The Filtnib's Progress

On Monday I treated myself to a ticket to see the new release of Blade Runner: The Final Cut at the Rio. I was reminded of how fun it is to go to the cinema alone, something I used to do a lot whilst at Cambridge, but got out of the habit once in London sheerly because of the expense of cinema tickets. However as the Rio does £5 student tickets on Mondays, maybe I'll get back into the habit. The great thing about solitary cinema is you don't have to worry about what the other person thinks; whether they're enjoying it as much (or as little) as you are; whether you made an error in choosing the film. You can just sit selfishly back and experience the film for what it is, distractionless.

At Monday's screening, just being in the cinema felt special. Once the trailers had finished, as the curtains trailed open to a black screen and the title credits appeared, a collective thrill ran through the audience like quicksilver. I think it's because we were all there as fans of the original film. We knew something good was coming. The theatre was almost full, mainly with young people in their twenties and thirties; gangs of sci-fi geeks, cult film buffs, the slightly intimidating dalstonite fashiontellectuals, and the odd person who might have even seen the original in a cinema rather than on their parent’s VCR.

The film’s Vangelis-scored soundtrack is incredible. Sitting in the blackness and feeling the waves of plangent chords wash over you is shiver-inspiring; like getting into a miner’s lift, watching the mesh shutters close and feeling yourself descend into the dark middle of the earth - you feel even before Blade Runner begins that this film is going to take you places, show you things that are new and dark and important.

It is stylish like too few movies dare to be today. Of course it takes a gutsy director with a capacious imagination to make something this coherent in vision. You also need a razor-sharp narrative focus, something that Ridley Scott managed to carve from the ingenious but multi-threaded novel that the film is based on: “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” by Philip K. Dick, written in 1968. In that, we engage with a number of characters, each with their own claims on our affection; in Blade Runner there is really only room for one protagonist and that is Harrison Ford’s morose yet likeable Rick Deckard.

And in a way, that’s cleaner, clearer. Like one of my journalism tutors says: “Once you’re on the M1, stay on the M1” - so, to keep your audience's attention, don’t go off on any slip-roads, just cleave to one story. Scott manages that perfectly: there’s no crossing of wires here, no distracting slip-roads into the religion or drugs themes that add breadth but also complicate the novel. Occasionally themes are gestured at that would have been better left out - when Ford's Deckard notes that the owl in the Tyrell Corporation offices is a fake, it's an observation loaded with meaning in the novel, yet somehow empty in the film, where the idea that all animals are now virtually extinct is never stated or explored.

Where the film exceeds the book is - perhaps predictably - in its visual evoking of a dystopian future. The story is set in ‘L.A., 2019’, but it’s a gloriously Chinesified L.A. with street stalls selling noodles, signs in Mandarin and kimonos everywhere; clearly the filmmakers foresaw China's global dominance even in 1982.

The other overriding influence is film noir: Rick Deckard is the future's Philip Marlowe, a hard-drinking, raincoat-wearing gumshoe except he carries a gun that can blast robots through glass, rather than the 9mm luger pistol preferred by Marlowe, and he travels around in jet-propelled flying cars. Aside from that, Deckard fits perfectly into the film noir tradition, traversing rain-slicked streets with collar up, falling for femme fatales and sustaining bruises to body and ego in the course of his work. His job is to 'retire' the Nexus 6 replicants - androids - that have escaped their slavery 'off-world' and are hiding somewhere in this always-night, neon-lit L.A.

These replicants are at once terrifying and pitiful; living in constant fear for their lives, capable of developing emotional connections with each other and more than conscious of the rare preciousness of life, yet also merciless and hideously violent. Rutger Hauer's performance is so compelling as to almost outshine Ford, though in fact they complement each other perfectly - Hauer intense, aggressive, everything externalized, speaking in near-poetry; Ford all wordless longing and internal conflict.

The only jarring moment in the film is the scene where Deckard seduces Rachel, a replicant who has been implanted with false memories to make her believe she is human. Why does their romance begin with what looks very much like rape? There must be some carefully thought out logic to it but despite searching online discussion boards I haven't yet found a legible answer.

Despite that, the film is still a masterpiece and has informed many movies since; its influence can be traced in Minority Report, the Terminator films, 12 Monkeys and Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins to name but a few. Catch it in the cinema while you can.

Last weekend I escaped to the Netherlands for a flying visit to see my parents. The utter scene-shift, from a rainswept London full of tiredness and adulthood to the sparkling cold sunlight that greeted me on Saturday morning in the Hague, with the breakfast table already laid and my parents reading the paper and making toast when I came downstairs in my dressing-gown, felt wholesome and good and cherishing, like having a tea-cosy pressed around me. To my admittedly geektastic excitement, I travelled via Eurostar, from the renovated St. Pancras station. The clean, shiny-newness of everything, from the lanterns, redbrick arches and glass roof to the laptop portals (with UK and European plug sockets) makes you feel like train travel is something exciting, even (whisper it) luxurious.










































The station before the renovation, which took 10 years.












After.


































For comparison's sake, I also took some snaps of Brussels Midi. Tintin; brilliant idea for decor. Also the mischievous, massive advertisement for the new fast Eurostar service to London, which shows Blair, Thatcher and Major all holding EU balloons which they are about to pop.

I'd like to recommend a blog to you:

http://songkick.blogspot.com

It's a bit like having your coolest music expert friend on call, any time of the day or night for recommendations. Very nicely written and wow, you get to listen to the recommended tracks for FREE, easy peasy, no annoying downloads or watching ads or getting the track cut in half just as you were getting into it.
So go! Read, listen, be merry.

In the last six weeks, as part of our journalism course, we've visited a coroner's court twice. For a while beforehand, I'd been worrying that the experience would inevitably induce morbid thoughts. In fact, I was surprised by what a strange and unexpectedly graceful beast the coroner's court is. The particular court that we visited, St Pancras', is tucked a few streets behind the shiny new Eurostar station, and was built in 1886. With its red brick gables, buttresses and arched windows, sitting placidly in a wide, tree-canopied park that doubles as a Victorian cemetery, the court resembles an odd kind of gingerbread house; or a setting for a chapter of Dickens' great unfinished gothic novel, Edwin Drood.

I guess in a way witnessing an inquest is sure to cast shadows, and the cases that we observed spoke of the drip-drip despair of individuals whose lives were a constant struggle against unjust odds and the plundering internal war of mental illness. Both deaths were basically suicides, although the coroner recorded an open verdict for the first because of complicating factors that I won't go into here. It would have been strange not to feel an empathetic sense of loss when listening to the accounts of these people's lives, read respectfully by the officer of the court to a mostly empty room. It made me think of King Lear when he glimpses the bedraggled Edgar in the storm and says: "Is man no more than this?... Thou art the thing itself: unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art".

There is something so painful about the smallness of the process that greeted the deaths; the quietness of these people's exits from the world. Yet at the same time, I felt a kind of warmth sitting in the court and hearing the coroner's careful, unrushed questions as he tried to clarify the deceased's last days, hours, minutes; tried to sift through the emotional accounts of witnesses and carers; tried to restore some dignity and truth to a scene long concluded. A coroner is either a trained lawyer, a trained doctor, or, as in the case at St. Pancras, both. He or she is surrounded by a team of people for whom dealing with the narratives of death is a career. Yet there is something very sensitive and gentle about the process of the coroner's court; all the staff seemed intent upon keeping the atmosphere calm, ordered and above all, respectful. Because, although the coroner is an instrument of the law; a whirring cog in the machinery of justice and record-keeping, he is never there to find a guilty party. His or her role is strictly limited to establishing the facts behind any death that is a) violent or unnatural or b) sudden. In this way the word 'court' itself is misleading, with its associations of a prosecution, the apportioning of blame or the allotting of punishment.


I've often thought the truly brave way to live would be to do so with the waking knowledge of one's own mortality - although not to the extent that you live in constant existential terror, because that would mean you got nothing whatsoever done and simply existed in constant paralysis, like the proverbial rabbit in the headlights - but there's certainly nothing like coming up close to death for putting the daily grind into perspective. I do wonder how the coroner lives his life and whether he experiences it differently because of his daily encounter with death. Also, I quite like the idea of an inquest as a very British way of trying to cope with the random earth-shattering chaos-inducing anarchy of death. In some cultures people weep and wail in the streets, beat their chests, paint ash on their foreheads; here we get some people together to try to ascribe some order to the event, to encircle it with legal language, methodical procedure. And thus, one feels, we go some way towards imposing propriety, structure, tidiness. We wrestle back a little bit of control over our own fates.

Though don't let me give the wrong impression: I don't think that kind of spiritual succour was ever the official function of the coroner's court. The word coroner comes from the Latin for 'crown'; in 1194, it was decreed that three knights and a clerk "attend" every death - presumably this was optimistic rather than an actual policy, unless medieval knights had a hotline to the grim reaper himself - but anyway, their name was "custos placitorum coronae" - "Keepers of the Pleas of the Crown", and their job was to make sure that the correct portion of the deceased's assets were kept for the Crown. So basically, they were a kind of tax collector. I prefer their role today.

On Saturday, I had the pleasure of a unique culinary experience. So good was it, that I would wager it won't stay unique for long, as good ideas in restaurant-land spread fast. But for one day, walking into Wahaca in Chandos Place, I felt a bit like Lucy in the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - the first lucky child to stumble across Narnia.
Comparing myself to Lucy does a gross injustice to my guide and general inspiration in all things eatable, Dizzy Ostrom, without whom I would have remained entirely ignorant of Wahaca, not to mention its location, Chandos Place, which quietly occupies a nondescript middle-ground somewhere between Covent Garden and Charing Cross. Dizzy had heard the buzz about Wahaca and mobilized us into a small expeditionary force to test its virtues. Just as well she did. For one thing, Mexican food has never tickled my tastebuds particularly, so in normal circumstances I wouldn't have gone out of my way to try this place. And secondly, as Wahaca is down a long flight of stairs, there was no chance I would have wandered past and glimpsed its supercool decor or been tempted by the lush foodstuffs being rushed out of its kitchens.
Instead, I walked in blind, zero expectations and only a rumbling tummy to challenge my impartiality.
Wahaca's website - www.wahaca.co.uk - talks a lot about 'street food'. Don't let the idea of half-cooked bacteria-fermenting dishes simmering in a bin lid on some dirty street put you off. This food is street as in really, really cool. I had the 'Sonora Salad', which involved sliced avocado, grilled chicken, cos lettuce and green rice in a bowl made of a giant tortilla.













(Dizzy in Wahaca)




My fellow expeditionaries Dizzy, Clare and Greg chose a selection of dishes from the street food menu, including chorizo quesillada, flaked mackerel tostada, pork pibil taco and sweetcorn on the cob with chilli, lime and creme fraiche. Yum-my. We also had the mandatory tortilla with homemade guacamole to start, and were each gifted with a complimentary tequila and virgin mary by our waiter, due to the fact that Friday had been the Day of the Dead and therefore (initially confusingly) a celebratory time. In keeping with the good spirits of the place, if it hadn't been lunchtime, I would have certainly been tempted to sample the restaurant's delicious-looking mojito. But by holding back on Saturday, at least we have a pressing excuse to return a.s.a.p. for an evening outing.













Me, looking quite besotted with my salad in a giant-tortilla; greg enjoying the virgin mary.

In the last fortnight, thousands of Buddhist monks in Burma have led peaceful demonstrations against the presiding military junta. The Myanmar authorities admit that thirteen people were killed during the subsequent crackdown, but Amnesty estimates the true number to be far higher, and ABC News suggested it would be in the hundreds.

Here are some photos from today's march through central London, organized by Amnesty to demonstrate solidarity with the Burmese people. We tied pieces of red cloth around our heads and lots of people had made placards and banners. We marched from outside the Tate Britain in Pimlico to Trafalgar Square.







At the same time as we were marching in London, demonstrations were also due to happen in Mongolia, Malaysia, Thailand, Austria, Belgium, France, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the US. That's the back of Marie-Aimee's bescarfed blonde head at the middle of the photo... And, less prettily, the houses of Parliament and Big Ben.




















































If you'd like to take some action, visit: http://www.amnesty.org.uk/actions_details.asp?ActionID=331

Or join the facebook group, which at time of writing, already has an astounding 355,415 members:
http://cambridge.facebook.com/group.php?gid=24957770200

A lighter post. Two things that have made me happy in the last few weeks. First: the band Midlake and their incredible album 'The Trials of Van Occupanther'. I only heard about the group when an American friend, Staton, added a video of their song Roscoe to his facebook profile. Such melodic songwriting and beautifully wrought harmonies. And when I started listening to their other songs, it was amazing because whereas usually you only really like one or two songs on an album, every single track I heard was immediately lovable. Thus I took the unprecedented step of paying to download the whole album from iTunes after Play.com told me I'd have to wait 5 weeks for them to get one in stock. It's been totally worth it so here's the video of one particularly lovely song.

In the office we work with our backs to televisions; typing, flicking through webpages, picking up phones. Typing. Behind our backs, pictures flash and headlines shout, unbeknownst, until someone turns around to reach for a book or a cardigan. Then, one day, you hear an audible intake of breath, or, if it's bad enough to warrant sharing, an utterance, an 'Oh my god', a low, awe-laden 'wow'.

Surely never a mystical instinct or an overwhelming sudden awareness of distant human suffering forces us to turn to 24-hour news and catch a breaking feed, the ticker tape of doom so unequal to its task, so mocking of our attempts to track tragedy, all over the world, now, as it happens now, and now.

Nevertheless, someone will glimpse capital letters on a red banner at the bottom of the screen, and sooner or later we will feel the need to stand around one television, for it is better to digest traginews en masse, to swear under our breaths but just loud enough to make ourselves heard, to feel the visceral thrill of knowing some kind of history is being made, and to believe, inanely, that by watching a screen, we are somehow present.

When the news broke that a number of university students had been shot by a gunman in Virginia, U.S.A, we were working on other stories. That week's international magazine cover was to have been some timely comment on European politicians; I had been asked to research a gently worshipful piece about the Queen. All were pushed to one side by the enormity of the Virginia story; a story that seemed to call to editors by name, demanding grand, funereal gestures; a new, black cover, numerous interactive build-out features online, a sombre, horrified, aghast tone.

There had been a tragedy. Terrible loss on a large scale and in horrific circumstances. Panic and terror and pain, all too easily imaginable. And yet.

As the self-reflexive media would eventually point out in the days to follow, 33 dead would have been a moderate to good day in Iraq. iraqbodycount.org reports 34 civilian dead on the 7th of April, 56 dead on the 6th of April. On the 18th April, 140 "shoppers, vendors in market and construction workers, commuters" were killed in Sadriya market, Baghdad. 4 times as many as had died that day in Virginia Tech.

And every single day, for weeks, months, years, Iraqi innocents are dying. As Polly Toynbee shouted through the vacuum, "THEY BELONG TO US!" (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2061826,00.html), for "This is our war, our fault, our bloodshed for aiding America's reckless and incompetent invasion and for failing to stop civil war."

So why is it that a random killing spree in a university town in the States exercises our imagination more than the surplus of death served up daily elsewhere?

I was at a loss to understand why Virginia Tech upset me more viscerally than Iraq. I felt nauseous for the rest of the day after watching the BBC breaking news footage of the American university massacre; the wide-eyed, numbed survivors with arms interlinked, the photos of the killer. Why was that more upsetting to me than seeing the bombed shards of buildings in Baghdad, innumerable photos of blood-spattered children or the same dazed look of terror in Iraqi victims as had shone from the eyes of the American students?... Was it simply, shamefully, because the Virginia Tech students were "white"? I believe that a degree of unconscious racism possibly, inexcusably, played some part in my empathy weightings, just as it explains in some terrible way the horrifically protracted global inaction over genocide in Darfur. But that wasn't just it. It's a kind of racism, maybe a step-brother or a cousin. Both come from the same ancestors: prejudice, fear and a lack of imagination. But I'd argue this had more to do with landscape than it had to do with skin colour.

It was only when I thought about the slugs that I got it.

So. The slugs.

The house we rent is a characterful four floor Victorian terrace house, 5 bedrooms and a sweet overgrown garden. It's charming in a rickety, under-maintained but homely way and I love it. But recently the contented safety I felt within its four walls was disturbed. We discovered a criss cross of shiny slug trails one morning, decorating the carpet of our living room. The glittery remnants of a slug disco. Later, a dinner guest picked up her discarded handbag from the floor to find one of the small creatures had taken up residence. Yuck.

Slugs in themselves are not particularly pleasant of course but the disquiet and unease I felt was entirely disproportionate to their presence. I think the reason was: by crossing from their proper place - the dark, unlooked-for damp of a plant pot somewhere down the garden path - and somehow entering the manmade enclosure of OUR HOUSE, the slugs had monumentally broken the sequence and structure of things; the separation of outside and inside; garden and house; grimy, slippery animality trespassing on all our attempts at cleanliness and control. Thus they signalled chaos, loss of control, the futility of human efforts.

A familiar trope in good horror movies is the way the worst terrors of all are initially prefigured by small disruptions in the natural order. At the beginning of Hitchcock's "The Birds", the heroine is pecked on the head by a gull. It's only a peck but as she takes her hand away from her head, there is blood. So in the same way, the bizarre and unlooked-for entrance of slugs into our carpeted living-room signalled nothing less than the possibility of apocalypse.

What's this got to do with Virginia Tech and Iraq?

Here's the thing: I wonder if Virginia's tragedy was somehow more emotive for me, because it was the perfect example of the random and the uncontrollable entering the order we have worked so carefully to create, the order that defines western civilization, for whose sake we go to war, go shopping, go to therapy, go to Ikea. For whose reason we send our young people to the safe bastions of controllable chaos that we call universities.

Imagine your house. It's best to imagine the cheapest, smallest house you've ever visited actually. Imagine what that would look like to an alien who just landed on earth. It would look weird: millions of people, all building little arbitrary structures to hide inside, all putting up walls and making glass windows as a compromise with the sun. Spreading carpet where there used to be grass. Installing front doors with locks and doorbells and letterboxes.

All of this, this fortressing of ourselves, is designed to keep out A LOT. Not just slugs but also snails, foxes, magpies, burglars, axe-murderers etc etc.

Physical boundaries, walls and roofs serve to delineate the order we wish to impose on the world in general. Thus our architecture takes on an identity that is deeply linked to our sense of order and security. And perhaps one of the reasons we find it much harder to relate to Iraq or Darfur than to, say, Virginia Tech, is a kind of architectural racism. Because in our naive, ignorant understanding, we fail to recognize the order in unfamiliar architecture. Thus the images of disorder, of structures being broken in foreign lands, are less shocking and less meaningful than those in the places we recognize. At some level we think, breakdown in a desert is almost no breakdown at all. It's like the three pigs and the wolf blowing down the house made of straw. No-one's surprised.

Really I suppose I'm talking about relating to a way of life. If we can't relate, if we can't imagine inhabiting a place, "walking around in someone's shoes" as Harper Lee would say, then we don't care so much. Because our own interests are not under threat. It's hard for the average Londoner to imagine living in a village in Darfur or Iraq, even before the war, and that makes it a lot easier to distance ourselves from the victims who need our help most.

We should care. So what's the answer? In terms of Darfur, I wonder whether the best thing would be to make a film that emphasized those elements of human life that are familiar to as many people as possible. For that you'd need a documentary team to go and follow a family for a number of months, spending time recording all the common human experiences of family, relationships, the voicing of basic human needs, the great silence meeting those needs. That we can all relate to. We need to see the things we recognize at an unconscious level being threatened and then perhaps we will make the threat our own. And maybe, just maybe, we will be galvanized into action.

Four out of five EU citizens inhabit metropolitan areas. So where's Europe’s greenest city? Likely suspects include Reykjavic in Iceland, Malmo in Sweden and Barcelona in Spain, all of whom were quick off the mark in instigating radical green reform. As the green city concept develops political cache, other metropolii are catching up, and nowadays many cities don’t just want to get green, they want to be the greenest of all. Events like the 2003 European Sustainable City Award (the winners were Ferrar, Heidelberg and Oslo) highlight the air of competitiveness that is beginning to seep into local environmental politics, while London’s Mayor Ken Livingstone chose this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos to publicize his commitment to making London “the undisputed world leader” in tackling climate change. But in Filtnib's humble opinion, the green crown must go to Freiburg: situated in Germany’s Black Forest, the city’s long-term embrace of all things green has single-handedly raised the eco-city game.

Freiburg is crucially a green party stronghold: in 2002 Mayor Dieter Salomon sailed into power with 65% of the vote, making it the first large green-governed city in Germany. But the burg’s eco-credentials go further back, and this is what makes it unique: in 1969, revolutionary transport regulations prioritized cyclists, public transport and pedestrians; the following year cyclepaths were introduced (they now run to 500km); and while most of Europe phased out its trams, Freiburg’s network was bravely being expanded. To put this in context, it's instructive to remember that right around this time, in 1971, French President Georges Pompidou was declaring, “the city must adapt to the car”. Good old Freiburg clearly wasn't listening: two years later the town centre was completely pedestrianized. Roll on 1991 and there's even a treat for the exercise-shy: a low-cost “environment public transport ticket” -just 44 euros a month will get you unlimited access to buses, trains and trams throughout the town and its 60km radius. Incredible. Mayor Salomon told me the highly successful scheme has since been copied across Europe, aswell as attracting research delegations from China and Japan.

Transport is just one element in the town’s sweeping eco-strategy. After the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 the council energetically pursued alternatives to nuclear power. Freiburg is now known as the solar capitol of Europe, hosting the headquarters of many solar research companies aswell as a Solar Training Centre. An innovative “solar village” has just been built within the new Vauban district of ecologically designed homes, where 50 solar houses all produce more energy than they consume. In 1996 the town had 274 square metres of solar cells; a decade on, solar panels span a colossal 11,223m. The 19 floor façade of Freiburg’s central station consists of 240 solar panels and the council even boasts a dedicated “solar information desk”.

Freiburg’s landscape is literally green, too: 42% of the surrounding area is under conservational protection and, as of 1992, any new construction on Freiburg’s municipal land must comply with a stringent low-energy standard, which caps the permissable energy requirement of a building at two thirds the national limit. Mayor Salomon argues that individual action is vital: "The real difference comes when people change their lifestyle, and this is also the real challenge. Thirty years ago in Germany there was only a small minority of people that lived in this way, and the majority laughed at them. Today, lots more people are thinking about it seriously." He adds that Freiburg isn't only concerned with limiting further damage; they’re now planning for a warmer world: "Freiburg will get a lot warmer, but we'll also have a more extreme climate. We expect flooding and storms".

One of Freiburg's favoured methods of mitigating the effects of climate change sounds somewhat like a new dance move: “greenroofing”. Fast becoming Germany's favourite home improvement, the process basically entails transforming roofs into vegetation layers that allow stormwater run-off, reduce energy costs and mitigate the urban heat-island effect. Freiburg's other big coup is a scrupulous recycling scheme: each household has 4 separate bins, and even kitchen and garden waste is composted. Consequently, waste disposal has more than halved since 1988, allowing Freiburg to win “best recycler” in the EU’s 2001 “Urban Audit” (80% of Freiburg's waste was recycled, compared to the European average of just 19%).

Despite the incredible achievements of this smallish town in the Black Forest, Freiburg's Head of Energy Klaus Hoppe isn't complacent, saying “There’s still a lot to do.” New targets are being set each year; right now Hoppe’s concerned with raising the 1.6% of power sourced from bioenergy to 2.7% by 2010. “Freiburg” literally means free city. The town’s eco-logic demands a lot of rules, but in the long-term it’s securing a more important freedom: that of future generations to inhabit a sustainable city. How long will it take for the rest of us to catch up?

In 2002, a species of moth never previously recorded in north-western Europe landed in Sean Clancy's garden in Kent, England. It would become known as "Clancy's Rustic", and by 2005, dozens were being recorded on the English coast. Meanwhile, in a cliff-top garden at one of the most southerly points of England, Britain's Centre for Ecology & Hydrology had been tracking insect migration since 1982. Their results were startling. Hordes of rare butterflies and moths (lepidoptera), once found only in the Mediterranean and North Africa, were venturing into Northern Europe in unprecedented numbers. In January, Tim Sparks and his team finally published their findings: over 25 years, new species of lepidoptera entering Britain had increased by a staggering 400%. Sparks says the cause is clear: global warming. Just as Al Gore called the melting of the polar ice-caps "the canary in the coal mine", the new itineraries of migrating insects are a bright yellow warning - tangible proof the world’s natural order is undergoing radical change. As the earth warms, with butterflies already on the move, could people be far behind? "There’s little we can do to control immigration of new insect species," says Sparks. "And unless climate change is moderated, it’s likely to displace large numbers of humans migrants in a similarly uncontrolled manner."

Climate-induced migration isn’t new; it’s a survival mechanism as old as life on earth. Human mobility helped cultures sidestep possible extinction, and often worked as a catalyst for growth and evolution. It could conceivably bring dividends again, but not without cost. The Earth Policy Institute in Washington estimates that 250,000 residents displaced by Hurricane Katrina have established homes elsewhere - and will never return to New Orleans. In December, the worst Bolivian floods in 25 years submerged an area the size of Britain, making 77,000 families homeless. “Environmental refugees could become one of the foremost human crises of our time” is the grim warning of Norman Myers, an Oxford University environmental scientist who has been investigating the phenomenon for 15 years.

When Myers first wrote about the new breed of “environmental refugees” in 1995, he was dismissed as a hysteric. He certainly painted a scary scenario: 200 million environmental refugees by 2050, equivalent to two-thirds of the population of the United States; “a massive crisis; famine and starvation.” But the tide has changed, and his apocalyptic vision - “This is a major new phenomenon and it’s growing much worse, very rapidly” - looks increasingly plausible. British geographer Richard Black, who once suggested the concept of environmental refugees was nothing but a “myth,” now acknowledges, “There’s no question that one of the consequences of climate change will be an increase in migration… New research has been published, and I’d like to think I have a more sophisticated view on it.” Black is a world expert on migration, and a contributing author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s landmark report on the impacts of global warming, released yesterday. His concession, therefore, is significant.

But while the likelihood of mass climate migration is now acknowledged, there’s still an unnerving lack of consensus on what one of the broadest impacts of global warming might actually look like. All the experts agree serious research is required, and urgently. Richard Black concedes, “We don’t have any adequate data source for understanding this. Not one.” Myers, who found it difficult to obtain funding for his research, is first to admit: “I’ve done little research since 1995, so I just don’t know whether the figures have changed. Nobody’s doing on-the-ground analysis.”

What is lamentably clear is that the biggest losers will be those already most vulnerable: the developing world. Impoverished and climate-sensitive nations like Bangladesh and Kenya simply don’t have the resources to provide relief for displaced residents, and are desperately low on cash for the construction projects that could limit future damage. In 1996 Myers estimated that sea level rises induced by global warming would threaten the lives of 26 million people in Bangladesh, 73 million in China and 20 million in India. It’s from these areas that “climate refugees” are most likely to emerge, alongside drought-stricken regions of Africa. In the Mandera district of North-East Kenya, a four-fold increase of drought has already forced half a million pastoral farmers to abandon their way of life. In the village of Libehiya, houses are buried in sand dunes. This, according to a Christian Aid study last year, is “the climate change frontline”.

Where will climate refugees go? Black suggests European policymakers who imagine millions of new asylum-seekers probably have it wrong: “I suspect worsening climate won’t dramatically increase the number of West Africans coming to Europe. It will just increase the number of poor and destitute West Africans. The more desperate your circumstances, the more difficult it is to put together the money for a long journey. If you’re an impoverished farmer affected by a natural disaster you don’t just think, ‘Oh I know, I’ll go to Paris’. These people are living on a dollar a day; they don’t have a few thousand dollars stashed under their beds.”


The biggest losers will be those who never manage to earn the official title of “refugee” and are thus ineligible for international aid. As yet, there's no official recognition that environmental problems could alone justify “refugee” status. Myers complains the UN won’t rewrite the rules, “because their budgets are already overstrained, and they’re worried they’ll be swamped. Yet these are people whose governments are unable to safeguard their lives.” A UNHCR spokesman told me that although “we’re aware of it and it’s certainly an issue to watch,” the world’s pre-eminent refugee agency has no current strategy to deal with the threat.

The developed world will of course have its own share of losers. In 2003, a heat wave in Europe killed over 21,000 people across five countries. The IPCC warns that such sweltering heat will become increasingly common, with higher maximum temperatures and an average rise of between 1.1 and 6.4 degrees C over the next century.

Will this create “climate refugees”? Talking to experts like Myers and Black, it seems the answer pivots on a population’s “adaptive capacity”; crucially, inhabitants in the West can adapt more easily than people in poorer, less developed economies. France was able to spend an extra $748 million on hospital emergency services during the 2003 heat wave, later developing a four-stage plan canicule (for the so-called “dog days” from early July to early September). The Netherlands, after a 1953 flood killed nearly 2,000 people and evacuated 70,000, spent $8 billion over 25 years to prevent a recurrence; they now have a ministry devoted solely to the prevention of flooding - a department much consulted by U.S. specialists post-Katrina. Even supposing some people are forced to move, skilled and wealthy Westerners are less likely to become “refugees”, so much as “migrants” who are able to adapt, find work and rebuild their lives even if their home is destroyed.

Enter the winners. While areas like southern Europe will become increasingly uncomfortable weather-wise, there could be capital gains for the more temperate north. The Scottish government is sponsoring “Highland 2007,” a campaign to promote the Highlands as a desirable place to live. It’s an effort to arrest a declining population, but such marketing could become unnecessary if forest fires, heat waves and water shortages encourage northwards relocation from Spain, Italy and southern France. Underpopulated areas like Sweden - a country the size of California with a population of 8 million - not to mention Norway and Finland, could reap the rewards of an influx of skilled workers. And as urban heat islands like London, Paris and Tokyo turn airless and muggy, internal migration could usefully redistribute population from cities to the country.

Archaeologist Arlene Rosen from University College London is convinced there will be another category of winners too. She’s just written a book called “Civilizing Climate”. “Certain ancient societies adapted to climate change. For every society that collapsed, there was one next door that survived and got stronger because of it.” Rosen points to the first state society in China in 1900 - 1500 B.C., where incredible drought was nevertheless accompanied by a period of growth and expanding social organization. Archaeologists believe difficult climatic conditions led directly to an increase in trade, which created an economic upswing across society. And for around 5000 years, the Sahara was a green and fertile area, until it began to dry up in 4000 B.C., causing the large-scale migration of people to the Nile region, a key step in the creation of Egyptian civilization. “Humans are a resilient species,” says Rosen.

She believes history has lessons to impart, if we care enough to listen. “The bottom line we get from studying societies that survived climate change is that it’s in everybody’s best interest to share resources between the winners and the losers." Rosen says. "Political and economic cooperation to move goods and services around is vital. Wealthy governments today need to be convinced that it’s in their own interests to help the developing world.” Myers believes action on climate refugees could define our future. “Ten years ago I wrote a book-length report on this, I gave lectures, I talked to policy leaders and politicians. The global community just turned its back.” With climate change finally a priority on the international agenda, the experts hope the time has come for environmental refugees to get the attention they deserve. Perhaps we can then confront the brave new migratory world with foresight, not just fear.

At the end of November last year, the BBC World Service made a Freedom of Information Request. Almost 4 months later, the requested information was finally released, and the BBC reported the findings on Monday.
Their revelation is shocking and disheartening. Yet strangely, coverage has been minimal. I can only hope this is due to the inevitably headline-grabbing Iranian-captive story, not some more sinister working of our government's political PR machine.
In brief: in October last year, respected British medical journal The Lancet published a breathtaking statistic: the total Iraqi death-count since the war began was at least 655,000. To put the figure in some sort of perspective, that's an average of over 500 people EVERY DAY.
At the time, the public was advised not to take the report seriously. Blair said the figure "wasn't anywhere near accurate". The Foreign Office questioned the Lancet's technique: "It is a fairly small sample they have taken and they have extrapolated it across the country". Stateside, President Bush was similarly dismissive: "I don't consider it a credible report." Hardly surprising, considering that in December 2005, Bush had suggested the death toll was only "30,000 more or less".
So what did those determined researchers at the BBC find out?
Here's Owen Bennett Jones from the World Service, writing in The New Statesman:

The documents, released to the BBC World Service, show civil servants suggesting that ministers should not "rubbish" the Lancet report. In one email, an official, apparently from No 10 but whose name has been blanked out, asks: "Are we really sure the report is likely to be right? That is certainly what the brief implies."Another nameless official replies: "We do not accept the figures quoted in the Lancet survey as accurate", but goes on to say: "The survey methodology used here cannot be rubbished, it is a tried and tested way of measuring mortality in conflict zones."
The documents advise ministers to use figures from the Iraqi health ministry, which estimates the number of deaths at less than 10 per cent of the Lancet's figure.The ministry in Baghdad relies on hospitals to report the number of victims of terrorism or military action. But, critics say, the ministry did not start counting until well after the invasion and required busy hospital staff to report daily. A statistician at the Department for International Development was also asked for an opinion of the Lancet study. The techniques used were "tried and tested", he said. If anything, the method "should lead to an underestimation of the deaths in the war and early post- invasion period".

In fact, chief scientific adviser to the Defense Ministry, Roy Anderson, called the report's methods "robust... close to best practice". And in the memo that the BBC obtained, Anderson's office told senior officials that the chief scientist "recommends caution in publicly criticizing the study."

At which point, Blair and Bush decided to publicly criticize the study.
There's something incredibly depressing about a government that not only made a terrible mistake by going into war in the first place, without a UN mandate or a referendum, but could not even do their war's innocent victims the justice of acknowledging their deaths. You'd think the existence of the Freedom of Information Act would discourage officials from ignoring their own experts' written advice, but then again, the way this story has been underreported suggests they don't need to worry.

I've just finished "My War Gone By, I Miss It So" by Anthony Loyd and am feeling that minor sense of loss one gets when you close the cover on a book you have loved. Were it not the property of my colleague I would be inclined to immediately reread. Had my breath knocked clean away by its incredible honesty and inspired prose. Most commentators seem to agree that Loyd is one of the best war correspondents of his generation, I'm no expert but certainly I've never read anything about conflict that comes close in terms of immediacy, elegance and intelligence. Most recently he's been writing amazing pieces for the Times from Afghanistan. This is his 1999 book based on his time in Bosnia during the Balkan conflict, aswell as his struggle with heroin addiction. Beautifully written and confronts you with impossible questions on every page. It did make me wonder what the point of learning about Hitler at school was, pretending it was HISTORY, when there was genocide and ethnic cleansing going on within Europe while we sat in our classrooms thinking things had changed. I'm ashamed to say I had no idea about the true horror of what happened in Bosnia until reading this.

Loyd has a new book out, "Another Bloody Love Letter", and I was lucky enough to hear him speak at the Frontline Club on Thursday night. Fairly soon you should be able to watch the video of the event on their website, well worth a look.

Church on the Corner

Brilliantly informative, often surprising, illuminating and entertaining. This is what church should be about.

“I remember Bill Clinton explaining this to me and saying… you may do 100 different things in a day but the 30 seconds that people see of you on the evening news is what you have done that day so far as they are concerned.”

Tony Blair, Podcast Interview with Stephen Fry, 6 February 2007


Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, the longest serving Labour Prime Minister in British history, has reached the twilight of his career. In the course of the coming year he will hand over the Premiership after a decade in power; a period that – fairly or unfairly - will be remembered less for its record-breaking longevity than for the impact of his deeply controversial foreign policy. At 54, he’s incredibly young to have concluded his time in office; when he entered Downing St at the age of 43, he was the youngest Prime Minister for 185 years. Blair’s final months do not hold out the promise of a gentle farewell; in many ways the battles he is currently fighting are the toughest of his career. The situation in Iraq has plumbed new depths; with the long-avoided term “civil war” now the default phrase in both news reports and policy documents, even American opinion has finally begun to turn, and as the Neo-Con star expires, past condemnation of Blair’s steadfast support of Bush echoes ever louder. At home, aggressive criticism over the NHS, the beleaguered prison service, military budgets and Labour’s unpopular education reform, stalks the government, while the unresolved cash-for-peerages scandal continues to cast a shadow over Labour’s collective integrity, with party chairman Hazel Blears admitting it has had “a corrosive effect”. Within his own party, Blair’s authority wanes. Many ministers admitted his refusal to state a leaving date created a limbo of inaction and confused loyalties.

The Prime Minister does not outwardly seem to rage against the dying of the light. Almost two-thirds of Britons polled in January by ICM said their opinion of Blair had worsened over the last year, and yet he seems to carry his unpopularity lightly; arguably he looked more haggard during the David Kelly affair of 2003. Interviewers note his current mood is surprisingly serene; despite being the only British PM ever to be called for interview in a criminal enquiry, he met the frantic questioning of journalists baying for blood in late January with calm detachment, appearing “the pattern of all patience”; no blush nor bead of sweat suggesting discomfort or shame.

In September, when asked which were the best and worst times of all his years in power, Blair said they had come within the space of twenty-four hours, in July 2006: “We won the Olympics one day and then we had the bombs the next day which was an extraordinary high to a low… that's probably the time I remember most vividly.” The many horrors of the war in Iraq are not mentioned. Over 34,000 Iraqi civilians are thought to have died in 2006 alone. The total death toll for the July bombings in London was 52. Blair’s afterthought – “that’s probably the time I remember most vividly” – is telling. He has yet to admit to himself his guilt over the chaos that currently engulfs the Middle East, that has killed tens of thousands of Iraqis and that, most alarmingly, shows no signs of reprieve. In March 2004, Desmond Tutu publicly criticised Blair for his part in an “immoral war”. For the deeply religious Prime Minister, this must have hit hard. The irony is that Blair is probably one of the most morally motivated leaders Britain has elected since Gladstone.


'Let us say one thing. If we are wrong, we will have destroyed a threat that, at its least, is responsible for inhuman carnage and suffering. That is something I am confident history will forgive'

Tony Blair addressing US Congress, 2003


Blair may not feel he has compromised on his own morals, but by adhering to them so stubbornly, he has compromised much that his party held dear. On the 28 January edition of the Politics Show, Jon Sopel pointed out that criticism of Blair had increasingly emerged from within his own party: “You get Peter Hain coming out saying the problem for us as a government, is actually to maintain a working relationship with what is the most right wing American administration, if not ever, then in living memory.” Blair tried to laugh off the remark: “I don’t think it’s very surprising that people in the Labour Party aren’t Neo-Cons.” Which is of course true: the Labour party by nature is at odds with Neo-Con philosophy. But this makes it all the more surprising that their leader has been acting like a Neo-Con so convincingly and for so long. Already preparing his next question, Sopel did not pick up on Blair’s unwitting admission that his foreign policy decisions had intrinsically contradicted the principles of his own party.

Our Tony has brought Labour a long way. He comprehensively revamped a tired political movement that had for a long time seemed amateur in its economic ideology and feeble in its reach, enabling the party to achieve two landslide victories in 1997 and 2001, and an unprecedented three terms in power. The closest any other Labour leader has come is Harold Wilson, who won no less than four elections, but two were in the same year, and the other two were only 18 months apart. Blair has overseen a period of incredible economic stability and can count many historic reforms among his achievements: the Good Friday agreement in Northern Ireland; the introduction of a national minimum wage; the banning of fox hunting and fur farming; the writing off of up to 100% of debt owed by the poorest countries in the world; devolution in Scotland and Wales; the creation of paternity leave. All of which represent the enactment of traditional Labour values. He has also used his famous charisma and diplomacy to inspire other international leaders on what will be the key global issue of the century: climate change. One American foreign policy source confessed: “On the environment, I don’t know if Bush would have gotten to where he is now... Blair has always urged him to move in the direction he’s now taken”.

So does his foreign policy betrayal of Labour matter? It is instructive to look back to the party’s roots in the early twentieth century. Ramsay Macdonald proclaimed “Labour’s vision of an ordered world embraces the nations now torn with enmity and strife. It stands, therefore, for a policy of International Co-operation through a strengthened and enlarged League of Nations; the settlement of disputes by conciliation and judicial arbitration” (1923 Labour Party General Election Manifesto). For better or worse, no-one could claim that Blair has adhered to such a policy of “concilation and judicial arbitration”. In 1931, the Labour manifesto even included ‘International disarmament’ in its list of goals: “The Labour Party has always been in the van of the Movement for International Peace; and it is universally recognised that its record, as a Government, above all in solving disarmament by Arbitration, gave to Great Britain the moral leadership of the World. Labour will seek to make that record even more distinguished.” Has Blair made Great Britain’s record “even more distinguished”?

Yet Blair’s defenders would argue such comparisons are odious. The PM’s pragmatic approach to the traditions of his party brought necessary reform in every aspect of domestic and economic policy; why not also in foreign policy? It is worth remembering that in the wake of WWII, Labour’s Manifesto in some respects pre-empted the realpolitik of Blair’s current justification of war as a necessary evil: “If peace is to be protected we must plan and act. Peace must not be regarded as a thing of passive inactivity: it must be a thing of life and action and work.”

The aftermath of Blair’s Iraq strategy may define not only his reputation in the years to come, but also the future shape of global democracy. With such high stakes, his legacy is almost impossible to predict until the fog of war currently surrounding Iraq has at least partially dispersed; what is already clear is that the optimism he once inspired, and the Messiah-like quality with which he led Labour into the new millennium, have long-since dispersed. But as his surprisingly impeccable comic timing on last week's Comic Relief clip with Catherine Tate showed, (http://www.pm.gov.uk/output/Page11312.asp) his charm has never left him, and there's a very good chance that in his post-PM role, it will make a statesman of him yet.

Filmed jerkily and using desaturated, low contrast stock, 'Half Nelson' is slightly abrasive to watch, at least at first. It takes a while to adjust to the almost constant movement of the camera and the slight shudder as it pans across a classroom. Yet within minutes, the actions of the characters on screen are so intriguing, so contradictory and yet believable, that you all but forget you are watching a film. And with that, the handheld immediacy of the cinematography suddenly stops being distracting and just brings you incredibly close to the story and its actors, in a way that a smoothly shot piece of Hollywood eye-candy never could.
I came out of the cinema with that odd, slightly disturbing sense that the reality of the film was temporarily more real than the reality I was exiting into; the last time I felt like that was after Rian Johnson's neo-noir 'Brick' last year with the iconic Joseph Gordon-Levitt (www.brickmovie.net). The other film that 'Half Nelson' bears comparison to is 'Requiem for a Dream'; both deal with the terrifying costs of drug addiction, but while 'Requiem' was so tragic as to become almost unwatchable in parts, 'Half Nelson' matches heartbreaking sadness with a gentle but insistent beat of redemption.
The casting is inspired; Ryan Gosling, Oscar-nominated for his performance as an unconventional, deeply troubled history teacher, is at once lovable, sexy and deeply pathetic. The only thing that took my eyes off him was a truly incredible performance by Shareeka Epps, in her feature film debut. Aged 17, the stillness of her face is broken only by the watchfulness of her world-weary eyes.
I don't want to talk too much about the plot, except to say that although it sounds like the ultimate cliched, overdone storyline - white middle-class well-intentioned teacher makes personal sacrifices to teach in a school of deprived kids and manages to inspire them - 'Half Nelson' actually transcends any kind of genre; it stands alone as a film more about politics and the burden of thoughtfulness than it is about education. There's no sentimentality here, just a raw kind of honesty and a great deal of intelligence. The editing is bold and imaginative, with great use of ellipsis, especially at the start; I suspect this might have been necessitated by an overlong running time; as it is the film could still benefit from being a wee bit shorter, but this is a minor caveat. All in all, unmissable, and a triumph for rising indie filmmakers Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden, Columbia and NYU graduates who are not only hugely talented and have made a fantastic film, but are also going out!?? I'm putting my jealousy aside. Good job guys.