UC23 August-September 1977 by Christopher Squire

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INSI0E:Unexplained events w Seabrook anti-nuclear demo w Paranoia power part 2w Fish farming A working solar collector designw Australia's illicit citizens' bandwpakistan's socialist entrepreneur, Building a radio transmitterĂ&#x192;Â§Th wastesaver centre & more....

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by 'ALTERNATIVE SOCIETY'. Topics for guest speakers & discussion., include a review of radical erouos across Eurooe; and: Ani-iculture, New Villages and rural experiments, Planning, Small Industries, Housing and A.T. Also excursions, films & publications. 15 places for European participants, and 5 places phis campsite reserved for overnight guests from UK groups. Full board & lodging + Fee = Â£44(Daily rates for UK participants on application but will not be expensive) Ut . New Mills. These three events will be held at a new rrwctin~ nhif -. .--- for the environmental/ alternatives movement, NEW MILLS, which is a converted water-mill in the Exmoor . National Park. It has been established by active members of the Alternative Society and similar organisations (some working as volunteers) and has a full-time Warden, from whom details of all meetings are available. (Send sa.e. Rhys Taylor, NEW MILLS, Luxborough, Watchet, Somerset, TA23 OLE. Tel: WASHFORD 281.

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ALTERNATIVE PATHS FOR PLANNING is the theme of a conference on Monday 12th Seotember at Trent Polvtechnic, ~ottingham1~he aim is to bring together many different views on the future of town "and country planning in these islands; so we invite structure planners and street farmers, windmill builders and development control officers, allotment diggers and Levellers, architects and surveyors. All welcome; bring an open mind, relax, share feelings as well as facts and figures. The speakers are Edward Goldsmith, Colin Ward, Gerry Foley and Prof. M.W. Thring. There will be a bookstall, video show and a small exhibition on working alternatives; and, after a good wholefood lunch, the chance for discussion. Tickets Â£ (students Â£2from Phil Brachi, Department of Town & Country Planning; (0602) 48248 ex. 2591. ALTERNATIVETECHNOLOGY IN BUILDING from September 9-14. Robert & Brenda Vale (authors of "The Autonomous house') will lead an intensive course for architects, buildirs and designers. There win also b e guest speakers, films and site visits. 15 places. Full board & lodging + Fee = (35, at New Mills. Â

STUDENT ENVIRONMENTAL ACTION, September 21-27. Cambridge University's SURVIVAL SOCIETY invite other student environmental groups to join an informal discussion of aims, tactics and experience. Nuclear Power win be the key issue. Guests from FOE and SERA. 20 places phis campsite. Board & lodging Â£3.2 per day, at New Mills. Detailed

iffiLSH ACTION FOR WORLD DEVELOPMENT is a newly formed group that is trying to promote a more active interest in world development. Initially, they plan to open a Third World shop/resource centre in Cardiff, and perhaps other readers with experience of similar projects could send them advice on setting up such centre - what to do/what NOT to do, sources of supplies, etc. etc. Also, if any readers in the South Wales area wish to help in any way, they would love to hear from you. Write to Margaret Cowen, Welsh Action for World Develooment. 50 Marlborough Road, Roath, Cardiff. WORK COLLECTIVES is the title of the second printing of the now expanded report on the conference of the same name, held at Laurieston Hall in December last year. It considers most aspects of working co-operatively; from money and accounts, through legal frameworks to political perspectives and sexual politics. Perhaps it is at its most useful when discussing the immense impact of a group's choice of rotas, credit systems, or other working arrangements. It also compares the legal systems of various existing collectives, printing the ICOM rules in full. Containing much useful information though not aammed full of it, there's not

An ALTERNATIVE TECHNOLOGY WORKSHOP has been arranged by the Future Studies Centre, and will Be held from Saturday August 20-27, in St. David's, Dyfed. There is sleeping accommodation for 20 in Court House, Cross Square, St Davids, Dyfed, Tel043 788 339, and there are also camping facilities. Send Â£1.0 registration fee to the FSC at 15 Kelso Road, Leeds, LS2 9PR. Tel: 0532 459865. The workshop fee isÂ£12.0 including food and accommodation. A HOME CRAFTS FAIR, orgmmed . by David and Katie Thear, will be held on Saturday August 13, at Broad Leys. There will be demonstrations of spinning and weaving, paper-making, chair-caning and an exhibition of equipment and materials used in craftwork. Methods of make do-and-mend will be featured and so will aaftwork as a small home business. Details from Practical Self Sufficiency. Broad Leys Publishing Co. Widdington, Saffron Walden, Essex. Tel: Saffron Walden

much meat in it for a pound, (just the job for veggies?). Talking to members of a co-op similar to your own, or-to the one you're thinking of starting, might be a useful approach. Available from Laurieston Hall, Castle Doughs, Kirkcudbrightshire. If it's a whokfood/aaft shop/community centre/coffee bar you've set your heart on forming, then UHURU A WORKING ALTERNATIVE will be engrossing reading. Available from selected bookshops, or from Uhuru, 35 Cowley Road, Oxford, it is a comprehensive aware took at Uhuru through the lives and words of members of that collective. The most important part . of this booklet, to some of us, at lea&@ the consideration of their relationships with people living in the area. Pragmatic, but with a touch of the visionary, it's encomaging reading. Price is 75p, phis 14p *'if you order it by mail. F'UND&FOR A FAIR FIGHT is the title of a leaflet printed by the North West's 'Network for Nuclear Concern', who are appealing for funds for the forthcoming Windscale Enquiry. 'Half-Life' who are represented at the enquiry, are affiliated to the Network, and, although the enquiry has already begun, funds are still urgently needed. They also have posters available, priced at 4 forÂ£1.15and 10 for t2.7O.If you wish to

A FARM IN THE CITY? If you fancy a visit to a farm in the middle of London, go and see Hilary Peters and her farmat Surrey Docks! Interested in organic farming, she and her partner grow vegetables and keen goats. geese, ducks and h e n s . ~ h elocal community m w also form part of the area, and they eventually hope to sell their surplus veg. The farm is open to visitorsand any Sunday after 11 am, and. Hilary isalso running day courses on Thursdays from 10-4 in goat rearing, dairying, vegi table growing and beekeeping. Cost id Â£per day, including meals. If you want to know more, write (enclosing sa.e.) to Hilary Peters, Union Wharf Nursery Garden, 15 Ballast Quay, London SE10. Tel01-858 421 1.

PARASCIENCE, an international organisation of ESP researchers, are holding their annual conference in London this year, from September 2 to 4. Details from Harold Briees 118 Dee Road. Tikhuist. Reading

THE ENERGY SHOW will be at the Empire Hall, Olympia, London from September 8 to 18. Sponsored by the Institute of Fuel, it will include displays by the UK branch of the International Solar Energy Society, commeicial AT manufacturers and the various fossil and nuclear energy interests. Details from the organisers, Trident Ltd, 23a Plymouth Rd, Tavistock Devon. I

BURTON ON TRENT is where it3: all happening in the Undercurrents Network Sandy and Hilary Morrison are organising meetings (and printing reports/newsheets of them), and are trying to get in touch with other interested Undercurrents readers in their are &ir interests and activities (apart from Undercurrents) include organic gardening, radical technology, food reform and folk music. Anyone interested - they hope to hoiu another meeting after this issue comes out, should either phone: Burton 63610, or write (PLEASE ENCLOSE S.A.E.) to 244

contribute to the fund, or get a leaflet, .. even buy some posters, write to Ken Blackburn, Half Life, 15 Lowther Avenue, Morecambe, Lanes. (N.B. please enclose S.A.E. and for the posters, send cash).

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COMET, (Combined Organic Move- : ment for Education and Training), was form* ed in June 1976 by a group of organisations concerned with the organic movement, and it hopes to plan and establish courses in organic methods of food production at Colleges of Agriculture and other places. If you are interested in attending a cour and being trained in organic methods, COMET would like you to complete their questionnaire, as soon as possible, as they are trying to show that there is a genuine need for sue courses. Using the results of the survey, the hope to put pressure on the government and the agricultural colleges to set up the courses that are most necessary, and to give the students financial support. They are also investigating the possibility of setting up an independent course based on a group of operational organic holdings. Get your questionnaire from the Soil Association, Wa nut Tree Manor, Haughley, Stowmarket, Suffolk. Comet's own address i s Lower Shaw Farm, Shaw, Swindon, Wilts. They ca send you a list of present courses and useful addresses (enclose a 9 x 4 S.A.E.)

currents has two new addres scriptions and orders should be to 6 South Street, Uley/Dursley, loucestershire.All other business ould be directed to 27 Clerkenwell Undercurrents is distributed exclusivel in the UK by Publications Distribution Co-operative, 27 Clerkenwell Close, London EC4 (Tel. 01-251 4976), and in the United States by Carrier Pigeon, 88 Fisher Avenue, Boston, Mass, 0212. Airfreight agents for North America are Expediters of the Printed Word Inc. 527 Madison Avenue, New.York, NY 10022. Second class postage paid at New York.

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e front cover shows a sample of events from last year's anti-nuclear

demonstrations at Brockdorf, in West Germany. Something for the Windscab enquiry to ruminate about. Thanks for the pictures are due to Uwe Herms, who took them, Infort?mtlons Oknst, who supplied them, and Eugen, who acquired thein. /

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The moffey crew respon&ble for Undercurrents includes Barbara Kern, Chris Hutton Squire, Dave Elliott, , Dave Kanner, Dave Smith, Duncan" Campbet!, Godfrey Boyle, Herbie Girardet, Joyce Evans, Martin Ince, Mutyn Partridge, Pat Coyne, Pete Glass, Pew Bonnici, Peter Cockerton, Richard Ebn, Sally Boyte, Tony Durham and Vicky Hutchings. There qe also literally dozens of other people who help out here and there, and whose only reward is anonymity. Many thanks to them. - * Uidercu#ents is cooked up at weekly meetings in London, details of which"can be discovered by ringing 01-2616774 during 'working* hours. Apyone who wants to do more tkan simply read the miigixine i s welcome come along. Underwmnts delights i n unsolicited contributions, and publishes.a large proportion of the ones received, i n line with our aimof being an open forum for alternative ideas. If possible things sent to us should be typed, doubiespaced, and on only one side ot"the paper. COPYRIGHT: The entire contents of Undercurrents is me taint copyright of Undercurrents Ltd and the respecti authors. But don't be frightened - thz @st to discourage exploiters and rip%ffiflnerchantsof one sort of another.

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EDDIES: Two months supply of news and information. KOALAMAN: Have you ever considered what a hassle it i s to make a cup of tea? LETTERS: Strife, controversy, verbal aggravation etc. SEABROOK: 1400 arrests in anti-nuke demo.

A^ND

NUKES TRADE UNIONS: Whither industrial democracy in a plutonium economy? KAHNVERSATION PIECE: The doyen of futurology recently visited Britain and, much to our surprise, turns out to be against nuclear

power. 13 FISHFARMING: The second part of this practical guide to a new source of food. 16 WASTESAVING: Recyclingworkers' control. . 18 BURNING BRIGHTLY: Building a woodstove; appropriate technology from Guatamala. 19 SCIENCE'S FOOL: The remarkable story of Charles Fort and his painstaking catalogue of events and phenomena unknown and inexplicable to science. 23 GOOD DAY SUNSHINE: Complete instructions for installing . h solar roof. ' 26 AIR ON A SHOESTRING: The first of two articles on the freedom of broadcasting, explains how to build a radio transmitter. 29 CITIZENS SEIZE BAND: I nAustralia people wanting to use Citizen's Band radio have presented the government with a fait accompli. 31 PARANOIA AND)CONSPIRACY: Twentieth century conspiracy theories, including the Gemstone File and Illuminatus! One way of getting things done. 35 SOCIALIST 36 FIFE DAY WEEK: A grand scheme for workers' co-operatives in Scotland. 37 OPUS: A community project near GlAgow which i s using alternative technology to help children inneed. 38 LOOSE ENDS: Reporting this time on London and Switzerland. 40 I N THE MAKING: Latest information from the catalogue of alternative projects./ 41 - REVIEWS: New titles that have w6 our way. 48 SMALL ADS and SUBSCRIPTION FORM.

ENTREPRENEUR:

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'he CIA in Australia lope about Britain Ifficial Secrets Action %scism in the USA

L 2 r n W eauallv between the US and ~ u s t r a l i a ,b u t i n practice nobody imagines that this is the case.

Whitlam's doubts

"Boyce caught them at their old game of f--- your ally." Thus the simple eloquence of former C I A agent Victor Warchetti . He was referring to the trial in Los \n$les of Charles Boyce, another C I A alumnus, on :barges of spying for the Russians. During the pro:eedings a number of highly damaging revelations were nade concerning the proliferation of American intellipnce operations in Australia, particularly during the lovernment of the ill-fated Gough Whitlam. Australia is currently reeling nder a deluge of facts and halfacts linking the CIA, AS10 (the iustralian Security Intelligence lrganisationl, the mysterious US efence installation at Pine Gap. .. ear Alice Springs, and the iovernor Gneral, Sir John Kerr, tho sensationally dismissed Uhitlam on November 11th. 1975. Whitiam had been unpopular i t h the Americans for a sspectably large number of masons. He had objected t o the resence of Australian agents in ihile, working actively w i t h he CIA t o bring down Allende's overnment. He had objected t o massive expansion of mineral xtraction in Australia by multinaional corporations in accordance iith an agreement between the 'rilateral Powers (North America, he EEC and Japan) that resource xploitation should be shifted away rom unstable areas such as ortuauesf Africa, in the dirr-:tion f more m a n i ~ ~ l a b(-odntnes. ic ,nci he ha0 o,:mandt!d land tailed 3 get) precise information about I e function of the Pine Gap base, n d the extent of CIA intelligence athering operations, The sign outside Pine Gap says Joint Defence Space Research %cility'. It was built i n the years 1966-1969 as a result of a treaty ?f which, Marchetti claims, he iimself was co-author. I t still isn't ;ertain what exactly goes on there - Marchetti is holding out f o r more noney before he tells - and the ssue is confused by the great (ariety of functions for which i t s suitable, One theorv is that it is I satellite tracKingstation, part of he Western nucleai defence and first strike' capability. Another s that i t is a riaior part of a ivorldwide electronic information lathering network. Both may be rue. From the point of view o f Australian domestic politics the second function is more important. In m e article The Eavesdroppers, written by Duncan Campbell and Mark Hosenball lor Time Out in May 1976 (and which caused Hosenbail's defiortationl, iney describe the existance of a gigantic supranational data collecting system which is

The nuclear world Namibian uranium Squatting afloat Rural resettlement

operated b y the US. Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The object o f this system is t o monitor radio Communications all over the alobe. t o tap international telephone calls f o r military and commercial intelligence, and t o act as a clearing house for all manner of information gathered by security organisations of the five powers, I t is connected t o a huge data bank maintained by the US National Security Agency in Frankfurt, West Germany, where records are maintained on individuals whom the authorities distrust. It was recently revealed that a staggering 7000 Australians are on file there. This network has bases throughout the world, mostly o n the extensive archipelago of Britain's remaining empire i n the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. There are also a number of related installations on the British mainland, centered on the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) i n Cheltenham. Pine Gap is almost without doubt the main Australian contribution t o the system; it is administered entirely by American personnel. I n principle any information gleaned as a result of the operation should be shared

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While he was Prime Minister Wh.tlam developed the suspicion that Pine Gap was b ~ i n q used 10 obtain Australian commercial i;formation for the benefit o f US and multinational interests, and t o interfere In the activities of government and trade unions. After some reluctance his own defence ministry provided h i m with a list of CIA operatives i n the country, which included the first director of Pine Gap, Richard Lee Stallings. Whitlam's government was o n the point of making an overt political issue out of the base in the first few days of November 1975, during which time the Senate was blocking his budget for that vear. and his continuance i n oflice hung in The balance. He was dismissed by the Governor General on kovrmlx'r 11 th. ostensibly because he couldn't secure parliamentary support, .ilIhouyh o t h - ~ more . insidious f u r o r s have recently come t o light. I t i s known that on November 8 t h Sir ~ o h n Kerr was briefed b y an unknown senior defence minist w official, and. i t is thought, was warned that ~ h ' i t l a m ' smoves. against Pine Gap were 'disloyal' and were threatening the Joint Australian-US security effort. This opinion was reinforced i n an extraordinary telegram sent on November 10th from ASIO's man i n Washington t o his H Q i n Canberra warning that the Americans were on the p o i n t of withdrawing all further cooperation because o l their displeasare 31 Whitlijrn's harrassinent of Stallinas. and that the matter ought t o be handled 'on an agencyto-agency basis'. That is, t o exclude the Australian government from any effective control over security operations. . After Whitlam's dismissal, on constitutionally dubious grounds, Malcolm Fraser was appointed i n the interim and Parliament dissolved. Since his Liberal Party was, ~

at that stage, 20% ahead of Whitlam's Labour Party in the opinion poles, the outcome was not very much in doubt, b u t the CIA had one last flina. Durinq the election campaign a number of letter bombs were received b y prominent people, allegedly from left-wina extremists- None of them exploded, except i n the media, Whitlam's fate was sealed.

Business as usual Anyone who thinks that CIA subversion is confined t o banana republics and far away places like Chile will now, perhaps, be thinking again; Gough Whitlam's government was one more victim of a massive conspiracy b y the US and her allies t o determine the future of the world's resources and western social systemsr There can be no toleration for anyone who steps out of line, even if, like Whitlam or Allende, they happen t o have been democratically elected. T h e Eavesdroppers network is Dart of the hardware o f this conspiracy - its ears and eyes. Throuqh i t the security services are able t o discover and oueil anv suggestion of dissent, any suggestion that the world should be run i n a different wav, anv outbrake of of the west, or extractors of raw materials i n the Third World. Britain is particularly vulnerable t o this sort of activity because of her flagging economy After the fate of Gough Whitlam there can be any doubt what would be the outcome if a truly radical governcame t o power here, orie which was not prepared t o underwrite western defence commitments. was not prepared t o run down social services at the insistance of the IMF, was not prepared t o countenance the continued exploitation of people and materials for the profit of capitalism. The superstructure of control is already in full working order - t h e bugging, the phonetaps, the data banks, the clandestine operations. This is what official secrets are all about.

o ice are sti g owing w i the success of Operatio vast raid carried out on 26th. when over 130 people were arrested i n different parts of the country and summarily transported t o Swindon. (Some would say this was punishment enough). 800 policemen from 16 regional crime squads took part i n the operation, a number of them armed. They alledge that a major LSD manufacture and distribution network has been smashed. I n a newspaper interview following the event DetectiveSuperintendant Greenslade, one of the organisers of the swoop, boasted that 'the operation was successful beyond m y wildest dreams. This could pave the way t o a national police force.' This and similar information is contained in News Release, 3 5 from ~ 1 Elgin Avenue. London Welo.

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Loosely-knit non-organisations calling themselves'smokey Bears' have sprung u p simultaneously all over the country. Their aim is t o achieve the legalisation, or even better, the normalisation, of cannabis, and their method is t o encourage mass public flouting of the law. They say they're going t o hold a giant smoke-in i n Hyde Park i n September. Watch out. Meanwhile Release, the West London group which exists t o help people with drug problems, and who are celebrating their tenth anniversary, believe i t or not, .I, (seems like it was yesterday.. went along t o the House of

Commons recently t o lobby MP's about a ammendments t o the Criminal Law Bill. Specifically these woutd remove prison sentences for possessing and growing cannabis, end police powers of 'stop and search' on suspicion of carrying drugs, and delete the crime o f allowing your home t o be used for turned smoking. ~ b o400 ~ people t up for the lobby, which, although laudable, is n o t really enough t o frighten the government i n t o making concessions. Most of Britain's estimated t w o million cannabis users, would, perhaps, rather keep a low profile and hope for the best.

Fhree face heavier charges Ine advantage to the Labour Party of an early election defeat i s hat the ignominious task of suppressing journalists at the behest of he Security Service would ass into the hands of a more enthuiastic loose talk bv, Merlin 'soft-~~ -~ -~ Because ~- of -...-. ..- Torv . , aovernment. ~. entre' Rees about deleting the 'blunderbuss' of Section Two of he Official Secrets Act, Attorney General Sam Silkin has been orced to bring charges against Crispin Aubrey, John Berry and )uncan Campbell under Section One of the Act - a piece of eavy artillery normally pointed at Russian spies.

~ ~ of ,he items being protected inthis wav was printed i n Socialist Worker some months ago. A message condemning the official Secrets Act and the AgeeHnwnhall sianed bv. --. -.deoortations.. .- .. . . , ~~ --. inter alia, Labour MP's Audrey Wise, Robin Cook and Frank L L Atlaun, has been sent t o governments participating i n the Belgrade review of the Helsinki Agreement on human riahts. This is a verv timely contribution t o the spirit of demtÃ£ in ,he light f governments of both east and west are burying the acrimony of the oast and , - - concentratina o n those endeavours whichthey hold common.

Committal proceedings will take lace at Tonenham Magistrates '.ourt on August 9th, w i t h a show rial at the O l d Bailev almost ertaldy delayed until early next 'ear. Thisevent is eagerly awaited ,y connoisseurs of the infinite lexibility of English law, w h o w i l l Ã keen t o discover how readily an i c t aaainst foreign espionage can Ã used t o muzzle domestic ournalism. I n the meantime the

ordeal of daily bail reporting w i l l continue for the three accused. Details of some of the prosecution evidence has been withheld from defence solicitors because the authorities consider it too secret for anyone t o know. Even the defendants. Their lawyers will be allowed t o cast a fleeting glance over the documents at New Scotland Yard, although it isn't clear, at the time of writing,

Right at work What Ishall do is to expose you 3 the cruel fact o f your sexual npotence, male and female will take away from you all hope $at you can flee the terror o f olitics t o the safety o f 'personal fe'. Ishall do this b y showing to ou that your frightenedpersonal n d sexual 1if.e contains for y o u as the outside world x h terroi~ ould never offer you. Iwilt thqs 'estroy your rabbit holes, mental s well as physical." hese are the words of Lyn Marcus, therwise known as Lyndon erinylt; La l o u c h e Jr., head of ie United States Labor Party. ht-'v were addressed t o his illowers in an internal memoran~ m one : shudders t o think what ? might have t o say t o his enemies. The USLP, you will have ^thered, is not at all like the British 'ganisation with a similar name ore formally known as the ational Caucus of Labor ~ m m i t t e e si t is, if anything, an umal of the extreme right. I t ~ecialisesin a bizarre variety of ib-Marxist rhetoric calculated I bring radicals into disrepute. ne characteristic pronouncement as that 'we have t o save capitalism I qive the working class time t o ake their revolution', Thev go on 1 say that '....we as qualified arxist economists fully underand the most fundamental inciples of capitalist development. e are uniquely well qualified t o Ivar~cean interim basis for ipitalist sector industrial developent. Since n o other competent ternative is being offered from ithin the capitalist sector, Labor omrnittee expertise - even by self- i s exerting a powerful and owing influence among broad

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circles o f t o p financial and political capitalist and pro-capitalist forces.' I t is difficult t o assess the size of USLP membership,. Their propaganda speaks of a central core (or 'first circle') of a few hundred, aided and abetted by a second circle of 10,000 part-time activists 'with penetration on issues t o between five and seven million persons i n total'. A more sober estimation would probably discount the second and subsequent circles as wishful thinking. Even i n the United States, the home of outlandish fringe grouus, their rhetoric is altowther t - ~ o shrill, too incon-. sistent and too paranoid t o be influerttial.Marcus retains a strong authoritarian grip on the organisation. and the turnaver of b u r n t uut,disillusioned members is high, But i n spite of this, genuine labour-militants i n the US are be becoming alarmed by the USLP's activities, which include the distribution of leaflets at factory dates. denouncing working class activists as Nazis or 'paid agents of the CIA'. I t is also claimed that there have been several hundred physical attacks on members of radical groups bv USLP paramilitary squads -tactics reminiscent of the National Front, a fascist organisation i n Britain. The main strength of the USLP is i n New York, with about forty other branches throughout the US. There are also branches i n Canada, Latin America and Belgium, b u t no sign of any activity, as yet, i n the UK. (Information from Brownshirts of the Seventies, a pamphlet

produced by the US anti-fascist group Terrorist Information Project.)

Public Secrets Meanwhile the novernment are preparing a Bill10 replace Section T w o o f the OSA, as announced

during the kerfuffle over the Child ~ Benefit cabinet leaks published i n New Society last year. A new watchdog body, calling itself Publi Secrets, has been set u p o n the initiative of Paul Barker, editor of New Society, and Frank Field, of the Child Poverty Action Group, who wrote the article containing the leak. Their concern is that Section two will be replaced b y a measure narrower in scope, b u t far more effective in suppressing really important information, The group is particularly worried that the new Bill will divert attention away from a possible legal right of access t o official information, of the sort recently enacted i n the USA and Sweden. They will be investigating the success of the policy i n these two countries, as well as considerin. the t w i n problems of how official information should be defined, and how i t is decided who should be authorised t o receive it.

Orbit seized While the international Law of the Sea Conference continues its protracted deliberations over the carve up of marine resources, the first step has been taken t o extend the debate into three dimensions. Eight equatorial countries - Brazil, the Congo, Ecuador, Kenya, Uganda and /

The eight signatories describe the orbit as a 'scarce and invaluable natural resource' which is at presen being used exclusively for the benefit of *dt,-veloped' nations. rather than t o the advantage of the poorer folk who live underneath it. The object of their claim is t o render 'authentic benefits t o their respective peoples and the world community'.

the earth's geostationary orbit Cynics may point out that the which passes over their respective equatorial nations drn hardly i n a territories - 22,000 miles up! A t this distance from the- surface position t o enforce their claim at the moment. Even d product of of the globs, and at this distance Britain's highly advanced space alone. satellites i n 'free fall' travel technology failed spectacularly t o 6,800 mph, which is also the speed reach this magic orbit a couple of of the earth's rotation. Consequenmonths ago - so what chance an tly spacecraft 'parked' i n this orbit, Indonesian border quard? B u t as a directlv above the eauator, aooear t o maintain a fixed position relative bargaining counterin the accelerating hussle over natural wealth it t o the surface. I t is a favourite location. ~ a r t i c u l a r l vf.o r communi- is, perhaps. an indication of vet another thing which industrial cations satellites, because it avoids the need for manoeuvrable tracking nations can n o longer take for equipment. granted.

Lunacy T o o little, too late' is the theme of the Festival of British Folly, sponsored b y a leading cancer company, i n Battersea Funfair until the end of October. One million visitors are expected. For only Â £ y o u can thrill t o a series of tableaux vivants showing the decline and fall of these islands since the Great Exhibition of 1851, a special attraction being one of British Aerospace's unsold Concordes, which was ferried i n b y Hovercraft. Also on show are an atomic submarine, other advanced military hardware, automatic letter sorting equipment, and an allelectric council flat.

The final display shows what life will be like i n 1991 when the North Sea bonanza is over. A simulated coal face two feet hiah has &en constructed, complete w i t h cold running water and unn i t e d firedamp. A l l the familv can try their hands getting at coal with a pick and siiovel, and those who prove especially adept can volunteer for the Ernest Bevin Corps of Coal Miners now being set u p by Tony Benn. Don't miss your chance t o see if you're good enough t o help your country fight its way out of the energy crisis! There is also a winter woolly knitting competition, and lectures on hypothermia and meatless cooking. Nothing like a peek i n t o tomorrow's world t o keep y o u happy w i t h today.

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In the nuclear fan

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The public enquiry into British Nuclear Fuel's proposed fuel reprocessing plant at Windscale is grinding on and on, and will continue so to do until well into the autumn Under the weight of verbage and obfuscation the issue gradually slips away from the front pages of the press and will, in due course, disappear altogether. In the event the decision going against BNFL (any takers?) it will represent one of the biggest upsets that the industrial countries have ever faced.

A t stake i s not merely a British export opportunity, nor even the Cumbrian environment, but the economic viability of nuclear power throughout the world, and the half-hearted struggle to avoid proliferation of weapons grade materials. The immediate reason for the Windscale extension is a fat contract to handle used Japa- ' nese fuel, which i s linked to a major US defence policy objective - that of keeping atomic bombs out of the hands of their former enemies. Since President Carter has made an (eminently reversible) decision to halt work on reprocessing facilities it is not immediately clear who would clear up Japan's nuclear mess if Britain doesn't. The only other reprocessing facility in Western Europe i s at La Hague, in France, which was recently closed by a strike of workers because of radiation leaks, and does not, in any case, have existing capacity to take on the Japanese deal. One possibility (and here's a straw i n the wind) is that the business could go t o Russia. There are several good reasons for this. First and foremost the USSR does not have t o contend with a soft liberal underbelly worried about radioactive fish and suchlike, and could therefore expand its reprocessing facilities without too much controversy. Secondly, Russia is already a nuclear superpower, with enough warheads t o decimate the world's population in the twinkling of an eye, so it doesn't really matter in strategic terms, if she acquires a little more plutonium. And, i n any case, what with detente and all that there's no reason why a sensible grown-up arrangement could't be reached whereby the dreaded Bolshies faithfully return Plutonium t o its rightful owners (in exchange for hard currency). But thirdly, and this is the crunch, Russia is already co-operating closely with the West i n the nuclear business. A senior US State Department official announced recently that a stacigering two thirds of the uranium currently fuelling western European

nukes has been enriched i n the Soviet Union. (International Herald Tribune, May 24th) They offer more favourable terms than the Americans for the service o f turning raw uranium into a nuclear fuel ("The Soviets just knock a nickle off our price,"). So what obstacles are there t o an east-west fuel reprocessing deal? I t would be enlightened self-interest between two industrial monoliths,

Opposition Worldwide In the meantime the struggle against atomic power continues unabated in most of the pronuclear states. I n West Germany, where opposition has been met with the full force of government violence, both physical and administrative. (the pictures on the cover of this magazine are a small sample) support for the struggle is estimated t o consist of some t w o million people, rather more than the 1.8 million total membership of ail legitimate political parties. This information is contained i n a book Plutonium undPolizeistaat b y Werner Biermann. (DM6.80 from AG SPAK ~ u b l i k i t i o n e m ,Freisenstr. 13, 1000 Berlin 61). A oanscandinavian 'Nordic Environment S O C W ~has V ' been formed t o present a co-orainattd alternative energy strategy t o the aovernments UD there. The burning issue is Sweden's nuke at Barseback, operated b y the Sydkraft company not 18 miles from downtown (and sometimes downwind) Copenhagen, Although Sweden's ruling right wing coalition ousted the entrenched social democrats on a platform which included the foreswearing of nuclear power, they have been strangely slow t o act since taking office. Barseback's major problem is that the postnuclear crud is beginning t o build UD. .~ Thev're waitina for extended reprocessing facilities at (surprise, surprise) Windscale. The people of Denmark are . . dead set against nuclear power, which is laudable self-restraint, considerinq thev have no indigenouseneryy sources worth talking about. In an opinion poll 58% were against, and only 16% in favour. A professor, a lecturer, a doctor and a journalist recently sailed their boat into the only Danish nuclear place, a research centre at Risoe. For over an hour they cased the joint without interference, including openinq a number o f doors w i t h radiation

w a r n i n g ~Eventually ~ a guard occupation is pl&.incu t o begin in July and t o continue as long as noticed them and, t o cut a short Story even shorter, they are t o be necessary. The stakes are high for France - vast sums of money are tried for illegal trespassing- They're being sunk into the design of an going t o plead not guilty since, they say, they were merely checking exportable breeder, which has th the centre's 'security' precautions added attraction of producing in the public interest. atomic bombs as a sideline

On June 24th an anti-nuclear pirate radio station was seized b v police near Solothurn. i n southern Switzerland, after being located i n a vehicle. Before the police swooped the pirates had managed t o broadcast 75 minutes of anti-nuclear propaganda encouraging people t o attend a demonstration at the site of a power station under construction. It took 28 police patrols and a h e l i c o ~ t etro f i n d them. Swiss police take radio pirates rather seriously since one i n Geneva m a n d t o make them look foolish b y broadcasting for two weeks without interruption last year.

Aggro I n the US an industrial conglomerate planning a nuke in central Iowa has shelved its plans because of 'regulatory uncertainties' i n state and national policy. This means they're afraid the authorities niiqht i t a n yettiny worried about unsolved problems liki.' waste disposal or fuel reprocessing, which is a tribute t o the anti-nuclear lobby. I t speaks volumes, of course, that atom freaks view the regulations as uncertain - not the nukes! The struggle became a b i t physical in Seabrook, New Hampshire, back i n M a y - something which can be read about elsewhere i n this issue. ... . More bower is expected this summer at Malville, i n France. The government intends t o build a breeder reactor at this felicitously named site, while a l o t of other people intend t o stop them. A n

Getting Around France is not a signatory of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treat unlike Canada (who exported nuclear technology t o India) an West Germanv (ditto Brazil). TI two countries' recently refused serve Argentina w i t h a CANDU reactor because of hanq-ups ovc finance and safety, while Germ has 'unilaterally' (ie in response t o strong US pressure) agreed t shelve any future deals with Br Another flourishing nuclear society which is unlikely t o suf the ravages o f the environment; lobby is South Korea, which h; just acquired its first nuke - b u b y the Vkstinghouse Corporatic of America and British firms Wimpey and General Electric. Local bossman President Park, is as brutal as fascist as ever en US patronage in the sacred nan of freedom, is afraid that nobod loves him, and may very well b correct. His greatest ambition i! owe a French reprocessing plan t o convert his dud fuel i n t o nuclear warheads, and although his American benefactors are rather wary of this, thev are presently running down their ground forces there and might not be able t o check h i m for VI much longer. The South Koreai would'cheerfully use nuclear weapons t o avoid being overwhelmed by their compatri in the north. No doubt the inh, tants of southern England wouli do as much.

Namibia theft Controversy continues t o surround Rio Tinto Zinc's uranium mine at Rossing, i n Namibia (South West Africa). Readers of Undercurrents 17 will recall that the major recipient of ore from this mine, i n a territory occupied b y South Africa in defiance of countless U N resolutions, will be British Nuclear Fuels Ltd. The Labour Party's 1973 Manifesto promised t o kill the Rossing deal, b u t the Energy Ministry has since fallen t o the lot of the Right Honourable Anthony Wedge-Woodben, people's friend, and the pledge has been conveniently forgotten. The recently formed Campaign against the ~ a h i b i a nuranium Contract, a spin-off of the A n t i Apartheid Movement, is seeking t o persuade British transoort unions t o ban shipments of ore from the mine. Motions hill be p u t before

annual conferences of the T G W l and ASLEF, while the National Union of Seamen savs it will recommend members t o look ou for ships carrying Rossing uranii 'with a view t o further action'. The Campaign is also asking constituency Labour Parties t o call for the cancellation of the contract at this vear's Dartv conference. S h a p u a ~ a n k ~ n g u aLoi , representative of SWAPO, the South West Africa People's Organisation, says that the contract is 'supporting South Africa's illegal occupation, and this could only jeapordise future relations between our t w o countries'. I n other words, Britain might have t o look elsewhere for uranium when the people of Namibia eventuall) regain control of their country,

Nuclear power worker killed The Central Electricitv Generatinu Board has Won fined Â£40 for ney.igence after the death last October of Robert Young, a worker at the Berkeley nuclear power station in Avon. The CEGB was prosecuted b y Berkeley magistrates under the Health and Safety a t work A c t w i t h such effect that the magistrate said the case "had only one commending feature; that is, that the CEGB adm.itted negligence." Young, a mechanical fitter of 29, suffered steam burns over 7 5 per cent of his body after being scalded b y steam and boiling water which escaped from a valve on an auxiliary boiler t o which he was giving an annual check. The boiler was certified as isolated and Young "

error con learl t o a refpasf: o f radioactivity. There has not been an accident involving a radioactive release yet, sparing the CEGB the expense of revising the regulations for radio-active standards, as well. There was no apparent mention of the accident when the press was entertained at Berkeley in May and assured that the station's

went t o work on it: in fact i t was isolated only flcctr~calv , not mrchanicaliv; tv-u isulntiuti certificates should have been issed. The error was made b y the Planning Department, which i s also responsible for the reactor itself. So boiler was not isolated from the station's main steam system, and an outrush of steam enveloped Young, burning h i m severely. I t took h i m eight days t o die in the local hospital. Young's union, the TGWU, is now t o sue the CEGB for negligence o n behalf of his widow Susan, 26, and his seven month old child, born three months after his death. The CEGB issued a reassuring statement that a mechanical backup exists at Berkeley so that n o human

here A R5^Q

expected life nas raised fron20 years Ion wnicn tnc sums wore based when the station onened in 1963) t o such levels thatwthere i s technically nothing t o l i m i t the station's future life." An example of "nothinu" miaht be the susnecfed reactor"faultwhich closedit tl following weekend.

Squat a boat Anyone living in the Midlands or the North-West of England and who is looking for a cheap boat, this might be your chance. A correspondent has been keeping his eyes open i n this area and has noticed seven auite substantial vessels which have apparently been discarded. They are not necessarily in very good condition, needless t o say, b u t they might just be better than nothing. They include a 70' x 14'

Mersey Flat, afloat near Liverpool a 25' x 7' marine ply cruiser sunk near Chester, a 37' x 7' half joey sunk on the Shropshire Union Canal, a 20' x 7' wooden pontoon afloat near Coventry, and others. Anvone who wants further information should write t o Undercurrents. marking their envelope 'Boats' a-nd including an SAE, And if anyone has any more neglected craft t o tell us about, please don't hesitate.

II 1

London Greenpeace recently held a 'Mutants' March t o draw attention t the dangers of nuclear technology, i n particular the proposed reprocessil extension at Windscale. Thev called on the Electricitv Council, the socalled Department of ~ n v i r o n m e n t ,the U K Atomic Energy Authority. British Nuclear Fuels L t d and Rio Tinto Zinc, suppliers of uranium by appointment t o the Queen, who owns a large chunk of the company. Photograph b y courtesy of The Newsline

Planning a return to the ...land

When Losehill Hall, the Peak District National Park Centre, arranged a conference this spring on "Planning Implications of Alternative Technology i n Rural Areas" most of the participants and arriving were planners several returned t o their Council Officrs openly entnusiastic for autonomous-serviced b u t l d i i i : ~ ~ They were also made aware of how the development control process, with its built-in conservatism, thwarts many experiments with alternative technology, land-use or lifestvles. The recent oiannina

....

was much quoted. (Conference papers Â£ from Peter Downing, Dartington Hall, Shinners Bridge, Totnes, Devon.) Meanwhile, at Lower Shaw Farm, Swindon, there have been several oatherinas of members of

Their common aim i s "to support a movement t o the countryside of people who wish t o live and work in sustainable rural communities on the principles of cooperation." (Dick Kitto, Lower Shaw Farm. Shaw, Swindon.) Their latest

meeting focussed upon planning (23-25 June) t o learn of ways through the planning system for rural experiments, and t o identify changes i n countryside planning policy necessary t o encourage rural resettlement. The professional role of the Planner as an impartial arbitrator is being increasingly challengedn Criticism from within the profession is strong, and a radical Planners Ecology Group has been proposed. Members would give advice t o rural resettlers and t r y t o influence policy-making b y fellow professionals. (Contact: Daniel Scharf, 40 Steventon Road, Drayton, Abingdon, Oxfordshire) Planners are re-thinking their roles in other European countries:again with interest i n the future of rural areas, small industries, food production, energy conservation and AT. Contact between radical groups in Britain and the Continent is gradually improving. This autumn the Alternative Society have arranged a "European Seminar on Rural Alternatives" t o share experiences between groups. (October 12-21. Details from Rhys Taylor, New Mills, Luxborough, Watchet, Somerset.) The most irnoortant area of communication is from radical

groups t o the public the potential rural resettlers. The RRG is cornpiling an Information Pack, as a loose-leaf file, on: rural communities, land & property surveys, land acquisition & uses, planning & legal aspects, past projects-successesand failures, agriculture, employment and

industry, building and ATo (Davi T h o m ~ s o nand Brvan Osbon w o like t o hear f r o m contributors information t o share. 129 Towel Street. Briahtlinusea. Essex.) publication laterthis year, and steadily updated. Likely cost uni Â£1

Undercurrents 27 Clerkenwell Close London EC4

NOT ANOTHER FIVE YEARS

AS YOU WERE

Congratulations o n the dullest Undercurrents yet. (UC 20) The real problems of co-operation, how practicallytoavoid hierarchies, when still insisting o n factories a s a means of production never seem t o come t o ~ n c e r c u & e nt's pages. David EUiott tells us that we have come a long way since the heady days of solar/wind/methane -has he given u gone hack t o the factory with union card dismayed a t how few real alternative technologies ever worked? AP arently we still believe in 'liberated' h' h technology, such a s Dave ~%ott's small-scale computer-operated machines, b u t how o n earth will these be produced, except in batches of half-a-million, using highly specialised techniques? How will the (the factory workers) co-ordinate themselves without co-ordinators (managers)? Maybe it really is possible t o produce computers on a craft scale -if so let's hear about it (China?). But I cannot help feeling that people who enthuse about computers being used in alternative ways are still high o n Kontrol technology. Then, Mike Cooley writes o n the continuing struggle. Yes, b u t this is what alternatives in technology are about - n o need t o repeat endlessly 'Someone should design some technology for socialism'. Aren't we the eople tryins t o do just that. anxisn't Undercurrents our network1 platform? What are we supposed t o do - wait f o r Lucas Aerospace (great hope of that AT m w e ment!) t o d o something? It is harder, and maybe arrogant, t o change other people except by example - t h e mess of factory and Office workers will not change much until there is a proven alternative. Undercurrents seems recently t o have been belittlingpersonal revolut'on i s though it is a great failure no! t o have changed many of the 57 million. Forget all that; such numbers are almost inconceivable. The mass statelmass illusion was. I thought, exposed a while back. How many of the articles in the last Undercurrents have been repeats useless for an kind of action? Early ~ ~ s d i f f ~in red having some practical mformatjon. even if incomplete or unrealist c, and with this DIY (real) appeal, there was less need for political slogans. The (political) messages, of self-control and craft satisfaction were implicitly understood. Since then I fear that establishment and success has corrupted or aged the UC Collective so that now political labelling counts more than the substanceof technology. Where are the spies f o r peace articles? Why not more on design and technical substance of real alternative technology? Surely n o t ererxone has given up - though you might have t o search a lot.

You have inlwda vital +t'In my letter (Unders 1ib211. The f o u r t h sentence flhoald i'Ã§Ã§ 'Pba~ let s n o t ban a revolution...

TRUST AND BOUND

WHOSE LEYS?

Robin Turner -.

his,

A.D. Clarke 82 St Barnards Rd Oxford

TERRESTRIAL ZODIACS

t h e m more difficult to shoot, COB t h e glorious twelfth. )

Kathleen D. Hicks 1

The cufture from which ley$ originated is pictured u twins

bawd o n cuhrifitence to f e l t d . & ~ : w e %%e.s. I n &is a e, my m m e n t is satest. f o r the% of

bend t h e d o n i f i c h c e of their;& vitiea (ie. Freemasonsand other Vltruvtans all member* o f the

Ivor Challen

reached its nadir in t h e country ol origin t h e US -where t h e FCC frankly admits that it is an uncon trolhhle n&ht-e. Along with sweet words abou to communicate', the11 -om axe gentle murmuring$ of spin-01 benefits t o Britain's ailing etectm ics Industry. What a hope! Akeauy Citizens' Band in Sweden is being swamped b y hi& ower amateur transceivers from Japan ille L of course b u t impossible to monitor

o n a wkiesca@. What's more. with improved radio propagation durinc the neyl5 years o r so of t h e ot cycle this bight-powered 2 inter#erence will b e radiate, world-wide. Ah, b u t with a second stria their b o w t h e campaigners deft say t h a t t h e y are pet1 nin for use of VHF frequencies ~ F M 'to avoid t h e shortcomings of the * USsituation' (ale). Ye8 - a n d where is t h e spin-off f o r manuf a c t u r e r ~here? Just check o n regular amateur radio equl ment currentlv available to auaMfied -

I Chesterford Gardens London NW3 7DD

CELIBACY AND PSYCHE

David Zeitlyr Robert A. de J.Hart

3 Trum ington R d

~ambridt e CB2 2AE

Highwood HID Rushbury Church Stretton Salop .

TAO OF LIBERATION

SUNKEN TERROR dynamic mike a deluxe antenoa stem*and so o n ad nauxeum. he Irony is that there's no thane* a t all t h a t the US CBer will ever become competent or d b c e r n k u enough to avoid being 'conned*: unlike t h e radio amateur he if not allowed t o make his own

Jternative a vision 1which ..-. . .man race

allowing t h a t commercial CB cuckoo to use your nest.

David Hope *--*lie

Colin Richard

undercurrents z5

CONSCIOUSNESS 111

So I am saddened that two pages of Undercurrents should carry a n article denigrating Charles Reich's description of the Amencan vision. It could be ours in Australia, and yours a t home, because Consciousness 111 seems t o be t h e b n l y valid answer t o Consciousness 11, For myself, I would say that we have t o disentangle three separate modes of thinking and articulating our thoughts: .the spiritual. the social and the physical. Very roughly, these three modes characterise Consciousness 111. the Liberal Reform and Consciousness 11. And the spiritual must come first. I trust my use o f the word will not be taken wrongly. but I can find n o better. Perhaps all I am saying is that you can only change yourself. Only you can know the medicine the philosophy t h e lifestyle a n d t h e artistic expression t h a t suits you best. If you can't do your own thing with verve, it would be no good trying t o do anybody else's.

Tony Wedd

T.M.A.

FOIL

Having failed t o reach Y O U by teleshone" I a m reduced t o writing t o you. his is t o tell you that we are ill a hit provoked by an error in the West Undercurrents. Page 4, Windscale Critical, you say that it s rumoured that Teddy Goldsmith has given Â£20,00 t o the Windscale apposition. This should, of course, have read 'Sir James' and the reason we mind is that this will perpetuate the myth that Teddy is rich. He isn't. WelL of course, by Â¥m standards, he is. hut by Jimmy's he isn't. He doesn't have any money to spare or t o give away. He doesn't have any monev for The Ideologist either, and we are endlessly trying to get people t o believe that we have t o make ends meet f r o m o u r o w n revenue. This misprint will make our task harder. The unbelievers will crow with delight. Also perhaps Sir Jamesmight be a hit put o u t specially if he thinks Teddy is getting the credit. The truth is t h a t Teddy was instrumental in persuading brother Jimmy t o part with (we thought it was Â £ 2 000 by the way) all that money a n d h e was and is involved in hashing together the heads o f t h e various factions who are involved in mounting the opposition. That is t o say, tring t o get FOE and CANTO, t o work together not t o waste their energies bashing each other. But providing money is not part of his brief. So could you publish an errata in your next issue please, saying t h a t the money came from Jimmy, not from Teddy!

In his letter (Undercurrents 221, Andrew Brown complains t h a t he cannot obtain reasonably high temperatures f r o m his parabolic reflector, even in the sunny Sudan. He will find the remedy t o his problem in a more reflective material than the galvanised steel sheet that he is using. A highly polished surface is necessary, if highly reflective aluminised polyester is unabailable. I have constructed parabolic cookers from pohshed aluminium and have obtained temperatures in excess o f 3000F in the UK climate on a sunny day last summer. Aluminised film is much better though, and even higher temperatures can be obtained. I managed to purchase some end-rolls of 'Lunar Foil'at half cost from a manufacturer. and whilst I gave a promise not t o re-sell it, I am sure somethine could be worked o u t if any readerwishes to obtain some, withoutpayin the high shop prices for Vadiatior roi~p. Concentratme solar collectors

Ruth Lumley-Smith

Chris Kiely 1 5 Aldington Close Lodge Park Redditch worcs

JUST DESSERTS

The Ecologist 7 3 Molesworth S t Wadebridge Cornwall

ALTERNATIVE VILLAGES

R.E.A. Lale PresidentICAMRAT 2 4 4 Calais Rd

Burton-on-Trent

The Lost World Queensland

WHAT'S YOUR POISON

BLEAK HOUSING

I 've been told that some beers are deliberately brewed t o give you a hangover the next day so you 11 think they are strong (ie. alcoholic) when they're not. Is this true?

J. Walker

I thought you might be interested to know that I've been working in an Estate Agents here f o r over a year now, and we have a lot Of enquiries from people wanting a derelict 'with a few acres of land'. Well, there's virtually nothing like that f o r sale up here any more, because most of the land belongs t o large estates o r large farms and they don't like t o sell any cottages they may have or any of their land. They use the old cottages for storing food for their animals or f o r their farm implements and so change the use of them making it necessary t o get planning permission if these are t o be changed back into dwelling house,^. We've o n l y h a d one semi-derelict in all the time I've been here which we sold with one-third of a n acre o f land.. The local people are inclined t o snap up any small cottages that do come onto the market and use them f o r letting o u t as holiday homes a t exorbitant rents during the summer tourist season. Any farm that's selling o f f a few acres oftiand usually sells these, t o t n e neighboyXing farmer. S o if anyone's thinking of buying a derelict cottage with a few acres up . here the might as well forget it. here's the problem with housing for the local people. so it's very difficult even t o find anywhen- t o rent.

Vat 69 100 Pipers St Seagram

u f ' ; and more expensive 'real olps'arc also notorious headache

bn-'i~crvmanager' for a new

JacquelineCooke Clauchrie Lodge Cumloden Newton Stewart Wigtownshire Scotland

hreu'cry in Edinburgh. Says the in the brewing industry would be a n d r u n l a g p , the lob might also be allractiw to a chemist o r microb i o l o x ~ t '. Come back Tai-tun, till is forgiven! Camrod

nJ: 'although experience

Stuart Ross 48 Rowlands Close Cheshunt Herts (Waltham Cross 25381)

happen here A Whyl, Malville, Brockdorf and Seabrook have all seen massive anti-nuclea demonstrations in the last few months. The increasingly violent and militant nature of German anti-nuclear campaigns, and police over-reaction (Cover, this issue), may have obscured theissue, but nevertheless nuclear power station construction has been slowed. I n America, antinuclear campaigns have been infused with the values of the radical ' counterculture, with a resultant aversion to hate and violence. Dave Elliott spent a week with the Clamshell Alliance at Seabrook, New Hampshire, New England, and wrote this report. THREE DAYS BEFORE the planned occupation at the Seabrook Nuclear Plant site, Meldrim Thomson, Governor o f New Hampshire, said: 'Our advanced information indicates that the planned demonstration o f April 30 i s nothing but a cover for terrorist activity. We are told that the demonstrators, who are coming from far parts o f the nation and as far away as England, plan t o seize the construction site. Confrontation i s a vital part o f their plan. Once they illegally occupy the site they do not plan to leave alive'. (Manchester Union Leader, April 27.)

Governor Thomson i s notorious for his reactionary views - he has allegedly called for the National Guard t o be equipped with tactical nuclear weapons -and his red baiting tactics. O f the Clamshell Alliance he said, in the article quoted above, their's 'is the destructive doctrine o f revolutionaries and communists'. His inflammatory remarks prior t o the demonstration were amplified by commentary and editorials in the Manchester Union Leader - a paper run by a close friend of the Governor, right wing publicist William Loeb: 'This Saturday's planned confrontation at the site . . . is essentially a military manoeuvre, led by leftist militants and designed t o test the state's ability t o uphold laws whose integrity its officials, appointed and elected, are sworn t o defend. 'Essentially these people (the Clamshell Alliance) are anti-democratic. They are the sarfie types that made up the brown-shirted storm troopers o f Adolf Hitler and the black-shirted mobs o f Benito Mussolini in Italy and the Red Guards in China and the brutal troops o f the Kremlin'. (Editorial, by Loeb M.U.L. 26 April). In the event this propaganda barrage backfired. The demonstration was one of the most good-humoured and peaceful ever witnessed i n the U.S., despite

the large numbers o f people involved 2,000 occupying on the day, 2.000 others coming t o sumort - and despite the intimidating presence o f some 500 (armed) police, state troopers and the National Guard - mobilised by Thomson. The credit for the success o f this massive exercise in non-violent civil disobedience must go t o the Clamshell Alliance who organised patiently over many months t o ensure that every contingency was planned forand that violent confrontation would be avoided. In the weeks preceding the occupation every occupier took part in 10 hours training sessions in non-violent occupation which involved role playing with mock police, to learn how t o cope with arrest and imprisonment. Dozens o f 'affinity groups' (of 10 to 20 people) were set up, each electing a ,pokesperson to communicate with the elected 'dec'isionmaking body' who were empowered to make any instant tactical decisions necessary during the occupation. This decentralised decision-making system worked well. (See Eddies, Undercurrents 22 for more details o f the demonstration.) The police and national guard were clearly impressed b y the effectiveness of the operation; although they were somewhat confused by the absence o f any leaders.

Ecstacy The police offered no resistance to the occupiers, who set up camp on the site, although some areas were fenced off and patrolled b y armed guards and dogs. The atmosphere was ecstatic, a cross between Woodstock and Paris '68 - the best o f the counter-culture, with its emphasis on 'consciousness' and peace, plus the effective organisation of the militant left. Demonstrators fanged from middleaged veterans o f the civil rights and anti war movements to young students, whom this was probably the first e.,

action. The anti-nuclear cause seems to have provided a focus for many o f those who had dropped out o f politics and headed for hill farms in Vermont. Following the Kent State massacre by the National Guard, many hundreds of thousands o f activists had retreated from the cities to try, as they put it, t o 'live their politics, rather than die for them' in self-sufficient rural communes. Now they were re-surfacing for the first major demo since the antiwar demos o f the early '70s. On Sunday afternoon (May Day) the police, after warning the occupiers that they were trespassing, started arresting everyone on the site, including press men and film crews. Some occupiers 'went limp' but otherwise no-one resisted arrest. The 1,414 arrested Clams were taken in school buses to local National Guard armouries, where they were kept penned together in large drill halls and specially erected prefabs. Conditions were often poor. A t the Portsmouth armoury few showers were available and toilet faci, ities were limited. A t the Manchester armoury 600 people spent the first few nights crammed together sleeping on the floor of the drill hall. The Clams grouptraining paid off. They had soon organised workshops, discussion groups, entertainment, food distribution, and press liaison committees and so on. In fact they were more or less occupying the jails instead o f the nuke site.

National Guard moved The National Guards jailers were very impressed by the calmness and oreanisation o f the Clams in a pretty untling situation. One Guardsman turnup i n civilian clothes one evening

. how moved'he was t?y the Clams hviour - an announcement which ight cheers not only from the nshellers but also from the guards luty. The Clamshellers seemed t o ! won over many o f the police. W i d e the jails, the media were larly sympathetic. The 'free the irook 1,414' slogan was too good ~iss, if only for the reason that their

- -

incarceration was costing the taxpayer (for food and pay for the guards) . , many hundreds of-thousands of dollars a day. Clamshellers began t o feel that the state was providing them with time and space t o set up the first Free University of the USA time which they spent discussing solar power, nuclear power and future tactics. But by the end of the first week,

- .

the strain began to tell. "ftie Clams had decided t o refuse bail - set at $500, and demand release on 'personal recognisance' (i.e. a personal commitment to'return for trial) - which was refused. Those who had pressing personal matters to attend to left, so by the end o f the first week the numbers in jail stabilised at around 800; including many people who had consciousJy decided to risk tosing their jobs, or fail college exams - no small sacrifice in a recession period. For many people outside, the occupation and subsequent imprisonment brought the nuclear power question, and in particular the civil liberties issue, sharply into focus. These people have behaved very well, have made considerable sacrifices, including personal freedom - they must have something o f importance to say'. Pressure mounted on Governor Thomson - until, just two weeks after the occupation, the occupiers wera-relea ed en bloc, on personal recognisance pending appeal, a move seen as a major victory by the Clamshellers.

Propaganda victory

Despite repeated attempts over six years by local people using legal means t o stop construction of the twin Westinghouse 1150 megawatt (thermal) pressurised water reactors at Seabrook, on the New Harnpshire coast, construction continues. Now the Public Services Company (sic) i s employing about 300 construction workers t o lay foundations and build the site infrastructure. Co ruction has been halted in the past by%P.A. (Environmental Protection Agency) ruling, only t o continue after re-assessment. Costly legal interventions by local organisations have come t o nothing. An initially pro-nuclear poll in the town was subsequently reversed when residents voted 768 t o 632 against. Issues at stake at Seabrook include:

The fate of the ecologically unique' SeabrookIHampton estuary renowned for the variety of shellfish it supports. One of the main sourcesof opposition has been the d a m f i i - hence the name Clamshell Alliance. The Seabrook plant would be cooled b y taking in 800,000 gallons per minute of sea water and returning it at as much as 40 C above the input temperature. Many ecolo~istsfeel this will disturb or destroy marine life i n the bay. The well nightimpossibility of evacuation, in the case of a reactor accident, of the sandy Seabrook and Hampton beaches used by tens o f thousands of holiday-makersi n the summer. The proximity of the site t o an (albeit inactive) earthquake fault along which 27 earth movements have been recorded within fifty miles o f the site in the last 300 years. This contravenes President Carter's recent instructions on reactor siting.

tourism, and no need for m o b power, particularly not nucleargenerated electricity which is likely t o cost the local people more than electricity from non-nuclear sources. But the objection to the plant is not just parochial; the Clamshell Alliance, which has chapters throughout New England and eftewhera is against nukes anywhere, for familiar reasons: the risk of accidental release of radioactive material; terrorist hijack of nlutonium; the problems of waste treatment and storage; and the smeller number of jobs produced, than i f the money was spent on energy conservationend the development of alternatiwenergy sources (New England is well suited t o offshore wind plants; indeed the New Alchemists base at Cape Cod is not far away.) Links with the unions I n a letter t o local labour unions, the Clamshellers have lumefted the creation of a Joint forum with unionists and envimnmentalists"to make the connection between job$_endenergy sources'. They argue that: 'Energy, from creation to distribution and final consumption, involves labour. Working conditions in mines, refineries and power plants - and safety both on the job and i n the coot-' munity -give workers a vested inter& in how energy is produced'. They quote the journal of the Labourers' Internetlonal Union (AFL-CIO)q w i n g that jobs i n the solar energy fiefd 'could well mount into thehundreds of thousands' and cite 8 study which shows that money invested in energy conservation and solar power would provide bur time'sas many Jobs as it would i f invested in nudear power. It remains t o be seen whether the Clamshellers working together with organisations such as the Envimnmental-

Clearly the occupation failed in i t s stated goal, o f halting construction at the site, even though the Clams have continued to mount small pickets there. But the propaganda victory resulting from the mass arrests and-the subse'quent legal wrangling5 is likely to be considerable. The fact that mass civil disobedience and subsequent court cases can provide a platform for public discussion of nuclear issues, was clearly recognised by a Buckingham County these Attorney, who argued that ' arrests could have been avoided. We could have used tear gas and fire hoses and more planning beforehand. Now we have to show all these people the (legal) system works'. (Attorney Eldredge M.U.L. 2 May). The prospect of clogging up the courts with 1,414 cases, each tikely to prove newsworthy, is obviously notan attractive one for the officials. The Clamshellers took direct action because years o f attempts t o legally oppose nuclear power through citizen ' intervention in the courts and through the various regulatory agencies have failed. Nearly 100 legal interventions by citizens over the past four years have all been unsuccessful. Some have led to temporary halts, minor modifications orre-sitings, but a few months later, construction continues. Whether the Seabrook campaign and those likely to follow it wilt succeed no-one knows. But, as the Clamshell Alliance point out, there were 18 arrests at the first'seabrook demonstration, 180 at the second last August, and 1.400 this time, next time , it maywell be ten times that,. a situation which no governor or governmerit can pass off as a conspiracy - orchestrated from Moscow.-

. ..

NUKES and UNIONS .*,.

in fear o f prosecution, go back to work he anti-nuclear lobby is having its fling at tm-Ă&#x192; the thin line of BNFL the picket line was broken anyway as xperts' at the Windscaie Inquiry are opposed by a wedge of QCs, prothe Mio f State ordered safety ssors, solic?itors,and people, from the various opposition organ' equipmerrtinto the plant.. . riends of the Earth, the Town and Country Planning AssociatiorCANT~, Suddenly, Julian C-S.W (now Jimm) SCRAM and the rest. The opponents cases are as wide-ranging and varied Williams) finds -that management no as the groups themselves: pollution in the Irish Sea, local infrastructure longer requires him - since he started writing for Undercurrents. Thinking thi problems, the long term disposal of radioactive wastes, a mismatch of is unfair, he appeals against his dismiss; local job skills with those required in the oxide reprocessingplant, and so by going to an Industrial Tribunal, but on (see Undercurrents 22). Mike Georae outlines the case of one arouo. he loses his case. The employer whispe~ the Socialist Environment and Fiesource Aspiation, which.lns raised ed 'national security' into the ear of th auestions about nuclear ~ower'seffect on emlovment and trade union Tribunal Chairman -that's enough t o rights. condemn the employee - no evidence

. .

AS JEREMY BUGLER wrote in ussing Faces at Windscale, (New Statesman, 17/6/7'7) what might seem obvious t o you and me about the problems o f nuclear power, is very far from being obvious t o others. Bugler asked why certain key people were not there; people like Arnold Weinstock of GEC, Hugh Scanlon, John Lyons (Gen. Sec., Electrical Power Engineers Association), and we can add to these union officials of the General and Municipal Workers Union (the main union at Windscale), ASTMS, Tass, T&GWU, etc. It'sassumed that the trade union movement is all for nukes just because Scanlon and the TUC have come out in favour o f the old 'more erfergy = more economic growth = less unemployment' equation. However, many other trade unionists privately oppose all or part the nuclear option.

the job w o r t h doing?

thatare created in the nuclear power industry . .. It's 1984, we've lost the nuclear fight and Godfrey Boyle, well-known Undercurrents hack writer, decides that you might be able t o use waste heat from Fast Breeder Reactors to feed district heating, schemes - so he tries t o get a job with BNFL. He doesn't get the job because he's a subvers/'ve, and o f course he's got no way of knowing or orovine that his politics lost him the job. ( ~ h g e ' salready hard evidence to show that more than one publicly-owned industry keeps files on employees' political activities through the agencies of the Economic League and the Special Branch. BNFL, a private company but funded by public money, i s no exception.)

Trade unions and trade unionists ve fought for well over a century to sate and preserve employees' rights. ~ey'vestruggled for the right to assotte together; to bargain collectively; to gage in industrial action; and, more cently, t o have some real say in health d safety matters, and to obtain inrmation for bargaining purposes and r the purpose of contesting individual smissals. The SERA submission to indscale casts severe doubts on the ility of trade unionists t o maintain ythingother than a pretence of these rd-won rights in the nuclear industry. Essentially, what we are arguing is at Windscale, Cumbria, and the rest of .,e world i s suffering from unemployment problems (amongst others!), and ^at nukes don't create employment to

N o legs t o stand on ulian Chalrnondtv-Smvthe ,-..- -. .- -., - ,, - Williams. however, is offered a job working on FBRs, where he decides to join the 'chaps in the union'. The price of bread doubles for the second time in a year and the union starts a new round of pay negotiations with the nuclear employer. They try to get some market information t o help them, but the employer says it can't ' divulge any information about its activities because its contracts are hush hush. Despite havingthe law on their side (the Employment Protection Act) the employees don't have a leg to stand on. But they make a demand anyway, which management refuses point blank, and they go on strike in furtherance of their wage demand. 'But', cries the employer/Minister of State, 'thisaction is dangerous and prejudicial to the safety of others, you can't leave the alan't unattended or poorly attended'. Then the good old 1875 Conspiracy Acts are trundled out

i s heard, the case is closed, and the employee sacked. Meanwhite,Hn another plant, anothe radioactive cat i s found, and the trade union representativeson the safety con mittee push for an enquiry into leakage at the plant. But they are informed tha as the plant i s Government owned, m p of the provisions of the Health and Safety at Work Act, 1974, don't in faci apply there, so they've got no way o f protecting themselves and the commun ity against radioactive leaks.

Nuclear technology is different Now remember. this i s not some hus hush military establishment, it's a publ: utility. like sewage disoosal. water SUDD and <he other electricity-generating6dl tries. But the politics of nuclear technology make iba qualitatively different ndustry to the others - conventional ~ n i activity o ~ there is ruled out, threat ined or harassed. And all this to heat louses that could be heated better oy heat pumps, district heating schemeburning rubbish, better insulation and all the rest o f the AT package. Energy for industry too can be provided witho recourse to this expensive and damagin option. Small coal-fired fluidised bed combustion units can produce electricil efficiently for one factory or an industrial estate, and then of course there's. all the solar and wind power options and natural gas. If security screening of employees starts in a big way in civil industry, and we accept it and all the other constrain on employment rights purely because i means more jobs, we might as well pad up and join the Arrhy. A well-discipline 'safe' industrial workforce i n the nuclei industry, and in others 'infected' by this precedent, i s pretty unlikely to create things like Alternative Corporatf Plans, or to call for the conversion of arms production into socially-useful production . . is it?

SAY WHAT YOU LIKE about Herman Kahn - and that advice has been taken more literally than even the most lax libel taws normally allow - there is no doubt that the man is acard. Theworld's most corpulent gadfly was at it again recently when he arrived in London to be master of ceremonies at a seminar on the ' 'European Malaise', organised by his own Hudson Institute. Actually, organised is something O f an overstatement since this end of the organisation, the Paris-based Hudson Europe, had omitted t o tell Kahn and Co. that they were organising an event of their own elsewhere on the Continent. What was intended to be a three-day affair down i n Brighton ended up as one day in the London Hilton. No matter. Amidst that gathering of the unthinkable and the unreasonable there was at least one unmentionable, an Undercurrents agent, eager to hear the apostle of megadeath and maxigrowth. He looks somewhat older and less animated than one expects. The beard fringes the face from ear to ear, giving hh he apwarance of a glduOut Iargarden Fornee The in a sortOf inteqer* ed with giggles. Later on in the session, duringa talk by one of his acolytes who was stupefyingly boring - he fell asleep, started snoring loudly and had to be revived by his personal assistant Cecelia~ who ~ looks ~amazing~ ly like Della Street o f the Perry Mason ptogrammes. "

Explosion Kahn is a veritable explosion of, (often eminently quotable) sayings, an aphorism bomb. He corruscates on thin ice, drawing together undigested data from a whol-t of disciplines and fusing them intoa glitteringly oversimplified conclusion and then moves . swiftly on to the next dictum before his listeners have plumbed the banality of the last. Still, it makes for amusing listening. Kahn began by claiming that a 'malaise'

was his family doctor -and he hasn't found out abouthim yet'. Coupled with this is the growth of the 'new class'. This appears to be a motley collection of groups who, in a less enlightened era, were labelled pink*, weirdoes, pointy heads, freaks and a variety of uncomplimentary ethnic epithets. The defining characteristics of this 'classJare, according to Kahn, relativism, the questioning of traditional absolute values, pacifism, cosmopolitanism, social reformism, anti-militarism, antimaterialismhd an attitude which is described as 'increasingly Pelagian, , &creasingY AugustinianD.This apparently means a move away from rationalism, order and science towards mysticism and transcendence. In Undercurrents terms, more faith in ley lines than land mines. --

The infection spreads So, was there a simitaf European malaise? Yes, said Kahn, although he can hardly be said to be without a vested interest. That's how he makes his mQney, telling us how malaised we all are. A symptom of the malaise was the thrall in which Opec held the continent, he explained, conjuring up visions o f Moslem hordes engaged i n an economic jihad. 'The battle of Tours may have to be fought again'. Left unspecified was who twbe the~latter-day l was~ , Charles Martel. Valery Giscard d'Estaing? Helmut Schmidt? Jim Callaghan, even? 'The malaise, as we marxists would put it, is the dying upper middle class. Some of you 1 see are not sharing my glee at the demise of civilisation'. The audience looked bemused. Kahn, a marxist? What did that make them? All classes as they go down generatf 'nutty movements'. Not that these movements were necessarily without their poim.,~ahn himself, generally pro-scienceand techfiology, understood the mcreasing fears of those who mistrusted the direction in which they appear to be taking us. 'It's like a man with an ageing and unpleasant wife'. Curiously enough he was a convinced nuclear opponent, on both proliferation and economic grounds. 'Any power m a n y which sells bonds on nuclear reactors i n f(te US ,is guifty o f

grounds. Any power-company which sells bonds on nuclear reactors in the US is guilty o f embezzlement'. The future o f science, however, troubled him. Consider, for example, the very 'real possibility o f a console wired up to pleasure centres of the brain. Rats which this particular dirty trick had' ' n played and pressed the pleasure ton for hoys, ignoring all food, until ey dropped with exhaustion. When hn first mooted the idea to Americans were horrified. N o t so, however, roup o f Brazilians. They all wanted know when it would be available. Rum chaps these Latins.

Forbidden fruits

Kahn feels the time has now come to put cu@s on the disseminationof scientific knowledge. There should be an index o f forbidden knowledge. An interestingidea, although the Vatican ,.beat him to it by several hundred years. Perhaps we should ordain our top scientists, make them take vows of poverty, non-proliferation and obedience and allow them to celebrate the mysterious o f science in a public ritual. It took 20 years for him to change his mind but now he could wax apocalyptic with the best of them. 'Science i s a product of the West. I f it is intrinsically evil what good is culture. If science is a mistake, perhaps the West is a mistake'. Having dispensed with science he then went on t o give five minutes each to God, whom he appears to treat as an approximate equal, business - structurally unprofitable, big government a child o f German social democracy, and what, one supposes, is part of his general philosophy of life. 'It's impossible to prune with a scalpel. If you can't do il with an axe you can't do it at all'. There was one final aside, which, to give him his due, said more about American social behaviour than a whole library of sociological textbooks. It concerned the seating arrangements o f two couples in a car. 'If they are working class the two men s i t in fron and the women behind. If they are middle class then husband and wife sit together. If "'" tare upper middle then each man ' nth the other's wife'.

L Ă&#x192;

Phosphorous above all, Potassium and Nitrogen are the most important basic SUPERPHOSPHATE elements in the pond, and are usually POTASSIUM. CHLOWOE found in animal quantities. Their most important action is in the bottom mud, which in decomposing releases nutrient* %MU G H T a l i t t l e at a time'to the flora and fauna found in"the mud, For this reason, a pond freshly put under water for the first time is more productive, this productivity diminishing with time to a stable level, as the nutrients in reserve in the soil are used up more or less rapidly; Fertilisers applied to the pond are absorbed by the mud and released gradually as they are needed. Fertilisation therefore presents the most economical and longer term way of increasing pond productivity. It is far more hygienic than supplementary feeding,-eliminatingthe risk o f dietary diseases and the danger o f oxygen depletion by decaying organic matter. t The type and quantity of fertiliser needed for a particular pond depends )h, earthworms and other terrestrial such as &rp.do better on a given on the pond. Before addition o f any vertebrates, together with a wide quantity of food than do Salmontype o f fertiliser, the water and soil o f ids. riety of detritus such as decaying the pond bottom must have a slightly getable matter. They also quickly alkaline reaction. Any acidity may be k4 = the age coefficient. Young fish irn to accept a wide variety of live and corrected by addition o f lime, as powhave a lower body maintenance epared foods. Too high a water flow dered limestone, quicklime or calcium ratio than older fish, meaning II disturb the pond bottom and retard young fish put on more weight for . cyanamide. As in conventional agricule ideal development of plant life, which ture, liming has several beneficial a given quantity of food than do a circular fringe of semi-submerged effects. It helps form a suitable crumb older fish. The coefficient = I for id emergent vegetation, and submerged structure which aids decomposition fish of six and over, 1.5, getation covering about 50%o f the processes in the bottom mud, and for fish below six months o f age. tal ~ o n area. d provides a reserve of carbon dioxide he chemical characteristics of the /which combats any change in pH and These productivity coefficients have )nd must be such that there are adequate by plants. It also been applied to the L ~ ~ formula ~ ~ - helps H assimilation ~ ~ ~ ppljes o f mineral elements like Calcium, brings about precipitation o f excessive toenablecomparisons to be made itrogen. Phosphorous and Potassium, organic matter in the wafer and def between ponds i n all regions o f the , id an absence o f toxins. Micronutrients troys harmful parasites of the fish. world despite the climatic conditions. saltsless abundant elements such as Lime is best applied to the pond the quality o f the water and the species )halt - are also important, but to an bottom before it is put under water, raised. The formula i s empirical, mean[determined extent. The pH 'is a good as a preliminary treatment before any ing that it has been made to f i t the facts flector of the state of the pond, acid other improvement procedures are rather than theory, and its application iters usually signifying low biogenic -carriedout. The amount o f lime provides a reasonable estimation of pacity. Carp prefer alQine, wellnecessary depends on the pond condinatural productivity. For example, a iffered water, as do most aquatic flora tions, but improvement o f the mud vend inmeadow land mav be assigned a rauna. could be achieved by adding between an average biogenic capacity of v,Defects in artificial ponds may be 48 kgms o f powdered limestone per based on the observation of surrourrdrnedied by various means, even if the are, provided the pond is not acid. More ing vegetation consisting willow herb, cal water supply i s unfavourable. Pond would tie needed to correct a pH deficit purple loosestrife and buttertups in ittoms may be stabilised by lining, Quicklime has twice the efficacy of abundance, with several other species trients increased by fertilisation and powdered limestone and should conseless well represented; an emergent h t problems alleviated by maintaining quently be added ih half the quantity. vegetation of crowfoot, bur-weed, itable depth and surface area. Phosphate fertilisers are the most bog-bean and floating pond weed; a The coefficient of productivity, k, i s important. Nearly all waters are low in relatively abundant fauna consistfng mposed in reality of four separate phosphorous content and treatment wid insect larvae o f Mayfly and Stonefly, efficients: these have the following mineral phosphorous fertiliser is nearly and molluscs and variousother invertesanings: always worthwhile. I t s effect can be brates; and finally, a slightly alkaline seen in the production o f algal 'blooms' pH (7.1). The surface area is estimated the temperature coefficient, which tingeing the water green. Productivity at 10 ares. The Leger-Huet formula in Europe with prevailing early may be increased from 50 to 1SO%, and can be used to estimate the probable temperatures of about 10'7. C is it has been calculated that 1 kg o f phosnatural vroductivitv as follows:' assiened the value 1. phate will give an average production K = NaxBx(k1 +k2+k3+k4) the chemical coefficient, based on supplement ~f 2.1 3 kgs of carp. Phosph. the pH of the water. It j s assigned . commonly comes as superphosphate or the value 1 for waters with a pH = 10/10~5(V)x(1+1.5+2+1) basic slag, and i s best applied at a concel less than 7, and the value 1.5 for tration o f about 1 kg per 350 square those alkaline waters with a pH metres (0.3 kgs per are). This value means that if we were to greater than 7. Potassium i s less important than pho: stock the pond with carp, we could the species coefficient. Salmonids phate, as average and rich ponds usually expect a yearly weight increase of about or cold water fish have been assign contain sufficient, but is beneficial in ed the value 1, and Cyprinids or , acidic waters, promoting the growth of The natural productivity of a pond warm water fish the value 2. This submerged plants. It is usually applied 'iepends ultimately on the quantity relates to the fact-that Cyprinids mixed with phosphate fertilisers and at o f inorganic nutrient substances present: 4

tivity without supplementary feed 28 + 18.6 = 46.6 kgms. The loss raw is usually estimated at 10%. If the growth target were three year old carp with an individual weight o f 1 kg (2% Ibs), ther the stocking density would b

46.6 1

-c.

We should therefore stockthe pond w i t t 52 two-year-old carp. As two-yeir-old carp weigh on average 300 gms, and we may expect to lose five or six of the carp placed in the pond, a check on the accuracy of the stocking density estimate might be made by adding the total weight stocked (15.6 kgms) to the estimated total productivity ( ~ 6 2 . 2and ) dividing this total weight produced at thefind o f the year by the initial stocking density. Without any mortality, the weight of each fish would then be 1.19 kgms, and would be slightly higher if there were six casualties. The model therefore provides a reasonably accurat projection o f the stocking density, and consideration o f the average initial weight of the fish stocked would allow some refinement to be made in the prediction. Two year old carp can weigh between 200 and 500 gms, so the final weight of the surviving fish will depend on this weight'to quite a large extent. If artificial feeding is practised, the model can provide an estimate of the amount o f food required throughout the year. In the above example, if it were decided t o increase the natural productivity by a factor of two with supplemental feeding, then this would mean a yearly growth increment of 2 x 46.6 = 93.2 kgms. When considerin natural productivity for the purpose of calculating supplemental food, it is usual to consider the total productivity due to natural productivity and the productivity due t o fertilisation together, as the natural-productivity. The amount of food to be distributed would thus be 46.6 kgms in this case, and the stockine density could be increased to 93.2 + 9.3; 102 two year if the growth target remains

out the same concentration. The phosphorous/nitrogen ratio plays nore important role, as phosphorous ficit limits the uptake o f nitrogen from &water. Nitrogenous fertilikrs are ost often used in new ponds which are ther without or have a poorly developI bottom mud. Organic-manure is probably the best I round fertiliser for the pond, as it ings with-it a supply o f all nutrients, ten improves the soil crumb structure id aids the growth o f the bacteria wended in the water. If not used with ire, it can cause an oxygen deficit in ie water, and it may also carry disease I the fish. The total productivity of a pond i s ~ereforethe total of the natural producvity, the productivity due t o fertilisaan, and the productivity due to artifict feeding, if any. The calculation of the crease in production due t o fertilisaon and the use o f supplementary food rather involved, due to &torsthat interact to gi oduction. Fertilisation can increase natu .oductivity by 50-150%. I gexample, there was an es wluctivity of 28 kgms per suming a conservative 35% f fertilisation, we should ex 3 kgms of carp per year. The stocking density of a pond is gulated by the amount of available ad, and the Leger-Uuet formula prodes a first approximation of the naturly availablefood. To calculate the effect fertilisation or supplementary feedingt,t&~stoofcing density, cerreCaoft

factors must be applied to the fortpula which estimate the total available food. The actual productivity achieved will depend on the stocking-density and the site o f the fish stocked. If the initial stocking density i s too low, then the fish will not be able t o convert all the available food to flesh, resulting i n a lower actual production than that predicted. If a lower number of larger fish arestocked, this will result in tar= individual fish. but the weight increment will be lower than that predicted because the fish will not utilise the available food as efficiently as a higher number of smaller fish. Many small carp in alpond will forage more effectively, musinggreater disturbance of the bottom-mud, thus inc the turnover time of nutrients in the mud, which will result in an increase growth of secondary food sources of the larger m o u n t of available nutrients in the water. I n the Far East, a lot o f small edible fish are produced, father than a smaller number o f 3 Ib-individuals. Productivity therefore increasesinversel y to the size o f fish stocked. The numerical stocking rate can be tfie following expression:

nately, this estimate o f the distributed is not accurate. .Another factor must be considered, an this is the food conversion ratio, which is the weight of food required tp produce a 1 kg weight increase in the fish. The relative food conversion rate is ob tained by dividing the quantity of focx distributed by the total production (th due to natural food + manuring+ artif cia1 food). It is dependent not only on rate = targetw hfood distributed, but also on facto. ividual fish) productivity (kgrns) such as the density of stocRing, individ Individual growth target ual weight, age, state o f health, water temperature and the method o f feedin; (quantity, spreading and the frequency the data from the previous of distribution). The relative conversio example, we know that natural productivrates for a wide variety o f foodstuffs ity will be around 28 kgms. In Britain, for have been worked out, but the actual an average pond, fertilisation will increase production o f fish flesh from artificial natural pro&ctMty by appximattty two- feeding willstill vary dependenton tht fhffds, SOtfÃˆ ÃˆBM$Ãˆfr~t*,ft(B ptO<tÃˆ& faetorst ;fBBn)B<ineÃ‡ta6<w.&tte ,

rig example, if the ~ r i n c i ~artificialal oodstuff w& lupin-seed,with a relative onve'rsion rate of 4, then the quantity eeded to double natural productivity Id be 46.e-x 4 = 186.4 kgms. ficial feedstuffs can consist of abte or animal foods, or a combinof these. Finally, I shall give a brief description f the reproductive techniques employin carp culture throughout the rid. In the first article, I pointed out a t the difficulties of breeding carp in e temperate areas of theworld prei n t the only drawback to its culture. arp are warm water fish, and need a igh temperature to spawn successfully. i Far Eastern countries, where temperture is not a limiting factor, ripe carp re collected from the wild or the farm ond and placed in breeding ponds, there aquatic vegetation on which the a s are normally laid. Probably the Idest technique s t i l l in use in Europe (id the car East is the Dubisch method, e shallow ponds containing grass ooded prior to the introduction areeders to the height of the grass, which the eggs are deposited. After ]awning, the fish are removed and ie eggs allowed to hatch in the pond. Many farms in Indonesia transport ie eggs to hatching ponds from the >awningponds, in which the eggs are .id on artificial nests, or kakabans (see istration). These are mats o f indjuk res in a bamboo frame, and are floatI the surface of the spawning pond.

until recently presented a major problem, because the surface of the eg i s coated with a sticky mucous, which in nature binds the eggs to the plants on which they are laid. Clumping of the eggs under artificial incubation coi ditions means that the eggs at the cent of the clump tend t o be deprived of oxygen, so they die. These dead eggs then become covered with fungal grow which spreads to the adjoining, living eggs, killing them. A technique has no' been devised whereby the mucous lay is removed from the eggs as soon as they have been artificially fertitised by milt from the male, so they do not c'" and the survival o f the eg& has been rreatly increased. Ihope this brief article will make a few people interested in carp farming maybe John Seymour might find time J to have a so. as carp are oolvsamous When eggs have been laid on both sides, and do n& mate for life.~h'& may thi they are removed-to the hatching ponds. fore be eaten with a clear conscience. I will endeavour to reply to any inquir In European temperate countrie , where the carp spawn only one a year, ' care o f Undercurrents, or made to the address below: and perhaps not at all ifsummer temperatures are not high enough, the usual P. L. Bryant, TO, Lower Queen Stret technique at the present time t o ensure Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands, spawning is to inject ripe carp with B72 lRT., ' hormones, termed spawning induction. The brood fish may be kept i n warm Paul water aauaria until thev reach maturity. ,, and the eggs retrieved by m u a l l y References: See Undercurrents 22 p.32 stripping the fish, as the eggs are not @turn. Fishfarming Pt. 1 Undercurrents 2 likely to be laid naturally under these p.31 line 28. This should read, 'A conditions. 1 area of one to f ~ ares e (1 are = Artificial incubation of the eggs h a s / 140th of an acre) is the. ..

the Wastesaver project it was something of a pioneerq venture. Up till then attempts to recycle household waste had been memeal and on a small scale: rag-and-bone men, pulp-paper merchants id silver-paper collections by charities. Recycling and reusing things ade ecological sense/but would it make financial sense? Oxfam were king a risk. That the Wastesaver has also been the scene of an experient in industrial democracy is, therefore, even more remarkable. 1n Walker describes the continuing shop floor revolution, and the day-day working of the scheme.

Istarted last November as a driver d was told that all the workforce at e Mill were allowed to have a say in eir work situation, and that at staff ietings once a month workers and inagement got together to exchange :as, thus the workforce influenced mageriat policy. This sounded fine, cept that the staff meetings consisto f a few very vocal speakers from

organisations writing articles sa, "rig the fi@t Is and VeV iJating to me- Eventually, the articulate members o f the workforce who opposed management were forced oueifhd it all left a bit o f bad feeling.

A kind of circus About the same time, a decision was

meetinghad absolutely no power whatsoever, and it seemed to me to be a kind o f circus where the manage-. ment played at industrial democracy jind gained the satisfaction of thinking that we were all one big happy family and everyone had a say. The trigger for change was a report from Oxfam (in Oxford) demanding a plan of action for the Wastesaver, as the lease on the Mill was due to run out and they had decided to stop pumping in money unless a profit could be made The management plan was to ask Oxfar for a quarter of a million pounds to build a brand new, chronium plated, all singing, all-dancing, custom built recycling factory in Leeds, which would then make thousands o f pounds every year for Oxfam to spend overseas. Everyone else atthe Mill felt that it w a l d be lunacy to spend 5uch a vast sum of money on a new factory when the one we had was making a considerable loss. We felt that the building, we had was not perfect, but that it could bi flsed far more effectively; and that to use it as a scapegoat for all Wastesaver's losses was unfair. So, rather than lust out it, we decided to do someworking party was set up, and o f working time to decideon fficient method o f organising

Working party victorious' It was a definite victory for

dred copies. We asked for an oppority to present it, and the Wastesaver's anager said that we could have the me amount of time to present our ans to the Oxfam Executive as he him-

Roughly two years ago Oxfam invested about Â£100,00 i n the Wastesaver project i n Huddersfield. A n old mill was rented, and equipped withsome simple bailing equip ment, and the distribution of the dumpy began. The dumpy is a steel frame which contains three plastic sacks - red, yellow, and blue for newspaper, ell other paper, and jumble respectively -and a woven *sack for tin, glass, end plastic. The sacks are collected and replaced every four

Mill might be run profitably. When the management returned from Oxford with their directions, they called together the working party and told us that we had done a remarkably

Glass recycling is hopelessly uneconomic: even ignoring the cost of collection, the processing costs more than the resale price. It would appear that the only way t o prevent the waste of glass is t o make a l l bottles returnable, and t o move away from the throw-away, non-returnable bottles being made today. However, as the glass industry is extremely powerful

degree of industrial democracy in the Mill, and we are in the process of seein how well we can make it work. Initial reactions are disappointing: the meetings seem to be dominated by the management who are more articulate

jobs; directives from Oxford have closed one department down; and there are probably going t o be further redundancies. But it's impossible to assess the situation at this stage.

RESERVATIONS However. I'd much rather see recycling happening i t the community level; with a community collection of paper at some central location maybe schools and churches or youth clubs -and the sale o f this to Wastesaver. This would generate money within the community, and thus, hopefully, damonstrate very clearly tha wane valuable stuff, and also genera: bit of money for community p r o j e . kind of collection do* happen t o a small extent in Hoddersfield, and it has proved t o be cheaper, even when paving Â£1a ton,

.....

A number of points about the project have became clear:

seems that it is only something like the Wasteaver that can prevent thg incredible waste of materials that we all throw away

s35

a-long system of ducts to the chimney, heatingother oots and being absorbed while the whole body of the stwe dadually heats up. Meanwhile the well-cooled smoke goes up the chimney having left its heat behind in the stove. We estimate that a well-built model can retain 90%of the heat of cdmbustion. We tell our students that if they can't hold the chimney intheir bare hands with the fire- bluing. the stove is too inefficient, - Heat flow is controlled by a series of dampers made of scrap metal sheeting which are raised and lowered in slots to controlairflow. With dampers-closed, the stove will simmer food all night, cooking breakfast beans on kitchen garbage while the family sleeps. Traditionally, the woman o f the house rises early to make a fire to boil coffee for breakfast. The stoves retain sufficient heat from the night before to heat coffee without having to add any firewood - this alone saves a considerable amount of wood.

:I?" '?'

Ă&#x201A; --a-A--&

---

- ---

A revolutionary woodstove has been developed in Guatemala. Preliminary tests were so successful that it looks likely to have a more beneficial effect on the undeveloped world than many a monster World Bank scheme. lanto Evans and Donald Wharton write about what may be-the most appropriate of appropriate technologies yet.

... 1'HE

MAYA, Guatemala's original abitants, were decimated by the Spaniards in the 16th Century. Rowever, numberigrew slowly until the middle of this century when there was a population of about three million, of varied racial descent, but mainly Mayas or of Mayan cestry, occupying half the land area.

es, emphysema, bronchitis and eye problems is high among women. Burns on ar,ms and hands are common and small children suffer horrible scalds when a boiling pot tilts on an insecure open fire. A t Choqui w6 have addressed ou6elves to these'three problems: * firewood conservation

The population explosion creates a sperate need for more fuel. In the past smoke.fined kitchens, and ere was always plenty of wood for * poor combustion at high altitudes. and woodis stil the main fuel. From these we developed a new approach Tortillas, the mainstay o f the diet, are to stove-building, carving the stovefrom a difficult to cook with any other fuel, and monolithic blockof 'lorena', a special vast amounts o f wood are needed to mix of sand, soiland water only. maintain the necessary temperature. Now, due to sharply rising fuel prices, people are abandoning their traditional 'foods for new (and at times less nutritious) ones which are more economical -No special tools are needed7 .to wok. Firewood costs $6-15 a tarea stoves; in-fact we made a special point o f (about a cubic metre) cut and stacked, using only a shovel, a machete and a , and. afamily will use this amount in a kitchen spoon i n their construction month, thus spending up to a quarte~of three tools which even the poorest housetheir cash income on firewood. Because hold own. Guatemala is a tropical country,food To build the stove, you construct a needs cooking for a long time to be adobe base and heap wet lorena on it hygienic. until youAave a solid block abou Most women S t i l l cook over an open . deep. When it i s dry enough, a pr fire, often on the floor, with three ed system o f ducts and potholes 'tituntes' (rocks) upon which the pot into it.To prevent heat andsmo perches. The growing-,middleclass will buy a propane stove fo&l50-200, or build a brick 'poyo', a raised cooking platform with a cast-iron surface, for $60-1-00. The poyo solves the smoke problem byt the holes to fit twoor three different uses evenmore firewood than an open sizes. The duct system is long and tortuous fire. to assureas much heat absorption as Sixty per cent of Guatemala's people possible before the smoke is lost up the live at 1500-3000 metres above sea level. chimney. Over the ducts are a series of High altitude causes oxygen starvation,. potholes o f diminishing temperature so there is poor combustion, whichlimits terminatingin a fix@water-heater made the variety o f fuels which will burn freely; from a fivegallon lard tin sunk into the

serenely smoking houses, smoke oozing out f r o t i rooftiles and the innumerable

conditions inside.

Smoke can damage yourhealth Smoke i s aconstant harassment and danger to health. Besides the streaming eyes and running noses which are toe lot

good looking Stove

A mud stove sounds rather squalid, ut they take whitewash well and we are experimenting with varnish and other finishes. They can even achieve great sculptural beauty; the forms are powerful and massive, and the surface can be decoratively carved and nobody has complained that they look ugly.

~ich a Zen master whacks a sleeping mealtator. I am not a believer i n conspiracies to suppress knowledge, but I do accept that a great fear and loathing arises inthe Establishment when confronted by the 'outlaw', or the 'Damned' a-s Fort called the data excommunicated n proper consideration, and this irally reinforces any tendency to preserve the status quo against new or threatening concepts, which are seen as eats 'to everything science stands for' vhich oftenmeans one's job, status credibility at risk. Science like any organism and closes rank he symbol o f chaoslO.This, with the tremendous authority the pronouncements'of scientists day put the onus on each xcept the rogues, bless them) t o abdicate their responsibility t o inquire nto the unknown, leaving many genuine ivenues to the cranks and charlatans. Fort wanted people t o think for themelves and refused to be drawn into ixplaining the mysteries he presented. h e true spirit of inquiry must become 1 personal intellectual, mystical and piritual odyssey. Fort thought his own nterpfetations o.f little consequence t o v a n e else; they were: 'suggestions and but the data will ;roping and stimuli >e for anybody t o formhis own opinions I shall find out for myself, and >n myone who cares to, may find out with ne'. One o f his techniques was t o fire nany different explanations at the.reader, nost o f them quite outrageous, but it ceeps you on your mental toes. These suggestions' conformed with the known and incomplete) facts o f the case as much is the equally absurd conventional ittempts at exptaining-away. Thus he :ounters the whirlwind-theory of showers -fishes by emphasisingthe anomalies1' d imaginingan invisible 'super-Sargasso ea' above us from which objects fall; ind of rains of blood, he,wrote that perlaps our whole solar sysfem is a living hing; that showers of blood upon this arth are its Internal hemorrhages - or wst living things in the sky A thing fie size of the Brooklyn Bridge, It's alive 1 outer space - something the size of M t r a l Park kills it. It drips.'* H~wrote withan eminently quotable it, by turns elegant and ,,iolent, but ak mys with a sagacious humility hard to natch irrany other philosopher of science, pntly mocking his own folly for engaging n such a business. A t 18 he ran away from is heavy-handed father's house and pent more than three years travelling round the world, sleeping rough and forking for his needs. He contracted nalaria onlhe way back to New York, narried the girl who nursed him, arid ettled down t o a life o f considerable loverty in the Bronx, relieved only by he meagre earnings of his journalism. lut all the while he read voraciously n d took notes'

. ..

.. .

extensive research 1 1 1916, &zed 42, he received a small

wee; &d

need.neverworry about

his daily bread again. He worked prodig-

notion of Continuity, the hapless Paul iously in the NY Public Library, collecting Kammet'er was working on a basically notes from papers, books and journals ' similar conception he called 'Seriality' on little scraps of paper (now held by -and both prefigured the Jung-Pauli that library). He reckons that he made thesis of ' ~ ~ n c h r o n i c i t ~ ' ? ~ the 'grand tour' of the extant material As far as we know, Fort read very at least three times, first accumulating little contemporary or religious philo25,000 and then 40,000 notes, destroy- - sophy, but in his younger day he did read Kant, Hegel, Spinoza, Stuart Mill ing them each time and starting anew and Berkeley. His ideas were born o f because they were 'not what I wanted'. much thought and objected when ma These notes were arbitrarily classified of his critics called him a Fundamental under 1,300 headings, and gave Fort ist, a Christian Scientist or a Berkeleyai two important perspectives: the nature pointing out that he was 'not out t o of scientific development in history, and the continuity o f all phenomena. restore Moses' in opposition to modern science, that the Christian Science Fort's view was difficult and undermethod o f dealing with unpleasantness scored every line he wrote, and is set (i.e. by wilfully ignoring it) was precise out in his first and third chapters; the ly what he was accusing orthodox rest o f his works being mainly devoted science of, and that whereas Berkeley t o examples in the various sciences and said all things existed in the beholder's types o f phenomena. Basically he saw mind, he was sayingthat all things, eve. all definitions categories, terminologies, the beholder's mind were ephemeral measurements and languages as arbitrary figments of a super-conscious universal and local expressions, and all our organic existence. Here too Fort was observations, perceptions and deducindependently formulating the philosotions were but imperfect a proximations phy o f a contemporary - the obscure .to unknowable absolutes?""I we Oxford scholar FH ~radleyl'. As could apply the word absolute to everyForteans we don't wish to turn Fort thing, say a frog, that Fr would be into a cult-fiWrel8, but out of convenGod*, he w o t e to a frieny4. Scientists ience use his name for this peculiar view out of mental laziness too often regard of the limitations o f knowledge, with a their 'laws' as absolute terms; whereas tip of the hat to all the jovial proto-Forts every true scientist would agree with in history, particularly those of the Karl Popper that every scientific stateCh'an, Taoist and Madhyamika Buddhist ment must remain tentative forever. F I schools, of whom we can be equally may indeed be corroborated, but every certain Fort kne-w nothing. Humour corroborationis relative to other state,was central to Fort's writings, and I'm writs which, again, are tentative.l6 sure that in the celestial debating halls Attempts t o express the universal in Fort's illustrious kindred spirits would purely local terms will naturally fall into agree with his idea of any science based paradox, error and failure. A scientific on transient phenomena. 1 conceive of experiment, said Fort,is an attempt to nothingin religion, science or philos define something by excluding the rest that is more than the proper thing to of the universe, and one must recognise for a while In the topography of the limitations of this method. This intellection I'dsay thyt knowledge was view accords with both everyday and mystical experience, in that nothing ' Ignorance surroundedby la~ghter.'~ can be reearded in isolation from all otherinfluences 'because all things-are People of the world ignite inter-related - continuous - ofunderA sense of humour is really necessary , lying oneness*. in view o f some o f the gruesome horrors we are necessarily interested in - like the bit,.^,.,, distinctions spontaneous human combustion (SHC). Fort called this universal anti-entropic A classic case came t o my attention tendency 'Continuity' - i.e. a state in recently, involving the death o f a retir which it is 'impossible to distinguish doctor, 1. Irving Bentley, on the night o phenomena at their mergingpoints', so 4 December 1966 in Coudersport, Pe that we cannot* ~ a n i a ~is ~generally ~ f t reckoned that' course* "Y wherered ^gins Or ends crematoria use heats of 2,000'~ (or more) sustained for several hours - even or distinguish In Orange of PU~PI~. ' then the recognisably human remains between some animal and vegetable have to be pulverized to ashes! Yet, as infusoria, or cause and effect; omen , in many other cases Icould give and event. Thus many o f Fort's notes D r Bentley was reduced to ashes in a are on simultaneous phenomena,Jike short time, without fuel-assistance or meteorites duringan earthquake, aerial pulverizers, except his foot (as you see globes of light and sheep mutilations in the accompanying photo). You will during a religious revival, uncony.x.ted also notice the hair-raisinganomaly of a dead bodies found in proximify in the supp6sedly fierce fire, contained in same park, the filing of patents on the tiny space - this effect ofSHC is well same subject at the same time by known-to us in cases of burnt bodies different people, a naked wildman in unscathed clothes or beds - the bath running through Lord Carnarvon's estateat the time he opened Tutanpain! is unblistered and Dr Bentley's -khamen1stomb, etc. Fort himself bathrobe unsinged. A pathologist, . soecialisinein fire deaths. Or Wiltonwould have been amused t o learn that .at the timehe was formulating his

...

tost amazinathingj've ever seen. As I ?viewit, the short hairs of myneck ristle with vogue fear. Were I living in be Middle Ages, I'd mutter something bout black magic. 21 .. Who could blame him - yet there asnever been any serious study o f Ikged cases since they first became opularly discussed inthe 17th and 18th enturies. One would have thought that ie implied mysteriousbiological and hysical processes involvedwou Id have rged some intrepid scientist t o brave 'hat Freud called 'the black tide of muttism'. What concerns me is that ases that have all the hallmarks o f appari t SHC are stilt reported today, and any tempt t o investigate them is subtly locked by police and coroners.The . iqu'est verdicts are usually vague,. xepting suppositions from the official ivestigators of hypthotheiicalcareless: es's with matches, pets supposedly flocking over heaters, etc. - b u t not ' . .rae shed o f proof! I n Dr Bentley's case te coroner's certificate lists ' j s p h y x i ~ on' as cause o f death.:How &n they ill that from a bit o f leg a i d a greasy . : - -' le of ashes, for heaven's sake! ~tit satisfied the lawand 'decently' iried the mystery! We need- soyi kind F research status that doesn.'t allow us to 2 made to feel likeghouls surprised. ', ter an open grave - and more import- . it access to police and medical records, . >meof thern'supposedly public but actically inacc&sib!e to the tikes of us in-establishment weirdos! ,

.:. .

umas in Surrey

Fort argued for a new kind 6f philophy in science --let's call it a radical inclusionist phenomenology. But in way we need more than that. Science seds an outsidestimulus - a p d f l y t o ing the hide of steepirtfcscience, as Fort it it. There i s also a need, from the ibtic's viewpoint, for someone to expose ie humbug with which some 'experts'

reement among experts when large otprints appeared in the snow at rnborough on NewYear's Eve 1970. key measured 8 x 4", showed a !adruped-typelocomotion and had

..:

,+.

five .claws at the front .Chessington ZOO erts' said first thatit was a brown and3en that it was a large sea-. ' gull!22 Large, indeed! When Iqueried the extent of the police investigations; whether out of curiosity or ofconfor the infants whose playgrou'nd the mystery beast had lumbered across, they had followed we tracks t o determine their origin etc, I was told b y the Asst. Chief Constable that: Tfierecord he Incidents In Januofy 1971 have * . 'feendestroyed, but ftom memory, 'here was no evidence that they were wade by the 'Surrey Puma ',and could 'listas easily-hove been the tracks of a %or large dog. In the meantmifi, folks, it'sstill out there, yakking it up with ids whole unofficial menagerie.

Notes and References

1) The Fool does not lead a revolt against the server and the observed. This paradigm was Law; he lures us into a region of the spirit, not superseded in science until the advent where a? Lamb would put it, the writ does of high-energy physics - its omen, asalnot run. ways, being a whopping paradox: that theEiiid Webford, The Fool: His social and ' yery act of measuring a subatomic particle Utewry history (Faber 1935). altered it into another particle or energyform. Scientifically, the observer "canno 2) Fort wrote four books: Book of the Damnlonger be considered separate from the ^ ed (l919),New L a d s 0 9 2 3 , Lo! (1931) experiment - physics becomes metaphysics and HW Tsknts (1932). These were collec- and the pronouncements of physicists ted into one volume, edited by Tiffany become interchangeable with those of all Thayer for the Fortean Society, The Books our mystics. Language isan added com>li. of Cliarks Fort (Holt 1941);reprinted with cation since of necessity we don't have any the same pagination by Dover m 1974 as adequate concepts tocorrectly question The Complete Books of Charles Port. All the universe or fully understand its answers, quote3 will be cited from The Books. Heisenberg wrote: 'What we observe is not nature itself, butnature exposed to our 3) Primers on thisand other Fortean pheno(Physicsand method of questm mena mentioned here, with references and 1963). Or as rPhibsop7ty, AUen cases,&e given in a forthcoming book by the Duck, in Alice in Wonderland sal-. John Kchell and myself, called Phenomena: A few* of wonden (Thamesand Hudson) , 'When I find a thing it'susually a t o g or to be released later this vear. a worm*. 4) Tiffany Thaw, in his introduction to The 14)Letter ta Edmund Hamilton, 25 October 1926 -quoted in Knight (see Note 5). Boots, and the late Iran Sanderson, in hisReluctant witnesses 15)Compare with Fort's irony - 'A straight Istartedrny journal, Fortean Times2a, line is the shortest distance between-two n 1973 to collect, preserve, record, and mints. Well then what is the shortest :ircutate Fortean data, and to encourage distance betw&two points? That isa straieht line. AcconUnEto the test of all le~earchand scholarship in 'Damned' agecthe definition t8at a strakht line is objects. This is not original %hemwas a-straight line cannot be improved upon. 1 Fortean Society that fizzled outin How do geologists determine the age of rocks? BY theFossHs in them. And how '959,yand two American orS/u\won9 6) do they determine the age of the fo& bunded in 1966 but has served as a By the rock's they're in'. Books nj44 & xia-1 wlklction ~ d @ for the t UK. 54718. 7) E(.*w& wr&*n *o chokr,y Witnesses to Fortean events can be studies: The UFO Wave of 1896 (privately 16)Paul Kammerer, Oas @setsder Sale bund in all walks of life, but almost rbbbd, 1974, and Char@ Fort, The (1919); CG Jueg;SyncWcity: An iniversally are so afraid of ridicule that Society S VfOs (privately publishamsual connecting pivi k (Routledge & & i s fmm , & Kegan Paul 1972; fp855). A broad hey keep their expOTBnces,to-thi'rw August W 5 ta August 1947. discussionof both can be found m elves. Occasionally, tho*, o~ebreaks Arthur KoestWs The Roots of Comet8) Book# p419. Furtherand modern discussion yrface, and asks,as one lady from ,,dence (Picador 1974). . bttmColdfieId did of a s h o w of 17)A good introduction to Bradley's obscure rogs @ere in 1954'*, whether anyone works in Richard WoUheim's FHBradley *saw it too. When they learn that (Peregrine Books 1969). ny interest isserious,'I've found these 18)Fort wrote to Hamilton 27 May 1926, icople read and r-ed -to giveme commenting on a pmpoaal to form a society: The great troubleis that the be details. Much of the ijatt&fstfw 9) majority of persons who are attracted are 7mes comes from'ky readers, wlÃ the om% that we do not want; S p i r i i end inclippings from papers, pcofes- a Fundamentalists, persons who are revolting ional journalsetc. Theseare published inst Scienmnot in (he least because they are affronted by the myth-stuff of v i t h a caveat; that they are onlyreports, the sciences, but because scientists oppose tues, feads, whatever, fdanyonewho . or do not encourage them'. Fort alsoknew ares to pick up and nose out* s &. the danger of turning anything into an hey mast not, like all other appearanctitution When Thayer formed the Fortean Society in 1930, Fort wrote to Theodore 5, be taken for 'the Tretii'. D&r, 19 Novenfter 1930: 1 wouldn't The paradigms of an age may seem join it any more than I'd be ah Elk!' ((Both owerfirily dominant (Fort called them q uoâ‚¬ in Knight - see note 5). llpw noted, fmmuiw biodreibof authenlominants'), but idm *y shift. ' tictec+s of faliing miterial, thatif, say, 19)&Ãˆo* p993 & 19. needs; trfrogs fall. they willallbe of the ' 'oftaire scorned the diet^ of fossils; same spedeii and age and'thtttfthe wn- 20)Lany E Arnold, The Flaming ate of* avoisfer reported to the Academy of Bent&ey',Pwiutt Fall 1976 t and tents ofa pond had beenauckedup by a the photo (wpyr&ht LE.Amold) are exciences tnT7fi9 that only peasants whirlwind (standard explanation) t h e is tracted from hi forthcomingbook Ablaze! - no 0 t h iMtWnMk ~ we weight or rize, fouldbetiieve~toneswuld fttl from the the case for adeases of spontaneous nor do the p'roductt of a hypothetical segreCY. because there are astones in the human nombuftlon, vo11 'Earth i n k mttoaby whirling come down anywhere b (mGteoriteswere'aw@&i toy the sition'. else. Fort a& judgedb the repeating of .ca+my in 1803); jpace<right was once many falls no whir~windswould visit the 21)lnterview with Alien W. Eckcrt, True May 1964. The case was that of Mr; Reeser, same place in the same msmoes with the Met bosh!' Today we see thfr bigboys who departed this earth on a pillar of fire as caqa many oases ceukibe given. mving i n on paraphy*fcÃawl paraFinally it s worth mentioning the$andard on the night of 1 July 1954. sychotogy; old Herbals and trÃˆ<Ãˆtton explmationh -iiflhrffa1ling 22)Aiderahot News (Midweekedition). >Ikmedicine has been plunderedfor ice:that itfalls from planes. If a modem 5 January 1971.1 am grateful to this now refufttion (The ~ce-fallProblern'by I.E. sw therapies and modem *-tidefunct paper, which chronicled many bf&na~, Weatherwisf 1960) k n o t to 'Puma' reports in its time, for taking and 11s; and computer-time is being lavishyourl&ingtherearepatba httadredtof suPPiy'W the Photograph1on astrology and ley lines. But as accounts(tornbef0fethedayÃˆo the . 23)Fortean Times, uarterly '- t 3.00/$6.00 mg as science is being done by fallible actonlane! per year (singles: 75p/3l.50) from: Box ~ n w i s there , will exist the 'Damned', . 12,Boo&-oW4. 152. London N10 lEP.EluiBnd. Annual

skn i.

a T

ie data that doesn't fit the current

shion in cosmology and there, pickg over the rubbish heaps.skeletonosets,andunder-carpet-sw&pings of

$ee~eV.yw'llflndus iwgwxt Fortwns. ,.*< - - -

- w*~_%k(Ãˆbei

13)The lacpageproblemis otmof lh<main

. a

GOOD DAYf SUNSHINE! The AT Group from Gloucestershire College of Art and Design, Department of Architecture have recently designed and installed a solar collector for heating domestic +

and in the roof space. A trimming, rafter wii5 positioned t o take the ed the collector (3). (It would be wise to check that t h i s is square with the eaves at

-. .

*-.- *^ -~ while the work tmjhe'foot y/kproeking, the 1Omo~pipkwasbent b y hand ing a semi-circular template (4) and the 50x25mm batten was used to seal the. een the plywood base and -is-

roof. Although a SE aspect and 20Ă&#x201A; pitch were not an ideal situation, I thought that a 6m2 collector ought to make a useful contribution to our modest needs for hot water. There are two of us living in the house at present, so use of water only for baths/showers (say 2 of each a week) would represent aminimum demand o f 48kWhlmonth. I f we include washing up and clothes washing, this figure increases to 75kWhlmonth.

Design

,The design evolved from a wish toe+ build acollector that wodd be-cheaper than that commercially available, would be lightweight and have a quick thermal response. Copper sheet Proved too expensive so it was decided to use aluminium sheet with a copper tube fixed t o it. Aluminium sheet.is available in S'x4'. beets, 2 sheets giving an area of Plywood* which *'Id be used as a base, is also available i n a'x4' sheets It was thought that aluminium glazing ' . bars would be simpler than makingup wooden frames. So the design shown in the diagram (fig 2) was devised.

Water Usage

'- '-

(901)

Water used 180 w-+mlWCJ

fimtli-435y

Ibwb/

Specific heat, water

1emp.that water muit tft raised KkWroir#

(301)

wsbfw "P

lot/ 1 #

3fc

Construction and Installation to strip the roof of ' he first job the existingsbtes a n w t e m . We had to lay the insulated 15mm pipes from the solar heated tank to the collector before we could continue, because the underside of the collector would become jnaable as soon as re-roofing bWOflim insulation was laid under the cokctor

This is equivalent to a maximum yearly demand of 900 kwh codpared with the average household in the U K which has a demand of about 5,000 kWh/year.

Table o f costs 24-28 Glass 4N0 55"x233/8" 4N0 475*8"x233/8" Glazing bars, bar caps, screws, brackets, nuts & bolts 29.81 (Frampton Furguson - Cambridge) 8.00 10mm copper tube 4.00 15mm copperiube 4.00 22mm copper tube 13.41 Copper fittings & clips 2.53 Zinc Chromate Primer & Matt Black Paint 18.55 Aluminium sheet 2 No. 8'x4'x22 swg Halfhard Aluminium sheet for flashing 6'x3'%22 swg soft 6.23 (Righton Ltd - Yate, Bristol) 7.80 Lead Flashing 3mx240mm 20.60 Plywood 2 No. 8'%4'xl/2" External 2.30 Softwood Battens 10m50mmx25mm .99 Header Tank (Addi 14.00 Pump (SMC Cadet) 13.00 Control Box ;168.50

"s-r

The aluminium sheets were dropped into the frame and etched withsandpaw ~h~ lornmpipe was then fixed with cable clips, nailing through the sheet into + the plywood, the clips were positioned : as required to give a good joint between 3 the copper pipe and aluminium sheet (5' I ~a screwed fixing ~ through ~ the Cabte clip would have proved a better job. The sheet and pipework were a mat of zinc choma& pfir then given ere bingpah&d mttblack with blackboard paint. As far as we can find out, the blackboard paint should with. stand the high temperatures, and the electrolytic action between the copper pipe arqtaluminium sheet should not% to0 problematic i n the relatively dry

amQsPbem-

The glazing bars were let into the top*

and bottom of the frames so that the glass would lie f f i s h with the frame, draughtexcluder was used to seal this

joint. The bars were fixed at the top and bottom and supported in the centre:

stituting hardboard for theglass, the lead flashing was then dressed around the top edge (6). It was worth spending an hour or so making up a cradle to transport the glass onto the roof (7). The glass could now be fixed in position, the lap joint being sealed with mastic (8) Only now can the slating be completed (9), (10) which means that youmustbe . prepared to have the roof off for some time.

Rlumbing

The heat exchanger in the solar hot, water tank was made from 22mm copper pipe using Yorkshire elbows (11). This -is fitted into the tank using compression

fittings. There was insufficient head te permit 'gra*ty' circulation, and anyway a pump is more suitable for a fast response. * The control circuit for the pump was based on John Wood's design. Using a length of flexible tubing and float the outlet from the solar hot water tank was modified so that the water always comes from the hotter top part of the tank (11). From the outlet the.solar heated water passes to the hot water cylinder where its temperature can be raised if necessary. Alternatively operating two valves allows the solar heated water to bypass the H W cylinder " (NB: the vent from the HW cylinder must not be valved).

Costs As always, the cost worked out'in excess of my original estimate of abou Ă&#x201A;ÂŁ30. I n theory, i f we get the energy we estimate out o f it, the system should p .for itself in about 10 years (assuming t unlikely event o f there being no increa in present-day fuel prices.)

Improvements Ifyou are thinking of undertaking a similar venture (1) make sure you have everything you need before you start.

e were held up for 2 weeks waiting for ie 18p thermistor, (2) don't use this (pe of polypropolyne tank which i s n ily difficult t o insulate but also the h .changer won't fit right at the bottom of e tank; a second-hand fortic tank ould be better, (3) it might be better to e a 10Ox25mm frame which would give %terflashing details around the coll6clr - you s t i l l only want a 12mm air ace between collector surface and glass ~wever,so the base would need supportg in the frame, (4) we thought that eating the collector at the eves would ake detailing easier, in fact it would ive been easier a few feet awav from the

we have been able t o have 'free after two fairly sunny days at the beginning o f April. Before this temperatures of about 3 0 ' ~ were obtained ed in the solar hot water tank during sunny snells. We've nearly finished the instruA n t a w which will enable more detailed checks to be made on the performance'Sind we hope to report on these in future $,sues.

John Willoughby , (with lots o f help from Jane, Stuart, Tony, Clare,Charles, Chris, Ann, Jamie and Steve.) r.?.-"

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. Try your local lithoprinter for a sour1 of cheap scrap aluminium. They often have used printing plates which they sell for 'beer money', and the going rate is about Ă&#x201A;ÂŁ5 per hundredweight. It has t o be a lithoprinter, though an old-fashioned letterpress outfit won't be able t o help you.

SHOESTRING

other forms of propaganda by dei it i s more likely to win the sympathy, and even the involvement, of the non-aligned public. Radio piracy has little tendency to causi any direct physical injury, or to alienate or damage a cause. @ ,.poF~spionage and bugging. - enemies will use this sort o f technique against you if they thirk it will help them, and why shoi Left not have the technology Lu play that kind of game if the occi sion arises? It is dirtyand 1 dlike it, and I do not want t o responsible for the spread of a w n techniques, or to recommend tha you make use o f them, but your ethical judgements are your own affair, and this is not an article or moral philosophy.

ere comes a time when the talking has to stop. The last two years have seen the formation of several groups 'demanding' the liberation of the mass-media, for instance, the Community Communications group and the United Kingdom Citizen Band Campaign, but it seems unlikely that their demands will be met. However, in Australia citizen band radio has been established not by pressure groups lobbying parliament, but by thousands of people breaking the law by using VHF radio transmitters and receivers (Undercurrents, this issue). The constant risk of having your equipment seized and confiscated means that radio-pirates need to use cheap equipment. And, as David Gardiner shows, almost anybody can build and operate inexpensive VHF radio transmitters, even if they thin that AM is before midday and a circuit is something to run round.

I HAVE a great secret to impart: radio is not magic. It will work for anybody if .

getting them t o work well, there are three major, recurring reasons for building radio they put the bits together in the right transmitters: order. Building a small radio transmitter T. For straigh'tf&rwardpurposes of i s a b e t assimple or as difficult =.wiring communication and coordination, up a tropical fish tank with its heaters, for example, for cornthermostats, lights, time switches and -Ă&#x192;Ë&#x2020;?-fi, munications between the front and pump, or correctly setting up a large back o f a large demonstration, keepnset layout. Of course radio wmpoine workers in touch in the fields of ts are somewhat smaller and probably a large rural commune, and comlie more delicate, and thCunderlying munication networks between urban theory would be more difficult if you ~ntres/communes/individuals. wanted t o learn about it, but radio trans2. For open-circuit broadcasting. Radio mitfers, like cars and alarm clocks, will broadcasting in most countries has 'work for people who do not understand been very effectively kept out o f the why they work. The theory is interesting hands of private, non-commercial arid perhaps fun, but not knowing the interests, and particularly out of the eory should not put you off building hands of the Left, because of its irdware for specific purposes. power and immediacy, and the This article aims to demystify radio a t personal, even intimate qualities of astto the point where the reader will radio compared to other mass media. el confident to put the practical Also, as one of the more recent iggestions to the test if the occasion mass media it was easier t o control ises. than the printing press or the arts. Pirate radio in the service of leftWhy build radio tranahiitters? wing causes is sufficiently novel t o &sides the intrinsic enjoyment o f attract an audience, andwilike

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Some disadvantages

Reasons for not building radio transmitters include: * Everything that i s worth doing wi radioequipment is iltegat. Penaiti are not often heavy, though this depends a great deal on circumstances, and typically, assuming, one is.a) caught and b) convicted, amount t o a fine and confiscatior of the transmitting equipment. A large percentage o f first time 'pirates' in England get o f f with a stern warning from the Post 0% Taking reasonable precautions, IiI having a look-out system for Post Office vehicles, occasionally chan ing the transmitter location, and i the last extreme, being ready to

abandon the hardware and take to one's heels, minimises the risk of being caught red-handed. The speed at which pirate transmissions can be tracked down electronically depends on the alertness o f the authorities, but one should at leastrefrain from making their job any easier by inadvertently giving away clues o f one's position over thdair. Even the most sleepy Post Office officials are likely to act if they have been given the address!

much simpler in design than the most component types and values (electronii basic transistor radios, and the availspecifications), and soa table o f tolerability of suitable semiconductors and ances has been included with the list 01 other components i s excellent, so the components in Table 1 for the benefit novice has the best chance of success. of anyone building from the 'spares @neq f the biggest limitations of box' who may not have the exact cornVHF is that except-in unusual circum.. ponent. Only the tuning coil, L l , is stances the s i g n w i l l not travel further critical; considerable variations in than the horizon, and in practice selefficiency result from experimenting dom e v e s anything like this range. Therefpre there is little point i n high transmitter power, but if maximum TCĂ&#x192; TR range ^.desirable a high aerial site is a considerable advantage. The range late 1 limitations can also work to the advantage of the user, because he i s unlikely to be noticed by Authority more than a few miles distant, and specific frequencies may be shared by large numbers of users provided that they are n o t too close together. with this coil, but experiment elsewhen Ten years ago the Post Office were in the circuitry simply i s not worth much more adept at electronically while. tracking down the Medium Wave pirates There are several permissible tech- . than the VHF ones, but it would be fair niques for building the circuit, the aetui * ~ ~useddfor communication i ~ is to say that this situation is now reverschoice partly depending on the intenda never strictly'private. Anything edHowever, it is a myth th* a V H F purpose o f theunit. Experienced radio one says stands a fair chance o f being overheard by someone somehobbyists will find that the unit can be transmitter i s easier t o track in any ! , absolute sense than a Medium Wave one. accommodated without difficulty on a where. piece o f ~erchoard2.5 cms by 5.5 cms, Plenty o f radios capable of receiving * There is the possibility (however (Plate I), but a simpler method of conVHF are easily available, and VHF is remote) o f interference with struction which practically ensures that ideal for the sort o f mobile communiessential services - or, for that the novice cannot make a wiring error i! cations envisaged as one o f the uses of matter, the police and If to use what are called bus-bars. In this the unit described. The,nominal fiethe transmitter is used within , quency range, i.e.-the m g e of frequen. method the components are soldered t~ the FM broadcasting band -two lengths o f stiff, bare copper wire cies to which ifcan be tuned, is 88-108 such interference cannot occur, but which constitute the positive and negaMHz, ^he same on the dail of an the possibility has served as tive battery rails in such a way that the dnq VHF radio. ~h~ transmitter a useful myth t o stir up feeling physical device closely resembles the is the output part o f the communication against pirate operators. (For a Wcircuit diagram on the printed page. ineach case, and the receiving er discussion o f the problems o f part is always a domestic VHF radio. free radio see Undercurrents8.) Obviously the frequency on which the - I receiver 'receives must be the same as th tequency and wavelength one on which the transmitter transmits, Frequencyand wavelength refer to the - and I will have m o k on how to achieve and maintain this happy state affairs me thing. Frequency, is the preferred later on. rm in the literature at the moment. ivebands awformally defined ran The basic transmitter unrt Capacitor C1 is a convenient componfrequencies allocated for differe One transmitter circuit1 i s employed, to start with (Plate 21, followed by ent irposes by international agree with very small variations, in the projects R2, R3, C3 and C4 (Plate 3). The ich of the 60's wave of radio to be described-in this article. The circuit component lay-out is not critical, but ak place on Medium Wave, or of this unit i s given in Figure 1. All the mplitude Modulated). This i s components used are in good supply dinaiy broadcast band receive and likely to remain so. Also, experieap transistor.radios everywh merit has shown that the circuit is uses frequencies from 1.6 MHz ceptionally - tolerant of variations in KHz, equivalent to wavelengths of Proceeding in this way (Plates 4-6) "70-550 metres. Alternatively VHF Comoonent ai/ai/at)ility: the circuit i s built up as a wiry skeleton, ery High Frequency) or FM (FreT h e f r i a t n t i i of shopping around in the and when completed it i s first tested / ency Modulated), was used. VHF 'junk shops' of Edgwre R e d and &la thoroughly and then, preferably, placed St a n be avoided by paying (lightly more quencies range from 88-108 MHz, in a metal box (Plate 7) with suitable in return for good quality components uivale~tto wavelengths around outlets for the wires, and embedded in ex-stock at: 'ee metres. The technical characterA. ~ a r s h a~ ~t ~d eood of epoxy resin. This has little electrical ics o f VHF and Medium Wave can 40-42 ~ricklewood con-, rariton, effect but strengthens the wire chassis seen tobe very different. Broadway capaators etc. and prevents parts from moving about London NW2 5% Fa' or rattling. However, t h e tuning capaciand counter sworn BF or Medium Wave? tor, or trimmer VCI, and the tuning coi Doram Electronics Good for hardwan. L1 should not be embedded in the resin There is a case for either band, but. Ltd. ea. horns, switchel, as these may need to be adjusted back dium Wave has the disadvantages BOX T R ~ plugsandso-Ă&#x192;Â§tc Lead. LS12 2U.F - Catalogue 60p, mail on-to the frequency afterthe resin dries requiring larger transmitting aerials, order only. or whenever a frequency change !her power levels i n the transmltthg cuitry and somewhat greater reduces the performance of L1. The me ihnical sophistication all round. , box should be connected to the battery erefore, for our present purposes rail for shielding purposes. The wire frame inside must be mounted so that components other than the negative ^ail ,

.not short-circuit'to the metal b

nd comes in two parts

fits our present purposes. However it ues have the disadvantage that once @beddedin resin no further servicing t component replacement is possible. ftt~'~robtem can be avoided by the use if slightly more elaborate mounting VStems like tag-boards instead of the %-immersion. I n certain instances, to be discussed rter, the intended purpose of the unit ktates the constructional technique o-be used, but it isa good idea to build we unit initially by the simplest techh u e to gain experience of its charach t t e before going on to more Eijthtsticated variants. The cornportents *are cheap enough for the first , tkmpt to be viewed as a training , . Xercise and either discarded or dip tofiled for salvage at some later date.

X)Idering made simple

F& those who have never soldered wfore, a smalt electric soldering iron is retty well essential for this kind of

ing' the metal case of the insert t o the The tuning coil 1 1 is the most critical negative battery rail. component and constructorsmay find - it worthwhile t o experiment with-differ- &tting up entails. My own findings are that the that theand unit has been o p t h u m radiated output is achieved with wmlAssuming y a microphone 3% turns o f copper wire 1mm thick insert and battery are connected, it wouffd.of! a former 0.7cms in diameter Should be Po* to lomathe transwhich i s removed after winding. The turns mittin frequency by tuning across thf are "stretched out' evenlqto occupy a &at of a nearby VHF receiver. When length of about 1 cm and the serial wire cwm frequency is found, a loud is soldered 1% turns from the sM feedback howl will be heard,"idicath coil connected to the positive tai that the microphone is 'live' and too deviation from these tfimensions close to the (radio) loudspeaker which causethe transmitter to operate it i s feeding. At very short range j% will some slightly modified frequency an be possible to receive the signal at need to be 'OWenseveral different dial settings on the sates Properly ordered experirfients are radio, but only one of the apparent or is the tfundamentalquite complicated to conduct and unless ' the builder is fairly experienced it might or transmitter frequency, so this be best to imitate the prototype L1, - *must next be found by increasing,. . at least to begin with. in steps, the distance between the purposes the 2N2219 is -;transmitter and the radio. When only one of the multiple signals femains (the strongest) the 'fundamental' has been located, and all the other false "responses can be ignored. Finally the - - position o f the 'fundamental' on the radio dial can be adjusted, up or down ' the scale, using VC1 on the transmittel It should be turned slowly, in small , ,-steps, with a pause' between each ., adjustment to see how it has affected the position of the 'fundamental' on .^.-the receiver dial. This whole process is more straightforward in practice

. the

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ble, and the golden rules are: scrape ie surfaces (wires, etc.) to be joined unIthey are clean and bright; always use :&-cored solder; and bring the soldering on and solder t o the componentsat . be same time - do not carry a blob of wlten solder to the joint on the tip of

ances of different specimens. The power advantage only becomes signi cant above 12 volts, making this dev particularly suitable for fixed bread casting transmitters operating from substantial power supplies. redecessors, but do not dwell on the

wet finger or sponge. Certain compone~ts'mustbe solderd into circuit the riaht way round. In

when a hand etc. is brought close to the microphone, try either reversing the connections to the insert okreart

When the transmitter is 'sitting' on a suitable clear channel the setting up procedure is complete and the unit is ready for use. I n the second half o f this article,

CITIZENS SEIZE BA

Australians cannot bear to see a natural resource left unused, or rationed by the government. So it has been through history with the land, the gold, and now . . . the ether. Today Australia's radio 'pirates' number 70 80,000 according to one of their spokesmen, 20,000. by Government figures. Without waiting for permission from the lawmakers, they have carved out their own Citizen's Band on the American model. They have met surprisingly tittle opposition. Now they are waiting for Canberra to put the stamp of legal approval on the situation which already exists. Tony Durham reports from down under. 23-channel CB rigs (transceivers) imwted from the US and Japan, are selling r as little as $80 (about Â£50in over irty shops, most of them in Australia's Â¥pulouSouth-east. CB equipment, .nned from the UK in 1968, can legally ie imported and sold in Australia. I t s use -0, is legal if you're a licensed radio iateur. But no-one asks for your licence the shop. And not all ads for CB gear intion, as they should, that you need icence to operate it. To commit an fence you must 'maintain' an unlicenstransmitter. In practice 'maintain' sans something more than merely to issess a rig. Shops like Dick Smith's ve not been busted, even though, as ie of his salesmen pointed out, 'Dick nith owns hundreds of rigs'. Neverthe.s, a court can convict without evidence ,at you have actually made illegal transissions. The maximum oenaltv under e Teleeraohv Act .Wireless . . ..~. -~ i s dl000 ie and six monthsjaij but mostoffenrs are fined $40-$80-%ly. In any case osecutions are rare. There were 97 in ;w South Wales last year. Since NSW obably has at least half of Australia's 1,000-plus CB operator;, the individual ance of escaping prosecution during I76 was better than 99 per cent. The irty-odd Radio Inspectors are hopelessoutnumbered. Like marijuana, CB radio now too popular to be stamped out the law. For an illegal activity, CB in Australia shamelessly public. I t has its magazine, >Australia, now reportedly joined by a ;ond, CB News. The CB clubsavoid the age of a subversive, underground moveint, and project themselves as groups

of responsible, respectable citizens. CBers' cars are identified by conspicuous antennae up to 9 foot long. Convoys of cars have part in mass demonstrations in taken bydney and Canberra, in support.of legaliation. About 80 of the clubs subscribe to the National Citizen's Radio Association. In its 109-page submission to the Minister for Post and Telecommunications, NCRA calls for immediate introduction of a Citizen Radio Communication Service in the 27 MHz (megahertz) band, using the same 23 channels as the US Citizen's Band. It proposes a $10 licence, available t o anyone who passes a non-technical examination on basic operating procedures and regulations. This would allow existing illegal operators to go legal without scrapping their equipment. NCRA stresses the benefits of CB to motorists and truckers, isolated homesteads and immobilised invalids, bushwalkers and small boat users. It also defends the legitimacyof the kind of social chatter which constitutes the bulk of CB traffic. 'Citizen's Radio saves lives' is a slogan used by the NCRA offshoot CREST (Citizen's Radio Emergency Service Teams). People called CREST Monitors listen in on Channel 9, (27.065 MHz), the channel set aside in the US for emergency calls, and informally adopted for the same purpose in Australia. On hearing a distress call, the monitor will relay the, message by phone to the appropriate emergency service. Established last September, CREST i s modelled on an American organisation called REACT. The NCRA document claims that CREST has 200 volunteer monitors covering six

;little stretch of Australia's radio spectrum has become a battleground.

capital cities and 22 other areas. Bill Payne, NCRA'SNational Director, put! the latest figure at about 1000 monitoi Originally they were asked to spend at

CLUBS

mong the surf, gun and motorcycle mags )U may find CB ~ustralia.

least 10 hours bv their radios. on roster each week; now'only five hours are required. The objective is a 24-hours-aday service, but this hasn't been achiev-ed consistently. Critics o f CREST tell 0 distress calls which went unanswered. Bill Payne says that such complaints have been investigated, and usu someone was monitoring at the 'Emergency' channel 9 has b scene of verbal and electronic b between CREST and licensed Though the monitors' prime func to listen, according to Bill Pay sometimes chip in with a standardwording request, asking people to leav Channel 9 free for emergency traffi Some amateurs regard this as fright cheek. Alone in the world, Australi and New Zealand have allotted the band 26.960-27.230 MHz for amateur use. This band overlaps CB channels 1 to 22, and some amateurs have begu to assert their territorial rights. Law is on the amateur's side, o f course, but CBers claim that only about 500 hams

PARANOIA & CONSPIRACY .in the first part of this say, which appeared in undercurrents 22, John Fletcher described the beliefs and delusions about conspiracies which have permeated history. But they are not just a thing of the past far from it. In Part II we find that the twentieth century imagination is more fertile in this respect than most.

daughter o f a wealthy Philadelphia banker, who i s the chief financial backer for Thomas Dewey, the Republican presidential contender against Franklin Roosevelt. Dewey was an isolationist, who argued in his campaign speeches that America should enter no foreign commitments after the war, and should slash defence spending. Soon our balding and overweight hero is no longer in a 1940's - detective novel, but is catapulted into a fullblown political conspiracy o f the 1970's. The blackmailers transpire to be a loose grouping of businessmen made rich by the New Deql, Democratic politicians, the Mafia, o f course, and a clique of senior officers in the Pentagon, determined that America -and its armed forces - will play a major role in postwar world politics,, Now, on the details o f the plot we have no way o f knowing whether Bergman was working on inside information or making it all up, but his broad thesis is borne out by historical evidence. The conspiracy was not a conspiracy in that it was open, but it was a conspiracy in that it was a murky and little publicised committee called the Council on Foreign Relations, set up and fmanced by the Rockefellers, the epitome of the internationally-minded New Deal businessman. The Council, consisting of an elite group of businessmen, academics, lawyers, journalists, and government officials, was created at the start o f the war quite simply to plan the post war world where, it was assumed, America would have 'unquestioned power'? The Council not only correctly forecast the future areasof US political and economic hegemony, but was instrumental in setting up the-United Nations, the World Bank, and the IMF. The Mafia is linked with this group through the OSS (forerunner o f the CIA), which used the Mafia to bring industrial peace to east coast ports in 1942, to aid the US Army in its invasion o f Sicily in 1944, and to assassinate Italian Communist leaders from 1945 to 1947. The sympathies of this interest group in the Roosevelt-Dewey contest areeasy enough to guess, and, with so much at stake, who would be surprised i6a few of it$ members ,. . "- -+. , *.- -- *.*r-e -&$= .-

Millenium hopes and expectations are starting to stir once more, and while few are prepared to let their mechanisticallytrained intelligence swallow the older beliefs listed in Part I, many more are prepared to spend time studying the modern equivalents - conspiracy theories. The world is awash with th With the advent o f the mass media, and its manipulation during and after the last war as a means of mass image creation, . the gap between the public appear the powerful'and their private beh has gradually widened. Since Watergate, and the Senate Sub-committee's rev tions on the private behaviour of th powerful, the public imagination ca riot. Eighty-five per cent of Americans are not now satisfied with the Warren Commission's report on the death of Kennedy. Much of the Daily Mail's recovery has been based on Nigel Dempster's brand of peek journalism, and on the publication of articles about such topics as President Kennedy's affair with a girl who was also sleeping with the head of the Mafia. Likewise the Daily Express, in the week it relaunched itself asa tabloid in direct competition to the Mail, chose to spend Â£350,00 advertising a series on Howard Hughes, the manage: , ment opining that the young readership they were aiming to capture would like 'a great anti-establishment story', full of conspiracy and high-level duplicity. In fact the whole of American history from Roosevelt's presidency onwards has now come up for re-examination in the public mind. Tn the United States this has become a way o f life. Take Andrew Bergman's 1974 novel, The Big Kiss-OfM 1944, which, on the surface, i s an elegant and witty pastiche o f Chandler's Dashiel Hammett private detective novels. A beautiful girl is being blackmailed by people who have gained the negatives of a stag f i l m she once starred in. One o f the characters goes off into a seemingly irrelevant harangue' about how Roosevelt saved American capitalism from revolution i n 1936 by his New Deal policies, an argument which is historically perfectly correct, even if a~swllyforgotten. Then it transpires that !girl who js being blackmailed teethe ~

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'But that's impossible', said Alice.'You can't believe things that ate impossible'. 'Tush',a i d the Red Queen, 'Some days I believe as many as thirteen impossible things before breakfast'.

ed in a little bit of with rodents - as the practice was colourfully known in Nixon's day. It i s certainly a fact that since Dewey was defeated, most presidents and every Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs has been a member of the council; and seven out of eight Secretaries of State have worked in some other way, too, for the Rockefellers.

The Cheesecake Connection In the States it i s precisely thosf publications which in the sixties did most to glamorise the image of spies and boost the fast, slick ethics which climaxed m Watergate, that now roost thoroughly investigate and seek to pull down the CIA, the FBI, and all other manifestations of the Corporate State. Thus the January 1977 issue of Playboy includes a lengthy interview with a man who built assassination devices for the CIA, an article by 5 liberal' reader defei ing the citizen's rights to carry arms as the last line o f defence against an autocratic government, andan article by Pat Krassner, ex-editor of Ramparts, on the Patty Hearst trial. I n this fascinating articlehy a self-confessed,charter memi

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Fthe 'It's All a Conspiracy Club', Krasssr argues that since the head of the ymbionese Liberation Army, Donald .' ,efreeze, (alias Cinque), is known t o ave worked as a police informer for the ublic Disorder Intelligence Unit of the os Angeles Police Department from' 967 to 1969, and then gone t o A CIAi n organisation called the Black Cultural sociation tobe tutored by CIA man obton Westbrook, an expert i n the tdoctrination of assassination and terrort cadres, then the SLA was a creation f the authorities. Its activities were ngineered to bringmaximum bad ublicity to all other urban guerrilla nits operating in California at that time, 'hose campaigns receive far less publiche ensuing editions are billed to iclude an interview with the ex-Chilean oreign Secretary (before he was ssassinated) about prison camps in hile, ('The Gulags o f the Western Hemishere?, an interview with Daniel Moyni-

or ToFBIaninextent order implicate ~ ~ the Gemstone File

~ put~ on him, d ~and knocksoff . ) M a y 10, becaiisi, as a Kennedy staffer, she knows too much: And Onadis fulfills . reflects this earlier, anti-East Coast isolationism, by stating that in 1932 ,theold Mafia custom against someone Onassis, who made his money by opium who. has'welch&d on a'deal -kill him, smuggling in Argentina, worked out a anti then-take his'girl, Jackie. Meanwhile, Maheu, who has bought out larg 'leal with Joseph Kennedy* Eugene Meyer, and Meyer Lansky (of the Mafia) pacts o f LasVegas Withthe money i to import liquor into the States, and in '~ugh&'/onassis hasgot from selling . 1934 did a deal with Rockefeller and TWA (5 billion-dollars), has fallen out the large oil companies (three o f the with 'Hughes', and blackmails/sues him seven which are still owned by the one spin-off being theClifford Irving Rockefellers) to import oil in Onassis's hoax. With the whole story threatening ships. None of these were sunk during to blow through so'much'infighting, \ the Second War. Nixon sets up the notorious p1umbers.i By 1957 Onassis has become head of McCord, Huntket-at;they fight a losing the Mafia and a very big voice in the battle against the ClA/Mafia/Kissinger/ US Establishment, He kidnaps Howard and Washington Post faction, who. Hughes, reduces him to a human vegesuccessfully expose Watergate. table, and sets up the elaborate charade The CIA has close bonds with the of Hughes's patronage of Nixon and Washington b s t . This paper Wa3 bough lesser politicians, and arranging with Joe i n the 1930's by Eugene Meyer (whom the Gemstone File'names in the origins Kennedy on board his yacht that J F K set up'with Joe Kennedy and Meyer should be Democratic nominee against ans sky), and passed into the hands o f Nixon. The Cuban Revolution was a blow not only to US foreign policy, but *his well-proportioned daughter, Kather to the vast Mafia-controlled interests ine (Meyer) Graham, wh'ose mammary there, and, organised by ex-FBI agent glands JohFMitchell once threatened ' Robert Maheu, who now works for to implicate in a mangle. Our own dear 'Hughes', plans are made for Castro's Cord Meyer, long time CiA head in e&ecution by the Mafia/CIA. London, i s not only a Meyer, but a Meanwhile, back at the White House, one-time brother-in-law ofthe wifftof the Kennedys rebel against Onassis, Ben Bradlee the'e'ditor of the Post, ai whether through idealism or Mafia firm'friend of JFK. TheCIA, frorn:the infighting, and start to do awkward overthrow o f Mossadeq in"Iran in 1953 things like halting MafiaICIA heroin . to the overthrow o f Aliende in-1973, shipments from S.E. Asia. Onassis has always worked hand-In-glovewith . switches the Mafia assassins from the New ~ o r k / ~ o c k e f e l l centred, er Caktro'to Kennedy with well-known multinational companies. The three. : results. Likewise, Bobby Kennedy i s heads of the CIA in the fifties, sixtte~;; bumped off before he can become and early seventies - Allan Dul president and publish his book The McCone, and Richard Helms qh@ies Enemy Within. Teddy bas 3 HTHnacuiateEa5t coastbusin to

nderground dissemination in the US, ritain. and Eurone. which starts with ie inviting words, "It is'dangerous to ansmit or even possess this information.' he photocopier has succeeded both ford of mouth and the illicit printing ress, which i s s t i l l used i n Russia. In ie late sixties and early seventies a ght wing document on Marxist infilÂ¥atioo f the US educational system chieved, according t o The Guardian, a irculation of several million, simply by eople photostating their copy and passig it on. There is a long history of nderground libertarian right-wing ublications i n the States, especially in ie South and West, concerned with iti-communist,mti-Wall Street, antiBI/CIA stories (e.g. The Strange Death fMarilyn Monroe, published by Herald F Freeman Press in 1964 which claimi that she was murdered by communist gents because, while having her known . ffair with Bobby Kennedy, she diswered his left-wing connections and ireatened t o expose him. This is an. reurnent which Norman Mailer later k e d to contend that she has been by.'& rtg(rt,wipgof the CIA

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munity approve?Will people ridicule grounds, two of them, Duties and M ; Cone, being transferred direct from and mock me?Will the police come and Rockefeller posts t o the Agency. From arrest me? ..' its-early involvement with the Mafia in, 4-y Every authoritarian society divides the forties, through the Cuban episode$"flK-klf as it divides the individual, into to the smuggling o f heroin from S.E. alienated halves. Those at the bottom Asia in the early 70's by the CIA-owned suffer from what I shall call nescience. Air America, the CIA and the Mafia have The natural sensory activity o f the had a close working relationship. With (nescient) - what the person sees, hears, the Mafia's ability to infiltrate organisasmells;tastes, feels, and, above all, tions, especially close allies, there i s the wants - i s always irrelevant and immaterdistinct possibility that the CIA could, ial. Th&authoritarian logogram, not the field o f sensed experience, determines by now, to say the least, be,heavily influenced by them. what is relevant and material. This i s \ Thfc Mafia, like any other large organas true o f the highly paid advertising isation, seeks power as naturally as'a calf copywriter as it is of an engine lathe noses for the udder. Las Vegas was virtualoperator. The person acts, not on ' ly created for them by the since-deleted personal experience and the evaluations Bugsv Siegel, and during the sixties they of the nervous system, but on the orders were negotiatinga multi-billion property from above. .Those at the top of the deal with the world's richest man, who authoritarian pyramid, however, suffer was in a penthouse suite just across the an equal and opposite burden of street, and whom no-one h talked to for 20 years. His This Hagbard Celine chappy lives ki a yellow submarine thatcruises over the sunken cities o f Atlantis and harbours in vast underground seas through their simple Sicili beneath Europe. He is a charter member ihat the Geirlstone File, while not bein wobable, remains distinctly possible in ts details. Perhaps its wide undergroun :ircu<ation owes something t o the fact Â¥haparanoids really are the only people who have any concept of what is going an. Chaldea, Jerusalem, the Persian assassins, Illurninatus the Knight Templars, the Catholic Which brings us, in thefullness-of- 4z^;..Church, the Freemasons, the John time. to what is ~robablvthe ultimate ' ' Birch Society, Cecil Rhodes, the Mafia, conspiracy/paranoia/prophecy trip, b the ~olsheviks,the Nazis, the White ' Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson's House, the Council on Foreign Relations, best seller, the Illurninatus! trilogy- a t o name but a very few. The,llluminati vastly ambitious and imaginative attempt are a group o f initiates whose aim is to "* -'hmanentize the Eschaton', i n other to realise human consciousness amid to provoke such.a crescendo of the fragmentation of the late twentieth -??words, - -L human suffering in a nuclear holocaust century centralised industrial society. To say that it is written with a-certain c.:s'(they have been responsible for all wars) that they achieve spiritual immortality amount of paranoia i s an understatement. The hero is not your aveta'ge Q2:<through mass sacrifice. There is proof of common-or-garden schizophrenic, but a"hte::$,;existence o f this sect at various raging quinquophrenic, who thinks he -'"zg,historical times. A group was formed is five people - the five different gun' s i n Germany in 1776 calling itself the men conspiracy theorists have long claim- p:,'#Huminatus; itwas known in nineteenth ed were present at t h e m n e of Kennedy's *-century Italy, and it probably had early assassination. It should be noted that all -> links with the Nazis. the characters, to say nothing of the The situation starts t o get more comauthors, are zonked out of their collec-. .- 'Â¥^- p k x as it dawns on everyone - characters, the heads throughout the entire boo< ke ,radesr, and authors - that all these and their dope-induced paranoia becomes %desperate anarchist libertarians, as they the book's leitmotif.' pursue each other through their Various Let us start with a proposition - 'With-. . quinquennial identities and underground - organisations, are also senior members out guilt there can be no civilisation'. Reading backwards, one comes across a o f the Illurninatus. character, Hagbard Celine, who is fierily \-- A t this point readers o f this article quoting his univeral theory, SNAFU (Situ- ''Y might have noticed that the story bears more than a passing resemblance t o @i.on Normal All Fucked Up), on why Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, ill hierarchical societies are inevitably i n chaos, by reading an extract from his autoMiles Copeland, an all-purpose CIA public relations spokesperson, wrote in biography Never Whistle While You 're Pissing. 'Every citizen in every authoritar- - a recent Observer article that Chesterton's t~oveli s the favourite SPY story of most. ian society already has such a 'radio' senior'CIA men. I n it a league of (giving instructions from the hierachies' anarchists dedicated to overthrowing all centre) built into his or her brain. This i3JVemmentss gradually discover not only radio is the little voice that asks each that each of them is a policeman, but ti* a desire is formed, 'Is it safe?Will that the head o f their organisation is my wife/husband/boss/church/com-

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the Chief o f Police. (GRAPO, the Spanish extremist organisation that specialises in kidnapping extreme right wing politicians is probably extreme right wing; the Italian civilian bombings in the late sixties, blamed oh left wingers, transpired to be right wing, and organised by the Italian intelligence services; the titular head of the Russian CP i n 1917 was discovered also to hold a senior position in the Czarist secret poli&; the recent bombings on the Moscow Underground, blamed on dissidents, were probably done by the authorities; fatty Hearst and the SLA were probably controlled by American intelligence agencies.) Anyone who wants to carry this analogy into contemporary events in Britain is at perfect liberty to drive themselves insane - or else read ~l/urn/natus!

Celestial Visions Which gets us toour final resting place, the sky. Modern man sees very little o f this phenomenon - even through windows he sees but a minuteportion o f i massy dome. When he travels he se only thewhite line in the' centre o f the road, on a train only the scurrying picture post card through the window, or a cramped clump o f clouds from an aeroplane. To see the skies, you have to.walk the high grounds, along the great hills and old deserted tracks which early man built along the ridge backs. Then, it opens like a chasm above you. You can judge the stability of a civilisation by its reverence for the heavens and all that move within them. . The macrocosm will echa the microcosm. Any tribe with a king -from the AngloSaxons to the Bantu - goes its own way on the ground, but relies on i t s king to communicate and intercede with the gods in the heavens.When he is in harmony with the deities and his rituals are efficacious and bring peace and harmony, then all i s well; but as soon as his charms and powers fail, then it will be writ large across a heavens con'vulsive with meteors and fery portents, and he will be casttiown by his people -and fall as swiftly and awfully as Lucifer from heaven. The heavens themselves display their anger and fury at the chaos below, and mirror its confusion. Convulsion in the heavens has always preceded convulsions on the earth, and centuries after our betters pooh-poohed such beliefs with their scienceand rationalism and planned gross national products, we below have always known instinctively where to look. A medieval English archbishop had cause t o rebuke the peasantry, who 'assert there is a certain region called the Magic Land, whence ships come i n the clouds: And these ships bear away the fruits of-the earth felled by hail and destroyed by storms to that sam country'. He claimed that it was wide believedthat the captains of these ships paid wizards and sorcerers t o bring on storms by their magic. I n 1845 The Taunton Courier reports

that 'Numbers of women and children were seen, after a smart thunderstorm had in some measure subsided, kneeling in the road (in Taunton) . . uttering the most impassioned prayers for mercy believing that the Second Coming of Christ was about t o take place'. Now, 1 am not concerned whether these things happenedinside people's heads in a sort of mass hallucination of humanity's collective unconscious, or portents actually flamed across the skies and little men climb out of flying saucers. What I am interested in is that they should occur, and in the particular times when they do occur. Our rural masters had as many dpportunities to

their petty, spiteful little actions i s far more concerned with lowering our noses ever more firmly into the trough), our subconscious s t i l l watches the sky, and in times of stress and political and social uncertainty, we find fiery portents therein. Three years after Taunton women saw visions i n the skiesin the midst of the famine o f '45, the country was on the edge of revolution. The Houses of , Parliament, the Bank o f England, and all important public buildings in London had .been provisioned and sandbagged for siege, barricades were on every bridge across London manned by the Guards, and London was 'defended' against the Chartists b y a quarter of a

1950's, with the cold war at its height, nuclear testing all the rage, and ~ussia's first sputnik freshly launched, there were mass sightings o f fiery lights in the night skies over America and Britain, and little men climbed from parked UFOs to tell perfectly ordinary and sane mortals that mankind would destroy it? self, and that nuclear weapons were upsetting the balance of the entire universe. Who was more sane - the guy who saw the little green men, or the governments building-mass nuclear weapons in the name of peace?Similarly, strange lights and UFOsonce more proliferated in the States at the height of the Vietnam War ip 65-73. What more were the psychedelic visions and rock explosions and student posturingsof the late sixties than a time of trial runs and experimentation with alternative solutions for the world crisis which (Ame in 1973 - and which we wiil spend the rest o f our lives dealing with? Humanity's instinctive collective unconscious can foresee and plan for the future far more surely than any coldsober, right-thinking political economists. Capitalists always refight the last crisis, marxists the one before that. The point &f this article has been to argue once more that #,human nature is a constant, not an ever-changing variable. That the freakish paranoias of today are as correct and just as valuable and true as the paranoias o f yesterday, and that they inspire and generate a momentum for revolutionary transcendence in humanity which i s both natural and inevitable. Just as prophets in the past read their futures in the skies and in their visions, so the underground conspiracy theorists or UFO fanatics of today, through their high-minded paranoia, divine the secrets and intentions of the mighty that move above us, and by the demands they inspire for change andreform, force the powerful to yield to the weak. Despite all the efforts of the most powerful TV, radio, newspapers, politicians, and government reports in the world, 85%o f Americans don't believe the official version of the Kennedy assassination. Whatever we ordinary Anglo Saxons might tell public opinion pollsters and T V cameras, opinions expressed in any and every public bar in the land would be enough, ifoverheard, to make every politician, businessmanand trade union leader flee the capital, and' the Silver Jubilee be celebrated in Mustiqu~ alone. Never ^ there a tirneof more portents - of freak weather conditions and mighty earthquakes, of monarchs and rulers and gm inconfusion, of ideasdebated upon the streets and inbackrooms and in broadsheets. John Fletcher

, getas high as we did, and they put the subsequent visionary paranoias to as much creative use as we do. The properties of fly agaric and laurel leaves are well known. Irish pipers and bards made the reeds for their pipes from hemp stalk, and onlookefc were often puzzled at the sight of them smoking the leaves. When Manx fishermen wished to see fairies they brewed a potion b m darnel leaves. Darnel used to be the commonest weed in English cornfields, and its seed came out in the hand t h m i n g with the grain, while the enzymes o f mouldy barley were famous for their visionary qualities. When tobacco burst on European consciousness and before its mass use dulled our collective metabolisms, it would sendmen into visionary fits. When medieval churches needed lead for the roof, it was raised by means of a church ate. All the richest members o f the parish would supply strong beer, which was then drunk in a celebration in church. Whoever bought and drank the most became known as 'god', and his visions and prophecies were heard with much reverence and respect by his fellows. Even though we now live in a centralised, industrialised, infenestrated society, mdnever really see or feel or live with thesky (our leaders might talk Of raising @w eye.t d y stars, but each one of

million soldiers, police, specials, Chelsea pensioners, and 'reltable elements' like stockbrokers - all armed. On April 8th, five days before the expected millenium, 'The Illustrated London News' carried a report that Queen Victoria had withdrawn t o her castle on the Isle of Wight because of fear of the revolution, and, in the same issue, a graphic description of huge lights and illuminations which had been seen in the skies all over Britain in broad daylight. I n 1897, as the US was cranked up into a state o f war hysteriaagainst the Spanish by the Hearst newspapers and the Sugar Trust% suddenly vast dirigibles and-monstrous airships were seen floating and sailing all over the country years before the$ had actually been * constructed - and the night skies flashed with weird lights and ominous clanks and groans. H.G. Wells and Jule$~ Verne made fortunes fictbnalising these mass sighting;. In 1913 Britain succumbled to the great airship scare, when anyone who could muster the en&rgy to stand outside his kitchen door could be . sure to witness a mechanical leviathan lumbering overhead. Probably the most famous UFO sighting of all time occurred before a gathering of 60,000 Portuguese peasants in 1917 (the'miracle of Fatima') at the height o f intense antigovernment agrarian unrest.* In the

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(~uofedinLand for the Peopk, p46) 2. h r t ~ g ~ the l , Impossible Revolution? by Philip Mailer (Solidarity, 1977) 3. Operation Trojan Horse, by John A. Keel, (Abacus, 1971).

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and balances are too cumbersome to allow original work and no onesteps t of line for fear of losing promotion hances. Once the bureaucratic feet get under the table of the soft number and secure pension, the desire to protect oneself becomes overwhelming, even for those who are concerned about the common good. It i s no wonder, then, r that so many otherwise well meaning governments are forced in desperation to invite foreign companies to invest INNOVATION in industry requires entrepre n,as Karl Marx and get things going. This inertia is hot realised. The problem is, t p w do you harness eir energy for the good some abstract function. Human orgar of all rather than for private gain? Simon Watt describes the work of isations are made up of people and it one 'socialist entrepreneur', Ghulam Kibria, and argues that we need is mutual mistrust, fear of displeasing them in Britain just as'much. the'boss and a desire for a cushy life thatcauses them t o be so conservativ "Technical trainbie atone does not ensure even needs fail to fit orooerlv and are defaced What needs to be encouraged i s a good start (in development). The creation of and distorted, bringing 'msolutions'. connected institutions to suit appropriate individual initiative, and this of coursi There will be few people who would technologies will be necessary. Also necessary leads t o the dilemma posed by privat now deny that tfie choice of technology will be specially devised training programmes enterprise, o f the acCumulation of is of the greatest importance. Putting for simple entrepreneurial talent, indmple management skills, simple accountancy and wealthand power in the hands o f the appropriate-technology concept simple marketing techniques etc. In ikon, individuals. The pursuit of private to be easy, into practice is not going what is involved is the raising of a new social interest without doubt produces however, and Ghulam KJbria'iexper- order. And it is all a political operation". Wealth, but it is concentrated in a ience (related in his report) will be ATDO 4th Six-monthly Report. few hands. Is iLpossible to harness deoressinglv fantlliar to others. He has the talents and abilities of individuals had to battle against the massive inertia for the comm n good? of the bweaucracy whose main objpe GHULAM KIBRIA came to Britain Critics of e trepreneurs tend to turndown livesseemtobeto' after thewar as an apprentice with an throw out the baby with the bath every proposal in the first instance and engineering company in Leeds. He returnwater. The crucial issue lies with the ed t o Pakistan with an HND in mechanical if the same proposal comes back repeatmotivation of entrepreneurs.-'The disedly,then only half the money needed engineering after t h i s practical education tinctive quality o f entrepreneurs is not should be allocated'. Paperwork proand set up a consultancy practice. Alarmthe ability t o run a business, invent liferates and, although it providesjobs, ed and concerned by the growing number techniques or persuade customers to it cannot deliver the goods. The excellent o f unemployed young people, Ghulam buy, nor the ability t o forecast profit work that ATDO has managed to carry voluntarily set up a training centre to by economic trend. It is, instead, a out so far has largely come about from -r provide basic instruction in the practical very original and very practical percep the efforts of'private businessmen and skills that would help these people to / tiveness - an ability to assemble or gifts from commercial banks (stage find gainful employment. Another re-assemble a new kind of activity from marxists, please note). His projects' Engineer working with the Pakistan ' whatever is available, to re-interpret include agricultural mechanisation, Government, Mubasher Hasan, alsoaware the meaning of things and fit them vegetable waste recycling for fertilisers, of this 'structural unemployment' amongtogether in new ways. It is also a very renewable sources o f energy, low cost s t the qoung and not so young, arranged . concrete kind o f imagination, alert to housing, small scaleindustrial producfor the funds to set up @e 'Appropriate the specific opportunities o f a particular tion and the like, bread and butter ' " Technology DevelopmentOrganisation place at a particular time, improvising stuff that is obviously needed. ., (ATDO). Ghulam Kibfia^vas made its with what lies a t hand'? Committees Changing people's attitudes and 7: Managef in 1973. Its limitations were cannot innovate, although they can government policies is obviously a sl<?w clearly seen from the start: ' . . . ATDO, encourage innovation. business, especially when it involves even with its fresh approach (to Entrepreneurial activity for private a radical re-examinationof the status ' development), can only plan, collect data and present it properly to political . quo. Yet time is passing and the protte~ps gain, even its fiercest opponents will admit, has some merits. Innovation are-becoming greater. This is not someauthority, provide management infra- 'can be rewarded; but only the ruthlea structure and assist in training cadres for , thing that is unique to Pakistan. In Britain, for instance, our administrators survive and in such an atmosphere of use by political authority. It cannot are mostly of the species coming largely maximising profit the social good is provide direction by itself; that is, it can from the 'Oxbridge litemti, they do not completely ignored. Education, publid be no substitute for political authority'. health and solar panels will only be The case for choosing more appropriate understand the ptoblems and potentials of production and the possibilities o f candidates for capita) risk-taking if ways of doing things to suit social needs doingpractical things in ways that there i s money in them. is now well known. The hard facts of provide useful and satisfying jobs. The Private enterprise is a mad cuckoo unemployment, neglect of food producfirst task is to outline the physical that brings forth loud voiced and tion in the rural areas, urban drift, lack possibilities; the next i s to implement' voracious creatures; bureaucracy lets of capital but plenty o f people, speak for them. Both will be hampered by a the eggs get cold. What are needed are themselves in Pakistan and, we should bureaucracy of-ignorant literati. This socialist entrepreneurs using their add, increasingly in Britain. The approis as true i n Britain as in Pakistan. talents t o innovate for the benefit of all. priate technology concept is, according Ghulam Kibria is such a man. to Ghulam ' .. .an attempt to devise Bureaucratic inertia and construct an organic framework of Simon Watt The institutional inertia o f bureautechnology of proper size, capable o f REFERENCES cracy in public bodies set up t o manage growing and expanding to enable the The ATDO Fourth Six-monthly Report is public affairs seems inevitable. What economic and social requirements to find available from: their own solution in it. By contrast, the happens is that responsibility is shared Planning and Development Division, Govern- , prevailing practice tries to hammer such out so much that action i s paralysedr merit of Pakistan, 17-B Satellite Town. requirements into a much bigger frameAny sense of urgency, personal involveRawalpindi, Pakistan. ment and creativity is removed,,criticism work o f imported technology, static and I. Porkst Energy and Economic Development, stone dead. The economic and wciai is positively discouraged. the checks D.E. Earl, OUP, 1975

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suitable to be made by the co-operative have been identified by market research into thirteen separate inventi'ons, most of which have shown unwell i n the preparation of first-year balance sheets. Ideas studied included: the re-cycling o f wood; the rnanufactun of a fuel-saving device; the refurbishing of North-Sea-Oil equipment; the construction of children's building blocks; making an industrial coupling; and the manufacture o f educational aids for the handicapped. Service industries (hotels, restaurants, shops etc.), farming, housin and building w-operatives have also bee considered for inclusion in a scheme which, it is believed, can create 10,000 jobs by 1987. Intermediate Technology links have been formed with two aca- . demic institutions.

A well paid job for everyone' has been a union rallying-cry since at least . the turn of the century. But is this possible, inan age when three men and a machine can go to run a production-line?And when recessions ignore Keynesian economics and carry on in their own sweet way? In Fife, John Morrison has been coming to grips with the of chronic uneinployment and iob-satisfaction. He has develooed the idea of an alliance (dare we say a syndicate?) of worker controlled co-operatives and is making considerable progress with implementingthe idea, as can be read below. social objective of creating work for otherIt has now been publicly admitted by

the Manpower Services Commission, in their latest 'glossy'^, that unemployment among young people is likely t o remain at the current levels at least to the end of the decade. What has not yet been conceded is that unemployment in 1977 is caused by different factors thawin 1962 or1971. The government's analysis o f the problem, as set out in the MSC publication, Towards a Comprehensive Manpower hlicy2, identifies cyclical economic circumstances (recession) and slow growth as the two contributors to the present situation. Most authorities would, howh r , reject such an approach as too simptistic. For example, in a study o f the European ~cohomic~ommunity3,it is stated that: Qn the basis of the experience of the ast fifteen or twenty years, it now eems an established fact t h d an ~vemllpolicyofgrowth . is not, in tself, sumcient to ensure full employnent. i o sustain levels of employment, a steadily increasing rate offewnomic growth, i n excess of the British 'ideal 2112-3%, would be necessary, for as Santosh Mukherjee writes4: to get a given level of output (of goods and services) in, say, 1972, in Britain; fewer people were needed to 'ie at work than in earlier years. 4n economist, Peter Donaldson, jess that current enemployment is sed by the continuing substitution o f capital for labour,the i6roduction o f machines t o do what was once done by workers. The view that automation is a major factor to be taken into account is also held by ~chumachefiand ~offler7, who wrote that the present technological revolution was leading towards a society which contained a large, enforced 'leisure class' of people.

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Something old, something new Fhe truth is that, i n a system where outside shareholding interests must be satisfied, and where the trippk pressures of international competition, inflation and high interest charges combine to squeeze profit levels, there is no place f?.the

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the basis of total control by central government ie.-total nationalisation, one must question the ability of such a system tomotivate its workers successfully. A third model is therefore needed; one which includes no external shareholders, and which provides its workers with the basis for real job satisfaction. Such a model i s t o be found in workers' selfmanagement, common ownership or workers' co-operatives; in the establishment of businesses owned and controlled b y those workhg within them. There are numerous examples in the United Kingdom, and throughout the world, o f successfully managed co-operatives. Their impact upon the unemployment scene is, however, frequently limited by the difficultieswhiuh are common to almost all small businesses? a lack o f technical expertise in fields such as financial and business management; market research leading to i&ntification o f new products for manufacture; and marketing. They also tend t o uffer difficulties in securing loan capital. The answer t o these problems may ie in the creation, within a defined hical area, of a confederation o f ling specialist technical the establishment o f a. to which member cocontribute and which launch new common

Raising capital ' The key to the system lies, howeve'r, i the formation of the Fife Enterprises ma agement team and, while there are funds aplenty - through the Job Creation Ptoeramme, and bodies such as the Scottish Development Agency and the National Enterprise Board for co-opqratlves themselves, to'secure the Â£26,00 necessary for the first year of operation o f Fif Enterprises is proving more difficult. Meanwhile, employment continues i t s inexorable march. This August, in Fift (population 325,000), there will be 2,400 sixteen and seventeen year olds ou o f work, compared to 650, aged fifteen, / sixteen, seventeen, in the 'bad year" of 1962. For 1,000 of these youths, Christmaswill find them still looking for their first job. The situation will be little different in other parts of the United . Kingdom. The Government's approach t o the problem still relies, almost exclusively, 01 the use o f traditional economic tools to control inflation, raise growth, and indue an 'export-led boom', while the new Youth Opportunities Programme is yet another essentially short-term palliative measure. Do they not know that today's unemployment is different? Do they not believe Toffler? Surely the time is alread~ with us, if not already past, to rethink 01 pattern of working life for the 1980s. Within that context, co-operatives, Fife Enterprises, and intermediate technology

is the basis o f the system which accepted in principle by Fife Council. The plan is p e g i s t e r tfie 'parent company', Fife Enterprises, which would exist both to initiate, and to provide technical expertise for small businesses organised as workers'co-operativefr. Twenty per cent o f the profits of the member co-operatives would be rerned t o Fife Entenirises t o oav for ered and to top up the loan establishment o f new co-

The legal structure has been drawn up by a lawyer versed in company and cooperative law. Products that would be "

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GARTRENICH, NEAR GLASGOW, is owned by a group of young people who are rebuilding it in their spare time. To the kids who use it, it i s a paradise, a place of endless grass and fields, a place you don't want t o leave; to the adults, it is a release, a change, an investment of time and labour, it i s something they see evolving, something that the kids and adults are making evolve. .About nine years ago, a group of young people formed an ecumenical group OPUS (One Purpose United I n Service). They leased an old, dilapidated farmhouse with about five acres of- ground aiming t o turn it into a plush religious retreat. To cut a long story short, they couldn't find the money, and the group dispersed. A few o f the original group rescued the idea, and the lease, and kept it ticking over for a couple of years, during which it was used in i t s spartan state by various groups who couldn't find anywhere better. From these groups. a nucleus of committed people grew, and with it, the feeling that the place could provide a lot more.

Despair i s a powerful force, and in this case, it was combined with fashion -all our friends were interested in windmills, probably because we forgot to mention muddy fields, hard work and our not being sure how to dismantle and transport the thing eight miles by road to Gartrewjch. Well, we got between fifteen and twenty people there for two weekends; borrowed ropes, pulleys, hammers, scaffolding, hard hats, safety harnesses anc eye protection; persuaded a friend to bring his car and trailer; and on a wet September morning, arrived at the base of the windpump - in a muddy field, at the bottom o f a hill a good quarter of a mile away from the nearest road. Two people perched at the top of the tower in the rain trying t o persuade the others that just another heave on the rope would get this b& off. That became more doubtful when friction in-the pulley system broke the rope and fifteen people sat down, rather heavily, in the mud. In the end, everything was removed from the top of the tower. That took all one weekend. The next Saturday, we lowered t h tower and carried it very slowly up the hill to the trailer, and thence, with some careful driving, to the farm. The bits are now lying, like giant conversation pieces, waiting the warmer weather to give us the courage to put them back together.

A solar roof over our heads

The first step was obvious. To cater for the rtumbers using the farmhouse, electricity was needed, and so the house was re'Freedom is a word I seldom use, wired. We then repaired the holes in the' without thinking'. And so it is sitting-room walls and decorated the front room. when John Hosie tells us about Encouraged by this comparative Gartrenich Farm, and the sense luxury, and lulled by our new-found of freedom people have found ~uildinga community -. warmth, we began to dream of things like while restoring it, adapting i t to a leakfree roof. It was winter and we We live in a world becoming increasAlternative Technology, and weren't too keen on wo king outside, so ingly aware of dwindling resources yet it available for impovermaking there was a lot of time or questions like: which ignires, and in some cases, ished city-kids to taste the what is the purpose o f a roof? and i s all suppressed its greatest resource: the . country-life. But all is not idylthis effort worth it, just to keep out the potential existeing within every person. lic; there is hard work to be rain? The problems of getting kids t o At Gartrenich, we seek to build a commuwash when there was no running water, done, and mud a-plenty nity, and that requires the involvement of never mind hot water, was the subject o f a all who use it, using all their experience long and heated argument, which suddenand skills, and hopefully bringing out som ly stopped when someone mentioned a of their hidden potential. Because the isn't so easy to stop kids playing football. solar roof. It made sense, here was the firm is being built by those who use it, So now we have hot water during the chance to do something more than keep the appropriateness of the technology summer when large numbers o f people use used becomes a prerequisite for its incluthexain out! the place. We had also convinced some of The idea was eventually accepted as sion within Gartrenich. Moving the windthe less-adventurous members o f the those in the group who believed i n the pump required fifteen people t o turn up group that AT is useful and doesn't take a idea, offered t o do the work. A noton two wet September weekends, keepinsignificant task, since this also involved lot of skill or money. In fact, the whole ing them there working all day was a -thing had given a lot of people a lot o f putting in cold water tanks and plumbing s t i f f test of how appropriate it was. the house. Finally it was done, by begging fun. The technology we use is simple Our success encouraged us t o look at and even buying the materials, reading enough for anyone from an overweight our next big problem - pumping all the books and talking to people, we got a sales rep. to the most bemused kid from flat plate trickle system working - one of water for up to forty people by hand the Gorbals to participate. This participafrom the well, which s about four hundred tion gives us all a stake, an investment in the first fully operational panels in metres from the house. The idea of a windScotland. the community. Our technology is not pump came up, and lo and behold, one day new, the windpump is thirty years old, on a walk across the moor, we found an The merits of being poor and one of the group remembers seeing a old disused multi-vane windpump. A few solar collector in Cyprus over twenty questions, a chat With the farmer, and B ecause we couldn't afford full-size years ago; yet it does provide an alternaafter a little negotiation, we bought it for glass sheets, we used glass left over from tive t o the impersonal technology which the scrap value. There was only one snag: an old greenhouse. Greenhouse-style pervades industry and-society today. glazing-has unexpected merits: the under- the twenty-five foot chunk of metal had .side of the glass is easy to clean, and it is to be moved within a month, namely in it. very cheap to replace a broken pane - it four weekends. &Ă&#x201A; -'Ă&#x201A;ÂĽ&* ". - -., *.

....

to requirements? Not so many years ago there were nice glossy reports about 'New Cities', from Buchanan t o Soleri we had plans t o separate traffic from pedestrians, to simplify, make more efficient, more convivial and so on. But just recently even our second-rate new towns o f Milton Keynes, that one just outside Southampton (can never remember its name) and all the others have had their allocations o f cash and people severely cut b y government. The birth rate's down, nobody much wants to move to them anyway, and firms can pick up more regional grant cash from moving into the established 'distress' areas. We're going to have to live with our existing cities, decay and I , so i t ' s time to really get down to thinking and acting about hat we want o f our cities. They won't go away by our wish,g to build 'new hamlets', rural communes and the rest. London's a good example o f many o f our established cities. s 'capital' status in reality only stretches from the Bank of ngland to the Law Courts, and from Oxford Street t o Chelsea, tere's an awful lot more o f it, places like Deptford, Lewisham i d Southall that exhibit very clearly the sort o f trends that e occurring in cities all over the country. Bad, and/or expensive housing exists alongside urban lotorways that pollute with lead and noise, whilst public ansport disappears, urban open space shrinks whilst the ~ m b e or f disused sites increases, there are already some parts f London where you feel distinctly uneasy walking after 00 pm, and there's unemployment and linked degradation F social and public amenities. London trade unionists are, of course, worried most about lemployment, and what I'm trying t o do here is to connect a t trade union struggle with the whole range of environmental i d social ills that affect London and other major cities. First, iemploymer~treally IS a problem, for whilst the overall unnployment rate in Greater London is 'only' 4%, compared ith about 5%% nationally, some o f the areas within London re much worse for instance: Deptford, Holloway, P'lplar and Stepney all suffer from 10% + unemploymeni levels, with an aggregate unemployment level o f almost 12% (compared with 11% on Clydeside and 9/2% on Tyneside); Of the 60 Deuartment of Emolovment areas in London. no less than 42 exhibit unemployment levels above the ' national level, with 16 having over 7/2% unemployment; Altogether, 20% ot unemployment in London concerns those who have been unemployed for over 9 months -this is the underlying structural unemployment o f the city; Half a million jobs have been lost in the city since 1961; 75% o f the jobs lost to London haven't in fact been planned at all, only 10% or so of jobs lost have gone via government relocation o f firms in the Special Assistance areas, the rest have either been totally lost, or are likely to be lost pretty soon. In 23 London areas over 90,000 jobs were lost between the years of 1971-3. merally speaking unemployment rose first in East and South 1st London with the massive run-down of the Docklands and sociated industries. I t has since spread more rapidly in arth London (clothing and small firms generally) and in

West and North West London where the 'affluent workers' o f the 1950s and 60s are being 'rationalised' out o f jobs - unemployment in this area has doubled between 1970 and '75. treating more employment i n London is not simply needei to increase peoples' disposable income as such, but also t o pay for public services locally. Even now the disadvantaged borou; o f Tower Hamlets, Southwark and Lambeth levy rates of Â£19 Â£52 and Â£13 per economically active person, whilst bourgeois Bromley, Harrow and Redbridge levy only Â£15, Â£18 and Â£11 respectively. So, employment leaves an area, and thi rates go up for those that are left with jobs and homes, rates which go increasingly towards staving o f f the resulting decay and demoralisation, for it's a well-known fact that economic; disadvantaged areas tend also to have a higher number of disadvantaged people who must rely on the Local Authority for all o f their requirements. So, high local unemployment starts a snowball o f less local cash for consumption (shops close, local industries suffer), les local public cash for job creation or increasing local amenities as the need for them rises, cuts in the resultant less well-used local public transport system, and local education suffers. An< as land prices fall, private and usually public landlords spend less on the upkeep o f existing properties, while 'developers' buy land cheaply for warehousing or for lorry parks - not many jobs there. I f redevelopment takes place on a sufficient scale then entirely new sets o f users can be attracted in, raising the rental income and thus the value o f the land - it's at about this stage that the Local Authority tries to buy in. So how do we s t 0 8 the collapse o f large chunks o f London Invite big industries back? Try t o develop new industries with the help of Local Authorities? First, big industries can get far more cash by starting up or developing facilities in the Development or Special Development Areas, Â£3%m having been paid to private industry'in Regional Assistance since August 1974, and Â£580 altogether paid to the private sector in all forms of regional support and regeneration this year. A t the moment London Local Authorities have to pay out in the region o f Â£300,00 per acre for buying industrial land and developing conventional industrial facilities before a single job is created, there's no Regional Assistance paid in London so boroughs that want to do the right thing and create jobs have to pay through the nose to encourage firms t o come t o their areas. Even the Job Creation Programme has tended t o favour thi traditional Development Areas, but the Programme i s peanuts anyway. 90,000 jobs have been created since the scheme start but with an average job 'life'of only 32 weeks, only 2 JCP schemes are o f over one year's duration, and a majority o f the who have worked in JCP schemes are back being unemployed now. The trade union response to all this is to call for a strong union reaction against all redundancies and closures - jobs lo! tomorrow may well be lost in perpetuity; this is largely longterm structural unemployment. We should all back this kind c call, but there's another, and equally important issue - the creation o f jobs. Easy to say, but what jobs, where, for what purpose, and how? To say that we should nave small-scale labour-intensive locallyand democratically controlled 'enterprises' making socially-useful goods may not only be a 'new cliche', but may1 also wrong. There's understandable suspicion in the trade union movement that we may just breeda new type o f sweatshop. Shouldn't we start with a co-ordinated effort to improvi those existing socialised services and goods that are falling under the l ~ ~ - i n s ~ iTreasury red cutsin public expenditure? I can think of many concerted trade union struggles that couli bring swift benefits to the teal Londoners, not the commuters playboys and well-heeled tourists.

currents A-Ã --

connect the chronic spares shortage in London Transport with engineering factory closures, Planning Agreements, the NEB and Local Authorities either helping, or despite them. Trade Union sponsorship of training and employment in construction trades (a quarter of a million unemployed construction workers in the country) which i s allied to direct labour rehabilitation of existing housing in the city. Getting the Surveyors unionised and fighting for t h e m 1 implementation o f the Community Land Act so that Local Authorities don't have to continue to pay wildly inflated land prices. Pushing those agencies (Co-operative Union, Co-op Wholesale Society, Co-operative Housing Agency, ICOM, the TUC) in the working party on the development of a Co-operative Development Agency. Using the Community Land Act to help introduce urban horticulture and i t s allied industries. Rising food prices may also set the scene for far more city allotments. JCPcash for clearance. ASLEF and NUR to push strongly for the reopening of inner and outer city rail systems, combined with an examination of London's neglectedwater transport system. jteps like these don't have to wait for new radical 'blueprints' or London. A lot can be done now. Certainly a significant iffort to set up local co-operatives, part under trade union, )art Local Authority and part community control would be ~erywelcome, but rather than have the odd co-op springing q here and there we should be developing a comprehensive edevelopment scheme for London through an integrated )Ian for city co-oporatives. What's 'socially useful' depends artly on what local needs really are, so these co-ops would rave to start at least by meeting existing needs. We need to develop our own plans for London. What's o happen in the next 5, 10,20 years? And without trade inion involvement local environment groups that want t o ave Open Spaces or prevent the demolition of good housing, ocal co-ops, local transport groups and so on will be fighting what's basically not a battle at all, but grinding inertia. . . Mike George. Inner City', by Nicholas Falk, Fabian Research Series 320 (1975) London's Jobs Crisis', A Trade Union Paper on London's Industrial Decline, prepared for the Greater London Association of Trades Councils by the Joint Docklands Action Group Resource Centre (1977). tent Trades Council evidence to GLATC. 'ublic Expenditure White Paper, Cmnd. 6393. Â¥>. Gazette, March 1977. rrade and Industry, 1 5 April 1977. taw Data on London Unemployment from DE Statistics Section.

Ywitzerland-a gross The average Swiss is much more satisfied with his way o f fe than, say, the English or American. Politically he is conervative, a capitalist and a great believer in tradition, and inds that many of his desires and ambitions can be fulfilled tithin the present system. Compared with an English person ie is more wealthy, physically fit, and equal with his comatriots and has a greater control over his government, local nd national. The country i s a federation of 22 cantons which, because if differences in their size, population and geographical

position have different principal bases to their economii For example, Zurich and Basel are mainly industrial can Valais and Tessin are strongly tourist orientated and cantonG like Fribourg or Bern are largely based on agriculture. Organic farming has been practised since before the Seco World War by small groups of farmers belonging to the anthroposophic movement of Rudolf Steiner; and since the war the number o f organic farms have been steadily growing as the demand-fortheir products increased. Food reform has also beeo a popular movement for decades and today most supermarkets and local shops stock a wide range of natural foods. Swiss cooking relies little on so-&' convenience foods, and most women bake their own cake: and biscuits. The traditional role of women, staying home cook, clean, and look after the children is still maintained fact they only gained the right to vote at the federal level in 1971. Recycling waste material is not a new idea for the Swiss. The practice o f separating household waste into glass, metal paper and non-recyclable rubbish ready for collection by thi local authority has existed for years. When one considers that Switzerland hasn't been in an armed conflict with a foreign country for 150 years, the country's consciousness o f the importance o f national defer appears surprising. Every man must join the army at the age of 19 or 20 for a course of basic instruction, and then returt at regular intervals - at first every year, then 2 or 3 yearly for retraining. Upon leaving the army, because of age or for health reasons, he joins the local Civil Defence where he sen until the age of 60. The government ako issues instructions to the population on protection in case of air raids or nuclei attack. Many homes and public buildings have their own air raid shelters with emergency equipment and stocks of food. The legal framework in which the Swiss people live varies enormously from place to place. Criminal law and areas in c law such as marriage and divorce are decided at national levâ but the school system, local taxes and such matters as build1 regulations are decided at local level. Therefore i f one wishe to live in a specific manner one can usually move to an area where this is possible. In this way the system tends to absorl all but the most radical elements. One of the ways in which the young people are revolting against the old family-based order i s by the increasing establ ment o f communal living arrangements. These range from flat and house sharing for economic reasons, mainly in the cities, to fully-fledged communes favouring the peasant-fam ing areas, especially the Tessin, south o f the Alps. Due to th harsh environment the northern valleys of the Tessin have come depopulated with the local inhabitants moving south . the tourist centres. Groups of young people have now move into many o f the old houses and are attempting to revitalise the deserted villages by combining traditional peasant farmil and craft work with communal living and income sharing. T some extent the government supports this way of life by pr< viding an annual subsidy for each sheep, goat 6i cow owned These subsidies account for a fairly large part o f the peasant farmers' incomes since the high altitude, long winter and poor soil make i t impossible to grow crops apart from some vegetables for home consumption. For anyone interested in the Swiss alternative scene, the following publications will be very useful: Alternativkatalog 1 and 2- a cross between Radical Techno ogy and Alternative England and Wales (Switzerland); Blaues Blatt-Blabla - a fortnightly alternative newspaper Adressbuch - a compilation of names and addresses o f people interested or actively involved in alternative projects and ecology. ' All three are vublished by the Dezentrale, c/o BIKU, Marc Klurfeld . Postfach 223 CH-3098 Koniz Switzerland They're all in German, but Marc Klurfeld speaks English, and he probably would answer any questions if an internatic al postal reolv coupon.is included. Manuela Broi

E PUBLICATIONS MSTRIBU-a-JN CO-OP Otm 4, p 35) has now reached a stage where it is poteniiallv viable as its turnover value is lit Â£600 a month of retail %It regularly distributes 'radifeminist, socialist and alterna;periodicals, books and pameta' to about 200 outlets. Registion as a members' co-operative co-op workers and publications liprogress. The Co-op started operations in gust 1976. They say: 'Our thod of work is collective b e ise we believe it is more effic- t . There are currently seven fulltime and part-time workers in London, as well as two regional repreaentatis. Every publication in the co-op membership and most we distribute are - is expected to contribute a minimum of one day's voluntary labour per month. Some do more, and some do less, but we ^relyon this help for our survival. In practice the co-op has a three-tier structure: 'waged workers who hold weekly meetings, a broader working group of workers and member publications which meets twice per month, and a plenary meeting for all participating publishers which meets three times a year." The Co-op is trying to extend its operations to newagents Londonand elsewhere. It is now setting up a mail order side for-people Who Eve in areas where its distribution service can't or doesn't reach, and this should start operations by September. The Co-op could always do with more help - either financial or in the form of voluntary labour - in many areas of the country. They are expanding their premises and, hope m y , their staff through a Job Creation Programme scheme. This planned expansion will bring up :stins of the maximum workable ;of a viable collective whioh can itinue to enable workers to comnicate properly amongst $em-

tes.

Distribution Co-op, CleikenweUClose, London IR OAT (01-251 4976). &ation<

iRING,SHARING... HE CO-OPERATIVE UNION, national advisory and informat organization of the established op movement, tell us that they happy to assist some of the Ãˆtype of co-operatives' with il, constitutional and accouncy advice and information. They ilish a booklet about the Union also a comprehensive list of ir books,reports and pamphlets veiything from 'Co-operative ik-keenine' to 'Studies in the Social Pl~flo&~hy of Co-operation'. Co-operative Union Ltd, Holy&

M6O OAS. IPS!

Many apologies to the Women's w i n Manchester which we

In The Making 4, the latest edition o f our Directory, pf Cooperatiw Projects is selling fast So order your copy now (see subscription rates below). The projects featured on this page are a selection of those we've heard about since ITM 4 went to press. These and many others will be featured in the first Supplement to ITM 4, which will be out soon. I f you're involved in starting a co-operative project - or if you would like an entry in In The Making, or its supplements, please get in touch with us. We're always pleased to receive articles, too, on any issue related to co-operatives, self-management or common ownership, or giving practical information about setting up projects. Keep those cards and letters coming in

...

PEOPLE

A LITTLE BIT OF IRELAND

WATERMILLS; we have had a plea for information from a German group starting a 'watermill project'. They seek publications and info eg. restoring buildings, alternative energy, organic farming, crafts and other aspects of AT and alternative living - all apparently hard to come by in Germany. Anybody who can help them contact: Eichenmuhk, Rietcreraume S, 8500 Numbers,Germany. BROMLEY: Ex-printer, inter ested in the 'alternative society' and its ideas on self-sufficiencyrequires contacts in the area. Would be willing to join existing project if the opportunity was available. Richard Jolly, 12 Aldennany Road, Bromley, Kent.

LHCESTER: Graham Garnu would like to start an alternative technology group going in Leiceater or roundabouts. He has built and got running a solar panel and is now building a windmilL Any contacts to: Gtilum Goner, 48 Wudens Walk, Leicestel LE3 3GG. Tel: Leicester (0533) 394555.

ALTERNATIVE IRELAND: An alternative guide to Ireland is'in the making'. Mary Phelan in Dublin is trying to contact people all over the country asking them to let her know of anything which they consider relevant to the book which is going on in their area: eg.p-ops, community projects, organic farms, free schools, rural or urban communitics, non-profit making bookshops information centres, craft workshops. A lot of information has already been collected - she hopes the Guide will be ready 'by about August', but is still anxious to hear from anyone with information/ help/ideas/advice. There are also plans afoot to set up a resources centre in Dublin: '. a sort of Irish BIT . . . a pool of resources, both human and material' which would also 'run workshops, produce a magazine or newsletter for and about the Irish scene, learn from What is and has been going on in other places without losting either our identity or our ideals.' Mary Phebn, 168 Rathgar Road, Dublin 6.

ICOF (Industrial common Ownership Finance Ltd) has now been recognised by the government as a 'relevant body' to act as a channel for the Â£250,00 loan fund under the Industrial Common Ownership Act (see ITM 4, p38). This means that they are likely to administer some. if not all, of theÂ£50,00 (maximum) a year for five years that will go to make up the fund They have also appointed thi new trustees - Colin Barnett (NUPE and TUC), Sidney Pepper (Equity Shales Ltd, a long established m-operative) and Lloyd Wilkin'son (Co-opeativeUnion) to' broaden their base. 1COF also hopes to appoint a full-time paid officer as Secretary in the near future. Sixteen loan applications for a total of Â£78,00 were received between June 1976 and June 1977 of which nine for a total of Â£44,00were granted.All but one of the outstanding loans have gone to new or nearly new firms. If you're starting up, contact ICOF who 'look for clear evidence of viability'. * TOP, c/o Brian Budge, 13 Mouht View Road. Chineford.

AGUIRRE ARTISTS CO-OP is based in a converted three-store building in Brixton. There is a shc on the ground floor selling a wide range of articles made by co-operative members. The workshops 01 the first and second floors current produce knitted and woven goods, clothing, silk-screened cards and fabrics, leatherwork, domestic lighting and woodwork. The facilities of the shop and workshop are open to all, the maker having control over the design and price. People may use as many c as few aspects of the ~ - 0 p e r a t h as they wish. . At present they are planning expand the co-operative in seve! ways. They need more: * craftspeople to make use of the workshops and to add to the range of skills in the co-operative * people to help with the commi ity side of the project who would willing, for instance, to train scho leaven. * people who are interested in th 'Co-operative idea' to formulate other projects within this structur such as a building co-operative, or a wholefood shop/restaurqt, or others of their own choosing. They have an information file and some expertise to offer to anyone interested in crafts and/or cooperatives, and would be pleased to hear from anyone wishing to usethe co-operative.

Carlos Castaneda's Journey. Richard de Mille. Capra Press. Â£3.70.20 pp. Distributed in UK by McBride Bros. & Broadleyl Ltd., Old Dean Farm, Singleborough, Milton Keynes, Bucks. Castaneda'sJourney attempts to sort out the questions all readers of the don Juanbooks must worry abouK is it all true?, does don Juan really exist? (It will not convey much, however, to those who have not read Carlos Castaneda's four books on his apprenticeship in the esoteric teachings of the Yaqui Indian don Juan.) Detailed analysis of Castaneda's private and academic life is undertaken to try and obtain insight into his influences and motives. It was a difficult task as Castaneda had followed the warrior'spath by concealing his personalhistory from all but the most diligent research. De Mille was considerably hampered by Castaneda's refusal to answer letters or to give interviews. De Millc unravels the complex time sequence and shows that there are gross and irresoluable inconsistencies between the books. A linguistic analysis on the conversations between don Juan and Carlos shows that i t is extremely unlikely that they tooK place i n Spanish dish ws.pr@abty'the

used. tram this he deduces that don juan does not exist and that Castaneda had no weird adventures in the Mexican desert. The obvious problems arising from this conclusion are: why did he write ,the books and why was he awarded a PhD in anthropology for Journey to Ixtlan (the third book). De Mille does a lot of detailed groundwork and then presents his theories to account for the behaviour o f Castaneda and his professors. He i s not afraid to speculate broadly whilst presenting the reader with all his data. Of particular value are the possible sources for Castaneda's ideas included in the bibliography which should keep the interested reader busy for months. One's impression of Castaneda is enriched by reading this book as one sees beyond Carlos the 'sceptical' to Castaneda the trickster, creater o f Carlos, don juan and all the others the man who turned anthropology. upside-downand walked off with a Doctor's degree. De Mille must be thankcd for providing a method for coming to terms with a slippery subject. Mike Lee

The National Front. Martin Walker. Â£1 Fontana. 224 pp. The blurb says 'The National Front c no longer be dismissed as a party o f the lunatic fringe; it must be understood, if is to be opposed. Martin Walker's book i the first to make such understanding possible'. Sadly, it isn't true. Walker's book is essential reading, because of the resurgei of the far right in Britain. But it's also pretty awful. The format of the book i s unpromisi~ - a series of chapters in chronological order detailing the history of the Front and i t s predecessors like the League of Empire Loyalists from the death of Hitler to 1976. The reader's fears are quickly confirmed. The book consists largely of a turgid tour of the Guardian cuttings files on the far right, detailing the meetings, tk people, the squabbles and the reunions, and almost completel\ avoiding the essential analysis of what the Front is about and where it i s going. The only analysis of the Front's success i s in the last chapter, which is an expose of Walker's rather poxy views of the British crisis. As might be expected, t h i s is distinguished neither by i t s clarity its incisiveness, or its value. Neither use nor ornament, it i s difficult to decide if the book would have been better off without it, simply left as a reliable resur' of the history o f the British right. What- the book fails t o offer -and what Walker could probably provide if I put his mind to it - is a close look at what the National Front says, and wher the roots of its attraction lie. It would have been very helpful to have more on why the Front thinks it attracts people; particularly on. the differing emphasis 01 intellectual argument and on the persua sion of drums, flags, and marching columns. But more to the point, since the 'populist' wing of the Front is now responsible for the generation of much of its policy, it would have been useful to have an analysis of the Front at worl in community groups, Trades Unions, and in trying to bypass theestablished locations of popular power. Similarly, Walker offers no suggestions on the possible left-wing response to National Socialist ideology on economic, militar and international policy, where the line between the internationalism df the lef and the nationalism of the right is-fine and increasingly difficult to tread in Britain in the late 1970s. So all that Walker's book needs i s a companion volume with more analysis and less biography; it's a pity that this paragon companion volume doesn't exi The other thing it needs, i f there is to b a second edition, is an index; i n a book whose primary function is reference, n< t te one is a ludi i false econom

Jiilary Hodgi

The Irish Co-op Movement. Its history - and development. Pat Bolger.

.. Institute o f Public Administration,

. 59 Lansdowne Rd, Dublin 4. Â£4.50 Â£9.0 hardback. 434 pp. This book describes a part o f the Irish rural scene from the 1800s up to the . present time, and will be o f interest to :-anyone involved in 'back to the land' and community activities in Britain. The ' author, Pat Bolger, is an agricultural adviser who writes a humourous column for the otherwise awful Farmers Journal. "He has traced the co-operative idea from its experimentalbeginnings to i t s * present state o f a multi-million pound business. The first intentional commune in Ireland is reckoned to be at Rahaline, Co-Clare, where, inspired by the ideas of Robert Owen, one John Scott Vandelenn formed a co-operative on 618 acres with about 50 of his labourers, servants and artisans in around 1830. This was at a . time of growing rural agitation when Secret societies terrorised the country-

side. The experiment succeeded, and calmed the locality with its peaceful, sober and thrifty ways. It all ended, however, after three years when the . owner gambled the estate away and Ireland lost a unique opportunity to pioneer co-operative enterprise. Indeed, the more one reads this well-researched book, the more one realises what Ireland might have become. The co-op movement really started , around 1890 in Doneraile, Co. Limerick, with Horace Plumbett as its leading figure, and by the turn o f the century had 36,000 members in 374 societies. It differed from the British'movernent in that it was an almostentirely rural phenomenon, with little wholesaling, trading or co-op banking i n the towns. Activities included village banks and libraries, creameries, turf cutting socie* ties, poultry, flax, tobacco, beekeeping, fishing and horticultural societies, with attempts at insurance and landownership. All on a very small scale however - the movement's magazine The Irish Home-

stead tells o f a peasant who borrowed Â£ for six months to raise pigs and ma1 a Â£ firofit. Smallholders in Britain should kn that it has all been done in Ireland before. Indeed Ireland could have been an Albion, the promised land, i f the co-op societies had expanded and form ed an island-wide 'common' wealth. This was the original intention, but afti the economic and civil wars o f the 1920s the movement stagnated and wa kept going by retired colonels, and cou tesses who encouraged lacemaking. Prosperity came t o the societies, especially in the field o f dairy produce, during the last war,and today the move ment involves 200,000 families with a turnover reaching a billion - it has become a sort o f materialistic freemasonr with little spiritual ethics. Education in organic, small-scale and wholesome agricultural activities is nil and all this sort o f information has to come from abroad. Pollution o f Irish waters i s not much less than in Britain now (17% -27%). This is a large paperback (6" x 9%") and the illustrations, which are mostly Victorian photographs o f personalities have a periftd charm - though they mi3 not seem much to readers used to alternative publications. I would recommen this book, especially in conjunction wit Estyn Evans' Irish Folk Ways, for those wanting to get some idea of rural l i f e as it was. and can be. in Ireland.

Science and Society in Prehistoric Britain. Euan MacKie.ftiul Elek. 252 pp. Â£12.50 If you ask a straight archaeologist what ourstone Age ancestors, the Brits who built Silbury Hill and Stongehenge five thousand years ago, were like, he'll tell you they were barbarians living in rural tribal communities under local chiefs. Suggestions that there . were skilled classes of professional specialists, astronomers, 'scientists', and so on, are greeted with sceptical condescension as the typical maunder-ing of the lunatic fringe of leyhunters. Indeed, it must be admitted that their talk o f 'dodmen' and 'colemen' and the wonderful secret knowledge that our ancestors possessed and we have lost has undoubtedly prejudiced open-minded professional archaeol gists against any theorising about t society that built these monuments. , ~better ~to get h on with real work, . dating Early Neolithic chambered cairns, and never mind what the people buried i n them were like. Euan MacKie thinks it is time for

public if not to~specialists.He holds that Stone Age Britain was an advanced theocracy, ruled by a caste of wise men, whose astronomical and (!) magical expertise enabled them t o command the surplus food and labour time o f the peasants among whom they lived for public works on a scale comparable to the pyramids o f Egypt two hundred years later or the dams of China today. We live in an age of make-work projects; anything to keep the workers busy and their minds off higher things. So it is quite natural to us to see Silbury Hill, all fifty million basket loads,of it, as the first in a long line o f job creation project's that culminate in the surplw-power stations o f today. What this'fcterpretat'on misses-is the moral aspect b u r y can hardly have been built by oppressed serfs cowering under the lash, so what was the source of the moral authority that these astronomer priests possessed? MacKie does not answer this question; he i s a professional archaeologist, determined to proceed by scientific method and'to avoid wild speculation, but he does draw a strik-

Mayans lived isolated from the world in dense forest country; instead of the free but primitive society of extended families one might have I pected, they evolved a hierarchical soci ety dominated by elite groups o f priest and warriors-livingapart from the mass in special ceremonial centres, with an advanced religion and all the arts of civilisation. Archaeological investigatio has shown that this elaborate social order quite suddenly collapsed and disappeared. All that remains today are a few subsistence peasants._He argues that the geographically isolated state o f Neolithic Britain might have provided the right protected environment for sucha fragile superstructure to evolve and survive until it was swep away by the warlike Beaker people about 2000 BC. He goes on to show how this analogy can be used t o generate hypotheses that can be tested against the evidence we have o f finds of special pottery and-the varying contents of middens. Finally, he identifies the Druids as the inheritors (2,000 years later) o f the Neolithic intellectual tradition. In sum, t h i s is a major work of synthesis and re-evaluation, which sets the study of Stone Age Britain on an entirely new basis. It is essential for all serious students. Let us hope it i s not too long before there is a paperback edition at a popular price so that it can achiew the wiSesreaderdlip it deserves. . <., = ..--.-I .-<^Ã &A>c,.A:L- .

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Immoral earnings i

7?7eArms Bazaar, Anthony Samvson.

trade, wherebyone firm's success makes another's morelikely rather than less, means that whole companies, industries and geogt^phical areas have, with government collaboration and encourage rnent, become successful by Way of several rrtkssive arms races and a series of wars%om the early days of European colonialism t o the fatter days o f Western imperialism in Vietnam and directly or via proxies in the Middle East. Sampson's look at the weapons trade is as good a guide to it as you'll find, better b y far, beingreadable, than the very worthy but impenetrable StPRI Arms Trade with tile Third'WorU (Penguin Â£I) very up t o date, and easy t o read. Its main disadvantage is that Sampson is as unshakeable a liberal as ever wrote for

Hodder and Stoughton. Â£5.95 340 pp. ISBN 0 340 21331 0. Anthony Sampson i s a prolific author of thoughtful and well researched books on important subjects. I n recent years these have included Europe, ITT, oil and now the weapons trade. His work is as thorough as extensive experience can make it.h e m by a budget and a time& a l e allowing him to go everywhere-and talk to everyone i n the arms business on the talkative side o f the iron curtain. Sampson's book on oil, The Seven Sisters, has twice been taken t o task in these columns as inadequate; in this reviewer's opinion, the main cause of the inade@uacyis Sampson's'concentration on individuals at the expense of political forces. So it's a pleasure that The Arms Bazaar, about an industry even more replete with astonishingcharacters-than oil, usually manages to get to the issues as well as t o the weanon salesmen and their customers and associates. Weapons have become a the economies of Preston, . Stevenage and I Bordeaux. Ihe strange rules o t the arms +

Likewise, his assessment of the chat to world peace which the current anasrace poses is not entirely useful; Sampson rightly points out that weapons last a long time and travel stealthily and far, Selling them to countries with no need . for them just t o provide profits and employment back in the UK is not fr& from moral problems, or from the risk of precipitating war. But Sampson's analysis fails to suggest that Britain, say, refrain from arms trading, despite his admiration for Japan's lead in doing just this, and not exactly being bankrupted by the sacrifice. Likewise, Sampson's comments on th Lucas Trade Union initiative to getawa) from weapons production - well known t o Undercurrents readers - confinesitself t o an uninformative paragraph givinl no idea o f the logical or moral strength of the Lucas initiative, much less i t s , content or its more general applicability Still, Sampson's book is a compelling -and useful look at onqof the world's tea attractive industries, whose political and financial importance is unlikely t o be diminished evenif its sales techniques a r e reformed. And one thing the book certainly includÃˆ is a useful guide t o the worldwide scandals which made that' reform inevitable. %.if you want t o about the arms trade, this is where tc Those who long for juicy scandal nearer home may take heart. Britain is the major arms &porter which hasn'i a good bribery upset recently over ar deals. British success in overseas markets means that British techniques of salesmanship can't have been all that differen from those of the competition. If a scandal does blow up, it might well be i n a nationalised industry like British Aeroscrape or. British Leyland. And, converse ly, there i s only one country where Lock heed sold extensively outside the USA which hasn't yet had its major- Lockheed scandal; it's Britak. Martin Inc

Chile ,source Introduction to Chile; a cartoon history. Chf?V+Ich. Bolivar PubWons. Â£1 ' The fact that interestmgtMnw ham been happening in Chile will not have. .escaped Undercurrents readers. But any readable and politically reliable explanation of these events will have, which is why Welch's book is welcome. It is a well drawn and well commented cartoon history o f Chile from the start of history (defined b y the wriual of the Spanish, as Welch points out) to 'the present, but concentrating firat on the overthrow o f Spanish rule and then on the frustration of sociat'am in Chile this century.

means that it i s only the latest of a , series of attempts at transforming Chilean society which have had to be put down if American interests in the are? were n o t t o take 9 nasty blow. Not all is gbcm; i n particular, campaigns mounted by British Trades Unions against trade with Chileare seen to have some effect, and Britian's tarnished reputation asa haven for victims o f repression isgivensome substance by the numbmofChilean refugees taken into the UK at the expense of the British left. Welch, who appears to have seen the work of Rius at least in passing, gets and much more that is

cd Newsletter or Economic Report;

although they are both excellent, as i s . their cousin Latin.America Commodity Report,.you're unlikely to want either the depth of analysis they offer or the -several hundred dollars a year ofbills which accompany them. Martin

&wsoteum. Hans Magnus Enzensberger. rianslated by Joachim Neugmschel. feenB ~Press. Â £~2 . ~ 0 / Â~£ fltdback. 155pp. -.Be warred: these 'biographies of major igures who have shapedliuman conscious. w' arepm That the *m fbr b ~ J e Read t<(s produced so? mqe. Machiavelli, Leibniz, Jacquesde faucanson twhoinvented a &k), Thomas Malthus, Darwin, Wilhelm h ("theorgasm is the orgasm is the im'), ~ ~ l ~ tBakunin, o v , c k Guevara -assorted aunts and aunties of our intellectual heritage are made to show a . toyan face (and usually a human arse #). Many of the great men here desIBied were mad; others were obsessed ttth order, precision, the machine. (eading throughlhis book, the evolution sfa mathematical, systematic, rational

lunacy becomes visible, a pedigree that- - - . runs ~ ftom ~ Giovanni/de Dondi of ~ Padua, ~~ ~ ~ who devoted his life to the construction of a'unique timepiece while plague carts mvalled the streets, through ~innaeus, dscipliner ~ffacts<-Anyaccidental = this cbook taste..(Quiz-book far f a m e must be rejected'), to Cerletti,and o n ntotheir o i s ~ uof ~ m*bev whoinvented skctro+hock treatment, like it; at the head of each culminating in cOn&mpmary monsters biography, i t s subjectis identified by who don't yet qualify for a initials and dates only; answers, as the chariis 8abbage was a fine specimen: fan expects, in the back.) Hans Magnus =when poor Tennyson sent him Enzensberget's heart is in one of the rig , hiÃˆverses('Every minute dies a man/: places:' - ..~ One is he ' After n& eating for aJong time, you'ce ed'that in the nextedition of your too weak to talk; ~ l ~ t P m t ~ ~ o n e o ~ you c apoke ~ about in garbageistop lation should be corrected as follows: What we know about hunger comes Ewry minute dies a-man/And one and hm the of $hesated; so itns a sixteentk-ishorn'. not much. Captic lefties withasecret l i G g for - --.TheÂ¥SpoonRiverAntWogvfhourdfmd .-.. -. . E.L. Masters ~

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'+he- Wild Foods of Great ~ r i t i n .

. C w e f m . Prism Press. 93pp. Â£2.50

- 'Firstly' ,write the publishers, (tempting to justify their reprinting of hfe1917 curiosity, 'it offena fascinainginsight into how the countryside serf pprovide'food. Secondly,'it does ~t confine itself to edible plants. 'htrdly, it includes detailed instnicfor preparation and cooking.' ns glad of these stated purposes, or without them Imight never have hovered any reason for the publica-

'hat is more notable, hardly a thing

as been added, either. The editors dmit dated andmisleading elements,

nil provide a patch of notes at the

aek, which they grandly call 'The

red to the coun

pubttfhers mean toindicate the who like this sort of thing, t h i s just author's brief nod in the direction of, might be the sort of thing they like. But the vegetable kingdom before indulging I expect the general paction will be to , " his lusty camivorism. And as for the lay thebook aside, in disappomtment detailed cooking instructions, these , that it didn't amount to more, and was are incidental, and slightly Bee'tonesque. - only a bandwagon jump'after all. Dolefully, Iconclude that, for those" , , "B&)o~~s ,L

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Eco-ecstasy Eco@&~ Ernest Caknbach. Banyan Tree'hks. 167 paw,. $2.95. Havingjust returned froma (oonth

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up heating systems in order to make effective use o f the extended growing season. The starting point of this book i s thal by consideration of the climatic charactiristics o f a particular site, greenhouses Brenda Vale and the Energy Primer, canhe designed which will optimise Portola-Inst., rather than, say, Radical growing conditions for many vegetables Technology. throughout the year, preventing overAfter yf&lksy, philosophical begtpheatingIn summer, and minimising ning, the ppwingsection, hopefully heat loss in winter. calling itself 'Alternative Architecture' The design procedure which i s follow; briefly dwoJses the use of trees, ed ha^ a number o f principles: optimishedges afta locat topography for she}'. ing winter energy collection, preventing tering and/or cooling. Electricity from - wind and water i s m x t on the agenda summer overheating, providing thermal storage and preventingexcessive heat los and here true electricity needs are at night. These design principles were identified and minimised where possiadopted by the authors in the cdnstrucble (the power rating and energy tion o f simple attached greenhouses, to consumptionof various household lengthen the growing season in the devices is shown here.) Central to the mountains o f New Mexico. The processbook is the home heating part in whfcfi es are explained i n great detail and, we are led systematically through .Therd and Heat Theory; although oriented towards a North American Readershiv. most o f the text 'Climatology', and 'Heat Loss in Dwellis relevant t o our situation in the UK. and me.orolqiat iws9-2tk data is o f little use other than interest The purpose o i a l l this is, o f course, and cornparnon however. There are to grow vegetables, and the chapter also sections on water and waste syson 'The Greenhouse Garden' contains terns (Methane etc.) and although vefy useful sections ol^vegetable planting - , complete much of the infortnation can cycles, planting layout and biotogical, be found elsewhere. pest control. The location of different Where does all this leave the British plants in the greenhouse is-very importreader? It is surely worth-% times tant, not just to provide the right conThe Autonomous House for sheer . ditions for a particular plant, but also to optirnise the production of the greenhouse over the ear. The final section (which shows o u t o f date now). However, references examoles o f ereenhouses and solar'' to the 'National Bureau of Standards' houses whichhave been built i n the etc. have no relevance and the use o f States in the last few years) seems to Imperial units is very tiresome. Too be unnecessary padding to what i s othermuch emphasis i s made on design wise an excellent book. This brings me from scratch and not enough on con-' to my one serious criticism o f the book version o f existing buildings. A nationrs which i s its relevance to our highly housing stock is one o f the greatest populated world and its ignoring of of its capital investmentsand it cannot the urban context o f most peoples' be written off, not even by an alternalives. All the greenhouses discussed tive planner. have a ground-level location, and yet this kind of space (adjacent to housing)' Pete Glass is what is rarely available in the city. Many Undercurrents readers would, -1 am sure, be interested in building The Foodand Heat ProducingSolar Greenproposals for roof-top greenhouses, house: Design, Construction. OperatÃˆ'on Rick Fisher and Bill Yanda. 161 pp. Â£4.25 whose construction details will be somewhat different (I'm still patchMost housing in the past 150 years has ing leaks from my attic greenhouse.)* been designed with little regard t o thermBrian Ford al performance; and the fame appliesto

in USA Other Homes & Garbage. J im Leckie Gij Masters, Harry Whitehouse, Lily Young. Sierra Club Books. 302 pp.

Â£7.00 Looking at the price of this, you' teckon there ought to be something jbecial about it, wouldn't you? It is tte most thorough technical selfsufficiency/autonomous house book around, but the authors still seem to @tieve that home production o f energy, water and food, and the disposal o f wastes is enough to create an ecological, greed-free society. I tfrink we would maintain now that this may be necessary but i s certainly not sufficient The entire sphere of production should be considered, not merely energy etc., and also a move taken from the individual t o community scale (or larger) where appropriate: 'A properly designed solar heating system can turn its back on coal strikes, natural gas prices, oil embargoes, and Alaskan pipeline.'. !!! (p76) So Other Homes and Garbaae. subtitled 'Designs for self sufficient living' should be compared with The

6 -.

m e r Builders Guide: Stone Maso ry. n-en Kern, Steve Magers and Lou Penfield. Builder Publications. PO . - - .- . - Owner Ockhurst, California, 93644.

.If this i s 4 foretaste of the Owner

. Builders Guide series then we may look forward, as eager and prospective owner 'builders are wont to do, to gatheringa collection of books o f real pnctical value. Books aplenty on do-it-yourself building tend to skirt lamely around working with stone, so here is a real -gap-Stopper (dry stone wallers please excuse the pun). Good advice is given in early chapters on choosing and quarrying stone and emphasis is placed on studying different kinds o f walling 'id masonry in your own area. , Ifyou happen to live i n an area witere stone is available there should &plenty of examples to study. To aid ' thisthe writers have included many photographs of different styles o f building t o help prospective builders t o identif y and choose the method most suited to their needs and locality. There i s an encouraging chapter on shaping stone including line drawings of the tools required. Too many people, they say, are too timid when it comes t o using this material and once you grasp the fact that it's mostly gravity that keeps a stone wall in place then you can't really go wrong. I would echo this especially if you use a cement mix t o :strengthen the mass. Really good walling doesn't need much binding together and can even be bedded with earth or left !dry1. Field walls, farm btildings and / houses stand testament to t h i s for centuries. If you feel traditional stonework is beyond you, then there i s a sizeable chunk o f the book devoted to cast-insit0 stone faced walls which are very 'easy to build. Basically this entails stacking stone (odd shaped lumps unsuitable for conventional walling will do) inside wooden or steel shuttering and simply pouring concrete in behind. Large areas of wall can be quickly done and doorwaysand window openings easily fibriczted as the work progresses. Bear in mind this is not a traditional method and is only as strong awl durable as the concrete. Nor will t h i s style look absolutely right next to real walling, but it's-cheap, quick, easy to do and infinitely better than most of the ticky-tacky work performed by many architects and builders tndav. . .~ l t h o u this ~ h i s an American publicsfien, the craft o f stone-masonry s&s to" We continued with very little variation %terms or techniques on the other side ditch. An extensive glossae gives rundown on esoteric words

what this one is all about. The general tone o f the book is one of confidenhwcauragement and t would e n d o h this. Like any craft, practice is absolutely necessary and it would be unwise to start your Gothick folly until you've mastered a couple o f garden watls, but once you are able to Dick u p the righbtone first time (and it doesn't take long) you will be building that which generations hence will find beautiful and practical. ?'revor Lawrence Other Homes mid Garbs@?, The Food & Heat ProducingSolar Greenhouse and Stone Masonry are only available in UK from Compendium Bookshop, 240 Camden High Street, London NW1. Please include Â£1.0 for the first, and 50p postage for the others,.

A t least three hospitals are being occw ~ i e bv d workers at the moment. Not. unforknatelv, as the first steo to democratic control of the health service but as a last ditch attempt to keep them open. A pamphlet from Militant, dauntingly entitled A Socialist programme t o save the Health Service provides a comprehensive analysis of the rote of the NHS and the inadequacies o f the present government policies. As well as facts and figures about the current state of the service, the pamphlet suggests a possible management structure of health workers, consumer interests and central government which would ~nwurageprevention as well as cure. available from Militant, 1 Mentmore Terrace, London E8 3PN for 30p + 8p postage.

Energy for Rural Development: Renewable Resources and Alternative Technologies for DevelonihgCountries is the latest (No 18) in a series o f free reports from the U.S. National Academy o f Sciences (2101 Constitution Ave. N.W., Washington D.C. 20418, USA); it concentrates on small-scale technologies suitabkJor rural be use (except for biogas wtlich covered by a separate study (No. M). Other topics in the scries include Aquatic Weeds, Water Supply, Undeyexploited Tropical Plants, andiManatee Research. Back home, Chris Thomas o f Earth Resources Research has just published her report on the paper industry (The %per Chain, 104 pp., Â£2.0 + 20p p&p from Friends o f the Earth. 9 Poland St. , London W ). At1 you p d to know is m*, trie<ts.fm~ded cleavage, efftoraswxse. quoins.. ...rt.wt-bsw

while half our needs are imported at steadily increasing prices. Plenty o f scope here for 'socially useful work' of a fairly unglamorous kind but Chris Thomas makes it dear that nothing is likely to happen until the State stops dithering and encourages the use of recycled paper either by putting a tax on wood pulp or more simply by using it more itself. It is too risky for the industry t o invest in recycling plants without a guaranteed market. Alternatives in Housing?A Report on Self Build in Britain (43pp 70p post free London WC1) i s a useful pamphlet that we missed when it first came out a year ago, written by a group o f architec tural students, it describes fourteen examples of self build and considers t o what extent &can provide an al.@rna tive to the conventional methods o f housing and its political implications. Anyone thinking of having a go should pick up a copy while stocks last; there are only a few left and it won't be reprinted. To continue: three useful pamphlets (each $1.00) can now be obtained from Eliot Coleman, Small Farm Research Association, Harborside, Me. 94642. Th first, the Annotated Bibltoarmhv o f BiologicalAgriculture, is apamphlet for doubters; an 11-page l i s t of all the ~ublicationsvou will need to read to convince yourself that you too can do the impossible and farm without chemicals. The Use o f Ground Rock Powders in Agriculture is a survey,of tfn literature, semeof w m g o e i ~back oyei l O O v e m on g^Ãˆ^)t~,fe^ds^>)Ã§^<^A^

aphy. European Biological Agricu - 2 frightening off the.nekus with details ' is Jamaica Destabilised, descri ?7$is a report of the 197$Europim. US attempts to remove the MÃ§...c of how to castrate your own piglets, " arm Tour, organisedbyth,e SFRAT- ;- or the life-cycTe o f the sheep's liver government, which seem to have been hich took in'~ritainTPfance, Germany,' hwarted by the Jamaican left. -fluke. For those who-have al I good thihgs, the pamphlets ed, nothing could be better comprehensive guide which in uted by the-PDC; they can as well as the sections on care ught from AHDC, 186 Kings livestock, practical instruction d, London WC1 X 9DE. ing and dressing the carcass, meat, Prices are 25p each for Scrap the Act, makin<sheepsmilk cheese and spinning Covert Act/on and famaica and 20p and wetvingthe wool from your homeeach for Assassination and Uncle Sam, sheared fleece. or Â£1. 5 the lot. Next in the series iso lout whilst the question o f who owns Ba&ard Beekeeping isin four parts. , on the CIA in Britain. The first explains the basic facts about ie resources i s ignored?!) and by proThe eighth SIPRI yearbook - World bees and hives; the second describes ding elementary information (present Armaments and Disarmament 1977 - has the processes involved in beekeeping; . orld food production is enough to just been published; a classic with which the third, mercifully short, examines a w i d e every person with around twice all military researchers should be akquainie minimum requirement for health problem or two and the last section deals ted. It offers much the same mixtore as with the harvest -although, as the id yet half the world's population, usual. Contents include a comprehensive 300 million people, are seriously under author points out, the most important section on military developments in ~urished).Concise texts and extensive product o f the hive is not the honey but 1976, and features on nuclear weapon ading lists are provided on such subthe inestimable advantage it brings t o accidents (which happen at a rate o f ctsas population control,and the lifethe garden through' pollination. Both one per three months), dioxin (the late %&theory, the Green Revolution and books (worthy successors to The Backin chemical warfare), military uses o f chnological fixes, the role of developyard Dairy Book and The Backyard satellites, and statistics on military exent in promoting disease in the Third fbuitry Book) are fully illustrated with penditure and production. No-one whc orld (dam building and the spread of doesn't know the yearbook i s likely to drawings and diagrams. iistosomiasis etc), jobs and the environThe most surprising radical publisher want to own a copy, as it costs SKr14C lent, pollution control and business foreign exchange dealer writes 'This i for ages is the Agee-Hosenball Defenc+^,^ terests, ecological warfare in Vietnam, Committee, many o f whose political &x&Samn near twenty quid, but the thing'! id, what is most likely to give ecology n major libraries'. UK and USA publisi activities wjjl continue, despite the bad name, the use o f ecological issues deoortation of the two Americans. :5 are MIT Press. 1 obscure the social basis ofcurrent AHDC has published a very worthwhile - - - For some reason the incidence of .oblems ('Ecology cannot transform -^hepression doesn't seem to coincide with series of pamphlets on the CIA and on ilitics, it can only inform politicians. covertactivi ty in general. ?economic depression. Be prepared for 2ilitics can transform ecology'). This ,The only one specifically about t in the economy with 'Depressio im pamphlet (one o f a series of aJterUK isscrap the Act, on the politics ges', a self-help guide to prevenl itive readingguides produced b y the Immigration Act 1971. Two on defeating depression, available SSRS and SCANUS, the student covert action are Covert Action: wh e author, E.A. jensen, 39 With)mmunity action section o f the NUS) nqxt? by Phil Agee and Alleged cdsmore light than many a porten- . Assassination Plots Involving Foreign ~ysvolume. It costs 75p plus postage Leaders, reprinted from the Senate ooklet of 'Depressives Associated' om SCANUS, 3 Endsleigh St, London hearings on US Intelligence; these bo with similar messages of hope and com- .".* discuss interventions b y US intelligence fort and a very practical l i s t of address against the left in CKk,theCongo, Two new books from Prism are The of related self-help organisations. Write ickyard Pig and Sheep Book (Â£1.95 Cuba, Angola, and elsewhere. Also to Mrs Janet Stevenson, 19 Merley Way ipp) by Ann Williams apd Backyard reprintedfrontithe USA fe Kissinger's Wimborne Minster, Dorset BH21 1QN. tekeeping (Â£.SO1120pp) by William secret-memo& whhfc arrive one day More self-help, this time for mutual) ;ott. Ann Williams assumes that her in Agee's mail on Key Intelligence supportive pairs-comes in The Barefoot aders are contemplating going in for Questions, giving guidelines on gather.Psychoanalyst by John Southgate and ieep or pigs, and encourages them to ing o f economic Intelligence b y US ' Rosemary Randell (pT.fceJl.00 from ive a try. Her book probably answers missions overseas. Called What Uncle e Ashciation ofKareflrHorney Psych I thequestions you might ask before . Sam wwtsto knowabout you, itsâ alytic CounG5llors)- which is a<tep-bl

'?"Â£-?z

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tification o f the th

No. 7) now on sale:

Music for Sociahsm Interview with saxophonist Dick Heckstall S Punk Rock len of No Property: Irish Rebel Music 'dm making" Cinema Action Communist Party Split *= The Beginning of the Sexual Revolution 35p from your local movement bookshop or 45p from l55a Drummond St, London W1:Amual Â£5The Leveller will be published monthly from issue, out on September 19.

AMSTERDAM & PARIS daily Â£I kTHENSf25 . DELHI Â£7 COPENHAGEN Â£ ~Iusworldwide economy tra 14 Shaftesbury Avenue Lond 01-439 0729/0557

Undercurrents 23

SMALL ADS

Sell your giraffe here! Small Ads at special giveaway price: 2p per word; Box Nos 50p. Copydate for No. 24 is August 22. Please send copy and replies t o Box Nos. t o our London office. 1 WORK

SHELTER

PUBLICATIONS

one cotturn BOW. Â¥a Gotiler t h e Mu.-Rertoratton of the pro rty Is well In hmd. Inunediaff needs include a good joiner and a ood builder, andour artsandcraftsand food

ETCETERA YOUR CHARACTER (rom you handwriting for Â£or $4. Flee kaflet from David and Mary Davies 20 North Street Oldlanc corn& BEiatol, red Britain,

%*hTszes* we attract, outlets for h-c-e .tipDa,etc. ew*menibenofthe collective thould have about Â£80 developant but 1for t e right to. Write to: Arnold Rauwr

BS15 a&. SMALL COMMUNITIES RESEARCH UNION h u f o m e d to research develop and promot small comn!iunitl& rural or

f$tZh&~~~ 12 Matthew Street. Stecktead* K" &*, bncs.

urban family-or commune basnot, as an alternative social forin t o ivaqtc.

ed, self-sufficient or HELP you- man wants cottage with acre of land in ex-* for work anywhere Jn Britain/.

Ireland South Wet?a to

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s & W = e P eta. I'UI a greenkee er. hanks tor listening. BOX

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NUCLEAR CRISIS : A Question of Breeding Edited by Hugh Montefiore and David Gosling Make up your own mind as to whether we should build fast breeder reactors. All the arguments both for and against have been assembled in this highly -readable volume from edited transcripts of the public hearings held in December 1976. Paperback Â£2.5 Hardback Â£6.0 176 pages

THE BACKYARD PIG AND SHEEP BOOK r. : Ann Williams -* Follows the practical, down-to-earth approach of !&' the other 'backyard' books. It covers feeding, fencing, housing, breeding, problems, harvesting, spinning, weaving and dyeing. Absolutely invaluable to the beginner. .+ 1.- P y Paperback Â£1.9 Hardback Â£3.9 ,\-,,W#176 pages

BE NICE TO NATURE : Natural Pest Control Greet Buchner and Fieke Hoogvelt Don't use aerosols and chemicals to deal with pests and insects around your house or in your garden. Bio-dynamic gardeners have compiled and tested some gentler, organically-based alternatives which will do the job just as well without polluting the environment. Hardback Â£3.5 Illustrated 96 pages

BACKYARD BEEKEEPING : G~ Bill Scott , An introduction to the art of beekeeping from the I " author of 'Food For Thought'. It removes much of the mystique that surrounds the subject. The practical approach with details o f d-i-y hives, etc. blends well with the quiet and gentle attitude of the author and with the beautiful illustrations. 100 pages Paperback Â£1.5 Hardback Â£3.5

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THE SOLAR HOME BOOK Bruce Anderson This technically rigorous yet lucidly written book particularly emphasises low cost conversions for the average homeowner. Many designs for new houses have been included (Selfbuild and Otherwise) as well as small scale projects such as Greenhouses and Solar Water Heaters. Over 200 diagrams, photos and drawings. Paperback Â£5.00 304 pages

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by L John Fry. Â£3.5 including p&p. This is generally acknowledged to be the best book on small-scale methane plants yet written. As the result o f an arrardement with the publisher the book is available to Undercurrents readers at this special price. Contents includes Building a vertical drum digester; a top-loader digester; a full-scale digester; scum accumulation; gas holders; biology o f digestion; raw materials; use of gas and sludge; safety precaution; glossary and bibliography. Anyone interested i n the conversion of organic waste into a clean, useful fuel will find Practical Methane invaluable.

BACK ISSUES

We like to think that Undercurrents is not so much a periodical asa growing collection of useful Information, most of which retains its value lo after publication. The following back-issuesarestill available at 50p for one copy and 25p for each extra copy, and t A's a form at the bottom o f page 48 for ordering.

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Supply/So& CollecWNature et ProgredGrow Your Oh. Ve^ctiblei Undaciuieatt 10 Joint bluewith Rewntence DIY So& Collector Deugn/Swud ~ardeaing/~nuchist Citiei/Futuic of AT/Land for the Pcdpte/GeiÃˆnSystems Thcoxy/Altenutive Culture: Part 1 UiMtacunerti 11 D N Windchaiger Deagn/BeelEeep&g/Ley Hunting/Rammed Earth/ Autonomous Houte/MindtxpÃˆnsion/AltemtiTcC>dturePut 2

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Lucu AeioÃ§p>cÃˆ/Biofot<lb~ck/CommuBi Technology/Comtek/ Alternative Medicine/Wind Power Put 2/Altenrtive Culture: Put 3

UndaciBnnb 13 DinfatEnergy A Food Production/Induatry,the Cowunity & AT/ Altunative F h $ d &Wales Supplement/Planning/JohnFry on Methane/Altdtive Culture: Part 4 Undetcnnenb14

Jack Mundey/AT Round the Wo~ld/BuihUngWithNatural Energy/ Insulation DIY InsulationIAT in Idia/Braehi on BRADIAT & Industry Conference Report -UwlocuNBts 15 'Who Needs Nukes?' teue . IiBulition va Nuclear Power/Towar& a Non-nuclear Future/AT & lob Creatioa/Productionfor Need/BtodyimnicGudening/RadiedTechnologynnvertor Design

Uadocmnf 17 lanet Technology lÃ§u Computer Ley Hunt/DowueIt-Younelf/Klrlitn Photogranhy/ChAtopher Wren'$ Beehlre/Saviw Your Own Seed/Women & AT/ Â Tcneitrial Zodiac* UndacunBti 18 IntermediateTtdinokify laue IT & the Third WorId/Ouncte Sciencc/IT & Second Class Capital/ Supcnnacka Cartoon/Leyhunttot:the LinÃ§ÃD r d H o. w, to Mike a Ley Detector 4* ,*Lfvs^ it Undercuneflta 19 Health W e Limits to Medicine / Politics of Self-Help/ Babes in the Wad 1 Guide to Alternative Medicine / Findhorn / National Centre for AT / Alternative History Undercurrent. 20 F i Anrivenny bsue Tony Benn on the Diggem / Fanning: 'chemlcalt' or organic? / Mike Cooby / David Dickson / CTT inteiview 1 Solar Energy Report / Paper Making / Broadcasting / Canals

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