climate change activist and science communicator; event photographer; amateur mapmaker — advocate for a stable global climate, reduced nuclear weapon risks, and safe human-AI interaction
All posts on what Bismarck called “the art of the possible”
Having seen the distinction-earning research design essay written by Lee Jones last year, I am now thoroughly fearful about the whole project. The extent of research he seems to have done, and the clarity with which he seems to have understood his question both stand in marked contrast to my present situation.
As such, it is perfectly clear that I really need to get cracking. The essay is due on May 29th.
Research Design Essay Planning
This month’s issue of The Walrus opens with a letter from Major General Lewis Mackenzie (ret.). He was the man in charge of the Canadian peacekeeping force in Sarajevo in 1992, remembered particularly for re-taking and maintaining control of the city’s airport. He’s also a man who I met several times at UBC and whose insight and candour I appreciated.
The letter argues that it is factually incorrect to say that Canada is a peacekeeping nation. Mackenzie doesn’t argue this for the familiar (and true) reason that our outlay on foreign relations of all kinds has been cut in order to maintain the budgetary surplus, but because the kind of operations the Canadian Forces are engaging in no longer have the character of classic inter-positional peacekeeping, as envisioned by Lester Pearson and used with such good effect to end the Suez Crisis. I’ve discussed the composition and present deployments of the Canadian Forces in a previous entry. While I am less sympathetic to his argument that Canada has never been a peacekeeping nation, I think the argument that we no longer play that role is convincing.
The reasons for this are mostly fairly obvious. A line of lightly armed personnel with blue helmets between two armies is no longer the model for military intervention in conflict zones. Given that most wars are now civil wars, the armies may be neither disciplined, organized, nor clearly defined. Chaotic and dangerous places do not lend themselves to soft blue berets, as Mackenzie identifies, but to the flak jackets and “camouflaged Kevlar helmets” that are the kit employed by almost all Canadian Forces members overseas: especially in our largest deployment, in Afghanistan.
Is Mackenzie right to challenge the peacekeeping myth? It’s something Canadians use as a heuristic device for understanding how Canada behaves in the world: out there solving problems and putting out fires where they erupt, as opposed to the more brash and world-changing strategies of our great southern neighbour. Obviously, it’s not an idea that should be perpetuated if it’s blatantly false. I would argue that it is not, but that the gritty details of contemporary peacekeeping, peacemaking, and peace enforcement must be recognized in the public arena.
One of the most regrettable developments in warfare recently has been the progression from a blue helmet or a red cross being a protective symbol to it being irrelevant or even grounds for being targeted. Partly, that has to do with the conflating of war fighting and reconstruction roles to which both the United States and Canada have contributed. When some jeeps have food aid in them and others have ammunition, there is little chance of retaining trust and credibility for those who distribute the first. Likewise, some planes dropping food packets while similar ones drop cluster bombs. When aid providing non-governmental organisations (NGOs) get integrated into war plans, similar problems arise. For that reason, I applaud the way in which Medicins Sans Frontiers, among other groups, have resisted the pressure to become subjugated to the military planning of western states.
The complex nature of modern peacekeeping operations may not be accurately reflected in the media and the opinions of the public at large. I think that Mackenzie is correct to raise the issue, but simply doing so doesn’t offer us a great deal of guidance. It is plausible that the Martin and Harper governments have actively managed the representation of Canadian operations in Afghanistan and elsewhere to heighten the sense that they are similar to the ‘traditional style’ of Canadian peacekeeping. If so, it’s understandable, given how much of an identity issue peacekeeping has become in Canada. To the extent that such idealization helps create support to take the initiative internationally, there is some value. To the extent that they confuse the issue and obscure the real character of our actions, the illusions should be dispelled.
My mother kindly sent me another book today: Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. I’ve heard a bit about it before, but remember virtually nothing of what was said. As I recall, The Economist was quite critical, but they don’t seem to have a great deal of patience when it comes to a number of alternative views about globalization. Once I finish On the Road and The Skeptical Environmentalist, I look forward to going through it as the next object of discretionary reading.
Aspects of today’s Environment Centre colloquium were quite good. I enjoyed the Vancouverite atmosphere, as well as the presentation by Guardian columnist George Monbiot. Particularly impressive were his historical asides, though his main argument came off as a bit of an afterthought. Spending time with so many people doing environmental studies was a reminder of just how completely outside the discipline I really am. The contrast in the kind of discourse that took place there and the kind in our various seminars was considerable. I’ve never heard the term ‘environmentalisms’ so many times in one day. Some of the presentations struck me as interminably long, lacking in direction, and somewhat pointless: especially one in which the presenter literally skimmed through a 16 page Microsoft Word document he had on screen, correcting the spelling of words as he went, and making general comments about what was written.
The event at Rhodes House was informative but largely unsurprising – except where it was dramatically punctuated by the thunderstorm that materialized as it was ongoing. I had seen two of the speakers before, at a previous Global Environmental Governance seminar, and the presentations they gave were quite similar to those I saw before. I did enjoy the presentation on AIDS by Mandisa Mbali, a Rhodes scholar and organizer of the Stop AIDS Society at Oxford.
For people in Oxford, there are some interesting events this coming Wednesday (May 10th):
Oxford University Centre for the Environment Symposium:
“What Future for Environmentalism?”10.00 Introduction
10.05 Noel Castree, Manchester University, “‘The Paradoxes of Environmental Politics”
10.45 David Pepper, Oxford Brookes University, “Ecotopianism: Transgressive or Regressive?”
11.25 Andrew Dobson, Keele University, “The Invisibility of the England and Wales Green Party – Why, and Does it Matter?”
12.05 General questions and discussion
12.30 Lunch
1.30 George Monbiot, journalist and writer, “Just Green”
2.10 Diana Liverman, Oxford University, “Environmentalisms and the Response to Neoliberalism in Latin America”
2.50 Joan Martinez Alier, Barcelona Autonomous University, “Social Metabolism and Ecological Distribution Conflicts”
3.30 – 4.00 Final discussion and close
As far as I can tell, all of these events are taking place in their building on South Parks Road.
Many thanks to Taylor Owen for forwarding me an email about it. Such is the decentralized nature of Oxford that, despite being on every mailing list I’ve come across, I hadn’t heard a word about it before. There is also a lecture that evening:
The Africa Society and Rhodes Scholar Southern Africa Forum Joint Panel Discussion Series:
Framing the Continent in 2005: Implications for the FutureMarked by the Make Poverty History Campaign, LiveAid, the G8 summit, and the Commission for Africa, 2005 was dubbed by many as the ‘Year of Africa.’ As we move into 2006 it is worth reflecting on the impacts-positive and negative-of these high profile initiatives and the subsequent media attention.
5:00pm to 7:00pm
Rhodes House: Jameson Room
I will be attending both.
PS. A compilation of Oxford Environment related information and events can be found here. The OUCE website is very counter-intuitive if you are trying to figure out what’s going on there. I couldn’t even find a page with information on this Wednesday’s event.
I promised myself the other day that I would write a post about something that I view as a serious fallacy related to development: the notion that dealing with infectious disease will just shift the death toll to hunger, rather than genuinely saving people. This view is misguided for reasons both moral and pragmatic. I will focus on the pragmatic here, since people who advance this neo-Malthusian argument tend to think of themselves as well-meaning but realistic. The first set of arguments have to do with the local capabilities of communities. The second, lesser, set have to do with the nature of the provision of aid. I will quickly examine each in turn.
The three big diseases upon which I will concentrate are HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis (TB). These have been rightly banded together as the three most serious global health concerns, with regards to infectious diseases. Each kills more than a million people a year, as well as making far more ill. As a bacterial illness, effective cures exist for all but the most resistant strains of tuberculosis. While no effective cure exists for either malaria or HIV/AIDS, drugs exist that can extend survival dramatically, and mechanisms exist to greatly restrict the spread of such illnesses. The notion that doing so would produce an equally severe problem elsewhere is based on a misconception about how such illnesses affect communities.
Local capabilities
Sick people are not productive people. Communities with high prevalance rates of infectious diseases lose agricultural productivity as members of the working population either become ill or need to spend their time caring for those who are. This is especially bad with regards to HIV/AIDS, which tends to kill people during their most productive years. That has left behind millions of orphans, who further draw upon the capabilities of the community in which they live. All manner of grim statistics could be brought to bear upon this point, but it seems intuitively obvious enough to stand on its own.
The possibilities of simultaneously dealing with the various factors that make extreme poverty endemic are demonstrated by the ’12 research villages’ that Jeffrey Sachs has established throughout Africa. The plan is to have 1000 by 2009. Each receives practical aid at the level of $250 per inhabitant: directed towards dealing with disease, boosting agricultural output, education, and other objectives espoused by the Millennium Development Goals. The whole program can be expressed in terms of seven simple goals:
Fertiliser and seed to improve food yield; anti-malarial bed nets; improved water sources; diversification from staple into cash crops; a school feeding programme; deworming for all; and the introduction of new technologies, such as energy-saving stoves and mobile phones.
The results so far seem to be very good, in terms of declining levels of infectious disease, improved crop yields and educational results, and the like. As with so many other projects, the difficulty is in scaling up the the point where millions of lives can be changed, but the example demonstrates how even a relatively inexpensive aid policy can produce tangible results in a number of crucial areas, without hitting any of the Malthusian barriers imagined by those who say that feeding hungry children just makes hungry adults. Another laudable feature of the program: all aspects of it are implemented and directed at a local level, reducing the extent that neocolonialist intentions can be attributed to the donors or international organizers.
World capabilities
Even in those cases where a sudden burst of attention enormously lessens the burden of disease in a food-strapped community, the difficulties of dealing with that situation are far easier than those of dealing with a place where one of these big three diseases has become endemic.
That’s partly because food provision doesn’t require the delivery of expertise into an area. The lack of qualified medical personnel in places like Sub-Saharan Africa is a major reason for which infectuous disease is so problematic there. The rich world has a double guilt in this capacity: because the austerity programs that were part of the structural adjustment policies of the IMF and World Bank have prevented governments from investing in such human capital, and because lots of rich countries (including Canada and the UK) have been doing all they can to buy up doctors and nurses from the poor world to help address problems in their own health systems.
Conclusions
Obviously, just providing food aid or help with specific problems isn’t adequate for dealing with persistent extreme poverty. That said, it seems foolish to voluntarily refrain from deploying such assistance as is politically and economically viable because of concerns about “feeding those who will die anyhow.” On the global level, the economic emergence of Asia – in which extreme poverty levels have seen amazing reductions in recent decades – shows what is possible even in the face of considerable levels of corruption, disease, and mismanagement.
The thesis discussion with Dr. Hurrell has further convinced me that I am on a good track. We also sorted out an agreeable pattern for this term’s work this evening: two essays for the core seminar, two papers specifically for him, the research design essay, and a third essay for him to be written during the subsequent break, if necessary. Based on my standard of 3000 word papers, that will mean 21,000 words of writing for this term, in total. (Not counting dozens of blog posts, of course)
While discussing the thesis topic, we edged closer to a real question. The idea, at this point, is to choose two examples of international environmental agreements, then investigate the role that science and scientific communities played in their formulation. Two possible examples at the Stockholm Convention – wherein the coordination of science and policy can be said to have gone fairly well – and the Kyoto Protocol – where the relationship is muddier and the policy outcome less effective. The methodology would centre around looking at the preparatory materials and history of both conventions, as well as interviewing participants. On the theoretical side, I would examine writing on the connections between science and policy in this and other areas, as well as as much philosophy of science as I can push through my limited mental faculties.
The above, expanded and fused with a preliminary survey of the literature, will form the body of the 6000 word research design essay I submit at the end of this month.
Tonight’s lectures on malaria, presented by the Oxford Global Health Group, demonstrated once more the kind of opportunity that is being missed with regards to global development. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), one million people per year die from the parasite. In addition, the direct economic costs imposed exceed $12B a year: a figure agreed upon by the two scientists and the representative from GlaxoSmithKline. By contrast, the WHO estimate for the cost of controlling malaria globally is just $3.2B a year. While money alone can’t solve so complex a problem, the gap between what is possible and what is being done remains unacceptable.
Like HIV/AIDS, while efforts are being made to find an effective vaccine, the state of affairs at the moment includes treatment and prevention measures. As Adrian Hill – the Director of Oxford’s Jenner Institute – discussed, there has never been an effective vaccine developed against any human parasitic illness, and the incredible complexity of the malarial life cycle and the long period of endemic coexistence between people, mosquitos, and parasites makes it a task of fiendish difficulty. That doesn’t mean that a vaccine is impossible. Indeed, Dr. Hill stressed how two moderately effective vaccines based on different approaches could combine into a single highly effective treatment. What it does mean is that the existence of effective mitigation mechanisms like pesticide-coated bednets and combination anti-malarial therapies should be focused upon.
I was pleased to learn that Oxford is presently the only organization in the world that is carrying out any level of clinical trial for vaccines addressing tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, and malaria. Each has an enormous global toll, in terms of lives lost and societies disrupted, and all are well within the present financial means of the world to reduce in significance enormously. When the constant refrain is that official development assistance gets spirited off by corrupt governments and into foreign bank accounts and BMWs, the case for funding large-scale research into the development and cost-reduction of medical responses to devastating illnesses of the poor world is clear and compelling.
The comparison everybody makes is with arms expenditures. That’s fair enough. Discretionary spending on armaments in the 2004 American federal budget was $399B. Three times more was spent on just missile defence than would cover the WHO’s estimated cost for global malarial control. $1.2B was allocated just for the V-22 Osprey aircraft: a design that many, even within the Air Force, consider hopelessly flawed and too dangerous to ever put into operation.
Though of another way, Canada’s GDP is about $1000B. The WHO estimate is therefore just 0.32% of the GDP of a single, relatively unpopulous, member of the rich country club. If anything, the global experience of smallpox and polio has shown that bold and properly funded global health strategies can yield fantastic returns. The chance to capitalize on that potential for AIDS, malaria, and TB is sitting right there for us to grasp.
Henry Shue’s presentation to the Strategic Studies Group tonight ended up being much more challenging than I expected. The topic was torture and “why no middle way is possible.” That is to say, something that I profoundly agree with. That said, I found his justification to be very problematic.
He began by asserting that torture is obviously immoral and illegal – a position that I do not contest, though we will come back to it. From there, he argued prudentially that states like the US and Britain mustn’t engage in torture for a number of reasons. The first set have to do with how there’s no guarantee the person you torture will know anything, that they might not tell you anyhow, and that the idealized case of the terrorist revealing the location of the hidden nuclear weapon under torture is extremely unlikely to ever transpire. These are fairly standard arguments that deal with the efficacy of torture as an instrument of achieving aims, rather than its acceptability.
His next batch of arguments had to do with the social basis of torture: namely, that to tolerate torture is to tolerate the existence of torturers in society. He argued that some minimal organization of torturers is necessary and that such an organization fundamentally corrupts the society around it. After his talk, I asked him a question about this. Specifically, I asked whether the fact that torturers are readily available around the world for those willing to import them or export prisoners to them changes this moral balance. A state like the United States could easily gain the ‘benefits’ of torture, without risking whatever dangers exist from a domestic torture agency.
His response largely brought us back to a muddle that is at the heart of this. I believe powerfully that torture is an abhorrent act: one that cannot be justified as a practice, even if it was likely to save many lives. This is an easy position to defend if you really believe in some kind of divine or natural justice. If, however, you believe that all the justice out there is what we as people create in the world around us, you are in a really tricky spot. Clearly, saving some huge number of lives must be balanced against the cost of destroying or mangling a smaller number: even if those people turn out to be innocent.
At the heart of things, I can’t come up with a reason for forbidding torture that is somehow firmly rooted to a real moral tapestry that all people are obviously attached to. That makes dealing with the prospect of torture in the ideal case extremely difficult.
My solution, for the moment, as in many other contentious matters is to step back from the greatest controversy and pick low hanging fruit. Even if we allow the possibility that it’s just intuitive revulsion that is the final basis for the understanding of torture as completely unallowable, we can make arguments about how we should operate to reduce the occurrence of torture as something that happens out in the world. This is especially feasible when it comes to states like America that have values fundamentally opposed to such obscene violations of human beings. It’s easier to accuse someone of violating their own moral code than it is to assert some everlasting external morality. Since I don’t feel capable of divining such a framework, but I am nonetheless confronted with irrefutable evidence of astonishing injustice in the world, the best answer seems to be to just act on the basis of a self-aware, pluralistic, and pragmatic ad hoc morality, rather than remain inactive while something terrible continues.
[Update: 21 May 2013] See also: Maureen Ramsay on torture
In four weeks’ time, I need to submit a 6000 word paper outlining my research question and methodology. Today, I gave a twenty minute presentation that basically outlined my area of interest and touched upon some possibilities. Until I’ve done more of a review of the literature, choosing a specific topic is probably unwise. There is much to do, and time for it is short.
The general research area is environmental politics: by which I mean the study of international agreements and actions related to the physical environment. Examples include climate change, fisheries, and pollutants. Within that playing field, I have also identified two directing interests: the relationship of science to policy, and the connections between all of this and development.
Science and policy
The natural sciences have a number of characteristics much admired and emulated by social scientists – as IR scholars frequently categorize themselves. As generally understood (and Tristan is going to murder me on this), science is a set of tools and approaches that allows people to learn about the true nature of the world. Theories are developed to account for observations and they are tested using other observation. Deficient theories are refined or rejected and progressively better understandings emerge. This is a very old and powerful account of the nature of scientific approaches.
From a global environmental politics (GEP) standpoint, the first area of interest here has to do with epistemic communities. That’s basically a fancy word for ‘fields’ or ‘disciplines.’ Members of such communities have their own vocabularies and ways of doing things: they have tools and competencies. Critically, they also have credibility in certain areas. What is interesting for my thesis is how science, credibility, and politics interact. When the Union of Concerned Scientists speaks out on nuclear testing or climate change, they wade into fundamentally political waters. Why are people generally willing to listen to what they have to say? On a related note, how do those seeking particular policies select and generate science that can be used to bolster their case; to what extent is science in environmentally relevant areas politicized, or otherwise prescriptive in non-obvious ways?
Another way in which GEP is concerned with science has to do with bureaucratic politics. That’s to say, how different constituent parts of a decision-making organization interact. An example would be the relationship between Congress, the presidency, and other actors in the formulation of American foreign policy. A standard account holds that these subsidiary groups vie for influence while engaged in complex negotiations with one another. Depending on how constructivist you care to be, you can also talk about constitution through iterated interaction. Analyzing global environmental regimes (for instance, the Kyoto Protocol) through a bureaucratic politics framework means examining which organizations helped to form it and what role they are playing now. The practical and theoretical connections between environmental scientists and organizations they dominate and the overall policymaking landscape are certainly worthy of investigation.
The development dimension
The two big environmentally relevant development issues, as I see them, are the emergence of new industrializing powers and the material conditions that have contributed to the absence of development in other areas. It says something that while I raised both in my presentation, everyone who responded mentioned only the question of China and India, never the one of the least developed states.
Anyone who glances at the state of commodities markets today can see that a China growing at near-double-digit rates has a huge appetite for energy and raw materials. The overall impact of that trend on the state of the world environment promises to be huge: more so when you acknowledge that China isn’t the only populous state growing rapidly. If we are to hope that these states will follow a more sustainable path to prosperity than the currently developed states, we are going to need institutional and legal structures that are both up to date with the best of environmental science and politically aware enough to craft incentives so that good outcomes will actually be achieved.
In contrast to the rapidly emerging economies are those that are not obviously improving in basic measures like life expectancy and health. Environmental factors probably play a role here as well: desertification, climate change, and the like. Likewise, an important role is played by factors that are both environmental and political, such as health and the search for raw materials. The more people with whom I speak, the clearer it becomes that this area is probably not a very interesting one for most people in the department, at least in terms of the considerations that go into thesis topic selection. Doing anything interdisciplinary with people in Oxford studying fields like health or geography seems to be quite difficult.
Plans
Between the areas mentioned above, there are many lifetimes worth of research that could be done. I want to find a question that is specific, novel, and original and that will allow me to make prescriptive suggestions for the improvement of some important area of environmental governance. As I progress towards that topic, I will put more information here. Of course, comments are extremely welcome.
PS. I got back the numerical result for my qualifying exam from Dr. Hurrell today: 68%. Missing a distinction by such a small margin makes me wish I had studied harder.
Today’s seminar for the Global Economic Governance Program was really excellent, discussing the future of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. On the panel were Jon Cuncliffe, Paul Collier, and Ngaire Woods. Overall, I would say that they agreed more than they disagreed. They primarily identified and discussed two areas of interest: the global financial consequences of the emergence of China and India and the role the Bank and the Fund should play in assisting development within countries that are either stagnating, or finding themselves at the start of an awkward path to reasonable prosperity.
While there, I realized that development might be the missing factor for my thesis. Conversing with Peter Dauvergne by email, he has identified the incredible variety of work already being done in the field of science and environmental politics. I need more of a focus if I am to say something new. To focus on the scientific and environmental questions that exist within the two areas listed above might be a good way to move forward. It captures concerns like China’s growing need for energy and resources, as well as issues like the problems of desertification and lack of decent access to water in sub-Saharan Africa.
Potentially, this is a way of bringing a lot of reading I’ve been doing that is somewhat peripheral to both the program and my thesis back into line. I don’t think it would be wise to extent the topic to consider health, which is also a fascinating intersection between science and development, but to use development to create a balanced triad between science and environmental politics might lend direction and balance, without going off topic.
Dr. Dauvergne also suggested that I read the last few years worth of issues of Environmental Politics: the journal from the MIT Press which he edits, as well as a thesis entitled Advocates, Experts or Collaborative Epistemic Communities by Lindsay Johnson, an MA student of his.
Comments would be especially appreciated on this, since I need to present my preliminary research plan on Tuesday at 11:00am.