A Few Introductory Notes on Edmund Newman's 'The Natural History Of British Butterflies and Moths' which may be useful

E Newman FES. FZS. finished his classic work in the late 1860s. By then, Newman was advanced in years and it was the culmination of much study and experience. He attempts a broad classification of Lepidoptera - a branch of study pretty much then in its infancy. Some of this may appear idiosyncratic today though Newman always gives good reason for classifying an insect this and not that. For example, under the Fritillaries he places the Camberwell Beauty (which he signifies as 'The White Bordered') the Peacock and the Red Admiral. This is followed by the 'Angle Wings' under which he includes the Painted Lady and White Admiral.

Also, the Latin classification is invariable a little different - mainly the first designate - though the second is largely similar to those in use today. There are exceptions however: The Small Blue for Newman is Lycaena Aisus and not Cupido Minimus (which even in Latin evokes the butterfly more accurately) and the Meadow Brown is Epinephale Janira and not Maniola Jurtina as today etc.

E Newman was a passionate researcher and during his life made discovery after discovery in the field: (e.g. The Large Blue at Barnwell Wold, Northants in the 1820s). His obvious enthusiasm over-rode his egoism and he frequently and without rancour, states his fellow entomologists objections to some of his classifications.

Following on from this disarming and democratic approach (so rare in these times) we must therefore pay attention to the information he collected over the years from particular entomologists he corresponded or, was friendly with. It seems Newman didn't take fools gladly and one feels he was conscious of wary of the proclivity to wild imaginings amongst field workers. Thus in his introduction to 'Natural History', Newman only mentions four entomologists by name whom he was particularly indebted to. Apart from a certain Mr. BOND (originally in block caps) - a friend who had collected the most unusual varieties some of which are illustrated in the book, Newman often refers to a Mr. BIRCHALL (again in caps) who in the localities list provided much information on butterflies in Yorkshire. Some of the findings in retrospect, are quite amazing - but more about that later.

The sheer eloquence of Newman's prose in particular his recourse to analogy to more securely anchor an observation cannot fail to impress. Hence his scientific descriptions have an added liveliness all the more necessary because of the poor quality of the book's engravings in an age when 100 words were generally worth more than one picture. (As ever Thomas Bewick was the exception in this recalcitrant media - his illustrations remain more telling than the greater flexibility afforded by lithography). However, throughout Newman's book there is an attempted life-size consistency of scale together with the odd visual record of a variety that compensates for poor quality and which was to set the pattern for insect illustration. But, there is no denying that Benjamin Wilkes hand-coloured illustrations in 'The English Moths and Butterflies' over a century earlier (1749) were much better.

Cumbersome though Newman's volume is, it could pass in its day for a field guide tailored to a growing mass market unlike in Wilkes' time. Moreover, wood engraving could be printed alongside type in one operation thus making production a lot cheaper. In comparison, bird illustrators, working on stone before the invention of photo-litho, were still looking for patrons and their work was sold as folio editions. We need only mention Audubon, Gould, Keuleman, Gronveld and Edward Lear. The latter, for instance, spent much of his life under the patronage of the 13th Earl of Derby illustrating birds from the aviary at Knowsley.

The extraordinary power and keenness of observation in romanticism must have influenced Newman. As a scientist however, emotional appeal had to give way to increased descriptive accuracy pursued relentlessly in page after page. In this endeavour he was only surpassed by the brilliance of John Ruskin's methodical jottings particularly on flowers. But Newman's scientific temper cannot restrain his lyricism and he writes of butterflies 'making love and sipping honey'. This may prefigure the sentimental effusion of late Victorian nature books (when a Lepidopterist stretches our incredulity when referring to a lone Scotch Argus as 'looking for a lost love') but the glorious innocence of this phase of Newman's adds a childlike charm to this monument of serious inquiry into Lepidoptera. If only we were so able to forget just for the moment our scientific adulthood.

Better than anyone before or since, Newman compiled some of the best English literature on the subject of butterflies and moths in a kind of foreword exquisitely titled: 'Prelude to Mottoes' (inevitably calling to mind the sensation caused by the publication of Wordsworth's early poem 'The Prelude' a year after the poet's death in 1850).

In the first paragraph of Newman's introduction, Philipe de Commine is quoted:

'It flies and seems a flower that floats on air'

And further on the caterpillar:

'Once a worm, a thing that crept,

On the bare earth, then wrought a tomb and slept'.

Always erudite, E Newman somehow turned up the finest poem (perhaps not excluding John Clare in the early 19th century) in English on butterflies and written by Edmund Spencer in Elizabethan times (well before the fledgling Lepidopterist Moses Harris and the Aurelians got going). it's probably worth quoting in full simply because it appears long forgotten and probably most people know nothing about it.

"Round about doth flie,

From bed to bed, from one to t'other border;

And take survey with curious busy eye,

Of every flower and herbe there set in order.

Now this, now that, he tasteth tenderly,

Yet none of them he rudely doth disorder.

Ne with his feete their silken leaves deface

But pastures on the pleasures of each place."

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"And evermore, with most varietie

And change of sweetness (for all change is sweet),

He casts his glutton sense to satisfie,

Now sucking of the sap of herbs most meet

Or of the dew, which yet on them doth lie

Now in the same bathing his tender feet;

And then he percheth on some branch thereby,

To neaten him, and his moist wings to dry"

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"And whatso else of virtue good or ill

Grew in the garden, fetched from far way

Of every one he takes and tastes at will;

And on their pleasures greedily doth prey

That when he hath both plaied and fed at fill

In the warme sunne he doth himself embay,

And then rests in riotous sufisaunce

Of all his gladfulness and kingly joyance."

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"What more felicite can fall to creature

Than to enjoy delight with libertie

And to be lord of all the works of Nature'

To reign in the aire from the earth to highest skie,

To feed on flowers, and weeds of glorious feature'

To take whatever thing doth please the eye'

Who rests not pleased with such happiness

Well worthy he to taste of wretchedness."

EDMUND SPENCER

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Newman's scholarly, wide-ranging introduction citing Greek myth, Ovid, Spencer and so on were meant to impress upon the Victorian reading public with its pronounced bias towards 'the classics' that entomology was a fit and proper subject in its own right. In that sense, Newman's classicising can get a bit heavy-handed as, for instance, when he describes chasing a Clouded Yellow assisted by a 'multitude of female Hibernians in the healthful pursuit of horticulture' adding, the scene must have been an exciting one and would have minded a classical spectator of Meleage, or Orestes, or Oedipus pursued by the Furies!

This straining for effect however is a mere entre to a still dubious sequel: the study of Lepidoptera is an end in itself ''a history worthy the study of every rational being'. The study of plants and birds had long enjoyed a measure of respectability. Aristotle for instance had long been regarded as the founder of Ornithology and his bird notes had been preciously guarded by the Medieval/Renaissance Church scholastics. But an interest in insects and especially butterflies and moths was pretty much the province of fools and eccentrics. Lady Glanville's will (her name was given posthumously to the Glanville Fritillary) was not contested in court on the grounds that anybody who collected butterflies could not be of a sound mind. In a very real way, Newman was a product of scientific non-conformity questioning all received opinion until sure of its veracity.

Significantly, Newman some ten years after Darwin's 'The Origin Of The Species' shrank back from evolutionary apostasy. However, in all fairness, the most unprejudiced mind of the time would have found it hard to believe that butterflies and moths have a history. 150 years later and we are still unable to supply the missing link and it will probably stay like that.

William Paley, who 'deduced' the existence of a god from nature's providential design was clearly a major influence on Newman. On that account alone he is closer to the spirit of Wordsworth who had dipped approvingly into Paley than to Darwin. Without a moment's hesitation, Newman speaks of a "creative wisdom' at work in the transformation of caterpillar into butterfly. However, in the hands of Newman, the point is a serious one and still worthy of our respect. 'Everyone now knows that a butterfly was not always a butterfly, probably everyone then knew it but there is little trace of that knowledge in the standard work of Linnaeus and Fabricus or in that of our own venerable Haworth'. Newman's close attention to describing in detail the various stages of a species life history was not only fairly untypical of its time but, also, had a symbolic intent beyond that of arguing in favour of a more naturally based system of classification which took into account the various stages of an insect's life. The metamorphosis of a butterfly was also that of death and resurrection and aside from the saccharine church warden piety of 'regions of bliss', the words Newman chooses suggest a more earth-bound liberation: 'Lastly comes the butterfly bursting from its prison house, and borne from place to place on beautiful wings'.

From the epoch of the French Revolution onwards, the butterfly far more than the bird (the Sans Culottes on occasion destroyed exotic collections of birds as aristocratic appendages even as the eagle was presently to become the national insignia of America and Germany) comes to embody the potential for change and becoming. In this remarkable piece of nature with such humble origins is concentrated the dialectic of movement and development and ultimately, the transformation of man. A single thread unites Goethe's 'Ecstasy and Desire' (the moth to the flame ''die and become', the German word for butterfly - schmetterling ' is used) Keats' 'Ode to Psyche' and Charles Fourier's 'Butterfly Principle' which is far more concretely grounded than the others in the novelty of his still inspiring approach to the division of labour. Newman was unaware of this powerful undercurrent yet from time to time it still bursts forth unrestrainedly with an artless lack of affectation. Such outbursts are today entirely lacking and it is only scientific self-censorship that is to blame. For conservation to be effective it can only be judged so from the standpoint of totality.

The following is a near verbatim account - and in the same order - of those relevant parts in Newman's classic relating to the butterflies of Yorkshire. Not all butterflies are mentioned here and most of the common ones have been left out. A few italicised comments by us are added with the intention of further clarifying information.

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Localities of Butterflies in Yorkshire

Silver Washed Fritillary (P. 22-25)

"...the Silver Washed Fritillary is decidedly a wood insect, and I imagine occurs in almost every extensive wood south of the Tweed..."

"It is more or less abundant in all the English and Welsh counties, from which, through the kindness of correspondents, I have received lists, and its non-appearance as a native of the others implies rather the absence of observers than the absence of the butterfly ...it occurs not uncommonly in our northern English counties, Northumberland, Cumberland and Durham."

Sadly, Newman makes no mention of Yorkshire localities most likely deeming it unnecessary probably because it was fairly common everywhere.

Dark Green Fritillary (P. 25-29)

Yorkshire: near York: Robert Cook.

Abundant on moors and open ground above Cloughton: J H Rowntree.

Scarborough, Wakefield, Sheffield, Leeds: E Birchall.

Common in oak woods about York, Scarborough and all the southern parts of the county: T H Allis.

Queen of Spain Fritillary (P. 32-35)

Yorkshire: One specimen on the west side of Oliver's Mount, Scarborough in September 1869: J H Rowntree.

One near York: Edwin Birchall.

High Brown Fritillary (P. 30-35)

Yorkshire: Near York: Robert Cook.

Yedmondale, and on moors near Cloughton: J H Rowntree.

Scarborough and Sheffield: Edwin Birchall.

Pearl-Bordered Fritillary (P. 35-37)

E. Newman makes no specific listing but makes a broad and interesting comment: 'It is included in every county list I have received through the kindness of correspondents, except Derbyshire, and in a very ingenious table compiled by Mr. Jenner Fust, and published in 'The Transactions of the Entomological Society' it appears in all the numerous sub-provinces into which he has divided Great Britain.'

So perhaps from this it may be concluded that the Pearl-Bordered Fritillary in the 1860s was to be seen in all the vice-counties of Yorkshire.

Small Pearl-Bordered Fritillary (P. 37-39)

Yorkshire: near York, plentiful on moors and in fir plantations near Cloughton: J H Rowntree.

Scarborough: Edwin Birchall.

It seems impossible to imagine now but the North York Moors where the butterfly must have been abundant in the 1860s was largely terra incognito prior to the building of the railway line from Middlesborough and York to Whitby. Until then, Whitby was a place of land-locked mystery. A book 'Forty Years in a Mooorland Parish' by the Rev. Atkinson garnered a measure of popularity, thanks largely to William Morris and Co, following its publication around 1870. To leaf through it for hints concerning the natural history of the region could be instructive. He does mention, for instance, that a squirrel within living memory could go from Kildale to Commondale 'wivoot once touching groond' It is now sparse moorland.

Small Pearl Bordered Fritillaries at Lawkland Moss, Cravendale, N Yorks early June 1997. The day was dark, and cold with heavy drizzle but the butterflies were to be clearly seen resting on the ragged robin opening their wings whenever there was a brief respite in the weather. Even then they were so comatose it was possible to lift them on to the fingers.

Marsh Fritillary (P 39-42) (Newman refers to it as the Greasy Fritillary)

Yorkshire: Near York : Robert Cook.

Comma (P. 48-52)

It's worth remembering that Newman was commenting upon this butterfly when it was declining rapidly everywhere throughout Britain. It would seem that the Comma is now more abundant in Yorkshire than for centuries.

Yorkshire: Common at York:T H Allis.

(Formerly taken at Raincliff Wood, near Scarborough, but not of late years: J H Rowntree ).

Huddersfield, rarely and singly: G T Porritt:

Halifax, Sheffield, Wakefield, Leeds: Edwin Burchall.

Large Tortoiseshell P. 55-58

Yorkshire: Near Scarborough, Huddersfield, York, Sheffield, Wakefield and Halifax: Edwin Birchall and others.

Incidently, Newman classifies the Small and Large Tortoiseshell under Fritillaries.

White Admiral (P. 67-71)

Lincolnshire: Common in the south of the county in fine seasons: T H Allis.

Even in Newman's time the White Admiral was never a Yorkshire species. In the meantime, look how this species has slowly moved north - well into mid and north Lincs and perhaps hovering on the Yorkshire borders.

Purple Emperor (P. 71-77)

Lincolnshire: About Lincoln, Bardney Wood and in south Lincolnshire: T H Allis.

Nottinghamshire: Occurs occasionally at Ollerton; in 1859 I had a fine female given me alive. It was taken inside a pigsty near the edge of Willow Wood, three miles from Ollerton ' R E Bramwell. Occasionally near Newark: George Gascoyne.

It hardly needs to be pointed out that both Ollerton and Newark are no distance from the Yorkshire border (especially Ollerton) so possibly at some point in the early 19th century there may have been a glint of the Purple Emperor in that part of Sherwood forest that passes across into Yorkshire. For the not too far-distant future it must be remembered that the range of the Purple Emperor, has extended considerably. Is there any northern extending breakout from the expanding south Notts populations?

Marbled White (P. 77-78)

Yorkshire: Near York, Robert Cook; Scarborough and Sheffield - Edwin Birchall; Common in Yorkshire ' T.H. Allis; it used to be found in Melton Wood near Doncaster, but has been extinct since a field that bordered the wood was ploughed; I do not think it is ever found now near Doncaster ' Alfred Ecroyd.

Scotch Argus (P. 82-86) (Newman refers to it as the Northern Brown)

Yorkshire: Colne: Edwin Birchall.

Common at Grassington, above Settle: T H Allis.

Colne is on the Lancashire/Yorkshire border and considering ever-changing county boundaries Colne must have been a Yorkshire town in the 1860s. One wonders where the Scotch Argus colony was near Colne and what happened to it? Most likely its demise wasn't to do with any kind of urban development as much of the landscape between Colne and Keighley is still fairly wild and uncultivated. Did the Colne Scotch Argus go the same way as that arresting, dark variety with indistinct eye spots which inhabited the semi-limestone pavement at the top of Grass Wood? Incidentally, we heard recently of a long lost colony of Scotch Argus on Eston Nab near Roseberry Topping on the North York Moors. True or false?

Speckled Wood (P. 87-88)

"I believe it occurs in every English and Welsh county"

No further comment or specific addition from Newman's Yorkshire field trip contacts.

The Gatekeeper (P. 93-95) (Newman refers to it as the Large Heath!)

Says it occurs in Yorkshire "without note of abundance or rarity"

Large Heath (Davus Form) (For Newman characterized as Rothlieb's Marsh Ringlet)

Yorkshire: Thorne Moors, near Doncaster: Alfred Ecroyd;

Hadfield Fens: E Birchall. "I took it on Thorne Moor, but wasted and had specimens given me from Cottingham near Hull. In visiting this latter locality, I find it different from Thorne Moor, which is mossy or spongy: but the Cottingham locality is rather like those spots where I have taken Davus in Scotland" J C Dale 'Zoologist.'

In the 1860s the Latin names for the sub-divisions of the Large Heath were rather different from what they are today and all were referred to as Davus, 'Davus in Scotland' would now, of course be 'Scotica'. The nearest Scotica colony to Hull would probably be north Northumberland or that isolated colony south of the Solway in north Cumbria. Also, Newman makes no mention of the North York Moors population so possibly they hadn't been discovered by then.

Duke Of Burgundy (P. 102-105)

Yorkshire: Abundant near Pickering in 1868: J H Rowntree.

Scarborough, Sheffield, York, Leeds: Edwin Birchall.

Doncaster: Alfred Ecroyd.

Interestingly, Newman tends to note a certain abundance in the northern counties: N Lancs, Cumberland and Lincolnshire and Westmoreland in contrast to the south west of England where he concludes the Duke of Burgundy to be 'rare'.

Green Hairstreak (P. 105-6)

"In England it occurs in nearly all the county lists I have received and when absent may be supposed to arise from want of observation."

Purple Hairstreak P. 106-108

Similar to previous report. Unspecific.

White Letter Hairstreak (P. 108-10) (To add to confusion Newman names this butterfly the Black Hairstreak!)

Yorkshire: The caterpillar is common on wych elm near Doncaster: Geo. T Porritt

Near York and Sheffield: Edwin Birchall

Edlington Wood near Barnsley: J Harrison

Very numerous near Doncaster in 1860: Alfred Ecroyd

Sheffield at Warncliffe Wood: Edwin Birchall.

Black Hairstreak (P. 110-111) (Newman refers to it as the Dark Hairstreak!)

It may be said that E Newman in 1828 identified the Black (Dark) Hairstreak as a distinctly different species to the White letter Hairstreak having become a recipient of an example purchased by the entomological club from a Mr Seaman. The butterfly was actually caught in Monk's wood, Huntingdonshire but no sooner was it declared to be a 'new species to Britain, than the locality became a mine of gold; and Mr Seaman very judiciously concluded to remove the mine to a greater distance, even to ultima thule of his geographical knowledge, Yorkshire.'(Newman)

It seems many entomologists made trips to Yorkshire but, of course, no Black Hairstreak was to be found. However, Newman in his localities guide reports that the butterfly thirty years later 'seems confined' to five counties one of which is, remarkably, Derbyshire!

Derbyshire: In a box of insects captured within a few miles of Chesterfield I find this very local species ' J. R. Hind. 'Intelligencer' Vol 1X P. 27. 'I believe the 'Entomologists Weekly Intelligencer' commenced publication in the mid 1850s to....'''

As we know Chesterfield is but a mile or so from the South Yorkshire boundary. How interesting!

Brown Hairstreak (P. 112-114)

E. Newman notes that the butterfly can be seen in Lincolnshire at Grange and Silverdale in N Lancashire and in Barron Wood, near Carlisle but no mention is made of Yorkshire.

Silver-Studded Blue. (P 119-121)

Newman surprisingly makes no mention of the Yorkshire localities around York, Pickering and Scarborough. However, in his countrywide survey, he mentions the N Yorkshire Lepidopterist, J Sang's observation that the butterfly is 'very common at Darlington'. Also, near Manchester ''common at Chat Moss, S. Lancs and Solwick Moss near Preston. Also, occurring in Lincolnshire and in Westmoreland and Witherslack and Faraway moss' J.B. Hodginson.

By way of an aside, it is the Darlington example which interests us here. Some of the railway cuttings particularly on what is now referred to as the Heritage line from Darlington to Wear Head were, in our youth in the 1950s, particularly rich in Lepidoptera like Dark Green Fritillary and big colonies of the sex-linked, var hospita of the Wood Tiger. E B Ford said this day-flying moth could be found on the hilly slopes of west Durham but not on the east Durham plain. As schoolboys we passed our discoveries in a letter to a Durham lepidopterist in 1956 but never received a reply - the information probably regarded as erroneous. Now we find that recently some of the shale ground north of Heighington station has been made into a protected Durham wild life site. However, the var hospita was to be found just south of Heighington station on a bankside known as Codlings bridge. Does this glorious place remain?

Brown Argus/ Northern Brown Argus (P. 123- 128)

Newman finds the differing 'species' all very confusing but makes no mention of either Argus in Yorkshire. He considers there are three different types: the Brown Argus, Castle Eden Argus and Scotch Brown Argus but they 'are nothing more than geographical races of one species'.

Chalk-Hill Blue (P. 130-131)

After reading Newman one cannot help but speculate that the Chalk-Hill Blue probably once - before records began - bred in Yorkshire.

Although Newman says: "It appears to be abundant everywhere in England on chalk, but generally absent where there is no chalk", he then goes on to somewhat contradict himself by listing northern areas where the butterfly could only have resided on a limestone base. Apart from Lincolnshire where T. H. Allis notes that it is: "common in Lincolnshire on Chalk" there's some facts which seem quite astounding.

Cumberland: Grisedale near Saddleback: Mr Hope of Penrith, told me he had taken it repeatedly ' J B Hodgkinson.

Lancashire: - Grange "Alfred Owen; abundant at Arnside in Siverdale more especially about Arnside Tower" J B Hodginson. (Does he mean the Tower area proper as now it's covered by green pasture for grazing or rather the Knott itself rising up 200 metres away').

Westmoreland: Rough fields, near Beetham and Milnthorpe, in August: J B Hodginson.

Small Blue (P. 134-135)

Newman does not specifically mention the Small Blue in Yorkshire but whether through an error of omission or not tantalizingly suggests it is there.

"It does not appear in my lists for Berkshire, Cornwall, Cheshire, Hertfordshire, Middlesex, Norfolk, Northampton, Nottingham, Shropshire, Surrey or Warwickshire but is present in all the other county lists."

The Large Blue (P. 137-140)

Although obviously never a Yorkshire species, Newman mentions G T Porritt's contribution towards unravelling the secret of the Large Blue although even Newman was unaware of just how elusive that final unravelling would be. In his book, Newman mentions Porritt only infrequently and one suspects there was little or no personal contact between them.

However, either Porritt's field reports or diary are erroneous or it's Newman's laxity or else there is a serious typographical error but; 'He informs us at page 166 of the same journal that on the 4th of May two young caterpillars emerged' (surely this must be July') A few sentences later and the same caterpillars 10 days on, "were about to undergo their final moult" (Surely this must mean first or second moult)

Swallowtail (P. 149-153)

Newman notes that single Swallowtails were captured in northern counties. "One taken at Gilsland about 15 miles from Carlisle and one brought along to an entomologist in Lancashire having been caught on a turnpike road in 1856. Newman acknowledges that he doesn't know if they'd been bred or escaped. Breeding and releasing Swallowtails quite arbitrarily was much in fashion at the time and it seems, some were released at Grassington on the Yorkshire Pennines !

Newman though leaves his most interesting note on Yorkshire.

Yorkshire: On page 27 of the preface to Haworth's "Lepidoptera Britannica" we find the following passage: "I know Machaon, the common Swallowtail Papilio, breeds near Beverley yet, and my brother-in-law, R Scales of Walworth, near London, possess a specimen of it which was taken there seven years since."

Haworth published in 1803 so the Swallowtail in the collection of R Scales must have been caught at Beverley in 1796 and seeing Haworth is so venerated, it's possible that R Scales' collection might be in a museum somewhere.

A further note of interest. In the Tolson Memorial Museum, Huddersfield, in the room exhibiting the varied collection of that excellent worker naturalist, Ben Morley, there's an exhibit of a Swallowtail supposedly caught at Horbury in West Yorkshire in 1840 and later presented to him. Of course, Swallowtails at Horbury in 1840 must be extremely unlikely though at the time, (as indeed, somewhat remains) there is a long stretch of very marshy ground beginning at Horbury going on and downwards through the lower Calder and that may, conceivably linked-up once with the fenland around Beverley. This though is pushing things. If the Swallowtail had been caught in 1740 - well perhaps!

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Note added in December 2004 (Extracts from a letter to Howard Frost 27-10-04 - on requesting the photo of Morley's Swallowtail for the forthcoming book on Yorkshire butterflies)

"Perhaps there may be something else I find rather more fascinating. I have a feeling Beverley wasn't the only place where the Swallowtail flew in Yorkshire up to the last decade of the 18th century. Although the early developments of the industrial revolution like canal building along with mills etc related to that form of transport would probably have finally put paid to presumably small Swallowtail colonies around say the early years of the 19th century some may have lingered on in areas where any interest in Lepidoptera would have been scant indeed and up river from Beverley. I suspect before the industrial revolution that a lot of Yorkshire rivers like the Ouse, Wharfe, Aire and Calder in their long approach to the Humber estuary had large flood plains which presumably merged at times into peat bogs on which milk parsley may have flourished. (In this respect rather like the River Yare's relationship with Strumpshaw Fen near Norwich which hosts a Swallowtail colony). Most likely these bogs were given a rudimentary drainage system and maybe covered with topsoil or possibly early pit spoil heap landfill as a basis for industrial building. I doubt very much if the peat would have been first extracted despite being a valuable fuel.

Obviously Horbury in 1840 was probably part of West Riding coketown and I suspect even a primitive version of Healey Mills Marshalling Yards was already up and running not so much for the transport of wool as a depot for coal. In fact coal used to be heaped up in these yards merely six years ago. Although large-scale capitalisation of coal didn't really take off until about 1850 in Yorkshire, the area to the immediate south of Horbury was riddled with small drift mines in the often deep, gorgeously wooded ravines that characterise the Netherton/Overton/Flockton area. These drift mines in such beautiful scenery had a scenic topography second to none. It's hardly surprising therefore that in the 1990s, Caphouse Colliery ' a combination of pit winding gear and drift tunnels ' was selected to be the heritage site for the National Mining Museum in a setting so picturesque it's like a miniature Appalachia. On visiting the museum you half suspect you'll run into Johnny Cash, guitar in hand singing Hazard Hollow! But it's precisely this ambience of stinking industry and natural beauty, which gives a certain aura to Horbury Bridge".

Morley's Swallowtail: Second thoughts!

"Could Horbury in the 1840s have retained a small patch of old peat bog that was favourable to a released Swallowtail or even an indigenous leftover that had travelled upstream rather than from Derbyshire' Reed beds are in any case reasonably common on these reaches of the Aire and Calder. Today on the recently created great lake of Fairburn Ings - only a few miles away and almost down river - and product of old pit water, if you close your eyes and simply look at the thick reed beds you can imagine you are somewhere on the Norfolk Broads. Alas though the banks are made up of former pit spoil heaps and any peat bog which once may have nourished milk parsley is something long gone never to return. However historically in the mid 19th century we cannot absolutely discount the possibility that our glorious Morley butterfly may have clung on somewhere around here. I think it's worth raising all such possibilities in a footnote to Ben's puzzling contribution." (Letter to Howard Frost)

Grizzled Skipper (P. 169-170) Dingy Skipper (P. 170-171)

Newman says of both butterflies that they occur in every county list.

Silver-Spotted Skipper (P. 172-173)

Yorkshire: Scarborough, York: Edwin Birchall

Fascinating! Remember Birchall was one of the few entomologists Newman particularly singles out in his preface so such a recording is probably not speculation or wish-fulfilment!

David and Stuart Wise.

April 2000

A critique of E O Wilson shall form an integral part of my hoped for book on butterflies. His early passion was for butterflies switching a little later to ants. He now describes himself, as a "small organism biologist" no doubt finding the term entomologist too constricting. So in his chosen field he is already pushing at the limits.

This enhanced scope, which ultimately derived from an early interest in insects, must have enabled him to crash other barriers like political economy (though he never uses the term as such) and aesthetics. He makes a hash of both failing to realise that each are in far greater crises than entomology ever will be. But the fact that he felt propelled to bring in other dimensions is what matters. It must reflect the fact that the life sciences are beginning to feel the heat. Yet it is not a good synthesis. In fact it is anything but a totalising movement. Rather it is interdisciplinary in aim and does not seek to transcend either political economy or aesthetics and which would put small organism biology on an even firmer footing, enriching it immeasurably.

He wrote an article for The Washington Post in 2000 entitled "Wings across two Cultures" in which he is shown holding a butterfly. In it he critiques the narrowness of much scientific work doubting for example if more than a dozen co-workers had read his essay on the discovery of cera pachyne ants in New Caledonia. Important though this was to the mycology elect, "preoccupied with their own sectors of the frontiers" he needed to contact a wider audience, a lay public and other scientists, even perhaps to secure the future of a highly specialised subject. And so he had to employ a different more imaginative approach, less constrained by strictly scientific rigour. And this for Wilson is where the "art" and the mistake come in: "Only later did it occur to me to write about these early efforts as a personal history, in a narrative that includes motive and emotion. When I decided to try it in Biophilia (1984) and Naturalist (1994), I discovered how difficult it was to compose this sort of literature." But why call it "literature"? Why not enhanced science? Literature is an embarrassingly naïve term one that is falling out of use and which cannot be rescued by bringing science to its aid. (The same is happening to Freud's highly problematical insights where Freud the litterateur i.e. his spellbinding ability to express himself and narrative powers are viewed as the be all and end all. In this sense science then becomes the last true refuge of the artist). But Wilson also realizes that classes in artistic appreciation for scientists ("merely playing the cello or admiring modern art") miss the point. Though he does not say so explicitly the aesthetic has to become integral to that of the scientific point of view. Only then can the false dichotomy of the two cultures, reminiscent so of C P Snow, be overcome and yet despite his artistic illusions this realisation comes creeping through because, in a significant turn of phase, it is a "frontier on its own". He then betrays the potential of this new frontier by evoking what has perished: "Among its greatest challenges, still largely unmet, is the conversion of the scientific creative process and world view into literature."

Wilson even implies that the evolution of science has outstripped human evolution and that its desiccated approach and presentation, in particular, is anti-human. The demand that this aridity be overcome is also a plea for the restoration of humanity and the fully evolved human being. However as we shall see Wilson's schema is also highly contradictory.

Following on from the aforementioned article Wilson gave an interview to The Guardian some two years later entitled "The Ant Man". As an evolved human being he has no qualms about giving interviews that just show how retarded his take is on the media and its immense capacity to distort the truth. However in this interview it is the socio-biologist that easily takes precedent over the social critic. In fact the two terms are to Wilson one and the same and so he blunders into the same trap as all other biologists, living and dead, great and small, have done. Quite simply they are lacking in any appreciation of Marx other than as a crude caricature and Wilson's pseudo-intelligent dismissal -"wonderful theory, wrong species"- cannot be bettered. Though the remark was hardly meant to be taken seriously what other species could it have possibly applied to? Ants have no history other than an evolutionary one. But for us "history is the natural history of man". And so we must remain highly sceptical about Wilson's claim that we are burdened down by our archaic past that is in every way different from the nightmarish past we are trying to awaken from. Wilson's past is that of the two/three million years we spent as hunter gatherers and which hard wired us to behave in a short term manner geared toward immediate survival. Hence long term strategies such as are required by conservation are alien to us. And so by implication are abstractions, generalities and universalities. Within this schema there is no place for ruling ideologies being those of the ruling class or that modes of thought are also modes of production. And so capitalism is not the problem, it is "man "or more precisely the cave man in each of us. It is to that far distant past Wilson's notion of an inborn love of nature - biophilia - harks back to. It certainly is an arresting notion and has to be taken seriously but this paleo-romanticism is something rather different in reality from swinging out of the forest to stand upright in some inviting Claude Lorraine like landscape, Most likely it would have been a dusty hot dangerous place in which to live and our biophilic instincts must have been subtly shaped over the countless millennia since. By the same token we are struck by the archaic nature of phobias - water, heights, thunder, snakes and so on. And yet it becomes too crude an instrument when he claims our instinct is to chop down trees and kill wild animals. A landless peasant will be more predisposed to cut yet more of the remaining Amazonian rain forest than an urban city dweller in London but that is not because one is more biologically evolved than the other. And there is every reason to think wild animals now fare rather better in urban than in country areas because to the general population they are very welcome. The notion of a raw, unmodified instinct becomes nonsensical and eventually even common sense is left out of the frame. A starving person kills to eat but they would rather steal from the local supermarket than kill the neighbour's cat.

Wilson and Thoreau: In Wilson's book "The Future of Life"(2001) there is a prologue to Thoreau. It could be said to mark Thoreau's coming of age within the scientific community which up to now, has held him at arms length as little more than a curiosity, at best a scientist in waiting. Yet Wilson's introductory letter to Thoreau (meaning that he is still very much alive) fails to grasp the essence of Thoreau although, quite rightly, he says, "you searched for essence at Walden Pond". Of a remembered generation that included Emerson, Whitman, Melville and Hawthorne, the most consequential is easily Thoreau even despite the enormously influential, though incomplete anarchism, of "Civil Disobedience". (Emerson said, correctly, he was "almost for abolition of government"). After reading a few paragraphs of "Walden Pond" my powers of perception really are improved, if only temporarily. I take note of the most insignificant things like the raindrops on a bare hawthorn bush. But I do not want to write a poem or compose a novel: that kind of activity belongs to the pre-history of essence.

Wilson has barely introduced himself, apologising for calling Thoreau by his first name, Henry (because his "words invite familiarity") than he describes "Walden Pond" as a "work of art" able "to reach across five generations to address the human condition accurately. Can there be a better definition of art'" Wrong. Art is of its time and therefore constrained by time in a way "Walden Pond" is not. And though Thoreau is never completely specific on this point, it is clear from reading "Walden Pond" that he is very much opposed to artifice. Wilson, for instance, calls his log cabin a "toy house" but if he had read the pages on "Economy", which describes the building of his 'house' he would know Thoreau was making a fundamental statement about architecture, building and related trades like carpentry and plastering. He was a utilitarian with a difference, an essential utilitarian, challenging the origin of the division of labour in each of us. Hence he was not a utilitarian in the specifically historical sense of the term that was predicated on an increasingly useless division of labour and coincident with the rise of industrial capitalism.

It is true that after "Economy" (which is really about paring the necessities of life down to the barest essentials to free up the rest of his life - he reckoned to work only six weeks a year - and not about the abolition of Political Economy) and describing, "where he lived" he devotes a chapter to "Reading". And though he might come across as a narrow classicist devoted exclusively to Homer and a sprinkling of other classical authors, do please take note: whilst building his cabin "when my hands were much employed, I read but little, but the least scraps of paper which lay on the ground, my holder, or tablecloth, afforded me as much entertainment, in fact answered the same purpose as The Iliad."

But as the next few pages under the heading of "Sounds" makes clear, the essential cannot be found here: "We are in danger of forgetting the language which all things and events speak without metaphor, which alone is copious and standard." What Thoreau means is actually obscure but it is also compelling: "Much is published, but little printed. The rays which stream through the shutter will be no longer remembered when the shutter is wholly removed". But we do get the gist even if it is wreathed in a haze of meaning. Literature is not just laid aside because of the need to work: " I did not read books this summer; I hoed beans. Nay, I often did better than this". And thus Thoreau gives the lie to Wilson's superficial judgement that "Walden Pond" is artistic in aim. And what follows is not just about the joys of idleness but the forgetting of time as measured by days of the week and the passing hours. It is in such passages that the oracular quality of "Walden Pond" is most potent. Though little actually happens (a bird, for instance, flits noiselessly through the house) once read it leaves an indelible impression.

The section (I object to the word chapter) is called "Sounds". And we can be in no doubt these sounds are superior to the written word which he has just described in "Reading" as "the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art". But not as evocative as "sound" and Thoreau really did listen: the timbre of distant bells, he believed, was subtly changed by the leaves and pine needles. Nature had its own melody it imparted to every sound. But in natural scientific terms this striking auditory perception went no further: he did not pause to wonder if the tronk, tronk, of bullfrogs were just that bit different as to suggest the presence of similar but separate species. And it is on this score that Wilson ceases to be laudatory and accuses him of scientific mediocrity. There is some substance to this accusation because as a naturalist he is so unique as to be almost unrecognisable. But he actually had read Darwin's "Voyage of the Beagle" and bought one of the first American copies of "The Origin of the Species" when it came out in 1859, scribbling notes in the margin. He certainly was becoming more of a natural scientist prior to his premature death at the age of 43 and occasionally in "Walden Pond" Latin nomenclature appears beside vernacular names.

But was Thoreau aspiring to be only a naturalist scientist or was he seeking to redefine natural science, to propel it along a different path to remake it without loss of accuracy? Did he aspire to be the parallel Darwin of a new world, to make good what Darwin failed to satisfy in otherwise receptive people? I say this in the hope of shaking from within 'science' that is E O Wilson's techno-scientific dogmatism without falling into the abyss of scepticism.

E O Wilson is an important, possibly major, entomologist, but he never succeeds in bringing out Thoreau's breadth, his decision to "interrogate every custom". In shrinking Thoreau his enviable grasp of many branches of natural history is very apparent, though I would argue this enormous knowledge has been gained at a great loss elsewhere. Wilson opts to call himself a small organism biologist in preference to an invertebrate biologist that suggests he finds the term entomologist an encumbrance and a hindrance. Creepy crawlies are small but beneath them is an even smaller world inhabiting extremities where only recently it was thought life could not survive. In Wilson's opinion Thoreau was a large organism man and his gaze only fractionally veered from the horizontal "first upward to scan the canopy, then down to scan the ground". He knew little of the world beneath our feet and the pressing necessity to develop a different optical slant if we are ever to come to an understanding and appreciation of this subterranean world without which we cannot survive. Scientists hitherto have all but ignored such a change in perspective in ways of seeing and it is to Wilson's credit that he challenges such deadening oversights. In fact the beauty of the microscopic intrigues him, which he gratingly refers to as a "micro-aesthetics". But if he is implying Thoreau was restricted to the conventions of his day he fails to understand the why and wherefore of Thoreau. His gaze was not directed exclusively at nature: potentially it was a total vision and in terms of either the very small or large, a neutral one. In fact his viewpoint is not all that different to Darwin's in "The Voyage of the Beagle" where, in this most exemplary of scientific travelogues, observations on the behaviour of indigenous populations vie with those on flora and fauna - with this essential difference the former is not held up to the same degree of critical scrutiny. In Thoreau's view how we looked was of no value if we did not see other things as well and which could equally apply to astronomy as to the budding science of microbiology: "to discover new satellites to Neptune, and not detect the motes in his eyes, or to what vagabond he is a satellite himself; or to be devoured by the monsters that swarm all around him, while contemplating the monsters in a drop of vinegar." Whether purely coincidental or not there is a prescience about Thoreau's observations: we cannot be sure exactly when he wrote the above but if he did so in the 1840's it strikingly anticipates Pasteur's voyage into the world of the "infinitely small" and his discovery in the early 1850's that fermentation is caused by living beings as in the spoliation of wine i.e. vinegar. Which underlines that Thoreau must be thought of as more of anticipation than a realised individual, a shadow cast from the future alert to the slightest suggestion.

This narrowing of viewpoint Thoreau attributed to the manner of education and, rather more than his friend Emerson, had a hearty dislike of college professors. Rather he was for a heuristic approach to learning, which was so extreme that it left little room for an instructor and might have toppled over into the educator becoming educated thus transcending the pragmatism of, learning-by-doing. Thus hostility to education as practised and its attendant hierarchy was inseparable from Thoreau's critique of the division of labour. Maybe because education was in the 1840's still in a half-formed gelatinous state Thoreau was more able to go one better. But for E O Wilson 'education' is not a problem never mind the wholesale capitalisation of knowledge, which Thoreau could not name because it was still in its infancy. So whatever critical reservations Wilson has about the term entomology it does not lead to a fundamental questioning of the compartmentalisation of knowledge or whatever is meant by knowledge in the first place. His reservations are of an interdisciplinary nature rather than marking the beginning of a critique of the knowledge industry.

In his intro, Wilson uncovered a sentence of Thoreau's which he paraphrases as: "In wildness is the salvation of the world". I have been unable to find the original but, even so, it is an arresting statement. And it is immeasurably more relevant today than 150 years ago. Yet Wilson is able to twist it into anticipating a branch of capital, and the mouth-watering profits to be made from nature by the valorisation of the wild masquerading as a conservation ethic. He tries to put a figure to it by asking, "How much is the biosphere worth" quoting from a team of scientists who in 1997 came up with the figure $33 trillion. This did not make economic sense to me at all and I wondered if that meant the likely cost of replacing these natural systems. In any case why go to the bother of doing a cost benefit analysis of nature at all? To do so implies argument only has a value if expressed in economic terms which immediately puts one on the same terrain as the opposition by accepting without quibble the terms of the debate. Besides it is simply not feasible to even think of replacing natural systems by a manufactured prosthesis along the lines of oxygen pumped from a cylinder. It amounts to saying only by first asking "how much" will it cost for humanity to be saved. There can be no more deadening triumph of economic man even if, to be charitable, this is not the intention of these marginal utility eco economists - (the value of a thing rises or falls on account of a subjective measurement of its worth not because of the expenditure of labour time).

Since the Romantic Movement nature has been surrounded with ambiguity and in one form or another its immediacy has been that of a vested interest. Increasingly it has come armed with a price tag. This marks more of a victory for commerce than for life and Jean Jacques Rousseau's natural man - the equal exchange between two contracting parties - was also the basis for unequal exchange and exploitation. Hence Wilson's plea for bio-diversity is also plea for economic self-interest and seeks to draw all of life, even down to the microbial, into the sphere of the commodity, a term, which like all other biologists, he does not have even a rudimentary understanding of. The pharmacological explosion essentially is the spin off from the increased sophistication of molecular biology and the discovery of DNA in the early fifties. 40% of all prescribed medicines either come directly from living tissue or are analogues of the same. Wilson mentions GMO's and, despite adding a note of caution, never once sees fit at the very least to say it is a world war waged by a few companies to gain control of world food production.

However as a major field naturalist, Wilson also knows that pharmacological breakthroughs rarely come purely and simply from within the laboratory. Invariably they are preceded by a complex history in which the field naturalist plays an essential though much overlooked part because it conflicts with the dominant techno-scientific-industrial rationale. Field workers are alerted to the properties of living things from observing local practises, reading old herbals or listening to old wives tales. They can also become embarrassingly implicated in bio-piracy thus further compromising the disinterested innocence of the field naturalist. By not raising the issue of bio-piracy and the patenting of analogues, Wilson is guilty of an oversight comparable to that of GMO's. He is also silent on such issues as the stripping of the bark from the Pacific Yews, which is endangering their survival, because it contains Taxol an ant carcinogen. No drug company is prepared to invest in manufacturing an analogue because, as a naturally occurring substance, it cannot be patented.

To Wilson the industrial expression of biodiversity is good business. And given the high percentage of pharmaceutical products derived from living organisms (world trade in plant extracts amounts to $84 billion a year) this is tantamount to giving the drug companies a clean bill of health. But to me this is only the bare beginnings of the story and I would love to read an in depth analysis which starts from the premise that as an industry it cannot but involve workers and capitalists and whose essential interests must conflict not only over wages but over the meaning of the work they are engaged upon. I would very much like to know more about the laboratory technicians (and not just the "hands") and why they are so quiescent. How deep do their criticisms go both of the company and what they are employed in doing? And, in general, is their "ecological footprint" every bit as bad, or even worse, than the stereotypical car worker? And what of the divided souls of field workers employed to hunt out new species that have the potential of becoming the next wonder drugs. Are some less conscience stricken than others when it comes to inveigling their way into primitive farming communities offering them a pittance for the surrender of their living pharmacopoeia? Wilson has nothing to say about any of this and still he has the cheek to call himself a follower of Thoreau. At the very least such an overview could revise the version of history as told by the conquerors. Just as we now believe proto-telescopes existed prior to Galileo so we now must humbly look afresh at the proto-science of the herbalist who lived better than the lab technician though probably not as long.

Having named many ant species new to science Wilson errs on the side of taxonomy. In his perspective knowledge of the species is power. In practise nature's riches become the riches of capitalism. Though a convinced evolutionist much of Wilson's work is a clarion call to the naming of the species. Almost messianic in tone (rather than "scientific") the "future of life" hinges on that task alone which is also the future of the bio-engineering and pharmaceutical companies. Three centuries ago the Swedish biologist, Linnaeus, was possessed by a similar urge to name the species. For him it was divinely ordained and his assistants in this heavenly task were "apostles" not lab assistants. In the intervening years money has replaced natural theology with evolution tacked on as a pre-capitalist formation.

Taxonomic description today and particularly if it were to fulfil Wilson's purpose, would be more than just precise English. It would be likely to carry a whole range of chemical signatures, which cannot deceive to anything like the same extent as words. In contrast Thoreau's nature is picked out only here and there with actual names and, occasionally, Latin names. In this Emerson marking a shift away from a panoramic nameless literary romanticism to a natural scientific 'romanticism' possibly influenced him: that is towards a more responsive complex, wider, different science. Species in Thoreau evoke fantasies and he is childlike enough to record these as worthy of interest. The Tawny Owl's screech brings to mind "the spirits, the low spirits and melancholy forebodings of fallen souls that once in human shape at night walked the earth and did the deeds of darkness". We may sneer condescendingly but who has not involuntarily shuddered when that blood-curdling scream has perked close by, the dark night. There is no scientific remedy to ward off our instantaneous recoil. To separate the outer from the inner is to cleave nature in two and we cease to be part of nature. The one approach does not have to sacrifice scientific accuracy, rather it can enrich it: "So much of nature as he is ignorant of, so much of his own nature does he not yet possess" (Emerson, "The American Scholar").

I can't say for sure what sparked my interest in nature at such an early age. By the age of 12, I was a passionate Lepidopterist and though now far more cognate I bemoan the passing of that passion, despite being an educational reject attending a sink sec' mod. Even then I would refer to the Vannessid family by its Latin name. I also recall the day when visiting a local quarry in the smoke-blackened West Riding of Yorkshire. I was told the names of several species of butterflies and day flying moths by the children of desperately poor parents. Little did I know but on that very first day I had been helped in making an important discovery. The Common Blue that was flying on this site in considerable numbers was unknown apart from rare singletons in West Yorkshire at that time. And where due to recollections of the 1950s the extremely rare Grayling butterfly was found in 2002.

I also still have my old butterfly and moth books and sometimes when drink has blotted out the day I will look at the selected colour plates and try to recapture how I once felt. For a fraction of a second I just about manage to do so. And to think this feeling once never left me. In particular there is a plate of Yellow Underwing moths that adorned the cover of Vol 11 of Richard South's work "The Moths of the British Isles" published around the turn of the last century. I cannot describe what affect this plate had on me. Though the moths appeared to stand off the page to describe it as having a 3D effect is to delimit it. It was in a dimension, perhaps several dimensions, all of its own. No other visual representation before or since has made this impression upon me.

I also greatly admired the colour plates in E B Ford's volumes on Butterflies and Moths and, even at that early age, felt they displayed a purpose that went beyond the mere beauty of the plates. They have withstood the test of time, not just with me but others also. Some three years back I recall meeting a young college natural science lecturer from Balliol College in Hell's Coppice near Oxford. Conversation turned from lamenting the absence of the Black Hairstreak butterfly that day to Lepidoptera in general and I asked him about Ford's current standing in Oxford. He appeared not to appreciate what I was driving at when I asked him if he thought Ford was influenced by the Oxford of his day. Though I did not say so directly for fear of appearing too political I had in mind the "leftward" shift which plainly effected one of his great mentors, E S Haldane. He had amusing tales to relate, particularly how Ford opposed the admission of women to senior common rooms because of their "shrill voices". And also that on his death Ford's eagerly awaited folder labelled genetics the contents of which had remained private, contained but one sentence. His research into genetics had started and finished with butterflies and moths. But - oh- those unforgettable colour plates. And what other major scientific work ever began with something so apparently unrelated as the Fall of Constantinople? This surreal detail, mentioned by the Fellow of All Souls College, had totally escaped my notice.

None of my early butterfly and moth books were ever fully closed. Even when shut they remained open. They had come to life in a more positive manner than nursery rhymes, and yet far removed from the dead adult world of bookshelves. In my early 20s', I came across a spontaneous, perhaps unsought, expression of Nietzsche's that probably he could not explain but which summed up my feelings exactly, "child-sized butterflies". Others responded in a similar fashion. Beyond the strained, somewhat biblical, presence of Lions and Serpents there is, throughout Nietzsche's work, the more meaningful neighbourhood of insects and single celled animals. As the introduction to the "Genealogy of Morals "says: "We all aspire to be winged insects". And yet, possibly aware of Nageli's cytological studies, he also narrows that world down to the microscopic even as he superimposed on single cell life an extra aesthetic rhythm and a will to power (cell division in fact). He was, before his time, a small organism, anti-philosopher confusedly requiring action before all else though finally it is hardly less confusing than Wilson's pragmatism.

In addition to being a historian of morals Nietzsche was also a genealogist of language doubting if we could ever achieve precision in language. But his radical empiricist view of language did not blind him to the role of language as a social enforcer. A "primal" language also accompanies the primal crime in the "Genealogy of Morals" and liberation also depends on a liberated word order. In this respect he is prepared to wholeheartedly give in to the metaphorical function of language, pushing it to extremes. And without falling back onto past mythologies we must commit ourselves to believing what it says. Remy Goncourt in Andre Breton's time tried to explain Saint Pol Roux's symbolist poetry in entirely pragmatic terms. Breton rightly responded by scathingly saying that a line of Saint Pol Roux's "The morrow of the caterpillar is the ladies ball room gown"- was not another way of saying a caterpillar becomes a butterfly.

Above: Andre Breton

Above: Fredrich Nietzsche

In fact from Linnaeus onwards the scientific naming of the species has been in thrall to classical mythology. Quite consciously, in the naming of some of the strange creatures found in the Burgess Shale dating from the Cambrian seas, the tradition of Latin and Greek derivatives was ignored. The same could be said of the naming of the components of the quarks with its several "flavours" - up, down, strange, charm, top and bottom - which have nothing to do with taste. By deliberately (and affectedly in the case of quarks) choosing different words, to the point of absurdity even, the crises of expression is posed but not expressed with anything like sufficient clarity. Change is restricted to the word order itself and within science, the crises of avant-garde 'literature' is partially recapitulated - but without the radical consequences.

This had long been the case with the naming in particular, of moths in 19th century Britain. That there may be something of real interest here has only recently being suspected. (C/f Emmett's book on names). Rarely if ever has taxonomy been so extravagant - at least in the vernacular i.e. English mode. This language fest was in marked contrast to the sobriety of the Latin designates and directly reflected what was happening to English as a functioning everyday language and as a literary tool. G M Hopkins engagement is almost entirely with words. Short of pushing language to the brink of disintegration he cannot find the order, or disorder of words, he needs. As a Jesuit priest he is debarred from opening up other fronts even though he has some contact with William Wallace, the translator of Hegel's "Science of Logic". He is also sympathetic to the Paris Commune. Yet finally words become invested with a weight they cannot support. We lose our way within the maze of words. I wish, whenever I see a Kestrel Hawk, I did not have to see it through Hopkins eyes: "The Wind Hover", the genuinely vernacular title of Manley Hopkins poem, says far more and with a far greater economy of language. It also takes a similar liberty with the word order, changing the second designate from a verb into a noun. The unfettering of the word order and a "low science" including a nascent animal ethnology were once not that different.

We are more familiar with the names of moths than the moths themselves. The "Concolorous" moth has been known by name to me since my earl teens but I still cannot say what it looks like. With the intensifying interest in varieties that changed, as words lost out in importance and appearance gained the upper hand, I am able to vividly recall many a variety that I cannot hope to put a name to. This development may help to explain why a colour plate of moths had such an impact upon me. It was invested with critique and promised a new world. It just was and needed no further explanation. This most artless of natural scientific symbolism was also the most successful.

The cult of varieties shattered the unnoticed links between systematisation and industrial standardisation. The near mesmeric effect of the uniqueness of some, if not all varieties was a living riposte to a mass produced, mechanised world. "Everything counter, original, spare, strange" could now be complimented with a natural scientific fact. Yet also, hidden from view in the cult of varieties, there lay the search for the laws governing inheritance. In fact that honour should have gone to a butterfly or moth with pronounced phenotypic characteristics, that bred more or less continuously throughout the year. For by now the structural richness of the insect world, in particular the extraordinary mimetic capacity of some insects, was recognised as a product of the rate of reproductive capacity, vastly accelerating the process of trial and error by natural selection. Instead the examination of annual crops of peas were to provide the key to the understanding of genes. But once Mendel's paper was generally known about, almost immediately the fast breeding fruit fly became the chosen object of study to establish, in part, the rate of mutation. By entering the laboratory, entomology had come of age. But it had lost its innocence, leading up to that time, a natural existence unspoilt by use. Apart from silk worms and bees, insects were not generally farmed, bred or cultivated. They were still unworthy objects of study as lacking in scientific merit as the growing number of people taking an interest in them. But because it had so little prestige and was subject to such ridicule, entomology was also an open door through which other properties appeared. Lady Glanville was declared mad and her will invalid because she collected butterflies. E Newman, the noted Victorian lepidopterist, found this low status difficult to live with and overcompensated by larding his acute observations with literary references. But it is the beauty of his descriptions that have survived not the wealth of his literary allusions / illusions.

Like the accompanying proletarian movement, entomology had to fight for its recognition. Everything challenging could find a refuge there, which may explain Nietzsche's numerous references to insects. The meanest invertebrates demanded the equality the French Revolution had promised, but their growing enfranchisement clipped their wings. Set against the bleak backdrop of the industrial revolution, the insect world offered an escape, if not from despoliation and an alienated existence, then into a diminutive new world.

But not before the caterpillar on a cap of Fly Agaric in "Alice in Wonderland" had pointedly demanded of Alice: "Who are you"? The long drawn out, increasingly sophisticated, examination of insects throughout the 19th Century was also an interrogation of us. In putting questions to nature we also were put on the spot, until now the birth or death of humanity is the question that haunts, or should haunt us. To get his point across E O Wilson argues humans no longer breed like primates but like microbes. He could have said exponentially, meaning the population grows by the same percentage each year and will double in the next 40 years. But numbers do not make the skin crawl as does the mutation of the human into bacterial growth. Entomology always did have a sting in its tail.

Without intending to do so, entomology relativized our existence. However in changing our spatial conception it did nothing to sharpen our understanding of historical time. As we grubbed about lifting stones and peeling back decaying bark, our dimensions became uncertain. To better comprehend the insect world we became insects and insects us. Nowhere was this better expressed that in Julian Huxley`s paragraph on ant parasites. When I obtained a copy of Wilson and Holddoblers, Pulitzer Prize winning book on ants, I scanned the bibliography for any mention of Huxley's short, exceedingly well written, introductory synopsis. I am not expert enough to say why it was omitted. Perhaps after all, it was too much of a summary and lacking in original research.

Focussing ever downwards the microscopic opened out, over the course of time, onto the cosmos. In the past 15 years our understanding of extremophiles - species that inhabit the extremes of the biologically tolerable - has grown by leaps and bounds. They are invariably small creatures - algae, bacteria and exceedingly small arthropods - adopted to withstand extreme heat (300 degrees and more), immense barometric pressure (37,000ft down) and even 1million rads of radioactivity (1000 can kill a human in days). Some amazing creatures are able to metabolise sulphide far beyond the reach of organic molecules from the photosynthetic biosphere. In a chilling remark Wilson wonders if they have an evolutionary future in the "post-catastrophic photosynthetic era". That life may have come from outer space (panspermia) is no longer thought preposterous. And if Dinococcus Radiodurans bacteria are anything to go by, the inferno of the "great bombardment" may have nourished similar creatures, pushing back the beginnings of life to a near molten period of earth's history.

Largely unfolding in a world dominated by industrial capitalism, the otherworldliness of entomology has now entered space-time. I get the impression the extent and significance of the world of small organisms has only recently been revealed to a highly receptive and enthusiastic E O Wilson. However it was his interest in butterflies in the first place, and then ants, that finally led him to this remote region guided by a succession of ever-smaller invertebrates. Eventually the world of the infinitely small became the infinitely large.

I also have been almost dragged along a similar path going from Lepidoptera to a revived interest in astronomy. (When I was young I was interested in both, but stars could not be collected and no one possessed a telescope to get a better look at them). I then went through a rich development that sought to change the world and life (a kind of situationist revolution) and I have never doubted this is the only secure hope of mankind. I returned to my childhood interest in butterflies (which never rally left me) because of revolutionary defeat and yet bringing with me what I had learned in the meantime. Immediately they became "dialectical", entering the arena of political economy, which meant they were no longer just butterflies. I now saw them flying against a backdrop of capitalism and it was blindingly obvious to me conservation measures could not be legitimately separated from the ownership of land, industrial farming, urbanism and cars. My transition to an interest in cosmological theories came about for many reasons. We are not that far off from knowing if life exists elsewhere in the solar system. In fact it is possible we shall know by this time next year, if the Mars probe is successful. Life could also exist on Europa and Callistro, two of Jupiter's moons.

But what kind of life. It is highly unlikely it will be anywhere near as evolved as life on Earth and small in comparison. But even at a near microscopic level it could result in the discovery of previously unknown phyla. We have had to come to terms with the fact evolution of life is far more random than even Darwin suspected. It is now generally accepted that it was meteor that finally brought the age of dinosaurs to an end. Though Darwin maybe was right in thinking there is an evolution in the direction of greater complexity, it does not mean the age of mammals had to succeed that of reptiles. This random event also changed the way we think about the solar system: if there is not a planetary giant like Jupiter somewhere in the outer solar system pulling debris from outer space, then the chances of complex life developing on an earth-sized planet is small. I have also been much impressed how geological studies have become extra terrestrial and what is learnt on earth can be applied to the heavens. Photographs of melting ice sheets here on earth indicate that the ice bound surface of Europa is thin in parts, suggesting the presence of a slushy sea beneath. And probes in the vicinity of Lake Vostok some two miles down under the Antarctica ice cap have revealed an array of living organisms. They do not tell us how life might have evolved on Europa, only that life is possible.

I also confess to being fascinated by the renewed interest shown by engineers in insect motility. And I had thought technology had reached such a degree of abstraction it had no need to refer to living things, as did Leonardo in his aviation studies. In fact I had argued in a pamphlet on "The Common Blue" butterfly that if Leonardo had examined butterflies rather than birds he may yet have arrived at a solution to the problem of human flight - no matter that part of his ornithopter, based on a study of birds wings, was a near perfect aerodynamic foil and not at all dissimilar to today's aeroplane wings. So imagine how surprised I was to learn that dragonfly wings and their flight mechanisms, were being examined afresh to create a short hop vehicle suitable for the Martian terrain. And also, that the independent movement of a cockroaches legs, rather than the wave motion of a millipedes, might provide a solution of how best to move a vehicle across rocky ground, supported only on tubular legs, without fear of it falling over. I was no less surprised by the ease with which I had been drawn into this rebirth of technological innocence, when I was choking on car ads, the latest luxury in plane travel or innovation in sound engineering, when all I wanted to do was shut my ears against noise. Perhaps we should look no further for the reason than both machines are destined to function in another world.

So much else besides has both a terrestrial and a sidereal content nowadays. Our increased understanding of animal sounds, even possible "language" might be of benefit in deciphering an alien language. We wonder also if this animal language has a structure beyond the mere naming of things i.e. one we haven't put there, which is always a danger with "signing" monkeys. And where exactly are the boundaries of intelligent life? The discovery that Honey Bees have a body language capable of transmitting a billion messages was one of the most remarkable finds of the 20th century. The bee will never be quite so humble again and when biology went astral, we began to ponder on the possible forms an alien intelligence would come wrapped in. The sci-fi humanoid insect, popular throughout the 20th century, expressed a typical dread of the insect world. It might now be seen as one of several options.

My further investigations into modern cosmogony revealed to me that our universe is a biophilic universe. That is one favourable to the development of life. If just one small feature had been slightly "out", life would never have developed. We are stardust built up out of the carbon generated by second-generation stars. But from our reduced perspective despair lies at the heart of every star burst.

Fascinated as I am by the contemporary cosmological theories, they pale besides those of the Ionian cosmogonists. There is, in the greater accuracy of the former, the same wonder as in the latter but the complete human being is not there - and more than ever it should be. Theory becomes a mere function of a particular type of brain and "life" increasingly comes to mean the possibility of "intelligent" life as conceived by this particular brain. It is all leading up to the moment the planet has to be abandoned because uninhabitable and these inhuman brains leave earth in a rocket because they have abandoned the struggle long ago for a better life. Whatever future remains they find it in the second law of thermodynamics, the gradual dissipation of energy as heat flows from hot to cold. In this red shifted twilight of the universe the brain thinks as little as possible to conserve energy. Most of the time is spent sleeping forgetting that, whilst asleep, we also dream and the brain remains active. But what do these theorists know about dreams seeing they can so happily stand aside from this nightmarish world?

Stuart Wise (incomplete notes. Spring 2004)

Part of a campaign to save Woodhall Quarries, Bradford, from redevelopment as car park and land fill

Above left: The Tutsan plant on the quarry floor
Above right: Woodhall Quarries from The Blue Pig direction

17th August, 2003

Dear Susan,
On a cold, overcast day in early January of this year (2003) we decided to visit Woodhall Quarry. We were prospecting possible sites in the Bradford area that might suit the Grayling which is only just beginning to make an appearance in West Yorks (Storrs Hill in Ossett, Healey Mills marshalling yards). By the time we arrived at the quarry snow was falling, yet despite the cold we noted the quarry was palpably warmer than the surrounding lanes and fields. We moved closer to the rocky face of the quarry, which was warmer still, and there I espied a plant in a thicket of bare Goat Willows which I was convinced must be Tutsan.

I resolved to go back in mid summer, when the plant would be in bloom and on the off chance I might find the Grayling, for the conditions in the quarry were ideal for the butterfly.

So on a lack lustre day (July 10th 2003 to be precise), for want of something better to do, I returned to the quarry. On the path leading from the Blue Pig pub to the entrance of the quarry my attention was caught by a butterfly flitting nervously around a bramble bush. By its flight I "knew" it was a Ringlet but until it settled I could not be 100% sure. But settle it would not. And so I gave up for the moment and entered the quarry instead to look for the Tutsan. I crossed the stony quarry floor to the grassed over hillocks at the far side and it was here that I noticed my second Ringlet. This time there was no doubting it. I had unexpectedly stumbled upon a colony of Ringlet butterflies.

I was nonplussed. However had the butterfly got here? I had, over the past few days been searching for the Ringlet along the banks of the Aire on the approach to Shipley upstream from Leeds. I duly found a few (and I mean a few, numbering six at most) and all were within 3 metres of the riverbank. I knew these to be the scouts of the southern invaders slowly but surely advancing up the Aire as they have done up the Wharfe. Once established they then tend to fan out and will migrate across fields, colonising field margins and lanes some distance from flowing water. We first became aware of this pattern some years ago at Wetherby where the butterfly could be found in lanes and hedge backs two fields distance from the Wharfe. However the further we went upstream the narrower the habitable area became and the more the butterfly tended to hug the water margin. Watching the butterfly fly upstream against the current we came to the conclusion the river was the main highway to further colonisation.

Nothing we have observed since has caused us to change our initial conjecture. By mid July of this year we realised the butterfly had conclusively arrived in Shipley (we saw one lone insect on the Denso Marston reserve). But we were left pondering the question how long would it be before the butterfly managed to overfly Shipley? We had been here before some years back, asking the self-same question when we found the "new" Ringlets in some numbers east of Otley but none to the west. Between the Denso Marston reserve and the first congenial stretch of territory at Saltaire alongside of the playing fields on the banks of the Aire, there lies at least a mile of very hostile terrain to the Ringlet. In fact it is not all that pleasant to us humans and includes new and old factories, mounds of rubbish tipped carelessly down the bankside, heaps of gritting salt, retail parks, a builders merchants, fitness clubs, car parks. plazas bedecked with Heineken parasols, three bridges and the busy Otley Rd. In our opinion, and baring a freak occurrence, numbers will really have to build up before there is even a remote possibility of the butterfly chancing it across this no-fly zone.

We had long known about the unique colony of Ringlets at Ben Rhydding gravel pits and my first photos of them in the early 90s' clearly show the remarkable range of variation going from the arete to the caeca (almost "blind" form). We also knew about the efforts to find the "other" colony that in our minds took on almost mythic proportions. We felt there just had to be another within the vicinity but all our efforts, and those of others, to locate it were in vain. We were also alert to the slightest variation amongst the new arrivals. But of the many hundreds we scrutinised we only found one where one of the spots on the hind wings was slightly pear shape, a characteristic of var lanceolata. This was fairly late one evening midway between Poole and Otley and confirmed our suspicions that the new arrivals had pushed up the country from the south. According to Thomas, the var lanceolata is more likely to be found in the south whilst the arete and caeca are generally restricted to the north. The co-authors (Heath/Emmett) of "Butterflies of the British Isles" also claim the Ringlets in the north are lighter and fractionally smaller adding "also there is an increased frequency in the north of forms with reduced occelli with ab arete and ab caeca occurring commonly". Imagine then my huge delight when on taking a closer look at the Woodhall quarry population I began to notice the presence of the arete and caeca forms of the Ringlet. Then like a flash it occurred to me that this was the second colony, the one we and others had been looking for all along. And here it was in the most unlikely spot imaginable, high on the hills overlooking Shipley close to Bradford Moor and the choking fumes of Leeds Rd. Returning up Woodhall lane, which comes out onto the Leeds Rd. and just past the old demolished railway bridge on the Leeds/Eccleshill line (where I had noticed a Ringlet though I had ceased to look for them) I turned to look back. There, directly opposite, in the blue distance was the confluence of the river Washburn and the Wharfe. Some three years ago the existence of the Ringlet in Lindley woods in the valley of the Washburn had been established by David Howson who on receiving a report of a likely sighting had promptly taken a look for himself. Though I have not found time to take a look myself, I do know it is a variable Ringlet population. What the ratio of variable to normal forms is I cannot say. At a rough guess I would hazard it is, at Woodhall Quarry, around 20%, though I was so excited I never once thought of counting. What mattered, above all else, was to take photos of them: good, bad or indifferent it did not matter for the time being. Just so long as I had some sort of proof because it was becoming evident to me this was a significant find. I cannot say how big the population is but everywhere I looked in and around the quarry I found Ringlets. It is my conviction it has been there for years, longer even than the Ben Rhydding colony that goes back to 1987 on a site much visited by naturalists.

I had a degree of familiarity with the Ringlet prior to visiting the site at Ben Rhydding on an annual basis in the 1990s'. But we were immediately struck by the behavioural peculiarities of this colony. We began to employ subjective terms like "inward looking"- even "neurotic"- to best characterise these unusual traits. An invisible boundary as transparent and as impenetrable as glass seemed to hem the colony in. The butterflies would, for instance, never go anywhere near the busy "Highway to the Lakes" between Burley and Ilkley. In the south to find Ringlets on roadside verges is not that uncommon particularly where there are ditches. However it seems to me if the ancestral colony of the Ben Rhydding and Woodhall Quarry colonies are the same (i.e. Lindley Wood in the Washburn valley) then the Woodhall Quarry colony has been able to overcome the "self-imposed restrictions" of the Ben Rhydding colony in ways which have yet to be determined more precisely. (It is for one thing much more able to adapt to drier conditions: to walk from the roadway to the centre of the Ben Rhydding colony can sometimes feel like suddenly passing from a desert into a mangrove swamp so appreciable is the increase in humidity on a hot day. Likewise the Woodhall Quarry Ringlets are not that fazed by the tormenting presence of dirt track riders and their infernal machines. However an underground spring issues from the quarry floor and it is often very damp under foot, conditions which suit the Ringlet perfectly).

In late spring 2001, a very interesting article appeared in 'The Naturalist 'published by the Yorkshire Naturalists Union (issue number 1037. Volume 1260). It was called "A Century and A Half of Change in the Butterfly Fauna of the Huddersfield area of Yorkshire" and written by Geoffrey Fryer and Ms Jill Lucas. Apart from anything else the historical details are very good, particularly as the survey is not restricted to Huddersfield but includes Bradford as well. There is a fascinating entry on the Ringlet in the Bradford area. "The Ringlet was also reported from Great Park, Low Moor, by W. Barraclough in 1949, the single individual being described as "almost v. obsoleta" (Dearing 1950). On the relevant NYU card Hewson noted that this was only seen and not taken, and C.R. Haxby regarded it as highly suspect (Bradford NS). The reason is unclear as Barraclough as an experienced lepidopterist, must have noted the reduction of the under-surface ocelli, and would hardly confuse even a variant Ringlet with any species". We would concur with Fryer and Lucas on this. Interestingly, sometime in the autumn of 2000, we had noted the same card when leafing through lepidoptera records in Cliffe Castle Museum in Keighley whilst engaged on research for a forthcoming book on Yorkshire butterflies. We were likewise puzzled by Haxby's comment who was a distinguished lepidopterist from Great Horton, Bradford. Perhaps what Barraclough saw was a v. obsoleta escapee from the Woodhall Quarry Ringlet population which had been blown by the wind across to Low Moor some two miles away' The case can never be proven but the likelihood that Barraclough did see an extreme variant of the Ringlet is now more probable than before. Remember also that an interest in butterflies in 1949, particularly in a heavily industrialised city like Bradford was, in comparison to today, an esoteric preoccupation so the chances of a colony of Ringlets remaining undetected is therefore higher.

We are entering a plea that every effort is made to preserve Woodhall Quarry. Apart from the Tutsan, the Early Marsh Orchids and a colony of Gatekeeper butterflies the real clincher must be the Ringlets. We have reason to believe that it forms part of the original Ringlet population, which existed in Northern England and the Scottish Lowlands prior to the industrial revolution. According to some authorities (e.g. Heath/Emmett) it was either forced out of, or destroyed, in industrial districts to lead a fugitive existence elsewhere. The following remarks by the co-authors of "Butterflies of the British Isles" are of considerable interest. "There is a scarcity of records from the Midlands and northern England; evidence indicates that it was formerly widespread in these areas (Harrison, 1959) and together with the retraction around London and in central Scotland, points to declines mainly in industrial areas (Heath et al, 1984)". Richard South in one of his classic volumes (1906) on British lepidoptera claims it "seems to have disappeared from districts in Lancashire and Yorkshire where it was once formerly common". South was indefatigable in his pursuit of local records and very much in line with the tradition first laid down by Edward Newman in the mid 19th Century. The Woodhall Quarry colony is, we maintain, a relic population from the pre-industrial era and one that has yet to be diluted by the influx from the south. It is the sole remaining pristine survivor from this era and therefore its value is inestimable. The same cannot now be said of the Ben Rhydding and Lindley Woods colonies. In the former the ratio of variable to normal forms has drastically declined. Four years ago we estimated the variation to be as high as 70% to 80% which is extraordinary by any standards. This may sound as if the tendency towards variation was increasing over the years and unfortunately the statistical proof is lacking. Our own recording was far from rigorous and looking back we can only kick ourselves for being so lazy and blind to the impending threat from outside. This golden opportunity has now become a lost opportunity. In our opinion the Ben Rhydding population was unique: it came as a surprise to learn that the Fords, father and son, put the percentage of variation within a graded series going from the arete to the caeca at only 5%. This was in a colony they kept under observation in Cumbria throughout the 1920s'. In the Tolson Museum in Huddersfield in the Porritt/Morley collection there is also a similar graded series all caught, it appears, around Castle Howard. We do not know if either Porritt or Morley left any relevant notes as to the incidence of these varieties and if the task of amassing this graded series proved to be a hard one. But they were, for certain, all caught in the 19th Century. Further research is needed to establish if these old populations in northern England and the Lowlands were subject to variation. And did these variation arise because the colonies were (or became) isolated over time and therefore favoured random genetic drift as distinct from the more rigorous selection pressures of larger populations? Or it may turn out it was the variations that were selected for in the majority of these discrete colonies, which would severely dent the argument supporting random genetic drift. Thus once more we find ourselves on the field of battle with, on the one side, the geneticists armed with equations ultimately derived from Mendelian laws of inheritance and, on the other side, field naturalists who come in peace armed only with the needles of close observation. We can say that a couple of years ago inspecting the Ben Rhydding population we noted that the variants tended to be more dished than the normal forms. Maybe there was some sort of hidden selection pressure at work manifesting itself in different emergence times and leading eventually to sympatric speciation. If this were the case then the chances of the variants mating with one another to produce a pure strain would be greatly increased. On the other hand it may only indicate that the "relic survivors" are more adjusted to the local climate. E B Ford thought the genetic factors controlling the arete/caeca gradient were fundamentally different to that of the var lanceolata because the "various mixtures" between the arete and normal forms is "quite in accord with the supposition that the reduction of spots in the Ringlet is controlled on a multi-factorial basis" (see the chapter "Genetic Interactions" from "Butterflies"). The contrast with the genetics of var lanceolata is particularly striking. Here the number in the second filial generation brackets out into a fairly typical Mendelian quantity. The multi-factorial nature of the arete (and presumably caeca form) could mean there are significant alterations in other aspects of the insects physiology which enable it to adapt to local conditions. I can remember occasions when the Wharfe in late winter, would violently overflow its banks at Ben Rhydding gravel pits even reaching the roadway. The young larva approaching their third moult would have been submerged under the turbulent water until such times as the flood receded. Have they the means to trap air allowing them to breathe as from a natural bell jar? The caterpillar is not hairy so the chances of them trapping bubbles of air in much the same way as fur does under water, is non-existent. Is it possible the spiracles have evolved in the direction of gills allowing the caterpillar to breathe under water?

Possibly the answers to these questions will never be known. If for instance the two populations are timed to emerge at different intervals it may only mean a line of possible evolutionary development amongst many others, has been discontinued - one that was specifically adjusted to conditions that prevailed prior to the warming that has undoubtedly been a factor in the spread of the Ringlet from the south into the north. Such "theorising" will forever remain on the level of speculation but of a kind that cannot just be dismissed as belonging on the wilder shores of speculation like the alleged existence of the Unicorn or Griffin. (The possibility of a balanced polymorphism cannot be discounted but to say why a balance might be advantageous as distinct from outright dominance of one form or the other is, in our present state of ignorance, impossible to demonstrate) However the discovery of the Woodhall Quarry population means if we are on the right track lepidopterists have been granted a final chance to study a colony that in all probability has its origins in pre-industrial times. It will be several years before the southern invaders, present in only ones' and twos' in the Aire valley directly below, will be able to scale the heights to Woodhall Quarry. For that reason it is imperative to do everything possible to preserve the quarry just as it is.

I did eventually find my hopeful Tutsan. It was flowering deep in a shady grove of Goat Willows. A garden escape quite possibly, but I have yet to see the plant in a Bradford garden. In the late afternoon I left a message on my brother's answering machine: "I have found a large colony of Ringlets at Woodhall Quarry that contains the arete and caeca form. I have also found a colony of early Gatekeepers. And it was Tutsan after all. Beat that if you can!"

Cheers,
Stuart Wise

Above left: Obsoleta Ringlet, Woodhall Quarries, Bradford, 11th July 2003
Above right: Possible obsoleta Ringlet in the long grass. Woodhall Quarries. 11th July 2003

Above left: Minor Ringlet lanceolata
Above right: Woodhall Quarries, Fagley, Bradford. 2004

(Next Letter)

22nd July 2004

Dear Susan,

In view of the on-going fight to retain Woodhall Quarry we think it exceedingly timely to raise the possibility of the site hosting a colony of Grayling in the not too distant future. We know of no other place in and around Bradford that is so eminently suited to eventual colonisation.

As you well know apart from the Pearl Bordered Fritillary, the Grayling is the rarest Yorkshire butterfly. Only four years ago (or thereabouts) this large and beautiful butterfly was almost officially pronounced extinct in Yorkshire. In fact the funeral service to mark its passing had hardly been announced when a miracle happened. It had arisen from the dead and was flapping its wings over the graveyards of smoke stack industry. News came that the Grayling had been found in the old marshalling yards around Haverton Hill between Middlesborough and Stockton. 40 years ago the place was an industrial desert of red oxide dust, choking fumes and blackness and at night the blast furnaces could be seen glowing in the night sky like beacons from hell. It was both horrible and awesome, as though all life roundabouts had been either burnt by fire or suffocated in soot.

Close on this discovery the butterfly was found on Storrs Hill, a disused quarry on the outskirts of Ossett, West Yorkshire. The next year (2003) following a hunch we discovered a huge colony in Healey Mills marshalling yards just below Storrs Hill. Again our minds went back to what the place was like well over forty years ago. Though not quite in the same league as Cargo Fleet and Haverton Hill for sheer awfulness, it was enough to deter industrial urchins like ourselves and other kids. Not only was the place inhospitable and unyielding to childhood games, we also felt it was dangerous and if we stayed there too long we would all end up with a terrible disease.

This site is pretty much off-limits and an exhaustive study of the distribution of the butterfly in the yard will not come easy. Nonetheless we were able to establish that in some areas of the yard, like close to the bridge on Storrs Hill Road, the butterfly is to be found in considerable numbers. Despite visiting the colony on two successive days we failed to establish the perimeter of the colony. But we have every reason to think that it may well extend westward into Wakefield following the railway lines to Wakefield Kirkgate and the banks of the River Calder where the terrain is very suitable, due largely to the mounds of bare earth left by a sand and gravel extraction plant. Further west between Dewsbury and Huddersfield there are similar workings close to Ravensthorpe and Mirfield railway stations.

Other potential sites also exist. We could mention the disused quarries at Soothill, Batley which, unfortunately have now been turned into heartbreaking landfill (see enclosed letter to Sam Ellis, Northern Butterfly Conservation Officer for Durham and Northumberland). For those with an eye for local geography in the near distance lies Storrs Hill, a similar disused quarry, though not on the scale of Soothill.

Where next? Why, Woodhall Quarry! It is close to both Storrs Hill and the marshalling yards as the crow flies and the Grayling is a large butterfly (the female has a wingspan of 60mm) and capable of powerful flight. The various grasses on which the larvae can feed, the rock faces, the bare earth and stony floor make it an ideal location. Though fairly high up and very visible from certain vantage points in Bradford like Fagley, Eccleshill, Ravenscliffe etc, the quarry is a sun trap possessed of a micro climate. On a cold winter's day the difference in temperature once inside the quarry, especially close to the rock face, is very noticeable.

Up to now the Grayling has tended to be a butterfly of the southern heaths or coastal margins elsewhere with a marked preference for sand dunes, cliff faces and the like. These recent changes in its location and habitat are of great importance. The Grayling is also a variable butterfly, a fact that was noted way back in the mid 19th Century by E Newman in his epoch making 'Natural History of Butterflies and Moths'. Interested though Newman was in the geographical distribution of lepidoptera, it only later became apparent that there were several distinct sub-species of Grayling in these islands. These variations have been called, rightly we believe, 'eco-phenotypic' reflecting in various ways the difference in habitats, even if the whys and wherefores are still awaiting elucidation. By the 1900s it was recognised that the lighter forms of the Grayling were to be found on chalk, whilst darker forms tended to be restricted to acidic soils. But since then a more complex picture has emerged. There are now 5 distinct sub-species beginning in order of time with sub-sp. Scota 1911 (Northern Scotland), then Thyone 1944 (N.Wales), Atlantica 1946 (Hebrides) Clarensis 1952 (Co Clare), and finally Hibernica 1971 (Co Kerry). To which, one day, a sixth may be added, Industrialis (W Yorkshire)! However if phenotypic change is already occurring, it is made all the harder to detect by the obstinate refusal of the butterfly to ever open its wings.

Particularly in South and West Yorkshire we are witnessing several striking example of eco-morphing. With the Dingy Skipper, the Grayling has become a butterfly of industrial dereliction which, are very different to typical sites like that of Morecambe Bay. But in the meantime railway sidings have changed, large parts of them falling into disuse as road transport has increasingly replaced that of rail. Unlike colliery spoil heaps in the wake of Aberfan, no attempt was made to prettify or, where possible, obliterate them as happened in Durham and Northumberland. Today, just as in Healey Mills marshalling yards, wagons lie abandoned on broken track with young birches thrusting up between couplings and bramble twining around rusting wheels. On a hot day the place burns like an oven with Grayling gliding between the petrified rolling stock, hopping as if in a dream from old wooden sleepers oozing molten tar, to briefly settling on a thistle. For this is perfection to this reborn 'industrial' butterfly.

Last year on a pre-arranged wild life walk along the Aire canal near Shipley we got talking to someone who had seen the Grayling in sand and gravel pits close to Doncaster in the 1970s'. They then disappeared. We then asked him if there were any railway sidings nearby. There were and we all wondered if they would be found somewhere in that massive confluence of sidings that surrounds Doncaster railway station. Earlier in the day one of us had visited the railway sidings at Raw Nook near Cleckheaton and within the Bradford municipal boundaries in the hope of finding the Grayling there. In fact it was too late in the season - a season which had been dominated by very high temperatures.

The Wakefield lepidopterist Roy Bedford also believes the railways are playing a major role in the expansion of the Grayling in West Yorkshire. We personally believe that the epicentre of this truly remarkable expansion was the old coal marshalling yard at Wath on Dearne near Barnsley. Evidently they were once the biggest in Europe. From here - we would suggest - the Grayling went on to Worsborough between Wath and Barnsley and from there to Healey Mills - with how many stops on the way still awaiting to be discovered?

When we lived in Ossett there were many railway lines in use then than now. As we criss-cross the countryside we mentally note where the old lines used to be and speculate on the potential wild life on the overgrown embankments and cuttings wherever these are visible. The line from Wakefield to Bradford that once passed through Ossett is all but untraceable thanks to the M1 and the acres upon hideous acres of suburban sprawl. But the line from Dewsbury that connects directly with Healey Mills and runs through the Spen Valley is still clearly visible for long stretches of the way. And this corridor may one day be used by the Grayling. Daily we become more convinced that in time it will eventually make it to Woodhall Quarry. Butterflies have little understood powers of discernment and recognition and once wafted off course by a strong breeze what happens next is not mere chance even if the butterfly is not by any means fully in control of where they set down. A tarmac quarry bottom (the future for Woodhall?) with rows of parked cars gleaming in the sunshine will not from the air be a welcoming spectacle to our butterfly.

Further research into the Woodhall Quarry Ringlets this year has strengthened our conviction that it once was the hub of an isolated pre-industrial colony that had retreated into a warm, damp, sheltered spot on high ground as far above the industrial pollution as possible. We maintain it is an historic colony and for that reason (never mind the incoming Grayling) it should remain just as it is. Forensic science is becoming an ever more subtle tool and what it is now able to tell us about the past was unthinkable even 20 years ago Who nowadays would be prepared to categorically deny that such conjectures as we have put forward will never be proven?

The closer one gets to the quarry, the greater the incidence of variation. We do not know the reason for this, only that it is an observable fact. Examining the many and varied European Ringlet populations we noticed that the reduction and elimination of hind wing spotting characteristic of the caeca and obsoleta form of 'our' hyperantus Ringlet was a feature of montane species. And where the hind wings were similar to the hyperantus form like in the Dewy Eyed Ringlet and the Dalmatian Ringlet we read that these butterflies are to be found on lowland pasture and along coastlines. Which seems to imply the absence or presence of hind wing spotting is there for a purpose and is the product of natural selection.

The turning over to 'productive use' of these derelict sites has been termed by some the 'new enclosures'. And the same arguments though suitably modified in their favour still apply as they once did to the old enclosing. The land lies fallow and though some of the former pit spoil heaps became agricultural land (one can see this at Dinnington and Cutsyke in Yorkshire, Markham in Derbyshire and a number of other places) dereliction generally implies no one is making any brass out of this potentially very lucrative muck. Not only are these sites an eyesore but an unexploited asset as well and therefore a running sore of criminal waste and neglect in an age in which money has become the only necessity. But take heart, salvation is at hand in the form of a chocolate box aesthetic of a pseudo-downs landscape, sanitised mock Tudor estates, manicured lawns, the commonplace 'exotic' of garden centre horticulture, car ports and entrepreneurship.

A growing proportion of these sites have tended to become informal commons in which one is free to roam and even graze an animal. This is now the custom, whatever the law may claim to the contrary, and local people increasingly resent their further enclosure by housing estates, factory units and the like. For they then become closed off or 'hedged-in', to use a time honoured expression that has its origin in the original agricultural enclosures and then spread throughout society to denote an imprisonment without bars because that was and still is the final outcome. Once these places have fallen into disuse they tend to become recreational and play areas and how many children in large urban areas like Bradford owe their awakening interest in nature to places such as these? Forget the dirt-track riders and their infernal machines for they are easily beaten back, despite their posture of aggression. We have noticed how on warm spring days Woodhall Quarry is used as a picnic area with towels spread out on the rock floor like on a beach. And sun bathers will climb the precipitous rock faces to find a sheltered ledge on which they will doze for hours occasionally raising themselves to look around, their eyes opened as never before to the beauty of the place. Bands of children also are to be seen exploring the quarry floor rock pools and carrying dime-store nylon fishing nets and jam-jars with handles made of string fastened around the rim. It is a very touching sight and gives one hope for the future all is not lost. For it was in just such a place that our interest in butterflies and moths was first stimulated at the age of ten on Storrs Hill in Ossett, now home to the Grayling.

POSTSCRIPT:

We have been so impressed by the bio-diversity of brownfield sites that bit by bit and almost accidentally we found ourselves with the makings of a video on the subject. It began with footage on the Dingy Skipper and then went on to include other butterflies like the Common Blue, the Brown Argus (yes!) and the increasingly threatened Wall. Our aim eventually is to make a nature film with a difference. Having long maintained there is too much nature in nature films we deliberately set out to give prominence to the actual habitat, the encroaching suburban glaciation, passing trains, motorway traffic, bikers and so on. We want a fidelity that is altogether lacking in modern nature films even if the final result is hard on the eyes and ears, For we want an end to comfortable viewing and narrative film making in which all the tricks of the trade from rigged sequences to endings in which all the separate threads of the plot are securely tied up to be relegated to a shelf out of harms way, are taken from the past of literature. In this final triumph of fiction it is as if Aldous has come to prevail over Julian Huxley, Lawrence over Gerard Durrell and most importantly of all, Dickie over David Attenborough. For in no other country in the world were the seeming polarities of 'art' and 'science' so closely united in families as here. And finally with such devastating effect as the history of 'virtual' nature films for TV audiences demonstrates.

Yours sincerely,

David & Stuart Wise

For the past two centuries urban dreamers and some with a proclivity for creating nightmares have been looking at the city in both fascination and horror. A minority wanted to abolish the city seeing only in its walls, streets and sweatshops, the misery of the oppressed whilst others wanted to aesthetically strengthen these features finally making these streets safe against insurrection. Thus Baron Hausmann's Paris freshly reconstructed in great boulevards nonetheless failed to prevent the Commune of 1871. Most wanted to ameliorate the conditions of the poor like Ebenezer Howard's late 19th century Garden Cities movement. It was a woefully naive project. It was followed by projects such as Le Corbusier's Unite de Habitation where a supposedly utopian project on the architect's drawing board merely masked the horror of its realisation. Those who wanted the city abolished in one way or another retain some interest. For instance Los Angeles first saw the light of day ironically as a radical Fourierist commune and we can never forget some of the imaginative whimsical fantasies deriving from aspects of Russian Constructivism between 1917-25 like Khlebnikov's lakes of soup and others who proposed zoned city climate areas to satisfy different aspects of a liberated social life.

Everything failed. Liberated zones became the stuff of science fiction or a film by Francois Truffaut when it wasn't Disneyfied in a celebration of a trivialised commodity cornucopia endlessly celebrating money and greed. In the early 1950s a more serious practical experiment evolved in the shape of psycho-geography which, investigating the ambience of existing city neighbourhoods as shaped by their often poor inhabitants, helped provide a core of radical revolutionary subjectivity through the activity of the International Lettrists and subsequently, the Situationists. This passionate quest initiating a search for an ever greater subversive totality, found expression in the French uprising of spring 1968. It was however, an experiment that could not survive as it was born in the lacunae between a city of memory, (often ad hoc, and based on peoples' everyday movements) and environmental planning as an adjunct of the spectacular commodity economy and where people are only of consequence as consumers. (Incidentally Thomas De Quincey's drift through the rookeries around London's Clerkenwell is, if you like, a foreshadowing of psycho-geography). At this highest point of historical becoming again everything failed.

Now we must try and make another great effort. It will probably be humanity's last chance. Is eco-city a possible solution? Though ecological critique must be an essential part of the critique of contemporary urban redevelopment, sadly the paradigms of eco-city - predicated on the social relations of commodity production - are lamentable.

The recent catastrophic floods in Europe (said to have cost £30 billion over the past six years) and elsewhere is leading to a change in the mechanics of water technology as significant as Leonardo's epochal plans to divert the Arno between Florence and Pisa in order to create what is recognisably the world's first business park. Though in his day Leonardo was the world's leading hydrologist, his plans to channel the movement of rivers was based on a conception of water flow which owes more to plumbing than a fully worked out appreciation of the very being of rivers from source to river mouth. Thus it was unlikely he could even begin to understand the importance of water meadows, marshes, upland drains, culverts even aquifers (if they were known about then) etc as a means of regulating flow. For this to happen Leonardo's vision had to become progressively more concretised through the urban geography of flood plains whilst inevitably the economic function of rivers as the main transport artery was set to decline. That we understand more about how rivers function and the necessity of returning them to their natural state, in so far as that is possible is solely due to the growing awareness the very nature of rivers has been violated and now threatens the violators.

Leonardo viewed his plans for the River Arno from, as it were, the air, thus anticipating aerial cartography. His cartographic innovations cover a territory controlled by renaissance princes not by the people, thus whatever control exists is illusory in the last analysis. The map is not the territory as defined by the likes of you and I. There is no map for that and hence all maps up to now are an abstraction of man and nature. Likewise the new thinking on rivers, the need to create porous urban spaces to prevent the inhabitants from being overwhelmed by periodic flooding on an ever more frequent and devastating scale takes place amidst increasing powerlessness. This solution in essence is technocratic despite its not incorrect claim to be more ecologically sound. It deliberately avoids dealing with the social relations of capitalism and cannot pretend therefore to be a lasting solution. The new relationship between man and nature necessarily implied by this superior understanding of rivers will forever be a pious dream because the only practical force capable of implementing it - that of an aroused, conscious populace - is discounted from the outset. At best it will remain a mere palliative.

The response of river engineers has been to get rid of the water fast, draining it off the land and down to the sea in tall-sided rivers re-engineered as high performance drains. Progressive planners are tearing down banks, dykes and levees to return the rivers to their flood plains. They are putting back meanders and marshes to slow the flow and even encouraging flood waters to percolate underground. Formerly when rivers meandered to the sea flood waters would lose their impetus because of wetlands, inland deltas and flood plains that did flood. By trying to turn the complex hydrology of rivers into the simple mechanics of a water pipe engineers have intensified the floods.

The Rhine is Europe's most engineered river. For two centuries German engineers have erased its backwaters and cut it off from its flood plain. The river has now lost 7% of its length and runs up to a third faster. Four fifths of the lower Rhine's flood plain is barricaded off so the water rises ever higher doing ever greater damage to the homes offices and roads that sit on the flood plain. After the 1995 floods Germany now intends to lower the level of the Rhine by 70 centimetres by 2020. The plan is to reinstate 1500 sq kilometres of flood plain on the lower Rhine. Drained fields will be replaced by water meadows and reed beds.

Above left: Drought and drying-up. The Rhine, 2004
Above right: The opposite - a drowned car

Hydrologists are increasingly insisting on a new approach to engineering not just rivers but the whole landscape. The UK's environmental agency says 'the focus is now on working with the forces of nature. Towering concrete walls are out and new wetlands are in" (The floods of 2000 cost 1 billion pounds). The agency is breaking the Thames banks upstream and flooding 10sq kilometres of ancient floodplain at Otmoor outside Oxford.

A tenth of all Europeans live on the flood plain of rivers

Today's eco-cities are yesterdays living cities envisaged by Archigram/Cedric Price etc - both evading the central question of town and revolution though suburban dispersal tends to make the latter formulation archaic and vague. Even in their day in the 1960s these Little Englander technicists had hardly heard of psycho-geography. The hopeless idiocies of Will Alsop and other architects with schemes for uninterrupted techno cum heritage cities - like a proposed link up between Liverpool and Hull - point to Archigram with knobs on. We have lost all conception of what a 'new city' might be like in terms of a liberated social space whilst the idea of a even a liberated 'edge city' appeals to no one because it suggests limitless sprawl and the continued devouring of greenery as the inhabitants in turn are devoured by privatised consumption. For the moment a limited, compromised, eco pragmatism is all there is, absorbing the ideal within a practical, narrowed down, utopianism entirely acceptable to sectors of capitalism. Berlin is their shining example. In the Potsdamer Platz a huge commercial development by Daimler Chrysler drainage has been limited to 3 litres per second per hectare which is just one percent of the potential run-off during a big storm. Architects have designed buildings to divert rainwater from roofs to flush toilets and irrigate roof gardens. This high-tech urban development can store a sixth of its annual rainfall.

New housing estates across the city are adopting a similar technology. In the Zehlendorf suburb, rain from the roofs, gardens and drives of 160 houses is collected to irrigate local parkland. In Harzahn there is a drain free estate of 1800 homes packed onto just 30 hectares and features cobbled roads that allow rainwater to percolate through to the soil beneath.

There are even far fetched plans to turn Los Angeles into an eco-city but in the present harsh anti-environmental climate it is unlikely to get far. Impervious surfaces cover 70% of the metropolis and la la land has spent billions to speed water flow after intense storms by digging huge drains and concreting river beds. An LA environmentalist reckons the city receives half the water it needs in rainfall. A number of citizens groups have appeared like 'Friends of the Los Angeles River' and 'Unpaved LA' that wish to hold on to the city's flood water. The expense involved is huge and besides conservation measures are increasingly deemed subversive in the States today. So a traditional solution whatever the expense is more than likely to overrule the limited rationality of a cost benefit analysis favouring the latter. The latest plan in LA is to spend $280 million raising the concrete walls on the Los Angeles River by another two metres yet the city lays out millions annually importing water from hundreds of kilometres away.

By the time the world is forced to adopt an eco solution to city planning it will already be too late. The planetary practicality of the ecologists is only likely to be fulfilled in a situation of overall nightmare but by then it will totally ineffective against the destructive forces that have been unleashed. We only have a short time left and unless the mass of the population begin to see through the unfolding catastrophe we are truly living without any hope of a future. Forlornly the chances of this happening are getting slimmer by the minute.

Stuart & David Wise 2004

Preamble concerning E.B. Ford

After completing several books and papers on hereditary, genetics and eugenics (for it was all the rage) and two enduring ones on butterflies and moths E B Ford, (a.k.a. Henry) conscious of his growing reputation, would ostentatiously carry with him into the senior commons rooms in Oxford a thick binder labelled genetics. Everyone was anxious to see the great man's scribbles and on his death the binder was eagerly opened and to every ones astonishment it contained---nothing.

However stuffed inside the blank pages under the title 'A Memorable Fancy' were the following notes. Perhaps they were for a book he intended to write but like every other naturalist never dared even contemplate doing. Had he done so it would have been dismissed as philosophy and not natural science. And this bare outline does sound like a lot of hot air but we feel the florid language has a basis in fact if turned right side up and made more concrete.

Hegel's chapter on the Absolute Idea gives us a final comprehensive demonstration of dialectical method. Here it is presented as the objective process of being, which preserves itself only through different modes of the 'negation of the negation'. It is this dynamic that eventually moves the absolute idea and makes the transition from the Logic to the Philosophy of Nature and of Mind.

However it is dialectical thought and thus contains its negation; it is not a harmonious and stable form but a process of unification of opposites. It is not complete except in its otherness, as object.

The absolute idea is the subject in its final form, thought. Its otherness and negation is the object, being. The absolute ides now has to be interpreted as objective being. However being is a different being from what began Hegel's Logic. For being now is a concrete totality wherein all particular forms subsist as the essential distinctions and relations of one comprehensive principle. Thus comprehended, being is nature and dialectical thought passes on to the 'Philosophy of Nature'. Hegel says that 'the idea freely releases itself' into nature' or freely 'determines itself' as nature. It is this statement putting the transition forward as an actual process in reality that offers great difficulties in the understanding of Hegel's system. (I had the greatest difficulty getting J B S Haldane to understand this but what could be expected from a Stalinist with a bourgeois conception of nature as something completely external and other. It must be remembered he was a firm friend of that notable crystallographer, Bernal who, as a faithful Stalinist and follower of Lysenko, denied the existence of genes in his 'Science in History' when it was first published in 1954. In the Penguin reprints in 1965/69 these embarrassing passages were nowhere to be seen. In this work science and the appliances of science are treated as an unequivocal good, especially once stripped of their capitalist wrapping as in the Soviet Union! It is an erudite, though very banal, interpretation of science in history and one that completely disregards essential concepts as alienation, praxis, the total human being, abolition of the state, money etc and is therefore little different from western fanfares to science. The two continued to remain good friends but the brilliance of both was much diminished by their appalling social conceptions. Bernal, using his knowledge of crystals, ventured into biophysics determining the structure and composition of biological molecules by X ray diffraction, a line of research that was not only closely followed by Haldane but which eventually led to the discovery of the double helix model of DNA. However let's continue...)

Nature achieves its truth when it enters the domain of history. The subjects development frees being from its blind necessity, and nature becomes part of human history and is increasingly shaped by human history and reflects therefore historical stages and social relationships.

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Hegel and Political Economy

Hegel's Philosophy of Nature in regard to evolution (Griffin)

Evolution in the direction of greater plasticity and autonomy. The unprecedented digging up of the earth's crust with mines and canals and the insights it brings into rock strata and the fossilised remains peculiar to each strata is not specifically mentioned. Earth's "history" (a term which has to be used advisedly in this instance - but only in this instance - in Hegel's work) is chiefly concerned with establishing the point the inorganic becomes the organic and rejecting in so doing an evolutionary perspective (however he calls Lamarck "a gifted Frenchman") "Argillaceous earth and coal formations become transformed unmistakably into peat, where mineral and vegetable are no longer distinguishable; for peat has a vegetable origin and yet all the same still belongs to the mineral kingdom." In fact it is the other way on: coal is derived from peat which is soil mingled with half decayed vegetable matter which then becomes lignite or "brown coal" and, continued further, becomes coal. "Argillaceous earth" must mean clay which can be transformed into shale consisting of thin layers and then, under great pressure, into slate.

Hegel then goes on: "it is the limestone formations which, in their ultimate formations, tend towards the osseous nature of the animal (passing over) into forms of which it cannot be said whether they are mineral or animal (molluscs)". They are not yet shells which could be regarded as the remains of an extinct animal world; although that is one explanation of the petrified animal forms - "(This is the key bifurcation: Hegel, the supreme historicist denies evolution in plants and animals - even the best biologist will subsequently deny it in human terms: "the struggle for existence" is also that of the war of one against all (Darwin): a bees nest is also a piece of real estate (Gould)". "Rudimentary organic forms in the geological organism, are also found in the coal measures in which the tree form is very often distinctly recognisable." Hegel also maintains fossilised remains are to be found in the boundaries of rock strata which would be logically consistent with his view of the organic proceeding from the inorganic and which he calls "playful essays in organic formations"). But, crucially - "these organic forms - are not to be thought of as having once actually lived and then died: on the contrary they are still born". He likens the process to that of a sculptor or painter who produces "forms which represent life but are not themselves living: Nature, however, does this directly, without needing such mediation". Hegel's conclusion here is similar to that advanced in the "Philosophy of the Fine Arts" that nature is superior to the arts even, it may be said as petrified nature. Actually, a few pages previously, Hegel, unaware of the inconsistency, was less tendentious in the situating of fossil remains when probably precising a standard works on geology. Of fossil remains in mountainous regions (he cites the Pyrenees, the Andes and the Alps) he says they "are not scattered throughout the whole mass of the mountain but occur only in individual strata, often in the greatest order, as if in families etc." Though he accepts geological time running into "millions" of years (a huge underestimation but daring for then) it is essentially of little interest because "the interest is confined to what is there before us". Earth history comes to a standstill in the bourgeois epoch with Europe and especially Germany as its epicentre: "the earth spirit- awakes (from) the movement and dreaming of one sleep, and receives its consciousness in Man, and so confronts itself as a stabilised formation". Henceforth nature everlasting becomes a given, like wage labour and the commodity. The shorelines of continents and the human species are here for all eternity. The present transcends geology and biology and the battle with nature is won. Global catastrophe can only be a retrograde fantasy because natural (i.e. unconscious) history is at an end. Catastrophe then tends to become the province of representation, something one views or reads about and not experienced directly until engulfed oneself.

Hegel's standpoint precludes any further empirical investigation into geological epochs because it is wanting precisely on that account. "To explain the geological organism usually means to make the order in which these different formations succeeded one another the chief business; but this kind of explanation is only external. This mere happening, which involves only a difference of time, this temporal succession of the strata, does not explain anything at all; or rather it completely ignores the necessity of the process, the comprehension of it" We soon learn that this necessity is a pre-formationism: "Nature's formations are determinate, bounded, and enter as such into existence. "The Mosaic story of creation is still the best in its quite naive statement - Man has not developed himself out of the animal, nor the animal out of the plant; each is at a single stroke what it is". Hegel is very insistent on his anti-evolutionist stance and his need to combat these theories which stemmed in particular from Lamarck. (As mentioned Lamarck is acknowledged in his "Philosophy of Nature" more, surprisingly, as a systematist than as a proto-evolutionist. The anti-evolutionist Cuvier is also cited but not the quarrel between the later and Lamarck) Hegel describes the monkey as "a satire on man". One could almost claim the same for his funny anti-evolutionism, which is more of a satire on creationism because of his obvious awareness of opposed arguments, which are more in keeping with Hegel. That he felt extremely threatened on this account is food for thought. Perhaps he feared he could not arrest nature with the ease he could immobilise dialectical thought in the Prussian State and in that sense his fears are also ours.

And now for Findlay's comments:

"Hegel's view of nature ' is to be understood as throughout working towards an end which will ultimately carry it beyond itself. It is arguable that this immanent teleology is a better and less prejudiced foundation for empirical investigations than the half-formulated absolutisms current in natural science."

And "Hegel: a re-examination"

"But though Hegel remains within the world of common sense and science, and does not underestimate its reality, his approach to it is neither commonsensical nor scientific; he sees the facts of that world in a revolutionary manner, which is not that of any other philosopher. Hegel, as we made plain, sees things in terms of a "principle of Idealism", which is not the principle of Berkeley, nor that of Plato, nor Kant, nor any previous thinker. It is quasi-teleological or quasi-teleological principle, according to which things must be seen as if existing on account of, or as if tending towards, certain consummating experiences, experiences where there will cease to be a barrier between the self and other persons or between the thinking mind and the world confronting it. This principle ' may have certain remote, long term empirical consequences, which we cannot precisely locate or pin down". (P. 351)

For a philosopher Hegel's knowledge of nature was exceptionally detailed. Essentially a work of synthesis he was only surpassed by Aristotle who did make original contributions of his own particularly in the field of systematics which could be said to have its origin in him. Yet in spite of the empirical detail one cannot help but be irked by the philosophising which comes as an unwelcome imposition on the text, though not because of Hegel's unease with natural science as insufficiently explanatory and begging of further questions. It is just that the questions we want to put to science cannot be addressed within a philosophical framework we suspect is fantastical rather than "deep". But as regards the detail, there is so much Hegel has to be right now and again. Even blindingly so when, for example, with fortuitous prescience he judges fungi to be closer to animals than plants however erroneous his process of reasoning is: "inorganic-organic forms like lichens and fungi which one does not rightly know how to classify ' peculiar, tough substances coming near to animal life." (P298) DNA studies have shown that fungi are closer to humans than to trees though a need for a separate phyla has long been recognised from the days when Linnaeus bracketed them alongside plants.

Fungi appear almost as an aside in the concluding section of "geological nature" ' a bridge between the inorganic/organic and "plant nature" which is the subject of the next 45 pages. (Geological nature occupies only half of that and which is also grouped specifically under "organics"). Goethe's theories on plant life are much in evidence. Indeed Goethe's name crops up constantly in the "Philosophy of Nature" not only as regards plants but also in his treatment of colour (in which he sides with Goethe as against Newton) and animal morphology. Obviously Goethe esteemed him deeply as a scientist because Goethe's obviously satisfied Hegel's quest for wholeness. As he remarks "Goethe's Metamorphose der Pflanzen marks the beginning of a rational conception of the nature of plant-life, in that it has forced attention away from a concern with mere details to a recognition of the unity of life", adding "Goethe with his great insight into nature has defined the growth of plants as a metamorphosis of one and the same formation "noting that his has major botanical treatise published in 1790" has been "treated with indifference by botanists who did not know what to make of it just because it contained the exposition of the whole".

Stuart Wise (1998)

(PS. Findlay was Prof of Philosophy at Newcastle University in the late 1950s. His book Hegel a Re-examination is still regarded as one of the best there is on Hegel)

A WORD OF WARNING: What's presented here is necessarily unfinished and incomplete seeing few people are discussing the totality of the grave and impending energy crises. It could be construed as simply iconoclastic, even sentimental, for there is no way of knowing if the argument presented can be considered largely right or wrong for at least a decade. At the moment energy is on a wing and a prayer and the techies' mind set is always reassuring i.e. in a few years time it will be possible to drill 3 miles down in the oil-rich Atlantic; it will be possible to extract oil from the shale measures etc. But will we hack it in time....? The following is merely a modest contribution to a debate that has hardly started and we continually have second thoughts about what is stated here.

Ancient sunlight & thoughts of autonomous dinosaurs

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PART I

"Energy is eternal delight
But war is energy enslaved
All futurity seems teeming with endless destruction never to be repelled.
For this is the night of time."

(William Blake c.2004)

Domestic and industrial energy costs in the UK have never been cheaper but the situation cannot last. Electricity prices in particular are bound to rise. It must always be born in mind the amount of electricity generated by gas turbines in the U.K. is increasing and by 2010 could reach the staggering figure of 90%. The synergy of gas and electricity in the U.K. today, with ever more companies supplying both, masks the fact that gas is easily the primary energy source.

The break-up of these two hitherto state monopolies is just one of the momentous consequences that followed hard on the defeat of the miners after their year long strike of 1984-85. It marked an end to the ethos of 'public service' that began with the "gas and water socialism" of the late Victorian era (i.e. municipal enterprises paid for out of the rates and managed, at least in principal, by locally appointed officials). Post war nationalisations were in part a statist ratification and extension of the illusions of direct democratic control that surrounded these local enterprises. Though the miners' strike retrospectively can in a simplistic way be seen as a battle for retaining nationalisation, it unleashed far profounder social currents that could not easily be contained by it, and which had been gathering force throughout the 1970s' and before. Paradoxically, one of the unforeseen outcomes of the wave of privatisations was its capacity to hi-jack the search for individual autonomy through class struggle and the consequent questioning of everything that had formerly constituted 'socialism', by substituting "sovereignty of choice" that allegedly put the consumer – and share buying – in control. Packed into a period of 20 years, there has scarcely been a more concentrated and monstrous inversion in recorded history.

The trading of energy stocks is as complete today as it ever shall be.

Companies buy and sell quanta of energy on a short term basis and any surplus will be traded forward on the assumption electricity prices will rise. Gas was fully deregulated (i.e. "opened up to competition") by 1998 and the electricity supply market by September 1999. Though water has been privatised it has not been possible to deregulate it. (Note that the control of water is closely connected in hydroelectric schemes with the generation of energy). The absence of a national grid is the main stumbling block but that was no obstacle to Enron, a water company able to prey on the easily duped, and perpetrate the most notorious act of corporate fraud of modern times.

The model citizen that arose to prominence following the defeat of the miners was encouraged to buy shares in the many privatisations that followed. In that way they could 'buy a piece of the action', 'be in control', and 'be free to choose'. And in fact according to the latest figures, by March 2003, 8 million consumers had switched from British Gas to another gas supplier and 11 million to a different electricity supplier: in sum 37% of gas and electricity consumers. The job of state regulators has been to guarantee 'fair competition' and provide a price comparison to "churners", a term used by utility companies to describe the movement of those consumers who choose to switch suppliers.

Though the state regulators monitor power companies they do not control them. But the more the supply of energy approximates to the ideal of perfect competition the queasier a small but growing number of energy strategists are beginning to feel.

Two days prior to the 20th anniversary of the miners' strike a TV programme IF detailed the catastrophic consequences of a disruption to the natural gas pipe line from Russia in the year 2010 when the UK will, on present trends, be almost wholly dependent on Russian natural gas. The timing of the programme can scarcely have been left to chance and though only one energy expert dared argue for an increased use of coal, the absence of an overall energy strategy was repeatedly emphasised. But what does this euphemistic "energy strategy" mean if not a return to an "economically pro-active state" (no one dared mention the taboo term "nationalisation"). It was obvious that energy companies, locked in fierce competition with each other, could not support the cost of building new power stations. A clean coal fired power station able to trap sulphur and nitrous oxide and the all important C02 emissions could easily cost £500 million. These critical objections were smothered by a knee jerk consensus which only goes to show that ruling circles in the UK are still bingeing on the excesses of Thatcherism and more zealously committed to the god of globalisation than even the American ruling class, which is still able to show caution where energy supplies are concerned (see further on).

Only the direst national emergency is now likely to result in a shift away from free market dogma. But when it does energy needs will play a major role not only here but elsewhere. An energy famine will close the era of globalisation and with luck will help usher in a return to a kind of woolly peoples' internationalism. Then there will be a rapid rearguard action and a rewriting of history in which quite possibly the defeat of the year long miners' strike and the almost total destruction of the coal industry will be seen as vindictive and short sighted and damaging to the business community at large. Though of course couched in terms of the national interest, it will not forever be able to conceal the class question and the onslaught on capitalism that was at the heart of the miners' strike.

Since the industrial revolution the future of the UK's energy needs has been the future of coal. Apart from anything else the Thatcher government of 1982-87 was indeed favoured in its battle against the miners in having on hand vast reserves of North Sea gas a by-product of North Sea oil extraction. This was the origin of the "dash for gas" and it was entirely fortuitous and providential such a raw material was at hand. Since 1970, UK domestic consumption has more than trebled. The reserves of natural gas are now almost exhausted as over 80% of the accessible total has gone and what little is left will be consumed at an even faster rate than previously as the country becomes ever more dependent on gas. In the oil/gas fields of the North Sea compressors have been used to accelerate extraction. But as luck would have it there was now a free market Mother (fucker) Russia to make good the shortfall. And not only Britain but a good part of Western Europe will have to rely on a very long, and vulnerable, pipeline from Russia. Twenty years ago this would have been unthinkable and though raw materials (e.g. vast supplies of timber) were traded from the Soviet Union to have become energy dependant on a so-called 'communist' state would have been out of the question.

Meanwhile the free market has all but triumphed worldwide and the kind of knee jerk response that accompanies it: free market = security of supply. The number of economists who continue to believe in this rubbish is astonishing. But dissident voices are increasing and with that a creeping back door interventionism that dare not speak its name. The fear is growing that the UK is overly dependent on a single source of energy and that the "dash for gas" is now suicidal folly. A more balanced approach is needed and this is where the "future for coal" once more comes in.

The last coal fired power station to be built in the UK was in the 1970s'. This is an extraordinary fact in itself given the manifold increases in the price of oil following the setting up of OPEC in 1973. Though the effect of oil price rises was felt at the petrol pumps and throughout industry it was not the case domestically. The now fabled three day week and the disruption of power supplies were entirely attributable to the earlier, 1972 miners' strike. The situation could not have been more different in Denmark where the country was 90% dependent on oil. After the oil shock of the early seventies Denmark rapidly shifted to reliance on coal to supply its energy needs and quickly introduced wide ranging energy conservation measures before turning increasingly to renewables. The response in France was to build nuclear power stations which still continue to provide nearly all of the country's energy needs. Germany began to follow suit but even before the impact of Chernobyl there was wide spread protest and Germany is to close all of its nuclear power stations by 2015, a commitment it will find hard to wriggle out of.

The fact that no new coal fired power stations were built following the two UK miners' strikes of the early seventies suggests that already the need to defeat uppity miners at all cost was becoming the first priority, even under the two Labour governments of 1974-79. The idea was beginning to take hold that the only successful course of action was a root and branch destruction of the industry and all of its subsidiaries. Extemporising became the order of the day and luckily later in the decade North Sea gas came on stream. An energy policy that favoured coal would only have resulted in yet more power to the miners elbow.

Though it was known that CO2 was increasing in the atmosphere, climate change was not yet an issue and it was only from the mid 1980s' onwards that it became pressing. Prior to that it was the sulphur content of coal, the cause of acid rain that was the main focus of international concern. Though now there can be no doubting the catastrophic consequences of a build-up of CO2 in the atmosphere, there is no doubting either the ideological uses it has been put to in the U.K. In ruling circles in the UK if power stations were to be converted into crematoria it would be more acceptable than burning coal! This is not because coal is a dirty fuel first and foremost but because in Britain's post war history there has been no event that was more traumatic and consequential than the miners' strike of 1984-5. Even the slightest capitulation amounts to abject surrender and because of that energy policy is hoist on its own petard and the room for manoeuvre small indeed. The devil has been recast as a coal miner.

So coal has become the great unmentionable and in the next few years most coal fired power stations will be closed down and the last few remaining pits flooded for good. Britain for the foreseeable future will be completely dependent on Russian natural gas and pitiful supplies of electricity from renewables especially wind power.

But wait a minute. What's this about coal creeping up the energy agenda once more? On Feb.24th 2003 the Labour government published a White Paper entitled Our Energy Future - Creating a Low Carbon Economy. It is hoped that by 2020 a fifth of the UK's energy needs will come from renewables - which takes a heck of believing. However there is another very telling clause supporting cleaner coal technology and N.B. "establishing an investment aid scheme to help existing pits develop new reserves". This White Paper was widely hailed by the Greens as a breakthrough because it "turned Britain's energy policy on its head" The first priority was no longer security of supply (can we get enough oil?) or "social justice" (are prices too high?) Priority no.1 was to be the protection of the atmosphere which was to be achieved by producing a low carbon economy. There was no mention of nuclear power which to the Greens was a further recommendation. So now the Greens, interestingly, are beginning to discreetly whisper the word "coal". What could have occasioned this change especially as they were very unsympathetic toward the miners' strike? In fact in an article in the New Statesmen some three years after the defeat of the miners claimed it was necessary to defeat the miners in the interests of a safe renewable energy and the need to meet the EEC's planned reductions in CO2 emissions. In order to understand this surprising u-turn we need only run through the other energy options to see why.

Generically (but with the occasional rare exception) ecologists have tended to look askance on revolutionary interpretations of history involving rupture and mass conflict ultimately deriving from Hegel and Marx. Right from the start of the contemporary ecology movement in the 1970s it has been dogged by accusations of class bias. This was nowhere more evident than in a 1970s TV production called Survivors in which humanity was all but destroyed by a virus. It is at heart a story of how the English middle class set out to rebuild civilisation and middle class snobbery. The main clash is between a trade union leader, Arthur Wormley, and his band of louts (who could be Arthur Scargill and "his" flying pickets because this was the moment of successful miners' strikes) and an aggressive right wing woman (an anticipation of the new feminism) seeking to re-found free enterprise on earth first principles. However this naked class prejudice amid the Habitat eco-kitsch, had to give way to less insidious and obvious forms of class bias. Yet it continues to surface with unfailing regularity. The Greens latest proposal to tax aviation fuel will mean thousands of ordinary working people will be unable to holiday abroad whilst the jet set will continue to enjoy their "enviable" life style. But if they were to add all holidays are a holiday in another peoples' misery it would make all the difference in the world. But the unending misery of capitalism in all its forms forever seems to elude their grasp.

Really the Greens are the heirs of the 18th century Enlightenment, which also goes some way to explaining their often insufferable optimism as though the battle has been won already. Reason they believe will finally prevail and this abstract rationalism prevents them from grasping that vested interests based on private property drastically forbids the implementation of reason on the scale that is now essential to survival. Indeed this limitation prevents the Greens from seeing the obvious and they themselves become a victim of irrationalism, especially over essential questions like the state, capital and labour and what is meant by the commodity economy. Despite the Greens apparent stance of non-negotiability one invariably finds this is not the case and throughout, there runs a deep vein of compromise. Hence critiques of consumption are drastically narrowed down, tending to concentrate exclusively on the question of sustainability, particularly the energy consumed in producing commodities. When it comes to consumerism, real needs and false needs never enter the frame. The sole criteria is that of guilt implying consumerism is fulfilling and does just what it says it will do for you on the label. It is a temptation we must resist because it is energy sinful – not that it is empty as well as wasteful. Hence the readiness to strike deals with the unsustainable, destructive fury of today's commodity economy and a willingness to embrace the lesser of intrinsically damaging energy "solutions". In not being "class aware" in the broadest, most expansive sense of the term, the Greens are never green enough.

By the year 2030 at the very latest oil will be running dry and the end of natural gas will be in sight. Well before that date there will have been numerous energy spikes vastly increasing the costs of energy based on these raw materials. Come 2010 the oil producers will be in control and a seller's market will have commenced reviving memories of the OPEC cartel in its heyday. And that is the best case scenario minus any extra disruption to supply caused by "oil wars" and "energy imperialism". America's oil production peaked in 1971 and from that date the country became increasingly dependent on oil imports until it is now almost totally so. Securing the Gulf became an urgent object of foreign policy eventually to be enshrined in the "Carter Doctrine". The merest hint of trouble was enough to set off alarm bells in case oil supplies were disrupted. Islam was encouraged to disrupt a growing class unity cutting across national and religious boundaries (even in Israel) and as a foil against the Soviet Union – but only to turn against its western benefactors. Due to the Iranian Islamic 'revolution' of 1979, 5.6 million barrels of crude disappeared overnight. A year ago it was hoped to construct an OPEC busting redoubt in Iraq, which, if the oil were allowed to flow freely, could supply a tenth of global consumption. However the "Baghdad cake walk" as we are all now increasingly aware is anything but a walk-over and the Saudi regime has to daily perform a juggling act making concessions to western oil interests and 'radical' Islamist sects to stay in power. (The house of Saud incidentally is responsible for the sumptuous Sunni mosques springing up all over Bradford whilst the mosques of irked Shias – and they are very open about their anger - still retain their makeshift, half-built, scruffy look). Nor should the potential for serious conflict in the future between America and Russia be ruled out. In 2003 BP started work on the 1000 mile Azerbaijan pipeline from Baku via Georgia to Turkish ports on the Mediterranean. Russia wanted the pipeline to be rerouted through Russia so, in retaliation, began to destabilize the region.

(Footnote:This is not just a question of securing hydrocarbon energy supplies. Russia is rich in raw materials (its new oligarchs, like the oil baron Khodorkovsky now languishing in jail and stripped of his assets, have made their billions from the daylight robbery and export of raw materials) that are coveted by an increasingly raw materials starved, manufacturing West. The domination and eventual carve up (regional privatisation) of Russia is a distant US strategic geopolitical objective. It will lead in the long run to the increasing militarisation of Russia as a defensive measure against external predation. A new version of the cold war is to be expected with Russian military nationalism, military renationalisations and expropriations combined with Kremlin autocracy castigated as the enemy, in place of the spurious erstwhile "communism".

The local wars that are fought today over raw materials like in Burundi are amongst the scariest ever. We recoil before images of pre-teen, nobody's child, killing machines carrying Kalashnikovs, drugged up to the eyeballs with drugs supplied by local warlords and slaughtering without mercy in their tattered sportswear gear. It also has its resonance in the overdeveloped world in the guns / drug culture which foreshadows a uniquely different militarisation, a subjective militarisation of "I" "I" "I" "I", of narcissistic monologue and hierarchy, of dissing and bullying, one that "realizes" art as the war of one against all and which the military per se could well conscript to contain the social breakdown which is likely to ensue from an energy driven ecological catastrophe on a colossal scale.)

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Oil has justly been called "the tears of the devil" and the political cost of guaranteeing security of supply (war after war after mind-numbing war) may be just too high even before the last drop of oil has been pumped out. The global market economy is built on limitless, cheap reliable fuel – mainly oil – and free marketers are the victims of their own propaganda if they think the situation is going to continue unchanged for the next three decades. Interventionism will begin to shuffle back and in fact we are already beginning to see it in the interconnected domains of transport and energy. In the UK there are energy subsidies for renewables, indirect capital grants to householders wishing to install a wind turbine, coal subventions and the de-facto nationalisation of Railtrack. But all this is as a ghost on the political scene but a ghost that will eventually materialize into flesh and bone. And on that date the political opportunism of the anti-globalisation movement will be apparent for all to see.

Short of a miracle there is no way renewables will quench capitalism's insatiable thirst for ever greater quantities of energy. And by pretending somehow they will, the greens are doing themselves no favours. If they were to say renewables can never hope to satisfy the expanding energy needs of capitalism but that they could come into their own in a post capitalist society, they would avoid falling into the trap that has been set by the nuclear lobby. In order to avoid this, the Greens would have to insist that life must change with renewables as the energy basis of this changed relationship between the human species and the rest of nature. If not, then their opportunism will eventually be exposed as a hollow sham, and all that they will have achieved is to help deliver the world in to the arms of a second instalment of nuclear power, requiring many thousands of new nuclear power stations.

Innovations in the efficacy of photo voltaic cells can be expected but like the dreams of nuclear and cold fusion it is advisable not to hold your breath. Besides little is known about two of these three possibilities (cold fusion is still fakir science - see the Fleischmann/Pons experiment of a few years back) and there is also the question of unwanted waste. It seems likely that nuclear fusion would have its own safety and waste problems, like what to do with the unstable, radioactive, element of tritium which has a half life of "only" 12 years, which is admittedly a fraction of that of plutonium. Moreover temperatures to equal that of the sun would have to be repeatedly generated. On the sun hydrogen particles subject to enormous heat and pressure collide with each other and some stick together in a reaction called thermonuclear fusion. This fusion produces helium and nuclear energy just as Einstein predicted in his famous formula where a small loss in mass is converted into a large amount of energy. This formula that has cast the darkest of shadows across modern times both in terms of its warlike and "peaceful" uses leads us to suspect the only benign fusion generator is the sun! And as for PV power the manufacture of photo voltaic cells for use, for instance, in PV tiles, is a hi-tech industry using exotic and hazardous chemicals like baron and arsenic. Their mass production will involve many dangers not least for the work force and, at the end of their useful life; they have to be safely disposed of, which could be a major headache.

Apart from hydrogen there remains the nuclear fission option – which frankly is not an option even though the nuclear lobby is massively gearing up for a comeback. Despite producing no greenhouse gases, nuclear energy really is the dirtiest and ultimately most costly of all fuels. There are enormous problems connected with waste disposal and decommissioning costs are huge. There are also 'extra economic' costs related to security which are largely shouldered by the state. A garrison state is also an expensive state and goes against the grain of a cost paring free trade liberalism. We have entered the age of permanent state manipulated terrorism without any historical parallels (though the Italy of the 1970s' was the laboratory - see Sanguinetti's Terrorism and the State - available from BM Chronos) and today's spiralling atrocities would be as nothing compared to a well aimed missile or plane hitting a nuclear reactor. And given the escalating scale of the terrorist counter attack against the terrorist war against terrorism, better not put temptation in temptations way. Fast breeder reactors produce surplus plutonium which could well finds its way into the manufacture of a small nuclear device which will then be exploded in order to 'save' humanity. Plutonium is also exceedingly toxic and has a half life of 24,000 years. One thousand millioneth of a gram has been known to cause cancer in a dog and a 100 megawatt nuclear power plant manufactures 250 kilos of plutonium a year. None of this bears thinking about - and for that reason the nuclear option probably will.

And as for the energy potential of hydrogen, please read the lengthy note at the end of this section. Ecologists were quick to welcome it as an alternative, non carbon based energy source – but then paused for thought. Hydrogen is a secondary fuel and like electricity has to be produced from a primary energy source. One could get the crazy situation of a carbon (CO2) creating power source being used to manufacture hydrogen, which then provides 'clean' electricity whose only waste product is water. (There are however several serious catches and you are advised to read the section on hydrogen) The only exit from this absurdist roundelay is to imagine a situation in which renewables like wind/ wave/tidal energy provide the power source for the electrolytic production of hydrogen which when supplied to a fuel cell would then provide the desired green, clean energy!

It is for the technical reasons set out above that coal began to stage something of a comeback in the thinking of the Greens and crucially in other quarters. And it is beginning to concentrate the minds of governments worldwide especially in those countries with known recoverable coal reserves and who have become increasingly energy dependent. In the USA 20 new coal pits have been sunk in recent years and Bush's energy secretary, Spencer Abrahams, advised Bush and Blair to build 'clean' coal fired power stations. Given just how reactionary and essentially militaristic Bush's energy policy is, such a statement is arresting. It does suggest a faint but growing tendency towards improving energy self-sufficiency, more autarchy and even isolationism, not just in America but elsewhere, with energy and transport to the forefront of this return (if not in every case) to state interventionism. A retreat from present day globalisation may easily become a reality and it is at this juncture a revived coal industry becomes possible here, but this time, wonder of wonders, supported by the Greens.

Living plants are able to exchange CO2 for oxygen during photosynthesis but the thought of creating a gas guzzling techno-plant capable of exchanging vast quantities of CO2 for oxygen belongs in the realm of sci-fi. Though clean coal is something of a misnomer, CO2 can be converted in to liquid hydro carbons for reuse in an ever diminishing combustion cycle where the waste gas is consumed until all used up. It is a very expensive process but to date is the closest one will ever get to genuinely clean coal. What is meant by 'clean' coal today is coal from which green house and other polluting gases have been sequestered. It is possible to do this with the sulphur and nitrous oxide content of coal and the technology is now available to sequester CO2 through a variety of processes (separation membranes, fluidisation). However it is costly and would considerably add to the price of electricity produced from coal. Though that is an important consideration for energy strategists, the real problem is where to dispose of the CO2 gas. And it is this question that still makes coal an unsafe fuel. Unsurprisingly the response to global warming by energy consortia, car firms, etc. has been to go in search of a techno-fix holy grail which will allow things to remain as they are. The gravity of the crises need never then be acknowledged. Carbon sequestration relaxes the pressure on energy companies, industry and the state to reduce fossil fuel use. Just think about it: for governments it is a far easier option than attacking energy consortia, the car industry, suburban sprawl and a way of living (or rather dying) permitted by the reckless use of fossil fuel. But to believe any other response is possible, except within quite narrow margins, is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of state power. The modern state is built on the victory of the bourgeoisie and has been fashioned to its own tastes. A "state of the whole people" is a myth but with the Greens and left social democrats an apparently unmovable one and which constitutes the basis of their teeth gritting harmony.

Oil companies have for some years been experimenting with the possibilities of pumping CO2 underground using a technique known as "enhanced oil extraction", which in plain English means the determination to squeeze every last remaining drop of oil from out of near depleted oil fields.. However, as Hitler well knew, concentrated CO2 is lethal and any geological fractures could release vast gas bubbles of the stuff into the atmosphere. During the 1980s' a couple of thousand people in Africa died as a result of a CO2 gas escape which, without warning, suddenly burst from the bottom of a lake. The same goes for pumping the gas into saline aquifers where it would eventually form carbonic acid which could then corrode the encasing rock and possibly vent the CO2 into the atmosphere. It is also possible to bury CO2 in the deep ocean where it dissolves and hopefully remains stationary. A joint research team from BP, Ford and Princeton is studying this process. But how stable is dissolved CO2 especially when faced with deep water turbulence or with potential changes to ocean circulation currents as a result of climate change? Experiments involve trial and error and unforeseen consequences are the rule rather than the exception. But the scale and the consequences of this type of experiment are such there is no room for error at all. As a climate scientist said: "If we tinker with the whole world, we only get one chance". The technofix approach to global warming is predicated on a narrow sequence of cause and effect. It may work for cars and aeroplanes but not where nature is concerned. A strictly linear approach is even too cramping for geological time scales involving scarcely to be imagined interactions between living tissue and inorganic matter. What is desperately needed is the humility to stand before nature and ask many, many questions involving a multiplicity of likely causes and effects before even daring to hazard a solution. This approach is totally alien to today's technologists limited as they are by the businesses they work for, their preparatory studies and the way they live. The scientist of Gaia – the paradox of a living earth - has become the latest convert to the philosophy of nuclear power like his illustrious forbear, the astronomer and physicist, Fred Hoyle, in the 1970s'. It is extraordinary these how two scientists (especially Lovelock, because the failure of nuclear power is now even more obvious than in the 1970s') who have added so much to our understanding of the way life was created and sustained on a tight rope stretched over an abyss of certain annihilation, cannot for the life of them imagine how human life might be completely transformed. It says more about the limitations of science today than the inherent limits of science. And finally we must never forget it will take decades for the world's climate to return to normal even if the reckless emission of greenhouse gases were to cease tomorrow.

At the end of the day it would seem coal is favoured by The Greens because despite everything it is the most attractive of less attractive alternatives that are presently available and can be modified. So it becomes a matter rather of the devil you know ---------. And one must remember the recoverable reserves of coal, in comparison to oil and natural gas, are practically inexhaustible.

There is yet another aspect which has barely been touched on by anyone. And that is coal's uses as a raw material besides that of energy. Prior to the discovery of the uses oil could be put to, coal extracts and the by-products of coal were the basis of the nascent pharmaceutical industry. These by products included dyes, medicinals, flavours, perfumes, synthetic rubbers, resins, synthetic liquid fuels, plastics etc. As a youth I well recall in the heart of the Durham coalfield a plant which produced a tough, but brittle, coal-based plastic called bakelite. The modern factory dominated the skyline and the choking fumes spread for miles. To us youngsters there was only one thing worse than going down the mines and that was to work at Bakelite! Given that the chemical and physical processes that produce coal, oil and natural gas are closely related it is not surprising that coal can be made to yield a broad spectrum of products comparable to those obtained from petroleum. At the very least the exhaustion of oil will mean coal's former uses will be investigated further, amongst which a coal-based plastic is a possibility. More organic forms of plastic that for example use sugar and cellulose as a base are known about. However bio-degradable plastics possess one major disadvantage: they have to be grown and the acreage of arable land that would be needed to satisfy capital's appetite for plastic would be awesome. If satisfactory organic substitutes were found it would go some way to solving the problem of the safe waste disposal of plastics as no-one can yet say what the possible toxic effects eventually will be from the millions of tons of "non-degradable" plastics (that will overtime degrade) now interred in the soil.

The same goes for the chances of organic fibre substituting for the steel or plastics used in the making of car bodies and which feature prominently in advertising campaigns as part of industry's effort to clean up its image. The purported 'greening' of technology particularly in the motor industry is especially noticeable.

A Daimler Chrysler car ad recently appeared showing a car shape cut into a field (a very large field, please note) in the manner of crop circles. Underneath it says "There's nothing strange about building cars from natural fibre" adding in smaller type "why not use natural fibres in our car parts, we thought. That way they will be stronger, lighter and more energy efficient to produce. And because the environment can regenerate itself, it'll help some natural resources too. And you see a virtuous circle forming?" Actually- no! The deceptive patter begs an awful lot of questions. How much natural fibre would be needed to make a car body? Would the fibre be genetically modified and how much energy intensive fertiliser would be needed to grow it? And would the car-crop be then sprayed with round-up or some equally deadly herbicide/pesticide? The end result could easily be worse for the natural environment than the present extraction and smelting of ore. Another Daimler Chrysler digitised ad. shows a Humming Bird supping water from a car exhaust like it was nectar from a flower. The caption reads "Just what the environment needs from a car. Water." And then again in smaller type : "If nature had one wish, what do you think it would be. A car that doesn't produce exhaust? We thought so too. That's why our hydrogen powered fuel cell vehicles emit only water". Not true. What about leakage of pressurised hydrogen which could end up contributing to the destruction of ozone or the as yet unknown effects of the build of hydrogen in the atmosphere should soil cease to absorb it? (See piece on hydrogen). With Daimler/Chrysler the sales pitch is aimed at the exclusive end of the car market but a few years back an ad appeared on TV advertising GM cars. No car was to be seen instead there were moving images of empty country roads, uncut hedges, trees and flowers and in the background the sound of songbirds. It lasted some three weeks before it was pulled. The chimerical absorption of manufacturing within nature had gone too far and was threatening sales.

Above left: "......Hydrogen powered fuel cells emit only water. Not true. What about leakage of pressurised hydrogen which could end up contributing to the destruction of ozone or the effects of the build of hydrogen................................................"

Above right:"How much natural fibre would be needed to grow it? And would the car-crop be then sprayed with round-up or equally deadly herbicide/pesticide? The end result could easily be worse for the natural environment than the present extraction and smelting of ore......

In 1957 the "Association of Desk and Derrick Clubs" was set up to raise the level of awareness of the extent of our dependency on oil and how good that is and must remain so until the rivers - not oil wells - run dry. It was an educational body largely run by women intent on capturing the minds of children and re-founding them on a petro-chemical basis. So what follows is a children's A-Z of oil products via some kind of Joycean flow with few commas or full stops.

A is for: adhesives air conditioners ammonia antihistamines antiseptics artificial teats artificial limbs aspirin. B is for: balloons bandages basketballs bin liners blenders boots bra's buttons C is for: cameras car batteries car bodies carpet tiles cassettes CD players celluloid chewing gum clothing cold cream combs/brushes compact discs credit cards condoms cunts (plastic) D is for: dentures deodorant dice diesel fuel dinnerware dishwashing liquid disposable nappies DVD dyes dolls and sex dolls E is for: electric blankets electricians tape F is for: fishing lines fishing rods floor wax food storage bags footballs furniture G is for: garbage bags gasoline gloves glue glycerine golf balls guitar strings H is for: hair colouring hair dyes hang gliders hearing aids heart valves replacement house paint I is for: ice chests infant seats inks insecticides insect repellent insulation J is for: jet fuel K is for: kerosene L is for: life jackets linoleum lip balm lipstick loudspeakers M is for: medical equipment mops motorcycle helmets motor oil movie film P is for: polish N is for nail polish nylons nylon rope O is for: oil filters P is for: pacemaker paint brushes pantyhose parachutes perfumes petroleum jelly photographic film photography piano keys plastic chairs plastic cups plastic fans plastic wrap plywood printer ribbon porn phalluses (mass produced) R is for: refrigerator seals roller blades roller blade wheels roofing paper roofing shingle rubber bands rubber boots rubber cement rubber glam wear S is for: spectacle frames saccharine safety glass shampoo shaving cream shirts shoe polish shower curtains slippers soft contact lenses stereos sunglasses surfboard surgical equipment sweaters syringes T is for: tape recorder telephone tennis racket tents thermos flask trousers tyres toilet seats toothpaste toys transparencies tupperware U is for: umbrellas upholstery V is for: vitamin capsules volley ball vibrators W is for: washing up liquid water pipes water skies waterproof clothing wax paper. And now, children, can you think of any oil based product for XYZ remembering that xylophone begins with an X and Zebras are animals. And when you go to chemistry class ask teacher how many of the above products could be made from coal?

Coal's second coming should not obscure the fact that coal still supplies around 30% of the world's energy needs. And even though the by-products of coal could one day be substituted for the petrochemical industry (let's call it a carbo-chemical industry) the new miners are likely to be rather different from the old because of increased mechanization, verging on near automation. The old mining industry had a totally different image to that of oil. There were never coal barons to match those of oil – a "Dallas", as it were, of the coalfields set in, say, Barnsley, filled with glamour, stretch limos' and starlets. The mere thought of it is ludicrous. And it was undoubtedly the class struggle that was unleashed wherever there were numerous coal mines that was, in this respect, decisive. In comparison to the oil industry the coal industry had been well and truly tamed – yet another reason why steps had to be taken to finish the coal industry off completely in the one country where it really had been brought to its knees. The extraction of oil was never that labour intensive – at least not in comparison to the coal - and only when the work did become arduous and the conditions dangerous, like on the rigs, did class struggle explode, as happened in Nigeria recently and to a lesser extent in the north sea (c/f the Piper Alpha disaster in the late 1980s').

Nonetheless, the oil workers' strike weapon or more is formidable as has been demonstrated on more than one occasion. There has been little enduring publicity on this and memory has been quickly suppressed. We can never forget the example of the oil workers' shoras (a form of workers' council) that ushered in the Iranian revolution of 1979 before the uprising was hijacked by fundamentalist Islam. Oil workers' shoras also played their part in the aborted Iraqi revolt against Saddam after the first Gulf war in 1991 Though not having the same impact, the huge oil workers' wildcat in the north sea was also the biggest oil workers' strike in history and ironically was influenced by the previous UK miners' struggle especially the contribution of oilmen's wives and girlfriends in occupations of rigs and off-shore facilities etc.

Oil's solidarity is spread thinly unlike that of coal. The bonds of solidarity between an oil extraction worker, a refinery worker and one in a petrochemical factory are tenuous. Trouble in one sector does not tend to spark off another. But in the mining industry as it was prior to 1985 in the UK there was close contact with other sectors of workers in the steel mills, the electricity generating industry, and on the railways. The former had earlier been part of the triple alliance but to which was now added a new, unpredictable and lethal wild card – the power workers. Something of this closeness is apparent from the photos. With a retreat from globalisation that an energy crisis would bring, a recombination of sorts is still possible.

The coal industry now has an image problem because of CO2 but it does not have a logo problem. Coal cannot be branded like Shell. There is a fundamental honesty about coal stamped on it by the struggle of the coal miners. It means what it says and what you see is what you get. The "coal interest" has never destabilised foreign governments or provoked conflicts other than class conflicts. In saying this one has also to be aware of the one huge exception proving the rule. The conflict between basic mineral resources (iron ore in Germany and coal in north east France) was a major contributory factor in the two inter-imperialist world wars marking the first 50 years of the 20th century and which later provided the raison d'etre of the present European Common Market.

There is an ersatz to the petrochemical industry one does not find in coal. It is shot through with fakery and the mimicry - of wood and wood grain especially -as it breathes ever more artifice into a polymerised chain reaction that becomes daily more convincing, deceiving even the trained eye. Buying influence like no other industry, the aim now of the petrochemical industry is total reproduction including the reproduction of nature. Short of a revolution, the goal of a virtual reality cannot be relinquished, because if it was, the reality of our shattered lives would be only too obvious. There were pit disasters in which people died but there was never a "plastic death", an entombment above ground in the products of the petrochemicals industry. The baton has to be passed on.

Coal as a raw material was never identified with artifice. It was the fuel which made mass artifice possible in the 19th century through the smelting of iron. However it was never directly employed in the production of artifice other than as a curio – a coal candlestick or carved crown - but that is set to change as it takes over from the petrochemicals industry.

Formerly coal miners were tertiary power workers. However they are destined to be reborn as also the tertiary artisans of coal. As most of Britain's coalfields were located in the countryside, the miners had a more direct relationship with nature than any other group of industrial workers. Their passion for nature tended to preclude art because that meant staying cooped up at home – and they already spent enough time like that underground. They wanted to be out and about. I know this was true of my own family. It also led miners into a direct conflict with farmers and the landed aristocracy in particular, made worse by the fact that the coal owners were also squeezed by the landowners into extracting maximum productivity from the miners. Lord Londonderry was hated in the Durham coalfield and calls for the nationalisation of the land meant almost as much as the nationalisation of the coal industry – though of course it meant something very different to working miners than it did to the politicians and union leaders who promoted these slogans. Though not rigorously worked out by any means it meant a new relationship to industry and nature, a relationship that is already loosely present in Shelley. It is ironic to think that coming generations of "miners" will be indirectly - and only indirectly – drawn in to the most sophisticated industrialised deception ever attempted, one that endeavours to do better than nature.

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PART II

The Hydrogen Economy: kill or cure?

The hydrogen fuel cell was invented as far back as 1839 by a barrister with an interest in science. It remained a scientific curiosity unto well into the 20th century and essentially came of age when NASA used energy derived from hydrogen cells for domestic fuel in the Apollo space craft's. Flammable liquid hydrogen is used, of course, as a fuel in rocket propulsion.

The flammability of hydrogen was first noted by the great alchemist Paracelsus in the 1500s'. In 1781, Henry Cavendish proved that water was the reaction product of hydrogen and oxygen. The name "hydrogen" derived from the Greek meaning "water producer" was given to the element by Antoine Lavosier (1743 – 1794). He quite lost his head over it, little suspecting it might well save the bourgeois order he fell victim to.

Hydrogen is the lightest of all elements and occurs in an un-combined form in only the minutest fractions in the normal atmosphere, some one to two parts of hydrogen in one and a half million parts of air. The abundance of hydrogen in the atmosphere increases with altitude because hydrogen's low density enables it to rise to great heights – where it can be very damaging to the ozone layer (see further on).

Hydrogen is by far the commonest element in the universe. The sun is about 75% hydrogen by weight. All the matter in the universe and ultimately life itself comes from a chain reaction from which the periodic table of the elements is derived involving first and second generation stars. Fred Hoyle was the first to detail this process, appropriating the title of the world's most popular tune, to describe humanity – unforgettably - as "stardust".

Though hydrogen is the commonest element in the universe it is not the case on earth and we earthlings, if we are to use it, must first make it. So from the outset the hydrogen economy is dependent on the production of hydrogen which is primarily an endothermic process requiring heat. (This contradictory fact has been touched on already in the section on coal and nuclear power). The largest production of hydrogen is through the catalytic action of steam on hydrocarbons. There is also the water-gas process in which steam reacts with coke at 1000 C. to eventually give hydrogen. The third largest source is through electrolysis procedures where an expenditure of 130 kilowatt hours is needed for the production of 1000 cubic feet of hydrogen. Under such conditions 7 gallons of water would be electrolysed. These facts alone must surely convince hydrogen zealots of the high temperatures that will have to be sustained over a long period of time if enough hydrogen is to be produced.

Vast quantities of hydrogen are used in the production of inorganic chemicals like ammonia and nitric acid and space agencies like NASA, ESA, and the Russian Soyuz, etc. use huge amounts of liquid hydrogen to power rockets. So a considerable hydrogen producing industry exists already but it is as nothing compared to what will be if a global hydrogen economy were to become a reality.

The hydrogen fuel cell is not a battery. It does not store electricity. However like a battery it is an electrochemical device that converts chemical energy directly into electrical energy. The reactants hydrogen and oxygen (hydrogen acts as negative electrode, oxygen as a positive) have to be continually supplied to the cell for an electric current to be produced. It is from the need to have a continuous supply and particularly to store hydrogen under pressure that extremely grave consequences arise, never mind the bizarre contradictions involved in the manufacture of this "potentially clean" fuel.

The hydrogen economy is still a futuristic pipe dream and besides it is no longer turning out to be the devolved, co-operative, inherently anti-capitalist, panacea it was once cooked up to be. (See the ravings of its chief apostle, Jeremy Rifkin in the book, The Hydrogen Economy: his technicist approach reminds me of Lenin's dictum:"electricity will bring the revolution"). It could even lead to an increase in green house warming as one of the side products is methane gas (which is even more potent than CO2) if the hydrogen needed is made from natural gas. If made from the gasification of coal, essential to the production of coke for example, CO2 emissions would increase by 5% worldwide. Moreover leakage from fuel cells in cars and power stations could increase ozone depletion. Leaked hydrogen could end up in the stratosphere (because it is the lightest of all elements) and react with hydroxyl radicals to form water vapour which would provide a reaction site for halogens such as chlorine to deplete stratospheric ozone (Science Vol. 1300. p147). Higher up in the troposphere (15km from the earth's crust), hydroxyl radicals could be destroyed which is tough shit for the planet because HO is an environmental cleaning agent which removes all manner of pollutants, including the potent green house gas, methane. We also don't know what the likely consequences of increased amounts of hydrogen in the atmosphere will be. It is reckoned 77% from the troposphere is consumed by the soil (Nature Vol. 428 p.918). But if the amount of hydrogen increases then the amount of soil uptake could decrease proportionally. And if the climate gets wetter the soil would be less able to absorb the hydrogen and shut-off would occur. The Midi in France burned up during the summer of 2003, but come the autumn it nearly capsized under the kind of deluge and flooding typical of global warming. "The wild card is how, in the future, will the climate and the hydrogen sink change" (New Scientist. 15th Nov 2003). The hydrogen economy could turn out to be the worst of all possible worlds: not only will we continue to fry and then drown but we'll all have progressive melanoma as well.

One cannot help thinking the propaganda enveloping the hydrogen economy is similar to that which heralded the birth of the nuclear economy e.g. limitless supplies of electricity too cheap to meter to accompany the brave new social democratic "utopias" that emerged from World War Two. Now that times have changed the hydrogen economy will provide the bedrock on which consumer capitalism can rest indefinitely because in one essential aspect (energy) it might be sustainable. A limitless vista of guilt free consumption opens up and capitalism is reborn as a green child. At least that's what's implied by the propaganda but already the brute power of factual research is beginning to undermine its claims. Cal. Tech. has estimated 10% to 20% of hydrogen could leak from fuel cells that would increase industrial emissions by between 60 million to 120 million tons per year if just the 1993 fleet of cars were converted to hydrogen use! Though the fossil fuel companies bestride the world like a colossus and, in a terror campaign not unworthy of Stalin, have intimidated the US energy dept into altering facts on global warming, they are unlikely to have sunk their teeth into the Californian Institute of Technology with the same ease. So these estimated figures must be taken seriously. Sure, there is a possibility that hydrogen entrepreneurs will eventually be able to solve the pollution problems attendant on the creation of a hydrogen based economy but all that belongs in a far distant future....

And when the hydrogen economy eventually does come on stream, hydrogen use is likely to be restricted to cars, lorries and public transport. Several European cities have already introduced hydrogen powered buses with the bus depot serving as a hydrogen refuelling station. For the most part "publicly owned", it is a boon to the local state which in the face of an uncaring, selfish world can blazon its progressive credentials. But the real aim of the hydrogen economy is the private car market which must be maintained whatever the cost. If the private car were to disappear, practically the whole of life, not least the urban and rural landscape would change. And that the rulers of this planet cannot countenance.

One thing that we can be sure of and that is, come what may, the energy of the future will be overwhelmingly electrical energy which includes energy derived from hydrogen. Energy crops providing bio fuels for transport use or the short rotation coppicing of willows such as now occurs on the Plain of York and that are then fed into local power plants, will never replace electrical energy. The electrical industry is an industry entirely founded on science: it has no history as an energy source prior to the understanding and utilization of electromagnetism. The growth of electricity generation after 1880 is also that of growing monopoly power in industry and banking, controlled in the last analysis by the State. It is naïve in the extreme to think these power companies will readily relinquish their grip on power and that new forms of energy, like hydrogen and renewables, will of themselves put power back in the hands of the people. For this to happen it will, at the very least, require the abolition of State power. But the Greens, like social democrats, share at least one mistaken conception: and that is the dangerous ideology of the "peoples' state", above that of classes and capitalism, and which can be made to work if only the right people are in power. It does, however, mean that the foundation of any future collaboration is already in place and ready to join forces to suppress genuine revolt, should the retreat from globalisation suddenly accelerate in response to an energy crisis.

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Wind/ Wave /Tidal power

Throughout the ages and well into the industrial revolution water power was the chief form of mechanical energy. It must never be forgotten either that the factory system and the division of labour into repetitive, specialised tasks (a consequence of mechanisation) was driven in its early stages by water power. This energy was sustainable and it is to be hoped Greens blush bright red when they reflect on it because the exploitation it implied was brutal in the extreme. As kids in W. Yorkshire we always found there was something indefinably ominous about a disused mill race and dam and that clung to the place, even allowing for the racing sluices and the silent depths of the mill pond covered in a motionless green slime. And in the ancient world rebellious slaves were regularly worked to death, or broken on mill tread wheels. A fixture of the penal system until the 20th century, the technology was certainly sustainable but more because slaves were as expendable as donkeys.

However there is no denying renewable forms of energy exert a powerful grip on the imagination today. They acts as a stimulus to further experiment and can attract all manner of people from plumbers to computer technicians and that goes well beyond the confines of energy self-sufficiency and any individual cost saving that might accrue. It can involve taking another look at discontinued technologies to ascertain if, in a moment of inspiration, any further improvements are possible. There is more than meets the eye to this remodelling of the past. Despite TV programs like Salvage Squad and the steadily growing number of magazines devoted to this mechanical antiquarianism, hidden within it is a shadowy critique of contemporary society that aches to find a more meaningful application.

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Tidal Power

But the reality of renewables is very different and sufficient to dash the spiralling enthusiasm of the most brilliant 'amateur'. They are rapidly becoming big business and none more so than tidal power. So far there are only two major tidal barrages that generate electricity: one is near St Malo in Brittany, the other is in Nova Scotia. However several have been proposed around Britain's shores and the one in Swansea Bay is now under construction. The State had long been interested in the scheme and in 1977 the DTI in a joint venture with the big engineering firm Atkins and Parkers proposed a scheme for the barrage. But that was back in the days of unashamed economic interventionism and by 1983 the State had disappeared from the scene. Then another joint venture had been formed by Atkins (the engineering company) and Wimpey (the building company) to promote the scheme. Revealingly their brief was to "assess the commercial viability of a privately owned and operated barrage selling power to the public grid system". However come 2004 and the State is back in the frame once more and once again it is the Atkins engineering company, now the biggest in the country, which is to take charge of the engineering and construction side.

The "installation costs" of building a tidal barrage are huge. A Severn barrage has been estimated at £10 billion. But once built the operating costs are low. However as the actual height and time of high tide can vary considerably and may not coincide with the peak demand for electricity, there has to be, as the jargon has it, "system reinforcement". And in the 1970s' and 1980s' any "generating deficit" was to be made up by Hinkley Point nuclear power station! In 2005 that function will fall, presumably, to gas generated electricity. The same problem also applies to wind power which is even more intermittent than wave power and also requires back up. Existing coal fired power stations that are on standby and operating below their designed output emit more CO2 as a result and so what is gained on the swings is lost on the roundabouts. It can be countered of course that this heavily ironic malfunction can be overcome if only there were more wind farms, which assumes that wind speeds from region to region, will always vary sufficiently. A way out of this conundrum, which completely does away with the unintended CO2, has been proposed. And that is if – wait for it – wind power is used to produce hydrogen!

Tidal power has generally involved an upper and lower basin or pool, each with intake and discharge openings and gates. The upper pool is allowed to fill during rising tides, then to discharge in to the lower pool, which has been simultaneously emptied. The lower pool is then emptied once the tide has ebbed sufficiently. The turbines and generators are housed in horizontal units built into the dam and can be run in either direction, by the incoming and outgoing tides. Apart from the long term impact on estuarial eco-systems and wild life - not to mention the constant silting up - these mega projects for megawatts are, if Roncy is anything to go by, thoroughly soulless and monotonous possessing nothing of the romance of jetties and lighthouses. And when has a dam or barrage not carried some kind of a roadway for gas guzzling bits of tin on four wheels?

Ocean waves are a tertiary form of solar energy (as is wind power) in that unequal heating of the earth's surface generates wind and wind blowing over water generates waves.If modern tidal power is still in its infancy, wave power both on shore (the conversion of breakwaters and old jetties) and off-shore is fresh off the drawing board.Tidal power has many historical precedents (The Domesday Book records many examples of just such schemes) and similar principles still apply. Water turbines are the modern successors of simple water wheels which date back 2000 years and the system of sluices for channelling outflow is much the same today as yesterday. But wave power does not have a history. Until the invention of electricity the mere thought of ever converting the oceans off-shore energy into a utilisable source of energy was entirely out of the question. And besides there was no need to because of the availability of fossil fuels for the thermal generation of electricity. But once it was recognised what the build up of CO2 in the atmosphere could do, wave power came of age. It ceased to be a private hobby or the bath tub musings of a visionary inventor and became a business opportunity instead. The drunken boat sank beneath the waves.

The Labour government is launching a £200,000 campaign to encourage private companies to invest in wave power as well as constructing a wave hub off the north Atlantic coast of Devon and Cornwall into which manufacturers of floating generators can plug their machines. It is a bit of "pump priming", a concealed subsidy - and demonstrates the discreet changes that are beginning to take place away from leaving the supply of energy entirely to market forces.

Yet wave power still retains something of its numinous beginnings. In addition to electricity it also generates a buzz, despite its business wrappings. There is something appealing about the childlike simplicity of its basic principles which can be simply demonstrated (and is) with the aid of a plastic bottle which has had a hole cut in its side and a straw. These pumping devices are called oscillating water columns (OWC) and this pneumatic power is converted to electricity by turbo generators. There are two types: in-shore and off-shore – an off-shore requiring OWC buoys which can be moored in water depths up to 200 metres where energy levels are greatest.

Claims that off-shore installations could also act as artificial reefs for once may not be mistaken. And, despite the jargon, "the retro fitting of power modules" into breakwaters and coastal defences can never be as deadening as a tidal barrage. A wave harnessed for its energy is the same wave that thrills us as it breaks over a coastal defence.

A new found respect for the oceans is rapidly forming. It is a respect born of fear that has nothing in common with the ancient fears of seafarers. The ocean has been tamed by oil tankers, aircraft carriers and cruise liners only for its might to return in a much more formidable guise. Over the past twenty years much has been added to our understanding of ocean currents – in particular the role of the global conveyor belt which wends up through the Atlantic to the polar region then sinks and turns south rounding the Cape into the Indian ocean where it wells up then moves on into the eastern Pacific where it rises once more off Japan and Siberia. "Our" Gulf Stream, which is part of the global loop, exceeds by a factor of 25 the combined flow of all the world's rivers. It is vital in maintaining W. Europe's temperate climate and no one knows for sure what would happen if this global current were to switch off because of melting ice caps and increased inundation. At the very least there would be a drastic altering of weather patterns across possibly the entire globe.

Though the global conveyor belt energises weather systems, other currents are stirred by the wind to create a system of currents that echoes the patterns of prevailing winds. It is these currents, which have enormous power, that potentially could be harnessed to generate electricity as could "tide squeeze" currents between islands from the Shetlands down to the Channel Islands.

Lautreamont in The Songs of Maldoror saw in the "old" ocean a "symbol of identity" that hid in its depths "future utilities for man" – and he did not mean fish either. Perhaps he was even anticipating the exploitation of marine biology by the bio-sciences and bio-companies. But as Lautreamont also says "you [the ocean] do not easily let the avid eyes of natural science divine the thousand secrets of your oeconomy" (sic) - thus creating a new word combining the ocean and the economy: an oceaneconomy. The ocean, particularly in a violent storm, has long been a favoured sign of the natural sublime but one we can rise above on account of our natural intelligence. Lautreamont no longer buys this argument: "Man says: "I am more intelligent than the ocean. It's possible even quite true; but the ocean is more formidable to him, than he to the ocean." And so we are faced with the grim paradox that a dramatic increase in the understanding of how oceans work is closely accompanied by an overall abandonment of reason, which, within a matter of years, could easily result in the altering of ocean currents through global warming and create maximum chaos and devastation – though not the overthrow of capitalism. The beautiful rationality (ultimately) of wave power also floats on a sea of madness and once these currents are "switched off" they cannot then be just "switched on" again.

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Hydro-electric power

This clean power (but increasingly dirty business) supplies almost one third of the world's electricity though for some reason estimates vary falling to as little as 2%. But less than 20 years ago only 6.7% of the world's energy was hydropower. The increase has come mainly in China, the former Soviet Union, Latin America and India, which may explain why western dominated statistics are not keeping pace with the reality. It also indicates energy supplies are becoming steadily centralised. From the 1940s to the 1970s many small US hydroelectric facilities were closed down because of high maintenance costs – only for some to be reopened after the increase in fossil fuel prices following the setting up of OPEC in 1973. The building of dams arouses great hostility especially amongst peoples whose homes and land are about to be submerged under water: it is reckoned some 40 to 80 million people have been displaced by big dams. The obligation to resettle some disguises the ruin of the many, especially those living downstream who are prepared for and dependant on seasonal flooding, fresh water fishing and so on. Big dams are a major factor in the sweeping of indigenous tribal and peasant communities off the land and into the kind of megalopolis increasingly typical of the "underdeveloped" world. As mini-grids are shut down everywhere, there is, throughout the world, a steadily growing dependency on national grids and centralised power networks.

Also dams are not just there for hydro-electric power. They are multi-purpose creations and are used for irrigation, flood control, as well as reservoirs that vainly aspire to slake capitalisms' thirst for ever more water. The industrial use of water is set to double by 2025. In Iceland several dams have been projected in collaboration with a Norwegian hydro company solely for the purpose of the energy intensive smelting of aluminium from bauxite imported from Australia. Iceland like Norway is one of those countries that have been able to project a clean energy image, meeting most of its energy needs from geothermal sources. However the mania for energy burns everything in its path. Dams are also destined to become in the future a bargaining counter of colossal political weight as the earth dries up and water wars break out. For two decades India and Bangladesh have quarrelled over the right to extract water from the Ganges during the dry season. Turkey's Grand Anotolian Project, a vast irrigation and hydroelectric damning scheme on the Tigris and Euphrates, threatens to deprive downstream Syria and Iraq of water. Egypt fears the appropriation of Nile water by upstream Sudan and Ethiopia. And the list is growing – unlike the supply of tap water.

ON THE BRINK OF DISASTER?
These two contrasting though similar photographs of the same southern Chilean glacier were taken merely 15 years a part..........

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Wind Power

This is easily the most visible form of renewable energy and in hilly districts in the UK it is now rarely possible to turn a full 350 degrees without catching sight of a wind farm or at least a lone wind mill. In 2000 there were 15,000 wind turbines in Hawaii and California and their combined power rating of 1500 mega watts is roughly equal to that of a conventional steam turbine power installation running off fossil fuel or nuclear fission.

A turbine is a machine that converts the energy stored in a fluid (water, gas, steam, wind) into mechanical energy. A wind turbine extracts energy from the wind by the rotation of a propeller that then drives an electricity generator. The older term windmill is often used to describe this device although electric power generation, not milling, has become its primary application. The aerodynamic blades owe far more to aeroplane propellers than to the windmill sails Don Quixote attacked though the claims made in support of wind turbines are every bit as farfetched. In 1984 the total output of all U.S. wind farms exceeded 150 million kilowatt hours. This does sound huge but in fact it only amounted to 1/100,000 of total electric power generated in the US.

From around the mid 19th century windmills were used for pumping water in rural areas until some bright spark realised they could also generate electricity. In fact the old fashioned metal windmills have become a comforting icon of America's rural past. After the oil price shocks of the mid 1970s interest was rekindled but it was global warming that provided the final spurt of enthusiasm.

Initially wind power was seen as free energy, a myth that has continued to cling to renewables. As a raw material, wind, like waves and sunlight, come for free. As an energy source no human labour is involved. Wind, waves or sunlight cannot be hewed like coal or drilled for like oil. Its energy can only be captured, untouched by human hand, in its raw form. As far as the raw material is concerned the pricing mechanism is therefore imposed. The fact that it is manipulable probably recommends it to Greens who want a half-way house mediated by the state between the cost of production and price. And on the level of price, through the aid of government subsidies that distort the cost of production, they proclaim a victory. In essence this is what they mean by anti-capitalism. By being half a commodity the rest doesn't matter because the state is in control. And that's what matters. The production of clean energy ultimately destroys market mechanisms. Because if one takes into account installation costs, the cost of connecting to the national grid, the laying of underground power lines from very out of the way places, maintenance costs, the price of wind turbines is two and a half that of thermally generated electricity.

Wind Energy

Is it not a mistake to call it part of the green industrial revolution? Does it not serve ends that are very ungreen like supplying power to highly polluting industries? Is the greening of industry even possible? Is it not a contradiction in terms like the workers inheriting industry on the basis which capitalism has laid down? Few ecologists dare speak of the major revolutionary changes that have to take place if life on this planet is to become viable.

Wind like wave energy is seen as generating local employment and spearheading a new industrial revolution (wind and wave power will require a considerable degree of maintenance) in areas noted for their outstanding natural beauty and which are as remote from the conventional notion of industry as can possibly be and have therefore become the havens of the well off. Their specious defence of romantic, unspoilt beauty masks hostility to industry per se and a dislike of the industrial working class even a green industrial working class.

Objections to wind power have centred on the undeniable fact wind power, unlike wave power, is not a constant source of energy and that therefore thermal generators are needed on the days when wind speed is low. Existing coal fired power stations that are on standby and operating below their designed output emit more CO2 as a result and so what is gained on the swings is lost on the roundabouts. However new build clean-coal fired power stations could reduce this hazard. And besides the national grid has admitted that if wind energy were to rise to 20% of total energy output the problem of intermittence would be overcome presumably because surplus capacity in one part of the country would compensate for deficit elsewhere.

The renewable energy sector loves to point out, as part of their opportunist effort to gain acceptance, that the goal of energy supply should be national independence and that henceforth the country need never be dependant in future on "unstable countries" for oil and gas in particular. The same argument could well apply to a regenerated coal industry in the not so distant future. Behind their talk of planetary politics the localism of the greens ("think local act global") often masks a hankering after nation state autarchies and their internationalism is at best superficial and has more in common with global bodies set up in the wake of Bretton Woods. They are also keen to emphasize that the raw materials of renewable energy are free – wind, wave and the sun - and therefore are not commodities. Hence in theory it is possible for a greener capitalism to escape the business cycle because a commodities spike, particularly an oil price rise, has always heralded a recession. It is not easy to see how the "natural communism" of wind, wave and the sun can ever be valorised and so far the megalomaniac ambitions of capitalists have fallen short of claiming ownership. Water and the earth we live on - yes - but not the air we breathe though it is conceivable that purer air could one day be bottled and sold. Typically it shows how limited the Greens notion of de-commodification is and which could, given half a chance, actually aid capitalist reconstruction. Alison Hill the head of communications at the British Wind Energy Association, also believes that wind power has a capacity equivalent to several times the countries energy needs, though she does not specify just how much of the landscape would be covered in wind farms and if wind generators would be attached to office blocks and urban high-rise.. The advocates of wave energy claim that the tidal surges of the Bristol Channel are sufficient to generate 20% of the country's energy needs.

PART III

The Greens hailed the Feb. 2002 white paper on energy as breaking at long last the link between energy generation and cost. Henceforth cheapness would not be the sole criteria. The opponents of renewables point to the fact that wind power for example is expensive at about twice the wholesale price of electricity. The electricity has also to be fed into the national grid and that means running power lines from the sometime almost inaccessible country locations of wind farms, which further adds to the cost. On the other hand the price of thermally generated electricity in the long run is bound to rise – in which case opposition to EEC legislation, i.e. the Renewables Obligation and Climate Change Levy, will decrease. There has recently been a significant increase in wind power energy ads in "quality" newspapers requesting customers to switch to wind power energy companies. Their marketing strategy is directed at middle class consumers with a bad conscience who are prepared to pay more and self consciously use recycled paper, envelopes etc. And their ecological footprint tends to be greater than most if one takes into account air travel. For the first time the state is subsidising a domestic wind power generator that can be attached to roofs and chimney stacks. However the savings are far from dramatic at around 30% of average domestic use. For the moment it is little better than an expensive toy and only likely to appeal to people with money to spend and a point to prove. Solar ceramic roof tiles are even more expensive and only the well-off will be tempted to go in for a re-roofing job with no guarantee of success. At this point the energy question starts to encroach on eco- housing, eco-build and the greening of cities. There is a "green calculator" software package for the construction industry called "Life Cycle Analysis of Design". Unlike other databases that calculate economic costs it calculates environmental ones, in particular the amount of energy and water consumed in the production of materials like cement, bricks, steel etc (New Scientist. 31st Jan.. 2004). It would be helpful at some point to go into how eco-build has taken over from the autocratic modelling of pointless urban utopias like play cities. At once more pragmatic and corresponding to a very pressing social need, eco-build does not even pay lip service to the question of mass praxis that redefines social space and the built environment. Also, unlike the play cities, it no longer connects with the revolution of modern art and the modern art of revolution and everything that implies. Instead of deepening critique with a wealth of scientific information, it only succeeds in narrowing down the totality of the transformation that is so desperately needed.

Technologically, architecturally and scientifically the ideology of living in harmony with nature masks the reality of the end of nature as a cyclical, more or less predictable, continuum. Climate has never remained stationary but it has generally changed sufficiently slowly to allow living things to adapt and evolve. But even in the best case scenario what is likely to happen will be just too fast for human plant and animal populations to adjust to. But as mankind nears extinction we are subjected to an increasing amount of imagery and word play (and not just through advertising) that suggests a return to nature. This techno romanticism grotesquely parodies the genuinely liberatory technology of all things made anew which may just one day come about.

Rather than calling it the "greening of technology" which would be a spurious claim and easily exposed as a lie, it is better served by calling it the arielization of technology after the figure of Ariel in The Tempest. Accompanied by a background of sound both musical, non-musical and somewhere in between (this advertising "noise" is an eerie travesty of the stage directions in The Tempest) we are meant to metaphorically take flight or become one with nature on contact with the "new" consumer technology whether it's a car or a bottle of water: we become pilots of the elements and techno-nature sprites, setting wrongs to rights and vindicating the mistakes of the past. Words become an integral part of the image and like in The Tempest the metaphor is abbreviated and resonates on different levels, for the new technology is also social engineering on a grand scale. Though suggestive of a new word order that would accompany a genuinely liberatory technology, it is one big lie. The latest diesel ads depict a breaking wave (an oil gusher in this day and age would never succeed in selling the poison) on which is boldly imprinted "Diesel Energy: New Wave of Diesel". Britain's biggest energy producer, "Powergen", sponsors TV weather reports in which only wind turbines are featured. Underneath their gently rotating blades there is to be seen a figure of fun, a new age clown, a guru wannnabee with a base ball cap who variously throws straw into the wind only to have it blown back in his face, sits cross-legged awaiting enlightenment or clumsily attempts to fly a kite. Each episode is meant to impart a live feeling of playful optimism running through the atmosphere, analogous to that of an electrical current Hence the layered words after each weather report: "Positive Energy – from Powergen" or "Positive Energy: Power in your hands – from Powergen".

(Though not directly state managed this artful advertising therapy ecospeak lends itself, especially in the hands of the Bush administration, to shameless newspeak. In response to the wild fires that swept American forests recently and which released yet more CO2 in the atmosphere, the Bush administration came up with the "Healthy Forest" initiative which is in fact a cover for the logging of old growth forests. And his "Clear Skies" project though suggesting a cleansing of pollutants from the atmosphere permitted, on the contrary, more emissions by repealing key provisions of the clean air act.)

Romantic technology is made to appear as if it had grown. Rather it is designed by nature and not invented or made by man. It enters our life like an airborne seed and the language that glides with it is the opposite of the unmediated pile driving of the paleo industrial era of 80 years ago - no "Triumphs of Invention", no "Wonders of Transport" or "Conquests of Engineering" implying a definitive conquest of nature. And should you think this is exaggerated well just take a look at an interview with one William McDonough, an eco architect, in New Scientist (March 20, 2004). To the question what would your new world look like? he answers "Why can't I design a building like a tree? A building that makes oxygen, fixes nitrogen, sequesters carbon, distils water, builds soil, accrues solar energy as fuel, makes complex sugars and food, creates micro climates, changes colour with the seasons and self replicates." Such claims are just asking for it and when we learn that he designed the GAP offices in California they are gone like morning mist. The "principles" on which the GAP offices are based he learnt from analysing a Bedouin tent made from goats' hair. The "factory" producing the raw materials walked on all fours and ate everything in sight. GAP devours human beings both as consumers and producers and to dare to suggest the largely manufactured raw materials that went into the building of the Californian offices were just as ecologically sound as a Bedouin tent is outrageous. Materials can be "reincarnated" (i.e. recycled) just as human beings can be re-produced. Knowing this he bonds more firmly with the cycle of life and his child. When asked where does he most like being, he answers "I like being on my back with my child on my stomach – in the woods, in the city, wherever. So long as we're both laughing". Typically this utilitarian eco-conservatism blinds him to the fact neither will be laughing for long and if they do continue to laugh it will be like Rimbaud's "the hideous laugh of the idiot".

Historically nature has been an antidote to tragedy. To understand the cycle of renewal is finally to transcend individual suffering absorbing it in the reality of the evolving species. Once history was seen to have an end (the end of pre-history) history and nature complimented each other as never before. Only a non repressive future could annul the horrors of the past and natural renewal was an inevitable part of that process.

The much lauded End of History appearing in the late 1980s and coincidentally complimenting the fall of the Berlin Wall had little to say about nature other than as a conservation side issue. Since this announcement the bourgeoisie has increasingly promoted the fullness of nature as if that too was part of the end of history but in order to deny the end of nature. And yet on its own admission the fullness of nature has inescapably included the destructive superlatives of The Perfect Storm, Superfire the force five Twister and more recently, The Day After Tomorrow, etc. We tend to remember the titles but not the movies but whatever the case we are meant to sit still and remain impassive at our own execution, the perfect audience - until the moment the torrent, or fire, bursts through the screen.

What is true of aspects of Hollywood (and hence art) is increasingly true of science where we are confronted with even greater mind unravelling paradoxes. Global pessimism and a blanket anti-humanism scientifically spun as "post humanity" or "enhanced humanity" (Stephen Hawking's term) coexists with genuine capacity for wonder and a baffling contentment with the status quo. Worst of all, these extreme contradictions are passed over in silence as if to say there is no contradiction and only our lack of scientific comprehension makes it appear so: "much weirdness but no contradiction" as Martin Rees said of Godel's theory of time travel deduced from Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. After writing Our Cosmic Habitat which, amongst other things, cogently argues from a providential physics, the case for a biophillic universe, Martin Rees ("Sir" Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal) then goes on to write, post 9/11, Our Final Century in which he states that the games up here on earth and that the only out for humanity (i.e. an engineered "post humanity") is to leave the earth for another planet and start afresh. In these books sci-fi "fact" and a cosmic ecology reflect a more mundane reality. Neither are sci-fi or ecology in the commonly accepted sense of the term (implying storytelling and conservation measures) and yet they share their common presuppositions: acceptance of the world as it is and the social relations it engenders – those of capitalism. At no other point in history has the prospect of imminent annihilation and a smug complacency complimented each other as they do now. But such is the bewildering level of contradiction in today's world. A concern for the welfare of humankind that once might have inspired The Rights of Man has been reduced to that of the survival of the few – and with little complaint. The hazardous seeding of the universe with human life will be predicated on the death of mankind here on earth. And the popular ideology that will legitimate it will be science fiction and futurology.

In The Final Century the right honourable Sir Martin has much to say about energy. He is unambiguously against nuclear energy because it is vulnerable to terrorist attack. However he would like to see energy economies in rocket propulsion fuels even going so far as to propose a nanotube lift which would do away with the rocketry necessary to escape the earth's gravitational pull. The future of space travel and exploration is, he thinks, that of private capitalism as distinct from state capitalism which initially put people into orbit but whose usefulness has now passed. Of course he does not employ such crude terms but that essentially is what he means. In fact it is highly unlikely any venture capitalist could possibly fund a nanotube lift into space. And if it ever does come about it will be a state venture and in that sense the economics would be no different to the wave hub presently being constructed in the Bristol Channel with private enterprises and the very rich renting use of the space lift. And who is to be saved in this our final century? Why the very same rich, silly! – the same, one might add, who are largely to blame for the terrorism in the world today. So in fact the chosen few would be carrying the weapons for their own destruction with them. But such reflections are beyond Sir Martin's undialectical imagination.

Sir Martin's fellow student, Stephen Hawking, has little to say about energy in the sense in which we are using the term here except as a flippant aside typical of the suave humour designed to relieve the tedium of the lecture hall and raise a smile amongst a captive student audience. In his book The Universe in a Nutshell he says

"if the population growth and the increase in the consumption of electricity continue at their current rates, by 2600 the world's population will be standing shoulder to shoulder and electricity use will make the earth glow red hot".

He has done the maths so he knows. But we are left in doubt as to the basic premises. Was he extrapolating from the current demands of the average American citizen as Fred Hoyle did in his 1970s book Energy or Extinction in which he arrived at a total energy flow requirement of 400 million million kilowatt hours should "we seek to raise the standard of living of everybody in the world to the American level". That this "standard of living" or, better, dying, had recently been questioned and attacked as never before had obviously escaped his notice. This dismal lack of a social imagination and of a responsiveness to genuine social movements may yet prove to be the undoing of the scientific community - or rather the general absence of one.

In a few years time the energy question will come to occupy centre stage and everyone in the world will to a greater or lesser degree be conscious of it. The life or death of the human species will hinge on it. However there is no doubting that if present upward energy trends are to continue Hoyle's book would have been more appropriately entitled Energy and Extinction not Energy or Extinction!!!!!!!!

Above left: Rancy in Brittany. Tidal barrage generating electricity across an estuary. A road runs across the barrage top

Above right: Sellafield Nuclear Power Station, Cumbria

Footnote: IGCC (The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)

This UN panel is now in a state of despair, the victim of its statist illusions.The Kyoto protocol has largely proved a sham and has done little to reverse CO2 emissions, especially since America has not signed up to it. Secondly there is a growing fear climate change may happen more quickly than conventional models of climate change predict. Unable to even begin to find the subject of global change that could halt global warming or even pose the question other than in terms of global state craft and political good will, members of this panel are starting to take a serious interest in mega engineering technology to combat global warming. So in Jan 2004 a conference was held in Cambridge UK to discuss the proposed technologies. It is interesting to note that until recently climate scientists dismissed the idea out of hand of engineering the way out of the problem on the grounds of costs and, more importantly, because the potential ecological impact of such schemes was unknown, and probably unknowable, until in place.

But predictable political inertia, surprising only to politically disingenuous people who make up such panels like the IGCC and who take the ideology of democracy at face value, has driven them into becoming reluctant futurologists. Space age engineering ventures beckon on a scale that may easily dwarf the dimensions of Starship Enterprise and that have all the crass simplicity of a Schwarznegger movie script wherein the world is saved by tea time. The most outlandish of all the schemes suggested so far is a diaphanous mirror a 1000 kilometres across, parked between the sun and the earth to reflect solar radiation back into space. Other schemes include reducing the earth reflectivity, its albedo, by putting shards of metal into the stratosphere or improving the reflectivity of white clouds by increasing their size with the aid of “cloud condensation nuclei”. But all these proposed schemes will do is actually encourage greenhouse gas emissions which some even see as a bonus because plants will grow faster One of the proponents of reducing the earth’s reflectivity was Alfred Teller, father of the H bomb, and who notoriously shopped Robert Oppenheimer. Hounded by the American secret service and his own conscience, the scientific disillusionment (and not to be confused with disillusionment with science per se) of Robert Oppenheimer who helped develop the A bomb and worked on the physics of black holes before they became an established scientific fact, may well repay a much closer look than has previously been the case. That climate change scientists are now ranged alongside such people as Teller is not comforting news. After having explored all options it may look like an act of desperation only we know they haven't begun to explore the only real option, that of the social overthrow of capitalism. And if for the moment they are definitely not capable of that, then a paralysing despair may well have a more fruitful outcome than the gimcrack remedies now being proposed. It could act as a springboard to adopting an entirely different strategy one that goes over the heads of governments to appeal directly to the mass of the people, because it is they who will be the first to directly experience the consequences of global warming.

Of all the possible options stripping CO2 from the atmosphere will likely be the one most favoured by the IGCC for the simple reason that methods of capturing and burying CO2 are better developed. But it will mean aligning themselves with previous hate figures like Julio Friedman, a former geologist from Exxon Mobil, and his grandiose plans for thousands of zero emission fuel plants that would burn cheap fossil fuels but capture the CO2 from the stack. From small scale beginnings he sees it becoming a billion tonne industry within a decade. Other suggestions are for a hasty burial at sea. Ken Caldeira of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and a close associate of Teller’s at the laboratory have suggested encasing it in giant plastic bags on the floor of the deep ocean or injecting it under the floating ice of the West Antarctic icecap!

Up to this point, as knowledge about climate change grew and grew, the warnings coming from the IGCC were ever more apocalyptic. It seemed to peak with the direst warning yet: that average temperatures were set to rise 8 to 10 degrees over the next 100 years. It was however left to others to draw attention to the fact that temperatures arose by a mere 8 degrees for the period of the Permian Extinction, the greatest mass extinction of all time.

The moment of the IGCC most devastating insights became that of their most craven submission. As a consequence they risk becoming a laughing stock, a parody of their ineffectual former selves though attentively listened to by those without power. Worse than that even: they are seen as belonging to what they once opposed. There is no madness more insidious or more likely to wreck destruction on an individual or body in the long run than this degree of capitulation.

We can see this in the case of James Lovelock of Gaia fame and who now believes “the cure to man-made climate change lies in engineering not in abandoning it”. If this means macro engineering on a scale grand enough to modify the planet's climate, well, so be it. In fact he wants a “Hippocratic oath for macro engineering”. But all mega-build projects today obscenely claim green credentials whether it's James Stirling's “Gherkin” in the city of London or the proposed plan to build a 12 mile long bridge across England`s most continuous on shore wild life haven in Morecambe Bay. The structure would be the world's first “green bridge” according to its promoters because it would incorporate sub-sea technology to harness tidal energy.

Lovelock is well known for designing exquisite instruments like his almost thimble size Electron Capture Detector for sniffing out trace elements which was to be crucial to the advance of environmental science. To go from Tom Thumb instrumentation to the Gargantuan in the name of reading off and then protecting, it is to be hoped, earth systems, is an indication of how Lovelock is morphing into an unrecognisable pastiche of his self. His conversion to the cause of nuclear power as the only effective way of combating global warming reinforces the impression of panic, as if Lovelock has weighed the anchor of his sanity and is now all at sea. He argues that the radioactive zone around Chernobyl is now one of the richest eco systems in the region. The wildlife doesn't worry about the radiation and natural selection will get rid of the inevitable mutations in plants and animals that would neither know nor care. He goes on to say he would quite happily accept the full output of one of the big nuclear power station and then he "would get free heat from it" and use it to also to "sterilize the stuff from supermarkets, the chicken and whatnot, full of salmonella". And he is not joking. As admirable as the Gaia hypothesis is - the paradox of a living earth that redraws the frontiers of life by merging the organic and organic – such comments are merely a lunatic homologue of the inspired brainstorm behind his original conception.

STUART WISE: Completed Spring 2004

See the following webs on the Revolt Against Plenty site:

A Destroyed Yorkshire Miner

M-m-m-miners

The Miners: Jenny Tells Her Tale

Kingsnorth 2008/Lisbon 1982. Miners and ecos. Monbiot & Scargill

Energy and Extinction 2004 [here]

Filmscripts. Miner/Butterfly Destruction. Part 1

Filmscripts.Miner/Butterfly Destruction. Part 2

Filmscripts.Miner/Butterfly Destruction. Part 3

In passing: a further contribution to the energy debate

Lines written in a state of depressed inertia on the physicist, Freeman Dyson (and branching thoughts). From letters to Jenny (2004)

Dear Jenny,

Of all modern physicists it is Freeman Dyson who has tackled the energy question in the most comprehensive manner both in its terrestrial and cosmological aspect. The link between the two is not stated explicitly because the carbon cycle is a particular form of energy derived from photosynthesis and for all we know - though it seems improbable - may be restricted to this planet unlike gravitational and electromagnetic energy. If there is a link it is in the reductionist way Dyson views mankind.

However there is no denying his ruminations on the carbon cycle has had an immense influence on the system of carbon credits now in place world wide. Prior to Dyson, scientists had been at a loss to explain how come atmospheric carbon dioxide was considerably less than it should have been. Millions of tons were somehow being subtracted from the atmosphere and Freeman Dyson guessed it must be because the contribution of trees and plants ('root to shoot ratio') to this process had been considerably underestimated. This credible explanation was seized on as a quick fix remedy: just plant more trees and forget about reducing carbon emissions. However that was before tinder dry forests began to burn with increasing frequency releasing vast quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And because it was a natural act and therefore unpredictable this would not affect the system of carbon credits. So theoretically every tree in America could burn but the country would still be in surplus provided enough trees had been previously planted no matter they were now only fit for providing charcoal for barbecues.

Though Freeman Dyson's speculations provided an escape clause for the world's major polluters to make maximum use of, it also implies a return to a more sustainable form of agriculture with far less emphasis on double or even treble crop yields per annum, which, with each ploughing prior to planting, results in yet more atmospheric carbon dioxide from the decaying roots. In one telling instance he even says it is more environmentally responsible to burn coal than wood. Where he is grotesquely at fault is in believing that the problem can be solved through political means provided the goodwill is there. How often have we heard that old saw before?

This naive political idealism morphs into an even stranger scientific 'idealism' somewhere between fact and fiction - fiction because it projects the givens of the present into a future trillions of years hence but sparing us the tedium of a sci-fi narrative. The increasing entropy of a system means everything to Freeman Dyson and pursuing the second law of thermo-dynamics to its logical conclusion foresees a universe which must eventually lose its gravitational and electro-magnetic energy.

But in the meantime what happens to us 'humans'' This is the interesting bit. We survive as 'intelligent life' - which means the brain though a much truncated brain - but as brains consume energy how then will we be able to best conserve energy? By energy efficient dreaming rather than through rigorous thought which requires an increased expenditure of energy. In the twilight of life and the universe this cosmic surrealism is the coldest of dreams unheated by unrealised desires. It is more a memory of things past, a long drawn out reiteration of past theorems, an eternity of academic dialogue uncorrupted by human emotions or endeavour. As such it profoundly reflects the world we live in, the mutant offspring of a science that has lost its anchor in humanity. It is the minus sign of intelligent life, a brain whose link with a sensory apparatus has been severed. It is a constructed, computerised brain - not even a robotic brain because a robot has at least crude sensors. As a 'scientific' abstraction it is embarrassingly close to the spiritual essence of the theologians. We are reminded of Rimbaud's exclamation: 'By intelligence one goes to god. Heart-rending misfortune.' Amongst today's physicists there is a sly rehabilitation of god that has come out of the search for ultimate causes - the origins of the universe - and a hyperbolic 'grand theory of everything'. Also the cosmic numbers don't add up to anything other: either that or our universe is just one of many, the multiverse being the last refuge of the atheist. Again a comment of Rimbaud's is extraordinarily apposite, the oracular Rimbaud he was never at ease with (because it confirmed fate, as it always has) except as a remarkable, very materialist, 'seer' of tendencies within capitalism: 'Geography, cosmogony, mechanics, chemistry------------Science the new nobility--------It is a vision of numbers. We are moving towards the Spirit.'

It is also a conception that privileges the human species in the guise of a weak and strong anthropomorphic principle.You takes your choice depending on your reading of the relevant physics. The sole purpose to life is then to understand - a passive registration of the facts and nothing more. However it smartly side steps the central question: how can we seize control over our lives and begin to make our own future? It is also profoundly anti-evolutionary and not only in terms of how the brain might have evolved together with the eye and the rest of the sensory apparatus, the opposable thumb, and our bi-pedal posture. The teleology behind the physicists mentioned is highly problematical when judged from an evolutionary standpoint: sight has evolved several times in the history of evolution as has, for example, winged flight in some insects. Why should 'intelligent life' be any different? But at this point it is very hard to disagree with Ernst Mayr's view that intelligent life has evolved only the once, unlike eyesight and wings.

In fact the increasingly sorry state we find ourselves in is characterised by an utter lack of intelligence and the dawning realisation this universe is indeed a habitat favourable to life has unfolded against a more general background of systematic, unrelieved cretinisation. Rather this points to the immanent demise of intelligent life not its consummation due to the fact that as highly evolved stardust we have been able to figure out where we came from, which a dog never could.

What role does modern cosmological theory play in the moulding of public opinion?

For there is no doubting that modern cosmologists are listened too more keenly than at any time since astronomy, theology and mathematics were combined as a cosmic legitimation of temporal power. The key to the power of modern cosmogony resides in its decisive refutation of a 'commonsense universe', not just as regards space and time but the number of exotic objects that have come to light since the early sixties like quasars, pulsars, supernovae, black holes - even, perhaps, quark stars. Weirdness today is an essential aspect of social control and draws its strength from the increasingly humdrum nature of social existence and the resistance to the 'ordinary' it inspires, whilst emphatically evading the question of everyday life. Formerly a 'new star' (like the supernova above Bethlehem 2000 years ago, or the last one in the Milky Way in 1604) was viewed as an ominous portent because the heavens like earthly powers were not subject to change. Weirdness is also an feature of celebrity status and merits publicity because it helps sell a person - and scientific superstardom as with pop stars, installation artists etc, very much depends on media publicity, even playing a decisive role in the matter of funding.

Media image making gained in importance as the power of the state massively declined as a source of finance for science. NASA knows this better than anyone and Carl Sagan's highly popular TV series 'Cosmos' in the early eighties marked this transition and set a scientific trend. It also required that the scientist be a personality, marketing their own brand of science and self, and which unmistakeably reflected the changes going on in work places where traditional wage structures were being replaced by individual settlements (determined also by the value a person puts on themselves) and career opportunities increasingly dependant on public relation skills. Brand You was also an essential aspect of fashionable notions like the weightless economy in the 1990s', driven largely by hype and the power of image making.

This is a long way from saying that science in the meantime has become utterly subjective, only that it is of its time, particularly as regards personalities and presentation but also in ways that are not yet completely clear. But it is not a total nonsense like a Tracy Emin or a Damien Hirst even as Hirst launches a painting into space, encouraged to do so by scientists anxious not to be thought of as installation philistines.

And yet, to get back to the allure of modern cosmogony, it undoubtedly does have a theocratic aspect. Its modern exponents intercede between their theories and us and in that way divert attention away from the meaningless of our everyday lives into a cosmic quest for answers, which can never deliver us from the temptation to revolt against the meaningless of our lives under capitalism.

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Dear Jenny,

...The worst of it is I cannot concentrate and all my reports are left unfinished like on the Dingy Skipper and the Grayling. Well, concentration is about the last thing to return. Meanwhile I am looking for hope in a world that honestly looks devoid of hope. I recall that Freud wrote somewhere how war results in an inhibition of all activity or, to use more contemporary terms, psychomotor retardation.

I think I am going to have to rewrite the thing I wrote on energy. I was prompted to write it by the 20th anniversary of the miners' strike, and I came to the conclusion that, given the constantly expanding energy needs of consumer capitalism, there would be a return to coal or nuclear power, once oil and natural gas were depleted.

Renewables can never hope to supply more than a fraction of contemporary energy needs though I do believe it could do so in a moneyless, communitarian society where real needs would replace the poverty of consumerism. (Some hope of that!). Though clean coal is now possible (sequestration of sulphur, nitrogen oxides and most importantly of all CO2) and though the cost of electricity generation would triple per kilowatt hour, nuclear power will almost certainly be the fuel of choice. The nuclear lobby is already gearing up to bang the drum of global warming with an efficacy the Greens could only dream of. In fact the nuclear fanatics are likely to co-opt their program by building wind farms as well as nuclear installations and so profit handsomely from government subsidies not only for renewables but also from the lavish handouts nuclear power has always been in receipt of because the private financial market was always wary of pouring cash into the bottomless, nuclear power, money pit. The notorious secrecy that has always surrounded nuclear power from the 'Manhattan Project' to the first nuclear pile constructed by Enrico Fermi (ie the prototype for the first generation of nuclear power stations that went under the very misleading title 'atoms for peace'- Calder Hall was built to produce plutonium for weapons and any electricity it produced was a by-product) will never change. In fact it will be worse than ever, given the unprecedented growth of terrorism. It will also be a godsend to governments and state machines ready to exploit any opportunity that enables them to terrorise ever more successfully their own increasingly subject populations. Compared with nuclear power, clean coal would be positively innocuous and for that reason would never be chosen, even if the economics were shown to be cheaper. It does produce noxious waste but on nothing like the time scale of radioactive waste and the decommissioning costs of coal-fired power stations are negligible when compared with nuclear power stations. Reliance on coal does not favour the construction of a garrison state to anything like the degree nuclear power does.

I reckon within a few years the anti-nuclear demonstrations will be back with a vengeance bigger than ever before and drawing in millions where previously it could count on thousands. Who knows but opposition to Menwith Hill could be major factors in changing the present dog eat dog mentality and internecine warfare that is now so prevalent in Bradford. We can but hope.

I had also wanted to discuss what Blake meant by 'Energy is eternal delight' and what place it occupied in Blake's schema of things. Freeman Dyson also prefixed the quotation from Blake to his discussion of energy. Of all physicists he is the most aware of the significance of energy to us earthlings and proposed, for example, the large scale planting of trees as carbon sinks that would use photo-synthetic energy to cleanse the atmosphere of the gas, an idea which was taken up by the G8 and fundamental to the system of carbon credits. Unfortunately he never took into account the fact that forests become tinder dry in the heat we are increasingly experiencing and burning forests release vast amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. He says physicists have little to add to Blake and really Blake says it all. In fact Freeman Dyson pushed the vision of entropy - the de-energising of the universe over trillions of years - further than anyone else, to the point where if intelligent life did survive we would be spending most of our time in a state of dreamy somnolence in order to conserve energy. I don't think this is what Blake had in mind even if his use of the term energy in his day would have evoked furnaces and steam engines and therefore essentially different to how the word was previously used. I think he was aware a kind of torpor was beginning to overtake mankind, a sort of depression of the spirits, and that we must place Blake's wonderful epigram beside his abiding interest in Job, the most inert, sad person in all history. Blake believed that Job was awaiting the onrush of desire, not mercy, and only in the intensely living would he find his salvation.

Well, I have surprised myself by writing this. A recall to life? Who knows?

Give Jessie a pat.

Cheers,

Stuart Wise

G(eneral) M(oters) F(ood)

The debate on GM Foods is part of a broader debate on genetic engineering

The emotive term 'Frankenstein Foods' owed more to the Hammer Horror films than to a proper appreciation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Over a century and a half before it has become a fact she was predicting the biological economy. Even then the only healing nature untouched by human hand that Victor Frankenstein can find is that of the ice caps or glaciated wastes. Over 10 years before Marx's Thesis on Feuerbach it can be seen as a possible objection to Marx's view that the nature that we see before us is a humanised nature. Subsequently Marx patently wins the argument but not the potential for liberation that was implied. Rather we should now speak of a nature of inhumanity where no immunity can be sought even on the northern icecap for here the risk of melanoma is greatly increased because of ozone depletion.

The story of Frankenstein comes from a pre-evolutionary age - but only just. However it can be read as a reflection on evolution. The monster has been manufactured: it has not come from an embryo with a history of trial and error going back millions of years. Like GM Foods the product had not even been tried and tested before it was unleashed on an unsuspecting world - though today we would say world market. It was made in a secret location free from prying eyes. But this clandestine laboratory of the damned, despite the baroque science that so easily lent itself to cinematic hyperbole, already contained today's bio-assembly line that will lead eventually to a mass manufactory: a new Fordism of designed and created human parts.

Despite arousing in us an overwhelming pity as do laboratory chimera whether they are mice or monkeys, Frankenstein is not just rejected by mankind but by nature as well. One of the most pertinent objections to GM foods is also one of the most overlooked and yet also potentially the most telling. From an evolutionary perspective GM is creationist minus the accompanying biblical rhetoric however. Trans-genetic species have not been selected for which means they are not necessarily fitter. Apologists for GM foods forget this cornerstone of evolutionary theory. When people accuse genetic engineers of 'playing God' they would be on far surer grounds if they were to take god out of the debate and indict them on anti-evolutionary grounds instead. One of the best letters I have read on the subject is worth quoting in full.

'Traditional breeding methods exchange genes between very closely-related species, which retain their natural order in the DNA. This is vital for the integrity of life since genes have evolved to exist and work in families.

The movement of a single gene by the reductionist approach of genetic engineering between totally unrelated organisms (e.g. an 'anti freeze' gene from an Arctic fish into tomatoes to produce frost resistance) results in the uncontrolled random splicing of the foreign gene into the host DNA. This invariably disrupts, to a lesser or greater degree, natural genetic order and biochemical activity.

The splicing of a piece of Spice Girls' music in the middle of a Mozart symphony (or vice versa) can hardly be called harmonious. Genetic engineering therefore clearly violates basic principles of genetic engineering.'

Dr. Michael Antoniou (senior lecturer in molecular pathology). Dec 20th 1997. The Guardian.

(We will for the moment leave the naive remarks on music as being in any way consonant with 'genetic harmony'. It does however thumbnail the difficulties even enlightened scientists have in dealing with histories other than natural history)

The health risks of GM foods have been largely ignored. GM foods are not covered by the American Food and Drug administration act. If they were the testing would have been far more rigorous. In fact there has been no testing whatsoever. The GM debate not only shows how big science calls the tune but also how it is controlled by big capital. Prenzias was hunted down by the vested interest of the scientific community including the Royal Society. Even 'Nature' published a disclaimer after featuring an article by him. The gagging orders were every bit as effective as those of Stalin when he gave his full support to Lysenko - only far more subtle. Prenzias should be thankful he is living in a more 'civilised' society: all he has lost is his job not his life!

However it is undoubtedly the food scares of the past few years particularly the BSE crises and then modern methods of animal husbandry that led to the devastating outbreak of Foot and Mouth disease that has resulted in the overwhelming rejection of GM foods in this country.

But we would do well to recall that it was the fate of the Monarch butterflies nectaring on GM maize that first focussed the attention of the human species on the health risk. The Monarch has become the butterfly icon but the effect of GM foods on wild life was judged a safer option to study than to stoke fears of a likely health risk because it was now obvious reputations and jobs were at stake. The bio-capitalists were turning out to be a very nasty crew who will let nothing stand in their way. They are the Standard Oil men of the new century.

The results of the field trials only served to confirm in the minds of a growing number of people that there is something intrinsically wrong with modern intensive agriculture. But the GM trials did more. Molecular biology, which genetic engineering is part of, is strictly for the experts and most people are instantly blinded by this highly specialist science. Or at least that is what 'they' want us to think. What then was 'our' re-action to the yard wide cordon sanitaire which supposedly would stop contamination of non GM crops' Knowing that a moth like the Convolvulus Hawk can easily travel 3000 miles in its lifetime and having fretted over advanced books on molecular biology my first thought was 'surely I must be mistaken - nobody could be that stupid'. I am now left wondering if the designers of these tests were just that. Or were they now so hyped up by isolation and the prospect of undreamed of wealth that they judged the rest of us to be complete morons even though an average ten year old could have faulted their experiments' The arrogance is stupendous. Either that or they are ignorant of the behaviour of pollinating insects - noisy, buzzing spiteful things that can sting and which will be excluded from genetic utopia. Proteus was a god that could assume any form and the protean trade of genetic engineering knows no limits.

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Further notes on the Hydrogen economy

Research at Cal Tec has centred on the leakage rate of cars and hydrogen power plants. Spiralling leakage rates could contribute to ozone depletion and even global warming. Leaked hydrogen could end up in the stratosphere and react with hydroxyl radicals to form water vapour, helping to form longer-lasting clouds over the poles. This would provide a reaction site for halogens such as chlorine to deplete stratospheric ozone (Science, vol 300.p147).

Hydroxyl radicals could be destroyed in the troposphere (15 kilometres from earth's surface}. OH is an environmental scrubber removing all manner of pollutants including methane.

At present about 80 million tonnes of hydrogen goes into the atmosphere every year with 15 million tonnes coming from industrial uses and burning of fossil fuels. Cal Tec estimates that 10% to 20% of hydrogen could leak from fuel cells. That would increase industrial emissions by between 60 million to 120 million per year if the 1994 fleet of cars were converted to hydrogen use. Liquid hydrogen tanks will leak more than gas tanks which take up more space and therefore unsuitable for cars.

Another potential source of problems is how the hydrogen is produced. If produced solely from coal gasification, world wide carbon dioxide emissions would increase by 5%. But make it from natural gas and CO2 emissions would fall while methane emissions would double. 'Hydrogen is not necessarily more benign ' it depends on how you produce it.'

It is reckoned 77% of hydrogen from the troposphere is consumed by the soil (Nature, Vol: 424, p 918). It is not necessarily the case that uptake by the soil would remain proportional to the concentration of hydrogen in the atmosphere. But if the climate became wetter the soil would be less able to absorb hydrogen and hydrogen uptake shuts off. 'The wild card in the future is how, in the future, will the climate and the hydrogen sink change' (New Scientist 15th Nov 2003).

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THE BIO-ECONOMY

Behind the very real threat of the 'privatisation of nature' (as opposed to what - its former 'nationalised' status') gene patenting especially (as defined by the GATT agreement on 'intellectual property rights' i.e. 'created' nature), there lies a far bigger question: the unprecedented quantification (valorization) of nature. Beginning with rough estimates on the monetary values of major natural history collections inspired to a considerable degree by the rising value of art auctions and in particular the blurring of the boundaries between 'art' and 'non-art' (like the Warhol estate running into hundreds of millions and hyped by aesthetic/anti aesthetic valuers organised into legal consortia), it led with a similar unintentional validity to asking such questions as what price air', what price clean water', what price eco-systems as public services'?

However the people who put this kind of price on nature were almost wholly opposed to the privatisation of nature. By appealing to our wallets they believed they were acting in the public good, calling for greater state regulation, even, seeing that nature does not honour national boundaries, looking far beyond the nation state to a global state and thus linking up with a tendency that was especially manifest after World War Two in Europe and America and had even formed part of the 3rd International particularly in the case of Bukharin. However the valuers of nature by applying the arithmetic of capitalism to nature were ultimately reducing, despite their 'good' intentions, all values to monetary values. By accepting the enemy's logic these false friends firmly put themselves on their terrain. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that their sums could in future add up to a cursory cost-benefit analysis, a ball-park figure that will be eagerly seized on by a venture capitalist. Rather than demonstrating the impossibility of providing a substitute - a synthetic eco system - it might do the reverse and act as a business opportunity.

When Darwin used Malthusian terms to describe the workings of nature he was blindly opening himself up to misappropriation by ideologues. As we all know the theory of natural selection was loaded with terms borrowed from the lexicon of free market liberalism. Though it was not a ringing endorsement of the latter, it did serve in the hands of Darwin's many popularisers to justify it. Though Darwin used terms like the 'survival of the fittest' and 'competition' he did not put a price on natural selection: the bills of the Galapagos finches were itemised according to their fitness not according to price. Indeed the idea of doing so would have struck everyone then as absurd.

Social Darwinism was an ideological misuse of Darwin whether seized on by imperialism or the 2nd International. The theory of natural selection did not even remotely anticipate an eventual enquiry into the political economy of nature though there were major discoveries around the same time that eventually would like those of Mendel and Pasteur. The fact that now mathematical balance sheets, economic metaphors and talk of privatisation abounds in treatise on nature means that a bio-economy is now a reality and all of nature is now up for grabs. It can take on a benign aspect that immediately captures our interest, like bluebells possibly holding a cure for TB. But it must not blind us to the ultimate purpose. (Scientists are looking at our native flora as a potential pharmacy just as they formerly looked at rain forests and chief amongst them is Robert Nash of the Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research at Aberystwyth. He is also - NB - research director of a business called Molecular Nature).

It is conceivable in the not too distant future that we shall recoil before nature as capital personified, just like a machine breaker before a machine. Imagine for example if GM crops were to be rammed down our throats by edict (and there is every possibility) and they were to turn out to be a major health hazard. How would we then look on the insect pollinators which we are still dependant on for two thirds of our food? We would unhesitatingly pull the wings off every butterfly we could get hold of and be thanked for it. For we would be nature saboteurs; the new Ludds of the bio-economy.

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GLOBAL WILDFIRES AND THE HYDROGEN ECONOMY

A quick way out of carbon taxes and so remain in credit, is to plant more trees. However trees once alight produce huge amounts of CO2 but under Clinton and Al Gore - his so-called eco Vice President planting trees - looked good and saved them from even having to propose drastic measures.

But wildfires came to the rescue and even this remedial gesture has gone up in smoke. The American House of Representatives has just passed the Healthy Forests Restoration Act (2003) cleverly presented as an anti-forest fire measure. This will lead to increased felling of old-growth trees. One of the major reasons wildfires swept through hills surrounding the San Bernardino Valley in October 2003 was because the burning of the chaparral, essential to the areas eco-system, had been prevented by the real estate enveloping the hills. It gives a new twist to the saying money to burn.

The burning of rain forests is frequently presented as the work of mean-minded, irresponsible small farmers. The main aim is to make us, and people not that different to our selves, the guilty party. In fact those responsible for most of the damage are logging companies and ranchers.

It is easy to flay the workers' movement for its short sightedness but the eco movement is, if anything, easier to manipulate. Much of the problem springs from its positivism and involvement in alternative strategies. It is working for a better future and the power of the negative is not part of its vocabulary.

The increasing faith in a forthcoming hydrogen economy that will replace the present carbon economy shows the degree to which the movement is technicist. In fact even the 'Economist' praises the initiatives in fuel cell research and the amounts of money invested by the major car companies and BP and looks forward to the end of the oil based economy. The technicist utopianism of Jeremy Rifkin, the most vocal populariser of the hydrogen economy, in fact only weakens resistance to the carbon economy because, like the gradualism of the 2nd International, everything has been won in advance and all we have to do is lie back and wait for perfection to arrive.

A hydrogen economy will not be pollution free. It can reduce CO2 emissions by up to 60% but more likely than not it will lead to increased energy use like far more cars on the road and thus increase greenhouse warming.

Further, further notes on the Hydrogen economy

The hydrogen fuel cell is the latest technological panacea for all our ills. This nature friendly futurism has arisen from the ashes of all other technological utopias. But with this difference: where all others have failed this one will succeed because it is heir to the revolutionary project. Indeed it is the revolution. But no technical innovation is inherently anti-capitalist. To claim otherwise is to substitute technique for social struggle.

However the high profile advocates of the hydrogen economy avoid mentioning capitalism. The technology is of itself decentralist - or so they claim. There is no need of a Central Hydrogen Generating Board and hence no national grid. Rather one has a grid powered and controlled by the consumers! We shall have a global grid of billions of producers paralleling that of the web (also fundamentally liberatory in the view of the hydrogen advocates). Every garage will be a hydrogen power station - a revealing touch because it implies the extension of car ownership but this time with a good conscience because it is now a non-polluting vehicle.

But to trumpet such claims as the apostles of the hydrogen cell economy do is in one fundamental aspect, to dance to the tune of the militarists of the hydro-carbon economy now that oil production is nearing its peak and supplies have to be secured as never before, even if that means occupying every oil producing country. But salvation is at hand: it is within our hands in the shape of the hydrogen economy. Utopia will dawn without ever having to take to the streets. And what the messianics of the hydrogen economy want from us is total passivity just as Bush and Blair do. They share each others optimism of those they oppose and talk of impending catastrophe then becomes the failure of reason, a blinkered short term pessimism that needs to be addressed by the mind police.

A Few Facts:

The EEC Commission is spending 2 billion on hydrogen research over the next two years.

By 2010 the Japanese Ministry of the Economy, Trade and Industry wants to see 50,000 hydrogen vehicles on the road and 5 million by 2020. Even President Bush said in this year's (2003) State of the Union address that the first set of wheels for today's newborns would run on hydrogen.

But it will probably be 15 to 20 years before fuel cell cars can even gain a toehold in the market. But fuel cell cars are the ultimate prize and have the largest potential market. However a hydrogen infrastructure of Hydrogen 'reformers' rather than transformers - a telling word change if ever there was one referring to the re-forming of natural gas to produce hydrogen. There is also the problem of finding a way to store and carry the fuel in cars.

The hydrogen sopranos are a very vocal lot and have even got the ear of George Bush, but only in order to serve the ends of real politic and to disguise his real intentions, recuperating the language of an eco-economy for opposite ends. In fact Bush wants to cut research into renewables and energy efficiency by $86 million while putting in place $2 billion for clean coal technologies, plus a 62% increase to $62 million for research on ways to sequester CO2 from burning fossil fuels so that it cannot enter the atmosphere. There is also a 19% increase in funding for nuclear research as well as vast subsidies for a new generation of nuclear reactors.

In Europe renewable energy's market share is about 6% about that of the U.S. Capacity is rising but so is energy demand therefore supply is constantly struggling to keep up with demand.

Bush's energy plans at least have the merit of being realistic in the short term even as he encourages short termism in energy consumption as never before. There will be no quick shift away from hydro-carbons to either hydrogen or nuclear power though in any contest it will be the latter that will prove victorious in the immediate future. Coal is definitely set for a come back. At present we can only guess what form that will take in a country like Britain where miners' struggles have become legend. (Since writing this the coal industry in this country has received a £52 million subsidy and 300 further miners taken on - the first increase since the miners' strike of 20years ago)

Hydrogen vehicles are already a practical possibility. There are fleets of buses powered by fuel cells in service right now - e.g. Madrid received the first fuel cell buses in May 2003 and 10 other European cities are set to by the end of 2003.

'Hydrogen may be more of a belief than a scientific issue. We can be very taken by the picture of power to the people. Hydrogen does not deliver a decentralised system on its own.'

(D Baldock, Director of the Institute for European Environmental Policy, London.)

EL NINO: Current of Conformity or Current of Revolt?

El Nino is the biggest climatic event in the world. The 1998 El Nino was the biggest on record causing crop failure in Southern Africa, storms in California, to failed monsoons in Asia. The Atlantic equivalent is the North Atlantic Oscillation (Gulf Stream).

Increased understanding of these currents have been seized on as a natural explanation for global warning rather as sun spots - courtesy of Piers Corbyn - have been. However they could be under the control of the greenhouse effect particularly in the case of the NAO. The melting of the north polar icecap is likely to push the salt sink further south leading, in one model, to a cooling equivalent to Labrador.

Old Indian Proverb (below)

'When you drive nature out of a door with a broom she'll come back through the window with a pitchfork'

Fred Engels (below)

'Let us not flatter ourselves for our victories over nature. For every such victory, it takes its revenge on us. We with flesh, blood and bones belong to nature and exist in its midst.'

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'Cars are dead' - subversive graffiti from 1968

'Cars are living' ' the biologisation of technology c.2000

This selection of car adverts was taken at random from the pages of New Scientist. At most they only cover a period of four years from 1998 to 2002 and in a concentrated form underline the extent of the greening of consumerism. In these ads nature and technology are blurred to a significantly greater degree than on TV where cars more generally are put through their paces in built-up environments stripped of nature. It indicates the degree to which the scientific community has changed, appealing, as these ads do, to a growing bad conscience, muted self-criticism and underlying unease. It also reflects a scientific Diaspora into the countryside ' a 'Tintern Abbey' of the laboratories merely in appearance where cars are drawn up on beaches, take to rough tracks, disperse dandelion seeds or become tin and glass four wheel drive pollinators. In one ad, Psyche, the secular goddess of Lepidoptera, now armed with a bow hi-jacked from Cupid distorts not only myth but the reality of the car turning it into the saviour of nature.

Possible captions

The scorpion car (a sting in its tail)

The seed dispensing car

The pollinating car

The body language car

The off-road car

The rocky-horror car

Beef import car

Noah's car

Rorsch test psycho-babble car

The miracle drives-on-water car

Drifting snow car

Psyche turned Cupid car

The Hydrogen ultimate car - to be looked at upside down because it is destined, like the fetishism of commodities, to be set right side up eventually.

To be continued... 2002 Mainly done by Stuart Wise

A New Somewhat Differently Nuanced Intro Cum Addition by David Wise...... as part of a presentation to the Michel Prigent Commemoration Group in December 1923:

Heighington Station, Co Durham and the oldest passenger railway station in the world

Above: Heighington Stn as we knew it as children in the late 1940s / early 1950s

Above: The same station in 1825 as Locomotion Number One is put on the rails

One of the photos below in Stuart Wise's Street One & Codlings shows the row of railway workers dwellings (which we lived in adjacent to the station and built in stone around the same time as Heighington railway station was opened in the early 1820s. It thus became the very first passenger railway station in the world and where George Stephenson's Locomotion Number 1 was put on the rail heralding the opening of the Stockton and Darlington railway in 1825. Stuart and me lived in these cottages and on our allotment in the mid to late 1940s situated between the cottages and the railway ticket office plus porters room (see above) and goods yard when messing about we accidently dug up some of the old railway lines which supported Locomotion Number 1. These old, rusting lines were immediately handed over to York Railway Museum once adults realised what had been unearthed. Sadly the old stone cottages (see below) weren't preserved and were callously knocked down during the 1980s before a site of historical interest notification could be placed on them. Once I found out a few months later my heart was broken.....

Although Stuart's missive (below) to a top nature bureaucrat in northern Butterfly Conservation is remarkable for its wealth of local natural history knowledge of insects and plants, even if the remit kind of blocks a concomitant take on the equally remarkable rare bird life that could also be found there. For instance, Corncrakes could be regularly heard on the other side of the railway from our bedroom window, whilst at the back of the house in neighbouring fields, Nightjars would fly in the evenings .

However nature is not the subject I wish to comment upon here, rather it's the remarkable character and understanding of the railway workers who inhabited these cottages many of whom were also nature sensitive memorably revealing hare's nests (known as forms) to us hidden among long grass.

All the workers' families who resided here were left wing. Most belonged to, or had affinities with the old Independent Labour party of Kier Hardie and his ilk who were in their heyday before the onset of World War !. There was one exception; the signalman Fred Sturdy who was a member of the Communist party. Fred was paranoid as he was always getting attacked for his belief in Russian 'communism' , though not from a right wing perspective but from a more sophisticated ILP perspective which pointed out that the revolution in Russia was a failure and Lenin's victory merely a coup d'etat. However all this disagreement with Fred was done in a witty rather than a nasty put down way. Thus when the seasonal Autumnal - often huge - murmurations of starlings from Siberia arrived on the Durham coastal flatlands of which Heighington was just to say a part of, neighbours would joust to Fred commenting that "Stalin's arrived". Also, one must put these comments in their historical context in and about a general fear stoked up by the USA after the end of World War 2 that Western Europe was about to fall to large Communist parties in Italy, Belgium and especially, France. Indeed, Fred had a tricolour flying in his backyard. (Historically the tricolour had been flown especially in areas of northern England - as against the union jack - in the long aftermath of the French Revolution of 1789.This was especially true of Bradford, itself perhaps the home of "physical force" Chartism right up to the early 1850s). However with Fred there was a more sophisticated 'modern' side suggesting that if the party took over in France considering the country's rebel history then a real grass roots, liberatory revolution would be instigated which would then spread over the rest of Western Europe far surpassing Tito's recent Yugoslavian experiment. It's a position still elucidated today among some intellectual circles mainly in academia. Nonetheless Fred felt paranoid and lonely and on a Friday night would get rotten drunk in the nearest pub well over a mile away in Aycliffe village, then stumble back home down an unlit dark tarmacked road ending up in his backyard situated just below our bedroom window. He then would throw up for a considerable time shouting "I wanna die, I wanna die" waking all of us up as we broke out into uncontrollable laughter tempered with sympathy for a fine neighbour!! After all from a young age we knew that signalmen often developed acute psychological problems due to isolation in their cabins plus their highly responsible positions. Indeed, around the same time a signalman who lived in Aycliffe village and worked on the main line from London to Edinburgh - and whom we knew through parents - committed suicide because he was held responsible for a few coal wagon derailments that delayed The Flying Scotsman for a few hours...

More or less, the atmosphere in these cottages was very friendly and neighbourly. Rarely was there any disputes.(actually I cannot remember anything really serious) and tramps were welcomed given money and food together with a dollop of Wesleyan trade union Methodism, even though the churches and chapels were too far away for any Sunday attendance and no one had a car. Nonetheless. Christmas and New Year and other occasions meant regular quite large get togethers. I nostalgically look back on them with delight and even as a child I often found the conversations intriguing from engine drivers mulling over difficult sections of local rail track to navigate, to train crashes, to more general takes on society at large. Remember too, this was the time of PM Clement Atlee's Labour government which in retrospect perhaps the most progressive government these islands ever had and there wasn't much of a visceral attack on Tories, rather a voice of progressive optimism about the future. Thus comments sometimes were pointedly directed towards us such as: "Hey lads when you are grown up, you won't have to worry so much about money as transport will be free and rents reduced to next to nothing" Such comments struck home though in a mild way as somehow or another we'd already felt such 'truths' in our bones .More importantly there was no indication in the atmosphere of the horrors to come, of neo-liberal economics and the growth of a kleptocracy implying the monetisation of almost everything even perhaps for the future including every breath we take.

These get togethers were also alcohol free and the conversations would drift into discussions surprisingly not of memories of World War 2 but once or twice of the failed Spanish revolution of the late 1930s, as we played with toys on the floor next to a burning coal fire. Once mention of the POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxista) was brought up. The POUM of course was a workers' organisation cum rank 'n' file militia that was partially truly liberatory having informal relations with the Spanish anarchists. (Interestingly too no railway worker here ever mentioned the anarchists) We, of course had no idea what the POUM was but in retrospect it was the name in itself that sparked the initial interest delighting in a punchy title to be repeated through the mouth like a steam train chugging by our windows - poum .poum, poum! Only much later reading George Orwell's Homage to Catalunya did we put 2 and 2 together, as Orwell in a somewhat haphazard way had joined the organisation heralding a taking up arms against largely fascist militias.

Moreover, there is another extremely interesting aside to all this: the formation of "Landscapes of Contempt". The original rural landscape around Heighington Stn had over the past decades been turned over into factories. Come the Second World War and they were requisitioned by the State for the assembly-line production of military shells and bombs. The buildings both high and low were then usually covered with soil and then planted with all kinds of scrubland plant particularly gorse and interspersed with ponds. It looked like an unusual veritable wilderness, From the air the high flying Luftwaffe were unable to find this military location and much to their chagrin. At the same time women workers were conscripted in their thousands to make the shells arriving each morning at Heighington stn from small local villages to big towns like Darlington and Bishop Auckland nearby. Little did they realize the chemicals they were using were often toxic even lethal. Quite quickly at the end of the war many of these hard working women died of cancer followed by shock and horror as this workforce were renamed in the MSM "The Aycliffe Angels". Moreover, having no idea this was what was happening as young children and imitating the indigenous tribes of North America, it became out playground as in no time we rapidly acquired a quite amazing knowledge of nature starting off with the newts in the industrially refashioned ponds becoming home not only to the common Smooth Newt but of all things, a large amount of Great Crested Newts!! And our long journey into nature had thus begun..........

On a more general level a lot of the early/mid 1940s was a time of reflux when a traditional working class was beginning to lose its identity or at least was morphing Old poverties still remained but mass consumerism was just to say in the wings even though the TV set had yet to make its deadly incursions never mind beyond that, a none future of Internet Second Life. Small working class communities (like ours) were relatively common but there was little notion of the "new poverties" on the horizon plus the deadly isolationism that would go with it, never mind the reality of an extinction apocalypse as nature was torn to shreds. Moreover within four years after the following text was written our transitioning into active intervention in and among what became known as the previously mentioned "Landscapes of Contempt" - the landscapes of our childhood - meant nature officialdom like Butterfly Conservation turned on us with appalling viciousness. In short having attained something like a revolutionary critique of the totality helped considerably by the French grouping Encyclopedie de Nuisances itself a development of situationist critique, we had become personae non gratae in conformist natural history circles.

David Wise: December 2023

Street One & Codlings - Stuart Wise

Dear Sam Ellis, (Butterfly Conservation Officer, northern England)

Although I now live in London, during the 1950s I lived in Newton Aycliffe and, though only in my early teens, was already a passionate lepidopterist.

You may be interested in the following observations. The Dingy Skipper, which is still found at Simpasture, once could be seen in their thousands over Aycliffe Trading estate and around Heighington Station, particularly on or near the cinder paths that intersected the land and sidings around the station. It was probably the biggest colony in the north of England including those in the E Yorks Wolds. The Trading estate had once been, during wartime, an immense armaments factory and earth had been bulldozed over the factories to camouflage them from the air.

After the war the factories had been converted to peacetime use though the artificial heaps and covering of earth had, for the moment, been left in place. By the mid-fifties it had become a haven for wildlife. Birds Foot trefoil, Ox Eye daisy, Thistles, Rose Bay Willow Herb, Gorse and Broom abounded. The Gorse was inhabited by flocks of Goldfinches and Skylarks were everywhere. In the winter time the occasional Waxwing could be seen and on the Willow Herb there were Elephant Hawk caterpillars. I can only assume that the Simpasture colony of Dingy Skippers was the ancestral colony, even though miniscule in comparison. There were, after all, a number of branch lines that criss-crossed the Trading Estate and were connected to the railway line at Simpasture Junction. It must have been along these conduits that the skipper spread on to the estate.

At Simpasture we would regularly find Drinker moth caterpillars almost, as it were, by our own choosing. As I recall we would playfully part the grass and there they were. In fact we once organised a competition amongst ourselves to see how many we could find in one evening!

However, the richest site by far for butterflies and moths was the railway embankment running from Heighington Station up to Codlings Bridge and slightly beyond in the Darlington direction. Although interestingly we never, as I recall, found any Dingy Skippers there was a colony of Dark Green Fritillaries numbering, I would guess, around 100 at the height of the emergence. In fact around 1949 an elder brother had bought a first edition of E B Ford's 'Butterflies' (which I still possess) convinced he had seen a Silver Washed Fritillary and needed to be sure. He still insists it was but I am equally persuaded it was a case of mistaken identity. Also, along this stretch of railway we found the Wood Tiger moth. Nothing all that special about that perhaps, except the sex-linked, white underwing var. hospita was also to be found there in considerable numbers. Though still schoolboys, we felt it was important and informed an elderly collector in Coniscliffe of our discovery. However, I doubt if this local record ever found its way in to the national records. Much later I found Ford mentions that it occurs in the hilly district of N W Durham. However this site at Codlings Bridge was only about a mile and a half from the beginning of the coastal plain.

Heighington Station, Co Durham. Two hundred yards or so up the line at the right of the photo is the exact location of Codlings Bridge. Does the Dark Green Fritillary still fly there? The Simpasture Nature Reserve is down left of the photo. The row of houses where we lived like the station itself & glorious focal point of a passionate childhood, now no longer exists.

Scar Close, N Yorks. Limestone pavement at the foot of the mountain of Ingleborough. A Dark Green Fritillary nectaring on thistle, August 2003. Across the field and rising in the background is Whernside, the highest Yorkshire mountain.

Yet of all the rarities that I found there none was more memorable than the Large Tortoiseshell that I saw flying along the railway embankment near Codlings Bridge in 1956. I failed to capture it, which was the bitterest disappointment of my brief collecting career. I never saw another one and possibly it had flown on the embankment from the nearby Cumby Wood which contained a number of Elms. There may even have been a small colony in the wood - who knows?

Finally, one more incident that may be of interest. One evening in the summer of 1956 a friend called to say there was a large moth resting in the doorway of his home just off Stephenson's Way. It turned out to be a Death's Head Hawk. We thought it was probably a female and, though still in fairly good condition, appeared to be exhausted. We took it home in the hope it would lay some eggs but it died shortly afterwards without ever moving or feeding. It is still preserved in the one remaining box in my collection from those days. I had heard tales from beekeepers around the Cleveland Hills that the moth would, not uncommonly, raid their hives.

I was also interested to read about the discovery of the Purple Hairstreak in Durham City. Two years ago we found it all over the Bradford area even up to where the stunted oaks gave out close to the summit of Baildon Moor. Encouraged to venture further afield last year we found it in Skipton Castle Woods. These specimens were still in pristine condition unlike the dished examples we were seeing around Bradford at the same time and which suggested a later emergence. This year we intend journeying to settle and beyond to Dent Head in the hope of finding in the high Pennines.

I am also beginning to wonder if the Skipton colony, in particular, is not an ancient colony which may have been there since time immemorial but which has escaped notice because of the Purple Hairstreaks secretive habits in these northerly latitudes and relatively high altitudes. Their behaviour is so very different to their southern counterparts and it took us some considerable time to learn how to look for them. Only rarely do they descend from the oak canopy and the best time to get a closer look at them is toward the end of their brief lives when they literally seem to fall to earth in a crazy, almost uncontrolled fashion. To say that they are on their last legs is not just a manner of speaking because the northern Purple Hairstreaks do appear to spend far more time perambulating around the twigs and branches of oak trees, interrupted by the occasional brief flight. I even speculated if the Skipton butterflies were in the process of becoming flightless, virtual butterflies!

There are forensic techniques, which could determine if the northern populations are genetically different and which could possibly account for their behavioural difference. This would be an interesting experiment but aside from ethical considerations to with the killing of butterflies, to actually capture a specimen from the Skipton Castle site would be almost impossible, seeing they are leading such a clandestine existence.

But to return to Aycliffe Trading Estate. It does hold a special place in my affections and this random creation does I think have something special to teach us. Looking back I am truly amazed at how favourable it was to wildlife even though that was the last thing the 'planners' ' if indeed there were planners, had in mind. In fact the aim was to imitate as closely as possible from the air, the spoil heaps that once liberally dotted the area, particularly around West Auckland, Lealholme, Coundon etc. And yet this bare-earth policy succeeded. It was composed entirely of clay, shale, low-grade coal and cinders. As a result grass was never able to gain a complete stranglehold sufficient to shade out other plant life. Once the Birds Foot Trefoil had become established it ideally suited the Common Blue and the Dingy Skipper. In comparison the patchwork of fields surrounding the estate for miles around had nothing so inviting to offer. It is also an interesting example because it shows how quickly species can expand if the conditions are right. And how different, and so much more successful, this trading Estate was from today's more consciously planned efforts at land reclamation. I have just returned from reconnoitring a landfill site between Batley and Morley in West Yorks called appropriately Soothill which once contained a vast number of pit heaps and a large quarry. Barely two miles away, at another disused quarry, the Grayling was found last year and I was gutted to see the Soothill quarry was being used for landfill. Soon it will be a featureless expanse and nearby several earth-moving vehicles are already at work levelling the land into a mindless pastiche of downland before covering it with soil and seeding it indiscriminately with grass. There must be more imaginative and sensitive ways of reclaiming so-called derelict land. A sort of needless banality of farming land appearances, combined with a caricature of nature, is being imposed upon it. Why not, for example, only cover part of the ground with soil and leave the rest bare? Why even the topographical irregularities which the eye and nature finds so refreshing and attractive. All I can say that as a child I found Aycliffe Trading estate much more exciting to play in and much more stimulating to the imagination and there was never any danger of being chased out by irate farmers. I also think it bequeathed within me a discontent rather than an outright rejection of the urban environment and industry, which is increasingly becoming a feature of contemporary conservation movements. I have a model, a touchstone, from which I can begin to challenge urban spaces, a vision rooted in an actual example of what can be done with them, particularly when faced with newer desolations like the typical Barretts estate. Yet when this Estate was first turned over to wartime use it must have looked a clay and shale hell rejected even by the worms and made all the worse by the forbidding grid plan of roads where the usual street names had been replaced by numerals like 'Street One'. However, less than 15 years later no roadside verge for miles around could equal the life that teemed along the borders of 'Street One', a name which will forever resonate within me.

Above: Aycliffe Trading Estate in its post Second World War butterfly-rich heyday. The photo on the right gives a clear indication of the great earth works covering the factories and where the Dingy Shipper emerged in thousands during May and June.

Anyhow I hope this is of some interest. I fear I can never return to Heighington Station, Codlings Bridge or Simpasture. It is far better I remember them as they once were.

Stuart Wise (Spring 2003)

Some Thoughts on Butterflies & the ensuing collapse of all categories... From naivety to greater coherence

Some thoughts on butterfly migration

In butterfly migration there is an instinctual sense of purpose. The key to migration is to understand that it is regulated largely by RHYTHM and SEQUENCE OF EVENTS, rather than by reason and foreknowledge.

The migrating butterfly keeps to one straight path. ...they have been seen flying through railway tunnels, through the windows of houses, through an afternoon of thick fog. ...beating their wings against walls trying to fly through rather than over them.

In migration butterflies 'know no fear' .Fear is suppressed. ...they may be stroked, and lifted onto one's finger. They have been seen flying 6" above the waves in mid-Atlantic; on the Rongbuk Glacier, 18000' up Mount Everest.

Spectacle

A swarm of Monarchs in New Jersey was described as 'almost past belief. ...millions is but feebly expressive'..miles of them is no exaggeration. They covered every twig in an area about 200 yards wide and over 2 miles long. The green landscape was changed to brown'.

In 1879 Painted Ladies flew northwards over Europe in such numbers 'as to cast a shadow on the ground'''. They have been seen from aeroplanes as great spiral nebulae, or as faint coloured gasses moving amongst the Cumulus''

Merill, an American astronomer, saw millions of Monarchs come into view of his telescope, clearly illuminated by the Moon.

The entomologist Skertchley observed the beginning of a migration in the Sudan in 1869. He saw the wiry grasses among the sand trembling though there was no breath of wind. With a closer look he saw that all the grasses were thickly hung with Painted Lady chrysalises - wriggling violently in the act of emerging. In half an hour they had dried their wings -and in a SPLIT SECOND the whole desert seemed to take to the air as a brown cloud and move away to the North East.

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In 1887 swarms of Silver Y moths reached the sugar beet fields of Lincolnshire and Norfolk in such numbers that the sound of their wings was distinctly audible .''.Wind and rain once beat a huge flock of white butterflies (a snowstorm) into a lake in Upper Bavaria; later they were washed ashore in thousands, forming a white rim round the lake.
''Dead Camberwell Beauties a rare migratory species formed a purple tide at Seaton Carew, Co. Durham in Autumn 1827; they had been driven from the coast of Scandinavia by a storm.

In August 1911 Professor Oliver was visiting a small island of about 2 acres on Sutton Broad, Norfolk. As he approached he saw the whole island covered with fluttering white butterflies,all of them were caught on the sticky leaves of the Insectivorous plant, the Sundew. Each small plant had captured 4 to 7 butterflies; mostly they were still alive when Professor Oliver saw them. Several counts gave an average of about six million butterflies caught in this gigantic trap.

Habit and myth

In Australia the aborigines once depended on the seasonal mass flight of the Bogang to the caves of N S Wales as valuable food.

E B Ford in connection with mimicry and warning colouration in insects writes: 'I personally have made a habit which I recommend to other naturalists of eating specimens of each species which I study'.

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The Javanese call migrating butterflies PILGRIMS''' In December 1883 there was a very great flight which the natives took to be the souls of the thousands of people who, in August of that year, had perished in the eruption of Krakatau.

Butterfly movements in Ceylon are said to be pilgrimages to the footprint of Buddha on top of the Hill of Sama Nalahanda''. The butterflies are said to go to the peak yellow, and return white - purged of their sins.

The enigma of the Large Blue

For years entomologists were unable to rear the Large Blue. The caterpillar would feed on Wild Thyme, reach the third moult, wander aimlessly, and then die.

Purefoy happened to pull up some thyme in Cornwall and found a full grown Large Blue larvae in an ants nest. The secret was out. ...Immediately Purefoy devised an ant-hill out of a huge walnut shell which was placed on a pile of earth in a tin box. This was placed on a large platform surrounded by water to prevent the ants escaping. A Large Blue caterpillar was put near the nest. Soon a foraging ant showed great interest and began to caress the caterpillar which responded by producing a drop of sweet fluid from the back of its neck. An hour later the caterpillar hunched its back and the ant bestrode it and staggered away carrying the huge prize to its nest. Inside the guest turned carnivorous and commenced to eat the ant larvae. Purefoy, unable to restrain himself, opened the nest on Christmas Day to show his friends. The caterpillar was neatly suspended from the roof of the shell, where it pupated after the winter.

In May 1915 a male Large Blue emerged and dried its wings on top of the walnut.

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A note on the cover: Period: 1900 to 1950 (from the original magazine)

Evreinov ' for reconstruction of the audience'/ de Chirico for his diatribes against 'modern art'/ Buffet (Bernard) - for his honesty / Aragon ' for throwing Maurice Martin du Gard's typewriter out of his window /Peret ' for spitting/ Morton (Jelly Roll) ' for snooker / Eisenstein ' for the early things/ Parker (Charlie) - for dying with laughter/ Sherman ' for eluding his followers/ Trotsky ' for Literature and Revolution/ Griffith for Intolerance/ Khlebnikov ' for his soup-lakes/ Duchamp (Marcel) ' for being Villon's brother/ Feks ' for factory for the eccentric actor/ Mayakovsky ' for not 'rummaging through yesterday's petrified crap'/ The rest for HEROISM and Jonathan Swift for today.

(Note 2004:Sherman never existed. We invented him as an amazing genius seeing people could be conned by anything.)

Notes on Icteric: Why the above? A litter bin of random notes from 2005

Icteric was a 'radical' arts magazine produced in Newcastle upon Tyne between 1966 and late 1967 representing the views of a small group of people holding somewhat similar views.

It was in retrospect a confused attempt - though brave for the time - to get to grips with a hidden history; that of the negation of art which throughout the 20th century had such profound though not generally recognised, consequences especially here in the UK. At that time we were faced here in the UK with a profoundly conservative cultural establishment (if not in pop music then certainly in the high arts) and any attempted re-evaluation amounted to heresy, fit only for the flames. The reproduction of one of the yellow covers illustrated here gives an idea of the iconic figures we revered in the mid 1960s. (Icteric meant jaundice as well as a cure for jaundice - hence the use of yellow and was a name picked at random out of a dictionary in the time-honoured Dadaist tradition). The exploding volcano is that of Andre Breton, the French surrealist (who, incidentally, was deeply interested in butterflies) because at the time his wide ranging thoughts seemed to us to knit together much that had previously been separated. Lettrism was then just a name and identified merely, at least in the English speaking world, with its artefact, concrete poetry. We knew nothing of Isou's post war theory of the rise and decay of form but, had we done so, would instantly have taken it on board. On another pinnacle there is the name Kasimir Malevich, the Russian constructivist, whose 'White on White', announcing the end of painting, fascinated us. It was to us a thing of ineffable beauty not because of how it looked but of what it implied compared to which the statements of American Abstract Expressionism like those of Rothko and Barnett Newman were mere wallpaper that enshrined rather than demolished the museum.

So Icteric was a kind of emancipatory ferment playing on the boundaries between art and life and in the process leading to the dissolution of artistic form particularly painting, sculpture, poetry, the novel and architecture. It didn't just stop with these traditional forms for as a group we were all journeying out of the enclosed world of art, 'the hysteria born within a studio' - as Tzara, the notable Dadaist had characterised it - or any other cultural setting, like staged performances, plays, concerts - jazz, rock, folk - toward an everyday world we dimly perceived had to be transformed.

It was, if you like, Isou avante la lettre. We also passionately sought to disinter as much of the buried past as we could, translating into English for the first time Jacques Vache's Letters of the War, put together just after the First World War by Andre Breton. This text, demanding we leave behind the ball and chain of art, became a founding document of surrealism. (Vache had a nihilistic disdain for the world, the war and the avant-garde and committed suicide as a joke. Amazingly he had first come to our attention when sitting our O levels and we had been much impressed by his habit of uprooting healthy plants and leaving sick ones be. At the time we had in our bedroom a cage full of Northern Eggar caterpillars we had collected on Fewston moors above Harrogate. But rather than kill them when they emerged we let them go, such was our growing horror of collecting. The beyond of art and the setting free of nature were unconsciously already present.

In the mid 1960s' we even attempted, we were travelling that fast, to read Hegel, because his name kept popping up in Surrealist texts. We had no idea Hegel was a much derided figure in the English philosophical establishment. We had all barely turned twenty.

We really weren't quite sure where we were going, though deep down we felt we were on the right track. Following on from the radical concepts behind Duchamp's ready mades we questioned the existence of artefacts. Art could be anything we said it was and we slowly began to think that Duchamp had betrayed his original promise. Despite moving to America to escape the stranglehold of European cultural elitism (and incidentally failing to see that America was destined to overtake Europe on that score) Duchamp continued, as Rimbaud said of Baudelaire 'to live in too artistic a milieu'. A master of irony and word play would Duchamp have savoured the irony of seeing his Urinal hailed as the most important single contribution to the evolution of modern art by cultural pundits (see The Guardian, December 2004). Unfortunately he would most likely have been flattered. The Urinal is now Tate Modern's altarpiece surrounded by a culturally beatified host of imitators. One wonders what effect a gesture like smashing the urinal would have in the media, on decrepit youth and the avant garde (rather arriere garde) of the cultural establishment. especially if accompanied by a coherent explanation. We are almost tempted, but the thought of the ensuing court case, accusations of cultural vandalism equivalent to the burning of the books, even a prison sentence and certainly a crippling fine for having destroyed a priceless work of art when the aim of the original piece was to debunk any such pretensions, is enough to deter anyone.

Surprisingly, some of the articles in the Icteric magazine are not entirely without merit. The piece on butterflies is one of them. It is not quite accurate to describe the Icteric text on butterflies as a natural ready made. One cannot help but marvel at some of the descriptions. The ready mades were simply chosen at random: aesthetics never came in to it. And if we now admire The Bottle Rack as a fine piece of design, as does Banham in his Theory and Design in the first Machine Age that was not Duchamp's intention, even if later he did go on to say that the only works of art that America had produced were its plumbing and bridges. In fact the piece on butterflies owes more to someone like Rodchenko, (a contemporary of Malevich) particularly his factographs. It is neither art nor science but rather awe before breathtaking natural spectacles rendered even more poignant forty years later by their gradual disappearance. And we were conscious; even then, the spectacles we described had virtually gone.

We had some inkling of how deeply we had been influenced by romanticism and the English nature tradition. Butterflies had, after all, been a youthful passion predating by a couple of years a passion for delta blues men and women and we well remember 'setting' dead specimens to the sound of Bessie Smith, Pinetop Smith, Earl Hines and so on (see Street One & Codlings on www.dialecticalbutterflies.com). The article on butterflies was also an attempt to recapture our childhood enthusiasm for butterflies, yet coming when it did it was brim full of an awareness of the break up of poetic form and diction harking back to the 19th century French poet Stephane Mallarme and even earlier. We wanted to communicate an intensity of lived experience poetry was unable to provide. We wanted the authenticity of real life. And we wanted, like the surrealists, 'to relive with intensity the best moments of childhood.' This phrase was never far from our lips and we gave it, and others, a renewed lease of life by reproducing them and plastering Newcastle with stickers. The Surrealists in some of the most remarkable texts of the 20th Century were to ask 'Is suicide a solution?' So we repeated the experiment and like the earlier investigation got disappointing replies and unsurprisingly received nothing like Artaud's who rejected the question by refraining it as 'an anterior form of suicide' meaning that we have all committed suicide already.

English poetry has always excelled in natural descriptions, surpassing all other rivals whether German, French and Italian. We have only to think of Chaucer, Spencer, Shakespeare, the Metaphysical Poets and then the Romantics. However with the Romantics nature begins to come into its own and starts to leap from the page. Most of the great romantics begin to take unprecedented liberty with form, anticipating by a 100 years the revolution of modern art. And even in an orthodox poet like Keats the signs are there a plenty ' 'a flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme'/ 'heard melodies are sweet but those unheard are sweeter'/ 'her book a churchyard tomb' (an observation Mallarme would have just loved!). We could say that this aspect has never been properly appreciated but that would be wrong: it has never even begun to be appreciated. And it was only after our ignominious flight from Newcastle that we began to appreciate this fact of overwhelming importance. (It is given a more comprehensive, though by no means exhaustive, treatment elsewhere on the website). In a way we were seeking to realize our own native romantic tradition and were its true heirs and not the piffling nonsense that has passed, with the odd exception, as 'poetry' since the death of Shelley and Byron. But we had no idea that this was the case for we had no one to guide or advise us. In this venture we were as alone as could be and disparaged on every side as 'mad' then 'bad' and finally 'dangerous', such was the wall of incomprehension. We were bound to be eventually broken by it, just as we were quickly radicalised through clashing constantly with it and getting nowhere.

In those far-off days the word ecology was hardly used at all. Yet it was the natural, more than anything else that obsessed us. We spoke of 'trembling nature'. And from that starting point we wished to reinvent the city, to bring nature into its heart and into people's living rooms, not as potted plants but as outrage. It was to be nature in excess, wild, exuberant, uncontrollable 'kinetic nature' and not one tailored to the mundanities of patio gardens. Down with polite horticulture, Newcastle was going to be the place of the new Amazonia. Seeing we lived right next to the north east coalfield we wanted to deposit a giant colliery spoil heap in the town centre. We wanted collapsing gardens, trees that raced along roads. Our cellar was converted into a lake by first banking it up with earth and then filling it with water. We loved it when cities flooded and waterfalls would cascade down the steps of newly constructed Arndale centres and living room floors gave way to reveal streams with easy chairs and dining room suites perched by the sides of these new embankments. This was decor with a difference.

We greatly admired the sacks of coal which Duchamp hung from the ceiling of the second surrealist exhibition. We were even more impressed when we found out a coal burning brazier that had been installed in the exhibition had singed the bottom of a couple of sacks which had then broken open, scattering coal everywhere.* One of us had a lorry load of sand delivered which was then deposited around the bed to create an interior desert in which to sleep and wake in. And, to one side, there was a Perspex cage in which thousands of flies were breeding on rotting meat. We lived what Damien Hirst sought only to exhibit. And the thought of making money out of it was the last thing in our head, which is the only thing in Hirst's.

For one of our experiments we reared a couple of dozen Privet Hawk caterpillars which were purchased from a butterfly farm. Eventually they pupated and, seeing we had long given up killing insects, let them go when these large, beautiful moths emerged. It was the humane thing to do and releases weren't the problem they are today. In fact a few years previously someone had taken it upon themselves to restore the Marbled White to the North Downs and today we are all very glad of it. Imagine our surprise when in the 1990s on looking at the distribution map of the Privet Hawk we noticed a small dot where Newcastle is and miles from the nearest location. Had we been responsible for inadvertently introducing the Privet Hawk in to Newcastle?

Even then our approach was fundamentally different to that of Hirst. We wanted to free up and then collaborate with nature not murder and then display it. The French for a still life is nature morte and the fact that Hirst wanted dead nature shows he has not broken with the artistic tradition at all in this respect, and also in many others. Instead of using an old butterfly collection which we did when we attached some butterflies to a pair of shoes (see the above photo from Icteric which even then was a tired update of e.g. an artefact like Meret Oppenheim's Fur covered Cup and Spoon), Hirst actually pulled the wings off recently killed Blue Morpho butterflies and then stuck them down as a decorative addition to his fashionable Pharmacy restaurant in Notting Hill. And the Shark, commissioned by the Saatchi's in the early 1990s, and which launched him on his money grubbing, brand name plc of a career he is now so proud of, was originally meant to be a Great White Shark. Days before he was due to bag one, it was placed on the endangered species list and Hurst had to make do instead with a Tiger Shark. It has just been sold for '6 000,000. A lifer in Wormwood Scrubs a few years back threatened, once outside, he was going 'to do' Hirst. If he should make good his promise we would suggest that afterwards he pickle Hurst in a tank of formaldehyde and then put him on display. Nothing in Hirst's life would then become him like the exhibiting of it. Rather too good for the Turner Prize however. In 2004 the winner of the abominable Turner racket, Jeremy Deller - and slightly more interesting than the usual prize winners- produced a film on Texas called Memory Bucket which ends up with a 10 minute sequence of millions of bats flying from the mouth of a cave into the night sky. It was nothing in comparison to Some Remarks on Butterflies.

Icteric was a brief moment in an altogether much bigger creative unfolding taking place all over the world from the mid 1960s onwards. A year and a half later in 1967 we were ambushed, almost unawares, by the far greater coherence of the International Lettrists and Situationists and their theoretical and practical contributions. Once confronted with these critiques we knew instantly this was what we had been groping towards all along in the dim twilight which was then Britain ' and in which nowadays there is even less of a flicker. With pitiless disdain we cast Icteric aside, and thought no more of it, ashamed of our juvenilia. Years later we were to be reminded of it when , in the late 1990s, we were told back copies of the magazine were fetching astonishingly high prices ' some said '1000 - though we can't believe it, and, what's more to the point, not even interested. One of us had also done a series of photo montages illustrating surrealist suggestions for altering Paris. They were done solely for money to go in an exhibition put together by R Hunt, one of the founders of Icteric, called 'Poetry must be made by all'. In the 21st century we were to find out the exhibition, which we then thought was evading the real issues, had acquired an iconic status even receiving a mention in Jappe's unimpassioned, somewhat academic, book on Guy Debord.

Otherwise we made no money whatsoever out of these avant garde experiments. In fact not only were we worse off economically but a target of ridicule. And to be sure, to give the opposition its due, they were only signposts and faintly ludicrous ones at that, toward a more lucid negation, as this ever more monstrous world appeared to totter.

In disgrace and calumnied as self-destructive idiots, and spat on from virtually all sides we were forced to leave Newcastle. And only if we were prepared to recant and return to the good old ways would the derision cease. But that would be tantamount to suicide so we 'chose' to be cast into oblivion instead and become the unmentionables. However, as so often happens in history, though we had been debarred in a manner of speaking from ever entering the city, in a manner of speaking the city also fell to us. But what we got instead was not the Newcastle Commune which one of our stickers had called for (Prepare now for the Newcastle Commune) but Newcastle, City of Culture and with growing embarrassment it began to be apparent to us that the origins of Newcastle's transformation, by realising a trajectory we had so vehemently rejected, lay partially in Icteric. It is indeed ironic to note how the converted Baltic Flour Mills on the banks of the Tyne is ranked second to Tate Modern (itself a former power station on the Thames embankment) as the 'modern art' venue. After our departure the art school and art scene in and around Newcastle University lapsed into a time warp from which it never awoke - as did every other art school and scene after 1968 and nor could they ever. Meanwhile the number of programs devoted to the role art schools played in Britain's 'creative renewal' in the 1960s grows and always neglects, deliberately or through sheer ignorance, to mention how they also nurtured a radicalism that exploded in 1968. And the currents present in Newcastle art school from the early 1960s onwards were the most coherent manifestation by far. In fact Newcastle never even gets a mention in these programs ' and if it ever does it is only in relation to Bryan Ferry who we lived next door to and had nothing but contempt for. It is as if they were a forerunner of the Cool Britannia business ethos, the sickly sweet, clueless Gallagher brothers and so on, though there was enough of that also.

And so the likes of Icteric became centre stage but even in their present manifestation are a world away from what we meant then and light years away from the only logically possible direction that was to immediately follow on. This particular apology for art history we are not proud to be part of, is closely linked to the world of advertising and corporate sponsors and unfailingly promoted by the media, particularly by The Guardian, The Independent and Channel 4 TV all of whom find it 'challenging'. The pathetic Jon Snow the Channel 4 newscaster is forever asking 'but is it art' but we doubt if he would get the joke if someone was to intervene and ask of a scene of total destruction, like the bombing of an Iraqi hospital, 'but is it art'?

In fact our critique in its more fully worked out form - and post Icteric - 30 or so years later found its way into the geography dept of the university via a belated repeat of psycho geography now out of historical context. A viciously reinstated Newcastle art scene was by then so cut-off from theory and reality that it hadn't the foggiest idea of its past never mind knowing what psycho geography meant. Nonetheless, in this city where anti-art as an essential part of a modern revolutionary critique was once proclaimed loudly, the simple realisation that art is nothing but a consumer appendage or that popular culture is now inseparable from advertising in an utterly commoditised social life far more dire than in the late 1960s has again been reaffirmed.

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(Footnote: That coal was central to Newcastle, worked as it were, behind our backs. Alongside the proposals for moving giant spoil heaps into the centre of Newcastle we had made small scale environments/installations of pit spoil heaps with model locomotives running through them surrounded by fake smoke ' another reinvention of childhood. It was a momentary phase in acquiring greater coherence. The explosion of the late 1960s with its profound anti-art drift saw miners from the local north east pits beginning to turn up curious yet attracted to the ensuing ever-widening subversion).

David & Stuart Wise. Winter 2004

Further Notes on Icteric

For decades afterwards we tended to treat the formative years in Newcastle as an embarrassment, a period in our lives we would prefer to forget. At best it was a necessary waste of time leading ineluctably to a much bigger picture expressed far more fully in May 1968 in France. However it is now painfully apparent there was nothing ineluctable about it and only now is it possible to reconstruct bit by bit the stages of this process and pose the essential question why then and not now, especially since what we were doing in Newcastle prior to 1967 has come to occupy center stage in the 'art' world. Unlocking these memories has not proved easy, especially as they have lain dormant for well over 36 years.

And so it is with the 8th/9th century Chinese 'poet', Han Shan. Purchasing a copy of Arthur Whalley's 'Chinese Poems' in a second hand shop for £1.50p, I re-read Han Shan in the very same book I had first encountered him. It was though I had last read him yesterday. Some lines had become imprinted on my memory which even then I felt were prophetic 'Even my own wife turned against me'. Ah yes, how true that would shortly turn out to be. 'Slip slap goes the wind in my face': of all the lines this is the one I most remember ' no poetic genius was required to write such a line for anyone could have written it.

Though of course we read Han Shan in translation, the literal descriptions eschewing practically all metaphor and metre seemed to point beyond poetry. We thought the same was true of the Japanese writer, Basho, especially the incident wherein he recounts trying to sell his snow covered hat. It seemed to us to subvert the conventions of the market because it was the snow rather than the hat that was important. But even so we felt uneasy about making it into a marketable commodity though we couldn`t then specify precisely why. The point, surely, was to awaken people to the beauty and possibilities of snow, not to make a living out of it

Han Shan's name is forever identified with the Cold Mountain, his chosen place of exile. Though the Cold Mountain was a place it was also a state of mind and it was the surface facticity that so attracted me indicating it was possible to imbue a bare fact with beauty and significance even in so drear a place as the Cold Mountain with its perpetual snows and fogs.. It was but a short step from this to investing a fact with social significance as to whether it enhanced our lives or not. By late 1967 this would be the overriding requirement: reborn people in a reborn world of 'facts' in which the government of people gives way to the administration of things, a state of affairs which has yet to exist. And it was the tireless nature lover J.J. Rouseau who was the first to succinctly formulate it thus - the anarchist tinged Rousseau and not the etatiste Rousseau. Though most people attribute this formulation to Engels he had in fact lifted it from Rousseau but in doing so gave it a far greater coherence.

At one point Han Shan breaks off to doubt if what he has written can ever capture the lived reality of what he is experiencing. 'Down in the pool there is not really a moon, the only moon is in the sky above. I sing to you this piece of song but in the song there is no zen'. Even then the reference to zen made us wince for we associated the zen cult with the beat poets like Ginsberg and their abysmal fetishization of literature. I fact far from being libertarian zen was institutionalised in the Japanese military, no matter that Han Shan had made a different use of it. The Cold Mountain tract was nature writing with a difference because it also exacted a refusal of the world, the one not being possible without the other. The mysticism was also very low key, in fact hardly present at all and infinitely less so than in the deist Wordsworth who rejected becoming an anchorite even though he felt pulled by it seeking, if only briefly, unlike Han Shan, a collectivist resolution through a bourgeois democratic revolution in which even grasses ( in fact rather more so than people!) were to be accorded rights. Hidden within Wordsworth there is also a rejection of the world, but crucially a world defined by the division of labour and Adam Smith which Han Shan, imprisoned in the last analyses by the ageless immobility of Chinese society, and despite his rejection of it, could not possibly have anticipated. And so a growing part of Wordswort`s legacy is his huge influence on the nature conservation movement (made necessary by industrial capitalism) and even modern anchorites like Thoreau and Muir have had, by sheer force of example, a similar massive influence on the conservation movement whatever their initial desire to have done with the world and get permanently lost in nature. I recall reading in Newcastle in the late sixties Gary Snyder's re working of Han Shan in which he attempted to give it a contemporary appeal by situating it in modern day San Francisco. But by then I knew there was no realistic alternative within capitalism, that we were not free to take it or leave it and that the Yosemite National Park was no substitute for the Cold Mountain. And besides there is no way a person would be permitted to camp out on the granite outcrops for any length of time - the Park Rangers would see to that. Today the illusion there is an alternative way of life within capitalist parameters has, over the past 35 years, gone forever, but paradoxically we are all increasingly becoming media anchorites locked away within four walls, finding it evermore difficult to venture out and only able to dream of nature as projected on TV. It is more than possible that in the end the only nature there will be is a parallel nature of digitised imagery that virtualizes the 'electric (electomagnetic) butterflies' of Rimbaud`s ravings. I have vivid memories of throwing myself on the bed in despair in Eslington Tce. in Newcastle and wishing, at the end of art, I had a cinematic device I could press closely to my face that would transport over the hills and valleys of North Yorkshire as if I was in a plane. How easy that would now be. And to think I once considered it a temporary cure for that acute sense of loss that comes with the death of art once we are prevented from seizing the social totality.

Han Shan was also a Taoist and Lao Tzu's writings also attracted us. We saw a link between the readymades and a line of Lao Tzu's: 'Exhibit the uncarved block'. Now of course we would rightly query why exhibit it in the first place To my knowledge no one has asked this question, certainly not Joseph Needham in his scholarly volumes on Chinese science, though he did enlighten me on the subversive role Taoism played in Chinese society, nourishing scientific enquiry in opposition to the prevailing Confucianism. (Needham was a member of that interesting bunch of British scientists who were influenced by 'dialectical materialism' as a result of meeting delegations of soviet scientists in the late 1920s and early 1930s and by which time the revolution was well and truly over with. So their wider vision, at least in comparison to their counterparts today, was also cruelly deformed by soviet style state capitalism which not one of them ever saw through. Though Needham was able to write a chapter dealing with Coleridge as a biologist in his The Sceptical Biologist (1929) - which few, if any, scientist would today be capable of - he ended up becoming a sickening apologist for Mao) .

Paradoxically wedded to this love of surface appearances requiring little further alteration other than in the social relationships, was a desire to realize metaphor by making it a fact, for here extremes met. French symbolist poetry had a peculiar plasticity about it as though always reaching out beyond the page. To us Rimbaud was more pure description then fantasy so imagine our delight when we read that the French communards had during the Commune of 1871 uprooted the trees that lined the grande boulevards and replanted them with their roots in the air and branches in the ground. It was close enough to Rimbaud's 'havoc of avenues' and to us symbolist imagery was a thwarted effort, confined to paper, to remake the world which was only possible through collective action such as happened in the Commune of 1871. Accordingly one of us printed a sticker with the slogan 'Prepare now for the Newcastle Commune' where only a couple of years previously we had reprinted surrealist stickers. 'Imagination with all its force tends to become real'. We were more alive than ever to Breton`s superb combining of Marx and Rimbaud: 'Marx said change the world, Rimbaud said change life: to us these two mottos are one and the same'.

Living in Newcastle a place world famous for its coal mines, shipbuilding, and heavy industry we had all become very 'French' and blind to the hostility we were provoking. Reaction in Newcastle always packed a punch. During the general strike of 1926 the middle classes armed themselves and were prepared, like nowhere else in the country, to drown the strike in blood. We were also unawares that the region had generated a radical critique of some aspects of culture, particularly mass cinema, in the shape of Jack Common that compared well with anything on the continent. Common was also able to link his critique to his profound working class experience and his observations on how, at night, engineering problems would be jointly resolved in the kitchen with the aid of a piece of chalk on grate blackening are priceless. Making use of whatever was available and in terms of sheer improvisation this was way beyond the uninspiring technical drawing we were instructed in at school. Later I began to wonder if my enthusiasm for Russian Constructivism in the mid sixties in Newcastle had not, in some roundabout way, been influenced by this local tradition. We had, as children, attended the Timothy Hackworth school in Shildon in Co Durham and every morning passed the great locomotive engineer's very modest house and famous engineering works, which then looked about to fall down, it was in such a state of disrepair. If not engineering in particular, construction was certainly in our blood.

But meanwhile English speaking symbolism meant nothing to us. TS Eliot was simply deplorable and we wondered how he ever could be placed alongside Mallarme, Rimbaud and Valery as Edmund Wilson had done in his famous 1930 book on symbolism, Axel's Castle. I recall that Robin Page, a happener from Leeds who came to stay one night, had contemptuously tossed to one side a copy of Eliot's Four Quartets that he had noticed on the book shelf. He had no need to bother however, it was simply a leftover from our school days and I still pride myself not one volume of Eliot`s disgraces my shelves. And the same fate befell W B Yeats whom we also had been taught to appreciate at school and though I have never been able to read Yeats since, his collection of Irish fairy tales is in a different league to anything Eliot did and provides a stepping stone to Singe's sojourn with the Arran Islanders. In its own way this was an attempt to realize symbolism and comparable with the best on the continent and still something that lives within me.

But we felt very alone and in face of a hostile world were virtually inseparable, because we only had each other. We were faced on all sides with a terrifying wall of incomprehension for there was nothing in the immediate past and little in the last 100 years in this country that was leading up to what we were doing- not to mention the revolutionary critique that was to rapidly follow on as naturally, or so it appeared then, as day follows night!

I can still remember the thrill of delight when on first opening in 1968 Marcuse's Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical enquiry into Freu, he had included an intelligible, highly relevant, reference to Mallarme in the intro. Here at last was someone in the English speaking world able to give Mallarme his due, not as an obscure poet but as a profound critic of language and so much more beside - which Marcuse does not begin to bring out. One can search the whole of Raymond Williams for even an appreciative murmur regarding what Mallarme was really about. Typically Williams had treated the forms of art as a given and only the social relations into which art is inserted as changeable. So we had in the late 60s`impatiently thrown aside his Culture and Society 1780-1950 as largely irrelevant because it did not remotely grapple with the question of form and missing out therefore on an essential, totally overlooked aspect, of the great romantics he venerates

Around the same time Roland Barthes Writing Degree Zero appeared in an English translation which also contained a reference to Mallarme. The book lay on the floor beside my bed in Newcastle for several weeks. I avidly read the little book because there was nothing at all comparable, simply on account of its modernity, by English speaking critics. And yet it lacked directness, deftly evading, at every twist and turn, saying too much that was leading. Only now am I able to see it as an academic rationalization of aesthetic lettrism ' and a stupid one at that - by a fink of the first water who professed to represent the movement more fully because of his wide ranging historical knowledge, which most of the more sincere lettrists just did not possess. But even so it is still more on the ball than a book I liberated in the 1990s by an English author Gordon Millan, Prof of French Studies in the University of Strathclyde on Mallarme entitled Mallarme: a throw of the dice. It is so vacuous I think I should be compensated for the effort it took to liberate it. How anyone can, after all these years, write a book on Mallarme in which the emerging anti-poet Mallarme is absent, is beyond me and only demonstrates yet again how empty universities really are and how backward Britain still is. The blurb on the cover provides a measure of the book's unrepetant orthodoxy: "defender of Manet and other impressionists, supporter of Zola and Rodin, Mallarme is now regarded is now regarded as one of the key figures of modernism." I had a right to expect better but it did show how isolated we really were in Newcastle all those years ago. The wonder is we have lived to tell the tale

I remember coming back from a pub one night and turning the corner into Eslington Tce. I noticed a child holding up a spool of magnetic tape(cassettes had yet to be invented) that was steaming in the wind. I was enchanted by his absorption and thought only a revolution will save him from having to grow up. 'The child abdicates his ecstasy' wrote Mallarme and his difficult poem entitled, fittingly, Prose:for des Esseintes (the character in Huysmans proto anti-novel Against Nature - and the only novel Mallarme ever really liked) is, I'm convinced, about that, though he could not bring himself to say so directly in his 'poem', which is wreathed in impenetrable obscurity. However it certainly seems to be about the need to take action, otherwise beauty will remain forever hidden by gladioli that have become too large, screening us, because of their overpowering presence, from true beauty. (Mallarme used the example of a simple flower to describe what he wanted from language, which Marcuse quotes in his above mentioned introduction). However we were fascinated by Mallarme for another reason. And that was because of his emphasis upon silence, which connected with our interest in John Cage. That a poet should be obsessed with silence was every bit as contradictory as a musician's obsession with silence yet one of a kind as we shall later see.

How we came to move beyond music, the precise steps that led up to it, escapes me somewhat. But I do remember that sometime after 1966 I became lucidly deaf to music and entered the world of pure sound from which I was never able to fully go back from, today more than ever, just like a growing number of other people in search of a theory as to why they can't. There had been precedents in the avante garde of the 20th Century beginning with Luigi Russolo's noise machines, Tzara's exhortation to musicians to smash their instruments, Satie and so on. We had even made a point of interviewing John Cage when he came to London and were particularly impressed by his opposition to the Vietnam war, which was then only just beginning to be an issue in Europe. In the interview he gave, and which we reproduced in Icteric, he said America was after the tin and tungsten in S.E. Asia which certainly was not the real reason America became embroiled in Vietnam. This literal interpretation of Lenin's Imperialism showed how limited Cage was on the broader questions, aside from the fact he never really turned his back on music, remaining a performer, 'a musician of hollow nothingness', to the end of his life. In fact, no musician qua musician has ever been able to arrive at a profound critique of the social totality, despite tendencies in that direction.

Next door to us in Newcastle, lived Brian Ferry. We regarded him as a good-looking dipstick and not much else - in fact, our attitude bordered on contempt because of his assiduous cultivation of the 'in crowd'.

Sometime in 1967 I started to share my flat in Newcastle with Gordan, a mathematician who was studying for a PhD. He was a member of Solidarity, a spin off from Socialisme ou Barbarie in France. We first got to know Gordon because of his irreverent denunciations of Trotskyites (who had a large presence on Tyneside - in fact Mr Newcastle himself, Dan Smith, had been one in his youth) at meetings called to oppose the Vietnam War.

We were fully in accord with Gordon's anti-Leninist stance, and eagerly read the pamphlets that Solidarity put out, many of an archival nature like those on the anti Bolshevik uprising in Krondstat in 1921 by Ida Mett and Alexandra Kollontai but which were useful in helping demolish the hold of Leninism. However wanting as we did by then a total revolution, mathematics was not exempt from entering the field of human praxis and we would have heated and frequently drunken discussions with each other.

For far more than old style workers' democracy was involved here and looking back this was an encounter that never yielded the fruits it promised like so much else then. Through Gordon I first came to know of Kurt Godel (the Austro-American mathematician) and Gordon would spend his days feeding the punch cards he had prepared at home into the main frame computer at Newcastle University. Though our discussion appeared to border on complete craziness, looking back I now think they were far from crazy and possessed a sort of inspirational lunacy and bizarre logic. They were taking place within an anti Bolshevik, libertarian perspective and therefore anything was possible had things been allowed to develop. I knew enough by then to know that Hegel, though smart enough to give mathematics its due, treated mathematics as a quantitative sum that could not brook contradiction. Though rigorous within its own terms it was finally only a part of a far more profound, dialectical, logic. For reality was essentially contradictory and the resolution of contradiction was what drove history forward. Hence for Hegel and Marx, dialectical logic became the only valid element in the whole of existing logic. I was also opposed to mathematics from a psychoanalytical viewpoint because I was then immersed in reading revolutionary interpretations of Freud. In psychoanalytical theory numbers and anality are one of a kind, mathematics originally being the sublimate of far more basic outpourings. Anality was also identified with sadistic fantasies of control and however barmy my pronouncements on the subject then were, few would deny that mathematics nowadays is more in control than ever through the binary notation on which digital technology is built. Gordon certainly did look at these revolutionary interpretations of Freud but whether it caused him to waver in his regard for mathematics as above history, I cannot say. In fact he interpreted the question of de-sublimation as more and better sex and like many others at that time opted for Reich. And when Solidarity finally did come to deal with psychoanalysis it was through the eyes of Reich and at the neglect of the far wider, explosive and disturbing question of repressed Eros.

All these years later I now realize that Gordon was studying the mathematical basis of computing and that had I enquired further I would have found that his line of study would lead directly to the creation of modern programming and the internet. I wish now I had been less adamant and had asked him more about Godel for I now know that Godel had anticipated the coding mechanisms of modern day computers by stating in the 1930s that mathematical systems contain paradoxes: systems could be logically coherent but judged from an external frame of reference can code for downright madness. Though it isn't strictly analogous to what Godel had in mind, Adobe's 'Photoshop' strikes me as just that. And at bottom this sums up how most people feel about computers, as if they are being tricked in to becoming part of a parallel reality, which they eventually will succumb to.

Gordon was also a classical music fan and at times I had to shut my ears to the sounds coming from his room. So in my proselytising, life and death, zeal I thought it right to acquaint him with the history of avant-garde noise makers from Satie through to John Cage for Gordon maintained there was a profound relationship between mathematics and music. However to me I no longer knew what was meant by music and the question which to me then hung over its existence has become over time a full stop to a growing number of people. In fact I felt utterly compelled to undermine the assumptions behind this long-standing postulate. Since then I have often pondered on Max Planck and Einstein playing classical compositions together on piano and violin, Heisenburg playing Bach on the church organ high above the caves on the outskirts of Dresden in which he was engaged on developing the A-bomb or Roger Penrose incessantly listening to Mozart as he pondered the mathematics of a singularity at the heart of a black hole. Did their 'revolutionary' physics and maths preclude every other kind of music excepting that of classical music?

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What Happened in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. (from a Critical, Hidden History of King Mob)

The mid-nineteen sixties and Icteric. Re-evaluation of a dissident European past. Russin nihilism. Recuperated artistic dada and revolutionary Dada. The forgotten revolutionary aspects of Surrealism. Conflict with the Tyneside poets. Closing down an Art School. Meetings with Black Mask in New York.

King Mob was initially a coming together in London of the then constituted English section of the SI – beginning somewhat to fall apart - and an ex-group, together with some other like-minded individuals, around the often confusedly anti-art magazine, Icteric, from Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. (Icteric, let it be said, was spuriously anti-art but we weren't to know that with such clarity at the time). Let us first deal here with the Newcastle experience as it has never been documented before.

Icteric, founded in the mid-1960s was, more or less, a name chosen at random from a dictionary and therefore in that somewhat time-honoured tradition of modern art emanating from Dada. It meant jaundice and a cure for jaundice at the same time – which everybody felt at its very inauspicious inauguration was appropriate. Simply put, everybody present was pissed-off with art in an institution or gallery, wearied and jaundiced about it if you like, and looking for something rather more turbulent and effective. Icteric's central aim, and quite resonantly put at the time, was the coming together (fusion) of art and life and was mainly the brainchild of Ron Hunt1 who was the librarian at the Dept of Fine Art at Newcastle University. Ron Hunt had been appointed to the post at the instigation of pop artist Richard Hamilton who taught at the university and who, ironically, around the same time, acquainted Don N. Smith with the theoretical journals of the French Situationists. Hamilton though, for some time had abandoned all semblances of radical critique pretty much falling into a benign, left social democracy, coolly and uncritically encompassing consumerist icons. A cool take was to be the essential in overcoming all adversity! In fact, it was a variant of the same terrible English inability to grasp most essential breakthroughs in perception and form which so marked the 20th century and much of the latter half of the 19th century. Despite penetrating social critiques like that of William Morris and George Orwell everything else was always to be done in such a seamlessly nice way and ever so watered-down.

Considering this was taking place in England (and in a relative back-water at that) covering an avalanche of omissions, repressions and outright hostility, Ron Hunt bravely at the time, delved into the history of modern art and began to put the record straight beginning to place all the long lost and forgotten (on purpose) radical experiments into the beginning of some coherent trajectory whose outcome at the time we were all rather fuzzy about but which was slowly but surely becoming clearer each day. Icteric became, more or less, the fulcrum of this unfolding - enlightening primarily ourselves - before any concern for anybody else. Basically, it was motivated by getting hold of anything that wasn't stultifyingly "English" in the conformist sense we found so unappealing. We went back and re-evaluated the Russian nihilists of the mid-19th century like Dobrolyubov and Pisarev whose The Destruction of Aesthetics hit a chord. We liked the hardness of their comments: "Shakespeare or a pair of boots"etc. Pisarev had said of himself he "would rather be a Russian shoemaker than a Russian Raphael". In a sense though it was their rebellion we liked even though it brought prison and calumny upon themselves. Pisarev's: "Denial is a hard, tedious and deadly task" meant something as we eagerly read Lampert's Sons Against Fathers in preparation – unbeknown to ourselves at the time – of our own revolt of sons (and now daughters!) against fathers! Could we go along with it to the letter? Hardly, but it was another of the necessary ingredients which later was truly to go somewhere. Finally though and perhaps inevitably, we found the concepts of the Russian nihilists too severely utilitarian for our liking. True, it was utilitarianism bordering on the apocalyptic but that didn't really fit in with our growing rejection, or rather, that suppression and realisation of art we were searching for despite being none too clear about this at the time. It wasn't just an either/or question. It wasn't just a question of the hungry and dispossessed for whom culture was a luxury they could ill afford. In fact, concern for the poor didn't even come in to it. We were arriving at the simple, though very dialectical, recognition that culture within its own frame of reference no longer possessed the slightest quality and the subsequent emptiness beckoned towards the creation of something entirely different. The conclusion that this meant inescapably the destruction of the commodity economy, social revolution and the creation of an entirely new world we didn't immediately perceive, but it did mean that a blow by blow repeat of Russian nihilism was irrelevant and quite beside the point. After all, during the lifetime of the Russian nihilists, great art particularly in the form of the Russian novel was at its height. However, Tolstoy's final rejection of the role of novelist was more in tune with Pisarev's essentially moral rejection – and incidentally illustrating the powerful impact of the nihilists on Russian society – than in the prepatory self-destruct of the novel's form as undertaken by the much younger Marcel Proust around the same time. A destruction which was to be continued and carried on to the final rampage of liberated words in Joyce's, Finnegan's Wake. Slowly but surely we were getting some sense of this, though always and perhaps inevitably, in a pretty chaotic way.

We mustn't though be too simplistic here about Pisarev's views. He wanted to see the emergence of a "non-cultural" scientific culture neither invented nor abstracted which could only be represented, "in actual living phenomena". As Lampert was to put it: "It was to be a culture which reflected man's changing and unimpeded vision of the universe, free especially from all the burdens of the past, and with none of the hot air of exalted places. It's "temples" would be "the workshops of human thought." It would eschew the artist as a sacred monomaniac, misunderstood and misinterpreted and ensure his status as simply a human being, endowed with a special gift of articulation and free from somnolence and escapism. His business would be roughly, to articulate on behalf of the inarticulate, to express for those who are unable to express themselves what is conducive to their growth as human persons and "thinking proletarians". He would be a spokesman for others and the despair of aesthetes yearning for elegant elaboration". Whilst the language of some of the above is too loose and imprecise for our times, a little later, around 1966, we couldn't help but make something of a connection between this and Dziga Vertov when first viewing his 1920's film Man with a Movie Camera and reading about the concepts behind Kino-Eye and the factograph, though more about that later....

The first Icteric magazine contained a translation by Anne Ryder of some of Jacques Vache's Lettres de Guerre (War Letters) and the first such translations to have appeared in English. The rest of the letters were to appear in the next edition of Icteric. The War Letters were a reflection on Vache's profound nihilistic experience of the First World War; an experience which also seems to have been the active fillip in mapping out a new subversive terrain whereby roles were played with and the spectator violently eliminates the performer. In a way, Vache's letters set the tone for what was to follow within our own hearts and minds which we interpreted as down with gallery art so, from now on, we were to take a serious look at those historical figures that attempted to negate art in the far-off days of Dada, Surrealism and Russian Constructivism. The painters and poets of these movements were quickly pushed aside and downgraded for their orthodox, though for their time, radical avant-garde representations. Eventually, we were only interested in these people if their activities, pointed clearly towards the hoped for real transcendence of art, that moment where everyday life would be splendidly renewed on a vast communal level. Finally, we preferred the real negation, so for us, the future lay in the lifestyle and comments of Arthur Craven, the boxer - the supposed nephew of Oscar Wilde - and the vitriolic producer of the Parisian based, Maintenant magazine, Vache (again) and Rimbaud at the moment he quit poetry. (Little did we know at the time that Breton criticised him for this evaluating his subsequent activities, like gunrunning, as dubious). Simply put, it was their negation of art that meant everything to us. We really responded with an ever-growing deep sympathy for the best of Cravan's comments like, "You must absolutely get through your head that art is for the bourgeois, and by bourgeois I mean: a monsieur without imagination"... and... "Soon you won't see anyone but artists in the street and the only thing you'll find no end of trouble in finding is a man" (Remembering this great comment by 1972, a comment was placed in a diary: "It's taken this long for "soon" to become reality". Thirty years after 1972, it was to have an even more astounding truth). We also really liked some of the early Surrealist experiments like the meeting at the relatively unknown church of St Julien de la Pauvre on the left bank of the Seine in Paris, followed by the early kind of practical psychic-automatism like drifts inherent in the Surrealist walks proceeding from a point based on where a pin had randomly been stuck into a map. We weren't so foolish, naive or headstrong as to not consider that some of these random drifts nearly pushed some of these protagonists into suicide. Then there were those supposedly brutal Surrealist slogans like; "leave your children in the woods set off on the roads" etc which we really got off on, even though we didn't take this exhortation at face value! We also admired some of the imaginative environmental projects of the Russian Constructivists around 1920, particularly Klebnikov's soup lakes and the proposed slow flying white on white squares schemes proposed by Malevich etc. Indeed, Icteric made a replica of Malevich's coffin that was exhibited in some exhibition some years later, which Jappe was to praise for its "excellent iconography" in the bibliography of his theoretical biography on Debord in 1993. We were interested in the concept of the factograph and bearing El Lissitsky in mind, it seemed like the starting point of an anti-literary presentation. Cinema wasn't spared either as we dismissed the entertainment industry, preferring – as previously stated - Dziga Vertov's films of the early 1920s and the first collaborations between Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali, particularly Le Chien Andalou and L'Age D'Or produced during the 1930s.We blindly accepted that cinema as provocation had come to an end at this point when rioting greeted the latter's first screening, although truth to tell, it was a riot instigated by enraged Catholics, and certainly wasn't a riot against the passive audience / performer relationship which was what we were aiming for. Nonetheless we were impressed and had anything like this happened since? We wanted to do likewise simply unaware of more recent and precise statements of the Lettrist anti-film particularly Howlings in Favour of De Sade which had provoked public outrage but we were only to learn about these events some three years later.

However, all this growing lucidity was jumbled up within Icteric together with a hotchpotch of modern art repeats, which Duchamp was to characterise around the same time as the "double-barrel effect", a point we noted at the time though we reacted with dismay when we heard Duchamp was making multiple editions of his old ready-mades for sale, no doubt aping Andy Warhol's activities living just down the street from him in lower Manhattan. We felt it was a sellout, which of course, it was. Though for all of us painting, sculpture, novels and poetry were dead, over and out, nonetheless some environmental constructions were deemed OK, those perhaps that were somewhat akin to artefacts that would have been more or less at home in those international Surrealist exhibitions of the 1930s and 40s. Not necessarily the most spectacularly weird artefacts but nutty things like the full coal sack hung from the ceiling of some art gallery. We particularly liked the fact that the sack accidentally bust open and all its mucky contents were scattered over the floor. Maybe our special liking for the latter had something to do with the Icteric collective living in Newcastle and the presence of the northeast miners - who's to say? More importantly, within a year or two we were also to realise the futility of this notion of 'new' objet d'art praxis, the more we developed a critique of the commodity per se.

Icteric produced anti-sociological questionnaires, some of which were Surrealist repeats. "Why not commit suicide" was one of them and people were invited to fill these questionnaires in. The responses were arid and, perhaps not surprisingly, even worse than a disappointed Breton had hoped for decades earlier. We had no budding Artaud around replying to the original questionnaire like: "I am unhappy like a man who has lost the best part of himself.....who has committed suicide already". But did we want a budding Artaud when we knew of individuals – even in this relatively optimistic period – who'd had enough of the total shit and slashed their wrists in the bath anyway? We shuddered and with no answers giving any signs of a eureka moment we concentrated on producing stickers again tending to be repetitious of the past such as "Surrealism Is The Communism of Genius" but seeing this was Newcastle in the mid 1960s and not Paris in the 1930s it really wasn't going to make much headway.

Happenings, or rather at least some of them, were embraced although that didn't stop us taking the piss out of the hip American's Merce Cunningham's performance art and his supposed "free expression" dancers in some London venue (much to the annoyance of some of the audience particularly when hearing Yorkshire accents – confirming perhaps the loutishness - of the provocateurs?) and then a little while later, putting on a nonsensical piano rendition performed by Trevor Winkfield mocking John Cage and taking delight in the fact that some idiots took it seriously. In fact we were mocking ourselves too as we had taken Cage and Cornelius Cardew seriously just a year previously and had even interviewed Cage for Icteric! Silence and the transcendence of music did really impact upon us, even though we still left wondering about the process of its overcoming – and still are for that matter. Little did we realise how all half-negation can be capitalized – turned into its opposite - and how avant-garde sounds a la John Cage morphed into the music of Ennio Morricone as backdrop to the Spaghetti Westerns, that last gasp necessary ingredient that helped give the zing to the last consequent Westerns. We read with interest about the auto-destructive activities of Metzger and Latham's book burnings disliking the fact that the latter were turned into objet d'arte to be hung on walls. We also pointed out – initially to everybody's disbelief- that these acts of auto-destruction influenced The Who (the performance ritual of guitar smashing) smashing up your instruments as a substitute for a real smashing up. Being clued in, we also quoted Tzara's dictum from a half century ago "musicians smash your instruments, let blind men take the stage". As if to give a point to this we rather pointlessly repeated Tzara's ROAR which just meant inviting everybody you could to turn up in a Newcastle city car park and ROAR your head off. Maybe a couple of 100 or so did just that. Jean Jacques Lebel, the French happener, around the same time wrote a long article for Icteric which though tending to extol his happening nonsense at the time was somewhat lucid about Artaud and very anti-police. Unbeknown to us, about the same time Don Smith and Rene Vienet, after a night's drinking, went round to his apartment and thoroughly slagged him off for his confusions about art and general lack of coherent critique. Jean Jacques just stood there – more or less apologetically. Although years later Don felt rather bad about this, it obviously had a good effect on Jean Jacques, as he rapidly then developed a much more lucid and subversive take on society and of course was one of the French contingent who were to tear down the fences at the Isle of Wight pop festival in 1971. It would seem therefore that a bald attack could certainly be good at times in pulling people across who are hovering on the brink in any case. A final comment upon Icteric's contents reveals a complete though for the time, well-intentioned muddle. A quasi-scientific document on butterfly oddities and recollections of rapturous displays of these delightful insects was also published and in terms of the detritus of modernism, was one of the better things in the magazines. The same might be said of a text on the amazing activities of slugs, which fell between a kind of factograph and natural science. The fact is though if Icteric had appeared 20 years later it would have been instantly capitalised by the right wing Saatchi Brothers end of culture emporium; however we were much more authentic heading completely in the opposite direction.

We were also coming from jazz, the other corner-stone of our end of culture orientation, particularly a passion for be-bop and its aftermath. However, even on this front we were becoming perplexed. Something was happening to jazz – it was beginning to fall apart and as much as we really desired to go along with John Coltrane's final atonal-like developments we were flummoxed albeit, trying to pretend we weren't. We were in fact beginning to relate the trajectory of jazz to the crises besetting the totality of modern art.

As if to underline this in an Ornette Coleman/Don Cherry concert in Newcastle's then prestigious City Hall in 1966 we clambered on the stage and put up ICTERIC in big letters behind the performers. Interestingly, nobody objected and the jazzmen showed no interest whatsoever. Truth to tell, by then, we felt our statement (our advertisement perhaps?) was better than the free form jazz itself simply because we knew we'd become engaged on a free form quest ourselves perhaps far more searching than the end of free form jazz itself which we also dimly recognized was kind of heading in the same direction though without the same clarity. (Later, we equated the ghetto uprisings in the United States as its real creative outcome having surpassed the musical form).

Moreover only three years previously a bunch of us in Newcastle had sat in awe in front of John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones, opened mouth at its transcendental brilliance knowing full well we were listening to something fantastic though even then – with a kind of premonition and a sad feeling in the gut – knowing somehow it wasn't going to be repeated because real history was beginning to say something far more pertinent and which the last days of jazz was also straining to discover. (How one can have sense of such things in the offing perhaps we'll never know). There was though a very enjoyable conclusion to this earlier moment. We and our friends – as per usual – sat through Coltrane's rendition of God Save the Queen which was then an obligatory formality all entertainment paid lip service to. One of us, David Young, loudly proclaimed to the stage and audience alike: "that it was the best God Save the Queen" he'd ever sat through.

The times were a'changing fast and the activities around Icteric were more and more moving towards total subversion. In no way could the group hold together and tensions within became palpable the more that risks were taken. In any case the group even when playing with the art/anti-art dichotomy had provoked outright hostility from the cultural establishment in Newcastle who were so conservatively brain-dead they couldn't even see where their own cultural future lay. Instead of intelligently patronizing or co-opting or even simply realising there was nothing overtly anti the system here (it was too confused for that) they came down upon it forcibly and stupidly - none so much when an article was published in a rag called The Northerner in 1966. It's perhaps worth quoting a few extracts from it......

"It was becoming increasingly obvious to a few people that there was no longer any valid reason to make sculpture or paintings. Looking at the current art magazines revealed a uniform dullness: nothing seemed to shine anywhere. The real was so much more interesting than the simulated and offered so many more possibilities" which was how it kicked off. The brash article was meant to be intentionally provocative, encompassing a kind of put-on blatant philistinism The opening sentence was followed by an attack on all art from Rembrandt, through Degas to Rodin in the spirit of Dada – a movement which was praised - along with the most subversive anti-art aspects of Surrealism and Russian Constructivism using ample quotes which ironically belied the 'philistinism': "Painting is a pharmaceutical product for idiots" (Francis Picabia) "art is nonsense" (Jacques Vache) and "the high images have fallen"(Andre Breton) etc.

"......... what we did as a group (Icteric) was merely to recognise this and to notice that in the last 25 years there has been a shabby attempt at restoration. After the rejection of aesthetics by Constructivism and Surrealism, Cubism (which Picabia called a "cathedral of shit") was reaffirmed with Abstract Expressionism......................................"

"What artists do now is merely capitalise on a stage in development and not carry it off one quarter as well. For instance, Neo-Dada which is supposed to relate to Dada when it's patently obvious that, say, a painter like Roy Lichtenstein relates more to Matisse than say, Duchamp. There is the same saleable gallery product, the same lovely "well applied paint", and the same viewing distance from the "canvas" – even using a canvas! Incredibly conservative. Is Lichtenstein a salon painter – the 1960s Bougereau ? (a French academician in the late 19th century). Is he even as good?"

"Are not Rheinhardt's and Stella's paintings about the death of painting? Painting about Malevich's "deserts of vast eternity"? As Nietzsche said: "The desert grows woe to him that bears the desert unto himself". Malevich rejected the love of the desert and ended by making Suprematist designs for his coffin. Will Stella do likewise? It is distressing to see pictures that were done in an iconoclastic spirit now interpreted as how to make pictures."

"...If all there is in front of us is a future of style, style, style, we must still attempt to recreate this (fundamental fury) that motivated Surrealism, Dada and Constructivism – and that re-creation must not be a style neither. Perhaps we can start by burying Surrealism, Dada and Constructivism, by recognising that they were in turn second class revolutionary movements".

In a way this was all very pointed stuff for the ignorant times of the mid-1960s and, moreover, in a very backward country in comparison to France and though working in the dark without knowledge of the International Lettrists or Situationists, nonetheless we were on the right path towards liberation, preparing the ground, readying us as it were to hear and inwardly digest the more lucid grasp which had been taking place elsewhere, even though the same message was also not at all well known in its place of birth. In saying this though, this short text on Icteric was finally confused and inconsistent and these passages quoted above were the best parts.

Nevertheless, as previously mentioned, this brief piece of propaganda created a furore among Newcastle's cultural establishment. Some even called for legal sanctions particularly as it had come on the heels of a declamation proclaiming support for the floods in the Italian city of Florence in 1966, when the river Arno burst its banks and had devastated (or for us had "transformed") the art treasures of that Renaissance city. No one came to our support and there was a loud silence from those - to be oh so famous - Tyneside Poets emanating from the somewhat avant-gardism of Basil Bunting's writings – around Tom Picard and the Morden Tower Collective who'd proudly brought Allen Ginsberg to the cold Newcastle nights. They also really didn't like that assault on poetry. How dare we when surrounded by philistinism and straights in any case! In return we thought they were bollocks without a critique! Looking back perhaps one could say that such things were a kind of crude, even vulgar, though necessary provocation of traditional artistic values. Nowadays though, when we survive in a situation where the nihilism of post modernism in its bland reinterpretation cum ultra-commodification mania encompassing memories, wilfully trashing these self same Renaissance objets d'art and where "higher values" are seamlessly flattened out in the pure value of money to be made from anything and everything, our support for anti-aesthetic Arno floods simply wouldn't have the same meaningful impact where today everything becomes an equivalent and Damien Hirst is the aesthetic equal of Michelangelo, etc.

We were cutting through crap as well as floundering. We were real and very authentic at the same time as the media – in a general sense – was beginning to take us. Maybe here it's best to quote from a diary jotting of 1972 as it also recounts something of which we were feeling at the time. "The overt recuperation of the Happening though was already well underway as it headed towards the mainstream as portrayed in - HELP - the first film by the Beatles. They also laughed at Neo-Dada art objects - wire sculptures etc. New media techniques of montage and quick splicing were developed as a form of hip youth cum-class-aggression against an ossified English ruling elite – but all set firmly within the on-going capitalist order." At the same time, around 1966, re-reading Harold Rosenberg's, The Tradition of the New - a book mainly about American Abstract Expressionism - suddenly the best of his comments came into focus as we noted an undertow which Rosenberg didn't dare clearly express. This implied that The Tradition of the New was better than the art commodities described – in particular beginning to note that Neo-Dadaist products were, "the relics of subversion" nothing more than "a ritualised vanguardism". This was just what we wanted to hear though by then we had acquired the wit to distance ourselves from his ultimately laudatory appraisal of Abstract Expressionism. A little later, in the same diary – looking at it again after all these years (!) - there follows something else and which still doesn't make complete sense – though getting somewhere: " The gestural, post abstract expressionist activity, wasn't enough without a better comprehension of the breakdown of everyday life. Taken as one-dimensional, post artistic, it also couldn't immediately comprehend the sheer totality of present day nihilism which does demand a greater comprehension of the vacuity at the heart of work, sex, personal relationships and the family, as well as the mirage of all important consumer identifications".

Around this time, Ron Hunt arranged an exhibition in Newcastle called Descent into the Street which despite the contradiction between the title and the situation – street and art gallery - and which we were aware of, clarified things further for us as it was a compilation of past acts in the first 40 or so years of the 20th century where art was pushed historically behind us, preparing the way for a greater general, communal creativity. It contained pointers towards the negation and supercession of art, although we were still fuzzy about where the path of supercession lay. In a sense the exhibition was the explanation of that history, if a little confused at times like bringing in examples of Maoist calisthenics etc. A little later Ron heard about the activities (from some marginal art magazine) of Black Mask in New York who'd made an intervention at some cultural meeting in a plush art gallery shouting "burn the museums baby", "art is dead", "Museum closed" etc. Exhilarated, he told us and none too soon, as we were all in trouble! One of us (Johnny Myers) had just padlocked and chained up the entrance to the university art school preventing any student or teacher from entering and on which was placed a notice in big black letters: "Art School Closed Forever". Moreover, just before that, he'd sprinkled gunpowder in a long trail down the interior steps and through the corridors of the sculpture school and was going to light it before getting stopped by horrified students who grassed him up. Soon letters were sent out to New York and we got replies immediately: "brothers/sisters come and join us"! So two of us (Dave Wise and Anne Ryder) went from Newcastle To New York and in the summer of 1967 engaged in some of the activities of Black Mask2 (one which resulted in being held up by the police at an H. Rap Brown meeting) and / or simply enjoying their company and writing one or two things, particularly a completely OTT bloodthirsty manifesto on which was placed the names of some of those who'd gathered around the now defunct Icteric. Having by then heard of the Situationists in New York, Ben Morea gave us the personal addresses and telephone numbers of those individuals who resided in London whom we duly contacted on our return to England.

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The following paragraphs and much later In the Hidden History of King Mob also relate to Newcastle.

There was much overlap between on-going activity in London and what was happening in Newcastle. At this point, it's probably worth going into a few details about subsequent events in Newcastle simply because nobody has done so and some of what took place was quite remarkable. The Icteric period had waned and a more direct response was called for. After "closing the Art School forever", Johnny Myers had erupted in a meeting of leftists against the Vietnam war shouting out, "We've got to make a Ho Chi Minh Trail out of Northumberland St" (the main drag in Newcastle). It wasn't that the guy was a leftist; he merely wanted to experience a crazy and exhilarating mayhem of unexpected eruption down the city's main thoroughfare. True, in his shouting it would have been better if Johnny had been more ironic about references to Ho Chi Minh, perhaps bringing in something of Bunuel's L'Age D'Or, as that was his intended effect. It never materialised as a mass event but a little later, on a hot sunny midday, Johnny took all his clothes off and walked down Northumberland St. He was arrested, banged up in Durham jail and later sectioned.

In response to this new mood, by 1967 many of us were quite willing to throw away many treasured possessions like art books, even ones you regularly looked at like Goya's etchings, jazz records – even a revered collection of Charlie Parker among which was Bird Symbols, basic craftsman's tools etc. It was a case of giving them to anybody who might want them. It was an attitude of "let everything slip from your grasp" and a slogan from the Peasants' millennium which possibly might smell of private property. It was however, taking place before a general historical time had been seized when it would be possible for everybody to let go of commodities precisely because commodity relations, the wages system and money would be in the process of self-liquidation. However, coming out with such common sense objections at the time wouldn't have met with much of a response as truly a force was rising within us and within so many other dispersed and disparate individuals that it was impossible to resist. We knew we were calling the shots and things must crumble before us...

First though it's worth making a few points here about that process which ultimately leads towards the abolition of money. In the late 19th century and some of the early years of the 20th century, it was reasonably common among a minority of workers, perhaps as a naive afterthought, to nod in the direction of the abolition of wage labour. Eventually, it was inscribed on some of the logos of the various union outfits (e.g. the National Union of Railwaymen and in the statutes of say, the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, etc.). That didn't mean the object was pursued – quite to the contrary - but it had to be mentioned occasionally as a kind of litany. If anything most of the impetus went into a form of nationalisation, whereby many things would then become free particularly bus and train travel and the health services. Many millions of workers in Britain around the time of the second inter-Imperialist world war subscribed to these illusions about nationalisation, so in that sense the notion of a world free from monetary exchange remained a powerful living force, if a very misguided one on how it could be achieved. After twenty years of nationalisation by the mid-1960s, most people knew this hadn't worked out they way the scriptures had suggested cynically shrugging off the hopes they might have had in following such a path, though such a lacunae though, almost like nature, abhorred a vacuum. As the shades of darkness fell, the owl of Minerva took another course as it again flew towards a moneyless future. The momentum transposed itself as it became more personal though nonetheless still collective at the same time often presenting itself as just who was into money and who wasn't. Of course the latter individuals were really rated! If you'd come from the well-off, it was a matter of spending money generously on others and not saving it, or else using it to fund projects. Essentially just get rid of! On a more general level there was the street hippy lingo directed against "bread heads" within their own ranks, which was powerful and scathing. Though the abolition of money and wage labour wasn't proclaimed as such as a revolutionary banner, it was palpably there in the atmosphere. Some individuals even refused to touch money for a number of years. Disdaining to sign on the dole, remarkably, they often succeeded. Many people had respect for them and though always in a tiny minority they nonetheless were admired for their ideological persistence, even though the emphasis here has to be placed on ideological and in that sense not too dissimilar to the old slogans. All of this had virtually disappeared by the mid-1970s merely lingering on here and there. A true monetary hell then set in when the only need and even eternal verity in society became money itself. True we all know about this but we didn't sufficiently grasp just how out of kilter this 'new' mood was with the changing but incessant undertow of the previous 130 years or so. Truly, a concerted reaction was trying harder than ever to abolish the becoming of history. Today, we have the abolition of money alright but in the sense of vast teeming millions on the outskirts of Mexico Cities everywhere plunged into the capitalist nightmare of commodity relations without a peso ever passing through their hands. Certainly, we do need more perceptive, in depth, theorizing about the abolition of money – of just how do we get from the here and now of money to the there of the post money economy where value in all its implications has been abolished?

Other things weren't so dramatic but there was a drift here too. The Alfred Street theatre project was set up by Ron Hunt and some friends (shades of Alfred Jarry?) together with the paraphernalia of exaggerated costumes that had characterised this form from Futurism through Dada to the days of agit prop after the Russian Revolution in 1917. The Alfred Street theatre figured fairly prominently in a quite ferocious on-going rent strike in Elswick, a run down suburb flanking river bank heavy industry in the west end of Newcastle which later, in 1992 became the focus of bitter rioting between youths and police. The Alfred Street theatre like all other street theatre didn't leave the terrain of art behind nor did it encapsulate a much more lucid trajectory – the shock tactic – inherited from the best traditions of modern art. Even though taking place in the streets with non professional actors, it relied upon the passive spectator / performer dichotomy - a dichotomy that had to be vanquished. Later in the 1970s, a film company, Z Films, based in Newcastle and following on from this somewhat Meyerhold axis produced some docu-fiction social realist films with a mixture of actors and non-actors on aspects of Tyneside life (Launch etc) which were completely without any consequence. Ron Hunt though in the late 1960s was strung out between street theatre and active intervention. He somehow acquired a copy of a super 8 home movie of the Motherfuckers garbage for garbage protest when, during a New York street cleaners' strike, they collected together rubbish from the streets of the Lower East Side and dumped it on the high culture Rockefeller Plaza. Ron really liked this intervention. It was certainly one of the best actions of the Motherfuckers and considerably more to the point than their super-militant histrionics which always invited jail and a far too arbitrary media attention which they hoped would produce a copy-cat effect or would add recruits to their small but fancied, Durutti-like, guerrilla image.

Some of the same people though who were engaged with Alfred Street theatre also simultaneously took part in some excellent interventions. A Surrealist weekend conference with various speakers held in Durham during the heady year of 1968 was wrecked. One of us pissed all over the stage at the same time wildly proclaiming to a 220 plus audience the failures of Surrealism. Obviously the harangue relied heavily on Situationist critique. In response, Patrick Hughes, the Surrealist painter, exploded in outrage, later claiming we'd destroyed the Surrealist movement in Britain. If only! A few years later and Patrick Hughes continued on his way, only this time via a TV series that was painful for its dull conformity and no different from the typical English Surrealist product found regularly in the cultural market place from the 1930s onwards. Ron Hunt objected to this disruption saying you had to give people the chance of finding out about Surrealism, particularly as now, in the shape of the magazine, Transformation a greater emphasis was being placed on its revolutionary kernel. OK but the mag only went as far as praising Cohn-Bendit ("Cohn-Bendit we need you here"), neglecting any deeper critique and was retarded in comparison to Maurice Brinton's fairly commendable effort for Solidarity in reviving the ultra-leftist critique. In any case, as it transpired even this emphasis on the revolutionary kernel of Surrealism in England would be rapidly abandoned.

Surrealism in these islands had always been a very tepid affair, eschewing the real nitty-gritty of the movement – the disruptions, (the Saint Pol Roux banquet et al) the manifestoes, the wild experiment - despite the fact that Surrealism even in France always tended to re-instate art after engaging in provocative acts. Under the conservative guidance of Roland Penrose, Surrealism in England remained a precious arty movement producing nothing significant. It never remotely broke the hold of a dominating artistic culture powered essentially by an Eng Lit ideology firmly cast within a long gone and once glorious past which could never be repeated. It never questioned the boundaries of art and its politics never made any imaginative leap, basically inclining towards leftist social democratic and Communist party sympathies. They stood on the same platform as Clement Atlee, the future post second world war, Labour Party PM extolling Picasso's Guernica and Ceri Richard's Surrealist poster campaign supporting the Spanish revolution that never went beyond a No Pasaran popular front stance. Surrealism in England was, unfortunately, merely a means of displaying a wearisome juxtaposition of images – coming from some kind of delving into the subconscious – in order to change a little the subject matter of traditional and outmoded categories like painting, sculpture, novels and poetry. It tended to reinforce a tradition of benign whimsy which was all too common, basically unable to shock anything apart from some right wing daily newspapers which even then, were avidly looking for copy. In a way, Surrealism made no impact on Britain precisely because it was already its greatest success story. We mean by this, that cornball and popular concept which sees Surrealism as really nothing more than placing disparate objects side by side to create some kind of frisson, a technique which was about to be taken up with increasing alacrity by advertising. Nowadays, these same techniques are accelerating ever faster with computer generated digitalised images. Although English Surrealists met and often struck up on-going friendships with some of the best French Surrealists, you are constantly amazed at how little – if any – of the real meat of Surrealist drift rubbed off on them. Some, like Nancy Cunard, even had close personal and sexual relationships. What on earth did they talk about – merely dreams and art? Surely though it proves the profound grip reaction in England had over even its more tempestuous personalities? Even that slightly more interesting part of English Surrealism – say the collaboration between the psychoanalyst Grace Pailthorpe and the painter, Rueben Mednikoff – lent itself towards the reformist impulse at the Portman Clinic and that notion of civilising the criminal or the insane through changed therapy. It certainly turned out to be instrumental in the now ubiquitous art therapy treatment cum tranquilizers which now fills you with so many predictable groans. Vaneigem's comment in his book on Surrealism is pertinent, "The contempt which the Surrealists heaped on torturers in white coats did not inoculate them against a temptation to co-opt attitudes usually treated clinically for purely artistic purposes". In fact, John Lyle launched the 1960s English Surrealist magazine Transformation with an exhibition of the "art" of the mad in an Exeter art gallery. For those later who were to fall foul of the psychiatric police and who'd developed a critique of art to be forced to paint and draw in the loony bin was quite an insult!

Like English Surrealism, English whimsy – of which it was a part – could also never embrace revolutionary violence against culture, ossified rituals, or some aspects of politics like Surrealism had done in France. In England it tended to fit in too neatly with its well-known eccentric image – e.g. the "wild nature crank" picked out for vicious ridicule in Blast – the Vorticist paper around 1913. Although English absurdity and whimsy had brought forth very penetrating and remarkable things, particularly in the late 19th century in the humour and profound fantasy of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, it rapidly lost its real cutting edge. Even so, both were liked by Queen Victoria who wasn't quite as reactionary as one may think having also once asked a lady in waiting if she could point out Karl Marx to her in some crowded theatre! However it could be said the French surrealists liked Lewis Carrol precisely because it went against the stifling dominant though limited 'rationalism' of post-1789 French ideology, but in England it conformed well with the dominant anti-rationalism of the ruling ideology. Since then, the same vein has kept resurfacing in more and more popular forms from the Goons radio shows to the Monty Python prime time TV shows. Indeed, the leftover English Surrealists in the 1950s commented – perhaps with a certain jealousy upon the mass appeal of the Goons – obviously impressed and wanting similar fame themselves. On a broader level, English Surrealism was more an expression of a current which produced those Heath Robinson whimsical sketches of fantastic machines than any pushing through of artistic negation like happened with the origins of Surrealism in France. At a later date, towards the end of the 1960s, Monty Python was able to divert and spectacularise the serious and subversive intent behind a revitalised and more all-rounded concept of play as a weapon against capitalism and the state into an up-dated comic relief fit for purpose and peak TV viewing times. It was clever recuperation. For all its pitching at English foibles – the piss takes on the upper class accent, the army (often the breeding ground for mad cap pranks anyway and where The Goons were spawned) etc, English absurdity always ends up supporting the status quo and the revolutionary transformation of everyday life is the last thing within its ken. In a sense though some of the British trad jazz scene had prepared the opening via the blues singer George Melly plus the mass market, surrealist packaging of Dick Lester's films. No wonder Melly, Spike Milligan and John Lennon have been called; "the unofficial trinity of British surrealism".

More than this though -and the real point - which should have been emphasised in the Durham intervention against Surrealism was that the annals of English Surrealism in the 1930s reads like a litany of almost everybody who was to become part of the mainstay of the cultural establishment by the late 1960s – from Henry Moore, to (Sir) Herbert Read, to William Coldstream etc. Those, who like Read, became academic cultural critics added nothing of value even though in the 1930s Read's motto had been: "To hell with culture". It's the usual familiar tale of modern times. Latter-day Surrealist influenced individuals in France who became academics like Georges Bataille and Henri Lefebvre really did contribute something in that ever widening momentum of a theory of negative becoming more total in scope. Where would the notion of potlatch be without Bataille; a notion emphasising riotous, festive destruction and where would the anti-specialism of everyday life – the terrain of total revolution - be without Lefebvre? Instead, we had Herbert Read's The Meaning of Art. A joke indeed if the implications weren't to be so dismal. It meant in this climate always coming up against a solid brick wall of incomprehension. Nothing much has changed since in that respect.........If only some of this had been communicated in a more enduring form at Durham. Interestingly, a guy called Anthony Earnshaw tried to be conciliatory during the bust-up. Indeed we still feel some affection towards him because he was a misfit not working at the time in some cultural capacity, but variously employed as crane driver, engineering fitter and lathe turner. He'd evolved his own kind of Surrealist walks in West Yorkshire boarding trains, descending at will and roaming thus for hours. Alas, only to abandon his negativity as slowly but surely he became an Art School lecturer allowing him finally to devote himself full time to art.

Other interventions took place. At the time there was this spate of right wing lecturers who seemed to enjoy giving talks at various university venues throughout the country knowing they were going to get disrupted by left wing Dave Sparts (a Private Eye, lock–jawed, spoof Trotskyist invention) who were going to call them racist, anti-working class etc, which of course they were but that was hardly the real point. In Newcastle, the Sparts were shoved out of the heckling limelight against Patrick Wall by a vociferous cabal hollering "beans, beans, beans" at the top of their voices, (see previous comments earlier on this intervention). In short, it was a playful detourning of an advertising jingle; if you like, it was nonsense for nonsense and a rather more appropriate way of dealing with right wing ideologues. At least it was enjoyable and a rather more infectious way of sparking off the beginnings of some real communication.

Perhaps the most significant intervention though was that against The Mothers of Invention at the City Hall, Newcastle when a bunch of protagonists got up from the audience and shouted "Up against the wall Mothers" to which Frank Zappa replied, "Surely you mean Up Against the Wall Motherfucker". The response was quickly shouted back, "No, no, no, we mean up against the wall, Mothers". Both big audience and performing band were perplexed and neither knew what was going on, and what exactly was being said in this intervention? There was also the in-joke side too, despite the seriousness of intent. Just who in Newcastle City Hall in this relatively out of the way place, in this, if you like, brusquely un-hip town in the boondocks would have heard of the Motherfuckers apart from Frank Zappa, his band and the protagonists? Most likely nobody. Those who stood up and shouted from the audience knew Zappa was one of the hippest dudes of the pop spectacle and "Up against the wall, Mothers" would probably fall on the audiences deaf, unknowing ears. They were right. Zappa did, after all, have some notion of a crazy negation if probably not much more. Remember, through his commercial power and influence, Zappa was able to fix it so that Wild Man Fisher, the very amusing paranoid schizophrenic anti-music musician who couldn't play a note on that guitar permanently glued to his hand, was given a recording session. Some of this complexity could have been suggested in a leaflet. Often there's nothing like some simple, packed with fact explanation to help the bigger picture on its way, and the leaflet could have been scattered throughout the audience in the old time-honoured way. Explanations like this are needed also because people otherwise are left in the dark, most likely considering the protagonists to be nothing more than malcontents with some personal grief against a particular celebrity or pop group. This just wasn't the case, but a little later it was just such damaged responses which were to become more common, spilling over into some kind of psychotic identification like Mark Chapman's killing of John Lennon in New York City in 1980. In fact as early as 1972, a "yob" - according to the media - called Billy Howells really hurt Zappa when he was performing at the Finsbury Park Empire in London. The alternative / libertarian leftist press still very active at that time, never commented upon the event, even though Howells got six months in jail. The attack wasn't probably too enlightened but some kind of explanation might have been revealing. You never know it might have contrasted nicely with a coherent leaflet from the Newcastle intervention and given it an extra dimension in terms of lucid contrast. Though most people don't understand such leaflets, one or two do and seeding starts from there and maybe in this dry desert one day, after rain, flowers will bloom. Moreover, such subversive challenges have to be clearly delineated – simply so they don't get confused with the prevalent, often eroto-maniacal, obsessive assaults on stars - in that combination of adoration-cum-hate. For sure, the latter maybe demonstrates some damaged kind of praxis, but it lacks the necessary ingredient of real enlightenment.

Obviously what was basically being contested here, like in other nonsense interventions, was the passive audience / performer relationship particularly as the pop concerts in the 1960s were moving on from club venue and City Halls to the giant pop festival and were in this respect, spectacles of gigantic reification we often compared with Chinese Maoist calisthenics. Some of us at the time even felt them to be some what akin to fundamentalist religious revivalist meetings in their role as pacification of rebel activity. Whilst undoubtedly true, it also did mean that we'd unwittingly blocked our ears to the last moments of great popular music from the Doobie Brothers to the sheer magnificence of Jimi Hendrix, who as a musician trying to escape the boundaries of music was quite the equal of Charlie Parker, Bud Powell or Django Rheinhardt.

A little later though and we had no real simpatico with the trouble which began to erupt at the huge rock festivals. Sure we thought it was OK, but recognised that it failed to address the real problem of spectacular separation. Though welcoming the tearing down of security fences at the Isle of Wight rock festival, we had serious reservations knowing that even if they made the concert a completely free event, the formal focus, the essential reification, had to be the real core of contestation which the Zappa intervention had hit fair and square. The pop musicians were meant to disintegrate, to commit suicide, to end the music. In essence we preferred that photo from an American Life mag from the riots in Detroit in 1967 where a black guy with his back to the camera is seen walking out of a looted store carrying a double bass. Scribbled underneath, Debord had commented, "Negro carrying a musical instrument after assassinating Mozart".

To be sure, the transcendence of art was particularly central to the developing revolutionary critique in Newcastle and had always been given a sharp focus. However a couple of years later and a lot of hard headed and by then excellent historical knowledge about its unfolding trajectory, particularly throughout the 20th century, had been added as further 'censored' pieces of the jig saw were revealed. The university art school became a beacon of anti-art ferment in response to this call to arms coming from the outside. Finally, sometime during early 1969 persons unknown firebombed part of the art school at night and most of the Art History dept was gutted. It took some time for firefighters to put out the blaze. Although Newcastle university art school never experienced the sit-ins like Guildford or Hornsey College of Art in London, it did more than partake in the most radical critiques-in-action; in fact it was way in front of everybody. In short and to put it bluntly, why occupy a place making mealy-mouthed reformist demands about different course content or inter-disciplinary studies – which always produces some variant of the same old crap – when you can burn the place down? Though nobody was ever arrested for this exemplary act, we were basically accused of being the instigators. To this of course we still proudly plead guilty! Perhaps more importantly a greater decision had been forcibly imposed on us because of this action, meaning there was now little hope of crawling back into safety shot employment on the fringes of the art scene (i.e. art academia) or even to become if you like, "independent scholars." But it went further than that; the Special Branch had names and blacklists threatened and this didn't just concern employment of a professional nature. One of us was even denied employment cleaning out blast furnaces at a steel mill in Rowley Regis in the west Midlands 'Black Country', the manager seconded for hiring new hands saying he'd received a report listing trouble making at the London School of Economics! It was no more than what many experienced at the time as both the blacklists and the official denial of their existence mushroomed. As the years went by, you could have groveled to the powers that be and asked for forgiveness - as many did – but think of the self-inflicted humiliation! In any case, you'd never be really forgiven so why give them the pleasure of capitulation in the first place? We have only to recount the case on a more spectacular level of the Hornsey College of Art agitator, Kim Howells, himself influenced by King Mob, who cravenly some years later crawled up the Labour party hierarchy, became a Welsh MP and an ardent adherent of Blairism and free market ideologies yet got nowhere as his past continued to haunt him through periodic tabloid exposure. In his present position as Minister of Culture, Howells plays on his provocative past though by now his critique has lost all semblance of coherence and comes across like some cantankerous fuddy-duddy.

If we'd had any hesitancy as to where we were headed, there's nothing like the political police to finally focus negative theory clearly for you. As the radical German playwright, George Buchner said in the 1840s; "The Darmstadt police were my muses"! Any immediate hope of making any kind of living in the cultural /educational field had been sealed off in any immediate sense - a survival venue you had messed around with, now and again, on a desultory few hours a week basis. Rarely though are things ever fixed immutably like that. Finally though it was nothing to bleat about as you really didn't want their fuck-crazy, mind-abusing jobs compromising clear thought in any case. For sure you could have been obsequious but unless you were prepared to eat shit, denying everything you'd experienced with the truth of capitulation ringing in your ears for ever more, then yes, baby, you were on the outside. If you'd done what was demanded, asked for forgiveness, ameliorated your words, scrambled your brain, then the world of lies and secure monetary compensation lay at your feet. There's always a choice to be made. Perhaps there was too much pride, perhaps past insults had been too much but there was finally some irreducible voice inside which said: NO.

What happened in Newcastle though sent shock waves throughout the city but like everywhere else where a revolutionary theory was posited, recuperation was its closest admirer. Two architectural students showed quite an interest only to use a few ill-digested ideas to update the crises in architecture as they cynically shaped a new architectural style leading up to the ghastly formal plagiarisms of post modernism. To be sure we'd applauded plagiarism , (Lautreamont's "Ideas improve, Plagiarism is necessary") but not in the sense of aesthetic additions and updating the role of architect! Their names were Nick Grimshaw and Terry Farrell and there's no need here to say more about these couple of twerps though Farrell subsequently was to receive a knighthood! Sufficient to point out that Farrell two decades later designed the monstrous new M15 secret service building in Vauxhall, London and Grimshaw designed the Eurostar terminal at Waterloo station. The mini plethora of cartoon hand-outs in Newcastle with new bubble-speak lines and captions also became a marketing idea for a new cartoon comic in the shape of VIS with its now well-known notorious characters and launching very lucrative careers for its illustrators and producers.

Again what is most interesting is something that's really unknown. Some aspects of the Situationist critique, particularly the provocative interventions captured the imaginative of young workers, particularly apprentices in the Tyneside shipyards. In the early 1970s, wildcat strikes mushroomed on the Tyne and the situation became barely controllable both for the bosses and union officials alike. Caught up with the notion of a "Strasbourg of the factories" then current at the time some rather more clued-in individuals decided to concentrate on the waterfront, but whether this had any effect or not isn't clear as general knowledge of their activities remain obscure. (What the "Strasbourg of the factories" refers to is the famous anti-student scandal at Strasbourg in 1966 which had such a massive impact in May '68 in France. In essence it was hoped there could be an even more profound follow-up with some kind of radical intervention in a big factory which would act as a beacon for others to follow) Somehow or another leaflets written, it seems, by Tyneside apprentices, appeared in wildcat strikes suggesting that foremen should be clobbered, local union officials ignored, and extolled wrecking machinery, suggesting furthermore that your lathe bench could be turned into a comfortable bed complete with extra tips on how to permanently dodge work while still getting paid etc. Indeed according to Dave Dunbar of the 1970s Infantile Disorders based in Leeds - though hailing from Newcastle - on one of the ships being built there, there was a secret section with beds where workers slept out of sight of the foremen. Such provocations finally resulted in Jimmy Murray, area boss of the Boilermakers or Transport union, exploding on local TyneTees television condemning "irresponsible Slituationlist (sic) leaflets" and waving a selection of them at the cameras whilst reading out choice phrases. Shock horror! In a way though, the Tyneside engineers had a long tradition of such libertarian subversion. Jack Common had come from their ranks and his account of The Right to Get Drunk Strike in about 1912 was in a similar vein. Common was a member of the Independent Labour Party - one of the best of the old organisations – and, which had quite a presence in County Durham around that time and among its members were many free-thinking libertarian workers who we remember with great affection from our childhood there. Initially Common had come from an engineering family background on the Tyne and was employed as a clerk. He was made redundant and experienced the harsh realities of the means tested dole in 1930s Newcastle. He then went south and ever after took more menial employment like unskilled assembly line work or caretaker jobs partially because he even felt some shame about white collar work he'd previously relied on for survival. Surprisingly, he even refused to become an engineering worker like his father.

In a way though revolt was returning to its roots. Had not Jack Common suggested in those excellent scraps of broad theoretical comment before he succumbed to the role of novelist that the best thing to do in a cinema was to go behind the curtains and look at the audience? Whilst not quite possessing the cutting edge of Vache's revolver pointed at the actors, it's not bad all the same. You cannot help but speculate that there was a subterranean continuity between notions like The Grand National Holiday (as the early form of the General Strike was once called on Tyneside), Jack Common and the events of the very early 1970s in the shipyards. It wasn't only the engineering apprentices but young miners from the west Durham coalfield who began to turn up at the broad, informal Solidarity/Situationist axis in Newcastle, no doubt attracted by the local publicity some of the interventions inevitably acquired and you wonder just what was this relationship between this and the thoughtful early writings of Dave Douglass, who was later, unfortunately, to become such a wooden anarcho-syndicalist and TV hogging demagogue? The concrete backdrop to this were the first shop floor led wildcat strikes beginning to break out in the nearby coalfield. Whatever. It was a fruitful pot-pourri of good old time and modern influences that was also marked by a heavy class bitterness. Miners would turn up in Newcastle on a Saturday night hoping to bed some radical middle-class young women and not averse to employing a bit of simplistic class demagoguery in order to achieve their ends. During 1969 we took a visit to the local Ashington Miners' Gala. It was a boiling hot day and Don Smith started shouting "revolution" over and over again. Responding to this and also shouting "revolution", Chris Gay jumped into the River Wansbeck where a number of young miners were already gambling in the water. Not at all put off by this - indeed kind of joining in – the lads playfully replied in their local pitmatic Geordie dialect which none of us 'outsiders' really understood, yet there was subliminal communication alright.

The bug of the social apartheid still dogs Jack Common in relation to George Orwell just like it does that other forgotten, brilliant engineer, Alfred Russell Wallace, the cofounder with Charles Darwin of natural selection. Although we critically commented upon Orwell in the late 1960s, the fact is, even those of us who'd hailed from Newcastle hadn't even heard of Jack Common. Colin Hutchinson, a guy around the Newcastle agitation, was the first to put together a selection of Common's critical writings in a well-produced booklet called Revolt in an Age of Plenty. Sure we'd made some acid comments about Orwell especially his dumb take on Surrealism though liking many of his essays and thoroughly respecting the excellent Homage to Catalunya, though noting his insistence on being termed a writer and his lack of comprehension regarding the decline of artistic form. As Don N Smith acutely said at the time it was just as well Orwell died when he did as his inadequacies would have meant he'd probably have ended up becoming a pathetic TV hack like Malcolm Muggeridge. If we'd known about Common in 1967-8 it would have been quite a revelation as his attempt to grasp the essence of rising modernity was far in advance of Orwell's and you can sense in some of his often convoluted expression that he's trying to get into shape a theory which was nigh on Situationist. Be that as it may, in passing we note their dissimilar deaths. Orwell died in a University College Hospital bed surrounded by so-called literary lions like Stephen Spender, Muggeridge, Anthony Powell and BBC journalists, Common died as a labourer on a building site in Newport Pagnell, Bucks.

Jack Common was a different kettle of fish as he defied categorisation and couldn't be fitted into some neat specialist place on the bookshelves. He wasn't a Surrealist nor was he a Social Realist, though both left some kind of mark upon him. If he had been a Social Realist, he would have been much more acceptable to the polyglot mix of the Establishment here particularly as social realism is acceptable to British leftist conservatism. Social realism was there well before the "Angry Young Men" writers, which the early Situationists derided in the mid to late 1950s precisely because they were writers and historically ignorant of the revolt against literary form (and which Jack Common had been more than vaguely aware of). Although social realism in the thirties had produced some haunting moments in the films say of Humphrey Jennings etc, as an increasingly denuded style, it was to remain a constant thereafter and to be much embraced by the new medium of television. In no way though did it disturb all those many time-honoured faceted and funded cultural roles beloved of the hierarchy here. Moreover, it was to serve as educator to all those aspiring cadres with high hopes of position in the new frontier posts of the state, whether as councillors, stress managers, social workers or even newly-fashioned crafty Leninists with their aspirations of leading the working classes. Social realism buttressed the emerging palliative concept of a basically PC community politics which nonetheless originally had its origins in the Empire pacification programmes of the old British Colonial Office. In Newcastle, it found an expression in "Z Films", a hip local outfit and previously mentioned, led by a cineaste creep called Murray Martin whose later claim to fame was a film based on the Meadow Well estate, which exploded in riot in the early 1990s. He tried to capitalise on the riot in order to further his career nationally though nothing really came of it. Moreover, the underlying slant of all these films - itself also indicative of social realism - is within a leftist social democratic framework with the state as enlightened facilitator. The state, the state, always the state!

In a sense Jack Common was the epitome and most clearly articulated expression of an open-minded probing which was not un-common on Tyneside and parts of Co Durham. This subversive tendency lurked behind a quite pervasive official cultural yearning it was plainly at odds with. Although it could be said Newcastle upon Tyne was an out of the way place the city nonetheless strived to achieve a major cultural image. City boss, T. Dan Smith in the 1960s banally wanted the city to be, "A Florence of the north". To even think you could build a "Florence" just like that and set aside from its essential historical time and place was a priceless piece of philistine and bureaucratic absurdity, though with the demise of that nonsense Newcastle was to achieve a massive post-modernist impact by ironically ditching its grandiose Renaissance project by recuperating that late 1960s life-enhancing experiment and more than embryonic subversion and turning it into its opposite. The city drew its sting forcing most of the instigators into exile, proceeding to pave the way for a bankrupt modernity by massively promoting 'end of culture' culture in the forms of gigantic displays from the sculptor Antony Gormley's moronic "Angel of the North" to the new waterfront Baltic Exchange Flour Mill, the veritable temple of Saatchi & Saatchi vacuity.

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Below: Photomontages by Stuart Wise (Newcastle, late 1960s) on the Surrealist suggestions for the transformation of Paris, "On the Irrational Embellishments of a City" in the 1933 issue Le surrealisme au service de la revolution.

These were interesting proposals for their time although today they have lost their cutting edge as we are seeing more banal approximations of these schemes in the process of construction seemingly everywhere whilst actual social and environmental conditions are in free-fall.

"Should one preserve, move, modify the following" (No 1) The statue of Jeanne D'Arc no longer riding horse but pig. (No 2) The Obelisk to be removed to the entrance of an Abbotoir where it will be held by a woman's immense gloved hand.

(No 3) The Arc de Triomphe to be turned into a toilet for both sexes. (No 4) Notre Dame. The towers to be replaced by an enormous glass cruet, one of the bottles filled with blood and the other with sperm. The building will become a sexual school for virgins.

(No 6) The Saint-Jacques Tower. / (No 7) / (No 8) Replace it by a factory chimney being climbed by a nude woman.

Written: 2003-4

For other articles on King Mob see the following:

A Hidden History of King Mob (Posters/Cartoons)

A Critical Hidden History of King Mob

On Georges Bataille:

On Bryan Ferry: "Ferry Across The Tyne"

On Ralph Rumney: Hidden Connections, Ruminations and Rambling Parentheses

Alex Trocchi's Hour Upon the Stage

BM BIS, BM BLOB, Riot and Post-Modernist Recuperation

Comparisons: From Mass Observation to King Mob

A Drift on Germaine Greer, Feminism and Modern-Day Shameless Ranterism

For Vicki: On What Happened at Selfridges in 1968

Nietzsche, Revolutionary Subversion and the Contemporary Attack on Music

New Introduction for a Spanish Book on Black Mask & the Motherfuckers

New Introduction to Spanish King Mob

Lost Ones Around King Mob

Land Art, Icteric and William Wordsworth

King Mob: Icteric & the Newcastle Experience from the early to late 1960s

New Afterword to The End of Music for La Felguera in Spain

THE ORIGINAL: The End of Music (1978)

• 1Libcom note: Ron Hunt's recollections of Icteric can be found here and here.
• 2Libcom note: more on this visit in Introduction for a book in Spanish on Black Mask & The Motherfuckers

Above: Moonrise by the Sea by Casper David Friedrich / GWF Hegel; re his profound theoretical critique of art

What we have here a series of notes written in an intentionally put-on academic style - though it is hoped with rather more edge - relating to English romanticism highlighted through a comparison with the different, more theoretical approach of German romanticism. It emphasises the sheer experimental revolt of poetic form inherent in the English experiment; an experiment that clearly pointed towards the transcendence of poetry. Although in Germany, Hegel provided a profound theoretical framework clearly pointing out abstractly that 'the arts were dying', in England that revolt was experienced in a more visceral, subjective way though no less profound. As a line of enquiry pointing to the final destruction and realisation of the historic endeavour alienated within art right up to the present day, these beginnings still remain an unwritten history cut short by the death of William Hazlitt in 1830 and lingering on somewhat in De Quincey only to be entirely extinguished in the Victorian era. This colossal reaction, though on the surface extensively modernised, is still powerfully present overwhelmed by the diktats of the Eng Lit pantheon with its vested interests in the immutability of form furiously dismissing any more accurate interpretation which would certainly point to something very different leading towards an entirely different world free of the ravages of capitalism. It is surprising that no aspiring young academic eager to challenge the petrified fossil of Eng Lit and maybe claiming a bit of notoriety in the process, hasn't risen to the occasion, even if the constraints of academia would require punches to be pulled. Nonetheless, like Writing Degree Zero fifty years ago in France, a kind of cat could be let out of the bag even if somewhat limping, as all this should have been said years ago in the immediate aftermath of the revolt of the late 1960s in these islands. It is still not too late to begin.

Recently (Jan/Feb 2006) there was a much praised TV series on romanticism put together by Peter Ackroyd, an academic who has written a few novels and at least one biography on a a major romantic figure in the shape of William Blake. Like his compatriot Richard Holmes who has studied the romantics more exclusively and who obviously has quite an influence on Ackroyd in emphasising the republican and social/political persuasion of the protagonists - hardly surprising seeing the TV survey often substituted the French revolution of 1789 with footage from May 1968 in France which both had experienced in their youth - Ackroyd fell well short of an all-rounded radical take on his subject. Instead of giving equal emphasis to the revolt of form at the heart of English romanticism he fell back finally on the usual Eng Lit homilies (yawn) about all the great poetry and art produced after initially pinpointing tantalising asides (e.g. how Coleridge and Wordsworth preferred their writings to remain anonymous at the first publication of the Lyrical Ballads in 1798) the significance of which he then could make no apposite comment on. Didn't such a gesture question the role of the artist deliberately disavowing any personality cult or special privilege and more than pointing to Lautreamont's later maxim: 'poetry must be made by all and not by one''

Nonetheless Ackroyd must be aware of such a drift as you couldn't fail but notice more than an echo of the English situationist group King Mob in the late 1960s. Some period piece re-enactment of Coleridge in a Quantocks' fishing village sees digitally imposed lines of romantic verse on the sea walls in the form of large, agitational slogans courtesy of some computer software programme. Hadn't King Mob originally done just this - though in raw spray paint - on the streets of Notting Hill in 1967/8? What King Mob had significantly failed to do or follow up with was a revolutionary critique of English romanticism emphasising the tendency towards formal dissolution at its very heart; a failure Ackroyd has merely compounded. It's hardly surprising that Ackroyd's conclusive comments at the end of his four part TV series were lame, even abysmal especially in seamlessly blending Byron's personality cult with the very lucrative media banalities of the modern day pop icon. In lightly skipping over the demonic impulse and outrage, which Byron let rip in his everyday life, the essential connection between such self-expression and the dissolution of artistic form is lost. It was a montaging or plagiarising which a few decades later was to find more coherent expression in Lautreamont's 'Songs of Maldoror'. Moreover, the plagiarism did not stop there as another Englishman had in the meantime made a further contribution in the shape of Charles Darwin. If you like Lautreamont blended the demonically hideous with the mutant transhuman having taken from Darwin not the origin of the species but where the species was horrifyingly going (see Fabre, Darwin, Dalton & 'DNA' Watson meet Lautreamont elsewhere on this website). It is an essential connection which all previous excellent comments and appraisals of Lautreamont from Andre Breton to Guy Debord have missed.

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In dredging up memories of the influence the French avant-garde of the 19th and early 20th century had on me (Lautremont, Rimbaud, Huysmans, Duchamp, Picabia, Vache, the Dadaists and the Surrealists like Andre Breton, Peret, Bataille etc) - and then my enthusiasm for the Russian avant-garde - I also was forced even farther back....

Somehow at the back of my mind there lingered the influence of the romantic tradition in this country. Over the years its revolutionary implications had become lost and it was this I have been struggling to bring to light. I needed to have some external frame of reference from which to judge it. And the only country that was remotely comparable was Germany. France was undergoing revolutionary upheaval and no literature of any consequence survives from that era. It had been left behind temporarily and only the image making of David survives and his designs for public spectacles enthroning the rule of reason and as a homage to Robespierre. Germany was not comparable to England economically because Germany was then merely an idea, the reality a pre-capitalist entity of squalid dukedoms and principalities, ruled by petty tyrants. England was on the verge of the greatest change since the Neolithic revolution of settled agriculture and city states, possessing freedoms (though not revolutionary freedom) that were the envy of the rest of the world. As a consequence the subversive potential of the arts was much reduced in scope and the gap between art and revolution much narrowed, with art struggling to find an ever diminishing role in the service of a more fundamental revolution that affected all pre-existing forms of art. Their place was increasingly occupied by passion, spontaneity, the revolutionary moment, confession and critique (see 'Confessions of an Opium Eater'; 'The Spirit of the Age'; parts of 'The Prelude'; 'In Defence of Poetry' in which poetry is viewed essentially as a progressive act and not merely the prerogative of metre and verse. Today we would say it is anything but the prerogative of metre and verse and unable to supersede art in its entirety has lapsed into meaningless acts or acting).

I can think of no more relevant words on Wordsworth than those of Hazlitt and which also applies to practically the whole of the English romantic movement from 1789 to the death of Shelley and Byron. He says in the 'Spirit of the Age' that Wordsworth's 'genius is a pure emanation of the Spirit of the Age ' it partakes of the revolutionary movement of the age: his muse is a levelling one, (he) tramples on the pride of art with greater pride. The Ode and Epode, the Strophe and anti Strophe, he laughs to scorn. The harp of Homer, the trump of Pindar and of Alcaeus, are still.' How different then is Schiller's historical approach and his efforts to categorize the forms of poetry by giving them a time and place within history, an approach that later on, Hegel was to greatly elaborate on. In 'Naive and Sentimental Poetry'. Schiller seeks, by historicising form, to establish the difference between ancient and modern poetry. Apart from anything else he sees it is man that has changed, losing over time a naturalness which henceforth it will be Schiller's appointed task to reclaim. (This historical categorisation of the arts, which Schiller initiates, may well have been prompted by the example of Linnaen systematics in the field of natural history. Rejecting this formalism, in which the part tends to separate from the whole, leads Goethe in the direction of evolution). Compared to Wordsworth's lack of sympathy for the arts, bordering on outright hostility, we cringe at Schiller's virtual deification of the Artist (see his poem 'Die Kunstlers') as would-be aesthetic supremo. And yet here is a much more concrete, fully worked out, critique of the growing division of labour than anything that can be found in Wordsworth or indeed the rest of the English romantics. Our lack of naturalness is solely due to that: 'They (the ancients) felt things naturally: we feel what is natural.(!) Our feeling for nature is like the longing of a sick man for health. (!) Nature makes the human race one with itself; art separates and divides.' However don't be deceived by this insightful bluster of radicalism: for Schiller it is only by being guided through the modern arts - nature 'as an idea and an object' - that man becomes whole again. In fact taken to its logical conclusion it does imply a certain transcendence and this possibility continually haunts, and runs away with Schiller, not least in his 'Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man'. Though inspired by Kant's 'Critique of Judgement' that appeared in 1787, and which is the most exhaustive examination of the aesthetic faculties residing in man and up to that point without precedent in human history in terms of its concentration and scope, it was the world shaking event two years later that was to concentrate Schiller's mind.( The 'Critique' is not an art history: one had to wait for Hegel for that who criticises Kant for not including 'becoming' amongst his categories of mind: had he been able to do so history would have played a much greater role in Kant's system). Appalled by the Terror, Schiller needed to settle accounts with it. And this he found in his rejection of the cultivation, or cult - of reason to the exclusion of all other faculties. Immoderate reason is responsible for the division of labour, the sensuous in alliance with a chastened reason, on the contrary, overcomes it. And its chief ally in this battle of the faculties, which puts an end to the distressing consequences of the division of labour, is the cultivation of the arts. Though unwittingly, Schiller was anticipating a response which henceforward was to become commonplace, particularly in the latter half of the 20th Century, where ever capitalist society breaks down: either cheap narcotics or a blitz of the arts or a combination of both and which nowadays is fundamental to the restoration of a threatened division of labour and workaday world, and, as it is now 'lived' the none-workaday world. In fact Schiller willy nilly both though his dramatic productions and grudging fealty to the German aristocratic courts of his time was dragged into becoming an artistic impresario in which stage craft and the mounting of public spectacle became uppermost. 150 years before the age of television he wanted a world of perfect illusion, the better to stage the illusion of freedom. (By appearing to be the consummation of drama in terms of staged illusion, TV is the denouement of drama, destroying once and for all its claims to be an agent of change and real liberation). Finally by assiduously recruiting the arts to his protest against the division of labour, Schiller's cause turns against him: he can be seen as founding an ever more complex, intertwined and, to capital, ever more necessary division of artistic labour whose ramifications are now so immense the problem is knowing where to begin - and end. Capital is now at a permanent stage of 'Homage to the Arts', the title of a dramatic, processional production written and staged by Schiller in honour of a royal marriage in Weimar in 1804.Today this permanent homage-to-the-arts economy is increasingly global in scale and is an aspect of globalisation that is never subjected to critique or, worse, even recognised, its grip is so pervasive and all powerful. Beyond that of making a lot of money, the purpose of this aesthetic economy is to pacify, distract and alienate a person ever further from their real, natural self and potential. Schiller never fully squared up to this dilemma though he was aware of it. To do so would have meant abandoning art and finding another path to the nature that modern man yearned to recover and that lay beyond the division of labour.

How different things are with Wordsworth who is at once less precise but more consequential and finally total in his approach to nature.The appreciation of nature is not to be prefaced by a prolonged tuition in artistic appreciation. Rather nature perpetually remonstrates with the arts and scorns them, needing no further adornment. However Schiller's critique of the division of labour is far more anchored in reality and history than Wordsworth. At this point Wordsworth's apriori nature really does get in the way of a more developed, historical understanding of the division of labour.The relationship which he postulates between man and nature is primal and no social arrangement will ever make good in the life of the individual the sense of loss an individual feels in the presence of nature when compared to how he or she responded to nature as a child. However in the 'still, sad music of humanity' which as an adult he hears in nature, it is the betrayal of his revolutionary ideals he is bemoaning. His abhorrence of the Terror throws him into the arms of nature but not before he is detained for a time by the certainties of mathematics, a compensation for that 'revolutionary reason' that has laid him low. But scientific reason is not good enough finally, because it cannot apprehend the higher reason, the 'very heaven' of youth and revolution, that was expressed in his thwarted revolutionary hopes. And so it is in the Lake District of his childhood he finds this reason once more, shorn ultimately of revolutionary rapture. And so he gives the lie to his own nature mysticism as expressed in his 'Intimations of Immortality' which rather suggests our most intense experience of nature had to be in the womb!

Wordsworth is the first anti poet/poet. He is just one among many and claims no special privileges. There are others, 'silent poets', like his brother who was lost at sea. Poetry is woven into the landscape of the Lake District and its peoples. It has no name: it just is. It spills over into everything. It is in a heap of hewn stones rather than in the 'outrage' of architectural madness it is destined to become. It is in the bower made of withered fern in which to lie down during summer in the company of sheep and from there through the 'open door place' (a hitherto unimaginable architectural term by the way) to gaze and gaze until the vision of what is, no dream can ever equal. And as for stone monuments what better than Ralph Jones, a giant made of stone, constructed as a lark by three lads on Great Howe at the foot of Thirlmere. Wordsworth would gladly have participated in its making because of its lack of pretence and the playful spirit in which it was conceived. This conception of poetry is absorbed in the everyday: it neither needs or knows of poetry in the customary sense.

Matters do not rest here. It is only logical Wordsworth should find encouragement and resolve not in the lives of the poets but in the lives of those who daily trod the fells. He would rather choose a leech gatherer as a guide than Virgil. This is the antithesis of Schiller's approach where art is midwife to the birth of a greater nature and the artist is on a higher plane to that of the life of the common people. Call it humility, call it what you like but I see a link between Wordsworth's attitude and the utter failure of revolutionary vanguards in this country.

Yet it is legitimate to draw comparisons between Goethe and Schiller and Wordsworth and Coleridge. However there is in England an absence of that mighty philosophical dimension which stretches from Kant to Hegel with in between the lesser figures of Schelling, Fichte and Schlegel. Poets in Germany, particularly Schiller turn their hand to philosophy. Goethe did not regard himself as philosophically minded, evolving an intuitive dialectic that is the antithesis of Kantian dualism and hence that of his friend Schiller who was also, despite himself, not comfortable with Kant. This intuitive dialectic also bears striking similarities to Hegel and springs directly from his scientific endeavours, Abandoning painting (as Hazlitt was to do in this country) he also turns his back on verse temporarily to grapple with a larger problem, that of the need to redefine science by imbuing it with the unwritten of poetry. Through awakened eyes that over time have narrowed to a squint bordering on blindness, Goethe seeks to poeticise science by magnifying its visual reality. Observation, by inheriting the artistic tradition, reclaims its rights, replacing a withered observation that is now dead to beauty and the cognitive power of beauty - hardly a Kantian conception. (Apart from its epistemological wrongness it introduces history which, if not entirely alien to Kant, played a small part in his total system. In fact Goethe was to write one of the very first histories of science. See his remarkable preface to his anti Newtonian, 'Theory of Colours') Hazlitt in fact does not take this path. Rather, abandoning painting he next writes a thesis 'An essay on the principles of human action'. Time and again in English romanticism we confront the question now open now hidden of human praxis as if beyond the arts, which have had their time, as beyond there lay more productive, fulfilling occupations. Compared to the potentialities of the whole man the arts are just a hindrance and an embarrassment. The plough is mightier than the pen and without mentioning Burns and his poetic production Wordsworth opts to heap praise on the Burns who knew how to plough a furrow, as if regretting he lacked the skill himself and therefore excluded from the truth of his own versifying which never should have become verse in the first instance. The cult of science and Goethe's challenge to that cult by stressing a more inclusive, rounded science which concentrates all human endeavour by transcending all art and science in a new unity never takes off in this country. Rather it is subsumed by the question of praxis of which science is but a part.

There is no philosophical resonance in England to match that of Germany. However the theoretical stabs and searching's of the English romantics are much more sui generis and can be found wanting if subjected to the tedium of a more strictly logical mind which however continues to remain haunted by the truths they have dismissed after a more discursive examination. In particular, I am thinking of the preface to the 'Lyrical Ballads' of 1797, composed jointly by Wordsworth and Coleridge but really Wordsworth's own. In this preface Wordsworth yearns to leave art behind and to find fulfilment in nature. Ever afterwards these views torment Coleridge and he must seek out an adequate rebuttal by rendering it more palatable and thus rescuing art. In his 'Biographia Literaria' composed many years later he goes to considerable pains to correct Wordsworth views which on more sober reflection are totally overstated and in need of correction. That he goes to these lengths does suggest the Preface was having an enormous influence, an influence not to Coleridge's liking who by this time wanted a commissariat of cultural continuity, a super-ministry entrusted with the safe guarding of the heritage of words (and the things created by words) of which he would be the soul presiding judge. To the Wordsworth of 'The Preface' the passionate language of common people is poetry though it must be understood this passion is linked to the unfolding of reason in its highest sense and illumined through and through by the imagination which is unleashed by sensuous apprehension at its most intense.

But had not Coleridge done the same and this time in a trance which dissolved the boundary between poetry and reverie, anticipating surrealism' 'Kubla Khan' renders his famous distinction between the primary and secondary imagination as set down years later in his 'Biographia Literaria', null and void. It is the one poem of his entire oeuvre he could not reconcile himself to or believe possible. And its creation continually reminds Coleridge of the days when poetry, unrepressed spontaneity and reverie were as one.

For once upon a time this to Coleridge was the bridge between 'art' and 'science' (again there is the same need for italics as in Goethe's case) and the unspoken basis of his relationship with the chemist Humphrey Davy. For a time they were as one. Davy's discovery of the intoxicating properties of nitrous oxide not only narrows the gap between poetry, reverie, spontaneity and science (the discovery of the gas was patiently arrived at through rigorous experiment) it is also in its way a concrete example of the central quest of Germanic absolute idealism, the unity of art and science and hence subject and object by the action of mind and body whose own internal make up reflected that of the external world and vice versa.(The unease this conception gives rise to - we need only think of Lebens Philosophie and the drag it exerted on evolutionary theory even as it strove to recognize evolution within the boundaries of the fixity of the species - this paradox is evident in both Goethe's Ur phenomenon and Hegel's Philosophy of Identity - could only be resolved by dialectical materialism and its more grounded approach which views mind as a historical creation.) It is also given a characteristically English twist at odds with the sober rigidities of German absolute idealism, that of intoxication from substance abuse: nitrous oxide became known as 'laughing gas'. Davy himself writes down his experiences on the drug, his descriptions possessing an unfettered richness like they were from the hand of Coleridge. Even to this day they are regarded as unsurpassed descriptions of drug highs. Davy and Coleridge compare notes and one is reminded of the close collaboration between Wordsworth and Coleridge and Goethe and Schiller to the point where none of them could be completely sure as to who wrote what. The collaboration between Davy and Coleridge is a completely new domain in comparison to which the experiments by Schelling comprehensible only in terms of his desire to get beyond the antinomies of Kant with the 'science' of mesmerism really are laughable. It took some time for Germany to make good this absence of hard science in contrast to England poised as it was on the brink of the earth shattering industrial revolution in which science as objectified through capitalist industry would increasingly hold sway. All that Germany had to offer instead were the mythologies of absolute idealism and the deceptive, easily derided, 'subjectivism' of Goetherian science, which could have yielded fruit, but not in the way its progenitors thought.

Once this particular collaboration between Coleridge and Davy ceased the antinomies of art and science would assert themselves once more. Yet both would continually strive to understand the other, Coleridge forever seeking to give a more comprehensive account of Davy's discoveries fitting them into a larger philosophical whole. And Davy, in turn, was flattered by Coleridge's attention using it as an entre into polite society He learns what it is to be a cultural snob for Davy plays second fiddle to Coleridge deferring to his self-appointed role as superior pedagogue to the practical experimenter. Through his acquaintance with Coleridge, Davy gains social ease, acceptance, and class haughtiness including the rancour that goes with it, particularly when a member of the lower class comes within their orbit, and proves to be better than they are, as happened with Michael Faraday, the blacksmith's son. In fact this relationship was to be of enormous consequence to the history of science in this country, and which was still being played out over a century and a half later in the late 1960s and with the question of revolutionary overthrow still dominating events and to the exclusion of all else this time, for now there were no privileged areas immune from upheaval.

As is well known, Coleridge single handed brought German idealist philosophy to this country. Interest in Kant and particularly Schelling and Schlegel dates from Coleridge's visit to Germany. He brings back dialectic in his suitcase though significantly he appears never to have heard of or ever mentions Hegel. He was slow to fulfil his early promise and meanwhile looked on as friends from his youth rose to stardom like Schelling and Holderlin. He had felt stirring within him a much deeper more thoroughly historical way of perceiving everything that lay before him and which took time to realize.

Pushing Coleridge to onside for the moment I believe I detect a link between Hegel's dialectical idealism and the part played by nature in Wordsworth's scheme of things. It is still I believe operative to this day and could be of major consequence to the conservationist and eco movements though this time the reason unleashed by contact with nature would necessarily involve a critique of political economy, consumer society, the state and wage labour. Hegel the atheist was a believer to the extent that he held that god, in other words the dialectic of theory and practise, was realized in the unfolding of history. Hence there was no prime mover, only the ever deepening profundity of dialectical thought in which god becomes, rising from inert matter through the vegetable and then animal kingdom and finally to man all unfolding within the universal history of a dialectical pan logicism but which by far the most interesting part is that of human history. Of all of Hegel's work that of the 'Philosophy of Nature' is the least interesting despite going to infinite pains to master his subject. The same can not be said of his 'Philosophy of the Fine Arts' which is still richly rewarding and is in every respect remarkable and profoundly innovatory. The dialectic gains strength over time. Thus nature is weak - in fact Hegel speaks of 'the impotence of nature'. But for Wordsworth it is strong and like Hegel ultimately the fount of reason. However this reason can only come about as a result of a passionate feeling for nature and it is only through contact with nature that we can discover this reason. And to find it we must become immersed in it its outward forms unleashing the imagination and laying bare mere appearances allowing us to connect with that reason which had been so cruelly betrayed by the French Revolution. For Wordsworth comes to nature after the destruction of his hopes in the French Revolution, that is why he hears in it the 'still sad music of humanity'. Though still retaining his commitment to equality it is the right of the dandelion that is proclaimed before that of the rights of man. We on the contrary have no choice other than to reject this truncated reason and go directly from nature to man which means confronting the capitalist mode of production and its abolition. Without that all life down to even the merest microbe is in jeopardy and what could be more irrational than assenting to that.

The conservation of Nature today should lead to a profounder line of reasoning than was ever the case in the past. This is the next and greatest addition to the Wordsworthian spirit articulated by him but never fully developed It should also lead to a reappraisal of history, of modes of production and of forms of art because all in some way or other are present in Wordsworth. But unlike Wordsworth, conservationists today don't seek in conservation an antidote to revolution but rather should find there a stimulus to revolution. And all are in one way or another being propelled in this direction. Beginning with nature, dialectical reason seeks to reclaim its rights.

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Recently (Jan/Feb 2006) there was a much praised TV series on romanticism put together by Peter Ackroyd, an academic who has written a few novels and at least one biography on a a major romantic figure in the shape of William Blake. Like his compatriot Richard Holmes who has studied the romantics more exclusively and who obviously has quite an influence on Ackroyd in emphasising the republican and social/political persuasion of the protagonists - hardly surprising seeing the TV survey often substituted the French revolution of 1789 with footage from May 1968 in France which both had experienced in their youth - Ackroyd fell well short of an all-rounded radical take on his subject. Instead of giving equal emphasis to the revolt of form at the heart of English romanticism he fell back finally on the usual Eng Lit homilies (yawn) about all the great poetry and art produced after initially pinpointing tantalising asides (e.g. how Coleridge and Wordsworth preferred their writings to remain anonymous at the first publication of the Lyrical Ballads in 1798) the significance of which he then could make no apposite comment on. Didn't such a gesture question the role of the artist deliberately disavowing any personality cult or special privilege and more than pointing to Lautreamont's later maxim: 'poetry must be made by all and not by one''

Nonetheless Ackroyd must be aware of such a drift as you couldn't fail but notice more than an echo of the English situationist group King Mob in the late 1960s. Some period piece re-enactment of Coleridge in a Quantocks' fishing village sees digitally imposed lines of romantic verse on the sea walls in the form of large, agitational slogans courtesy of some computer software programme. Hadn't King Mob originally done just this - though in raw spray paint - on the streets of Notting Hill in 1967/8? What King Mob had significantly failed to do or follow up with was a revolutionary critique of English romanticism emphasising the tendency towards formal dissolution at its very heart; a failure Ackroyd has merely compounded. It's hardly surprising that Ackroyd's conclusive comments at the end of his four part TV series were lame, even abysmal especially in seamlessly blending Byron's personality cult with the very lucrative media banalities of the modern day pop icon. In lightly skipping over the demonic impulse and outrage, which Byron let rip in his everyday life, the essential connection between such self-expression and the dissolution of artistic form is lost. It was a montaging or plagiarising which a few decades later was to find more coherent expression in Lautreamont's 'Songs of Maldoror'. Moreover, the plagiarism did not stop there as another Englishman had in the meantime made a further contribution in the shape of Charles Darwin. If you like Lautreamont blended the demonically hideous with the mutant transhuman having taken from Darwin not the origin of the species but where the species was horrifyingly going (see Fabre, Darwin, Dalton & 'DNA' Watson meet Lautreamont elsewhere on this website). It is an essential connection which all previous excellent comments and appraisals of Lautreamont from Andre Breton to Guy Debord have missed.

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In dredging up memories of the influence the French avant-garde of the 19th and early 20th century had on me (Lautremont, Rimbaud, Huysmans, Duchamp, Picabia, Vache, the Dadaists and the Surrealists like Andre Breton, Peret, Bataille etc) - and then my enthusiasm for the Russian avant-garde - I also was forced even farther back....

Somehow at the back of my mind there lingered the influence of the romantic tradition in this country. Over the years its revolutionary implications had become lost and it was this I have been struggling to bring to light. I needed to have some external frame of reference from which to judge it. And the only country that was remotely comparable was Germany. France was undergoing revolutionary upheaval and no literature of any consequence survives from that era. It had been left behind temporarily and only the image making of David survives and his designs for public spectacles enthroning the rule of reason and as a homage to Robespierre. Germany was not comparable to England economically because Germany was then merely an idea, the reality a pre-capitalist entity of squalid dukedoms and principalities, ruled by petty tyrants. England was on the verge of the greatest change since the Neolithic revolution of settled agriculture and city states, possessing freedoms (though not revolutionary freedom) that were the envy of the rest of the world. As a consequence the subversive potential of the arts was much reduced in scope and the gap between art and revolution much narrowed, with art struggling to find an ever diminishing role in the service of a more fundamental revolution that affected all pre-existing forms of art. Their place was increasingly occupied by passion, spontaneity, the revolutionary moment, confession and critique (see 'Confessions of an Opium Eater'; 'The Spirit of the Age'; parts of 'The Prelude'; 'In Defence of Poetry' in which poetry is viewed essentially as a progressive act and not merely the prerogative of metre and verse. Today we would say it is anything but the prerogative of metre and verse and unable to supersede art in its entirety has lapsed into meaningless acts or acting).

I can think of no more relevant words on Wordsworth than those of Hazlitt and which also applies to practically the whole of the English romantic movement from 1789 to the death of Shelley and Byron. He says in the 'Spirit of the Age' that Wordsworth's 'genius is a pure emanation of the Spirit of the Age ' it partakes of the revolutionary movement of the age: his muse is a levelling one, (he) tramples on the pride of art with greater pride. The Ode and Epode, the Strophe and anti Strophe, he laughs to scorn. The harp of Homer, the trump of Pindar and of Alcaeus, are still.' How different then is Schiller's historical approach and his efforts to categorize the forms of poetry by giving them a time and place within history, an approach that later on, Hegel was to greatly elaborate on. In 'Naive and Sentimental Poetry'. Schiller seeks, by historicising form, to establish the difference between ancient and modern poetry. Apart from anything else he sees it is man that has changed, losing over time a naturalness which henceforth it will be Schiller's appointed task to reclaim. (This historical categorisation of the arts, which Schiller initiates, may well have been prompted by the example of Linnaen systematics in the field of natural history. Rejecting this formalism, in which the part tends to separate from the whole, leads Goethe in the direction of evolution). Compared to Wordsworth's lack of sympathy for the arts, bordering on outright hostility, we cringe at Schiller's virtual deification of the Artist (see his poem 'Die Kunstlers') as would-be aesthetic supremo. And yet here is a much more concrete, fully worked out, critique of the growing division of labour than anything that can be found in Wordsworth or indeed the rest of the English romantics. Our lack of naturalness is solely due to that: 'They (the ancients) felt things naturally: we feel what is natural.(!) Our feeling for nature is like the longing of a sick man for health. (!) Nature makes the human race one with itself; art separates and divides.' However don't be deceived by this insightful bluster of radicalism: for Schiller it is only by being guided through the modern arts - nature 'as an idea and an object' - that man becomes whole again. In fact taken to its logical conclusion it does imply a certain transcendence and this possibility continually haunts, and runs away with Schiller, not least in his 'Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man'. Though inspired by Kant's 'Critique of Judgement' that appeared in 1787, and which is the most exhaustive examination of the aesthetic faculties residing in man and up to that point without precedent in human history in terms of its concentration and scope, it was the world shaking event two years later that was to concentrate Schiller's mind.( The 'Critique' is not an art history: one had to wait for Hegel for that who criticises Kant for not including 'becoming' amongst his categories of mind: had he been able to do so history would have played a much greater role in Kant's system). Appalled by the Terror, Schiller needed to settle accounts with it. And this he found in his rejection of the cultivation, or cult - of reason to the exclusion of all other faculties. Immoderate reason is responsible for the division of labour, the sensuous in alliance with a chastened reason, on the contrary, overcomes it. And its chief ally in this battle of the faculties, which puts an end to the distressing consequences of the division of labour, is the cultivation of the arts. Though unwittingly, Schiller was anticipating a response which henceforward was to become commonplace, particularly in the latter half of the 20th Century, where ever capitalist society breaks down: either cheap narcotics or a blitz of the arts or a combination of both and which nowadays is fundamental to the restoration of a threatened division of labour and workaday world, and, as it is now 'lived' the none-workaday world. In fact Schiller willy nilly both though his dramatic productions and grudging fealty to the German aristocratic courts of his time was dragged into becoming an artistic impresario in which stage craft and the mounting of public spectacle became uppermost. 150 years before the age of television he wanted a world of perfect illusion, the better to stage the illusion of freedom. (By appearing to be the consummation of drama in terms of staged illusion, TV is the denouement of drama, destroying once and for all its claims to be an agent of change and real liberation). Finally by assiduously recruiting the arts to his protest against the division of labour, Schiller's cause turns against him: he can be seen as founding an ever more complex, intertwined and, to capital, ever more necessary division of artistic labour whose ramifications are now so immense the problem is knowing where to begin - and end. Capital is now at a permanent stage of 'Homage to the Arts', the title of a dramatic, processional production written and staged by Schiller in honour of a royal marriage in Weimar in 1804.Today this permanent homage-to-the-arts economy is increasingly global in scale and is an aspect of globalisation that is never subjected to critique or, worse, even recognised, its grip is so pervasive and all powerful. Beyond that of making a lot of money, the purpose of this aesthetic economy is to pacify, distract and alienate a person ever further from their real, natural self and potential. Schiller never fully squared up to this dilemma though he was aware of it. To do so would have meant abandoning art and finding another path to the nature that modern man yearned to recover and that lay beyond the division of labour.

How different things are with Wordsworth who is at once less precise but more consequential and finally total in his approach to nature.The appreciation of nature is not to be prefaced by a prolonged tuition in artistic appreciation. Rather nature perpetually remonstrates with the arts and scorns them, needing no further adornment. However Schiller's critique of the division of labour is far more anchored in reality and history than Wordsworth. At this point Wordsworth's apriori nature really does get in the way of a more developed, historical understanding of the division of labour.The relationship which he postulates between man and nature is primal and no social arrangement will ever make good in the life of the individual the sense of loss an individual feels in the presence of nature when compared to how he or she responded to nature as a child. However in the 'still, sad music of humanity' which as an adult he hears in nature, it is the betrayal of his revolutionary ideals he is bemoaning. His abhorrence of the Terror throws him into the arms of nature but not before he is detained for a time by the certainties of mathematics, a compensation for that 'revolutionary reason' that has laid him low. But scientific reason is not good enough finally, because it cannot apprehend the higher reason, the 'very heaven' of youth and revolution, that was expressed in his thwarted revolutionary hopes. And so it is in the Lake District of his childhood he finds this reason once more, shorn ultimately of revolutionary rapture. And so he gives the lie to his own nature mysticism as expressed in his 'Intimations of Immortality' which rather suggests our most intense experience of nature had to be in the womb!

Wordsworth is the first anti poet/poet. He is just one among many and claims no special privileges. There are others, 'silent poets', like his brother who was lost at sea. Poetry is woven into the landscape of the Lake District and its peoples. It has no name: it just is. It spills over into everything. It is in a heap of hewn stones rather than in the 'outrage' of architectural madness it is destined to become. It is in the bower made of withered fern in which to lie down during summer in the company of sheep and from there through the 'open door place' (a hitherto unimaginable architectural term by the way) to gaze and gaze until the vision of what is, no dream can ever equal. And as for stone monuments what better than Ralph Jones, a giant made of stone, constructed as a lark by three lads on Great Howe at the foot of Thirlmere. Wordsworth would gladly have participated in its making because of its lack of pretence and the playful spirit in which it was conceived. This conception of poetry is absorbed in the everyday: it neither needs or knows of poetry in the customary sense.

Matters do not rest here. It is only logical Wordsworth should find encouragement and resolve not in the lives of the poets but in the lives of those who daily trod the fells. He would rather choose a leech gatherer as a guide than Virgil. This is the antithesis of Schiller's approach where art is midwife to the birth of a greater nature and the artist is on a higher plane to that of the life of the common people. Call it humility, call it what you like but I see a link between Wordsworth's attitude and the utter failure of revolutionary vanguards in this country.

Yet it is legitimate to draw comparisons between Goethe and Schiller and Wordsworth and Coleridge. However there is in England an absence of that mighty philosophical dimension which stretches from Kant to Hegel with in between the lesser figures of Schelling, Fichte and Schlegel. Poets in Germany, particularly Schiller turn their hand to philosophy. Goethe did not regard himself as philosophically minded, evolving an intuitive dialectic that is the antithesis of Kantian dualism and hence that of his friend Schiller who was also, despite himself, not comfortable with Kant. This intuitive dialectic also bears striking similarities to Hegel and springs directly from his scientific endeavours, Abandoning painting (as Hazlitt was to do in this country) he also turns his back on verse temporarily to grapple with a larger problem, that of the need to redefine science by imbuing it with the unwritten of poetry. Through awakened eyes that over time have narrowed to a squint bordering on blindness, Goethe seeks to poeticise science by magnifying its visual reality. Observation, by inheriting the artistic tradition, reclaims its rights, replacing a withered observation that is now dead to beauty and the cognitive power of beauty - hardly a Kantian conception. (Apart from its epistemological wrongness it introduces history which, if not entirely alien to Kant, played a small part in his total system. In fact Goethe was to write one of the very first histories of science. See his remarkable preface to his anti Newtonian, 'Theory of Colours') Hazlitt in fact does not take this path. Rather, abandoning painting he next writes a thesis 'An essay on the principles of human action'. Time and again in English romanticism we confront the question now open now hidden of human praxis as if beyond the arts, which have had their time, as beyond there lay more productive, fulfilling occupations. Compared to the potentialities of the whole man the arts are just a hindrance and an embarrassment. The plough is mightier than the pen and without mentioning Burns and his poetic production Wordsworth opts to heap praise on the Burns who knew how to plough a furrow, as if regretting he lacked the skill himself and therefore excluded from the truth of his own versifying which never should have become verse in the first instance. The cult of science and Goethe's challenge to that cult by stressing a more inclusive, rounded science which concentrates all human endeavour by transcending all art and science in a new unity never takes off in this country. Rather it is subsumed by the question of praxis of which science is but a part.

There is no philosophical resonance in England to match that of Germany. However the theoretical stabs and searching's of the English romantics are much more sui generis and can be found wanting if subjected to the tedium of a more strictly logical mind which however continues to remain haunted by the truths they have dismissed after a more discursive examination. In particular, I am thinking of the preface to the 'Lyrical Ballads' of 1797, composed jointly by Wordsworth and Coleridge but really Wordsworth's own. In this preface Wordsworth yearns to leave art behind and to find fulfilment in nature. Ever afterwards these views torment Coleridge and he must seek out an adequate rebuttal by rendering it more palatable and thus rescuing art. In his 'Biographia Literaria' composed many years later he goes to considerable pains to correct Wordsworth views which on more sober reflection are totally overstated and in need of correction. That he goes to these lengths does suggest the Preface was having an enormous influence, an influence not to Coleridge's liking who by this time wanted a commissariat of cultural continuity, a super-ministry entrusted with the safe guarding of the heritage of words (and the things created by words) of which he would be the soul presiding judge. To the Wordsworth of 'The Preface' the passionate language of common people is poetry though it must be understood this passion is linked to the unfolding of reason in its highest sense and illumined through and through by the imagination which is unleashed by sensuous apprehension at its most intense.

But had not Coleridge done the same and this time in a trance which dissolved the boundary between poetry and reverie, anticipating surrealism' 'Kubla Khan' renders his famous distinction between the primary and secondary imagination as set down years later in his 'Biographia Literaria', null and void. It is the one poem of his entire oeuvre he could not reconcile himself to or believe possible. And its creation continually reminds Coleridge of the days when poetry, unrepressed spontaneity and reverie were as one.

For once upon a time this to Coleridge was the bridge between 'art' and 'science' (again there is the same need for italics as in Goethe's case) and the unspoken basis of his relationship with the chemist Humphrey Davy. For a time they were as one. Davy's discovery of the intoxicating properties of nitrous oxide not only narrows the gap between poetry, reverie, spontaneity and science (the discovery of the gas was patiently arrived at through rigorous experiment) it is also in its way a concrete example of the central quest of Germanic absolute idealism, the unity of art and science and hence subject and object by the action of mind and body whose own internal make up reflected that of the external world and vice versa.(The unease this conception gives rise to - we need only think of Lebens Philosophie and the drag it exerted on evolutionary theory even as it strove to recognize evolution within the boundaries of the fixity of the species - this paradox is evident in both Goethe's Ur phenomenon and Hegel's Philosophy of Identity - could only be resolved by dialectical materialism and its more grounded approach which views mind as a historical creation.) It is also given a characteristically English twist at odds with the sober rigidities of German absolute idealism, that of intoxication from substance abuse: nitrous oxide became known as 'laughing gas'. Davy himself writes down his experiences on the drug, his descriptions possessing an unfettered richness like they were from the hand of Coleridge. Even to this day they are regarded as unsurpassed descriptions of drug highs. Davy and Coleridge compare notes and one is reminded of the close collaboration between Wordsworth and Coleridge and Goethe and Schiller to the point where none of them could be completely sure as to who wrote what. The collaboration between Davy and Coleridge is a completely new domain in comparison to which the experiments by Schelling comprehensible only in terms of his desire to get beyond the antinomies of Kant with the 'science' of mesmerism really are laughable. It took some time for Germany to make good this absence of hard science in contrast to England poised as it was on the brink of the earth shattering industrial revolution in which science as objectified through capitalist industry would increasingly hold sway. All that Germany had to offer instead were the mythologies of absolute idealism and the deceptive, easily derided, 'subjectivism' of Goetherian science, which could have yielded fruit, but not in the way its progenitors thought.

Once this particular collaboration between Coleridge and Davy ceased the antinomies of art and science would assert themselves once more. Yet both would continually strive to understand the other, Coleridge forever seeking to give a more comprehensive account of Davy's discoveries fitting them into a larger philosophical whole. And Davy, in turn, was flattered by Coleridge's attention using it as an entre into polite society He learns what it is to be a cultural snob for Davy plays second fiddle to Coleridge deferring to his self-appointed role as superior pedagogue to the practical experimenter. Through his acquaintance with Coleridge, Davy gains social ease, acceptance, and class haughtiness including the rancour that goes with it, particularly when a member of the lower class comes within their orbit, and proves to be better than they are, as happened with Michael Faraday, the blacksmith's son. In fact this relationship was to be of enormous consequence to the history of science in this country, and which was still being played out over a century and a half later in the late 1960s and with the question of revolutionary overthrow still dominating events and to the exclusion of all else this time, for now there were no privileged areas immune from upheaval.

As is well known, Coleridge single handed brought German idealist philosophy to this country. Interest in Kant and particularly Schelling and Schlegel dates from Coleridge's visit to Germany. He brings back dialectic in his suitcase though significantly he appears never to have heard of or ever mentions Hegel. He was slow to fulfil his early promise and meanwhile looked on as friends from his youth rose to stardom like Schelling and Holderlin. He had felt stirring within him a much deeper more thoroughly historical way of perceiving everything that lay before him and which took time to realize.

Pushing Coleridge to onside for the moment I believe I detect a link between Hegel's dialectical idealism and the part played by nature in Wordsworth's scheme of things. It is still I believe operative to this day and could be of major consequence to the conservationist and eco movements though this time the reason unleashed by contact with nature would necessarily involve a critique of political economy, consumer society, the state and wage labour. Hegel the atheist was a believer to the extent that he held that god, in other words the dialectic of theory and practise, was realized in the unfolding of history. Hence there was no prime mover, only the ever deepening profundity of dialectical thought in which god becomes, rising from inert matter through the vegetable and then animal kingdom and finally to man all unfolding within the universal history of a dialectical pan logicism but which by far the most interesting part is that of human history. Of all of Hegel's work that of the 'Philosophy of Nature' is the least interesting despite going to infinite pains to master his subject. The same can not be said of his 'Philosophy of the Fine Arts' which is still richly rewarding and is in every respect remarkable and profoundly innovatory. The dialectic gains strength over time. Thus nature is weak - in fact Hegel speaks of 'the impotence of nature'. But for Wordsworth it is strong and like Hegel ultimately the fount of reason. However this reason can only come about as a result of a passionate feeling for nature and it is only through contact with nature that we can discover this reason. And to find it we must become immersed in it its outward forms unleashing the imagination and laying bare mere appearances allowing us to connect with that reason which had been so cruelly betrayed by the French Revolution. For Wordsworth comes to nature after the destruction of his hopes in the French Revolution, that is why he hears in it the 'still sad music of humanity'. Though still retaining his commitment to equality it is the right of the dandelion that is proclaimed before that of the rights of man. We on the contrary have no choice other than to reject this truncated reason and go directly from nature to man which means confronting the capitalist mode of production and its abolition. Without that all life down to even the merest microbe is in jeopardy and what could be more irrational than assenting to that.

The conservation of Nature today should lead to a profounder line of reasoning than was ever the case in the past. This is the next and greatest addition to the Wordsworthian spirit articulated by him but never fully developed It should also lead to a reappraisal of history, of modes of production and of forms of art because all in some way or other are present in Wordsworth. But unlike Wordsworth, conservationists today don't seek in conservation an antidote to revolution but rather should find there a stimulus to revolution. And all are in one way or another being propelled in this direction. Beginning with nature, dialectical reason seeks to reclaim its rights.

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Dialectical lines for insects:

Goethe: Das Lebendge will ich preisen,

Das nach flammentod sich sehner

'I would praise the living thing that longs for death by fire'

'You no longer remain a prisoner in the shadowing darkness and a new desire snatches you up to a higher union. No distance can weigh you down, you come flying, fascinated, and at last, lusting for the light, poor moth, you perish in the flame. And until you possess it, this commandment: die and become! you will be but a dismal guest on the dark earth.'

c/f. Shelley: 'The desire of the moth for the star'

Keats: Imagination (fancy) as an antidote to the failure of pleasure at least as then understood by the prevailing utilitarianism and its crude psychology of what constitutes pleasure. Pleasure is perishable and domestic, the imagination is not: 'ever let the fancy roam, pleasure never is at home' i.e. real pleasure knows no home comforts, it must stray far and wide. However the imagination (or fancy) is an interior affair; it rarely struggles to become real in Keats. Imagination 'opens wide the mind's cage door': properly understood butterflies liberate the mind or rather overawe the mind, unleashing a limitless inventiveness in thought (which wants to become real and has need of practical realities). Like the spider or the caterpillar, the imagination weaves a silk thread but one that has to be broken in order to truly liberate the mind: 'break the mesh of the fancy's silken leash; quickly break her prison string,'(Fancy) And so to 'Ode to Psyche'. Keats builds a sanctuary to Psyche in his heart. But like the intruder in the virgin undergrowth of Epping Forest who finds a pair of mating Ringlet butterflies in the grass - I have come to the conclusion they were Ringlets that Keats saw and I'm also convinced the location had to be Epping Forest - Psyche appeals to the 'untrodden region of my mind' from which branch 'shadowy thoughts', thoughts that no one has ever had before, wrenching the mind from its accustomed pathways and therefore sweetly painful. Thought becomes like nature ever creating ever changing, and the window left open at night with a light behind it that attract moths becomes a symbol of that process. For Goethe this desire of the moth for the flame becomes a desire for a higher union. It arises from the fulfilment of sexual desire and is released by it, an act of procreation that also procreates us, 'begetting as we begat'. It is a higher, more total, union though not qualitatively different from the 'warm love' of Keats though it requires we die in order to become. ('Stirbe und Werde!')

The hidden message of entomology is love not hate: it is about union and communion, an understanding and love of what is different - and what could be more different than insect anatomy -; it is about the liberation of desire, the greater dissatisfaction that desire brings, it is an anticipation of the higher person, an anticipation of the human community that reaches for the stars.

Keats says he recognises Cupid but that Psyche puzzles him. In the mating Ringlets he espies both Cupid and Psyche but significantly it is Psyche 'with awakened eyes'. (In the myth Psyche's eyes are closed when Cupid makes love to her).The eye is of primary importance to Keats: his first major work is 'Endymion', based on the mythical youth who dreamed whilst awake. It cannot therefore be the eye of the scientific empiricist but a fuller eye and one the optician needs to recognise is just as real. In 'Ode to Psyche' Keats' eye becomes not just an instrument of sight but a musical instrument though which he can sing for the first time the beauty of butterflies: 'I see and sing, by my own eyes inspired'. The Lyre ' 'the fond believing lyre'- belongs to the past of an enchanted nature that can never return, in the same way as the Greek gods can never return. Psyche was originally a mortal but a mortal who has outlived the Greek gods and is still alive, her 'lucent fans' (wings) still 'fluttering', because saved from the aging process of repetitive ritual. She lives because she symbolises that which is new and innovatory and seeking ever greater unity in a difference bound by love. Psyche then becomes the negation of myth, the embodiment of free thinking and the realisation of history.

Entomology should have made the best science because the last, the one that was most in step with the maturing of humanity. But entomology was always something of an afterthought; a leftover after everything else had been dealt with. Other than Aristotle, no other philosopher gave it the time of day and his basic nomenclature of head, thorax, abdomen still stands. John Ray's (1628/1705) last book was on insects and not published during his lifetime. Having described nigh on 19,000 plant species he then sought to bring order into the animal kingdom based chiefly on toes, hoofs and teeth. Insects were a poor third though Ray's refusal to swear an oath of allegiance to a restored king, Charles 11, and a newly arisen state religion, bequeathed to scientific natural history in this country an independence and anti-state cast of mind it has never been able to wholly rid itself of. This is still powerfully present in Keats and other romantics.

So overall there were no dead generations to weigh entomology down; it did not evolve throughout successive millennia to the same degree as the other sciences. Entomology was almost new born and never underwent a Copernican revolution. The lion and the lamb are more potent biblical symbols than the locust and the locust never did get to lie down with the lion and the lamb. For there was to be no redemption for insects in mainstream thought. But insects were everywhere and the scientific study of insects mirrored more faithfully the contradictions of the society it grew up in both as a reaction to it (the initial uselessness of entomology and therefore attractive to many who felt marginalized and rejected like cockroaches, a fugitive discipline for fugitive minds) and as most embodying the goals of industrial capitalism by eventually bringing about the destruction of all insects - the utter folly of GM foods and ever more powerful pesticides - and hence entomology as a branch of learning. Applied Entomology also encapsulates the most suicidal tendencies of modern capitalism.

Keats had an uneasy relationship with music and the Ode to Psyche is the least tuneful of his great odes. It could not be other. ' The Ode to a Nightingale' is a song to the nightingale but a song in which the nightingale's song outdoes the poem, if we could but hear it. But in the 'Ode to Psyche' we don't know what song is being sung. It is a song without a tune lacking any frame of musical reference. Not words set to music, rather something akin to musical eyesight. In that sense it takes up where the 'Ode to a Grecian Urn' left off: 'Heard melodies are sweet but those unheard are sweeter'. They are, of course, heard in the inner ear of the imagination and so are similar to the atheist Shelley's craving for 'the music that is divine' and different from what we can now hear because it means fulfilment and not the promise of fulfilment. Keats found an intimation of this in the music of nature and from an early age his ear must have been highly attuned to natural sound for in his teenage 'Hymn to Pan' ( the spirit of nature) he refers to Pan as the 'strange ministrant of undescribed sounds, that come a swooning over hollow grounds, and wither drearily on barren moors'. Are there such unexplained sounds that travel for miles? Have I missed them because I have become deaf in the same way as I am afflicted by partial blindness and am losing my sense of smell, taste and touch? In any case it makes me realize how little I have listened and need to listen in the future.

Why did Keats concentrate on Psyche and not continue to treat Cupid and Psyche as a couple? In isolating Psyche like he did I think he was feeling his way back, like a scientist and dreamer combined in the same person, to a first principle on which to found everything else. He needed to separate Psyche from Cupid who had been bound together throughout history, though in fact the unlike resonances that Keats is describing could apply to Cupid's darts. Rather I think the number of illustrations of Psyche on her own and looking more like a human butterfly than ever must have become more frequent in children's books and elsewhere because of the growing interest in Lepidoptera. Keats had perhaps unconsciously registered this. He was fragmenting myth in order to create a more plausible riposte to modern scientific empiricism which was leaving too much out. He was unweaving the rainbow to weave a better one.

What is the love Keats outlines between a male and female butterfly, Cupid and Psyche, and the rest of humanity? For this is about picture thinking and outlines. The butterflies are not clinched in a passionate embrace, rather they are sleeping in each others arms with merely a promise of kisses in the new dawn and the morrow which never comes. Though wrapped around each other they are 'disjointed' and 'their lips touched not', a posture which makes me think it could only have been a pair of mating Ringlets that he had seen in the woodland, for theirs is a triangular form of mating almost as if they were about to embrace, like humans, and they tend not to fly off when approached as do Meadow Browns. What other woodland butterfly could it have been? Mating Speckled Woods are an uncommon sight and probably do so in trees rather than in the grass. This aside, I think Keats was hinting at the growing apartness of modern love, that it exists (and exits) increasingly as an ideal, something much thought about but never experienced directly. There is sex and little else. Real love is then a separation, an alienation and a yearning. It also flies off into other realms and is quickly sublimated, displaced onto thought that is more than mere reverie, at once reasoned and highly imaginative. However it needs a living symbol, a practical act to express itself through. And this is achieved by opening the window at night so that moths, attracted by the light, can fly in. How much has yet to be rightfully attributed to entomology like species still awaiting identification, though different in kind from the conventional classification of insects!

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Marx and Heine in relation to Keats, Shelley, John Ray, Von Frisch and Mallarme - among others

Here in England there is nothing to compare with the encounter between Heine and Marx. There is a far reaching interplay between the two and both are deeply affected by the rising tide of revolt in Germany (or what was to become Germany) and the rest of Europe. By the 1840s' Heine is asserting that prose, not poetry, was a more appropriate form of expression going so far as to announce the imminent demise of poetry. Replying to a poetry competition in 1837 offering as a prize a golden quill, Heine sent four lines declaring the songbird is dead never to be re-awakened concluding with the recommendation 'to stick the golden quill up your ass'. (Such a blunt statement is unimaginable in England at the time but there was no one approaching Heine's stature either) However the young Marx, picking himself up from his failure as a poet, is able to formulate the beyond of poetry in so striking a manner that Heine is easily outclassed. He is writing at length about his love for Jenny and his failure to find a poetic form adequate to the emotions coursing through him. It is worth quoting at length:

'a remote beyond, such as my love, became my heaven, my art. Everything grew vague, and all that is vague lacks boundaries; onslaughts against the present, broad and shapeless expressions of unnatural feeling, constructed purely out of the blue, the complete opposition of what is and what ought to be, rhetorical reflections instead of poetic thoughts but perhaps also a certain warmth of sentiment and a struggle for movement characterises all the poems in the first three volumes I sent to Jenny. The whole horizon of a longing which sees no frontiers assumed many forms and frustrated my effort to write with poetic conciseness.'

It is, you will agree, richer and more eloquent than poetry and could equally apply to the hopes aroused by class struggle.

Echoes of Heine abound in Marx's early writings but undoubtedly the best-known example is Heine's characterization of religion as 'spiritual opium'. Marx refers to religion as 'the sigh of the oppressed creature ---- the opium of the people'. This also is a definite improvement on Heine.

We can also see the contrast between them when we compare what both of them have to say about the armed uprising of the Silesian weavers in June 1844 which was bloodily put down by the Prussian army. Heine wrote a short, very compact, poem on the uprising in which the desperate weavers weave the motto of the Prussian military God, King and Fatherland into a shroud. But there is no mention of brotherhood, freedom and private property. Though the poem was learnt by heart by generations of German workers finally we are more satisfied and cheered by Marx's comments which, though less melodious, have a distinct bearing upon the theory and practise of the proletariat that is directed toward a social totality and looks far beyond the immediate. In the 'Song of the Weavers' Marx sees a 'bold battle cry which does not mention the hearth, factory or district but which the proletariat immediately proclaims its opposition to private property in a forceful, sharp, ruthless and violent manner ------ whereas every other movement turned initially only against the industrialist, the visible enemy, this one attacked also the hidden enemy, namely the banker. (Critical notes on 'The King of Prussia and Social Reform').

There is a degree of impersonality to the 'Silesian Weavers' which is unusual for Heine. It is influenced by the ballad form like much of the 'radical' poetry of this era. Heine disliked conventional verse forms and is very specific in his condemnation of 'political poetry' which is also formally conservative. He is now able to pose the question of form in a more pertinent manner than Marx who is now on the point of dismissing the question as all but irrelevant having nothing further to say on the subject except for a few lines in the Grundrisse. 'Freedom', Heine declared, should manifest itself, 'in the treatment, in the form, by no means in the subject' and, 'artists who choose freedom itself and emancipation for their subject are usually of limited shackled spirit, truly unfree'. We can already see here how potentially explosive the issue is because it implies the artist is unfree who opts for moribund forms.

There is even the hint that precisely the form of poetry compromises the poet. Popular poetry of the late 1830's and 1840's represented an escape from the obscurantism of the Young Hegelians and it had the added advantage of not being subject to the same stifling censorship as critique. Its radicalism was therefore merely apparent even though Georg Herwegh tried to invade Germany from France at the head of a few hundred German exiles that were instantly routed. Another 'political poet' Freiligrath, who had been awarded a pension by the King of Prussia, is also only known to us from his contact with Marx. His chief claim to fame comes from handing on to Marx the three volumes of Hegel's 'Science of Logic' which had once belonged to Bakunin. And thereby hangs a tale. Maybe it is possible to rescue Hegel's 'Science of Logic' from the mortal blows dealt it by Engel's 'Dialectics of Nature' and its enthronement as a state religion in that dark farce of a communist society, the former Soviet Union and which could have ended once and for all any hope for humanity in that its shadow still falls over all who fight for social revolution today.

(Marx subsequently would only fleetingly refer to art, an oversite which could only have the most negative consequences: henceforth art would rise above history and take on the aspect of the eternal, stepping in for a fading religiosity. However Hegel gets the last laugh because his historicisation of form though wrapped in an idealist dialectic provides a more convincing account of the rise and fall of form).

Though Marx was the first to treat philosophy and religion as an alienation of humanities essential social power he did not apply the same criteria to art. Hegel did precisely that by absorbing and overcoming art within a greater philosophy at the very moment of its transcendence. It is to be sure a breath-taking concept with a reach that anticipates the avante garde of the early 20th Century. Hegel's Philosophy of the Arts is still viable and remains the only valid approach to the moment of art and its potential for transcendence up to that time. I well recall my astonishment on reading the concluding paragraphs in the section on painting where quite unequivocally he declares the task of painting to be complete. All that is left at best is illustration. There is even a touch of philistinism in Hegel's approach particularly in his emphasis on photographic realism. It was to be a white square on a white background painted in Russia a hundred years later that announced the lingering death of painting.

Hegel here is at his most direct. His books on architecture, sculpture/music and poetry are less forthright in their conclusions and it was left to history to provide the detail. The section on music ends with extravagant praise for a musician, possibly a gypsy, overheard improvising on a guitar and exceeding all the other pleasures Hegel has previously derived from music. Gone are the orchestras and choirs numbering hundreds of musicians and singers and all performing by rote.

The preface to the 'Philosophy of Art' begins with a unique and highly contemporaneous, analysis of situations. The first condition is a general world condition meaning really that though history has always existed it has not always existed as world history.The missing factor is in fact the world market. Out of this first condition indeterminate and determinate situations arise leading in the latter case to the creation of new values. The determinate situation alone involves meaningful action and the clarification of the situation is 'necessary to any enquiry into the true constituents of action'. It is the job of art to bring out the essentials of action in the sense of a genuinely historic action. But once humanity has fulfilled its destiny art is consigned to the prehistory of alienation and in its place the Hegelian concept reigns. Read critique for this concept and the dialectic of theory and practise in the act of revolution and we are a step nearer the truth. For Hegel art remains forever behind events but given his emphasis upon action he prefers forms that move (also reflected incidentally in his preference for animal life above the vegetative and inanimate) and have a beginning, middle and end. Architecture is superceeded by sculpture and then painting and all are static forms. Next comes music in this ascending scale and then finally poetry and drama.

When one looks at England in the 1840s' there is not even an inkling of a debate on form, nor even the merest hint that to raise such a question also raises the question of freedom. The possibility of any such debate had ended with the death of Hazlitt though Emily Bronte was to turn the ordered sequence of the novel inside out with her use of flashback.

Chartism is accompanied more by poetic bombast than verse not even remotely comparable to Heine's. And yet Chartism must also have had its popular songs and forms of expression. There is evidence to suggest these forms were losing their traditional cohesion and were coming apart at the seams. Both Coleridge and Shelley had stretched the ballad form almost beyond recognition, which is not the case with Heine. One wonders how much it reflected a more general undermining of popular forms. Given the speed of the changes taking place in agriculture and the beginnings of large scale industry it is unlikely that popular forms of expression would not also have bent under the strain.

It is not too much to say that Shelley became a reborn icon of revolt the moment he was introduced to radical Chartist workers. The slow uncovering of the amazing truth about Shelley subsequently became linked to the rise and the fall of the workers' movement. On top of the green Shelley there is now a red Shelley though both advance together.

The massacre of unarmed men, women and children in 1818 on St Peter's field in Manchester was an event no less important in England than the uprising of 1848 in France. Though exiled in Italy, Shelley's response on hearing the news, was immediate and furious. However the greatness of 'the Mask of Anarchy' taken out of context obscures the extent to which in the two months following Peterloo, Shelley was pushing at the limits of poetry, He was a 'modern' before his time easily some 80 years in advance of what was to occur and possessing a power of synthesis which in many ways outstripped it and would take even longer to catch up with.

One could analyse at length 'the Mask of Anarchy'. Suffice to say there is an anticipation of the form of the workers and soldiers council but only in terms of a mass presence, eventually, of both. It is a passive body that passively resists and not an anticipation of how historically they actually did move to take over. What prompts the soldiers to take the side of the oppressed gathered in a 'Great Assembly' is shame and the fact no woman would look at them. Nor is Shelley's notion of a great assembly taken a stage further: it does not take matters into its own hands becoming both a legislative and executive organ. Like no other poet before him he recognizes the power of the masses but then cannot conceive of an anti-statist legislative body. Though the son in law of William Godwin 'the father of English anarchism' the latter's theoretical anarchism remained a dead letter because it was built around the enlightened teacher who dispensed emancipation through the power of reason rather than being disarmed enough to receive it. Thus emancipation was known in advance and held no surprises. (Remaining aloof from the French Revolution and Peterloo, Godwin's legacy has bedevilled English anarchism ever since - wooden in its responses, insular, unable to move with the times and several steps behind the real movement).

In the 'Mask of Anarchy' there are undeniable pointers that could have led to a critique of political economy. Had he not died so young one wonders how the ageing Shelley might have responded to the young Marx. Possibly with an even greater enthusiasm and understanding than Heine: apart from the first 40 pages the rest of 'the German Ideology' remains uncut in Heine's copy.

In Heine's 'Silesian Weavers' there is no mention of money - or lack of it - but which is of course implied. However in Shelley's tract things are far more explicit. He speaks of the 'ghost of gold' meaning paper money ('paper coin') and though it may look as though he is arguing for an early form of the gold standard in fact his grasp of the significance of paper money is uncanny and opens up a rich vein of potential enquiry. 'Paper coin ' that forgery' could refer to the practise of printing money and its increasingly fictive character as time went by. As conceived by Shelley and also born out by reality it also leads to an increase in the rate of exploitation taking 'from toil a thousand fold more than e'er its substance could/ In the tyrannies of old'.

However Peterloo was a catalyst for so much more. It brought everything to a head. As one of the more responsible biographers of Shelley has rightly said his output that ran 'in an unbroken curve from 6th Sept 1818 when he first received news of Peterloo until 5th Nov ' suggest a state of exultant energy and vision 'that it is difficult to conceive in ordinary terms'. Shelley is frequently able to hit the nail on the head more in his 'prose' (e.g. letters etc.) than in his poetry. In a dedication letter he looks forward to a London that 'shall be an habitation of bitterns; when St Paul's, Westminster Abbey shall stand, shapeless and nameless ruins, in the midst of an unpeopled marsh; when the piers of Waterloo Bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers and cast the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream'' This London may look empty but really Shelley is reclaiming nature for the people: the ruin of Waterloo Bridge is also a reprisal for Peterloo. In this fantasy of destruction and renewal Shelley has touched on the question of 'town and revolution' that a hundred years later was to become of such burning importance.

There is no doubting that Shelley's innovations outstripped his theorising and only now can we see where they were leading. In 'Peter Bell the third' which is a piss take on Wordsworth and Coleridge he writes about hell (i.e. London) reducing 'poetry' to an incantation of names that is almost pre-lettrist and yet also very powerful: 'German soldiers ' camps - confusion - tumults - lotteries - rage - delusion - gin - suicide - and Methodism'. No punctuation either, just dashes. And in a letter to Leigh Hunt outlining his defence of Richard Carlile on trial for sedition for defending the Peterloo demonstrators he was both aware of how the meaning of words could be turned in to their opposites by power ('though oppression should change names and names cease to be oppressions') and of the need to rescue language for the sake of 'liberty and the oppressed'. Note that this crisis of language was not just an aesthetic dilemma as it had a tendency to become in Mallarme but was central to the fate of humanity. In the same letter to Hunt he reflects on their respective differences of 'theory and practise' which he then crossed out almost as if he sensed he was running dangerously ahead of his time.

During this period Shelley writes the death certificate of English nature poetry: 'Ode to the West Wind'. Never again could it acquire the same degree of urgency and uplift us quite so much. Henceforth nature was to become something split-off but into which we could read the failed hopes of humanity and even for those who have an ear and eye for it, the formal transcendence of art into life though it would be more correct to say the 'life sciences'.

If read consecutively the 'Mask of Anarchy' and the 'Ode to the West Wind' seem to almost blend. 'The Ode to the West Wind' conceived within days of the 'Mask of Anarchy' could not but also be a reflection on Peterloo but this time within a natural setting. The very words become superimposed. The leaves driven by the wind like 'ghosts before an enchanter fleeing ' yellow red pestilence stricken' aren't simply sickly, poverty stricken mill workers but also the 'ghosts of gold ' paper money' which was already beginning to turn nature inside out.

Natural imagery would never again acquire this degree of unspecific generality open to a number of interpretations but whose bottom line, in any case, was the need for revolution. This combining of social struggle and wild nature corresponded to a deep undercurrent in the rapidly forming industrial working class and which left an indelible imprint upon it never to be entirely effaced. Shelley echoed this apparent contradiction though in a very striking way. That is why it is mistaken particularly in this country to view the proletariat as a cog in a machine that would inherit the world on the basis of large-scale industry laid down by capitalism. Ecologists who have viewed the 'workers' from outside as slaves to consumption have consistently failed to acknowledge this.

Nature and political revolution had formed an indissoluble whole in Romanticism. Hazlitt had unforgettably described Wordsworth's muse as 'a levelling' one. Nature was for the people, by the people and representative government was its direct consequence. However Shelley is the first to see that nature is also riven by class antagonism. Even worse, despotism could eventually cause nature to perish. He writes of the 'fish ' poisoned in the streams; the birds in the green woods perished' and finally with outstanding prescience and most alarmingly of all 'the insect rave ---- withered up' and 'avarice died before the god it made'.

We are getting perilously close to the situation described by Shelley and that grants significance to insects never previously accorded to them. In fact this belated but growing appreciation of the indispensable role small organisms play in sustaining life also unfolds against a background of increased commoditisation in which money strives to be the sole necessity even if that means its eventual annihilation because of universal destruction. Beside this nightmare scenario the abolition of money by means of concious peoples' uprising is beginning to look increasingly unlikely.

Shelley's 'Revolt of Islam' from which the above quotes come was written in Jan 1818, a mere eight months before the Peterloo massacre. We are perhaps reading too much into these words of Shelley twisting them into the strait jacket of political economy when perhaps he held to a more simplistic, more political view of liberty as representative government. However Shelley was never specific on this point and designing constitutions was of scant interest to him enough to make one think he was at odds with the idea. There is nothing about votes for all, an elected parliament with a fixed term of office, an independent judiciary and whatever else takes the fancy of the typical constitutionalist, in 'The Mask of Anarchy'.

It has been said that Keat's 'Ode to Autumn' is also a commentary on Peterloo reflected through the prism of nature. If so it becomes a strain to penetrate the layers of allusion to get at the truth and even then we cannot be entirely sure. However more on this later. Enough to say that Keats' mode of poetical encryption was taken up by naturalists in their unconscious manner of alluding to something vague beneath the hard science of the text. Science, particularly natural science, was becoming enveloped in an all encompassing nebula of values and meaning that was almost impossible to decipher and doubly so once it became regarded as unhinged to draw attention to it. This 'symbolisation' of science and not just literature, which also heralded its end, has never received the attention it merits.

Far more so than Shelley who modelled himself at least partly on the materialism of Lucretius, the key to this splitting off of the natural from the social is to be found in Keats. This forking is given a far clearer expression in the 'Ode to a Nightingale' than in the 'Ode to Autumn'. In the former it is the bird (i.e. the study of birds - ornithology) that is able to escape the present condition of man and the desire for the peace of the grave: 'no hungry generations tread thee down' that is the generations of men, women and children that were shortly to assemble at Peterloo.

In the 'Ode to a Nightingale', perhaps the most famous of all time, Keats mapped out the territory on which the science of animal ethnology was set to unfold. Beyond certain limits transgression was henceforth forbidden. (In a rather different vein he was to do the same for entomology in his 'Ode to Psyche', only this time the jumping of fences into other fields was encouraged. Indeed it was the floating essence of entomology because its uselessness and scientific marginality implied it was not open to conscription by power having, 'no voice, no lute, no pipe').

Keats would have sung a different tune had he seen how entomology was to be transformed particularly by Pasteur and the growing acknowledgement of the role played by insects in the transmission of diseases. And also how along with worms they acted as a morphological bridge to the world of the 'infinitely small'. He might also have divined how insects would become a bogeyman of modern capitalist agriculture prepared even to destroy the pollinators and therefore agriculture, creating unprecedented famine.

That entomology has long ceased to be a discrete discipline, ramifying now into the chemical industry, bioengineering and genetic modification does not completely overturn the ground plan laid down more generally by Keats. In a book - one picked at random ''The Discovery of Animal Behaviour' by John Sparks the separate worlds of animal and human 'behaviours' are viewed less as a break in continuity between the human and the animal kingdom but rather as a fundamental division between town and country. All the great animal ethnologists of the 20th Century, Lorenz, Tinbergen, Von Frisch were brought up in a country setting and were stimulated by the presence of nature from an early age. But this enviable head start also produced a grotesque social retardation. It was a joy to find Von Frisch`s memoirs 'A Biologist Remembers' in a second hand bookshop but very distressing to learn of his deeply conservative responses to the Bavarian Soviet in 1918-19. And this by a biologist who did more than any other in the 20th Century to puncture the overweening anthropomorphism of the human species when he discovered the Honey Bee possessed a subtle language, the most complex so far known outside that of humans. Social turbulence, the unnatural life of the great conurbations - this is the forgetfulness of the great animal ethnologists, - that forgetting of the human condition which involved social warfare so ardently desired by Keats in the 'Ode to the Nightingale'. And by a bewildering reversal of perspective, animal behaviours are given an abiding relevance outside their proper employ by being uncritically superimposed upon the human. The 'immortal bird' of Keats' ode becomes an inverse anthropomorphism destined to live on in us because of a wilful refusal to face up to what really happened in human history.

Shelley's idea of love is not that different from Keats. Yet it has more to do with transcendence, the flight of thought as a prelude to action than in bringing opposites together or merely conjuring with the new in one's mind. And for that purpose insect analogies come to mind and yet they are more then mere analogies, they are living symbols: we take to the air with them and not merely by way of illustration.

The poem in which the memorable line 'the desire of the moth for the star' occurs is simply entitled 'To what' - To nothing in particular and everything. For it is also about the failing power of words which have lost there meaning not merely through repeated use but because their use has become devalued as the object of the word has become devalued. It is never recognised the author of 'In Defence of Poetry' - incidentally Shelley's view of what is poetry far transcends the written word having already escaped the page in the introductory sentences - increasingly had a problem with language, frequently pushing it beyond the limits of comprehension as language broke under the strain of what he really wanted to say. The ethereal Shelley was strangely rooted in the empiricist tradition of Locke, Berkeley and Hume, struggling to create objects through words in a way inadmissible to empiricism, before they became a fact, He was lettriste avante la lettre, rejecting the conventional division of writing into poetry and prose as 'a vulgar error' and going so far as to maintain poetry could be reduced to just one word or, come to that, none at all, like in the absence of a predicate in the above title. Where words failed only a moth aspiring to reach a bright star could restore the meaning of the word love, a love he could no longer give outside of a new society.

Shelley finds love in nature because he can no longer find it in man. It is nature that responds to his thoughts and moods not man and is the more sentient of the two. Only when humanity is restored to its full self will he find himself in humanity and not merely nature. And when it does come he finds the desire of the moth for the star in the events of Peterloo.

The standard treatment of John Ray, the founding father of English natural history is typical. That Ray was formerly a clergyman always receives a mention accompanied by the rider we are indeed fortunate because he was then able to devote his entire life to the study of natural history. John Sparks in 'The Discovery of Animal Behaviour' goes even further and says that after the bloody civil war of the 1640s' Ray sought in the peace of nature a refuge from all this turmoil. It is much more complex than that. Ray refused to swear an oath that would have compromised his independence and made a state religion out of his puritan faith. He was sacked from his job because of his principles. The struggle for the recognition of nature goes to the heart of the English revolution. Not only did it signify equality but independence of mind. Even if there is not one sign of the tumultuous pleasures of the flesh in Ray set free by the civil war of the 1640s' it does not mean Ray did not regard them as also part of creation just as birds flowers fish and trees were: only that his passions were channelled in to soberly recording and describing the flora and fauna of England. But he is not the detached recorder of the bio-biographers, the ascetic scientist probing an external nature, a subject as lifeless as the object of enquiry. And nothing much is ever made of Ray's collection of country sayings and local dialect, except to note it. Did this not also imply a resistance to a state leviathan that was imposing uniformity on language that was capable of destroying minority speech even down to the local names for plants and animals? These frequently are extraordinarily deft and may even have contained the outlines of a superior certainly more memorable system of classification.

Ray was a great classifier but one cannot help but feel that in his descriptions he was seeking a beyond that if pushed invites comparison with Shelley: 'he will watch from dawn to gloom/ the late reflected sun illume/ the yellow bees in the ivy bloom/nor heed nor see what things they be/ but from these create he can/ forms more real than living man' etc.

The blurring of the outlines of the species can also be given a completely opposite treatment where the characters acquire a clarity of outline they do not possess in reality. And they appear bigger to our eyes. This is Mallarme's approach. His botanical descriptions belong to a changed, better world in which geography has been reborn even as it assimilates and transforms the most advanced geological thinking:

'Yes, in an island that the air loads with sight and not with visions, every flower showed itself to be larger without our discussing it.

Such huge flower that each one was invariably adorned with a lucid contour, a hiatus that separated it from the gardens'.

As is made plain this is not a visionary state: it could be an everyday reality. But it requires action to get there and typically Mallarme veils this recognition in the almost impenetrable obscurity of little known Greek and Latin names (uttered by a child that has 'abdicated from his ecstasy' in the passage to adulthood) that means 'arise'(the wild praxis of Dionysus possibly} and 'beauty', but a beauty 'hidden by the too large gladiolus'.

Mallarme's recoil from the endless hybrids and varieties of horticulture is also a search for a primal language free from social deceit and which also simplifies nature and renders it less artificial. When he says, 'flower' he wants us to see a flower different to those found in bouquets and in the 'hiatus (of) gardens' or in 'gladioli'. The great classifiers such as Ray and Linnaeus never deigned to describe garden varieties even though hybrids in nature were a problem for them: this would be left to the aestheticians of horticulture writing in garden catalogues and which in the late 19th century was already becoming an industry.

Mallarme's generic flower concludes 'variation on a subject', a rambling enquiry into the crisis of versification. Though wreathed at times in inpenetrable obscurity, Mallarme in this text and others was demolishing with soft hammer blows, a facade that had stood firm since Homer. Read carefully it also says something about the state of commodification then reached where 'to speak has no connection with the reality of things except commercially'. But this primitive accumulation of words by the commodity had yet to seize the inner world of reveries and it this symphonic parallel discourse of layered meanings that Mallarme (forever ambiguously) finds 'nothing or almost an art'. Mallarme's investigations into language has attracted the attention of professional linguists, particularly his observations on word tonalities, but it always comes as a disappointment to find it ends there. The division of mental labour is so ingrained that Mallarme's search for a language that means what it says and the fundamental crises of literature and so much else he spent a lifetime proclaiming is not just passed over in silence: it just does not go in.

For a brief moment in the UK, say from 1965 to the early 1970s', the real Mallarme, as distinct from the uncomfortable litterateur, began, though only just, to be recognised. Investigating the tools of his trade with a dimension and depth no other poet had even thought of doing, Mallarme found himself on the threshold of a new age: the age of revolution which posed all things anew.

This other Mallarme and what it was to lead to, transcends the fixed terms of the 'two cultures'. No other Situationist influenced grouping anywhere in the world in the late 1960s had so many ex-scientists as King Mob in the UK. Why this was so is a question that not only has never been raised but never gone into. That moment has now gone and we can't now ask the questions we needed to then when we were all in full flow simply because the individuals involved have dispersed far and wide and no longer have any relevant contact with each other. All that remain are memories of tantalising conversations and probings cut short during moments of passionate invention. The only ex-scientist fully congnisant with the death of art and yet able to write a critique of science was Phil Meyler in his book 'And Yet it Moves'. Though now out of print this book has recently been published in Spanish by Campo Abierto and as a poor substitute can be read on the www.revoltagainstplenty.com web).

Instead we are left with C.P. Snow's naive opposition from the 1950s' and which still forms the basis of Richard Dawkin's book 'Unweaving the Rainbow'. Dawkins is a militant atheist but as far as capitalism is concerned he is not even agnostic: he is an out and out believer. Not one word escapes his lips on the social utilization of science. The merest flickerings of revolt are entirely absent. So it is not surprising if his conception of art is limited by an almost quaint aestheticism, which belongs - and only just - to the 19th century.

[Libcom note - illustration above by Clement B Davis, from Fabre's "The Life of the Spider". This did not accompany the original article.]

Interweaving the naturalist's objectivity with fantasy Lautreamont created a nomenclature of horror superseding the polarities of science and art by creating a barely coherent third term that is still struggling for its form and truth. Out of the existing taxonomies he generates new species that interact with and re-assemble a human species pushed to the point of absurdity and disintegration. His disruptive imagery had its sights on the notion of the beautiful but in time its visual appeal came to constitute a surrealist aesthetic, though one very much against the movement's original impulse, and then finally formed part of the language of advertising. Despite aspiring to become a practical force, Lautreamont's vision, though reflecting an all enveloping pathology, still remained imprisoned within the form of a book that more than any other work of fiction announced the unravelling of literature.

"Look at the ancient spider of the large species slowly poking its head out of a hole set in the ground at one of the corner intersections of the room. We are no longer in the narrative. It listens attentively for any rustling that may stir its mandibles in the air. Alas! We have now reached the real as regard the tarantula, and although an exclamation mark might be put at the end of every sentence, that is perhaps no reason for dispensing with them".

(The Songs of Maldoror. Lautreamont 1868)

"Little Paul has his own insect cages; his own little garden no larger than a pocket-handkerchief, where he grows beans; his forest plantation, in which stand four oaks a hand's breadth high, still furnished on one side with the acorn that feed them. It all makes a welcome change from grammar, which gets on none the worse for it".

(Souvenirs Entomologiques. Henri Fabre - around the same time)

We look "at the ancient spider of the large species" through the eyes of a naturalist, hence what we see cannot be part of a literary narrative. And if there is to be a narrative it can only be like those in Fabre's 'Souvenirs Entomologiques' and insects are a great vehicle for scientific narrative particularly where metamorphosis is involved. We may call Fabre's approach scientific narrative yet where else do we find in a great scientific text chapter headings like: 'A well dressed caterpillar' that then goes on to describe in matchless detail the Puss Moth caterpillar's habit of adorning itself? Though the entomologist Latreille gave the name of 'The Sisyphus' to the scavenger beetle only Fabre, when describing the insect and its habits, can mix unconstrained enthusiasm with a power of close observation that for page after page never flags. We enter in to that world and dimensions change just as they do in Lautreamont. And as for Lautreamont's cryptic remarks on exclamation marks how many do we find in a scientific journal like 'Nature'!

There very existence implies a lack of impartiality allowing us to then write about the doom of humanity without turning a hair. But it is science, both 'good' and 'bad', that should now be apostrophised considering how much science, for good and evil, is now deeply involved in the ultimate fate of humanity. We can divine in Lautreamont a hidden plea for a changed relationship between subject and object and in how many other major scientific texts not just those to do with entomology (though there are specific reasons for it in the case of the latter) is grammar mentioned like in Fabre? As he says 'it gets on none the worse for it.'

A closer examination of the relationship Lautreamont and Fabre would be worthwhile. The French context is particularly important. The French contribution to the nascent science of entomology is second to none. We only have only to think of Fabre and Latreille in the 19th century and Reaumur before them. There is also a link, though not an obvious one, between Pasteur and Fabre that needs explaining. Microbiology dealt with smaller quantities than the smallest of insects. However Pasteur sought out Fabre when investigating the blight then ravaging French sericulture. The world of the 'infinitely small' (Pasteur) and the 'monde a part' of insects which Fabre did so much to introduce us to, involved a change of scale in the way we now thought about small organisms. Their importance as regards the human species would henceforth only grow to massive proportions - and is still growing.

The situation was very different here. This rescaling of insects both symbolically and in terms of the Order of Insecta was given a different twist. Possessive individualism and the Victorian passion for collecting tended to remove, particularly butterflies and moths, from their living context. However the arid series of varieties expressed a repressed wish to change life.

In comparison to France the great contributions of British entomology were almost an act of defiance. There was little educational preparation behind them in the sense of established institutions. Wallace was apprenticed to a surveyor at the age of 15 and at the age of 13 Bates was grafting for a hosiery manufacturer. Darwin, Wallace, Bates - all three had subverted the division of labour in their own way in a country, more than any other, gave it ultimate legitimation. It is yet another reason why the mere mention of nature has such an incendiary quality to it. When Darwin broached the idea of publishing his 'Origins of the Species' 10 years earlier it was not just his fears radical Chartists would see grinning monkeys in positions of power everywhere but that personally he had undermined the legitimacy of the division of labour and the crown prince of the free marketeers, Adam Smith. By contrast Latreille had gained his release from prison during the French revolution because of his chance discovery in his cell of a previously unknown species of beetle. Thus almost from its inception entomology became institutionalised in a manner totally at odds with its development in Britain although Fabre was to be denied the chair of Zoology in Marseille because of his peasant mannerisms ('ses allures paysannes'). Both Latreille and Fabre were opposed to evolutionary theory and yet both were in the closest contact with it. (One wonders how much academic state pedagogy has played in all this because opposition to 'official' science ' today we would say 'big science' - has in France largely come from outside since maybe the surrealists and not from within science as is more the case in Britain.)

We know next to nothing about Lautreamont yet only nine years separates the 'Origins of the Species' from 'Les Chants des Maldoror'.The latter is very obviously the work of a very precocious youth, one versed in the sciences, especially the life sciences. He had to have read Darwin or at the very least was acquainted with his ideas. Not however in order to refute him but redefine him. What scandalised him was not what man had evolved from but what he was evolving in to. And if Darwin appeared to make his peace with god in the concluding paragraph of the 'Origins', Lautremont steadfastly refused to do so. The evolutionary tree finally branches, because of manifold oppression, in to the most grotesque mutations imaginable. Not only are these mutants biologically unable to breed, they have also lost the desire to do so They may try, like the two sharks - one a shark the other a manshark - but their union is a 'long, hideous and chaste union.'

"I gave them fixatives, jars and boxes, and instructions for removing and fixing the brains (from the extermination camps) and they came bringing them like the delivery van from a furniture company. There was wonderful material among those brains, beautiful mental defectives, malformations and early infantile diseases.'

(The above is a quote from the Nazi brain scientist, Professor Hallevorden, director of the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Brain Research in Berlin. He was reinstated in his post in 1948 and continued there until his retirement)

"I cast a long look of satisfaction upon the duality that composes me--------and find myself beautiful! Beautiful as the congenital malformation of man's sexual organs consisting of the relative brevity of the urethal canal and the division or absence of its lower wall so that this canal opens at a variable distance from the gland and below the penis;------- or rather as the following truth: 'The system of scales, modes, and their harmonic series does not rest upon variable natural laws but is, on the contrary, the result of aesthetic principles which have carried with the progressive development of mankind, and will vary again'.

'as beautiful as the trembling of hands in alcoholism'

(The above is a quote from Lautreamont's, The Songs of Maldoror)

Today we find in Lautreamont the hint of something far more sinister that is fast becoming a reality. It is not generally appreciated how much bio-engineering is driven by an aesthetic/consumer eugenics which also resumes the project of the avant garde to change life. Lautreamont deliberately sought to undermine aesthetic niceties by introducing at every turn the pathological that is still then double-edged enough to contain a promise of humanity. That is why the above quotes from 'Les Chants' must not be read as affirming the words of the Nazi brain scientist: in fact the mutilation we experience deep within ourselves, and which Lautreamont describes with the factual accuracy of a diagnostician, is socially conditioned and therefore temporary. And how does he let us know this. By in the next moment historicizing artistic form - in this instance music - a concept which is also as beautiful as 'deformity'. (Where ever did such a quote come from, if it is indeed a quote).

When eugenics first made its appearance it was the brain child of Francis Dalton, the cousin of Charles Darwin. Paradoxically it arose out of Darwin's failure to crack the laws governing inheritance which his theory of natural selection presupposed. But once known these laws could, in theory, be controlled in the way that evolutionary theory never could be because it is inherently unpredictable. There were economic benefits but eugenics then could not be run as a profitable private business. What the biology lacked in technical achievement it made up for in ideological conviction centred around class and race supported mainly by the state. We hardly need mention the sterilization campaigns, the assault upon the indigent, the mentally ill, the incurably sick, ethnic minorities and the camps because the apostles of the new eugenics will do that for us. What underwrites the certainty of the new eugenicists is their belief this time it will work because the market is now in control, for it was the state that formerly distorted the science of eugenics.

Eugenics has become a consumer item and Watson has gone on record as asking what's wrong in designing females with blonde hair, blue eyes and big tits as that's what men want? Yet female commodity stereotyping is infinitely more diverse than this and like as not today's infant and infantile eugenics may forever be condemned to follow the market, not shape it. In fact Watson's free market, and supposedly freely chosen stereotype, has definite Aryan characteristics, (the blonde beast not the beautiful blonde), and is every bit as likely, in the name of the beautiful, to produce nothing but horror. Ultimately it will prove to be the most devastating of ironies where, like in the past, it will be the insane that impose upon those with a chance of finding sanity. The only way out of this madness is collective creation and Lautreamont cautions us to read his terrible pages with maximum care..

Stuart Wise 2004

As common as muck: all male assembly around a piece of shit! Ranmore Common, Surrey, August 25th 2005. However the Adonis Blue is far from common and to see 10 together is a once in a lifetime sight. Included amongst them were a male Common Blue and a male Chalkhill Blue. Though female Adonis Blues were nectaring close by, none ventured onto this all male preserve. Male aggression and the territorial imperative were briefly forgotten as each butterfly drank its cocktail of mineral water at this faecal lounge bar on the roadside verge. Photographed over a half hour period around 13:30 hours.

The numbered sequence above captures the moment (Figs 9/10/11/12) the sun came out from behind the intermittent cloud. It was, for late August, quite a breezy, cool day, though perfect for observing blue butterflies that then did not hesitate to open their wings. The bank side that skirts Denbies Hillside (honoured with an aerial view in E.B. Ford's opus) was also sheltered from the wind and this, combined with the overnight rain that had softened the dried outer crust of the dog faeces, made the conditions ideal. Hence this wonderful chance occurrence, making up for what otherwise would have been a disappointing day. This marvellous natural spectacle will stay with us forever. Possibly because dogs are carnivores the mineral content of their faeces is higher than those of herbivores. On the manure left by the horses on the hillside only two blues, or at most three, could be found tarrying at any one time. Once the sun came out some Adonis Blues almost immediately quit their dog's dinner, necessary for the repair of cell tissue, and elected to nectar on the blooms of marjoram close by. On the far right of fig 12 a singleton can be seen doing just that. One can make out a male Common Blue with its wings open in the centre of fig 3and 4. In fig 8 a male Chalkhill Blue is just about discernible in the upper left corner.

The spring emergence of the Adonis Blue in 2005 had been exceptional. And if the 26th Aug 2005 was anything to go by, the second emergence was just as impressive. The cold spring weather of 2005 appears not to have affected the Adonis Blue though it decimated the first generation of the Common Blue. Our original purpose on Aug 26th had been to photograph the Common Blue, particularly the female Common Blue, on the Surrey Hills to compliment the numbers of second generation Common Blues we had photographed in South and West Yorks around Sheffield, Castleford, Leeds and Bradford. However we were disappointed to find the second brood of Common Blues all but gone. Even so, compared with the reasonable number we found in the north, there appeared to be far fewer.

The following is a theoretical drift sparked by this unusual encounter...........

This chance encounter of rare butterflies, dog excreta and two genuinely unprejudiced 'socio-biologists' (well let's pretend for the moment) keenly aware of the indissoluble unity of both man and nature and the need to conserve and liberate both in a single undivided act of revolution, immediately stimulated several lines of enquiry. For those attuned to the significance of 'chance', this encounter exhales the scent of certain radical avant-garde currents of the last 100 years, which have yet to bear their uncompromising fruits. However for the more 'scientifically' minded it led to a consideration of the nitrogen cycle, which is equally explosive. For the darling butterflies were intent on procuring the mineral content of the dog's faeces, in particular the nitrate compounds so essential to all life whether plant or animal.

When we allude to explosive consequences we were not just thinking of the discovery of nitro glycerine in 1846, of TNT in 1863 and dynamite by Nobel in 1867, all of them compounds of nitrogen, the 30th most abundant element. Though increasingly an essential element of war from the mid 19th century onwards, nitrogen became in the 20th Century also an essential element of agriculture. In fact one could say the agricultural use of manufactured nitrogen compounds was war carried on by other means, a war that is still being waged by biochemical companies, giant agricultural conglomerates and supermarkets to gain total control over food production worldwide. Prior to 1905 the fertility of soil had largely depended on plant bacteria and microorganisms in the soil. However in that year a German chemist Fritz Haber showed it was possible to make nitrogen and hydrogen gases react when heated to 500c to form ammonia, the basic feedstock for the chemical industry and the basis of artificial fertilizers.

78% of the earth's atmosphere is made up of nitrogen and today close on 50 million tonnes of nitrogen is extracted yearly from the atmosphere. It is an energy intensive process because nitrogen is an unusually inert gas and the nitrogen molecule N2 is one of the most stable molecules, being held together by an extremely strong bond. Only when a high temperature is supplied does a reaction begin to take place and ammonia produced. Ammonia is, of course, very soluble in water and ammonia based fertilizers (nitrates) can be poured onto the ravaged soils of the world's breadbaskets and rice bowls which, with each passing day, become ever more depleted of all organic nutrients. Had the soil a voice we would hear it repeatedly scream for its seasonal fixes of nitrates, phosphorus and potassium cooked and packed into bags labelled NPK/Agricultural Narcotics, K being the chemical symbol of potassium. Once set in motion the use of nitrate fertilizers becomes a vicious spiral it is nigh on impossible to escape from. As the soil howls for an even bigger fix of nitrates, it is a habit far harder to break than coming off junk because to the farmer and agribusinesses increasingly hooked up to, and hooked on, the world market there is even less margin of choice than there is to a junkie. Despite the growing organic sector, cold turkey on an industrial scale would spell near worldwide economic ruin as well as widespread starvation.

A century ago we were solar-derived energy eating animals. But not any more. Today for every calorie of food energy consumed, ten calories of manufactured energy goes into its production and transportation. As we vainly strive to reproduce the energy that powers the sun (atomic fusion) we are becoming less directly dependant than ever on that energy. This primal act of hubris can only result in the most terrible disaster.

Prior to that watershed year of 1905 for agriculture, war, pesticides and chemical defoliants, nitrogen fixing was almost entirely an organic process. When we inhale we take in oxygen and breathe out CO2. However the large percentage of nitrogen we breathe in returns to the atmosphere unchanged. The process of biological nitrogen fixing, without which human and animal life could not survive, is the work of symbiotic bacteria, rhizobium, present in the root nodules of certain plants (the leguminosae) and which are able to fix atmospheric nitrogen, and azobacter, free living soil micro organisms. From there the fixed nitrogen was (and still is, of course!) incorporated into living things both plant and animal and from which it emerges as excreta from animals and from decomposing dead matter.

There also has been an enormous increase in the atmospheric nitrogen that soils can absorb and which previously was largely due to lightning that caused the highly stable nitrogen element, because of the high voltages passing through the inert atmospheric nitrogen, to change into a weak solution of nitric acid (HNO2). Combined with rainwater it reaches the ground where it forms nitrates, which are then absorbed by plants. Back in 1850 it has been estimated each hectare of ground received about 10 kilos of nitrogen per year, mostly from nitrogen compounds dissolved in rain. Today however about 45 kilograms per hectare is deposited annually. Most is from the burning of fossil fuels, car exhausts and the fuel burnt to heat homes, which produce various oxides of nitrogen. It is only now becoming apparent that this is seriously threatening the diversity of plant communities favouring certain grasses, in particular mat and bent grass. Combined with global warming encouraging the unseasonable growth of grass, it is paradoxically leading to a year round, bilious greening of the countryside at the expense of other plant life. Together with the brochure appeal of smart rye grass, so favoured by house builders and newbuild industrial construction firms, this deathly green substitute for the deceased and unlamented Astroturf, only adds to the depressing spectacle of invasive expanses of mono-grassland with not even a hint of daisies and dandelions to relieve the monotony. Again we are just learning about this as we are about the role of nitrogen in the acetcholins, the neurotransmitter that passes messages from one nerve ending to another. Nitrogen is also a component of many other biologically important molecules such as haem - part of haemoglobin. So the storehouse of knowledge increases but to no avail because true knowledge and the capacity to use it has been stripped of power. Sciencia no potestas est.

But to return for a moment to those lovely blue butterflies feasting off excreta. Like every other butterfly enthusiast we were familiar with the sight of butterflies drinking their fill around the perimeter of rainwater pools on non-porous soils. This rainwater also contained water-soluble nitrogen compounds. In old woodlands the nitrogen content of standing pools would be largely organic deriving from the action of largely non leguminous, nitrogen fixing bacteria of the genus Frankia and other tree and plant bacteria and finally micro-organisms in the soil that are uniquely adapted to absorbing nitrogen from the atmosphere and turning it into a usable compound.

However because chalk and limestone are porous this terrain dries out far quicker than it would on more acidic soils. So the chance of rainwater forming pools and remaining for any length of time is considerably lessened. In that case for downland butterflies the only other ready source of nitrates has to be animal excreta, especially excreta that has been made soluble by a downpour. Hence the somewhat revolting and quite common sight of beautiful butterflies gorging themselves on shit and so different from those fairy-like woodland pools, glinting in shafts of sunlight, around which assemble White Admirals and even the occasional Purple Emperor.

We also began to wonder if faecal feasting was once a much more common sight than it is today, not only on chalk and limestone down land but on all types of soils. Reliant as soil was on crop rotation (the practise of leaving fields fallow) and natural organic processes, nitrates would have been in much shorter supply than they are today and so butterflies would have tended to seek out the excreta of grazing animals far more than they now do simply because standing water and damp, muddy soils are nowadays far richer in nitrates than they were in times past. We are, of course, guessing but the reasoning is soundly based even if the facts are lacking. The most destructive excess of this super abundance of nitrates can be seen in the phenomena of eutrophication, the excessive growth of algae and higher plants on natural waters due to their 'fertilization'. The plant life dies off and pollutes the water as it decomposes, removing oxygen in the process and killing of fishes and other freshwater life. In fact fertilizers are the largest source of the pollution of ground and drinking water.

Happy as pigs in shit, these Adonis Blue males were wholly absorbed in downing their faecal cocktail. They were oblivious to our presence and had we wanted to feast at the trough alongside them they would have given place but not flown off. A National Trust estate van passing within two inches of them and even a dog sniffing around as dogs do, failed to rile them and only the suns rays seemed to affect them, closing their wings when it clouded over. This was a living testimony to the power of nitrogen and if we reflect that that the average human being carries around a total of 1.3 kilograms of nitrogen that is quite a weight to lug about. We cannot argue the case for nitrogen too strongly: it is a constituent of DNA and as such is part of the genetic code and a constituent of the many amino acids that form enzymes, the basic ingredient of all proteins.

It must have been a rich cocktail indeed because one certainly cannot approach puddling White Admirals, Clouded Yellows, Purple Emperors or the Brown Argus with the same ease. The fact that it was a carnivore's faeces and not a herbivore's must have made all the difference. The high protein meat diets of dogs contain more concentrated nitrogen compounds than that of typical ruminant let out to pasture and which invariable spends more time feeding - and defecating. And so the liberal amounts of horse dung on Denbies Hillside proved far less attractive to the butterflies when compared with the dog dirt moistened by the over night rain and partially reheated by the sun. Admittedly the dung was more exposed to a cooling breeze on the hillside but, even so, one or more butterflies would, as they did in the past, occasionally alight to imbibe the nitrate content. But a closer inspection of the dung clearly showed the presence of plant fibre (i.e. undigested cellulose) because most mammals lack the enzyme catalysing the degradation of cellulose and which is found in some invertebrates (e.g. termites) fungi, bacteria etc. Had the horses on Denbies Hillside been fed with artificial feed rather than left to graze on sparse down land grass it may well have been a different story. It also led us to wonder how much artificial feedstock, either directly or indirectly, went into canned dog food and just how energy intensive the rows of Chappie on the shelves of supermarkets really were, including the energy that went into the manufacture of the tin cans. For any estimate of the nitrogen cycle, which is today a highly capitalised cycle, must include an estimate of the vast amounts of energy expended on the manufacture of artificial fertilizers not to mention the energy expanded on the global food transportation network. The nitrogen cycle is inescapably part of the looming energy crises and these assembled Adonis Blues were radiating a message from those unclouded blue wings, the most saturated, intense blue wings of the genus that in the not too distant future, thirty years at the maximum, the game will be up.

With the rapidly approaching energy crises there will undoubtedly be a return to a more traditional form of agriculture, particularly soil husbandry. Already the value of the nitrogen-based fix is being increasingly questioned. For instance the UN's Food and Agricultural organisation admitted in 1997 that wheat yields in both Mexico and the US had shown no increase in 13 years. An intensifying energy crisis will only increase the cost of artificial fertilizers as soils become ever more organically impoverished. And it will take years for these manufactured soils to recover from decades of drug dependency. But what form the social content of this latter day farming revolution will take is any bodies guess and is dependent on the tempo of the struggle against capitalism, a struggle that has been all but annihilated and never have the rulers of this world felt so secure in their desperation.

It could result in a hell on earth, somewhere between a warped physiocracy (with a bizarrely reworked 'Tableau Economique' to match this new agrarian emergency) and modern feudal vassalage with the manufacturing sector restricted to the repair (recycling!) of whatever machinery is still around. Paper money would cease to exist and there would be a return to solid coin based largely on the produce of the soil with vast estates inherited from today's immense agriculture concentrations, overseen by vicious modern landlords disposing of the labour of armies of truly 'post modern' agricultural labourers living a brutalised hand to mouth existence. Defra could be replaced by a lethally bureaucratised Soil Association. For the moment, this amiable, approachable though somewhat naive association has yet to undergo the malforming transformation of a high profile organisation like Greenpeace. Though never a paragon of clarity, its woolly populism once gave more than a margin of free scope to individual initiatives and to a joyous, if confused, contestation. Not any more for Greenpeace is today a 'bloated corporation' run by suits on 'substantial salaries while someone else does their job', intent only on avoiding confrontation, striking deals with oil corporations and putting the rest of the organisation's employees on short term contacts. (See the interesting article 'War and Greenpeace' by John Castel, former captain of 'Rainbow Warrior', in 'The Independent' 8/8/2005). It all sounds very familiar and Greenpeace looks to be gearing up to face a future that in terms of previously unbelievable and aberrant forms of capitalism, will make the last 30 years of fictive values and treading water appear 'rational' and benevolent.

It is becoming obvious that if humanity is to be in with a chance of surviving the next hundred years, the future will have to be predominantly agrarian once more. The number of individuals compelled to draw this conclusion is rising exponentially. Inevitably it is a very mixed bag, ranging from the greater clarity of Rene Riesel (formerly of the Confederation Paysanne in France) to the far more muddled Colin Tudge. The latter's latest book 'The Secret Lives of Trees' is a fascinating study of trees and, by continually emphasising humanity's never ending dependence on trees, revolutionises our evaluation of them. Not quite the same can be said of 'Oak: The Frame of Civilization' by W.B. Logan, a book that appeared around the same time. Though it is about the oak tree's human story, the age of oak ends with the steam driven, iron-clad ships of the American Confederacy in the civil war of 1860-65. Dealing not with a particular species but with the tree family, the sheer quantity of tree science Tudge gets to grip with in a masterly fashion, leads him to conclude we can never do without trees. He is therefore forced to confront political economy in the shape of money, government, political parties, big business (however not the state, which is crucial) but by seeking an alternative within political economy rather than its abolition which includes money, government, political parties, business and the state, it is unlikely he will be able, in the long run, to prevent a single tree from being felled. Riesel would never make the same mistake and thus neither he nor Tudge would ever see eye to eye. However it is up to Tudge to make the first move. For we have every reason to believe this totalising approach is on the increase, particularly from within the life sciences, though it also turns up in other unexpected places with increasing frequency (e.g. geology). This approach is driven, as never before, by scientific logic, it does not come from without in response to a social upheaval. It is therefore not a moral choice but recognition of inescapable fact. However there are false and true totalities and regrettably it is the former that is likely to predominate and do more harm than good. Hence it is necessary to stress, above all else, the correct critique of political economy. Yet this very wording 'correct' causes the flesh to creep reminding one of all the other absolutes no longer relevant. What you can say is that over the last 75 years a certain still largely unknown path has been clearly though slowly demarcated which we now have to traverse and discover a lot more about negotiating its many twists and turns. It began with a Marx contra Marx, a separation of the state capitalist Marx from all the theoretical subtleties surrounding Marx's analyses of the capitalist mode of production and the potential points of transcendence. Such approach has already accounted for a great variety of insight. For those looking for a more grounded approach to the ecological crises this montage is yet in its infancy and for those who are naive on this subject they could do worse than peruse Loren Goldner's website at https://www.breaktheirhaughtypower.net/ all the while recognising that Loren has yet to bring eco-critique and energy crises into his wide-ranging and excellent general orbit. Despite the well-intentioned and broadly right perspectives belonging to the green anarchists there lack of theoretical rigour leaves much to be desired.

And now for another drift related to the Adonis Blues.....

Extremes meet and a coda has to be affixed to this scientific preamble one that stems directly from the avant-garde movements of the past 70 years and their harbinger from even earlier times. The manner in which chance - a once in a lifetime chance opportunity - has been emphasised and its capture on camera is significant. For some it will immediately evoke that now classic instance of all chance events, 'as beautiful as the meeting of an umbrella and typewriter on a dissecting table'. To describe it as an image (though it let loose an endless stream of images in art and advertising it cannot be held responsible for) is just plain wrong for it is intended as a frontal assault upon the stock in trade of literature. Most likely written within weeks of Darwin's publication of the 'Origin of the Species' it has the quality of a direct observation, a record of a simple, though disturbing, coincidence, something that the man, Isidore Ducasse, and not the author, Lautreamont, had chanced upon on his daily rounds. It is overwhelmingly present in a way a novel restricted to a specific place and time, and therefore safely cordoned off by history, can never be. It is also not intended as a poetic metaphor, a mere seeming that alters nothing in reality: it simply is. Lautreamont's observation was intended as a blunt instrument that doubled as a demolition hammer and a tool essential to the task of reconstruction.

The objects that make up Lautreamont's embryonic observation are utilitarian objects that were, at least as regards umbrellas and typewriters beginning to be mass manufactured. They are not ornamental but everyday objects free from the stylistic mishmash borrowed largely, though not exclusively, from the Greco/roman/renaissance past an anxiety ridden industry, fearful at the lack of precedent, was becoming good at faking. The concomitant Greco/roman/renaissance body beautiful ideal was also undermined by Lautreamont when he wrote 'as beautiful as the trembling of an alcoholics hand'. It would be a mistake to think Lautreamont found beauty in disintegration rather that the realization of beauty is not possible other than by personally undergoing a profound experience of disintegration and understanding it from within. Otherwise one will be trapped by one of the palliatives to capitalism none of which ever succeeds and only makes matters worse.

And in an aphoristic addendum entitled 'Poesies' (more like the 'pocketful of poesies' that plague victims caught a sweet spring-like whiff of as they were first struck down) to the Songs of Maldoror, Lautreamont states unforgettably 'poetry will be made by all'. This chance meeting, the most famous in all 'literature' even as it was consigning literature to the dustbin, also implied praxis, a praxis that was to be taken up by the most radical moments of surrealism in the 1920s and early 1930s like their perambulations, which endeavoured 'to leave behind the ball and chain of art'. Though 'a dismal failure' by 'setting out on the road' they set a powerful and very influential precedent that would be repeatedly taken up in one form or another, throughout the rest of the 20th century. Unquestionably the most significant was the derive initiated in Paris during the late 1950s which sought to rid the perambulations of their aimlessness and overarching emphasis upon chance. They were meant as a prelude to urban insurrection (and in fact were in retrospect) a reconnoitring of terrain with that end in view.

However from its origins in Lautreamont (and others like De Quincey and up to a point Nerval) these perambulations, becoming ever more lucid with the passing of time, at least up to the mid-sixties when the original purpose of the derive was irrevocably lost, were overwhelmingly urban in character. The countryside was dismissed as boring, uneventful and predictable, the antithesis of encounter - by chance or otherwise. There is no adoration of nature in Lautreamont: it is as repulsive as everything else. It is a grotesquely deformed, aberrant nature that has evolved (the debt to Darwin is obvious) beyond anything we would recognise as nature. With hindsight the Songs of Maldoror could be said to be an anticipation of the bio-economy, the stage at which biology becomes industrialised and Fordist assembly lines give place to the bio-assembly line of genetic engineering and bionic prosthetics. Unlike Fukuyama's 'Our Post Human Future ' The Consequences of the Bi-technology Revolution' (the title of his 2002 book) this supernature has all gone horribly wrong and, at the end of history, the promise of a superior technohumanity is cruelly betrayed and turns into the ugliest, subhuman, deformity.

An anticipation of what is still to come, this hateful nature has become the ultimate commodity. But even before Lautreamont, in fact from the closing decades of the 18th Century, nature had become the object of a rescue operation. To the failed painter Goethe, it had to be visualized differently one that implied the metamorphosis of painterly values (transcendence of art and post Newtonian science) into a new unity of nature. Kant's 'Critique of Judgement' was unquestionably the main influence behind this advance. Under the theme of 'Nature as Art' it was carried further in the Germany of the 1800s than anywhere else, a development that has never been recognised, still less analysed, as fully as it deserves to be. It led to the most preposterous claim to be able to see into the life of things to such an extent it was possible to surpass nature and become a demiurge of creation, a designer of life. For this was part and parcel of the logic of absolute idealism. It was in this spirit that Goethe wrote his grandiloquent creationist preliminaries for what would eventually become the very sober 'Metamorphoses of Plants', though his idealism reflected that of Hegel rather than Kant who would never, for one moment, have countenanced such exaggerated claims.

These inflated pretensions were a response both to the French revolution and the industrial revolution and in them there is a deepening awareness of the dialectics of man and nature and that, though a part of nature, man - universal man - was beginning to impose himself on the rest of nature with a power and scope unprecedented in all of human history and in the process appeared to be reinventing nature, society and man.

Strangely enough in the hands of Keats' poem 'The Song of Opposites' this dialectic becomes a homely cockney dialectic within nature: a cheery song of opposites and chance occurrence as if nature itself was becoming a boring routine event, the natural equivalent of mass production. One says 'strangely' because of course Keats is far from cheery enmeshed as he was in an opulently-denied despair and yearning with nature as a vast metaphor of promise and thwarted desire. Looking for the unusual in nature also became a disguised wish to change life and hence comes into the inheritance of the avant-garde tradition. A history extending back over 200 years also shaped our response to these Adonis Blues, which we were well aware of at the time.

After the defeat of the UK's miners' strike (1984-5) all hope of a better world ended in this country. And so the both of us some 15 years ago began to seek solace in the countryside. Something then happened we were not prepared for, that caught us unawares like we had been pushed from behind. Not only did unexpected things happen within the order of nature like finding a Hedge Brown a 150 yards from Wormwood Scrubs prison and then a few years later stumbling by chance on a small colony on the scree slope of Malham Cove, but we began to have significant encounters in the field. If we chanced on someone with a camera or a pair of binoculars it invariably led to far more than an exchange of pleasantries. These encounters would with increasing regularity hit on the very basis of contemporary civilisation by continually asking awkward questions seldom raised elsewhere. Conversation would float as effortlessly as the clouds over head from observation on the behaviour of a butterfly to the catastrophic consequences of a consumer boom in the newly emerging BRICS (Brazil Russia India China) as if neither contradicted the other but were profoundly interconnected - as they are.

Tramping, as we often did around the Surrey Hills and the Chilterns we were struck by the place names which were richly evocative of the puritan revolution and the civil war of the 1640s, names like Burford, Puritan Way, Milton Close, Pulpit Hill and St George's Hill forever associated with the name of Winstanley and that profound moment that was to ring throughout the ages, when a group of men and women took over the land and began to dig. From a patch of ground on which the Small Blue was flying we had gazed at the hill from afar. A short while later, without ever leaving heath land, we were on Banstead Down where the Marbled White was introduced during the 1950s after dying out there. As for Pulpit Hill -----we had gone to Little Kimble in the Chilterns in the late spring of 1997 to look for the Duke of Burgundy Fritillary when we came across this rounded, steep sided, chalk mound with the name of Pulpit Hill. Entirely by chance we had, earlier on in the day, stumbled into the ground of Chequers, the prime minister's country residence. We had left quickly not because ordered to by security staff rather that we had no desire to remain there, it was so park-like and barren of wild life. How enticing in comparison was Pulpit Hill, the true victor in the civil war and not Chequers or parliament.

On the summit of Pulpit Hill there was a lone cow, as unmoving as stone, framed against the deep blue sky. There was also a thick grove of hawthorn through which ran a carefully tended tunnel roofed by impenetrable branches that had been cut and shaped probably centuries ago. And round and about the Common Blue teemed in such numbers that, when they came to roost, as many as five could be found on one grass stalk. And yet we also felt something was missing, the name reminding us of the days when the countryside was also teeming with people and hedge preachers who found in nature not just equality but the blessings of desire, a god given and therefore equal right to indulge the passions freely, endowing what was to become the stand point of enlightenment scientific neutrality with a new meaning: 'nature to be commanded must be obeyed'. However this was passionate, not instrumental reasoning in which we ourselves have still to be the test beds of the humanely possible.

This also has became a feature of the new terrain of encounter a place where a hidden love of darting, stolen looks of undoubted warmth and the thoroughly genuine seems about to burst its shackles and find new forms of expression. The air crackles with a muted eroticism as though the sexes were beginning to be at ease with each other and more able to speak their minds and be their true selves. A surrealist worth his or her salt would have instantly recognised it. Once when visiting Hell's Coppice in Bernwood Forest a couple of miles walk from Sandbeds on the outskirts of Oxford to search for the Brown Hairstreak we happened to bump into a middle aged couple with grey hair who had also stationed themselves in a lane bordered with buckthorn and blackthorn in the hope of catching a glimpse of the elusive insects. After awhile they moved off and we followed a half hour later. We knew the Brown Hairstreak likes to jink around tall ash trees usually ashes situated on higher grounds. There were several large ashes that bordered a large ploughed field a few hundred yards away and we had in the past espied the Hairstreaks on the top branches. The path to these ashes ran through a dense woodland so thick with scrub it muffled the sound of intruders. And intrude we did, for on straightening up after crawling practically on all fours through a tangled mass of low branches and brambles, we came across the couple leaning up against a tree laughing and kissing each other full on the lips, the woman's skirt riding up around her waist. They were not the slightest bit abashed and carried on as if all that had surprised them was a pair of muntjac.

We were slower to recover from our embarrassment and yet we both remarked how such a scene would once have been typical and that the divorce of human passion from the setting of nature was to the detriment of both. To the lyrical sound of giggles coming from within the wood we did see our Hairstreaks high up in the top branches of the oaks. A couple appeared to be performing a pre-nuptial mating ritual and presently disappeared from view. How I wish at that moment I had a balloon which could carry me up, up, up and away just above the canopy for I knew no one had ever witnessed or photographed a pair of mating Brown Hairstreaks in the wild.

Climbing up into the canopy would not have been the same as hanging there just above the tree tops, able to move about silently and at will without disturbing as much as a leaf. I half imagined to myself a dream like structure that could do this. Viewing 'A Treetop Odyssey' in the summer of 2005 I realised that my dream machine had become half fact and was even being devised whilst I lay on my back in the ploughed furrows staring up at the top ashes sometime in the late 1990s'. This scientific adventure story was about a journey atop the canopy of Madagascan forest, a unique vantage point from which to view a unique island with a unique flora and fauna. An airship had been used from which was suspended a webbed cradle, nicknamed the pretzel, which enabled scientists to walk the canopy. However the thrill of the new at what up to then had been impossible, soon gave way to doubt then contempt, and finally outrage. The cost must have been colossal and the credits gave no indication who paid for the bulk of this expedition. Led by Prof. Halle from Montpellier University, academic funding could never have stretched this far. Seeing that the expedition included a couple of botanists employed to capture scents by a cosmetics company and other scientists employed by biochemical companies in search of - in fact the biopirating - of yet another block buster drug, the source of the funding was immediately clear, so clear that on no account had their sponsorship ever to be mentioned. This was a seductive example of the kind of bio rapacity that had underwritten the Rio biodiversity conference of 1992 and the rules stated, though no one dared say so out loud, that conservation had to yield a profit. This, after all, is the opinion of the eminence grise E.O. Wilson, sociobiologist and myrmycologist, whose views on bio diversity had played such a part in the conclusions that flowed from the Rio conference. That biodiversity - not withstanding its profound scientific claims that biodiversity tends to yield even more biodiversity - has been guided by the profit motive from the moment it began to slip glibly off the tongue, is a major reason why biodiversity groups attached to councils (yet another reason for their being totally ineffective) are worse then useless at the local level when it comes to stopping the annihilation of the species. Capitalist society is rotten to the core. Nature is not yet but could be entirely engulfed by it, beginning with the free market monetarist philosophy that underlies biodiversity.

What gladdened me the next day were the number of friends I met in the street who had watched the program and had felt the same way as I did without me needing prompt them. This indignation was much greater than could be expected given the present climate of rewarding robber barons, pension fund cut purses and the haves and have more. It demonstrated how sensitive the issue of nature is becoming, as sensitive as the cap on a phial of nitro glycerine.

It was in Hell's Coppice we encountered an amateur naturalist who though an ardent wild life photographer and still high from having photographed a Wilson's Petrol (possibly the world's commonest sea bird but not around these shores), had long ago rid himself of his TV. He was so proud at having done what, at some time or other, we had all wanted to do but lacked the resolve. Would our lives change, had his, and the question went unanswered because no one asked it, though I could now kick myself for not asking it. Here was an opportunity to probe the depths because TV is a media that has yet to find its form and content and will never do so while capitalism exists.

Earlier on that day we had fallen in with a tutor from Balliol College. How the conversation drifted is yet another example of the potential that now exists for encounter in the countryside. It began innocently enough, while we were casting our eyes over the blackthorns. 'Looking for the Black Hairstreak,' he enquired, for this was the exact spot the Black Hairstreak was discovered by a school boy in the early 1900s'. Immediately the news got out the place was swarming with lepidopterists from nearby Oxford University and come Friday afternoon tutors would say 'see you in hell' rather than 'see you after the weekend'!

We have yet to see our first Black Hairstreak in Hell's Coppice but according to this young man still in his 20's he had, several years back, counted as many as 20 on one bush. They may now have gone for good and he also mentioned he had been privileged to see the hibernacula of the March Fritillary by the side by the side of the path leading to the makeshift car park. Not anymore for the National Trust in its absolute lack of infinite wisdom had seen fit to lay a tar macadam road to the now paved over car park, and - heyho - the Marsh Fritillary is now only a distant memory. We each shook our heads in disbelief and it was then by the by it came out he was a tutor in Balliol College almost as if it was something to be ashamed of, for he certainly did not go out of his way to mention it. Of course we immediately wanted to know if the memory of another being, a human being, had survived the passing of time - that of E.B. Ford's. Very much so, and we were regaled with a number of telling stories, well worth recounting some day, regarding this great lepidopterist. The close relationship between J.B.S. Haldane and Ford had always interested me for Haldane had dominated the biological sciences in this country during the 1930s and 1940s, exercising a profound influence on Ford. Knowing Haldane was a 'red' (though being a Stalinist that also meant red with the blood of the workers he idolised, and writing trenchant articles on scientific subjects for their edification in the pages of 'The Daily Worker') I attempted to move the conversation in this direction. Alas, he did not perceive what I was driving at and all he could say, in this respect, was that Ford had objected to opening up the senior common rooms to women on the grounds their voices were too shrill! After the scandals surrounding 'the dark lady of DNA' (Rosalind Franklin, who succeeded in photographing the helical structure of DNA before Crick and Watson deduced it and who has only received a very belated recognition and astronomers like the all but ignored Henrietta Levitt who painstakingly mapped the Cepheid Variables, crucial to understanding the scale of the universe), the male dominated scientific fraternity is now desperate to make amends for its sexist past, an act of contrition that conveniently covers up a far more fundamental question; the relationship between capitalism and science. Despite the increased integration of women into science this question is still scarcely ever asked.

This also had a bearing on my desire to know more about Imms who had written a very influential book in the 1930s entitled 'General text book of Entomology' though he was better known as the author of 'Insect Natural History' which came out after World War Two as part of 'The New Naturalist' series. He had also been a close friend of Ford's and when he died in 1949 it was, to Ford, not only a loss to entomology but a deeply felt personal bereavement. Imms had brought together a vast mass of material into a very readable whole. He also marked the moment entomology lost its innocence and was fortunate enough not to have straddled the two worlds of pure entomology and applied entomology with World War Two as the dividing line. Even so he anticipated this development being appointed in 1913 reader in agricultural entomology at Victoria University Manchester and then, on the outbreak of war, crop inspector of the board of agriculture and fisheries. It wasn't immediately apparent that the chlorinated gases used as a chemical weapon on the western front could, once suitably modified, be deployed against insects.

At the same time Imms was putting together his masterwork, Vincent Wigglesworth was composing 'The Principles of Insect Physiology' which came out in 1939. With a name to match the job description, Wigglesworth profoundly influenced the course entomology was to take following the end of World War Two, hitching entomology's so far unsullied reputation ineradicably to the bio chemicals industry and the green revolution, actually the first of the 'green' misnomers. The post war green revolution was part of a campaign to sell a complete package including heavy machinery, prodigal irrigation schemes and hybrid varieties of soy, wheat, rice etc. responsive to pesticides, fertilizers, and herbicides. It was the first attempt to gain global control of agriculture, the latest being that of GM foods.

Entomology's changing face began commendably with Wigglesworth telling his students at the London School of Tropical Medicine that more people had died in the First World War from insect borne diseases than had been killed in action. With this sobering thought, applied entomology had come of age, just as the shift in emphasis meant any extra entomological investigation into social causes would henceforth be strictly off limits, especially a probing analysis - and one that badly needs to be done - of the relationship between applied entomology and the agrochemical industrial military complex. A 1945 edition of 'Time' had published a picture of the first atomic bomb explosion alongside a report announcing DDT as the ultimate weapon in the war on insects. In 'Silent Spring' Rachel Carson had cited four examples from the 'Journal of Entomology' wherein researchers had listed chemical industry support for their researches. The Colorado beetle is perhaps the worlds most recognisable and notorious beetle. It was also the first to become resistant to pesticides: genetic variation and the insect's rapid rate of reproduction kept yielding generations able to tolerate each new poison.

The indiscriminate use of pesticides violates a fundamental law of evolution and it always amazes me how the agrochemical companies in their search for the ultimate insect poison, continue to overlook the obvious. Or do they? Most likely they are aware of it; only it does not make business sense to publicly acknowledge it. In fact Wigglesworth spanning the two worlds of pure and applied entomology was also aware of another shift, that from state to private capitalism. He did not unfortunately express it as bluntly as this but the tendency towards the privatisation of science bothered him greatly not seeing that state sponsored science was not the same as a genuinely public science, a science open to all and only possible once commodity society is abolished. This confusion continues to this day and was particularly marked in the feud that broke out around the mapping of the human genome. Of course we prefer Sulston, and the others that helped him, to Craig Venter who threatened to undermine this international effort and make the human genome into a corporate monopoly. But the title of Sulston`s book 'The Common Thread' detailing the history of this scientific breakthrough refers to more than just DNA for it is also a plea on behalf of the public realm which, as is typically the case with virtually every scientist, becomes confused with that of the state-of-the-common-people, which, regarding the present day state (or any other), is a meaningless populist illusion.

There is a revealing entry in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography on Wigglesworth - and also telling on account of its pulled punches but which is enough to wish for a more candid exposure: 'By the time he died much research in his chosen field had become managed, unpublished, or even hidden, with untested information reserved for industrial gain, business profit, political showmanship or military power'. Perhaps the only well-known scientist in this country in recent years who would have scoffed at the dichotomy of public and private in terms of the state v the private market is Dr. Chris Pallis, the eminent brain surgeon and former 'head' of the ultra leftist group, Solidarity but who was nonetheless, quite nervous about mingling his scientific research and career with his theories on society. In a way this was hardly surprising as the frequent visits to his house by the Special Branch received savage tabloid attention. It can be said that Chris Pallis as a scientist was partly in the tradition of Needham and Haldane, his specialism separate from his identification with the workers' movement. It was though a significant advance as Pallis forthrightly saw through all the cruel and bloody deception inherent in what officially was known as the past workers' movement, not only its variant social democratic forms but those of Leninism, Maoism and Trotskyism. However lack of a critique of society's totality (which also marred Solidarity's contribution) meant comments on medicine and medical research were limited confined primarily to a condemnation of the growth of a cumbersome NHS bureaucracy.

One of Wigglesworth students, James Beaumont (who was later to be knighted as indeed was Wigglesworth) - we have come along way since Lady Glanville was judged to be off her rocker, citing as evidence her passion for butterflies - found that insect skins were covered with an infinitely thin layer of wax. It would be a mistake to think an entomologist like Beaumont was an unwitting dupe: his researches on the permeability of insect eggshells that are even more waterproof than the insects were done with the aim of showing how poisons can get in. In the 1970s he was to work for Geest devising a means of coating bananas in wax which did away with refrigerated containers: these cryogenic bananas would still look fresh after being shipped thousands of miles and unripe fruit became a thing of the past. The analysis of insect wax had advanced the science of poisoning; now it was serving the make believe art of fresh-food retailing, which since the 1970s has invaded the shelves of every supermarket.

The career of Sir James Beaumont reflects the changing fortunes of entomology from its gradual acceptance as an academic discipline of no 'use' to anyone, to being of central importance to the giant agrochemical companies and latterly to biotech firms seeking a final solution to the insect question.

We had wanted to put these questions to our new acquaintance from Balliol College in the hope this more informal setting in a country lane, well away from the prying eyes of academia ever ready to snitch on those not prepared to shut up, would lead to a more frank exchange. Surprisingly he had never heard of Imms and was temporarily put on the back foot but his new regard for us was at once apparent. The only chapter in Imms 'Insect Natural History' which could be of practical use is the one on biological forms of control, the only really effective form of insect control up to World War Two. However to read it as a statement of Imms's ecological sympathies would be mistaken: he was lucky enough not to know any better.

I am indebted to our new friend for another reason for he made me aware of the surreal starting point of Ford's book on butterflies. 'What other book on butterflies' he claimed, 'begins with the Fall of Constantinople'' He was right and I had forgotten or rather the fact had never struck me, as it should. Yes, there was always something not quite right in the head about lepidopterists and would that we got out of our heads more often.

However this young lecturer was not altogether secure in his ivory tower. With a wry smile he mentioned how the city of 'dreaming spires' had been renamed the city of 'screaming tyres', referring to the habitual practise of 'taking and driving without care' cars from the city centre and racing them to an appointed spot on the Blackbird Lees estate where residents of all ages and sexes would turn out to watch the live performance. This was not much more than harmless fun with an edge and well before the fire and brimstone game playing became a deadly business and the screech of tyres a prelude to a drive-by shooting. Though town and gown and the saga of the Cutteslow Walls - a wall separating the university precincts from plebeian quarters - have long passed into history, this lecturer was still gnawed from within by something more demanding than a social conscience in the abstract. If butterflies were to die out (and make no mistake, this is a very real possibility) so would his scientific specialism. To him the former luxury of scientific neutrality was not an option and his indignation at the wanton destruction of the Marsh Fritillary in Hell's Coppice that of a person with his back to the wall.

Not everyone we meet in the field is quite so committed to nature though as a general rule there is a great openness and readiness to show interest. This is particularly true of brownfield sites and other places that have so far eluded classification permitting nature to flourish unchecked and unaided and frequently the better for that. In the summer of 2005 - on the 9th of August to be precise the very same day we were to see second generation Dingy Skippers at Waleswood, South Yorks - we met nearby a former engineer on what had once been the Kiveton Park pit spoil heap now in the throws of the most goddam awful makeover sponsored by Yorkshire Forward. We explained we were concerned about the fate of the Dingy Skipper and that despite specific instructions, essential habitat requirements had been wilfully ignored. He was immediately interested and soon he was giving us an invaluable lesson on the geology of the spoil heap, picking up bits from the surviving portions of exposed spoil without which the Dingy Skipper does not stand a chance of surviving. What I had taken to be iron ore or oxidised iron and which imparted to spoil heaps a touch of ochre was, I learnt, burnt shale and a reminder that these nature rich heaps once had a tendency to catch fire. A self-taught geologist, he was fascinated by atomic weight and marvelled how a small lump of iron ore could weigh as much as a far larger chunk of coal.

This former engineer was an innocent at large, a typical South Yorks type whose disarming authenticity and sincerity belongs more to the industrial past than present. Though he didn't say so in as many words, the miners' strike of 1984/85 had changed his life. And now he passed his days drifting from one derelict site to another, rummaging amongst the bones of long dead industries in and around Sheffield like he was searching for his sanity and lost hope in the crumbling remains. He said he had taken early retirement but he was only in his early forties. Bit by bit the true story came out. He had become a victim of the intensification of labour and the lengthening of the working day, driving 200 miles to work where he was then expected, at eight in the morning, to launch himself into exacting calculations, on which lives depended, and then, come knocking off time and tired out, do the return journey amid ever mounting levels of traffic. He was going to visit a friend in prison who was convinced the CIA were listening in on him. His friend had been given a 7 month stretch for boarding a bus, snatching a mobile out of a woman's hand, and then after first smashing the mobile to bits, fighting with other passengers and the bus driver. It was possible to sympathise with this 'theft' of a mobile, for this act of paranoid critical activity had nothing to do with making money. A mental hospital was by far the more appropriate place where, if lucky, he could at least rest. But from now on our new found lapsed-engineer friend would be looking out for the Dingy Skipper on every abandoned spoil heap he visited.

Of all mental disorders there is today none more ubiquitous than depression. It is a growing affliction seemingly hell-bent on becoming a universal malady, the mental equivalent of the common cold. I recall some years back reading a book on botany that mentioned how a particular botanist was prevented from completing important work on account of a recurrent manic-depressive cycle. I mentioned this to a friend - the same who had come up with the title 'Dialectical Butterflies' for this website - how such details were becoming worthy of mention. 'And not before time' he replied.

'Nature Cure' by Richard Mabey is an account of a depressive episode in his life and his subsequent recovery from it in nature's arms. Yet there's no escaping the fact it is a 'nature' reeking of wealth. Nowhere in his book do we meet up with the forlorn souls who are in the habit of frequenting nature reserves, heathlands and wastes where traditionally idiots get the drop on royalty and being without money is no stigma, unless of course you are tempted into a hut run by the RSPB. At one point Mabey was so bad that he admitted himself into the same asylum near Peterborough the great John Clare had passed the majority of his later life. The penniless Clare was sectioned, Mabey went of his own accord paying for the privilege, which would not have come cheap. Rejected by a farmer's daughter because of his lowly labouring origins and then eventually made homeless by the enclosing of common land, Clare gave a new grounding to the romantic treatment of madness and depression. He was driven mad - and nature with him - by social forces and the loss of nature that he felt so deeply, was also an act of the expropriation of his livelihood down to his childhood memories. Though much transformed, this melancholy dialectic of man and nature is essentially our own.

This is not to minimize the pain of depression but it is obvious that the sad people we have met and cause tears to prick at the mere thought of them, have a different tale of woe to tell than that of 'Nature Cure', one of broken relationships, of lives blighted by poverty and unhappiness with not the slightest prospect of ever finding a job.

Like the person we met in Strumpshaw Fen, Norfolk one day. His torn coat, frayed trousers, shabby shoes and spectacles held together by elastoplast, told its own story. He was from Nottingham and his weather beaten face meant his life was passed in the wild. He was carrying an old tripod on which was mounted a very battered, second hand birdscope, the very inferiority of his equipment contrasting with the very latest in camera and optical technology competitively hung around the necks of a number of others, for the fen is managed by those fat cats of nature conservation, the RSPB. He did not fit in and we instantly warmed to him as he did to us. Whenever he sighted anything of interest he made brief notes in a fat, soiled notebook. How we would have loved to dip in that notebook. Did it contain more than just field observations, perhaps cryptic records of his mental states, or equally brief accounts of his conversation with others, which only he could understand? Where did it begin and where did it end? Did it even have a beginning or end? Were such notebooks the start of a real dialectics of nature, a taking up where Clare left off, though minus the rhymes, in which madness, nature and property relations, which the seizure of common lands was only a part of, were raised? We discussed train times journeys and travel concessions, one that would have enabled him to get to and fro on the same day from Nottingham to Ashstead on the North Downs where, with any luck, he would see the Purple Emperor. In the meantime we would break off to look at a Marsh Harrier or Swallowtail or fall silent to listen to Ceti's Warbler in between discussing the pros and cons of introductions, which he was unsure about. For this guy was learned and with a past he preferred to forget about and by becoming totally absorbed in nature able to achieve, in the best sense of the term, forgetfulness of self.

Fragments of conservations that were going somewhere and other half forgotten recollections slowly worm their way up. Like meeting an ex-soldier dressed in battle fatigues, his army issue tent draped over a branch in a corner of Raw Nook, a former railway siding on the line between Bradford and Halifax. He had made himself an unofficial warden of this now rich wild life habitat. By expressing a need to draw closer to, and bivouac if only for one night, in the heart of nature he clearly wished to do more than just conserve nature. Nature was a bolthole in more ways than one for it allowed him to escape from his housing situation on the Woodside Estate where his harmless eccentricity had attracted, and was bound to attract, the attention of conformist local bullies (i.e. not youths) who never gave him a moment's peace. The fact that he was ex-army - and therefore not a danger - would only have increased their cowardly determination to hunt him down. He had come upon me unawares, materialising out of the undergrowth, and causing me to jump. His army uniform of green and brown and likewise his tent were the green and brown of nature's primary means of camouflage Used by standing armies worldwide for aggressive and defensive purposes, this camouflage had been put to other uses permitting him to close in on shy birds and take impressive photos. It also allowed him to disappear into the background and find the faceless anonymity he craved.

Sometimes addresses and e-mails are exchanged on parting and the polite au revoir, 'be seeing you around', turns out to be true.

Once upon a time we chanced on a school teacher in her thirties in Strumpshaw Fen. A year later we just happened to meet her in the same location. We straightaway asked her if she had managed to get up to Garton Loch to see the Ospreys. Her blushes were poignant and lovely and, starting to feel more confident, spoke of her hatred of teaching and how like a prison school had become and the little she actually felt for her pupils. She couldn't wait for Friday afternoon when she would make a dash for her car and race through the countryside like a mad woman, ignoring all the rules of road safety, just to get a glimpse, for instance, of the Stone Curlews before it grew too dark. Still living at home with her parents and sleeping in the little bedroom she had been brought up in, nature was her salvation, her release, her reason for living, the benchmark from which to judge the rest of society, and the bedrock of her frankness when it came to speaking her mind about school. For this woman cared and did not have to lie and spout nonsense in front of nature like she was required to do in the classroom.

On brownfield sites especially those, which by definition implies a significant amount of industrial dereliction, other kinds of fruitful encounters are possible, especially if the industry is still just to say ticking over. These places attract industrial historians - and in the case of Healey Mills Marshalling yards in Horbury, West Yorks and where the Grayling was discovered in 2003 - railway enthusiasts in their droves. Sometimes they position themselves at the perimeter and stare through binoculars and many is the time we have asked them what bird were they observing. They, in turn, immediately assume we are there for a final examination of the elderly rolling stock that has been shunted into this industrial grave yards prior to being interred by the yard's undertakers. From talking at cross-purposes initially, a strange cross-fertilization could ensue. On being told of the yards unexamined, but already astonishing insect life, and the need, at all costs, to preserve it, appreciation of this living museum turned to wide eyed wonderment. One often feels like accompanying these train buffs if only to learn the correct names what to us, is little more than a heap of scrap metal but which is essential if we are to bring out a reality that is sometimes beyond belief, like when the Grayling lands on an old hand-operated railway points lever.

It also brings back memories of our childhood in the 1950s when one day we would be out chasing butterflies, the next sitting at the end of Doncaster or York railway station with another identification guide in our hand: Allen's 1/- guide to the steam trains of the LNER. And how in the company of other kids and, in the genuine spirit of youth, game for anything, we would sneak into the railway sidings and poke our heads around the corner of Doncaster engine sheds or the Roundhouse in York sidings. We knew it was not really permitted but a blind eye was turned more often than not. How I wish I could today trespass with the same ease onto the sprawling and increasingly derelict railway sidings of Doncaster, York, Leeds and elsewhere to see what wonders await amid the decaying rolling stock, now too eaten away and fallen to bits to ever move. Nationalization is not the same as socialization but even so the illusion that nationalised industry was owned by the public meant access was far less restricted even to us kids. Some must have been injured for hoards would invade sidings and main railway stations on a Saturday but still the practise was tolerated. Nor were we ever really warned of the dangers of playing on railway lines not on account of parental irresponsibility but because we were freer to make up our own minds and equally free to shoot the rapids and drown in the river Calder if the raft made from oil drums and odd bits of wood nailed and lashed together had capsized.

On the 23 July 2005 I was detained for a short while in Healey Mills Marshalling Yards and threatened with arrest. Prior to this for some three weeks in the late summer of 2004 I became quite depressed and took to my bed. A dismissive letter from a stuck-up biodiversity official on Rotherham Council saying he had not seen the Dingy Skipper on the site of the former Orgreave coking plant had been the trigger. Nor according to him had there been any other recordings even though we'd seen them there in relative abundance. And his word was law so let the destruction roll-on, this time with the approval of the local biodiversity group. It was enough to make anyone give up the ghost. Having found the Grayling colony in Healey Mills the saving of it has become a deeply personal matter to the both of us. As I was being escorted out the yards perhaps 10 or more Grayling rose in front of me. I excitedly pointed them out to my captors: 'look, look' I said 'the Grayling'. I forget the exact reply but the intention was to crush all life out of the Grayling and me: there were plans afoot to develop the yards in the next eight years and if I was ever to go anywhere near the yards again I would be arrested on sight. Just the thought of pulling the wings of the Grayling and every other butterfly and insect in the yards excited their malice like they had regressed to being five year olds, bloodying a stone with the bashed-up bodies of flies and beetles. It was this that I found the most wounding. How I wish I'd had the foresight to keep my camcorder on and I know now never to turn it off during confrontations like these. For it gives an idea of the unspeakable readiness of people, invariably that little bit higher up the social scale and in some minor managerial position, to quite happily consent to the destruction of every living thing, not just as onlookers but as active participants. I had been in the yards during weekdays and the May Gurney track maintenance workers had paid no attention to me, which had given me a false sense of security.

As I walked up Healey Rd, Ossett and then on past my old school, the road rose up to meet me and my eyes were blurred with anger for I couldn't see straight. The last time I had done this walk was over 50 years ago. I mentally rehearsed a gallows speech as I was been led of to the cells of how it was a far, far better thing to save the Grayling than my own life! Back in Bradford the mock-heroic, self-dramatisation gave way to more considered reflections. Why hadn't my captors taken me out by the fishpond when I specifically asked to be led through the grounds of the angling club that rent the land from EWS, the yards owners? Were they afraid the anglers would come to my rescue and point a few things out, like the yard's ambiguous legal status? With a long tradition of poaching from country landowners behind them, anglers make excellent backroom lawyers, for the seizing of fishing rights had been a big part of enclosure. (No account of Thomas Bewick, the greatest bird and wild life illustrator this country has known, would be complete without mentioning his sympathy for poachers and his unswerving loyalty to radical causes up to his dying day in the late 18th century). I had pointed out that public rights of way ran through the yards and were clearly indicated on old maps. Later I was to find out the land the Yards had been built on had been requisitioned by the War Department during World War I when a de facto nationalisation of industry had prevailed. It was essential the coal and iron ore be quickly moved to the furnaces to aid the war effort and the area between Horbury and Huddersfield and around Dewsbury was crammed with pits, the last ones at Emley Moor and Caphouse closing after the defeat of the miners' strike in 1985. (Incidentally both sites may well have contained colonies of Dingy Skippers. Emley Moor is now a bleak modern industrial estate with bleak nature-furnishings and Caphouse the site of the National Mining Museum. Though we did not find any trefoil on the latter site there was plenty in the lanes round about, which suggests it grew on the former soil heap prior to it being made into, of all things, a nature trail!) But before 1914, the land the Yards now occupy was under water for some of the year, for it was swamp land, part of the wide Calder flood plain and possibly it was on this very spot a singleton Swallowtail, once on show in the Tolson Memorial Museum in Huddersfield, was seemingly caught in the 1840s. Swamplands, or to give them their more fashionable title, wetlands, belonged to everyone, even more so than tilled or grazed common land where a system of primogeniture based on custom was in operation. Enclosure of common lands in each case required a separate act of parliament, which plainly did not happen when the wetlands on which the Yards are now situated were first seized. It was an illegal act, that for reasons of state ignored parliamentary procedure and if push came to shove EWS could find themselves in a very awkward position. Even if EWS are unaware of the doubtful legal grounds it is standing on overall (as unstable as the land it was built on, evident from the widespread subsidence), the brutal over re-action of local managers suggests they are bent on preventing access by blocking off both ends to what they admit is a legal right of way through the yards along the elevated pathway that runs from Horbury Bridge to Healey Mills.

A protracted legal campaign could bring EWS to its knees or at least to the negotiating table for, as I learnt from one train buff, EWS is deeply in the red. Nonetheless, if past experiences are anything to go by, the heart would go out of the Yards if they became an official nature reserve. The fact that it is an underemployed working yard and functioning industrial museum in which the exhibits quickly end up as scrap metal, makes it a constantly changing environment all the more magical because nothing in it is simulated. It is for real. Everyday one freight train pulls out the yards around three in the afternoon. It grinds slowly forward along the railway lines that have buckled under the weight of the big diesel locos and lack of a proper foundation, a legacy of the haste at which ballast was thrown over the bog at the outbreak of the First World War nearly 100 years ago. The train does not dare to pick up speed until it joins the mainline to Dewsbury otherwise it would almost certainly be derailed. Out of sight we watch the train pull past us. It is long and drawn out and the effect can be mesmeric close to. After that the yards proper fall silent but we never feel safe until we have seen the May Gurney van depart. The yards are then ours but we now know not to expose ourselves to the view of passing passenger trains. We keep an eye on the same signal box we did when we were young kids in short trousers and dive for cover if on the off-chance we should see anyone, though we are by now pensionable hooligans.

And now imagine (it's easy if you try) a tannalised wooden fence running down the centre of the yards: to one side there is a functioning marshalling yard with its splendid array of old diesel locomotives, burnt out carriages, aged rolling stock, thrown away oil cans, rusting bolts, rubber pads, rotting sleepers, concrete pads and what not. On the other there is a large area of exposed hard core from which the rusting railway lines and all pieces of jagged metal have been removed, everything in short likely to remind us this was once a railway siding. Sure the Grayling is there and doing very well but nothing is going to stop me or you from looking wistfully at the other side of the tracks as a Grayling flies over the fence and weaves in and out of the silent, drawn up locomotives and rolling stock. I know what I would do: I would ignore the signposts telling me this is the limit of the nature reserve and not to trespass on the railway sidings and be over that fence like a shot. For we cannot confine nature to the nature reserve and if we continue to believe we can safely section it to places of asylum where it will be looked after, we ourselves will eventually go mad and die off.

What angered me most about my temporary detention in the Yards was the humiliating manner I was infantilised by this wretched nobody of a yard manager (or so he said) who was only obeying orders. His first words to me, so loud they echoed around the deserted yards, were 'do you know you are trespassing on private property' not that I was in danger of been run over, though it was quite obvious the only way these crooked twisting railway lines could accommodate rolling stock is if it was shunted up the track inch by inch. There was no reasonable answer to such a question: at 61 I was a naughty boy all over again. It would have made not one scrap of difference either if I had asked why there was no notice warning people not to trespass at the entrance to the yards on the path that leads from Horbury Bridge. And it would merely have been academic to this apology for a human being, used to giving and taking orders rather than questioning them, had I pointed out that when I was a schoolboy how come no one, including the police or rail workers, had ever once said to us kids 'do you know you are trespassing on private property''. Rather we were ushered off railway precincts and warned not to come back for our own good, which of course we still roundly resented. This yard manager's first words to me had emphasised the retreat of the public domain and the fetishism of private property to such a pitch it was now hallowed ground. By rights I should have instantly sunk to my knees. For it reflected the wholesale privatisation of life where even the public realm is being swallowed by the private as we are forced into a cell like existence(i.e. home life) somewhere between a monks cloister and a prison landing.

Private debt good public bad and the raving insistence on private property before all else.

Earlier on that day the first of August 2005 waiting for the cloud to clear I had taken refuge in 'the heather triangle', the site of the former Ossett sewerage works where in the space of 50 years since its closure there has been a rapid succession from sphagnum moss, to clumps of soft rush and other grasses that root on boggy ground, to broom, birch and sallow and finally to heather and trefoil and a generous covering of early marsh orchids. Whenever a passenger train travelling from Wakefield to Dewsbury had passed I would slide down deeper into the heather to avoid being noticed. Though in a good year the Grayling normally flies in the triangle I saw none in 2005 so, to pass the time, I had glanced through a newspaper article entitled 'Pester power: Trouble in Store' about kids as consumers by Madeleine Bunting. Still smarting, that evening I wrote the following entry in my 'nature' diary: 'these born to buy kids (not born to live kids) by the age of 10 would frequently know 300 brand names and more. Would that they knew 300 species! M. Bunting is one of those journalists who sees something but never able to grasp a subject with all the radicalism it demands. Sitting here alone I could only think what kind of a future is there for humanity when today's children are like they are and that it is increasingly being left to much older people to fight for the right of nature to exist'.

Two hours later I couldn't have been more infantilised by authority for if I had been an ultimate consumer, say a teenage biker rigged out in all the latest gear caught crashing through the Yards on a Harley Davidson (which does happen), the flunkeys who apprehended me would have been far more inclined to render homage to consumer brands and have treated that biker with far more understanding and esteem than was to be my lot. On the scale that calibrates infantilism there was none lower than I. Moreover it seemed to reflect the growing infantilization of nature. In this increasingly actual, comic book, pop up world of nature, trees in public spaces, are pruned to become lollipop trees resembling the first naive attempts of tiny tots to represent trees. Rabbits likewise have taken to living in cottages because their burrows have been filled in as they are a bio-hazard and a danger to passers-by who would sue a fly for buzzing too loudly if they could get it to appear in court. Recalling the sheer obtuseness we encountered over the past year my lip quivers with fury. The high profile given to all things green belies the hostility one meets with on the ground. Much of this has to do with how we are inducted into nature by the media and especially TV and thereby persuaded of its fullness, for paradoxically nature as representation is closer and nature as reality further away than it ever was two hundred years ago, The immensely popular 'Spring Watch' is unmistakably live and in comparison to which my spring watch is as denuded as the bare trees. Though trumpeted as a reply to Reality TV, like the latter it blurs our perception of what exists. Recently a well off young couple tried to get a rookery destroyed that had been mentioned in the Doomsday Book on the grounds that the rook parliament was disturbing their peace and privacy! In fact this says it all, for it is all about the loss and stamping out of whatever communication is left, even amongst birds! I rather think this couple could have paid lip service to green issues but come the crunch, the reality of nature was just too much and couldn't be switched off like TV. By the same token if we wish to conserve nature all we have to do is click on the box that says 'do you want to save nature' and it will be.

It is not even a matter that nature is alright in its place, for today nature itself is not right unless its sting is drawn and designed by a health and safety executive mindful of litigation. The result is to take the risk out of nature, to render it innocuous and teach it manners at the very moment it is about to give humanity a lesson it may never recover from, never mind ever forget. This is why I made a plea earlier on to keep the Yards as they are though knowing full well this is not possible in the society we live in. Should the Grayling and other butterflies like the Brown Argus and Dingy Skipper, also present in the Yards, be rescued they would be made to drag out their lives in a sanitised habitat protected from the only disasters that really matter, like laddering a pair of tights or getting chewing gum stuck to the soles of one's shoes. No one will then even begin to guess at the pleasure, at times bordering on ecstasy, I felt that day I discovered the Grayling in the Yards - how it was like walking on air when I saw them flying amid the toxic industrial detritus and stationary locomotives, flushing them up wherever I went until quite late in the evening.

The Yards are a perfect example of what have come to be called a brownfield site. There has been along standing prejudice that nature cannot possibly thrive on such sites. Amongst the New Naturalist series outstanding for their combination of text that does not talk down and a preference for brilliant informative photography - Markham, Beaufoy, Hoskins and even Julian Huxley - over illustration (as though one of the aims of the Russian Constructivists that the reactionary role of the artist had to be replaced by the revolutionary one of the technician had been taken on board in a typically British absence of mind that only reinforced the overall cultural conservatism) there is a volume which includes a chapter on the magnesian limestone strip that extends from north of Nottingham and peters out on the cliffs of Cullercoats Bay just north of Newcastle. I underlined the following comment on account of its ready acknowledgement of prejudice.

Wanting to know more, I found out we had been raised on the magnesian limestone strip just north of Darlington and running directly beneath Heighington Station where Stephenson's Locomotion No 1 had been placed on the level crossing of the Stockton and Darlington Railway. For a mile and a half to either side the countryside was astonishingly rich in wild life particularly in the railway sidings and on the railway embankments leading up to, and just beyond, Codlings Bridge. Trains and butterflies went together and many is the time we would be tearing up and down these embankments chasing a Dark Green Fritillary when a steam train thundered by pulling thirty or more wagons filled with coal from the Durham coalfield. Never once were we told to stop by the railway authorities or ever warned to be careful by the platelayers who plied the line, swinging their long hammers with unerring skill to bang in the wooden chocs that had fallen out the joints holding the rail in place.

The passion that we feel for Healey Mills Marshalling Yards is an attempt to relive, as the French surrealists exhorted some of the best moments of our childhood and youth in a present that has become much more property conscious and paranoid. We also see it as a right to the reclaiming of childhood where there was not the same division between nature, industry and human habitation.

So it is already more than mere sentiment and about recognition of the facts. No one has done more to put the issue of brownfield sites on the map than Oliver Gilbert. Though a specialist in lichens from his chair in Sheffield University he became aware of the fig trees by the banks of the Don writing two influential books 'Habitat Creation and Repair' and 'The Ecology of Urban Habitats'. These fig trees are still there (as is the unrecorded one by the muck beck by Shipley Station, Bradford) but the steel furnaces against which they were photographed for Mabey's 'Flora Britannica' have gone forever. Recently we have travelled the road that leads from the M1 to Sheffield city centre many times It is a landscape of industrial devastation a still overpowering reminder of Sheffield's former industrial might now grown silent and like a bomb site in places overgrown with buddleia and sparse grasses - just perfect for the 'urban' Grayling! It has to be our favourite street in the entire world.

But where the devastation ends landscaping begins and, with a sinking feeling, one soon notices the carefully tended, very boring, flowerbeds on Sheffield's roundabouts bearing the Vertase logo, a firm specialising in the reclamation of toxic land. Gilbert Oliver had ended up teaching landscape architects and no doubt he tried to drill into them a need to respect and encourage the overlooked biodiversity of these sites. There is very little evidence that he succeeded and we had to ask ourselves has there ever been an instance latterly where a landscape architect has improved the visual appearance of reclaimed land never mind showed proper care for whatever wild life was there in the first place? To the last man and woman they are nature sculpting deadbeats we can well do without, put to work whenever a local council has a mind to improve the appearance of a wasteland that left to itself is showing lots of promise or when industrial new build or a housing estate needs to be set off by a sham of greenery.

Oliver Gilbert may not have objected to brownfield sites being renamed urban commons because the changed definition implies they were here to stay. No such luck, as the on going destruction with even worse to come, of former pit spoil heaps of South and West Yorks, shows. Nowhere is safe for long and everyone who seeks to give a nature a hand by planting some tender shoots of say trefoil must know the bitter disappointment when the following year they have been dug up and destroyed in the name of development. It happens with a frequency that rules out chance mishap.

And yet we are likely in the long run (40/50) years to have the last laugh. But it will be a bitter laugh and a pyrrhic victory one not worth the having because of the cost involved. For anyone with half a mind who takes time out to reflect will realise the present day civilization is doomed, doomed by its all consuming need for energy and raw material driven by the power of money and capital.

We are almost on the brink of a historic turning point at least the equal of the Neolithic revolution of 8 to 10,000 years ago. Its immanence has yet to sink in and though the numbers that would unhesitatingly agree are still a trickle in this overheated world trickles can become torrents within minutes.

It is not just consumer capitalism that is a stake but a whole way of life based on industrial capitalism, which in the not too distant future will be judged the most gigantic act of hubris in the entire 3 million years of Homo erectus. We are suffering, far more than enjoying, the last days of consumer capitalism where no thought is given for the morrow, where last week's must have is not this weeks, where the day - and only for the day - of instant fashion in clothing and electronic gadgetry in particular draws ever closer.

For like minded people the question that is forever on their lips is when will the realization sink in there is no turning back and that humanity has sleep walked into the most gigantic catastrophe from which recovery becomes more impossible with each day that passes. Its immanence is such that one cannot help but wonder how people will react when they wake up from a deep sleep to a nightmare world. Struck dumb with horror are words that come to mind. And dumb animals, frightened for their lives and at their wits end, are easily stampeded and easily herded once exhausted.

Right now the only hope I have left is that there will be, come the hour, an explosion of practical intelligence and that in the last moments people will come together and prove able to launch a final, desperate act of resistance without which the cause not only of human freedom but of life itself is lost. There are years of conditioning to be sloughed off, years and years of systematic cretinisation with each generation more dumb than the last. And there is so much relearning to be done, so many footsteps to be retraced in so little time, if there is to be any hope at all. The accumulated contradictions today are so immense and of such incommensurable proportions the mind reels before such enormity and critique lies dying unable to raise an arm in protest and offer hope. To live without hope is an impossibility and just about the worst thought that can occur to anyone is that the hope of utopia has gone for good.

And yet coming through apocalyptic end-of-oil scenarios in particular (though not those of global warming) is the unmistakeable influence of utopian schemes that bring to mind Sir Thomas More, Charles Fourier, William Morris and others. The authors of these latter-day scenarios whether former economists or retired geologists have no left wing axe to grind. The logic of events has forced these conclusions upon them rather than they forcing themselves on events. And so roads will become orchards, back alleys, gardens, parking lots, fields and motorways the new strip cultivation of the agri-nature future. Craft production will return, as will draught animals and a mode of transport far more dependant on animals. The country will take over the towns and cities and whatever is left of manufacturing industry will be of a local nature and globalisation in 50 years time a dim memory.

There is a neat inevitability to these schemas, the heir actually of the crudest economic determinism arising from a simplistic reading of Marx ('Capitalism like an iron law of nature begets its own negation') as though the brightest of daybreaks is possible on the last second to midnight.

There will be a return to an agri-nature in place of industrialised agriculture. Again there is no margin of choice. But it will be a parody of a genuinely transformed relationship between man and nature, of that higher relationship that has long been dreamt of. It will be the cruel awakening from past utopias their ultimate disabuse, as it will be for the utopian hopes of conservationists that this sustainable agriculture will be nature friendly. Frightening though it is to admit it how long will it be before mass starvation becomes a fact of life not just in Africa but everywhere? 'Give me the bread motherfucker' will mean just that. Quite simply with the energy crises agricultural yields will fall with an accelerating rate despite the fact there are limits to agricultural yields from the application of industrial fertilizers. And rather than food for free, food prices will rocket. Whatever is left of nature will be left to look after itself, such will be the pressure to feed the world's population. Against all the odds it may thrive surprisingly well. However don't for one moment be seduced by the idea that the 'greening' of the cities will be a urban commons writ large. It will be a place of nightmares and not dreams a caricature of Clare's common land where nature was not there, as it is today, but here, there and everywhere.

I see in the crumbling Healey Mills Marshalling Yards a vision of industry's future. Whatever manufacturing capacity is retained it is bound to be dramatically different from what it is today. A great deal of dismantling will need to be done and America, Europe, Japan and China will resemble a vast junk yard of spare parts awaiting to be put to new uses, a real scrap heap challenge for history's terminally dispossessed and not for the delectation of TV audiences. Again only the deaf could fail to hear in this an echo of the appropriation of capitalist industry by the workers and its reorientation toward social ends, which required the closing down of most of it. Whatever role consciousness would have played in all this, - and this reorientation of production would have entailed the widest ranging public debate in all history, truly the stuff of dreams and not to be missed - what lies in store for most industry is its auto-destruction with the workers performing little or no part in it, at least initially. Taken out of their hands the workers historic destiny would have been, once again, done for them, expropriated this time more by the tools of their trades than by the vanguard parties they naively put their trust in. When consciousness arrives too late upon the scene the most dangerous events are given free reign to do their worst behind the backs of people.

On the day after I was detained in the Yards I was out filming the Purple Hairstreak in Odsal Woods when a man approached me in his 70s who asked me what I was doing. My head still whirling at the thought that precious habitat might shortly be destroyed by a brutal act of vandalism with not a voice raised in protest, I was immediately on the defensive fully expecting to be ordered off this right of way because it belonged to South Bradford golf club. Instead he showed an interest and glad to have a sympathetic ear for once, poured out my tale of woe. Having lived in Bradford all his life he knew of the Yards and was intrigued to learn they harboured such an amazing array of species. However the fact that butterflies were doing so well in this working industrial environment did not surprise him because his memory stretched back to war time Bradford when every piece of available land, including railway embankments, were covered in allotments. More than anything else it was the butterflies he remembered, more than he had ever seen before or since in Bradford. I asked him if they were 'Cabbage Whites' attracted by the rows of brassicae but he assured me there were many other 'colourful' ones, presumably Small Tortoiseshells and maybe Red Admirals. He delighted in the memory of such profusion for we never remotely see the likes of it today.

These allotments were part of the 'dig for victory' campaign, in fact a greening of urban spaces on a scale almost impossible to imagine in post war - or even pre-war - Britain. The onset of the first oil crises in the 1970s had revived memories of this event or, more precisely, images of this event, with rock posters cashing in on the act and photographs of a horse and cart been drawn through a square in Brussels, headquarters of the EEC, and therefore invested with additional symbolic weight. Cars even more that after 'the night of the barricades' in May 1968 began to look finite creations though for very different reasons. The car survived the trashing of May 1968 as it did the oil crises' of the seventies and early eighties. In fact as an object of consumption it grew and grew in number and importance becoming bigger, flashier, more stretched, more energy-intensive, more necessary, more of a machine for spending yet more time in, a life in itself and here for good - only then to start choking on what it was guzzling. It never ceases to amaze me how the cars eventual demise, despite having yet to fully sink in, resumes through an altogether different route all but forgotten radical projects as though there is no escaping, in one form or another, the historical denouement sketched out over 40 years ago. I had thought the chief danger to the Yards came from housing overspill from Horbury Green, an expensive looking, legoland fold with an interior courtyard (for cars not people) but this proved not to be the case. It would have meant building a road bridge over a main railway line and that would be enormously expensive. Ironically it is the energy crises that may spur the Yards transformation from a near derelict siding into a modern facility once the cost of road transport begins to dramatically outweigh that of rail transport.

In a front page article, which attracted considerable attention in The Independent, James Lovelock, warned that it may well be too late now to do anything to halt global warming. The 'siege economy' (though these are not his words) he now regards as inevitable resembles that of wartime dig-for-victory though another name is equally applicable; that of 'war communism'. Lovelock is under no illusions either about green alternatives to fossil fuels like bio fuels: there simply will not be sufficient agricultural land to grow such fancy items on. Though he does not expressly say so (though that is what's implied), climate change and the looming energy crises will effectively bury the car industry. I had half expected the article to endorse nuclear power but by now Lovelock probably realises nuclear new build in Britain will not make one jot of difference overall and that the nuclearization of the world is just a scientific phantasm and can never become fact, at least in its fissionable form.

There is a new tone of desperation in the article, the expression of a mind on the brink matching that of the earth. Lovelock has finally lost his faith in the capacity of science to effectively respond to a challenge on this scale: there is no wonder of science in the offing powerful enough to defeat this monster. The normally optimistic boffin, secure in the knowledge science will eventually come up with an answer, has become unrecognisable both to us and to himself. Adrift in uncharted waters like so many others from the science monkey house, there is a chance, though a very remote one, he will finally begin to make anti-capitalist sense. Gone are the barmy schemes for umbrellas in space the size of the moon to deflect the suns rays or flippant gestures we are not sure if we are meant to take seriously or in fun - like his readiness to welcome a lead case of spent uranium fuel into his kitchen because the heat generated by radioactive decay would save on his electricity bills!

Lovelock had also warmed to the deserted concrete sarcophagus that is now Chernobyl. In the first flush of enthusiasm for nuclear power he had outrageously suggested that the original inhabitants of Chernobyl return, not because it was safe to do so, but because it was becoming an eco-tourist destination: if plants and animals were thriving there why shouldn't human beings and what matters if genes mutate, cancer abounds and lives are cut short, we are all going to die anyway, the only difference is we are the only species to know that. Behind the mask of stoic indifference he had a point to prove: if the price for maintaining the equilibrium of gaia was nuclear contamination, even world-wide nuclear contamination, then it was a price worth paying. For certain he did not see in Chernobyl, as it now is, a vision of the future (though a post- human one that oddly almost doubles as post-revolutionary one) for he had spent his life ignoring the fact there was an alternative to present day society. The gaia hypothesis had appeared in the early 70s at a time of revolutionary ebb that would eventually turn into the most sustained period of reaction in all history. By an irony of history eventually a horrible mockery of this revolutionary alternative will almost certainly impose itself brutally.

The nearby town of Pripyat was constructed in the 1970s to house 48,000 people a typical, soviet style, concrete jungle (now actual jungle) of communal living, blocks sports stadia, community centres and so on. It could be Livingstone, it could be Roehampton, it could be Dunkirk, it could be Rotterdam, in fact anywhere in Britain and Europe. In the silent town square poplar trees sprout through the concrete and the football pitch has become a small forest. Herds of rare wild horses roam the streets, as do foxes, wolves and wild boar. For the first time the place looks fit for human habitation - and, with a few essential alterations, it is, if it weren't for the radiation. Nature left to itself has renovated these loveless blocks of concrete making them more appealing then any design makeover to date and in a far shorter space of time than it took the Healey Mills Marshalling Yards to undergo a similar transformation. And there is much that is enticing about Pripyat and not only to the herds of rare species of wild horses, the foxes, wolves and wild boar but something that is now humanly desirable about it, and fit for habitation for the first time. But Lovelock's attraction is essentially different to ours: rather than see gaia upset he would prefer to see the place inhabited once more and if the price for that is to live in a radioactive world well it's a price worth paying. That nature left to itself has carried out a task of reconstruction on these loveless blocks of concrete far more appealing then any makeover to date is not what he means. Lovelock's vision of a self-regulating planet is a natural process in which homo sapiens is part of that process but not a dominant part. Rather than use such finally nonsensical terms as positive feedback it would make more sense to substitute consumer capitalism. That would begin to make for a proper debate one that could appeal to the mass of the people because it would put the destiny of the planet firmly in their hands. It is now obvious the equilibrium has been upset and the full import of Lovelock's theoretical anti-humanism becomes apparent shifting toward a perverse rationalisation of what could well have been an initial killer instinct.
There is a letter of Shelley's written to Maria Gisborne. It is a most unusual letter because it is expressed in metrical form and could be called a poem. However it is a letter and as always with Shelley at his best, in his eagerness to find what lies on the other side, pushes hard at the formal limits of poetry. There was not his like anywhere else in the world at that time or anyone able to fully appreciate his radicalism, including Shelley, for he often leapt outside himself and far into the future.

The letter is not just formally innovative, an anticipation of the decline in literary form that was to mark the rest of the 19th Century and the early decades of the 20th century, it is also a statement about the formal possibilities of industry as though the first major uprising in history by the industrial working class at Peterloo needed to be rounded-off by a fundamental refashioning of science and industry. For Shelley the potential is limitless, the task protean. It begins with the hammering of swords into ploughshares but beyond that who can say. Shelley is a trifle bewildered by the objects of industry he finds at hand in an engineer's study. They are mysterious objects but their very indefiniteness is a powerful stimulant to the imagination, an imagination that henceforth would be in the round and not confined to a piece of paper. In their protean presence the traditional Shelley i.e. the poet Shelley is outclassed - and knows it: poetry, that archaic lumber-room and museum of the imagination, has had its day.

Unable to suppress a childish impulse he makes a paper boat and floats it across a bowl of mercury for the industrial revolution is not just a sign of the maturing of a universal humanity but also has the potential to realise childhood dreams. The bowl is of walnut, the liquid in it mercury. The naturalist Shelley is effortlessly able to name the wood and he must have been familiar with mercury's notoriously toxic properties and its mind-altering reputation.

The toxicity of industry was in Shelley's day a fraction of what it is today. Yet never the less we are at a comparable protean turn but an end rather than a beginning which would continue well after Shelley's death and found its most advanced expression for a few brief years in Russian Constructivism both socially and technically. The late 1960s and early 70s were the last occasion a creative renewal of industry was on the cards stretching from the sabotage of assembly lines, industrial detournement and even industrial reconstruction naively expressed in the alternative Lucas aerospace plan was on the cards.

There is scarcely even a glimmer of such constructive insurgency today. And yet at the same time industrial capitalism is being undermined in a way its customary gravediggers had never anticipated but which the archly conservative Ruskin had foreseen. In the meantime we can only wait and wonder when will the truth of these dire warnings sink in, for with each day that passes the planet drifts out of our orbit and beyond our saving.

We are approaching a cross roads from which there is no turning back a reminder that Marx had written in the 18th Brumaire 'at long last to create a situation from which no turning back is possible'. However the emphasis - an emphasis that makes all the difference, is on create: what we are facing is a situation that will have been largely decided for us, one we did not make and is not of our choosing.

Stuart Wise. January 2006
(with critical omissions and additions by David Wise)

All sciences ought to be dragged into a confrontation with capitalism: the big question is why they aren't seeing how, with increasing frequency, they come so close. Geology is no exception though it is far more likely to be true in the case of a zoologist, a botanist or a lepidopterist. One would have thought the slow time of geology would have rendered it completely impervious to a critique of capitalism. But not so though I need to read Richard Fortey's 'The Earth' to get an idea of the lie of the land.

And so to 'Rock School' (Dec 31st 2005 The Guardian). The article is about a paleoclimatologist Jane Francis, a lecturer employed by Leeds University. Unfortunately the cheery face in the accompanying photograph also suggests the sun always shines on Jane Francis and her dire, incontrovertible, prognostications staggeringly at one remove from her own life. What she learns does not devastate her and one is forced to ask at what point does scientific objectivity become academic indifference?

She had studied geology in Southampton in the 70s.On graduation work was hard to find so she opted for post graduate studies eventually joining the British Antarctica survey. For years Antarctica has been the preserve of geologists and explorers. Recently it has become clear that the continent is fundamentally responsible for the way the world is today: it may even have played a part in the route of homo sapiens to the top of the eco system. 40 million years ago it was a green house world with high atmospheric C02 . Antarctica had already drifted to its present position when, for reasons that are still not clear, ice began to form in the Antarctica.

Her vision of a transformed world (actually a 'scientific' proxy for revolutionary revenge on the folly of building large cities on flood plains) alarmingly accepts the melting of the ice caps and the rise in sea levels as probably inevitable: 'She thinks we live in ridiculous places. Something like 65 metres of potential sea level rise is trapped in the ice so London is gone and Cambridge will follow. Leeds is OK but Florida goes as do Bangladesh, the Pacific Islands and Holland. She has just been to Shanghai and saw it had been built on the Yangtze delta. She thought: 'well how long is that going to be there''

This apocalyptic fatalism is a consequence of the resigned conformity of her life, broadly faithful to the only moral that can be drawn from geology - that of the vast span of geological time which subducts historical time in a comparative instant, barely leaving a trace. Such a schema saves her from having to take a truly radical stance. Nothing can be done even though part of her knows very well this is no longer just a matter of nature's way: 'We fiddle too much with natural systems. The point is the earth takes care of itself.' though a major part of her analysis suggests otherwise but remains prudently hidden, like the bulk of an iceberg, through fear of what all most certainly would happen if she was too outspoken. Jane Francis is one of those who have identified, documented, read the book of nature correctly only to close it at the final chapter on homo sapiens. Too much is at stake, not least her job, and the myth that nothing can be done certainly makes for a more comfortable life in the short term. So there will be no rock-fall of critique crushing all before it. And we may as well accept in a few million years mankind will be preserved as 'a little black line of carbon. If that. We wont leave much record in the rock sequence'. And so life goes on, the life of academic respectability. She proudly displays her Polar Medal. She was only the fourth woman to be awarded it.

As she crossed Millennium Square in Leeds she briefly stopped to look at 'The Earth from Space' photographic exhibition. 'To Francis it demonstrates the new cooperation between science and art she has long been pushing for. She has been working with musicians who are composing pieces using rocks that sing. 'My arty friends on Portland wanted to know why some stones made a note of such a perfect pitch when you hit them'. This new type of scientist appearing after the late sixties is a sucker for installation art and tends to press the feminist angle but cannot begin to critique either.

Geologists also have a vested interest in the use of stone in construction. It makes daily life more interesting, and walking more of an adventure: 'Walking back to the station through Victoria Quarter, she can tell the origin of every surface. 'Look at those ripples in a piece of sandstone, probably local, formed in a river about 300 million years ago. I hate it when people grind rocks up and put them on a road, I don`t mind if you make buildings out of them, slabs tiles anything that enhances beauty. But grinding them up to make to make tarmac or cement? That's an abuse'. Geology came of age at the very moment when artificial building materials began to increasingly dominate cityscapes. This desire to return to building materials whose origins are recognisable, around which we can weave a fascinating history, has the potential to transform cities. And by becoming aware of more radical traditions which arrived at similar conclusions though from a very different starting point, a dialogue with radical critiques of art becomes possible. The contemporary cult of art and the artist no matter how formally 'radical' they might appear to be, such as making music out of stone, ultimately seeks to suppress all knowledge of these radical origins, despite being entirely, though contradictorily, dependant upon them as source material. However such spurious radicalism is by now so run of the mill that even a vague acquaintance with the actual sources is becoming a rarity, such is the growing ignorance of history.

There is an accompanying map of the perambulation around Leeds beginning at Millennium Square where the 'Earth from the Air' exhibition was showing. Next step on the map was the Civic Centre where Francis 'enthused about the fusion of science and art while analysing the lime deposits'. The third stop was at her laboratory in Leeds University where 'she unveils a future map of the world, sinking as the ice cap melts'. And finally onto Victoria Quarter where she marvels at the ripples in a piece of sandstone. One cannot fail to be reminded of the situationist map of Paris though it is unlikely that either the reporter or the geologist knew of its existence or iconic importance. For icons like these, though more influential than ever, have lost their meaning and value as the beginnings of a critique of urbanism that subsequently lost its way. The derive has become an aesthetic perambulation linked to rising property values, a mere avant-garde gloss on the traditional estate agents description or, as in this instance, an extra curricula scientific derive in an artistic wrapping which coyly flirts with radicalism (the false and unimaginative reinvention of cities through natural disasters such as happened to New Orleans in 2005). Given that Leeds is now the UK's second city, a city that over the past 25 years has totally remade itself as a financial centre second only to the City of London, it should come as no surprise. The Leeds Festival in the summer of 2005 featured an installation artist who between announcements giving the time of arrivals and departures from Leeds City Station reproduced the sound of the river Aire as it passed beneath the station fifty feet below. The Arches was always a thrilling dark place and a Piranesi-like gallery ran alongside the tunnel through which the pent up river surged. First there were the boutiques and now this to seal off the tunnel from real adventure. And don't go down the mines Daddy, for there's an avant-garde artist at the bottom of the lift shaft. During the summer of 2005, Leeds Radio ran a short piece on another installation artist, a former member of the Pogues, no less, who was making music out of the sound of dripping water in an abandoned mine close to Leeds. This water music is the opposite of music to the ears, more an advertisement of self in the hope of grabbing sponsorship from willing corporate bodies increasingly in that canned subversion tradition of Banksy and acolytes eager to tap into that huge floating wall of money which present day capitalism has at its disposal providing there is an art gallery displaying vacuous though costly product at the end of the process.

This hasn't happened out of the blue in Leeds as over the past few decades there's been a slow build-up. A background of playing with the limits of artistic form, though only occasionally grasping the nettle, was probably given the initial push way back in the early 1960s when a pronounced surrealist influence made an entrance guided by the figures of Patrick Hugues, Eric Thacker and Antony Earnshaw. The latter two in particular revived somewhat the radical departures of the surrealists initiating random walks and train rides throughout West Yorkshire seeking encounter, interesting objects and locations. Following quickly on their heels, Happening and Installation ensconced themselves on the fringes of the local cultural establishment through Robin Page and Terry Atkinson followed by a watered down theoretical edge in the shape of ex-situationist, Tim Clark, with books like The Image of the People - about Eduard Manet - and The Absolute Bourgeois - about Gustave Courbet. (More recently the guy has tried somewhat lamely to recover his initial radicalism through publication of the undoubtedly good Afflicted Powers book around the 9/11 catastrophe in New York). Most of these individuals in one way or another taught full or part time at the university or local colleges and art schools. Nonetheless these moments of adaptation, compromise and recuperation possibly helped spur into existence more genuine currents like Infantile Disorders in the 1970s out of which sprang The Gang of Four and Mekons punk bands ( and much to the disgust of the original ID protagonists), the Armley Surrealists and especially the now defunct loose grouping around the magazine Here & Now. These currents set in motion a more radical critique especially re-evaluation of the modern day urban geography of Leeds; how it could be thrown and disrupted in imaginative ways thus putting space into the orbit of other radical, more human uses.

Remember as previously mentioned, Leeds is the second UK city and the second financial centre. A reinvented artistic makeover and ambience parallels this rise as a world stock market player at the same time as the critique of culture has also somewhat slipped the leach encompassing subversion and practical activity. Alas what was liberating in these experiments never fulfilled their promise or acquired a hard edge. Increasingly a dark night closed in. What is left are fuzzy memories and pale shadows, yet it is this ambience that forms the background to the geological derive of Jane Francis and her cohorts.

The following contains comments on The Lucas Aerospace Plan published elsewhere on the www.revoltagainstplenty.com web1 . (Lucas Aerospace is now, of course, BAE defence systems). It was put together some time in the mid to late 1970s. It was a collaborative effort by three people and the aim eventually was to dig a little deeper and in particular go behind the scenes and statist razz-mattaz fostered by the so-called left and seek out the views of shop floor workers in Lucas Aerospace as well as imposing, rightly or wrongly some of our own. Above all we wished to puncture vanguardist illusions that were continually diverting mass struggle and leading it along false paths to nowhere. These few pages, like so much else that was valuable, never saw the light of day and it was only by chance that we recently came across this survivor from the trash can, folded up and covered in dust, seeing the experiment had been raised in a conference we went to on workers' control in Latin America. However its discovery, saved from the gnawing criticism of the mice, was extraordinarily timely for this experiment of near on thirty years ago is once more in the news and not only in Latin America. But the historical background could not be more different.

For a number of reasons we were never wholly for the Lucas Aerospace alternative plan nor were we ever wholly against it. This set us apart from, on the one hand, the naive enthusiasm of people like Hilary Wainwright (the idiot is still at it only this time promoting Porto Alegre illusions re Gordon Brown's community control initiatives) who co-authored a book on Lucas Aerospace that required a lot of reading between the lines to make the effort worthwhile, and, on the other hand, unsubtle, ultra leftist, blanket dismissals: For there can be no doubting that the Alternative Plan left a legacy that continues to absorb. We believed then, and still do, that ours was one of the few balanced approaches to this significant event in labour history. (Joao Bernardo's in Portugal was another).

The revival of interest in the Alternative Plan is due to a number of reasons. However two in particular stand out. The first concerns the decision to renew in the UK Trident's nuclear capabilities, the second the growth in 'sustainable' technologies that are presently undergoing an unprecedented degree of expansion and one set to continue into the indefinite future.

Should the Labour government plump for renewing Trident then jobs will be saved. If not then redundancies will run into 1000s. If jobs are then to be saved the only alternative will be to follow the biblical injunction and hammer swords into plough shares - exactly the situation the workers at Lucas Aerospace were faced with back in the mid to late 1970s. It is hardly surprising therefore that memory of that distant event has been reawakened particularly in Scotland because it is the Faslane site on the Clyde that will be most affected by layoffs. However the dormant collective memory has also been aided by the fact that breakaways are occurring in the Labour party in Scotland and, given that a system of proportional representation exists in the Scottish parliament, these parties are experiencing a considerable degree of electoral success, as are Scottish greens. This altogether more fluid situation as compared with what exists south of the border at Westminster means that it is okay to mention the Lucas Aerospace plan in Scotland's less policed political circles. Indeed for the first time in British political history situationist theory is edging through the post modern doors of Scotland's theme park parliament building and was even faintly recognisable in Gordon Brown's banal speeches before he became PM of Gt Britain plc. None of these amounts to much and the most one can say it is preferable to the stifling conformity south of the border.

On top of the decision to renew Trident has come the embarrassing revelations of a slush fund to grease the palms of the Saudi royal family in order to secure armament contracts worth billions and billions, the bribes themselves by the arms giant BAE allegedly amounting to £5 billion. We shall never know for the enquiry by the serious fraud office was halted by the attorney general Lord Goldsmith, the very same person who had legitimated the dodgy dossier and declared the war in Iraq to be legal. So much for an independent judiciary - if anyone needed reminding not least the Middle East states Blair is lecturing on the need for a constitutional separation of powers. There is much talk in the highbrow media of a 'stench of corruption' as if the cash for peerages row alone wasn't enough. But little will happen because in contrast to the 1970s there is no mass movement, no tiger to ride to force through limited change in the political realm. Where once feet could be heard marching in the streets there is now only the silence of defeat. The Lucas Aerospace alternative plan unfolded against a background of momentous struggle. Without that major ingredient the plan was unlikely ever to have got beyond the drawing board stage. The fact that prototypes were produced - though only prototypes - required a loosening of the financial purse strings inconceivable in today's climate. Who paid for these prototypes to be made - Lucas, the Banks, the Labour Government - who? For at this stage they were a cost of production not saleable commodities and fear, the dream of a better life as well as the cooptation of class struggle all had their parts to play in equal measure. The Lucas alternative plan has to be seen in this context, a context we largely took for granted when writing our appraisal, never suspecting for one moment within ten years it would be all but over bar the shouting.

When Labour came to power in 1997 it promised it would implement an ethical foreign policy which amongst other things meant control of the arms trade for Britain is second only to America in terms of armaments production. However during the ten years Labour has been in power there has been a massive off shoring of manufacturing capacity and jobs until today where arms manufacturing counts for 40% of the total manufacture the rest being made up by pharmaceuticals. In fact overall one could say reactionary war on all fronts and drug taking on all fours just about defines Britain these days.

With the ending of the Cold War there came inevitably a drop in armaments production and a limited conversion to peace time use as happened after the end of World War Two though on nothing like the same scale. Crucially however the decision to switch production had come from the top down over, the workers themselves having no say in the changeover as by now the masses were being definitively expunged from history at least in the west and with it the very idea of class struggle as the motor of history. Factory occupations became a thing of the past as increasingly did the more traditional factory equipped for large scale production - though at the same time factory size in China was becoming the modern equivalent of the Great Wall stretching factory construction to an immensity never seriously rivalled in the west. In fact the counterpart of these mega factories in the west are the mega warehouses and superstores of a retailing sector increasingly dependant on imports and developed to their furthest extent in America with Britain not too far behind, though available land is a far bigger obstacle to further growth than in America.

Alternative technology has reflected the downsizing of the UK's industrial base. In comparison to the production runs envisaged by the Lucas Alternative Plan it is essentially small scale and if demand was to significantly increase then, short of an energy price rise which would make relocation prohibitively expensive, production would be switched to cheap labour economies elsewhere. Either that or succeed in suppressing industrial wages to the level they are in China and India, a juicy prospect the accession of east European states to the EU now makes possible. Much of the alternative technology sector is directed at the UK's single biggest appreciating asset - the home - a fact that immediately sets it apart from the more broadly based social aims of the Alternative Plan which even so had evolved alongside a housing boom (though about to go bust) and unprecedented levels of home ownership. Already the DIY chain B&Q is planning to stock miniature wind turbines that can be fitted to the ridge beam of roofs or chimney stacks and which will just about take the chill off the water when the hot tap is turned on. At the higher end of the market there are solar panels and combined heat and power units and before long the familiar double glazing sales pitch will be replaced by a triple glazing one in a bid to sell the mirage of carbon neutral homes when there is not even the remotest possibility of that in the near future, even in terms of basic heating and lighting, - never mind the now well known fact that increased energy efficiency inevitably leads, under consumer capitalism, to increased energy use. The home, as an appreciating asset, fuels the credit mechanism which fuels consumption leading to yet more carbon emissions because energy is still mainly fossil fuel based.

At the time the Alternative Plan was dreamt up no one thought to compare what was happening in Lucas Aerospace with the arrival of 'community housing' on the urban terrain like, for instance, the Byker Wall then nearing completion in Newcastle. This on paper was an attempt to reconstruct social housing from the ground up with future tenants having the deciding say in their design and construction. In retrospect there are now obvious parallels with what was happening in Lucas Aerospace that were far from evident at the time. Both had arisen out of separate but related struggles, the one located in the factory, the other originating in working class communities about to be levelled but obstinately resisting all efforts to 'decamp' them to high rise estates, a word then in favour amongst planners and evoking Nazi resettlement projects. In effect the latter struggle amounted to a rejection of post war planning and architecture and was a major factor in undermining, like never before, the professions of planner and architect but not enough to result in their abolition. Offspring of the steady rise from the mid 19th century onwards of state intervention into the free market and with no professional history prior to that event, no other profession remotely compares with that of the planner in this respect. From its origin in the 19th century the aim of planning has been to subordinate the market to that of use (like in 'land use planning') and this required above all an economically proactive state able to 'bend' the law of value. And if today planners are having to use words and expressions alien to the spirit of the town and country planning tradition it is because the planning process is increasingly been pushed to one side and the planner is having to reluctantly come to terms with, and choke on, the language of its free market political enemy. However in the 1960s and 1970s it was challenged by a far more suss and humanely grounded enemy; an independent tenants' movement that sought to translate planning's empty lexicon belonging to the fairy tale world of a an alternative political economy into a reality that transcended both the free market and its statist derivatives by insisting upon a genuine use value for the first time in the history of shelter under capitalism. Its vague longing was for housing by the people rather than for the people, the latter long since relegated to a council house statist conception. But then, just as it was about to break away from everything that had hitherto comprised social housing, the movement submitted to the social reformers of planning and architecture (like Ralph Erskine in Newcastle) and lost the initiative, even helping revitalize these now reviled professions. In fact the entire history of the community architecture movement culminating in Rod Hackney's (by now Prince Charles favourite architect) presidency of the ARIBA can be read as attempt to retrieve respect for the architect, beginning with the manipulation of grass roots movements that had done so much to fatally damage that respect and which the profession despite big names like Rogers, Foster, Ghery - and even because of them - has never been able to fully claw back. This division between base and 'superstructure' was also apparent in the Lucas Alternative Plan and we were not wrong to insist on the importance of this division in the piece we wrote in the late 1970s.

Today alternative technology and building are far closer together than they ever were in the late seventies and just supposing there was to be a re-run of the Alternative Plan, say in BAE in response to layoffs in the armaments firm, then we could expect to see a string of products directed toward energy saving in the home, shops, offices, public spaces and transport. Not that this is likely to happen but even if it did the social dimension that comes from widespread struggle would be absent. If it were there vital questions would be asked of these new inventions that would propel them beyond their immediate context. And the first question that would be asked is: 'OK, fair enough, but in the meantime we are confronted with this monster capitalism and without its abolition your energy saving inventions are no more than palliatives that are side-stepping the main issue'.

A necessary, and much needed digression, on Jack Common. A Geordie urban derive and the proposed Newcastle Commune of the late 1960s

One has only to compare the award winning BedZed 'zero energy development' at Wallington and visible from the carriage window as the train pulls into Hackbridge station on the London Victoria/Sutton line with the likewise award winning Byker Wall in Newcastle for the difference to be obvious. Originally a Victorian working class area of densely built terraces Newcastle City Council in 1960 decided to redevelop the Byker area. Though much of the housing was in need of major repairs, most residents wanted to stay put in Byker, a resolve that grew stronger as the decade wore on. Come the late 1960s the residents knew for sure what lay in store for them and were more than ever determined not to swap their terraced slums for high rise anxiety, mod cons and atomised living. In 1968 the bard of Newcastle street life, Jack Common had died, his autobiographical book 'Kiddar's Luck' and 'The Freedom of the Streets' infusing these same mean terraced rows with joy and liberation, a message its residents were now really taking to heart. For sure, Common must have had a real impact on this rebellion though it's also one impossible to accurately calibrate, a factor which always makes individual contributions so tantalising and still so necessary. To crown it all major revolts at that time were massively impacting upon the urban terrain and the smell of burning hung in the air, which the Byker residents had also to be aware of.

We have often wondered if we also had influenced local reactions to redevelopment in some vague way. Fascinated as we were by the prospect of a radical seizure and transformation of the urban terrain, like happened in the Paris Commune of 1871, one of our band had produced a sticker proclaiming: 'Prepare now for the Newcastle Commune' which had been stuck on pubs and hoardings fringing the Byker area in Shieldfield and elsewhere around Newcastle. The main point however is that by now our increasingly articulate contempt for architects and planners knew no bounds, a view that had been growing since 1966 and with each passing year taking an ever more radical direction. Thoroughly disliking the slash and burn policies of contemporary official urban demolition, the delights of real destruction were a different matter and the necessary precondition for a new world with present day, or old, forms of construction arising from a changed, and constantly changing everyday life and, not the other way round as planners and architects have to believe. We only asked of these finks to commit professional suicide, which a visionary few did. It wasn't much to ask as we were doing the same as artists so we weren't being hypocritical in our demands. In a sense both us and the residents of Byker had arrived following different routes at similar conclusions but unfortunately at the time insufficiently appreciative and wary of each other to make a real difference, though if the subversive drift of the times had continued for certain some coming together would have happened. However the combined, though still separate impact certainly unsettled architects and though by no means enough, the Byker Wall was designed to halt any further radicalising dialogue in its tracks. So the residents of Byker were subtly discouraged from even daring to imagine anything more than the amelioration of the urban terrain.

In 1967/68 we had not read Common, or even heard of him, though there was a literary current in Tyneside that had, a current that we despised because it was literary (e.g. Sid Chaplin, Basil Bunting) and hence reactionary, as dense as a fog on the Tyne and unawares an apocalyptic vision of total change had been hatched right in their midst in Newcastle. When we did eventually get to read Common in the 1970s it came as a revelation. Though his background was sufficiently similar to ours - and also like that of many other sympathetic people we knew on Tyneside, including Colin Hutchinson who was chiefly responsible for producing 'Revolt against Plenty', the first of a number of reprints of Common's writings - he was able to begin to link up the region's hugely innovative railway, engineering traditions with a critique of art which, though not revolutionary to the same degree as ours, really only required tweaking. It is possible to edit some of his comments to make them sound more revolutionary than they in fact are.

In his collection of essays 'Freedom of the Streets' (1938) he says 'Artistic revolutions are generally appeals from art to life'. In social revolutions the process is very similar - a point of view that still maintains a separation between art and life but open to being pushed that bit further. For basically that is all that it required, the working (and unemployed) stiff from Tyneside having a more radical artistic critique than any then current in Britain and one that evolved intuitively. Reflecting more coherent developments on the continent it left his sometime friend, George Orwell, standing. (Orwell denigrated surrealism as a bourgeois hoax and had no time for it.) Common, more open to the unconscious and perhaps less afraid of it and luckily shorn of that public school up-bringing that requires one always stays in control, objected to surrealism's individual appropriation of the unconscious as if it were a personal possession. As always his way of expressing it was inimical, for he also had a tendency to break-up on the reefs of the inexpressible, just like his mentor Shelley: 'The surrealists put their shirt on nightmare as a dark horse, but they take care to hang on to the cuff-links'. The clothing metaphor is very apt for what he was dimly anticipating here was the valorisation of the unconscious by capitalism and its consequent exhaustion as a fount of inspiration just in itself, a tendency that was not to achieve its utmost impact through advertising until well after World War Two. However, rather surprisingly Common did not make the link at all explicit and in fact his beloved Newcastle had by the 1960s, became the city outside of London most identified with absorbing art into advertising, with art taking the cue from advertising rather than the other way round. This capitulation to the commodity economy not only had the effect of devaluing art and the high minded nonsense that went with it but also had the unforeseen consequence of helping bring on a far wider ranging critique of the commodity economy that, come the beginning of 1967, was set to explode.

Not that Common was blind to the increase in advertising during the 1920s and 30s. In fact he speculated, long before the invention of lasers, on the possibility of using the moon as a screen on which to project adverts. He even had some thoughts on the eventual commercialisation of space. However though seemingly overlooking the conscription of the avant-garde into the selling of capitalism, had he not died in that watershed year 1968, our guess is that he would eventually have responded positively to such slogans as: 'Culture. Ugh, the one commodity that helps sells all the rest'.

We were also mightily impressed by his subversion of the audience/performance nexus when he argued that it was more instructive to stand behind the screen at the cinema and observe the audience than watch the film. There was more here than just the beginnings of a critique of audience passivity and its submission to cultural spectacle. We also much admired his account of an informal engineering brain-storming session he had witnessed as a young lad in his house, for it was not all that different from our own experiences. In his 'Right to get Drunk Strike' text he pays homage to the engineers he had personally known: 'You see they liked their work, they studied to know how to do it and long after they were out of their apprenticeship the most of them liked nothing better than to be given a ticklish job and find a way around it - even when they lost money over it. Often I've sat as a lad listening to my uncles and his lads discussing points about their work -...they'd argue each illustrating his ideas with a stump of chalk and the front of the chimney piece for a blackboard. That's how British craftsmanship was taught in thousands of families. It's why bridges stay up and dams don't burst-..' We also knew this skill was primed for a break out, given half an opportunity, and that there was a mute Tatlin (the constructivist 'artist' at the time of the Russian revolution) lurking in many an engineer frustrated by the utilitarian conventions of the day. A number of examples spring to mind from our own childhood in the North East and West Yorks, so we are rather surprised Common did not follow up his superb vignette with something even more eye-popping.

The reason has to be unemployment, for many of the Tyneside engineers he revered would then be on the dole and fit only for the scrap heap, their skills no longer in demand: 'We don't value what we've got here; we'll let it all go from us, rotting on the dole. Perhaps only Soviet Russia knows how important such a tradition is, for there it did not exist'. Though never a fan of Russia and lacking a theory of state capitalism until at least the 1950s and maybe right up to his death, Common keenly appreciated how new Russia's engineering traditions were, a newness that was sufficiently unformed to make room for the avant-garde ' that and a 'revolution' of course. More's the shame then Common never knew anything about the Russian avant-garde because he would have been quick to see in it the visionary rays that occasionally flashed across the shop floors of the North East's engineering factories and whose scintilla of sparks burnt deeper than the already 'deeply satisfying something in the steady running of the belts, the endless hum and clang, the low colours'. (Who else besides Common would have noticed these 'low colours', for this is not an artist's eye, rather that of a painter and decorator who has learnt to value themselves differently and see their job in a new light).

In 1968, the year that Common died, a superb reconstruction of Tatlin's glider was completed by Raf Fulcher in the art school of Newcastle University. It is now on display in the Moderna Musset in Stockholm, but by a kind of ironical rights it should be honoured as the talisman of the reinvented Newcastle we have all come to know and loathe today. It is only now clear it marked the beginning of the end for Newcastle's world-renowned traditional engineering sector - the shipbuilding, the steam locomotives and functional bridge building which Common took such a pride in. As a lad he described in 'Kiddar's Luck' how he would linger at the end of Tynemouth pier (as we did) 'in the hope a really big ship would come in'. If she was Tyne built we swelled with communal pride and wished we were on her, going to rule far seas by the might of riveted steel and true craftsmanship.' Note, by the way, he says 'rule far seas' and not lands, for Common was really describing a victorious encounter with the elements and not the oppressed peoples' of the empire, a perspective that is more than half way toward disengaging engineering from capitalist social relations.

After completing his reconstruction of Tatlin's glider, Raf Fulcher went on to work for the open-air industrial museum at Beamish that was then being set up. Just south of Gateshead and no distance from Wylam where George Stephenson had made his legendary twin colliery engines 'Puffing Billy'and 'Wylam Dilly', this was the spot where Tyneside's industrial heritage was now destined for, anticipating the moment, over 30 years later, when the region would be increasingly given over to cultural display of one sort or another. Raf's skill at getting Tyneside's rusting industrial legacy to work once more had been honed by the task of reconstructing Tatlin's glider, a task he carried off to perfection. However he would not tinker for long on this industrial dowry heap and was captured in no time at all by the university-neutering machine where he has continued to rot to this day. This avant-garde Fred Dibnah potentially has so much to say - and yet he will be unable to break his vow of silence, like so many other people on Tyneside who were once witnesses to radical events. His comments on the fledgling industrial museum at Beamish and which set the pattern for countless other similar museums around the country, could be invaluable and assist in the cobbling together of a theory of industrial archaeology as counter revolutionary fashion that sought to reduce working class history to an innocuous totality of decorative tin boxes, coronation mugs, jam jars and interesting bits of machinery. Real history is thus replaced by a neutral aesthetic historicism essential to the pacific marketing of history through tourism. That Beamish museum also chimes with the increased valorisation for tourist purposes of Tyneside's roman past is no coincidence.

And it must have ceaselessly crossed Raf's mind that the general ambience that gave rise to the banal, throw-back clap trap 'art engineering' of sculptor Anthony Gormley's 'Angel of the North' and the much vaunted 'Eye Bridge' that spans the Tyne from Newcastle to the Baltic Exchange (a former flour mill and now the main rival to London's Tate Modern) incontestably has its origins in his 1968 unsung reconstruction of Tatlin's glider. Just as Tatlin's glider approximates to the form of a bird so the 'Eye Bridge' is actually based on a human eye and 'blinks'. However even though the bridge does 'work', unlike the flightless glider, it will never rival the Tatlin original or even, for that matter, Raf's replica. What Tatlin was part off in Russia and Raf was part of in Newcastle will always count for far more than the piffling 'Angel of the North' (would that it blow down and become the 'Fallen Angel of the North') or the 'Eye Bridge' because they are essentially the products of a commodified art /life inspired counter insurgency that achieved, against all the odds, its most concentrated expression in Newcastle and that arose out of a defeated revolution. Raf does not wish to be reminded of this.

Since reconstructing Tatlin's Glider, Raf Fulcher went on to construct one artistic abomination after another. Among them are: 'Garden Front' 1997 for Jesmond metro station for the Nexus public art group; The Swirle Pavillion 1998, for a Community Tyne and Wear development company; A post-modernist Folly for the Quayside; Grizedale Forest sculpture, a Cumbria site specific installation 2000 and so. All of them play on the Icteric theme of the elements but frozen in time via Yves Klein together with early Icteric inspired land art and obviously carefully avoiding any revolutionary conclusions.

The philosophy of history becomes historicism the irretrievably past and can only be remembered; the marketing of historical memories not as a prelude to the present that helps understand the present, for that is forbidden. The proper understanding of history is no longer an aid to combativity, rather it is reduced to a museum of no relevance to the present and yet it is all about the present, reducing past history to domestic possessions to supercede modes of transport and former work places. It only sees value in the past but is about the present; it is a reactionary world view faithful to external trappings. A past totality reduced to an aesthetic.

In Newcastle, contemporary aestheticism has been collaged together neutralising all that was best about its past history, old as well as so explosively new. The miners who were once the backbone of the Ashington School of Painters have recently been awarded a big, new museum complex and the public street toilet 'netty' that in Byker produced one of their most celebrated and amusing 1930s paintings, has been preserved as a sculptural memory openly acknowledged also as a Geordie tribute to Marcel Duchamp who played such a part in the fiery subversive movement that erupted in the city during the late 1960s. And as far as the Ashington miners are concerned and for those who derailed The Flying Scotsman north of Newcastle in revenge for the defeat of the 1926 General Strike, why their memory becomes that of a Fluxus-coloured anestheticised event like a replica of a Wolf Vostell happening of the 1960s where two pre-arranged steam locomotives careering at full speed crash into each other and nothing more than an event, endlessly after, to be displayed on the walls of an art gallery.

The contemporary magazine Transgressions put out by some rather more enlightened teaching staff from the geography dept of Newcastle University, none the less cannot situate the demise of the derive and other innovative urban vanguardisms within the context of Newcastle. We need only note the quayside's "Hadrian's cycleway" meander sponsored by respectable moneyed bodies to instantly realise everything of meaning and importance has been evacuated as participants cycle there way through streets designed to death past forlorn, packaged references like the Swirle Pavilion and the junk, obelisk-like sculpture relating to the six senses called "The Blacksmiths Needle" with its passing nod to Tatlin's 'Monument to the 3rd International". Everything of value truly gone, lost, trashed and stolen....

This selective detour through nearly two hundred years of Tyneside history has been necessary to set the scene and now we are once more back at community architecture, the Byker Wall - and a critical omission in Common's work that needs some explaining. He touches on many other subjects but never specifically architecture or even building for that matter, though his last moments were spent on a building site in Newport Pagnell, dying of a heart attack there. And yet his 'right riveting read', 'Kiddar's Luck', is mainly about the terraced streets of Heaton and Byker, these very same streets that Newcastle City Council wanted to knock down and, come the late 60s, the residents were saying no to. To Common these streets were more like arteries, the living tissue of a bricks and mortar second skin that was being propelled through space and time. However it was the people who lived there that made it appear so and no one has expressed this communal arena, this 'gutter flow', better than Common:

'These people live on the street. Why there's such a good communal stir and warmth out on the pavements that it would be a queer kiddy that would sooner sit in doors than mix in it - even if the indoors was a palace --- no wonder that the moment he can toddle by himself he makes for the street door like a duck to the pond. Who wants a mother in a crowd like this. A kiddy in the street comes to know these street corners as intimately as he knows the furniture in his own home. Each of them in turn has been his playground. ------- This street is his own place'.

Common also adds: 'The average working class house is a small and inconvenient place' and it was this domestic claustrophobia more than anything else, more even than the attraction of 'mod cons', that drove the working class into the bleak high rises of the New Jerusalems from the mid 1950s onwards. The housing legislation of the last half of the 19th century and first half of the 20th Century has largely been taken up with the question of improved space standards and the reinforcing of the nuclear family. Such comments as 'who wants a mother in a crowd like this' would have been utterly repellent to the proponents of these space ideals that reeked of entombment. These improved space standards would always turn into an even greater confinement (and family disintegration of the worst sort) and it was this the residents of Byker in the late 1960s were most opposed to - that and the loss of the freedom of the streets that went with it.

There is another little noticed aspect to this whole affair and which potentially had explosive repercussions. The representative apparatus of the working class was beginning to crumble throughout the developed world and in its place a more direct democracy was evolving. When the residents of Byker became convinced they could make a better job of housing than the local authority they were not only challenging professional roles they were also undermining local democracy and an on-going deference by local councillors to the bureaucratic apparatus in City Hall.

We know that to be true more than most. To our eternal shame we had an elder brother who besides teaching in the architecture school of Newcastle University also had his own private architectural practise, doing, on occasions, jobs for the council. Never tempted to vote anything but Labour he had come to despise his background as only the upwardly mobile working class can. Any scheme that was submitted to the council also had to be approved by the elected local councillors whom he derided as 'the pigeon fanciers' because they could be gulled into agreeing to anything by a few slick words. A few of these local councillors were corrupt for this was the era of Mr Newcastle, Dan Smith, the city boss who would later go to jail for accepting bribes. However the question of corruption is neither here nor there, for it was not a matter of the usurpation of direct democracy, for that was still only a dream on the horizon of the fledgling tenant insurgents like the awakening residents of Byker who were beginning to slough off their local representatives and all they stood for, or rather bowed down to, and to give notice that the revocable mandate must also extend to the actual reconstruction of the urban terrain. By giving the formula a pioneering new content this was a unique addition to it and one capable of rescuing it from the tedium of repetition because it raised many new questions requiring new answers of the sort the ultra left only rarely regard as valid if not actually mad. The people of Byker thus stood alone disarmed of a theory of a practical unitary urbanism they were groping towards and which the best theorists, like Vaneigem had only briefly sketched.

At this juncture Erskine and his mob of community architects step in and essentially derail the process, stopping it from reaching anything like its maximum potential. Our elder brother was disturbed by the revolts of the late sixties even modifying somewhat his attitude to architecture and the formerly despised 'pigeon fanciers'. He was employed in some minor capacity on the Byker Wall and though continuing to be down on strikes, particularly in the Tyne shipyards, he began to use his past to his advantage slapping down the naive, not very clued-in though could be venemous young snipers of the professional left, including feminists, and, if threatened, asking them (for example) if they had ever lived in a house without water or had to go down a dirt road to a pump to get it - because he had. Although true, that sort of raw experience of deprivation was enough to silence most people, including these Young Turks though, of course, not us. In fact this architectural 'workerism' had become indispensable to the professions reconstruction for it was 'the workers' as tenants come the late 60s who were the real power behind the rejection of 'the modern movement' in architecture and not just some fancy stylistic revolt. Though our elders brothers' faith in the modern movement of Corb, Mies, Gropius etc was hardly shaken at all it was certainly not the case with community architects who by now were awakening up to its latent authoritarianism and the fact it had been favoured by the varying degrees of state capitalisms'. The modern movement like the rise of town planning has to be seen in the context of the rise of state capitalism.

Though more total perspectives were instantly denigrated and vilified, there were occasional touches that simply would not take place today like Erskine using a funeral parlour as his on-site office where residents waiting to be re-housed could drop in, consult the plans, make suggestions etc. This in itself implied a criticism of the remoteness of the usual architectural practise just as it proved to be a necessary cleansing operation if the role and prestige of the architect were ever to recover from the much needed roughing up. Alan Milburn, the former Health Secretary, was still writing about the Byker Wall development in an article in the Sunday Times in December 2006 but now the funeral parlour has become 'a corner shop'. Typically this mildly irreverent deviation from the norm must now be passed over in silence as though it never happened.

What was good about all this activity in its heyday - and we are the only people who can put it together - stills awaits its encounter and renewed realisation in a now monstrously alienated world teetering on the edge of complete collapse.

And so to BedZEEEEEEEEEEd and the Stern Report

In contrast there is not the remotest hint of role crises in the very recent BedZed development, neither on behalf of the developers, wholly at ease with their market orientation, or by the architects. The development was the brainchild of Bio Regional Development Group, the Peabody Trust and the then little known architect Bill Dunster who is now groaning under the weight of official citations, the heaviest of all (and which could well prove to be his undoing) being the ambiguous backing given to the BedZed development by the Labour government following the publication of the Treasury's Stern Report. When the UK Solar Award described the project 'as perhaps the most influential of all housing this century- did they mean the century to come? Whatever the time frame there will be few if any similar projects that come anywhere near the impact the development is having and will continue to have.

Constructed for an unknown market, BedZed was an eco spec development (as the brochure says: 'Bio Regional takes a market led approach') comprising 100 homes, community facilities and workplaces for a further 100 whereas the Byker Wall was a continuation of post Second World War 'social' housing policies but one now threatened from without and within, caught between the twin pincer movements of a disgruntled clientele (an insurgent proletariat groping beyond the pitfalls of private v state capitalism toward genuinely revolutionary social solutions) and a resurgent belief in free markets (Selsdon man) as the social democratic consensus was torn up, the Byker Wall and community architecture in general being its most advanced expression.

In fact the subsequent career of Erskine was to reflect this move away from state sponsorship toward a private market that mixed entrepreneurship with a growing awareness of ecological issues especially the pressing matter of sustainable construction. Erskine's Millennium Village set for completion by 2000 on the Greenwich Peninsula and forming part of Sir Richard Rogers master plan which included the now notorious Millennium Dome had already anticipated by three years the BedZed development. The much-hyped selling points of the Millennium Village include a combined heat and power unit. Trumpeted as 'the first UK private housing development to inaugurate CPH' it is said to reduce energy consumption by 80% which is only 10% less than Bed Zed. There is also a water cycling system, storing rainwater to flush toilets which reduces water consumption by 30%. Moreover, 30% to 40% of wood and aluminium was recycled and the cedar for louvers, sun shades and rain screens was obtained from sustainable harvested sources. Turned into a hollow parody of its former self, the design also echoed that of the Byker Wall, paralleling the trajectory of installation art that, in many instances, particularly in Newcastle, had previously been a confused prelude to social revolution but has now become mainstream, an avant-garde buttress to the status quo and its main line of defence, no less. In Erskine's latter-day, haunted, design there is not even the pretence of sociability pace the Byker Wall. But come BedZed and 'behavioural modification' is very much the order of the day, especially the pious emphasis upon car pools, an individual choice involving residents' life styles and external to how the development was constructed and functions from the point of view of sustainability.

Whereas thirty five years ago the burning issue for ruling elites was how best to deflect social movements, the aim now is to inject an element of lost sociability - though no more than that - into living no matter how spurious on reflection it turns out to be. For instance it is exceedingly doubtful if the car pool is now anything other than a token gesture given the isolation of the BedZed development next to a former huge sewerage farm (and now wild life haven) across which in the distance can be glimpsed Croyden's huge shopping emporium.

Immediately following the publication of the Stern Report, the BedZed development hit the headlines making it famous overnight. Though advertised as a zero energy development this was patently untrue right from the start, the project using 70% less energy than typical housing of a similar size. Like the Millennium Village, the BedZed development also has a CHP unit this time run off wood chips supplied by the local council, though 'The Times' and 'Daily Telegraph' immediately picked on the fact that it was not currently working. However the ultimate aim of zero energy housing is to break the vicious circle of improved energy efficiency leading to an actual increase in energy consumed. Logically this must lead to a fundamental critique of consumerism, gadgetry, the market and capitalism but since when has logic proved decisive when dealing with fundamental capitalist irrationality? The recommendations of the Stern Report though couched in the language of markets and commissioned by the Treasury under the auspices of the Labour government were certainly too much for it and it was immediately contradicted by the Barker Report also sponsored by the Treasury into how best legislate the time-consuming current planning process out of existence and replace it with State diktat.

A former chief economist at the World Bank and now chief economic advisor to the treasury Stern's report is steeped in market language. Assessment of the economic impact of climate change is described as 'the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen'. In response to market failure he wants more of the same and the outcome of carrying on with business as usual is 'catastrophic' comparing it to the combined effect of the two world wars and the 1930s economic crash. Stern seeks to put a price on the on the cause and effect of climate change on the biosphere though his attempts to quantify failure - 'the economics of genocide'- exceeds any possible assessment in value terms, a classic case of the quantative turning in to the qualitative. What price can one put on such a catastrophic event as the melting of the icecaps or the desertification of rain forests? Yet the overall language remains that of the economist who still lacks a critique of political economy and looks to economic remedies to save the day. Also it involves a criticism, which taken a stage further implies a critique of convenience, and consumer capitalism, which then at all cost must be stopped from ever probing too deeply. What the Stern report wanted and will get are at best half measures which will merely draw out the catastrophe but still not substantial enough to prevent. With nothing to say on green issues never mind the prospect for a green economy, the latter was heavily weighted in favour of the present 'growth agenda' euphemism for capitalism, Stern resigned from the Treasury following the publication of the Barker Report, the announcement of a new runway for Heathrow airport and the Chancellor's failure to impose green incentives or properly tax airlines in the autumn budget.

Stern's excruciating eco-friedmanism arising phoenix like from 'the greatest and widest ranging market failure ever seen' is no more than a determination to finally make markets work, greenery being the magic ingredient that will change capitalism forever into an equitable, responsible, sustainable, stable system. This forlorn hope flies in the face of humanity's accumulated experience of capitalism and the problem henceforth will be how to stop a growing concern with green issues from turning into a full blown critique of capitalism. The only way 'we can have our cake and eat it' - and which is how The Guardian described the report's bland conclusions implying both growth and greenery are still possible (and which obviously the smiling Blair gave his full endorsement to) is in future to massively up green propaganda and the quotient of greenwash. This was vividly illustrated when Ruth Kelly now, note well, Treasury secretary for homes and communities, visited the recently opened up birders' RSPB reserve at Rainham marshes in the Thames Gateway whilst a few miles away an industrially derelict site, described as 'England's rain forest' because of the remarkable diversity of its insect life, was about to be half concreted over. Uncritically acclaimed in the press and on TV, this visit marked a new low in cynical manipulation though on the surface it appeared all progress and light and quite without precedent for any government minister, certainly a Treasury minister. Henceforth it would make more sense to drop all mention of the corrupted word sustainability and in its place initiate a debate on the present alignment of finance capital and nature, for the Labour government intent on the destruction of the latter in the name of its conservation has just added the two together, the final total amounting to 'your money and your life'.

The Rainham Marshes PSPB reserve is located on the north side of the Thames estuary amid the critically important industrially derelict wasteland of the Thames Gateway, a massive housing venture of 250,000 new homes. 20 years ago the marshes were stagnant back water that regularly ignited because of all the inflammable waste that was regularly dumped there. That the RSPB in the meantime has been able to successfully reclaim this devastated wetland habitat only goes to show that landscape design is best left to conservationists or anyone else that has a feel for nature but no feel for landscape architects whose main purpose in life is to destroy landscape and nature.

However on the Ruth Kelly grace and favour occasion the RSPB reserve was being used for political ends in a way no other conservation body has so far been used. That the RSPB submitted without a murmur may turn out to be a factor of immense significance for the future of nature and politics. It was only to be expected a media personality like Bill Oddy would be invited to the opening. A more appealing figure than the head masterly David Attenborough, his garrulous nature buffoonery has won him a far bigger audience than his previous traditional role as a comic in The Goodies. Millions of viewers regularly switch on, at peak viewing times, to watch the BBC's 'Springwatch' and now 'Autumnwatch', the program becoming a kind of nature soap opera with more than a dash of Reality TV - viz the tension, with more than a hint of thwarted sexuality, between Oddy the Oldie and the program's other presenter, the former model Kate Humble. However the media scrum was not there for him (or her), rather it was there because of the presence of the Treasury Minister Ruth Kelly, the media having been alerted beforehand by the Treasury's publicity machine, the DCLG (Dept of Communications and Local Government).

For some time now it has been recognised in political circles the Thames Gateway was lacking in a 'coherent vision' and 'identity' (see Financial Times November 22nd 2006). In this age of brand names, the lower reaches of the Thames had no identifiable image to work on (unlike Newcastle, Sheffield or even Norwich) that could be recast to launch the area into 'post modernity.' In line with Prescott's stress upon housing, it had become City of London overspill, rather like Docklands before the building of Canary Wharf, only much more featureless, a colossal low density sprawl of Legoland redbrick with few rail links and wholly dependent on the car and out of town shopping centres. Of course the project from the very start had been described as sustainable, the description becoming patently threadbare as early as 2003 when it was recognised it was failing on every count other than looking sustainable and jumbo-rustic. The scarcity of water resources in the increasingly drought stricken south east only added to the growing barrage of criticism, there being no water recycling of any sort anywhere in the Thames Gateway - not to mention other failings like poor thermal insulation and the fact the eyesore was car mad and microwave, fridge freezer crazy.

Something had to be done to improve the rhetoric of sustainability and in the process create an identity for the area. The architect Sir Terry Farrell (who incidentally had been trained in Newcastle and had shared a little in the melting pot Newcastle was becoming from the early to late 1960s) had argued that the Thames Gateway should be a new kind of national park with linked parkland and green spaces along the Thames estuary. Previously, in his oversized fish tank 'The Deep' in Hull, Farrell had used the showcasing of the marine environment as a selling strategy and image booster for this somewhat overlooked city on the mouth of the Humber and still traumatised by the run down of its traditional industries - the docks, fishing fleet and the waterfront trades linked to them. The Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) had also been working on an identity project as part of attempts to rebrand the Gateway, believing the TG identity should encompass themes such as reconnecting with nature and the estuary through greener more sustainable communities.

Though a hollow, dictatorial pretence, nevertheless Farrell's idea of a 'National Park' smacked too much of the National Trust and a zero growth conservationist spirit and so the Treasury has sought to distance itself from Farrell's and CABE's recommendations wanting instead the name: 'Thames Estuary Parklands', a looser term which lent itself to developments such as industrial parks and the anti nature, sham of greenery that invariably lines their boulevards. Hence Ruth Kelly's surprising appearance at the opening of the RSPB reserve on Rainham marshes. She had also emphasised when opening the eco visitors centre that TG would in future become an 'exemplar for low and zero carbon development' thus stamping the formerly amorphous sprawl of the TG with a new conservationist identity and sustainable mission, Rainham Marshes becoming the symbol of its incorporation and coat of arms which should bear the legend, if it was honest: 'We Betray'. When Ruth Kelly mentioned 'low and zero carbon development' she must have had the BedZed development in mind, the Treasury's embrace likely to prove fatal to the project's legacy for it will now result in a rash of shoddy imitations that are a hollow mockery of sustainability. And provided it is able to sustain the pretence (the only sustainability that matters to finance capital) all these inferior developments will receive the Treasury's seal of approval.

How can we pretend to be doing something whilst not doing anything? This is the government's dilemma and this is why Ruth Kelly's visit was so important. Henceforth it is the advertising of nature and conservation that must do the hidden persuading, the green wash/brain wash that is going to become so integral to political survival and the survival of the state. Treasury greenery has to be the most cunning, treacherous greenery of all. When he was Chancellor, Brown brought Stern into the Treasury poaching him from the World Bank. In late 2006 he painted himself green publishing a booklet: 'The Green Shift (or should that be shifty') Environmental policies to match a changing public climate'. It was funded by Britain's biggest green house gas generator EON, the German firm which owns Powergen, and also by Scottish power who went to court to demand that the European Commission give them more licenses to emit an extra 20m tons of carbon. From the title it must be clear that the government fears the changing public climate more than climate change.

However it is equally obvious the Stern Report will provide a massive boost to the market in 'alternative' technologies, the hardware becoming mainstream affording the green entrepreneurs (Dunster, the BedZed architect, has patented a quack wind tunnel designed to increase updraft to roof mounted wind turbines) and consumers much smug self-satisfaction whilst evading the real question which social ecology poses but market ecology does not - that of the overthrow of capitalism. Visiting the BedZed development we became aware of the scope for green entrepreneurship - everything from the manufacturing of educational wall charts illustrating birds, such as The Guardian and The Independent produce as supplements, but now have become rolls of wallpaper, to lamp shades knowingly depicting Monarch butterflies, the designers obviously having dipped deeper than merely looking at colour plates of the butterfly. There were even bags of pellets composted from recycled materials to be used as fire wood displaying, amongst others, the Butterfly Conservation logo. Though not yet become a brand name the business potential is huge and who knows if bcuk might one day replace fcuk?

BedZed's heating system uses just 10% of the energy ordinary buildings of the same size would need and this is supplied by woodchips from trees provided by the council. When the chips are burnt they also generate some of BedZed's electricity. Cupboards in which hot water tanks sit are lined rather than the tank so people can use the cupboards to air clothes. The development takes some of the water from the roof and encourages people to use there cars as little as possible. Each flat has its own garden, densely packed like the inner city. Alternative technology is profoundly entrepreneurial in a way the Lucas Aerospace plan was not. In the latter, there was a considerable element that was against the market, replacing it with need though still preserving exchange. This was always the left social democratic contradiction. Dunster has patented a wind turbine a wind turbine mounted on an aerodynamic tower that he claims will raise wind speed between two and three times. It's a building for a nightmare future, a kind of ecofuturism, the greening of the Italian futurist architect Sant Elia, of concrete and high rise trees, concrete green jungles and so on.

And yet within the BedZed complex there was still a disarming friendliness about the place as if the staff that worked there were committed to its aims and needed all the help they could get. When asked if we had come by car we proudly said no and for the first time our reply was not greeted with shock horror as though not owning a car was a sure sign of social inferiority. Peering through the windows on the ground floor of Dunster's architectural practise we were surprised when the door opened and we were invited in to take a look around. Talking to the receptionist later we mentioned that we were sure we had seen a Marsh Harrier quartering the ground of the former sewerage works on the other side of the railway. Our guess turned out to be right for the receptionist would leave scraps of meat on the fence outside for the Harrier bringing the bird right into the heart of the BedZed development and near enough into Dunster's offices bringing on that happy time when vultures will tear every architectural practise to pieces. The Marsh Harrier is a rare bird and just in itself this observation was very memorable, perhaps even a contribution towards understanding the bird's ecology. But when combined with other things like discussing ventilation systems, wind turbines, combined heat and power units, car pools, four wheel drives, public transport, home ownership v rented accommodation etc some kind of totality is being posed although one that needs to be pushed much further as essentially this totality is ring fenced by capitalist paradigms.

Down with eco-business: A Thames ex-lighterman's barge and a hoped for eco-collectivity

We were much struck also by BedZed's grassed roofs and the fact that Canadian flea bane had taken root in some of them as they do on vacant lots everywhere. However these weeds were left untreated, as were the reclaimed floorboards, which were used as bed ends and thermal insulation, the screw heads though buried still visible. We were beguilingly reminded of a number of construction projects we have been engaged in over the last decade which we enjoyed doing but did not set much store by at the time, certainly not in terms of even remotely considering then as in any way prefiguring the future. An old barge we converted on the Thames just happened to be opposite one of Norman Foster's stepped high rises that was then going up on the opposite side of the Thames, some of the apartments sold before the foundations were laid and changing hands several times before being completed. We did not doubt then or now that what we did on the barge was way better than Foster's bit of steel and concrete slap across the river. Foster of course does not know this but he may still recall the day when one of our gang, en route to a builder's merchants, accidentally on purpose spilt a cup of coffee over him as he lay stretched out in a chair, taking his ease in one of Battersea's gentrified river front forecourts, saying: 'Oh look the arsehole who fucked over the waterfront'.

Some of the timber that we used on the barge had been taken from skips and were simply large pine tree trunks that had been squared off either by a machine or manually and would have held up house fronts in the days before steel joists started to be substituted for wood sometime during the 1880s. Had we not rescued these amazing bits of timber they would have ended up on a bonfire and by retrieving them we were acknowledging the chopping down of the world's great pine forests and honouring their memory. Each piece had its story to tell and in this increasingly standardised world we will never see the likes of these rough-hewn, one-offs again. But this was only part of the picture and though a vital part, the actual constructing was accompanied by a free wheeling looseness, which none the less worked and was integral to the design and execution.

An architect had drawn up a plan, which we immediately abandoned as impractical, and with no definite plan of our own, grew the design as it went along, not quite sure how it would work out. We took it in our stride though we were all at sea to begin with, not used to the sometimes extreme pitching and tossing caused by the wash from passing boats. And it took several days to find our sea legs and back on land as we tried to get to sleep at night the room would rock. We also rapidly learnt a spirit level for instance was of no damn use on a boat that was settling at an angle on a sand bank twice a day.

No single person could ever have pulled it off and looking back we all wonder how ever we had the balls to take the job on and, though competences were unevenly distributed, it would not be accurate to describe it as a division of labour. Things were just never that rigid. There was also an indispensable extra dimension to the whole thing and that was everyone engaged on the job had their eyes turned toward the future, knowing capitalism was simply unworkable. And though we concentrated on the job in hand and even took a pride in it, we were all conscious, to varying degrees, the job we were doing was fundamentally compromised by the fact it was not outside the social relationship engendered by capitalism. So inevitably we felt a distance from what we doing and therefore not an expression of what we really believed in or what we were capable of. The barge could only be an alienated product of our labour even though it outclassed everything currently being built on the Thames embankment - not least because we could not fully believe in what we were doing which could only be invested with real meaning in a post capitalist society. But in the meantime in the run up to that desired prospect what really matters is not just how a thing looks, the materials used and salvaged etc but the spirit in which it is done.

In future some of this vital ambiance must eventually imbue projects that take the BedZed development as their starting point - for there are bound to be many. Otherwise things will not urgently move in the subversive direction they have to. Yet clearly there was a gulf between the barge and the BedZed development - we being infinitely the more open-minded and clearer about the steps to be taken if the world is to be saved. The ethos behind BedZed development seeks to save the world without changing it, which means it is doomed from the kick off. On the other hand we were not innovating technically and the barge could have been more energy efficient with perhaps a double cavity layer of insulation wrap or a wind turbine with the necessary minimum of two metre blades mounted high up on a mast. The barge is fitted with an enormously expensive central heating system run off bottled gas and which replaced the briquette fired pithers system that successfully heated part of the lower deck but barely took the chill of the air elsewhere. In the winter the barge could be freezing cold and in summer just the opposite, the deck becoming almost too hot to touch but much cooler below where we had fitted a tongue and groove wooden ceiling with foil backed insulating wrap and a layer of red anti-oxidising paint in-between.

We certainly felt much closer to nature working on the barge than we had ever done on a building job before. It became important to know if the tide was coming in or going out and if we were going to spend all day being flung about. The souls of our feet registered the moment the barge lifted off and the moment it settled on the sand bank. The behaviour of the cormorants altered according to the ebb and flow and we would count the number of seconds they remained below the surface. The ferocity of the tides would vary according to the moon's position and on some evenings the ebb tide would roar and for the first time we all began to appreciate not only the immense gravitational influence of the moon but its capacity to influence psychological life which mariners must have been almost as open to as the inmates of asylums. During the night Canadian Geese would land on the tennis court sized roof and deck leaving their unmistakeable droppings behind for us to clean up in the morning. That is until the more aggressive Grey Lag Geese arrived and cleared them off, eating the young chicks. On our way to a builder's merchant one morning we counted 15 Herons on a moored barge similar to the one we were converting. We were also working on the boat on the day of the sun's eclipse. Sometime around midday the sky began to darken and a gaggle of Mallards that used to collect on the shingle beach beneath the stone pier began to roost, burying their beaks in their dorsal feathers. A crowd had assembled on the Thames embankment and broke out into applause at the height of the eclipse, some letting off fireworks. In 1928 the last time there had been a total eclipse people sank on their knees as the moon's shadow raced across the earth toward them. Now it had become spectacle, nature's ultimate stage show.

Working out in the open my ears became attuned to a particular birdcall, which I rapidly identified as that of the Grey Wagtail. Ever since I have instantly thrilled to the call, noting that in 2006 I was hearing it well into late autumn when normally they should be making their way to N. Africa. We built an improvised bird table for them on the prow of the boat. The bird table had been bought from the RSPB and we had laid a pine tree trunk athwart the stern and stuck a broom handle through it attaching the table on the end of it and lashing the broom handle to the trunk with steel wire hawsers. Though back to front, instead of a mermaid we had a nature bowsprit. And like virtually everything else on the barge we had only a vague idea as what to do next and as much surprised by the end result as anybody. In the society of alienation this is as close to un-alienated labour as it's possible to get.

We also had set to work on another boat moored on a wharf near Battersea Power Station. This is not the place to go into the trial and tribulations of that particular job. However since the emphasis here has been on the peculiar closeness we felt with nature when working on the river bank, mention must be made of one particular incident. Getting off the bus in the morning we had noticed webs of caterpillars, which soon spread to the sycamores overhanging the embankment, denuding them within days. These turned out to be the caterpillars of the notorious Brown Tail moth, once more or less confined to Spain, and whose hairs break when even lightly touched, causing the body to erupt in a rash. Though the trees were some distance away, nevertheless some caterpillars were finding their way into the hull and soon we were all scratching. We were never sure how they got there - perhaps they spun a silken thread from their tails and were carried by the wind into the boat's interior. On reflection the most important point about the incident is the way we had been confronted with two sets of unusual problems, one to do with a freak occurrence of nature (which set us thinking about climate change and the fact this moth had few natural predators in this country) the other to do with how we were going to squeeze as much space as possible out of the hull's wrought iron interior which meant bending large sheets of marine ply. We were determined to avoid at all cost the land lubber, cut and run approach of studding the boats hull out with up-rights and making square shaped 'house' rooms out of the interior, which to say the least, was wasteful of space and simply evaded the challenge of creating the sort of unusual living spaces former industrial barges are tailor made for.

This way of working and its openness to nature indeed its wide openness in many other respects and typical of construction sites where there is no overarching repressive authority, though no subcontracting, has to be the way of working if there is to be any future. We scrounged timber from far and wide even rescuing a shaped armrest from the embers of a fire up north and transporting it back to London in the boot of a National Express coach. This eventually ended up as part of the bathroom skylight and the catch on the gate at the top of the gangway leading to the floating pontoon. However this task of salvaging choice bits of timber was not done with an eye to business. The same cannot be said of the recycled timber used in the BedZed development, which will have been purchased from any number of builders' merchants now advertising reclaimed timber. For the recycling of waste material is set to become big business driven not just by necessity but by an increasingly anguished middle class that is beginning to wake up to the devastating consequences of reckless consumption but remains as remote as ever from taking up a genuinely revolutionary critique of consumer capitalism as part of a critique of capitalism per se. The favoured option, ethical consumption, is not even a half way house because it is about choice within capitalism not opposition to capitalism though it constantly risks turning into that.

We think it important to point out that the carbon footprint of the eight or so people involved in converting the barge over a period of time would have to be amongst the lowest in the 'highly advanced' world. Not one of us owned a car and we all used public transport when not cycling into work. One travelled to India by plane but the preferred option when travelling two and fro to Europe was by the Eurostar express. We did use electrical tools but an eco plumber who would sit in on the endless discussions - and which were such a joy even when opposite opinions were expressed - frowned on this if carried to excess. The argument that they saved time and that we would price ourselves out of a job if we did not use them did not greatly impress him either. He even thought it would be a good idea to get rid of washing machines and go back to hand washing using a bar of carbolic soap, a wash board and a poss-tub. We were all old enough to just about remember this and did not relish the idea. Yet on reflection only one of us had a washing machine and even he preferred to hand rather than machine-wash his shirts. The fact that the plumber had a wacko side to him only added to the thrills and spills of the site. He had written an article in the plumbers' gazette entitled 'Plumbers and Madness' and of course we all said 'well he should know' whilst at the same time conceding he was making a more general, very valid, point, plumbers tending to be the most child like and off the wall of all building operatives. (We were once bystanders to a bit of mad hatter daftness that lasted a good hour between a plumber in his 40s and his young mate not yet twenty making pea shooters out of 18mm copper pipe to pop each other with in celebration of the fact not one of their 100s of joints leaked). 'Our' plumber was so salvage crazy he refused to renew the copper pipes that ran into the pithers stove and which had seen better days. Overtime they must have become blocked and one Xmas eve we were all racing to make the barge habitable including the plumber who was determined to get the pithers stove up and running. All appeared to be going well the pithers stove shedding a lovely warm glow around the lower deck when the time came to go home. Later on that night one of us received a somewhat conspiratorial, hushed phone call from the plumber. Apparently the stove had blown up and we all had visions of the boat rocketing to the moon.

Things go wrong and they have done at the BedZed development. The CHP unit has broken down and the ball race on the ventilating cowls has seized up and no longer turns as it should. This has been solved at Dunsters's Penryn development in Cornwall by adopting the ball race from the Ford Mondeo which can run over a quarter of a million miles. For sure this re-invention was an impressive way of detourning the consumer muck of present day gadgetry but wish it had been done within an anti-capitalist framework.

This gives a new slant to the fabled Mondeo Man that troubled middle England voters whose troubles will only get worse. It is also the kind of innovation that Dunster is likely to patent. Though touched with an inventive genius our fabled plumber will have no such luck because try as he might he is unable to act in a business like manner and always excellently fucks it. What's more he is only a plumber and not an architect, a fundamental 'trade' differential that in a country like Britain counts for everything and soon causes accusations of class prejudice to fly. Thus he invented a water conservation for St James hospital in Leeds, invited to do so by a middle management representative from Yorkshire Water he met in the fox holes dug to oppose the Newbury by-pass. The managers of the hospital were impressed by the water conservation scheme but typically then doubted that a mere plumber could have possibly invented such a scheme. To add insult to injury, they then became sceptical of his abilities to install the scheme and simply appropriated the scheme, possibly altering a few details here and there, knowing the plumber would be unlikely to go to law. The project was then handed over to a major building company and the plumber compensated with an interview on Yorkshire television and a free meal at Harvey Nichols new shopping emporium in Leeds, both of which he refused point blank saying in any case he loathed Harvey Nichols and would never dream of going into the store. What angered him the most was the banality of a meal at the UK's premier snob store as somehow providing sufficient compensation. The guy pushed to the brink of violence by constant humiliation just to say contained himself.

Though he was up to doing the job himself he felt he needed others on board to stop him, we suspect, from going off at tangent and becoming lost in detail the more the mad boffin succeeded in gaining complete possession of him. So he asked if we would be interested. However we knew him from old and we were well aware that a touch of genius was accompanied by a streak of madness that was not easy to live or work with. (He was also a twin and what he had to say on the subject of twins must be appended to the already vast literature on twins - in particular how twins are irresistibly drawn to the idea of revolution and apt to be more feral than other kids from an early age, their parents unable to maintain much of a grip on them for any length of time). We learnt he had already approached the former shipbuilding firm of Cammel Lairds on the Mersey with precise specifications for a water tank that would have to be transported over the Pennines on a large trailer accompanied by an escort. We knew he would have been quite capable of stopping the convoy on the M62 because a plant on the motorway verge had caught his eye, oblivious to the fact he was causing a tailback that stretched to Manchester. And he was uniquely able to absolve himself of all responsibility forever repeating 'no es mia culpa' when things began to go badly wrong.

His way of working had to be commended for he was constantly stepping outside the job to do other things on the whim of the moment. When working on the barge he would go out of his way to recycle the tea bags, emptying their contents on to the acidic, nutrient poor, soil of the pot plants on the deck that was continually being degraded by the salt sea spray. On other jobs he would point to trees right in the centre of London he had planted years previously back in the 1970s and 80s. One evening about to knock off work he went all pensive and wished he was going on to attend a post revolutionary meeting that was going to decide how best to flood the Notting Hill flyover and create an aerial waterway where once there had been a motorway. This was a pre-eminently practical suggestion, but his imagination was not always so luminously materialist and intent on seizing hold of lifeless things to put them to a new use. Once when working on the barge we were all much entertained by his conviction that the increase of Kestrel Hawks on motorway bank sides had to be due to their gorging on the bloody flesh of crash victims!

These imaginative flights of fancy coming from a person ill-adjusted to capitalist norms must make the general ambience of BedZed developments and their ilk definitely prosaic in comparison. They will not have the stories to relate, or experience to draw on, we have, or the insights or even ultimately the inventive capacity for they lack a far flung social imagination. Nothing of the conformist odour of the architectural practise clung to our off-beam building gang. The pity is we can't tell the entire truth about it either because, as an endangered species of builder, it would only make matter worse in this stifling climate of conservatism which it is essential to combat if remedial action against climate change is to be at all effective. Though between ourselves we often say 'most builders would not take this trouble' we would, on most counts, be judged 'irresponsible' though that's the last thing we are. But people who know this, and can say why, are as much under threat as we are. At the end of the day - and it is the end if there isn't an unprecedented world uprising by the poor sometime fairly soon - our approach has to be understood and broadened, not whittled down to nothing which unfortunately seems to be the likeliest outcome - until such times as a catastrophe forces a rethink and by which time it may well be too late and what we once practised turned into an ugly travesty.

Community build and the Lucas Aerospace Plan arose out of a workers' movement that was beginning to push at the boundaries and, here and there, crash right through them. And we were right to feel distanced from them because they were also attempts to reign in that movement and divert it into constructive channels which, if they did not anticipate tendencies within capitalism that would become central to it ten years later, were certainly designed to stop the flood tide of revolt from turning into a revolution. We recently chanced on a writing pad filled with obsessive note taking on Lucas Aerospace. In order to relive the obsession we mentally went back 30 years recalling how we searched and searched for any mention of capitalism amongst the many utterances of its chief protagonist, Mike Cooley, wearily copying out his many comments on the man/machine interface as though that was the fundamental problem. In fact Cooley's technicist preoccupations have much in common with those of Dunster, the architect of the BedZed development who has even less to say about capitalism than Cooley. However there is one essential difference: though Dunster is not riding a wave or even making waves he is causing ripples to flow in the stagnant pool of conformity that is Britain today. And he knows, deep down, that it is not a matter of an either/or, 'architecture or revolution' as the abysmal Le Corbusier claimed, (adding 'revolution can be avoided') but both, the real problem being and, which Dunster and others will increasingly have to cope with, how to initiate change and yet stop it from becoming full blown revolutionary critique.

Notes within a thesis form: Deal or No Deal

1

Today the aim of BedZed developments cannot just be confined to the constructing of zero energy spaces. To a degree it demands a change in life styles in particular in carbon intensive life styles and has therefore to stimulate and encourage the desire for change and not stifle it as did the community architecture movement and the Lucas Aerospace venture of 30 years ago. But as it stands that change in life styles is little more than easy living and New Years' resolutions.

2

To build differently we have to live differently. If social ecology is ever to become more than a mere word it requires that people come together and act. And that is just not happening. The preferred option is to roll over and die and on this ground-zero passivity it is possible to erect a 'sustainable' Tower of Babel that must forever circle around the truth but never land on the ground. Only direct action will rip off the eco masks of the despoilers and expose them for the sham they are and in that sense today's climate of passivity is very different from the conditions that led to the Lucas Aerospace plan and the need to derail mass action.

3

The call amongst the greens has been for leadership for true statesmanship showing they have no critique whatsoever of the wages system, exchange, commodity exploitation, value, surplus value, the state; absolutely essential omissions that are bound to doom all their endeavours to complete failure. A report called 'High Stakes' published later by the Institute of Public Policy and Research saw through the hollowness yet its remedies are equally as hollow adding there is on obvious political mechanism or program in existence that is going to do the political and technical job which is true though what is false is to believe there ever could be. The Ecologist in its Dec 2006/Jan 2007 issue sank to the abysmal level of calling for a green Winston Churchill, which Al Gore in his eco-market film 'An Inconvenient Truth' also plays lip service to!

4

The growing debate about the benefits of public transport is also awakening inveterate car users to the realisation they are missing out on a level of communality that can lift spirits. Can any car journey ever match the chance encounters of public transport, the odd balls or the illuminating snippets of conservation overheard on a bus or on a local train service? It moved one letter writer to advise ex-PM Blair to try sailing to the states then 'buy an old Chevrolet and share the driving with Cherie just as many of us have done.' However it is the last sentence that's the real clincher: 'You might even find yourselves with something genuinely interesting to relate at the end of the trip.' What this means is that the lives of politicians and celebrities are boring because devoid of real incidents their status and wealth precluding genuine contact.

5

Blair also insisted that science was the key to tackling global warming. What he may have had in mind are such barmy ideas as space sunshades which Mr. Gaia, James Lovelock, also supports, the earth goddess becoming totally reliant on this modern day techno-atlas for her continuing health. This sunshade would be 60,000 miles in length (!) would take 25 years to get into orbit and would cost £50 billion a year for the whole of its 50 years lifespan. It must be the ultimate flight of fancy and if this is what Blair means by science coming to the rescue then faith in a providential god who will step in at the last moment is every bit as rational.

6

Moreover the Blair's refused to give up long haul holiday flights rejecting the need to set a personal example on greenhouse gases by taking breaks closer to home. In an interview with Sky News he claimed that what he had previously called 'the world's greatest environmental challenge' did not require unreasonable sacrifices. He also unhesitatingly assumes that long haul holiday flights are the maximum embodiment of the pleasure principle, and not the painful, home from home, banal bore they have become to an increasing number of people looking for more fulfilling alternatives to the standardised holiday package - hence the growth of pseudo alternatives like eco-tourism, a have your cake and eat it substitute for a truly decommoditised eco perambulation. More than ever we are all now prisoners of a flattened universe with nowhere to go. Any attempt to increase taxes on aviation fuel would Blair says 'end up actually putting people off the green agenda by saying that you must not have a good time any more and can't consume.' This time though Epicureanism is no longer an option because the situation is so serious that having a good time re traditional notions of what good times are supposed to be, irretrievably joins with the last dance of death. But, more practically what will be the bitter harvest of disillusionment that is their inevitable accompaniment, once the nonsensical notion of a sustainable capitalism fails? The only beneficiaries from the mass paralysis following failure will be a stupidity the like of which we've never seen and for that reason will find favour in government circles around the world; i.e. those who have the most to profit from absolute stupidity.

7

Typically middle class lifestyles are also challenged from an unexpected and to them painful source. Like it or not the carbon foot print of the shameless of this world are less than theirs and from this earth enhancing perspective live far more responsible lives. This unchallengeable fact is unpalatable to the eco middle classes brought up on a thirty-year-old diet of feckless workers and demonic council tenants. To think - after all these years - 'the workers' and the work shy are becoming once more the salt of the earth, to be respected rather than despised, emulated more than rejected. Such are the ironies of history - or rather the essence of dialectics. Quality dailies and the tabloids are increasingly saying the same thing 'the richest fuel global warming - but the poorest suffer most from it'. The Democratic Republic of the Congo for instance produces virtually no carbon emissions and this includes the ecologically reinvented though utterly immiserated city of Kinshasa, a city of 6 million and therefore more of a warning of the breakdown to come than a model for the future.

8

How far can one push green lifestyles without the whole gathering a momentum and becoming a critique of capitalism? Can change come to mean more than ecological exhortations like the Independent's 2007 change your life posters? Can it forever stay mired in pious promises and hypocritical cant? Or will people eventually take to the streets unable to endure the culture of lies a moment longer? Monbiot though welcoming the Stern Report particularly his conclusion that it will cost far more attempting to live with climate change than taking remedial action amounting to one percent of global GDP a year does not like the fact 'the Stern review reduces the discussion about climate change to one about money.' 'Most of the costs of climate change are not measured in pounds and dollars but in the cost to human life.' BBC Focus; January 2007. Ah yes - but to go from here to the demand to change life aren't we back at 1968? And then we have to take note all over again of the positive achievements of the much denigrated workers' movement and bring the two together for the first time and for the most consequential battle ever to be fought.

Stuart Wise: Summer 2007. (Plus some additions from Flaky Dave)

• 1Libcom note: and now at https://libcom.org/article/redirection-production-lucas-aerospace-plan-mid-1970s

Above: Peppered Moth plus variations

(The following is a theoretical drift which originally saw the light of day as a letter to a very intelligent guy in Huddersfield with a passion for moths and, on a more general level, a fellow traveller on the same eco-revolutionary wavelength. It has since been amended, somewhat altered and put in a more coherent sequence)

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Dear Huddersfield Mothman,

Thanks for your appreciative remarks on the www.dialecticalbutterflies.com website. Excuse the delay in replying but have been very busy.

Regarding melanism have you read the little book Of Moths and Men by Judith Harper? The title is suggestive of a feminist approach to the subject (i.e. women would never have been so easily duped!) and is subtitled: "Intrigue, tragedy and the Peppered Moth". But it appears Kettlewell may have falsified the evidence and the question of industrial melanism a far more complicated matter than has been made out hitherto. As is well known both EB Ford and the great Haldane uncritically accepted Kettlewell's findings. I do know the controversy over the Peppered Moth has cast considerable doubt on the EB Ford /Kettlewell thesis that it was an evolutionary response to industrialization and one we could see happening before our very eyes. Everyone wants to see evolution happening before their eyes but even so there can be no doubt that urbanism and industrialization has profoundly affected wild life and we are only just becoming aware of how deep and on going the process is.

I was going to send you a short resume I had been wrestling with regarding Marxism and science particularly in relationship to four notable 20th century British scientists – Haldane, (a geneticist, amongst other things) Bernal (a crystallographer), Levy (a mathematician and physicist) and Needham (a biochemist chiefly interested in embryology who in 1932 founded the Theoretical Biology Club to counteract the eugenic thinking of the Rockefeller Foundation that was promoting a reductive "science of man" which was also a science of social control. Nothing has fundamentally changed since, though the term eugenic has been discreetly dropped from the scientific vocabulary though the concept is still very much alive and kicking).

However, such a resume requires a return to basics and raising that most difficult of subjects, the relationship between dialectical and scientific reason. Even this division is suspect because Hegel would argue dialectical reason is scientific in fact more rigorous than mathematical or formal logic. The more I puzzle over it and think about it the more questions it inevitable raises and the more my mind goes dark pondering these thorny questions – ouch.

I read two essays by Levy and Bernal on dialectical materialism as a general science or a higher science, whichever way you like to put it. Levy, an honest man, who was eventually expelled from the Communist party (and to his credit the Labour party also!) clearly had great difficulties with its scholastic categorisations. He refers to the "laws" of dialectical change as written in "almost medieval language" and is "repellent to the scientific man". (See his essay: A Scientific Worker looks at Dialectical Materialism 1934). Interestingly the only scientist Henri Lefebvre respectfully mentions in his little book Dialectical Materialism written in the late 1930s is Hyman Levy. He most have felt attracted to Levy's lack of dogmatism and thought here was a fellow spirit who cannot easily be made to toe the party line even though Lefebvre continued to do so well into the 1950s.Though Bernal and Levy were friends, Bernal pretty much remained a faithful scientific apparatchik of the Soviet Union all his life and had no difficulty in accepting Engels's Dialectics of Nature as the new Soviet Sermon on the Mount. Lefebvre's Dialectical Materialism was important in reviving the long lost themes of reification and alienation so essential to a critique of capitalism. (Would that scientists could take up these themes today and it must remain one of the great mysteries of our time why a scream of pain, powerful enough to burst the ear drums and which has no equivalent in scientific history, has not rent the world's scientific laboratories). Lefebvre almost pokes fun at Hegel's triadic formulation of thesis, antithesis, synthesis central to dialectical thought, citing no less an authority than Hegel himself : "If one wants to count them" says Hegel").

In a forward to the fifth edition of Dialectical Materialism written in 1961 Lefebvre apologises for his adherence, twenty-five years previously, to dialectical materialism as a philosophy of nature i.e. the natural sciences. He blames Stalin and Zhdanov for this error – perhaps crime would be a more appropriate word - but he would have done better had he gone back to basics and indicted Engels Dialectics of Nature (c.1873) and before that Hegel's Philosophy of Nature. It is a commonplace of Marxist hagiography that Marx turned Hegel's dialectic right side up, giving it a materialist foundation. However as Lefebvre reminds us: "It was only with great caution that Marx embarked on this path (as in his application of the dialectical method to economics)". Engels, a connoisseur of Hegel if ever there was one, was more ready to throw caution to the wind believing the dialectical materialist method possessed a universal truth i.e. was applicable to all sciences. And he also thought he was turning Hegel right side up whereas Engels's critique, when it comes to nature, is basically the same as Hegel's who was the most materialist of all idealist philosophers, though Engels did recognise this when he perceptively wrote "idealist systems also filled themselves more and more with a materialist content". What other airy-fairy, wilting philosopher with their head in the clouds has wallowed in shit like Hegel, realising without it humanity would starve? To see in this a remarkable anticipation of the importance of the nitrate cycle is not to confer on Hegel the benefit of hindsight!

Hegel's philosophy of nature is a summation of tendencies begun by Kant within classical German philosophy. It is a strain to even attempt to read it today though my foreign languages publishing house copy of Engels's "Dialectics of Nature" was mislaid, without undue regret, years ago. It would be unfair to say Hegel's "Philosophy of Nature" died without issue but it did take the deification of Engels to successfully imprint its spirit on a third of the world.

In fact "naturphilosophie", of which Hegel's work forms a discrete part, was once hugely influential and, it has to be said, more scientifically consequential as regards actual discoveries than dialectical materialism ever was. (Its proper field of application I will repeatedly stress is the history of science and I unhesitatingly agree with Hyman Levy's considered judgement "the so-called laws of the dialectic, couched as they must be in very general terms, must have there principal application in the field of social and economic development. They appear to add little or nothing to the detailed methods of analysis of scientific workers"). We have only to think of Goethe's anatomical studies and great work on plant morphology. That most influential of 19th century geologists and naturalists, Louis Aggasiz (1807-73), was a naturphilosophe - and the first to suggest, as a result of meticulous observation, there had been several ice ages. So was the nasty Richard Owen, the life-long opponent of Darwin and coiner of the word "dinosaur". However to say that all naturalists who subscribed to the argument for God's existence from design, like William Paley, were nature-philosophers in the strict German meaning of the term would be wrong. Paley could point to the blue yonder and say that's where God is. But following Kant, the high priests of German nature philosophy rigorously rejected any ontological proof of God's existence but retained it as a regulative if not a constitutive hypothesis. The philosophers that immediately followed Kant introduced an ever greater dynamism ("praxis"!) into their respective systems with the result that God became ever less a preformed entity but something that was continually developing towards an ever greater perfection in nature and man.(In fact it was on the specific nature of the relationship between the two that finally caused Hegel to distance himself from Schelling, preferring to see in nature the "otherness" of man, or the "idea", and hence the alienation of man, or the "idea".) Whew! I have already pointed out the close materialist/idealist parallels between Hegel's and Engels's conception of nature but Hegel's conviction, which he loved to throw in the face of German Romanticism, that nature had been tamed and bent to mankind's purpose was one he shared with Marx. In the margins of a lecture he gave in 1805-6 he wrote: "Wind, mighty river, mighty ocean, subjugated, cultivated. No point in exchanging compliments with it – puerile sentimentalities etc". This comment is all the more fit for my purpose in so far as it was part of a lecture dealing with tools - yes tools – and the teleology of labour, which sounds more grounded if we call it the labour process. And then compare it with the following quotation from Marx's Grundrisse (1857-8)

"Where does Vulcan come in as against Roberts and Co? Jupiter as against the lightning conductor? And Hermes as against the Credit Mobilier? All mythology masters and dominates and shapes the forces of nature in and through the imagination; hence it disappears as soon as man gains mastery over the forces of nature".

What must be at once apparent to anyone reading this today is that we haven't gained control over the forces of nature and that nature is set to take the most terrible revenge.

(A little aside: Having discovered what has to be Britain's most unusual Grayling colony in Healey Mills Marshalling Yards midway twixt Wakefield and Dewsbury in West Yorkshire, I began to look into the origin of the yards, turning up an old photo of a huge iron foundry, the property of Roberts and Co! Could this be the very company Marx was referring to? And how odd that the foundry has long since gone and in its stead there is this most unusual colony of butterflies.)

What happens now? And what impact will this awareness have on the future trajectory of science? It all seems a very far cry from the glowing positivism of dialectical materialism. Suppose a hellish catastrophe is just around the corner? Despite the destruction of lives, by far the greatest Homo erectus as a genus has ever endured and its bitter, even insupportable aftermath, it also seems unlikely a nature religion will once more take root with all its myths, attendant rituals and suspension of disbelief. The handful of survivors will be living in a state of acute existential agony and bereft of that most precious gift, the dream of utopia. They will have no past worth remembering and no future to look forward to, and perhaps even incapable of reproducing themselves. The guilt over what that meaningless abstraction "humanity" has done in the past may be such that the survivors spontaneously abase themselves before any living object in the natural world, ready to beg forgiveness. There will certainly be no "exchanging of compliments with it" analogous to Hegel's cynical depiction of romantic nature schmaltz. The horrors that the soviet state philosophy of dialectical materialism (in fact the philosophy of state capitalism - a concept that now must never be given a renewed airing) strove to conceal is mild in comparison, even though it did involve the deaths of millions in the gulags. So let us now return to the cosier comforts of those years, which seem positively humane in comparison to what will undoubtedly come to pass short of an anti-capitalist revolution.

I have in my possession the first edition of Bernal's Science in History (1954!) in which he denies, under the influence of Lysenko, the existence of genes. ("genes were supposed to be material bodies - but – neither then nor since have they been isolated and their nature still remains hypothetical"- in later editions the offending sentences have been mercifully removed). What is amazing Bernal even managed to convince the great populational geneticist Haldane of it - but not for long and scientific integrity won out in the end when Haldane was forced to denounce Lysenko as a fawning, politically manipulated impostor. (In fact Julian Huxley had irrefutably exposed Lysenko as a fraudster and if Haldane had continued to ratify this perversion of scientific integrity he would have become the butt of ridicule in a scientific community that previously went in awe of him. As it was, Haldane remained a great scientist and both Crick and Watson were deeply indebted to him and the discovery of the DNA molecule may have been delayed if it wasn't for Haldane).

I don't know if Haldane wrote on dialectical materialism as a – as the - philosophy of science but would be interested to know more. And as for Needham - who cannot but be impressed by his four volumes on Chinese Science? I went on the internet to see if I could find a copy of his book The Sceptical Biologist and was amazed to find several copies for sale, all in America and Canada. (This came out in 1929 a year or so before Bukharin made an entrance at the international conference on science in which he strove to press upon scientists the acceptance of "dialectical materialism" as a guiding philosophy to their studies. The worst depression in the history of capitalism was beginning to bite and this conference, precisely on account of Bukharin's well-timed intervention, had a huge influence on scientists around the world. It also marks the beginning of the canonization of dialectical materialism as the Soviet Union's new religion which was then assiduously promoted by Stalin who, incidentally, seized hold of Bukharin's ideas on science whilst vehemently rejecting his proposed economic reforms which were an anticipation of Gorbachov's some fifty years later. After an infamous Moscow show trial Bukharin was bundled off to the Lubyanka prison and shot). However to repeat, it is mainly within the domain of scientific history, not actual scientific method, that dialectical materialism has scored its greatest success. Bukharin's scientific proselytising was greatly aided by what was generally regarded as a brilliant and innovative interpretation of Newton by Boris Hessen in Science at the Cross-Roads, a collection of papers edited by Bukharin and presented to the International Congress of Science and Technology held in 1931. This essay endeavoured to show how the general mechanical problems Newton set himself to solve were conditioned by the current needs of technics, particularly the technics of military and naval warfare. Later Bernal would write a lengthy book on science (op. cit. Science in History 1954) in which he argued as a matter of principle technical innovation tended to come before that of 'pure' scientific theory, which essentially was an extrapolation after the fact. And today Needham is chiefly remembered for his volumes on Chinese science. The volumes are also intended as a necessary corrective to the arrogance of western scientists. He claims for instance that the Chinese discovered the circulation of the blood before William Harvey but have never been credited with that discovery. By all accounts Needham remained a humble, approachable man all his life and he comes across as an attractive personality which is more than can be said for most scientists today, drunk as they are on petty power and the ethos of business – rather, in fact, like installation artists ever looking to hand out their autographs.

Needham also wrote on Coleridge in an essay entitled Coleridge as a Biologist in The Sceptical Biologist which I would be very interested to read. Under the influence of German philosophical idealism, the clash of opposites and their interpenetration began to play an increasingly important part in Coleridge's thought and I rather think Needham was perhaps the last biologist capable of tackling such a tricky subject. (Coleridges's favourite proverb was "extremes meet"- the debt to dialectical philosophy is obvious though surprisingly he never once mentioned Hegel to my knowledge, though he does Schelling who, for a time, was theoretically close to Hegel to the point of actually collaborating on some texts together. Coleridge is credited with bringing classical German philosophy to Britain almost unaided. He had plunged in at the deep end actually reading Kant in German, which is no mean achievement. However he must have found the Kantian antinomies repugnant and constantly strove to find a way beyond them, writing in his truly astonishing notebooks things like "the reconciliation of the many with the one – of a plurality with unity". He found this reconciliation in the realm of the imagination which "reveals itself in the reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities". This, in essentials, is little different to Kant's view as expressed in The Critique of Judgement his last great work on aesthetics and natural organisms in particular – which revealingly takes up a major part of the book - and published shortly before the French Revolution of 1789. This latter work is commonly acknowledged as reconciling the two formerly opposed antinomies of pure and practical reason and was immediately seized on as pointing to a practical resolution of the problem. What a pity then these half-buried ideas in Coleridge were never subsequently taken up and given a more practical field to play in other than that of art or poetry and which, as the 19th century turned into the 20th century and then the 21st, became an ever more empty substitute for genuine, practical creativity. Who knows but we could have had an "English" version of Marx's - Thesis on Feurbach - the summation of romanticism if you like - and which would have been of huge relevance to our time. I will end this protracted digression with a couple of conjoint quotes from Coleridge's notebooks penned during the revolutionary West Country years of 1794-9: "Property intended to secure to every man the produce of his toil - as at present instituted, operates directly contrariwise to this. NB", "Poetry – excites us to artificial feelings – makes us callous to real ones". This very remarkable combination of thoughts needed the merest tweaking to become truly explosive).

The more quietist, reconciliatory, reactionary side of Kant's aesthetics, is nonetheless there in the attitude of some of today's scientists who are patently close to the end of their tether and ready to clutch at the ghost of a straw. This will no doubt come as a surprise to them but there is a definite correspondence. I was particularly struck by a review of Steve Jones book Coral by Richard Fortey (author of Trilobite! and The Earth, etc) who censures Jones for being insensitive to the beauty of coral reefs. This must surely be a plea entered on behalf of the bleakest nature aesthetic ever. In Keats' Ode to Melancholy beauty must die but in the scheme of things it will also be reborn. But not so today and after Keats, the definitions of beauty that really mattered were heavily ironic and designed to shock - the very opposite of "beauty". If Lautreamont were alive today and something of a lepidopterist – which he could easily have been - he may well have supplemented his remarks on the beautiful trembling of an alcoholic's hand, with something along the lines of "as beautiful as the last, disorientated Dingy Skipper and a bulldozer on a Yorkshire colliery spoil heap." In so far as it implies the opposite, irony is a dialectical mode of expression and if the axiom was to lead to uproar and the eventual saving of the Dingy Skipper on these spoil heaps then – yes - it would be truly "beautiful". But make no mistake about it, in today's increasingly repressive climate it could mean the ugliest of set–to's.

And the worst of it is there is scarcely a scientist alive today who dare tell it like it is. Neither Fortey nor Jones, for example, will come clean about capitalism and prefer in the last instance to opt for all manner of evasions rather than acknowledge it. The fact that Steve Jones never mentions capitalism to my mind vitiates his Coral book. Excuse me for thinking that it is blindingly obvious capitalism plays a preponderant role in the destruction of the world's coral reefs. Rather than admit it, Jones plumps for a lame Darwinism as though this mass extinction at present under way is a natural rather than social event and cannot therefore be prevented. Someone like Steve Jones is more open to such questions but yields to a Duchampian readymade Darwinism, patently a cop out, at least avoids the indignity of being ostracised from a highly conservative scientific community increasingly afraid of its own shadow. (Just how much, intellectual humiliation and abuse is a scientist prepared to put up with before she/he joins a picket line?) His co-conspirator in remaining silent has to be Richard Fortey who is also aware of the impending destruction but mounts a desperate final plea on behalf of nature's beauty commending us to enjoy it while we can though it is fast fading from the scene. Colin Tudge is prepared to speak his mind and is doubtless regarded as somewhat off it by the academic community. I greatly benefited from reading his book on trees and one day must get around to reading his: "And so shall you reap." Yet in our opinion his critiques of political economy remains rudimentary despite his increasingly vociferous condemnation of capitalism. He wants the democratisation of money rather than its abolition. None the less, the guy very recently (The Guardian July 31st 2007) probably accurately predicts that the outcome of the Summer of Floods will be "that Britain's farming should go the way of its coal-mining" seeing the county's climate has become too fickle for agriculture. (Globalisation's answer is always to up the ante closing down the offending object/subject.)

Most paid-up scientific intellectuals are however fearful and /or benign in their critiques so it is hardly surprising that conservation practise, if one can even call it that, is what it is. The naiveté of groups like Butterfly Conservation and Buglife when faced with the all-devouring ogre beggars belief. Ted Benton the bumble bee expert is prepared to call into question the profit motif which in every case takes precedence over conservation matters. But even so his nascent critique of political economy must be pushed further - much, much further. As for James Lovelock the question does not even figure in his analysis though few who have bothered to study him would doubt the conclusion spilling over from his Revenge of Gaia that if things continue as they are the end result will be billions dead. The two hundred millions who died in the two world wars become almost paltry beside Lovelock's death certificate for Homo sapiens. The fact that he is prepared to countenance this unprecedented catastrophe, the worst by far in the entire history of the human species, with such equanimity is indeed chilling. And what about the survivors of such a holocaust? Will they be able to function as per normal? Lovelock never once raises the question what life will be like for the survivors of such an unimaginable holocaust. Psychologically it will be wretched in the extreme. There will be nothing to look back on or even forward to and humanity's utopian impulse will be extinguished forever. The pitiful remnants of humanity may well fizzle out because the hell of continuing to live on in the aftermath of all that suffering will be just too much for the human mind to bear.

Dialectical Materialism as a term has, of course, long fallen out of use. Maybe it is due for a more thoroughly worked-through revival, maybe not. However it does strike me certain concepts belonging to what may loosely be called dialectical materialism find their way into the work of Fritjof Capra, particularly his Tao of Physics (1971) and The Turning Point (1982). Significantly Needham receives a honourable mention in the latter book. I also think it significant The Tao of Physics commences on a beach in California with a surf-city, tableau-vivante, epiphany resembling one of those dreadful alternative collages of psychedelic quantum particles set against a shadowy backdrop of Hindu deities that Allen Ginsberg could easily have cooked up. In a sense Capra is concluding what Robert Oppenheimer (the tortured inventor, with others, of the atomic bomb) initiated and it is not difficult to imagine the despairing Oppie, taking time-off from reading the Mahabarata, singing along to "Hari Krishna, Hare Rama". Finally Capra's two books have almost certainly been influenced by the anarchist Murray Bookchin and The Institute of Social Ecology he set up first of all in the 1960s. But of course Capra discreetly avoids mentioning Murray as did Rachel Carson of Silent Spring fame, way back in the 1950s because Murray made no bones about his anti-capitalist convictions. None the less she pillaged Murray's themes, the book being a nauseating example of recuperation – the means whereby the essential sting is taken out of valid arguments – thus making them somewhat acceptable to the powerful system which imperiously rules this impossible world.

However Capra believes "the revolution" will come from a revolution in perception alone. It won't. It can't. By itself a change in outlook will not change society and no where in his books are basic questions like funding, the role of the state and big business ever raised. Consequently it should come as no surprise that what Capra is condemning ("mechanism", "domination", "self-assertion", the "yang" rather than the "yin", the "pong" and not the "ping") in his books has only grown worse - infinitely worse - over the last thirty years and this despite his lauding of feminism and ecologism – both by now "isms" by the way and like all isms compromised to the hilt by the biggest ism of them all, capitalism. What a relief then to get away from this obfuscation and read the final sentence of Levy's previously cited essay written over 30 years prior to the Tao of Physics and, which seems obvious to silly old me: "But to expect such a revolution in outlook without a corresponding change in the whole structure of society would be itself undialectical".

James Lovelock the author of Gaia fulsomely praised The Turning Point when it came out in 1982 describing it as "an essential guide for anyone inquiring about the place of science and metascience in our contemporary culture". Lovelock was by this time just beginning to savour a growing fame but what on earth could he mean by metascience? It is certainly true his theory of a live earth was reinstating a long dead, though non-mythological, animus (the only concession to mythology is in the name Gaia, the Earth Goddess) but a word like metascience does imply a metaphysic of science and in that sense can be bracketed alongside dialectical materialism, a corpus of ideas and laws Lovelock would beyond a shadow of a doubt find ludicrous. Or could "metascience" be code for the need for a new totality, a totality Lovelock, and a rapidly growing number of other scientists, are forced to knock their heads against yet at the same time are set on dodging and, rather than confront the self-evident, lash out in all directions? This is a very real, growing dilemma and more often than not it leads to a chilling, generalised apoplexy rather than a coherent knitting together – "a totality" - of separated fragments. Lovelock's Revenge of Gaiat (2006) unfortunately falls into this category. Apart from his nimbyism and support for nuclear power there is never much more than a nebulous mention of consumerism or globalisation, certainly not the forces - unfettered international capitalism - that have led to it - subjects, surely, essential to tackle if the revenge of Gaia is to be halted. Once really threatened one does wonder if the increasing number of people like Lovelock will not hesitate to resort to the utmost barbarism. The answer to this question will certainly come over the next thirty years or so.

Lovelock in the book paints the blackest of pictures, truly a scientistic, Rodchenko-like, Black on Black. On the back cover of the penguin edition, Mark Lynas is quoted as saying it is an "utterly terrifying" book. Now Lynas has just built himself a reputation by writing a book 6 Degrees (2007) that describes what happens to the planet with each one-degree increase in temperature. At six degrees fireballs are exploding in the air. Is he depressed by this? Well, if he is he hardly shows it, for Lynas is one of the growing band of eco-operators seeking to profit from apocalypse by landing himself a superannuated position on the board of a global company. Never the less Lynas's book describes in an easy to read, popular manner - and with much graphic detail - the horror which awaits us and for that we must give him credit. As for Lovelock he is too well established to hanker after the job of businessman of doomsday. He is too comfortably off to want more and that makes Lovelock the more dangerous because his crazed opinions are free from the taint of money and consequently that much more attractive and potent. Meanwhile, as a foretaste of what's in Lovelock's store, sample the following: "Whatever form future society takes it will be tribal, and hence there will be the privileged and the poor" - or - "Most of us prefer an urban existence, provided that predatory low life is kept invisible". And by that he does not mean urban foxes!

In fact Lovelock has no feel at all for brownfield sites. He says rightly that the majority of people now live in cities and that consequently they are cut-off from mother earth (Gaia) and have no awareness of the natural world. There is some truth to this but it also fails to explain the growing popularity of nature programs on TV. This also raises a host of other important issues Lovelock is blind to, like the valorising of nature program presenters able to increase their net worth and nest egg with each fledged brood of tits or swallows. (In addition to presenting Springwatch, the enormously popular nature-soap, a life-sized cut out of Bill Oddy is to be found in lots of garden centres promoting some horticultural disaster or other. He also has no qualms sales-pitching for B&Q either, a DIY store that epitomises the de-industrialisation of Britain and the lightning, subcontracted industrialisation of China, international capital attracted there by a limitless industrial reserve army, able temporarily to offset the falling rate of profit. However to insist on this degree of logic and to argue that it is two sides of the same coin is largely frowned on in wild life circles and considered irrelevant, churlish and bad form.)

That said it should come as no surprise to find Lovelock's unrepentant class snobbery translates into a rural, almost chocolate box, idyll.

"By good countryside I mean farming land and communities that live well with the earth and presents an ecosystem which – has ample room for woodlands, hedgerows and meadows. Most of southern England was like this before 1940, and the largest remaining parts are in the West Country especially Devon".

He illustrates his book with a number of colour plates one of which especially caught my eye on account of its beauty. It is a typical scene from the next county down the peninsula and is captioned: "Cornwall, England. Land devastated by tin and copper mining". The objection I have to Lovelock is not just that he has no eye for the beauty of industrial dereliction, but that he also has no appreciation of the growing awareness that sites like these are becoming wildlife havens.

In a recent radio program broadcast on Radio 4, May 31st 2007 entitled Costing the Earth - an examination of brownfield sites even I was astonished to hear one of the interviewees claim that the bigger the city the more biodiverse they are, a claim I still have trouble believing. On the same program the redoubtable Ted Benton author of the definitive work on bumblebees (Bumblebees The New Naturalist 2006) could be heard kicking off about "the profit motif" and, which has in every case won out as opposed to conservation. Would that Butterfly Conservation could say the same and not mince matters, which makes it all but impossible in the long run to conserve butterflies. Benton is keenly appreciative of the wonders that have come have to light in the industrial graveyard of the Thames estuary and his discovery of the Scarce Emerald Damsel Fly (lestes dryas) in the late 1980s on the abandoned Occidental site on Canvey Island was one of the factors leading to a closer examination of this breath-taking, sublime place.

Since he wrote his book on bumblebees an edge has crept into Ted Benton's voice knowing that he can do little to halt the destruction of the former Occidental site and what rightly has been described as "England's rain forest". Of course we need to say more about the structure of capitalism than just point the finger at the profit motif. But it is a start and prompted me to look through the index where I chanced on William Blake's name. Going to the relevant page I found that Benton had indicted William Blake for introducing a sharp division between urban and rural life ever since he compared the "dark satanic mills" with "England's green and pleasant land". I would disagree with this characterisation of Blake for of all the great romantics he was the closest to industry and the industrial working class. And he was the most consistently revolutionary. But the fact that Ted had been able to put Blake into perspective and felt it appropriate to mention his name linking it to the need to preserve brownfield sites meant that here at last was a person one could have a fruitful discussion with and so widen and push the whole matter of conservation forward. We would have much to learn from each other, which is how things should be. But not so Butterfly Conservation who have closed their doors to a wider questioning such that to query, for example, the increasing control of the Treasury over urban, particularly housing, development must inevitably lead to riots in Pall Mall and the abolition of the monarchy (if only!). They are that paranoid. For the life of me I cannot help feeling there is something Stalinoid about the organisation requiring absolute obedience and obeisance – or else!

During May of this year (2007) I also listened to a radio program on beetles which I wish now I had recorded. Tongue in cheek and chuckling slightly one of the coleopterist's interviewed described beetles as the proletariat of the insect world whilst butterflies were the middle class! In fact he had a point. Beetles are everywhere and have invaded every nook and cranny and to illustrate his point this coleopterist went off to see what he could find in the way of beetles under a gasometer. Butterflies are far pickier and until the last couple of decades they were firmly associated in everyone's mind with the countryside. This is no longer the case and strictly speaking it never was true - certainly not as regards moths, though looking through a major work like Richard South's Moths published in the first decade of the 20th century, the name Shipley crops up now and again whereas I have yet to find a reference to Bradford. (For those who don't know Shipley is the posher part of Bradford!) Old habits die-hard and unfortunately Butterfly Conservation have yet to truly emancipate themselves from a Lovelockian hankering for a vanished rural idyll that will never return except as a brutal parody of its former self, perhaps even as an armed gated community.

The prejudice against industry and brownfield sites is such that one top official went so far as to describe old railway sidings as eyesores! What chance of saving the Dingy Skippers on the pit spoils heaps of northern England given this degree of rural chauvinism? These arcane, very traditional attitudes were nurtured way back and spring from the counterattack launched against industrial capitalism by a landed and commercial aristocracy miffed at the repeal of the Corn Laws in the 1830s. Of course the last thing I want to do is to cast myself in the role of an apologist for industrial capitalism but I do wish to stress how fundamental these attitudes are in this country and what an invasive, stuck-up, petty-minded (a pettiness that ultimately comes from a courtly respect for the minutiae of hierarchy), jaundiced, carnivorous plant it is, becoming stronger by the moment the more industrial capitalism and a manual proletariat is routed and finance capitalism takes over. I stressed this country because the surprising fact mentioned previously regarding big city biodiversity came from a study of German cities – and Germany in 2006 generated a £60 billion trade surplus in manufactured goods. Clearly there is nothing like the same prejudice against industry as in this country and this also applies to industrial dereliction because in Germany in the Ruhr at least one industrial park has been created and the old steel works in Duisberg left to oxidise and rot down and nature free to invade as it so pleases. But in England in particular all traces of the industrial past are assaulted with such a pathological ruthlessness and sheer vindictiveness that shortly not a hint of it will remain, including the wild life that was beginning to take up residence there. To its abiding shame Butterfly Conservation at worst has lent its authority to this terrible destruction (actually a holocaust of the Dingy Skipper) and at best stayed silent. We did, in fact, 'discover' a lot of colonies or if not that, gave them profile. Only one of these discoveries, the Penistone railway station colony is still for the moment thriving though perhaps half has been destroyed through development since coming across it in 2004.

Recently, it seems according to friends, things have taken a sinister turn and Butterfly Conservation together with other wildlife organisations are helping local councils to supposedly recreate Dingy Skipper and possibly other habitats for other flora and fauna on the Notts / Derbys spoil heaps, after they've been destroyed by government/commercial diktat with utterly disastrous results. Is this face saving or sheer cynicism or a mixture of both? This is especially so at Warsop Vale in North Notts where in the last three years or so, an expensive makeover has taken place which inevitably has destroyed an abundant colony of the Dingy Skipper but (hey!) the developers, fearing recriminations perhaps, have had the bare-faced cheek to do an about turn and supposedly re-create the original sympathetic wildlife terrain while retaining their chocolate box, essentially southern England image of nature so beloved of the estate agent sell. And who have been their best friends in this skull-duggery? Why no other than Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust and Butterfly Conservation who have sanctioned this con whereby a nutrient rich meadowland base, no matter that there maybe a fair mix of crushed limestone, maerl and paper crumble thrown in for good measure, has been imposed over the necessary nutrient poor cover which so favours the Dingy Skipper along with many other species. It painfully hasn't worked yet the truth of a tiny emergence or extinction of the butterfly has been effectively silenced. These on-going Nottinghamshire makeovers have not only destroyed the Dingy Skipper but the Grizzled Skipper and Small Blue too, despite media sound bites proclaiming the contrary. Butterfly Conservation tells you to inform the authorities if you find something of importance as it's a step in the right direction. Don't bother as all you're going to do is give the authorities the information they need to swat the natural invertebrate bastards before anybody else realises what's on their doorstep.

The point here is: it is now impossible to work with developers in any capacity whatsoever simply because they are so brutally draconian though very skilled in the black art of spin. Absolutely everything they turn their hand to is wrong, wrong, wrong. What genuine conservationists must do is expose this arrogance, throw up their hands in horror and stop placating these monsters, even if it means saying "there's nothing we can do about it". At least that would be honest. In South Yorkshire, the developmental umbrella bodies knowing well they have destroyed the rich and getting ever-richer biodiversity of the spoil heaps have stealthily gone back (in the dead of night one wonders?) and in the case of the Dingy Skipper planted birds foot trefoil here and there after the original plants were destroyed wholesale. Well it shows they finally care doesn't it? The trouble is they've seeded the new fluorescent green rye grass with the broad stem, tall trefoil favoured by the horticultural sales pitch and which is anathema to the Dingy Skipper. But the pet ecologists in the pay of the developers don't care. Why should they; just gimme money honey!

As for destruction the same fate awaits the Grayling colony in Healey Mills Marshalling Yards between Wakefield and Dewsbury. Essentially, the colony has been left to its devices for it was indeed remarkable to see how the butterflies were availing themselves if the rotting industrial detritus choosing to perch on rusting points levers rather than on birch bark, a favourite resting spot and which prompted Niko Tinbergen to describe the butterfly as "the bark with wings". To my mind it is the most remarkable Grayling colony in the country which has been left to perish. Again we are disgusted with Butterfly Conservation and local biodiversity groups in Wakefield's and Kirklees council for failing to do anything about the butterfly allowing a now rampant carr woodland to invade the broad expanses of rusting tracks, hardcore and decades old remnants of coal heaps which the grayling would frequently rest on. I doubt if the EWS management is even aware of the butterfly's existence and for sure I'm no longer prepared to risk arrest in the yards in the hope that something may eventually be done about it. Haphazardly situated on the Calder flood plain, on the all but abandoned yards which will never be developed because of subsidence, I'm sure an approach from a biodiversity group or BC could at least succeed in getting rid of some of the invasive carr woodland which will eventually kill off the Grayling in a few years time. However I have come to the conclusion that is just what these bodies wants because it saves them from an embarrassing conundrum and once the butterfly has gone the top management will breathe a sigh of relief and are clear to continue with their main concern which is the preservation of spin not butterflies. Saving the butterfly here is a very simple, uncomplicated, matter though it's like asking for the moon. If my brother is expelled from Butterfly Conservation for speaking the truth well then bring it on!

Further to your e-mail I should point out we are not Trotskyists despite Trotsky's fascination with in butterflies, a passion he found he shared with the surrealist Andre Breton when they met up. In fact Trotsky for all his insights (he was something of a polymath hence his interest in butterflies) never developed a theory of state capitalism or how it was nourished within the heart of the Bolshevik party right from the start. Admittedly he came close to it and then shied off at the last moment as though the whole issue was just too contentious for words. Whether the world will ever go back to state capitalism or variants of it (and which was very much part of the post war settlement and consensus) is a moot point. Arguably there are signs of it in Putin's Russia and Venezuela and possible eventually throughout the whole of Latin America should the new Bolivarianism become more of a reality.

I also should point out that the four British scientists I have previously mentioned never once questioned the role of the Bolshevik party or rejected the need for a vanguard party though Hyman Levy perhaps came the closest to that fundamental recognition. In the late 1960s more scientists than ever took that step, junking at the same time the pursuit of a career in science. The real history of this movement, the passions, the aspirations, the reasons for rejecting the science of our time has yet to be written. In truth the surface has barely been scratched and in twenty years time or less it will be lost forever. There was certainly more to it than a revolt against the military/industrial complex (though that was important) and involved the large scale bureaucratisation of science and the rejection of the consumer life style that went with it – the house, the nuclear family, the family car, the yearly holidays, the in-laws, Christmas, birthdays etc. Dropping out the scientific rat race for good and unable ever to re-join the scientific fold, I know at least one that went mad (Jerry B) and another that committed suicide (Spooks) and both oriented around the King Mob loose grouping we helped put together. Not for them the idea of redefining themselves as a scientific "worker" (which required they stay put like a cog in a machine) which had satisfied a Levy or Bernal. Once rid of such rebellious spirits, the scientific community was able to concentrate on what really mattered – business. Scientists today are encouraged to see themselves as businessmen and women, potential plcs' with a stock market valuation and flotation price. How one yearns to travel back not only thirty five years but to recover some of the unworldliness of a Needham even if we do find his secretaryship of the Guild of St Luke, a society aimed at promoting spirituality among doctors and medical students, not to out taste, for it is better than what we have today.

However we are unshakeably convinced the only solution to the mounting horrors confronting this little planet is a form of eco-socialism (or social ecology), one of collective/individual autonomy which is anti-money, anti-statist, cooperative and international. Obviously new forms of organisation are required, ones that are built from the ground up, that are open and democratic and function according to the best traditions of 'the workers' movement' as expressed in the workers' councils. However work has become a four-letter word and most work carried out today is socially irresponsible and destructive and in the interests of the survival of the species (rather than that of the fittest – an idiotic concept when applied to humanity as if ex PM Blair got where he is through Darwinian edict rather than media fiat) should be instantly abolished and redefined from scratch. Unwise though it is to anticipate forms of mass organisation we can at least say the revocable mandate operative at all times and in all places will be central to them. How this will work out with niche organisations like those concerned specifically with butterflies, beetles, birds, plants etc it is difficult to say but at least some kind of debate should be initiated along these lines instead of expecting the membership to go along with a set of principles drawn up behind closed doors by species experts and by people fresh out of university with little experience of reality and struggle and who impose their own version of TINA. (There Is No Other Way). Behind this adamantine negative formalism there undoubtedly lurks the fear of direct action and that people will start to do things for themselves and thrust established green organisations to one side as happened with the anti-road protestors, especially at Twyford Down in the early 1990s and which finally broke the resolve of the Tory Party to continue with their road program. That Labour stealthily resumed it is one more indication of the need for constant vigilance and never on any account to trust what politicians say. One thing for sure disillusionment with green organisations has never been so low when in fact it should be at an all time high. Beyond the apathy and fear there is also a growing awareness of how inept green organisations are at confronting – even naming - the accumulating horrors of international capitalism, a system which is now patently bent on suicide and has been appropriately labelled suicide capitalism by the enlightened French (who else?)

We likewise belong to the more libertarian wing of the communist movement, (though like the situationists – that influence is obvious throughout the www.dialecticalbutterflies.com web - we reject the term communist because it is a description that has become too devalued) believing in control from below. This was the guiding idea behind Anton Pannekoek's Workers Councils though it is perhaps ill-advised to employ such a term today seeing that most work today is socially destructive and should be instantly abolished. (Pannekoek was also an astronomer and a philosopher of science who dismissed Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism as bourgeois materialism mirroring the bourgeois, rather than proletarian, revolution then under way in Russia. Dialectical Materialism was to him an infinitely more subtle instrument because of its approach to causation, even because it denies causation altogether. I have to admit I do find Pannekoek's ideas a bit quirky in this respect and to my mind it is simply a more modern version of Hume's empiricism - with the crucial proviso Hume was a social conservative which Pannekoek patently was not. If pushed to extremes empiricism can appear to easily dispose of 'the truths' of science so is it to be wondered that Hume gave liberal vent to his spleen, ill-liberally repeating such terms as "cant", "mystical jargon", "hypocrisy", "fury", "fanaticism" over and over again when describing in his six volume History (1754-62) the forces opposed to Charles 1 in the English Civil War of 1640-5).

Stuart Wise. Summer 2007

Bataille's most important work The Accursed Share was originally published in its complete form as Le Part Maudit by Editions Minuit in 1967 though many sub-sections had escaped in passages published here and there in magazine form years previously going back to the early 1950s. It must have seemed the predictions in the book were coming true a year later in the French uprising of May 1968 when Bataille's discussion of surplus potlatch morphed into the revolutionary festival of the oppressed. However by then far more coherent developments based initially on the theory of what to do with the surplus were available and it is somewhat unfortunate Bataille's major work was to be eclipsed by events. If by 1967 the work of The Accursed Share was already done, thereafter and post '68 it is the book's vagaries that become influential, Bataille in general having a huge influence on post-modernist nothingness. The worst of Bataille - and their was much - became the endless, evasive tedium garnishing the hip ideology of counter revolution which followed though this depended more on other aspects of Bataille's oeuvre which will be discussed here shortly.

The Accursed Share is prefixed with a quotation from Blake 'Exuberance is Beauty' but really much of the book is taking up with a discussion of energy and so a further aphorism from Blake would have been exactly right: 'Energy is Eternal Delight'. Rereading the book carefully this time I was forcibly struck by the fact there is a lot of science in it, not quite 'hard' science but not soft either and that his discussion of energy and of the biosphere anticipates Lovelock because he treats energy, which he says ultimately derives from light (and which in a manner of speaking includes gravity), as a constant of the organic and inorganic. It's what happens to it, how it evolves, changes, transformed and is consumed, whether in a good or bad form, that is the critical factor. So it would not surprise me if The Accursed Share begins to attract a readership once more, a different sort of readership to that of ex-artists (who were the first to grasp the revolutionary significance of Bataille's ideas) composed of economists, ecologists, geologists and scientists particularly physicists like Freeman Dyson who as we know is spellbound by Blake's dictum. (And so much of Blake is spellbinding and The Accursed Share was the push that I needed to finally acknowledge that Blake was the greatest, the most consistently revolutionary, the most experimentally minded of all the Romantics. The closest to the nascent industrial proletariat and to industry, he was the last social visionary known and published who genuinely did 'see' things, (there were many others whom alas had no profile) that part of him disappearing underground to reappear for example amongst the miners like in my elderly uncles and aunts as it vanished amongst 'the poets' except as affectation, but without that brilliantly scary capacity among individuals liberally ensconced among the industrial working class to 'see' adding to social critique as it so palpably did in Blake. And what was true of Blake was also true of many individuals among the dispossessed of the English revolution of the 1640s). Moreover it was also a vision of wildness encompassing sexual and social longings and liberation as an indivisible whole that was common to a scorned "irregular Methodism".

Bataille had also been in consultation with a scientist George Ambrosini, a research director at the X-ray laboratory. Bataille explicitly says that without Ambrosini "I could not have constructed this book". In fact France played a crucial role in the discovery of X-rays (Madame Curie) and in the build up to understanding how nuclear fission works (Louise Meintner) and Bataille and Ambrosini must have discussed the finer points of atomic theory with Bataille acting as the junior partner. As a generous and remarkable footnote of relevance to the present by Bataille concedes "This book is in large part the work of Ambrosini. I personally regret that the atomic research in which he participates has removed him, for a time, from research in general economy. I must express the hope that he will resume in particular the study he has begun with me of the movements of energy on the surface of the globe" (my emphasis) The collaboration between Bataille and Ambrosini doesn't quite come off. But what should have been a portent of things to come and something to be taken to a much higher level, is now as far away as ever and it is as though this fruitful collaboration never existed, a mere one off and never to be even remotely countenanced when contemporary conditions are crying out for a cooperation of the best there is. No single individual is capable of uniting all knowledge into a coherent revolutionary whole and we are condemned to trying as best as we can.

The sense of apocalypse that pervades the book, of a sudden and catastrophic release of energy, is that of the atomic bomb. Bataille must have known of the first and second law of thermodynamics and their universal relevance though never mentions them specifically. And yet the entire book is about energy as an overlooked category of political economy, indeed the basic category implying energy as work by which he largely means the work of the industrial proletariat, and what is then done with the surplus, surplus energy rather than surplus value (Bataille appears to avoid the concept as too limiting). And yet there are significant glimpses of other forms of energy, that of light, of photosynthesis, the energy of the biosphere including its geology, all of which comes as a revelation to modern sensibilities now attuned to the immanence of another form of apocalypse, nature's apocalypse arising from the capitalised burning of fossil energy the most essential qualification of all regarding the burning of fossil fuels and the one that can never be accurately discussed.

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In a biography of Bataille by Nick Land entitled The Thirst for Annihilation Land wrote that the crucial themes traversing Bataille work were laughter, excrement and death exhibiting themselves as all encompassing, irreconcilable and irreducible as Bataille himself. The trouble is Bataille was also something of an exhibitionist and though never a pre-celebrity, liked to shock for the sake of it. Nonetheless it meant he became a very easy target for the vast extent of post modernist recuperation.

In 1928 Bataille pseudonymously published a porno novel The Story of the Eye. Around this time or in response to the book, Breton called him an obsessive and an excremental philosopher. For certain the conflict between these two was quite something. But ever since the late 1960s and early 1970s the greater lucidity of Andre Breton in comparison to Georges Bataille has melted into the background and a shift utterly related to the reactionary nature of these abysmal times. Bataille came to constantly deploy the notion of 'transgression' especially transgression against any form of sexual morality at the same time as he fought shy of discussing anything to do with 'transcendence' more particularly transcendence of the fundamental basics of a society increasingly rotten to the core. It is a necessary distinction to make because the last decades of the 20th century - and since - transgression in terms of changed behaviour in everyday life has become something which capitalism has quite happily been able to take on board, indeed becoming its very lifeblood. The shock value of transgression has thus become greatly weakened even helping the money-making machine on its apocalyptic way as it careers headlong towards the brink of the greatest precipice in human history. Transcendence, especially social revolutionary transcendence was fundamental to Breton and even as he got older - though in a highly contradictory manner - he at one and the same time became more ridiculously mystically artistic (e.g. nervous of the shamanic objet d'art he'd collected in his apartment thinking they had profound powers) and more lucid (e.g. his contribution to the short but to the point surrealist text on the 1956 Hungarian revolution which strongly supported the sovereignty of the workers councils). Bataille, though always interesting and often very sharp indeed lacked that fundamental clarity. However his writing always breathes life eschewing the academism (and academic role) that destroyed Foucault and the even more miserable plethora of post modernists that were to follow e.g. Bataille's first wife married Lacan and Derrida also was deeply influenced by Bataille. As for Foucault he never even dared go as far as Bataille and Foucault's notion of "limit experience" was merely a dilution of transgression. For Foucault, "limit experience" was the derring-do of an acid trip driving out into the Arizona desert listening to Schoenberg! (Wow, the audacity of such a thing). As for us "limit experience" we could perhaps say was the day we ended up working on an IRA building site where some of the guys openly talked of soldiers they'd shot from Belfast's Divis Flats thinking we were from N. Ireland and as meek northern English specimens shaking and keeping our damned mouths shut. Well, if not "limit experience" it was also 10 times more hairy than chance encounter!

Nonetheless today in comparison to Andre Breton, Georges Bataille's much mitigated influence is seemingly everywhere especially in that whole slew of installation artists and safe marketable seeming provocations that never really question the artistic paradigms, roles and other representations of the old order. For certain it sits comfortably in an art gallery and well before the 1997 major exhibition in the Pompidou centre in Paris called Formless devoted to a rereading of Bataille ideas as explanation and adjunct to a diverse range of post-war art. This exhibit though was finally to artistically canonise Bataille.

It's not as if the professional pundits aren't completely unawares of some of this; it's just that they haven't got to mention these essential truths too much, for if they did they'd be out of their professional dissimulators jobs pretty darned quick. Nonetheless occasionally they have to insert a few telling lines as you have to keep on board a certain veracity but it is a tightrope they walk. Consider some of the following in relation to the exhibition: 'Undercover Surrealism: Miro, Masson, and the vision of George Bataille' put on at London's Hayward Gallery and elaborated by that snaked-tongued cultural journalist Adrian Searle in The Guardian (11/5/06)

The exhibition was basically centred around Documents edited by Bataille along with Michel Leiris running to 15 issues between 1929/30. They dreamed of setting up editorial office in a particularly decrepit Paris brothel the prostitutes being enlisted in the editorial teem.

If Bataille is known today to a general audience, it is as a pornographer. Undercover surrealism celebrates the perverse, the contrary, the deliberately incongruous, and the arcane. The show was a cabinet of curiosities and at times a chamber of horrors. Catholic kitsch passion bottles were displayed in the same section as Picasso's 'Three Dancers'.

The exhibition was the brain child of art historian Dawn Ades and part of the team that created the 1978 'Dada and Surrealism Reviewed' in the Hey-word gallery and included a small section devoted to Bataille. Picasso had an entire issue of Documents devoted to him. Bataille remarked Picasso was a man "who could love a canvas as much as a fetishist loves a shoe". According to Searle it was surprising how little remains genuinely shocking. Mostly the frisson of transgression has died away, if only because we have seen so much. As with so much that was once deemed beyond the pale, the thrill has gone, or at least has found its market niche gone mainstream---. The most abject pornography imaginable is but few clicks away on the internet, while surrealism has been thoroughly co-opted by the advertising game. "One final point: it is the photographs rather than the conventional art that still provokes recoil like those taken in a slaughterhouse". (Adrian Searle, the Guardian 11/5/06)

And then we have others adding their ten penneth cultivating the Bataille legend of sheer mystique.

Consider Thomas Sutcliffe in the Independent January 2007 writing on the Chapman Bros' exhibition at Tate Liverpool:

'There were lots about Bataille and Deleuze etc. But no mention of the commercial enterprises that exist to satisfy all teenagers appetite for the gross and morbid. I was reminded - of - the horror comic constructions kits that were popular when I was young. Is Bataille really a bigger influence? Great chunks of aesthetic DNA had been excluded from the essays about their work.'

Consider journalist Johann Hari 5/2/2007 on The Art of Subverting the Enlightenment

'If a single work of modern art has penetrated our distracted consciousness in the past decade it is the penis-nosed, vagina mouthed child-mannequins designed by Dinos and Jake Chapman ---The Chapman brothers offer a kind of punk art that spits in your face punches you in the stomach and nicks your wallet while you are puking on the floor'.

Hari describes himself as 'staggering around their retrospective in Tate Liverpool'. Hari sees them as anti-Enlightenment even equating them with fascism and definitely exemplifying the irrationality of the times. However, the reality is far more banal. They are the perfect expression of capitalism - emptily provocative, shallow, pseudo-profound and animated by the all consuming desire for money and fame no different from the Gallagher brothers. Jake Chapman has declared 'The Enlightenment project ' virulently infects the earth'. He says this not because he believes it or that he agrees with Horkheimer's denunciation of the Enlightenment but because it pointlessly shocks - just like his reply to the question: 'Does Bataille's formulation of the conception of transgression relate to the way that work like your own is sometimes suggested as being part of a necessary force' to which he replied: 'Yes - a good social service like the children who killed Jamie Bulger'. The only possible result: - An increase in the personality price rating of this enfante horrible of art whose sole concern is the amassing of wealth through the media savvy milking of the shallowest notoriety. Hari points out 'foolish critics' (i.e. duped critics unable to see the obvious) have praised the 'moral anger' in the Chapman's work but to Hari this is immoral anger, celebrating injustice and cruelty as 'transgression' and remember a favourite concept of Bataille's who is the 'the Chapman's intellectual hero'. Bataille more than anyone else has been responsible for the latter day cult of De Sade as pornographer, post-modern shock jock and tasteless advertiser and which is designed for one purpose only - to mask the fact De Sade was at times a genuine revolutionary. Despite Bataille's pretending to be more De Sade than De Sade was himself, the only achievement of the 20th cult of De Sade has been to take him out of the Bastille and lock him up instead in the myriad bastions of museums of modern art. Hari obviously hates De Sade just as any English moral philosopher would be honour bound to (shades of Bertrand Russell here), simplistically accepting without question the conventional wisdom that De Sade was - well - no more than a sadist enjoying killing and torture for its own sake, forgetting he courageously spoke out against the death sentence at the height of the terror as well as describing the totality of all forms of sexuality, the 'nice' ones and the 'nasty' ones. Now both stances took courage - enormous courage.

Hari however is right to hate that other disciple of Bataille, Michael Foucault: 'In a telling parable about post modernism, Foucault went to Iran in 1978 to witness the incipient revolution---. He was searching for a new intellectual project. He found it in Ayatollah Khomeini! As Hari says had Foucault stayed on in Tehran he would have been eventually hanged for his homosexuality. Jake Chapman had objected to the opposition to the blowing up of ancient Buddhist sculptures by the Taliban - and which the Chapman Bros' supported - as 'strange' describing it as 'live, vital religious opposition to something that has a direct and local meaning to them'. To which we would reply why not blow up all of the Chapman brothers works, Dinos and Jake included for they are their 'art'. Without them it is meaningless junk because the artist today is the art. Now that would have more than a local meaning for its truth would resonate across the globe and would be a blow for universal freedom.

They also made a mint at the Frieze art fair, perhaps around £250.000 for a few hours crap work and that's is by the by merely a day's trading and a price far above your average seller of vegetables in disappearing trad style markets.

Consider also Louise Jury, arts correspondent to The Independent 1st August 2006 on the ICA exhibition of Juvenilia: August 2006. Dinos Chapman exhibited a papier-mache money-box pig made when he was eight. 'The Chapman Brothers' principle capacity in recent years has been to shock, whether through sexually mutated child mannequins or the doctoring of an edition of Goya's etchings'. Need we go on ad nauseum?

Regarding Bataille and his huge influence, let's deal in particular with Genesis P-Orridge and his partner, Lady Jane Breyer (now deceased) seeing they obviously come to mind. Indeed the very title 'Lady' is hardly ironic because they really did/do worship the established hierarchy and both fairly recently performed at the Royal Festival Hall in London. This very life style orientation bears all the hallmarks of Bataille's influence - realised in the flesh as it were - especially the afore mentioned 1920s novel, The History of the Eye which in itself is also Lautreamont without somehow his name never in the frame. The latter's presence is there in the dismembered self of body parts, the recombinant recombined DNA human being, the chromosome reconstructed human being and the bizarre reflection on Darwinism and natural selection. (The original Songs of Maldoror appeared two years after The Origins of the Species and in the same year as Mendel's discoveries which ultimately would lead to the analysis of DNA and its aesthetic, spectacularised equivalent which Porridge is part of. And perhaps too it's worth remembering that Breton hated the fact Isodore Ducasse had deployed the aristocratic non-de-plume Comte de Lautreamont though this was possibly an ironic wave in the direction of Lord Byron). However, it only needed Orridge and deceased partner to take Bataille's aestheticisation of De Sade and Lautremont a step further - a seemingly but only seemingly - more radical step for it to become 'real' as each swapped living tissue which the couple epithetically styled 'pandrogyny'. Essentially Orridge and deceased partner are about making a fashion statement out of body parts and always and despite the social workery tinge of helping poorly children is always with an eye to potential money making by keeping the whole reconstruction/deconstruction within the safe orbit of the gallery system exactly on the lines of creeps like the Chapman Bros, Stewart Home etc. Orridge's is no longer about clothes promo but promoing flesh leaving behind their older vanguardisms like industrial music - because industry is now passé - and body parts, concomitant essentially with a growing absence of feeling, is now the thing.

However, the living death of market appeal is nothing as linear and clear-cut as this because like so much else nostalgically pointing to the demise of creativity especially emphasised on the pop circuit who constantly reform their pop groups for yet another in memoriam final act and curtain repeated ad infinitum. Obviously such post festums are preludes to accruing more dosh so Porridge put together industrial music's Throbbing Gristle for a 'final' concert in 2004. The reunion - the pointless reunions - clearly mark the utter deadness of the age whether in the pop milieu or a lot more sadly - as we really cannot expect much else from a pop world on its last legs - the last Rebel Worker, the last King Mob, a revamped situationist group get together - and so on. The sentimentality of all this is truly astounding, especially as the latter examples involve no crude money making beyond ridiculously imitating the style of those who do.

After the failure of his hedge funds in the late 1990s, Michael Milken saw new money making prospects in the emerging bio-economy as a source of futures trading. A decade later and Orridge and Co are the artistic counterpart of Craig Venter's publicity mad machine purveying the potentiality of life forms as pure capitalism and stock market quotation. Doubtless there will be many more followers: I cyborg as a fashion statement.

However, rather than go into Craig Venter here and quite what a monster the guy is dwarfing any Dr Frankenstein in his grotesque billionairing it is best to refer to the next section on the bio-economy and not its pale Orridge-like reflection. One further point, the bio-engineering text deals with Das Kapital. Bataille's take on Marx and social revolution was very limited, even verging on the appalling. Unlike the deeper reflections around Breton which tentatively pointed towards the greater coherence of Lettrism, International Lettrism and the Situationists regarding the central questions of our age, Bataille was largely to equate Marx with the state, especially the Stalinist state as filtered through the crap the French Communist party put out which he half supported or thought of as an inevitable next step throughout the whole of Europe. Yes, sadly it was all this despite Bataille's slight incursions into Trotskyism in the late 1920s which from then on he was unable to develop. It was to prove a fatal limitation and Bataille's downfall in terms of a future worth remembering.

Above: A Portuguese Remembrance (Lembrando) of Stuart Wise in a 2022 edition of Flauta da Luz (The Enlightened Flute)

When discussing this new, vast and increasingly heavily capitalised scientific field of bio-economy other terms spring to mind like bio-mechanisation, bio tech and bio-industrialisation. The first term suggests mechanical parts though we do nowadays refer to bio engineering which no longer conjures up images of moving mechanical parts like in a child's meccano set from decades ago. Rather it indicates something that has been made or modified i.e. artificially put together or manufactured and could as well apply to a prosthetic as to genetically modified wheat (though the latter is not made, rather stuck together like a collage - a gene collage).

Bio-industrialisation I much prefer because it implies bio-production and therefore serial production of biological products. The entire concept, suitably modified, then can benefit from the kind of treatment one finds in Capital 1 by Marx, particularly the section Machinery and Modern Industry though today we would be dealing with computers, scanners, chemical tests and so on, whilst the question of the motive power (electricity) is scarce worth mentioning. (Actually it is but for different reasons) It would also be worthwhile to look at the chapters prior to the section on machinery and seek to understand their logical progression. The preceding chapter is entitled The Division of Labour and Manufacture and deals with the breaking down of the work process into its constituent parts and co-operation, which is the title of the prior chapter. This chapter is only 14 pages long and in a famous aside Marx says the reason why a dozen persons working together will, in their collective working day of 144 hours, produce more than 12 isolated men each working 12 hours, is because man is 'a social animal' and 'not as Aristotle contends, a political' one. But how to apply this obvious truth to the bio-industries is a question as thorny as a bramble bush. The spirit of cooperation is to be found in the critiques of the bio-industries; it has not as yet arisen organically from the bio-industry's work force. The transformation of bio-labour is not comparable to the transformation of handicraft into mechanized labour: we cannot compare the handicraft production of furniture with that found in a furniture factory to the present day mass production of synthesized organic compounds derived from plants and fungi whose existence may have first been detected by a medicine man and who may well have engaged others to collect the stuff from the wild, and who then helped prepare and extract the medicinal properties.

How relevant are other chapters in Capital 1 to the bio industry? Proceeding backwards from the chapter on Co-Operation we have 'The Concept of Relative Surplus value' (this can be applied without much difficulty) then the 'Rate and Mass of Surplus Value', 'The Working Day' (pressures to lengthen it will certainly apply), 'The Rate of Surplus Value', 'Constant and Variable Capital' (most certainly - e.g. increasingly sophisticated computerised aids like Craig Venter's use of computers to speed up the mapping of the human genome so he could then privately own the results) 'The Labour Process' (an unqualified yes: 'Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and nature'. Marx starts with primitive labour but not with that 'primitive instinctive form of labour that reminds us of the mere animal'. What distinguishes the labour of man from that of the spider and bee is imagination, the capacity to envisage the result.) All these chapters come under the general heading The Production of Absolute Surplus-Value. The 'Division of Labour and Manufacture comes under the general heading Production of Relative Surplus Value.

As we retrace our steps we come to Part 1 Commodities and Money and here we are on much firmer ground. No one, just no one, is going to doubt the importance of money to the bio-industries as the following notes on the Australian bio-industry demonstrates. But do parts one, two, three and four of Das Kapital necessarily follow each other as spring, summer, autumn and winter in all instances of capitalist production? And how do we even selectively apply them to the bio-economy?

Why is Australia to the forefront of the new bio-prospecting plus commercial ecology industries? The answer lies in its virgin rain forests and two firms in particular: Cerylid Biosciences in Melbourne and Ecobiotics in Queensland . Cerylid Biosciences claims to have the world's largest library of Australian biotic extracts taken from more than 60,000 samples collected from marine macro-organisms microbes and plants. It has partners overseas in Aventis (of GM food fame), Chiron in the US and Chugai in Japan - these three firms have been given access to the library in return for any later revenues and royalties. The CEO Jackie Fairley says about 85% of plants and drugs in Australia are found nowhere else. Some of these firms are colossal corporations. The Franco-German drug company Aventis not so long ago had bankers and lawyers working on hostile bids for a much larger rival, Sanofi, who pocketed a cool 150 million dollars. Yes, these are the sums bandied about now in bio-engineering.

Merely a few years ago, ecology was popularly conceived as a profession for the 'spiritually' dedicated bravely fighting for the planet's future against brutal odds. Nothing now could be farther from the truth as capitalism and ecology walk hand in hand. The CEOs' of Ecobiotics also turn their eco training to capital account. Instead of gathering as many examples as possible in the hope of finding some sort of useful bio activity, they use their background as rain forest ecologists to help them narrow down their research. Out of every 100 samples they collect, 85% have the bio-activity they were looking for. 'It's our understanding of the environment that has allowed us to be so successful' says co-founder Victoria Gordon. 'As far as bio-discovery goes, the best place to be is in highly biodiverse areas - and the most biodiverse region on earth is the tropical rainforest'. Location, Location Location - Ecobiotics is located close to the state's tropical rainforest!

Victoria is the Australian state most developed for bio-tech companies. It is home to 38% of the country's bio-tech companies including the largest CSL which makes blood products and vaccines and which also has manufacturing bases in Europe and the US. There are also medical device companies: Resmid was founded in 1989 to commercialise a facial mask created at university of Sydney for treating sleeping disorders and Sonic Health employs more than 10,000 people and a core business providing pathology and radiology testing to GP's.

All this has to be paid for and Bio-Tech Capital is an investment fund for bio-tech industry. These must have a retinue of brokers to invest with them and lack of local funds requires overseas partnerships or overseas investment. Drugs developed by bio-medical though aided by big chemical companies like Glaxo Smith Kline. Biota of Melbourne has developed flu drug Relenza though GSK has global sales and marketing rights.

There is also a Blair/Brownite state/private partnership amounting to £60 million: a consortium of universities and research institutes seeking to attract money from Big Pharma and federal government including a national stem cell centre in Melbourne and Neuro-sciences in Victoria. University labs are also leased to private companies. Ecobiotics outsources much of its researches using Queensland 's Institute of Medical Research in Brisbane to do anti-cancer testing and CSIRO Molecular Sciences in Melbourne for chemical analysis.

The potential of a block buster drug is what counts which instantly alters market valuations. The temptation is there for scientific entrepreneurs to big up their researches, in short to resort to share ramping, to bring in more cash some of which then goes directly in to their pockets and their word means more than any broker's.

Below Australia lays Antarctica and a similar gold mine or rather gold mines for other prospecting and not just bio-prospecting. Today, both the Arctic and Antarctica have increasingly become dangerous and highly contentious areas for potential, even immanent world conflict, because rival power blocks are beginning to claim huge chunks as their own. This predation smacks of the European inter-imperialist rivalries of the late 19th century and, like the late 19th century it's basically a battle over mineral resources in the ground especially oil, now that the dreaded moment of Peak Oil hovers on the horizon or indeed, maybe here seeing the world's oil companies statistics on what stocks they possess are so mind bogglingly opaque. It even smells like something of a re-run of the Englishman's Hobson's thesis on Liberal Imperialism which Lenin was to plagiarise. This time though rivalry meets end game because fossil fuels - that by now well known rape of the earth which we have lived with for the last 50 years or so - is reaching a frightening apogee which could well lead to renewed inter-imperialist conflict of far more appalling proportions than that which created the First World War, never mind the final ecological ruin and virtual extinction of life which would be part and partial of its holocaust.

If this is not frightening enough, Antarctica is prey to another gold rush akin to the patenting of Australia 's bio-diversity in its northern rain forests. Bio-prospecting has now become the big thing in the frozen wastes. The UN warns of danger of turning Antarctica's microscopic life forms into a billion dollar industry making everything from detergents to cancer treatments. It could mean a literal 21st century gold rush plundering in Antarctica for its extremophiles bacteria, fungi and algae. The UN found 62 patents in European patent Office that elide on Antarctic wildlife and 300 references and 92 applications referring to Antarctica in US patent and trademark office. There's a problem with IPR threatening to undermine international rules (who owns Antarctica ?) Also there are environmental problems of harvesting resources. Bio-prospecting is usually done by consortia composed of private and public bodies. This has made it difficult to draw a line between scientific research and commercial activities. Financial gain is a motive for much of the research. The UN estimates that the market for products derived from genetic resources in cosmetics and drug industry is worth up to $100 billion, 62% of cancer drugs approved by US Food and Drugs Administration are of natural origin or modelled on natural products. 'The greatest commercial impact so far has been made by enzymes from extremophiles. Due to the species robust nature the enzymes can be exposed to harsh conditions such as bleach chemicals and high temperature, and have been successfully used as protein degrading additives in detergents' according to the UN report. In glycoprotein commercial bio-prospectors have found an antifreeze in Antarctic cod. It is now being investigated as a way of improving freeze tolerance in commercial plants improving production of fish farming in cold climates extending shelf life of frozen foods and improving surgical techniques for transplanting of frozen organs and tissues.

In Britain more than a million genetically modified animals mainly mice were used in medical experiment since 2006 four times as many as in 1995 and such experiments are expected to increase rapidly in future years. World wide, dogs, cats, cattle, pigs, sheep goats, monkeys, quail, chicken fish and insects have all been genetically modified or cloned.

Genetic modification is a 30 year old technology. It involves inserting an extra gene or modifying the expression of an existing gene within the DNA of the animal. It is mainly about the production of agricultural or pharmaceutical products.

Oncomouse: Engineered to develop cancer it enabled researchers to use IRT as a model of the disease. It was involved in one of the earliest patent applications on an animal.

Spider silk goats: Spider silk protein gene is inserted into goats to extract the substance from their milk. The silk is stronger than steel so could be used in industry.

Humanised cattle: A range of experiments have tried to introduce important human genes into cattle so that pharmaceutical proteins can be extracted from their milk

Knock out mice: Mice have a gene modified or destroyed so that scientists can study the outcome. Evidently it has created a 'revolution' in the understanding of mammalian genes.

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Consider below two bizarre experiments culled from the newspapers though separated by 50 years

The New Scientist: November 1st 2007
From most bizarre experiments ever conducted in the name of scientific enquiry:

Soviet surgeon Vladimir Demikov in 1954 unveiled a two headed dog created in the lab by grafting the head, shoulders and front legs of a puppy on the neck of a German shepherd dog. The German shepherd would shake the puppy and the puppy would bite back. Dr Demikov repeated his experiments 18 more times over next 15years. Though his work was dismissed as a publicity stunt outside the Soviet Union Demikov was credited with developing surgical techniques that paved the way for the first human heart transplant.

The Supermouse

from the Independent. 2nd Nov 2007

Scientists have been astounded by the creation of a genetically modified supermouse with extraordinary physical abilities that may one day be used to transform people's abilities. The Mouse can run up to six kilometres at a speed of 20metres per minute for five hours without stopping. It came about as a result of a standard genetic modification to a single metabolism gene shared with humans and it is accepted that it may be possible to use the findings to develop new drugs or treatments that could one day be used to enhance the natural abilities of athletes. The Professor of biochemistry at Cleveland University in Ohio, Richard Hanson said that the physical performance of the supermouse can only be compared to supremely fit athletes like Lance Armstrong who won Tour de France seven consecutive times from 1999 to 2005. The genetic alteration to a gene involved in glucose metabolism appears to stimulate the efficient use of body fat for energy production they are ten times more active than ordinary mice and live longer. On the downside they eat twice as much as control mice but they are half the weight and are very aggressive. Why this is the case we are not really sure. We do not think that this mouse model is an appropriate model for human gene therapy. The mighty mice have up to 100 times more the concentration of the enzyme in its muscles compared with ordinary mice.

Finally we end up with the monster Craig Venter. Venter, the grotesque realisation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein nearly two hundred years later but a Frankenstein in infinitely commercial democratic form because it opens up onto a commercially democratic DIY vista one heralded by the evolution of Bill Gate's Microsoft, patenting and thieving geek experiment every which way repackaging them in a visually acceptable way, thus easy to handle and making Gate's the richest thief, er man in the world, until the arrival of Venter who has obviously modelled himself on the boss of Microsoft. DNA sampling or Synbio will most likely within the next 20 years be presented as a software programme allowing every home grown experimenter leeway to organically destroy the world by way of biological montage and a form of Picasso's synthetic cubism become horror story.

In episodes of high drama, Craig Venter was initially labelled a high school drop out and beach bum according to his book: My Life decoded: My genome - My Life. When denied the funds to expand his ambitious DNA sequencing project within the government lab where he was working he formed an association with a venture capitalist to set up a non profit research institute, The Institute of Genome Research: an associated commercial company, Human Genome Sciences would patent all the TIGRs gene discoveries. He then fell out with his commercial backers. Venter then entered a new pact with the devil to set up the company Celera Genomics claiming he could set up sequencing the whole human genome in two years on his own. He set up Celera in direct competition with an international collaboration that he publicly ridiculed for being cumbersome slow and riven with internal politics. Venter reveals how frequently he was at odd with backers, but in the end he bowed to their demands for commercial secrecy. He became personally identified with the quest to own the genome, attracting even more opprobrium from those on the public side who eventually ensured that a human sequence as complete and accurate as possible was freely available in public databases. Venter never an opportunity to claim for himself the title of first or fastest---it is always my new method, my discovery and indeed my genome. Large egos are far from unusual in science but Venter's is an extreme case and his is a study in ambition. What we miss is any examination of the ethics of access to genomic information or any sense of wonder at the mysteries that the cracking of life code is beginning to reveal. The Double Helix by Watson launched the genre of confessional biography.

In the Guardian of October 22nd 2007, journo Madeleine Bunting came up with one of her less pulled punches articles involving Synbio and the final happening Graig Venter needs to make him the numero uno richest man in the world. Synbio is about using nature as a giant meccano set building entirely new organisms from bits of DNA called bio-bricks in what is known as the bottom up approach. In this Brave New World synthetic biologists will work like graphic designers building new organisms on their laptops and emailing them off to the gene foundry for construction. Already huge money is being ploughed in. Venter and his colleagues are plastering every step of their research with sweeping broad brush patent applications. It's a gold rush and by 2015 it is estimated that a fifth of the chemical industry (worth $1.8trillion dollars) could be dependent on Synbio. The public have to be kept on side and persuaded that the risks of Synbio are worth taking. What leading synthetic biologists don't want is a public backlash and heavy handed government interference. So beware of how we are being sold this scientific revolution with pledges to help Africa 's poor the poster child for Synbio is the production of a cheap anti-malarial drug, there is a shortage of artemisinin extracted from the wormwood tree. Most tantalising possibilities might offer help with climate change bacteria that could soak up carbon dioxide by creating vast slurry pits of bacteria. Freeman Dyson has suggested creating black leaved forests for a more efficient use of sunlight in an article on Synbio in the New York Review of Books. We could shortly be busy creating our own biodiversity to replace the one we have lost. In the minds of these apostles we might have a new improved nature. Whatever, the future is an industrialisation of nature.

How Synbio could go wrong keeps scientists awake at night. Drew Endy at MIT has said: 'I expect this technology will be misapplied'. And it would be irresponsible to have a conversation about the technology without acknowledging this fact. Synbio has the potential to be a highly accessible technology much like electronics is today. In a decade thousands of labs and science graduates are likely to be able to practise Synbio making the task of regulating its use extremely difficult. Creating fantastic bacteria in a lab is one thing what happens in the case of an escape and the bacteria crossed with its wild cousins? The whole point of this science is the development of large scale use outside the lab but what can we predict, what consequences could releasing these new organisms have? Moreover, we know less than 1% of existing bacteria and have very little understanding how they mutate. We need responsible scientists but that's long been the sickest of jokes; besides the promise of huge riches will keep driving development - Venter claims that if he pulls of this organism, it could be worth billions even trillions of dollars in licensing deals.

When here we have mentioned techniques of modern art in relation to these scientific experiments we're not too short of the mark especially techniques facilitating collage, montage and photo-montage extending to the typical surrealist found object estranged encounter redolent of Lautreamont's famous dictum: "As beautiful as the chance encounter of an umbrella and sewing machine on a dissecting table" except the deployment of an adjective like 'beautiful' is meant to be ironic, displaced, suggestive of frissons far removed from traditional connotations of beauty. In these two texts; these two interconnected texts from Georges Bataille to Bio-industrialisation we can see the links between avant garde showpieces like Genesis P Orridge and Graig Venter in miming and maiming techniques which may be reaching their final realisation and the possible point of total destruction of all life on earth.

Stuart Wise : January 2008

In the Icteric years between 1965-67 in Newcastle upon Tyne we had a daft already threadbare notion of 'living sculpture' and all that can be said about it is that it did represent a revolt, albeit a confused one, against gallery art. Cringing though we now do at any mention of our youthful follies, 'living sculpture' was an anticipation of the Land Art movement that was yet to come And when it did it would go big time, earning mega bucks for its practitioners, particularly in America. The scale of some of these land art monuments are such that we are entitled to view them as a form of real estate, little different in their ecological impact to the unchecked expansion of cities like Phoenix in Arizona into threatened desert habitats. This urban sprawl is frequently the object of arson attacks though we know of no instance of land art coming under such sustained assault - more's the pity.

In fact the starting point of this development was an exhibition held in the Dwan Gallery in New York in 1968, that significant year of massive global revolt. Though a recuperative reflection of this genuine revolt from those below without name and celebrity, this exhibition had nothing to do with the ambience of total revolution, which was to be the glorious promise at the centre of that amazing year and a promise still awaiting fulfilment. Called 'Earthworks', the Dwan Gallery show and name came from a novel about ecological catastrophe, and the art works were vaguely eco with mounds of 'pungent' soil, some contaminated, some sweet, rooms filled with earth and photographs of scarred wheat fields. Its aims were then modest, though pointless, providing the eco critiques of Rachel Carson, Murray Bookchin, and Alan Hoffman (of Black Mask/Motherfuckers) etc with an 'artistic' inflection the latter two would, most likely have dismissed contemptuously. However mice, labour and bring forth mountains and many of these Dwan Gallery alumni are now responsible for Land Art constructions on the scale of, and even bigger, than Mayan Pyramids and with egos to match.

One of them is Michael Heizer who has carved a brutal, enormous incision across a valley in Nevada that involved the abstraction of 240,000 tons of blasted rock. Living in a vast Nevada ranch this paranoid Howard Hughes of Land Art is protected by guards and is funded by the Dia Foundation in New York that curates land artists and their projects of Himalayan proportions. Another Dwan Gallery alumnus is Charles Ross and his 'Star Axis' has been partially funded by a post cold war NASA that has had to become PR conscious and media savvy (e.g. stimulating interest in the search for extra terrestrial life) in order to get Congress to stump up more cash. (This also goes hand in hand with the increased privatisation of NASA and its decline in its military prowess, which is probably only temporary). Another is James Turrell who has sculpted an entire mountain in the Painted Desert. Turrell was also commissioned by New Labour to contribute a piece ('Night Rain') to that expensive white elephant and financial disaster, the Millennium Dome in Greenwich .

These mega projects are becoming the subject of criticism by an increasingly rattled American public, fed up with yet another avant-garde Mount Rushmore. However there is no chance such projects will catch on in the UK. Charles Newington's 'White Horse' (2003) cut in to the down above Folkestone is the closest this country has ever come. This ridiculous imitation of such magnificent monuments as the Uffingham Horse on the Wiltshire downs is meant to somehow compensate for the destruction caused by the building of the Channel Tunnel rail link. However it has aroused the fury of environmental campaigners who rightly say it has caused irreparable damage to a rare and very threatened landscape.

For that reason it is unlikely a similar monstrous excrescence will ever be commissioned and the days when over 150 years ago a landowner could carve out a huge white horse on the Hambleton Hills in North Yorks are long gone. So land artists in the UK like Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy have had to be more discreet and 'humble'. Even so when Long won the Turner Prize and was complimented for his 'contribution to English landscape' he encountered nothing but popular derision. As a building worker friend said: 'A frog makes a contribution to the English landscape. But you don't then bung it 20 grand'. Though in the name of conservation, money ensures all shall be well with eco destruction; these artists now have to tread very carefully. And when they start to think big they are obliged to look for the wide-open spaces abroad. Russia could well be next......

The latest nonsense in the mid-noughties is 'Cape Farewell', an environmental project funded by the Arts Council in the frozen north. Turner Prize stalwarts like Gormley and Whiteread, old masters at the art of deception, have been invited to the Arctic to do their environmental worst, for 'Cape Farewell' is dedicated to raising awareness of climate change. Gormley (him again!) has sculpted a 'Snowman' rather than an 'Angel of the North'. And we are seriously meant to think far more highly of his abominable snowman than anything kids could do. Hallowed by the avant-gardist cult of the personality, or rather celebrity, it is a born again snowman, an angel of a snowman, the quintessence of all snowmen because it is made by Gormley who is famous, rich, talked about, invited here, there and everywhere, sits on the Arts Council, is a director of the Sage Music Centre in Gateshead-on-Tyne, has plenty of media exposure and must therefore be a genius. See!

We can wail along with that old saw, a waste of the tax payers' money, and smile at 'The Times' cartoon which has a modern day Titus Oates leaving to see this polar art exhibition with the words 'I may be gone some time', but it does miss the point. Gormley's 'Snowman' can never capture the thrill of seeing a police van during the miners' strike of 1984-5 charge a snowman made by local kids who had just been taunting and pelting them with snowballs. However malice had its just reward that day, for the snowman had been packed around a concrete post. Now that really does add a zing to life and we can begin to experience snow afresh because of it.

As an indication of how times have changed since the mid 1960s and Icteric, a biologist, Tom Wakeford, from Newcastle University has been employed by the 'Cape Farewell' project to 'advise artists on contemporary thinking about the environment'. This involvement by scientists with art is set to increase and will only thicken the smoke screen of delusion surrounding the contemporary avant-garde. A renewable energy power station in the from of a slug or sea worm has been projected for East Anglia and is the 'brainchild' of environmental scientists from the University of East Anglia. Digital artists and digital techniques have been employed in its design, which simulates organic forms.

Should the slug ever be built it is also intended to act as a regional symbol and brand like 'the Angel of the North' or the 'Eden Project' in Cornwall . But there are others, which have been short-listed by the East of England Development Association like the 'Fields of Vision', a landscape art installation using plant stems that generate sound and 'North Sea Train', a train covered in sand, which will tour Northern Europe via Scandinavia. In 1966 we would have been attracted by the idea but the funding would then never possibly have been made available. During that year we were especially fascinated by trains an amalgamation - if you like - of our railway background which had enmeshed with post Russian revolution agit-prop trains and the rinky-dink engines and coal trucks which plied the pit spoil heaps (see photo). None the less our train, apart from the illustrated model, remained a ghost train something that travelled in the imagination unlike this slick intercity/intercontinental business express with yards of avant-garde sandpaper and hype stuck to its carriages.

Finally, in 2008 we have been presented with the biggest monstrosity of all: the proposed 'Angel of the South' to be constructed on a chalk pit at Ebbsfleet, Kent marking Ashford's international railway station and heralding a major development of homes and commercial space on adjacent land. Throwing his hat in the ring and hoping to win the competition there is Turner prize winner Mark Wallinger, specialising in cloned subversion removing protest from its vital place in the streets in order to make a pretty penny. So what will the creep come up with: An enormous caterpillar?

A related avenue of enquiry suggests itself but which cannot be gone into in any depth here. And that is, how much slack does this sculptural mega engineering take up as regards an underemployed engineering trade, now that traditional engineering has been increasingly transferred to the new workshop of the world, China? Would we not be better off seeing this new art/engineering not in traditional manufacturing terms but as a high value added service industry, an 'ideas' economy trading in style and styling, image, brand and logo that has supplanted traditional manufacturing. And are not the contradictions of the 'invisible economy' most visible here with the construction workers fuming at the inequalities in pay, with the lions share going to the likes of Gormley etc. who merely dream up the shit in the first place, leaving it to others to get their hands dirty, constructing it. Far more skilled at publicity than in the use of materials, they invite comparison with the university trained engineers that arose to dominance in the 20th Century and who likewise rarely set foot in a workshop.

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A few insights based on Wordsworth's 1810 Guide to the Lake District

Wordsworth, thankfully unable to escape his childhood and 'his baby dreams' remained stuck like glue in the life of the local people of the Cumbrian fells and being one of the first anti poet poets, revelled in the artless creativity of these people; of the 'silent poet' as he so beautifully put it, set in a landscape still largely cut-off from a burgeoning cash nexus and wage labour and where primitive forms of barter were the main medium of exchange. If Wordsworth saw poverty (he rightly condemned abject want) he tended to see it as the 'happy poverty' of a plain though richly fulfilled way of life. His insights and appreciation are thus enormously prescient, if put in the right light - maybe that 'celestial light' - of a possible world without money reaching for the stars. All that is then needed is for Wordsworth, his mission accomplished, to disappear along with the transcendence of the role of poet.

For Wordsworth the buildings dotted throughout the Lake District were an emanation of the life of the inhabitants where there was no such thing as style and where architectural criticism was a meaningless term as meaningless as literary criticism with both the poet and architect having no place in this society. Wordsworth saw the buildings of the Lake dwellers as an organic part of nature, affected and even augmented by its inhabitants. These lakes and inner valleys were also 'unadorned by any remains of ancient grandeur castles or monastic edifice. And to begin with the cottages' without any intrusion of more assuming buildings' which is then backed-up quoting with approval the Elizabethan poet, Edmund Spencer:

'In whose enclosed shadow there was pight

A fair pavilion, scarcely to be seen'

For in this environment in the late 18th and early 19th century, housing and outhouses 'are in many instances the colour of native rocks' rough cast and whitewash - and - being proprietor at liberty to follow their own fancy, so that these humble dwellings remind the contemplative spectator of a production of Nature and may (using a strong expression) rather be said to have grown than to be have been erected; - to have arisen by an instinct of their own out of the native rock - so little is there in them of formality, such is their wildness and beauty'.

The Chimneys: 'the singular beauty of the chimney' and of a quadrangular shape rising one or two feet above the roof; which low square is often surmounted by a tall cylinder giving to the cottage chimney the most beautiful shape in which it is ever seen'.

The Buildings: made of rough unhewn slates -'so that both the coverings and sides of the houses have furnished places of rest for the seeds of lichens mosses ferns and flowers. Hence buildings which in their very form call to mind the processes of Nature do thus clothed in part with a vegetable garb appear to be received into the bosom of the living principle of things, as it acts and exists among the woods and fields'.combine these incidents and images together, and you have the representation the representative idea of a mountain cottage in this country so beautifully formed in itself and so richly adorned by the band of Nature.'

The Bridges: 'the great number of bridges' over the brooks and torrents connecting these cottages and 'the daring and graceful neglect of danger and accommodation' the rudeness of the forms of some and their endless variety'I must at the same time add that many of these structures are in themselves models of elegance as if they had been formed upon principles of the most thoughtful architecture' that happy instinct by which consummate beauty was produced are disappearing fast'.

Wordsworth then goes on to unfavourably compare the cottages and bridges with stately homes and the houses of middle rank as he descends from the mountain hillsides into the valleys emphasising the beginnings of horticulture in contrast with the previous descriptions of the cottage garden, especially the topiary 'those elaborate displays of pretty art' which cause one to smile 'while the house does not deign to look upon the natural beauty or the sublimity which its situation almost unavoidably commands'. This is then compared with 'the little garden with its shed for beehives, its small bed of pot-herbs and its borders of flowers for Sunday poesies' etc. At the head of these dales was found 'a perfect republic of shepherds and agriculturalists' - 'this pure commonwealth' which only by sleight and apparent ownership can be connected to the mighty empire beyond'. Having adverted to the feelings that justify the introduction of a few exotic plants, provided they be confined almost to the doors of the house, we may add that a transition should be contrived, without abruptness, from these foreigners to the rest of the shrubs which ought to be of the kinds scattered by nature through the woods - holly broom wild rose, elder, dogberry white and blackthorn etc either these only or such as are carefully selected in consequence of their being united in form and harmonising in colour with them, especially with respect to colour when the tints are most diversified as in autumn and spring.'

The Hatred of the Larch: Because it is 'for those who plant for profit'. Larch and fir plantations have been spread, merely with a view to profit, but in many instances for the sake of ornament' reminding you of the behaviour of the Forestry Commission even twenty years ago. None the less Wordsworth comes out with a beautiful description of the larch's 'pink tassels in blossom'. 'The process by which she (nature) forms woods and forests is as follows; seeds are scattered indiscriminately by winds, brought by waters and dropped by birds' i.e. shat out. The seedling is sheltered by bramble or other prickly shrubs - a protective device of nature not chance ' nature as art and providential design. 'Let the images of nature be your guide and the whole secret lurks in a few words; thickets or underwoods ' single trees - tree clustered or in groups - groves - unbroken woods, but with varied masses of foliage, glades - invisible or winding boundaries' trees climbing up to the horizon and in some places - the whole body of the tree appearing to stand in the clear sky'.

The Walls and Pathways: Wordsworth was against 'the modern system of gardening which is now, I hope, on the decline' and which was so far from the truth. What comes across too is a dislike of garden walls something which Wordsworth was to abjure and even practise himself with the garden at the back of Dove Cottage in Grasmere disappearing without demarcation into the slope of the mountain'. Natural pathways as conducive to heightened emotion like that of speech (as in the 'Preface to the Lyrical Ballads') 'laying out grounds'.is to assist nature in moving the affections'. Wordsworth objects to the relaying of pathways into 'manufactured walks' brushed neatly without a blade of grass or weed upon them, or anything that bore traces of a human footstep, more indeed of human hands but wear and tear of foot was none'. He remembers 'the most beautiful specimen of a forest footpath ever seen by human eyes this path winds with ' the subtlety of a spirit, contracting or enlarging itself, visible or invisible as it likes' and the fields are like a 'large piece of lawless patchwork'.

'That peaceful harmony of form and colour, which had been through a long lapse of ages most happily preserved'.. Objects that are divided from each other by strong lines of demarcation'. A new habit of pleasure will be formed arising out of the fine gradations by which in nature one thing passes into another and the boundaries that constitute individuality disappear ' the hill overgrown with self-planted wood.'

The New Settlers: The urbanization of the countryside: 'I mean a warping of the natural mind occasioned by the consciousness that this country being an object of general admiration every new house would be looked upon and commented on either for approbation or censure'. The craving for prospect also which is immoderate in new settlers' with their houses deliberately not organic but 'ornamental to the landscape.'

'The rule is simple; with respect to grounds - work, where you can in the spirit of Nature, with an invisible hand of art' Antiquity who may be styled the co-partner and sister of nature be not denied the respect to which she is entitled' Wordsworth laments: 'If the thirst for prospect were mitigated by those considerations of comfort shelter and convenience which used to be chiefly sought after.'

The Palladianism of mansion and estate which removed the village in the manner of Capability Brown plus an objection to the formal architectural style of the age and although Wordsworth doesn't deploy the then fashionable architectural term, you know what is meant. He even envisages houses the colour of iron ore and coal on the Cumbrian plain in the area where coal and iron ore was plentiful only to reject them' He does approve that 'the glare of whitewash has been subdued by time and enriched by weather-stains'. The builder of taste' (in the Lake District ) respecting the surrounding geological base utilising 'the pure blue gravel from the bed of the river' as a 'masonry rough cast to protect from the weather.' 'On the sides of bleak and desolate moors, we are indeed thankful for the sight of white cottages. I have certainly seen such buildings glittering in sunrise, and in wandering lights, with no common pleasure.'

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Ominously Wordsworth ends with recognition of the collapse of domestic industry particularly weaving through manufacture. And also how farms become concentrated into fewer and fewer hands and the cottages knocked down as new mansions are built 'out of the ruins of the ancient cottages; whose little enclosures, with all the wild graces that grew out of them, disappears'.Wordsworth's final sentence looks towards a day when the Lake District will be nationalised and protected by something like a very enlightened National Trust which would eschew the primacy of money and business. Such is the man's naivety about the nation state. In this sense Wordsworth's heir truly was John Ruskin's enlightened despotism under a cabal of statist uber-intellectuals who understood what was best for the people and the general good answerable to nobody but themselves. On the other hand, that 'levelling muse' that was at the heart of Wordsworth's perceptions and counterposed to a Ruskin style elite couldn't see beyond the nation state to anything like a vision of an eco-oriented, wageless and moneyless peoples' collectivity the world over and which we have no choice but to search for now.

Here we have another problem. Most of the egomaniacs that make up the school of present day land artists would adore these sympathies and descriptions penned by Wordsworth so long ago; even perhaps desirous of some kind of re-vamped National Trust this time having real teeth. They could perhaps even add to Wordsworth's thoughts in a not entirely insensitive way which is why the present grotesque phase of capitalism needs the services of land artists so badly. Wordsworth had originally put these observations down responding to the fact that the Lake District was on the cusp of one of the first immanent suburbanite invasion that could destroy its character in a 'rash and ignorant assault' and he hoped the new colonisers would respect the ambience he had skilfully outlined, even perhaps listening to him. It was alas a forlorn hope and you cannot help but be pissed off with the guy's naivety if only because it's given rise ever since to so many well-intentioned individuals completely underestimating how brutal capitalism's expanded reproduction must be. Thus Richard Mabey's beguiling niceties - and so enjoyed by a woolly-minded anarchism when put on bookshelf display at eco-camps - is marked by a very eloquent English style, even somewhat Wordsworthian in tone, which perpetually baulks at hitting the nail on the head; a Mabey who in his youth had some of his articles reprinted in Rebel Worker that combative counterpart to Black Mask in New York in the late 1960s!

In the same manner the land artists admire what's there both in terms of natural features and what may have happened since in, for example, the decaying legacy of industrial features - for industrial sites once they also fall into ruin enter into an organic life of their own also becoming part of nature - but then they go one step further than the unwanted incomers into the Lake District during the Romantic era, tearing up what's there in order to impose their own crock of shit where a morphing different kind of beauty was evolving by itself alone. That's an imposition that Wordsworth would hardly have had the gall to even contemplate though in his poem on Yorkshire's Malham Cove he does suggest the awesome sheer limestone cliffs could be moulded into an amphitheatre and ironically, in this instance, prescient of what the land artists 200 years hence could have the technical means and dosh to outrageously impose. Wordsworth notes in The Guide that before his time, mountains and precipices never received any poetical accolade in the verse of Gray, Goldsmith or even more recently, Robbie Burns who, lamenting the thistle cut down by his plough, never really looked up from his work in the field to marvel at the splendid summit of Scafell just across the Solway Firth. (To this we would add Daniel Defoe who viewed with horror the bare-backed Yorkshire mountains of Ingleborough and Pen-y-ghent together with their inhabitants).

Today few take account of the beauties inherent in industrial dereliction an experience which should be brought into an expanded Kantian reinterpretation regarding the superiority of nature's terrain over that of art; a terrain whereby the evolving character of a formerly commodified object loses its original use value undergoing a natural redefinition preyed on by the natural world which also today picks up on the memory of a Duchampian ready made having lost the stifling mantle of the art gallery object or, indeed, art itself. Regarding industrial dereliction a further quote from Wordsworth is apposite: 'Let Nature be all in all, taking care that everything done by man shall be in the way of being adopted by her'.

For a brief moment, Icteric played with transforming the landscape - especially the landscape of dereliction - as individual artistic intervention only to definitively reject such a cul-de-sac as we encompassed the praxis of total social revolutionary upheaval and the artless 'silent' poetry made by all and not by one and going farther into this process than Wordsworth would ever dared envisage or could have contemplated at the time. Nonetheless we honour him for becoming one of the first to set out - and remain despite his overtures to conformity cultivating the more enlightened aristocracy as formal Poet Laureate in later life - on this 'unhewn' path.

As for unhewn paths, it wasn't just architecture without architects Wordsworth desired but buildings without builders, or rather, builders without style that went hand in glove with the architects' plan like those required by the neo-classical mansions and Georgian crescents of the time. In reality Wordsworth's sympathy was for the builder who wasn't a 'proper' builder as such, though knowing his structural onions and as practised in the Lake District, the peasant builder in tune and harmony with local nature who'd learned ways of doing and making things alongside husbandry of the land, the animals and haymaking. In its broad outlines this can still be a practical vision of the future now that ecological, and economic, collapse is immanent. We have only to think about the 'Hobbit' houses winkling their way into grounds of National Trust land and flouting the dry as dust and brutally stupid edicts of the planners and in many other temporary dwellings like the 'scratch cities' of the displaced inhabitants of floods and havoc which is likely to be the immediate future of our warmer and much wetter islands; of a flooded Robin Hood Inn in the vale of Wentbridge in South Yorkshire in the summer of 2007 giving off a new inflection to the emancipatory myth of the 'merry men' as temporary lakes stretched far away to the horizon surrounding the decaying industrial infrastructure around a once vibrant Doncaster.

Not forgetting the delight of Derek Jarman's dispersed garden around Prospect Cottage on the shingle beach of Dungeness where found objects - seafarers chains and the like - are semi-disguised with a mass of indigenous sea plants and the only work of merit Jarman ever did. Rather better too than Asger Jorn's seemingly natural Jardin D'Albisola cluttered and ruined by the many rubbishy artistic objects of his own making he placed there and the sad but lucrative backdrop to the guy's superb early theorising. Interestingly too in Wordsworth's Guide mention is made of a garden in Lord Lowther's grounds near Penrith whereby the wild garden had been punctuated by a clued-in gardener 'in twining pathways along the banks of the river, making little cells and bowers with inscriptions of his own writings' which, in retrospect you cannot help but compare and see as something of a precursor of the piece of municipal hillside in Scotland Ian Hamilton Findlay was to turn into a concrete poetry affair nearly two centuries later. However, because the latter's effort quickly became an art event and thus intensively capitalised as artistic real estate, it doesn't point the way to the eco-emancipation of those buildings and their surrounds that might be put in place if humanity is to have a future.

Wordsworth's contribution to the original Guide was initially published anonymously harking back a few years to the original anonymity of the Lyrical Ballads, and an anonymity suggestive of the silent, no profile creativity of the people once they are allowed to be so and an act which never needs to be named. And yet A Guide to the Lake District was the first (and best) tourist brochure ever produced written at the moment when the tourist industry wasn't even a ghost on the horizon merely a gleam in the eyes of the rich. Now that the horror story which is contemporary mass, democratised tourism reveals its brutal characteristics culpable of assisting in the final plundering of the planet's sentient life, Wordsworth's perceptions have poignancy together with a deadly sting in the tale. No longer is environmental sensitivity at the heart of the matter even in the promotion of eco-tourism, rather it is the total packaged deal where travel is enervation with Easy Jet catering for the billions of people themselves 'prisoners of a flattened universe'. Better to refuse most travel if at all possible. Better to look under the stones merely a few feet away from you and from there the last hopes of a new world might spring. Even perhaps as Wordsworth put it: 'We have too much hurrying about in these islands, much for idle pleasure and more from our activity in the pursuit of wealth'. Moreover, even in this early moment of environmental devastation in the first decades of the 19th century, there are times when Wordsworth calls for something of an ecological apocalypse or, at least, the revenge of nature against technological cum industrial/urban assault.

'Weighing the mischief with the promised gain

Mountains, and Vales, and Floods, I call on you

To share the passion of just disdain'

Wordsworth emphasised the perceptions inherent in the activity of the walking traveller and in this he was right. We have no choice but to more or less return to this. When Wordsworth revisited the Simplon pass in the Alps in the 1840s after many years absence he fulminates against the new military road (predecessor of the traffic packed super highway in place today) having displaced 'the old muleteer track with its primitive simplicities' which had so inspired him in his youth above which rose steep-sided: 'woods decaying, never to be decayed' and 'the black drizzling crags that spake' knowing they were overwhelming him sensing too they were bringing about the disintegration of all literature as the heightened presence of nature was breaking through all formal artistic representation including that of painting, music and sculpture though without Wordsworth having the concepts in his head to clearly grasp this. Nevertheless, his remarks in Appendix 11: the Kendal and Windermere Railway written in December 1844 for a local newspaper are remarkable when outlining his objections to speed and development containing lines worthy of a more contemporary situationist denunciation in the manner perhaps of the Encyclopaedia des Nuisances intelligent diatribe against the TGV super train or indeed some well chosen words by Rene Riesel.... 'and instead of travellers proceeding with leisure to observe and feel, mere pilgrims of fashion hurried along in their carriages, not a few of them perhaps discussing the merits of 'the last new Novel' or poring over their Guide-books, or fast asleep' a process whereby: 'Art interfered with and takes the lead of Nature' meaning, takes the lead over nature and thus a step backwards.

In BM Blob's 'A Summer with a Thousand Julys' there's a montaged comment on the riot which hit Keswick when 1,000 motorcyclists went on the rampage during the glorious uprisings of 1981. Underneath a photo of a steep rising mountain side, Lewis Carroll's 'Upon the Lonely Moor' - a parody of Wordsworth's romantic nature poems - is quoted:

'His accents mild took up the tale,

I set it in a blaze'

This was just the kind of contradictory clash and frisson that we had been mulling over quietly, and not so quietly, for many a year. In the days of King Mob in the late 1960s a number of us suggested - as is well known - a blowing up of Wordsworth. Back then we didn't have sufficient all-rounded knowledge to put the case in a clearer manner helping unblock retarded, half-baked notions, freeing Wordsworth from the legions of boring, usually academic Eng Lit types with a set in aspic notion of poetry. Here we attempt to restore such a deficit. How about for starters somebody sawing a leg off that giant table and chair on Hampstead Heath?

Some Thoughts: 2006-8. D and S Wise
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For further recent commentary related to the above read the following in the "Wreckage & bric-a-brac" series:

A Hidden History of King Mob (Posters/Cartoons)

A Critical Hidden History of King Mob

On Georges Bataille:

On Bryan Ferry: "Ferry Across The Tyne"

On Ralph Rumney: Hidden Connections, Ruminations and Rambling Parentheses

Alex Trocchi's Hour Upon the Stage

BM BIS, BM BLOB, Riot and Post-Modernist Recuperation

Comparisons: From Mass Observation to King Mob

A Drift on Germaine Greer, Feminism and Modern-Day Shameless Ranterism

For Vicki: On What Happened at Selfridges in 1968

Nietzsche, Revolutionary Subversion and the Contemporary Attack on Music

New Introduction for a Spanish Book on Black Mask & the Motherfuckers

New Introduction to Spanish King Mob

Lost Ones Around King Mob

Land Art, Icteric and William Wordsworth

King Mob: Icteric & the Newcastle Experience from the early to late 1960s

New Afterword to The End of Music for La Felguera in Spain

THE ORIGINAL: The End of Music (1978)

(The following is a theoretical drift which originally saw the light of day as a letter to a very intelligent guy in Huddersfield with a passion for moths and, on a more general level, a fellow traveller on the same eco-revolutionary wavelength. It has since been amended, somewhat altered and put in a more coherent sequence)

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Dear Huddersfield Mothman,

Thanks for your appreciative remarks on the www.dialecticalbutterflies.com website. Excuse the delay in replying but have been very busy.

Regarding melanism have you read the little book Of Moths and Men by Judith Harper? The title is suggestive of a feminist approach to the subject (i.e. women would never have been so easily duped!) and is subtitled: 'Intrigue, tragedy and the Peppered Moth'. But it appears Kettlewell may have falsified the evidence and the question of industrial melanism a far more complicated matter than has been made out hitherto. As is well known both EB Ford and the great Haldane uncritically accepted Kettlewell's findings. I do know the controversy over the Peppered Moth has cast considerable doubt on the EB Ford/Kettlewell thesis that it was an evolutionary response to industrialization and one we could see happening before our very eyes. Everyone wants to see evolution happening before their eyes but even so there can be no doubt that urbanism and industrialization has profoundly affected wild life and we are only just becoming aware of how deep and on going the process is.

I was going to send you a short resume I had been wrestling with regarding Marxism and science particularly in relationship to four notable 20th century British scientists. Haldane, (a geneticist, amongst other things) Bernal (a crystallographer), Levy (a mathematician and physicist) and Needham (a biochemist chiefly interested in embryology who in 1932 founded the Theoretical Biology Club to counteract the eugenic thinking of the Rockefeller Foundation that was promoting a reductive 'science of man' which was also a science of social control. Nothing has fundamentally changed since, though the term eugenic has been discreetly dropped from the scientific vocabulary though the concept is still very much alive and kicking).

However, such a resume requires a return to basics and raising that most difficult of subjects, the relationship between dialectical and scientific reason. Even this division is suspect because Hegel would argue dialectical reason is scientific in fact more rigorous than mathematical or formal logic. The more I puzzle over it and think about it the more questions it inevitable raises and the more my mind goes dark pondering these thorny questions - ouch.

I read two essays by Levy and Bernal on dialectical materialism as a general science or a higher science, whichever way you like to put it. Levy, an honest man, who was eventually expelled from the Communist party (and to his credit the Labour party also!) clearly had great difficulties with its scholastic categorisations. He refers to the 'laws' of dialectical change as written in 'almost medieval language' and is 'repellent to the scientific man'. (See his essay: A Scientific Worker looks at Dialectical Materialism 1934). Interestingly the only scientist Henri Lefebvre respectfully mentions in his little book Dialectical Materialism written in the late 1930s is Hyman Levy. He most have felt attracted to Levy's lack of dogmatism and thought here was a fellow spirit who cannot easily be made to toe the party line even though Lefebvre continued to do so well into the 1950s.Though Bernal and Levy were friends, Bernal pretty much remained a faithful scientific apparatchik of the Soviet Union all his life and had no difficulty in accepting Engels's Dialectics of Nature as the new Soviet Sermon on the Mount. Lefebvre's Dialectical Materialism was important in reviving the long lost themes of reification and alienation so essential to a critique of capitalism. (Would that scientists could take up these themes today and it must remain one of the great mysteries of our time why a scream of pain, powerful enough to burst the ear drums and which has no equivalent in scientific history, has not rent the world's scientific laboratories). Lefebvre almost pokes fun at Hegel's triadic formulation of thesis, antithesis, synthesis central to dialectical thought, citing no less an authority than Hegel himself : 'If one wants to count them' says Hegel').

In a forward to the fifth edition of 'Dialectical Materialism' written in 1961 Lefebvre apologises for his adherence, twenty-five years previously, to dialectical materialism as a philosophy of nature i.e. the natural sciences. He blames Stalin and Zhdanov for this error ' perhaps crime would be a more appropriate word - but he would have done better had he gone back to basics and indicted Engels 'Dialectics of Nature' (c.1873) and before that Hegel's Philosophy of Nature. It is a commonplace of Marxist hagiography that Marx turned Hegel's dialectic right side up, giving it a materialist foundation. However as Lefebvre reminds us: 'It was only with great caution that Marx embarked on this path (as in his application of the dialectical method to economics)'. Engels, a connoisseur of Hegel if ever there was one, was more ready to throw caution to the wind believing the dialectical materialist method possessed a universal truth i.e. was applicable to all sciences. And he also thought he was turning Hegel right side up whereas Engels's critique, when it comes to nature, is basically the same as Hegel's who was the most materialist of all idealist philosophers, though Engels did recognise this when he perceptively wrote 'idealist systems also filled themselves more and more with a materialist content'. What other aerie fairy, wilting philosopher with their head in the clouds has wallowed in shit like Hegel, realising without it humanity would starve? To see in this a remarkable anticipation of the importance of the nitrate cycle is not to confer on Hegel the benefit of hindsight!

Hegel's philosophy of nature is a summation of tendencies begun by Kant within classical German philosophy. It is a strain to even attempt to read it today though my foreign languages publishing house copy of Engels's Dialectics of Nature was mislaid, without undue regret, years ago. It would be unfair to say Hegel's Philosophy of Nature died without issue but it did take the deification of Engels to successfully imprint its spirit on a third of the world.

In fact 'naturphilosophie', of which Hegel's work forms a discrete part, was once hugely influential and, it has to be said, more scientifically consequential as regards actual discoveries than dialectical materialism ever was. (Its proper field of application I will repeatedly stress is the history of science and I unhesitatingly agree with Hyman Levy's considered judgement 'the so-called laws of the dialectic, couched as they must be in very general terms, must have there principal application in the field of social and economic development. They appear to add little or nothing to the detailed methods of analysis of scientific workers'). We have only to think of Goethe's anatomical studies and great work on plant morphology. That most influential of 19th century geologists and naturalists, Louis Aggasiz (1807-73), was a naturphilosophe - and the first to suggest, as a result of meticulous observation, there had been several ice ages. So was the nasty Richard Owen, the life-long opponent of Darwin and coiner of the word 'dinosaur'. However to say that all naturalists who subscribed to the argument for God's existence from design, like William Paley, were nature-philosophers in the strict German meaning of the term would be wrong. Paley could point to the blue yonder and say that's where God is. But following Kant, the high priests of German nature philosophy rigorously rejected any ontological proof of God's existence but retained it as a regulative if not a constitutive hypothesis. The philosophers that immediately followed Kant introduced an ever greater dynamism ('praxis'!) into their respective systems with the result that God became ever less a preformed entity but something that was continually developing towards an ever greater perfection in nature and man.(In fact it was on the specific nature of the relationship between the two that finally caused Hegel to distance himself from Schelling, preferring to see in nature the 'otherness' of man, or the 'idea', and hence the alienation of man, or the 'idea'.) Whew! I have already pointed out the close materialist/idealist parallels between Hegel's and Engels's conception of nature but Hegel's conviction, which he loved to throw in the face of German romanticism, that nature had been tamed and bent to mankind's purpose was one he shared with Marx. In the margins of a lecture he gave in 1805-6 he wrote: 'Wind, mighty river, mighty ocean, subjugated, cultivated. No point in exchanging compliments with it ' puerile sentimentalities etc'. This comment is all the more fit for my purpose in so far as it was part of a lecture dealing with tools - yes tools ' and the teleology of labour, which sounds more grounded if we call it the labour process. And then compare it with the following quotation from Marx's 'Grundrisse' (1857-8) 'Where does Vulcan come in as against Roberts and Co? Jupiter as against the lightning conductor? And Hermes as against the Credit Mobilier? All mythology masters and dominates and shapes the forces of nature in and through the imagination; hence it disappears as soon as man gains mastery over the forces of nature'. What must be at once apparent to anyone reading this today is that we haven't gained control over the forces of nature and that nature is set to take the most terrible revenge.

(A little aside: Having discovered what has to be Britain's most unusual Grayling colony in Healey Mills Marshalling Yards midway twixt Wakefield and Dewsbury in West Yorkshire, I began to look into the origin of the yards, turning up an old photo of a huge iron foundry, the property of Roberts and Co! Could this be the very company Marx was referring to? And how odd that the foundry has long since gone and in its stead there is this most unusual colony of butterflies.)

What happens now? And what impact will this awareness have on the future trajectory of science? It all seems a very far cry from the glowing positivism of dialectical materialism. Suppose a hellish catastrophe is just around the corner? Despite the destruction of lives, by far the greatest Homo erectus as a genus has ever endured and its bitter, even insupportable aftermath, it also seems unlikely a nature religion will once more take root with all its myths, attendant rituals and suspension of disbelief. The handful of survivors will be living in a state of acute existential agony and bereft of that most precious gift, the dream of utopia. They will have no past worth remembering and no future to look forward to, and perhaps even incapable of reproducing themselves. The guilt over what that meaningless abstraction 'humanity' has done in the past may be such that the survivors spontaneously abase themselves before any living object in the natural world, ready to beg forgiveness. There will certainly be no 'exchanging of compliments with it' analogous to Hegel's cynical depiction of romantic nature schmaltz. The horrors that the soviet state philosophy of dialectical materialism (in fact the philosophy of state capitalism - a concept that now must never be given a renewed airing) strove to conceal is mild in comparison, even though it did involve the deaths of millions in the gulags. So let us now return to the cosier comforts of those years, which seem positively humane in comparison to what will undoubtedly come to pass short of an anti-capitalist revolution.

I have in my possession the first edition of Bernal's Science in History (1954!) in which he denies, under the influence of Lysenko, the existence of genes. ('genes were supposed to be material bodies - but ' neither then nor since have they been isolated and their nature still remains hypothetical'- in later editions the offending sentences have been mercifully removed). What is amazing Bernal even managed to convince the great populational geneticist Haldane of it - but not for long and scientific integrity won out in the end when Haldane was forced to denounce Lysenko as a fawning, politically manipulated impostor. (In fact Julian Huxley had irrefutably exposed Lysenko as a fraudster and if Haldane had continued to ratify this perversion of scientific integrity he would have become the butt of ridicule in a scientific community that previously went in awe of him. As it was, Haldane remained a great scientist and both Crick and Watson were deeply indebted to him and the discovery of the DNA molecule may have been delayed if it wasn't for Haldane).

I don't know if Haldane wrote on dialectical materialism as a ' as the - philosophy of science but would be interested to know more. And as for Needham - who cannot but be impressed by his four volumes on Chinese Science? I went on the internet to see if I could find a copy of his book The Sceptical Biologist and was amazed to find several copies for sale, all in America and Canada. (This came out in 1929 a year or so before Bukharin made an entrance at the international conference on science in which he strove to press upon scientists the acceptance of 'dialectical materialism' as a guiding philosophy to their studies. The worst depression in the history of capitalism was beginning to bite and this conference, precisely on account of Bukharin's well-timed intervention, had a huge influence on scientists around the world. It also marks the beginning of the canonization of dialectical materialism as the Soviet Union's new religion which was then assiduously promoted by Stalin who, incidentally, seized hold of Bukharin's ideas on science whilst vehemently rejecting his proposed economic reforms which were an anticipation of Gorbachov's some fifty years later. After an infamous Moscow show trial Bukharin was bundled off to the Lubyanka prison and shot). However to repeat, it is mainly within the domain of scientific history, not actual scientific method, that dialectical materialism has scored its greatest success. Bukharin's scientific proselytising was greatly aided by what was generally regarded as a brilliant and innovative interpretation of Newton by Boris Hessen in Science at the Cross-Roads, a collection of papers edited by Bukharin and presented to the International Congress of Science and Technology held in 1931. This essay endeavoured to show how the general mechanical problems Newton set himself to solve were conditioned by the current needs of technics, particularly the technics of military and naval warfare. Later Bernal would write a lengthy book on science (op. cit. Science in History 1954) in which he argued as a matter of principle technical innovation tended to come before that of 'pure' scientific theory, which essentially was an extrapolation after the fact. And today Needham is chiefly remembered for his volumes on Chinese science. The volumes are also intended as a necessary corrective to the arrogance of western scientists. He claims for instance that the Chinese discovered the circulation of the blood before William Harvey but have never been credited with that discovery. By all accounts Needham remained a humble, approachable man all his life and he comes across as an attractive personality which is more than can be said for most scientists today, drunk as they are on petty power and the ethos of business ' rather, in fact, like installation artists ever looking to hand out their autographs.

Needham also wrote on Coleridge in an essay entitled 'Coleridge as a biologist' in The Sceptical Biologist which I would be very interested to read. Under the influence of German philosophical idealism, the clash of opposites and their interpenetration began to play an increasingly important part in Coleridge's thought and I rather think Needham was perhaps the last biologist capable of tackling such a tricky subject. (Coleridges's favourite proverb was 'extremes meet'- the debt to dialectical philosophy is obvious though surprisingly he never once mentioned Hegel to my knowledge, though he does Schelling who, for a time, was theoretically close to Hegel to the point of actually collaborating on some texts together. Coleridge is credited with bringing classical German philosophy to Britain almost unaided. He had plunged in at the deep end actually reading Kant in German, which is no mean achievement. However he must have found the Kantian antinomies repugnant and constantly strove to find a way beyond them, writing in his truly astonishing notebooks things like 'the reconciliation of the many with the one ' of a plurality with unity'. He found this reconciliation in the realm of the imagination which 'reveals itself in the reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities'. This, in essentials, is little different to Kant's view as expressed in The Critique of Judgement his last great work on aesthetics and natural organisms in particular ' which revealingly takes up a major part of the book - and published shortly before the French Revolution of 1789. This latter work is commonly acknowledged as reconciling the two formerly opposed antinomies of pure and practical reason and was immediately seized on as pointing to a practical resolution of the problem. What a pity then these half-buried ideas in Coleridge were never subsequently taken up and given a more practical field to play in other than that of art or poetry and which, as the 19th century turned into the 20th century and then the 21st, became an ever more empty substitute for genuine, practical creativity. Who knows but we could have had an 'English' version of Marx's - Thesis on Feurbach - the summation of romanticism if you like - and which would have been of huge relevance to our time. I will end this protracted digression with a couple of conjoint quotes from Coleridge's notebooks penned during the revolutionary West Country years of 1794-9: 'Property intended to secure to every man the produce of his toil - as at present instituted, operates directly contrariwise to this. (NB', 'Poetry ' excites us to artificial feelings ' makes us callous to real ones'. This very remarkable combination of thoughts needed the merest tweaking to become truly explosive).

The more quietist, reconciliatory, reactionary side of Kant's aesthetics, is nonetheless there in the attitude of some of today's scientists who are patently close to the end of their tether and ready to clutch at the ghost of a straw. This will no doubt come as a surprise to them but there is a definite correspondence. I was particularly struck by a review of Steve Jones book Coral by Richard Fortey (author of Trilobite! and The Earth etc) who censures Jones for being insensitive to the beauty of coral reefs. This must surely be a plea entered on behalf of the bleakest nature aesthetic ever. In Keats' Ode to Melancholy beauty must die but in the scheme of things it will also be reborn. But not so today and after Keats, the definitions of beauty that really mattered were heavily ironic and designed to shock - the very opposite of 'beauty'. If Lautreamont were alive today and something of a lepidopterist ' which he could easily have been - he may well have supplemented his remarks on the beautiful trembling of an alcoholic's hand, with something along the lines of 'as beautiful as the last, disorientated Dingy Skipper and a bulldozer on a Yorkshire colliery spoil heap.' In so far as it implies the opposite, irony is a dialectical mode of expression and if the axiom was to lead to uproar and the eventual saving of the Dingy Skipper on these spoil heaps then ' yes - it would be truly 'beautiful'. But make no mistake about it, in today's increasingly repressive climate it could mean the ugliest of set-to's.

And the worst of it is there is scarcely a scientist alive today who dare tell it like it is. Neither Fortey nor Jones, for example, will come clean about capitalism and prefer in the last instance to opt for all manner of evasions rather than acknowledge it. The fact that Steve Jones never mentions capitalism to my mind vitiates his 'Coral' book. Excuse me for thinking that it is blindingly obvious capitalism plays a preponderant role in the destruction of the world's coral reefs. Rather than admit it, Jones plumps for a lame Darwinism as though this mass extinction at present under way is a natural rather than social event and cannot therefore be prevented. Someone like Steve Jones is more open to such questions but yields to a Duchampian readymade Darwinism, patently a cop out, at least avoids the indignity of being ostracised from a highly conservative scientific community increasingly afraid of its own shadow. (Just how much, intellectual humiliation and abuse is a scientist prepared to put up with before she/he joins a picket line?) His co-conspirator in remaining silent has to be Richard Fortey who is also aware of the impending destruction but mounts a desperate final plea on behalf of nature's beauty commending us to enjoy it while we can though it is fast fading from the scene. Colin Tudge is prepared to speak his mind and is doubtless regarded as somewhat off it by the academic community. I greatly benefited from reading his book on trees and one day must get around to reading his: 'And so shall you reap.' Yet in our opinion his critiques of political economy remains rudimentary despite his increasingly vociferous condemnation of capitalism. He wants the democratisation of money rather than its abolition. None the less, the guy very recently (The Guardian July 31st 2007) probably accurately predicts that the outcome of the Summer of Floods will be 'that Britain's farming should go the way of its coal-mining' seeing the county's climate has become too fickle for agriculture. (Globalisation's answer is always to up the ante closing down the offending object/subject.)

Most paid-up scientific intellectuals are however fearful and/or benign in their critiques so it is hardly surprising that conservation practise, if one can even call it that, is what it is. The naivet' of groups like Butterfly Conservation and Buglife when faced with the all-devouring ogre beggars belief. Ted Benton the bumble bee expert is prepared to call into question the profit motif which in every case takes precedence over conservation matters. But even so his nascent critique of political economy must be pushed further - much, much further. As for James Lovelock the question does not even figure in his analysis though few who have bothered to study him would doubt the conclusion spilling over from his Revenge of Gaia that if things continue as they are the end result will be billions dead. The two hundred millions who died in the two world wars become almost paltry beside Lovelock's death certificate for Homo sapiens. The fact that he is prepared to countenance this unprecedented catastrophe, the worst by far in the entire history of the human species, with such equanimity is indeed chilling. And what about the survivors of such a holocaust? Will they be able to function as per normal? Lovelock never once raises the question what life will be like for the survivors of such an unimaginable holocaust. Psychologically it will be wretched in the extreme. There will be nothing to look back on or even forward to and humanity's utopian impulse will be extinguished forever. The pitiful remnants of humanity may well fizzle out because the hell of continuing to live on in the aftermath of all that suffering will be just too much for the human mind to bear.

Dialectical Materialism as a term has, of course, long fallen out of use. Maybe it is due for a more thoroughly worked-through revival, maybe not. However it does strike me certain concepts belonging to what may loosely be called dialectical materialism find their way into the work of Fritjof Capra, particularly his Tao of Physics (1971) and The Turning Point (1982). Significantly Needham receives a honourable mention in the latter book. I also think it significant The Tao of Physics' commences on a beach in California with a surf-city, tableau vivante, epiphany resembling one of those dreadful alternative collages of psychedelic quantum particles set against a shadowy backdrop of Hindu deities that Allen Ginsberg could easily have cooked up. In a sense Capra is concluding what Robert Oppenheimer (the tortured inventor, with others, of the atomic bomb) initiated and it is not difficult to imagine the despairing Oppie, taking time-off from reading the Mahabarata, singing along to 'Hari Krishna, Hare Rama'. Finally Capra's two books have almost certainly been influenced by the anarchist Murray Bookchin and the Institute of Social Ecology he set up first of all in the 1960s. But of course Capra discreetly avoids mentioning Murray as did Rachel Carson of Silent Spring fame, way back in the 1950s because Murray made no bones about his anti-capitalist convictions. None the less she pillaged Murray's themes, the book being a nauseating example of recuperation ' the means whereby the essential sting is taken out of valid arguments ' thus making them somewhat acceptable to the powerful system which imperiously rules this impossible world.

However, Capra believes 'the revolution' will come from a revolution in perception alone. It won't. It can't. By itself a change in outlook will not change society and no where in his books are basic questions like funding, the role of the state and big business ever raised. Consequently it should come as no surprise that what Capra is condemning ('mechanism', 'domination', 'self-assertion', the 'yang' rather than the 'yin', the 'pong' and not the 'ping') in his books has only grown worse - infinitely worse - over the last thirty years and this despite his lauding of feminism and ecologism ' both by now 'isms' by the way and like all isms compromised to the hilt by the biggest ism of them all, capitalism. What a relief then to get away from this obfuscation and read the final sentence of Levy's previously cited essay written over 30 years prior to the Tao of Physics and, which seems obvious to silly old me: 'But to expect such a revolution in outlook without a corresponding change in the whole structure of society would be itself undialectical'.

James Lovelock the author of Gaia fulsomely praised The Turning Point when it came out in 1982 describing it as 'an essential guide for anyone inquiring about the place of science and metascience in our contemporary culture'. Lovelock was by this time just beginning to savour a growing fame but what on earth could he mean by metascience? It is certainly true his theory of a live earth was reinstating a long dead, though non-mythological, animus (the only concession to mythology is in the name Gaia, the Earth Goddess) but a word like metascience does imply a metaphysic of science and in that sense can be bracketed alongside dialectical materialism, a corpus of ideas and laws Lovelock would beyond a shadow of a doubt find ludicrous. Or could 'metascience' be code for the need for a new totality, a totality Lovelock, and a rapidly growing number of other scientists, are forced to knock their heads against yet at the same time are set on dodging and, rather than confront the self-evident, lash out in all directions? This is a very real, growing dilemma and more often than not it leads to a chilling, generalised apoplexy rather than a coherent knitting together ' 'a totality' - of separated fragments. Lovelock's Revenge of Gaia (2006) unfortunately falls into this category. Apart from his nimbyism and support for nuclear power there is never much more than a nebulous mention of consumerism or globalisation, certainly not the forces - unfettered international capitalism - that have led to it - subjects, surely, essential to tackle if the revenge of Gaia is to be halted. Once really threatened one does wonder if the increasing number of people like Lovelock will not hesitate to resort to the utmost barbarism. The answer to this question will certainly come over the next thirty years or so.

Lovelock in the book paints the blackest of pictures, truly a scientistic, Rodchenko-like, Black on Black. On the back cover of the penguin edition, Mark Lynas is quoted as saying it is an 'utterly terrifying' book. Now Lynas has just built himself a reputation by writing a book '6 Degrees' (2007) that describes what happens to the planet with each one-degree increase in temperature. At six degrees fireballs are exploding in the air. Is he depressed by this? Well, if he is he hardly shows it, for Lynas is one of the growing band of eco-operators seeking to profit from apocalypse by landing himself a superannuated position on the board of a global company. Never the less Lynas's book describes in an easy to read, popular manner - and with much graphic detail - the horror which awaits us and for that we must give him credit. As for Lovelock he is too well established to hanker after the job of businessman of domesday. He is too comfortably off to want more and that makes Lovelock the more dangerous because his crazed opinions are free from the taint of money and consequently that much more attractive and potent. Meanwhile, as a foretaste of what's in Lovelock's store, sample the following: 'Whatever form future society takes it will be tribal, and hence there will be the privileged and the poor' - or - 'Most of us prefer an urban existence, provided that predatory low life is kept invisible'. And by that he does not mean urban foxes!

In fact Lovelock has no feel at all for brownfield sites. He says rightly that the majority of people now live in cities and that consequently they are cut-off from mother earth (Gaia) and have no awareness of the natural world. There is some truth to this but it also fails to explain the growing popularity of nature programs on TV. This also raises a host of other important issues Lovelock is blind to, like the valorising of nature program presenters able to increase their net worth and nest egg with each fledged brood of tits or swallows. (In addition to presenting Springwatch, the enormously popular nature-soap, a life-sized cut out of Bill Oddy is to be found in lots of garden centres promoting some horticultural disaster or other. He also has no qualms sales-pitching for B&Q either, a DIY store that epitomises the de-industrialisation of Britain and the lightning, subcontracted industrialisation of China, international capital attracted there by a limitless industrial reserve army, able temporarily to offset the falling rate of profit. However to insist on this degree of logic and to argue that it is two sides of the same coin is largely frowned on in wild life circles and considered irrelevant, churlish and bad form.)

That said it should come as no surprise to find Lovelock's unrepentant class snobbery translates into a rural, almost chocolate box, idyll. 'By good countryside I mean farming land and communities that live well with the earth and presents an ecosystem which ' has ample room for woodlands, hedgerows and meadows. Most of southern England was like this before 1940, and the largest remaining parts are in the West Country especially Devon'. He illustrates his book with a number of colour plates one of which especially caught my eye on account of its beauty. It is a typical scene from the next county down the peninsula and is captioned: 'Cornwall, England. Land devastated by tin and copper mining'. The objection I have to Lovelock is not just that he has no eye for the beauty of industrial dereliction, but that he also has no appreciation of the growing awareness that sites like these are becoming wildlife havens.

In a recent radio program broadcast on Radio 4, May 31st 2007 entitled Costing the Earth - an examination of brownfield sites even I was astonished to hear one of the interviewees claim that the bigger the city the more bio diverse they are, a claim I still have trouble believing. On the same program the redoubtable Ted Benton author of the definitive work on bumblebees (Bumblebees The New Naturalist 2006) could be heard kicking off about 'the profit motif' and, which has in every case won out as opposed to conservation. Would that Butterfly Conservation could say the same and not mince matters, which makes it all but impossible in the long run to conserve butterflies. Benton is keenly appreciative of the wonders that have come have to light in the industrial graveyard of the Thames estuary and his discovery of the Scarce Emerald Damsel Fly (lestes dryas) in the late 1980s on the abandoned Occidental site on Canvey Island was one of the factors leading to a closer examination of this breathtaking, sublime place.

Since he wrote his book on bumblebees an edge has crept into Ted Benton's voice knowing that he can do little to halt the destruction of the former Occidental site and what rightly has been described as 'England's rain forest'. Of course we need to say more about the structure of capitalism than just point the finger at the profit motif. But it is a start and prompted me to look through the index where I chanced on William Blake's name. Going to the relevant page I found that Benton had indicted William Blake for introducing a sharp division between urban and rural life ever since he compared the 'dark satanic mills' with 'England's green and pleasant land'. I would disagree with this characterisation of Blake for of all the great romantics he was the closest to industry and the industrial working class. And he was the most consistently revolutionary. But the fact that Ted had been able to put Blake into perspective and felt it appropriate to mention his name linking it to the need to preserve brownfield sites meant that here at last was a person one could have a fruitful discussion with and so widen and push the whole matter of conservation forward. We would have much to learn from each other, which is how things should be. But not so Butterfly Conservation who have closed their doors to a wider questioning such that to query, for example, the increasing control of the Treasury over urban, particularly housing, development must inevitably lead to riots in Pall Mall and the abolition of the monarchy (if only!). They are that paranoid. For the life of me I cannot help feeling there is something Stalinoid about the organisation requiring absolute obedience and obeisance ' or else!

During May of this year (2007) I also listened to a radio program on beetles which I wish now I had recorded. Tongue in cheek and chuckling slightly one of the coleopterist's interviewed described beetles as the proletariat of the insect world whilst butterflies were the middle class! In fact he had a point. Beetles are everywhere and have invaded every nook and cranny and to illustrate his point this coleopterist went off to see what he could find in the way of beetles under a gasometer. Butterflies are far pickier and until the last couple of decades they were firmly associated in everyone's mind with the countryside. This is no longer the case and strictly speaking it never was true - certainly not as regards moths, though looking through a major work like Richard South's 'Moths' published in the first decade of the 20th century, the name Shipley crops up now and again whereas I have yet to find a reference to Bradford. (For those who don't know Shipley is the posher part of Bradford!) Old habits die-hard and unfortunately Butterfly Conservation have yet to truly emancipate themselves from a Lovelockian hankering for a vanished rural idyll that will never return except as a brutal parody of its former self, perhaps even as an armed gated community.

The prejudice against industry and brownfield sites is such that one top official went so far as to describe old railway sidings as eyesores! What chance of saving the Dingy Skippers on the pit spoils heaps of northern England given this degree of rural chauvinism? These arcane, very traditional attitudes were nurtured way back and spring from the counterattack launched against industrial capitalism by a landed and commercial aristocracy miffed at the repeal of the Corn Laws in the 1830s. Of course the last thing I want to do is to cast myself in the role of an apologist for industrial capitalism but I do wish to stress how fundamental these attitudes are in this country and what an invasive, stuck-up, petty-minded (a pettiness that ultimately comes from a courtly respect for the minutiae of hierarchy), jaundiced, carnivorous plant it is, becoming stronger by the moment the more industrial capitalism and a manual proletariat is routed and finance capitalism takes over. I stressed this country because the surprising fact mentioned previously regarding big city biodiversity came from a study of German cities and Germany in 2006 generated a '60 billion trade surplus in manufactured goods. Clearly there is nothing like the same prejudice against industry as in this country and this also applies to industrial dereliction because in Germany in the Ruhr at least one industrial park has been created and the old steel works in Duisberg left to oxidise and rot down and nature free to invade as it so pleases. But in England in particular all traces of the industrial past are assaulted with such a pathological ruthlessness and sheer vindictiveness that shortly not a hint of it will remain, including the wild life that was beginning to take up residence there. To its abiding shame Butterfly Conservation at worst has lent its authority to this terrible destruction (actually a holocaust of the Dingy Skipper) and at best stayed silent. We did, in fact, 'discover' a lot of colonies or if not that, gave them profile. Only one of these discoveries, the Penistone railway station colony is still for the moment thriving though perhaps half has been destroyed through development since coming across it in 2004.

Recently, it seems according to friends, things have taken a sinister turn and Butterfly Conservation together with other wildlife organisations are helping local councils to supposedly recreate Dingy Skipper and possibly other habitats for other flora and fauna on the Notts/Derbys spoil heaps, after they've been destroyed by government/commercial diktat with utterly disastrous results. Is this face saving or sheer cynicism or a mixture of both? This is especially so at Warsop Vale in North Notts where in the last three years or so, an expensive makeover has taken place which inevitably has destroyed an abundant colony of the Dingy Skipper but (hey!) the developers, fearing recriminations perhaps, have had the bare-faced cheek to do an about turn and supposedly re-create the original sympathetic wildlife terrain while retaining their chocolate box, essentially southern England image of nature so beloved of the estate agent sell. And who have been their best friends in this skull-duggery? Why no other than Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust and Butterfly Conservation who have sanctioned this con whereby a nutrient rich meadowland base, no matter that there maybe a fair mix of crushed limestone, maerl and paper crumble thrown in for good measure, has been imposed over the necessary nutrient poor cover which so favours the Dingy Skipper along with many other species. It painfully hasn't worked yet the truth of a tiny emergence or extinction of the butterfly has been effectively silenced. These on-going Nottinghamshire makeovers have not only destroyed the Dingy Skipper but the Grizzled Skipper and Small Blue too, despite media sound bites proclaiming the contrary. Butterfly Conservation tells you to inform the authorities if you find something of importance as it's a step in the right direction. Don't bother as all you're going to do is give the authorities the information they need to swat the natural invertebrate bastards before anybody else realises what's on their doorstep.

The point here is: it is now impossible to work with developers in any capacity whatsoever simply because they are so brutally draconian though very skilled in the black art of spin. Absolutely everything they turn their hand to is wrong, wrong, wrong. What genuine conservationists must do is expose this arrogance, throw up their hands in horror and stop placating these monsters, even if it means saying 'there's nothing we can do about it'. At least that would be honest. In South Yorkshire, the developmental umbrella bodies knowing well they have destroyed the rich and getting ever-richer biodiversity of the spoil heaps have stealthily gone back (in the dead of night one wonders?) and in the case of the Dingy Skipper planted birds foot trefoil here and there after the original plants were destroyed wholesale. Well it shows they finally care doesn't it? The trouble is they've seeded the new fluorescent green rye grass with the broad stem, tall trefoil favoured by the horticultural sales pitch and which is anathema to the Dingy Skipper. But the pet ecologists in the pay of the developers don't care. Why should they; just gimme money honey!

As for destruction the same fate awaits the Grayling colony in Healey Mills Marshalling Yards between Wakefield and Dewsbury. Essentially, the colony has been left to its devices for it was indeed remarkable to see how the butterflies were availing themselves if the rotting industrial detritus choosing to perch on rusting points levers rather than on birch bark, a favourite resting spot and which prompted Niko Tinbergen to describe the butterfly as 'the bark with wings'. To my mind it is the most remarkable Grayling colony in the country which has been left to perish. Again we are disgusted with Butterfly Conservation and local biodiversity groups in Wakefield's and Kirklees council for failing to do anything about the butterfly allowing a now rampant carr woodland to invade the broad expanses of rusting tracks, hardcore and decades old remnants of coal heaps which the grayling would frequently rest on. I doubt if the EWS management is even aware of the butterfly's existence and for sure I'm no longer prepared to risk arrest in the yards in the hope that something may eventually be done about it. Haphazardly situated on the Calder flood plain, on the all but abandoned yards which will never be developed because of subsidence, I'm sure an approach from a biodiversity group or BC could at least succeed in getting rid of some of the invasive carr woodland which will eventually kill off the Grayling in a few years time. However I have come to the conclusion that is just what these bodies wants because it saves them from an embarrassing conundrum and once the butterfly has gone the top management will breathe a sigh of relief and are clear to continue with their main concern which is the preservation of spin not butterflies. Saving the butterfly here is a very simple, uncomplicated, matter though it's like asking for the moon. If my brother is expelled from Butterfly Conservation for speaking the truth well then bring it on!

Further to your e-mail I should point out we are not Trotskyists despite Trotsky's fascination with in butterflies, a passion he found he shared with the surrealist Andre Breton when they met up. In fact Trotsky for all his insights (he was something of a polymath hence his interest in butterflies) never developed a theory of state capitalism or how it was nourished within the heart of the Bolshevik party right from the start. Admittedly he came close to it and then shied off at the last moment as though the whole issue was just too contentious for words. Whether the world will ever go back to state capitalism or variants of it (and which was very much part of the post war settlement and consensus) is a moot point. Arguably there are signs of it in Putin's Russia and Venezuela and possible eventually throughout the whole of Latin America should the new Bolivarianism become more of a reality.

I also should point out that the four British scientists I have previously mentioned never once questioned the role of the Bolshevik party or rejected the need for a vanguard party though Hyman Levy perhaps came the closest to that fundamental recognition. In the late 1960s more scientists than ever took that step, junking at the same time the pursuit of a career in science. The real history of this movement, the passions, the aspirations, the reasons for rejecting the science of our time has yet to be written. In truth the surface has barely been scratched and in twenty years time or less it will be lost forever. There was certainly more to it than a revolt against the military/industrial complex (though that was important) and involved the large scale bureaucratisation of science and the rejection of the consumer life style that went with it - the house, the nuclear family, the family car, the yearly holidays, the in-laws, Christmas, birthdays etc. Dropping out the scientific rat race for good and unable ever to rejoin the scientific fold, I know at least one that went mad (Jerry B) and another that committed suicide (Spooks) and both oriented around the King Mob loose grouping we helped put together. Not for them the idea of redefining themselves as a scientific 'worker' (which required they stay put like a cog in a machine) which had satisfied a Levy or Bernal. Once rid of such rebellious spirits, the scientific community was able to concentrate on what really mattered - business. Scientists today are encouraged to see themselves as businessmen and women, potential plcs' with a stock market valuation and flotation price. How one yearns to travel back not only thirty five years but to recover some of the unworldliness of a Needham even if we do find his secretaryship of the Guild of St Luke, a society aimed at promoting spirituality among doctors and medical students, not to out taste, for it is better than what we have today.

However we are unshakeably convinced the only solution to the mounting horrors confronting this little planet is a form of eco-socialism (or social ecology), one of collective/individual autonomy which is anti-money, anti-statist, cooperative and international. Obviously new forms of organisation are required, ones that are built from the ground up, that are open and democratic and function according to the best traditions of 'the workers' movement' as expressed in the workers' councils. However work has become a four-letter word and most work carried out today is socially irresponsible and destructive and in the interests of the survival of the species (rather than that of the fittest ' an idiotic concept when applied to humanity as if ex PM Blair got where he is through Darwinian edict rather than media fiat) should be instantly abolished and redefined from scratch. Unwise though it is to anticipate forms of mass organisation we can at least say the revocable mandate operative at all times and in all places will be central to them. How this will work out with niche organisations like those concerned specifically with butterflies, beetles, birds, plants etc it is difficult to say but at least some kind of debate should be initiated along these lines instead of expecting the membership to go along with a set of principles drawn up behind closed doors by species experts and by people fresh out of university with little experience of reality and struggle and who impose their own version of TINA. (There Is No Other Way). Behind this adamantine negative formalism there undoubtedly lurks the fear of direct action and that people will start to do things for themselves and thrust established green organisations to one side as happened with the anti-road protestors, especially at Twyford Down in the early 1990s and which finally broke the resolve of the Tory Party to continue with their road program. That Labour stealthily resumed it is one more indication of the need for constant vigilance and never on any account to trust what politicians say. One thing for sure disillusionment with green organisations has never been so low when in fact it should be at an all time high. Beyond the apathy and fear there is also a growing awareness of how inept green organisations are at confronting ' even naming - the accumulating horrors of international capitalism, a system which is now patently bent on suicide and has been appropriately labelled suicide capitalism by the enlightened French (who else?)

We likewise belong to the more libertarian wing of the communist movement, (though like the situationists ' that influence is obvious throughout the www.dialecticalbutterflies.com web - we reject the term communist because it is a description that has become too devalued) believing in control from below. This was the guiding idea behind Anton Pannekoek's 'Workers Councils' though it is perhaps ill-advised to employ such a term today seeing that most work today is socially destructive and should be instantly abolished. (Pannekoek was also an astronomer and a philosopher of science who dismissed Lenin's 'Materialism and Empirio-Criticism' as bourgeois materialism mirroring the bourgeois, rather than proletarian, revolution then under way in Russia. Dialectical Materialism was to him an infinitely more subtle instrument because of its approach to causation, even because it denies causation altogether. I have to admit I do find Pannekoek's ideas a bit quirky in this respect and to my mind it is simply a more modern version of Hume's empiricism - with the crucial proviso Hume was a social conservative which Pannekoek patently was not. If pushed to extremes empiricism can appear to easily dispose of 'the truths' of science so is it to be wondered that Hume gave liberal vent to his spleen, ill-liberally repeating such terms as 'cant', 'mystical jargon', 'hypocrisy', 'fury', 'fanaticism' over and over again when describing in his six volume 'History' (1754-62) the forces opposed to Charles 1 in the English Civil War of 1640-5).

Stuart Wise. Summer 2007

For more precise comment on the failure of conservation go to the Dingy Skipper filmscripts plus the videos section on the Revolt Against Plenty web:

Filmscripts. Miner/Butterfly Destruction. Part 1

Filmscripts.Miner/Butterfly Destruction. Part 2

Filmscripts.Miner/Butterfly Destruction. Part 3