Mussels, Beans and Two Veg, anyone?

Borlotti beans grown by yours truly

Alarming information from the BBC (article by Roger Harrabin) and others about greenhouse gas emissions arising from eating meat.

This has of course been known for some time. We're (we = humans) still eating meat, of course, and craving for more, it would seem. Meanwhile, the ice is melting, the sea is rising and getting warmer and all those nasty things are brewing which will make life much more difficult for us all ( = humans and most other creatures).

Are there any solutions, apart form turning the whole Earth into some sort of intensive meat production farm, producing bionic bovines emitting less methane, or searching for a laboratory produced artificial meat solution to satisfy our craving?

There are indeed, and one of them is to eat much less of the stuff. That is, if you are not completely disgusted by the thought that meat is, after all, the flesh of an animal which we have wilfully killed or had killed in order to eat it, and decide to not eat any at all.

I like my meat as much as the next human but it is not difficult at all to eat much less of it. Think of it as a treat and not a necessity; eat other things which are just as good for you (beans and pulses come to mind).

Eating something meaty and nice once a week, using the leftovers and gorging on vegetables, beans, peas, potatoes etc etc the rest of the time is also good for your personal health.

Add a few mussels (which require practically no input to produce a delicious meaty/fishy treat and store carbon in their shells) or other low impact shellfish and you have the sort of diet which will make you look ten years younger and about which you can be smug to your meat-eating friends who are destroying the Earth.

Give it a go.

Whisky Nose

Heard a report in the Today programme (8th October 2012) on BBC Radio 4 about the smell of rotten eggs in Scotch whisky.

Producers have been complaining of this unpleasant odour given off by whisky matured in Sherry barrels sterilised by using sulphur, at, it would seem, fairly strong concentrations.

If ever there was an argument against excessive use of sulphur (in whatever form) in wines or whisky then this is possibly it.

Top of the Pops 1976 (and what wine were we drinking ?)

Sat watching TOTP 2 on BBC television recently as a respite from the omnipresent Olympics. An episode from 1976.

I mused that around that time music (by which I mean 'popular' music) was such a great part of life for everyone, or so it seemed.

NME was required reading for any serious person. John Peel was listened to religiously. Top of the Pops was never missed, no matter what the circumstances.

Record collections were examined, played and commented on by anyone who happened to come round.

The sound was much better. None of those stupid earpieces or heaven help us headphones (how silly they look walking around festooned with such audio appendages).

Is this just silly nostalgia, or is there any substance to this ?

Examining the charts of 1976 one finds all sorts of material ranging from albums Dark Side of the Moon (Pinkfloyd) and A Night at the Opera (Queen), to singles I am a Cider Drinker (The Wurzels) and Save Your Kisses for Me (Brotherhood of Man)

Looking back it is easy to see that musical offerings (no reference intended to J.S. Bach or Schoenberg) ranged from the sublime to the...well I'm not sure how to describe them.

As for the wines... What would you have been supping while listening to your favourite track ?

British or Irish wine (yes, made from imported grape juice - can't remember the brand names - apart from Rheingau-  but they were rough, to say the least), Matteus Rose, Piat du Beaujolais, Sauternes at Christmas, not forgetting Blue Nun. Or perhaps not. You might not even have drunk any of this stuff at all, except at parties.

Mostly you could say that widely available wines (i.e. not from specialist merchants) were fairly unremarkable, indeed sometimes downright bad. It would have been more or less the same in France and other winemaking countries too.

Whereas music may have deteriorated since 1976 (and this is an entirely personal and subjective view), the choice and quality of wine now available has improved immeasurably, even miraculously, to attain a golden age undreamed of then.

To what do we owe this flowering of the viticultural and winemaking arts ?

There is no simple answer. I do however think that this is largely due to the improvement in the wine knowledge and experience of the 'average' wine drinker and the knowledge, viticultural and scientific of the winemakers.

Wine drinkers are exposed to many different wines in restaurants, supermarkets, on holiday and have developed a taste for good drinkable wines. Result: a demand for good drinkable wines.

Winemakers large and small are much better equipped both intellectually and technologically to cope with most things nature can throw at them and know precisely what they are doing and why. Result: good drinkable wines.

Another factor is that people have more money in their pockets than in 1976 and the relative price of a bottle of wine has fallen considerably, despite increases in duty (in the UK). Without adjusting for purchasing power something costing £1 in 1976 would now cost £6.61; if you earned £1 in 1976, you would now earn £14.84. So according to this simple arithmetic prices have increased by 6 times but incomes have gone up by almost 15 times.

Wine is now affordable for most people, and wine producers know this.

I am sure there are many other factors at work but the upshot is that we were not drinking very pleasant wines in 1976 and I do not look back on this period as a lost paradise, except perhaps for some of the music.

Nuclear subs (2)

The recent news (BBC and elsewhere 29th March) that two large energy companies RWE npower and E.ON have withdrawn plans to build new nuclear power stations comes as no surprise. There is not enough money in it for private investors. The enormous risks involved are clearly putting them off.

The only organisation which can possibly undertake this type of very long term nuclear power investment is the state. No private company will ever make sufficient returns for it to be viable for them and they may not be in existence long enough either (some states appear to be a bit shaky too). They will wait until the government decides to make the initial investment and allow them to make the returns from the captive customer base of the energy consumer (similar pattern to the railways, water and even more favourable than the current privatised energy supply industry).

These companies can clearly see more profits and less risk in oil, gas and coal. I would expect that gas obtained via fracking will soon be the next big thing, as this country appear to have large reserves of it. The government appears to be intent on burning fossil fuels for as long as they are available and are offering £1bn to anyone who can come up with a viable carbon capture scheme (3rd April in case you were thinking April Fool)).

There is already a viable carbon capture scheme in existence: is it known as the Earth system, Gaia, Nature or whatever you care to call it. It has been doing this free of charge for billions of years, but we seem to be intent on destroying it.

Alcohol abuse (Panorama)

Having seen the latest Panorama on BBC1 I can only conclude that it was the Alastair Campbell show masquerading as a serious piece about alcohol abuse, binge drinking, middle class alcoholics and the rest.

Jokes apart, this is indeed a grave subject and the programme did deal with it well, on the whole.

The most obvious problem from what I saw is that organisations whose job is to propose controls or restrictions on the availability and low price of many alcoholic drinks should not be largely influenced by drinks companies themselves. These, mostly multinational, companies only want people to drink as much as possible whatever the consequences. Here Alastair did admit to the rather loose policies of the government he had the dubious honour of advising (24 hour drinking etc). New Labour does bear some responsibility for much of the alcohol-related carnage seen on our streets every weekend.

Another obvious conclusion is that on-trade consumption is the way to go whether this be in pubs or restaurants. Landlords and licensees can and do decide when people have had enough.

The amount of alcohol consumed by a sizeable number of individuals is excessive and should be curbed in some way. And it is not only in this country that the problem exists. In France, which has the reputation of being a country of mostly 'responsible' alcohol consumption, drinking to excess among younger people is a growing phenomenon. Is this a sign of a more general malaise in our societies ?

Under what conditions might it be possible to curb excessive drinking ? A few suggestions: drink business (especially big business) off advisory bodies; government to ensure alcohol is not under priced (in relation to say when I was a young man 30 years ago); a better deal for pubs and restaurants which should be THE place to have a drink, not sitting at home with cheap booze flogged by supermarkets.

Beyond these superficial palliatives, only the transformation of our society to something altogether more green, social, and worthwhile for everyone will cure these ills. That is another question.

Wilderness and change

View of Grand Veymont mountain and the Haut Plateau du Vercors

I have never been to a true wilderness. Aldo Leopold is reported to have said that a true wilderness is where you can travel for two weeks on horseback without seeing any signs of humans (as told by Jeff Turner in his film The Last Grizzly of Paradise Valley shown recently on BBC TV).

The closest I have come to that increasingly hard to find place is the Haut Plateau du Vercors in southern France. As can be seen from the photo above, it is pretty empty of people except for the few shepherds who spend the summer in these mountain pastures. Although you can't travel two weeks on horseback without seeing signs of humans, you can get lost for several weeks as one unfortunate hiker managed to do a couple of years back. You may, if you are lucky, be able to spend a whole day without seeing a single person.

The Vulture soars

In the summer there are usually a few people passing through, but they do not stay - water being difficult to find up here - and you are more likely to see Marmots, Alpine Ibex, or Chamois. Not forgetting the Vultures (Gyps Fulvus) who glide far and wide over these mountains, their wings making a whistling noise as they pass, just like the gliders manned by human beings which venture up from a little airstrip far below. In bad weather you will find nobody at all, and you would do well to know how to navigate with a compass, because the fog can reduce visibility to a few centimetres. This is why I like this place so much. You can empty your mind here and just be.

This area has never been settled, and even in the lower areas around Vassieux-en-Vercors life is hard and dependent on tourism. The regional nature park status helps no doubt. In prehistoric times this part of the Vercors was of great interest to the humans of the time who would come up from the valleys 1500 metres below to take advantage of the flint deposits to make tools. The flints are particularly large here and can be made into blades measuring up to 25cm long. These blades would have been much sought after, as weapons, tools or prestigious gifts. This would have been a summer activity and the flint makers would have made their way back down at the end of the season laden with the blades and tools they had crafted.

Then one day they stopped. We can see where they worked to this day at the museum (worth a visit) which has been set up to preserve this precious vestige of our distant ancestors. The remains of partly worked tools are still there where they were left by some craftsman thousands of years ago. Did they intend to come back ? No doubt bronze had arrived and it was no longer worth their while coming up here for flints. It was the end of the flint makers.

This is a touching reminder that there have been upheavals of this kind throughout the history of our species. The frequency of these changes, or creative destruction, as Schumpeter puts it, has no doubt been increasing over the centuries. In our time it seems that change is becoming exponential, hour by hour, a seething maelstrom. If you look away for 2 seconds, the world and everything in it will have changed. But of course some things seem to remain unchanged nevertheless, such as this landscape of mountain meadow and high altitude forest and the caves used by man before history. Long may it be so.

Musée de la Préhistoire - Vassieux en Vercors http://www.prehistoire-vercors.fr/
Parc régional naturel du Vercors http://parc-du-vercors.fr/fr_FR/index.php

Small Mercy

News (BBC Radio 4) that the last battery hen has been freed uplifted briefly, a small mercy in a world of injustice. She will end her days as a hen should, free to roam, and live outside. Hens are still generally kept in cages, albeit larger ones with a few comforts. In many other European countries they are still kept in wire cages with no room to move, and die of exhaustion when they can lay no more. Of course one must not ignore the economic reasons for this. Many producers simply cannot afford to make the required changes, the amount they are paid for their eggs being insufficient to allow this.

Supermarkets and the 'consumer' are no doubt to blame for this, often preferring to import and buy cheaper eggs from elsewhere. Eggs are considered to be cheap, as are poultry, pork and many other kinds of produce. They should be valued more and we should be prepared to pay more for them, in the knowledge that the creatures we are asking to work for us or we are consuming can at least live with some comfort and dignity. I will never forget the look of despair and hopelessness in the eyes of pigs kept indoors in a battery style system with only concrete for a vista and hardly any room to move. I felt really ashamed. Pigs are happy creatures, and this shows when they are kept in plenty of space and the ability to go wild (rather like children) outdoors. I still like eating them, though, and perhaps all this concern for their welfare is only hypocrisy on my part.

In any case the moral is: find out how and where it is made and buy the best you can afford, preferably from a local producer.

Bird Brains

Crow soaking a piece of dry bread in a puddle

Listened to the fascinating BBC Radio 4 series 'The Life Scientific' on what it is like to be a scientist, the subject of which this week was Nicky Clayton and her research into the evolution of intelligence in birds - particularly corvids. I felt a particular affinity with this scientist's work as I have often seen birds manifesting intelligence in many situations - admittedly mostly to do with obtaining food.

The photo here shows a crow dipping a piece of dry bread in a puddle to make it soft enough to eat. Another crow looks on, hoping for his share of the bread.

Intelligence and cooperation: not just human traits.

True Value

How much is a Ladybird ?

Who can put a price on Art or Nature ? What price a species wiped out by humans through greed or stupidity or usually both ?

Look at paintings such as the many versions of the Card Players or the representations of apples by Paul Cézanne or innumerable works by Claude Monet or Pablo Picasso or any of the other great painters of the 19th and 20th centuries. These works are beyond monetary value; whether they are in public or private collections they belong, in some sense, to all humans, such is their profound emotional presence. Having seen the recent BBC programme in the Storyville series about the Barnes collection - 'valued' at $25 billion, I have my reservations about putting a price on things, and about those who do so for their own mercantile motives. Some things are simply too precious and valuable to be judged in terms of some currency or other. It is common knowledge that money can all of a sudden become worthless, but throughout the short history of humanity, value still remains. From the earliest stone tools, to the first representations of animals or humans, to the cave paintings at Lascaux to the most exuberant Matisse, some of the things made by humans are the most loving, joyful, masterful creations of the Tribal Monkey.

Who can dispute this profound emotionality who has approached the Guernica by Pablo Picasso in the Reina Sofia in Madrid. It's presence is brooding and felt even when it is out of sight - probably because you are treated to some of the artist's sketches and drawings in preparation for the painting as you draw near. When you actually see it it is rather like a blow to the stomach such is the wave of emotion which fills you and overwhelms you. What is the value of this painting ? If it were to be sold, who could afford it ? Spain might be tempted in its hour of economic need. Its sale could make a dent in the deficit no doubt, but whether a price could be put on it is uncertain.

One thing on which a price has been put but which is not valued is energy and energy production. We have been brought up to believe that energy, be it electricity or petrol or gas or coal is freely available in unlimited quantities and can be bought cheaply, so cheaply in fact that it matters not how much we use or waste. Modern societies are founded on the fact that vast quantities of energy on a scale unimaginable to our ancestors who were limited to mainly wind, wood and animal power are immediately available to us for transport, manufacturing, home heating etc. Now that is probably less so now than it was only a few years ago mainly because speculators have driven up the price of oil, but it must be said that the price of fossil energy particularly bears no relation to how precious and finite a resource it is. Air transport in particular pays no premium of any kind on its use of energy. Nor does the price take account of the damage to the earth system done by large scale emissions of carbon dioxide and the risks that this implies for the future stability of our climate,  and the availability of food and water for the multitudes of humans now present on this planet.

Would it not be better to price energy fairly and enable people to use less of it and more efficiently in a society which is good at using small amounts of energy from mainly renewable resources to produce prosperity and stability ? The means, financial and technological, already exist for us to achieve this. What is lacking is the will to do so. Our governments must act to produce the conditions for this to happen. Oil companies would do well to divert their vast resources into energy efficiency and renewable energy projects. We as individuals should look at the little things we can do to make our own lives more efficient, less wasteful, more at peace with existence. What is the cost of a species lost through our fault or more precisely negligence. What price can you put on a Ladybird or a Great Auk, an Otter or a Peregrine ?

The Great Debasement

It seems that with a lot of things nowadays you get less and less good stuff and more dross which you do not want. Take the BBC for example. The BBC symbolises or used to symbolise all that was good and solid and permanent about the world. Many moons ago it would have been possible to have nearly an hour of viewing for every hour of television. The only interruptions were the credits and between-programme announcements. Pretty good value. Watch any programme now and you will find that it invariably starts late because we are treated to tiresome in-house 'advertising' for other tedious programmes on other Beeb channels with the sound turned up full blast for good measure in case you didn't hear. Once you've got through all this, both at the beginning and end of the programme you want to view, you find you've only had 50 minutes instead of an hour. I am convinced that they are currently working toward 45 minutes so that their actual content matches other 'commercial' channels. The cost of a programme to us is thus increased by about a quarter, for absolutely no extra value.

Everywhere we turn it seems that there is more and more 'content' and less and less meaning. This is one of the disadvantages of instant mass communication by anyone and everyone, including me. Is it a bad thing ? Possibly. We are overwhelmed by so-called 'information' which in fact is simply noise, and loud at that, when we should be seeking out meaning, information that will help us live our lives, be happier, healthier, wiser. James Lovelock proposes that all essential human knowledge should be gathered together in one place - perhaps even in one book, as a repository of wisdom for the remnants of humanity trying to preserve civilisation in the event of catastrophic climate change. What a book this might be. But what to put in it ? Should it be limited to science and technology, or should it also contain all the great works of human literature ? Should it also remind the survivors of how many species their unconscious actions have wiped out, showing them in all their great beauty ?

Difficult questions and no answers. Some would say that the Internet already serves Lovelock's purpose. I suppose it does, up to a point, but it is too dependent on fragile electronics and data storage systems. Better as a Great Book, I think.