Life interacts with the atmosphere and the oceans, no less than sunlight and gravity. Hardly surprisingly, we are only now beginning to understand how all the cogs turn together. Sure there are models of climate behaviour, but these models simply ignore or approximate many of the influences on our weather and ocean systems. They go so far, but should very definitely not be mistaken as the sorts of ‘high fidelity’ models that exist, say, to test the performance of bridges or to predict the motion of the planets in our Solar System.

So Geoengineering is about intervening with something that is far from fully understood, yet at the same time very, very precious, and quite probably fragile (certainly from the point of view of securing continued human habitation). On top of that, it isn’t properly engineering at all, and ought to really to be called ‘geoexperimenting’: an experiment that some experts say “could irrevocably alter rainfall patterns and interfere with the earth’s climate.” Irrevocably being a very, very long time.

If you were worried about the switch on of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, then you really shouldn’t have been, because the fuss about black holes and so forth was really just a load of media hype – quite possibly cooked up by some of the scientists who knew better, of course, but perhaps thought it worthwhile to play the media circus for greater publicity. And for a few weeks, the media couldn’t get enough of the LHC. Everyone was talking about hadrons. Geoengineering, on the other hand, which, if ever implemented (and judging by the levels of investment, looks set to be coming), must be considered a genuine threat to our continuing existence on Earth, yet rarely gets a mention.

In June 2010, Democracy Now! hosted an interesting debate between Indian environmentalist and scientist, Vandana Shiva, and geopolitical analyst and columnist, Gwynne Dyer. Here are some of the carefully considered reasons Vandana Shiva gave for rejecting geoengineering solutions:

It’s an engineering paradigm that created the fossil fuel age, that gave us climate change. And Einstein warned us and said you can’t solve problems with the same mindset that created them. Geoengineering is trying to solve the problems with the same old mindset of controlling nature. And the phrase that was used, of cheating — let’s cheat — you can’t cheat nature. That’s something people should recognize by now. There is no cheating possible. Eventually, the laws of Gaia determine the final outcome. […]

I work on ecological agriculture. We need that sunlight for photosynthesis. The geoengineers don’t realize, sunshine is not a curse on the planet. The sun is not the problem. The problem is the mess of pollution we are creating. So, again, we can’t cheat.

Well, the first thing is, there’s never enough time, but you have to find the solutions. And to use the excuse of immediacy and urgency to take the wrong action is not a solution. In terms of time, we do organic farming, and again, in my book Soil Not Oil, we’ve shown that a localized ecological biodiverse system of farming could solve 40 percent of the climate problem, because 40 percent emissions are coming from food miles, nitrogen oxide emissions, cutting down the Amazon forest, all linked to a globalized industrialized food system. Tomorrow we can do that. In three years’ time, all of the world’s farming could be ecological, absorbing the carbon dioxide and putting fertility back in the soil. It’s not a fifty-year experiment. It’s an assured, guaranteed path that has been shown to work.

Click here to watch the video and read the full transcript on the Democracy Now! website.

So just why would Bill Gates choose to blemish his reputation by getting so deeply involved in an enterprise as controversial as geoengineering? To save the planet from climate change? So he says, although it seems that he does have another incentive too – I wonder if you can guess:

As well as Gates, other wealthy individuals including Sir Richard Branson, tar sands magnate Murray Edwards and the co-founder of Skype, Niklas Zennström, have funded a series of official reports into future use of the technology. Branson, who has frequently called for geoengineering to combat climate change, helped fund the Royal Society’s inquiry into solar radiation management last year through his Carbon War Room charity. It is not known how much he contributed.

Professors David Keith, of Harvard University, and Ken Caldeira of Stanford, are the world’s two leading advocates of major research into geoengineering the upper atmosphere to provide earth with a reflective shield. They have so far received over $4.6m from Gates to run the Fund for Innovative Climate and Energy Research (Ficer). Nearly half Ficer’s money, which comes directly from Gates’s personal funds, has so far been used for their own research, but the rest is disbursed by them to fund the work of other advocates of large-scale interventions.

According to statements of financial interests, Keith receives an undisclosed sum from Bill Gates each year, and is the president and majority owner of the geoengineering company Carbon Engineering, in which both Gates and Edwards have major stakes – believed to be together worth over $10m.

Another Edwards company, Canadian Natural Resources, has plans to spend $25bn to turn the bitumen-bearing sand found in northern Alberta into barrels of crude oil. Caldeira says he receives $375,000 a year from Gates, holds a carbon capture patent and works for Intellectual Ventures, a private geoegineering research company part-owned by Gates and run by Nathan Myhrvold, former head of technology at Microsoft.

Click here for John Vidal’s full article (which reads like an almanack of conflicts of interest).

Here in Yorkshire, there is a saying that “where there’s muck there’s money”, and when it comes to geoengineering there is muck aplenty. Stuff like sulphur dioxide that we’ve been scrubbing from our industrial chimneys for many years, in efforts to prevent acid rain and to clean up the air quality of our cities. But here the idea is to spray sulphur dioxide and other muck directly into the high atmosphere in order to ‘provide earth with a reflective shield’.¹⁰ In other words, to block out the sun by increasing pollution, which is sufficiently hare-brained to have been dreamt up by Blofeld.

All of which now causes me to wonder who is the more dangerous: the more or less openly diabolical Monsanto or such ‘eco-friendly’ meddlers as Gates, Buffett and Branson to name but a few. Whatever the case, the lesson for those intent on world domination remains the same. And aspiring Bond villains will please take note – Forget about your mountain hideouts and armies of incompetents, what you really need is good publicity, and best of all, the backing of a respectable charitable foundation. Just knock it off with all of that “no, I expect you to die Mr Bond”, and try gently rattling a tin instead. “Welcome Mr Bond,” you might say, politely adding “have you ever considered making a small donation to save the planet?”

1 “The vast majority of the world’s 500m farmers still collect their best seeds each year and replant them. Preventing a process followed since farming began 10,000 years ago has been seen as endangering their way of life.

The problem for Monsanto and other companies is that in developing countries terminator has become synonymous with GM and a symbol of the increasing control of world agriculture by big foreign corporations.

In Monsanto’s version, seeds are soaked in the antibiotic tetracycline, which sets in motion a genetic chain reaction that ultimately instructs the plant to kill its own seeds.

Monsanto’s chief executive, Robert Shapiro, in a letter to the Rockefeller Foundation in New York which announced the terminator’s development, said the company intended to continue research into sophisticated “trait technologies”.

These have been dubbed “terminator 2”, or “gene-switchers”, and would allow a company to develop crops that grow only if sprayed with a regimen of chemicals that include its herbicides or insecticides.”

From an article entitled “World braced for terminator 2”, written by John Vidal, published in the Guardian on October 6, 1999. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/1999/oct/06/gm.food2

2 “Previously unseen Environment Agency documents from 2005 show that almost 30 years after being filled, Brofiscin [a quarry in South Wales where Monsanto dumped waste from its chemical works in Newport and elsewhere] is one of the most contaminated places in Britain. According to engineering company WS Atkins, in a report prepared for the agency and the local authority in 2005 but never made public, the site contains at least 67 toxic chemicals. Seven PCBs have been identified, along with vinyl chlorides and naphthalene.”

From an article entitled “The wasteland: how years of secret chemical dumping left a toxic legacy – Monsanto helped to create one of the most contaminated sites in Britain”, written by John Vidal, published in the Guardian on February 12, 2007. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/feb/12/uknews.pollution1

3 From an article entitled “Why is the Gates foundation investing in GM giant Monsanto? – The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s investments in Monsanto and Cargill have come under heavy criticism. Is it time for the foundation to come clean on its visions for argiculture in developing countries?” written by John Vidal, published by the Guardian on September 29, 2010. http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2010/sep/29/gates-foundation-gm-monsanto

4 From a report by the Community Alliance for Global Justice, posted on August 25, 2010. http://www.seattleglobaljustice.org/2010/08/for-immediate-release-gates-foundation-invests-in-monsanto/

5 From an article entitled “Monsanto and Gates Foundation Push GE Crops on Africa”, written by Mike Ludwig, published by Truthout on July 12, 2011. http://www.truth-out.org/second-green-revolutionaries-gates-foundation-and-monsanto-push-ge-crops-africa/1310411034

6 According to an article entitled “The Struggle for Daily Bread”, written by David Rieff, published by the New York Times on October 14, 2011. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/15/opinion/15iht-edrieff15.html

7 From an article entitled “Bill Gates backs climate scientists lobbying for large-scale geoengineering: Other wealthy individuals have also funded a series of reports into the future use of technologies to geoengineer the climate”, written by John Vidal, published in the Guardian on February 6, 2012. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/feb/06/bill-gates-climate-scientists-geoengineering

8 Over the short term of a few decades, the output of solar radiation is nearly constant (varying by up to about 0.1%), but the Sun also produces a continuous stream of charged particles known as the solar wind, which is far from constant, varying considerably depending on solar activity. Although the stream is deflected by the Earth’s magnetic field, some of the particles do nevertheless interact with the Earth’s upper atmosphere, producing the wonderful aurora whilst also heating the ionosphere. In addition to this, the solar wind helps to reduce the influx of cosmic rays. Does any of this affect the climate at lower levels in the Earth’s atmosphere? The answer is that we simply don’t know precisely how processes in the upper atmosphere affect the climate below. There are theories that cosmic rays are important for cloud formation, whilst it could also be the case that changes in the ionosphere can shift the position of the high altitude jet streams. In both cases, the effects on the climate would be very significant.

9 To read more about the theory of how changes in the Earth’s movement and orientation affect climate see the wikipedia entry on Milankovitch cycles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles.

10 Sulphur dioxide is noxious enough, but “potential types of particles for injection include sulfur dioxide, aluminum oxide dust or even designer self-levitating aerosols [which are one of David Keith’s ideas]…”. These would then need to be ‘replenished’ every year or two years. Replenished because it will all slowly but surely fall back to Earth. In this case of ‘aluminium oxide dust’ and the ‘designer aerosols’ this means clouds of nanoparticles that would then fall out over land and sea, building up in concentration in our rivers, our soil and our homes. Could these it toxic? Well, there is still much debate about the toxicity of aluminium oxide, but certainly reasons for concern, and especially given evidence of its adverse effects on the germination of seeds and growth of plants – something that Monsanto could no doubt help out with later.

Read more of these proposals in “Unilateral Geoengineering: Non-technical Briefing Notes for a Workshop at the Council on Foreign Relations”, published April 15, 2008. (Quote taken from p.4) https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:b1EPc92sD8UJ:www.cfr.org/content/thinktank/GeoEng_041209.pdf+geoengineering+aluminium+oxide&hl=en&gl=uk&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESih0YswcESwswvLvNdo4BdK-lBPke3qvH6bQ-N8ZxALTs8zbJnXtDkhkhUmE7k6QjjjR5F8ORJ8DHWPhCmm4DTMkdCNiBsz3DGx0ZsBMII7LssnM0bzX2RzLhZyehFzZWRfsA4X&sig=AHIEtbQvJBXXg09zivyqBcyDS52PneIFVw