12 March 2008

I've just come back from Barcelona where I took part in Art Center of Pasadena's Global Dialogues on Disruptive Thinking. I chaired the panel on climate change. I didn't know anything about Art Center but found out it was one of the world's leading design colleges which trains many of the world's top industrial designers. But according to the hyper-energetic President of the college, Richard Koshalek, his students now don't just want careers, they want to contribute to society.

The event turned out to be very stimulating . I was lucky to have on my panel the extraordinarily impressive Peter Head, head of global planning at the engineering, construction and design company Arup. Among many other things Peter is Project Director for the Dongtan eco-city project in China. Not only is a committed environmentalist (he said going to Schumacher College had had a profound effect on him), he is also in a position to make a difference. For anyone who might suspect Dongtan is just irrelevant window dressing, Peter said he found the Chinese he was working with the most intelligent and impressive people in the field he had ever encountered. In fact he said the real problem was here in the West where we entirely lack the visionary political leadership we need to take the radical steps necessary to respond to climate change. Extremely thought-provoking. And my other pannellist was the fine and sensitive writer on Antarctica Sara Wheeler - I thoroughly recommed her wonderful and funny travel book Terra Incognita.

15 February 2008

The other day I went to see the Chinese film Still Life set in the area of the Three Gorges dam project on the Yangtze river. It's a quiet, slow film but I thoroughly recommend it. How do people cope with this kind of change - 2000 year-old cities destroyed and whole landscapes rearranged in vast schemes of physical and social engineering? What do you hold on to, or hold to, when all familiar landmarks disappear?

The pragmatic, laconic Chinese seem to manage better than you might imagine.

But what about poetry? This area of the Yangtze is considered the mother lode of Chinese poetry, celebrated especially by the poets of the Tang dynasty (and the film ends with some haunting lines by Li Po). What happens when you destroy the ource of poetry? It would be like us turning the Lake District into a a giant opencast mine.

Today Ching Ling and I are going to Taiwan. I am impressed by what I read about the way this apparently overcrowded island (23 million people in an area the size of Holland) has set protecting its very special environment. 20% of the island consists of protected National Parks. Taiwan has more than 500 species of birds, which is nearly three times as many as we have on a much larger island.

On 7 March I am presenting a debate on Climate Change at the Art Center Global Dialogues: Disruptive Thinking at the Palau de la Musica in Barcelona. I hope it will touch on the issue of climate change as disruptive possibility.

29 December 2007

A correction to my last entry. Apparently, although Oxfordshire County Council's Town Green Inspector advised against the application to make Thrupp Lake a Town Green, Save Radley Lakes obtained a counter-opinion from a top barrister arguing that it would be legally unsound to refuse Town Green status for the lake. So the Council has deferred the decision, the lake has not been turned into a dump and the fight is very much still on.

A piece of good news: Westminster Council turned down the Royal Parks' disgraceful application to build ten five-a-side football pitches on the site of the former golf and tennis school in Regent's Park. Not so good news: the former tennis coach of the tennis school, made redundant several months ago in preparation for this scheme, hanged himself at the site just before Christmas.

1 November 2007

Sad news from the Radley Lakes protesters. The application to have Thrupp Lake registered as a Town Green by one of the protesters has apparently been turned down by Oxfordshire County Council, who appear to be wholly in the pocket of RTE npower. See the Save the Radley Lakes website for further details. Bravely the protesters say they are not giving up. (NB See entry above for correction)

Even worse news for the planet, buried on page 16 of the Daily Telegraph. A new UN report on the environment says we are rapidly reaching the point of no return at which essential ecosystem services will be irreparably damaged. If this comes on page 16, what precedes it? Oh, you can guess; the usual Royal tittle-tattle.

Last night I watched a few minutes of the annual ITV Television Awards. Repelled and mystified by the gibberish and rubbish on display, I switched it off. Somehow we've reached a point where the cultural common ground has been invaded by the most unutterable dross. No wonder the nation appears to be suffering from plagues of obesity and aimlessness. People actually need culture, real "culturing" culture, to provide common ground for relationships and communities. That was why Lorca's La Barrada theatre company travelled round Spain's poorest regions performing classics such as Lope de Vega's Fuenteovejuna in the 1930s.

Comments please!

3rd August 2007

RTE npower, owner of the Radley lakes, who want to use one of them as a dump for Pulverised Fuel Ash, have slapped a High Court injunction on Dr Peter Harbour, an eminent retired physicist, preventing him from setting foot on and around the lakes, and restricting his liberty in other ways. He received a bundle of so-called evidence, mostly from anonymous sources, claiming he had tried to run down security guards at the site, a most grave allegation which he says is quite absurd (and I believe him). The only way to challenge this injunction would be to go to court, where even if he won the case he might be liable for up to £300,000 costs.

This constitutes a most serious abuse of a law originally framed to deter stalkers.

Corporate bully-boys are using dubious laws to clamp down on legitimate dissent and protest.

I've been reading The Last Puritan by George Santayana - rather slowly I must admit, because it's not a novel with any great narrative thrust and the best bits are philosophical reflections, about poetry, about the destiny of America. I've been meaning to get into Santayana for a long time: I've always liked his idea that religion is essentially literature, which is in no way to demean it but maybe to take the sting out of it. Though with the current rumpous over the knighting of Salman Rushdie that may sound rather optimistic. I read the Book of Genesis or the Book of Job as great, profound literature, not literally true but metaphorically or philosophically true. Should i start burning books by Richard Dawkins? I don't think so, however much they annoy me (and I am an unbeliever).

Here is a quotation from Santayana on poetry: "Poetry is like spray blown by some wind from a heaving sea, or like sparks blown from a smouldering fire: a cry which the violence of circumstances wrings from some poor fellow. This cry or spark is flimsy in itslef and playful, yet there's tragedy behind it. Enchantment paints these fantastic heraldries in the shield of loyalty, or perhaps of despair."

This makes me think of flamenco (remembering Santayana was half-Spanish and spent the first eight years of his life in Spain), the authentic flamenco you can still find in certain places in Jerez and Trebujena, where old guys drinking sherry suddenly unleash great cries or wails of cante jondo. I asked one of these guys what flamenco was about and he said it was "para desahogar el espiritu."