Times in the balance

Now sum­mer is here it is easy to ig­nore the wider world and only take in what we see through the sun's glare at the beach or from the top of a shady moun­tain. Away from the ease of na­ture's in­no­cence though, it seems we are liv­ing in piv­otal and fas­ci­nat­ing days. The good news is that Eu­rope can take heart from some real achieve­ments in en­vi­ron­men­tal en­ergy over the last few months. For ex­am­ple, in the month of May, Ger­many was al­most en­tirely pow­ered by solar and wind, Britain func­tioned with­out coal for the first time in over a cen­tury, and Por­tu­gal ran on re­new­able en­ergy alone for four days straight. Also, the EU Par­lia­ment has called on the Eu­ro­pean Com­mis­sion to se­verely re­strict per­mit­ted uses of the toxic agri­cul­tural her­bi­cide glyphosate –a prob­a­ble cause of can­cer and a sub­stance al­ready found in our blood­streams.

Just across the sea in Tunisia is an­other de­vel­op­ment that must be wel­come to any­one who cares about basic human rights. In that part of the con­ti­nent that orig­i­nally sparked the Mid­dle East­ern Arab Spring protests over five years ago, Tunisia's once-ex­treme En­nahda party “of­fi­cially de­clared that it will sep­a­rate its re­li­gious ac­tiv­i­ties from its po­lit­i­cal ones...[and] ac­knowl­edged the pri­macy of sec­u­lar democ­racy over Is­lamist theoc­racy.” In other words, mosques there will be po­lit­i­cally neu­tral –a major blow to any re­cruiters of fun­da­men­tal­ist ter­ror­ists.

But there are also cur­rent af­fairs sto­ries that are not at all heart­en­ing. Con­ser­v­a­tive party at­tacks on the tax­payer-funded BBC con­tinue with­out mercy. David Cameron's gov­ern­ment is try­ing to take more money away from chil­dren's pro­grammes in a move to­wards cor­po­rate ad­ver­tis­ing on the great media in­sti­tu­tion. This idea of com­plete aban­don­ment of the pub­lic sec­tor is being taken to it's log­i­cal con­clu­sion else­where. In Gur­gaon, a boom­ing In­dian city with a pop­u­la­tion of mil­lions, they live and work “with­out a city­wide sys­tem for water, elec­tric­ity or even pub­lic sew­ers.”

It is ex­actly this kind of prob­lem that tech­nol­ogy mag­nate Bill Gates sees hold­ing the US back. He re­cently made the case for pub­lic fund­ing of cru­cial in­fra­struc­ture, ar­gu­ing: “Since World War II, US-gov­ern­ment R&D [re­search and de­vel­op­ment] has de­fined the state of the art in al­most every area. The pri­vate sec­tor is in gen­eral inept,” he said. At least North Amer­ica is ex­pe­ri­enc­ing a resur­gence in the sales of books. In 2015, in­comes for in­de­pen­dent book­sellers were up over 10%, and re­main strong in 2016. Sadly, this is not the case for the UK, where over 600 in­de­pen­dent book­shops have closed in the last decade.

Mean­while in Aus­tralia, Peter Dut­ton (a man doc­tors voted ‘the worst Health Min­is­ter in 35 years' hav­ing cut $57 bn from pub­lic hos­pi­tals) is now in charge of im­mi­gra­tion. He was promptly caught on cam­era mak­ing jokes about cli­mate im­pacts on low-lying Pa­cific Is­lands while on a diplo­matic visit. Then, as part of Aus­tralia's right-wing gov­ern­ment, he made the self-con­tra­dict­ing com­ment that refugees “won't be nu­mer­ate or lit­er­ate... They would lan­guish on un­em­ploy­ment ...These peo­ple will be tak­ing Aus­tralian jobs.”

Over the sum­mer I'm going to stop think­ing about the above news items. I'm sure there will soon be fresh pieces of our human do­ings to be amazed by.