Happy with the photos I took yesterday around the village, and that more of them came out well than did not; a sign that I’m getting a hang of the X10. Just one or two of them were out of focus or poorly exposed.
Problems lingered this morning after uninstalling Protonvpn, which proved too buggy on my Linux box. After the uninstall I couldn’t enter some sites (including this one). This was resolved by restarting the modem. I may have to return to the earlier vpn (which worked fine).
Our resident climatologist Avner Gross has a good article about climate change in the Hebrew version of Haaretz that didn’t make it into English, so I read it today. Together with Greta’s book, through which I’m still plodding, I feel a bit under the weather.
It’s almost impossible to depart this country, at least to Europe, without airplanes, so I think I have hit on a unique plan: Go to the airport and book the first plane with an empty seat. Planes are rarely full, especially out of season. Once in Europe, it is possible to go by trains or buses, which are less harmful to the biosphere.
That won’t help with India. The days of overland travel through Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan have passed. With an Israeli resident stamp, Iran could arrest me as a spy, while India is wary of travelers who have been to Pakistan. I’m not even sure that foreigners can travel through the Wagah border these days.
I’m still suffering from my by cold. We had a couple of guests over the weekend. C H, a Canadian citizen, who is associated with the Thich Nhat Hanh sanghas – a former “boat person” who escaped from Vietnam just after the war. She is a member of a Buddhist practice centre in Ontario, and on her way back to Canada, was about to visit another practice centre in Italy.
Our other visitors were G with his son. G is an Italian married to a Parsi woman from Bombay. They met years ago when on a bus to volunteer at the Freedom Theatre of the late Juliano Mir Khamees, in Jenin. G has been participating in a Feldenkreis course for the last four years, because he finds the therapy helpful for their son, who suffers from CP. They have been living partly in India and partly in Hongkong, but will be moving to the UK in the summer, as his wife has accepted an academic position there. When he was visiting the UK with his son, to find out about schools, he was amazed by the rough treatment they received at the airport – basically they were shut in a room and interrogated. That was because he had made the mistake of not purchasing onward tickets. A warm welcome to post-Brexit Britain.
The situation has been a bit tense in the Palestinian village Hares that we often visit, after a young person from the village went on a rampage in the settlement of Ariel and killed three Israelis, before eventually being shot dead by the army. One immediate result was that other members of the village were denied entry permits to their jobs at the nearby large Israeli industrial park there – where the culprit, Muhammad Souf, had been working. Our friend in Hares, Issa, happens to be a distant relative, with the same family name – and he also has a son called Muhammad. Issa is in a wheel chair for the last 20 years after being shot by an Israeli soldier’s bullet on his doorstep, during the second intifada. He is paralyzed from the waste down. But he was and has continued to be a peace activist. Like-minded Israelis are always welcome in his home and C.H., the Canadian Buddhist mentioned above, had just a few days prior to the current events, facilitated a day of mindfulness for Israelis and Palestinians there.
Hares is for the most part a peaceful village, but no one should be surprised that the desperation felt by the vast majority of Palestinians under military occupation results in occasional desperate acts of violence. In many cases it is simply an “honourable” way to commit suicide – though at terrible cost because the perpetrator knows that punishment will be visited on his entire family; all his loved ones, who in many cases have no idea of his intentions. As of Wednesday, the army was preparing to demolish the family home.
The way in which the violence of the occupation poisons the futures of Palestinian young people can be understood from the video Arna’s Children, a heartbreaking feature-length movie that can be watched on YouTube (I could not get it to load in Invidious). The movie was made by Juliano, mentioned above, about the work of his mother, a Jewish Israeli married to a Palestinian, with young people in Jenin. Juliano himself was assassinated some time afterwards by an unknown assailant.
COP 27
I haven’t been keeping up so well with COP 27, which has been running for two weeks and is being extended due to a deadlock. In the news from today the “good news” is that
Annual electric car sales are on track to exceed 10m in 2022, up more than 60% year on year and more than triple the 3.1m sold in 2020.
More than 13% of new cars sold globally in the first half of 2022 were electric, up from 8.7% in 2021, and 4.3% in 2020.
Electric vehicle use in 2022 will avoid the burning of 1.7m barrels of oil per day – more than the total oil consumption of France or Mexico, both G20 economies.
I think that is good news only if the electricity itself is not coming from fossil fuels. This isn’t happening here.
The article also points out that electric vehicles are cheaper to maintain; and yesterday I read that they require less labour to produce (because less moving parts). So this will mean eventually that buying and owning them will be cheaper. That’s not necessarily good news for the environment though. I think that governments should be prioritizing and subsidizing public transportation.
Looking further down the Guardian’s live-blog for the conference there’s this:
Surprisingly large number of gas deals struck at Egyptian summit.
The announced deals include an agreement between Tanzania and Shell for an LNG export facility, a move by the French oil and gas giant Total to drill in Lebanon, a partnership between Saudi Arabia and Indonesia on oil and gas extraction and a deal spearheaded by the US to provide new renewable energy investment to Egypt, in return for gas exports to Europe.
It seems that over “600 fossil fuel lobbyists have attended, a record…” have attended the conference.
There have similarly been more than a doubling of representatives of Big Agriculture from the previous conference.
Meat, dairy and pesticide producers were all present at the climate conference, which this year had a focus on biodiversity.
Many have complained that there has been little discussion of how meat and dairy production is responsible for a large portion of both emissions and biodiversity degradation.
…the number of delegates linked to such businesses rose from 76 in 2021 to at least 160 this year – double the presence at COP26 in Glasgow. The world’s top five pesticide producers sent 27 representatives, according to the research, which is more than some country delegations.
There were 35 delegates linked to the biggest meat and dairy companies and associated industry lobby groups, which DeSmog worked out is greater than the combined delegations of the Philippines and Haiti, which are among the countries most affected by climate breakdown.
So it’s really amazing: the COPs have become annual opportunities for lobbyists from the oil companies and agrobusiness to do business and make deals that instead of mitigating climate change, help to accelerate it instead.
Went up to the Sea of Galilee with the family, staying in Kfar Hittim, in the large house of an Israeli-Indian couple who seem to spend most of their time in India. We were 12; 8 adults and four kids. Kfar Hittim is near the place where Salah ad-Din’s forces won a decisive battle against the crusadors towards the end of the 12th century. It’s said that they won by cutting the crusadors off from the lake and then starting a wildfire where they were encamped. The battle decimated the crusador forces. Afterwards, more than 200 knights were beheaded, and the ordinary soldiers were enslaved. The king and some of the barons were shown mercy.
In 1948 the Palestinians were forced out of the area; the village of Hittin and others were evacuated or destroyed.
An earlier battle was fought in the time of Herod against rebels that were holding out in difficult to access caves in the cliffs of Arbel. They were defeated when Herod’s forces sent down soldiers in chests, who set fires at the cave entrances and smoked out the rebel fighters and their families.
The same caves must have been an ideal domicile for the paleolithic people who earlier inhabited them, in an area then teeming with wildlife.
The whole area is geologically extreme, a landscape formed by extinct volcanos and earthquakes, the sheer cliffs plunging almost 400 meters – and the lake itself well below sea level. It’s a small part of the Syrian-African rift – a feature that goes all the way down to Africa’s great lake system. A great tear in the earth’s crust, which till today is disturbed by constant tremors, though most of them are too faint to feel. We looked down over the valley from the edge of one of the two “Horns” of Hittim, as these high cliffs at Arbel were known.
The Climate Book
I pre-ordered The Climate Book, by Greta Thunberg from Kobobooks, for my ereader and it arrived in time for the weekend. It looks promising: a kind of one-stop-shop climate primer with chapters by more than a hundred experts, thinkers and writers.
Villa Triste
I enjoyed this Patrick Modiano novel as much as another of his that I read last year. His novels are often short, which suits me, as I read very slowly in French and often need to consult my Kobo reader’s French dictionary. I like his particular style of “auto-fiction” and will probably read more of his books.
Lupin
A similar exercise is watching French TV series on Netflix. It’s quite laborious as I need to stop the video often to absorb the subtitles; an hour long show can last a couple of hours, that way. Eventually I will hopefully calm down and stop trying to catch every mumbled throw-away bit of idiom. I tend to approach languages as I did when learning Sanskrit – a mistake, no doubt.
“Lupin” itself is entertaining, though often quite ridiculous. I don’t know if it will continue to hold my interest.
India
During the weekend we were discussing our travels. M said that her impression of India was that, more than in other places, she felt that people were very close to the earth and to the basic realities of life. I know what she means, but I’m not sure that it’s true anymore. It seems to me that many Indians are caught up in illusions and frivolities that have little to do with basic needs.
They can apparently now afford to forget all about the “realities of life”, and instead promote a toxic blend of nationalism and religious fundamentalism. Here are people trying to trying to persuade the courts that mosques that have been standing for a millenium are actually Hindu temples; or that somewhere in the Taj Mahal is a secret cupboard crammed with the Hindu idols pillaged from an earlier temple. Inspired by the destruction of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya, They would like to see thousands more mosques either destroyed or converted into temples.
Fanatics there always are; the problem is that in modern India they are increasingly supported by the government, the police, and sometimes by the judiciary. Fanatics are no longer a small minority but the power in the land. They enjoy popular support. The situation has many parallels to Israel, whose government is also increasingly in the hands of rightwing pyromaniacs. But there are differences. The political agenda here is different and more focused. It’s less about religion, more about colonisation. Zionism and Hindutva may both be nationalistic ideologies that seem to hark back to an earlier era, but they are not quite comparable.
In his recent interviews, Kim Stanley Robinson has been saying that the 3 or 4 years that have passed since he wrote Ministry of the Future have given him more room for optimism that we will successfully address climate change. On the other hand, Amitav Ghosh another novelist who has been doing some non-fiction writing on climate change, looks at the same period and finds reason to be pessimistic. Probably both writers would qualify such categorical statements, but that’s the drift. Others like Yanis Varafoukis, Noam Chomsky, Miguel Fuentes and (ultimate pessimist) Guy McPherson have been weighing in on the subject.
None of these are climate change experts. They are, like all of us, following the accumulating studies and news reports, while trying to understand and figure out how to address the changes that are unfolding. What we individually bring to the picture is the life experience that contributes to our perspective and to our tendency towards positive or negative thinking.
My own life experience comes from observing the Israeli – Palestinian conflict while living in a small Jewish – Arab community. There have been moments of great optimism and of pessimism. The optimism at the moment of the Oslo accords and the pessimism at the breakdown and second intifada of 2001, and everything since. As a community we haven’t given up. In talks to groups of visitors, I have often said that a source of optimism is the knowledge that the two peoples are stuck together, clinging to the same bit of land. Since neither side can rid itself of the other, the only choice is to determine how to live together. They can either keep fighting or find a way to make peace, and my assumption is that common sense will eventually prevail.
But it’s only an assumption. They might conceivably go on fighting forever, or until one side grinds down the other and wins. The balance of power is not equal, but it never has been. History favors first one warring faction then the other.
A further insight is that peace is never a static position that, once achieved, can be taken for granted. It’s part of an ever-changing continuum. Even if and when peace is attained, there needs to be a constant struggle to maintain it.
Within the larger reality of peace or the lack of it, there is our individual life and our responsibility to do the best that we can: to live life in conformity with our vision, to give our children an education that is conducive to that vision, etc. It isn’t necessary, and is not advisable, to wait for geo-political peace in order to live according to our vision of peace.
So, when I look at climate change, it’s this experience that I bring to it. A knowledge that, like the Jewish – Palestinian conflict, it’s a process whose resolution I will not see in my lifetime. I may see an accumulation of changes; some that are negative, maybe devastating; adaptations that bring cause for optimism. But whatever I live to see, it won’t be the end. The only thing that’s irreversible for us, as a species, is human extinction.
If I want humanity to reduce its carbon emissions and to live in greater harmony with nature, I can start by doing so personally, to the extent that individual choices can be made. Much of what we do is governed by large systems that are beyond our control, such as the sources of the energy we use. However other areas, such as diet and the purchase of goods, are subject to personal choice. And usually, what is good and healthy for the individual turns out to be what’s good for humanity and the biosphere.
Much of the discussion on climate change revolves around the psychological conundrum of whether it is advisable to issue dire warnings of the coming apocalypse, or whether this will only lead to defeatism. That’s not for me to say. I’m not in the business of trying to influence anybody; why should anyone listen? So I don’t care; can afford to be honest.
Consideration of the future may invite optimism or pessimism. But whether humanity will eventually prevail does not need to influence our current decisions. We already know enough in order to make informed, healthy choices about how to live, individually and collectively. The closer we align with the objective of reducing our negative impact upon the planet, the greater will be the chances of our survival.
Monbiot gives a perspective on the current situation of protest in the UK:
In 2018, Theresa May’s government oversaw the erection of a statue of Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square, which holds a banner saying “Courage calls to courage everywhere”, because a century is a safe distance from which to celebrate radical action. Since then, the Conservatives have introduced viciously repressive laws to stifle the voice of courage. Between the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act that the former home secretary Priti Patel rushed through parliament, and the public order bill over which Cruella Braverman presides, the government is carefully criminalising every effective means of protest in England and Wales, leaving us with nothing but authorised processions conducted in near silence and letters to our MPs, which are universally ignored by both media and legislators.
The public order bill is the kind of legislation you might expect to see in Russia, Iran or Egypt. Illegal protest is defined by the bill as acts causing “serious disruption to two or more individuals, or to an organisation”. Given that the Police Act redefined “serious disruption” to include noise, this means, in effect, all meaningful protest.
For locking or glueing yourself to another protester, or to the railings or any other object, you can be sentenced to 51 weeks in prison – in other words, twice the maximum sentence for common assault. Sitting in the road, or obstructing fracking machinery, pipelines and other oil and gas infrastructure, airports or printing presses (Rupert says thanks) can get you a year. For digging a tunnel as part of a protest, you can be sent down for three years.
Even more sinister are the “serious disruption prevention orders” in the bill. Anyone who has taken part in a protest in England or Wales in the previous five years, whether or not they have been convicted of an offence, can be served with a two-year order forbidding them from attending further protests. Like prisoners on probation, they may be required to report to “a particular person at a particular place at … particular times on particular days”, “to remain at a particular place for particular periods” and to submit to wearing an electronic tag. They may not associate “with particular persons”, enter “particular areas” or use the internet to encourage other people to protest. If you break these terms, you face up to 51 weeks in prison. So much for “civilised” and “democratic”.
Reading George Monbiot’s critique of “Planet of the Humans” I appreciated his ability to sift through the many details, see where the errors lie and then state the ways in which the film is inaccurate, dangerous and damaging to the cause that it is supposedly trying to support. Environmentalists face so many challenges from the political right and those with vested interests who wish to undermine challenges to the continued degradation of the biosphere.
Perhaps I misinterpreted the film, or saw what I wanted to see in it. Or perhaps I’m right after all. It’s true that everyone experiences reality according to their individual tendencies. What dawned on me while watching it was that however careful we are to produce cleaner forms of energy, and however efficient those processes become, we will simply be encouraged to consume more, and it is built into the capitalist system and our own species’ nature to do so. We will not be able to reverse the destruction because the more we produce, the more we will use. I don’t see this as being a problem of the developing world and its burgeoning population (and growing needs), but a challenge to be addressed by those who are at the pinnacle of progress – who are also the heaviest consumers. They need to provide leadership in learning how to use less, not more.
