Earth Day: John Denver versus the pandora's box

My friends are sometimes surprised to hear that I'm a John Denver fan. I disagree with some of - actually most of - his political views, but then again I like some of John Lennon's early 1970s music, even though the man was by then an even nuttier fruitcake than he was in the Beatles.

What I admire is Denver's adherence to his principles, and one of the first things I point out when talking about him is that while rock and pop oligarchs were recording their histrionic singles Do they Know it's Christmas? and We are the World, Denver was frequently in African countries with his sleeves rolled up. Denver had wanted to be on We are the World, but the single's producer, Ken Kragen, who also managed Harry Chapin and Kenny Rogers, commented that "several [un-named] people felt his image would hurt the credibility of the recording as a pop/rock anthem. I didn't agree".

Similarly, while Earth Day, instituted in 1970, is a once-a-year "awareness-raising exercise" for some, the title of Denver's 1990 song for the occasion summed up his typically uncompromising view: Celebrate Earth day (Every Day).

In other words, if you think that the activities of humankind are causing global warming, you can use your God-given free will to give up your car, stop flying in aeroplanes (admittedly not hard to do recently with the help of Icelandic volcanoes) and power your household entirely with wind-turbines. Every day.

My favourite Earth Day story was from Anthony Watts, stating that today Arctic sea-ice is at its hightest for 9 years, while Telegraph blogger James Delingpole lists the lunacy of Earth Day votaries:

• "Between 75 and 85 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct" by 1995 - Earth Day founder, the late Gaylord Nelson.


• The world will be "…eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age," Kenneth Watt, speaking at Swarthmore University, April 19, 1970.


• "By 1985, air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half…" Life magazine, January 1970.

Gaylord Nelson, aside from founding Earth Day, is also famous for instituting hearings as a Senator on the safety of the contraceptive pill which required US manufacturers to place a statement as to the Pill's safety on its boxes, the first time in the country that an adverse effect had to be listed on a pharmaceutical product, and I can't fault him for that. But I think it gives an insight into the way his mind worked that no women were invited to testify, and this gave "reproductive rights" advocate Alice Wolfson a chance to stake her place in the dimming light.

Another peek into his psyche is given by his insistence that Earth Day should be held on April 22. This was against the likes of, say, anthropologist Margaret Mead, who called Earth Day "the first holy day which transcends all national borders", that the feast should be held on the Spring Equinox, which falls around a month earlier. Students of history will note, therefore, the significance of the first Earth Day being held on 22 April 1970: it was, according to the Grergorian Calendar, the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov - Lenin.

Sadly, in the aftermath of John Denver's last flight, I am not aware of eminent left-leaning figures who believe in showing what they think about the environment at least as much through how they live as what they say. I suspect they were sidelined from public life by the same sort of ideologues who decided Denver was not appropriate for We are the World.

So we are left with a holyday of obligation for a monster who murdered and oppressed his own people before directing his baleful gaze towards Russia's neighbours, thence to the rest of the world both in his own right and through his unintended heir Stalin, who muscled in on his legacy the same way that Alice Wolfson piggybacked on the unsuspecting Gaylord Nelson. Thus do each generation's self-elected prophets hand a Pandora's box to those who will empty its contents upon the silent majority of the next.

And that's before we get to Al Gore.

Related post: lights on: don't let earth hour usher in a dark age

lights on: don't let earth hour usher in a dark age

In the Draughty Old Fen last night, I didn't see many more houses in the dark than the number of people who are usually out on a Saturday evening leave behind. The reason I was looking was that Earth Hour took place from 8.30-9.30, during which people who believe the theory that the activities of humankind are causing our climate to change were told to leave their lights off to make "a call to stand up, to take responsibility, to get involved and lead the way towards a sustainable future".

If so, Earth Hour fell at the first hurdle. In the words of the Daily Telegraph:

Even if power stations are turned off, the upsurge in turning the lights back on one hour later will require power stations that can fire up quickly like oil and coal.

Energy experts said it could therefore result in an increase in carbon emissions "rendering all good intentions useless at a flick of a switch".

But WWF said the campaign was about raising awareness and saving energy in the long term, rather than a short-term fix.

Any chess player understands the principle of making an immediate sacrifice for a future gain, but if the WWF (World Wildlife Foundation) and its Green fellow-travellers were really into long-term thinking, they wouldn't have campaigned for decades against the cleanest proven source of large amounts of energy around: nuclear power. Because the protests of a tiny minority of vocal vested interests were heeded, Great Britain now has only 19 nuclear reactors, and the new generation, commissioned only last year, won't be ready to fire up until 2020, if there aren't yet more objections.

I was interested to see a night-time satellite image of South Korea taken during Earth Hour on Anthony Watts' Watts up with That blog, showing the country's towns as lit up as on any other night, while on the north of the border a Communist dark age still exists.

I am concerned that in our still-free societies there are those who would like to lead us into such a dark age and, although little that justice-and-peace types say surprises me, I was shocked last year to be invited to "fast" from the lights in my house from Ash Wednesday so that I and my family would appreciate God's gift of light on Easter Sunday. Was it coincidence that this was also the time of the changeover from real lightbulbs that have served us well from Edison's time to the pathetically poor energy-saving bulbs that don't even light up when you switch them on?

Suite 101's Paula Stiles identifies the term Dark Ages as having originally been coined by the Italian Renaissance poet Petrarch, who "appears to have used the term to describe the 5th to 14th centuries in protest at the relentless denigration of ancient pagan religion by Christian writers during this period."

Bertrand Russell, in his A History of Western Philosophy, doesn't link Petrarch with the phrase, but places the conception of the modern era at the Renaissance (in a chapter entitled The eclipse of the Papacy), and vents his anger on the Fathers of the Church, with special bile reserved for St Augustine, whose death was roughly contemporaneous with the final decomposition of the Roman Empire:

It is strange that the last men of intellectual eminence before the dark ages were concerned, not with saving civilization or expelling the barbarians or reforming the abuses of the administration, but with preaching the merit of virginity and the damnation of unbaptized infants. Seeing that these were the preoccupations that the Church handed on to the converted barbarians, it is no wonder that the succeeding age surpassed almost all other fully historical periods in cruelty and superstition.

(It should be said that Russell lets his prejudice - and western ethnocentrism - trump his erudition here: one could say that the rump Roman Empire, as the Byzantine civilisation centred on Constantinople, survived happily into mid-Renaissance times until destroyed by Sultan Mehmed's Ottoman army in 1453).

But how dark were the dark ages? If the past is another country, we would be ethnocentric ourselves to blame other civilisations for not undergoing the explosion of progress that has marked ours since, say, the invention of the steam locomotive by William Murdoch and James Watt in the late 18th century. But the early medieval period was not short of eureka moments in many fields.

In 1150, for example, the Knights Templar sowed the seeds of modern capitalism by inventing the "letter of credit" - which would evolve into the cheque - that allowed a pilgim to deposit funds in one place and redeem them in another far away.

Shortly afterwards, the arbitrary power of absolute monarchs was dealt a fatal blow by the Magna Carta, signed in England in 1215. Around the same time, Franciscan Friar Roger Bacon would initiate the scientific method by making a hypothesis, testing it and then refining it further if it passed the test; if not, moving on to another hypothesis - one of his experiments was on the ancient remedy of ground willow bark to treat fever and pain, which would be built on by French chemist Charles Frederic Gerhardt to synthesize Aspirin in 1853.

Underpinning both of these - and much else - was the novel addition of wheels to the plough in the 6th century (above), allowing it to increase in weight and till more and heavier soil, allowing populations to increase and create more pressure for innovation.

But now we have a movement of groups of activists, supposedly informed by science, to stifle any innovation that they do not approve of, and allow only research that saves the appearances of anthropogenic climate change/global warming, which is being shoved down the throats of our children and young people in education and leisure. Case in point: energy secretary Ed Milliband commissioned adverts promoting the theory of anthropogenic climate change as fact and using nursery-rhymes to do so, only (thank God) to have them banned by the Advertising Standards Authority on he grounds that the clear implications of the ads weren't supported by science. Milliband had obviously studied his Jesuit educational theory: "give me the child for his first seven years..."; but at least the lights are still on in the ASA.

The Telegraph's Murray Wardrop reports that earth is said to be entering a new period of geological time due to the acts of humankind having an indelible effect on old Gaia. Eugene F Stoermer of the University of Michigan's Center for Great Lakes and Aquatic Sciences places the handover from the present Holocene era to the putative Anthropocene at the end of the 18th century and "James Watt's invention of the steam engine" - William Murdoch obviously having gone the same way as Alfred Wallace, Friedrich Engels and woogie.

Last night I marked Earth Hour by having every light in the house switched on - except Maxima's room, as our cat Magus was curled up sleeping on her duvet. It was no mere excercise in contrarianism - we need a symbol of our desire to keep the lights on in science, and in our hard-won freedoms of conscience and expression.

To allow a Dark Age of fluffy earth-worship to be imposed would necessitate abuses of knowledge and wisdom that would have horrified the followers of the Old Religions whose torches were finally extinguished by the so-called Enlightenment's genteel patrician oppression; and the population control measures needed for proposed swingeing cuts in carbon dioxide (a gas necessary for all life on earth) would make the Holocaust look like a practice session. And guess what? It wouldn't be the lives of hand-wringing liberal intellectuals that were demanded.

Come next Earth Hour, my electricity meter will be working as hard as ever and for a good cause. When the time comes, I heartily commend Damian Thompson's advice to you: "Beat the 'Earth Hour' fascists and turn on your lights NOW!"

top tip for Tuesday

Only time for one tip this week, as I'm experimenting with the seat-of-the-pants style of editing the church mag: but what a tip it is.

Last Friday John Smeaton, director of SPUC (the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children) drews a line in the sand in response to the Government's abusive proposals for sex education in schools, which bode ill for the Christian, Jewish, Hindu and Muslim voluntary grant-aided

Smeaton cites a Government media release praising St Thomas More's RC School in Bedford on the grounds that, among other things,

St Thomas More delivers SRE [sex and relationships education] through the pastoral programme in conjunction with the RE syllabus...the school explicitly recognises the reality that some young people may choose to be sexually active and, if that is the case, they need the knowledge and confidence to make an informed choice to protect themselves from pregnancy and STIs. The school nurse provides students with clear accurate information about the full range of contraception and STIs and details of local services...Pregnancy options, including abortion, are also discussed in a non-judgemental way with the RE syllabus requiring students to understand the spectrum of pro- and anti-choice views on abortion.

Smeaton provides a long list of tenets of the Roman Catholic faith that these grounds violate, after announcing that "I will be writing to St Thomas More school, asking them to confirm or deny the government's claims about what is happening in its school."

Later that day, the Telegraph's Blogs Editor, Damian Thomson forecast Bad Things for Oona Stannard, chief executive of the Catholic Education Service, which, as Smeaton identified, had helped the Government draw up its guidelines. Fr Tim Finnegan, a frequent flier on this feature, refers to both posts as he runs with the theme on his blog The Hermeneutic of Continuity. He asks how far the moral relativism will be taken:

I doubt whether you would get Healthy Schools Status if you taught that there was a range of views on the advantages of smoking tobacco; and I don't suppose there is meant to be a valid range of views on the pros and cons of nazism as a system of government. The relativism of Ed Balls and his friends who are setting the agenda for secular Britain is actually only applied to the "views" they disagree with, such as Catholic moral teaching on the sanctity of life, marriage, and the procreation of children.

The Government is mounting an attack both on one Faith and on faith. I remember minor Scottish politicians muttering about "Rome on the rates" and, as they have risen, they have dripped their poison slowly through the years in the hope that the erosion would create a cavity large enough to insert their specious moral outrage about "religion on the rates".

As John Smeaton notes, today - Tuesday 23 - is the day when Parliament is due to vote on what is effectively the nationalisation of the bodies, minds and spirits of our children.

Smeaton remarks that St Thomas More "preferred to sacrifice himself rather than put the state's demands above the church's teachings", as can be seen in the 1966 film
A man for All Seasons starring, among others, Paul Scofield and Susannah York. I wonder if the Government was careful to use a school bearing his name as a Trojan horse to try to use the state's demands to extinguish the church's teaching?

breakfast, clarinets and God's jukebox

Chris Evans has taken over Terry Wogan's place at the helm of the BBC Radio 2 Breakfast Show slot, and very well he did too on his first day. It was small change that he defied the bookies to start the programme with All You Need is Love, but far more significant that the show was preceeded by veteran newsreader Moira Stewart, who had previously been progressively sidelined by the BBC until she left in October 2007 in a row about ageism.

But for me the best part was when the mother of a girl called Emilia Copp texted in to ask for a request for her daughter, who had given up a hired clarinet for a bought one as a birthday present, the delivery having been delayed due to our sudden attack of winter: Evans got her on the phone and arranged for Philip Mercer, accomplished clarinet player and teacher, to play "happy birthday" to her.

However, Sir Terry's retirement and Evans' occupancy of the keystone breakfast slot has eclipsed an arguably more momentous event: the return of Mark Lamarr.

Perhaps a little recent history is germane here.

In October 2008, unstable shock-jocks Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand were due to interview actor Andrew Sachs on the latter's show. When he failed to answer and an answerphone kicked in, Ross shouted "He's [expletive deleted] your grand-daughter!" and various rephrasings thereof down the phone. (The grandchild in question being Georgina Baillie, a burlesque performer also known as Voluptua.)

Over the next couple of weeks the BBC went into lockdown and even resorted to telling the lie that Sachs had not made a complaint, until Daily Mail columnist Melanie Philips penned an explosive article that blew the whole affair open.

Where Lamarr comes in is that when controller Lesley Thomas was fired for giving the pre-recorded Ross-Brand show her approval despite not having listened to it, Bob Shennan - whose strength lay in talk radio - replaced her at the helm of this specialist music station. One of his first acts was to axe the inoffensive Lamarr's three shows, which covered rockabilly, alternative 60's music and a show comprised of his pick of the last 70 years of popular music called God's Jukebox. He is a dedicated hunter-gatherer of the best not-well-known sounds and, as one music blogger says, expends a vast amount of time and effort hunting down music that is not heard anywhere else. The only complaint I ever heard about him was that he played too much reggae.

And there's the irony of the diversity-ridden alternative universe in which the BBC lives, moves and has its being. Lamarr, like DJ legend Alan Freed, is a white enthusiast for black musical culture, although unlike Freed his favoured ground is ska/rocksteady/reggae as opposed to rhythm'n'blues. He seems to have come under the same suspicion as Madness, a ska/rocksteady band (and favourite of Maxima's) who were accused of being racists because they were all-white, a charge not levelled at the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Queen, Oasis and all the other white bands who reap fields sown by Leadbelly, Robert Johnson, Chuck Berry et al. When Mark Lamarr was sent packing, Radio 2 lost a whole lot of its black music output, probably over half, while the chances that you'd get two white blokes talking when tuning into this specialist music station rose exponentially.

Two of those blokes are musician and DJ Mark Radcliffe and music journalist-turned-DJ Stuart Maconie, who jointly present a 2-hour show on four weekday evenings per week. Great things were promised and great things delivered, initially; now, apart from the odd coup like a recent interview with Danny Thompson, bass-player for Nick Drake, they play ping-pong with memories for longer and longer, and one wonders at what point they will find the cupboard empty.

Lamarr is returning, and not a moment too soon, and in another twist of irony is placed as favourite to take over from Jonathan Ross on his Saturday morning talk-show, whose contract involving astronomical amounts of license-payers' money is not being renewed. I wonder if, given Lamarr's already-proven prowess at interviewing (he's covered Ross's absences more than once), Lamarr's departure was insisted on by Ross? It fits the timescale at both ends.

Whatever, I will enjoy listening to Mark Lamarr, and hope that this specialist music station gives us the rest of our music back.

And I also hope that Emilia gets her clarinet.

despite the thermofascists, French farce at Copenhagen

Writing about the Treaty of Versailles in his 1994 masterwork Diplomacy, Henry Kissinger summed up why the 2009 Copenhagen United Nations Climate Change Conference was flawed from the start:

it is almost always a mistake for heads of state to undertake the details of a negotiation. They are then obliged to master specifics normally handled bu their foreign offices and are deflected onto subjects more appropriate to their subordinates, while being kept from issues only heads of states can resolve. Since no one without a well-developed ego reaches the highest office, compromise is difficult and deadlocks are dangerous. With the domestic positions of the interlocutors so often dependent on at least the semblance of success, negotiations more often concentrate on obscuring differences than they do on dealing with the essence of a problem.

Graced by the likes of Leonardo diCaprio, Daryl Hannah and Helena Christensen, Copenhagen 2009 has barely limped past the finishing tape despite the supporters of both Gordon Brown and Barack Obama claiming that their man struggled alone to achieve a compromise against the odds. Labour snob-for-hire Polly Toynbee captured the air of frustration with ordinary people whom the Establishment has gone out of its way to gag:

Most leaders in Copenhagen were out ahead of their people. Most understand the crisis better than those they represent, promising more sacrifice than their citizens are yet ready to accept – while no doubt praying for some miraculous technological escape.

Sudanese diplomat Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping spoke for the G77 group of the corrupt régimes of developing countries who had brought their begging-bowls to the Baltic when he asked what Obama would tell his daughters about his part in abandoning their Kenyan relatives, then developed the tired old theme comparing of climate-change "deniers" to scum who say that the Holocaust never happened by saying that Copenhagen spelled "incineration" for Africa and was comparable to the Nazis "sending six million Jews into the furnace". (Sweden's chief negotiator Anders Turesson called the reference "utterly despicable" - maybe the country's still ashamed of its politicians' initial apathy towards the Aftonbladet blood libel scandal.)

Shortly before the conference began, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown had a swipe at people who believe the hard science showing that changes in climate are not predominantly due to the actions of humankind, calling us "flat earthers", and the attacks have not let up. In Lord Christopher Monckton's case the attack was not metaphorical; as reported in the tap, the anthropogenic climate-change sceptic had the correct paperwork to enter the conference but was excluded, then was assaulted by a Danish policeman despite having followed St John's Ambulance recommendations to keep his hands in his pockets; he had turned his back and was walking away when he was knocked unconscious.

Other attacks are more insidious. The First Post's resident psychoanalyst, Coline Covington, spoke of Sarah Palin, as a typical climate change "denier", as having the sort of narcissism seen in small children; displaying her membership of the Richard Dawkins school of rhetoric, she sets up her straw man at the start of the article by talking about Nick Griffin, leader of the neo-nazi BNP. She says, referring to Palin and by implication to many of us, "Climate change threatens our narcissistic omnipotence. Deniers do not want anyone else telling them they can't drive large cars or run two refrigerators...This is a mentality resembling the narcissism of small children who want to hold onto their illusion of omnipotence and control over mother."

What Covington is referring to is more than the sexually-deviant scribblings of Sigmund Freud that imprisoned many children in their abusers' houses by interpreting their reports as libidinous fantasies; she's talking about narcissistic personality disorder, in a disappointing confirmation of the hostility of many psychiatric professionals towards people with personality disorders, and their over-readiness to inflict the diagnostic sentence upon people of whom they disapprove.

Copenhagen has failed, and that's disappointing because, for opposition against the thermofascists to turn to an effective resistance movement, we need to know exactly what we're resisting. The reason it's failed is precisely as Kissinger identified, that there were too many powerful egos with long memories at the conference.

Case in point: there will be consequences for Obama's humiliating China for not meeting Kyoto targets in the presence of that country's Prime Minister: had he watched Li Yu's 2007 Dam Street (Hong Yan) he would have learned the lesson you can find in the most basic internet guide for doing business with Chinese people - "Never allow your protagonist to lose face, and try not to lose face yourself." Heads of state like Britain's Gordon Brown, the US's Barack Obama and India's Manmohan Singh would have done better to send their foreign ministers or, even better, senior diplomats. Is Henry Kissinger still working?

the education issue

I've only had a Statcounter account for a year or so, so I don't know at what point schools and universities started accessing this blog in large numbers. But that they do is gratifying. For a couple of months through Statcounter, I've been keeping a track on what schools authorities and boards, universities and other educational institutions and charities have been accessing the blog, and what posts have been the most popular. This has led to me keeping a rolling tally of the last 50 universities etc to access the blog, down on the bottom of the sidebar to the right.

I blog about popular culture against the background of Judaeo-Christian faith traditions and conservative political views and, when I'm not writing about things like cookies (see the previous post) try to research topics exhaustively. I write for the only person you can honestly write for - myself - and am glad that, alongside several online friends I've made like Linda Pam and Revd Bosco, academic instutions have chosen to follow the blog, some quite regularly. I hope you all continue to enjoy it.

I've posted a full top 30 over on the Top 30 from the Fen site; here's the top ten. (Note: it would be mischevous of me to mention which posts were accessed by the Houses of Parliament and the US House of Representatives, so I won't.)

Underage smoking is more stupid than criminal An unorthodox but time-honoured way to discourage an underage smoker, using inclusion instead of stigmatisation. Accessed by schools authorities internationally.

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Was the presidential election a set-up?When Goulong Li went head-to-head with Tom Chigbo for the presidency of Cambridge University Student Union, university dons took the unprecedented move of briefing against Li in local and even national newspapers, professing their shock at his opinion - which he had spoken freely for a year and a half - that homosexuals could be "cured". But the point at which he lost the election may have been when, during the filmed hustings, he took his Bible from his pocket. This post was very popular in both Cambridge and universities across the US.

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Cannabis policy's in no more chaos than usual As Frank Nutt's supporters predict Bad Things for drugs policies in the wake of his removal as head of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, I find myself in the unusual position of supporting the government on his sacking.

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Abigail Blackburn and the truth about pregorexia Celebrity culture eats its own children, and nobody profits more than editors like Abigail Blackburn. Written about a documentary by singer and model Louise Redknapp, the post has been enduringly popular within and outwith educational establishments.

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Anne Frank In the display on Anne Frank in Cambridge's Addenbrooke's Hospital - the foundation was delivering diversity training - we saw the world famous picture of Anne staring into a future she would never see. Accessed by some universities, but predominantly by schools.

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Norman Tebbit and the art of Risk Former Conservative Party chairman Norman Tebbit showed a magisterial understanding of the concept of risk when he suggested voters could elect smaller parties as a reaction to the MPs' expenses crisis. Councils, schools and insurance companies take note.

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Fatal Misconception - the struggle to control world population Indira Gandhi's first government collapsed in chaos because of population control measures drawn up by white westerners, but eugenics has returned. Very popular in India for reasons that become obvious, but also internationally, and by some surprising institutions.

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Good taste back on the horizon - how mad are you? A documentary recreating David Rosenhahn's 1972 experiment involving "pseudopatients" admittied to a psychiatric ward - with surprising results.

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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows From Harry Potter through such stopping points as Odysseus and back - but contains spoilers: big ones! Both unis and schools seemed to like this one.

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Chlamydia, koalas and killer sex education The government is attacking the epidemic of chlamydia in young people on two fronts: firstly, by grafting it onto its campaign to delay early sex; and secondly, by handing out condoms to the population it's trying to delay early sex within.