Forumers,
With Aubrey's permission please find below his very perceptive and acute
commentary to Alastair's earlier epistle (by way of Monbiot) which both
Alastair and myself agree should be of interest to CF folk.
all best to you all,
and of course to our dear friend, Aubrey
mark
----------
From: Aubrey Meyer <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 13 May 2011 09:38:27 +0100
To: "[log in to unmask]" <[log in to unmask]>
Cc: 'Paul Kingsnorth' <[log in to unmask]>, Levene M.
<[log in to unmask]>
Subject: RE: Political Economy of Militarising Climate Change - my money's
on Pachamama
Dear Alastair
Thank you for your email and your comments on the CRISIS list.
Warm regards
Aubrey
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
You referred to George Monbiot's recent piece in
the Guardian where he quotes appreciatively the
remark from Paul Kingsnorth in "Quants and Poets"
'on his eloquent Dark Mountain' web-site. The
remark of Paul's that Monbiot quotes is, łthe
green movement has torpedoed itself with numbers.˛
You then included a reference to the response to
Paul that I put on this web-site which said that
the dichotomy between words and numbers observed
in "Quants and Poets" is false. Thank you.
The real reasoning behind those remarks I made on
Paul's web-site, source from where I have lived
much of my life - as a string-player in the world
of music. The real issue for jobbing musicians
[but especially string players] is 'the structure
of numbers' and the understanding [or the growth
to understanding] of the 'path-dependency' that
arises from that. To coin a phrase it asks, 'does
it know where it is going and why its going there?'.
This, simply, is 'teleology'. Musicians realize
they are surrounded by an invisible framework or
'structure of numbers' within which the constant
challenge from that 'structure' or 'signal' is to
play 'in-time' and 'in-tune'. Here is an
audio-visual device that I hope helps to explain that: -
http://www.gci.org.uk/animations/vibrating-strings.swf
in http://www.gci.org.uk/music.html
The political debate around climate change has
become increasingly absurd. Its certainly not
just the 'green movement' that has torpedoed
itself with numbers, it is the entire process.
The entire UNFCCC debate is increasingly
overwhelmed by 'noise' and increasingly divorced
from 'signal', i.e. it has lost its way or any
sense of how to 'structure' the task for UNFCCC-compliance.
From the outset, Contraction and Convergence
[C&C] was conceived as a transparent
'guiding-reference-set' for exactly that. It was
always positioned 'teleologically' as an
'attractor', saying political debates without
numbers are just clamour, political numbers
without structure are too, but the structure of
numbers can yet make UNFCCC-compliance possible
[and poets of us all too, if we but listen].
Einstein once famously said, "God doesn't play dice".
I think a better way of saying that is, "yes of
course God does - but one should never forget that God designed them".
Here - linked to the 'strings' AV - is a
Pythagorean 'Cube' [Dice maybe?] for C&C as a 'Well Tempered Climate
Accord'.
http://www.richardellismedia.com/candc/candc-cube-web-edit.html
Who knows? Perhaps C&C is now up a 'Dark
Mountain' too. It seems to me to be a sort of
refuge for people who want somehow to get away
from all that noise,and this is entirely
understandable . . . . . but down the mountain,
C&C still the most frequently cited and arguably
the most widely supported model in the process
and the real reason for this is that structure is beautiful: -
http://www.gci.org.uk/endorsements.html
My real interest lies still only with music rather than 'climate politics'
At 08:39 13/05/2011, Alastair McIntosh wrote:
>Magnificently put on Mark/Tom, Steve. It greatly pleases me to see debate of
>calibre happening here at both the scientific and psychodynamic levels.
>
>Can I point people towards George Monbiot's Guardian website comment the
>other day:
>
>http://www.monbiot.com/2011/05/05/our-crushing-dilemmas/
>
>I think it's a hugely important statement that's come, yet again, from his
>harrowing independence of mind. He's reflecting on a fascinating piece by
>Paul Kingsnorth of Dark Mountain/Uncivilisation which is linked within his
>article. It's a reflection that moved me all the more because there was
>quite a public disagreement between Tom and Paul at last year's Dark
>Mountain conference. In Scotland we have a name for a cultural custom by
>which poets and intellectuals engage in a kind of spat where they really let
>rip at one another at one level, but hold the friendship and respect
>together at another. It's called a "flyting" - see
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flyting - and the way George has responded to
>Paul here shows how it is possible both to disagree strongly and appreciate
>almost in the same breath. So too, I trust, on this forum with Mark's and
>Tom's "friendly spat" as Steve puts it. But of wider relevance to the
>Mark/Tom debate is the fact that George is commenting on Paul's having drawn
>attention to the dichotomy between the "quants" (the quantifiers), and the
>poets. George rallies to support Paul on this point: he says we need to
>correct a balance which has been lost between quants and poets that has
>caused the environment movement to have narrowed its vision too much in the
>direction of carbon crunching, with the risk of damaging the wider
>motivations that draw us towards being environmentalists. Our old friend
>once on this list, Aubrey Meyer, made a good comment on Paul's site (I think
>it was) suggesting that the quants/poets dichotomy is ultimately a false
>dichotomy. We are living in a world where we need to try and embrace both.
>
>On a different matter, I await, and would appreciate, any comment on my
>posting yesterday as to how best to get a reality check on the science of
>the methane bomb question. Is it correct that in the informed scientific
>community there is considerably more uncertainty around CH4 dynamics than
>around CO2, and if so, where does that leave pushing the geoengineering
>debate out on the CH4 front? Do I take silence to mean that the rest of you
>also lack an adequate answer, or was it a silly question to have wasted
>everyone's time asking?
>
>Alastair.
>
>
>
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