Oxford University Press's Blog, page 953
April 22, 2013
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What does Earth Day mean for an environmental law scholar?
I have been pondering this question since asking my seven-year-old son (who for the record is not an environmental law scholar) what Earth Day was about and he told me ‘That’s the day you think about climate change and stuff’. His description might not be the most accurate and Earth Day has a complex history, but he is correct in the general sentiment. The problem of course, is that like all environmental law scholars, I am thinking ‘about climate change and stuff’ every day and so having a special day to think about these issues seems a bit gratuitous.
Or maybe not. Earth Day, if it is anything for a scholar, is a day to take stock and reflect on how environmental protection policy and law have evolved over four decades. That reflective process is not as easy as most would think; the speed and scale of environmental debate often leaves scholars, decision-makers, and ordinary people with little time to think about the bigger picture. Different areas of environmental law have become specialized and compartmentalized. There is no such thing as a generalist environmental lawyer or environmental law scholar anymore; rather there are experts working in specialist areas of environmental protection. In such circumstances it becomes very difficult to see how environmental law has evolved overall. So let me use this Earth Day to reflect on that process of evolution and progression.
The first thing to note is that the process of evolution in relation to environmental law and policy has not been linear. The first Earth Day in 1970, celebrated primarily in the US, was at a time when there was bipartisan support for environmental protection in many Western jurisdictions. Much of this arose out of the appreciation that environment degradation placed real limits on economic growth. That appreciation developed into the concept of sustainable development with the Bruntland report in 1988 and the Rio Conference on Environment and Development in 1992. The situation now is far more complex. On the one hand, there have been the development of quite ambitious environmental law regimes; the UK Climate Change Act 2008 is a good example. On the other hand, environmental protection has less political traction than it once did and there is now a perception that environmental law, not environmental problems, provides limits on growth. Another example is public participation. While it is recognized as an important feature of regulatory regimes in theory, that does does not mean that it is an accepted part of the landscape in practice.
Paysage à Port-Goulphar, Claude Monet, 1886. Art Institute of Chicago.
Second, it is clear that over time the governance structures for environmental decision-making have become more polycentric and require a more nuanced account of governance structures. Within any one jurisdiction, a number of different regimes that address different issues will exist and these will overlap and interrelate. Likewise, the national, transnational, and international levels of environmental regulation interact in complex ways. Thus for example, the nature of regulatory competition in the environmental context is multi-dimensional and national decisions about nuclear energy don’t take place in a jurisdictional bubble.
Finally, environmental law scholars must really get to grips with the legal detail. We must dig deep into the infrastructure planning regime so as to understand what role public participation is really playing in that context. You cannot understand the prospects of the Climate Change Act 2008 without understanding the legal and political nature of devolution. Scholars must move past simple understandings of regulatory competition. The evolution of environmental law is thus really about its increasingly complexity, and thus the need for greater expertise on the part of legal scholars. This of course is one of the reasons for the compartmentalization of the subject; it is hard to foster expertise right across the vast landscape of environmental law.
Such fragmentation and specialization does not mean that environmental law scholars in different areas cannot and should not communicate with each other. Rather the challenges of interacting across these specialized areas need to be faced head on. Likewise, any attempt to develop overarching approaches to environmental law should not be at the expense of the legal detail.
So all in all there is great merit in my son’s perception of Earth Day. There is a lot of ‘stuff’ to think about, and think hard about. That ‘stuff’ requires careful and critical reflection and the process of thinking is by no means easy. That of course makes Earth Day important for environmental law scholars.
Liz Fisher is General Editor of the Journal of Environmental Law. Read a special collection of journals articles for Earth Day.
Condensing essential information into just three issues a year, the Journal of Environmental Law has become an authoritative source of informed analysis for all those who have any dealings in this vital field of legal study. The journal exists for both legal practitioners and academics, but also proves accessible for all other groups concerned with the environment, from scientists to planners.
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Earth Day
Today is Earth Day. At least, that’s the date of the official International Mother Earth Day, as adopted by the United Nations in 2009. It’s a day when we’re asked to reflect on the interdependence of all living things, our responsibility to restore damaged environments to health, and to cherish the world around us.
It was in the 1960s, the decade in which the modern environmental movement emerged, that the idea was born of dedicating one day of the year to celebrating the natural world and publicizing the injuries being inflicted on it. There had been several recent spectacular disasters. In 1967 the oil tanker Torrey Canyon ran aground on the Scilly Isles, causing the world’s first major oil spill. Between 1953 and 1960, people living near Minamata Bay, Japan, were slowly poisoned by eating fish and shellfish contaminated with mercury compounds in effluent from a chemical factory. Londoners had long experience of the winter smog, a mixture of fog and smoke, which afflicted most industrial cities, but in December 1952 the smog killed some 4,000. It was so dense that a performance of La Traviata at Sadler’s Wells Theatre had to be cancelled because the audience couldn’t see the stage. Cinemas closed because no one could see the screen. Gaylord Nelson, a US senator from Wisconsin, saw the damage caused in 1969 when an oil well blew out not far from Santa Barbara, California, releasing between 80,000 and 100,000 barrels of crude oil, and called for an ‘environmental teach-in’ to be held on 22 April 1970 to raise awareness of the harm being done. That was probably the first Earth Day.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of books and articles appeared around that time, warning of the dire consequences of allowing the situation to continue. And in June 1970 the first edition of The Ecologist magazine hit the newsstands, dedicated to describing and analyzing what many saw as an impending crisis of existential proportions. It all came to a head early in 1972, when The Ecologist devoted the whole of its January issue to one long article called ‘A Blueprint for Survival.’ Meanwhile, the United Nations was preparing for its first major international conference, which was also the first conference on the state of the global environment. The United Nations Conference on the Human Environment—the Stockholm Conference—was held in Stockholm in the summer of 1972.
June in Stockholm was sunny and warm, and the summer days were long. I was there as a member of a team from The Ecologist that collaborated with the recently formed Friends of the Earth to produce a daily conference newspaper, the Stockholm Conference Eco. Each morning we set out to attend meetings, returning in the evening to our office at a technical college in a Stockholm suburb to type our stories—no desktop computers in those days. The reports were cut out, pasted down, headlined, and finally taken to a Stockholm daily where it was printed. The following morning, volunteers distributed copies to all the hotels where delegates were staying and after the first few days they were allowed to take it into official conference premises.
The ‘Stockholm Conference Eco,’ (c) Michael Allaby.
The Stockholm Conference exposed the conflict between environmental protection and the need for economic development, a conflict that still remains unresolved. But it also encouraged governments to work together in addressing the most urgent environmental problems. Mainly under the auspices of the United Nations, a series of treaties followed, and in subsequent years there were more environmental conferences. Stockholm led to the creation of the Nairobi-based UN Environment Programme, which coordinates much of this activity.
On 22 April, as we mark the forty-third Earth Day, we can perhaps take stock of what was achieved. There are no more London smogs. Factories are no longer permitted to discharge their untreated effluents into rivers, so the rivers are cleaner. There are fish—lots of fish—in the Thames. Nor are industries allowed to release harmful dust and gases into the air. The condition of regional seas, such as the Mediterranean, is monitored and regulated by the countries bordering them. Pesticides are rigorously tested for their effects on non-target organisms before being licensed for use. The list of improvements is a long one, and the improvements are very real.
It is not to say that no problems remain. Of course they do, and some are serious. But they are acknowledged and serious professionals dedicate their lives to finding and applying solutions, and environmental protection and nature conservation now offer rewarding careers. There is always more to be done. But experience shows that we can advance, and that a better, healthier, and more interesting environment is within our grasp.
Michael Allaby has written many books on environmental science and especially on climatology and meteorology. He is an editor of The Oxford Dictionary of Environment and Conservation, and the General Editor of several other Oxford Dictionaries, including the Dictionaries of Earth Sciences, Ecology, Plant Sciences, and Zoology.
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How much do you know about environmental law?
To support Earth Day 2013, and to see how much you know about environmental law, we present this quiz. Happy Earth Day from our environmental law team!
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Top five untrue facts about Hitler
It has been thirty years this month since the master forger Konrad Kujau had his fifteen minutes of fame. Kujau managed to fool Stern magazine in Germany and the Sunday Times into believing that Hitler had secretly kept a diary. On 25 April 1983, Stern went public with the sensational story that Hitler’s diaries – which Kujau had penned in the late 70s and early 80s – had surfaced and that the history of the century had to be rewritten. By 6 May, it had become clear that two of the most venerable German and British publications had become the laughing stock of their nations. While no-one still believes that Hitler kept a diary, many other untrue facts about Hitler have been surprisingly resilient:
1. Hitler was really called Schicklgruber.
Adolf Hitler as a child
Would Germans have been prepared to greet each other with a hearty ‘Heil Schicklgruber’ every day? Could Hitler have become a dictator if he had used his real name, Schicklgruber, or would this have been just too ridiculous aname for a dictator? These are the kind of questions that continue to be discussed regularly on internet discussion sites. They are, however, historically pointless questions, as Schicklgruber never was Hitler’s name. Hitler’s father had been born out of the wedlock to Maria Anna Schicklgruber. Yet he had changed his name to Hitler, the name of his step-father, who by all likelihood also was his biological father, well before Adolf Hitler was born. While the claim that Adolf Hitler was really called Adolf Schicklgruber is historical nonsense, it is nevertheless telling that people continue to spread the claim. It points to the urge of people to turn Hitler into an object of ridicule.
2. Hitler had a Jewish grandfather.
The idea that the nemesis of the Jews of Europe was, according the logic of his own Nuremberg laws, a ‘quarter-Jew’ himself dates back to the attempt of some of his opponents to prevent Hitler from coming to power. As Hitler’s father was born out of wedlock, the claim was that Hitler had been fathered by the head of the Jewish household for which Hitler’s grandmother Maria Anna had worked for a while.
If the results of the unethical DNA testing of Hitler’s Austrian and American relatives, carried out a few years ago by the Belgian journalist Jean-Paul Mulders, are to be trusted, we now finally know for certain that the step-father of Hitler’s father was indeed his biological father and therefore Hitler did not have a Jewish grand-father. Yet what may be more important than the question of whether objectively speaking Hitler had a Jewish grandfather is what Hitler himself thought of the matter. It is likely Hitler feared being the grandson of a Jew, as he seems to have commissioned Hans Frank, his chief jurist, to look into the claim that he had Jewish ancestry in 1930.
3. Hitler fathered a child in World War I before losing one of his testicles.
Another ‘fact’ which was exposed as untrue by Jean-Paul Mulders, if his DNA testing is to be trusted, is the idea – only revived by a French news magazine last year – that Hitler fathered a child with a French woman during the First World War. Most other evidence also suggests that Hitler was neither heterosexual nor, as some claim, homosexual but asexual. Then again, German authorities seem to have made payments to Hitler’s French family during World War Two which is odd if no relationship of any kind had existed between Hitler and the mother of Hitler’s purported son.
The belief popularized by an English Second World War rhyme that Hitler had only one ‘ball’ was recently claimed to have finally proven to be true as a result of newly available testimony of a German medical orderly who claimed to have treated Hitler after being wounded in his groin. However, nothing in this story really adds up.
4. Hitler survived World War II.
If we are to believe recent news reports, Adolf and Eva Hitler escaped from Berlin in the eleventh hour, as the Russians were closing in. On board a submarine they made their way to Argentina, where they lived happily ever after until Hitler died of old age in the 1960s. The Hitler-escaped-to-Argentina story is only the latest tale in the saga that has tried to explain why, in 1945 and after, no Western investigators managed to locate Hitler’s corpse. Yet eyewitness testimony of several people exists that confirms that Hitler committed suicide and that his body was soaked with petrol before being burned. Furthermore, parts of Hitler’s skull and teeth are almost certainly held in a Russian repository. Even in the absence of eye-witness testimony and forensic evidence, Hitler’s psychological make-up makes it implausible to argue that he would have wanted to continue to live after his downfall at the hand of the allies.
Eva Braun and Adolf Hitler
5. Hitler himself was the most significant creator of untrue Hitler facts.
What Hitler told the world about how he had turned from a postcard painter into a fascist leader was seldom supported by true facts. A pathological and talented liar, Hitler told people whatever they wanted to hear and what was politically opportune. The core of his invented story were the four years that he served in the German Army on the Western Front. It was a story that he told so successfully that it was believed for almost a century after the end of the Great War. Hitler used it when he wanted to tell his core supporters that National Socialism had been born in the trenches of the First World War and that the war had made him. He also used it when he tried to broaden his appeal to a skeptical public in the late 1920s. And he used it in 1938 to court and fool Neville Chamberlain by telling the British prime minister a tall story of how a British soldier had saved his life in 1918. Many other canards of Hitler and untrue facts created by his propagandists persist to the present day. As the young historian Norman Domeier recently put it, “today’s perception of Nazi Germany by the public at large is still dominated by Nazi propaganda.”
Thomas Weber teaches European and international history at the University of Aberdeen and directs the Centre for Global Security and Governance. He is also Fritz Thyssen Fellow at Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University. Since earning his DPhil from the University of Oxford, he has held fellowships or has taught at Harvard University, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Chicago, and the University of Glasgow. He is the author of Hitler’s First War: Adolf Hitler, the Men of the List Regiment, and the First World War (2010).
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Image credits: Adolf Hitler, Kinderbild [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons; Bundesarchiv, B 145 Bild-F051673-0059 / CC-BY-SA [CC-BY-SA-3.0-de [Creative Commons Licence] via Wikimedia Commons
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April 21, 2013
How is Earth doing after 40 years of Earth Days?
This year we will celebrate Earth Day for the 43rd time. Where have we come in those years in dealing with the environment, and how has Earth’s environment fared? I have been an ecological scientist since 1965, five years before the first Earth day. Many improvements have taken place in how the major nations deal with the environment. People the world over are much more aware of the environment, but ironically, some of the ways people think about it have not changed. There are still major gaps, concerns, confusions, and misunderstandings about ecology and the environment.
On the positive side, today in the United States we have strong environmental laws, including the Endangered Species Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Clean Air Act. The Environmental Protection Agency was created, and all the federal agencies that deal with land and water have major programs for environmental protection and improvement. Most states too have environmental protection departments under a variety of names. Non-governmental organizations, most of them small and little known in 1970, have grown into billion dollar enterprises, taken seriously by governments.
So why is it that after all this progress we have difficulty solving so many environmental problems? And why is there so much controversy about them? How could something that seems basically a set of scientific questions have been politicized and made into ideologies, to the point that each side in the environmental debates views the other side as immoral and worse? Why can’t we just engineer our planet like we do airplanes, cell phones, televisions, and automobiles? Why can’t the planet run as steadily and smoothly as the spinning blades of a hydroturbine as it produces electricity from one of our major dams?
Some of the answers may surprise you.
We have lost touch with nature in a direct, personal sense: many of us are no longer deeply aware of nature, alert with all our senses. Although the word “environment” may be on our lips daily, few of us have the deep connection to nature that moved Cicero two millennia ago. Without that, environmental issues become abstracted, appearing as just another special interest with a backing politician, like Al Gore, telling us what to believe and whom to disapprove of.
Yes, environmental issues are so popular and affect so much of our lives and economy that many spokesmen have come forward. But some of those who claim to know the truth about it have no training or experience about it. They are today’s snake oil salesmen, feeding us phrases that capture our attention on whichever environmental position they champion. As a result, we ignore many of the key issues we should be thinking about. At the moment, we are captured by climate change, our current morality play. Meanwhile, our forests and fisheries suffer from too little attention and care. Invasive species hitch rides on our commercial jets, but we ignore these dangerous traveling companions.
In our technological age, we know more about the environment than any previous civilization. We are drowned in facts. But we are also drowned in “facts” that aren’t facts. As a result, we seem to be the civilization most confused about what nature really is, how it really works, what it means to us, and where we fit into it — if at all. Before the scientific and technological age, most civilizations had their own firm beliefs about nature, how it worked, and where people fit in. They mostly got it wrong, at least from our modern scientific understanding, but in each civilization most people agreed about it. It was not a center of moral debate.
Perversely, although our information about nature has increased greatly, we hold on to the dominant fundamental myth that nature is perfect, fixed, constant, unchanging, except when we tinker with it. Our major laws and policies and even many of our scientific premises assume this constancy. Meanwhile, nature in all its forms—climate, oceans, forests, individual species—has gone on changing, has always changed.
In every environmental issue I have worked on, I have been shocked to discover that although we are drowning in environmental information, some of the most basic and essential information has never been gathered. For instance, the state of Oregon passed a special bill to fund a study of the relative effects of forestry on salmon. I was asked to direct it and quickly discovered that the basic facts we needed in order to answer the question were unknown. Of the 23 rivers we were asked to study, salmon had been counted on only two. The state did not have a map of its forests. Logging permits were given by counties, which did not record the logging methods, area to be cut, or any other information necessary for an ecological assessment. All the blame for the decline in salmon was attributed to human actions though salmon live in perhaps the most changeable series of environments of any animal.
Does this matter? Such mistakes cost big money and lead to endless political and ideological debates without solving problems. As the leader of an environmental group in Oregon told me, “When the government said they could manage salmon, we thought that meant we could manage to have salmon.”
Unless we deepen our personal connection with nature, unless we get away from the folktales that dominate our beliefs about nature, unless we get involved and monitor what is around us, we will continue to see each environmental issue as just another political special interest and not know how to judge what is said, nor care deeply about it.
The bottom line: contact nature, think about it, feel it; seek facts, not slogans; understand science’s methods, not the catchphrases of its pseudo-spokespersons.
Daniel B. Botkin is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of The Moon in the Nautilus Shell: Discordant Harmonies Reconsidered and Our Natural History: The Lessons of Lewis and Clark.
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Image credit: Richie Run Vista (1) by Nicholas A. Tonelli from Pennsylvania, USA. Creative Commons License via Wikimedia Commons.
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Sacred groves
In 1967, the historian Lynn White, Jr., published a ground-breaking essay proposing that values embedded in Christianity had helped to legitimize the despoliation of the earth. Writing three years before the first Earth Day, White argued in “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis” that Biblical cosmologies granted moral sanction to our unrestrained exploitation of natural resources by advancing the view that humans exist apart from and above all the rest of creation, whose sole purpose it is to meet the needs of humanity.
As a scholar of the emergence of science and technology in medieval Europe, White’s primary interest was to show how Christian views of humanity’s relation to nature gave rise to Baconian science and technology, which treated nature as an object to be investigated and mastered for human benefit. With a quick dig at Ronald Reagan’s alleged anti-environmentalist quip, “If you’ve seen one redwood tree, you’ve seen them all,” White wrote:
To a Christian a tree can be no more than a physical fact. The whole concept of the sacred grove is alien to Christianity and to the ethos of the West. For nearly 2 millennia Christian missionaries have been chopping down sacred groves, which are idolatrous because they assume spirit in nature.
At a time when many assumed that technological solutions could be found for the mounting problems caused by industrialization, White argued that more technology would not solve anything. What was needed was a fundamental shift in worldview and values.
Sacred grove near Sikupati, courtesy of author.
White’s controversial essay inspired a flurry of response. Some scholars argued against his damning critique of Christianity and described the many expressions of Christianity that foster a less exploitative approach to the environment. Others pursued the hints scattered throughout his essay that non-Western religions might promote more sustainable values in relation to natural resource use. My own research on the sacred groves of India was initially inspired by the hope that these diminutive islands of biodiversity might teach us something about how Hindu values put deliberate limits on consumption, even in a context of enormously pressing material need.
In the forty years since White’s essay was first published, we have learned that the deep values undergirding our actions are remarkably impervious to change. It’s even doubtful that our minds harbor any single, coherent foundation for our actions. Rather, our deeds are more likely motivated by a welter of thoughts, needs, desires, and impulses, many of which are not even under our conscious control.
Consider the discouraging fact that even those of us who espouse values of sustainability live lives of flagrant contradiction. We jet off to far flung lands, wearing clothes from China and eating food from Mexico, quietly oblivious of our carbon footprints ballooning out like the shoes of some perverse circus clown. Once made aware of the effects of our choices, we are able to rationalize them away with ease. If White argued that greater scientific understanding and more sophisticated technological fixes would not reverse the damage of industrialization, our inability to change even the most egregiously destructive behaviors—transcontinental airline travel, eating strawberries in January—suggests that consciousness-raising exercises alone aren’t going to do much either.
Yet, with it’s punchy prose and sweeping argument, White’s article not only inspired the creation of an academic subfield—religion and environmentalism—it also inspired the religious environmentalism movement, a more pragmatic if equally fragmented effort to enlist religion in the service of ecology. Organizations of people of faith such as the Alliance of Religions and Conservation based in the UK, Eco-Friends in India, and the US-based National Religious Partnership for the Environment and Interfaith Power and Light (IPL), among many others, bring people together to educate, advocate, and implement concrete changes in their communities.
These movements demonstrate several crucial aspects about religion that make it a potent force for catalyzing the kind of radical changes that White anticipated, and that we so desperately need today. First, religion is more than just beliefs or ideas. Beyond equipping people with cosmologies that orient them to each other, to the divine, and to the non-human world, religions offer a way for people to act in groups. Privatized responses to the dire environmental threats we face today are largely ineffective. But when they are multiplied by thousands, and by millions, they can have a profound effect. Love it or hate it, religion has an excellent track-record for motivating this kind of collective action.
Second, religious people are motivated by many things besides what we might define as religion. Rural residents of India who preserve (and sometimes cut down) sacred groves are driven by many things: needs for agricultural land, fodder and fuel-wood, aspirations for a better life, desires to conform to new or transformed identities. The same could be said for religious urban dwellers in the United States faced with competing interests, like whether to expand the church’s parking lot or preserve 75-year old maple trees that give shade to a picnic area.
This is not to say that religion acts as a mere ideological cover for materialistic motivations, as when the felling of a sacred grove to build a modern concrete temple, or a maple tree to build a parking lot, is seen as a way to bring in more people and more revenue. Or that people are being simply pious when they enforce the sanctions that protect sacred groves from overuse, or put solar panels on the roof of their churches. Rather, more truthful understandings of how faith, religious practice, community, and natural resource use are intertwined are only possible when we recognize that religious people are also workers, family members, citizens, and residents of places that are precious in manifold ways.
Eliza F. Kent is Associate Professor of Religion at Colgate University and the author of Converting Women: Gender and Protestant Christianity in Colonial South India and Sacred Groves and Local Gods: Religion and Environmentalism in South India.
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Earth Day then, Earth Day now: ages apart
By the late 1960s, air and water pollution had already achieved serious environmental damage in the USA. Acid rain damaged forests, smog plagued cities, and suburban sprawl in its own paved-over way extended urban blight. Yet little appropriate national legislation existed. There was no Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Clean Water Act, or Endangered Species Act. Land, rivers, and people — whether in city or countryside — were all dumped on.
In 1969 that changed as two events grabbed the headlines: California’s pristine coast at Santa Barbara played host to a massive oil spill and Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River caught on fire. US Senator Gaylord Nelson, known from previous public service as Wisconsin’s “Conservation Governor,” flew back from Santa Barbara with an idea and on 22 April 1970, the first Earth Day was celebrated by 20 million Americans across the nation.
Earth Day quickly went global. By the 30th anniversary in 2000, people in 184 countries were holding Earth Day celebrations. That year the focus was clean energy. A decade later, the 40th anniversary saw attention shift to climate change. It also recalled Nelson’s address to a huge throng on the National Mall twenty years earlier: “I don’t want to have to come limping back here twenty years from now on the 40th anniversary of Earth Day… and have the embarrassing responsibility of telling your sons and daughters that you didn’t do your duty—that you didn’t become the conservation generation that we hoped for.”
The conservation generation hoped for? If the aim then was conservation, where is Earth Day now?
Earth Day 2013 marks a different age. The destabilization of climate change alongside the degradation of ecosystems and the loss of biodiversity dramatizes an altered planet — so deeply altered that the “sweet spot” of sufficient planetary stability to host all the human civilizations ever known, the late Holocene, is exiting. Scientists have already given its successor a name: “the Anthropocene.” If the mark of the Holocene was relative climate stability conducive to life, then the tattoo of the Anthropocene is cumulative human activities powerful enough to alter Earth’s core surface processes: atmosphere, ocean, or land. While humanly-induced, these core changes even occur where humans have little or no presence—at the polar ice caps, in ocean depths, in upper regions of the atmosphere. Everything—air, water, soil—is sufficiently impacted so as to render Planet Home passing strange.
The consequence is a familiar geological age moving so far out of phase that the planet can no longer be counted on for steady seasons of seedtime and harvest; for glacial waters feeding great rivers; for sea levels trustworthy enough to permit the building of great cities; for sufficient time for flora and fauna to adjust to new insect predators and diseases, or drought and deluge; for governments capable of marshaling resources to handle disasters of greater number and intensity or to allay the conflicts that arise when desperate people are rendered helpless and homeless en masse; for rainfall and snowpack and enough resources to assure that future generations will survive and thrive on a diminished and destabilized planet; and for ocean biochemistry stable enough to maintain eons-old underwater rainforests. (We are losing ocean eco-systems faster than terrestrial ones.)
In a word, Earth Day 2013 finds the third rock from the sun undergoing a transformation inimical to the very civilization that creates that transformation. Nature’s economy is deeply at odds with the global human economy. The result is not, as in 1970, a conservation crisis that threatened the pleasures of a way of life firmly in place. The result is a civilizational crisis that begs for a different way of life. What was, on that first Earth Day, full-blown confidence that industrial-technological civilization and 3.7 billion people could right itself has in 2013 become a troubled doubt that global consumerism for the nearly doubled population—7 billion—can. For some, uncertainty that never occurred in 1970 now looms. Because “planetary health is primary, and human well-being is derivative” (Th. Berry), and because “the first law of economics is the preservation of Earth’s economy” (also Berry), it has yet to be proven that we are a viable species for the very age we helped give birth. What is the faith and manner of living that takes us where we must go, from fossil-fueled industrial civilization to ecological civilization? Earth Day then and Earth Day now are ages apart.
Larry Rasmussen is the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor Emeritus of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary, New York City. He is the author of Earth-Honoring Faith: Religious Ethics in a New Key.
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Image Credit: View on Earth. Photo by Heikenwaelder Hugo, Austria. Creative Commons Licence via Wikimedia Commons.
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The father of the modern computer
Who was Alan Turing and why is he regarded as one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century? How did he become the father of computer science? How did the development of the Automatic Computing Engine lead to the development of the first modern computer? We spoke with B. Jack Copeland, author of Turing: Pioneer of the Information Age, about Turing’s work.
How did the Automatic Computing Engine make it possible to invent the first modern computer?
Click here to view the embedded video.
B. Jack Copeland is the Director of the Turing Archive for the History of Computing, and author of Turing: Pioneer of the Information Age, Alan Turing’s Electronic Brain, and Colossus. He is the editor of The Essential Turing. Read the new revelations about Turing’s death after Copeland’s investigation into the inquest.
Visit the Turing hub on the Oxford University Press UK website for the latest news in the Centenary year (2012). Read our previous posts on Alan Turing including: “Maurice Wilkes on Alan Turing” by Peter J. Bentley, “Turing : the irruption of Materialism into thought” by Paul Cockshott, “Alan Turing’s Cryptographic Legacy” by Keith M. Martin, and “Turing’s Grand Unification” by Cristopher Moore and Stephan Mertens, “Computers as authors and the Turing Test” by Kees van Deemter, and “Alan Turing, Code-Breaker” by Jack Copeland.
For more information about Turing’s codebreaking work, and to view digital facsimiles of declassified wartime ‘Ultra’ documents, visit The Turing Archive for the History of Computing. There is also an extensive photo gallery of Turing and his war at www.the-turing-web-book.com.
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April 20, 2013
A sharer’s feast: Shakespeare’s birthday party 398 years on
The twenty-third of April 1564, or a day or two earlier, saw the birth of William Shakespeare, and on that same day fifty-two years later, also in Stratford, he died. This congruence of dates lends some credibility to the account given by the local vicar many years later of the way the playwright spent his final hours:
Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting and it seems drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted.
These fellow poet-playwrights were close members of Shakespeare’s social circle. Drayton is recorded receiving treatment in the medical diaries of Shakespeare’s son in law, Dr. Hall, and it was Ben Jonson who composed the leading epitaph on the ‘sweet swan of Avon’ for the complete edition of his plays. There is good reason, then, to imagine this company toasting Shakespeare’s fifty-second birthday on or around 23 April 1616.
Shakespeare and His Contemporaries by John Faed
If we imagine that this party really happened, how would Shakespeare have related to these fellow dramatists? Oddly, some biographers paint a dark picture of Shakespeare’s retirement—imagining his alienation, marital troubles, and even conjuring a diagnosis of syphilis. Beyond the rather cutting bequest of a ‘second best bed’ to his wife, Anne, however, there is no basis for such a negative assessment. Shakespeare was famous: his plays were still in the repertory and more than half of them (and all of his poems) were also available in print. If fame was not enough, there was also money. We are used to thinking of Shakespeare as set apart from his generation by his genius; we are less used, perhaps, to thinking of him as set apart by his wealth.Pure talent will only take us so far as an explanation for this special position. Jonson was a great poet, but grumbled that ‘of all his plays he never gained two hundred pounds’. Professional writers of the age, popular or otherwise, suffered continually from a lack of money. Almost all had acute financial troubles and even successful playwrights such as Drayton or Jonson left no substantial wealth at the time of their death. The reason that Shakespeare would have been able to celebrate his fifty-second birthday in style (and leave a very substantial inheritance afterwards) can be traced to a decision that he had made twenty-four years earlier.
Unlike any of his contemporaries, Shakespeare had invested in London’s public theatre. In an age before copyright, this was arguably the smartest financial decision that an artist had ever made. In the summer of 1594 (already established as a famous poet) he had bought a one-eighth share in a company of actors, becoming a Fellow in the newly formed Lord Chamberlain’s Men. He became a joint decision maker at their meetings and a joint owner of their costumes, performance properties, and plays. Before this time Shakespeare (like Drayton or Jonson) had pitched his plays to multiple acting companies, getting a fixed fee when he made a sale. Afterwards, as a shareholder, he had a continuing income from the performance receipts of his plays and those of others. No literary playwright had ever been in this position. Though Shakespeare must have laid down the equivalent of around a year’s income to make this investment (probably through borrowing), it very quickly made him very rich.
Prior to 1594 there are indications that Shakespeare’s family were suffering from financial problems; there are certainly no signs of growing wealth. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, however, proved a successful venture, growing with speed into the nation’s dominant acting company. The profits from gate receipts and court payments were distributed among the eight sharers, performers who employed hired actors and hired playwrights at fixed rates. All of the founding sharers became wealthy and the great house at which the playwright died in 1616 was one early reward of the decision that Shakespeare made. This mansion (with ten fireplaces, the second largest house in Stratford) was bought for cash in 1597. Shakespeare carried out substantial renovations and had resources enough to extend the garden, buying extra land and demolishing a cottage to get this done. The year after he still had spare money for other investments, including a stock of malt. From 1594 onwards there is a steady record of Shakespeare’s ever-growing prosperity. Indeed, within two years of becoming a sharer, he had begun the expensive business of procuring a gentleman’s coat of arms.
The contrast between Shakespeare’s wealth and that of those who might have joined him for his birthday party remains oddly under-reported. In 1600—as Shakespeare continued to acquire land, tithes, and additional property (including a 10% stake in the Globe)—Jonson was imprisoned for debt. Debtor’s jail was a common abode for the playwrighting profession: Chapman, Dekker, and Middleton, to name but some, suffered the same fate. While it’s tempting to conclude that Shakespeare’s financial pre-eminence is simply justice (reflecting his superior talent) there is case for thinking of matters the other way round. His position as a shareholder also brought special artistic privileges. After 1594 (unlike his contemporaries) Shakespeare wrote for one company and without immediate financial pressure; he could specify the actors who would perform the roles he created; and he had a long-term stake in the life of his plays on the stage.
If Shakespeare did toast his birthday with Jonson and Drayton on 23 April 1616 he did so from a privileged position. Above all else, he had the year 1594 to thank for that. He could look out over what was now known as ‘the Great Garden’ of New Place, the owner of other property, including a residence in the exclusive Blackfriars district of London. Reason enough to hold a ‘merry meeting’ and ‘drink deep’.
Bart van Es is Lecturer in English at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Catherine’s College. He has previously written books on Edmund Spenser and has a special interest in the writing of history in the Renaissance. Shakespeare in Company is his first work on drama and was supported by the award of an AHRC Fellowship.
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Image credit: Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, John Faed [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
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