Environment – Paola Trimarco

My week in the heat

I haven’t been on holiday near the Equator or sitting in a sauna at some upmarket health club that I don’t belong to. The heat comes from reading and listening to climate science. Hot temperatures and hot in the sense of stoking my anger. As tomorrow is Earth Day, yet another awareness campaign, I promise I won’t mention any numbers or statistics as you will have heard enough, and I don’t think they’re very helpful. What we need is a shift in thinking. Here are some highlights that have rattled my head this week and have brought me to this conclusion.

In David Wallace-Wells’ newsletter, the environmentalist describes how critiques of the ‘catastrophic thinking’ in recent climate activism have been ‘regularly and conspicuously levelled by complacent centrists and patronizing greybeards against the alarmist fringe of the climate movement — yes, warming was happening, they acknowledged, and yes, it represented a challenge to the world’s collective status quo, but still, all of this hyperbolic talk was, let’s be honest, a bit much.’ This does an excellent job of depicting the stance of many public figures who are not climate change deniers but are not fighting for the environment either. It is as if positioning oneself in the middle of the argument, avoiding extremes, is reasonable. In this case, it’s not.

I’ve been reading Simon Sharpe’s Five Times Faster: Rethinking the Science, Economics, and Diplomacy of Climate Change, where the issue of communicating the dangers of climate change is looked at from a slightly different angle. Sharpe argues that climate scientists have been pulling their punches when presenting their findings to the public and to policy makers because these scientists have tended to talk in terms of predictions, which they are naturally cautious in making. It would be better, according to Sharpe to address the effects of climate change in terms of risk assessment – that is, looking at the worst possible scenario. He compares risk assessment in other fields to make his case. ‘What would become of a national security adviser who stormed out of a briefing on a terrorist threat complaining that it was all too depressing? Or a chief medical officer who decided not to warn political leaders of an approaching pandemic in case the bad news caused them to ‘switch off’? Obviously, such negligence is unthinkable.’ Yet, scientists, economists and politicians have skirted around risk assessment in the context of climate change. My blood boils thinking about it.

I took a break from these commentaries on catastrophic thinking and parlance only to find this item in the New York Times: ‘India is among the most vulnerable countries to human-caused climate change. And its poorest people are at the greatest risk…. This week, many parts of India were under heat wave alerts. Schools and colleges were closed in most parts of West Bengal state.’ Over to EuroNews, where there were stories around the fact that 2022 had the warmest summer on record across Europe. There was no escaping it.

Finally, returning to Simon Sharpe as he has the right words to describe what’s been going on in my head this week. He writes, ‘Thinking about climate change risks can be emotionally draining. You might feel you’ve heard enough by this point. There are increasing reports of climate change scientists and activists needing psychological support to cope with the strains of constantly staring into the abyss, trying to tell people about it, and witnessing the utter inadequacy of our collective response.’ Am I an activist, or an ordinary news junkie, needing psychological support? Perhaps not yet, but I did find writing this blog therapeutic.

Five Vignettes About Trees

I attended Joyce Kilmer Elementary School in Chicago, where the first line of Kilmer’s best-known poem was painted in old-worldly script above the stage of the auditorium: ‘I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree.’ The metaphor still works for me, but the rhymed couplets throughout the poem (I will spare you) edge close to doggerel. Thankfully, loads of other poems about trees have been published. I’ve recently discovered the French-Canadian poet Hélène Dorion, whose collection ‘Mes forêts,’ as the title suggests, features trees. Here’s a sample:

Trees bite into the soil
their bodies parched
in the cold of their roots
gaunt shadows bodies
pressed together
we hear the song
of fracture and desire
body like the tide going out
pale boat
lost in its night

body of love and storm
given over to the earth
that it licks as if
it were a wall to pierce through

Hélène Dorion (Translated by Susanna Lang)

With talk of today being the Spring Equinox in the marginalia of the news, I was reminded of St Joseph’s Day. It’s the day before the equinox, but nevertheless it was for me as a child the Italo-American version of St Patrick’s Day. It was customary to wear red. In Italy, it’s also celebrated by gorging on a zeppola, a custard-filled pastry with cherries on top – the cherries represent the buds on the trees in spring.

At the start of the year, I enrolled in another MOOC intended for French undergraduates to help me expand my French vocabulary. The course, entitled ‘Les Arbes,’ was about the biology of trees and their contribution to the Earth’s biodiversity. Once again, learning scientific French highlighted the paucity of my scientific English. Many of the words I looked up in French were the same or close to it in English.

In Cambridgeshire where I live, a furore has erupted over new plans led by the county council to build a busway (a bus-only road) from a new 6000-home development to the town of Cambridge. Building such a road will involve cutting down 1,000 trees. The majority of these arboreal victims are in the Coton Orchard, one of the UK’s largest and oldest orchards, with a unique ecosystem that cannot be mitigated with planting new trees elsewhere. This is part of a pattern in Britain, where the mass felling of trees has been carried out in the interest of road building. In 2018, despite two years of protests from residents in Sheffield, the city council allowed for the felling of some 17,500 trees. It later turned out that the justification for this was based on misunderstandings of an environmental survey coupled with misinforming the public.

I’m not just being sentimental about trees – all trees everywhere. Trees are also a crop that provide wood for furniture and pulp for toilet paper, among other things. Some trees also need to be cut down due to disease or public health reasons. The destruction of trees in our parks and towns is a different matter altogether. With the loss of these trees, the bird and insect populations, already in catastrophic decline, suffer greatly. To this, it’s necessary to add negative effects of such barbarous acts on the human population, both in terms of our physical health (such as the quality of the air that we breathe) and psychological health (where studies have shown improvements in emotional well-being with the introduction of sylvan spaces).

Every year, I buy an artsy calendar to add some colour and visual creativity to my home office in Ely. It’s also a place to jot down writing deadlines, meetings and health club activities – things that are on my phone calendar as well but are sometimes forgotten when my head is in the comfort of clouds. My 2023 calendar has a tree theme. Every month displays a painting of trees by some famous, and some not so famous, European artists. Looking at these photos of paintings everyday – these meadows, these tree-lined shores, these shaded forests – gives my days a natural sense of calm and beauty. Since according to a French professor lecturing on the MOOC, there are over 60,000 species of trees, every year could have a tree theme, a different tree calendar, and in the remainder of my lifetime, I still will have only scratched the surface.

Above: Emmanuel Gondouin, La Forêt, 1912
Feature image: Henri Charles Manguin, Les oliviers à Cavalière, 1905

An Alternative Valentine’s Day

No cards. No flowers. No chocolates. No boozy dinner at an upmarket restaurant. Today, we celebrated Valentine’s in a different way.

Since Christmas my David and I have been doing the green thing of not giving each other cards. Over the years, we have exchanged cards for birthdays, anniversaries and all the big holidays. We saved these in our personal filing cabinets, most of David’s to me have been transferred to a plastic storage box with other paper-based memorabilia and my writings that pre-dated internet clouds. We both know full well that in our senile dotage, these overpriced cardboard confectioneries are going to the recycle bin, which then goes to the overflowing waste management centre, where currently less than 60% of recyclables are recycled.

Recent years have also seen us both clean up the clutter around us, and 2022, after my milestone birthday, became the year to cease card-giving and consequently, card storage. No jokey Christmas greetings or 25^th wedding anniversary of rhyming sentiments written by strangers. Instead, we wished each other happy Christmas and anniversary and washed down special meals with good wine. Chink.

As with Christmas cards, there is also an historical case against exchanging Valentine’s Day cards and gifts. A little internet research (okay, not peer-reviewed) reveals that St Valentine of Rome was added to the calendar of saints by Pope Galesius in 496 even though he was martyred in 296 for performing weddings for soldiers who were not permitted to marry. This lovers’ day did not see the exchange of cards and gifts until the 19^th century with the industrial revolution. Like so many customs, the festive day had become commercialised, a chance to sell mass-produced cards, sweets and flowers. We’re not so much breaking with tradition as we are fighting consumerism.

Within this Hallmark-free zone we celebrated Valentine’s Day by going to a pub in our town of Ely, partaking in the two meals for £25 lunchtime special. Yet, stingy doesn’t mean we are devoid of sentimentality. While waiting for our meals, we talked about this blog and my wish to end it on a love poem that isn’t soppy. Without hesitation, David said, ‘”An Arundel Tomb” by Philip Larkin.’

Side by side, their faces blurred,

The earl and countess lie in stone,

Their proper habits vaguely shown

As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,

And that faint hint of the absurd—

The little dogs under their feet.

Such plainness of the pre-baroque

Hardly involves the eye, until

It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still

Clasped empty in the other; and

One sees, with a sharp tender shock,

His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

They would not think to lie so long.

Such faithfulness in effigy

Was just a detail friends would see:

A sculptor’s sweet commissioned grace

Thrown off in helping to prolong

The Latin names around the base.

They would not guess how early in

Their supine stationary voyage

The air would change to soundless damage,

Turn the old tenantry away;

How soon succeeding eyes begin

To look, not read. Rigidly they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths

Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light

Each summer thronged the glass. A bright

Litter of birdcalls strewed the same

Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths

The endless altered people came,

Washing at their identity.

Now, helpless in the hollow of

An unarmorial age, a trough

Of smoke in slow suspended skeins

Above their scrap of history,

Only an attitude remains:

Time has transfigured them into

Untruth. The stone fidelity

They hardly meant has come to be

Their final blazon, and to prove

Our almost-instinct almost true:

What will survive of us is love.

Philip Larkin (from The Poetry Foundation.org)

Have a happy eco-friendly anti-consumerist Valentine’s Day.

The Arundel tomb that Larkin was referring to. You can just see the couple handing hands.

Thrutopia

Move aside dystopian literature and make way for thrutopian tales that give hope without the silliness of sugar-coated utopias. In recent years, I’ve been reading about this call to arms to establish a new genre of literature. The word has its origins in the idea of going ‘thru’ from one place to another.

In 2017, writing for the Huffington Post, environmental campaigner Rupert Read made the case that a thrutopia could get us through the climate crisis. In sum, his argument was that we need ‘artistic or philosophical vision’ for the future that dealt with the harsh realities without being dystopic and without the blind optimism of utopia. He explains:

‘Thrutopias would be about how to get from here to there, where ‘there’ is far far away in time. How to live and love and vision and carve out a future, through pressed times that will endure. The climate crisis is going to be a long emergency, probably lasting hundreds of years. It is useless to fantasise a shining sheer escape from it to utopia. But it’s similarly useless, dangerously defeatist, to wallow around in dystopias. We need ways of seeing, understanding, inhabiting, creating what will be needed for the very long haul.’

While I agree with the general idea, I don’t think I’d call dystopic literature ‘dangerously defeatist.’ I’m thinking Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which was first in the 80s and more recently thanks to the TV series, a warning of a world controlled by religious extremists. Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road are likewise more realistic than defeatist, but with the reader knowing that they have elements of make-believe. The real sense of defeatism emerges when reading commentaries in the media about the irreversible damage brought on by the climate crisis at a time when a world leader of dubious sanity is threatening to use nuclear arms.

This new thrutopic-like genre was also proposed by novelist Ben Okri, writing in The Guardian around the time of Cop26. Like Read, Okri calls exclaims, ‘We have to find a new art and a new psychology to penetrate the apathy and the denial that are preventing us making the changes that are inevitable if our world is to survive.’ Like Read, he criticises dystopias and utopias, opting for a realism that gives us hope.

Taking thrutopic literature a step further, this summer Mslexia, in an article penned by novelist Manda Scott, offered a primer on the topic, giving advice and workshop ideas for writers wishing to try their hand at this new genre. Years ago, I dabbled in psychological science fiction, and the idea of creating a thrutopic story had me wondering. Yes, I could give it a try. Why not?

Then I read ‘The Secret Source,’ a short story by Ben Orki in The New Yorker. It’s set in the not-too-distant future where the world is trapped in the water crisis and cruel, cynical governments conserve drinking water by poisoning its minions. Dark reading from the writer who espoused ‘hope.’ I confess, I enjoyed this deliciously dystopic tale, perhaps for the same reason that I find villains are often more interesting than heroes. That is, I’m hedging towards thrutopia in philosophy if I can sink my teeth into the occasional dystopic story.

According to Read, the philosophy of thrutopia can be simply stated: ‘Don’t defer your dreams. We need those dreams now. Experience the present as paradisiacal, and change it where it isn’t, and then we might just get through.’ That sounds fine to me.

Illustration by Holly Warburton, purloined from *The New Yorker*.

Environmentalists hating science?

With the death of James Lovelock last week at the ripe age of 103, the obits have been full of his quotable remarks. He once said, ‘Too many greens are not just ignorant of science, they hate science.’ Lovelock wrote this in 1964 in his seminal book Homage to Gaia, reflecting on his hypothesis that the earth was like a self-regulating organism. It seems unimaginable now, but this idea that greens hate science held through the 70s and into the 80s. That was when the shift started to take hold and green politics was shedding off its hippy-come-new age origins. I recall being on the crust of that wave and how it changed my life.

My early childhood in the 60s was peppered with tie-dyed t-shirts, peace signs, Joan Baez and psychedelia. Although I was only superficially aware of it, the 60s saw the birth of the ecology movement and green politics. Although Lovelock was publishing his Gaia hypothesis before this time, the science behind his ideas hadn’t yet taken hold in the popular mindset. Unlike environmentalism today, the hippies and new agers lead this eco-awareness by pointing the figure not only at governments, but also at scientists that gave us the technologies that polluted our air and water. The emphasis was on returning to the sanctity of nature. This would have a huge influence on my thinking for years to come, aided and abetted by my post-divorce mother, who was a compulsive shopper for spirituality.

My late childhood and teen years were marked by a parade of Hindu swamis, mediation groups, psychic readings, Course in Miracles meetings and creative consciousness workshops, dabbling along the way in the Kabala, Zen Buddhism, Sufism and the writings of Carlos Castaneda. All of this was laced with pop psychology, and all of this was seen as cool. The highlights were the spiritual retreats led by the spiritual group du jour out into nature – forest preserves near Chicago or a jaunt up to the Wisconsin countryside. Since my family didn’t own a car, any trip that was devoid of public transport and that meant getting away from city neighbourhoods and skyscrapers was itself an otherworldly experience. Meditation and chanting were not required.

At these retreats that, alongside tree-hugging – I mean this literally – I was exposed to a dangerous dichotomy. Spirituality seemed anti-science because it accepted phenomena (e.g., psychic healing) that could not be explained by science. Scientists, especially medical scientists, didn’t know what they were doing. Like the materialists, they were seen as corporate and were pushing us away from higher consciousness, formerly known as God. I was aware of some of the ironies even then. The new age movement was in its own way commercial and corporate and had its share of charlatans, looking to separate people from their money. The biggest irony of them all was that scientists were the ones informing us about the long-term consequences of pollution – the greenhouse effect and climate change.

I was also troubled by this polemic as a teenager as my interests in biology and astronomy was growing in parallel to my interests in literature and language. Such is the mind of a teenager, where everything and nothing seem possible. I suspected a non-spiritual career move into the sciences would have had a detrimental effect on my relationship with my mother, self-righteous and judgmental in her quest for spirit.

As my world opened through education and travel, the spiritual movement was losing its grip on me. But something in it, perhaps its comforting familiarity or the idea that these spiritual paths went against convention, still held an attraction for me. It was there like an old song from childhood, a welcomed earworm.

In the mid-80s, when I was a postgrad at Edinburgh studying linguistics, my mother would write to me hinting that I take advantage of being in Scotland to visit Findhorn, a spiritual community in Inverness. It was known at the time for its organic farming and less charitably as a place that Americas visited to become hippies. I was intrigued enough to take the four-hour train journey – but on my own terms. I attended an environmental conference held at the community. It was a heady mix, intended to bring together spirituality and environmentalism. Interestingly, despite the distinctive styles and ways of speaking, the two domains did not clash. I realised that these worlds were no longer divided as they were in my childhood. As an aside, in the years since then, Findhorn has renamed itself as an ‘ecovillage.’

While my mother thought I was at Findhorn discovering spirit, I was meeting with Green Party members and representatives from environmental NGOs. And it was there that I encountered Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis, in all its beauty, its science and metaphor rolled into one.

I satisfied my mother’s spiritual needs in my letter to her with a new age spin on Gaia – that is, the Native American’s has been saying this all along – and I mentioned to her the Druids and self-proclaimed psychics and healers that I had met. I left out the geology, chemistry and biology supporting Lovelock’s work.

That was the last ‘spiritual retreat’ I went on. Gaia was the footbridge that took me into the sciences, leaving behind on the other side a dubious spiritual land. The river in between flows with psychology that I dip into and accept and the mindfulness in my daily meditation practice that can be seen as spiritual and/or physiological.

Photos by Yann Arthus-Bertrand

I’ve been a fan of photography as far back as I can remember, and it could have been my metier had I been born later, into the age of digital and affordable photography. As an admirer of others’ works, among my favourite photographers are Annie Leibovitz, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Georgia O’Keeffe (yes, she was a photographer too).

I can now add to this list Yann Arthus-Bertrand, having recently discovered his work in Nice. This French-born photographer and film director is known for his environmental and socially conscious works, including the films Human (2015), Woman (2019) and Legacy (2021).

The exhibit I saw was indoors at the Musée de la Photographie and outdoors in a public square and the popular Promenade du Paillon – a public park in the city centre. As art in public spaces has long been the preserve of sculptors and architects, I was delighted to see visual art’s poor cousin photography in these open spaces for all to experience.

I was most struck by Arthus-Bertrand’s aerial photos taken all over the world. It’s hard to summarise them as they depict scenes as eclectic as life itself. Some of these aerial shots verged on optical illusions, appearing at first to be one thing, but revealed to be something else upon close inspection. Whether capturing the wonders of the natural world or freezing in time the spectrum of poverty and human labour, the images hold an aesthetic as haunting as they are enjoyable. I did feel a slight discomfort in marvelling at the beautiful colours and boxy shapes of a favela in Sao Paulo as seen from the air.

When talking about art, images support the words. I recommend visiting Arthus-Bertrand’s website or doing a search for him on Pinterest, where his fans have pinned hundreds of his photos. On this note, I close on the words of Arthus-Bertrand, who like many of us wanted one career, but ended up doing something else:

I wanted to be a scientist. I did a thesis on lions. But I realised photography can show things writing can’t. Lions were my professors of photography.

Dying languages, changing climates

With the recent publication of ‘Native Speaker 2,’a few people have asked me about the inspiration behind this story of a feisty nonagenarian who is one of the last speakers of an American Indian language. It was loosely based on a talk that I heard at a linguistics conference back in 1995. When an old American Indian woman spoke in a quivering voice of her sister’s death marking the demise of their language – with no one to speak to, a language doesn’t live – there wasn’t a dry eye in the auditorium. Some 25 years later, the emotion of her words stays with me. My retelling added some humour in the characterisation of the aged woman, and I used the Wintu language group of Californian languages as the language on the verge of extinction. My gratitude to Leanne Hinton’s Flutes of Fire, a highly readable book about Californian Indian Languages.

Dying and extinct languages are undoubtedly one of the many consequences of colonialism. One of the other consequences is that countries colonised in the modern era (16^th century to the present) are more vulnerable to disasters brought on by climate change. This has been highlighted these last few weeks with coverage of COP26, where indigenous peoples and their supporters had a more notable presence than at previous COPs. One native Brazilian, protesting against the destruction of rainforests, also made the point that the rich nations that colonised the southern hemisphere have caused most of the devastation to our planet and are still reaping the rewards.

Okay, I was talking about California earlier, a rich state in rich country (speaking in broad terms). America has been both colonised and coloniser. Though it could come down to the appellations, Native/Indian American and just American. Nevertheless, the cultural and linguistic side of these dual roles, coloniser and colonised, has been surreptitious and slow, taking place over decades and centuries. But on the environmental side, the spirit of both roles can be seen in the damage the US has brought upon the world, including itself, in my lifetime. America has become the bully who self harms.

On a lighter and nerdier note, according to linguists and anthropologists, the relationship between climate and language has other direct links. Differences across languages can be explained in part by different regional climates. For example, languages spoken in warm, wet and heavily wooded areas, such as in the Asian-Indian subcontinent, tend to use more vowels and fewer consonants. At the other extreme, languages used in arid, desert-like regions are more consonant heavy. One of the explanations for this has to do with the effects of dryness on the vocal cords (all vowel sounds are voiced, involving vibration of the vocal cords).

The conference I went to back in the nineties was my first and last native American language conference. As fascinating as it was, I was among the few non-indigenous people in attendance. The linguistic field of language documentation for dying languages had moved on and was starting to hand over the reins to those whose ancestors spoke the native languages. Although people were welcoming, I felt like an intruder, a descendant of contemptible European colonisers. I only wish now that my younger self realised the full extent of the harm of colonisation, damage that goes far beyond languages and cultures.

Being Off Grid

The adage goes, ‘If you want to learn something, teach it.’ I think equally true is, ‘If you want to learn about something, write about it.’

East Anglia Bylines asked me to contribute a piece on a local energy project for their series of articles to run during COP26. In brief, the little-known village of Swaffham Prior, England is planning to use ground and air source heat pumps to bring heat into homes through a centralised community network. Until now, such heat pumps have been used for individual buildings and housing/office developments. This village will be among the first places in the UK to connect an entire community to a renewable heating network.

As I mentioned in the article, some seventy percent of the village’s 300 homes are currently burning oil for heating. What I didn’t mention was my surprise at learning this. At the risk of sounding naïve, I thought heating oil went out with flower power (that’s a reference to the 1960s for my younger readers). I had assumed every home in Britain was on the National Grid by now.

According to statistica.com (UK: heating methods survey 2021 | Statista), some 4% of UK homes – that’s over one million households – use oil-burning for heat. Nearly all of these are in rural areas and small villages like Swaffham Prior. Nearly 90% of homes in the UK use gas, the vast majority of which are on the national grid using central heating systems. Like other Western nations, we have a long way to go towards green energies.

Being off the grid once had a certain romantic appeal, a sense of independence from government-led systems. When it comes to home heating, for me this fantasy evaporated back in the 80s when I found myself living in Scotland with only a gas fireplace – no radiators. I recall winter mornings seeing the steam from my breath as I put on the kettle.

The only other time that I lived off grid was in Oman (2014-2015). Gas was only used for cooking and was delivered in large canisters that were hooked up outside our apartment building. Each canister lasted a few months and cost the equivalent of $2 (water was more expensive). The trick was knowing when you needed a refill and then keeping your eyes open for the pickup truck with canisters in tow. As for winter heating, there wasn’t any. In the coldest winter months, daytime temperatures were about 20C (68F) at their lowest. At night, being in the interior of Oman surrounded by desert, it could get quite cold, near freezing some nights. Our heating system consisted of fleece blankets and winter coats.

As an urban Westerner, I’ve grown accustomed to life on the grid, but I don’t see why we cannot follow in the footsteps of Swaffham Prior and other communities opting for what is essentially a green grid.

Getting Bees

Pardon the pun, but the English language makes it hard to talk about these apoidean insects without falling into word play (to bee or not…).

When it comes to bees, I have my own character arch. I grew up fearing them even though I didn’t see them often in my Chicago childhood. Some of this fear, like many fears, overlapped with hatred and ignorance. My mother was an insect hater, shooing away flies and ants, crushing the odd centipede and spider who dared to crawl around our apartment. My grandmother, who also raised me, was once stung by a bee in the supermarket, giving her a rounded bump on her otherwise flat bum. She was sure it was a bee. Reflecting back, I’m not so sure. Bee stings on humans are in fact rare. Sure, beekeepers wear jumpsuits and netted hats, but they are after all trespassing and disrupting the bees’ homes.

If a bee were responsible for the bump on Grandma’s bum, it was because the old woman was asking for it. During summer months, she would wear white trousers and tops that were either all white, or white with some yellow print. She certainly dressed the part to attract pollinators. I suspect too that the allegedly aggressive bee sensed that Grandma lived on a diet of chocolate bars, coffee cake and Danish pastry, washed down many evenings with a vodka martini. The sweetness must have oozed from her skin.

Believing much of what I was told as a child, bees were to be feared and not swatted at as you would invariably miss, and the bee would come back around and sting you. You could end up in hospital! While there are people who have allergies to bee stings, they can be treated at home – but this rational couldn’t be accepted when I was growing up or even into early adulthood, where I would step nervously away from any bee I encountered.

I overcame my fear of bees in a single afternoon some dozen years after my grandmother’s purported incident. I was back in Edinburgh and took a day trip to the west coast of Scotland with my former landlady Erica, one of my surrogate mothers. We were in the gardens of some stately home having a picnic when a small bee came drifting over our food. Just when I was about to give Erica a warning, she noticed it and smiled, while luring the creature closer to her with a strawberry and directing it to a patch of heather. She made some comment about how ‘marvellous’ the creatures were.

In the time between my picnic with Erica and the bee and the present day, like any self-respecting environmental activist, I have learned about the value of bees. I’m thinking of the quote attributed to Albert Einstein, even if not completely accurate, it makes the point: ‘If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.’ In the popular press, I have also encountered some myths about bees. Not to detract from the dangers of pesticides and pollution, but the leading destroyers of bees are not manmade chemicals, but other insects, such as hornets and mites.

This brings me to one of the best books I’ve read recently, The Ardent Swarm, a novel by Tunisian writer Yamen Manai. A beekeeper in a village in Iraq loses thousands of his bees to an invasion of hornets. This is against the backdrop of Isis-like ‘holy men’ descending upon the village bringing gifts to influence the villagers to vote for them and join their militant cause. The allegorical link between the destruction of the beehives and the lives of the villagers becomes apparent with the discovery that the hornets came over from East Asia in packages brought to the village by the ‘holy men.’

I’ve only just started to scratch the surface of books, fiction and non-fiction, about bees. This appears to be a topic full of aficionados and maybe even fetishists. While I do adore these creatures and worry about their survival, I don’t think I belong to either category. Having said that, I’ve recently purchased a Save the Bee packet from Friends of the Earth to do my bit. If Erica were around, I know she’d be proud of me.

(Whew, got through that without any more puns.)

His Octopus Teacher

Craig Foster’s Oscar-winning documentary, My Octopus Teacher, did everything a documentary should do. Beautifully filmed, it followed a clear narrative and gave a generalist audience scientific information mixed alongside a real-life character arch. How could anyone object to such a film? Pippa Bailey in The New Statesman does just that.

She starts by mocking Foster’s friendship with the octopus: ‘“I remember that day when it all started…” Foster intones, as though it’s the start of a romcom; the music swells when she reaches for his hand.’ Bailey fails to point out that he never gave the octopus a name and throughout the film elucidates the biology and behaviour of the octopus in ways that obviously distinguish it from human. Example: he informs us that most of the octopus’s cognition is in their arms.

Bailey goes on the attack of Foster’s approach to his subject: ‘Foster imagines the octopus as being like “a human friend”, waving to say, “Hi, I’m excited to see you”; he can feel her trust for him, he says, her invitation into her world. He wonders what she’s thinking, what she dreams about.’

Reading this, I couldn’t help but to think about the way people interact with their dogs and cats, treating them very much like human friends. When dogs behave in ways akin to the human for ‘excited to see you’ it’s because we have trained them to behave like that with stimuli of food, petting and playful exercise. As for cats, who display limited understanding of humans, we talk to them as if they care and when it’s bleeding obvious that they don’t care, we praise them for their independence. Furthermore, the therapeutic value of having pets is well documented. According to QI, the act of cuddling a dog can relieve stress for up to six months after the cuddle. Given that Foster points out at the start of the film that he was at a crossroads, unproductive as a film-maker and troubled by this in a way that sounded like a mid-life crisis wrapped in depression, this therapy was needed.

Having said all of this, I do think Bailey makes some cogent points. She notes: ‘There are, to my mind, two extremes in documentaries about animals: those that present the animal kingdom as separate from people, their only human presence David Attenborough’s narration (other presenters are available); and those, such as Tiger King or the masterful Blackfish, that document an overly close relationship between humans and animals: obsessive, intrusive. My Octopus Teacher doesn’t go that far…’ Bailey goes on to say, ‘Animals are not there for us, to be treated as commodities or companions as we see fit; to be reduced to their usefulness to us. Nature does not exist to alleviate our restless emptiness, much as it may do so.’ I agree with that, and Tiger King was at times hard watching for these reasons – profit motive and self-aggrandisement reigned supreme (pun intended). But I don’t think that Foster’s documentary erred in these ways. In the end it was clear that animals have their own, often cruel, life cycles that we humans need to give space for by not continuing to destroy our natural environment.

Bailey’s conclusion: ‘Must we view an octopus as a friend, a saviour, a teacher? Couldn’t we simply settle for not eating them?’

My conclusion: An octopus can be a friend, a saviour, a teacher, or simply something of the natural world to marvel at. But whatever you do, don’t eat them.