UEA Climate Change email issue

The unfolding the the Hacked Tyndall Center Email Revelations story has been interesting, this mini post is mainly to remind myself to write about it.

• Fishy timing, with tories seemingly cool on the issue with election year in the UK approaching, and the very hyped Copenhagen negotiations imminent.
  
• Why is it such a surprise that science is actually socially and politically produced?
• Is this really such a big deal? simply scientist banter?
• Is this like the ball tampering issue from cricket? standard practice but a good few get their knickers in a knot over it.
  
• How much is the 'media' responsible for bad communication on this issue?
  
• Incredible that climate denial had joined the ranks of genocide denial and holocaust denial isnt it?
• What part has the isolation of human and physical disciplines played in this mess up? fake interdisciplinarity doesn't count.
• What part has governmental technocracy played in cynicising the public towards decarbonisation?
• Climate Change is a discourse of power, its terms are contested from the academy to the parliament. This must be unpicked and refreshed because it has repressed certain trajectories of knowing. (cf. research funding streams) and perhaps entrenched soulless intellectual activity.
  
• There is too much bandwagonning and therefore waste of precious scientific capital in this area, this isnt just about climate change field but any contemporary science policy perogative.
  

Its time for political ecology to hit the Public Sphere, please.

Thankyou George Monbiot, thankyou Nigel Lawson

oo, and big ummah love to all the hajis out there!

An Iqbalian Vision for a New World

Here's a bit of Javidnama.


There is a world stil lost in our hearts,
A world that still waits for the call or 'Rise!'
A world without distinctions of blood and colour,
Where evening shines brighter
Than morning in the West;
A world purged of sultan and slave,
Boundless as a beleiver's heart;
A glorious world, which had its seed cast,
Into 'Umar's soul by a single look;
An eternal world, but one whose events are always new,
Ever new fruit of its master principles;
Within, it is not afflicted with change,
But outward change is occurring every moment.
See, that world is inside you!
I will tell you what its master principles are...

(Trans. Mustansir Mir)

[New word] EcoNaivety

Probably a temporary state, but i feel that certain publics are being rendered thus by the lifeless technocracy that has set in following neoliberal appropriation of environmental values specifically in the mitigation of human induced Climate Change.


Can you hear it?

Mrs Jones please turn of the light to save the environment (money), I shall just build a coal power station over your mothers grave, ok?

New parking charges are now in place in the university, we are letting a private company run the operation because we care about the environment.

Look at me, I'm an environmental consultancy sucking off the teat of local government funding streams, would you like a keyring.

I am an ecocrapitalist. I have decided to crade imaginary carbon in order to exploit the current policy space for every last grain of hope it might have left.


I can always hear it.

Maybe it was the Stern Report, maybe its just us, maybe its just the trappings of our times and powerlessness.

EcoNaivety is stuck in linearity and must get out. It builds a wall of carbon kajoosity around potentially creative relationships with each other. Dont get me wrong, accountancy has its place. Along with Family, Islah, Ummah and Baraka.

I suppose this was what we were getting at all those years ago with the banner
'Let's not let our postindustrial guilt suffocate our wanderlust'

Instead of regarding humankind as a permenant blight upon the face of the earth, we might conceive of ourselves as a potentially custodial, sympathetic constellation of forces. This is not a new revelation.

Why are you taking it out on BROWN, it was you son's choice and the evil Bliar's leadership wot got him killed.

These days the British public are being force fed armed forces pride and trained against thought crimes. Every billboard tries to explain the virtues of wearing a poppy with a backdrop of

The most wise and courageous thing to do would be to withdraw the limp phallus of british state terror from the middle east and central asian areas. Its made things worse. You can't polish a turd, even when its made with the congealed blood of tens of thousands of Asians and a few hundred white people.

The Prime Minister writes a letter to the mother of a soldier killed recently. What does she go and do?.... scream straight to the tabloids over his spelling. Meanwhile the tabloids get their kicks out of playing up the Prime Minister's sight problems. What grace and class.

Blue washed right, left and center.

Pathetic really.

Get them out .
Bring them home.
Stop thinking that you are the solution, you're not.