Capitalism, climate, and the dark mountain.

I found Naomi Klein’s recent article for The Nation, Capitalism vs. the Climate, to be very thought-provoking. I think it has helped me find my way into the Dark Mountain project – a discussion I perhaps wasn’t ready for until now.

It makes the very interesting point that western governments, neo-liberals and deniers of climate science might understand the science very well, and have understood that it requires not just half-measures but a complete re-engineering of our economics and society. When they say that climate change is a “green Trojan horse, whose belly is full with red Marxist socio-economic doctrine”, they might be more right than we give them credit for.

The article draws our attention to the battle that needs fighting on cultural and psychological grounds. What climate science asks for is the end of the world, as far as the powerful are concerned. You can’t change their minds with argument or science. It is far easier for them to distort reality than to change their world view.

Instead, the Left needs to start differentiating itself and offering a completely alternative model. Most of us on the Left are far too timid on economic matters. We think that by appeasing the powerful, we’ll win enough concessions to avert climate disaster. Never has there been such a gift to the Left as climate science, and the “gift” will get greater each year as the storm-clouds of environmental catastrophes loom.

Having read Capitalism vs. the Climate, I’m convinced that the Left are generally sleep-walking to disaster, just as much as the Right are rushing there headlong. Having said that, as I consider the Occupy movement, I wonder if I detect the first faint glimmerings of an adequate response to The Powerful.

So, although I am still deeply uncomfortable with the way some in the Dark Mountain conversation have pilloried environmentalists in the past, I think Naomi Klein’s article has given me a new starting point. What we’re doing on the Left, and in the “green movement” is, at its worst, appeasement. Perhaps at it’s best, it’s still often the dodgy logic of “we must do something; this is something; we must do this!”. The problem is not just technological. Not even technological. Technology can probably solve all our problems. The problem is cultural, political and emotional. Right now, I haven’t a clue what the solution might be. However, as a musician and an artist, I feel strangely excited by not knowing the answer to something. Not-knowing is a great place to start.

Dark Mountain, here I come

Photo credit: http://www.sxc.hu/profile/blattner

Biased much, Radio 4 Today?

Dear Radio 4 Today programme,

On this morning’s programme, you aired two pieces on the possibility of shale gas extraction in Lancashire.

The first piece was an interview with Professor Tim Considine of the University of Wyoming. He spoke glowingly of how shale gas extraction reduced gas prices by 50% – a figure which the Today programme repeated in a later tweet. However, figures on this graph show that Considine must have done some heavy cherry-picking to arrive at the 50% figure. Also, looking at Considine’s faculty website, one can see that his graphs about energy use are sourced from Quadrillion – the company pushing to start fracking in the UK. Both of these observations, freely and easily available, imply that Consodine is biased and has connections with the industry which will benefit from shale gas extraction. Consodine was not challenged at all on his figures, and the connections between his faculty and the shale gas industry were not disclosed or questioned.

Later, in the main interview on shale gas, you gave a good airing to the views of Lord Lawson – a founder of the Global Warming Policy Foundation which is based on climate change denial – and barely challenged him when he tried to claim that opponents of shale gas (including the current Energy Minister Chris Huhne) were ideologically driven, or that wind turbines are “offensive to the environment”. You did allow a soupçon of balance from Professor Paul Stevens in this second interview, but it was very weak and hardly an oppositional voice to Lawson’s.

Given the degree of opposition to shale gas, your choice of interviewees today certainly gave the shale gas industry a very easy ride.

If this discussion wasn’t a carefully orchestrated PR performance by representatives of the shale gas industry, then the Today programme’s poor-quality journalism here has certainly left it open to such charges.

I hope, in future, that the Today programme take much greater pains to disclose the connections and backgrounds of people who are given airtime on these issues – or at least to challenge people much harder when those connections are implied rather than confirmed. Knowing who is talking and why they are talking is as crucial as content of what they are saying.

Who cares if it’s traditional?

Black Swan Rapper. Credit: flickr.com/people/stevewelburn

I’ve been playing folk music and dancing to it for just over a decade now. I wasn’t born into it. I was brought up musical, but I didn’t discover the indigenous folk culture of the English until I’d left home and been through university. Anyone involved in folk culture will have experienced the ongoing tension between tradition and innovation.  I’d like to share a few of my recent thoughts on this.

Now, my thing is pipe-playing.  I play the border pipes, which originated in the north of England and lowlands of Scotland. However, the pipes I play might not be considered strictly traditional. They’re made by Jonathan Swayne of Somerset, and they’re really much more like Central French pipes in their sound and fingering – albeit crafted in the style of the British border pipes.  So, a fusion of Northumbrian and French pipes, built in the South West of England. I play them to accompany a couple of local folk dance groups, and I’m just starting to play for English Ceilidhs and French social dancing – all of which goes on regularly in this wonderful town of Sheffield.  My repertoire on the pipes is a growing mix of music from England, Northumberland, France and Scandinavia.

Am I a traditional musician? I don’t know. I’m playing mostly traditional music, or recently composed music written in a traditional style. But I’m not playing it because it’s traditional. I’m playing it because it’s a whole lot of fun and it sounds great.

What does “traditional” even mean?

Maybe it’s worth just thinking about what “traditional” means, when we’re talking about folk culture. There are a couple of common meanings implied by use of the word:

1. People have been doing your thing, in a certain way, for a long time.  There aren’t any clear rules about exactly how long people should do the thing before it becomes traditional. However, you get the most kudos if it has been going on for so long that nobody knows when it started.
2. The way you do your thing was taught to you by someone who was doing it before you were born, and was taught to them by someone who was doing it before they were born.

There’s also a third meaning, which has both fallen out of favour and become less meaningful over the last 60 years. This is that the people doing their thing were born and live in the place where the thing is has traditionally been done. This was important because folk culture is the product of a community, not just an individual. Communities have always generally been geographically specific. Today, and probably more tomorrow, we belong to multiple intersecting communities that are both local and spread across the country and the world.  Having said this, I think locality often still plays some part in defining something as traditional.

OK, maybe you can define it, but who cares?

Well, one big reason for caring is that this stuff (music, dance, art, stories, song, rituals) has been given to us by people who care.  They looked after it all their lives and passed it on to us.  We might think that it’s not our thing, or that we can do something better, but that’s not a very good spirit in which to accept such a gift.

There is also another more important reason for caring, in the long run. We’re increasingly noticing how much smarter people are when they work together. Crowd-sourcing is used by today’s social networking services who link together thousands of individuals to produce something much more powerful than the sum of its parts. Folk culture is crowd-sourced art. The longer a dance is danced, or a song sung, the greater the number of people who have shaped it, adding their experiences and their knowledge.  As artists performing today, maybe our work will be more powerful if it draws from and gives back to the rich river of our cultural traditions.

Tradition sounds a bit stuffy to me. I just want to do my thing.

Northumbrian smallpiper, Adrian Schofield. Credit: flickr.com/people/preef

So, here we are, at the tension I really wanted to write about.  Some people want traditions to stay the same, others would like more freedom. Some want to revive abandoned traditions, and others want to establish new traditions.  I think that the statement “folk culture is crowd-sourced art” is a good way to approach this.

Crowd-sourcing acknowledges the “wisdom of the crowd”. It’s a very positive view of humanity which says we’re smarter in large groups.  Applied to folk culture, there are two dimensions to it. There is depth–the generations of artists stretching back in time who have shaped your song or your dance. There is also breadth–the others of your generation who are working with the same material, bringing their different perspective.

This culture is dynamic. Art doesn’t stand still. Individual artists may be working with a traditional form, but, in order to give it life and breath, they are finding their own way to express themselves, and interpreting the material in the context of their own life and their own community.  As artists, we need to find something in the art that resonates with us, or our work would have no soul.

Of course, individuals find their own place in the tension between tradition and innovation. Some focus largely on understanding and preserving the material that has been handed down to them, where others want to invent and create.  However, with enough individuals involved, I think we can be confident there will be sufficient diversity of interests to honour the past, keep the present exciting, and the future hopeful.

So what can we take away from this?

Don’t knock an individual or a group that want to focus entirely on preserving the tradition as it is. For some people, this is of vital importance and where their love and interest lies. They may not be encouraging the tradition to grow or adapt, but their critically important contribution is in carrying it forwards through time to pass on as a gift to others.  We wouldn’t have any traditions at all if there weren’t people in this role, and our culture would be much poorer for it.

Bear in mind that our world is changing rapidly. Most of us today are members of many intersecting communities connected by location, family, work, leisure and technology. We travel and communicate globally on a scale never seen before in the history of our species.  This is a fantastic opportunity for our traditions and our folk culture.  Folk art is combining and evolving like never before as newcomers to the artforms mix and match.  If you’re a traditionalist, try not to look down your nose at the weird and wacky new expressions of your tradition.  Nothing is being watered down and I am sure there is a process of natural selection working on artforms and ideas that carries only the richest and healthiest forwards in time.

If you’re new to folk culture, don’t let your lack of prior knowledge stop you contributing and inventing.  Ours is an artform that constantly improves as more people get involved. Play your part. Be as creative as you can be, pass it on, and build on what others pass to you. If you can’t find something in the tradition that suits your purposes, make it up and build it in. There’s plenty of room in here for more.

Perfect font sizing

I’ve spent way too long over the last 12 months fretting over the problems of font sizes and typographic scale.  My own experiments have led to me creating this in the last few weeks – a prototype typographic scale calculator.  It does all sorts of number crunching to generate font-sizes which look pleasant together, look the same in all browsers, and allow visitors full control of the font size through their browser controls.

Imagine the combination of joy and bitterness when I discovered this great post on Snook.ca–Font Sizing with REM–not a reference to the designer’s preferred background music, or even the sleep-inducing effects of font-size calculations. No. It turns out that CSS3 has solved all our font-sizing problems by giving us the Root EM unit of measurement. Even better, it works in all modern browsers (including Internet Explorer 9). The only downside is that for older browsers (IE6,7 & 8) and currently Opera (which, I’m sure, will soon catch up), you need to specify a fall-back font-size in pixels.

So, “grrrr” that I’ve spent so long trying to fix a problem which is now solved by CSS3, but a bit “yay!” for its being solved.  As soon as I can, I shall update my calculator to work with REMs.

We’re living through a vast collective lie

The degree to which the narrative surrounding the UK financial crisis has been distorted is absolutely breathtaking: the story that runaway public spending, not the implosion of the banks is responsible for our national debt.

An open letter to the Sheffield Labour Party

This is an open, public letter to the Sheffield Labour Party, in particular to my local Labour candidate, Bob Johnson. Bob was kind enough to write to me today, but I felt his letter raised a big question. I’ve attached a photo of his letter to this post.

Turning Trafalgar Square into Tahrir Square probably won’t work

Last weekend I took part in the mass demonstration in Sheffield against the public spending cuts which the Coalition Government are forcing through.

In the speeches which concluded the demonstration, there were calls to “crush the coalition” by “turning Trafalgar Square into Tahrir Square” in the London demonstrations this coming week.

Beat austerity with frugality

This is a beautiful comment from Guardian reader Vraaak in response to Polly Toynbee’s article, The ‘good society’ must prevail —

If we make sure that every transaction we make or thing we do will benefit the people in power and their corporate parasite friends as little as possible, we can lead more sustainable happier lives and at the same time start to cut off their supply of cash. They want austere, let’s give them frugal. See how much in interest rates they collect then.

So, let us develop frugal minds and lives. Let us reduce our waste, curb any costly habits, and suppress our need for instant gratification by means of fiscal self-restraint. Let us be more efficient in the way we use the money and items we have. Let us defy expensive social norms and embrace cost-free options. Let’s barter where we can—which is a whole lot of fun in its own right.

Learning WordPress for Drupalistas

A little while back, I read Dougal Campbell’s article, WordPress and Drupal: Convergence?. It certainly seems that two of the most widely-used website publishing systems are learning a lot from each other, to their mutual benefit.

My background is in Drupal development, but I’ve recently been putting some effort into learning WordPress too. I fairly close to launching this blog with my own WordPress installation, and although I decided not to for a number of reasons, it’s helped me get some good insight into the things WordPress is good at, and the kinds of projects where it may be a better fit than Drupal. I found the biggest problem was that I’ve developed most of my approaches to website building “the Drupal way”, and so I hope this article will offer a bit of a leg up for others coming at WordPress from a Drupal perspective.

A Proper Introduction

Well, here I am, writing the first post of my new blog. To get the ball rolling, as ‘twere, I shall publish here the transcript of a recent interview with me, undertaken by Walter Tregony-Finknottle on behalf of Tweed Ho!, the magazine for the urban country gentleman.