BIG FUG LINKS 1

Big Fug can be relied on to provide some of the most interesting links around. He has unusual tastes. Here is the first crop. Many more to come.

Animusic Pipe Dream
An extraordinary piece of computer animation. Watch and be amazed.

If The Earth Were A Sandwich
Never before have two pieces of bread been simultaneously placed on the ground directly opposite each other on the globe, thus making an EARTH SANDWICH.

Getting Real: The book
The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application. 171 page PDF, $19. Buy it now and download it today!

Puzzle World Database
Lee Krasnow builds extraordinary wooden puzzles

LATEST ART/SubScreenSonic

'Latest Art' is a new production from the South Coast that deserves a wide viewing - a no-nonsense gallery showcase of diverse work with some genuinely interesting articles. Refreshingly free from twee polemic or academe, I can see this catching on in a big way. Available FREE in London and the South-East.

Most interesting piece for me in this first issue was the article 'On the Wall' by Jeff Hemmings, linked to 'SubscreenSonic', a new exhibition of concert and gig posters at the Basement in Brighton. It asks the big question as to whether this show can whet the appetite of promoters, venue managers and artists and reignite the passion for gig posters that existed in the 1960s and 1970s.

I have been pondering this issue for some time, having spent five years cataloguing Felix Dennis' OZ Archives, studying in particular and in detail the history of such posters - an explosion of graphic art that hadn't been seen since Art Nouveau at the turn of the 20th century (and very influenced by that style, incidentally).

This was further reinforced by purchasing 'Art of Modern Rock' by Paul Grushkin & Dennis King [Chronicle Books], the sequel to 'The Art of Rock' documenting the earlier period, an eye-popping collection of more than 1,800 extraordinary posters produced in the last 25 years. Responding to the demise of the LP in the mid 1980s (with its superb tradition of album cover art), the rock poster rushed in to fill the void and swiftly boosted a growing independent/ alternative music scene. The book is stunning and overwhelming. The new artists are using old fashioned letterpress and silkscreen alongside digital technology with extraordinary results. There is work here from 375 international artists and studios. I don't believe that I had seen a single one of these posters in any magazine in the UK. Why is that ? Open any double page in this giant book and you're presented with an array of startling images in every graphic style under the sun. I have yet to show this book to anyone who is not startled and overwhemed. The work stands comparison with the very best of the hippy posters of the past. Why is this not happening in the UK ? Or is it about to happen? I shall be investigating further. In fact, I've decided to head down this afternoon. Will report back as discovered the show finishes tomorrow.

As it turns out Sub Screen Sonic was fab, an impressive showcase of work by 33 artists and studios - all American except for one English guy (Nick Rhodes from Manchester) and an Italian. The organisers told me they'd had large numbers of visitors during the week and one can only hope that more such shows follow in the UK and that we see more silkscreen/letterpress work happening in the UK.

ARTHUR LEE LOVE FEST

Benefit Concert For LOVE's Arthur Lee To Be Held At NYC's Beacon Theater on June 23rd.

'An all-star benefit concert, titled WE'RE DOING IT FOR LOVE, will be held at New York's Beacon Theater on Friday, June 23 which will attempt to cover the massive medical expenses of rock legend Arthur Lee (LOVE) who was diagnosed in February with Acute Myelogenous Leukemia (AML). Unfortunately, Arthur has no medical insurance, already has medical bills in excess of $100,000 and is facing a probable bone marrow transplant.

With a rapidly increasing lineup at press time including Robert Plant, Ian Hunter, David Johansen, Yo La Tengo and Garland Jeffreys and a host of other significant artists expected to be added in the coming weeks, in addition to hopefully solving a major financial crisis, this concert will shine a long-overdue spotlight on the hugely influential but greatly underappreciated music of one of the truly innovative and influential rock artists of all-time. Tickets go onsale Friday, May 12th at noon at the Beacon Theater box office (74th & Broadway) and all Ticketmaster outlets (212-307-7171), www.ticketmaster.com. All of the concert's proceeds will go to Arthur's medical expenses.

Produced by veteran New York concert promoter Steve Weitzman of SW Productions, in association with Arthur Lee's manager Mark Linn, the show will feature artists who will either be performng Arthur Lee's material, their own originals or a combination of both. Many of the artists invited have had a history of performing LOVE covers in their live sets or on records, and Robert Plant, for one, has been performing three of Arthur's songs regurlarly during his most recent tour.

This upcoming concert infact, owes a large debt of gratitude to the legendary Led Zeppelin vocalist, as he was the first significant artist who agreed to perform, stating simply in a mid-April email to Mr. Weitzman that he "would definitely like to be involved...and will sing with anybody!" He has also insisted on taking care of his own plane fare from London in addition to his NY hotel expenses even when those were offerered to be included in the show's budget. Very soonafter Mr. Plant confirmed, Ian Hunter followed, and in addition to doing his own performance, offered to have his stellar band back up Mr. Plant who happily accepted that arrangement. The show's producer was told to expect"some old Led Zeppelin songs" as well as material by Arthur Lee and a few other songs long admired by Mr. Plant that he hasn't often performed live. Mr. Hunter and Mr. Plant also plan on singing together on certain selections, marking the first time onstage that they will have ever done that.

Understandably, for Arthur Lee, currently battling his life-threatening illness in Memphis, news of this concert has been practically the best medicine possible and has significantly picked up his spirits. When told about Robert Plant's involvement by his manager Mark Linn, he said, "That's great! Why don't you get that guitarist too... Jimmy something," adding with his "arthuresque" humor and take on life, "Robert Plant is a man of his word. and a man's word is his castle!" While his situation is extremely serious and the next few weeks will be his most challenging with ongoing chemotherapy and extensive hospital stays, he recently told his manager thathe is not afraid of dying, only pain. If he is physically able to travel next month, he added, he would love to attend the Beacon show.

It has been well-chronicled that Arthur Lee is a man larger than life. He is a flamboyant artist with a trail of myth and mythology that follows him like a feathered boa. His band, LOVE, was the first rock band signed toElektra Records, and Arthur is responsible for talking company founder Jac Holzman into signing The Doors. Before all this, in 1964, Arthur gave his friend, an unknown Jimi Hendrix, his first appearance on record (the Arthur Lee penned "My Diary" by Rosa Lee Brooks). LOVE's third recording, the landmark "Forever Changes," is still widely considered to be one of the greatest rock and roll discs of all time. In a Rolling Stone special issuetwo years ago, it was voted the 40th greatest album ever, on a list ranking the top 500 LP's of all time, even finishing ahead of such classics as Jimi Hendrix's "Electric Ladyland", the Rolling Stones' "Beggars Banquet", "Meet The Beatles," Led Zeppelin "IV" and John Lennon's "Imagine."

Mass acceptance was elusive for LOVE at the height of their creativity as they were definitely not "careerist." They preferred staying close to home, living together in "the castle" near Griffith Park in Los Angeles as opposed to life on the road. Arthur even turned down invitations to perform at the Monterey Pop Festival and Woodstock. In the late '80's and early '90's, Arthur spent approximately seven years in jail for "allegedly" shooting off a gun in his apartment.

When he was released, he wasted no time getting back to the road and his music. He performed his first New York shows in 25 years in 1994 when he was booked by Steve Weitzman at Tramps for three shows over two engagements in the summer and fall of that year.During the past four years, Arthur Lee has performed the entire "Forever Changes" album to sold out audiences and fantastic reviews throughout Europe and the United States. backed by the local LA group Baby Lemonade, and a string and horn section. Just when he thought his bad times were finally over, he learned he was sick.

Information regardiing the latest talent additions will be constantly updated on Arthur Lee's website, www.thelovesociety.com. In addition, Rolling Stone magazine has a preview article in their special 1,000th issue ("In The News" section, page 44). Fans who are unable to attend the concert and want to make a credit card donation to Arthur will find a link for that on his website.To everyone who has him in his or her thoughts, Arthur Lee sends his LOVE.'

For further contact: Steve Weitzman/SW Productions - 212-254-1725, steveweitzman10@hotmail.com.Mark Linn, Arthur Lee's manager - 615-480-6923, delmores@comcast.netAlicia Gelernt, Noble Music - 646-408-9645, alicia@noblemusic.net

[Thanks to Ian Grant for the info]

RIP: Desmond Dekker

KEITH RICHARDS WATCH: Richards is astounding his doctors, by the latest accounts, with the speed of his recovery. He is the man who cannot die by normal (or abnormal) means. He is not appearing in 'The Pirates of the Caribbean 2' as initially rumoured.

LEWES FOOTNOTE: Composed while listening to 'On The Boards' by Taste and 'Raw Sienna' by Savoy Brown - both on crunchy vinyl, whilst having tea with Russell, who reports that earlier in the day he spotted Nick Cave in a brown suit in Bill's, our local eating and meeting venue. The weather still hasn't improved.

IDENTITY CARDS/PASSPORT RENEWAL

Manek Dubash writes :
'IBM researcher Michael Osborne, whose job is research into secure ID cards, slated the UK government’s ID cards scheme on the grounds of cost, over-centralisation, and being the wrong tool for the job. Based in Big Blue’s Zurich research labs, where the scanning tunnelling microscope was invented and won its inventors a Nobel Prize, Osborne said that the problem is neither the cards nor the fact that the scheme is intended to use biometric technology.

The big issue is that the UK government, plans to set up a central database containing volumes of data about its citizens. Unlike other European governments, most of whom already use some form of ID card, the central database will allow connections between different identity contexts - such as driver, taxpayer, or healthcare recipient - which compromises security. Centrally-stored biometric data would be attractive to hackers, he said, adding that such data could be made anonymous but that the UK Government’s plans do not include such an implementation. '
See full story here: Techworld

To keep up with the latest developments on this topic, visit NO21D - the main site for the national campaign against ID cards and the National Identity Register. It is not affiliated to any political party and is funded almost entirely by voluntary donations. Founded in 2004, it aims to bring together people and organisations from all sections of the community in opposition to the Government's plan for compulsory registration, fingerprinting and lifelong tracking of all UK residents by means of a centralised 'identity' database. They want the public to be properly informed about a scheme that has kept invisible by spin, but that aims to transform all our lives. NO2ID is supported by over 70 organisations, including unions, political parties, and local
councils-and more than 30,000 individuals. They already have around 100 local groups across the UK. You can find the nearest one here

WHY YOU SHOULD RENEW YOUR PASSPORT NOW

Passports will change soon in order to force you to have a government ID card. On March 30th, the Identity Cards Act 2006 became law. Among other things this lets the Home Office turn your passport into a ‘designated document’ for its ID card scheme. That means that as soon as it is can—maybe in 2008 or 2009, but possibly before—the new ‘United Kingdom Identity & Passport Service’ (UKIPS) will refuse to renew your passport unless you attend an official interview and agree to be fingerprinted and give a wide range of personal information for a “National Identity Register” database.

The National Identity Register (NIR) will be the biggest store of personal data in the world. And once you are on it, you are on it for life. You will be required to update any details about you that change for the official record, or be fined. They want to make sure they know where you live. Every use of your passport will be recorded on the NIR—when you travel and whenever you use it to verify your identity, say at the bank or to get a job. That information may be seen by police, tax, housing, and benefits officials and thousands of other Government agencies. It may even be checked by private companies.

But for now you have a choice. The current rule is that you can renew your passport at any time. NO2ID got the Home Office to make its policy clear, and you can read it on the new UKIPS website: “You do not have to wait until your passport is nearly expired to renew it, but we can add no more than 9 months unexpired validity from the old passport to the new one. You can renew your passport whenever you wish, but you must pay the full fee and no refund can be given for the unexpired validity in the old passport”.

In other words, you can buy 10 years’ freedom from compulsory Registration on the NIR for just £51, right now. You may get slightly longer than 10 years on your new passport—but that’s entirely up to the Home Office. The government says the price will rise to at least £93 when it starts issuing ID cards. But the way you can get a passport will change from as early as October.

That’s why we suggest you act now and “renew for freedom”.

UPDATE: GORE AND LOVELOCK

Following on from my postings concerning my encounter with Al Gore and his latest activities (see: I Bought Al Gore Lunch: Real As Rain and Al Gore 2: An Inconvenient Truth ), the man himself popped up in major pieces in these two mainstream magazines in the same month.
We're all going green it seems and Al is the new Poster Boy of the Climate Change revolution. Chance to judge for yourself as Gore will be making a presentation of his no-holds-barred view of climate change on 21st June 2-4pm at Tate Britain. The event is being organised by The Carbon Neutral Company in conjunction with the All Party Parliamentary Climate Change Group. Immediately afterwards, CNC are co-hosting with BSkyB, a panel discussion about what UK business is and could do to achieve a step change in managing CO2 emissions.



Following on my from previous post on James Lovelock (see: James Lovelock: Man of the Moment ), purpose of which being to underline the fact that JL had been a longtime supporter of nuclear energy rather than a deep green who'd only recently changed his viewpoint, comes hard and fast evidence that, in fact, he has been part of the nuclear lobby for years to a much greater extent than previously realised and also had connections with the intelligence establishment.
See: http://www.nuclearspin.org/index.php/James_Lovelock

MUSICAL ROUNDUP

Guitar Man by Will Hodgkinson
[Bloomsbury 2006]
A Six-String Odyssey or You Love That Guitar More Than You Love Me

At the age of 34, Will – who had been told he was tone deaf at school, decides not only to learn the guitar and but also commits himself to performing before a live audience in six months time by boasting to all his friends.

In particular, he wants to learn and play ‘Anji’ by Davy Graham – a tricky but seminal guitar instrumental, recorded by Paul Simon and Bert Jansch amongst others.

Having exhausted the advice of immediate friends and colleagues, he begins roaming further afield and chats and take lessons from Johnny Marr and Bert Jansch. He goes to the States and meets Roger McGuinn in Orlando, travels to Nashville, Memphis and New York and on his return, buys an electric guitar and meets the legendary eccentric/reclusive Davy Graham himself.

In addition, he learns about such outsiders as Teddy Paige and Jackson C. Frank and such masters as Django Reinhart, Robert Johnson, Link Wray and Charlie Christian, and about the whole history of the instrument from Renaissance times to the present day.

The author if a born story teller with a delightful touch, who deftly interweaves these experiences and encounters with accounts of his attempts to form a band called Double Fantasy, and rehearse them in the basement of his family home and the impact that his whole adventure has on private life, especially on his long-suffering partner NJ. All ends happily in a successful gig and a final leeson from Jansch, who patiently takes him through ‘Anji’ until he more or less gets the hang of it.,

What could have been mawkish in the wrong hands, is instead, truly informative and inspiring. - a joyful, amusing, engaging book that should be read by anybody whose trying to learn or planning to learn the guitar. Also by anybody who plays guitar or is remotely interested in the instrument.

Read Will Hodgkinson's article on Davy Graham in The Guardian: 'The Original Guitar God'

DAVY GRAHAM
There is definitely a resurgence of interest in this beatnik pioneer. I well remember some years back now, excitedly discovering ‘Folk, Blues and Beyond’, originally recorded Decca in 1964 with Gus Dudgeon on the desk (now available again on Topic) and it remains my favourite – a perfect blend of styles and genres, way ahead of its time and highly influential.

Also re-released of late is another stunner – ‘Folk Roots, New Routes – by Davy Graham with Shirley Collins [A Wing and a Prayer 2005} which startlingly juxtaposes the pure trad folk voice and tunes of Shirley with esoteric and adventurous guitar work from Graham.

So enamoured did I become that I made strenuous efforts to track Graham down and book for one of our ‘New Beat Experience’ events in Brighton. No joy unfortunately.

Davy Graham Official site: http://www.daveygraham.moonfruit.com/
Apparently DG is at work on a new album called Fahrenheit and Centigrade
Outright Records: http://www.outrightrecords.co.uk/about_davy.htm
Find out more about Davy Graham and past releases
Davy Graham discography:http://kneeling.co.uk/frames2.asp?pages/davygraham/default.asp


CROSSING THE BRIDGE: THE SOUND OF ISTANBUL
Just been to see this remarkable music film at our local arthouse cinema (Duke of York’s in Brighton). A documentary journey, directed by Fatih Akin, through the musical underworlds of the music of Istanbul in the company of Alexander Hacke who records an extraordinary range of music – from heavy rap, experimental, Turkish pop, Romany and Kurdish to Pink-Floydie eastern psychedelia and much more. Moving and inspiring and a must see.
[The soundtrack album and book of the film are available. DVD is out on June 26th]

Here is the synopsis from the official press pack. Further details from the movies' official site: http://www.crossingthebridge.de/

'A maverick in Istanbul. ALEXANDER HACKE, a member of the German avant-garde band EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN for more than 20 years, first came into contact with the city and its music while producing the score for the movie HEAD-ON (GEGEN DIE WAND). In Istanbul he met the members of the neo-psychedelic band BABA ZULA. When their bass player dropped out, he was asked to sit in for her. Alex Hacke is a collector of musical styles and loves to experiment with sound, and so it didn’t take much to persuade him. But he didn’t just bring his bass guitar, but also a complete mobile recording studio, including his “magic mike”, which he has used to capture exotic sounds from all over the world. He calls his approach to collecting sounds “street recording”, and it allows him to make professional recordings just about anywhere.

And so he sets out to capture the musical diversity of Istanbul onto his hard drive. His aim is to expose western ears to the broadest possible spectrum of Turkish music, ranging from modern electronic sounds, rock and hip-hop, right down to classical “Arabesque” music. FATIH AKIN, director of HEAD-ON, accompanies him with his camera and shoots a portrait of Istanbul’s lively music scene, whose music suffuses every part of the city, and which is dearly loved by all of its inhabitants. Hacke’s home base is the venerable Büyük Londra Oteli (Grand Hotel de Londres) in Istanbul’s district of Beyoglu, probably the most “European” spot in all of Turkey. From here he wanders through an alien, contradictory, lively, and seductive world, collecting impressions and tracks, drifting along in the unstoppable stream of this mega city of myriad facets.

But no hard drive or film can do justice to the diversity and overwhelming force of musical and visual impressions this city generates. With this experience he finally returns home, a musical treasure in his baggage, which now needs to be sifted and presented to the world.'

ON THE TURNTABLE

Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros – Streetcore [Hellcat Records 2003]
Amadou & Mariam: 1990-1995 The Best of the African Years [Syllart Productions 2005]
Toumani Diabate’s Symmetric Orchestra [World Circuit 2006]
Hamilton de Holanda – Samba do Avião [Kind of Blue 2006]
Anouar Braham – Le Voyage de Sahar [ECM 2006]
The Django Reinhardt Festival: Live At Birdland
[Kind of Blue 2006]

Compilations
Alligator Records 35 x35 (35 Songs, 35 Years of Genuine Houserockin’ Music) [2006].
The R&B Scene [Deram 1998]
The Blues Scene [Deram 1999]
Feber 2: Andres Lokko Folk [Amigo Musik 2005]
Play Back (Good Music Re-visited) [Sony BMG 2005]

Normal Service Will Be Resumed...

BOHO IS BACK

Amazingly - we're playing a gig.

Gatwick: 35 minutes

Victoria: 55 minutes

Brighton: 20 minutes

See you there

Cowboy Poetry

"Heading Home" by Joelle Smith

Used with permission from www.CowboyPoetry.com

DIGEST 1

Firstly, apologies to regular readers for the lack of postings this month. Real life has intervened in the shape of professional deadlines.

In addition, I have launched a new blog which has required a great deal of work and attention: The World of Trees I hope you enjoy it.

Book of the Month: One of the most articulate and interesting interviewees in Martin Scorsese's Dylan documentary was the legendary Dave van Ronk, whose autobiography 'The Mayor of MacDougal Street' has recently been published by Da Capo Press. Van Ronk, who died in 2002 actually set out to write a social history of the culture of Greenwich Village but passed on before such a project could be completed. His friend and biographer Elijah Wald (author of the acclaimed 'Escaping the Delta', a biography of Robert Johnson) took the chapters van Ronk had completed and, in a masterful manner, pieced together the remainder of the narrative with consummate skill and grace. Van Ronk's distinctive voice resonates throughout the book and this remarkable work of biographical ventriloquism takes the reader to the heart of the burgeoning folk scene of the 1960s in which van Ronk was to play such an important role. This bear of a man knew and played with all the major figures on the scene, encouraging the young Dylan and even housing him for a while. He also hung out with jazz greats and politicos and proves the perfect guide to the intricacies of the late '50s bohemian culture. For musicians, there's a lot of detailed instrument talk here plus a non-airbrushed view of the scuzziness of the nascent folk circuit. Van Ronk had a built-in bullshit meter, refused to suffer fools gladly and was never backwards in coming forwards with an opinion, however unfashionable. This engaging memoir, stuffed with tall tales and vivid anecdotes, leavened with a deep streak of black humour, is a fitting memorial to one of the true originals.

Delighted that legendary Dylan scribe Michael Gray has got his own blog up and running here: http://bobdylanencyclopedia.blogspot.com/

His new book 'The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia' is due to be published in the States and here by Continuum, on June 15th (H/B 832 pages. £25/$40). The first edition will contain a searchable CD-Rom and has 850 entries and 16pp of illustrations. According to the publishers, the many different kinds of entries include:

- Bios of singers, musicians, songwriters and composers who have influenced Dylan and/or worked with him
- Critical assessments and factual details (including place & date of recording, date of release and original catalogue nos.) for every Dylan album and for a large number of individual songs selected from Dylan’s decades of work
- Bios of writers, poets and other key cultural figures who have impacted on Dylan’s work and/or who are mentioned within it, from William Blake to William Carlos Williams, from Lenny Bruce to Franz Kafka
- Topics like Artists vs. Critics, Angels, Dylan Interpreters, The Co-option of Music of Advertising, Early 1960s Pop Music, Beat Poetry, Rock’n’Roll, Country Blues, Pre-C20 American poetry, Dylan Fanzines, Cowboy Heroes, The Use of Hollywood Dialogue in Dylan’s Lyrics, ‘Grandma and Walpole’s Cat,” “Frying an Egg on Stage,” and many many more.

RIP: Ali Farka Touré
Writer Bill Cardoso, who coined the term "gonzo" to describe the journalism of Hunter S Thompson, has died in California at the age of 68.

Publishing on Demand: There's been a flurry of articles of late on the new possibilities offered through digital publishing for aspiring authors to see their work in print by creating their own books. This kind of thing used to be called 'vanity publishing' but is now reemerging as yet another aspect of the 'digital empowerment' debate. Still early days, but the skeleton of a new world of publishing is now visible. [Thanks to Flo for the sources]

'Publish and be downloaded' by Damian Whitworth
An internet entrepreneur says his latest venture will revolutionise the book-publishing industry, turning us all into potential J. K. Rowlings

'Frustrated author? Publish yourself' and the follow-up piece 'Click, download, publish' by Victor Keegan. Go to http://technology.guardian.co.uk/ and search by author.

'From blog to book' [The Bookseller]: 'The New York Times tells us that blogs that aspire to literary permanence, can now achieve it through the new Book-Smart software from Blurb, a publish-your-own-book service. "The software, which is expected to be available free later this month at www.blurb.com, features a 'Slurper' tool that automatically downloads and reformats the contents of a Web log into a book that bloggers and their admirers can purchase online."

Find out about the Lulu Blooker Prize, the world's first literary prize devoted to "blooks": books based on blogs or websites.

The number of bloggers - people who write online journals - topped 30m during the week of March 11th, according to technorati.com, the search engine that monitors activity of this kind.

New Developments

A powerful poster for an important event.
See: http://www.freewestpapua.org/ and http://www.infopapua.org/

Delighted that the first story to be picked up from THE GENERALIST is currrently featuring on the US alt-journalism site www.mixeye.com/ Click Browse and go to 'The Truth Is Out There Somewhere.'

Pleased to get one of my pictures in the latest issue of Viva Lewes, our fab new local web mag. This is an original site by any standards - it scrolls sidways for one. A beautiful piece of web design, complemented by genuinely interesting editorial with real style. In addition, it is providing an important service to the local community, giving the town a new view of itself. An unqualified success.

Excited by the fact that our band BOHO is now featuring on http://www.myspace.com/bohobeat.
Check it out.

There is the thinnest of crescent moons tonight. The world is turning.

Stephan Schmidheiney: Rio 1992 & BCSD

Stephan Schmidheiney is not a name known to many, certainly not to me before May 1992, when I interviewed him in London on the eve of the Rio Earth summit, at which he led the Business Council for Sustainable Development - an organisation he funded and directed - that succeeded in having a big influence on all aspects of the Rio process. As a result, this Swiss billionaire has ever since been seen (or promoted) as an enlightened businessman with a global reputation for pushing forward enlightened messages and policies, enouraging the corporate community to become more sustainable and ecologic. And to have invested in such enterprises himself. If not Bob Geldof, then certainly a man with a mission and deep pockets to further his aims, with the ear of the Presidents, CEOs, the World Bank and other global leaders - including Bono no doubt. As we shall see in Part 2: things are not always what they seem. But here to begin with is the profile of Schmidheiny and his views I wrote, as part of a larger pre-Rio piece entitled 'Business As Usual' for The Indepedent on Sunday (published 31 May 1992).

The Schmidheiny dynasty began in the late nineteenth century with Jacob, a shoemaker's son. In 1866, Jacob bought Heerbrugg castle and the surrounding area in eastern Switzerland and built a weaving mill and a brickworks. Four generations later, an empire has been created that forms an important part of the Swiss economy.

Jacob divided his fortune between his two sons, establishing a family custom which survives to this day. The Schmidheiny rule of inheritance requires that each son is given a domain over which he has absolute control, to avoid family squabbling. When Stephan — Jacob's great-grandson, a qualified lawyer now aged 44 — came into his inheritance, he rebuilt it into three private holding companies which together control Landis & Gyr (energy management), Leica (optical and scientific instruments), Asea Brown Boveri (power stations and electrical equipment) and SMH (watches, including Swatch). Schmidheiny is also on the board of Nestle and of Switzerland's largest hank, the Union Bank of Switzerland. He and his elder brother Thomas, who runs one of the world's largest cement companies and is on the boards of Swissair and Credit Suisse, have between them a net worth in excess of $3bn.

Journalists interviewing Stephan Schmidheiny are given in advance two approved Press profiles. One describes "an achiever with a penchant for fundamentalist social criticism and an inclination to self-doubt". As a young man, we are told, he considered becoming a missionary or a development worker. "I had a tough childhood. Not materially — we wanted far within^ But f was preoccupied with the big questions — existence, the meaning of life." His father wanted him to qualify as an engineer; Stephan wanted to study law. He hung around in Zurich, "plagued by self-doubt".

His degree thesis, on investment risk guarantees, dealt with a subject dear to the heart of his father, who had tried to get such a concept accepted by the Swiss government. It was a theme in tune with Switzerland's internationally expanding industries, which were looking for some form of state-backed guarantee for investments they were making in the third world. Within a year Stephan had not only been awarded his doctorate but also surmounted his identity crisis. By 1984, he had control of a sizeable part of an empire worth around Sfr2bn, with 23,000 employees.

Two events followed which are crucial to the official presentations of Stephan's life and character: a business slump and an environmental health ha2ard. In a profile in the September 1986 issue of Fortune magazine, he said: "For 30 years my father's company enjoyed uninterrupted growth. But six months after I became managing director in 1975, the construction market collapsed and we lost 30 per cent of our business. That kind of experience forms the pattern of your thinking."

[n 1976 he decided to lead one of his companies, Eternit, out of the asbestos business, due to rising evidence of health hazards. Eternit was one of the world's leading asbestos cement producers. Stephan, according to one profile, "had first-hand experience of the fibre — now recognised as highly carcinogenic - as the site foreman on one of the company's plants in Brazil." When Sweden put a ban on asbestos cement Stephan was sent there, and returned with the conviction that Eternit needed to get out of the stuff fast.

Stephan's father and the company's old guard serioulsy believed, according to the profile, that a few technical improvements to the extraction systems of the factories and a change in name from asbestos cement to fibre cement would do the trick. But Stephan Schmidheiny sensed deep down that mere cosmetics were not going to be enough. He defeated internal opposition to launch a search for a substitute. The company and its German affiliate aimed to put their cement production on an asbestos-free basis by 1990. In addition it shed its minority shareholding in Eternit Brazil and, consequently, the company's 50 per cent stake in the world's biggest asbestos mine.

Schmidheiny refers to the subsequent restructuring of his empire as "industrial architecture". His profiler tells us that he built his vision of the future "on the ruins of the Eternit empire", via investment in high-tech companies which would help preserve the natural environment."

SITTING in an office in a leafy Bloomsbury square, Stephan Schmidheiny describes himself as "a Swiss maverick idealist rich man". If that suggests an overt charisma, it is misleading: he is a crisp businessman with the self-effacing air of the truly rich.

In the summer of 1990, Maurice Strong [the organiser of the Rio Earth summit] approached Schmidheiny. "Maurice was looking for someone who would stimulate business interest in the whole Rio process," Schmidheiny says. Together they formed the Business Council for Sustainable Development, with Schmid-heiny's role being "to make sure that the business voice is heard in a process where many decisions need to be taken which can only be implemented on the condition that business understands the message and co-operates and actually makes things happen."

Two years later, after spending a third of his time and £4.5m of his own money enlisting 47 leading industrialists (including the heads of Volkswagen, Du Pont, Alcoa, Nippon Steel and Royal Dutch Shell), Schmidheiny was in Washington, telling George Bush: "The environment must no longer be an issue primarily addressed on the ethical and legal levels, but should become an integral consideration in the economic game which has maJe possible the triumph of freedom in the world."

Schmidheiny hopes the council will be seen as a symbol of "eco-efficiency", a beacon that will lead the corporate conscience into a new age. In his book, Changing Course, he states that the cornerstone of sustainable development is "a system of open, competitive markets both within and between countries" — in other words, the removal of barriers that restrict market access and activity. Environmental measures should be imposed through economic instruments (such as taxes) rather than controls or self-regulation. Subsidies should be phased out, and prices should "increasingly reflect the costs of environmental damage". BCSD supports the introduction of pollution taxes, and a closer relationship between aid programmes and business investments.

When it is suggested to him that his approach seems to concentrate on the economic approach to ecology, ignoring ethical considerations, Schmidheiny responds: "In the past, the environment problem in the world has been very much a question of moral ethics, and of humanitarian efforts and philanthropic motives. The consequence was that governments have reacted, by and large, in a repressive way - bans of all kinds, regulations, standards imposed on industry. We believe that has served a useful purpose, but that now the time has come where this must be integrated into the whole economy. If we don't, we lose."

Isn't the idea of unlimited growth outdated? "We believe there must be further development in the whole world. How could you possibly deny growth to those 5 billion people in the poorest segments of society, in the poorest countries? We need growth in all parts of the planet. We have these poor people, but we also need this in the industrial countries in order to move towards more efficiency. We do need growth. We need growth to overcome inefficient behaviour. It's an apparent paradox, but I think you'll find out that it's true."

Are we witnessing the birth of the real New World Order?

"1 accept that we have the burden of having caused a major part of the pollution in the past, and are still doing so. I think the industrialised countries have the increasing public awareness, political pressure, financial means and technical ability to change that behaviour. In developing countries, all these factors are missing - you don't have public awareness, because priorities are different, and you don't have the financial or technical means. The basis for my New World Order is to find a new and sound basis for co-operation in the world, rather than exploitation.

"I've been telling my friends in the developing countries, 'Why don't you look at this global environment challenge as a new basis for co-operation?' For the first time in history, rich countries should care for developing countries — not only on moral grounds and through philanthropic efforts ... but in our very mutual self-interest."

But doesn't the run-up to Rio suggest the differences between exploiters and the exploited are widening?

"So isn't business, in this respect, one small segment of humanity being exposed to the same problem? In the past, the whole of human civilisation and culture was based on how to dominate nature. That comes to an end — and I think that business is part of that process. We now learn that unless we overcome the traditional view that creating wealth means using up and throwing away natural resources, we will lose out."

TO FIND OUT WHAT STEPHAN SCHMIDHEINEY HAS BEEN UP TO SINCE RIO, SEE NEXT POSTING

Stephan Schmidheiney 2; The Asbestos Ghost

Stephan Schmidheiney

Welcome to my official web site Here you’ll find information regarding my entrepreneurial and philanthropic activities. I’d also like to share with you my biography and some personal ideas. I cordially invite you to browse through this site.

'The Schmidheiny family had always led a private life, removed from public scrutiny. Suddenly, I found myself on the front page of the newspapers, linked to the harmful effects of asbestos, the very effects from which I was trying to protect society, my employees, and the group. This was very hard, not only for me, but also for my family and friends.

'In retrospect, and taking into account our present knowledge of the many tragic victims of asbestos, I am glad that I remained steadfast in my decision to put an end to asbestos use, despite the uncertainty and resistance from the industry, my own group, and many of my employees. As we know now, the illnesses caused by asbestos only manifest themselves many years and even decades after exposure to the fibers. This is a profoundly deplorable situation, particularly since neither governments nor the industry recognized the problem's implications and for a long time failed to take the necessary protective measures.'

'ASBESTOS MAGNATE TO ENVIRONMENTAL GURU:THE MORPHING OF STEPHAN SCHMIDHEINY'
BY DANIEL M. BERMAN AND ADRIAN KNOEPFLI (September 2000)
Full text here: http://www.abrea.com.br/Danbermaneng.pdf

'What has Stephan Schmidheiny, former sole proprietor of ETERNIT, done with his billions from the sale of Eternit's asbestos properties in the late 1980s? Between 1984 and 1999 Schmidheiny's net worth doubled from US$2 billion to US$4.4 billion. Part of what Schmidheiny has done is to reinvest in Latin American forest properties. According to recent Swiss accounts, Stephan Schmidheiny began buying Chilean forest land in 1982, and he now owns over 120,000 hectares in Southern Chile, near Concepcion, landwhich the Mapuche Indians claim has been theirs since time immemorial. The Mapuche charge that some of the land Schmidheiny bought was stolen from them during the Pinochet dictatorship, using that regime's standard techniques of intimidation, torture, and murder.'


Secrecy and Subterfuge in Switzerland
by Laurie Kazan-Allen (October 5th 2004)
'In 1985, the Swiss Eternit Group, owned by Stephan Schmiedheiny, was the world's second largest seller of asbestos; its asbestos-cement operations in thirty-two countries had annual sales of $2 billion. Although the Group had divested itself of asbestos holdings by 1990, former Eternit workers who have contracted asbestos-related disease remain unacknowledged and uncompensated in many countries.

'From the mid-1970s, Eternit was run by Stephan Schmidheiny who succeeded his Father as Chairman. In 1984, Schmidheiny was worth US$2 billion; in 2002, Forbes magazine estimated his wealth as US$4 billion. Since 2002, Stephan Schmidheiny does not enter into discussions about asbestos nor “does he comment publicly on this subject any more.”


'Swiss multinational Anova is facing claims in South Africa from lawyers representing former asbestos miners'
by Ariane Gigon Bormann in Zurich, Valérie Hirsch in Johannesburg (Swissinfo. 19 April 2003)
'The action stems from the company’s activities in South Africa, which were terminated at the end of the 1970s. The case is being led by Richard Spoor, a South African lawyer who has represented asbestos workers against a number of corporations.'

'In a few weeks time, Spoor is due in Switzerland to meet representatives of the former multinational Eternit, which became Anova...now presided over by Hans-Rudolf Merz, who took over from Schmidheiny last summer.

Singled out
'Merz feels that the lawyer is targeting one man: Stephan Schmidheiny. “Because he is Swiss, because he is rich, some people want to blame him for all their problems,” he said. Merz adds that 20 years ago, when Schmidheiny suggested that asbestos should be abandoned, the rest of the industry laughed at him.

'According to the Swiss financial magazine, Bilanz, Schmidheiny’s decision to get out of the asbestos business dated back to 1976, but it took nearly 20 years to completely pull out.

'The Schmidheiny brothers, who held a leading role at Eternit in the 1970s, have begun to leave the business world. Stephan has retired to Costa Rica, where he runs a development aid foundation, Avina.His brother, Thomas, announced earlier this month he was giving up his majority voting rights at Holcim, the world’s second-biggest cement maker.'


The Asbestos Cancer Epidemic by Joseph Ladou (Environmental Health Perspectives, Vol. 112, 2004)

Excerpt

The asbestos cancer epidemic may take as many as 10 million lives before asbestos is banned worldwide and exposures are brought to an end. In many developed countries, in the most affected age groups, mesothelioma may account for 1% of all deaths. In addition to mesotheliomas, 5-7% of all lung cancers can be attributed to occupational exposures to asbestos.

The asbestos cancer epidemic would have been largely preventable if the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Labor Organization (ILO) had responded early and responsibly. The WHO was late in recognizing the epidemic and failed to act decisively after it was well under way. The WHO and the ILO continue to fail to address the problem of asbestos mining, manufacturing, and use and world trade of a known human carcinogen.

Part of the problem is that the WHO and the ILO have allowed organizations such as the International Commission on Occupational Health (ICOH) and other asbestos industry advocates to manipulate them and to distort scientific evidence. The global asbestos cancer epidemic is a story of monumental failure to protect the public health.

More than 30 million tons of asbestos in its various forms have been mined in the past century. Asbestos is one of the most pervasive environmental hazards in the world, present in more than 3,000 manufactured products. All forms of asbestos can result in asbestosis (a progressive fibrotic disease of the lungs), lung cancer, and mesothelioma, a cancer arising in the membranes lining the pleural and peritoneal cavities.

Full text here:
http://www.caut.ca/en/issues/asbestos/art_epidemic.pdf


'The tragedy of asbestos: Eternit and the consequences of a hundred years of asbestos cement
by R.F. Ruers and N. Schouten. Translated into English by Steven P. McGiffen. © September 2005
Socialistische Partij (Netherlands)

'In the European Union, the use of asbestos has been totally forbidden since January 1st, 2005, but in a number of developing countries it continues to rise. At the present time, on the world scale, two million tonnes of asbestos per year are used, usually without any form of protection.

'As long ago as 1930 it was confirmed that exposure to asbestos dust was dangerous to the point of being life-threatening. It nevertheless took until the beginning of the 21st century to have asbestos use banned within the EU. Before this, tens of thousands of victims suffered while a long struggle was fought against the ‘magic mineral’.

'By means of their massive power and extensive influence the asbestos cement concerns succeeded in postponing the ban on asbestos by decades, years in which huge profits were made at the expense of a multitude of factory workers and their families.

'In this report we reveal how, since the 1920s, the major asbestos concerns have used an international cartel to distort knowledge of asbestos and its dangers, with profit as their only goal.

'On the basis of these facts, some of which we have uncovered and will be new to the reader, and some of which are already well-known, we argue that these corporate groups should be held responsible for the human suffering which they have caused. Environmental damage must be systematically mapped and the high costs of cleaning it up should be paid by the polluter.'

THIS REPORT
Collaboration between Eternit companies has been used quite consciously to work against the introduction of measures responding to the dangers of asbestos cement, preventing them completely or delaying then for as long as possible. How this has been achieved is the subject of this report.

Chapter 2 describes the way in which Eternit companies have co-operated intensively during the whole period of their existence. The third chapter demonstrates that these firms knew very early on about the dangers to health their product presented. Chapter 4 shows what these firms did with this knowledge. Through lobbying and by delaying research these companies worked against the introduction of measures to deal with the dangers of asbestos cement. In the fifth chapter we look at the disinformation campaigns organised by Eternit companies, by means of which they succeeded in manipulating their customers’ trust, political decision-making and the medical debate.

Chapter 6 brings the report’s most important conclusions together and offers a number of recommendations on the basis of our research.

SEE ALSO:
'An Eternity of Misdeeds' [Nostromo Research, London December 9 2005] http://www.minesandcommunities.org/Action/press834.htm

International Journal of Environmental Health
Special Issue - Asbestos Dispatches
(Volume 10, Number 2. April - June 2004)

International Ban Asbestos Secretariat home page for an extensive archive of recent and archived articles and reports.]

TRIBUTE TO AN ESTEEMED COLLEAGUE
by Laurie Kazan-Allen
Jose Jesus Pessoa, known to one and all as Ze da Capa, died on November 3, 2005 in Osasco, Brazil; he was 63 years old and had suffered from asbestosis for many years. Ze da Capa had worked at the Eternit asbestos-cement factory as a foreman for more than 27 years. In 1995 he was one of the founding members of ABREA (The Brazilian Association of the Exposed to Asbestos), the first group to represent the interests of Brazilian asbestos workers. He was determined and courageous and worked assiduously to ensure that the voice of ABREA was heard nationally. Working closely with his colleagues Eliezer, Aldo and Fernanda, he laid the foundations for an organization which today stands as a testament to the vision of these pioneers. In 2000, the ABREA leadership and members brought together hundreds of international and Brazilian delegates at the world's first Global Asbestos Congress which was held in Osasco, near Sao Paulo.
Ze da Capa was a man of immense charm; his infectious smile and sense of humor were irresistible. His loyalty and sense of fun inspired friends and colleagues. He was the proud father of two wonderful daughters, Mara and Eliana, and the devoted husband to Dolores. The world is a sadder and duller place without him. Rest in peace dear friend.

Einstein-A-Go-Go

Einstein-A-Go-Go: You can add your own message in chalk on this
famous image by going to Hetemeel.com. [Thanks to JT for this]

I Bought Al Gore Lunch: Real As Rain

The young Al Gore at his typewriter at the Nashville Tennessean in 1962

On the 17th May 1992, on the eve of the Rio Earth Summit, on a Sunday lunchtime I found myself in the 'green room' of a London Weekend Television news studio with the then Senator Al Gore, Crispin Tickell (former UK ambassador to the UN and the man who was widely credited as convincing Margaret Thatcher about the reality of global warming) and Marcus Strong, the Canadian principal organiser of the Earth Summit.

Earlier that week [12 May] I had also interviewed Stephan Schimdheiny, one of the richest men in Switzerland, head of some eight corporations, who was leading the global corporate pitch at Rio. Material from Gore and Schmidheiny provided the major quotes in a feature piece 'It's Business As Usual' I produced for Richard Williams, then editor of the 'Independent on Sunday' magazine, at that time an impressive large-format magazine of which carried serious journalism and top photography.

[Interestingly, Gore was a complete unknown to the British press at that point and the published piece largely centred on the background history of Schmidheiney, Strong and the prognosis for the forthcoming Rio Summit'. The sub-title sums it up: 'A Swiss billionaire and the Rio Summit organiser have teamed up to convert big business to the cause. Or is it just a corporate greenwash?]

After the tv show, Al Gore and I were taken by hire car to Orsos in Covent Garden, where I interviewed him about his just published book 'Earth in the Balance.' At the end of the meal, I discovered Gore was being driven down to Gatwick Airport - halfway home for me - so I hitched a ride.

Yes it was just like a scene from 'The Candidate' - a real Kennedy moment. Just a few weeks later, on 9 July, Bill Clinton announced his selection of Gore as running mate.

As the majority of my interview with Gore was not published in the Independent, I tried to sell a fuller profile of Gore to The Guardian (which I faxed to Alan Rusbridger on 8 June) but with no success. So, almost 14 years later, this is its first publication. I hope you think it makes interesting reading. Just in case you get confused, the Bush in question is George Senior. How times change !

REAL AS RAIN

Throughout the tv news coverage of the Bush administration's intransigent and un-imaginative stance on Rio, one man's views have been consistently presented as a counter-point, those of Senator Al Gore. He is man little known to the British public but in the US he is widely perceived as the greenest Senator in the Congress and the man for the Democratic nomination in 1996.

Gore is a second-generation senator, a Baptist from Tennessee. He is, amongst other things, one of the architects of the Superfund Law to deal with toxic waste sites and head of the committee in charge of NASA. His well-written just published book 'Earth In The Balance' provides not only a clear analysis of global problems but also ranges across a wide canvas of other scientific and spiritual matters, concluding with an outline for a Global Marshall Plan.

In person he is tall, dark-haired, clean-shaven, well built, personable and intelligent. When we met he had just flown in from the black ghettos of Memphis for a tv debate on Rio and was en route to Strasbourg. This interview was conducted over a fast lunch at Orsos and during an 85mph drive to Gatwick and it is clear that he lives his life on this kind of tight schedule.

He has had some great teachers and has travelled the world in search of a true understanding of the global ecological crisis and how it can be resolved. As his book reveals, he has witnessed at first hand the Aral Sea disaster, has stood on the Antarctica ice, been in a nuclear submarine below the Arctic and travelled in the Amazonian rain forest. In Vietnam he trudged through a landscape defoliated by Agent Orange. He has done virtual reality and contributed a major article to Scientific American about the need to build the new 'data highways'. He understands the links between environmental awareness and electronics. He has internalised the JFK myth, draws his strength from Jeffersonian principles and his metaphors from the cutting edge of science.

When he was a child, his mother made him realise the importance of Rachgel Carson's 'Silent Spring'. His college professor was Roger Revelle, the first person in the worid to monitor carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and, along with C.O. Keeling, discoverer of the 'greenhouse effect'. He studied the nuclear arms race and ran for President and lost in 1987.

His inner spiritual search was intensified by an afternoon in April 1989 when, in front of his eyes, his six-year old son Albert was hit by a car and flung thirty feet in the air. The long life-and-death struggle that ensued, ending happily with his son's survival, caused him to rethink all his values. He was 40, a failed Presidential candidate, a man ready for personal change. He quotes Ghandi: "We must be the change we wish to see in the world".


Our conversation began with the Founding Fathers for whom Gore has great respect. Like Jefferson, he aspires to achieving a 'catholic understanding of the whole of knowledge' and he describes the original Constitution as a 'blueprint for an ingenious machine that uses pressure valves and compensating forces to achieve a dynamic balance between the needs of the individual and the needs of the community, between freedom and order, between passions and principles.' Their ideas, he believes, are now very contemporary.

"Our civilisation's relationship to knowledge is unhealthy in at least one important respect. We have chosen the strategy of specialising in ever narrower fields of inquiry to the exclusion of any sustained effort to integrate what we're learning with an improved understanding of the whole of knowledge. And we rationalise this approach by telling ourselves that its absolutely impossible for anyone to keep up with all the facts emerging in every field of inquiry so it's efficient to just look at a tiny subset of knowledge.

"The result is that we don't pay attention to the way the parts relate to the whole. There's an implicit assumption that somewhere someone is putting all this together and no-one is. So whenever an important value relating to the whole is at risk no-one speaks for it."

THE NEW PARADIGM
Which, of course, is exactly the problem when we come to talk about the global environment. I put it to him that we are living in the last days of the Enlightenment paradigm and, in the classic paradigm theory, the anomalies are accumlating but we don't yet have the new vision and the new model.

"But it is in fact emerging.The manner in which a change of this kind takes place is rather like the way a shift in tectonic plates causes an earthquake. As the two paradigms press against one other, the pressure builds up for a long period of time before there's any tangible evidence of change on the surface. Just as in a real earthquake, there's a sudden heaving motion as one plate submerges the other and the shock waves [result].
When enough pressure builds up, one paradigm moves over the other one submerging it and the shock waves knock down the conceptual edifices that have been associated with the old paradigm. We're now in the stage where the pressure is building nearly to the point where this shift will take place. It's a very deep change.

"The ideas with which Descartes, Francis Bacon and others are associated, [is] that we would eventually be able to contain in our intellect the full mathematical blueprint of all reality, predict the movement within the patterns we have deciphered and then master all of reality.

"It was that arrogant and hubristic notion which led to, in the extreme form, communism, which was after all the notion that we could completely contain in an intellectual design all of human society and then manhandle reality to make it conform to the preconceived notion. The fact that communismm collapsed suddenly at the very moment when we see this paradigm shift about to take place in all these other fields is not an accident. Its part of the same shift.

He agreed with my notion that Fukuyama's The End of History' is not the end of history but the end of the old model, one in which the mass media and the intellectual apparatus that surrounds it is still trapped.

MISSION TO PLANET EARTH
Conversation then turned to the earth as the new powerful, holistic symbol and to his involvement with NASA's Mission to Planet Earth.

"It's extremely important as a way of accelerating the solidification of this new consensus, as a way of identifying the best methods for healing the reelationship between civilisation and the earth and as a way of actually beginning the healing process itself.

"I've advocated a change in the design of Mission to Planet Earth to ensure that it is a mission by the people of Planet Earth and I'm now working with NASA and a number of corporations on a design for a worldwide education programme to link schoolchi1dren in every country wishing to participate, in a programme for monitoring the environment in their individual areas and recording [their findings] on a daily basis.

"What I envisage eventually, on cable television at least, is hourly updates on what is happening to the global environment both in terms of the indicators of temperature, wind speed, drought, soil aridity, soil erosion etc and in the way of mitigation and remediation worldwide. That's not far off. Its possible to link that together within two to three years."

"I've just had a meeting with the new NASA administrator Daniel Golden and I was recommending the creation of a new programme called Digital Earth to create a very dense, interactive model capable of accepting data inputs from a variety of different formats and contaning them within this grid, which will evolve to become an ever denser and more accurate representation of the world system.

I have also just completed a long negotation with the intelligence communi ty and the director [of the CIA] Robert Gates. It has just been agreed formally between the two of us to allow a panel of earth scientists to go through a very elabarate security check, so that they get the codeword clearance at the top level of classification. That includes lie detector tests and all kinds of things. Some of these scientists may not want to go through this but most of them are willing to do this in the cause.

"They will then go into the guts of the intelligence community as a scouting party to find the databases that are most relevant to quickly upgrade our understanding of the climate system. We have a very large array of satellites and other data collection systems that are totally hidden from public view, A good bit of the information that they're planning to get through Mission from Planet to Earth ten to fifteen years from now is, in fact, already available - except that it's top secret. (The first fruits of this was the release of Arctic sea ice data)

"I made it clear to the intelligence community that there would, under no circumstances be any compromise of national security. Starting from the premise, we then found ways to scrub out the national security sensitive information and still bring into the open these enormous volumes of data that the scientists have never seen before."

WHOLE EARTH
British cosmologist Fred Hoyle predicted in 1948 that: "once a photograph of the Earth, taken from outside, is available, we shall, in an emotional sense, acquire an additional dimension . . .Once let the sheer isolation of the Earth become plain to every man, whatever his nationality or creed, and a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.'

"In a sense the Apollo 11 picture of the earth was a turning point. There's a moral philosopher named Mark Sagoff who argues that the old controversy between preservation and conservation, between the idea that nature is pristine and must be kept sheltered from human impact - or at least important parts of it must be - and the idea that nature is a collection of natural resources which we need for our own consumptive patterns, the task [being] to manage those patterns of consumption in ways that safeguard the continued availability of resource. He argues that both of these approaches really rest on the assumption that nature is one thing and human beings are something else altogether. The debate in the media and the environmental movement unfolded within that old paradigm.

"The solution is obviously to see ourselves as an integral part of the ecological system. And one concept, according to this particular thinker, is to dwell on the concept of place. We sink roots in a place and, as a consequence, we feel not only a connection to it but also an obligation to preserve it as [we are] a part of it. The image from Apollo 11, that first image of earth from space, was a breakthrough conceptually, primarily because it demonstrated that the earth is one place. That we are rooted in this one place. That is as important an element in the new paradigm as any other."

SCIENCE AND RELIGION
In his book Gore devotes a chapter to his ideas about 'environmentalism of the spirit' and quotes Teilhard de Chardin's view that "The fate of mankind, as well as of religion, depends on the emergence of a new faith in the future."

"Recently in Washington DC, I hosted a conference of religious leaders and scientists to talk about the global environment. We had the presiding bishops of the Episcopal Church, the Methodist church, the Baptist church, people from the Evangelical movement, from the historical African-American churches, the American Jewish community, the Council of Bishops of the Catholic church, right down the list - and a long list of some of the most distinguished scientists in the United States including Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, E.O. Wilson and Sherwood Row!and.

"The meeting went on for three days. It was a wonderful discussion and at the end of the conference they negotiated the text of a joint appeal. I chaired the session. One line of the appeal] was, we don't have to agree on how the world began in order to agree on the need to preserve it. Then they fanned out and went off lobbying members of Congress. The presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church went to see President Bush, that's his denomination.

"I really believe there's a pending rapprochement between science and religion worldwide on this issue. Science, of course, is perhaps especially guilty of this problem we talked about earlier of increasing specialisation to increasingly narrow fields of inquiry. But the science of ecology, which emphasises relationships, is now leading to some very large changes in the way traditional science interprets some of the phenomena it has heretofore described in other languages.

"Every new discovery seems to bring into view an ever-more elaborate and richly complex web of interrelationships. It seems to be only logical to extrapolate that explosion of discovery to a point where the entire known universe will be seen as an elaborately interconnected whole. The new discovery that confirms the Big Bang theory is part of that process Once science arrives at this view of the universe, the distance between science and religion will have narrowed even more.

REALPOLITIC
At this point the conversation takes a turn, when the real potential significance of the person sitting opposite me comes into focus.

"If I have the chance to run for President in the future I will and I will make the best use of whatever political talent I've gained in the effort to translate this issue into the central organising principle of the post-Cold War world. It must become that. I don't think, incidentally, it's anything like an impossible task. I think it will happen. It's just that we're in a race. It needs to happen sooner rather than later. It's happening, especially with young people. They're so much farther ahead of the others. There've been public opinion polls internationally that demonstrate quite conclusively that the number one issue for young people in almost every country is this task of saving the global environment. In the Year 2000 there will be 2 billion teenagers. It's a frightening thought in and of itself. They will all have the same notions about this change which has to take place.

RIO EARTH SUMMIT
Talk turned to Rio. Press coverage generally has been 'polluted with pessimism' in one memorable editorial phrase. What is the subtext though? Is this the fabled new world order taking shape? Is Rio just one stage in the process of reshaping the global political landscape?

"For the last fifty years, the central organising principle for the Western democracies has been the defeat of communism. In the United States, for example, that meant Federal assistance to local schools was approved only after the Russians had launched Sputnik. People from all parts of the ideological spectrum agreed that central government support of local schools was necessary if for no other reason [than that] it would assist our struggle against communism. My father was the author of the Interstate Highway Bill but it passed under the heading the Defense Interstate Highway Bill because in time of war, it would be quite useful for the trucks bringing material for the effort to defeat communism.

"Now that communism has been defeated, we are confronted with a great many new realities in the world. Chief among them is the emotional realisation by people all over the earth that we now have a global civilisation. It is a community of nations to be sure but it is truly a global civilisation linked together by an electronic comminucations grid - CNN, BBC and computer networks. The business community has long since begun to define all of its challenges in a global context. The scientific commmunity does the same thing. The fax machines between Bejing and East Anglia and Palo Alto are buzzing away right now.

"We are now at a point where politics has to catch up with the rest of civilisation and construct a global agenda of common problems which must be susceptible to cooperative worldwide solutions. So the new organs ing principle then must be the task of saving the world's environment and the Earth Summitt is the first of many world summit meetings at which this new global agenda will be drafted. It is in that sense, already a success.
Beneath the rhetoric this palpable sense of coming together is quite powerful. The shift in attitudes on the part of developing nations is quite pronounced, even though its disguised by the lingering resort to the ideological warfare of North and South left over from the 1960s,

"In fact that conflict is not what it appears to be. The new depth of concern about the global environment within the developing countries is a powerful fact of life. The South used to implicitly threaten the North with environmental irresponsibility if the North didn't cough up lots of money. We still hear [some of] that rhetoric [but] its an artefact of the past. The South now knows in its bones [that] the pattern of development has to change if the North does the right thing by them or not. Of course the North must do the right thing because it will not be physically possible for the South to accomplish the transition in time unless there is a truly cooperative effort. So all of these things are occurring beneath the surface at Rio.

"The great tragedy of Rio is that an occasion of this sort was intended to be the ideal setting for new commitments to get on with the task in hand. The fact that we've seen this enormous moral and political cowardice on the part of the leaders in the industrial world means that the tiny bit of substantive progress made at Rio is entirely out of proportion to the rapidly worsening problem. We've made an inch of progress while the problem has raced ahead many miles in its severity."

CORPORATIONS
In his book, Senator Gore talks about the aftermath of the Gulf and reveals that James Baker had to disinvest his oil shares before he could talk about global warming. President Bush is, of course, an oil man through and through. Surely there is another fight going on. Entrenched corporate interests who have the power are damn well not going to give it up for anybody. As far as they are concerned, the world can go to hell in a handbasket.

"In this sense its a very old a classic struggle between short-term greed expressing itself as exploitation and a longer-term view of our obligations to generations to come. It's just that this whole conflict now has much higher stakes. The damage that can be accomplished by a continuation of this old resort to short-term greed is just unthinkable now.

"There is a very well-financed. well-organised and extremely agressive effort by elements within the coal industry and the electric utility industry to promote the Big Lie that we don't have a problem. They have already the cost the world several precious years in the effort to establish a new consensus and they seem bound and determined to do whatever it takes to fight this to the very end.

"At the last Rio preparatory meeting, the chief lobbyist for the US coal industry, a man named Don Pearlman, regularly caucused with the OPEC delegations and concocted strategy together. At a number of international meetings it seemed obvious to most observers that the Bush administration and the OPEC delegation were seeing eye-to-eye on tactical as well as strategic questions and worked cooperatively to prevent more meaningful agreements.

There is obviously a big change going on in the corporate world with green and spiritual ideas taking root.

"This is coming because of this very deep paradigm shift. What is a corporation? Is it a seperate entity unto itself, chartered to make money and nothing more, or is it an entity with complex interconnections to the society and the civilisation and the ecological system within which it makes money. This breakthrough to a new way of conceiving of the role of corporations in society confers a tremendous competitive advantage. Those who see the opportunity for profit in change are growing rapidly in numbers. I believe that the world business revolution in quality is being intertwined with the environmental revolution. This relationship between the business ethic and the environmental ethic is one of the keys to whether it moves in the right direction or not.

Corporations are now saying give us the responsibility but can we trust the the corporate world?

"I will quote you Ronald Reagan's dictum about the START negotiations. Trust But Verify, And where verification leads one to identify an agglomerati on of economic power being directed in a way that is intended to frustrate progress in saving the earth's environment, then we must be willing to take steps to correct that.

"But what's the alternative. The two polar extremes are untrammelled mercantilism and virulent statism. The latter has been associated with by far the worst environmental tragedies on the planet. Given a choice between the two approaches, one wants to learn from experience and recognise that modified free markets with appropriate restraints on unethical behaviour and unwise short-term exploitative behaviour represents an option generally to be preferred over what I regard as sometimes naive faith in central government programmes that sound good in concept but, for a variety of reasons, don't really accomplish what is intended. The reason why statism has been such a dismal failure in its communist iteration and elsewhere is that it deadens the human spirit and one does not unlock a higher fraction of the human potential unless there is a certain range of freedom.

Senator Gore tells me about a new movie, whose premiere he attended, called 'Mindwalk', made by Fritjof Capra and his brother Bert and starring Liv Ullman, Sam Waterstone and John Heard. It's about a Democratic senator who ran for President in 1988 and lost but is now totally absorbed in the global ecological crisis. The film takes the form of a two hour conversation between these protagonists as they wander round Mont St Michel. He could well be the model. He has certainly dedicated the rest of his life to his vision of global change. But is he for real? As real as rain, as they say in Tennessee,

Footnote: Gore's piece about the forthcoming concept of the Information Superhighway was called 'Infrastructure for the Global Village' and appeared in Scientific American, September 1991.

Al Gore 2: An Inconvenient Truth

The subsequent story of Gore's rise to Vice President and his subsequent crooked defeat by Bush is well known and part of the historical record. He was widely criticised during the campaign for the formality and woodenness of his public persona. Yet in recent years his star has risen again, partly due to a dogged one-man tour of cities and towns across America. in which he has been delivering a powerful audio-visual presentation about global warming.

A full description of this presentation can be found at: 'Al Gore at the TED 2006 conference'. It begins:

TED organizer Chris Anderson introduces Al Gore as the president of an "alternate universe this close to our own." Vice President Gore takes the stage, unfortunately not naked to the waist, beating drums. But he does open with a good joke:' I am Al Gore. I used to be the next President of the United States of America.' [laughter, applause] 'I don't think that's funny'.

'Gore's talk is a slideshow of images, designed to help us think about "a planetary emergency, a climate crisis". He quotes the old saw that the Chinese character for crisis includes signs for "danger" and "opportunity" and suggests that we have the possibility of making the 21st century the "Century of Renewal"



Read one reaction to his presentation, an Editorial at buzzflash.com entitled:
'If Al Gore Falls in the Forest and No One is There To Hear Him..'

Digest: 'True transformations in politics are as rare as palm trees in the Arctic Circle. But Al Gore is that palm tree. On Martin Luther King Day, Al Gore took us to the mountaintop and allowed us to view the desecrated landscape of Constitutional rubble that the Bush Administration has spread across America. Gore has, for the last three years, been a prophet of saving our democracy and restoring out Constitution. Al Gore isn't just bringing the truth to the Bush Administration. He is bringing it to a Democratic establishment which has been patriotically compromised and Constitutionally corrupted by their personal sinecures and commitment to their Senate positions, rather than their commitment to our Constitution. This is Al Gore day on our BuzzFlash alerts, because Al Gore has the temerity to tell the truth with passion and alarm -- and document his assertions every step of the way. Gore is the real thing, someone who went through a personal crisis, traveled to the mountaintop, and saw the light. '


Footage of Gore's tour has been woven into a global warming documentary, directed by Davis Guggenheim [94 Minutes, color] called An Inconvenient Truth Reviewed in the Sundance Film Festival catalogue by Caroline Libresco as follows:

'Extreme poverty, intractable wars, virulent disease, hatred of all stripes–these are a few of the scourges we live with today. And yet global climate change trumps them all; for if it's not addressed, all life on the planet will be devastated, regardless of geography, class, race, or creed. 'The Inconvenient Truth' is the gripping story of former Vice President Al Gore, who became interested in this startling issue while at college 30 years ago, and now devotes his life to reversing global warming. Traveling the world, he has built a visually mesmerizing presentation designed to disabuse doubters of the notion that climate change is debatable. The heart of Davis Guggenheim's film is this elegant multimedia lecture itself, where Gore indisputably correlates CO2 emissions with exponentially rising temperatures, already responsible for dramatic climactic shifts like ice-cap melting, drought, and rising sea levels. Interwoven with this riveting public address are intimate moments revealing the poetic, searching side of Gore as he struggles to define his purpose in the aftermath of the 2000 election. This is activist cinema at its very best, for it serves to popularize and demythologize a problem long obscured by those most threatened by the solution. With humor and searing intelligence, Gore outlines crucial steps we must take to avert impending disaster and proves that inaction is no longer an option–in fact, it's immoral.

Read review of the Sundance screening at Treehugger, one of the smartest environment sites on the web.

A full-length video of a talk Gore gave towards the end of 2005 at the NetImpact conference at Stanford
can be heard and seen here.

There is also a web petition aimed at the UN to try and institute a Global Environmental Ambassador and suggesting that Al Gore should be the first. Sign up here if you agree.
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/618253462?ltl=1131811764

Gore is also in the headlines on two other fronts:

1. On 24th Feb, environmental activists from the Computer TakeBack Campaign, a national coalition of environmental organizations, descended on Gore's Nashville office in an attempt to convince him to use his position on the board of Apple Computers to get the company to recycle their products. [They have already persuaded Hewlett-Packard and Dell to support producer take-back of toxic discarded products carrying their brand names.]

The group's website claims Apple's electronic wastes contain dangerous toxic chemicals.

"The iLife isn't quite as harmonious as it seems. Lurking underneath Apple's beautifully designed digital music players and computers are poisonous chemicals like lead and mercury that can cause birth defects and disabilities. When the millions of Apple's obsolete computers and other electronic products hit the landfills and incinerators, millions of pounds of toxic lead and other highly toxic materials will be dumped into our air, land, and water."

2. Also this month, Al Gore’s Current TV - a news network for young adults which Gore co-founded - is facing two lawsuits over its name - from Maryland-based Current Communications Group, a provider of broadband Internet services, and Minnesota Public Radio. Both parties claim that they made priopr registartion of the Current trademark. A statement from Current TV noted, "We know of no consumers who confuse us with Minnesota Public Radio, and we can't imagine that anybody ever would."

Out and About 2

In London: had lunch with John Elkington at Gallerie Charlick (138 Gray's Inn Road), where there's currently an excellent show of photos by Stuart Redler

To escape a hail storm, ducked into Magma at 117-119 Clerkenwell Road - for my money, the best book/magazine/DVD shop around.

Bought The Believer, an excellent, quirky and beautifully designed perfect-bound journal of thought-provoking contributions, published 10 times a year from San Francisco and Juxtapoz, an underground and cult/art and culture mag of real punch and flair, showcasing some extraordinary work.
Genuinely exciting stuff, as is the DVD of 'Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus', a fantabulous documentary by Andrew Douglas recently screened on the BBC Arena programme, tracking singer Jim White on a journey through the netherbelly of the Southern States. This is a marvelous and imaginative film, genuinely fresh and unexpected in style, showcasing some wonderful southern music from the likes of the Handsome Family, Johnny Dowd and David Johansen - a spine tingling and spellbinding experience.

Fourth Door Review

Published annually, Fourth Door Review, in the words of its publisher and editor Oliver Lowenstein, ''explores the relationships between ecology and technology, art and architecture, and new media and new music. Part book, part magazine, Fourth Door Review expands these horizons in ground-breaking ways, offering in-depth essay-features and interviews alongside short overviews, across a spectrum of connections contemporary art, design, craft and architecture are making with new technologies, sustainability and ecological perspectives.'

'Fourth Door Review 7’s centrepiece is the Architexts Scenario themed section which explores the new and recent buildings of the Maggie Centres movement, featuring a Frank Gehry interview, Charles Jencks writing on the whole Maggies story, plus an overview of the related wider field of ongoing research being carried out in the healthcare design field, and a call for architects to take on the sustainable argument for improvements in health to be met with healthy buildings. Alongside the Design with Care section, building on its focus on contemporary Timberbuild in previous issues, Architexts features an in-depth interview with Europe’s leading timber engineer, Julius Natterer.

'In the arts section, Framework the second part of the interview Andy Goldsworthy interview concludes Fourth Door’s exploration of eco-arts superstar artists work. Further Scottish input comes in the form of Dundee based cross-disciplinary installation artists, Dalziel and Scullion, while the Margins of Music section is devoted to one of the leading Nordic musicians of his generation, Jan Garbarek. In Digitalis, the new media section, the twinpath life of George Dyson is examined in detail, looking both at his advocacy of the electronic edges in his book Darwin Among the Machines, the integration of cad-cam into his primary working life, Baidarka (kayak) boat building and how this, and many years of real life kayaking amidst the Northern Pacific and Alaskan coastal lands has brought to him a visionary, futuristic ecological perspective. '

Further details at
http://www.fourthdoor.co.uk

Underground Lullaby

It was an underground lullaby

Somewhere beneath, outside, left of centre
There is another kind of world
Where things operate by other rules
In my underground lullaby

A world of secrets, passions and blue desires
Just behind the curtain of reality
There is another world
In my underground lullaby

Strange to relate and even stranger to recall
I was caught up in reality once
Before zen caught up with me
And I learnt how to be free from it all
One day at a time

Moments of time mean nothing
If they fail to rhyme and chime
In with the web of life
The flow of existence
The patterns of perception
The Golden section

Droplets of yellow fall from blue piano keys
The old joanna never fails to please
When in the hands of a master
The dappled dreams and drifting thought beams
The old singer acknowledges the applause
And shuffles off his mortal coil right there
On the bareboard stage
We watch as his soul uncurls and spirals upwards
Like smoke and disperses in the rafters
Adding a scintilla of stain
To the browned ceiling panels that keep out the rain
Havanas never smelt so sweet
As that man’s soul escaping on Bourbon Street

Lies are the hard stuff to chew
In your eyes so much harder to live with
Nothing walks the night like fear

Dressing rooms strewn with pantaloons
Buffoons playing bassoons
A hairy-eyed monster casting the runes
Bill Evans playing those cool jazz tunes
The waitress with her big bazooms
Swirls of chat wash round the room

Drenched by life, I stumbled into space
I remember falling four stories
Watching the iron balustrades tumble past me in slow motion
As I whirled like as astronaut mending a communication satellite
Right into the arms of mother earth
When I awoke I knew I was a broken man
Who’d been healed by life

The star-struck sailors cluster round the raven-haired star
Who’s laughing at their biceps, choking on their applause
They form a ring around her radiance

And the sirens sound in the neighouring streets
As whores and pimps come out to eat
The fresh meat

The batter and clatter
Crash and dash
Holy commotion
Of daytime
The sweet night
With birds asleep above
The street lights

Trust in me whispered a voice in my ear
I tried to comprehend what it was saying
But the words just seemed to hum
And the sky was turning my way
And I fell down to my knees on the damp street

Trust in me
How long had it been since he heard those words
And how many times had they been betrayed
Her face came back wholesale
He could smell her neck and hold her tiny hands
Once more

To little to late and then a mistake
A bad word at the wrong time was all it took in the end
To unlock the padlock of attachment
And send me spinning through the bars of the world

Hold tight to me she said
But I had to set her free
There was no time to dream
Only puddles and islands
Fringe thoughts on curved beaches
And the passing smudge of a steamer’s smoke
Like a brushstroke on the horizon

Scheister strokes his tie, spits in the street
Picks his nails, picks his nose
Adjusts his velvet collar
Snorts in anticipation and waits
She comes out of the third door on the left
It bangs shut behind her
Scheister peels off from the brickwork
And ambles in her wake
The chase begins
Bound to be bad stuff waiting up there’s a way
As the old man used to say
The old man
The old man
How many times can I say that
Like a mantra

And, as to a friend
I confided my secrets to the man in the weatherproof suit
He didn’t seem to care
The women opposite me in the train
Spread her legs the more I talked
I wanted to talk my way home
But my nerve failed me at the first tunnel