Live Cobblers

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Live Earth today. Snore. Cataloguing all the things I hate about the idea would take up the entire bandwidth of the blogger.com server, so I'll keep it down to the two main ones:

1. The name. Firstly it smacks of a kind of brand-synergy with Live Aid/8 which, frankly, I find very distasteful when associated with motives so far away from commercialism as saving the environment and fighting poverty (Naomi Klein was right: non-branded space is becoming rarer and rarer - it now even extends to charity events). But secondly, and more importantly, it goes hand in hand with the idiotic and hugely misleading idea that our duty as "citizens of the global village" (or whatever we're supposed to be now) is to Save Planet Earth!

"We are killing our planet!" the message seems to be. "Its life is in our hands! We must help the earth to live! Save it! Live Earth!"

Bollocks. The earth will be alive long after we are dead and gone, and life here has endured and abided a heck of a lot worse than us in its existence. The Cambrian Extinction, the end of the dinosaurs, countless ice ages, the supervolcano under Yellowstone Park...they relegate our efforts to the equivalent of a flea-bite. The very idea that we human beings might be anything like a threat to the Life of Planet Earth is unspeakable hubris of the very kind which the Live Earth concerts are presumably exhorting us to abandon. In fact, while we pose a danger to certain species of large animals and might be in a position to affect the planet's climate a little, we are basically here on the sufferance of insects and bacteria, who will be around long after we have faded into a distant memory.

Rather than Live Earth, I think a better name for the concert would be Live Us, because that is really what we should really be concerned about - that we don't affect our own environment so much that it becomes impossible for us to survive in it.

2. The self-righteousness. My toes are curling even thinking about the kind of sanctimonious guilt-tripping and moralising which viewers will be forced to endure - and endure, I might add, from the likes of Madonna, the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Black Eyed Peas and Genesis. Annoying, fake, superficial solidarity in the name of "making a difference" will be the order of the day, along with a cartload of po-faced speechifying about how terrible we human beings are and how we all need to think seriously about conserving energy and changing our lifestyles (not Madonna's lifestyle, you understand: our lifestyles).

The worst thing is, it is all just same old, same old: Western culture has always felt the need for missionary zeal, stretching from the Crusades to colonialism to the White Man's Burden, and nowadays the messages are slightly different - fighting poverty, spreading democracy and human rights, and saving the environment - but the roots are the same: the desire to make ourselves seem superior. Meanwhile the rest of the world quietly gets on with things - China has done more to fight climate change than any Western country (and done so without silly guilt-avoidance techniques like carbon off-setting), but we rarely hear about it because it doesn't fit in with our idea of preaching The Message to the global-warming heathens (as exemplified by the fact that Live Earth concerts are even going to go on places like Beijing and Tokyo).

I really wish the organisers and participants would just fuck off and do something useful. But putting on this event will make them feel good about themselves and the fact that they're "making a difference", and that's all that really matters.

Against Silliness

I've realised recently that the majority of my opinions about current events are influenced to a large degree by the principle that, the more hysterical and overinflated the claims of one 'side' of a given argument are, the less likely I am to agree with them - no matter what their argument is.

The best example of this is the Israel-Palestine debate. Now, I'm reasonably aware that both parties to that struggle have legitemate grievances and concerns, and that without compromise on either side there can be no solution to the conflict. But the hyperbolic accusations of the pro-Palestinian cause - that Israel is based on a system of apartheid; that Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians; that Israel's government is like the Nazi party; and that "Israel is the worst human rights violator in the world", have served in the past year or so to considerably sway my opinion against the Palestinian cause and toward Israel, whose supporters don't resort to such (frankly) silliness, and who comport themselves in a generally reasonable and responsible way - that is, without bandying about wild, patently untrue accusations.

Likewise, while my politics could be defined as broadly centrist and I find myself therefore disliking the policies of President Bush, I'm so sick of hearing talentless comedians making jokes about how stupid he is on the BBC that I've come to dislike his detractors even more. Personal attacks, especially obviously false ones - Bush might be inarticulate, but he's no fool - make me immediately hostile towards those using them; because if that's what you have to resort to, it's more than likely an admission that you don't have much else to say. "Bush is so stupid! Bwahahaha!" Yes, but what are your ideas about how to make the world a better place, again? More importantly, because you think he's stupid, does that mean you think that the millions of people who voted for him are stupid too? If so, what are the implications for your view of the democratic process?

And there's global warming too. I would describe myself as an environmentalist, and I regularly make contributions to Greenpeace. I believe that the most important task facing mankind today is how we can generate wealth in the developing world without impacting negatively on the environment, and how we can create sustainable fishing and forestry industries. But I'm tired of hearing about how global warming will spell the end for polar bears (who are highly adaptable, and lived in Greenland when the temperature there was considerably warmer than it is today), how it will destroy fish stocks (when the truth is much more complicated), and how it is responsible for the disappearance of British songbirds (when all reliable reports indicate that increased temperatures have led to greater berry growth in woodland, tempting songbirds away from gardens and actually leading to a large, sustained increase in their numbers) - especially when those animals and environments are under greater threat from direct human interference in the form of hunting, overuse, or habitat destruction. Global warming might be a legitemate fear and it might well require of us drastic measures to deal with it, but its cause is not served, as far as I'm concerned, by falsehoods and bombast, which can only damage the veracity of genuine calls for greater environmental protection.

Of course, I usually make my mind up on such issues based on the balance of probabilities - even though I dislike Bush's detractors, I also usually disagree with his policies; even though I detest the global warming bandwagon, I recognise that it is scientific reality and that it has to be tackled; even though I loathe the pro-Palestinian propaganda machine, the real reason I support Israel is because I've examined the facts. But I really, really wish that people would be sensible about these matters, without feeling they have to resort to shrill, sanctimonious blather. Hurled accusations are the last resort of the intellectually impoverished, and contribute nothing to constructive debate.

Lyrebirds and Suchlike

In the woods of Southern Australia there lives an animal called the Lyrebird, a large songbird with an extraordinary ability to mimic sounds. It generally does this in order to attract mates, which it does by putting on a show on a little staging platform in the forest, dancing around and imitating the calls of all the other birds around it. (Why the female should find this ability attractive is a mystery; it is probably to do with the principle of positive feedback loops in sexual selection, whereby a slight, random female preference for an aspect of male morphology grows exponentially as the genes for the preference and the morphology become linked; the behaviour becomes steadily more attractive because it is attrative.)

In recent times, though, the bird has taken to imitating not only other bird calls, but also sounds produced by humans - such as camera clicks, chainsaws, car alarms, car engines and rifle shots. It does this with uncanny accuracy, intertwining such sounds seamlessly into its song.

The bird's ability is, I think, by turns charming and horrifying, and in its own way a strange commentary on the modern world, in which we could say that the "sounds of the forest" as we traditionally understand them - bird song, the wind rustling through leaves, the movement of small animals in leaf litter - are only as much a part of life in the average forest as are the noises of chainsaws, rifleshots and car alarms; human development and overt influence now permeates the world to a degree which must have been inconcievable even a century ago. I've never subscribed to the view that indigenous peoples left their environments basically untouched (even the most 'primitive' societies manipulated forest fire and seed dispersal to their own advantage) but even so, it cannot be argued that our time has brought anything less than an astonishing level of human presence and human technology throughout the world.

It makes me wonder about global warming. I've often thought that the global warming bandwagon serves to distract people from other, perhaps more pressing, environmental concerns, and that it's important to note that, while climate change may threaten certain ecologies in the long term, in the short term far more pressure is being placed on the natural world by basic, old fashioned human expansionism - and we shouldn't let ourselves off the hook in that regard by focusing all of our energies on the bluff and bluster of the lobbying surrounding global warming.