How mixing poetry and science helps us better understand the world
PLATO banished poets from his utopian Republic. Wordsworth declared that “Our meddling intellect/Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things/We murder to dissect.”
Common sense tells us that science and imagination, reason and poetry represent different – if not antagonistic – ways of looking at the world.
Three books of poetry published to mark the bicentenary of Darwin‘s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On The Origin Of Species suggest that, on the contrary, both science and poetry require a proper sense of wonder and humility if we are to understand the world.
It is without question her best book to date, a fascinating, entertaining and often moving account of the public scientist and the private man. The poems dealing with the conflict between Darwin’s religious faith and his scientific convictions are especially good, as we watch him understand the “violence under the bright surface” of the natural world – “Out of famine, death and struggle for existence/comes the most exalted end/we’re capable of conceiving: creation/of the higher animals!”
“Man thinks himself, in his arrogance, a great work/and worthy a Deity’s glance. More humble/and true, I’d assert – to think him created, not handbox new but slowly. From this. From the animals/Once you have granted one species may change/to another, the whole fabric totters and fails.”
Marx and Darwin: Two great revolutionary thinkers of the nineteenth century. Part 1: here.
First, music by guitarist-vocalist Fabian Schrama. Many of his songs are about love. Among his inspirations is Damien Rice.
Then, poetry by Floor Voerman; much of it about women and death.
Then, a column by yours truly, about birds.
Finally, music by Love-O-Rama (they are not yet really sure about the name). A female vocalist, Linda van der Meulen, and a male acoustic guitarist, Arjan Appelman. What are their inspirations? Cornelis Vreeswijk, Arjan said. Georges Brassens, Linda said.
A SOUTH Korean court has sentenced two left-wing activists to at least two years in prison for establishing a solidarity group to improve relations with North Korea.
The Seoul Central District Court convicted Choi Han-Wook and Kang Jin-Goo on Tuesday of violating the broadly worded National Security Law, which was established during the cold war era. …
Court spokesman Kwon Tae-hyung said that Mr Choi and Mr Kang had received sentences of 24 months and 30 months respectively. …
The court concluded that the Solidarity for Practice of the South-North Joint Declaration (SPSNJD) group is “pro-enemy.” …
The SPSNJD said in a statement that it only aims to promote peace on the divided Korean peninsula.
It also accused the court of using an “old-fashioned” security law to return South Korean society to the cold war era.
The outpouring of public sympathy for [former South Korean president] Roh following his death is misplaced in view of his record in office. Nevertheless, the widespread mourning points to bitterness over the deepening social divide in the country: here.
SACKED workers staging a sit-in at the Visteon car components factory in west Belfast announced on Tuesday that they would contest any attempt to have them removed.
A legal bid by administrators KPMG to get the workers evicted was due to be made in the High Court on Tuesday.
But it was adjourned until Friday after a barrister who was instructed at the last moment to represent the workers told the court that he would challenge any eviction notice.
The Unite shop steward at the plant John Maguire said that the workers would wait to see what happened in court before deciding whether to voluntarily comply with any expulsion order.
Mr Maguire said: “We will wait and see and make that call after Friday. We don’t expect a decision by the court that day, there is still a need for further negotiation.”
Some of the 210 plant workers who were made redundant have been occupying the plant since March, when they and around 400 workers at two sister plants in England were told that their jobs had been axed.
They refused to vacate the factory, claiming that they had been given guarantees on pay and conditions when the company was hived off from Ford nine years ago.
Last week, they rejected a deal which bosses had said would give most workers an initial cash payment equal to 16 weeks pay followed by additional payments which would approximately equate to what was in their employment agreement.
A similar sit-in at the Visteon site in Basildon, Essex, ended after KPMG took court action against union leaders.
Visteon workers to ignore eviction order: here. And here.
Peace campaigners have demanded a full independent inquiry into the policing of demonstrations as the police watchdog admitted that officers’ G20 tactics were “unacceptable”: here.
PEACE and environmental campaigners say they are “unsurprised” at revelations that agents provocateurs infiltrated the G20 protest last month: here.
CAMPAIGNERS attending a public meeting of the Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA) have demanded a full public inquiry into police violence at the G20 marches: here.
The family of Ian Tomlinson has accused the City of London police, Scotland Yard and the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) of trying to prevent them from speaking out about the circumstances of his death: here.
MPs have warned Britain’s police chiefs that they must rethink the controversial tactic of “kettling” participants of mass demonstrations: here.
At long last, Parliament’s home affairs committee has produced its report on police tactics during the G20 protests in April and, as was widely expected, has come out strongly against the tactic of “kettling”: here.
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) stated on Monday that there is sufficient evidence to charge a police officer with the assault of a female protester during the G20 protests in April: here.
The family of G20 protest victim Ian Tomlinson have lodged a fresh complaint with the police independent watchdog: here.
POLICE on Tuesday banned a planned Budget day protest in Whitehall and warned organiser Owen Jones that he could be arrested and imprisoned for up to a year if it went ahead: here. From that report:
The demos are organised by Their Crisis Not Ours, a campaign launched by the Labour Representation Committee and backed by seven national unions.
This video is an interview with John McDonnell of the Labour Representation Committee.
With little press coverage, it was reported in February that a new police intelligence operation, the Confidential Intelligence Unit (CIU), had been established in Britain: here.
A lawyer acting on behalf of three men arrested during dawn terror raids in Greater Manchester, Liverpool and Lancashire accused the government on Wednesday of breaching their human rights as it emerged that all 12 had been released without charge but now face deportation: here.
Muslim leaders in Lancashire said on Thursday that the arrest, detention and subsequent release without charge of 12 people in police raids has created huge anxiety among the local community: here.
The inspirational life and tragic death of teacher and anti-fascist Blair Peach: here. And here. And here.
ISRAEL was stilled on Tuesday as it observed its annual memorial day to commemorate the six million Jews who perished in the nazi genocide.
The country came to a halt for two minutes as air-raid sirens rang out in remembrance of the Holocaust victims.
An official wreath-laying ceremony at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, followed. In deference to the solemnity of the day, restaurants, bars and places of entertainment were closed.
In Poland, Jewish youths marched from the ruins of the nazi extermination camp at Auschwitz to the neighbouring Birkenau satellite camp in a March of the Living.
Marchers set out from Auschwitz’s infamous iron gates – crowned with the words “Arbeit Macht Frei,” or “Work Sets You Free” – and walked two miles to Birkenau, a site of wooden barracks and the ruins of gas chambers.
At least 1.1 million people perished in the camp’s gas chambers or from starvation, disease and forced labour. The camp was liberated in January 1945 by Soviet troops.
Workers hold ‘lying’ bosses over plans to outsource factory jobs
Tuesday 21 April 2009
WORKERS at a French subsidiary of US firm Molex have detained two bosses in protest at plans to close the plant in south-east France.
Molex Automotive announced in October they were planning to close the plant and relocate its work to China and the US.
But workers “discovered that Molex officials planned and organised the closing of the plant at Villemur-sur-Tarn long before the October announcement to employees,” said Jean-Marc Denjean, a lawyer for the employees.
Some 300 workers will lose their jobs when the plant, which manufactures electrical connectors, ceases production on June 30.
Trade union representative Guy Pavan said: “Officials premeditated their move for months and lied to us,” adding that the workers intended to save their jobs and keep the equipment should the company leave.
He said that about 100 workers entered a room at the company where workers and managers were meeting on Monday.
They demanded that plant director Philippe Fort leave, then detained co-director Marcus Kerriou and human resources director Coline Colboc. …
Some polls in France have revealed that up to half of French people believe such measures are justifiable for workers seeking a better redundancy package during the economic crisis.
A blog supporting the Molex workers’ actions is here. It is in French, but on its right hand side is a button for translation into English and other languages. There is an Internet petition in support of the workers there as well.
Update Wednesday 22 April 2009: Employees at a factory in south-west France freed two bosses whom they have held captive for two days in protest at plans to close the plant and throw its 300-strong workforce on the scrapheap: here.
Dimon cited “an expensive war in Iraq” as one of the possible triggers of the economic collapse. Spending on the war ballooned the deficit and crowded out investment in domestic priorities. Meanwhile, the trade deficit soared. …
Dimon also places some of the blame for the crisis on greed for ever-higher profits, which he refers to as “irrational pressure…to show increasingly better returns.” The system he’s referring to — which pressures companies to steadily increase returns due to the cost of capital — is called capitalism.
Art exhibit illustrates horrors of Iraq occupation: here.
10 Environmental Disasters to Remember on Earth Day
April 21, 2009
Ten tragic lessons in our nation’s environmental history that should never be forgotten. And one climate destabilization tragedy in the making that needs our urgent help.
According to a United Nations report released in 2007, our planet is at risk of losing three species per hour. Ahmed Djoghlaf, the head of the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity, declared: “We are indeed experiencing the greatest wave of extinctions since the disappearance of the dinosaurs. Extinction rates are rising by a factor of up to 1,000 above natural rates. Every hour, three species disappear. Every day, up to 150 species are lost. Every year, between 18,000 and 55,000 species become extinct.”
For John J. Audubon, the extinction of the Passenger Pigeon, the great American wild pigeon, would have ranked high: “The multitudes of Wild Pigeons in our woods are astonishing,” Audubon wrote. “Indeed, after having viewed them so often, and under so many circumstances, I even now feel inclined to pause, and assure myself that what I am going to relate is fact. Yet I have seen it all, and that too in the company of persons who, like myself, were struck with amazement.” A victim of hunting and industrial abuses, the last Passenger Pigeon died in an Ohio zoo in 1914.
Imagine a quarter-mile strip of land stretching from Washington, DC until San Francisco: An estimated 800-1000 square miles of mountains and valleys have been eliminated from the American landscape since the launch of mountaintop removal strip mining operations in central Appalachia in 1970. Using explosives and heavy machinery, over 500 mountains in the oldest and one of the most diverse ranges on earth, have been clear cut, blown to bits and then toppled into valleys and streams with their waste since President Jimmy Carter signed the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act in 1977, which shamefully recognized mountaintop removal as an approved mining technique.
Mountaintop removal has not only destroyed the natural heritage; it has ripped out the roots of the Appalachian culture and depopulated the historic mountain communities in the process.
It continues today as one of the most egregious human rights and environmental violations in the nation.
With a severe temperature inversion, poisonous gases such as sulfuric acid and nitrogen dioxide were trapped in the stagnant air of the Donora mill town in the Monongahela River Valley in Pennsylvania. Released from various steel works and a zinc plant, whose sulfuric emissions had wiped out most vegetation within a half-mile, 20 people were killed and thousands stricken with respiratory and heart problems by the smog in the fall of 1948.
4. Don’t Call Them Accidents: The TVA Coal Ash, Martin County Coal Slurry and Buffalo Creek Disasters
When the dike broke at the TVA Kingston Fossil Plant coal fly ash pond on December 22, 2008, and over 1.1 billion gallons of toxic sludge eased its way into tributaries and watersheds of the Tennessee River, former MSHA investigator Tony Oppegard had flashbacks to the largely overlooked Martin County, Kentucky coal slurry impoundment that broke on October 11, 2000, and dumped over 306 million gallons of toxic sludge into the tributaries of the Tug Fork River. Both dirty coal incidents and negligent handling wiped out aquatic life and contaminated the drinking water for thousands of residents.
As the worst environmental disasters in the eastern states in modern times, the two incidents didn’t rank as “accidents” to Oppegard, a veteran Kentucky mine safety lawyer and investigator. “A spill implies something benign (“I spilled my milk”), and many folks won’t read past the headline. It also implies that it was “just an accident” –that is, that it wasn’t foreseeable and that gross negligence or criminal conduct didn’t occur, which I certainly would not assume at this point. To the contrary, I assume that there was gross negligence in this case.”
The TVA disaster came as a wakeup call that nearly half the American population (and their watersheds) live within an hour’s drive of a coal ash pond or slurry impoundment. It also reminded the nation that the coal ash pond had yet to be classified or regulated as hazardous waste sites.
Residents in the Buffalo Creek Hollow were not so fortunate. On February 26, 1972, over 132 million gallons of sludge broke past a coal slurry impoundment, flooded 16 townships, and took 125 lives and left thousands of people homeless in Logan County, West Virginia.
In a quiet neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York, over 21,000 tons of toxic waste were buried in the 1940s, covered with dirt and a plot of grass. Twenty-five years later, recognizing the extraordinary rates of birth defects, miscarriages, cancer and nervous disorders in the area — along with the construction of a school near the contaminated site — Love Canal resident Lois Gibbs led a campaign to uncover the environmental disaster. According to one survey, 56% of the children born in the 1970s suffered from some form of a birth defect. An EPA study estimated that one out of three residents in the area had undergone chromosomal damage.
Eventually, 800 families were relocated from the area. Their tragedy led to the passing of the Comprehensive Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act, or Superfund Act, which granted federal authorities the funds to clean up contaminated sites and hold polluters accountable.
On March 24, 1989, the Exxon Valdez oil tanker struck a reef in the Prince William Sound and poured 10.8 million gallons of crude oil into the sea. Wiping out the marine life in the area, the oil spill eventually stretched over 11,000 square miles.
Twenty years later, the Exxon disaster is not a story of naval impairment and workplace negligence, or an indicator of the toxic levels of oil. As Meg White writes: “Beyond the environmental massacre precipitated by the spill itself, Exxon is guilty of extreme negligence. Alaskan fishing towns such as Cordova and Valdez are shadows of their former selves due to the environmental, economic, and social repercussions of the spill. Despite corporate promises, the communities torn asunder by the disaster were never made whole again. It’s a sad state of affairs when people who have been hurting for two decades are still waiting for the situation they’ve been trapped in to be resolved. That is, in itself, an important reason to go back to this story on its 20th anniversary.”
The site of one of the largest strip mines in the country since 1966, Black Mesa remains like a scar on our nation’s conscience for the scandalous machinations of Peabody Energy on the Dine/Navajo and Hopi reservations. As part of a 273-mile slurry line, billions of gallons of water were also siphoned from the Navajo aquifer for decades. As the main water source for the native farmers and ranchers in the area, this caused wells and springs to dry up, groundwater levels to plummet and native vegetation to vanish.
As investigative journalist Judith Nies reported in 1998: “Thirty years after the strip mining for coal began, the cities have the energy they were promised, but the Hopi and Navajo nations are not rich-that part of the plan proved ephemeral. Instead, Black Mesa has suffered human rights abuses and ecological devastation; the Hopi water supply is drying up; thousands of archeological sites have been destroyed; and, unbeknownst to most Americans, twelve thousand Navajos have been removed from their lands-the largest removal of Indians in the United States since the 1880s.”
The nightmare of Black Mesa is not over. In an 11th hour ploy, the Bush administration gave the green light for an expansion of strip mining at Black Mesa in December, 2008. “Black Mesa is the female mountain, coal is her liver, water is her lifeblood, and we need to leave it in the ground,” says Marie Gladue Dine from Black Mesa. “Taking coal out of the earth is a dirty business, and it’s time to move toward a clean energy future that respects indigenous communities and our future generations.”
On August 29th, 2005, Hurricane Katrina, the third major hurricane of the 2005 season, hit the Gulf Coast of the United States. The Category 4 hurricane took over 1,300 lives and displaced hundreds of thousands of residents. It devastated marine habitats over 217 square miles of coastline.
Finding that the levees protecting New Orleans were not built for the most severe hurricanes and lacked a warning system for breaches and repairs to the levees, the Bipartisan Congressional Report concluded: “The failure of local, state, and federal governments to respond more effectively to Katrina — which had been predicted in theory for many years, and forecast with startling accuracy for five days — demonstrates that whatever improvements have been made to our capacity to respond to natural or man-made disasters, four and half years after 9/11, we are still not fully prepared.”
As a combination of over-grazing, over-cultivation, and unwise agricultural practices and abuses that led to massive erosion and destruction of the natural grasslands, extraordinary drought conditions in the 1930s whipped up massive dust storms across 100 million acres of Oklahoma and Texas and parts of the Great Plains.
Author Timothy Egan noted: “There are so many echoes of what happened in the 1930s and Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast in the summer of 2005. For starters, there were ample warnings that a large part of the United States could be rendered uninhabitable if people continued to live as they did – in this case, ripping up all the grass that held the earth in place. In one sense, the prairie grass was like the levees around New Orleans; the grass protected the land against ferocious winds, cycles of drought, and storms. Then after the big dusters hit, you had a massive exodus: more than a quarter million people left their homes and fled. Never before or since had so many Americans been on the move because of a single weather event – until Hurricane Katrina.”
It didn’t take place in the United States, but it deserves a spot on any list of American-sponsored environmental disasters: On the night of December 3, 1984, a Union Carbide pesticide plant leak exposed over 500,000 people to toxic methyl isocyanate gases in Bhopal, India. A village awoke to the mayhem of terror and burning lungs; an estimated 8,000 people died, though the numbers have never been confirmed and are assumed to be much greater. Union Carbide had disregarded warnings about potential leaks and improper safety conditions for years.
The native Inupiat villagers in Kivalina and Shishmaref, along a six-mile barrier island between the Chukchi Sea and the Kivalina River on the Northwest Arctic coast, are on the frontlines of climate change. With the sea ice melting, their coastline community has experienced massive erosion and devastation. The villagers have sued ExxonMobil and a host of oil companies, power companies and one coal company for the destruction of their way of life from unchecked CO2 emissions.
Pete Slaiby, Shell’s general manager for Alaska, said the company remains committed to drilling in Arctic waters off Alaska and to build that into a major new production base for oil and gas, even after a decision from an appeals court in Washington, D.C. on Friday that found the federal offshore leasing plan
“We still have every intention of pursuing a drilling program in the Beaufort and the Chukchi,” Slaiby told the Anchorage Chamber of Commerce.
Friday’s court ruling declared invalid the Minerals Management Service‘s five-year federal leasing plan under which Shell and others acquired exploration rights in the ice-choked Chukchi. The court ruled that the MMS failed to do proper environmental reviews before authorizing the 2007-2012 leasing program, and ordered the agency to rewrite the plan.
Last year’s record-breaking Chukchi Sea lease sale, which drew $2.66 billion in high bids, was the only Alaska lease sale that was conducted under the current five-year plan. Shell was the biggest bidder, putting up $2.1 billion for exploration rights.
ConocoPhillips, Spain’s Repsol Exploration and Production, Norway’s StatoilHydro and Italy’s Eni also picked up leases in that Chukchi Sea sale.
ConocoPhillips, which spent about $500 million acquiring leases there, has planned to start exploration drilling in 2010, on a schedule similar to that of Shell‘s. …
Separate litigation also over environmental reviews, meanwhile, has stalled Shell‘s plans for exploration drilling at its Sivulliq prospect in the Beaufort Sea, a project the company had intended to start in 2007. …
Offshore Arctic Alaska oil development has long been controversial. The area is used by polar bears and various types of whales, which are protected by the Endangered Species Act, and other marine mammals that are considered to be vulnerable to the Arctic’s rapidly warming climate.
THE Asian Development Bank (ADB) has warned that global warming will cause the economies of some Asian countries to contract by up to 7 per cent annually by the end of the century, here.
Oil installations in Arctic are bad for birds, good for predators: here.
WASHINGTON, July 22, 2010 – World Wildlife Fund’s long campaign to protect Alaska’s Arctic seas and coastlines from oil and gas development won a major victory last night when a federal court put a hold on recent leases that would have opened up the Chukchi Sea to new drilling: here.
