UC59 April -May 1983 by Christopher Squire

1 Colin Sweet 1 LEARN GERMAN IN GERMANS IN A TEACHERS COOP -small and effective language classes -political and cultural rneetings-informal and friendly atmosphere ZENTRUM FUR DEUTSCHE SPRACHE UND KULTUR E.V. Sandweg 113 , 6000 Frankfurt / M. Tel. 0611-497433 HEINEMANN EDUCATIONAL BOOKS Freepost EM17,22 Bedford Square, London WC1 B 3BR

POLITICS FOR LIFE SUPPORT BRITAINS GREEN Fi.TY The Greens Have Done I t In Germany With Your Help We Too Can Work For: GREEN PEACE FOR SURVIVAL LAND AND LIBERTY FOR THE THIRD WORLD SHARED WORK FOR A CARING SOCIETY MOCRACY FOR A N ALTERNATIVE BRITAIN Membership Â£ (Â£unwaged, students, pensioners) Ecology Party Office: 36/38clapham Rd, London SW9 OJQ, 01-73

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Undercurrents Eddies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Nukes Solve Acid Rain?

Nuclear Free Pacific campaign and other hot news and cool comment

The latest corrosive developments bv John May

Letters.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 BundestagStreakedGreen. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Biomass - the energy of the future?

Roland Clarke looks at the aftermath o f the German elections

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Beast News . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 John May's animal lib update Greening the Economy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Jonathan Porritt's alternative budget speech Have We A Future?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Petra Kelly looks into her green crystal ball NATTA NEWS.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Alternative Tech buff Simon Mays column Lead On The Brain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Heavy metal petrol politics b y Nick Kollerstrom The Religion Of The Machine Age. .......... 24 Mog Johnstone interviews Dora Russell

Plant Power..

The Big Fix.

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Just keep taking the pills says Andrew Tyler

Merging Red and Green.

Europe's other Green parties

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Health and Efficiency.

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Natural Health Centresprobed by roving reporter Ian Grant

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 Reviews. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39

Briefing

Three pages of events and contacts

Weird Stuff Bulletin

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Paul Sieveking on phantom car crashes

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Small A d s . . Subscriptions.. Froth

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Loony Doomstar goes bananas

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UNDERCURRENTS No, 59 AprIlJMay 1983

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'THE P.W.R. IN THE USA,FRANCE AND BRITAIN' Proceedings of the Conference at the Polytechnic of the South Bank,October 1982, 'Issues in the Sizewell "B" Public Inquiry'. Papers by Komanoff, Pollard, Miller (USA), Schapira, Pharabod, Etemad (France), Keck (Germany), van der Pligt (Holland), Bamaby, Bowden and many others from the UK. Available in six volumes (Â£ per volume or Â£0 for the set of six). Further information and order form from Centre for Energy Studies, Polytechnic of the South Bank, London SE1.01-928 8989 ext. 2399.

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UNDERCURRENTS No. 59

EDDIES ing Marquessas and Gambier islanders. Under French goveri ment auspices 10% of the Polynesian population has been sent overseas for . treatment. International pressure for forced an end t o atmospheric Missile testing range, may testing in 1974, but fifty one yield a similar result. underground tests conducted But nuclear weapons on Mururoa to date, have had opponents will have fewer grounds for optimism in equally deleterious effects on French Polynesia. France has Pacific eco-systems. Mururoa has sunk more than 1.5 metrei exploded 92 devices in the Mururoa test area since 1966 since testing began. A fissure 30cm wide by 800m long has and with even a Socialist appeared which could government favouring the development of the neutron aggravate radiation spillage. Officially countenanced bomb, shows no sign of abandoning its current test pollution has been comprogramme. The legacy of the pounded by numerous incidents, the effects of which 41 atmospheric tests conducted during 1966-74 has are beginning t o emerge. The recently become apparent South Pacific Commission and with the alarming incidence of World Health Authority ulcers, miscarriages and reports an ominous increase cancers amongst the neighboul of ciguatera, the deadly fish

ADDING WEIGHT to this year's Nuclear Free Pacific Week fourteen thousand citizens of the tiny trust ierritory of Belau in the Caroline Islands have voted to reject the American militia in the proposed Sompact of Free Association. This result preserves, in the face of billion dollar blandishments, the unique 'no nukes' clause in the islands' constitution which forbids the storage of nuclear weapons material on Belauan territory. It's a major set-back for the Pentagon's plans t o militarise a third of Belau's land area; plans which included a 30,000 acre jungle warfare training zone, a military airport/ weapons storage facility and ultimately, it's suspected, a Trident submarine base. The referendum due to take place shortly in Kwajalein atoll in the Marshall Islands, site of a US Anti-Ballistic

peace by security. FAR FROM being scrapped the government's Ă&#x201A;ÂŁmill'lon anti-CNDadvertising campaign is waiting in the wings for Heseltine's nod. This was the campaign that got hastily shunted backstage ih February. The expensive props of propaganda, the booklets, leaflets, television commercials were reviewed as an embarassment, in theory. The Opposition claimed it a misuse of public money and Whitehall officials warned that it was party political campaigning. Previously the MOD had handled the PR side of the government's case. So Peter Blaker, Minister for Armed Forces, and Geoffrey Pattie, Minister for Procurement hopping over t o enlist J W

poisoning disease in the area since several pounds of plutonium ('A life 24,000 years) were washed into the sea during a storm. The current test programme calls for eight underground nuclear explosions in Mururoa and neighbouring Fangataufa atoll in 1983. The Pacific islanders and ecological groups will have plenty to protest about in next year's remembrances of that first 'Bravo* hydrogen bomb. Paul Todd (PNS) Thompson the advertising agency to paint the right sort of pictures and touch the 'young, uncommitted' was logical. But was it also that CND caused the strategists to bolt? Why throw off the covert method of persuasion (by briefing t o MPs) and expect even a sympathetic sector of the public to swallow the conspicuous spending and a suddenly partisan Central Office of Information? The mistake made, another idea hassurfaced. The Conservative Party's pronuke publicity stays, openingly, with Central Office - only Heseltine's speeches, other pro-nuke publicity, PR for the 'antiHeseltine's CNDactions, go back t o the MOD. This Defence Secretariat has clear intentions; to counteract unilateralism and CND,and to put the government's case. It after all is not going t o be enmeshed in party political ramifications. It can even use the COI,

ÃˆÂ

Seaside view a t Sizewell: beneath the off-shore outlet for cooling water, turbulence indicates the atomic station's discharges.

TWO SEPARATE objections in Britain, against nuclear power stations, look set t o reach the courts this spring, b d at last give public criticism a fair hearing. In what may be the first court action against the government's nuclear programme, people in Hartlepool, Cleveland, are challenging the CEGB's plans t o build a second 1300 MW AGR on a site just four miles from their town and Redcar, and less than a mile from the Seal Sands petro-chemical complex. Doubts about the safety of such proximity were first expressed by Nil. The CEGB concluded that no second station would be built which didn't have additional protection against gas-cloud explosion. Substantiating this, a report from the Political Ecology Research Group found that the AGR containment building might not withstand a Flixboroughtype explosion - a serious consideration bearing in mind the explosion at the ICI Billingham plant three miles from the AGR in 1982.

NIREX,the new radioactive waste disposal body, intends to announce plans later this year to dig three big land dumps for holding intermediate waste now in store. The dumps will include a deep concrete-lined 'facility' that will either be in tunnels 1,000 feet down somewhere along Britain's coast, or in existing limestone caves. It'll be huge, serviced by two complete trainloads of waite a day. (A major row seems certain when the planned site is announced.) Two other sitet. shallower and taking l e u dangerout wute, will be probably in clay fields somewhere in iouth-eut England, Thh won't necenarily mean the end of sea-dumping, But it will ttart t o clear the backlog of intermediate waste (competed of sludges, reactor equipment, and cladding which surrounds the reactor fuel), tome of which h a been accumulating at Windscale for 25 yearn. It'll also be the resting place of the vaat

amounts of heavily contamii ated rubble produced when the current crop of power stations are demolished at th end of the century. The CEGB has revealed that it'll soon put forward plans for 'dry storage' actually a glorified airconditioned warehouses ir which t o keep high level waste, at present reproce-ec t o remove plutonium. This ii 'necessary' because BNF h u not made plans for dealing with the waste fuel due t o come from Power stations in the late 1990s. GEC, the firr which designed the new storeat Says they could cheaply contain unreproceued fuel more or l e u forever. CEGB says only that they would provide 'flexibility' in deciding when t o reprocess the fuel.

TORY PLEDGES may disturb us, but by a curloua twist, recent reforms within the Inland Revenue could benefit thoae in the electorate who really can't stomach the conversion of hard-earned c u h into Trident warhead*.

The pressure group Make Our Power Station Safe (MOPSS) ,says that a High Court action may be taken t o compel1 Nil t o revoke the existing AGR's licence while it remains vulnerable t o blast - and nuclear safety regulations continue t o be breached. @Contactfor MOPSS (donations towards the Â£10,00 law costs very welcome): Kevin Daws, 1 0 Scanbeck Drive, Marske-by-sea, Redcar. Cleveland.

Meanwhile . . . the Official Solicitor at the Sizewell 'B' Inquiry is jousting with registered Objector, David Ross. Ross criticised the Inquiry for being conducted conttary t o natural justice verbal evidence granted t o CEGB only, no objectors' questions until May, no financial aid from public taxes paid t o fund the Inquiry . . redress might be sought from an international court. Didn't this argue support? Unable t o judge, said the Solicitor t o Ross, unless asked by a court . . you'll need a lawyer. Is that what being on the circuit means?

Meanwhile the Peace Tax Campaign battles on for recognition of the 1916 principle of conscientious objection. Six thousand taxpayers support the proposal that their military dues (average Â£36 a year) should be diverted t o a Peace-

It in, sadly, a tiny present from Mrn Thatcher, Quite pouibly she didn't mean it. But, if the IR is demanding your bath In lieu of taxes you building Fund. Thirty withhold because you know objectors are in conflict with the IR which is paying over Â£36,00 into i f general fund and not, u requested, into an Oveneas Development Fund. they'll go t o 'defence' (1981- This could be 'embezzlement I2 budget 812,668,000,000) on a grand scale' as one PTC put it. well h e ' s restricted their ight of entry, and reformed a ~ m i o aTIX Campaign i t 26 F hurlow Rd, LOkWtbr. he enforcement procedures. Details, Lord Keith's report). TblOPhOn* 0 5 3 3 702fifl7

UNDERCURRENTS No. 59

rural drive 'EVERY DAY poor people are forced t o work for 4d a day, though corn is dear,' wrote Gerard Windanley in 1649. Today the corn. still expensive but with CAP aid, continues t o ensure profitability for British farmers. No-one can say either that twentieth century farmworkers' pay doesn't follow tradition. This and other rural problems - the mass exodus from the countryside, lack of rural housing, resistance t o common ownership of facilities and land, and the inadequate safeguards for conservation - occupied speakers at the Socialist Countryside Group's inaugural meeting opened by Michael Foot on March 26th in London. The 'affiliated' socialists which a future Labour

1 Protestors for animal welfare turn to ' civil disobedience' after a rally through Trafaigar Square, London, on 19th March

The British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection is being 'stone-walled' by the Department of Health and Social Security and the Home Secretary, in its efforts to persuade the government to replace the 1874 Cruelty to Animals Act with up to date from the DHSS, which, closing the doors on any debate about the LD50 test, advised that 'despite attacks on its usefulness by eminent scientists . . . the European Community Directives On interest to make available the medicines . . . require that LD50 be determined, names of the 527 places . where possible. Such a currently registered (under directive has the force of an the 1876 Act) for the perinstruction . . . there is thereformance of experiments., This was in reply to a question fore no alternative to raised in the House by compliance with it.' BUAV is not unduly BUAV'S Angela Walder. The same day she was sent a letter surprised by this attitude.

THAT STAPLE of British cooking, the baked potato, was accused recently of being an unsavour part of our diet. The Working Party on Pesticides Residues, of the Ministry of Agriculture, reports detecting widely differing amounts of the anti-sprouting chemical technazene lingering on potatoes taken from retail and experimental samples. Technazene deposits ranged from O.lmg/kg t o 218mg/ kg. While most of this dust is lost on washing and peeling, the report says 0.01 to

0.9mg/kg would normally remain on tubers. This means, according to agricultural journalist Graham Harvey, that there's a fairly high probability of, now and again, ingesting more than 200 times the recommended safety limit - of a chemical which the Potato Marketing Board admits isn't permitted on potatoes being exported to the continent. Now Lawrnece Hills, director of the Henry Doubleday Research Institute advises people not t o eat potato skins unless the

tubers are organically grown. Dr P.J. Bunyan of the Workipg Party remains unconvinced about the dangers. He says technazene was used on only 25% of stored potatoes; the very high levels found on experimental samples (not available t o the public) were caused by spraying 'to maximise the residues which a potato could hold.' Anyway, almost all technazene is destroyed in cooking, he concludes. The safety of this is still questionable. MAFF's report states quite clearly that the

F o r three years the government has shown reluctance a to make reforms in animal experimentation, preferring to postpone its own legislation until the appearance of the Council of Europe's Directive at Strasbourg. Now nearing ratification the Directive - still mean on animal protection - will make for easy digestion by the government's bureaucrats - about t o draw up their own Green Paper ('when time permits'). BUAV suspected the modernisation of the Act would be little more than an administrative clean-up when their campaign officer, Tim Stallwood, received a letter from 1 0 Downing Street last December. In reply t o his question concerning the use of substitutes for live animals the government understood 'they may be quicker, cheaper and more realiable,' but 'there are no government funds for research into alternatives'. The policy is to support experiments for testing cosmetics and alcohol, which are already subject to controls, and further, those tests causing pain or distress, which are 'a necessary end'. BUAV is most alarmed however by the fact that the Advisory Committee on Animal Experiments to the Home Secretary includes licencees of the 1876 Act. 'What this means,' says Angela Walder, 'is that the government doesn't want the Home Secretary to form an independent scientific judgement and be answerable to Parliament, but to stick with weak legislation from. the EEC.' sprout suppressant chemical is very widely used, yet the Ministry's tests were carried out only after concern was voiced. All agri-chemicals must be cleared through the Pesticide Safety Precautions Scheme before being marketed, and while Dr. Bunyan's view that 'we d o live in a chemical world' may be correct, it is unacceptable to most that this tale indicates big gaps in the control of pesticide usage. Sally Ed wards

- to L-. [N THE OFFICIALLY coined Fragile Community' of 'erthshire's Upper Tay Valley, h e local residents are closing tanks t o ensure the life of heir region and working t o a banning model developed ~ya contemporary of Darwin. Sir Patrick Geddes - town >lanner,marine biologist, and nventor of the term conurbation - and his fornula for a self-reliant ;ommunity fed by small scale mterprise, is being invoked mce more for the purpose of he Aberfeldy Project. The Jpper yay, where Aberfeldy s the main town, is one of nany rural regions on the andslide t o economic stagiation. But since the spring >f1982 it has opted for self kelp. It lay, the planners ound, outside the support of he Highlands and Islands Ievelopment Board, and laving n o favourable status in he EEC, was not eligible for ny grant aid. It suffers youth inemployment - seven resently out of work, but his figure masks teenage

migration t o the cities - and within all other age groups sports an unsatisfactory imbalance of the sexes (predominantly female as it happens). The project aims t o return the region t o full employment by developing Natural Energy Technology. The revival rests upon the interlinking of the four sectors in the 'Geddes' model. 'Gedde' one, is the 'Fact*'. Aberfeldy-style these come from the Breadalbane Institute, a charitable 'clearing house' set up in 1974 which made an initial survey of the area. A 'thinktank' for R&D and educational facilities is provided by the Achloa Centre a private the 'deeds' originate with existing local businesses, and the 'acts' are carried by the It may read like the history of Marks and Spencer but Howard Liddell of Achloa, says effective action has only been possible since those elements were drawn together. The region, so far, has two windmill projects, one installed

THE INQUEST on Colin

and working, a revitalised timber to industry, famer itching sell his a hydro-electricity currently the entire homestea, to the National Grid, and several projects for the develo of micro-hydro and solar systems. The vital ingredient in this network though, says Liddell, is local human energy. The question, unfortunately, remains - can it be harnessed without the of YOPS, MSC . .?

-1

Mongolia steppes intowind !IS DUSK 'moulds the steppes nto a grey tableau a steady uind scours the land. A wolf og-trots madly, hungrily lowards the nomads' partem. Then - clonk! On go the high power p o t lamps. The wolf squats, !ar cocked. The sweet

melodies of UB40 ring upon the air from the three channel satellite T V - the journey wasn't wasted. High tech on the steppes is brought by Northumbria Energy Workshop Ltd. Wolves apart, the nomadic Mongolian tribes needed a form of renewable energy suitable for both domestic and agricultural use. And so early last year, after previous delegations to Northumbria, the Mongolians in Ulan Bator requested four of the workshops' wind-battery systems. Eventually they were installed on the plains where the winds are not high, but persistent enough t o produce constant energy. The machines are modified Winco Winchargers

on aluminium towers with control modules power outlets. Eac comolete unit canbe assembled without a spanner and erected by two people. Geoff Watson of the workshop believes that without basic electrical equipment the Mongolian infrastructure would suffer due t o young people moving away t o the city. Since the 1921 revolution, the country has been decentralised with local co-operatives providing accommodation (and windmills) and an economic structure which supports schools and medical facilities. In Ulan Bator - average temperature -3OC - co-op schemes include district heating for housing. This summer a Mark I1 wind system with 50W turbines, (and cable flexible down t o -60Â°Cwill be sent from Northumbria t o further power the Mongolian steppes.

Roach, who died recently by gunshot at Stoke Newington Police Station, London, will be on the 18th April. The verdict of the coroner will be concluded from the questions 'how, where and when' in connection with t h e incident. Any mystery surrounding the death will be, therefore, eliminated as evidence is drawn up. Or will it? According t o the Roach Family Support Committee, if the coroner fails t o look into the police treatment of the black Roach family after the death, or into'the hasty and false police accusation of Roach's 'mental instability', important pointers t o the Force's indifference to, at the worst suppression of, the truth, will be missed. A voluntary visit t o the police station by Roach o n 17th January, and his suicide by gun-in-mouth exhibitionism, is not impossible. It is highly unusual. And suspicious. Compounded with recent police activities in the area - the smashing of the windscreen of councillor Twomey's lorry heading the RFSC protest march, the arrest of over 80 people including Roach's father 'for obstruction' (since the rallies ! are peaceful) - and of Hackney Council's vote of no { confidence in the local police, } it looks like an inevitable loss under a brutal police regime, , unaccountable t o law. c The GLC Police Committee's Paul Boateng admits inquests "often fail t o get at the truth". But in any case c the RFSC, backed by MPs Ernie Roberts and Ian a Mikardo, is demanding an 2 open inquiry from the Home Secretary. Will there be an E inquest too into the other unexplained deaths at SN police station - Aseta c Simmons in May 1971 E (misadventure?), Michael ? FeMria in 1978 (bled t o 2 death in custody?). . . . Will Commander Taylor there Â take time t o read the Scarman Report on police 2 relations with the a community? c

Source: John Morris and Morris Herman UNDERCURRENTS No. 59

ALARMING LEVELS of lead around schools have been found by the Campaign for Lead-free Air, following a survey which measured the lead content of dust at fifty sites in twenty-five British ;owns last autumn. The survey, published last month, reveals that nearly 70% of the samples taken exceeded the GLC guidelines of 500 parts per million. Over 30% of the samples contained more than 6,000 ppm, the level at which the GLC carries out special investigation to identify the sources of lead. Some of the highest levels were detected along the

HAVING SUFFERED from psychosomatic leg pains at every other Ecology Party Conference, the March meeting in Malvern was a relief - the coming election gave delegates a clear sense of purpose; lots of attention fixed on media technique, and the adoption of a manifesto. Aside from inspiring us to 'turn green', the Party's policies are departing from the allegedly eco-liberal tack, though they don't fully meet expectations of those who wanted a thorough fepiinist and nonviolent approach. Simone Wilkinson and Susan Lamb of Women for Life on EarthLboth well received, plan t o stand on a joint WFLOE/Eco ticket at th~election(the Guardian's report of a general election pact between Eco and WFLOE is untrue). ' Des Wilson, FOE, spoke in broad terms of a green realignment and managed t o melt the usual coolness in the Eco-FOErelationship; the delegates approved FOE'S plan to compile a points register for the 'Relative Greeness' of every general election candidate. It was, Wilson said, designed t o bring Eco out on t o p . . . David Taylor , . . Des Wilson should, however, lend his ear to the rumblings of discontent concerning the Green Rally

south coast of England with over 6,000 ppm found on pavements outside two schools in Brighton and ' Bournemouth. CLEAR'S procedure of collecting samples inside and outside the schools' playgrounds showed that in the majority of cases lead levels were higher on the pavement than in the playground, implicating traffic as the main culprit. However the converse in some schools suggests the problem may also lie in leaded paint on the buildings. Â¥Mor information: CLEAR newspaper (15p 81 sae) or the report (Â£10from 2 Northdown St., London N1.

Saharan fringe: in Kordofan province water is a luxury

Common crisis looms

THE BRANDT COMMISSION'S warning that only a major re-structuring of the international financial system will prevent the world ecoorganised by FoE/CLEAR nomy from collapsing has (ie. Des Wilson) for April caused great public concern, (see Briefing). The style, say but has been almost comcritics, is distinctly old-wave pletely ignored by - faithful masses before a governments. gallery of stars. For the Now a new report from record: David Bellamy, Petra the Commission entitled Kelly, Ralph Nader (civil Â¥CommoCrisis' warns that rights campaigner), Jonathon further decline is likely to Porritt (Eco Party). Joan cause the disintegration of Ruddock (CND), Graham societies and create conSearle (Stop Sizewell 'B'), ditions of poverty in many and - Des Wizon. So finally parts of the world. environmentalists are sharing The Commission stresses a platform with peace campaigners. It's just unfortunate, that only a new relationship between industrial and . say displeased feminists, that developing countries can by the time the rally gets to help overcome this crisis, and Bristol there're no women speakers. 'Just a coincidence', 'the Third World cannot continue t o be exploited. In says Patricia S i m m of 1982 $650 billion was spent CLEAR when the all-male on the arms race and the line-up is pointed out. Peter Cflshaw Commission singles this out construction work o n t h e Prevlaka nuclear power station. The station's promoters will try a second referendum even though thirty two groups voted the project down. WISE JAPAN: A Green Party, called Hyogo-Midori-no-To, has been established. For 1000 yen new, sympathetic members are invited t o join, says one seventy four year old founder member. This spring the party plans t o put up a candidate in the Ashiya City municipal elections. Japan Resources YUGOSLAVIA: Energy workers voted in a referendum against allowing combined investment of 96 mining, generation and distribution organisations to fund pre-

TANZANIA: Mbulu and Hanang villagers, disenchanted the bureaucracy of the national tree planting campaign, are growing their own tree seedlings in nurseries as

as the major factor contributing to the West's economic decline. Presently developing countries bear the brunt of the recession but the report says "It is increasingly obvious that we are all in the same boat, the North cannot contemplate with unconcern the fact that the South's end of the boat is sinking." The report also stresses the need for renewed growth. The IMP must be restructured s o that its lending policy shows special consideration t o developing countries. The advice that food and energy production in the Third World should be increased will be universally accepted . . . but perhaps not so the mooted "increase in aid and investment". Ed ward Fen ton Â ¥ ~ r a n d t ~ ~ o m m i s s i1983 on' report published by Pan, 128 Buckingham Palace Rd., London SW1 (Â£1.9 + 26p postaqe).

future stock to refurbish the countryside. Tree felling accounts for 1,200 square miles of denuded land annually, and is hastening the desertification of Tanzania. Earthscan Bulletin CZECHOSLOVAKIA: In the Erz Mountains trees covering 10,000 hectares have died from the effects of acid rain. Reafforestation has so far failed. Earthscan Bulletin BRAZIL: The population of Cubatao, designated one of the world's most polluted areas, by the WHO, is suffering a high incidence of congenital deformation. Scientists fear the 1000 tonnes of pollutants daily emitted into the air are t o Ecoforum blame.

t o fight animal exploitation. So now that 'Undercurrents' has become a proanimal liberation magazine might I suggest, Ms Osbond, that you change it for a public ation more in accord with your views, say the 'Daily Mail'. Long live the ALF! Paul Gravet

September 1981 Women For Life On Earth were a bunch of people walking from Cardiff t o Greenham t o protest about Cruise missiles and the idea and name came from one woman, Ann Pettit, who kicked the whole thing off. Women And Life On Earth, a separate group, may have met in each other's OR TOO LIBERAL? sitting rooms, and Stephanie and Leonie with them, but Unfortunately Ishall nobbe Ann Pettit, Karmen Cutler reading this letter, if publishei and a few other women in I have been a regular UC Wales who organised that reader for years, but I can no first march knew nothing longer continue. about it! TOO RADICAL? At one time Undies was a The two networks commire of useful information I enclose my annual subbined a couple of months age (maybe that's 'mine'- E d ) scription, mostly out of a under the name of Women carefully gleaned by obviousl! For Life On Earth, for sense of duty: I have every committed people from issue since no. 3. It amazes greater efficiency, and to (often) obscure sources. Wind avoid confusion (some me that a single journal can print the unmitigated rubbish power; pirate radio stations; hopes !). computer technology - all titled 'The Naked Lunch' I'd like to use this column useful stuff. between the same covers as to sing Ann Pettit's praises Now? I might as well read 'Before and after Science'. she planted the acorn from When are you getting out the Radio Times of New which this particular tree Statesman. I even suspect a of short trousers? grew, and continues to grow. Mark Selinger growing respect for the State! I'd also like t o acknowledge I mean to say, do you really those first Greenham think Die Grunen will change marchers, whose blisters bore I am very pleased that you the basis of German society witness t o their fragile hopes. have been devoting so much now they've got 6% of the attention to the animal Ramona Reill: vote? liberation movement. It It's either complacency, or PARTY TIME seems, however, that you are offending one o r two of your you're joining the other side. Thanks for the articles on But there is still time to less radical readers, namely Europe's Green Parties and th change. Come on, a Ms Osbond in UC58. Rudolf Bahro interview. 'Undercurrents', subvert and She describes the Animal The Greens are just ['ll change my mind! Liberation Front as 'terrorA. Moll beginning to gather here in ists'. I would prefer the (Rudolf Bahro o f the German sleepy Herefordshire. A description 'freedom fightHereford branch of the Greens said in UC 58: T o n y ers'. We are fighting back on Ecology Party recently came is too conservative in Benn behalf of an oppressed group into being. his thinking'. Whereabouts in who are unable t o help themI know some people in the Radio Times can you read selves. As far as I know the wider movement feel uncerstuff like that? E d ) ALF have never physically tain about the growth of the harmed a sentient being, Ecology Party, and I don't CREDIT WHERE IT'S human or animal. It is true think that we, within the DUE that they have destroyed party, must ever let it become property used t o exploit [ wish to express my total over-important. Party animals, but as such inanEigreement with Leonie branches are but gathering imate objects are unable to Caldecott's letter in UC 58, points. I would endorse feel pain this is not an act of Bahro's view that in the long saying that we must be careviolence but an act of aggress- ful t o acknowledge each term, organisational loyalties ion. The people who are other's work in the movement are less important than guilty of violence are the alliances over issues; that a She went on to praise animal exploiters Ms Osbond Stephanie Leland's work in movement is much more defends. important than a party. starting and building up I am also concerned with However, many of us feel Women For Life On Earth the exploitation of human in Britain.' There was then an the need t o organise ourselves beings. All suffering is indivwticle further on in the maga- far more effectively, and I isible - 'all is one' - somethink the party has a useful sine entitled 'Women For thing which reductionists like Life On Earth' by Stephanie role t o play. Ms Osbond have failed to Pete Blench ilaiming that WFLOE began grasp. I am a member of is 'small groups of women Amnesty International and needing in each other's sitting REGRET War on Want, but the sad Manv thanks for thesample .ooms' and it was this that fact is that there is very ipurred the Cardiff-Greenham copy of 'Undercurrents'. little one can do in this [t really excellent but, to narch in 1981 and the country in the way of direct -esulting peace camp. be honest, I can't afford t o action t o combat human subscribe a t the moment. As Leonie says. we must suffering abroad. However, icknowledge one another, so Living all year in a caravan, there is a great deal one can do : am writing to say that in feeding once-stray animals on

. ..

my pension (I am almost 80) and having to cut down on some of the 1 2 animal protection societies, Amnesty and various ecological societies in England, I now concentrate on new ecological and animal interests in Ireland. So for the time being, 'Au revoir' and all my best wishes. Peace and love to you all. Sheila Fitzgerald

PEACE CITY On Monday January loth, Sheffield Peace Action occupied the empty masonic hall in Sheffield's city centre. We have set up a Peace Centre in the building with rooms for meetings, creche, films, theatre, exhibitions etc and as a place where people can drop in for a chat, i drink, and find out information regarding the peace movement locally and nationally. Although the City Council ias declared support for the aeace movement in the past, ;hey have reacted t o the xcupation by cutting off the ilectricity. We have taken this direct iction because of the slow wogress (due t o bureaucracy) >ftalks between the City council and Sheffield CND .bout the proposed setting ip of a council-organised reace centre. To ensure that a peace entre of this kind has the ipportunity to get established gainst all odds we need money - any donations, no latter how small, should be ant to: Sheffield Peace lotion, 94 Surrey Street, heffield 1, S. Yorks. Yours in peace, Carol Grimes

\NY ANSWERS? Nhat is hard to explain to )uteiders about the place vhere you live? What do you mjoy noticing about the place vhere you live? What is the weather today? Vhat differences does it nake? Send what you notice to Using Sun, Box 428, iausalito, CA 94966 USA. Vnswers from all over the vorld will be printed in the rook, 'The Rising Sun Neighbourhood'. Lnd while you've got your ien out, why not write to: Jndercurrents Letters, 7 Clerkenwell Close, London 3C1R OAT. UNDERCURRENTS No. 59

g Streak id Green espite themuck raking and the SPD's flirtation with green voters, Die Grunen succeeded in passing the 5% barrier in the March 6th elections, to put 27 representatives in the West German Bundestag. Die Grunen now have the means to put forward green alternatives to the collapsing industrial society and to bring the voice of Europe's peace movement into one of the West's most important parliaments. Many outsiders interpreted the election as a defeat for the peace movement, seeing it as the go-ahead for deploying Cruise & Pershing. But the Gennansvoted primarily on economic issues, since before March 6th, the CDU/CSU/FDP government was losing the missiles debate, with only 38% of their voters supporting deployment. Business leaders media & politicians painted the possible SPD-Die Grunen coalition as a threat t o economic stability, saying it would increase unemployment dramatically along with government expenditure. Many companies made contracts for investments & orders dependent on a CDU victory, while the government claimed that due to their measures

since October, economic recovery had begun. Many voters were taken in by the government's decision to go ahead with the Rhine-Danube canal and other massive projects creating thousands of jobs. But the canal is costing Â£16,00 per each of the 17,000 jobs! Die Grunen' realistic programme for one million jobs in alternative energy, housing, agriculture, recycling, repair and other ecological enterprises, would have cost just Â£3,50 per job! The election result was hardly surprising given that the SPD was in power for 1 3 years until last October, and in most people's minds partly responsible for 2.54 million unemployed, crippling government expenditure and economic stagnation. Their programme of freer spending t o restore economic growth, consumer buying and social welfare, was seen as flying in the face of dwindling government resources. However, despite all their promises and the support of big business, it is unlikely that Kohl's government will have any more success in the long run, given the structural defects of Western society. Unfortunately, the threat of nuclear weapons was totally muddled by these other issues, and misinterpretation of the election result had taken the pressure off NATO and led to Reagan making excessive attacks on the USSR at a

tit

time w ..-..-.-..--.. ity a t Geneva is needed. But even if a compromise is reached there, some of the missiles will be deployed and if the talks fail, the blame will be put on the USSR whatever the US does. However truth has a way of getting out and Die Gmnen have pledged to reveal all that goes o n behind Bonn's closed doors. The slightest hint of US back-peddling at Geneva could remove much of the support for deployment overnight. The peace movement are already preparing massive demonstrations to block installation of the new weapons. After the election Petra Kelly said the representatives 'cannot be less militant than the other members of the movement just because we have been elected. For instance we may stage a hunger strike if it really comes down to the point where they are going to deploy the missiles'. If such an action was joined by other representatives in Germany & elsewhere and by grassroots activists, it could introduce a whole new unstoppable dimension to the movement. However the Green parliamentarians must seek to inspire without drawing the strength & initiative away from the growing number of greens and other disarmers everywhere.

Roland Clarke

Roland Clarke concludes his discussion of the emerging green political parties in Europe.

1 Red and Green espite the growing number of viable 'post-industrial', 'humanscale' enterprises, traditional political parties condemn any political programmes based on such initiatives, as either Utopian or destructive to Western Europe's economy and, therefore, its security. However, Die Grunen, the key targets for such criticism, have convinced many West German voters, including 11%of those unemployed, that only major radical solutions to the economic and ecological crises can work. Moreover, their policies are shared not just by their green colleagues but also by a number of 'left socialist' parties in other European countries.

The Dutch Radical Party (PPR) is one of Die Oilmen's nine colleagues in the European Green and Radical Parties' Coordination Group, and politically one of the most experienced. Since 1970 they have been involved in a number of 'progressive agreements' with the main Socialist party (PvdA) and the Pacifist Socialist Party (PSP), including having two ministers and one secretary in the 1973-76 coalition government. A large number of their policies were included in this coalition's programme but failed t o work due to the limited time period of four years and the opposing policies of their partners. Recently, as the PvdA has moved further right and PPR towards green and radical socialist ideas, the possibilities for co-operation have become harder. In the September '82 National elections, however, PvdA campaigned on 'left socialist' issues and tookvotes from PPR and PSP, but failed to have the majority necessary t o form the government. PPR with 1.65% lost their third parliamentarian, but PSP with 2.27% retained their three seats. Ria Deckers, the PPR1sparliamentary leader, now feels that in 1983 local PPR support for small-scale 'person and environment friendly' enterprises will be crucial for the future. While their parliamentary group is being diminished their local representation grows. PPR have stood for 200 of Holland's Community Councils and won 150

seats in them, while in the eleven Provincial Parliaments they increased their representation from eight t o fifteen this year. PPR have found, like the greens in Belgium and Germany, that more effective changes and alternatives are possible at local level, as the 'vision' is clearer to people. It is also far easier for people t o put aside political labels and work together on concrete issues in a community situation. Already the PPR has formed local coalitions with PSP in some councils, and in a few even with the Dutch Communist Party (CPN), who also have a growing tendency towards green ideas. At the moment a fairly large section of Dutch people involved in alternative and ecological projects see either PPR, PSP or CPN as the political represenatives of their ideas. This situation makes it almost impossible for a new green party to do

activists and voters from the three small left parties. Some senior members of PPR have officially registered the name 'Green Party' in the hope that it will arise out of or can include PPR. However, the present inclination is far more towards an alliance of the small left parties as PPR and PSP need a joint list at the European Elections t o get 4% of the vote and one MEP. A coalition with CPN as well, is another possibility and could, with the right policies, get two MEPs, perhaps rotated between the three parties. Unfortunately, this creates problems for PPR's green colleagues in the Coordination, who believe that the media and other parties would capitalise on 'green connections with communists'

The situation is complicated by the appearance of a second 'coordination group' linking up the left socialist parties, who share many of the green parties' concerns and areinvolved in some of the same campaigns. The initiator of this second 'coordination' is the Dutch PSP, which was formed in 1957, with a strong emphasis on pacifism. PSP's own brand of socialism is anti-militarist, anti-authoritarian, favours local democratic power, protection of human rights, selfdetermination for developing countries, and supports almost all ecological principles and policies. In at least four other countries, PSP has sister parties, which it feels similar to, and they are trying to bring together a loose alliance of parties with a left-socialist-radical perspective at the European level t o oppose the establishment parties in the European Parliament. t present the group is made up of non-Leninist Communists (like the Dutch and Swedish), left socialists, and progressive nationalists and regionalists (Basques and Bretons). Three members of the Green and Radical Coordination, the Ecology Party, PPR and Die Grunen, have observer status. In theory, there are many areas of almost total agreement between the two coordination groups, such as disarmament, decentralisation, third world development, nuclear power and economic growth. Unfortunately, the differences in strategy, priorities and basic ideology make an alliance before 1984 almost impossible. Yet the two must find some way t o come together especially when the escalation of the ecological crisis which now encompasses all other threats, requires time to tackle. Too much delay makes Rudolf Bahro's 'mass exodus' not an extreme course, but the only one. Already, two of the left socialist parties are electorally Red-Green, giving a major priority t o the ecological crisis. The Socialist Peoples Parties in Norway (SV - 5% and four MPs) and in Denmark (SF - 11.8%, 2 1 MPs and one MEP) both have programmes that are drawing radical socialist and ecological ideas together. They are unlikely to wait for the Green parties t o recognise them as allies and will be capable of using positively the successes of Die UNDERCURRENTS No, 59

the major parties are engaged in one of the grossest exercises of collective electoral mendacity ever seen

Grunen, to highlight the same ecological problems in their countries in conjunction with sound short term economic policies. The Green parties are often blinded by too many problems with traditional socialist and other parties using 'green packaging' to win votes, and give the impression that they won't work with potential friends because of what their enemies will say. The danger is that this attitude only isolates the green parties and fuels the element in them which behaves like an alternative centre party and hesitates from radical change and extra-parliamentary grassroots actions. Too often parliamentary representation becomes the major key and not part of a broader strategy, so principles and radical policies become compromised t o win votes. Such an approach is even more dangerous in a country like Britain, with an unrepresentativeelectoral system that even discriminates against a third political grouping. The Ecology Party's division over a green Defence policy and NVDA, and its pre-occupation with an electroalist strategy, in some cases at the expense of local action and grassroots change, alienates it from the broader green and radical movement. Yet many of its policies, such as employment, are seen by PSP as closer to the left socialists' than SERA'S

Good bread no hassles; energy and enthusiasm more important than qualifications. I f interested, give us a

level of local community decisionmaking, they can meet as people and not as labels. There, grassroots action , and change through cooperation is possible, but there still needs to be some supportive role at the different levels of government, the levels at which labels begin to play false. Perhaps the solutiZnlies in realising that all these groups are not on the traditional leftring spectrum, with its commitment to growth, authority and materialism, but on a 'new, positive, holistic and human' spectrum that unites individual freedom with collective consciousness. Perhaps the greens are not just part of this spectrum but the whole of it, and that is why Die Grunen have come so far as a broad spectrum federation of grassroots based 'parties'. Ecology has its roots in all these othei political ideologies and yet goes beyond them in its total analysis of the crises, so maybe they can all work together as greens, at any level without fear of their enemies. Rudolf Bahro sees the left socialist parties, as 'the forerunners of been1 more successful in campaigns and the greens' who 'should sacrifice their elections, when they worked inalliance existence not tomorrow, but in their with other green and community action own perspective'. 'Ecology is imprisoned in these parties by outdated socialist o where can the greens, left socialists, theory andpriorities'. Clearly many of non-Leninist communists, radicals us need to emerge from our respective and also the libertarians and anarch- party political prisons if we want to ists, combine their energies. Clearly build a green society. at the level of concrete issues, at the Roland Clarke

policies are. Yet these policies are trapped in the Ecology Party's old style party political approach, at a time when the initiatives are needed now, and not just when voted in. The Ecology Party needs t o see itself as an integral part of a broader green movement, campaigning, initiating alternatives, and putting up candidates jointly with other groups. Die Grunen and the Belgian =en parties have often

BEAST NEWS

St Petersburg, Florida (AP) -Plans to parachute three pigs to highlight a 'Great American Pig-Ou t' festival were scrapped underpressure from a local animal rights group who said it would have been cruel and inhumane. (18.1 33)

c -

even f u r t h e r letter bombs from the 'shadowy extremist coup' the Animal Rights Alitia have further deepened the mystery as to whether they are - in the words of John Bryant of the Animal Protection Alliance 'the handiwork of a fanatical "animal lover" or a bid to stave off reform by discrediting the animal protection cause.'

For the record, the incendiary devices went to: Cabinet Minister Peter Walker, Secretary of State for Agriculture at his Ministry in Whitehall; the Canadian High Commission; Bristol University's veterinary centre in Westonsuper-Mare; Professor Roy Calne, head of department of surgery at Addenbtooke's Hospital in Cambridge; the Manchester HQ of Edelsons the furriers. A day later two others were discovered at a furrier's shop in Hull and at an undisclosed address in Manchester. The various reports added little t o our knowledge of the situation except that it was revealed the devices were posted in Liverpool and that 'police are working o n the assumption that its members are violently opposed t o animal slaughter and experimentation.' (Times) One of the recipients of these devices, Professor Roy Calne, was given ample space in theSunday Times t o air his feelings about the incident, (printed 2

just under an article reaffirming Thatcher's point that modernday peace campaigners are just like the rotten Nazi appeasers of the 30s) and his article proved to be a concise summary of all the main pro-vivisection arguments. Most readers would have swallowed his reasonable points unless, perhaps, they had seen the photospread in the Daily Mirror (Janilary 13th), which showed six dogs rescued by the ALF from the Cambridge University animal holding unit known as 'Laundry Farm'. An editorial clearly stated that these dogs had obviously at one time been people's pets. They were destined to reach transplant surgeon Professor Roy Calne. None of which is t o try and justify the sending of letter bombs. It is worth repeating part of the editorial in the new issue of Liberator, the campaigning newspaper of the BUAV which reads as follows: 'We have to draw the line over which we must never step. That line is between violence to property and violence t o life. Animal Rights people will, amongst other tactics, break the law to create new laws. Governments, through their lack o f action, have pushed the Movement into such forms o f campaigning. We must never let them push us into "letter bomb" tactics as this would discredit the Animal Rights Movement and what it stands for don't ever underestimate the powerful forces that would just love to see that happen!' Incidentally, the New Scientist linked the bomb attack on Canada House with the spate of raids in Canada

in the past two years. They report that 'In a raid o n the J.M.Scneider meatpacking plants at Kitchener, Ontario trucks had their tyres slashed, other attacks have been made on meat plants in the Montreal areas and on research laboratories at McGill University and the Hospital for Sick children in ~orontb.' But perhaps the most interesting news came in the Mail On Sunday which reported that New Scotland Yard and the British Veterinary Association are mounting operations t o meet the threats from animal-lib 'fanatics'. The police, it is claimed, are collating all reports of animal rights actions in order t o build up a nationwide picture. Meanwhile, we are told 'secret contacts have been takingplace between the BVA and un#erground animal rights groups . . to produce a pact by impressing on animal libbers that vets are equally concerned with animal welfare.' We await further developments with interest.

Draguignan (Reuter) -Brigitte Bardot has been acquitted o f insulting a St Tropes florist over the death o f a cat. (29.1.83)

ill the Swiss ban vivisection? A referendum is t o be held on the 1 subject within the next eighteen ' months and public feelings run inert. A recent demonstration in Bern

UNDERCURRENTS No. 59

'there is no known pregnancy test for polar bears'

drew support from West Germany, France and Austria and there is no doubt that there is a growing movement throughout central Europe. Of course Switzerland is the heartland and homestead of three major chemical companies - Ciba-Geigy, Hoffmann-La Roche and Sandoz who between them use two million animals a year in their laboratories. Ranged against them are the more than 150,000 Swiss people who have forced the referendum which, if passed, could effectively end pharmaceutical research in the country. Similar battles are taking place in the US over H.R. 6928, the final version of a 'facilities' bill aimed at the construction and modernisation of 'animal rooms' and their inspection, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. It pays lip service to the idea of developing alternatives in order to get the humane society backing but provides no funds for this purpose. Make no mistake we're talking about big business here, as this extract from the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical association attests to: 'The research animal industry in this country has advanced both in size and technologically in a manner which parallels the overall scientific advances of biomedical research. An entirely new industry has been developed. . . with several o f the larger companies having obtained international status with stock traded regularly on the major exchanges of this country .' That was written in 1972. The latest annual report of the US Department of Agriculture shows that, as of 1981, there were 1,664 animal suppliers of which 536 were new. Charles River Breeding Laboratories, the subject of an in-depth probe in The Beast and known affectionately as the 'General Motors of Animal Breeding' had their best year ever. It was also announced that a national Chimpanzee Breeding Program is under way, backed by $112,980 of National Institute of Health Funds. Yet in a recent issue of Lab Animal the trade magazine for the US Animal Research Professional, Or Orland A. Soave revealed that there had been an almost 40 percent overall decrease in the use of research animals during the period 1968-1978, mainly on the grounds of cost rather than morality. Whatever the truth of the matter, US animal liberationists still have a long struggle ahead. Incidentally,Lab Animal also carries

Hunt. They include: tape recordings of Sousa marches and wolf howls, spraying deer repellent, using helicopters to scatter game, mining duck blinds with rotten eggs and using a device called the Star-Spangled Goose, a redlwhite and blue motorised duck-shaped object which swims the marshes blaring out the National Anthem.

an advert for a new type of dog food, specially formulated for stress conditions found in the lab. Called Respom 2000, the ad copy reads: 'To meet the special needs o f growing puppies, lactating bitches, hypertensive breeds, and dogs under experimental stress, Respond 2000 supplies more digestible energy and substantially more protein than many other dog foods. And it provides the vitamins and minemls needed to maintain peak conditions without overfeeding.' What next?

PREGNANCY SLIP KILLS BEARS; The deaths o f twin bears at Edinburgh Zoo are thought to have been caused by the stress o f being shut up together. They were,believed to be pregnant and were locked in cubbing dens. They were not pregnant and died two weeks after the confinement. There is no known pregnancy test for polar bears. (Times 26.2.83)

'Dogs will be carrying firms'slogans around the streets o f London and earning cash for their owners. The man behind the idea, 24-year old Ray Woolford. anticipates no problems with animal rights campaigners who might think he is exploiting man's best friend. "Putting an advertising slogan on a dog's coat is certainly not cruel. And I think they will step out with an extra spring in their step knowing they are helping to earn their keep.' (Standard, 16.2.83)

The seals may have won at the Council of Europe but thanks to the farming lobby, they voted by 72 to 67 that there was no reason to restrict or prohibit the cramming of geese to produce foie gras, an industry that supports 20,000 small fanners in France, Just launched on the discerning British palate is the Vegeburger, brainchild of Greg Sams of Harmony Foods, now a Ă&#x201A;ÂŁ2. million a year turnover operation. Launched nationally, he Best news of the month has been hopes to be selling 250,000 a week that, even before the two-year ban on within six months. However he wasn't the import of baby seal products has allowed to use the phrases 'the no-cow been passed by the European burger' and 'delicious, nutritious and Community, the traditional Newfound- kind to animals' in his TV commercials land hunt has been abandoned because for the product. the bottom has dropped out of the Turkey eaters should be warned that consumer market and only a handful of if you survive the dangers of salmonella hunters are expected to take out license poisoning you could still fall prone to this year. This represents a major victor another bacterium, rejoicing in the name for Fund For Animals, Greenpeace and of carnpylobactorjejuni, which is the many other animal groups who led responsible for a sixth of the case the fight. infectious food poisoning. Research has Now the strugglelooks like spreadin# also shown that over 70 per cent of to the hunting activities of the North broiler chicken carcases are also contamAmerican mainland. We are perhaps inated in this way, producing such used by now to the activities of the acute abdominal pains in the eater that Hunt Saboteurs but in the States its a a doctor can easily mistake it for a case whole new ballgame and a very much of acute appendicitis. more dangerous pursuit. Their huntsmei Incidentally, Alan Long, Research have guns and are not afraid to use advisor of the Vegetarian Society has them. discovered, by examining the menu in The fight is being led by Friends of a Korean restaurant, that their word Animals who have developed a variety c for meat is 'yuk'. ingenious methods for disrupting the John May

Are you confused by Keynes, fazed by Friedman or turned off by Tax Reform? The green movement hasn't paid sufficient attention to economic realities argues Jonathan Porritt, chairperson of the National Council of the Ecology Party.

conomics remains the Achilles Heel of the green movement. We seem to have so little to offer, as the debate remains obstinately bogged down in the swamps of monetarism or neoKeynesianism, stage-managed by the manipulation of redundant polarisations, and rendered utterly inaccessible through a terminology as depersonalised and obscurantist as that which characterizes the nuclear debate.

That this should be so is mostly our fault; the majority of those who see themselves as part of the green movement choose to keep out of the economic debate. A tradition of utopianism at one end of the scale has gone hand in hand with an often narrow minded self sufficiency movement at the other. But the problems we face are no more resolvable through the effete rhapsodies of the former than through the shit-encrusted worthiness of the latter. Escapist ends without means, escapist means without ends: between the dreamers and the drop-outs, it's little wonder that green economics remains utterly irrelevant t o most people in this country. Nor should we be su rised that the em-growth fixations o r former ecologists has done little t o enhance our credibility. Growth provides the social and economic touchstone of modem societies; so sacred a cow has it become that t o propose its instant slaughter is to put oneself beyond the pale of most people's comprehension. It's all a question of time-scale. In the long run, all nations will have t o learn t o manage the demands of their people within a sustainable economy. The' characteristics of such an economy are clear: reduced industrial throughput, greater self-reliance through larger decentralised economic activity, maximised use of renewable resources and conservation of non-renewable resources, and a far-reaching redistribution of wealth, land and the means of production. Such an economy would emphasise the importance of sociallyuseful, personally fulfilling work, within a more cooperatively-based framework and enhanced by the use of new tech-

nologies where they complement the above features. In the short term, we have t o find ways of arriving at this goal by establishing consensus on certain transitional moves; green economics is just as much in the business of persuading people as the rest of them. When Rudolf Bahro addressed the Ecology Party Conference in October, there were many who were frankly sceptical of his apocalyptic vision of the end of industrialism, and it's been interesting to see how very differently the Greens in Germany presented their

economic policies in the recent election. For all their wonderfully inspiring success, they are still aware that they attract the support of only,5% of German people. The vast majority remain apprehensive about the extreme anti-industrialism of some ec010gi~t~. o the first task of green economics remains that of persuading people that we simply can't go on as we've done before. Old fashioned economic growth, generated by continually increasing industrial output, is simply not possible. There are enormous dangers in a system which

UNDERCURRENTS No. 59

is so irrational that merely to survive it has to create the demands that it then seeks to satisfy, and then to create yet more of them. The logic of ecology stands in direct opposition t o the logic of industrialism; for it is clear that in the very process of 'succeeding', industry cannot help but destroy its own material base. High consumption cannot be sustained indefinitely on a planet with severely finite resources. That remains the unchanging message of physical ecology. Beyond that, we have also learned what appalling social and human costs can arise on account of our uncaring, throw-away industrial society. Rising expenditure on welfare, the health services, crime prevention, pollution control and a score of other so-called 'external costs', imposes an increasing burden on limited resources. There's little doubt that these problems will be exacerbated by the accelerated introduction of the microchip. The maximisation of productivity and profits requires a reduction in labour costs, and extensive application of the new technology, whatever the nominal levels of growth t o which it contributes, will cause the loss of millions of jobs. The political implications of all this are staggering - and it must be said that a large part of the green movement still chooses t o ignore them. Until very recently, the relationship between industrial output and employment levels was so obvious that it would have been perverse to question it. Rising output meant that firms hired more workers and unemployment fell. But this relationship can no longer be taken for granted. Since 1950, there have been three distinct phases in OECD countries: between 1950 and 1965 there was a 7% growth in industrial output and a 1% increase in employment; between 1965 and 1973, there was a 6% growth in output, but employment remained stagnant; between 1973 and 1979, there was only a 1% growth in output, but an average fall in employment of 2% per annum. Since then, things have got even worse. The belief that it's still possible t o stablize unemployment by stimulating demand and so pushing up industrial output is at the heart of conventional politics. Tragically, this option is no longer open: for one thing, output will soon be severely limited by market saturation, and for another, productivity will increase so rapidly as to offset the possibility of any significant reduction in unemployment. Full employment on

the basis of increased industrid output is therefore a myth, and the major parties are engaged in one of the g r ~ s ~ eexercises st of collective electoral mendacity ever seen. Not only would any such increase in output be ecological suicide, it would not even achieve the desired goal of reducing unemployment. So much for demonstrating what's wrong; it's much harder to demon-

strate that there is an alternative, and one which is positively desirable from the point of view of social cohesion and individual self-interest. It's important t o stress that element of self-interest if we wish t o engage in the real world. Multinationals, banks, centralised bureaucracies, money itself: these all loom large in our various green horror-catalogues. But for the vast majority of people the perceived, direct

the majorparties are engaged in one of the grossest exercises of collective electoral mendacity ever seen

benefits they derive from them easily outweigh the disbenefits that are for the most part indirect or 'someone else's concern'. Sustainability,selfreliance, decentralisation, voluntary simplicity: I can say from bitter experience, that these don't cut a lot of ice on your average door-step! ere again, green economics is caught in a time-trap. From the long-term point of view it is for instance quite clear that we have to in some way of dividing up the 'national cake' that is not necessarily dependent on people having a job. Should not basic material security be guaranteed through a Minimum Income Scheme, whereby all social security benefits and tax allowances would be replaced by a single automatic payment? All would be eligible, whether they were in work or out of work; such a scheme would underpin the wages of the low paid and halt the drift towards a dangerous divided society, in which those with high-technology skills or industrial muscle can continue to demand high wages, whilst the low-paid and unemployed are trapped by increasing poverty With that sort of guaranteed safety net, a decentralised economy, based on local production for local needs, could become a reality. Community Development Banks and Employment Agencies could be set up to channel local savings into schemes to create local employment, with the whole community engaged in the creation of long-term wealth rather than the spurious affluence of advert-induced mass consumption. But such changes seem so distant and sweeping that they have little immediate relevance to today's industrial wasteland That's what we have to address outselves to now, and too many greens remind. me of the ever-popular Irishman giving directions to a stranger: 'Well now, this is not the place to be starting from if you're wanting to get there'. (But will Eco ban Irish jokes?- Ed.) . There are three main areas in which Immediate and significant transitional measures could be brought about, without an eariy green revolution. The first of these is the unglarnorous area of fiscal change. This country's tax base is in a complete mess, and crying out for reform. The goals of such reform should be to shift the burden of taxation away from employment and work onto the consumption of resources, away from smaller units to larger units, away from initiative and creative thinking to waste

of nuclear power, a massive safe-energy and inefficiency. More specifically, a programme could create hundreds of Resources Tax should be introduced jobs; the building industry could be and the employer's element of the expanded, and we need major investNational Insurance levy phased out; ment in the coal industry, the railways multinationals and big business could and our canal system; the Resources be encouraged to split into smaller units by the introduction of a Turnover Tax mentioned above would provide the necessary incentive for re-use and Tax, and Corporation Tax made progressive (thelarger the company, the recycling, and encourage maintenance and repair firms. more it would have to pay); and the There is, quite simply, more good threshold for VAT should be considerwork to be done than there are people ably reduced, and all repair and to do it. Green economics lays a lot of maintenance work zero-rated. stress on that word 'good'. So desperate he second area concerns a whole have both people and politicians becomt series of structural changes in the that work of any description seems economy, with the emphasis on better than no work; we turn a blind small businesses and cooperatives, eye to the mass of socially irresponsible on part-time and casual work, on selfproduction that results from such employment and community projects. desperation. Most greens take the view We need a strategy of positive diirirnithat good work fulfilling to the nation in favour of human-scale individual, beneficial to the community, economic activity. The Manpower harmless to the environment -remains Services Commission could be usefully a basic necessity of the human conrestructured to play in its part in this dition. And that means that until people shift of emphasis, and there would be a assume control over the socio-economic far larger role for local government; the forces that shape their lives, politicians GLC has already shown what can be will be capable of little more than a done through a Regional Enterprise series of palliative gestures. As one of Board and support for cooperatives. the Lucas Aerospace Combine put it, Moreover, given that there will 'it's like keepingpeople in a cage and inevitably be fewer and fewer jobs debating with them about the colour in the formal economy, we need a consistent and thorough-goingapproach of the bars'. It is in this sense that writers as to the redistribution of work. We face different as Schumacher and Marcuse a choice between an economy in which have made a plea for peoples' liberation perhaps a quarter of the population from 'the shackles of affluence'. In such work as many as 50 hours a week and are highly paid and highly taxed in ordei a liberated world, work should cease to be just the means by which we earn a to maintain the rest; or an economy in which those who are willing and able to living (ie. wage-labour), but would play its rightful part in the development of work have the right to such work, but the full potential of each individual. for fewer hours, thus spreading both Even from this very brief round-up, work and its benefits more equitably it must be apparent that there exists through society. Many measures have the makings of a green economic already been canvassed, including a alternative. But it's so often been badly reduction in basic weekly hours, a presented; we so often seem to come ban on all overtime, early retirement, across as woolly-hatted and woollyand comprehensive work-sharing and minded lentil-stirrerswhen the job-splitting schemes. questioning gets a little tough. Too And the third area of immediate concern is to create new jobs which are many people sympathetic to a green perspective are reluctant to relate their not vulnerable to technological change or to the pressures of inflation. There Is environmental and ecological concerns to the economic imperatives of latter still considerable scope for sustainable day industrialism. They can see that growth through the development of we're stuck on a wickedly destructive socially-useful products, and the protreadmill, but it seems so difficult to do vision of the real needs of society anything about getting off it. through small-scale enterprise. And we That has to change. There is little should be addressing ourselves to the doubt that a coherent, realistic proneeds of the future: food production gramme of green economics is could be encouraged at every level, fundamental to the prospects for any emphasis given to programmes of rural genuinely radical platform in this regeneration, reafforestation and land country. reclamation; by rejecting the insanity Jonathan Porritt

UNDERCURRENTS No. 59

vanished. After brief investigatio~ the case is declared closed. And I dm think about Sophie SchoU, the brave woman who fought in her own way, together with her brother, against the fascist state of Germany, against suppression and dictatorship.

Petra Kelly, newly elected as head of the German Green Party List, gave the following speech when she received the 'Alternative Nobel Prize' recemtly in Stockholm. *

I would like to cite Emma Goldman, who wrote: 'The true emuncipatwn begins neither at the polls nor in the courts, it begins in women's soul.' History tells us that w e v oppressed c l a gained ~ true liberation from its mastem through its own efforks. It is newsmy that women earn from that lesson, that they realize that their freedom will reach as far as their power to achieve their freedom reaches The true essenceof Emma Goldman'! feminist vision was that women should start taking reqonsibility for their own lives instead of trying to improve or purify those lives of men. Emma Goldman explained that is male e g o t i i , vanity and strength in the patriarchal sense, operated to enslave women. It waspartly, she argued, because women themselves often idolized those qualitie in men, creating than a self-perpetuating system. Women must change their consciousness,break from the patriarch. al circle and free themselves from such ill-suited ideals as those of the ma~uline,patriarchal and nuclear society. All too long we have been told that to gain equal chances and equal opporhnities, we must accept the equal rights and equal duties of men. ~ uit-cannot t be-emancipation to learn how to operate a nuclear reach or or to be able to sit in a nuclear silo and control the control board.

Have We aFuture? w M y vision of a non-violent, ecological and non-exploitathe republic! 'Oh sisters, come you sing for all you're worth Arms are made for h k h g , sisters, we are asking for the Earth' I dedicate this speech and these remarks first and foremost to my 77-year-oldgrandmother, Frau Kinigunde Birle, who has accompanied me here to Stockholm and who has been my guardian light and inspiration throughout these past 35 years. I also dedicate these remarks to my sister who

has died of cancer and radiation illness in 1970 and who has been the motivation of all my work and efforts within the anti-nude= and anti-war moyement in the pas1 13 years, And when I make these remarks, I also think of Karen Silkwood, the lab technician at an Oklahoma plutonian factory operated by the Kerr-McGee Nuclear company. On November 13th, 1974 she was on her way to deliver her documents about the hazards and wrong-doings inside the facility to a New York Times reporter. She never arrived. Her car went off the road and she

hile women and men blockaded many nuclear ahd atomic installations on the 12th of December 1982, whether in Bitburd Germany or in Greenham com60n or in StockholmlSweden, the vertical and horizontal arms race is continuing. The vertical arms race, in which the main contestants, are the USA and USSR - the continuous attempt to gain numerical and technological superiority - faster, bigger and deadlier missiles leadiig as now to the USA acquiring fiist strike capability and superion@ through the proposed stationing of owner-controlled Pershing 11 and Cruise Missiles. And there is also the horizontal arms race, in which mo-, a@ more .

nations acquire the potential t o produce nuclear weapons or to procure them otherwise. During this decade* many countries will be abie to come within hours of the pbduction of the bomb - including many nations which have agreed to abstain from making one - without actually violating their non-prolifemtion agreement. The bomb and the reactor - they cannot be, in tht eyes of the hropean peace and ecological and women's movement, separated. They are truly Siamese twins - they are swords from so-called ploughshares The military potential of civilian use of nuclear energy has been underestimated. y 1985, about 40 countries will have enough missile material to make three bombs or more. Almost as many are likely to have enough fissile material for 30 to 60 of suck weapons or more. Existing civilian nuclear activities, have as a byproduct, advanced many countries a long way towards the production of atomic weapons grade material. Further. more*since c~ i l i a nnuclear activities overlap with military ones, they can provide a cover-up for further military advance.

over 1million Horoshimas worth* already hang over the world, and their number grows daily. At this p m m t time Ronald Reagan and the United States government subsidize more reactors for South Korea and pressures the Philippines to continue their work on reactors. The USSR speeds up its reactor programme and exports nuclea supplies to the Third World. France develops neutron bombs and the United Kingdom announcesprogramm~ to make its own tritium and highly enriched uranium. Gennany is about to build commercial reprocessing plants and has just g ~ e the n green light to the Fast Breeder in Kalkar. Th world continues to spend over half a trillion Dollars a year a million Dollars per minute - on more efficien~ ways to kill people! On Monday, 6th August 1945, a totally different era in human history had opened. The forces which held together the constituent particles of the atom had been harassed to man's use: on this day, men used them. By a decision of the American military authoritiesymade in wake of the protests of many of the scientistswho

had worked on this project, an atomic bomb wasdmppedon Hiroshima. About 213 of the world's popuhtimn today were born after the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I too was born in 1947? after the bomb on Hiioshima and Nagasaki. Many of us were born in this atomic age and have grown up with the bomb, with many irresponsible leaders, often infantile old men, whether they be in the White House or in the Kremlin? and we have been made to believe that we can live with the bomb and can continue to watch the politicians and military personal build up their stock o overkill war t o p . But in 1976 and in 1981, I went to Hiroshima and to Nagasaki, and I will not forget the atomic victims still suffering today in the atomk hoqitak in Japan and elsewhere in the Pacific, I cannot forget watchiig the children bring their coloured paper cranes to the Memorial Park in Hiroshima and I cannot forget the many women and men of the Pacifk Islands, of the Bikini atoll, of Micronesia, the Indians of the United States and the Aborigines in Australia - all victims of the nuclear industry*aU victims of the militarization and nuclearbation of thii planet Earth which has no emergency exit. have also seen the luxurious airconditioned and thick-carpeted rooms of the &ropean Ekonomic Community in Brussels where I have worked for the pa& 9%years, and I have seen them at NATO*and I have seen them within the Pentagon. There, such terms and such unholy language as 'body-co~nt*~ 'collateml damage*, 'escalation control' and 'targets of opportunity* are used. There, people work, who? speech and behaviour suggest that they are of the conviction that they are doing what needs to bd done and is therefore right. Why can they not stand back from their day-to-day computerized killings and begin to examine the implications of their work? How can these human beings be converted? Just before his death, Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell issued an appeal in which they said: ?3hall we put an end of the human race; or shall mankind and womankind renounce war? Most of us are not neutral in feeling, but, as human beings, we have to remember, that if the issues between East and West are to be decided in any manner that can give any possible satisfaction to anybody, whether A s h y European or American*whether White or Black, then these issues mu* not

be decided by war.' (from the EinsteinRussell Manifesto). Albert Einstein also stated that peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding. And as Mahatma Gandhi said: 'There is no way to peace, peace is the only way.' 'Wars will cease when men refase to fiiht' - this has attracted many t o the pacifist philosophy which is an integral part of the Green Party, the party for which I speak, the alternative party and non-violent movement which I have helped to build up since leaving the Social-Democratic Party in 1978. The Green Party, a non-violent, ecological and basic-democratic antiw u coalition of parliamentary and outer-pariamentary grass roots oriented forces within the Federal Republic of Germany, is a t the moment the only hope I have t o change not only the system of stmctural and personal violence but also to find a way out of the insane policies of atomic deterrance The Green Party t o which I have dedic. ated my efforts and all my energy in the past 3 years, is committed t o basic democracy, t o ecology in the broadest sense of the term, t o social justice and to non-violence. Military leaders and politicians have in the past aroused partial unity by means of fear, pride, anger, hate, lies. Unity can also be aroused by love and the desire for social justice. e can kill thousands, because we have first learned t o call them the enemy. Wars commence in our culture first of all because

we kill each other in euphemisms and abstractionslong before the first missile: have been launched! It has never been true that nuclear war is unthinkable. It has been thought and has been put into effect. It was done in 1945 in the name of the Allies - it was done by professing Christians, when a victory against the Japanese wascertain. What is unthinkable is that nuclear war could happen t o us. So long as we can suppor that this war will be inflicted o n 'them' the thought comes easily. 'And if we can suppose that this war will save our lives, or serve our self-interest o r even save us from queuing every other day for gasoline, then the act can easily follow on.' (E.P. Thompson). We think each other t o death. The deformed human mind is the ultimate doomsday weapon - it is out of the human mind that the Pershing 11s and SS20 and neutron warheads come. All-over the world, people from the grass roots, from below, are saying 'no' t o the games of the super-powers. They are coming in the thousands and in the hundred thousands tomorrow. Women were arrested o n November 17th, 1980 at the end of a two-days civil disobedie~ceaction at the Pentagon. Women were recently arrested outside the missile base a t Greenham Common, for they had protested nonviolently for several months in a peace camp. And on September 9th 1980, a group called 'Plough-shares Eight' (among them the Berrigan Brothers) walked into the General Electric Reentry division plant a t King of Prussial

Pennsylvania, hammered on two nuclear warhead cones and poured their blood on the damaged cones and on documents and desksuntil they were stopped by guards and arrested. On March 6th, 1981 they were found guilty of several felonies: burglary, criminal conspiracy etc. a t the Montgomery country court in Wellstown/Pennsylvania. Daniel Berrigan, stated in December 1980: 'The State has perverted law t o the point of legalizing its nuclear psychosis. 6 0 cents of every Federal Tax dollar now goes into the bottomless rathole of the Pentagon. This state and others like it throughout the world remain invincible unless they are challenged by non-violent c ~ idisobedience. l I believe we are a t that point. The government has become invincible t o our fear, accountable t o no one for military waste, invincible in its determination t o initiate or t o provoke thermo-nuclear war. We commit civil disobedience at General Electric, because this genocidal entity is the fifth leading producer of weaponry in the United States. T o maintain this incredible position, General Electric drains 3 million dollars a day from the public treasury, an enormous larceny against the poor.' We must do all we can to prevent an Euroshima. We must resort t o nonviolent blockades, sit-ins, die-ins, hours of silence, fasting periods, inform ation campaigns, discussion with the police and with military personell. We must rejoice with the many (69,000) thousands of war resisters this year. We must also resist any attempt by the statesmen and politicians of East and West to manipulate this movement t o their own advantage . . . Our objectives must be to free Europe from confrontation and t o lead this Europe out of both blocks. e must begin to work towards conversion models and join our critical trade unionists, such as Mike Cooley from Lucas Aerospace, a deal friend of mine, so that we have solutions for the 8 to 10% unemployed workers in the arms industry, once peace breaks out. We must find ways and means to make alternative production, to produce socially usefully and necessary products instead of military supplie. And we women in this peace movement, my sisters, reject the plans to integrate women into the armed forces. We will not forsake our liberation by accepting patriarchy's interpretation

of equality. Many women have risen to leadership positions in the German anti-war and Green movement and these women make very clear that in order to establish more equal relations between the sexes, men must learn to nurtum life rather than train women to kill and obey orders. The anti-war and anti-nuclear movement does not mean negative protest: it is nece.ssarily pro-emironmen4 prowoods and-pro-fields,pro-rivers and oceans, pro-plants and animals, pmsolar energy, preclean air and above all, pro-people. It is a planetay vision, a planetary moral standard, for h u n w people, poor people, women, youth, tht handicapped, the old people, the Amazone tribes, the Aborigines, the inner-city slum dwellers, the oppremd minorities everywhere - we are all in this together. We are in fact the realists, we are not only the dreamers of brother- and sisterhood, of nonviolence and of survivaL When I think of the non-uwlence

that we need not only in the course of politics but as a m y of life, I think of the natiue Americans, who have a reverence for life, respect, human dignity and understand the interconnection of all things to an extent that has yet to be surpassed. The genocide perpetrated by the United States on the Indian tribes and cultures - a pattern which still continues today - remains one of the most crucial indictments of the white civilization. In 1854, Chief Seattle, leader of the Suquamish-tribe in the Washington temtory delivered this prophetic speech to mark the transferral of ancestral Indian lands to the Federal Government: '. . this we know. The Earth does not belong to man; men belongs to the Earth, this we know. All things are connected like the blood which unites one family. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the Earth, befalls the sons of the Earth. Man'did not weave the web of life, he is nearly a part in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.' A.J. Musk wrote that humanity faced a major crisis in which only the drastic change such as is suggested by the terms rebirth, conversion, can bring deliverance. A.G. Muste called for a non-violent revolutionary movement which would include both changes in external relationships and an inner transformation of the individual. That is to say that while we are fighting against the larger war, the ABC-war,

deprivation is surely as heinous death by force of arms. We must bring together on thi; planet Earth the different p u p s which have been used to work in an isolation and that means hard work. We must form a grass mots alliance based on shared interests if we are to reach out effectively to a larger audience. We heed to develop a non-violent strategy, not only to stop the deployment of fimt strike missiles in Europe, but to begin reducing all mass destructive weapons and finally to get rid of them. And I make a last appeal not only to the Peace Movement in Europe, but to the Third World movement werywhere, because especially wotqen and children of the ,..- -am-.Third World are to perish fiist. They against the small wars, the wars of have already begun to starve. All that is violence that take place every day in asked of them is to starve quietly. The tragedy of women in the Third World our streets where women fear to walk is one that moves me, touches me deepalone at night, that take place every time a woman is raped or beaten, that ly. There are now about a hundred take place every time a child is hit or million children under the age of 5 always hungry. 1 5 million children die struck. We need not only change the status quo of the so-called institutevery year from infection and malionaliued violence, but we also need nutrition, and there are about 800 to change ourselves fundamentally million illiterates in this world, nearly before we can change the social and 2/3of them are women. The developed political life, nations are armed to their teeth and Conscience must become stronger mean not only to hold on t o what they than custom, and personal risks must have, but to grasp everything they stiil be taken to better the common lot. I can. The suffering people of this world think at this stage especially about must come together to take control the brave initiatives of the Catholic of their lives, ta wrest political power bishops in the United States, on the from their present masters pushing them questions of nuclear disarmament. I towards destruction. The Earth has think of Bishop Raymond Hunthausen been mistreated and only by restoring who has been initiative a tax-strike a balance, only by living with the since April of 1982 with the consequen- Earth, only by employing knowledge ce of perhaps having to go to jaiL I and expertise towards soft energies, think of Daniel Ellsberg and the many and soft technology, a technology men and women on sat on the railfor people and for life, can we overroad tracks in Rocky Flats to stop a come the patriarchal ego. plutonium train. I think of the 1984 and George Orwell - they are farmers in Comiso/Italywho are trying not so far from us, and not so far from to help buy the property to prevent the us is the police-and-atomic state and siting of Cruise Missiles which will the danger of totalitarian regimes point at Libya I think of the 'other all in the name of making secure the America', which is now engaged in nuclear societies. We must lose our the Freeze Campaign and I think fears and we must speak up and we of the many Japanese sisters and must demand what is ours and what is brothers who together with our friends our children's. We must begin to rein the Pacific are marching for a nuclear discover our own nature, we must begin free world. And I think of our sisters to forge new ways, ways of wholeness, and brothers in Eastern Europe may it inter-connectedness, balance, prwrbe within the union of Solidarnosc or vation and decenhalisation. AS Gandhi said, the non-violence of may it be within the East Germany peace movement within the churches the weak must become the non-vi01enCe in East Germany under the symbol of of the brave. I believed that unarmed 'Swords into plough-shares'. tmth and unconditional love will have In any attempt to measure the arms the final word in reality. Petra Karin Kelly race this is the bottom line: Death by

Photomontages on pages 15,20,ond 31 are from ~ M E R A W O R K ' Sexcellenr rowing e ~ h i b . ition. Ring 0 1-9806256 for details.

UNDERCUR ENTs No, 59

With more and more 'experts' telling us that lead in petrol is lethal, Nick Kollerstrom, author of Lead on the Brain explains the politics and problems of banning it.

f the Japanese can build cars to run on lead-free petrol, why can't we? Most experts are by now convinced that there is a health risk from lead, and that we all have too much of it. By the end of 1985, the petrol companies will have reduced the amount of lead in petrol from 0.4 grains per litre (g/l) to 0.15g/l and total emissions from vehicle exhaust will be down to about three thousand tons per annum, in Britain. There were two main

reasons why they made this decision, instead of taking it all out. Firstly, there is the EEC legislation, in force since 1980, that petrol containing between 0.4 and 0.15g/l lead must be available in member states. This is t o facilitate international trade in cars, and also t o enable a car t o be driven throughout Europe without adjustment. Secondly, it was a move which cost the car industries nothing. UK petroleum firms are having to invest an estimated Â£30 million in building

new plant, so that the three grades of petrol will continue t o be available, at the same octanes, but with 60% less lead in. So the cars won't notice any difference. Taking it right out would have had two effects in car redesign, one major and one quite minor. Nearly all UK cars (85%) have high compression ratio engines, and need high octane fuel. This needs t o be fuelled with lead in, because the petroleum companies are emphatic that they cannot produce in bulk highoctane leadless fuel. The refining would have t o be too severe, and it would be too expensive. So, instead, UK cars would have t o be redesigned t o run on low-octane, leadless petrols. This means rebuilding the cars with lower compression ratio engines. Also, exhaust valves would have t o be hardened t o take leadless fuel. This decision has already been made by Russia (1956) Japan (1973) America (1975) Sweden (1980) and most recently by Australia (1981). Every country which has decided t o go leadfree has taken the two-star low-octane route, and none has ever seriously considered producing four star petrol on a large scale. An EEC investigation which compared the efficiency of cars at various octanes, against the cost of refining the fuel t o different octane grades, concluded that 92 octane was the most economical octane for leadfree petrol. For the 0.15g/l fuel that we'll have by the end of 1985, it concluded that 9 5 octane was the most economical. Lead is put into petrol as tetra-ethyllead (TEL), about a teaspoonful per gallon, and as it happens Britain is the number one world exporter of TEL. Perhaps this is why the Government is not in a hurry t o get rid of it. Associated Octel earns Britain Â£10 million every year. But there are other reasons too. Lead happens t o be a very useful substance as well as being one of the most toxic elements. TEL is a far better antiknock agent than anything else. It stops premature ignition of the petrol/air mixture as it is being compressed in the cylinder, enabling a higher compression ratio t o be obtained. Methyllmanganese was widely used in the US after lead was banned, t o boost the octane rating of fuel by 2-3 points, but only a few states now permit this owing t o concern about the accumulation of manganese in the environment. UK petrol companies have given an undertaking not t o add it instead of lead. UNDERCURRENTS No. 59

Other additives suggested include MTBE (methyl tertiary butyl ether) to petrol, as this has a high octane, about 100, but such large quantities would be required that it certainly couldn't be used instead of lead throughout Europe. very recent alternative possibility has come from the lead filters developed by Associated Octel. These fit on to cars in place of the silencer, only they are slightly larger so slight chassis modifications would be required. They cost about twice as m u d as silencer &d could add Â£5 t o the cost of a car, but then they last twice as long so in the end there would be little extra cost. They last for about 50,000 miles which is six years driving, on average. The crucial question with filters is the efficiency which they maintain over years. In the past, when they were tried with 0.4g/l they couldn't really cope and only managed 50-60% filtering efficiency. However, Octel, who have developed the filter, now claim t o have one which maintains 80-90% filtering efficiency over 50,000 miles, for any car driven under 70 mph. This would reduce air lead emissions t o about 1/15 of their 1981 levels, which many would regard as quite acceptable. Octel's position over these filters is intriguing. Understandably, they have to deny claims that their product has been damaging the brains of children. Therefore, they cannot recommend that there is any need for the filters. However, if the public want them they are available! A Royal Commissfon which is now looking into whether any further lead reductions are necessary, and which will report later this year, is looking it these various possibilities. It will compare the claims of the filters as against the lead-free two-star route. Let's look in more detail at what the atter would involve. It will-cost the petrol companies irtually nothing t o produce lead-free wo-star petrol. They could do it omorrow. They simply stop adding E L and blend together the high and ow octane fractions they have at resent, and it would come out at 92 ~ctane.The only thing they would then omplain about is that this would ontradict the directive they were given n 1981, and that the investment they re presently making t o go down t o .15g/l would be partially wasted. About 5% more crude oil would iced to be refined each year because the fficiency of UK cars, i.e. how many

E a

miles they do t o the gallon, will decrease when they are readjusted t o run on twostar petrol. This will cost UK car drivers about Â£50 million per annum as extra fuel, at current prices. In the US, some drivers were dissatisfied with the lower performance which they got from cars on leadless 'regular' fuel, i.e. two-star, so garages introduced another pump with 'premium' grade leadless fuel with an octane rating of about 94, which gave a better performance, i.e. more thrust in the engine. However, UK oil companies definitely don't want t o have five pumps at each petrol station! During the transition period, when all new cars are being made t o run on leadless fuel, both leaded petrol for old cars and leadless petrol for new cars will be available. The petrol companies do not want the huge extra expense of putting extra petrol pumps on t o every garage forecourt. So, if it were decided to phase out lead in petrol entirely, they would rather opt for simply replacing all of the two-star petrol at present

available with two-star leadless. So the 20% or so of UK cars presently using two-star would suddenly be running on leadless fuel. There is the problem here that lead has a lubricating function in preventing exhaust valve recession. But only a trace of it is needed. So for one fill in every 1 0 or so present cars running on two-star would have to fill up on three-star, which would still have lead in. This would ensure that they had the trace of lead necessary for smooth running. (N.B. This would not apply t o Japanese cars which are manufactured with hardened exhaust valves and therefore have no need for lead.) In the meantime, one way to avoid lead polluting the air for those addicted t o the internal combustion engine is t o travel by bus - with a diesel engine, they use no lead - that is, if you can afford the fares.

Nick Kollerstrom

author of 'Lead On The Brain' (Wildwood) CLEAR,2 Northdown St, London N19B9

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Americans to smash up the Germans. That was the reason for the second world war.' Dora Russell at her house in As everyone who had read her Cornwall recently. She has autobiography, The Tamarisk Tree lived near Lands End since the knows, Dora Russell went to Russia 1920s and this house has seen her in 1920, at a time when such visits activities over the years as writer, were banned by the British Govemcampaigner for birth control and ment, a young girl travelling on her child allowances, women and own volition. She had already visited America with her father and in the childrens' rights, and as mother 20s she argued that hostility towards and teacher who ran her own Russia was pointless and dangerous. progressive school for 16 years. She wrote again in a recent pamphlet Her school predated the better'The failure to recognise and promote known school at Dartington and, friendly relations with Soviet Russia as we can learn from the cover of was one o f the greatest blunders o f the second volume of her autobio- history. ' graphy, A S . Neil1 called her the 'When I went to America in 191 7 'only other educator'. I saw the machine in operation and technology being treated like a religion. She was one of the founders In Russia in 1920 1found what I of the Conservation Society, thought was the spirit that could helped set up CND, and went animate the running o f the machine, on women's peace marches in the comrades saw it that way too; but pre-CND days. She even organized the idea was that once you get the a 'Women's Peace Caravan' that thing running, it would run like a toured Russia in the 50s. machine and everyone would fit into I had great misgivings about America their proper place in society.' being called into the first world war. ' A t that time everyone was talking When thev were all stuck in the mud about the evils o f capitalism in Russia m Flanders it was practically staleand the capitalists were talking about mate. If we had had a truce then, and the evils o f communism. I argued they settled it with Germany, without were both stuck in the same thing. America, we might have had a united The industrial machine had become Europe; but instead we called in the

y w h o l e life ha^ uulens p e n t fighting t h e cold war', said

a religion with two sects. Capitalism and Communism was like Catholicism and Pro testantism.' Immediately after her return from Russia she went to China with Bertrand Russell. 'When I came back no-one understood what I was trying to say, so what with the birth control campaigns, m y children and Bertie (she was married to Bertrand Russell for 12 years) it was too difficult to carry on with the book. Convinced that most of the things I had prophesied had come true Ipicked it up again recently and asked myself, what is it all about? Why did we make the machine'. Her answer to this question has taken the form of a history of consciousness titled The Religion o f the Machine Age t o be published by RKP in September, who gave her the original contract 6 0 years ago. She finally felt able to produce the book because in the last two decades we had begun to understand what Dora understood right a t the beginning: the worship of industrialisation and technology is potentially a worse danger than any political ideology. er comprehensive history maps out past events - from primitive man and the Babylonians - as dominated by a male consciousness. the past shows us how men have consistantly turned away from a dis-

UNDERCURRENTS No. 59

The industrial machine had become a religion with two sects

course on emotional life. Instead they have explored and created abstract systems which are then turned on the world as a creed or political system. Patriarchal society has always been more interested, abstract notions such as astrology, mathematics that human lifeor the life o f the planet. Mathematics and religion and science become confused together as male ideology grows. We see God the Father transformed by the later medieval period into God the Clockmaker and architect o f the universe. Her description o f the formulation of male conscious is as follows. The nature o f sex is such that a man is more easily able to reject the body to persue intellectual speculation whereas women's relationship t o the physical aspects o f life is maintained by pregnancy, child bearing and rearing. Descriptions o f myths, political systems, philosophies, ideologies and religious beliefs all are evidence for 'mens flight from the body'. By fleeing thus they have managed to create a mechanical universe. Her concept o f male and female is psychological and emotional rather than referring only t o biological differences. While men tend t o ignore the 'female*,women themselves, children and the life o f the planet, so do some women (such as our glorous leaderene). She is worried that, having fought for sexual liberation and birth control, many women are adapting a 'Male' iissociation from themselves, and a nechanical approach t o sex and life. 3he does not see the mechanical age as 1 mistake only that we must now lecessarily move on to another epoch.

A discussion o f her book naturally moves therefore into a discussion o f her own life. 'When I began to write my first book The Right t o be Happy I wanted to stretch the human system and base it on basic biological needs food, shelter, sex, parenthood, knowledge o f the environment, needs which the society growing up around me simply didn't cater for - it seemed to me then, the exising dualism o f mind and matter, soul and body was the chief source o f what was wrong with our society. It led to the repressing o f the creative force o f instinct and basins our laws and institutions upon abstraction.' 'Taking this idea further, the problem o f dualism has obviously derived from the philosophy and religion o f men since there is no sign that women had any part in shaping it'. 'Men do not ask themselves what goes on with the woman who he relegates to serving his own physical needs by keeping her in ignorance and seclusion. Perhaps the enslavement o f women came about when men first discovered their own part in begetting children, whose birth was not a miracle o f femah fertility. I believe the true nature o f men's repression and hostility to wome begins with dependence and resentmen, of women as sex partners and as maternal source o f safety and care during childhood. . . Women are forced to accept men's view o f sexuality, to be ashamed o f their earthly desires, to becomes frigid and take on many diseuises foreign to their natures.' Only prehistory is women's history, , says Dora, when the basis o f our farm-

ing culture, the cultivation o f domestic plants and animals, developed y retaining the opposition of feminine and masculine as distinct qualities t o draw on this book may not be liked by all feminists but it does support an ecofeminist argument in a fairly farseeing way, with its eye cast simultaneously backwards and forwards through history, I f male sexuality is the 'Prime Cause' o f our persistently inhuman political structures, then would we not be better modelling our world on female sexuality? 'If you ask any o f ourpundits what are the motives underlyingpolitical action, some will say lust for power, others economic forces, material determmism by the means of production, sometimes perhaps religious sectarian interest, or more often idealistic hopes for improving the human condition. Yet the relationship o f sex difference, between men and women, to the rearing o f their offspring, and the foundation o f the family is obviously the beginning o f economic and social life. . , Social happiness and harmony will flow from the co-opemtion and adjustment o f two parential leads'. She has in the past been described as a pagan. Was a belief in the processes o f nature a kind o f religion too. 'It's not a religion. It's an obvious fact o f nature. I used to have a lot of feelings of pantheism as a child. I talked to the trees and the God of the sea. The sunset used to excite me and the clouds. It's not religious to realise you live on this earth, that you are an animal like other species. That's just accepting life as it is.' I f women's sexual and parental nature were the blue print (or greenprint!) for future society we should find human nature as basically a cooperative one. 'There is a naturaraffinity between one organism and another which I think is killed by mechanism. I have a great affinity with my cat.' The cat shows his approval o f this statement by trying his luck and settling on her desk papers. 'We have lost the use o f our senses largely by intellectualising our lives'. 'Instead o f coming together and saying lets make up our mind how much steel the world needs, they say don't bring any steel here our workers are out o f work. Co-opemtion is a dirty word. The phrase 'our competitors' drives me to distraction. Of course they must have the cold war as a means of keeping competition alive, so they

go on, if she dare, until these poor workers in the factories got the same as the South Koreans, who have been exploited ever since America won the war'. 'Law and order does not mean having enemies, nor does it mean repression. Patriarchal law says that your family is in opposition to all other families and your children should do exactly as they are told. I f you are the true mother and father in your household 'you don't have to argue with your children.' She wrote of her book In Defence o f Children, (1932), 'I envisage the possibility o f a society in which the feeling o f women and fathers for their offspring would extend beyond the home into the body politic thus rendering the state no longer a mechanism but the mother and father o f the state'. he preface t o The Religion o f the Machine Age will be the first chapter she wrote on her return from Russia in 1922 entitled The Soul o f Russia and the body o f America! The ideas embodied in it were read by her a t Cambridge debate on Industrialism and Religion but her paper was not well received or understood. The Prospects o f Industrial Civilisation, published in 1923 and jointly written with Bertrand Russell was the product of a furious argument with Bertrand Russell on the Red Sea, on the way t o China Russell had been voicing his anxiety for the freedom of democracy. 'Why are you worrying', was Dora's retort, 'Industrialism will make an end o f democracy, it is

a system that can only be run by oligarchs or a dictator. ' In one volume of The Tamarisk Tree she wrote, 'Ove~ the years I have seen in Hitler, in Germany, Russia, and in the West, the fulfillment o f my melancholy prophesy engendered by that torrid discussion.' The Right to be Happy was one o the first shots of the ecology battle because it was saying we don't want a society based on mathematics and plans. The theme of her second book Hypathia or Women and Knowledge vi concerned with the disabilities suffere by women 'deprived of both citizensh and education' and women's right t o sexual pleasure. There was a great outcry against the last assertion which ensured the book sold 600 copies a week. Extracts from these books will be published this year under the new feminist imprint Pandora. It will also contain articles written by Dora f o r t h Spanish magazine El Sor. 'I used to write for many years for El Sol all the things they didn't want to hear in England' says Dora with a chuckle. She has written the forward t o Keepin, the Peace (see Leone Caldecott's articl in the last issue) and a chapter has bee written on her life in Feminist Theoris by Dale Spender 1983. It looks like bein The Year of Dora Russell. Hypatia was a lecturer a t the ancient university of Alexandra, who had the misfortune of being tofn t o pieces by early Christians for her beliefs. Dora chose her name as a title thinking she might incur the same fate once the book was published;

indeed life has dealt her heavy blows. Bertie for all his greatness, wished t o have someone t o look after him rather than someone who not only asserted matriarchial views but wished t o live by them. He divorced her in the most xuel fashion, taking custody of their two children Dora has since written affectionately (TT1) of their years together while criticising part of his political philosophy. Her lover Paul Gillard, a political activist and novelist, was murdered, possibly by fascists, possibly by British Intelligence. Her's and Bertie's eldest son John suffered a severe breakdown in 1953. She has seen the monopolies and the threat of world destruction grow but she has never withdrawn from life o r political activity. truly remarkable women at 89, she sat and talked t o us for hours without visibly tiring while vitality radiated from her. She had two faces, both compelling: the first is strong and intelligent betraying a remarkable concentration and the second is one of a great sense of humour. Her face dissolves as she laughs into that of a more ordinary person who knows how t o enjoy life. I t is ironic that a feminist like herself has written another novel on men's history albeit one with a wry twist. 'The interesting thing about the Religion of the Machine Age is no men understand it. Women read it and they say Ah yes this is the right book but men say its just a history of ideas, what is she talking about?' The style in which her books, especially the early ones, are written is not the more cynical style we are used t o in modem writing. Contemporary academic books are crowded with information and cross references as if their authors are desperately trying t o fend off uncertainty by a birth of facts. Dora's writing comes from an era of uncluttered relaxed, of sometimes passionate, clarity: from the brilliant Cambridge of her youth. It may be because she is a writer she has amazing recall and can emotionally relate t o the past. Memories do not float past her like a faded cinematograph but are warm and alive. She is not afraid of a poetic o u t b u s t of emotional ideas (she was a renowned speaker in the labour movement) but there is nothing mystical in her world history. T m alwaysafraid ofputtingany mystical connection on things. Fritjof Copra has published books (The Turn-

UNDERCURRENTS No. 59

which talks about departing from Newtonian cosmology and living more by Einsteins' views. I said that already in my letter from Peking in 1920'. This slowness of people to grasp what she sees as obvious seems to amuse, exas. perate and slightly please her all at the same time. The Death ofNature by an American Carolyn Merchant, published here last year, also demonstrates how the mechanised version of the world has taken over since the 17th century but she does not take us back into the deep recesses of history as Dora does, nor does she place the same emphasis on a religious outlook helping to reinforce a mechanistic view. Bahro said too, in his book Socialism and Survival, 'The need for some kind of religious transformation is a disposition of human nature, of our spiritual world i.e. a mental reality. Marxists should take note'.

'Ididn't know about Carolyn Merchant's book until I had written mine', exclaims Dora. 'By the time mine comes out, they will say, Oh, we've heard that all before'. . . 'It's most interesting about Bahro', she continues, 'I've always been anti-marx kt, and for very good reason, because Marx was only interested in the industrial society. Marx never looked at the species as a whole, he always looked at men as the conquerer of nature. I think people have a time trying to disentangle themselves from Marx. Then they say. Look I've noticed there was a person called Jesus Christ. Bahro is like all 'religious' people, he has an idea and he wants to use it to convert people. I'm quite against trying to convert people like that.' She says she is by temperament an anarchist but is also a socialist because she believes in peoples' rights. he present wave of feminism has concentrated much more on the short term. It has aimed consciousness raising and pragmatic changes that can help women now. Many feminists may see Dora's vision as an ideology that can be used against women because it wants them t o conside themselves as mothers. While Dora's warnings of the dangers of industrialism were ignored in the 20s' slowly but inexorably the tide of opinion has changed. Fom Rachel Carson's Silent Spring to Schumacher and Bahro the

f the environment can no longer be [nored. Dora wrote in 1973 'I appreciate

ully the claim that women, have made o enter what is so called a man's world. But there is no such thing as two sepam te world's for men and women. But what women have found 's even as they do break into areas which used only to be allocated for men their lives are fragmented - split between work, motherhood and their emotional selves. 'The whole question o f women runninga home and having a job worried m y generation. It wasn't as central to the argument as it is now, but we were strongly arguing for nurseries for two reasons. First to relieve mothers who wanted to go to work and secondly because it was considered much better for children. In a small family house dominated by adults you don'tget democratic feelings you get with dealing with people your own age.' Her generations passionate belief in the future generations is not something we can understand in the recession tom, over-populated wastelands of today, but it was very much a part of Dora's life and ingrained in her philosophy. Dora ran her 'progressive' schools for 16 years and she recorded her's and the children's experience in The Tamarisk Tree, Volume 2. The first five years she did so in partnership with Bertie, before their divorce. It's not possible for her educational ideas to take root she says, 'It's quite imposs-

ible in a machine society. The first duty that men and women should undertake is the care and nuture o f their species, but it is the very last thing they undertake. The object o f the exam system is to turn out the professional people you want. More and more people who canrtot get jobs are those who can't get a technical training. The world will be divided between the elite who can run the mathematical and technological things and the people who can't.'

he has little time for a question which suggests the roots of all human nature is destructive.

'People are both creative and destructive. You cannot deny that people are destructive. That is why I think early education is important. I

think everything depends on how, in the early years, you give a young child the chance to follow its own creative instinct. I f people start to smash things up then there is something wrong with the way they are being handled. We might get a civil war because o f the amount o f oppression that is going on. Thatcher's plan can only explode into violence. She says we ought to create wealth but she doesn't mean art, litemture or beautifulpeople, but profits.' She feels that the Greens movement is the hope for the future. 'Because at

last they have seen that the industrial society cannot go on for ever, which is the thing that struck me too. The machine age has t o come to an end because if it doesn't the planet will come to an end. I think it's the one hope. Until we can produce a new philosophy which sees men and women as part o f the planet, until we do, it's all quite hopeless, because if we don't have a nuclear war we shall go on ruining the planet by man's conquest o f nature. It has gone on for hundreds o f years now destroying nature. I f men could only understand what we are trying to say and women could cooperate with gifts men have, then we could have a philosophy that would extend life on this planet.' 'People are just beginning to realise in the Labour movement that ecology has got any meaning. We're so backward and provincial, but now ecology is getting tied up with the women's movement. I think 'Women for Life on Earth' is a very good slogan.' Would she mind getting arrested at Greenham Common? 'Well o f course

I wouldn't mind. But the point is: What's the most useful thing you can do. I would have dearly have loved to go on the 12th o f December but I would have been a nuisance as the police had it so arranged that you had to walk 4 miles to get there! I can't even walk to the post box!' She is slightly bemused at the flood of interest that has come t o her so late in life. (Her granddaughter informed us that many 'tourists' like us came t o see Dora in Cornwall). She thinks it has something t o do with being of the last generation 'Igot on

very well with my grand mother. She always encouraged me and said I could do anything'. Mog Johnston1

"Acid rain k n o w s no political boundaries. Pushed b y t h e wind, polluted air masses d u m p acid rain and heavy metals o n whoever is downwind. What originates in t h e stacks of coal-burning plants i n t h e Midwest falls on N e w England and eastern Canada. What is born in Canada gets exported to t h e eastern United States. I n Europe, acid rain originating i n England, France and Germany eventually drops in Denmark, Norway and Sweden. A s t h e biological and economic impacts of acid rain become more clear, political clashes between countries will intensify." his is Hubert W. Vogelmass, Professor of Botany writing in a recent issue of the American magazine Na tural History and his remarks coincide with a further breakdown in relationships between the US and Canada over this corrosive subject. In desperation at the worsening plight of its lakes and the threat t o its tourist, timber and fishing industries, Canada has moved beyond traditional political persuasion and mounting a lobbying effort o n Congress and the American people. Early in February it was reported that scientists from Canada and the US have given up attempts t o agree about what effect acid rain is having o n the environment of North America. Now the US Justice Department has classified' as propaganda three Canadian films which deal with nuclear war and the threat of acid rain and there are moves to set up a register of people and organisations viewing them. The scientific evidence remains circumstantial as no one has yet managed t o trace sulfate ions from furnace to forest but it's growing stronger as time passes. Vogelmann has been studying one special area in Vermont known as Camels Hump. He writes: Twenty years ago the evergreen forests on the slopes o f Camels Hump, a highpeak in the northern Green Mountains o f Vermont, were deep green and dense. The red spruces and

Solve Acid Rah? The CEGB are suggesting that nuclear power could solve acid rain. John May brings you the latest corrosions in the debate.

amounts of heavy metals found in the atmosphere, has the ability t o stunt plant growth dramatically, t o kill fungi and mosses. The rain also combines with insoluable aluminium found in the soil, enabling it t o be taken up by the roots of trees to provide a toxic cocktail that kills. The scientific work continues apace on many continents. Canadian researchers have been dropping water from acidified lakes into the eyes of rabbits to test for the likely effects on swimmers. No damage has been found. he mountain has been intensely In the UK it seems things are moving studied since the mid-1960s and it a t last. MP Tom Dalyell devoted his has now been discovered that regular page in the New Scientist t o the nearly 50 per cent of the spruces in subject recently and reported o n a the forest have died since 1965. The meeting in the Upper House attended possibility of insect damage, populatior by a heavyweight crew of all-party MPs cycles, climate changes have been and experts from both sides of the investigate as causes of this tree debate. What emerged is that we could mortality only t o be discredited. Acid reduce our toxic emissions by half rain looks like the culprit. between now and the year 2000 a t the Just how acid has our rain become? cost of Ă&#x201A;ÂŁ50million and a n increase in This can be measured by comparing it the price of electricity of 15%. with pre-industrial rain, frozen in annua The CEGB,never ones to miss a layers of precipitation deep in the trick, seriously suggested at the Sizewell Greenland icecaps. The answer, in the enquiry, that building a nuclear power northeastern United States, is at least station was an effective way of reducing thirty to forty times more acidic. acid rain, as it would save us building a Lab experiments have shown that coal-fired one. Some argument. this, when combined with small John May

balsam firs that dominated the vegetation near the mountain-top thrived under high rainfall and cool temperatures. The trees were luxuriant, the forest was fragrant, and a walk among the conifers gave one a feeling of serenity -a sense o f entering a primeval forest. The upper slopes o f Camels Hump have probably never been lumbered. Some red spruce more than three hundred years old reached one hundred feet into the sky, dwarfing the younger spruces and firs below.'

UNDERCURRENTS No. 59 i

Plant Power or Biomass is being touted as a way of providing local Nuke-Free energy. Nigel Dudley looks at the pros and cons.

ow that the initial flurry of excitement about solar panels and windmills has died down a little, renewable energy research has swung towards a number of other solar sources for potential fuels. By far the greatest growth of interest over the last few years has been in the use of photosynthesis as a way of storing solar power and converting it into a variety of useful human energy sources. The use of 'biomass' has a number of advantages over other solar energy sources.1 Once plant material is available it can be treated in several different ways t o release the stored solar energy. All dry plant materials can be burnt t o produce heat, or subjected topyrolysis or gasification techniques to produce charcoal, tars and fuel gas. Many types of plants can be broken down and distilled to form alcohols like ethanol and methanol, which are suitable as automobile fuels, while others can produce oils directly from their tissues. Wet plant matter can be put through anaerobic (oxygen-free) digestion t o form biogas and fertilizer. There is, likewise, a great range of available biomass materials for us t o utilise. Most initial research has been directed towards 'waste' plant materials from farming, forestry and domestic sources, including sewage. In the future, we are likely t o see a growth in the number of energy catch crops, planted between the growing seasons of food crops, along with areas used specifically for fuel growing, with crops like coppiced, timber, single-stem forestry plantations and non-woody energy crops. Brazil already has a vast alcohol programme using mainly sugar cane, while South Korea and China have both planted huge areas of timber for fuelwood. Even the more wealthy countries are getting into the act, with Sweden planning to produce large amounts of energy from fuel plantations of conifers and the USA now getting more energy from wood than it does from nuclear power. Almost every country seems t o have some solar biological programme, and research in Britain has investigated a wide range of possibilities, including catch crops and fast-growing plantations.

Photosynthetic fall-out Underneath the euphoria, a few dissidents are not quite as happy however. Biomass has, they claim, almost as much potential t o cause problems as some of the more obviously polluting energy technologies, unless handled very carefully. The pitfalls divide fairly easily into two camps, ecological and political repercussions. Some of the ecological pitfalls have been dealt with elsewhere.2 It doesn't take a lot of imagination to realise that taking away crops and replacing them with more of the same, which are themselves removed as soon as possible and so on, will lead to resource depletion in the soil as surely for fuel crops as it does for food. There is a strong body of opinion that believes we may already be doing tins to an unacceptable degree with our present forestry cropping, and an intensification of the system could only make it worse. However, because each crop takes several years, rather than a single year, the effects may not show up much for a while, and lull developers into a state of complacency. At the very least, energy plantations will need fertilizing in some way, although whether this is achieved by means of inorganic fertilisers or organic is still very open to debate. Current plans to make better use of waste forestry products, like blanches and roots, can only make the situation worse. However, it is the effects on land use that are causing the widest concern. Another serious suggestion put forward, is for cropping fastgrowing natural vegetation, including heather, gorse and bracken, by means of specially designed mechanical cutters, dragged onto the hills by means of tractors or caterpillar-track vehicles. Although it seems difficult to imagine that the plants could produce enough energy to offset the costs of harvesting them, calculations made by workers under contract t o the Energy Technology Support Unit at Harwell believe that this may in fact be the case, and that the system could be sustainable if plants were cropped in the autumn, when many of the nutrients had been returned to the soil. But they don't say what effects cropping would have on the wildlife, or the constant use of heavy plant could

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t is amenity that causes worries in other areas. Countryside groups already bemoan the number of plantation forests we have on our land, and use of biomass for energy would eventually mean many more. Although some of these could be a positive benefit in providing extra wildlife habitats (as in the case of timber coppices or broadleaved plantations) maximisation of production will probably mean that all 'weeds' have to be rooted out or killed with pesticides, while many of the most promising fuel trees are not British at all, but exotics like Eucalyptus.

Biomass in the Third World Whilst use of biomass in temperate countries seems t o be rather a twoedged sword, capable of good or bad depending on how it is developed, its use in the poor countries of the Third World is both more vital and more potentially disastrous. It is important to realise that the vast bulk of people in many Third World countries, comprising some 2,000 million people, already rely on biomass for their fuel almost entirely in the form of fuel wood. And the loss of fuelwood, at an accelerating pace in many areas, is by far the most urgent energy crisis today on a worldwide scale.3 For these, the rural poor of the world's poorest nations, there is no alternative to biomass; even the most optimistic energy scenarios in many developing countries cannot envisage production of any other form of energy for these people in the foreseeable future. So, as stocks of trees are felled, it becomes imperative to replant and replenish the stocks, yet this replanting is still confined to a very few countries where rural organisation is more easily mobilised, either through totalitarian measures as in South Korea, or through village communes as in

China. Other countries, which have replanting programmes initiated by an unpopular and inefficient government, o r by a rich elite, are far less likely to actually take off and succeed. Local tree-planters in India planted huge areas of trees upside-down, as a protest against the inevitable exploitation they believed would result. In many areas of Africa and Asia, young trees are taken for firewood while still far too small, simply because there is no alternative. Larger trees have branches removed systematically, weakening and eventually killing the entire tree. Where other biomass methods have been introduced, these have also met with mixed success. Methane digesters, which decompose sewage and produce methane gas and fertilizer, would seem to be an ideal solution in many countries, especially where livestock manure is often burnt in the absence of wood, thus robbing the soil of much-needed nutrients. In China there are now, if we are to accept official statistics, at least 7 million small methane digesters found throughout the country, providing the bulk of rural cooking gas from human and pig manure, and still leaving a bonus of liquid fertilizer where all the pathogens have been killed in the digestion process. In India, a similar scheme was implemented, and a million digesters are now found in India, but the results have been far less effective, and large numbers of digesters are ignored or inefficiently used by villagers, although the conditions of both countries should make use equally easy. Reasons for the differences can be traced back t o traditions, both of attitudes to waste and of cooking. In China, human sewage has long been regarded as a resource rather than just an unpleasant by-product to be abandoned. In India, on the other hand, cleaning toilets, or any contact with sewage, was the job of the untouchables. and old habits are dying hard in

countries will see fuel plants themselves as a possible export crop, providing desperately needed foreign capital. Yet, if they do so, valuable land will once more be set aside to providing for the rich nations, and the rich elites in the developing countries, rather than fulfilling the vital role of feeding and clothing those developing country inhabitants most desperately in need of help. Biomass could become just one more factor in the widening gap betweer and haves and the have nots.4 Biomass for energy is, therefore, a villagers expected to empty buckets of paradox for any concerned person at the their own faeces into communal pits to moment. Out of all the sparkling new make energy. Again, cooking expecrenewable energy systems being bandied tations are different. In China, stir-fried around, it may well be the most likely foods need the intense heat produced by to actually help people in the short-term the methane digester, and are cooked both t o supply energy and to claw back quickly, so that there is sufficient gas some of the means of survival from for all. Indians, on the other hand, tend faceless companies and governments. to slow-cooking foods like curries, which But we must be very careful if these need less intense heat for a far longer gains are not to be made at the expense period, and the simple methane digesters of our ecology, or that good intentions cheap enough for the villages are not do not simply get perverted into more ideal at producing this. profits for the minority. Nigel Dudley Politics and biomass

hilst introducing new schemes into a traditional society will always be a protracted process, there is evidence that aid teams, and local self-help groups are coming to grips with some of the problems of supplying biomass energy. At its best, plant power has many advantages over other traditional fuels, being locally produced, and usually using techniques already developed to produce food and resources in the past. Rural selfsufficiency comes many stages nearer if energy can be obtained directly from the land around where people are living. There is, unfortunately, a less agreeable aspect to the politics of biomass. As interest grows in the West, it could easily be that Third World

Footnotes 1. For a much more complete description, see, for example, 'Energy: The Biomass Option', Henry Bungay, Wiley, 1981. 2. See 'Ecological Side Effects of Using Biomass for Energy', Nigel Dudley, Ecos, Autumn 1982. 3. 'Firewood: the world's greatest energy crises'; Eric Eckholm, Worldwatch paper number 1; 1975. 4. 'Food or Fuel: new competition for the world's cropland'; Lester Brown, worldwatch papers 1978. These references are only an outline. Although very little has been published about general ecological effects of biomass (hence referencing myself -sorry) a lot has been published about opportunities etc, and I will be happy t o try and direct people to the correct sources if they write t o me with SAE.

UNDERCURRENTS No. 59

The Big Fix victim. For years she was fed on grisly daily cocktail for a weak heart, each Don't worry, it's all going to be new drug aimed at cancelling out the a right. Just keep taking those bad effects of the one before. Eventually she developed leg ulcers that pills. It's a state-authorized fix, refused to heal and turned gangrenous. says reluctant 'guinea pig' She died finally in a stupor of more Andrew Tyler. drugs issued t o blot out recognition of what she'd come to. Cured To Death suggests this sort of rugs are a currency. They have no moral content only varying manically careless prescribing is not untypical. Four out of five visits to degrees of toxicity. Nations British doctors, say the authors, end make laws and develop with drugs - invariably the substantially appetites for drugs according to more expensive brand name substances the social pulse and economic rather than their equally effective imperative. It is therefore a vile generic equivalents - passing hands. hypocrisy to pretend transcendent Yet in 90 per cent of these cases there is no medical ailment in sight. The values are involved. pills are used t o unclutter overcrowded For instance, right nbw we see the surgeries by doctors who've forgotten British authorities wringing their hands the fundamentals of medicine. These over the influx of South West Asian doctors cite the burden of work but a heroin, yet the peddlars of the most more irresistible factor is the strategy lethal drugs in this country are not of major drug companies and their tricky Asians or right wing Turkish acquiesent partners in government. terrorists they are the pharmaceutical he official pimp for the drug giants companies whose monopoly over the within the National Health set-up is 'licit' market is enforced by government, the Department of Health and The picture presented t o the public Social Security. Currently it prois that the drug companies have their odd wrinkle such as Thalidamide or the cures Ă&#x201A;ÂŁ1. billion worth of business per more recent Opren tragedy (61 arthritis year. Most goes to the top 65 firms who are guaranteed a 'reasonable profit' sufferers killed off in two years) but in the main we are reaping benefits from a under the terms of secret price negotiations. The details of what the multitude of miracle cures. Not so. companies ask of the DHSS, and why, A new book called Cured To Death is not open t o outside scrutiny. by Dr Arabella Melville and Colin Johnson estimates that side effects from Outsiders include bodies such as the Committee On The Safety Of Medicine. prescribed drugs kill between 10,000 One individual who is not short of and 15,000 people each year. Furthermore there has been no marked gains in drug cctmpany data is the family GP. Each month s/he is unloaded with a life expectancy due to drugs since the hundredweight of advertising material. '50s. There is one rep. for every seven of As a minor aside my own grandthem; 40 free medical journals plugging mother was one such 'side effect'

brand name promises, free meals, film shows, jaunts t o foreign capitals and hundreds of pounds worth of free drug samples. It was at a Paris jaunt last October that a platform speaker warned about the dangers of Opren. Unfortunately the delegates were by this time insensible with the pleasure of their own importance and a vital clue was missed that could have saved numerous lives. While Opren has now been withdrawn, a report in Private Eye suggests another of Eli Lilly's arthritis products - Dista - is also knocking off alarming numbers of people. Correspondence from several doctors in the British Medical Journal say 'the drug is the commonest cause of death in those cases referred t o forensic medical departments'. As few as four tablets over the recommended daily dosage could prove fatal, according to the Eye report. So far Eli Lilly have warded off such unpleasant innuendo and their drug continues t o be prescribed with little inhibition. octors and pharmacists laid the spadework for their drugs monopoly in the late 19th century when they inspired a series of new laws that granted them sole prescribing and dispensing rights t o opium and its derivatives. It was the aspirin/Valium of its day. Babies were fed it when troublesome or colicky (and more than a few died). Poets such as Coleridge hinted at its inspirational qualities and thus tinged it with some glamour. But there was no 'addiction model'. Not until one was created as the rationale for the new monopoly laws. The logic of these statutes was that ordinary people without 'specialist knowledge' weren't t o be trusted to medicate dangerous opium for themselves. But along with the specialist knowledge came specialist fees, and so the Pharmacy Acts weren't just an attack on self-medication but, to an extent, an attack on the poor unable t o afford doctors. Of course there were problems associated with opium preparations and they certainly didn't clear up once the monopoly had been achieved. Many could be attributed to powerful derivatives as well as to the manner in which they were promoted. In a German laboratory in 1803 the ten times more potent morphine was extracted and peddled freely as a cure for opium craving. A subsequent derivative -three or four times stronger yet - was heroin. This was promoted by

the German Bayer company in the 1890s as a cough suppressant and, indirectly as the answer t o morphine addiction. To compound this gross train of illogic, another powerful invention of German labs - Methadone - is present13 peddled by British and American medical establishments as the heroin solution. But the drawback with having painted opium dangerous in the 19th centurya(theprofessionals had t o in order t o commandeer its distribution) was that they also triggered moral panic in the hearts of upstanding citizenry. Who was responsible for all the vile abuse? Not doctors or pharmacists -they were merely administering to an affliction. So whose fault was it? Useful scapegoats, particularly in America, were racial minorities. There were the Chinese, for instance, in whose parlours 'sporting type' whites were discovering the secrets of opium smoking! The legend of the yellow man trading in succulent white flesh gew up. In the US south it was the negro who was damaging white youth with his marijuana and cocaine. In truth, a good deal more damage than these unauthorised fixes was being done by the increasingly popular hyperdermic syringe. It was the syringe invention that led to the creation of the bona fide junkie - a creature both exquisitely shocking and profitable for the tagalong entrepreneur. Newspapers and then films helped pushed the idea and we now know that many film stars were themselves hooked on a variety of solutions just as members of the British literati were before them.) Later still the music business extracted its own rich currency, only this time the image was of a glamorous wastrel with a metal nose job and a blood change from Switzerland. But in the first two decades of the century when junkie hysteria was at a perfect pitch and pharmacists were still dishing it out, the situation read like this: . . . within the next few months a great effort will be made to stir the nation to a sense o f peril that threatens it in the spread o f the drug habit. . . a new hypnotic in introduced and becomes fashionable in much the same way as a new style o f dressing the hair . . . The hyperdermic syringe is also sold to an extent that indicates a widespread use and many dainty handbags

contain all that is required for a stimulant injection. . .' The (London) Pall Mall Gazette, 1912 With unstanding citizenry aroused, the unfettered prescribing couldn't go on. Numerous laws were passed from the 1920's onwards, both international and domestic. Their effect was t o be brand opium the venal factor as well as tighten the moral and financial authority over all drug sales by the harmacological industry. ince the public still had a deep craving to be tranquilised it meant switching t o new, safer substances. At the turn of the century it was bromides (potassium bromide). They were prescribed as a sedative, sleeper and anti-convulsant. They were immensely popular too until psychiatric wards began filling up with bromism cases - people exhibiting delirium, trembling and body rashes. A subsequent solution was the barbiturate. Derived from barbituric acid, it was introduced as a sleeping tablet in 1903 and, like bromides, enjoyed no restriction on its sale over chemist counters until 1956 when disquiet began t o rumble. Doctors were. still ....prescribing .- - - more . th

1969, at which time the drug's addictive and suicidal properties were known. Official figures suggest about 2,000 people were dying each year as a result. Even as late as 1979 when there was no residual doubt only professional ignorance or callousness, a further 809 barb-linked fatalities occurred in a single year. Amphetamines (amphetamine sulphate) are in a different pharmacological category in that they stimulate rather than depress but as another massively-distributed mind-alterer they are an interesting case. First synthesized in 1887 they became the wonder drug of World War I1 when prescribed by the military t o pep up troop work rate. At War's end they were promoted as a 'safe euphoric' They were used t o slim the obese, quieten over-active children, as a cure for bedwetting and even t o draw out uncommunicative psychiatric patients. Untold numbers were dumped on the Japanese, causing epidemic usage. Again there was no bar t o overthe-chemist-counter sales until the early '60s when young pleasure seekers began using them without the due

UNDERCURRENTS No. 59

Like their predecessors - bromides and barbiturates - these drugs were promoted as something of a benign and faithful friend: mother's little helper. We now know tolerance builds up within a matter of weeks and an increasingly large dose is subsequently required for the 'patient' to get off. If the dose isn't increased the consumption amounts to a no-effect, useless habit. If more supplies are got hold of then there are all the problems associated with dependence and -should it be attempted - withdrawal. So far, Valium and Librium's tox'kity quotient is rated low but we've already seen with bromides, barbiturates and amphetamines, how perception about such things can change with the political business breeze. The ancient and deeply maligned opiate, meanwhile, continues t o be castigated. This is now a political and economic necessity. Western drug companies' production is so thoroughly tied up with synthetic compounds it is important than opium - a product of Asia - is kept 'dirty' and underground. The West signs international conventions that keep it that way. In contrast we (Britain, the US, etc) refuse to ratify important United Nations conventions that would apply equivalent controls t o modern psychotropic (mind altering) agents. And so opiate production is shoved into the hands of thugs, spies, fools and groups with extrefne political ambition. Street prices climb t o compensate for the trafficking hazards, People kill, steal and die for a fix which is often dangerously adulterated And this takes place not because these opiates are in themselves more dangerous than the National Health equivalent (pure opium is relatively non-toxic) but because they are a politically illegitimate currency. e should bear in mind at this point that the British authorities themselves once exhibited a great deal of enthusiasm for the illegal trafficking of opium. In fact we invented large-scale opium peddling in the 18th century as part of the Imperial quest. In China the opium habit became so endemic it reached the imperial palace, seizing the aplace guards, the eunuchs, the emperor himself and killing off his two eldest sons. When China finally resisted, Britain

M I

trade. There were in fact two wars. both of them ending in Chinese defeat. Business continued to magnify (from 300 tons in 1790 t o 3,500 in 1906) and eventually China thoroughly capitulated. Home grown production grew t o the point where it outstripped what Britian was bringing in. Yet before British trade - enforced by war - virtually nothing had been produced on Chinese soil. t is a peculiarly savage irony that not only is China held culpable these days for starting the modem opium trade but that in the land of the Benglas from whence we extracted those 18th and 19th century stocks, British drug companies (the modern equivalent of East India Company) are currently peddling large quantities or irrelevant, dangerous and highly expensive pharmaceuticals. In 1981 the Bangladesh drugs bill was Ă&#x201A;ÂŁ3 million. Three quarters went t o Western multinationals, the largest share to British-owned firms. Then, a year later, the Bangladesh government appointed an Expert Committee t o examine this vast intake. It looked at 4140 items and found 1707 were either useless or dangerous and that they had tn be phased out on a sliding time scale. Among the rejected substances was a capsule called Ceenu, promoted as a 'life saving cancer drug*yet which in the States is permitted t o be administered by just a few specialists and then for only two types of cancer - because of 'deadly adverse reactions'. Another rejected tablet was an anabolic steroid called Orabolin. In Britain it may warn that it is 'not recommended for children' because of side effects which include stunted bone development. In Bangladesh it is

pushed as a 'cure for malnutrition among children. . growth in every drop.' Oxfam report that Orabolin is frequently used by impoverished families who believe the drug is a better buy for their children than food. The Expert Committee also criticised the transfer pricing racket whereby Bangladesh subsidiaries of Western multinationals are charged up to five times more for raw materials by the parent company than would be asked for on the open market. It is by such means - inflating prices, avoiding taxthat multinationals can afford their' vast promotional networks throughout the 'underdeveloped' world and thus reinforce the pharmaceutical drug habit. Not surprisingly, when Bangladesh produced its new Expert Committee policy the multinationals read it as a dangerous precedent. They argued it would endanger the people's health by depriving them of invaluable medicine. They enlisted the aid of the British, German, US and Dutch Govern-. ments t o press for its abolition or modification. Hints were dropped that foreign investment could suffer. Against the odds the Bangladesh government's drugs policy still remains broadly intact. It serves today as an inspiration not just t o the poor nations of the South but also t o apparently sophisticated countries like our own which still has no sane drugs policy and is equally hooked on pharmacalogical garbage. The sins of the old opium trade, of drug dumping in modern Bangladesh are being repeated now in the UK. It is the jungle law of the free market economy. Andrew Tvler

Alternatives to the 'Big Fix' do exist. Ian Grant investigates the growth of 'Natural Health Centres'

h & Effici ency T

group. I t opened in January 1981. oung kids have a total lead look t o They do not diagnose at the Centre, their irises these days," said Brenda but have a noticeboard of practitioners, Coverdale reflectively, during her Jennifer added, "I can explain the lunchbreak at the Nature individual therapies to people but can Care Centre, Streatham. "They have only recommend them individually. very grey looking eyes". But she Officially recommending them is described ways of getting it out of the difficult " body through diet and utilizing food On their attitudes to orthodox supplements. Just one illustration permedicine, Jennifer added, "We would haps of natural therapies getting t o like to see a synthesis, the best of parts of the body the 'other medicine' modern and traditional Also a wider doesn't seem t o reach. understanding o f the physical body There are 30 Natural Health Centres that the traditions like shiatsu and acuin Britain, according to the Natural puncture entail and serious thought Health Network. They range from fully given to nutrition in creating health. fledged outfits giving a wide range of therapies and courses, to ones without a We would like to see a willingness to location putting on one lecture a month. consider the therapies and their use actively in their own right. What's Whatever their size or scope, they have happening at the moment is people broadly similar ideals, that the mind, trundle along until they are ill and then emotions and each function of the need radical intervention. Natural healbody are interdependent and should be in proper balance with each other. They ing works ten years in advance. It can b. believe this 'whole' has a natural healing used as a preventative to stop degeneration. " force which sustains growth and life in all living things. The treatment t o restore health and the way of life She does not see natural healing as recommended t o retain it should help 'alternative' but complementary to wha the natural healing force t o work most is being practised. "Modern medicine is very analytical; we can complement effectively. that by appreciating the whole. The I talked t o three women who run modern focuses on a particular disease Natural Health Centres in the South of or organ; we focus on the totality o f England and found a remarkable conthe human state. It's not alternative; sensus on their aims and ideals. Jennifer John runs and helped found after all, acupuncture has been around 4,000 years. " the Brighton Natural Health Centre. Its I asked if she saw a natural alliance function is primarily educational, "to give people more understanding o f their forming with green/ecology principles. She said, "we have no political bias or lives in a wide context and to create basis. We don't see it in political terms, health from a natural basis. " They run it's wider, more universal than that. a whole range of courses from oriental Politics brings to mind a duality and diagnosis, reflexology, shiatsu, macroconflict with one side versus the other. biotic~,yoga, dance, mime, and have Personally, I want to see less conflict started several women only and coming from more understanding o f children's classes. where we are." Jennifer defines health as a state of She said, "The Centres reflect the positive wellbeing and not just being character o f the place they're in. Now a free from sickness. She added, "my

definition is a broad one, involving spiritual, mental, physical and emotional health. It concerns the relationship between you, the environsociety, friends, home and work. The BNHC originally grew out of a mouo who wanted to meet to find out

wider range o f people are coming due to shifting attitudes o f the media and increased awareness o f things like the k U e o f changing n u t r i t i o n ~ h ~e u b l i c are Starting to realise that it is not radical or trendy but something worth considering. After all, we're not

he Nature Care Centre in Streatham, South London is more of a health complex and has diagnostic, treatment. education and training functions. treat with osteopathy, acupuncture and homeopathy and give iris diagnosis. There is also a psychotherapist and hypnotherapist who can be used in concert with other treatments or alone. All the practitioners are trained in their respective fields and are members of their particular naturopathic association. They teach aromatherapy, acupressure, reflexology, basic massage! and touch for health, things which can be taken home and used among family and friends. Brenda Coverdale, who runs the Centre, said, "We limit the

s he^

numbers on the courses because individual work is crucial in these fields We have to teach very thoroughly, not just on bits o f the body, but the body as a whole. The Centre puts on one lecture a month on natural therapies fo the public." She said, "We would like to see people taking more responsibility for their own health. Too many people throw health problems in the door for the therapist to solve. They should be takinga closer look at junk food or whether they are burning the candle at both ends." She said, "We feel people should be able to choose for themselves the treatment they want, either penicillin or herbs. They are entitled to that choice. Most people have decided on which therapy they want before coming, but if not, then iris diagnosis is offered which gives a very good indication on what is going on in the body and a decision is made after." Brenda mentioned the fact that iridology shows up very clearly the amount of lead in the body and where it is entering, either through the respiratory system or stomach. She has found, after examining thousands of pairs of eyes, that the majority under 20 get it from the air and those over 30 from food or water. Brenda has a very down-to-earth approach and doesn't see natural therapies as a cure-all; "Idon't think it's the total answer. No natural therapy is a panacea for all ills. There is a big area in the middle where there is a need for allopathic drugs and surgery. It's UNDERCURRENTS No. 59 h

exceptionally conservative here. It's OK if you want to be gathered under the ecology wing but we want to be acceptable to as large a number as possible. " She was very enthusiastic about the Cancer Help Centre in Bristol which uses diet, relaxation, breathing hospital rejects in a chronic condition, and natural therapies to treat cancer. I some have been under treatment for talked with them briefly. A spokesman years and it limits what you can do. It's said,."Nobody says we can cure. We can acute cases we can treat best. Most who make people's lives o f a better quality come here have had some sort o f illness and if that means they are cured o f and some after treatment develop an their cancer, fine. " They are opening a alternative way o f looking at health. residential centre in Clifton later this We find people whose health has year. improved come to us before going to The Natural Health Network in the doctor. " Cheltenham is an information centre on The Centre has been running for five natural health and acts as a link years and gets all its patients on between centres. Sylvia Hancock, who recommendation. They also try to keep runs it, said, "Natural health centres are the fees as low as possible. Brenda said, very much new things. They are dotted "Once it gets to Â£20-Â£a time, it's all over the country and starting up all only available to a certain group o f the time although there aren't many in people. " They run reduced rates for Wales, Scotland or Ireland. " The UB40s and pensioners. Network has a quarterly newsletter and On any links with the green alliance, is helpful to centres starting up with Geoff Wadlow said, "Remember the lists of practitioners in different areas. therapists are members o f theirproSylvia said that if there's any interest fessional associations. I don't see them from the medical profession it's towards aligning with these things, they are too homeopathy. She said, "Response from self-interested in getting government doctors goes in areas. We haven't done recognition for therapies and training particularly well here. The Centres tend processes more on a par with the health to be more educational than diagnostic. services. There is a potential more on We put everything in front o f the public the individual and health centre level." and wherever possible let them choose." I asked whether getting bits of theory ary Browning runs the Cotswold here and there could lead to confusion. Natural Health Centre, which She said, "There is a responsibility on opened three years ago. There are the practitioner to assess what the nine therapists at the Centre. She patient can cope with or understand. It described the attitude of the orthodoxy is an intuitive thing. The key to all this "We're happy to work with them; they is taking responsibility for your own are not with us. They don't accondition and understanding how it has knowledge some of the therapies. come about and why. " They 're very sceptical. " On any links Ian Grant with the green alliance, she said: "it's medical referrals within the NHS. The Centre is trying t o get natural therapies more recognised as part of the health system and is putting a lecture on in June for doctors which will hopefully turn into a workshop. She said, "A lot come here as

migraines, hay fever and arthrities where we come in. It's the grey area where we can hopefully do some good. There is no such thing as a 100 per cent cure." On the attitude of orthodox medicine she said, "The allopathic people are dubious. It's the same old story. " Geoff Wadlow, acupuncturist at the Centre, says the orthodox view of alternative medicine ranges from unscientific t o dangerous, because we don't know how t o recognise illnesses and cures represent a placebo or psychosomatic effect. However, he did say some doctors had an open attitude. The major criticism is qn the basis on which it works. He also mentioned economic interests, i.e. the medical establishment's position in the medicoindustrial complex and also the fact that doctors have a monopoly on

BRIEFING COURSES 0 There are some interesting and varied courses running at the City University in their summer term, which starts the week beginning April 18. Some of the more interesting ones are: The Mass Media and Women Mondays The Powers Behind the Screen Mondays Politics and Society in the 20th Century Tuesdays The Urban Experience Tuesdays Applications and enquiries should be sent to Adult Education, Centre for Arts and Related Studies, The City University, Northampton Square, London EC1, tel 01-253 4399 ext. 3252 or 3268. 0 Green Deserts will be holding a one-week course on building Lorena Stoves from April 22-29. These are claylsand cooking stoves with many applications in the Third World, which are also more fuelefficient than traditional hearths. The course is essentially practical and is aimed at people who intend t o work in rural communities. Participants will design and build 4 or 5 stoves for a variety of uses. The cost i s Â£50; the venue will be Brick Kiln farm, Rougham, nr Bury St Edmunds. For further details write to Green Deserts Ltd, Rougham, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, or phone (0359) 70265.

and development' public meeting on the Friday evening at the Mitchell library. The rest of the weekend will include discussion workshops, a visit to Centrepeace resource centre and a showing of the newly-revisedslide show. The new CAAT exhibition, Alternatives to the Arms Trade, will also be on display. The meeting will be at the Friends Meeting Hcfuse, 16 Newton Terrace, Glasgow 3. Further details are available from CAAT, 5 Caledonian Road, London N1, tel01-278 1976.

On April 9-10 community radio buffs can go to a conference on Community Radio in Sheffield. Topics to be discussed include whether there is a community radio 'movement', news from the pirates, cable, women's radio, black workshops, and music. There will be sessions for beginners and practical workshops where one can swop ideas, experiences, and tapes It will cost Â£ for individuals, Â£ unwaged (but Â£1 for reps from institutions). For further details contact John Hanlon on (0742) 22991 or 738572 during the day, or Carolyn Leary on (0742) 667730 (eves).

place on April 30, and will cost Â£3.5 including lunch. The proceedings will be divided into amorning and afternoon, with the morning one looking at how conservation should be carried out (should there be SSSIs, National Parks, etc.?) and the afternoon one at farmers, finance and conservation practices. Speakers include Marion Shoard, Chris Hall and Lord Melchett. To book, contact Alasdair Liddell, Public Events organiser, Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, London SW7, tel 01-589 6323 ext. 795. People interested in nontechnological childbirth may be interested in an Active Birth conference in Leicester on June 4. Speakers will include Janet Balaskas, Jean Towler, Beverley Beech, Yehudi Gordon and Brian Radley; other local midwives and obstetricians will also be present. There will be food on sale and a creche will be provided. The conference will take place at Moat College, Maidstone Road, Leicester, from 9.30-4.30, and will cost Â£4.5 (Â£2.5 unwaged). For more information write to

the following addresses: Sun Bear, 20 Millfield Road, York for the York lectures; Sun Bear, 5 Ferris House, Whidborne Street, London WC1, tel01-278 8621 for the London ones; by phone to (024541) 2601 for the Romford one; to (04536) 77524 for the Stroud one; and t o (0452) 21968 or (0242) 32776 for the Glastonbury one. Jean Gimpel will be the guest speaker at the second dinner-discussion of the Academic Inn on April 14. The title of his paper i s The future of the Third World after the decline and fall of Western civilisation - an interesting concept. He will be discussing the models he has devised for Third World governments and others concerned with selfsustainable development strategies, based on his research into mediaeval and ancient technologies. The dinner will be at the Royal Overseas League, Park Place, St James Street, London SW1, and costs Â£2. Tickets and details of time, etc, are available From 24 Abercorn Place, London NW8, tel 01-286 4366. 8

DEMONSTRATIONS

Daws Hill peace camp have organised three days of action from April 8-10. The first day, Friday, will be a day of education and work for peace, with workshops on a number of peace issues, plus videos and films. Two courses and an open Registration starts at Bucks. day will run at the Commonwork Friends and Allies is the Leicester Active Birth Conference, College of Higher Education, Centre in April and May. The name of a weekend conference on 9 Cross Green, Rothley, Leicester, High Wycombe, at loam. The fee dates are as follows: April 22-24 for people concerned or phone (0533) 374555. is 50p. On the Saturday, a human April 22-24 Who i s the Enemy? withlinterested in community chain will link the two war bases May 1 Open Day. culture, development, arts and USAF Daws Hill and RAF/ May 6-8 Self Audit. LECTURES AND MEETINGS of politics in the UK. There will be NATO Strike command, Naphill The first course concerns our a variety of workshops and Â From April 12-20, Sun (about 5 miles apart). People perceptions and assumptions seminars covering the future of Bear - a Native American living north of Oxford should about the Soviet Union, while community cinema; the influence medicine man of the Chippewa assemble at noon at Walter's Ash, the second focuses on self of ethnic art in our culture; what tribe -will be visiting England. RAF Naphill, and walk towards analysis and looking at what is 'community'; have community While he is here he will be giving Wycombe. International groups events in our lives have become arts become a force of reaction?; and those living south of Oxford lectures and seminars about the experience. The cost is Â£4 for and strategies for cultural action. should assemble at noon at Path of Power, dealing with the first weekend, Â£2 for the The cost of the weekend will be Native American medicine and its Holywell Mead and walk t o Daws second. Further details are Â£7.50 and the venue i s St Hill. There will be a rally at 4pm contemporary relevance, Native available from Neil and Jennifer Edmunds Arts Centre, Salisbury, at the peace camp in Daws Hill prophecies and earth changes, Wates, Commonwork Centre, Wiltshire. For further details Lane. On Sunday there will be a Earth awareness and healing, and Bore Place, Chiddingstone, Kent, send an SAE to Marion Rose, march starting in Hughenden the Medicine Wheel (a standing tel (073277) 255 or 708. Friends and Allies, c/o The Park, High Wycombe, at noon circle of stones). He stresses that Garden Flat, 67 Belsize Park which will go via Daws Hill to he i s non-political. He will visit Gardens, London NW3. Holywell Mead. At Holywell the following towns and cities: CONFERENCES Mead there will be music, songs April 12-13 York. This year's Campaign A symposium on and speeches from 2-5.30pm. April 15,16,17 London. Against the Arms Trade national Conservation has been organised There will be concerts on all three April 18 Romford, Essex. meeting will be held in Glasgow by that most radical of organisevenings. More information is April 19 Stroud, Glos. from April 8-10. Part of the ations, the Natural History available from Sean Hawkey on April 20 Glastonbury, Somerset. proceedings will be a 'disarmameni Museum. The symposium will take Further details are available from (06285) 22624.

UNDERCURRENTS No. 59

B Ã A massive kite flying event will take place at USIRAF Lakenheath, Suffolk, on April 2 4 from noon onwards. A balloon race, theatre, music and a huge 'paint-in' will take place. Next jay, April 25, there will be a blockade of the Lakenheath base, ~eginningat 6.30am. For further information contact the Lakenheath peace camp on I05381 716556. Ã April 24 is World Day for Laboratory Animals. T o draw attention t o this fact, the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection have organised a sponsored march of 9% miles from Clapham Common t o Carshalton. A t Carshalton there will be a demonstration against the British Industrial Biological Research Association laboratories. If you want t o march, sponsorship forms are available from the BUAV, 143 Charing Cross Road, London WC2, tel 01-734 2691.

Ã London Region CND Trade Union Committee is organising a midday action, including a lunch-time meeting, on May 12 at Thorn-Brymar, Enfield. This firm has NATO contracts and manufactures equipment for missiles and the Nimrod and Harrier. All trade unionists are welcome at the action. For further information contact the Trade Union committee at London Region CND, 6 Endsleigh Street, London WC1, tel01-388 1628.

The Peace Pledge Union have designated the week of May 14-21 as Anti-Militarist week. They hope that the week will focus attention on issues behind the rhetoric of disarmament, and to help develop ways of actually beginning the disarmament process now. People are asked to show films and arrange discussions on the implications of militarism. May 2 1 will be the national day of action, with vigils, die-ins, street theatre, leafletting, etc. outside recruiting offices, war memorials and other military buildings. Let them know if you're organising anything; alternatively, if you want t o participate in an action, if you phone them nearer the time they will be able t o give you more details. Contact the PPU, 6 Endsleigh Street, London WC1, tel01-387 5501. I f you're unemployed, you may be able t o take part in a Walk for Life, from Faslane t o Greenhan Common. The walk starts on May 19 and ends up at Greenham Common on August 6, Hiroshima Day. So far, the participants will be peace campers from Burghfield,

E F I

vlolesworth, Lossiemouth and Sreenham, and monks and nuns )f the Japan Buddha Sangha. rhere will be meetings i n towns, ind action at military installations ilong the way. For details phone 11-806 461 5. Towards the end of May here will be several actions lappening at Upper Heyford )eace camp in Oxfordshire. From flay 21-23 there will be a Peace 'entecost b y Christian CND at he base, with a march starting it 1 1am on the 21st at Bicester Manorsfield Road car park) and nding at USAF Upper Heyford, ollowed b y a festival, religious ervice and torchlight vigil; on the '2nd there will be workshops on heology and on non-violent iirect action outside the base; on he 23rd there will be some kind )f action, planned the day )efore. For more information on hese, contact Christian CND on 11-263 0977. Ten days later here will be a fourday blockade >fthe air base, organised b y the Jpper Heyford peace campers. rhis will be from May 31-June !. For further information on he blockade, phone (0869) I0461 or 40321. I

There is a national march and rally in Liverpool on May 28, as a protest against cruel experiments on animals, monkeys in particular. The march assembles in William Brown Street, near Lime Street railway station, and will go through the city centre, on t o the Monkey Research Unit at Liverpool University and finally end up at the Stanley Theatre, Mount Pleasant. A t the Stanley Theatre there will be a rally with speakers from Animal Aid, BUAV and PCAP. I f you want further information, write t o Daniel Lindsay, 28 Broughton Drive, Grassendale, Liverpool 19, of phone (051) 494 0470.

FESTIVALS AND FUN To mark the publication of Over Our Dead Bodies: Women Against the Bomb, Virago Press have organised a major book launch (open t o men, women, and children) with women

iingers, actors, poets, musicians, speakers and writers all performng at Central Hall, Westminster, London SW1 on April 16, from 3.30-7.30. The performers nclude Frankie Armstrong, Harriet Harman, Sheila Rowbotham, Joan Ruddock, Spare Tyre theatre company, Fay Neldon and Susannah York. children's entertainment, book ;tails and food will also be available. Tickets cost Â£ (50p un~ a g e d ,children free); all proceeds to the peace movement. Billed as 'the environ. nental event of the year', the h e n Rally is an evening at central Hall, Westminster, -ondon SW1, featuring speakers 'etra Kelly, Ralph Nader, Des Wilson, David Bellamy, Joan ruddock, Jonathan Porritt and Graham Searle. The event takes )lace on April 27 at 7.30 (doors )pentband starts playing at 7pm). rhe event then goes t o Leeds r o w n Hall on April 28, where 3ruce Kent and Yves Donzalski .eplace the t w o women speakers; ind finally t o the Watershed i n 3ristol on April29. In Bristol the ine u p will be Nader, Wilson, jearle, Bellamy, Donzalski and Jonathan Dimbleby. Tickets for :he London and Bristol venues :ost a rather exorbitant Â£5those o r Leeds cost Â£ (Â£ unwaged). rhey are available on receipt of a :heque and SAE from Rally Box )fiice, CLEAR, 2 Northdown St, London N1, tel. 01-833 1250 cheques made payable t o FOE;LEAR account). D

May 7 will see a Youth Ã Eestival for Peace in Brockwell Â¡ark Brixton, London SW2. The festival starts at noon in the park, 3ut it will be preceded by a march which starts on the Victoria Embankment at 1 l a m and passes h e Houses of Parliament on its way t o Brockwell Park. For urther information contact fouth CND on 01-263 0977. The British Trust for Conservation Volunteers have produced a programme of spring tasks, ranging from creating a nature trail on the Commonwork farm t o building drystone walls and stiles. Projects last one t o t w o weeks, with volunteers being accommodated i n volunteer centres, tents, cottages or village halls. A contribution of Â£1.8 per day includes food, accommodation and administrative costs. To attend, you should belbecome a member of the National Conservation Volunteers or a local group affiliated t o the BTCV. For further details write t o the NCV administrator, BTCV, 36 St Mary's Street, Wallingford, Oxon. D

The third Alternative Opportunities Fair will be held on May 11 at the University of York's Vanbrugh College. The fair will consist o f a series of open forums throughout the afternoon on issues such as community work, working overseas as a volunteer, and alternative work styles; video tape screenings; and stalls from a range of communities, conservation groups, alternative education and health groups, co-ops, and overseas volunteer groups. The day is designed t o give hope t o students and others who feel unhappy with conventional career opportunities, t o show that it is possible t o escape the rat race. The fair runs from 12-4.30, in the Vanbrugh dining hall.

The Westland Revel is a w weekend of folk song, music and dance, combined with workshops, teach-ins and lectures on the antinuclear/peace issue, which will take place from May 20-22 near Tiverton, Devon. There will be a ceilidh, children's events and stalls as well. Since one of the aims is t o promote links between people and groups, including those i n the immediate area, numbers will be restricted t o about 200. Tickets for the whole weekend cost Â£ (preferably bought i n advance), children under 1 6 free. For further information send an SAE t o Clare Penney, Westland, Pennymoor, Tiverton, Devon, tel (03636) 341. I f you fancy a weekend in Brussels, you may like t o drop in t o The World We Choose, an exhibition-cum-gathering involving several hundred organisations with concerns for environment, personal and social transformation, education, co-operative living, peace and disarmament, participative democracy, etc. It will comprise several hundred stands, an ongoing programme of lectures and panel discussions, dances, games, shows, concerts, drama and meditation. The event takes place from May 27-29 at Brussels' Exhibition Halls, Hall no. 5, Heyzel, Brussels. more information is available by sending an SAE t o Carol Newfield, 52 Tile Street, London SW3, or by phoning 01 -352 7246.

TheBriefing pages cannot be written unlesswewt information on what is happening i n the way of courses, conferences, dernonstrations or festivals; or what new publications or campaigns are being launched. If you are organising anything which U C readers may be interested i n attending, or if you have a new pamphlet1 campaign that you want us to publicise, let us know.

PUBLICATIONS

I E F I

No Bunkers Here is a pamphlet about the successful campaign of Mid-GlamorganCND groups to prevent the modernisation of a nuclear bunker near Bridgend to a standard suitable 'for wartime use'. It describes the background of the bunker, the campaigning and lobbying of councillors, the setting up of the peace camp there, and the final aciof direct action in which they sat on the would-be bunker walls to stop the concrete being pourex Inspiringi I t costs $1 and is available from either MidGlamorgan CND, 6 Kingsley Terrace, Thomastown, Methyr Tydfil or Peace News, 8 Elm Avenue, Nottingham.

Four factsheets with basic information on Third World issues have been produced by Third World First. The factsheets - on food, aid, work and technolow -all

t o find their way around the enormous numbers of books published each year. There are sections on animals, food production. crops, energy, useful technology, periodicals and a list of useful addresses. The Guide is available at Â£1.20 including postage, from Peter Byrne, Penzance Library, Morrab Road, Penzance, Cornwall cheques/postal orders should be made out to Public Libraries Group, Library Association.

GENERAL In Cambridge ten people have been squatting a disused vicarage in the centre of the city since last August, as an urban equivalent of peace camps. The vicarage has been renamed the Cambridge Peace Centre. The people involved with it want t o take peace beyond the point of having meetings and giving out

0 The Anti-Nuclear Campaign has reprinted the Select Bibliography on Nuclear Power from the back of the Index to Parliamentary Questions i n Atom (1960-81)that they produced last year. It is available i n exchange for a large SAE, marked 'Bibliography' i n the top left hand corner, from ANC Mail Order, PO Box 216, Sheffield 1. 0 Peace Force Scotland have produced a number of factsheets which are ideal for beginners who want information, as well as campaigners to use as reference material in sticky situations. There are 12 factsheets i n total, on the cost of arms; the nuclear arsenal; nuclear strategies; radiation; chemical weapons; germ warfare; 'civil defence'; behaviour of the USSR, USA and UK; neutralism in action; troops for tomorrow; the atom link; and the nuclear club. They cost l o p each, with discount for large orders, and are available from Peace Force Scotland, The Lantern House, Olympia Arcade, High St, Kirkcaldy, Fife.

The alternative film distributor, Concord Films Council, has produced another supplement to their existing catalogue. Of the recent additions, Atomic Cafe is probably the best known, followed by Guide to Armageddon. Other additions include Beyond the Brandt Report, Home on the Range, World Disarmament - the Time has Come, and Armaments. The hiring fee varies. For a copy of the supplement, send an SAE to Concord Films Council, 201 Felixstowe Rd, Ipswich, Suffolk. 0

clippings service from 13 radical English magazines, and runs alternative English courses for social activists who need more English in order to extend their sphere of action t o an international level in such areas as peace campaigning, anti-nuclear co-ordination, the environment, Third World solidarity, the radical media, and human rights. Each service costs money - Â£ for the address list; Â£1 (for 6 months) or Â£2 (for 12 months) for the clippings service; and Â£70/wee for the course. For more'information write t o them at 14 New Rd, Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, tel. (0422) 44660. Wildlife magazine are trying t o gather information about work being done on new methods of agriculture, horticulture and other types of food production, t o demonstrate the potential for linking food production with conservation and environmental policies. They are also interested i n any plans t o promote new attitudes to food production and consumption amongst the general public. I f you can help, contact Mo Dodson at 3 Priory Gardens, London SW13.

WOMEN

GORDEN HUNT

give key facts, trends and ideas for further reading as well as information on foodsystems, seeds, women at work, transnational companies and energy technology. Each factsheet costs 20p + 15p postage, or 60p + 20p for the tour; discounts are giver. for bulk orders. They are available from 3W1,232 Cowlev Rd, Oxford. A useful recommended ;election of better books on ;elf sufficiency has recently seen published. The booklet, Self Sufficiency i s one of a ieries of Readers' Guides comliled by librarians and informt i o n workers t o help people

leaflets on Cruise and Trident; they feel it i s important to link up the basis of the gay and women's movements that the personal is political with working for peace. The centre is based at 45 Jesus Lane, Cambridge.

The Radical English Movement is a co-op which provides education, information and publicity t o people all over the world. It has produced a global alternative address list of groups, peiodicals and publishers active in many alternative fields from feminism to animal rights and the environment issue. The co-op also operates a monthly radical

0 Safety on Housing Estates is a tape made by a group of women on South-East London's Aylesbury Estate, about the fear of violence that women face when living on inner city housing estates. The programme which is 24 minutes long, i s based on interviews with local women- It looks at how violence functions in our society and what positive responses we can make to it, such as self-defence classes, late night bus services, and demands for council improvements on estates. The tape can be used either for radio broadcasts; as a focus for discussion in meetings; or as an educational resource. It is available from Walworth Cable Radio, The Activities Centre, 1A Wendover, Thurlow St, London SE17, tel. 01-701 9010, at a cost of Â£ (institutions) or Â£ (groups and individuals). Broadcast fee is negotiable.

A Woman's Place, the women's centre-cum-information and referral centre which acts as a focus for many London (and national) women's groups, has moved. Its new address is Hungeiford House, Victoria Embankment, London WC2, tel.O1-836 6081. It is now adjacent to Embankment station.

UNDERCURRENTS No. 5!

REVIEWS The telling observation, says Bookchin, provides 'an excellent formula for recasting the traditional picture of natural evolution as a The Ecology of Freedom meaningless competitive tableau bloodied by the struggle to survive. ' Murray Bookchin In other words it becomes necessPrism Press Â£6.9 ary to replace 'natural selection' as the motive force o f biological evolutTHE TITLE o f this book. . . is meant ion with 'natural intercation' to take to express the reconciliation o f nature account o f the ability o f life t o shape and human society in a new ecological and maintain the environment that, at sensibility and a new ecological society.' I f Bookchin's Post-Scarcity Anarchpresent, is held t o be the 'selective' source o f its evolution. ism (1971)was one o f the key books This is heady stuff indeed - a new behind the original thinking o f Underview full o f exciting perspectives on currents, so this new work should be which to ponder. After all, our view one of its touchstones for the eighties. o f nature shapes our view o f ourselves. It's a massively detailed work, a I f it is true that plants and animals do synthesis o f a lifetime o f unified and not 'enslave' and 'exploit' each other coherent thinking about the problems of our times, I t is exhilarating and but, rather, 'continually adapt to unwittingly aid each other' then exasperating by turns and contains so this gives a new model on which to much o f importance, so many ideas shape our society and our lives. drawn from such a wealth o f wideThe result o f this thinking is a whole ranging knowledge, that this reviewer new flood o f questions - ecological, can only draw out some o f the major social, political and behaviouralthemes involved. What Bookchin is attacking is 'The which Bookchin eloquently explores. The language is dense but worth the curse o f domination' which he believes has 'infused almost everv human endeav; effort.As he sees it, now is the time our since the decline o f organic society. when we must face up to the true nature o f our predicament. He writes: This domination is enshrined in 'In this confluence o f social and hierarchies, structures that exist in ecological crises, we can no longer real life as tangible organisations but afford to be unimaginative; we can also, more subtly, in our minds - in our whole way o f thinking about the no longer afford to do without utopian thinking. The crises are too world and in our attidues towards nature. serious and the possibilities too sweepIn order t o free ourselves from ing to be resolved by customary modes this 'authoritarian' view we need to o f thought - the very sensibilities that adopt what Bookchin terms a 'liberproduced these crises in the first tarian' perspective, whose characteristplace. Years ago, the French students ics are unity in diversity, spontanaeity in the May-June uprising of 1968 and complementary relationships. These expressed this sharp contrast of are the coordinates from which we alternatives magnificently in their can plot our social bearings. slogan: "Be practical! Do the impossOne specific example o f this is ible!" To this demand, the generation what he terms 'mutualism', first that faces the next century can add the advocated by naturalist/anarchist more solemn injunction: 'If we don't Peter Kropotkin in the last century do the impossible, we shall be faced in direct opposition t o the Darwin with the unthinkable!' view o f the world, which has become , John May a major shaper o f modern consciousness. He quotes William Trager's Albion Symbiosis (1970) as follows: 'The conflict in nature between Brenda Vale. different kinds o f organisms has been Spindlewood Press. Â£6.95 popularly expressed in phrases like "struggle for existence " and "survival of the fittest". Yet few people realise ALBION is described by its publishers that mutural cooperation between as a 'Utopian romance'. It is strangely different kinds o f organisms reminiscent o f William Morris' News symbiosis - is just as important, and from Nowhere which, when I read it that the "fittest" may be the one many years ago, I could hardly put that most helps others to survive.' down. In contrast, I found that I had

VISIONS -

to put Brenda Vale's book down frequently - not because I didn't like it but because I kept finding the detail too overwhelming and indigestible. Albion is set seventy-five years in the future and tells the story o f a year in the life o f 'John'. He leaves his native village in the Fens t o travel t o London where he lives for a while in a community in Rotherhithe and meets Annie. They spend a few weeks travelling on the canals and waterways, delivering steel to a workshop in Birmingham. In the course o f the story, we are taken through an England which has become a very decentralised, community-based society. Eventually, when John and Annie travel back from Birmingham t o the Fens, John has to decide whether to go back with Annie t o London or stay in his rather boring village. I found the dialogue frequently rather stilted - for example, when people launched into complicated explanations o f how things worked. even though the people to whom they were talking should already have known In other Utopian novels (like News from Nowhere) authors get round this problem by using the device o f having a 'stranger' to whom things have to be explained. Albion depicts an England o f the future in which we all live in peace and harmony, without exploiting either people or resources. But how did we get there? Brenda Vale's explanation left me rather dissatisfied. Apparently there was a nuclear explosion in the North o f France in which several hundred people died. The whole o f England then just decided to turn its back on 'the state' and it withered away, leaving the way clear for a decentralised society powered by solar collectors, methane digesters and windmills. No bloody revolution, no rich people fighting back while the plebs took over the land and built their energy-conserving houses on it. Perhaps the author o f a 'Utopian romance' should not be obliged t o say how Utopia came about, but if she does choose to delve into that can o f worms, then she should come up with a much more convincing explanation than she has done. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the book's wonderful descriptions o f the countryside and the seasons. But reading Albion is like eating a rich meal: you have to pause frequently t o digest it. Sally Boyle

NUKE PAGE Nuclear Free Pacific. Derrick Purdue. Marine Action Centre.

IT'S NOT often that Britain can claim to lead the world nowadays. One unfortunate exception t o the rule is our enthusiasm for dumping radioactive waste into the sea, where we are still way at the top of the league despite protests from surrounding nations, the decision of an international dumping conference and vigorous protests within the UK itself. Indeed, just to show that the spirit of Dunkirk isn't completely dead, Britain is planning t o virtually double the amount of waste dumped this year, disposing of it for Belgium and Switzerland as well. However, patriots will be delighted to hear that our precedent hasn't gone unnoticed in the big wide world outside the North Sea. Now Japan is joining us by disposing of low level waste in the Pacific 500 miles from Tokyo with an aim t o dumping high level waste in the same way in the future. The hazards of sea dumping, including the likelihood of leakage, are only the latest: in a series of nuclear threats hanging over the Pacific, which are focalising discontent in many areas against the rich nations bringing their unhealthy materials into the area. After years of atmospheric bomb testing, which rendered entire islands uninhabitable, underground nuclear weapons testing by the French at Murcroa threatens the stability of the island and means a strong possibility of radioactive materials leaking to the surface. The United States are bringing many nuclear weapons into the area, making many islands targets in the event of nuclear war. Old frustrations about colonialism are growing again, and a strong nuclear free Pacific movement has sprung up, The people of the island are now looking towards the West for encouragement in their fight. The MAC document lays out the main details succinctly and suggests that British groups help with petitions and by supporting the valuable work that Greenpeace are doing In this area. Leaflets and more information avail-

The Kremlin Cat and the Bomb. K. G. Babington. Oriel Press. Â£6.95 'FELISKI closed his eyes and let his mind roam. . . All those malignant devices, French bombs, Russian rockets, British sheik, American missiles - every one o f them was now out of action. And they had been put out o f action not by elaborate, sophisticated tools or by other weapons, but by a few simple screwdrivers and thousands upon thousands o f teeth. Mice's teeth that nibbled through wires and fuel pipes to play havoc with electronic systems, able from Greenpeace or Cambridge CND, 26 Argyle Street, Cambridge. Unfortunately the document was only produced in a limited edition, but a few may still be available from MAC, The Bath House, Gwydir Street, Cambridge. Nigel Dudley

A Global Peace Study Guide. G. K. Wilson. Housmans. Â£2.75

ARESOLOGY,pacology, ireneology,

caritasology, polemology , . .if you can write a hundred words on any of these terms, you may find A Global Peace Study Guide useful. Otherwise you probably won't. Admittedly, two-thirds of the book consists of a bibliography

guidance systems, fuel systems, ignition systems, in fact any system that the ingenious mind o f man could devise all destroyed by the pervasiue, inexorable teeth o f the mice.' The Kremlin Cat and the Bomb is a delightful, charming, ingenious, inventive, surprising, subversive and fanciful book. In style, its is as lighthearted as Benson's The Peace Book, but a t the same time almost as calculating and manipulative a s Orwell's Animal Farm. Its subject matter is, of course, ideologically sound. The only thing left to say is - read it! Lowana Veal and addresses of peace organisations, but even these aren't comprehensive. Basically. the book covers the international history of peace research and describes the methodology and theory of the discipline. It includes an etymology of the various peace disciplines (aresology ,pacology ,etc.), a complicated genealogy of peace thought through the ages, and other peace study tools such as how to construct a polelogram (severity of conflict vs time). These tools may be of interest t o researchers or students, but t o the peace activist they are irrelevant if not incomprehensible. I'm sure that something mote accessible/relevant to peace activists could be produced. Lowana Veal UNDERCURRENTS NO. 59

Certified The Myth of the Hyperactive Child and other Means of Child Control. Peter Schrag and Diane Divoky. Penguin (Pelican) Ă&#x201A;ÂŁ2.95 Here is a scary book. It describes methods in use in America for controlling disruptive children: methods which don't rely on physical punishment and restraint but depend on the diagnosis of undesirable behaviour as an illness. If you're faced with a child who's misbehaved, what you do with hirnlher usually depends on the behaviour; kids don't normally get flogged for talking in class. But once you've diagnosed talking in class as a symptom of a disease known as hypemctivity, then you're dealing instead with a kid who's sick, and naturally anything that might help cure this sickness is justifiable. Not surprisingly, the book's packaging dwells on the use of psychoactive drugs amphetamines and tranquillisers - as the most horrific example of this approach. In some areas, children are being diagnosed as 'over-active' and therefore in need of drug therapy as early as two; though anyone who's lived with a two-year-old knows that the time to worry about them is not when they're active but when they're quiet. At what point does 'activity' in a two-year-old cease to be the normal exploration of the environment by a young of the species, and become instead a symptom? Clearly it's likely to be at that level where the parent decides he/she can no longer cope. Since parents vary enormously in their ability (and willingness) to cope, as well as in what they expect from their children, a diagnosis of hyperactivity at'this age is bound to depend as much on family circumstances as on any objective characteristicsof the child's behaviour. But the really heavy use of drugs is at school age. In most of the cases quoted in this book, the child has been sent home with a note from the teacher: 'Your child is hyperactive. Please see a physician.' (I often complain about my kids' schools, and the way they treat parents, but I really can't imagine them sending home a note to tell me my child should see a doctor for behaviour problems.) Case after case is described

of kids drugged from eight to sixteen, welfare officers, the State, the A m y their bodies trembling, their sleep virtually everybody except you and your family. Well, who's going to hire a disturbed, under-sized and bone-thin person the doctors say will become from the appetite-suppressant sideeffects. At sixteen, no longer the delinquent? In slum or suburb, as the authors school's problem, they're taken off the point out, the most insidious effect of drugs. Then they have to learn, years these programmes of diagnosis comes later than they would normally have from their very existence. If you don't done, how to cope with impulses and want 40 mg. of Dexedrine every day emotions long muted by the drugs. like your friend Pete who used to be so Saddening it is to read about these lively and now sits there staring into unlucky and powerless children in the space, you'd better keep quiet. And if hands of their benevolent therapists. joining in a protest is going to get you But what seems even worse to me, a yellow card marked Young Delinquen because it affects all children, is the in the police files, is it really worth it? process of diagnosis itself. The The common feature is the lack of any screening, the psychological tests, the right t o defend yourself. Since you have labelling it starts almost at birth and no way of knowing what psychological carries on relentlessly throughout crimes have been recorded in your school, each child's dossier getting dossier; and since it is all being done in steadily thicker and thicker. Of course, the name of medical treatment; and the records are never shown to parents, since above all you are only a child, all let alone the child. In the affluent suburbs they acquire labels like learning normal rights to a fair hearing are simply bypassed. disabled, minimal bmin dysfunction, And in this country? It's likely to be perceptual cripple, dyslexia, dyscalcula; some time yet before the average NHS labels which may not only win them a drugged existence but also will influence GP is ready to prescribe speed for kids at a teacher's say-so, but the the sort of education they are offered. confidential records are with us already. Do you know what's in your kid's school record? Were you assuming that it was only exam scores? You're almost certainly mistaken. It will probably contain comments on your family life, for instance if you're a single parent, and quite possibly remarks about your - own political or sexual history. Our What happens to slum kids is predictably worse. Although the ethos is schools haven't yet been hit by the batteries of psychological tests ('How still one of treatment rather than punishment, the emphasis is on control, often do your parenti tell you they love you?') and screening programmes; but and the police take an interest in the how long will it be before they are? results of the tests. Different jargon is In America, the Family Educational used: unsocialised aggressive; potentially Rights and Privacy Act (1974) explicitly violent; sociopath; XYY chromosome syndrome; and of course predelinquent. giants parents the right to inspect and challenge their children's school records; The last term means that you haven't in practice, its provisions have been actually done anything wrong yet but successfully circumvented by, for the experts reckon that sooner or later example, redefining what constitutes you will. You might as well, because once you've got the label the results are school records, or by simple defiance. In this country, no such right has ever likely to be the same as if you had: existed, and the schools and teachers' special classes; or a harness to wear in unions would surely do everything to the playground so the teacher can give prevent its birth. But those who dislike you an electric shock whenever you do something 'undesirable'; or placement in the Police National Computer, where odd bits of gossip and rumour get a Youth Home where your every word solemnly and permanently recorded for and move will be monitored 24 hours a private official use without the subject's day; or drugs; or even psychosurgery. knowledge and without legal restraint, At the very least, you will be followed might like to think about the files kept For the rest of your life by school on children. Is there really much records defining you as 'predelinquent' difference? - records which will be accessible to Ellen Crowe police, potential employers, doctors,

Good

STEPPING OUR WAY

The One-Straw Revolution - an Introduction to Natural Farming Masanobu Fukoka. Rodale Press. Emmaus, Pennsylvania, USA. WI'H CHINA now opening its oil fields t o the petrol companies and sending its agriculture post-grads t o American universities it is perhaps timely t o review this book, which first appeared in 1978. The One-Straw Revolution is the unassuming autobiography of Masanobu Fukuoka who, as a young microbiologist working for the Japanese government, became disillusioned with imported agricultural innovations which undermined society, depleted the soil and created a dependency on chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides. Mr. Fukuoka returned t o the family farm and in the last 40 years has developed a system of minimal farming

Between Friends. i i a n Hanscombe. Sheba. Â£3.95 IN DESCRIBING itself as a novel falling back o n the tradition of Richardson, this book is probably stretching a point. Basically it is a collection of largely polemic letters written by four women who represent different viewpoints and lifestyles and who, conveniently, live in different cities: Meg, the moderate lesbian, mother of a son and seeker after the truth; Anne, committed feminist with a humanist face and an anti-sexist relationship with a man; Jane, radical lesbian, separatist, ex-housewife, now living in a women's house; and Frances, much-loved friend of Meg, muchthreatened by feminism and lesbianism, and married t o a shit whom she defends rather than confront the truth. All of which, one cannot help feeling, is a very convenient platform for the author t o convey all the thoughts she has ever had about feminism and lesbianism. The plot, minimal enough, is contrived in such a way as to get maximum mileage out of controversial issues and the characters seldom become more than mouthpieces with remark-

ased on the observation of nature. He chronicles with wry humour his arly attempts at a complete and rapid iturn t o nature. Undaunted by his dures he has now developed an itegrated farm ecosystem. Care and ispect for the earth are central t o his hilosophy. He avoids ploughing, referring t o plant into the preceding rop, and keeping a permanent cover of itrogen fixing clover on his grain fields. A major advantage of his 'no-till'

ably similar styles of writing. Surprisingly, however, the result is readable, stimulating, and human. I'hough the author's sympathies fairly ipparent lie in a synthesis between riews of Meg and Anne, Jane's and Frances's positions are put forward with understanding. The challenges the women direct a t each other do arovoke sparks, and d o result in them juestioning themselves and even makng some shifts. The book really represents a continuing dialogue in the writer's mind, in which most of the ssues are far from resolved. There is a lot here with which lesbians and 'eminists will identify. Julienne Dicker

Solar Prospects. Michael Flood. Wildwood House. Â£6.95 THE IDEA for this book started as a simple explanation of solar energy but, like Topsy, it just grew and grew. Although Michael Flood clearly demonstrates that all sources of renewable energy can be traced back to the sun, this book is not simply about solar power. 'Some strange things are happening abroad' the editor observes, 'the South

method is that soil is not broken up and exposed t o the ravages of wind and water erosion. All the organic matter produced from the soil is returned, and over the years the fertility of the worked soil increases naturally. The yields of Mr Fukuoka's fields of rye, barley and rice are as high or higher than his neighbours' who use the energy intensive, chemical methods of conventional modem agriculture. And his crops are less prone t o disease and pests because he is careful t o maintain a mixture of wild animals, insects and micro-organisms that can deal with attacks. The book is a delight t o read as well as being informative and inspirational. The actual crops Mr. Fukuoka has chosen t o work with are particularly suited t o this locality, but the underlying principles are widely applicable, as evidenced by a Fukuoka-style farm that has been working for the last 3 years in Holland.* Robert Hamblett Contact: Jackso Natuurlijke Boerderij Produkten, Voorne 13,6624 KL, Heerewaarden, Netherlands. Tel: B8877 2189. Africans are running tractors o n sunflower oil; the French are planning to manufacture petrol substitutes from artichokes', and so forth. But this is also true of the UK, the waxing and waning of the government's research programme accepted. Wind powered heat chums are being developed for heating greenhouses; geothermal energy, which could be a major heating resource for u p t o one fifth of the population, is about t o be used by Southampton city council, even though a unique legal wrangle is likely t o upset the applecart; some exciting developments in the field of electric transport are on the horizon from Clive Sinclair and Cambridge University and a small wind turbine company in Northumberland is exporting Yak transportable machines t o the Mongolians. Not all of these examples are covered in this book, but as a primer thi book does an excellent job of explainiq the issues and technologies in the area. Although the prime audience for this book must be the safe energy lobby, its slightly text book style may well turn out t o be its great strength, as the time for energy studies t o be universally into duced onto the school curriculum is well overdue. Such a book would make an admirable spearhead for such a politically sensitive campaign. Simon May

ANIMAL PAGE -

Animal Thought Stephen walker. Routledge & Kegan Paul. Â£7.50.

IF YOU, like me, spent your biology lessons at school wanking in the back row or flicking peanuts at the class prefect, you will have problems with this tome. That's not t o say that Walker has not gone right out of his way to make the difficult and complex subject of animal thought as accessible as possible. And, although the book is aimed at the ivory towers of academia both in style and its disgusting price, it's still very much worth the fight. Walker spreads out the facts and theories like peanut butter on rye, thick and satisfying. An excellent history of philosophers' views of animals' mental attributes. Walker puts the academic boot (or sandal?) in on Descartes' crude view of animals as machines, although this still remains today a very powerful idea. It's not unusual to hear people say 'animals are just instincts' and treat them accordingly. The subject of animal thought seems to have fallen out of favour in the nineteenth century, when it had been quite a hot potato, and was met in the twentieth century by the reactionary behavieurists led by Skinner, his box et al. This has led back to square one, where animals are machines with no real capability of 1 free will and thought. Walker consistently fires arrows of doubt into all the old hack theories, which makes stimulating reading. Walker remains dubious of the existing researcn of primate intelligence using sign language, gestures etc. He is xitical of such methods of research, without doubting the important similarities that the higher primates lave with human beings. He dampens ;he enthusiasm of those who believe they have 'drunk the dragon's blood' md communicated with apes. Never.heless, Walker does not refrain from jointing out the intelligence of inmates and that their brains are highly ieveloped on similar lines to our own which is good news for monkeys but lard luck for pigeons and marmosets. Walker's book is essential reading o r those who believe that animal

is an important booklet which covers much new ground, summarising as it does the history of hunting and antihunt legislation together with details of hunt sab tactics -all couched in a wide political and social context. It is no surprise that the book's opening quotes should come from the likesof Tony Benn, Paul Foot, Peter Hain and Arthur Scargill. Windeatt's concern, throughout his work as feature writer on The Beast and as film researcher on The Animals Film, has been to stress that animal liberation is an important issue that the Left should consider. Every year hunters kill 30,000 foxes in Britain in the name of pest control, an excuse that fits in with the popular notion that foxes are a menace to valuable livestock. For the record their main diet is voles, rats, mice, frogs, beetles and rabbits. Repeated attempts at anti-hunt legislation have been thwarted over the years making direct action inevitable. Ugly clashes between the two sides are frequent with the sabs invariably coming off worst, both on the field and in the courts. Windeatt cites the notorious case of Valerie Walters, called as a witness in a case involving hunters who'd assaulted sabs, who found herself in prison for refusing t o be bound over t o keep the peace under an act of 1361. He reports that she has had 'a dead fox wiped over her face, her car sprayed with red paint, has been the victim of numerous threats and has spent the month on heavy duties a t Riseley Remand Centre.' One facthe doesn't mention is that being a Hunt Saboteur automatically guarantees you a place on the police computer. Windeatt quite rightly points out that t h e right to peaceful direct The Hunt and the Anti-Hunt action is being generally eroded' and Philip Windeatt Pluto Press. Â£1.9 sees the link t o picketing and other forms of non-violent protest. FHE hunting season is in full swing and These important matters for onince again the woods and fields resound going debate can only benefit from ;o the bright chatter of well-dressed further airing. Windeatt has succeeded 5ders engaged in that most stimulating in his aim of giving the issue a wider ~f social pursuits - hounding an animal platform, even though his conclusions ;o death. make depressing reading. For centuries this prerogative of As he puts it: 'It is not difficult to ielted earls and landed gentry has gone understand why animals are treated so in unobserved and without interference. indifferently in a society where the However the twin forces of hunt powerful minority hold the majority sabotage and inflation are beginning t o in similar contempt. What is hard is nip at the heels of even the most wellto break the circle of unthinking zonnected Hunts and the tide of public cruelty; this can only be done as people opinion has turned. begin to question the accepted values of Philip Windeatt's concise and pointed our way life. ' More poker toJohn his pen. May iccount of the battle over bloodsports thought is important if we are serious about promoting the concept of animal liberation. The more intelligent and conscious we show animals to be, hopefully (as the theory goes) the more respect we will have for them. But I am the first to admit that rational argument does not win everybody to a cause, especially when someone is making a mint out of that exploitation and animals make extremely good profit fodder. Walker only makes a fleeting reference to animal welfare and does no1 not quote any of the known animal lib tomes, not even Peter Singer's Animal Liberation which Walker would do we1 to read. None of the moral problems o responsibilities that Walker throws up are actually discussed. Should, for example, higher animals with responses not so dissimilar to ours be in research laboratories undergoing painful experimentation? Do we live in a society that can accommodate such far reaching concepts? Are we just whistling in the wind? No doubt Walke leaves such conclusions for the philosophy department down his corridor at the University of London, and that's a shame. Animal intelligence is always presented in a trivialised fashion in the press and the media - 'the whacky world of animals' - so Stephen Walker's book is important, and his aim of attempting to expand the debate beyond the conservative mainstream of academia is admirable. It's a very good reference book that should be rooted out next time you are at the library. Encephalisation rules ok. Philip Windeatl

POETRY PAGE Hard Lines ed. Ian Dury Faber Â£1.9 For Life On Earth ed Maggie Gee (available for Â£1.2 from Mrs J. Pollock, School of English Studies, University of East Anglia or Â£.OO from selected booksellers). New Departures 15 Â£1.5 from Piedmont, Bisley, Stroud, G 10s. If you hadn't noticed, there's something of a poetry resurgence going on. As in quite a few areas I could mention, the literary world has been dominated by the Oxbridge, usually male mafia for too long. The ideal poem of this school is clever, sharp and usually pointless. The more like a crossword puzzle it is the better, because this means you can have seminars galore on them and feel smug when you're in on the joke. There are of course honourable exceptions like Ted Hughes, who seem to have slipped through the net by accident.. The current nickname for this genre is 'Martian' poetry after Craig Raine's book A Martian Sends a Postcard Home. Unfortunately this doesn't mean that all 'non-martian' poetry is any good. Hard Lines is a collection of 'young people's poetry and prose' (read kids-on-the-street) and emerged from a 'Something Else' TV programme where a group of young poets were complaining about the lack of outlets for their work. Ian Dury has contributed a positive if eccentric intro - he informs us 'perpetual progress is inevitable' - I have a soft spot for optimists. The criticism I have of the book is that there is too much cliched adolescent angst; the first poem 'Teenage Poems Crumpled at the Back of my Drawer' pokes fun at this syndrome. Quite a few of these pieces should have remained at the back of the drawer. In spite of including some rude words, the collection lacks sparkle and I was told

that 'political' poems had not been included, a mistaken editorial cop-out. There's also a disturbing element of using militaristic imagery to add spice to dull poems eg 'Your love is like a neutron bomb/A total killer that's a fact' from James Kelly or 'I will be your Armalite/fifm at your shoulder' from Andrew Darlington. Feed thisbook to your pet piranha. The most' encouraging thing is that this may be a regular venture, writers are asked to send stuff in - the standard can only get better. ' For Life On Earth, a oetrylprose collection edited by Magg e Gee. is concerned with attitudes to the bomb. Rachel Doran's 'We're Going to Stop A Holocaust', written when she was ten, shows more spirit than the whole of Hard Lines put together. There's some anti-nuke propaganda from the likes of Exeter CND (the most concise argument against Cruise I've seen), photomontages (we used one in the last UC), sci-fi, fantasy and some superb poetry (Oliver Bernard and Nicki Jackowska in particular). The book is a

useful reminder that the nuclear psychosis is so absurd and extreme that conventional politico-speak is no longei enough. Because language is a reflectior of our society, if we are looking for alternatives that should include language (read 'Man Made Language' b j Dale Spender, or '1984' if you're not convinced). A brief plug for the latest New Departures magazine, which is one of the best yet - the range is vast, from Ivor Cutler, Gary Snyder, Judith Kazantzis, Ted Hughes and Michelene Wandor to ranter Attila the Stockbroker, dub poet Benjamin Zephaniah and over-rated junkie William Burroughs. A literary Guy Fawkes night - so, some of the fireworks are duds, but they are more than made up for by poetic pyrotechnics, rhyming, ranting rockets, catherine wheel communiques, semiotic sparklers, bangers from Babel and verse that burn: like Roman candles in the night. (There' alsoalot of alliteration). Martians watch out. Peter Culshan

THE JOY OF SQUATTING For the Stoke Newington wine bar set the rice-salad days are over, no more roll-mop herrings, it's judgment day for the nouveau pauvres. We're gonna have to cut down on the coke and the pot there's six months rent due on the licensed squat. We fixed the roof with elastoplast and put chewing gum in the cracks, we did the plumbing collectively standing on each others backs. The mugs were strictly Reject shop, we even installed central heating we had a budgie sanctuary and communal compulsive eating and we talked everything through at the weekly house meeting. Different people moved in and out and we all had friends to stay, at one stage there were 69 in there on a single day - 9 housing activists, an exiled Chilean diplomat, 12 community dentists, 2 proves in hiding, a mime-troupe, 4 womens football teams, and I'll never forget the principled abstentionist Mango fetishists. But now the end is near - it's time to face the hessian curtain, with the pigs at the door giving it what for it's back to Wimbledon Richmond and Merton. The licence is up, we can't pay the dealer or the instalments on the video, we'll have to cancel the trip through Africa and our membership of the Dalston Rio. It's goodbye to respectable squalor and henna in our hair unless we can borrow some bread from Daddy, and buy somewhere. Andy P. Taken from Poems for the Young Professional - the Habitat Book o f alternative comic verse. Available for 90p from 6 Wilberforce Rd, London N4. UNDERCURRENTS No. 59

Mr Chips Micro-chips With Everything. (Ed) Paul Sieghart. Comedia. Â£3.50 AN EXHAUSTIVE menu from the ICA's seminars, 'IT'S Consequences: The social and political implications of information technology', held during July 1982. The ICA involvement in the issues of IT might seem puzzling a t first but, as Nicky S inger points out in the preface to these edited transcripts, this was a 'direct challenge to the contempomry myth that technology is somehow "other" from human life'. The seminars covered five discreet areas: IT - Doom or Boom; the Third World; Work and/or Leisure; Privacy; the Mass Media. However, perhaps the most interesting and the one least

mentioned in public debate was the Third World. The role of these seminars was to raise questions and this issue raised several which, given the speed at which IT is advancing, needs to be addressed with some urgency. IT is more capital intensive than labour intensive; will this negate the less developed countries' traditional advantage of cheap labour? Will IT destabiiise already unstable less

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developed countries or, given the problems of ownership and control, is this what it will intentionally be used for? As Paul Sieghart points out, 'Would the Ayatollah, for instance, have been able to depose the Shah o f Iran from his base in Paris without the use o f cassettes to influence the illiterate?' The debate was not all pessimistic, however. Alan Benjamin pointed out many useful applications for IT already showing results in the Third World, especially in the telecommunications field. Both China and India have an advanced programme of rural education under way using television and cassettes: given the falling costs of digital equipment, the future, .-- in this area at least, looks hopeful. All in all, this is an interesting book which one can dip into for a wide range of essays from a wide range of people. Simon Mays

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ANCIENT Magical community based on the feminist principle. Read 'The Book of Rhianne', Â£ from A n Droichead Beo (U), Burtonport, Donegal, Ireland. THE Collective Housing Handbook - all the information legal, tax, finance, self-manage management - for co-operative housing. Available from bookshops Â£3.5 or Laurieston Hall, Castle Douglas, Kirkcudbrightshire, Â£3.90

COMMUNITY HOMEOPATHY trainee, radical Christian, separated, and son 5, seek t o startljoin community oriented towards healing, spiritual growth, peace and wise use of resources. Diane 01-741 3365.11 Bridge Avenue, London W6. O L D H A L L COMMUNITY (established 9 years) seeks new members for family-sized space (Â£19,40 capital). Share an enormous house, farm, 70

A man from Pontiac, Michigan, was sure he had hit someone when driving about 6 0 mph on an Oakland County road on the night of January 4th, 1983. The hood and front of the man's car were damaged, but he couldn't find a victim. He called the police and firefighters, a Detroit police helicopter and three trackingdogs. All they found was a front wheel cover from the car. A police technician examined the car. 'I've been doing this kind of work for 2 1 years', mused police Cpl. Ted Spring, 'and I can't believe that somebody could walk away from that kind of impact.' (Grand Rapid Press, 9 Jan 1983) Factory owner Antonio Gatto, 50, was driving home t o Treviso, near Venice, at one o'clock in the morning. The icy fog was thick and visibility down to three or four feet on the country road. . . Crawling along and leaning out of the window t o watch the side of the road he suddenly saw a fugure loom out of the fog. He braked, but skidded on a patch of ice and ran right into the person with a thump. He was only about 50 yards from the spot where his brother Mario had been knocked down and killed by a car two years previously. He got out and searched the road.

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GO-COUNSELLING residential. Laurieston Hall, S.W. Scotland. 8-21 July. Â£97.5 including food. Details - Frank, 26 Brownlow C A N A L collective needs more Road, London NW1O.O1-966 people. Ultimate aim is t o build canal-based community. Currently 4676. need people interested in barge HANDWEAVING in operation and/or boatbuilding. Pembrokeshire (weekly, AprilMust enjoy hard work and simple Oct) o n secluded organic smalllife. Freeboard, 15 Greenheys holding. Spin, dye and weave your Road, Liverpool 8. own rugs, furnishings, wallhangings, clothing, accessories LOTHLOR IEN is an exciting etc. Learn t o make your own . and unique experiment i n cornsimple equipment. Expert Tuition, munity living. I f y o u are interested i n organic gardening and small friendly atmosphere. SAE Martin Weatherheath (UC), Snail Trail holding, building, therapy and Handweavers, Penwenallt Farm, living communally, write t o us Cilgerran, Cardigan, Dyfed. for more information. Enclose s.a.e. to: Lothlorien, Corsock, Castle Douglas, DG7 3DR.

GLYNHYNOD Farm situated ip beautiful Welsh valley near Cardigan coast offers 4-week courses with practical tuition COURSES i n cheesa-making, baking sourdough bread, wholefood cooking, INTRODUCTION t o focusing. working i n organic garden, The politics of giving 'therapy' away. Learn a way of reflecting on milking and general selfsufficiency skills. 4-week course a situation, decision or idea i n order t o create further clarity and including full board and tuition Â£200 Maximum 10 meaning. Tel 263 1897.9am12 noon weekdays. Starts January persons. Send large SAE for prospectus and application and April.

W E I R D

S T U F F No sign of the victim. He slid down the roadside ditch and felt his way along for several yards in each direction. Again nothing. Then just as he began t o climb out of the ditch a 30-ton lorry, which because of the fog had been on the wrong side of the road, crashed into his car almost flattening it. 'I am now sure', said Senor Gatto later, 'that it was the ghost of my brother. Every week we place flowers a t the spot where he was killed and I am convinced that he appeared on the

road to save my life.' (Sunday Express, 20 Jan 1980) And now we return t o Michigan, and leave vanishing victims for a very real bowling ball. Fast-food restaurant manager Thomas Hart, 30, and his wife Linda were driving home to Westland, Michigan, in the early morning of 4th December 1982 on a poorly-lit road after spending the evening a t a friend's house. Suddenly, a 14-pound burgundy bowling ball bounced on the hood of the car and crashed through the front windshield, striking Hart on the head. He died in the evening. Police found the mud-covered bowling ball - a Galaxy-model with small finger and thumb holes as if made for a woman or child but bearing no identifying initials. Since there were no overpasses or high buildings in the area, they speculated that it was hurled from a wooded area near the road or from a passing car. The Detroit News offered a $2,000 reward for any information leading to an arrest and conviction, according t o The Vancouver Sun (13 Dec 1982). I don't know if anyone picked up on this. Paul Sieveking Thanks to: Paul Burd, Dave Fideler and Larry Gumbone. UNDERCURRENTS No. 59

form. Glynhynod Farm, Ffostrasol, Llandysul, Cardiganshire. Tel Rhydlewis 528. W E offer a comprehensive course in spinning, weaving, and veg. dyeing for beginners. Full accommodation in beautiful North Devon manor house. April 22-25, May 20-23, August 19-22. SAE A. Bos, Butler's Farm, Chittlehamholt, Umberleigh, Ex 37 9MT. North Devon. WOMEN for Peace: weekend workshop. 6th-8th May in Reading. Workshops. Speakers. Creche and accommodation. For information write: Women's Weekend Workshop, Reading CND, PO Box 158, Reading Berks, or phone Geraldine: Reading 61361.

HOUSING Â£9,75 ono, East Cork, Eire. Irish farmhouse and outbuildings 315 acre plot (plus rent-f ree field). Electricity - Rayburn cooker. House habitable, just needs modernisation. Outbuildings - 2 storey barn, byres, sheds etc. need renovating and partial rebuilding. Beautiful secluded valley with river nearby, 12 miles to scenic coast and 10 miles to Midleton (Marketown).

Urgent sale required. Tel: Mick Garrett, Southampton 618794. MALE, 26 (Eco, CND member) wishing to move to Bristol, seeks permanentltemporary accommodation. Please phone 0203 327718 or write, Kevin, 212 Greenmoor Road, Nuneaton, Warwickshire.

EVENTS EASTER demonstration. Good Friday 14 mile human chain linking Burghfield-Greenham. Trident Cruise. 14-mile balloon lift off. If you cant' attend sponsor a balloon 20p each. CND P.O. Box 158 Reading.

HOLIDAYS BICYCLING in South of France. Windwheels will transport you and your bicycle to Languedoc on the Mediterranean, Montpellier. 6 days' rudimentary campaing included in the price. 3 weeks or 4 weeks, Â£25 return, advance booking necessary. Further info, sae to: LOW Impact Travel, 9 Gray's Cottages, East Gates, Colchester, Essex. Tel. 0206 35 575. SET your own pace through midWales. A cycle holiday gives you a chance to explore the beauty, Deace and auiet of this little

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has a vacancy on our apprenticeship scheme for an organic gardener on a voluntary basis. An exciting challenging chance to learn. Please apply giving full details and enclosing an SAE to Jeremy light.

CONTACTS WE are a mixed anti-sexist WANTED: skilledlsemi-skilled group meeting regularly, and are worker t o join mixed building interested in setting up a netcollective of 3 women, 3 men. work (for pooling of information Skills required in general and providing a means of building or joinery or plastering. communication), and other Contact Leeds Building Collec. special projects. Anyone with tive, 4 Knowle Road, Leeds 4; ideas, energy, resources or inforTel 785253. mation to share, please ring for details of meetings: Susan or WHOLEFOOD bakery coPaul 01-603 8768, John operative in South London seeks 01-994 33 12. new members. We bake bread and deliver throughout London RADICAL anti-sexist man, aged six days per week. Our com31, who's into relating the male mitment t o working in a collectworkhouse trustee battering of ive is about having lots of personal homeless men to the male and political energy. We are into battering of women, and the creating an alternative t o the male British colonialist rape of oppressive synthetic foodIrish men to the male rape of processing industry run by women. Wants t o buy a Â£2,00 money-grabbing corporations that share of an activist anti-sexist exploit the Third World. New communal house. Nick members don't need to have Bannerman, 2 Victoria Street, particular skills, but must be Belfast BT1 3GE. willing t o take responsibility IN view of the ultimate end of the within the workspace. Low wages universe and present danger t o all and heavy workload. SLBC, 639 life, i s there any sense in reGarrett Lane, London SW18. producing? Also sensible to Tel 01-947 5264. oppose tobacco, excess alcohol ASHRAM Community House sport, religion, war, but support (Sparkbrook). Unique venturevegism, legal hash, ecology, inner-city, multi-cultural interequality. Agree, meet similar? faith, (Birmingham) invites comGeof or Jane, your previous mitted people, residents or replies were delayed seven volunteers t o live and/or partimonths. Box no. 5911. cipate in employment projectMUSICIANS wanted for cooperative development, urban Manchester-based band; non-. farming. Tel: 021-773-7061. sexist, etc. Contact Carol: 061CENTRE for Alternative 860 5301, or Mike: 061-434 Technology, Machynlleth, Powys, 5707.

F l a t s for s a l e * , with beautiful riverside garden. Where else c a n you f i n d people working for home-birth; new child-care; all-age both-sex soft-ball hockey; democracy i n education; Green networks; community r a d i o ; summer g a t h e r i n g s ; Namibia; sensible lob-creation; and radical p a r t i e s ? Oh yes, and peace.

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We're by open flood meadow, but t h i s view i s seen from the town centre with good shops. The bridge i s closed to most t r a f f i c , but w e ' v e parking a n d possibly moorings. Cambridge or Huntingdon are half a n hour by bus. Trains take l e s s than a n hour to Kings Cross from Huntingdon. Or we've s i x coaches from the door to Kings Cross each day. By c a r , we're 60 miles of motorway from London. The town i s friendly, the pressure i s elsewhere, a n d t h e r e ' s more a n d more going on. Two-roomed f l a t s Â£23,000 Single room with shower/wc Â£9,500 or the possibility of converting old but sound shed TO your own t a s t e , or even living over your own workshop. Send for f u l l d e t a i l s of f l a t s , s i t e , 'and town from Tim Eiloart, Rivermill House, St Ives, Huntinadon, or phone OLEO-670i.6. * F l a t s sometimes to let.

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Emotional plague. Findhorn. Compost & comm&(2). Water power; Oz comm&ity radio: Punk; Thailand; positive sabotage.

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551

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Rudolf Bahro Interview; Mount Fuji Peacecamp: Lucas Aerospace; Europe's Green Parties: Women for Life on Earth.

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- either Sheila Durie and Rob Edwards Fuelling the Nuclear Arms Race (worth Â£2.95or Erik

Eckholm's Down to Earth (worth Â£3.95am yours if you take our a subscription. That's ten issues of Undercurrents plus a choice of two of the test books t o emerge from the environmental and anti-nuclear movement for years. Fuelling the Nuclear Arms Race sheds new light on the red connections between nuclear power and the nuclear arms race. Down to Earth is an analysis of the state of the environment globally; covering pollution and toxic wastes, population growth, desertification, biological diversify, health and energy. Both books are important additions to the environmentaldebate. Send just Â£8.5 to Subscription dept, Undercurrents, 27 Clerkenwell Close, London EC1 (further details on page 48).

factual information and studied with striking tones of phrase. The organisation" and subject matter of the book reflect the metamtphosis of the environmental issue in ten years." New Scientist On Fuelling the Nuclear Arms Race: "This book is a must for activists wanting to cot% y some incontrovertible evidence, against all things nuclear" Labour Herald

___________________________________________ Undercurrents 59 April - May 1983 3 Eddies 8 Letters 9 Bundestag Streaked Green - Roland Clarke looks at the aftermath of the German elections 10 Merging Red and Green - Roland Clarke 12 Beast News - John May 14 Greening the Economy - Jonathan Porritt 17 Have We A Future? - Petra Kelly 21 NATTA News - Simon Mays column 22 Lead On The Brain - Nick Kollerstrom 24 The Religion Of The Machine Age - Mog Johnstone interviews Dora Russell 28 Nukes Solve Acid Rain? The latest corrosive developments - John May 29 Plant Power: Biomass - the energy of the future? - Nigel Dudley 31 The Big Fix: Just keep taking the pills - Andrew Tyler 34 Health and Efficiency: Natural Health Centres - lan Grant 36 Briefing 39 Reviews 46 Weird Stuff Bulletin - Paul Sieveking 46 Small Ads 48 Subscriptions & Froth - Loony Doomster

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