The Dark Mountain Project: Fatalistic Hokum

Self indulgence has a url, and it's www.dark-mountain.net. 

Follow it, and you will be welcomed to the Dark Mountain Project, the brain-child of journalists Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine, and a global movement of 'writers, artists, craftspeople and workers with practical skills' who, to cut a long story short, don't believe in civilisation. They have therefore created a process named Uncivilisation. Unfortunately it's somewhat difficult to find anywhere on the website what the process involves, or aims to achieve, or what it actually means, other than being a fairly catchy hook of a title. Hopefully the manifesto will explain this, as I am already slightly unnerved by the amount of scare-quotes used on the home page. They are not 'activists'. They are not trying to 'save the world'. They are not interested in 'apocalyptic fantasies'. Still don't know what they actually do. Want to find out.

The manifesto of the Dark Mountain Project begins with promise; we are promised the end of the world, and soon. The collapse of the world's ecology and of human civilisation's economy are brought together in parallel to create an 'equal' sign pointing to imminent disaster. The writing in the manifesto is excessively flowery, but the leading points are highly pertinent, once you've plucked all the fluff off them, and point to some really problematic issues facing us today.

• Human civilisation is fragile, and built on such horrors as forest burnings and battery chicken sheds
• Blind belief in progress is dangerous, capitalism will eat us
• The fact that we've created a word for 'nature' proves our belief that we are not part of it
• Our human-centric cultures are destoying the planet

Ten pages later, we are led, finally, to the crux of the matter. The bit we have all been waiting for. What are we to do about this overwhelming state of affairs?

We believe that artists—which is to us the most welcoming of words,

taking under its wing writers of all kinds, painters, musicians, sculptors,

poets, designers, creators, makers of things, dreamers of dreams—have a

responsibility to begin the process of decoupling. We believe that, in the age

of ecocide, the last taboo must be broken—and that only artists can do it.

Ecocide demands a response. That response is too important to be left

to politicians, economists, conceptual thinkers, number crunchers; too

all-pervasive to be left to activists or campaigners. Artists are needed.

The rest of the manifesto cites some poets that the authors think are rather good. And that's it. It transpires that the Dark Mountain Project really isn't about 'saving the world'. It's about watching the world die, and writing a haiku about it. So, if you're a politician, an economist, an activist or a campaigner, hey man, why don't ya just stick that in your pipe and smoke it.



Dark Mountain: Issue One is available on amazon.co.uk for £11.99, free delivery with Amazon Prime. Although there probably won't be the free delivery any more. You know, once the world has ended and all.

Animal Memes

Can a photo of a shelter dog mean the difference between life and death for that animal? The New York Times article 'Fired from a Shelter After Photographing the Animals' features the story of shelter worker Emily Tannen, who was fired from her job at Animal Care and Control of New York City, apparently for photographing the residents in ways that were prohibited in the shelter regulations, prohibitions which included featuring humans in the photos, amongst other things. Ms Tannen argued that the photographs that were being used to advertise the residents were not selling them well enough. A couple of harshly lit snaps of dogs sitting against a blue wall, while being held in place with a length of rope tied around their necks, illustrate this point. She used her own Nikon camera to take some more flattering photos, which highlighted each dog's characteristics in an empathetic and appealing, and yes, a tug-at-the-heartstrings way. The article claims that Ms Tannen's breach of the photography rules is the reason she was fired, but as the shelter declined to comment this is not entirely certain. Maybe I just don't want to believe that an animal welfare organisation could be that parochial. Which is silly, because I already know that it can. Hey ho. In my experience the answer to the question is yes, a good photo sometimes means the difference between life and death for a shelter dog.

Ever since hearing the simple statement that images change far more minds that words ever will, I've been a little image obsessed. In Picturing the Beast (2001) Steve Baker dissects the various images of animals that Westerners consume every day. Without the close contact that our ancestors would have had with other species, these images are often all we have to go on in our formation of opinions about animals, which is why imagery is more important than ever. In The Postmodern Animal (2000) Baker focuses on postmodern animal art as being the avenue through which animals can be truly discovered. This is all very well but it tends to be the case that the only people who come to view postmodern animal art are the people who already enjoy viewing postmodern animal art. In other words, you're preaching to the choir.

Much more interesting, and potentially wider reaching, is the idea of animal memes. This week I discovered a website called Know Your Meme. I found it by following a link from an online article about an American police officer named John Pike, who has come to be more popularly known as Pepper Spray Cop, after he was videoed casually pepper spraying a line of students, who were staging a peaceful, sitting protest at the University of California Davis. The scene was equal parts shocking and incongruous. Pike literally sauntered down the line as if he were spraying his kitchen counter with anti-bac. It was pretty awful, but what's fascinating is the appropriation of the still image of Pike into an endless avalanche of photoshopped montages insinuating him into an array of famous images, from Pike spraying the former US presidents on Mount Rushmore, to Pike spraying Edvard Munch's The Scream, to Pike spraying Jesus at the Last Supper, and so on. Some of these are comical, and some far more sinister, and some are comical-sinister, but each says something, and each reinforces Pepper Spray Cop as a meme.

I'm not saying that we do the same with every shelter dog on death row, waiting to find an owner as the clock ticks mercilessly down. But this is a way to say something with imagery that goes beyond the earnest pages of the animal activist's pamphlet, or the high-brow catalogue of a postmodern exhibition. Pop culture is just that, popular culture, and it's wide open and waiting for images that really say something about animals to hit the mainstream.

You don't need to challenge everybody's mind. You just need to challenge enough minds.

Hive Space

I recently interviewed Phil Chandler, who runs the biobees.com website, and who identifies himself as a Natural Beekeeper. Natural beekeepers are unlike those that they label as 'Conventional Beekeepers' in many ways, but the overarching definition is that there is less control, or interference, in and over the life of the honey bee, hence 'natural' beekeeping. The source of the argument (and if you spend any amount of time on the popular beekeeping forums, argument is the nicest word for it...things get heated on there) is the hive itself.

Most hives in this country are of the 'WBC' style. They use a space at the bottom for the queen to lay her eggs and for her helpers to tend the brood. The queen is seperated from the rest of the hive by mesh, a 'queen excluder', which prevents her accessing the other levels of the hive, and thereby using any more cells to lay brood. The cells are therefore exclusively available for honey production, and honey is made and stored here by the army of worker bees. To ensure that the workers do not expend any valuable honey-making energy on the construction of wax combs, 'foundation', sheets in the shape of honey comb, are fitted by the beekeeper.

                    Image from countryactivities.co.uk

This is the most common set-up that we have, but quite clearly, there is very little that's 'natural' about it. It has man-made written all over it. Natural Beekeepers do not prevent the queen accessing the rest of her hive and do not use foundation for the bees to work from, preferring to use the 'top-bar' hive model (plans available free on biobees.com), which provides thin bars for the bees to begin to construct their comb on, in whatever shape or direction takes their fancy. Less efficient for honey production, but closer to the way that apis mellifera would work in the wild, where pre-fab comb just isn't on offer.

I asked Phil about the differences between conventional and natural beekeepers.

Thank you for using the term 'conventional'. A lot of people start off using the word 'traditional', well, I think it's wrong  to use the word 'traditional' about a system of beekeeping that's been around for fifty years, so I prefer to use the word 'conventional' to distinguish between the beekeeper for whom the priority is honey yield, as opposed to what we have come to call the 'natural beekeeper', whose priority is pretty much more about the health of bees, and curiosity about bees in general, I suppose. We're much more inclined towards bee conservation, bee observation, and learning about bees - their behaviour - than we are about producing the maximum amount of honey.

                                                                                                                        Image from cornwallhoney.com

There's a saying that if you ask three beekeepers a question you'll get four differing opinions back. I interviewed a beekeeper named Martin yesterday, who has been experimenting with polyurethane hives, which provide far greater insluation, and so better thermodynamics. Martin considers all wooden hives - both WBC and Top Bar are included in this - to be cruel to bees. He bases this on the fact that bees in the wild build their nests in the thick of tree trunks, which have very different heat-retention features to a 17mm piece of wood. Martin's bees don't need to cluster together for warmth during the winter, the way that other people's bees do. Instead, they're kept at a balmy 17 degrees Celsius, even around the peripheries of their hive.

A hive is a battleground. The queen slays all pretenders to her throne with her scythe-shaped sting and the workers starve and bite to death the lazy drones at the beginning of winter, when they can no longer afford the honey to keep freeloaders alive. The hive is a battleground for beekeepers too, who use the space as a testing field for their theories and experiments, pressuring the bees to produce as much honey as possible, or contriving to produce the healthiest pollinators. If a colony of bees is a little civilisation, then the beekeeper is their omniscient god.

Staffies. They're Softer than you think

Today Battersea Dogs and Cats Home launched their Staffies. They're Softer than you think campaign, by paying a visit to Parliament, accompanied by seven Staffordshire Bull Terriers, one of which was knitted and stuffed. The knitted Staff is the face of this campaign, featuring prominently on the website and in mail-drop pamphlets (the first time I've heard of Battersea conducting mail-drops).

I mentioned the need for counter-images of Stafforshires a little while ago, and I've been thinking about it ever since. The knitted image forms part of this counter-culture, and although it's difficult to predict how effective it will be, I like it. The image was created by James North at marketing company Meteorite who have previously turned out work for the likes of Expedia, the Royal Mail and Blackberry. It's pretty clever, because it gets away from the stigmatised photographic imagery of Staffies and re-contextualises the dog, with a subtle reference back to the days when the Staff was still known as the 'Nanny dog'. Yes, it's neotenic. But it forms part of a, hopefully, larger collective of imagery that re-defines what it is to be a Staffordshire, and the more diverse we can get the better.

I was at a lecture on honey bee behaviour the other day, when the lecturer mentioned that it is almost never possible to change people's minds with words, but it is possible to change their minds with images. Let's undermine the slobbering, fearsome media Staffie, and get some more Staffordshire art out there.

Wickedness

Today I have been haunted by this article, about a dog who was tied to the back of a Porsche and dragged along the road until dead.

The beagle collie cross died of terrible injuries after being pulled at speeds of up to 70mph along the A27 close to Brighton, East Sussex.

Its mangled body was eventually dumped in a lay-by and the brutal motorist drove off.

Officers found the battered corpse behind a Tesco store in Brighton, East Sussex, late on Sunday night.

Detectives believe the vile episode was deliberate.

The alarm was raised at 10pm on Sunday night, when a bystander dialled 999 after seeing the black Porsche 911 Carrera towing the terrified beagle through a car park at Devil's Dyke beauty spot.

Half an hour later, police received another call to say the driver was heading along a nearby dual carriageway, with the dog, now clearly dead, still attached to the car.

Yes, the article was found on the Daily Mail website, and yes, the Daily Mail have a shonky reputation when it comes to journalistic integrity. A quick search (via everyclick.com) brought up the story on several other news sites, including the Huffington Post. Comments in response are unsurprising and fairly contiguous across the board (but I guess we have to factor in the type of person who clicks on an article like that in the first place).

This is one of the most evil things I have heard of. But labelling something as evil tends to put a preemptive stop to any further examination. So, I have to ask myself, is it possible for me to understand the motivation of someone who would do this?  Some people have a lot of empathy for nonhumans, some have very little, and most are somewhere in the middle. For whatever reason, I feel pain when I hear about the pain of other beings, particularly vulnerable ones. On an imaginary sliding empathy scale, I am close to one end of it, where most people might be somewhere in the middle. I think that being right at either end of the scale would be deeply debilitating. For those who empathise with every creature’s pain; well, we are psychologically not set up to feel everybody’s anguish as deeply as we feel our own, we simply wouldn’t be able to function. If I was right at that end, I would probably live under my desk, pressing my face into the wall and making gurgling noises. Then there are those for whom the only meaningful pain is their own; other beings (including other humans) don’t feel pain, or if they do, it is irrelevant.

Does this make these people evil? Not necessarily. There are a lot of sociopaths out there who seem to get along fine, or fine-ish. There is a difference, however, between not empthasing with others, and actively enjoying their misery and hurt. I have a feeling that the person who did this heinous thing was not actually getting his kicks from the pain of the dog; he was trying to hurt the person, or people, who loved the dog. The people who torture and kill animals for the pleasure of it do it mainly in private, secret, insidious ways. This was a public broadcast. This was a human who wanted to hurt a human, and the best way to do that was through the torture of a dog, whose interests were entirely irrelevant.

In Wickedness, Mary Midgley (1984) asks us to think of evil not as a positive, but as a negative. Not as something extra that people have, but as something that they lack.

However great may be the force of the external pressures on people, we still need to understand the way in which those people respond to the pressures. Infection can bring on fever, but only in creatures with a suitable circulatory system. Like fever, spite, resentment, envy, avarice, cruelty, meanness, hatred and the rest are themselves complex states, and they produce complex activities. Outside events may indeed bring them on, but, like other malfunctions, they would not develop if we were not prone to them. Simpler, non-social creatures are not capable of these responses and do not show them. Neither do some defective humans. Emotionally, we are capable of these vices, because we are capable of states opposite to them, namely the virtues, and these virtues would be unreal if they did not have an opposite alternative. The vices are the defects of our qualities. Our nature provides for both. If it did not, we should not be free.

Last month Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature was published. In it, Pinker argues (apparently extremely convincingly) that human beings are less violent now than at any other time in our history. From what I understand, Pinker’s facts come only from the analysis of human-on-human violence and I suspect that human-on-animal violence would, through sheer numbers, tell the opposite story. But surely it gives us somewhere to start...

In Vitro Meat

Everyone’s talking about in vitro meat, otherwise known as cultured meat, test tube meat, lab meat, or Franken-meat (I think I made that last one up all by myself, but it's probably been done)...

So what is it? Put simply, in vitro meat is meat that’s been grown on a rack, not on a living animal. Nicola Jones’ article for Nature, entitled A Taste of Things to Come ?, has a diagram which sums it up as follows. A small biopsy is taken from a live animal (let’s say, a pig). From this biopsy, cells called mysosatellite cells can be extracted. A growth serum is then added to the cells, which are applied to a rack or scaffold, where byofibres bind them together to form muscle. The rack is repeatedly stretched to build the muscle tissue and boost protein, and the resulting meat is ground into strips which can then be formed into, for example, a sausage.

Advocates of in vitro meat say that it will reduce the suffering of factory-farmed animals (one small biopsy can theoretically generate a billion pounds of meat), reduce deforestation and global warming (no need for grazing space, and less cows equals less methane), and feed the world’s poor. Critics of in vitro meat say that meat that doesn’t come from an animal is unnatural (of course, compared to what comes out of a battery farm this argument is shonky at best), that the taste of ‘real’ meat can never be replicated, and that there are already meat substitutes out there for the anaemic little vegetarians to feast upon. Interestingly, certain animal activists are also critical of in vitro meat, because of the initial process of extracting cells from a living animal, and the fact that some (but not all) of the current growth serums being used also contain animal extracts.

This puts animal advocates in a tricky position. Can saving the pain of thousands, possibly millions of farmed animals be worth the pain of hundreds, possibly thousands of farmed animals? Activist Jeff Perz has written a lengthy ‘Case Against Test Tube Meat’ centred around the premise that causing the suffering of even a single animal is unethical, and it therefore follows that the legacy of in vitro meat will be suffering and sorrow, and true animal advocates should have nothing to do with it. I’m not a utilitarian, but in this case, I would say that more suffering will be saved than will be caused, and dude, that’s about as good as we’re going to get. Plus, the biopsy is allegedly painless, and there are serums available that have no animal content whatsoever, utilising mushroom extracts instead.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals have a competition running for the first person who can bring in vitro chicken to market by June 30^th 2012. The prize, a million dollars, is probably peanuts to the cost of actually achieving this in the first place, but it shows that by and large the activist establishment is on board.

So is this actually going to come off? There’s a minor glitch in that, due to lab regulations, none of the scientists so far have been able to taste the fruits of their labours. If they can get past that (and personally I would be happy to volunteer my taste buds, and gag reflexes, in the name of science) and get the taste right, it could be marketable. Above all, though, like everything else, this will come down to the bottom line – money. Dirty, dirty money. If they can make it cheaper than the factory farm alternative – and that’s going to take some doing – there will be a market for it.

Here, then, are my suggestions for the first products of surreptitious replacement: spam, corned beef, fish fingers, sausage rolls, chicken nuggets, chicken dippers, chicken swizzlers, ground beef pizza topping, and of course, you’ve got to have your Franken-meat frankfurters. Yum.

Pet Photography

I’ve recently started teaching myself photography. I’ve had a DSLR for a few years now, but never managed to get off the automatic set up buttons – you know, ‘portrait’, ‘landscape’ etc. Now, I’m planning to go the full kahoney.

Why? As I mentioned before, I volunteer on Sundays at Battersea Dogs Home. A few weeks back we were told to look out for an article in the Sunday Times by a journalist who had borrowed a BDH resident Staffordshire Bull Terrier for a test day out, to find out whether the Staff would be true to media stereotype, and savage his wife and children. Anyway, like an idiot, I forgot to look out for it, and missed out.  That is, until last Friday, when I found a copy in my local Chinese takeaway (sweet and sour bean curd and steamed rice. Heaven). The lady at the takeaway said I could keep the magazine, and it’s been next to my computer every since.

The cover depicts a very middle glass gentleman, presumably the journalist, Matt Rudd, sitting neatly on a park bench, with a chunky black Staffie seating equally neatly beside him. While the man looks away into the distance, the Staff gazes straight down the lense of the camera. The picture is completely incongruous and utterly charming… without cutesy-fying the dog in question. The article that follows is even handed and sweet, with Rudd falling slowly for the soft charms of Dixie, the dog in question. But the cover picture is what stays with you long after the words have all drifted away. And this is what makes me want to be a photographer.

The Staffordshire Bull Terrier is in dire need of re-branding. Battersea and the RSPCA have tried in recent years to launch the Staffordshire into the main stream, by talking about all the wonderful qualities that Staffs have. By nature, they are loyal, warm, loving dogs. They adore people. It’s part of their problem – a Staff will do anything, anything, to please its owner… which means that there’s a lot riding on the owner’s intentions. Anyway, all the lovely qualities have been written about, spoken about. But nothing really changes. I was down walking on the meads the other day with Eggbert, and a family of four stopped to coo over him until the mum asked what breed he was (they had a toy poodle with them. The kids were dressed in identical macs. I should have known really…). When I replied that Eggie is a Staff Cross, it was literally as if I’d slapped the woman across her face. She yanked the arms of her children away from Eggie and pulled her brood from us, calling back over her shoulder ‘I don’t approve of them’.

Aside from the possible philosophical and existential interpretations of what she could have meant by not approving of a species (I don’t approve of sharks, occasionally they eat people’s arms. I don’t approve of giraffes, their necks are too long for my liking) the gist of it was that the woman had clearly not been touched by the message that the shelters are trying to put out.

A recent study conducted in the U.S (James Serpell was one of the researchers), looked at levels of aggression in particular breeds, and named the top ten most aggressive breeds, starting with the highest levels, as 1. Dachsund, 2. Chihuahua, 3. Jack Russell, 4. Australian Cattle Dog, 4. Cocker Spaniel, 6. Beagle, 7. Border Collie, 8. Pit Bull Terrier, 9. Great Dane, 10. English Springer Spaniel. If the gangsters are paying attention we should shortly see sausage dogs being paraded through the ghetto on chain leads. The point is, I don’t doubt that every different study will come out with a different top ten, but come on, Staffordshires don’t even feature. Their lookey-likey cousin the PBT comes in a meagre eighth. That’s going to be an embarrassing conversation down the dog pit next week…

I read somewhere recently that the best marketing happens when people don’t realise they are being marketed to…they just suddenly find their opinions changing, without quite knowing why. The best way to re-brand the Staffie is not to plead with people for greater understanding, it is to infiltrate society at large with counter-images to the snarling, slavering pictures that we are fed by the red top tabloids and other media outlets. Staffies have been branded as aggressive beasts, and only an intelligent, pervasive, almost insidious scheme of counter-branding is going to level the playing field. And, as much as I like words, the most powerful way to do this is through images.

Am I really advocating a snowstorm of neotenised, anthropomorphised Staffie-baby pictures? To an extent perhaps. However, I don’t think Staffies as a breed would benefit from being stuffed into Louis Vuitton handbags and fed cupcakes. We need to depict, not just the dog, but the owner too. All types of people have Staffie companions. I see them around all the time. Families with young children (in happier times the Staffie was known as the Nanny Dog), single women, pensioners, people with other breeds of dog too. Those are the pictures we need. Somebody needs to do an exhibition of Staffie and their Human photos, so that people who do not see the real Staffies trotting down their street, are still privy to another point of view. This would also have the knock-on benefit of making the Staffie not such a desirable dog for the yobs. After all, what self-respecting rude boy is going to want to man-up with a chunky Staff if he knows that the granny down the street has one.

I love Staffies. I’ve walked hundreds of them. My little old man Maxwell has a strong dose of Staffordshire in him, amongst other things. And so, to phase one of the re-branding of the Staffordshire Bull Terrier…find out what the buttons on my camera actually do.

Week 1 - Max is going to get sick of me practicing on him...