Maladets!

The eternal crisis

2012-01-04T18:35:00.000+01:00

Humanity has become its own greatest enemy. We have made progress, and improved the lives of millions, but at a high price. Our progress has been economical, not spiritual. We have chosen to exploit the earth, rather than to learn to live with it. We have pursued profit up to a point where we are depleted of resources, and not only those profits but our very survival is threatened.

These words are my own, and they all ring true to me. It is not a controversial statement - it is a more or less well formulated sum up of what ecologism stand for in today's debate.

Empirical data seems to support such a vision - no other animal has ever treathened Homo Sapiens. In the first quarter of 2010, 314,7 mn mobile phones were sold, which indicates the enormous scope of economic development. In spite of this, no one would argue that art or litterature has reached a higher level of development. As for how we treat the earth, think about the river Titas in Bangladesh or deforestation in the Amazon (or are we bettering?). Where there ain't much rubber left, anymore. In stead we have to make rubber from petroleum products. I guess you haven't missed we are running out of oil? It is hard to see how we will live in a world without oil, even harder in one more than two degrees warmer, the scenario that we should get used to.

The odd thing is that writing this feels relevant. A few years ago, when I was competition-blogging about climate change, I could easily have written something like this and being praised for it. But it is an old story, and should be so even to my grandmother. Earlier today I finished a neat litte book by the Swedish writer Elin Wägner - Fred med Jorden. Where she writes exactly the same thing. The book as written during the second world war. But the same idea, clad in better words, is easy to locate also in Gandhi's or Tolstoj's writings from the late 19th century.

Isn't is strange, how we can live a hundred year under an immidate threat to our existence? It is easy to think that the ecological question is maybe not so urgent after all, if we have managed so well until now. On the other hand a friend just yesterday told me how fast he had seen the glaciers in the Alps dissapearing, and there is a lot of hands-on information about the loss of ice in the arctic and antarctic regions as well. To presume that a world without ice will be a similar word seems to contradict physics.

Well, maybe there will come out something from the Large Hadron Collider that changes all we know about physics, and explains why ecological crises do not really affect us.

Or maybe this is a political question, as much as one about science. Maybe it is about the clash of two ideologies - one seeing man as master of the universe, and the other one seeing man as a species among others. A clash that has been raging since the beginnings of industrial society.

That is almost certainly a valid description of reality. Somewhere out there there is a reality - less ice and less life, but it is interpretated through our pre-determined minds. I guess that is why we can not really discuss climate change, or environment politics - such topics are most often perceived either as political correctness or as ill-guided radicalism.

The world in 2012

2011-12-31T10:12:00.000+01:00

The climate in 2012I am traveling to Bulgaria to celebrate New Year Eve and since I calculated to spend six hours traveling I got myself a copy of The Economist's The World in 2012. 24 hours later I am still traveling and so i could read it twice if I wanted. Which I might. The Economist is one of my favorite English language publications, and I am a big fan of the way the combine insight with a great prose. This time I feel a little let down.The 2011 I lived through was a year not so much of politics as of deep transformations. It was climate change, peak oil and #occupywallstreet. We have yet to see what comes out of that movement, and I did not expect the Economist to sympathize with a movement saying that the interest of 1% is contrary to that of 99%. But I was eager to read some analysis of the return of street politics in the western world. There was none, just a one sentence speculation that US Left wing populism might gt violent in 2012. Did they use a NYPD white shirt officer to edit the paper, or what?

Peak Oil is discussed in one article, that actually hopes that OPEC will use its influence to lower oil prices and boost global growth. Are there people at the Economist who actually believe that the current oil prices are inflated by greedy sheiks? During my 2011 countries like Saudi Arabia struggled to meet demand, and will continue to do so in 2012. As for climate change, the treatment of the issue was disheartening. The buzz phrase was sprinkled over the text were appropriate, but in every occasion described as a political choice, e.g. what will it mean for UK politics when the government tries to curb co2 emissions?That is a valid question, of course, but not at all what I expected from the Economist. If someone accepts climate change as a reality, it is also clear that it will have tremendous effect on all kinds of social and economical life. Floods might disrupt industries, or new crops can become profitable. An initiated analysis of how climate change will affect the global economy would be among the most relevant reading right now. How sad that the Economist fails to deliver that.The writers seem to presume that business and politics can exist somehow independently of the physical world they exist in, something that they know very well is not true. But I guess some graphs predictions about how severe weather will affect the US economy would cause furore, and anger the papers' readership. In publishing, you give the people what the people wants.

Climate change arrives in Sweden

2011-12-28T23:32:00.000+01:00

2011 is likely to go to history as the year that the New Climate started affecting Sweden. Not only has this Christmas been one of the warmest ever - insurance costs caused by extreme weather was up 18% since last year according to the local insurance industry. A spokesman for the insurers explains that climate change will mean more extreme weather, with increased prices for insurances as a result.

The insurance industry has for a long time been the great hope of many industrialists, including me. Not because an inherent goodness - this industry is probably as controlled by greed as any other. Which is what makes insurance companies interesting - they are set to lose a lot of money from more volatile weather, and have a strict vested interest in combating climate change.

It is nice to see the Swedish insurers out of the closet - hopefully they can lend some weight to environmentalists demands for more robust climate politics. I have a secret dream that they would actually use their power and refuse to insure companies that work against them - like oil drilling companies. BP would not exist today if Deepwater Horizon had not been insured. On the other hand it is probably a very bad idea to let private companies use political power.

Nonetheless, climate change is now not only a question for environmentalists. It is a new business reality that has officially arrived in Sweden.

Ni är inte ensamma!

2011-12-21T23:34:00.000+01:00

When I first visited Bulgaria, in the fall of 2007, I could not help but notice posters, billboards, buttons everywhere saying "Ne ste sami!" It means "you are not alone", and is probably the first full sentece I learned in Bulgarian. In Swedish it would be, literally "Ni är inte ensamma!", and when I come back to Sweden in January after this winter's Bulgaria trip I hope to see those word written all over town.

(The Ne ste sami-ribbon)The slogan was aimed at the five Bulgarian nurses that were sitting on death row in Libya, blamed for contaminating blood with HIV, and killing Libyan children. This was before the Arab spring, and Libya was still a dictatorship where it was easier to blame and jail foreigners than admitting mistakes. The Arab spring has yet to affect Ethiopia. The state is more suspicious of dissent than ever, maybe scared by the specter of public protest like those in the Mediterranean Arab states. Scores of local foreign journalists have been harassed. Two of them are the Swedes Johan Peterson and Martin Schibbye. They were earlier today found guilty of supporting terrorists and entering Ethiopia illegally. They have confessed of entering without VISA together with an ethnic militia that has been terror-labeled by the government in Addis Abebba, but maintain that their purpose was solely to investigate the work of the Swedish company Lundin Petroleum in the Ogaden province. My private opinion is this: Lundin Petroleum is a secretive company with a very bad reputation when it comes to Human Rights. Schibbye and Peterson should be praised, not jailed for trying to bring stories about their work in Ogaden into the light. Another opinion might be that Schibbye and Peterson were acting foolishly and should be reprimanded and thrown out of Ethiopia but not senteced to jail. This seems to be the official view of our Foreign Minister Carl Bildt (Link in Swedish), who himself worked for Lundin Petroleum when the company's activities in Ogaden were initiated.A lot of thing could be written about Carl Bildt's dubious role in this drama, but it might suffice to say that the best thing with having him in government is that it keeps him away from Lundin Petroleum where he might do more harm. A lot could also be written about the terrorism laws that Peterson and Schibbye are sentenced under. Western commentators point out that these laws allow the Ethiopian government to label anyone it doesn't like a terrorist. But it is hardly the first government to do so. It is simply abusing a system of black listing organizations that has been abundantly abused since 9/11. But right now, the main focus must be to get Peterson and Schibbye home. Sweden needs journalists like them, the world needs to know about Lundin Petroleum and they do need us. They need to know that they are not alone. The Bulgarian "Ne ste sami" campaign was succesful, and the nurses eventually returned to their families. There is no reason Sweden should not manage to get Peterson and Schibbye free. But it might take a stubborn campaign saying "Ni är inte ensamma!" Let us start it now.

(Foto: Scanpix)

Acidification

2011-08-01T21:59:00.000+02:00

If China criticised Sweden over Human Rights would you believe them?

Today, 1st of August, there has been a lot of talk about acidification in Sweden. Acid lakes was identified as an environmental problem in the 60's and in the early eighties the Swedish state started bombing lakes with lime, in order to increase their pH.

In the 7.00 morning news, the national radio reported that researchers at the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency had found that pH levels had improved, but still are far from good, in spite of less acid pollution from industries. The study found that lime bombing will have to continue far into the future, in spite of being the most expensive environmental campaign ever in Sweden, the total cost since 1977 is about 400 million EUR.

That must sound scary in libertarian ears, and quite predictably - in the 19.30 news Rapport, the most viewed TV news, reported that researchers from SLU (the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences) had found that a) the natural acidity of our lakes has been undervalued, b) the role of pollution has been over rated c) that lime bombing is unnecessary, or might actually harm some lakes, by bringing their pH level to above normal. "We do not want all lakes to look the same", a long haired fellow explained to the reporter.

In his long hair he looked like the traditional lefty environmentalist, but such a statement is pretty hard to swallow when it comes from an institution that uses state money to propagate for agribusiness. It is an institution that has argued that agribusiness does NOT emit more nitrogen and phosphorous than ecological farming. And that Santa Claus exists... If you look at the kind of agriculture SLU prefers over organic, it consists of large harmful monocultures. For sure, I don't want our lakes to be overly alkalic, but that problem is a very minor one in the context of biodiversity loss.

The situation is a little like if China would criticise Sweden about human rights. No matter where we live, of course, there are things to criticise, Sweden for example has not signed a number of international treaties about the rights of native populations. If such criticism came from Amnesty international, we would take it seriously. But if it came from someone who breaks human rights every day at home, we would expect that something else lies behind. When SLU speaks about biodiversity, you should be equally suspicious.

If you have spent some time reading debates about climate change, you know the script. A scientific truth - that our akes are still acid, is encountered with some study of a minor detail - we have a lacking understanding of the historical acidity in our lakes, that comes with a politically pleasant conclusion - we should not spend money on lime bombing.

It is amazing how the libertarians, who are so critical of post modernism, feminism and queer theories in humanities, have so totally embraced post modernism in science. Theirs is a world where truth exists only in the eye of the beholder, and the perspective can be changed until a politically pleasant truth appears. Outside of the beholders eye is chaos.

But maybe the world is like that? Maybe there are no all encompassing truths to believe in? In some sense there is not, but in cases like these there are two ways to realize whom to believe, the one who argues for lime bombing or the one who argues against.

The first one is to using high school science. An 8th grader should be able to see the flaw in SLU's argument. Acidity is a natural process, that is greatly boosted buy humans burning fossil fuels. As long as we burn fossil fuels, we will have acid lakes. We have managed to limit the impact, but not to prevent it. Which is what was reported in the morning news.

The second way to see who is lying is to look if they put their money where their mouth is. Since money is the measure of all things in this world, those who care about the environment will also be those who propose to spend money on it. Those who argue against such spending care for something else.

So why did the topic of acidification suddenly get so interesting in Sweden? It must be wonderful for the government to have such an institution as SLU. Now they can propose to cut money for lime bombing, and refer to sound science. Whatever the their own Environmental Protection Agency says.

Revkin, again

2011-07-22T11:34:00.002+02:00

This year has been ripe with climate-related news. Tornadoes, torrential rains and heat waves. Today the BBC reports that the deadly heatwave that has been lingering in the US midwest is moving east, and affecting approximately 50% of the nations inhabitants. As always, some are more affected than other's.

A few months back, when tornadoes, not heat waves, was the big problem, Andrew Revkin provoked the Green mainstream, including me, by saying that protecting people against disasters is a more urgent problem than lowering co2 levels in the atmosphere. He was wrong, but at the same time strikingly right.

It is obvious that anyone concerned about disaster protection, must urge for radical cuts in co2 emissions. Business as usual will make more severe storms occur more often, and render any current disaster protection useless. The only protection that lasts more than a decade will be to address the cause of the problem, not the symptoms.

Against the backdrop of climate change, it is very tempting to regard the world of day to day politics as futile and irrelevant. When the world is four degrees warmer now, we will have much more serious problems than budget deficits or Rupert Murdoch's media politics.

Unfortunately, Revkin was right about one thing: while we wait for the disease to be cured, the symptoms will have to be treated. Huffington Post illustrates how the bickering in politics affects a population reeling under climate change: several US states have cut money to help poor citizens pay their electrical bills. So when the heat now is on, many poor Americans can't afford an air conditioner, which means long days in potentially harmful temperatures.

Not surprising at all - when climate change strikes, we are no omniscient semi gods, but human beings stuck in the same spider web of petty politics as we has always been.

Personally, I see alternatives to public spending in cases like these as Utopian. But this is what we should discuss. Politicians shouldn't be caught up in a 18th century ideology where a balanced budget is the aim of politics, but address the real question - how do we as a society make sure that as few people as possible suffer as little as possible from climate change.

Be it trough public spending for electricity bills, incentives to build better houses, or encouraging the suffering people to invent their own solutions. The only thing that is really wrong, is ignoring the problem, and pretending that a balanced budget is going to help.

Sofia Bikes

2011-07-13T16:14:00.001+02:00

Before heading south to Plovdiv I've spent a little less than 24 hours in Sofia. It was relentlessly hot, and to a large extent everything was as I remembered it. Lots of shabby houses still standing around, several new glass and steel buildings int he outskirts, and building sites everywhere which gives a sense of a constant work in process.

Besides from the better looking park in front of NDK, two things impressed me, though. One was the boom of small stores/bars/restaurant with a dedicatedly alternative and green image. The second thing was that it seemed everyone has bought a bike since I was last around.

This post is the first on my holiday blog maladets! - freewheeling. Stay updated with it, if you want to read more like this.

(Picture grabbed from the Among the Birds blog) (c) 2010 Zona Urbana

There are a lot of cool places to go nowadays for those living in, or staying in Sofia. A bunch of alternative water holes present themselves on this lovely cartooned map of Sofia. A must for anyone who wants to visit the best of Sofia. This kind of places, the common ground between them might be a shared clientèle, and shared values like alternative life style, small scale and environmental thinking. It is vegetarian restaurants, bio-shops, and craft stores producing jewelery form recycled material.

As a Swede, it is not without envy that I watch such places appearing one more and more street corners. In my home town, Lund, the development seems to be the opposite - small stores are rapidly pushed out of market by big retail chains and the shopping malls outside the city. It is curious how the numerous malls in Sofia has not yet managed to destroy this market for small scale commercial activities.

Two reasons are obvious - more and more young Bulgarians have developed a taste for this kind of things, and also some money to pay restaurant bills with. And due to the still rough state of many buildings in central Sofia, rents are still far from what they are in Western Europe, even in a place like Lund, which makes it easier to make money on small businesses. If I was a Sofia politician, I would think a lot about how to improve buildings in the center, without raising rents too much. Too many cities have made their centers tidy but boring. Sofia still has a chance to avoid that.

So for the bikes. When I was living in Sofia, some people did bike, but they were very rare. It was perfectly possible to go an entire day without seeing a single bike. Now, bikers are still a minority, they are a very visible minority. In almost every crossing you would see one biker navigating between cars.

Which is probably one clue why so many people do it. Biking is green, cheap and fashionable as in Western Europe, but except for that it seems to be the absolutely fastest way to move through central Sofia. Cars are usually stuck in two lines, buses and trams as well, but a daring biker find his way in between. A Swedish biker probably wouldn't, let's say that the bicyclists in Sofia bike pretty much as the drivers drive.

I look forward to coming back to this city twice a year for the rest of my life, and this is the kind of things I hope to see more of. Which reminds me of my everyday life back home... it is definitely time for me to buy a new bike.

Let's produce!

2011-07-07T23:44:00.000+02:00

The topic is in media again - we waste too much food. But what else could you expect from a consumer?

This morning the Swedish radio reported that 25% of all carrots produced in Sweden are never reach the supermarkets. If they are not the right size and shape, producers throw them away. It is not the first time the topic of food waste is in the media. In 2010 Svenska Dagbladet reported that the supermarkets themselves throw away enormous amounts of food, and in 2009 Dagens Nyheter reported that households do the same. All in all, according to the Swedish radio, a third of all food produced in or imported to Sweden is thrown away (and usually not even composted).

I guess this does not upset Marxists already suspicious of markets. Hardhearted liberals who sees it as a human right to waste food if you find it makes you happier will not raise their eyebrows. The one's who find the story disturbing are either greens, eager to diminish our ecological footprint or blue eyed liberals that see markets as something beautiful, something that allots the best opportunity to each man and each carrot, and leaves nothing as waste. And of course the great majority of people who sees a problem in food scarcity, and wait for market economy to solve it. Silly dreamers.

Imagine a market, anywhere, anytime. Imagine an oriental bazaar in the middle ages, a Swedish mârten in early 20th century or a supermarket in Tokyo. It is the same thing everywhere. A buyer comes armed with money to a seller, and his task is to pick out the best possible product she, or sometimes he, can get for those money. If the seller sells carrots, it is the very essence of buying to pick out the larger and straighter one's, and reject the smaller and quirkier one's.

The fact that those small and quirky carrots might get sold in the oriental bazaar is just because there wasn't enough of the big and straight one's. In modern Sweden there is no such scarcity, and logically they get rejected. We have PR agencies and social sciences predicting consumers behavior, and supermarkets know very well that a quirky carrot will not be sold, and might even destroy the whole impression of their vegetable selling area, reducing other sales as well.

Farmers also know that, so why would they bother to send the carrot to a supermarket that will not manage to sell it? In this society it makes more sense to aim at returning food waste as compost to the land, than to try to stop the waste, that is the very symbol of wealth.

Is it a problem? Yes it is. 925 million people go to bed hungry already today so there is use for all this food that is thrown away. Food scarcity is ever more likely as populations grow and agriculture deteriorates due to climate change and unwise use of land. And we are heavily over-using our ecological resources. Using land for resource intensive agriculture and then trow away the products is politically acceptable to some of us, but suicide in the real world.

Since the problem is not what we do wrong, but to our correct and logical behavior as consumers in the market, the clue to solving it is to let people be producers, not just consumers. A consumer's job is to choose between carrots, but a producer would rather see the amount of work that was invested in all of them. For the consumer the carrot's value is relative, for the producer it is absolute. And since the world does, actually, depend on biological and physical facts, a absolute world view makes more sense than a relative one. Whereas the consumer would would choose the catastrophe that brings the most bang for his buck, a producer mind would spend the money to avert a catastrophe.

The problem is consumerism itself. You can not expect a consumer to be wary about resources. But who said that we all must be consumers? Inside we are all artists and gardeners. And that is what the world requires of us to be. Let's stop pretending we are something else.

The C-word

2011-07-04T18:08:00.000+02:00

The inhabitants of the Danish capital Copenhagen are shocked. Flash floods in the weekend unearthed the invisible urban dwellers, roads were closed, and insurance claims are the highest ever. One wish only that such extreme weather had occurred at another time.

Extremely heavy rains on Saturday flooded the Danish city, with the result that living and dead rats from the sewers appeared on street level. Don't touch them without a glove - rats can carry diseases, authorities warn. I wouldn't try touching a rat that was spewed out from the sewer no matter what authorities say, but obvious there might be people who have never before been exposed to the existence of rats.

They are as ubiquitous in modern cities as they ever were, but modern city planning has manged to separate the rat population from the human population to the degree that people are surprised once they see one, even though rats as a race live where humans live. You didn't see a rat on top of a mountain, did you? It is telling how severe weather can make the ghosts form past centuries reappear in the modern metropolis.

The consequences of the flood are wide ranging - some people in Sweden are unable to access their email accounts located on danish servers. "I am lucky to be on vacation" a commenter on Aftonbladeta>, a Swedish news site, writes. Whatever will be the final cost of this disaster, they would have been much worse had it occurred on a busy weekday than on a Saturday in July.

Miraculously, no person have been injured, but thousand of buildings have been flooded, and the insurance claims will be record high, insurance companies say to Politikken, a major Danish newspaper. It will probably also take record time to find out exactly how big. The last record was set as far back as - 2010, when less violent rains caused damages of approximately 134 000 000 EUR. The last record before that was in 2007, which makes a worrying trend.

In another Danish paper, Berlingske Tidene, a meteorologist says that he has never before seen a similar rain. Of course he has not. There will not be any more rains like the one's we have seen. Our climate is changing and chaos is the new normal. But anyone with computer and/or library access during the last five years know that this is what a warming atmosphere leads to. As the IPCC wrote in its Fourth Assessment Report back in 2007 : Negative impacts [of climate change] will include increased risk of inland flash floods, and more frequent coastal flooding and increased erosion (due to storminess and sea-level rise). I am not implying that anyone with a computer has been reading IPCC reports, but there has been a lot of articles and blog post about this throughout the last decade.

When the predicted flash flood now comes, wouldn't the reasonable reaction be to think that the prediction is true, and go to extreme measures to mitigate climate change? Or at least saying "hey, this was predicted four years ago - maybe reevaluate those predictions?"

Still, the taboo around climate change seems to be stronger than it ever was . You will have to look really hard to find an article in a mainstream paper evening mentioning the C word in connection with the Copenhagen floods.

When I looked for some older articles with climate change predictions, I read that in 2008 thousand of people were marching in Swedish cities, demanding political action against climate change Where are they (we) now? As these predictions come true one after another, the discussion about climate change have lost its intensity. Maybe it was more convenient to discuss it when it was a threatening future, rather than a lethal presence?

Maybe things would have looked different if the COP15 meeting in December 2009 had taken place in a flooded Copenhagen. Maybe Obama & co. would than have realized what was at stake? That winter was oddly normal, something that surely made it easier for politicians to believe that things were not as bad as scientists said. The international negotiations derailed, and public interest waned. And the climate changed.

If there is anything positive in all this, it is the record breaking insurance costs. The insurance man quoted above is taken aback by the extent of damages, but hardly surprised - for good reasons. Insurance companies have economic incentives to take climate change seriously, as the Guardian recently pointed out.

While other industries fight hard to keep on making money on destroying the planet, the insurance business is the one who has to pay for the party, as claims from floods, wild fires and tornadoes amount. The world's biggest insurance company, Munich Re is already active to put climate change on the agenda, and ultimately they will have their way. Society wouldn't work without reasonably priced insurances, any more than it works with too expensive oil. You either pay that insurance, or bears the cost yourself, which is suicidal when weather is bound not only to get worse, but to continue deteriorating for a long time.

At one point all other business will be at the insurers' mercy. Until then we will not see any real political initiatives against climate change. And media will continue to avoid the C word in order to not appear greenish and left leaning. How soon is that? Cast your vote in the poll to the right!

Energy waste

2011-07-03T19:44:00.001+02:00

Every environmentalist's favorite sports event - the Tour de France is on again, so what could be more suitable than a post on cycling.

I live approximately four kilometers from work, a distance where individual choices really matter. It is far enough to go by car, close enough to take the bike, and public transport is frequent and smooth. So everything, save helicopter, is a realistic choice for me. I do read a bunch of ecologist blogs and dress in Patagonia wear so it might not be a surprise that I take the bike.

Now imagine a fictive colleague of mine who also lives four kilometers from our workplace. Let's call him Charlie. Charlie thinks of my lifestyle as a slightly hypocritical way of being hip through pretending to worry about 1000 and one catastrophes. He takes the car, always did, and tells himself that whatever is true about global warming, his driving or not driving is very unlikely to change the bottom line. I might change his own bottom, though.

I eat a breakfast consisting of about 3-400 k cal Is it unreasonable to presume that Charlie does as well? Not so. At work we eat together, and both consume about 500 k cal for lunch. Since Charlie and I are both bon viviants in hiding we usually consume about 650 k cal for dinner. To sum up: in a day we both consume 1450-1550 k cal

These numbers are completely arbitrary. My point is this: it is not unreasonable to imagine two individuals with the same intake of energy and the same job, one of them bicycling and the other one driving a car. I could even invent a scenario where the car driver eats more than the cyclist, without being unreasonable.

Obviously these 1450-1550 k cal is enough to transport me to work and back without feeling dizzy. It is also enough to take me through a working day with the same kind of tasks as Charlie. The question is what happens to them in Charlie's body.

We differ incredibly much, and conclusions could not be made about a single individual. Some of us can ride cars without growing a stomach, some of us can not. But unless bicyclists eat more, and car drivers work out more in their spare the result on the population at large can only be one: fat car drivers. And this is what nation after nation turn into as modernity spreads around the globe. There is a very strong correlation between car driving and obesity. It is shown in statistics, and self evident.

It follows that investing in highways and making it easier for people to commute by car, as governments around the globe do, will have adverse effects on the nation's health. And that anyone who drives a car on a daily basis must come up with some kind of plan of how to use the energy he or she consumes as food during the day.

The problem is not only related to car driving, of course. It is a general problem in a society where human work is replaced with automation. We are likely to eat the same amount of food as we always did - so what do we do with the energy we do not need any more?

The alternative to obesity is to exercise for the sake of exercise. That can be relaxing at times, but if you think of it as energy usage it is rather wasteful - like sending people to dig a whole and refill it, like the first French Republic did to curb unemployment. Wouldn't it make more sense to use up that energy for productive work, and then have a rest?

In other situations we tend to think that working hours and energy should be used for something useful. Why do we not think the same about the energy we consume as food? The enormous amount of human power in a 7 billion world could be harnessed for something better than gymming, right?

Good news

2011-06-27T20:32:00.001+02:00

It is often said that bad news dominate media, and that positive developments are ignored since they do not have the dramatic news appeal of a disaster. Climate change kills ice bears makes more headlines than the consumption of ecological food increases.

There is some truth in that, but unfortunately the opposite is equally true. According to Google "ecological food consumption" renders 3,900 000 hits, while "climate change ice bears" renders merely 1,600 000 hits. Media consumers do sometimes cherry pick positive news in a negative trend, as recent reporting about threatened species show. (Isn't it funny how often two opposite things are equally true? Maybe the world should not be understood in truths, but in riddles and contradictions).

The fact that the Arabian Onyx is not any longer threatened is of course positive. It was duly reported in on-line media during the last weeks. The animal was once hunted into close to extinction and only survived as a minuscule population in zoos. But hard work of reintroducing it to wildlife has brought fruit, and the species is not any more threatened. A cynical mind would probably add that the Arabian Onyx, being specialist on desert survival, is more than average fit for the new word of desertification and global warming.

Whereas the Onyx became a poster child for hope, a promise that everything that is broken can be fixed, much less media attention was given to the fact that the total number of endangered species is higher than ever, in spite of years of hard work from biologists, NGO's and authorities. The most threatened group of animals are amphibians, and what is troublesome that unlike the Onyx it is not mindless hunting or other human misconduct which threatens them but the way we feed ourselves. We have done away with the wetlands, and those we didn't do away with are rapidly covered by grass, fueled by the enormous spill of nitrates from agriculture.

To change that would take action on a completely different scale than a wildlife preservation campaign. It is unlikely to be done before amphibians go extinct, and someone should start thinking about what that means for humanity. Someone else should ponder over what it means for morality that humans not only make use of nature, but dispose with species at will.

The Arabian Onyx was a global story, southern Sweden had its own local eco-sunshine story. A peregrine falcon, the hallmark of threatened species, the bird whose almost disappearance led to the ban of DDT and fueled the emergence of the ecological movement, has started nesting under the Öresund bridge.

Great news, in deed. Over all, the Öresund bridge has not become the ecological disaster that some people feared, it has rather added life to the marine environment. That shows that humans can build without threatening animals and the eco systems, no? It does. But once again it is ridiculous to see the commotion about the peregrine falcon, when the list of endangered species and plant is growing also in Sweden, for the same reasons as elsewhere in the world.

So is it really true that bad news get more press than good news? The short answer is no. A little longer one is that the problem is that only news that can be good headlines are discussed. Arabian Onyxes and peregrine falcons are big and beautiful animals, and it is very easy to invoke human sympathy for them. Having sympathy for a toad usually requires either a religious veneration of the creation, or an understanding of its role in an ecological system. Which is why religious and scientific thinking are anything but opposite when it comes to nature.

The media logic also affects what bad news are reported. A good story has a beginning, a development and an end. Things like wars, revolutions and floods meet these demands and get reported. But the underlying trends - positive like the factual and gradual emancipation of women in many countries, or negative like a gradually warming climate or the gradual loss of biodiversity among insect and amphibians do not meet these demands and are therefor underreported.

How wonderful it could be if we could be glad about the Arabian Onyx, and let those good news inspire us to do something for other species as well. But if we acted like that we would be gods, not humans.

The S***t hits the fan

2011-06-24T19:30:00.000+02:00

Peak Oil has been discussed on-line for quite some time, but while you are reading this, the thing is actually happening. A number of countries dependent on oil-imports headed by the US were so worried about the effect of high pill prices on the economy that they have decided to tap their emergency oil reserve to the market in order to lower prices by political intervention. Prices have, of course, fell, and as could be predicted, another group of countries dependent on oil-exports, OPEC - Saudi Arabia are obviously infuriated. Such a development is almost sure to have geopolitical consequences, but I predict that it will not be the winner of this battle, but the country that first breaks it dependence on oil that will be the next world leader.

The Reuters article I link to above somehow manages to discuss the event in economical and political terms without even mentioning peak oil - in spite of acknowledging the fact that meager oil reserves makes oil more expensive in an article 13/06. Nor does it mention climate change, even though writing about the topic 18/06, and the common sense knowledge that if we use all oil there is on earth, we will render the planet inhabitable. With peak oil and climate change in mind, high oil prices are hardly a problem. It might slow down economies, but it will

a) make oil reserves last longer and
b) make climate friendly alternatives to oil more profitable.

Reuters is a praiseworthy news source, writing for a specific set of readers - the international business community. They sense danger when politicians try to manipulate commodity markets in this way, and with good reason so. This is but one sign of the fact that free market liberalism is a dieing ideology. It has never been more than an ideology, and as such it should serve the needs of the ruling elite. Power is based on more or less content consumers, and when the ideology of free markets can not generate that, elites will discard with the ideology, not with their power. Technically, one could argue that since the consumer countries have paid for these reserves they are free to do what they want with them, but that is beside the point, since states have pledged to abstain from this kind of action, even though they always have had the opportunity.

Since the move is headed by president Obama, republican politicians in the US are also protesting about that they see as an unwise use of reserves. It is hard to imagine that a party based on "drill, baby drill", would have behaved more wisely if they were in power, and Obama would probably face even fiercer resistance if he tried to limit co2 emissions or prepare the US for Peak Oil, but the republicans nevertheless find themselves in the right on this issue.

Oil prices are high, but they have so far not made people in the west starve, even though they have aggravated poverty in the south. On the other hand, oil prices might be more likely to push people into self-sufficiency in the south, and thus improve their position. We know that more business as usual would have fatal consequence for all, so what is the sense in using the reserves now, and not when we really need them? And what is the sense in going into a conflict with oil producing countries? It is plain logic that OPEC will retaliate, but they are probably wise enough to do when they reckon that the consumer countries have used up their reserves. Then it will really be the seller's market, and the consuming countries would not come out as winners of such a conflict. At least not without going to war, so we could expect more Iraq/Afghanistan-like action in oil producing countries in the decades to come.

The shit has now hit the fan. Peak oil has made oil prices rice to the point where they pose a political problem, and elites are getting desperate. Especially so since nuclear power is less attractive after Fukushima, as Reuters points out. Maybe so, but I think many politicians will see no good alternative to nuclear power in the years ahead. Because oil prices will never return to the levels that keep America going.

Nuclear power, however, is vulnerable to peak oil in the same way as food is. We do not eat oil, but the price of oil affects the price of food since agriculture is motorized and food must be transported. Nuclear power is a highly centralized way of creating electricity, and as such it requires a lot of oil to run. The mining of uranium is motorized, and also uranium must be transported at a price that is determined by the oil price. The only way to create cheap nuclear energy for the consumer is to subsidize it, and the nuclear industry is already today heavily subsidized. But those subsidizes must come from somewhere, i.e. from the consumers tax bill. It seems this is an equation without solutions for the modern state, something that can be moderated in the short run but will be fatal in the long. What we are looking at is a civilization in decline.

And what are politicians so desperate about? As I wrote before, if the concern was the wellbeing of people, it would make a lot more sense to save as much oil as possible for later, or preferable stop using oil at all, starting tomorrow. What is at stake is not peoples lives, but companies' profits. Obama and the pack are desperate about keeping up GNP numbers, and other statistics on the macro level until the next crash. They are buying time, and pay with our future. As they always do.

What I wonder is which country will be the first to make a brave move and try out the obvious alternative: to dismantle centralized systems and let local communities supply food and energy for themselves, using oil, wind- nuclear power, donkey charts, bicycles or whatever they find suitable. That country will not look like the states we know of today, but it will be the powerhouse of the 21th century.

The S***t hits the fan

Peak Oil has been discussed on-line for quite some time, but while you are reading this, the thing is actually happening. A number of countries dependent on oil-imports headed by the US were so worried about the effect of high pill prices on the economy that they have decided to release their emergency stocks to the market in order to lower prices by political intervention. Prices have, of course, fell, and as could be predicted, another group of countries dependent on oil-exports, OPEC - Saudi Arabia are obviously infuriated. Such a development is almost sure to have geopolitical consequences, but I predict that it will not be the winner of this battle, but the country that first breaks it dependence on oil that will be the next world leader.

The Reuters article I link to above somehow manages to discuss the event in economical and political terms without even mentioning peak oil - in spite of acknowledging the fact that meager oil reserves makes oil more expensive in an article 13/06. Nor does it mention climate change, even though writing about the topic 18/06, and the common sense knowledge that if we use all oil there is on earth, we will render the planet inhabitable. With peak oil and climate change in mind, high oil prices are hardly a problem. It might slow down economies, but it will

a) make oil reserves last longer and
b) make climate friendly alternatives to oil more profitable.

When bad news are the good news

2011-06-20T23:07:00.000+02:00

It is horrifying to read about the natural disasters that torment country after country. But maybe disasters like these is the only thing that can make our politicians wake up?

Fears loom that the international community will fail against to find a binding agreement on co2 emissions, and that the compromises made in Copenhagen and Cancun were made in vain. I think this is

very likely

sad

but less relevant

It is sad that our leadership fails us when we need it the most, but it could hardly be a surprise for anyone. Climate politics is but one example of the obvious fact - elected politicians do not rule - they are ruled by special interests like the car-, oil- and coal industries. The function politicians are playing in the modern democratic society is to mitigate between different interests, to execute their policies, and to shield these interests from public anger. The perfect example is Greece, where the government carries out a policy dictated from the IMF, and willingly face the anger of it's population, rather than letting signore EU/IMF take the hit.

In fact, all data was on the table in Copenhagen, and if there was ever a chance for a political solution to the climate problem, it was then. Obama knows as well as I do that the climate is changing, but as a corporate America servant his job is to keep the issue out of the public debate until capitalists have moved their assets from dieing industries like cars and coal into perceived green industries as solar, nuclear and wind energy.

The result of the Copenhagen meeting in itself indicates that we have nothing to hope from politics as they look today. Quite frankly, nothing that can come out of the next meeting in Durban, SA, will be worth the paper it is written on, so if the diplomatic process breaks down it is just as good. Maybe better.

We have to look for the good news somewhere else. And right now the worst news are the best one's.

For things to change, the realities on the ground must change. And they are changing. Even though media is still oddly nervous about discussing the relation between climate change and extreme weather events the connection is as well documented as it gets. It is almost a truism - climate change means changing weather. The statistics are horrifying: staggering 42 million people are displaced due to climatic changes. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that extreme weather events have grown more frequent in the United States since 1980. Part of that shift is due to climate change, said Tom Karl, director of the agency's National Climatic Data Center. I wonder what the other part of that shift is due to...

Last year, like the years before it witnessed unprecedented weather events. Pakistan flooded, and the drought in Russia made food prices peak (again). This year's weather looks even grimmer. Tornadoes, wildfires and floods in the US. Floods and drought in China. Water scarcity in Pakistan. Do I sound like an alarmist? Well, if one manages to connect the dots, as Bill McKibben writes in an article far better than this post, there is real reason to alarm.

Politicians on a local level, presumably since big business doesn’t bother to buy them have already started to deal with the new reality. Chicago is planning for climate change. So is other cities worldwide.

Obama and other world leaders can not ignore this reality for ever. But the question is not only when they are prepared to act, but if they are prepared to let go of their servitude to big business, and let communities on the local level govern themselves democratically. States can't afford to lose business. Local communities can't afford losing one day of adaption for climate change. Which is why it makes sense to decentralize the important decisions to the local level.

The conflicts that are not

2011-06-15T22:15:00.000+02:00

The arab spring and the greek crisis has brought street protest back to the TV screens. But if we don't realize the threat of climate change, democracy won't do us much good.

The Mediterranean spring brought the ancient battle between people and their rulers back to the TV screens. The Arab spring has so far shown meager results. The success stories Tunisia and Egypt look increasingly like stolen revolutions. The West seems incompetent to make change happen in Libya, too scared about any chaos involving Israel to bother with Syria and supportive of the oppressors in Yemen and Bahrain.

On the other side of the Mediterranean, that sea that always served as unifier, not an obstacle, similar movements in Spain, Italy and Greece fight their battles for democracy in a very different context. But they don't look any more successful.

Successful or not they remind us that democracy is never to be taken for granted but must be struggled for, and when you are not struggling it doesn't exist.

Do not underestimate my cordial support for anyone fighting for democracy, especially when putting her or his life at stake. But the truly worrying about today's political context is not these conflicts, but how irrelevant they rapidly become. We all know that the world is quickly becoming a very different place, with fuel shortages and ecological disasters. In such a world survival is important. The Greek sovereign debt is not. Not any more than the Byzantine empire's debts - a matter for historians.

Syrians are lacking democracy and economic development. But putting Syria on the right track will require something quite different than introducing elections and market economy. It will need to re-invent a way to live in a desert without the help of fossil fuels. While I am writing the Syrian army is carrying out a "scorched earth" campaign against rebellious cities in the north.

This earth has already been scorched. "The four-year drought in Syria has pushed two million to three million people into extreme poverty" New York Times wrote less than a year ago. Two and a half year ago AFDP reported that 160 Syrian villages have been deserted due to the drought.

This is the real problem, the one that should be on TV every day. It is absolutely global. Million of peoples are turned into beggars and refugees by climate change. And yet we find time to discuss the Greek sovereign debt... As a grim irony - when citizens that have endured four long years of drought now run from the army, they are now greeted by heavy rains. Grim, but predictable. For decades science has predicted that global warming will make weather events more extreme. Drier droughts and heavier storms.

Of course, dictatorships are not fit to meet this challenge, and one could very optimisticly see the current push for democracy as a first step towards governments that dare dealing with the real issues that Egyptians, Syrians, Greeks and all of us face. But in order for that to happen, global elites would have to realize the gravity of the matter and lend such a movement support. At the moment they are not.

Did the Syrian four year drought and the massive displacement of rural citizens play a part in generating the current unrest? Is it a coincidence that conflicts appear in areas severely affected by climate change?

The political impacts of climate change could be a wake up call to politicians and if so, that would be good. Because if we don't address the issues that really matter - climate change, peak oil and food insecurity, democracy will not bring anything good, not matter how heroic the struggle for it may be.

Still. My heart goes out to those risking their lives for a better world. If we all were so brave, maybe we could get out of this mess?

Hypocrisies

2011-06-14T18:55:00.000+02:00

Swedish local communities can veto against wind power - but not against oil drilling. What is fair about that?

Last week the Swedish parliament voted on a proposal from the opposition to restrict local communities' right to veto against wind power investments. The reason such such a veto exists is not pure nimby-ism or conservatism. Wind mills does affect the local environment and any environmentalist approach to land usage must recognize the local communities right to decide over local investments.

Still, the veto has been criticized as an obstacle to the development of clean energy in Sweden. We currently produce less than 1500 GWh of wind power while other European countries like Spain produces less than 30 000 GWh and Germany around 40 000 GWh.

That is much more wind power produced per inhabitant. Of course, every country (or rather every bio-region) has to find it's own energy mix, and the value of this kind of comparison might be limited.

What makes the matter sour is not so much this decision per se, but the hypocrisy that surrounds it. In various parts of southern Sweden oil companies are searching for places to extract more fossil fuels.
You can not drill oil wells in Sweden, but you can extract some using the infamous method of hydraulic fracturing. An activity that does not only add new co2 emissions to a heated world, but in many cases destroys the life of local communities through pollution. We talk about ugly sites that makes land unusable for tourism. We talk about noise that makes people leave their homes. And we talk about numerous cases of local disasters where chemicals leak out and poison drinking water.

If you have not heard about hydraulic fracturing before I advise you to watch this video - and be aware that this is an issue coming to your country if it isn't already there.

Against such land usage neither local communities, nor the land owners themselves have any veto. Because they only own the land - whatever lies under it is leased by the state to private interests.

Imagine having a small scale farm trying to attract tourists to a distant but beautiful area. This is not an uncommon scenario for European countryside dwellers. Against your will the state gives a company you never heard of the right to extract oil 200 meters from your house. If you're lucky it won't kill you. But you can forget any plans you had about developing your land.

Civil resistance against Shell's attempt to extract oil in Skåne was actually too strong to prevent it form happening, but campaigners have been working hard for a change in the law, giving landowners and local communities a say similar the wind power veto. Such a proposal was however turned down in the parliament, without any clear motivation. The law will be revised, but not changed.

To make matter worse, the right wing populists Sverigedemokraterna are cynically used in the debate. Yesterday the opposition forced through further revisions of the government's social policy, helped by the votes of Sverigedemokraterna. Of course, the government was eager to point out this, and that the opposition can only have its way by cooperating with a racist party. But if it wasn't for this racist party, the government would have lost this vote, and there would be no local veto against wind power investments.

Could one claim that a miniscule racist party that manages Sweden's energy policy? I think it is more fair to say that it is managed by undue respect for corporate interests, voluntary blindness and hypocrisy.

How does these matters look in the country where you look? Do you have a right for local communities to veto against wind power / fossil fuel extraction? I would love to read about that in the comments.

Let Germany save us all

2011-05-30T22:35:00.000+02:00

As it happens in democracies, events in the real world affects German politics. After being severly punished in the state elections, Merkel's liberal right governement changed its mind on nuclear power, and decided to honour the previous government's promise to close all German reactors by 2022.

It is easy to hold strong opinions about nuclear power. In spite of the fact that influential green thinkers such as James Hansen and James Lovelock both advocate nuclear power as the best/only way to maintain civilisation without fossil fuels. True as they might be, what Lovelock and Hansen are talking about is the so called fourth generation of nuclear power. These plants theoretically solve a host of the problems today's plants create. Like the waste issue - in stead of building an enrourmous pile of potentially lethal waste, these plants promise to reuse the waste as fuel, until it is not dangerous any more. Which sounds great if it works. We might have no choice but to try.

The facilities that are to be closed down in Germany are nothing like this though. They are old and problem torn. Any one who believes in nucelar power should be glad to see them closed. The industry, however seems more eager to run them as long as they are profitable before building next generation plants, which is the core of the nuclear problem. Nuclear power could maybe be safe in the hands of scientists like Lovelock and Hansen, but any CEO will treat it as just another souce of large and safe income which makes him relunctant to renew it.

The reactions in Sweden, and elsewhere in Europe, to the German U-turn is shock and fear. The major newssource Dagens Nyheter claims that the price of electricity will double if the decision is carried through. Interstingly, most people interviewed in the article does not think so, but DN chose that headline. For some reason, that is what they want readers to believe.

Let us for a moment presume that it is true. Prices on electricity will double. Everyone agrees that we need to save energy - wouldn't a drastic price hike be the best way to create energy prudence? Wouldn't it drastically increase the profitability of renewable energy?

For sure it would, and the way things look right now it would be a blessing. The Swedish energy authority forecast Sweden's energy useage to keep growing until 2030. If that happens, what chances do we have to lower co2 emissions? None. Any positive development would require a shock therapy. If the decision in Germany doubles prices in Sweden - we ought to thank he Germans for saving our future. Unfortunately, it is so much easier to whine about higher prices, than to realize what problems low prices create.

IN the real world it is unlikely that the German decision will have so drastic consequenses, and it is still far from fait accompli . Merkel's decision must first be approved in the parliament, where it will come under fierce critizism from the industry and politicians. It will be intersting to see who comes out as the winner in the end - Europe's strongest civil society or an infamous industry.

I

The ill posed question - or how Andrew Revkin got it wrong

2011-05-05T23:13:00.000+02:00

In a recent dot Earth post Andrew C Revkin discusses what is most relevant when discussing the US' most lethal tornadoes since 1932 - climate change or resilient housing? The disaster is terrifying. So far 291 people are confirmed dead.

Revkin's bottom line is this: Limiting emissions of greenhouse gases is a long-term challenge that needs to be addressed in ways that achieve results; building and living resiliently in tornado zones is a real-time imperative, with or without a push from climate change.

A telling point is that Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi were much worse hit than S:t Louis. That would suggest that it is not the tornadoes themselves that kill people, but the lack of preparation. Revkin quotes the meteorologist Mike Smith, suggesting a number of different reasons - St Louis has warning system independent of the power grid and far better shelters in form of basements.

Of course, quoting this Mike Smith is not the best idea in an article that relates to climate change. Smith does not believe in IPCC climatic projections - you can watch him make a fool of himself in this video on YouTube. Isn't it embarrassing with a meteorologist who can't tell the difference between a weather forecast and a climate projection?

But you can not accuse the man of being inconsistent. Just as he doesn't think that the 2011 tornadoes are related to climate change, he didn't think that the 2008 floods were.

It will probably take more than a couple of deaths to convince a man like Mike Smith. My post, however is about Revkin, an influential writer I have a certain amount of respect for. It is sad to see him fall in the age-old mistake of putting the question as a choice between people and planet. This particular disaster shows maybe more than any other that it is instead a choice between profit/power or planet/people.

Let's begin with the tricky question that Smith doesn't understand - the difference between climate and weather. Weather is what creates specific storms. Climate is what causes the likeliness for all kinds of weathers. In a world with 349 ppm co2 in the atmosphere storms like those ravaging Alabama are rare phenomena. In a world with 500 ppm co2 in the atmosphere they are commonplace. but there will be windy days and sunny days in both worlds.

Climate change is the obvious culprit if we see a trend of more frequent and more devastating storms (as we do), but it can not cause any specific storm. An analogy is that no one has died from an unhealthy diet. If you in spite of that think that a healthy diet can make you live longer and healthier, you have every reason to believe that climate change will lead to more storms like these, and that extreme weather events are more common now than in our grandparent's times because of their actions.

What Revkin, and Smith as well, does grasp is that the outcome of these extreme weather events does not depend on the levels of co2 in the atmosphere, but on how well prepared we are for the kind of eather these levels produce. It is ironic that a less developed economy would be better equipped than ours to withstand climate change - our global supply chains and coastal metropoles are anything but resilient. Waters are rising, and if trucks can not travel 24/7 through Europe the risk of foot shortages in a country like Sweden would be real.

Too many of those killed in these storms lived in mobile homes, or in homes not fitting to withstand a tornado. Many of them were poor. If we allow poverty to exist we expose thousand of citizens to dangerous weather. How can we make sure that that is not the case next time a twister strikes? Revkin lists a number of improvements but forgets to mention that it would take regulations and surveillance to make sure they are followed. Which might not be such an easy thing to achieve in today's political climate.

Which brings us to the heart of the matter - the real problem is not our lifestyle - it changes faster than we can think, but a corrupted political system ruled by private interests. James Hansen's book Storms of my grandchildrena> makes it very clear. A working democracy would not let oil companies hunt for oil in Canadian tar sands, neither on off shore drilling sites. In a working democracy scientists would be unhindered to communicate with politicians and public. If the facts that everybody knows were presented with the urgency of economic news, it would not be difficult to muster political support for battling climate change. After all, it is the voters' basements who will be flooded.

So how come politicians find time to hunt terrorists but not to protect its citizens? Unless we presume a conspiracy, or shameless stupidity among voters and politicians alike, the simple answer is that the political system is controlled by interests that make profits in the world as it is, and therefore have a strong incentive not tchange it. They are the one's who are presented with the true choice - either to give up their profits and their power to give the planet and people a chance to survive. Or to use their power to make as big profits as possible until the bubble bursts.

It is likely that the very same people who would oppose to any stricter regulations of co2 emissions would also be the ones to protest against stricter housing norms. Thus, creating sustainable societies in tornado-struck areas, and addressing co2 emissions demands the same thing. That some kind of democratic movement curbs the power of capital owners and dares to ignore how their bottom line is affected. I don't expect to read that on Dot Earth, though...

Finally, lets look at the question Revkin began with - is it irresponsible to write about lethal storms without mentioning climate change? My response would be that it is irresponsible not to mention the need to reduce inherent and avoidable human vulnerability to tornadoes in the crowding South, particularly in low-income regions with flimsy housing.

Why not mention both? Is it so hard to think that tornadoes are bad and they will get worse, so we must make sure that people have decent housing? Maybe because accepting the notion that has grown stronger among environmentalists - that climate change is happening now, would require for Revkin to leave his conviction that limiting emissions of greenhouse gases is a long-term challenge. Unfortunately it might already be too late, and if it is not, it is a more pressing issue than rebuilding Alabama. As if that wasn't pressing enough.

Some people get it, though... Like Steve Earl.

Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie

2011-05-02T21:50:00.000+02:00

The lawn outside my flat is clean. That might not sound impessive, given that my country of residence is Sweden, but if you'd been here during the weekend you would be surprised. Valborg, the 30th of April, is something like the Swedish "Students Day", and it is celebrated with plenty of alcohol, and tons of litter in the streets. Think food left overs, whine bottles, beer cans, plastic plates, underwear, demolished bikes...

It is somehow odd, when you have once been to countries where people do what they can to avoid dirt, to note that for Swedes, partying is very closely related to dirt. The dirtier the better. It is interesting how a Bulgarian who likes cleanliness is perfectly able to keep a place in order, even if he or she is drunk, whereas a Swede loses this ability after the first beer. Once the party is on, normal values do not apply.

Hold on, you say - not only Swedes live in Sweden. It is a little premature, almost racist to blame this mess on the mentality of the Swedes. True enough - almost a third of the inhabitants of this corner of Sweden would not call themselves Swedes, but if you go to celebrate 30th of April, that is not the impression you'll get. You will rather come to believe the myth that all Swedish peopel are tall and blonde, for the people who ravage in the streets are predominantly blond and tall. All well educated with good manners - le charme discret de la bourgeoisie.

It is the class/ethnic dimension is what makes it worth blogging about the fact that the lawn today, two days later is clean. Who do you think cleaned it? Tall, blonde Swedes? Not so. I saw a few women of Asian descent, who surely didn't take part in the celebrations, and have personally met the slighlty disabled guy who takes care of this specific lawn. He is Swedish, but lacks in education and manners. After all, who minds cleaning up after themselves if there is an under-paied sucker from a different social group who does it for you?

And what is wrong with that? After all, it takes all sorts of people to make the world, and isn't it a decent job also to clean streets and markets. Undoubltly so, but I think most Swedish people visiting Bulgaria reacts strongly on the fact that everyone cleaining the streets is a roma citizen, and Bulgaria has a pretty bad reputation about discrimination. It looks like one kind of poeople cleans up after another kind of people, and we feel that it is scandalous. It is.

But what is different in Sweden? Nothing but the language of the street cleaners. And the fact We not only litter the streets, but indulge in polluting them, perversly enjoying the fact that it is someone else's mess to clean up.

Was this ever our land?

2011-04-13T22:17:00.000+02:00

As a novice gardener I have been reading up on organic gardening lately, and managed to grasp a basic tenet - don't nourish the plants - improve the soil. That will benefit an entire eco-system. Besides, it is the soil, not the plants that we pass on to future generations.

Once you manage your own garden soil depletion becomes emotional - and maybe it is first when you try to grow something you realize how dependent mankind is on fertile soils. Unfortunately there are as many ways to destroy soils as to improve them.

Huffington Post has posted a video from the Environmental Working Group, reporting that soil erosion in Iowa is much worse than official number say. There is no reason to believe that it looks otherwise elsewhere in the US the video says. Neither in Europe.

The video starts out with Woody Guthrie's classic words - “this land was made for you and me”. The video rethorically asks: If that is true, then how comes farmers are allow to poison and destroy it? By over-using land and demolishing traditional soil protections like bushes along rivers, industrial agriculture is destroying the land we thought was ours for quick and high profits.

The problem is obvious for everyone - even the European Commission. But agricultural policies on both sides of the Atlantic plays a pivotal part in keeping soil depletion profitable. How? Through subsidies to agriculture, based not on how the land is worked, but how much it yields. Which is an incentive to any farmer that is financially dependent on his land to over-use it.

It is easy to understand why states sould want to subsidise specific kinds of farming - be it traditional farms kept for the sake of the landscape (they sometimes get subsidies), experimental eco-farms (they never get subsidies) or other cases. It is harder to understand why commercial agriculture needs to be subsidied. We all need food, so in a working market economy it should be the easiest business to make money form.

Outside books, there is no such thing as a working market economy (even though it sounds nice). The 21th cenury world is designed by political influential people. Some are elected, some are not.

For various reasons, these people like to see us drive cars and go shopping in malls. To do that we need to be working 8-5 in industries and services and buy our food in stores. Whichis dull, so our loyalty to the system must be bought with cheap food. Which is why agriculture is subsidised. It is not about supporting farmers, it is about keeping the consumer society running. If you find it hard to imagine the political implication of high food prices, just take a look at Tunisia and Egypt.

This might sound radical and bitter. The real picture is more complicated, of course, but it is not any different. This is the how the world looks, and everybody knows.

But since we, also the environmentally aware of us, are the one's who eat this cheap subsidized food, we reap the profits of the system, and leave future generations to pay the bill. We have no incentives to change anything, and nothing changes.

Which is why soil depletion may be a good thing - if it gets serious enough to affect food prices, we will have to face the problem we have created, and ultimately save our selves with organic agriculture. There are plenty of ways to grow food without depleting the soil. We just don't have the incentives to use them yet.

A touch of Balkan

2011-03-18T10:37:00.001+01:00

A life is a prolonged period of time spent longing for memories or fantasies. Eternity is those short interruptions when desire is directed towards the moment.

At the moment I spend most of this life longing either for Bulgaria, that I left a little more than a year ago, or longing for an idealized Swedish childhood with dizzy contours.

I spend most of today on trains, and doing this in Sweden 2011 is something that reminds me a lot more about Bulgaria than about Sweden in the late eighties/ early ninties.

The trip from Lund to Gothenburg turned out a lot more convenient than I had feared at one moment. Due to strong winds (more about this later), trains did not run on schedule from Malmö, which affects the entire southern Sweden.

My train was merely 20 minutes late, but trains have been rescheduled we stop only once between Lund and Goteborg, which means that I know no one will come asking for my seat, and I wasn't pennywise to not buy a seat reservation. My brother did, though. His train is on time, but the seat hehad booked turned out to be one for wheel chairs.

There is nothing particularly about a delayed train, or a misunderstanding about a seat reservation. Things like that happens once in a while everywhere. What gives me the feeling of being back at the balkans is that every single time I have been travelling with train in Sweden the last year, something similar has happened.

Trains replaced with buses, criminals on the train and delays. Hours of delays. My brother could add his own experiences to this list, and so could thousands of other Swedish travellers. Not only Swedish, by the way. Last week the German travel bureau Dertours announced that they will stop selling train trips in Sweden, due to the unreliable schedule. Sad news.

It is comparably comfortable to be delayed in Sweden, though. Trains and stations are warm and cosy, and nothing like a Bulgarian train. What gives you the feeling of being in the Balkans is the certainity that some kind of surprise will await you at the station. You count on the train being delayed but go there a long time in advance to be on place when the plan changes. When the train is on time, that is so uncommon, that it also counts as a surprise...

It is a tense feeling in the stomach, a heightened attention about what is happening around you. Is that train over there yours? What is that update on the screen? What did the loudspeaker just say? There can be no relaxation until you get off the train at the right destination. Brace yourself.

Could this be otherwise? Every delay usually have a pretty good explanation. Temperatures were very low this winter, and it did blow hard winds today. But when problems occur this often, there is a systematic error. A train system must be adapted to the weather being where the trains run. And while we are struggling to cope with 20th century weather, we by now know for sure that temeperatures will be more extreme and winds blow harder in a not very distant future. The weather is already more extreme than it was back in my idealised Swedish childhood but there is more to come.

The spectre of climate change poses a formidable challenge to the Swedish train infrastructure. I hope that engineers are already counting on more weather resistant trains, and that polticians are getting ready to pay. For we do need trains, in order to keep our civilisation alive without fossil fuels.

On the non-sustainability of nuclear power

2011-03-15T22:12:00.000+01:00

Have no fear for atomic energy - cause none of them can stop the time
/Redemption Song by Bob Marley

As Japan's nuclear crisis is unravelling, the fear of radiation has re-entered the western mind. The Swedish blogosphere is bickering, in the US Obama is defiant, but not triumphant, about the future of nuclear energy in the US. In Germany Angela Merkel gives in to a vocal anti-nuclear opinion that reminds us about the force in political grassroots movements.

I, too, am very frightened about the spectre of a major nuclear disaster, and speechless before the folly of trying to keep nuclear waste safe for 100 000 years. Tomorrow the Swedish nuclear industry will present a plan how to do that... environmental organisations are critical, and argue that the copper containers will corrode after 1000 years. What kind of thousand year's Reich do they imagine that can follow this up until 3011? And what kind of civilisation would be able to keep the danger in memory for 100 000 years? Certainly not homo sapiens - the nuclear industry must hope that some new breed of sapiens appears, and that we manage to transfer vital information about our ecologial footprint to them. Harry Potter is more realistic. Unless these utopias come true, the most likely outcome is that Sweish groundwater will be heavyily polluted and swats of land inhabitable.

But still - have no fear. In spite of all talk about a nuclear renaissance, improved technology and the brilliant idea that nuclear power can replace fossile fuels, nuclear power has no future in a world of expensive oil. Not because it is dangerous, but because it is just as dependent on these fossil fuels as any other industry is.

Consider the mining process - what do you think that the trucks run on? Fossil fuels, of course. Then the very product of the mines have to be transported to powerplants. By sailing boats? Unfortunately not. This trip, as any other, will be fossily fueled.

Once the nuclear fuel reaches the plant, it's consumption emits very little co2, which is about the only positive thing about nucelar power. But for doing so it requires a massive infrastructure, experts travelling in cars, parts coming in trucks and all these things that any other business do. All this things require fossil fuels - and all businesses rely on fossil fuels.

As the price of oil goes up, as it certainly will - the cost of all these transport will be added to the price of nuclear power , and make it a much less attractive kind of energy it is as long as driving trucks is cheap. The cost of building new plants will rise even more since building involves many transports. And that cost is not small even today. Security will likely be less safe when the industry is forced to save money.

There is no future for nucelar power in a peak oil world. Of course it is theoretically possible to run this whole scheme with sailing ships and electric vehicles, but that would require a massive investment in these technologies, investments that are very delayed. It will be very expensive and exposed to the same kind of flaws as fossil fuels - once everyone wants an electric vehicle, we will havea real problem finding metals for batteries.

Nuclear power is a very efficient way to produce energy, but it does not in any way replace fossil fuels. At least not before trucks are electrical. And maybe this is worse than the risk of future groundwater pollution and radiation crises. What so much energy produced so easily does is to make electricity cheaper, which is highly popular among consumers, but also discourages them to save energy. In spite of alleged technical progress, the average Swede consumes more enrgy today than 25 years ago. Maybe the real question about nuclear energy is - how big an obstacle is it to energy saving?

Whatever the answer to that question is, Nuclear power "can not stop the time", as Bob Marley sings. As so many other things, it will become way too expensive when fossil fuels become rare, and few societies wil have the means to keep it running. In stead we will have to look for solutions that do the work with a minimal energy consumption. Small scale, local and smart - those will be the keywords in the future, whether you like it or not.

Creating floods in a world of tsunamis

2011-03-11T22:36:00.001+01:00

Unlike most disasters in our time, the tsunami in Japan was neither related to fake liberalism, nor to climate change. Yet it gives us a lot of food for thought, when comntemplating the world we've set to change.

Earth quakes and tsunamis have existed since before mankind existed. They are a part of this world, which is something we should bear in mind. This world is getting hotter, and when we change the temperature in the atmosphere, we do not add an unknown number of natural disasters to a tabula rasa - we add the catastrophes that we have created to the one's that were there before us.

Reading the news from Japan tonight, one might feel that latter ones are more than enough. Through climate change, we create an awesome potential of an earth quake like this, and floods like in Paktisan simultaneously. Stocks fell in the US on the news form Japan, earing that widespread destrrucion will have ramifications for the world economy. From where will we take the cash to rebuild houses after disasters like that in the future?

Writing from another highly developed country, it is in many wasy easier to relate toa disaster in Japan, than one in Pakistan, simply because the infrastructure in Japan is more like the one I live in. As climatic conditions deteriorate, the disaster we now read about in Al Jazeera, will become the new normal also in the rich world. Japan offers a glimps of what that might look like.

No country could be better prepared to cope with an earthquake, and no country have better economic means to deal with a disaster. The ease or pain with which Japan raises after this disaster will tell us a lot about our own vulnerability, and hopefully it will be a case study to learn from.

But Japan is not a typical rich country. If our economic thories were valid, Japan should be a very poor country. On both sides of the atlantic politicans have been sacrificing social welfare and democratic rights for one fundamental goal - Economic growth. Japan on the other hand have, forced by circumstances live through an entire decade without growth. Which obviously hasn't ruined the country.

That does not make Japan a perfect example of a sustainable civilisation - the country is struggling to bring down its co2 emissions, but it does prove one thing - that growth and wealth are not the same thing. Japan has no economic growth. But it does have the wealth to deal with a massive earthquake. Which is all that counts in the end.

8th of March - the anti corruption day

2011-03-08T20:45:00.000+01:00

It is the International Women's Day, and I find myself being an angrier feminst than ever. I am born 1980, and it seems to me that we have already passed the Peak Democracy, sometime around 1995. Society is definitely more traditional, more conservative and more male dominated than it was ten or fifteen years ago.

One example of this is the horrendous rulings by the Swedish Supreme Court. Two weeks ago the court ruled that the men who had bought and sold a 15 years old disabled roma girl in the center of Malmö were free of guilt, and the girl was probably lying. One of several similar cases where men who have been convicted in lower courts for crimes against women are freed in the supreme court.

Utter rubbish, that can only only be explained with one thing - when men commit crime against women, or Swedish against immigrants, judges rule as mildly as possible. Maybe becasue they are all Swedish males themselves.

The Swedish legislation in these matters is strict, and a lot of efforts have been made at combatting this kind of crimes with harder legislation. But the supreme court seems to hold an opinion of their own, that sexual crimes are not really crimes, and in a court the judge's opinion weighs heavier than the politician's.

Which is how it should be in a democracy... at least how it is supposed to work on the paper. The 20th century showed that political power over the courts lead to tyranny. In the 21th, the independence of courts have turned into a problem. Not only in Sweden - I remember a seminar in Buglaria where environmentalists asked a juridical expert what to do about corruption within the juridical system. The answer was that very little can be done, since politican for good reasons are banned from controlling judges.

When corruption gets into the heart of the juridical system it easily gets very entrenched. The price for that is, as always, paied by those with the weakest voice in society. Like environmentalists, minorities and women. This day is for them all.

Which is why I would like to use this occasion to propagate for a Swedish writere whod edicated her life to the defense of all voiceless people in society - Elin Wägner. She wrote a number of novels, a lot of political writing, and was an activist against war between the world wars. If women like her had power and not only influence, the world would be a better place.

Read about Elin Wägner at Wikipedia
... and on Maladets!

The cooking animal

2011-01-31T16:36:00.003+01:00

Next monday I am off to see Tim Jackson adress the topic of prosperity without growth in Malmö. I am looking forward to the lecture, and have been musing about the topic myself the last couple of days. The world is currently living through a number tof interrelated crises.

The climate crisis, the biodiversity crisis, peak oil, peak phosphorus. These crises are just a few, that you easily can find plenty of internet articles about, but the truth is that whatever aspect of human ecology you look at, we are running out of resources and killing the habitats that produce them. Still world leaders flock like migratory birds in Davos to speak of a comparatively insignificant financial crisis.

At the root of everything lies two facts - an increasing population and an even more increasing consumption. In order to keep the wheels running we must buy a little more than last year, a fact that Jackson describes so well i the Ted talk below: It's a story about us, people, being persuaded to spend money we don't have on things we don't need to create impressions that won't last on people we don't care about.

How can that be? Jackson is rather hopeful, and sees the solution in a political system that awards not only self interest and innovation, but also tradition and solidarity. If Obama or someone else can create such a system, we might be able to save ourselves.

I am aslo eager for such a political system, but have lately come to think if the problem is not deeper than that. Whereas single humans behave as rational individuals, humans en masse seem just as ruled by outher forces as any other species in the environment. And just as a sheep will eat itself to death if you let it to, humans seem unable to stop their hunger for consumption even long after we have realized that it is harmful.

Rich or poor, we tend to consume just as much as our powers let us. As Jackson points out, the only thing thing that has ever helped us curb co² emissions is not new technology but economic depressions. We have a good chance of creating a liveable world if all of us start today to live as we should - eat locally produced food, stop travelling by car etc. But the chances for that to happen are... slim.

Where does this paradox come from? How can a species that has developed biology as a science not be able to live according to its knowledge? (An even more interesting paradox is that the ability to live according to our knowledge seems to diminish the more we know - it was not a problem in cultures where scientific biology was unknown). A thought struck me yesterday, that I spent almost entirely in the kitchen - maybe all of this has to do with the cooking. Homo sapiens is not so much an eating animal as a cooking animal.

Many people have suggested that meat consumption was what developed the human to what it is today, but eating meat requires cooking. Maybe the search of tasty and healthy recipies was what really developed our brains?

The fact that we depend on cooked food has implications for our survival. Whereas most animals walk around with food freely available most of the time and more often are eaten by others than starving to death, humans loivealienated by one step from the food around them.

I can see a link between the need of cooking, and the social istitutions that has shaped us more than any other - private property. If wheat was eaten as it is, those who worked in the fields would have to be very strictly observed unless they eat their masters food themselves. It would have been close to impossible in pre-modern times. But wheat must be gathered, milled and baked before it turns into bread, which makes the theft of it more complicated than simply putting it in your mouth.

This reflects even in how we think of theft - eating an apple is hardly looked upon as a crime, whereas picking someones applesand carrying away with them definitely is. We do not really own the final product, not in the way we own its means of production. The demand for preparations and cooking creates theft, thefts creates property, and property has made inequality between humans into a qualitatively different matter than inequality within a band of dogs.

What property did is that it connected consumption with status - owning the wheat field means eating a lot, and eating thus symbolizes owning. Today, when property is often digital and invisible people around you see what you eat, not what you own. Thus we compete with each other in consumption, not owning, and even go to absurdities like borrowing money to consuming stuff that we neither need nor want.

Is there a way for politics to adress this? Maybe, but the homo sapiens is a damn tricky animal to deal with, so it will not be easy. I am eager to hear what Tim Jackson says about the issue on monday, though.

Tim Jackson's economic reality check on TED:

My New Moleskine

2010-12-27T22:15:00.001+01:00

It is the 27th of January, and I have some reason to celebrate. Today marks the first day in my brand new Moleskine calendar, and I can start using it. I have been waiting for a month, at least. If I took my financial situation seriously, things like these would probably be exactly what I should spend less money on. On the other hand 15 EUR can seem cheap for something that is used 365 days in a year. But there are bigger problems than my private budget. Vanity like this is choking the earth to death.

By Zedlik (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons

More people live more comfortable than ever, which is a good thing, and we can thank capitalism and consumerism for that. Our civlisation is heavily dependent on an ever increasing group of consumers, and that is why it makes consumers out of substistence farmers with an amazing speed. Few people miss the toil of their parents. This is a great world. But can not claim that we save it for our children.

The climate is changing, making it harder to survive. Especially for those mentioned above, who just have put poverty behind. To future generations we hand over a more densly populated world with less natural resources, less arable land, less water, less biodiversity. Technology will maybe help them survive another year, but if the long time trend is not reversed, there is simply no future for humanity. Which will probably be great for the few species that will remain on earth after we have gone.

This time of year the newpapers are filled with analyzes of 2010 and forecasts for 2011. If you look at economical history, anyone will tell yo that the supply of natural resources is pivotal for human economy. Yet almost no economical forecast, positive or negative, take the diminshing supply of natural resources into account when they predict the future. Economists seem to presume that the earth will look thes same in 2011 as it did in 2010, when the only thing we know is that it will not. Which is why they are always wrong.

Our outtake of natural resources is megalomaniacal - in a time when close to everyone speaks about the environment, and green entrepeneurs spawn as mushrooms from the ground. The problem with these entrepeneurs is not what they do, but what they do not do. As long as green consumerism doesn't make us consume less, it achieves nothing. It is our endless hunger for stuff and services that keeps chinese coal heated factories running and fossil fuel trucks rolling on our highways. For those of you who haven't seen it , I warmly recommend Annie Leonard's The Story of Stuff, for a witty explanation of how our consumption impoversihes the earth.

The problem is that consumerism does not only impoverish the earth, it also enrichen us in terms of money and wealth. With our current economical thinking that wealth is the quantitative sigen of wellbeing we are forced to choose between the generation currently living in wealth, and the unborn millions. And it would be deeply unmoral to pritoritize the welfare of a human being that doesn't exist, over one that exists here and now.

Maybe this is why it is so hard to break with consumerism, even though we all know that it is the root of all our problems? Or maybe it is because consumerism speaks to our human weaknesses rather than our morals. I could well have made my own calendar out of recycled paper, but it was unrestricted vanity that made me buy a Moleskine calendar instead. That was my contribution to a shopping spree that is bound to end in chaos.

What we need is a way of understanding economics that can differentiate between wealth and wellbeing. With a such understanding falling profits, or falling GDP wouldn't be a problem at in it self, since that could just as well indicate that we manage to live well with less money, as economic problems. But to get there, we must get over our vanity.

The Road - Cormac Mc Carthy

2010-12-22T12:34:00.000+01:00

I did the mistake, grave as always, to read the book (in Swedish translation) after I had watched the film. Not only does some of the tension get lost when you are familiar with the plot - when I read the book I could not see anything else than the actors' faces in front of me. Nonetheless, this is a story that is worthy of all the attention it has received, both as a book and as a film.

The story is simple. In a near past a catastrophe has happened, and human civilization has crumbled. A man and his son leave their home in northern USA in search of more agreeable conditions further south. What has happened, where they are and whether there is some piece of land untouched by the catastrophe is not very relevant. This is a story about how humans deal with catastrophes, how we invent religious rituals when we need them , and that without morals and values we are not human any more.

This is a real page turner, and there is a constant nerve in the book, not so much because what is actually happening to the two, but because of fear of what will happen. This is probably one of the bigger differences between the book and the film - the film dwells much more on horrible details of cannibalism, and lustful memories of love. Just like a film must do.

So why has it become such a success? One obvious explanation is the fear of a catastrophe in the near future. Both climate change and peak oil can make you wonder what will actually remain of life as we know it a hundred years from now. The road can be read as one suggestion about this.

But what is so scary with the story, and what gave me the creeps, is not the horrible circumstances the two live in. It is much more the sense of living after "peak civilization" so t say. And I think this is something that resounds with today's generations. Our culture is retro, our politics are old fashioned. We are told, and it is easy to accept, that we have come to the end of history, where all countries are ordered along 20th century lines. Even the internet, our generations biggest upheaval, has become more of a distribution channel for the entertainment industry than a new way of perceiving democracy.

So even if we don't share the physical circumstances of the protagonists in the Road, it is very easy to recognize the feeling of living after the party has ended. Too easy to not be touched by the book.

The revenge of history

2010-12-16T21:53:00.000+01:00

Bulgaria was one of the few east european countries that prosecuted communists after the fall of communism. Todor Zhivkov, the party secretary who had ruled the country more or less as his kingdom was sentenced to seven years in jail, years that he spent in house arrest due to fragile health.

But except for a few spectacular cases like this, the past was left untouched. Maybe convicting Zhivkov even helped to direct public anger away from fellow travellers, and soon more pressing problems emerged when the nation tried to eek out a living within capitalism.

For these reasons or other, Bulgaria was unusually late with opening the files of its former secret service (DS). Not until 2006 where the files opened, and in 2007 a parliamentary commission was appointed to examine them.

This commision, in media referred to as the files commision, has now done its work and released a list of names of people who were cooperating with the DS. Suprising or not, a large number of ambassadors currently working for Bulgarian embassies appear on this list. Among others, the ambassador to Sweden...

The Bulgarian PM Boyko Borisov has publicly called for these ambassadors to be replaced. Tough words form a man who has served as a body guard to mr. Zhivkov himself, but he obviously has a point, and the liberal parties agree with him on this.

Borisov as Zhivkov's body guard

The socialists on the other hand, defends the ambassadors, and point at what they have done for Bulgaria's EU and NATO integration. Which is also a valid point, I guess.

Is it right to bring up someone's past twenty years later? If yes - than what room is there for forgiveness and development. If no - then anytthing can be done, as long as no one finds out at the moment. This is a problem that any country with a totalitarian past, not only ex- communist, but also the ex- fascist Portugal and Spain for example, must deal with. I guess that what the files commission's work shows is that the history is something you must deal with. If you try to hide it it will come back with revenge.

Reading Elin Wägner

2010-12-15T23:58:00.000+01:00

Since the snow fell and made Lund's cobbled streets dangerous for biking, I have been travelling by bus 20 minutes every morning. That is just about enough for one chapter in one of the most inspiring books I have reading my whole life - Väckarklocka (1941) by Elin Wägner.

Elin Wägner, picture from Wikimedia Commons

Halfway through it, I can't help but wondering what the Swedish brand of liberalistic feminism actually means for women. Wägner would argue that our society only lets women repeat the mistakes of men, without making any concessions to womens knowledge, traditions and abilities. What the earth and future generations needs is a more feminine way of life. I remember that my grandmother used to say the same thing, and I'll be damned if she is not right in the end. Because she is a mother. And mothers always are.

Wägner's idea of equality is not necessarily to treat men and women the same way. It is much more about giving equal weight to all voices in society - men and women alike. Only thus can we keep the most precious pieces of traditional knowledge while adapting to the future.

She sees pre-history as a relatively stable state of female domination, when human life aimed at surviving without disturbing the other species in nature.The focus of this civilization was nursing, caring and respecting, not to take more than needed, and always to sustain life, not kill it.

At some point, the timing was different in different corners of the world, there was a male revolution. The entire history since we have written sources have been one of increasing male domination and a mission to conquer nature (other nations, other races, other genders...)

I don't know if Wägner would agree with me, but I read this as a struggle between ideas, not physical people. For different reasons one idea has appealed to men and another to women, but there is nothing that says that an individual of any gender should feel more attracted by one idea than the other. Men can care, women can conquer. All should care.

The book gives plenty of examples, from ancient history to the fight for universal suffrage in the early 20th century to illustrate Wägners view of history. A brief look at Wikipedia indicates that it is a debated topic still today whether a Matriarchy as Wägner describes it has ever existed. On the other hand, we generally accept the idea that a people's choice of Gods say something about themselves. People in autocratic male societies very often worship an autocratic male god - so why presume that the people who worshiped fertility goddesses were not matriarchies?

That is not really important, though, since Wägner has something to say about here and now. In her concept of motherhood, the essence of matriarchy, she unites ecology, solidarity and democracy. She also gives a coherent answer to the seemingly eternal problems - why do we start wars?, why are we so unjust? and why are we so stupid that we time after time deplete the very resources we depend on? Think Peak oil, or how the ancient Greeks cut down the forests around the Mediterranean.

How well does such a message fit into the current (Swedish) feministic debate? When I see how questions about gender equality are discussed in Sweden, I think too much emphasis is laid on the equality between individuals, and too little on the lack of values like nursing and caring. Very much is said about women's right to make a career, and very little about the downsides of a society where individuals strive to make personal careers.

Needless to say, equality between individuals is utterly important. Women has as big right as men to do whatever they please, and it is a good thing about Swedish society that it is open for untraditional choices. But that equality often generates very little freedom - a great majority of the women who try making a career face invisible hurdles like exclusion from decision making circles, discrimination if they
choose to have a baby etc. At one point in their life I think very many of them will agree with Wägner that a highly competitive labour market is a way for men to keep occupying the most important posts in society.

How do we come to terms with that problem? That has been the question for all feminists since the most disturbing forms of legal discrimination were abolished. Wägner is probably right that if we want anything to change, we must dare looking beyond this society and pay a much greater attention to the millenia of womens experience that we try to live without. We must strive for a society where equality means every individuals right to be what they are, not replace one idea of what women are - housewives, with another - career women.

Fotball fans in Eastern Europe

2010-12-14T22:35:00.002+01:00

I was shocked to hear about the racist riots in Moscow last weekend. A hooligan supporter of Spartak Moscow was shot by caucasian men, and footbal fans retaliated with a mayhem that ended with two people dead. I am no good at russian, but I think it is a good thing that Gazeta.ru dares calling the beast by its name - pogroms.

In the Guardian article above western commentators and russian liberals sees the Russian authorities as partly responsible for fomenting xenophobical feelings to divert frustrations over social and economical woes.

Making a political connection is probably correct. For all I know about Russia, it would be impossible to imagine any other kind of organised people than football fans to cause such havoc in downtown Moscow.

And Russia is not alone. Football fans are pivotal actors on the political scenes in many post-communist countries, not least on the Balkans. In the book This is Serbia Calling, Matthew Collins mentions how it was the fans of Red Star Belgrade that both brought Milosveic to power, and fought the decisive battle against his police when he fell.

Fan's graffiti from Beograd

The football fans of Bulgaria are not any more pleasant than the Spartak Moscow ones - they were probably the only kind of people that truly scared me while I was living in Sofia. In the beautiful film Eastern Plays they are depicted as doing the dirty work for politicians. Something that is easy to believe but maybe harder to prove.

But after all, who was it that decided the course of events on 14/1 2009? The people I talked to after the riots all said that football fans came uninvited to the protests, to fight with the police. For the fun of it? Or did someone want them there?

I don't know. Their presence turned the demonstration violent, and changed the political dynamics into something that was impossible for the Stanishev government to manage.

Someone who wants to really understand the politics of Eastern Europe should make reasearch on the violent football fans. maybe someone has already done it - if you know of any such work, please let me know!

The realities of war

2010-12-13T20:59:00.001+01:00

The last couple of weeks living in Sweden has felt almost like living in the big world. Not only are we prosecuting the world's most wanted man - mr. Julian Assange of Wikileaks - yesterday the scandinavian idyll was struck by a suicide bomber, a fact that has made headlines on both sides of the Atlantic.

As for Assange, I will not say anything for now. Let's just remember that in a democracy everybody is innocent until proven guilty. The suicide bomber, however, is obviously guilty, and the country is struggling to understand where he came from.

There are a few ways to explain this phenomenon. One, that is not too uncommon, is that Islam is essentially an evil religion, and that the best muslims are the most secularized. But any muslim who takes his faith seriously is prepared to kill in the name of Muhammed, these almost exclusively white, male, christian commentators think.

Moderate muslims on the other hand, nervously remind us that this man was a lunatic, a fact that has nothing to do with his religion. Just as we don't take christian lunatics, of which there are a few, as the representants of an entire civilization, this guy shouldn't be seen as anything else than a criminal.

This view is of course true, but some people might see it as a little simplistic. They would point at a society that excludes large groups of muslims, and say that allowing social problems like these, is like asking for this kind of troubles. If someone had seen this guy in pre-school, and cared for him, he would never have gone this far. Which is also a valid point, I think.

What all these views overlook is the fact that we are in a war. In a message to the Swedish news agency TT, the bomber said that this was a revenge for what is happening in Afghanistan, and the most probable explanation is to see it as an act of warfare. Isn't it a little strange that we take it for granted that individuals sacrifice their lives for a cause when they wear army uniforms, but not when they look like civilians?

War scenes painted by Francisco de Goya

Sweden is in a war in Afghanistan, and like any other war civlians are hit hard. For millenia we have been aware that war has a very butalizing effect on whoever takes part in them, and for every combatant the line between covilian and enemy soldier is soon blurred. We are horrified when a self proclaimed taliban fighter tries to kill civilians in Stockholm, but isn't it a whole lot worse that NATO troops killed 160 Afghan civilians in 2010 (until 1st of November)?

A suicide bomber in Stockholm is horrible news, but hardly surprising. Civilian deaths is just the reality of war.

(Some links are in Swedish - I apologize to foreign readers)

What kind of Europe does Stockholm want?

2010-11-21T21:20:00.001+01:00

After the collapse of the EU budget talks this week, Barroso was clearly dissapointed with a small group of countries that fought against increasing the EU parliament's budget. One of these countries was Sweden, together with the UK and the netherlands. To the Swedish minister of finance, it was irresponsible to expand spending while European states are slashing expences. To Barroso, and the MEP's, it is pennywise to try to build an integrated Europe without money.

To me, the differing opinions are less interesting than the fact that they differ. Maladets! has long since noted a growing rift between the Swedish liberal right government and European institutions. It has been about Israel and the Euro. More recently the EU directive on maternity leave was heavily critizised by Swedish liberals in the government and in the press.

For the Swedish left, it is easy to sarcastically label the EU-weary liberal right as nationalists and inward looking. In deed - the Swedish right wing has historically been very quick to label anyone who questions EU policies as a nationalist, so it might not be more than fair that they are judged by their own standards, but I don not think this is a correct analysis.

The Swedish liberal right is not inward looking, and they are fond of European integration. It is not just for show that the liberal party is the only Swedish party to seriously campaign for euro membership. Moreover, the Swedish government is far from isolated when its opinions run counter to Bruxelle's. As Barroso pointed out, there was a number of countries who opposed the EP on this issue. A number of countries, who tend to think the same in European debates. So it is rather about conflicting visions about europe, where continental Europe (read: France) stands against the north western periphery, like the UK and Scandinavian member states. And Germany lingers somewhere in the middle.

The issue at hand - what resources should the European parliament reign over, is emblematic. The Cameron-Reinfeldt axis in the north west seem to favour a Europe with a downsized bureaucracy, that decides as little as possible. Its foremost function is to make sure that member states are not unduelly distorting competition. It is easy to see the contours of a neo liberal night watchman state, but we must admit that this vision also allows for any social policies, as long as they are administered on a national - not European - level.

On continental Europe, the push for a more active EU seems much stronger. I can imagine that there are different forces at play here. One is the more ambitious franco-german vision of the European union, that sees national legislation and bureaucracy replaced with a European legislation and bureaucracy, that is bascially the same thing on a bigger scale. As an example, the Euroepan Union is already involved in a great deal of projects that a night watcher state would shun. For example, many readers will be familiar with the Youth in Action programme, in which the European Union finances thousands of volunteers every year with the direct ambition of spurring social change - creating a European consciousness among the continent's youth.

If we compare this vision of the EU, with the north western idea of a night watchman state, it is very easy to recognise an old historical heritage. Whereas the british isles spawned liberals like J.S Mill, Adam Smith and Spencer, continental Euope fostered ideolgies like Marx's socialism and Durkheim's organic solidarity.

But maybe more relevant than historical precurrents, is the fact that different countires expect very different things from the EU. Some contries, like the Scandinavian, percieve themselves as wealthier than the EU at large, and are so according to economist's common sense. For a cynic, it is easy to see how Sweden would pay money to an EU budget but less clear what Swedes would benefit.

On the other hand, there are a whole lot of Euroepan countries who perceive themesleves as, and are, less wealthy than the EU at large. In these countries, social policies are hard to find because they are difficult to fund. An enlarged EU budget, and wider responsibilites for the Union, might well mean a great improvement for citizens' welfare in poorer EU countries.

In today's Sydsvenskan, the editor in chief notes that the collapsing bugdget talks will seem like a friendly chat compared to the upcoming talk about agricultural subsidies. Here enormous economical interests clash with strong ideological convictions, and it is a safe bet that Sweden and the UK will be on the same side against France again.

Crises come,a dn crises go - and the Union will survie also this row, of course. But if the counterparts in the same in row after row, the European Union might at one point seem like a confederation of wider regions, not a federation of national states. But maybe that is a natural development? It is interesting to ponder.

Can anything good come out of Cancun?

2010-10-11T19:58:00.000+02:00

COP 15 was a failure. Can something good come out of the COP16? meeting in Cancun in November? In Copeenhagen too much time was spent on blaming other governments, and the to the watered out Copenhagen accord
was lined by power politics and hypocrisy. Will governments be more willing to face their own responsibility this time? To be frank, I don't think the chances of a fair, binding and ambitious agreement are very big. But maybe we can hope for a dialogue that is both fair and ambitious.

If there is something that the year since COP15 has showed, it is that the momentum for the climate movement is not waning. At least not in the world outside politics. Yesterday, on the 10 October 2010, thousands of citizens gathered at 7347 different work parties coordinated by 350.org all over the world. It can be about fixing bikes, planting trees or anyhing that makes our planet live longer. This will send a clear signal to decision makers - citizens ARE worried about climate change, and swe want to see ambitious policies witht the double aim to ease effects of , and adjusting society climate change.

When politicians and negotiators meet in Cancun, diplomatic realities will probably limit their freedom to act, as always happen on high level UN meetings. Meanwhile, interesting things are happening all the time in the everyday polticial work, on all political levels. One example is the Danish commission on climate change policy whose recently published proposals chocked Swedish media, where talk about a country not dependent on fossil fuel is still regarded as irresponsible green utopias. Another is the Local Renewables conference in Freiburg later this week, where local governements from all over Europe and the rest of the world will meet to discuss the role of renewables in local transports. Sexy? Maybe. Interesting? Definitely. Local governments are running the very bus and train systems that we need to find a sustainable life style. Forgive me my Eurocentrism, I am sure that examples like these can be dound in most countries on all continents.

And let's not forget private enterprise. The tidal wave of green and climate friendly slogans on our billboards is impressive, almost annoying. It seems impossible to sell something these days without claiming that it is climate friendly. A lot of this is mere greenwashing, of course, but it nonetheless indicates how important these questions are for consumers. And it seems like those companies who really take environmental issues seriously find their way to consumers more and more easily.

Things are happening, and they are picking up speed. In the middle of this process the Cancun meeting takes place. It can surprise or dissapoint, but most probably it will not change much on the ground. Does that make it meningless? After all, lots of money is spent on meetings like these, money that could maybe be put at better use somewhere else?

No. meaningless it is not. As true as it is that the real difference is the coiches you and I make every day, it is also true that politics is part of this process. What governments need to do in Cancun is to think larger than national interests. Environmental challenges are all about local solutions to global problems. But local solutions must be encouraged by a sense of globally shared responisbility.

Many fora are international, but the only one that can claim to be truy global is the UN. Which is why we still needs meetings like the COPs. Fora like the G20 can be more efficient, but they can never fill this function. We can get very angry about the fact that the Danish governement tried to sidestep the world's poor countries in Copenhagen, but at the same time, this is maybe the only context where European governements are actually forced to respond to opinions from poor countries.

Of course, we should hope for the outcome in Cancun to be as positive as possible. We should work for a binding, ambitious and fair climate agreement, something that pushes governements to work with, and not against their citizens. But the main achievement of the UN's work will not be the agreement, but the process of getting there. Let's accept nothing but a fair and ambitious dialogue in Cancun.

Sverigedemokraterna - more important than the suburbs?

2010-09-12T22:47:00.001+02:00

Sweden is heading towards elections, and a few minutes ago I watched the tow main contendands for the prime minister post, the socialist Mona Sahlin and the right wing Fredrik Reinfeldt debate our country's future. It was a nice debate, where the journalist brought up a number of interesting subjects. Half an hour into the program, she raised the topic of the situation in the poorest Swedish suburbs.

While the situation in Sweden is probably better than in many other countries, we do have our share of integration problems. The population in these areas are almost exclusively non-Swedish, and the unemployment is staggering - around 50 %. That said, you should not believe what foreign media write about these areas - they do generate some organized crime, but are not a hot-bed for religious fanatism and hatred.

Background Info
Sverigedemokraterna a Swedish right wing populist party very similar to Le Pen's party in France Mona Sahlin Leader of the Swedish socialistic party Socialdemokraterna, currently in opposition Fredrik Reinfeldt Leader of the Swedish right wing party Moderaterna, currently in government

This is a social issue that does deserve some attention. It is a problem that has grown since the 70's, under both left- and right wing governments. A history of small progresses are impressively non-efficient in changing fundamental structures.

What are our leaders planning to do during the coming four years to ameliorate this situation? I still don't know. After confessing that the problem exist, both politicians, aided by the journalist, turned to the question that really captured their imagination - what happens if Sverigedemokraterna, a Swedish right wing populist party very similar to Le Pen's party in France, enters the parliament? Both parties promised not to cooperate with Sverigedemokraterna under any circumstance (we'll see about that), and our prime minister emphasised that those who love Sweden vote for him, not for Sverigedemokraterna.

I share their disgust for a party with deep roots in neo-nazism, a party that builds its politics on prejudices and that is generally irresponsible. But I think that Sahlin's and Reinfeldt's attitude is both arrogant and beneficial to Sverigedemokraterna.

It is arrogant, because it neglects the fact that Sweden has a real problem with integration. People in Rosengård live under circumstances that no Swedishg citizen should live under, and politicians should be working day and night to change that. Especially Mona Sahlin - she has wathed a new and ugly of class division grow, and as a politician of the left she has a moral obligation to see this as very important. More important than winning the almighty middle class vote.

The people who vote for Sverigedemokraterna also have a number of real problems that should be adressed. These are people that are worried about their security, people who feel neglected and bethrodded. Voting for Sverigedemokraterna is a way of rebelling, and a search for recognition. It is not a search for efficient and responsible politics.

The fact that Sverigedemokraterna might take seats in the parliament is of minorl interst compared to this. Sverigedemokraterna are bastards, but they are not a menace to society - they are rather an indication on what is wrong. If we could find the courage to discuss the real issues in our society, I am sure that Sverigedemokraterna would very quickly become very irrelevant. They basically ecxist in the vacuum that should be filled by a modern left wing.

Unfortunately I can't help thinking that today's debate is a nice example of how the Swedish debeate can sometimes be provinicial. Parties like Sverigedemokraterna exist in virtually every European country, but for the Swedish political class it has been a point of honour that our parliament has been free of them. What Reinfeldt and Sahlin seem to fear most of all is not a political reality, but the scandal, and a stained reputation. The desire to be something better than the rest of the world is much stronger than the conviction that the same forces that are shaping Europe are shaping also us.

Moreover, I think few voters are moved by Reinfeldt's words, that those who love Sweden vote for him. Personally I felt sick, and as I wrote above, I don't think that the Sverigedemokraterna voters care very much about responsible politicians. Sverigedemokraterna themselves do not need neither his, nor Sahlin's love. What they need is to be despised by the established politicians so that they can create an image where there is an elite that do whatever they can to keep the strugglling minority out in the cold. Anyone who watched today's debate will have exactly that impression, and as a matter of fact I think it is true.

I can't blame Sahlin and Reinfeldt from trying to keep racists out in the cold, and I am convinced by their anti-racism. But I do blame them for giving Sverigedemokraterna what they want, and for not taking inconvenient issues about social inequalities seriously. The people in Rosengård deserve that we discuss their situation. But maybe this is a sign of how racially segregated Sweden actually is... for the Swedes, Sverigedemokraterna is much more interesting than life in Rosengård.

"Det ska löna sig att arbeta"

2010-08-14T23:35:00.000+02:00

The title means "it should be profitable to work", and it has been a political slogan in Sweden for as long as I can remember - it is funny how communistic it sounds when translated into English...

The statement is pretty uncontroversial, but has been used as an argument from economical liberals for spending less money on unemployment benefits.

I don't regard myself as poor in anyway, but I am still delighted to know that I am not turning a page in my life. After a week in Portugal I will start a real job, as a kind of teacher/teaching assistant. Until now I have been toiling in the most proletarian jobs avaliable for non skilled ethnic Swedes - in daycare with disabled persons. What makes it proletarian is not so much the tasks (that are kind of nice), but the fact that you are paied by the hour, and have no security whatsoever, since you are litteraly not employed when not working. Which makes you work your ass off every month in case you don't get enough hours next month. It is an old story - all over the world workers gathers in the town squares, or at the docks in the morning, to see if they get a job or not,a nd they have done so for centuries.

Picture: CC by HB Art on Flickr

In such a position a phrases like "it should be profitable to work" sounds like a joke. Especially when it comes from economic liberals. The logic is that socialism has made us lazy, and that we prefer unemployment benefits to work.

On the contrary, I think that socialism is built on a moral that says that you should work, not for your own profit but for society. If I wasn't raised that way, I might have applied for benefits, in stead of keep working by the hour.

Economical liberals think that this is not true. Humans act for their own profit, and we should do so. Society grows richer when private proftis grow. This sounds a lot more realistic than the socialistic idealism, and liberal politicians have succeded alarmingly well in creating a nation of entrepeneurs who try hard to get rich, without a trace of bad conscience.

What is the proper way to react for someone who thinks that humans act for their own profits, when they find themselves in a job without trade strong trade unions and with low wages? They will compare costs/benefits of having the job with the costs/benefits of unemployment, of course. The theory says that if unemployment sucks enough you will take any job. But in reality the reverse is more realistic - if the job sucks enough any kind of unemployment is preferrable. Even if it means living outside the economy.

So if you really want to make it profitable to work, what you should do is to ensure that trade unions are strong, and that salaries increase more than company profits. Which would require heavy legislation and much less freedom for company owners.

The problem is that more or less liberal politicians have done the exact opposite. They have deregulated the economy and weakened trade unions. It would be hard for these entrepeneurs to get rich othewise.

But already Adam Smith realized that this hardly makes work more profitable. In other words, in a deregulated society it is much less profitable to work than it was before the deregulations. In a stark capitalist society, work is very unlikely to make you rich. but it can give you stability and intellectual challenges, which all that counts in the end.

Universal suffrage...

2010-07-27T23:11:00.000+02:00

I just read in Denyat s Darik, that a deputy from the Bulgarian party GERB, currently in government has suggested that all candidates in public election should take a test of their psychological abilities before they can be elected.

One wonder how Emil Karanikolov understands democracy. Whom would be trusted with the task to test the people? Would this mean that mentally disabled people are not eligble to be elected? Should they have the right to vote? What rights should they have?

In the system that I call democracy every citizen has teh right to vote and to be elected, even though few of them are suitable for office. But the alternative is much worse, as Karanikolov should know. Is it that easy to forget totalitarianism?

Agriculture that generates hunger

2010-07-19T22:55:00.000+02:00

7.1 mn people are currently suffering from famine in the Sahel. It would be naïve to think that all of them will make it through the winter. We thought that we had passed headlines about famine to history, but in fact they are bound to become our future if we don't give up two myths. One is that modern agriculture is efficient. The other is that development means urbanization. These thoughts are illusions, and until we drop them, we will only move closer to a very hungry world.

Conventional agriculture is not efficient

Above is a top of the line combine from John Deere. Machines like these are useless on small fields. Big fields require pesticides. Lands treated with pesticides demand fertilizers. The combine must have oil. That is the ecological cycle of conventional agriculture, also known as agribusiness. Except, it is not really a cycle...

In spite of deploying few people to produce fantastic yields, conventional agriculture is not efficient in the relevant sense of the word. A study in the Phillipines showed that Growing rice the organic method was 4 times more energy efficient than the conventional method. The organic method is defined as farmers who no longer apply chemical fertilizer and pesticides. Instead, they practice rice straw recycling, use green manure crops (Azolla, Sesbania); and raise livestock (ducks, swine, cattle or carabao) to produce on-farm the manure which they apply in their farm as fresh manure or prepared into compost. In other words - the farmers who used imporved methods that they had inhereited from pre-industrial times were more efficient than their pseudo-modernized collegues.

Several studies have come to the similar conclusions. Labour intensive organic farming is more energy efficient, more secure and sometimes even give bigger yields. Lim Li Ching writes on the Institute of Science in Society's homepage:

Projects in Senegal involving 2000 farmers promoted stall-fed livestock, composting systems, use of green manures, water harvesting systems and rock phosphate. Yields of millet and peanuts increased dramatically, by 75-195% and 75-165% respectively. Because the soils have greater water retaining capacity, fluctuations in yields are less pronounced between high and low rainfall years.

The World Food Program cites errant rainfall as one of the reasons to the latest hunger catastrophe in the Sahel... it is clear that conventional agriculture has nothing to offer the world's hungry.

Poverty in the countryside feeds urbanization

For traditional farmers, the competition from agribusiness is killing. Since the headquartes of agribusinesses like other businesses are situated in the cities, the profits from the bigger yields leave the countryside. In a country like Sweden. the contryside populations relies largely on tourism and state- or EU support. As the wealth grows in the cities, poverty grows on the countryside, which draws people away from there to the city, where they (hopefully) work for a living and buy their food instead.

The UN's World Urbanization Prospects states that by now more than half of the world's population live in cities - more people live in the countryside in the developing world than in developed countries. In 2025 more than half of the the population in what is today the developing world will live in cities, and by 2050 68.70 % of the world's total population will live in cities.

Since people must eat, that means one of two things - either these cities must be self-sufficient in food production, or the third of the population still living in the countryside must produce food for all the rest.

Cities have never been self-sufficient, and it seems unlikely that they will ever be. With radically different eating habits it would maybe be possible in a city like Lund with 300 inhabitants/km2. But how could it be possible in Kolkata with the staggering 29,650 inhabitants/km2? Kolkata is the world's most densly populated city. It is a safe bet that by 2050 less people than today will eat the food that they have grown themselves. And that is the very idea of progress - already Adam Smith noted that the wealth of a nation grows when people divide their labour. If the farmer farms and the blacksmith hammers out the nails while the programmist sips jolt cola in front of the computer screen, all of them are more eficient and get more wealth to share in the end.

Smith is obviously right about this. Just take a look around. Wherever you sit in the world, you are likely to see an affluence that your parents or grandparents could never dream of. This is largely due to industrialization and a greater division of labour. The problem with deploying Smith's ideas today is that his classic work The Wealth of Nations was published already in 1776. Smith could never have predicted how the use of oil would change the economic dynamics.

Urbanization is not sustainable

Unfortunately, it is not the human intellect that has made the the affluence around you possible. It is not human toil that has allowed almost all of us to move to the cities. It is all about oil. Subsidized oil has made transports cheap, and has decoupled the food production from social life. For my salad I might use spanish tomatoes, dutch lettuce and bulgarian cheese. For my mother's birthday I could have bought a kenyan flower. These products are all taken to my store by the use of oil. Without oil, the cities would be very sad places to live. But if transports was the only problem, we would be better off than we are.

The Swedish author Gunnar Lindstedt writes that in terms of working hours the industrialized agriculture produces 40 times more food than it did before the advent of oil. But working hours was the way we measured work in Smith's time. The man or woman who drives the John Deere combine above is not necessarily more intelligent, skilled or hard working than his or her ancestors. It is the oil in the tank that does the work. In a world where 7.1 Million people are allowed to starve, it seems seems murderous to critizise an 40% increase in food production. But the other side of the coin is that without oil the current working hours in agriculture will produce 40% less food. That is really scary. Especially for those living in the cities, who have no other means of obtaining food than paying for it. The prices they pay are very closely related to the price of oil as the charts below show (Be aware of the different dates). The situation gets critical when oil costs more than 100 USD / barrel - and at one point it becomes impossible to produce food and sell it as a commodity with profit, if you use oil for production and transport. That will be the end of agribusiness. Spanish tomatoes will not be avaliable in my store any more. Neither will there be enough rice in Kolkata.

Peak Oil

When are we running out of oil? Recently Lloyds and Chatham house published a study, that warnes businesses to adapt as soon as possible. Paul Stevens from Chatham house calculates that the lack of oil will push oil prices above 200 USD / barrel before 2020. The impact of such a price hike on food prices is easy to imagine. In 2008 a hike to 125 USD/barrel led to riots and political crises. It will affect much more than 7.1 million people. Worst hit will be the poor in the cities, exactly the same people who are now leaving their rural lives behind. What Chatham house and Lloyd's report says is that within decades, they will need their lands back. A prioritized task for policy makers should be to assure that they get them back.

But why not simply substitute oil for something else? It is not easily done. We can easily heat our homes with other kinds of energy, but it is hard to imagine a global transport system that runs on wind power or coal. Sailing ships and steam boats? Why not, but they would hardly sustain the current levels of exports and imports. There is of course one easy fix - to run motors on ethanol in stead of gas. But almost immediately after trying that we saw the food crisis of 2008, casued on one hand by high oil prices, and on the other by fertile grounds being used for ethanol production. With a growing population, we will need to use those fertile land even more.

Algae is maybe a more promising substitute. But the technology is still experimental, and at the moment more energy is spent on making algae into fuel than the give as fuel. Unless this research takes a giant leap forward, we will have to do with the fastest growing source of energy - human labour.

Without oil we will need 40 times as many people working in agriculture as today. It doesn't necerssarily mean a return to the middle ages - only a return to economical realities. We know more about biology and agriculture than we did a two hundred years ago, and we exchange information faster than ever. What Smith shows is that the only force that can ever help us is human innovations, not oil. Unlike agriculture, the internet can easily be maintained with other sources of energy, so maybe the future countryside will be populated with self-sufficient netizens?

More people in agriculture can mean that people move back to the countryside. This is not uncommon in history, quite recently it happened in eastern Europe after the fall of communism(PDF link), and it will no doubt happen to some extent. But wew can also redefine what a city is. The problem is not the number of inhabitants per se, but the population density. Cities could work as clusters of smaller, largely self-sufficient towns. The city landscape could be used much more productively than it is used today. We can grow food on rooftops, balconies and in shipping containers, becoming a lot more self-sufficient than today. The borders between cities and countryside will become blurred - and hopefully the internet can preserve the best of our oil-dependent urban civilization. And make labour-intensive farmwork profitable.

A hungry man is an angry man, but a man who fears hunger is innovative. I do not doubt that mankind will adapt to a world without oil pretty fast when it is forced to, but probably not one day too early. The current pattern with less and less people producing food for more and more consumers is not sustainable. We should start thinking now about how we can turn urbanization trends around. Developing countries should beware of making the same mistakes as developed countries has made - and fortunately this seems to be more and more acknowledged. I think the key is to keep agriculture depending on human labour rather than oil, but improving access to services like healthcare and education in the countryside.

We already live after peak oil. Adapting to that doesn't require money. It only requires our time, dedication and intelligence. But I think it will also be fun.

DN's lousy journalism on the oil spill

2010-07-02T01:04:00.002+02:00

Photo credit: NASA, Taken from wikimedia commons

Oil is still leaking from BP's collapsed Deep Water Horizon rig, and has been doing so since 20th April.
Infographic world have posted a nice overview of what has happened so far (click on the image for readable
size). What will happen in the future is impossible to say, but the effects may be immense and profound.

BP have dealt with the catastrophe in a way that makes you wonder what the difference is between a democracy like the US and a dictatorship like China really is. Tidbits of information have been served to the public, but free and critical investigations have been consciously obstructed. Isn't that a crime? Shouldn't it bea crime? Shouldn't it at least piss journalists off?

It pisses some people off, notably the journalists in Lousiana who try to do their work, but on this side of the Atlantic, the otrage is absent.

The Huffington posts reports that journalists are not even allowed to visit a compound where an unknown number of workers and locals are treated for unknown diseases. Isn't that a bigger problem than BP's Swedish chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg's faux pas, that has preoccupied much of the Swedish press?

The interest in Svanberg could be explained as a mere provncialism. Here I want to focus on an article I find much more disturbing - this one, published on Dagens Nyheter's homepage 28th of June, and obviously judged important since it is still there today, 2nd of July.

Few animals die from oil, Dagens Nyheter claims in the headline, more exactly 1.573 birds, and refer to Olof Lindén, Prof. Maritime Management at World Maritime University in Malmö, Sweden.

This is the infomration that is served in the lead paragraph - a limited number of birds die, and that is a fact verified by science.

If we continue reading, we find that Prof. Lindén has not done any research whatsoever himself - DN presents him with the number of dead birds, coming form BP themselves. He thinks that it is not much, and ponder why this is so.

We have no reason to doubt Lindéns knowledge, but foreign readers should know that he has been in controversies before, when he told politicians that the Nord Stream baltic pipeline wouldn't have big environmental effets. Guess who funded that research - the Nord Stream company.

All in all, Dagens Nyheter's article looks very much like something that came out of the BP PR department. The article is presented as an answer to an earlier article, based on an article in the Guardian, claiming that BP kills sea turtles while trying to burn oil away form the water.

If we presume that this is all correct - a limited number of birds and other animals have been found dead in the Mexican gulf, Dagens Nyheter's text is still deeply problematic. It either shows a fantastic incompetence, or an attempt at deceiving readers.

The number of dead birds and the total environmental impact are two very different things. The Guardian reports that scientists are suspecting that a dead zone without oxygene has formed around the oil spill. This kills animals, but more important it moves them to different habitats. Ecology is a system of interdependencies, and a dead zone anywhere is bound to have effects everywhere.

Unlike Dagens Nyheter, the Guardian are quoting researchers who have actually been at the site (I adore Malmö as a city, but it is very far from Louisiana, US). They are much more pessimistic than BP PR staff, and Prof. Lindén. Given the outcry against BP's attempts at censorship, one could ask why Dagens Nyheter let the company spokesmen stand unchallenged in an article. One could also ask why the article discusses wether 406 or 425 turtles have died when the real impact lies elsewhere. Does the journalist at Dagens Nyheter not understand that? Or does she not want to write it?

I think both.

Heading south

2010-06-10T11:05:00.001+02:00

The time has come to once again visit maladets! home country - Bulgaria. That means that maladets! in Bulgaria will come to life again.

As last time, the ambition is to serve the world wide web with more pictures, less analyzes and more personal writing. The context behind wathever comes up will be sea, sun, traffic jams, tsatsa, Shumensko and other Bulgarian niceties. And who knows... maybe I will find my MP3 player somewhere?

Enjoy!

Carl's hard choices

2010-05-31T15:03:00.000+02:00

Swedish politics used to be easy - the right was pro-EU and pro-Israel. The left was more interested in the developing world and pro-Palestinian. But the times they are a'changing - I have blogged about the EU issue before, and with the Ship to Gaza tragedy on his hands, our
right wing foreign minister Carl Bildt faces a tough dilemma - Israel or Turkey?

During the last decade, Carl Bildt and Swedish politicians in general have been playing idiots - loudly complaining about Hamas' militant politics and hopeing that Israel, as a democracy, would follow ms. Clinton's advice. Surprise, surprise - they didn't. Israel is a country at war, and wars destroy the countries that wage them. If Israel was ever the only democracy in the middle east, it is quickly corrupted and tribalised.

Be that as it may - support for Israel in Sweden is more about opposing the left wing and appealing to Swedish christian voters.

But as Israel is brutalized, it becomes harder to be its friend. Not long ago Carl Bildt had to deal with Israeli demands to censor Swedish press, and an ambassador who was ore loyal to her host country than to Sweden. Would we send a communist as ambassador in Cuba? Anyway, try saying that Israel should accept also its opponents right to writer their opinions, without being called 'anti-semit'.

Meanwhile, down there where it acutally happens, things have changed a lot. Turkey, NATO member and once an ally of Israel against despotic arab states has emerged as a regional superpower, much more influential than Israel or Iran. As such it has found a new sense of dignity, and likes to think of itself as a peacemaker in the middle east. Unlike the US, Turkey has a lot to win and very little to lose from pointing out that Israel is acctively sabotaging the non-existing peace process, and the conflict between the countries have grown more and more bitter.

When Israeli pirates then kill numerous Turkish citizens on international water, it is understandable that Turkey's reaction is angry. That gives us the unlikely situation that the EU is currently being critizised severly by the EU and Turkey, while Egypt cares more for its ties to the US than for any Palestinians, international waters, democracy or the lives of activists.

Carl Bildt must have cried when he heard the news today. Within the EU he has been vocally supporting Turkey's bid for membership. He strongly condemned the Swedish opposition's statement that the genocide of Armenians in 1915 was a genocide. In short - he has had a very clear policy towards Turkey.

From today one it will be hard to be the friend of both Turkey and Israel. Carl Bildt must choose which friend to keep - my bet is that he goes for a less compromising stance towards Israel, in order to save Sweden's relationship to Turkey.

Upcoming interview with Linda Scott Jacobsson at Lund Fair Trade City

2010-05-23T20:27:00.000+02:00

Lund - the city I live in is a Fair Trade City, which means that the municipality, NGO's and private enterprises cooperate in promoting Fair Trade products.

Does this actually work? How does it look in practice? What are the problems that come up?

I don't know. That is why I will meet with Linda Scott Jacobsson, who is responisble at the municipality tomorrow Monday.

Linda Scott Jacobsson at a Fair Trade Event in Lund

Is there something I shouldn't miss? Do you have any questions? I would be glad to bring any questions from readers to the interview.

Please either post questions as comments here, or send tham to me as an email at danielnylinnilsson (a) gmail.com

Stockholm and Brussels revisited.

2010-05-17T19:37:00.000+02:00

Awkward. Maybe that's the best way to describe Sweden's relationship to the European Union. Last week the former Finnish prime minister Paavo Lippanen vented his spleen on Sweden, that unlike Finland chose to remain outside the euro zone. That is maybe not really fair of him - the Swedes who voted no to the Euro did it becasue they thought joining the euro zone would harm the Swedish economy. Lippanen probably thought that it would do the Finnish economy good, and not only out of his belief in the European project. Lippanen was especially disappointed with his social democratic counterpart in Sweden, Göran Persson.

Be it fair or not, Dagens Nyheter's liberal chronicle writer Michael Wolodarski agrees with Lippanens criticism of the Swedish social democrats. That probably comes easy to Wolodarski, but the writer is worried about the current liberal right government's luke warm attitude towards the euro. Prime minister Reinfeldt, who used to be a staunch euro supporter, has publicly expressed his doubts about the project, and seems happy to keep Sweden out of the current turmoil.

Picture from the European Parliament

For Wolodarski, who is more of a liberal ideologist than a politician this is incomprehensible. As I wrote in an earlier post, in Sweden a positive view of the EU has been an integrated part of liberal thinking, and EU criticism a left wing speciality. I was then speculating that this is about to change - time will tell, but today we learn that Sweden figured as a major voice against the European parliament's attemt at controlling the hedgefund industry. I write that down in my notebook, and keep speculating.

The Norwegian anti-EU organisation Nei til EU were happy about the rift between Reinfeldt and Wolodarski, but I don't see a new EU-critical consensus emerging between the Swedish left and right. What I do see is that they are changing places. Both the left and the rigth have very good reasons to do so, and if we still have a liberal right government in October, things will move quickly.

The left's anti-EU zeal has understandably weakened after 15 years of membership. I think that the experience of neighbouring to the culturally more European, but veryEU-critical Denmark, the atlantic - and European high culture oriented Norway outside the EU and the EU-loving but arguably less European Finland have left Swedes with one conclusion - in Scandinavia being and EU member or not doesn't change very much, for better or worse.

Margot Wallström's succes as a vice president of the European Commission surely made a lot of Swedish social democrats look on the EU with new eyes. Wallström's succes was not restricted to Sweden, and it is worth noting that the most famous Swede ever in the EU political system is a socialist.

The problem for the Swedish liberals is that they have used the EU as a lever for their own ideas, and they have done it very well. Sweden has come a far way from the social democratic state it was in 1995 when we joined the European union. In many areas we are among the most liberal countries on the continent - an example is that Swedish pension funds are managed in the very hedgefonds that south european parliamentarians are trying to regulate. The Swedish liberals find themselvs far ahead of Europe, and that they might have to protect their gains from the eucrats.

The last rows about how to deal with this - and future crises has seen Europe divided along north-south lines. The new UK conservative governement will make an excellent ally to a liberal Swedish one.

What can the Swedish left do in such a scenario? The traditional answer would be to win the next elections and push through social democratic reforms. But that will be hard. The truly important liberal reforms, like the free school system, are more likely to collapse than to be reformed. Tax-rises are impopular and threaten to eradicate support for a left wing government, which makes the scope of fundamental reforms limited.

It seems much easier to take the way over Brussels. Continental Europe is probably a much to complicated economical and political envionment for sweeping liberal reforms like those possible in Sweden. The European left seems more vivid than the Swedish, and what is more important: the continental European right is far more leftish than the Swedish. If the left parties for example want a 30 or 35 hours working week, as teh left and the green party has pledged to do, it seems more efficient to fight for European legislation than for changes in Sweden.

Isn't it ironic? That's the way the world moves.

Swimming in Sofia

2010-05-15T22:58:00.001+02:00

In a chronicle today in my hometown newspaper Värmlands Folkblad, Clara Bodin tells about a number of ex-communistic swimming baths she has visited.

The article is a formidable read (in Swedish), and it brought back a lot of memories from the times when I was swimming twice weekly before going to work in Sofia.

But it also gave me a kind of bitter taste... why does every account from Eastern Europe have to repeat the same tired stereotypes? Even those written by well meaning and knowledgeable authors.

(picture from wikimedia)

Clara tells stories about the swimming hall in Chisinau that hasn't been renovated since World War II
(I doubt it was built before World War II, but I have never been there), about little old ladies with seemingly irrelevant occupations asking, and about the smell of sovietic detergents or maybe the lack if detergents.

The swimming bath in Sofia makes it to Clara's Top 5 with a 100 m. long pool, overgrown with weeds. I don't really understand which stadion she has in mind ("the olympic stadium"), but to enter it Clara had to pay one little old lady, give the recepit to another little old lady, and get a pair of sandals from a third.

Anyone with a basic knowledge of Easter Europe will smile at this description. It immediately brings a lot of pictures to my mind, even though I went to another bath with a tiny 25 m. pool - the Sport Chamber. I remember the lady who gave out the keys to my locker, who was so utterly disinterested that I had to tap her shoulder in order to get the key. I remember the shower with six showers, where the warm water finished if more than four people where showering at the same time.

But to be honest - this is not what I was thinking about at all at the time I was going there. These visits made my days a lot better - I remember the walks through the park from Orlov most to General Gurko bus stop. Once the winter was over in early March, it was wonderful.

Inside the floor was a little cold, but in which swimming bath is it not? The water was 26 C, and if I was not there on time I had to navigate between the other swimmers. It was neither very fancy, nor very exotic. Just a swimming bath. Dressed in swimming trunks, Bulgarians look very similar to Swedes.

The sad thing is that Claras description is that it is not a lie. It is one story about Bulgaria, one story among many. But this version of Bulgaria - dirty, postcommunistic, outdated - is a cliché that all to often replaces a curious look at reality.

Stockholm vs. Brussels - a new deal?

2010-05-14T18:14:00.004+02:00

Greece's close-to-bancruptcy has rattled the EU. The seriousness of the situation is underlined by the magnitude of the answer that came form the EU finance ministers last week. The fantastic sum of 750 bn EUR is supposed to calm the markets, and to show how dedicated European leaders are to save the Euro. Only time will tell if it is enough.

Yesterday the European Commission announced that a whole number countries, among them Sweden and Bulgaria did not meet the requirements to joint the Euro zone. Estonia did meet the criteria, but this looks more like a polite way of saying that the Eurozone has more than enough of its own problems right now. One of this problems is obviously the different economic realities in the different euro zone countries - and each new member state will make the divergence even bigger.

Image by irene

In spite of headlines talking about the collapse of the Euro, both Bulgarian and Swedish politicians have stated that they are looking to join the Eurozone, which seems suidical at a first look.
For Bulgaria it makes slightly more sense than Sweden. the EU is in Bulgaria about very much more than economic issues, it is part of the process to make Bulgaria a firmly rooted European country. Many Bulgarians feel that their country was de-europeanized when the Ottomans took it over in the late medieval times, and that it has not yet been fully reintegrated.

That Bulgarian politicians claim that they want to join the Eurozone might be interpreted as a sign of showing their loyality to Brussels, and their pro-european values to their own voters. It doesn't necessarily mean that they will want to join right now. But in an unpredicatable world the Euro will always be a safer bet than the Bulgrian leva, and the 750 bn EUR for bail outs is more than the Bulgarian state could ever conjur up. We must also remember that the Bulgarian leva is already pegged to the Euro, so whatever happens to the Euro will happen to the leva as well.

The situation in Sweden is quite different. Yesterday Jan Björklund, leader of the liberal party Folkpartiet said in Swedish radio that he wants Sweden to adopt the Euro as soon as possible - something that his opponent from the green party Peter Eriksson called "dangerous politics". Sweden already has a strong currency, so it is unclear what to gain from joining the Eurozone. Possibly Euro-adoption would lead to increased trade with the European continent, but that weighs lightly compared to the benefits of having a free flowing currency. One can easily imagine how much harder the financial crisis would have hit Swedish industry if the krona wasn't able to sink and make Swedish products cheaper internationally.

Björklund was actually very clear that his longing for the Euro had little to do with economic realities. He is a believer, and he believes in the Euro and a united Europe. This is no surprise. Here up north EU question has been a very square right - left question. Whereas the right, especially the liberals routinely says yes to everything that has to do with Europe, the left routinely says no.

That is why it was slightly surprising to read this morning that the Swedish prime minister Frederik Reinfeldt had protested against the European Commissions plan to prevent the greek situation from reoccur. The commission proposal includes a stricter enforcement of the rules about good economic behavior, and that each member state (or possibly just euro zone countries) hands over a draft budet proposal to the commission for control. This is exactly what angeered Mr. Reinfeldt , who doesn't think that well behaving countries should have their budgets controlled by Brusells.

Why not, one may ask. The point of the control would not be to punish wrongdoers, but to prevent small mistakes from turning into big crises. It would mean a giant step towards European integration, something that the Swedish liberal right has been fighting for since the EU was called the EEC. It is obvious that something has to change now, so why not grasp the moment and try to create a unified Europe once and for all?

The EU -debate in the nities was maybe the first political debate I took part in myself, and back then it seemed to be a good reason for the left/right division. EU legislation seemed to coincide neatly with how the liberal right wanted to reform Sweden. A defence of the social democratic welfare state included a defence of Swedish legislation against EU directives. That defence was lost. Sweden became neo-liberalised. But what happened to Europe?

If one travels in Europe these days, it is sometimes like taking a trip to the Sweden I grew up in. Is there any other country where the train system is privatized as in Sweden? Oh yes, the UK... but I've heard they are not so pleased with it there. And the schools? is there any other country were the state pays for private schools? Well the UK under Cameron might try 'Swedish schools', but I bet they will change their mind sooner than later.

After some ten years inside the EU, it is clear that outside Sweden there are a number of political projects that try to use the union as their own platform, not all of whom are liberal. In the wake of the crisis neo-liberal thinking seems much more discredited on the continent than it is in Sweden (maybe this is just a provincial delay?). The strongest words against greedy bankers came from France and Germany, not Sweden.

The Economist's blogger Charlemange highlights that France has its own plans for the EU , a project that has been carried out with consistence since decades. It is about giving the European Union power over member states' economical and social policies, and then upgrade them so that no country can undercut French industry with less generous welfare systems.

If we have four more years of right wing governanve in Sweden after the elections in September, the French plans sound like music to my ears. At the moment the EU seems to be drifting leftwards, and if they hand over control over the Swedish budget, it will be increasingly difficult to carry out expensive neo-liberal projects. Like "Swedish schools" or privatized trains. MAybe that is what makes Reinfeldt nervous.

The shame of living in a monarchy

2010-04-29T22:40:00.001+02:00

People have a variety of opinions of Nicolas Sarkozy, and I am not one of his supporters. The fuzz in the media about his wedding with Carla Bruní were stupid and annoying, but if you don't like Sarkozy, his marriage is hardly your business. If you live in Sweden, things are more complicated.

The thing is that up here we live with an antiquated institution called monarchy. Our
king Carl XVI Gustav, a man for whom I have never had the chance to vote and who did nothing to earn his position is the official head of my state.

He is doing that all right, I guess. After all, it is not his own fault that he is the king, and he has commited only minor stupidities. I hold no illusions that I, or anyone else, would make a better king. There are also some good historical reasons for monarchy - a brief look at the world shows that the worst despots are almost always presidents, and monarchies are usually peaceful and democratic countries.

I used to regard the monarchy as a non-issue, but this summer the crown princess is getting married, and that has brought the problems with monarchy to light. Suddenly the royalties are not only annoyingly smiling family on TV - they are actually my heads of state.

Picture from the Royal Swedish Court

Aftonbladet expects the wedding to cost more than 64 M SEK. 14 M SEK swill be paied directly with taxpayers money The costs include among other things the accomodation of prominent wedding guests - which puts us in a dilemma. Either the princess is a free human being who invites her friends to her own wedding. If this is paied for with public funds it is plain corruption. Or she treats her wedding as an affair of state, and invites guests whose presence will somehow benefit Sweden. Then she is practically a slave, whose personal life belongs to the Swedish state.

Additionally the great church in Stockholm has been renovated, for about 14 M SEK. One could be happy about that, after all the church is a national treasure, and the renovation will benefit Stockholmers and tourists for years. But one could also despair that in a parliamentary democracy that even has a minstry of culture, it is the personal life ms. Victoria Bernadotte that decides when our public churches are renovated. Presume that she didn't want to get married? When would these 14 M SEK be spent? We have the same dilemma here - either we are paying for Victoria Bernadotte's personal wedding, or she is a life-time employee without union rights and vacations.

It is not at all about the money - a Swedish business publication calculate that local businesses in Stockholm will see sales boosted with 30 M SEK, even though a thoughtful reader will ask why our taxmoney are used to boost their sales. The expenses for our monarchy are pure waste, but they are just a fraction of the state budget, and therefore neglectable.

The real problem is the mixing of private and public responsibilities and obligations. Wereas it is very clear that Sarkozy is on his job when he talks in TV, and living his private life when he gets married. As a French citizens, you can demand him to act responsible when at work, monitor his work, and punish him when he fails to do so. It is very unclear when royalties are "at work" and when they are not, and it is therefore hard to demand any meaningful responsibility from them. Presumably royalties are presenting us, and that gives me as "employer" a responsibility over their entire lives. Do we want that? is that how we think of work, or how we think of people?

The tragedy of it all is that nothing of this is new, the same arguments were in use 100 or 200 years ago. But the reasons that made most countries choose republicanism then, are the same today.

The media coverage of Sarkozy's wedding may have been akin to the endless stupdities in Swedish TV right now. But at least his political opponents money were not used for paying his wedding. He is a president when he is at work, but he can take holidays, and even quite whenever he likes. Victoria has no such freedom. Her private life is my business, since she is representing me. I am sure it feels as humiliating for her as it does for me.

Bookblogging - This is Serbia calling

2010-04-18T22:58:00.001+02:00

How would you write the perfect book? Start with an ever interesting topic - Yugoslavia at war with itself. Continue with finding an unique angle to describe it, and then do that in a way that keeps readers spellbound throughout 278 pages.

That is exactly what Matthew Collin does in the book This is Serbia calling where he tells the story of B92 - the Belgrade underground radio station that became the center

of resistance against the Milosevic regime in the 90's.

The yugoslav wars continue to fascinate readers. The war ended in 1995 and Milosevic fell in 2000, but the topic remains relevant to anyone trying to understand southeastern Europe.

Much has already been written on the subject. Collin's ingenious take is to focus on a well known radio station. It is all about the social history of a country at war, but nothing about it is academic. In some ways it resembles one of Scorsese's rock'n'roll documentaries - easy to read or watch, but dull an interchangeable.But while every band has the same story - the are not famous, they get famous, they get bored with what they do and when they get old enough they miss their youth. A radio station is something else. It has a different dynamic, but the smell of rock'n'roll is still there. At least if you write about a station that commented Milosevic's totalitarian politics with White Riot by the Clash and Fight the power by Public enemy.

Collins is a highly merited journalist, and as a writer he excells in the kind of storytelling that makes my knees soft. It is all about keeping it simple, without keeping it short.

I have only read about one sixth of the book, but so far three things strike me: how little I know, that everything could have been so much different, and how the powers that lead to the yugoslav catastrophe are obvious all over the Balkans.

The wars in former Jugoslavia played a huge role in my personal histoty. They occupied news in the years when my interest in the world arond me awakened - I was 10 years when Ljubljana was bombed, and 19 when NATO bombed Belgrade. It is beyond doubt that these stories affected how I, and many with me, see the world.

In spite of months in front of the TV and weeks of newspaper- and book reading, there is so much I didn't know. As I remember, the war was either explained with the evils of communism, the evil Serbian people or the eternal ethnical hatred on the Balkans. Many people hated Milosevic but very few bothered to describe how he came to power in Serbia - against the will of many citizens.

It could have been so much different. Milosevic was an usurpator, that manoeuvred with skill in a moment of uncertainity. In spite of his communist background, he didn't inherit his power in post-Communist Serbia as did Iliescu in Romania. He took it, but in the spring betweenn 1989 and 1990 many people, at least in Belgrade, thaught that history would push the former Yugoslavia towards democracy. Serbia's history offers many explanation, but Collins constantly remind us about is that Milosevic was not just any politician. He knew very well how to use mass media to achieve his ends, and was not afraid to do so If Milosevic had been just a grey party official, communism could have faded away like elswhere in eastern Europe, and the eternal balcanic hatred could have stayed historical.

B92 represented a formidable threat to Milosevic, because they gradually became the only voice of a group that would never conform to his agenda - the urban, cosmopolitan and highly educated youth. Here the story gets disturbingly relevant - isn't this the same opposition that we still see in any south east european country?

In Moldova the urban youth faced a real dictator (who is not half as witty as was Milosevic). The Bulgarian youth face something quite different - a corrupted establishment that monopolizes power but sees no interest in old fashioned totalitarianism.

This establishment is more or less identical - a highly debatable relation to the country's communist past, a wealth that was more or less openly gathered with criminal means, connections with organised crime, and a kind of watered down nationalism. The young intelligentia is often the only group that can voice any kind of legitimate alternative, but they are not alone in opposing the government.

Collin decribes the happenings of 9th of March 1990, when Milosevic's police fought and ultimaltely defeated its opponents in the streets of Belgrade. He describes an odd coalition of forces that makes no sense at all - liberal youth, hard core nationalists, football hooligans and other professional troublemakers.

I remember when Bulgarian police fought demonstrators 14/1 2009 (PDF link). Also then the government faced the same weird collection of people - the best and the worst people in the country. Environmentalists together with neo-fascists and football hooligans. Maybe this is more than a simple coincidence. Maybe the polticial forces that led Serbia into the abyss are present also in Bulgaria, albeit on a different scale. Or maybe not - I am not qualified to answer that question.

The Balkans is not a white area on the map any more, but very much of what is written still deals with the basic questions, in the west as well as in local productions. Much is still not known about this part of Europe. Like the history of football hooliganism, and its role in society. Or how youth in cities like Novi Sad or Nis responded to Milosevic. Change is under way, but painfully slow. The Bulgarian film Istochni Piesi touches on the topic of football hooliganism in Bulgaria, but the topic deserves books. Much is written about how discriminated roma populations are, but where are the books asking what role roma actually play as political gun fodder and underpayed labour?

We need a new kind of (English) litterature about the balkans. A litterature that dares being unpolite and rude, lookin for answers to the tough questions. Collins book is a fantastic contribution to such a litterature.

Free schools - a way to make the family matter more than the individual?

2010-04-05T18:36:00.005+02:00

This is the third post discussing a trend I see in the Swedish education system, a trend to use public institutions to shield middle class Swedish citizens from foreign or native competition. In the first post I discussed the decision to charge non-EU students with tuition fees. In the second post I examined the new system of merit points, who unintentionally(?) discriminate foreign students. In this post I take a look at the primary school system, that probably never before in Swedish history has been so segregated as it is today.

If we follow the Swedish educational madness down to the earlier school years, the raison'd'etré

of the system is visible even for the naked eye. Since 1992, Sweden has a unique system for private schools - they are funded with tax money. This is supposed to make every family financially able to choose a private school for their kids, and quite predictable all research on the subject indicate that too many private schools become preserves for ethnically swedish middle class kids without problems. This is the same group of pupils that 12 years later will compete with Chinese and Bulgarian students for higher education.

There are of course many kinds of private schools. Some are religious, christian or muslim, some have a pedagogical idea, more and more they are run for a profit by publicly listed companies. But if anyone can choose a private school, why do parents from certain social classes do so, while parents from other classes do not?

The system is not complicated - every pupil allocated a sum of money by the local authorities, money that are transfered to the school where he or she studies. A private school with 500 pupils will get just as much money as a public school with 500 pupils. But public schools are obliged to serve a whole community, including its less wealthy members, also kids that might have problems adapting to school.

Private schools have some benifits in the system. For example they can limit the number of pupils they accept, in order to never have "empty seats". But basically they benefit from teh fact that they will only get pupils, whose parents know enough, and are self confident enough, to make an informed choice. These pupils seldom have problems in any school system. With smaller classes, and pupils who all come from healthy families, it is not hard to create an excellent. Which attracts even more families who feel that their children belong in this environment.

For sure, many private schools teach better than many public schools. In Sweden, as everywhere in the world. The problem is not what the pupils do there. The problems are rather that these pupils and their parents are badly missed by the public schools, where they would have acted as integrators in groups where many children feel alienated from society. It is also a problem that the excellent education they get is paied for by the parents whose kids are left in struggling public schools.

I can not see how it is fair from any perspective that poor people's taxes are used to finance schools where only rich people's children go. And I can not see how it is fair from a liberal perspective to tax one group, and use the money to create a privilege for someone else. This government is neither liberal, nor conservative or socialist. It is fighting desperately for the right of a stressed Swedish intelligentia to live above the rest of the world.

That is why segregation is tolerated already in the earliest school years. That is why pupils who have the time and power to study modern languages get extra merit points for university - where their places are safeguarded against foreign competition. As if their skills and ambition would not be enough. And that is why students from Moldova will have to pay 5000 EUR/semester for something that I can get for free.

Do I sound rabid? Maybe so.. these texts were written in a mood of agitation rather than analytical camlness. Nonetheless, I am more convinced than ever that in a time of Bologna processes and internationalisations of higher education, we must understand that universities are merely the end last institutions in a long chain of schools, and that political decisions about academia can not be disentagled from school policies, that are much less internationalised.

An international perspective is necessary, though, and I could not imagine anything more useful than a global, and maybe first European debate on education in general. To get a perspective - take a look at the Bulgarian blog Blizo do bebeto, discussing elit schools in Bulgaria, and the aims of education in society in general. The post is in Bulgaria, but Google translate will help you.

Merit points - a way to keep middle class schools pure?

2010-03-26T15:10:00.004+01:00

In the last post I tried to explain the proposal to charge foreigns form outside the European Union with tuition fees. I also argued that it was unlucky, since it is unfair, and would would make Swedish universities less internationalized, in a time when they should become more.

Tuition fees for non-EU students is the wrong thing to do, but in isolation the arguments are somehow intelligible. Swedish universities do lose out one a lot of money from students who are rich enough to pay, but not smart enough to get scholarships, compared to universities in the Netherlands, the UK or elsewhere. And it is quite a problem for the vision of Europe that education costs so much in some places and is free elsewhere. Even more problmatic is that the relation between costs and high quality education is seldom straight forward.

Tuition fees, however, is just a part of a vision of education that is shared not only by the government but by vast layers in the Swedish political class. A vision that runs contrary to teachers' professional experience and pedagogical science, as well as liberalism as defined above: "to enable individuals to make their own choices". To Swedish readers I strongly reccomend Johan Ernestams article in the last issue of Pedagogiska Magasinet (Nr 1, 2010). The rest of you will have to keep reading.

This vision rests on the conviction that there is no pedagogical science, that children do what you tell them to -not what you do, and that the Internet Age needs schools as they looked 100 years ago.

With a remarkable succesful economy Sweden has managed to increase its industrial output with 65% since 1993 , and a number of internet giants are Swedish inventions - like Skype, Spotifyand Vobbler. But in spite of this, our school pupils have continued to score worse and worse in international tests like the PISA. It is rather unclear what this kind of studies actually measure, and even more unclear what relationship test results have to do with society more in general, but they have deeply unnerved our politicians. Maybe the issue at stake is not national wealth but national pride... more and more often I find myself wondering if I am writing about Sweden or some Balkanesque country with a less solid reputation.

For sure one can find reason to worry. In a globalized world, the competition for the word's best jobs is tough, and being born in Sweden is maybe not the asset it used to be. There are millions of ambitious students in Asian, African, Latin American and East-European countries that aspire for posts that used to belong to the western intelligentia. But the answer from the Swedish government has been blunt. More discipline and specialisated schools. Pick out kids who show talents while they are young and put them in spetznaz schools. Of course, it does not work, and every year the debate and the reforms get more desperate.

The latest reform, that has been severly critizised from all kind of professionals, and most likely will be judged as a break of EU principles for discriminating foreign students, has been carried out with a breathtaing incompetence. The idea is to give merit points to students who pupils who study certain subjects in school - Mathematics, English and Modern languages. These merit points will facilitate access to university, and pupils witll thus be encuouraged to study these subjects. Of course Swedish authorities can not assign merit points to foreign documents, so one result is that Swedish and foreign studens will have to compete in two different quotas. The quota for foreign students in popular programmes like psychology, where almost all Swedish applicants have top grades, will be small or non-existing. Which makes a lot of sense in one way - it would be very disencouraging for the Swedish students if they are not accepted to the best educations, after having studied the courses that Father State has chosen to give merit points. But it is hard to see it as fair competition with foreign born students.

Theoretically, I am not against the idea to encourage pupils to study certain subjects. After all society might lack German speakers, for example. But the task to choose what subjects are more important than others is not an easy one. However, how the responsible politicians could fail to see that their proposal discriminates foreign students is a mystery. It is less so, if we se the proposal in connection with the introduction of tuiton fees. A pattern is then discernible. The critizised and seemingly haphazard reforms all serve the same purpose - to safeguard a certain group of people's access to higher education in Sweden. That group can be defined as Swedish youth studying theoretical programmes in high school.

It has been a peculiarity of the Swedish school system that everyone who finished school had the competence to apply for University. The politicians are now about to change that. From 2011 on, if things go as planned, only pupils studying theorietical programms will automatically be qualified for university studies. In addition to this, the same group of pupils will get the merit points.

Who will not get the merit points? One group that were already mentioned above, are foreign students. Another group is Swedish pupils in practical programmes, but for them the biggest problem is rather that many of them will finish school without qualifications for university. They might not bother too much about that when they are 18, but if they change their mind ten years later, the threshold will be much larger than it is for those who finish practical programmes in the current system. And for a liberal society it is to be problematic if there is no easy way for a carpenter to become an engineer. In today's economy, that requires so much mroe knowledge from end-users and the rank and file in companies, it is also a problem if intelligent people stay away from practical educations by default, because they want to be qualified for university. We need intelligent, skilled and qualified carpenters.

Another group that that gets a harder life with this system are those pupils studying theoretical programmes who have another native tongue than Swedish. They will get punished for studying their native language, as this is something they must choose in stead of a modern language. The only way they cang et merit points for studying their native language is if they apply to study it at university. But courses in immigrant's languages are neither popular, nor crowded, so having these merit points will be more or less useless. No one comes from Bulgaria to Sweden to study Arabic or Persian...

For example, if you are Persian and wants to study for a degree in civil engineering - studying French or Italian will give you extra merit points, while studying Persian will not. Even more difficult to understand is that studying French on the highest level will actually give more merit points than spending these hours on studying Persian, even if you want to study Persian in University. It is short sighted, stupid and racist by Swedish society to not encourage pupils with natural access to several languages to spend time on developing the skills that such a background needs, skills that Swedish society today is craving for.

The merit points are further problematic, since a pupil need to make the right choices already in the early school years in order to come out with maximum points when he or she finishes high school. For example, if you don't choose to study a modern language in school (e.g. replace it with extra Swedish if you don't have Swedish as your native language, or study your native language), or if you change your mind and study German in school and Spanish in high school, you have no chance to study modern languages at the highest levels, the levels that will give you the most merit points. As the pupils tend to be too young to realize the full consequenss of their choices, the responsibility of choice right lies with the parent. In a liberal society it is very problematicv if your life depend more on your parents' choices than your own.

Non-swedish parents who realize this face an epic dilemma - should they choose to let their child study its native tongue, and take extra hours in Swedish - as the pedagogical and psycological scientific consensus would suggest them to do, or take a gamble that the kid will learn this on his or her own, and take courses that give merit points - as the Swedish state expects them to do?

But also ethnical Swedish parents will have to thnk twice or trice about their child's education, since their child's learning carreer will be founded already in the earliest school years. That is what I will take up in the next post

Tuition fees - a way to keep Sweden Swedish?

2010-03-21T21:53:00.006+01:00

I live in Sweden together with my Bulgarian girlfriend who is studying on the psychology programme in Lund, one of our dear country's most renowned sites of education. The education itself is no doubt high class, but God knows that not everyone was prepared to accept a foreign student when we came here. She, and to some extent both of us, have encountered endless obstacles and more red tape than we could ever imagine. and we have both seen a lot.

The university of Lund is well accustomed to exchange students studying master programmes, but the prospect of an individual from Bulgaria who wants to enroll in a Swedish university just like one of us was, and for many is still is, beyond comprehension. I liked to think that that the two of us are the forerunners of a true European, or even global, generation, and that university staff will eventually get used to a world where people don't necessary live in one country their entire life. Also, my own positive memories form Swedish universities made me benevolent, and a few years in more chaotic countries has induced in me a profound respect for the Swedish kind of law-abiding bureacracy.

Maybe I was naïve, but five months ago I didn't interpret these obstacles as any institutionalised racism. But the recently announces decision to ask non-EU student for tuition fees made me suspicious, and the recent schism between our minister of higher education Tobias Krantz and Högskoleverket - the Swedish university authority , made my innocence look embarrasing.

The issue at hand is that mr. Krantz has proposed a system where foreign students are accepted
on certain quotas i.e. not in competition with Swedish students. While this might theoretically make it easier for foreign students to take a place on some programmes, all places on popular programmes, like the psychology programme, are likely to go to Swedish applicants, Högskoleverket warns.

Besides a long list of other complaints from various higher education education instances, the proposed legislation will probably have to be changed, since it breaks some fundamental EU principles. It is every European citizen's right to apply for education in any EU country and be treated as a native. In Brusells, and elsewhere in Europe this must seem like an unexpected outbreak of racism from a government that used to have a strong European profile. This is not the case. Neither is it incompetence or lunacy. It is part of a strategy from the Swedish government to safeguard the privileges of those being born into a Swedish bourgeoisie family, privileges that are under pressure in a globalized world. But to see that one must not see the university politics as separate from school politics. I believe that most foreign observers live in a blissful arrogance about the latter.

It will take me some time to clear out the concepts, but it is worth trying. Here is the first post out of three, that will deal mainly with the decision to ask non-EU students for tuition fees, starting in the autumn semester 2011. The entire article can be found on the Maladets! homepage

The decision was met with strong protests from students' organisations in Sweden, but for the wrong reasons, I am afraid. It is obvious that this is a first step and that later also Swedish and EU students will pay for their educatuon, and that is what the students' organisations fear. But few people have protested against the strange logic that asks an Albanian, Moldovan or Macedonian students to pay 10 000 EUR or less per semester to study something that would be free for anyone from Sweden or France, Protugal or Romania.

The motivation for the the decision is that Swedish citizens pay for the education through their taxes, while foreign citzens do not. Or in plain English - that Swedish parents are tired of financing other parents' kids' education in Sweden. That is a despicable populist argument. In a tax-funded system everyone pays for everyone's benefits. Some people pay more tax than others, is that unfair? Probably not more unfair than the fact that also children from rich families get a free education. I can not see why my tax money could not pay for an ambitious Moldovan Master student as well as some back slick Swedish economy student flying to Stockholm in the weekends and spending his summers in St Tropez. Let's use our tax money that create a world class system and let everyone who wants to compete for the places.

The argument also overlooks the great contribution that foreign students bring to Sweden. They are highly beneficial not only for universities, but also for society. International environments create oppurtunities for business that might not exist in less vibrant environments. Foreign students bring multiculturalism, innovation and new perspectives. Even if they don't pay a single Euro for studying here, they give something to Sweden that no money in the world can buy.

Stockholm in 1900 - Stockholm is a city that is built by immigrants, for immigrants, but no one benefited more than Sweden. Image from Riksantikvariembetet.

The only viable alternative to a system that is free for all is that everyone pays. All commentators agree is what the government utlimately wants to achieve, by small steps. Even our Minister of education would realize that it makes more sense that UK students pay than that Moldovans do.

The proposal for tuition fees includes two scholarships of approximately EUR 3 000 000 each, annualy. The first one is open for all applicants, and the money are supposed to cover tuition fees only. The second is open for students from developing countries like Bangladesh, Zambia and Burkina Faso only, and these money should also cover living costs. As politically correct as it may sound to support students from the developing world, it is basically cheap PR. The money will come from the foreign aid budget - the students receiving scholarships will replace small farmers, womens' NGO's and other recipients of Swedish foreign aid. And it is not just little cynical to hand out money that will return to Swedish bank accounts within a year as tuition fees.

One might wonder why a liberal government has chosen this path of action. If liberalism is defined a enabling individuals to make their own choices, it seems like free education is a much better way to give equal opportunities? But free education leaves too little room for politicians' desire to control.

Future plans

2010-03-12T18:55:00.002+01:00

Maladets! is alive again, as anyone reading this probably already knows. As if anything witht that name could die...

During the autumn and winter this blog was neglected, and my energy was in stead spent on the Th!nk About it! Climate change competition. It was a great experience, and guess what? I did it well enough to be selected as a blogger also in the next round, where the topic will be "The developing world".

As you have seen, I have started writing about developing issues also on maladets!, mostly as a way to get to know the subject. I plan to continue posting on maladets!, also after the competition starts. Everything worth reading will be found here, and the best pieces also on the competition site.

In addition, I have a little project trying to get my fingers dirty with HTML from scratch.... everything I ever write is supposed to end up on the Maladets! homepage, but this will also be the place where I test my programming skills. At the moment they are... basic.

As you migh also have noticed, Maladets! has been redesigned. I was experimenting with different customized templates, but in the end I settled for a Blogger template. One reason is that I like it, and that it meets my main requirement - simplicity. I could probably find a nice custom template, but what I couldn't make work was the like/unlike buttons under the posts. I really like them, as a way for readers to give input without commenting. Feel free to use them!

The side bar has been dedicated to sharing and following gadgets... somehow this is the essence of the internet I think, and since I love to tweet what I read myself, I want to make it easy to share the maldets! posts.

Last but not least... in the side bar you will find a banner for the Reporters without Borders (RSF) yearly World Day Against Cyber Censorship , which is today, March 12th. It is late to put up the banner, but I am a strong supporter of their cause.

There are many threats to free speech on the internet today, The obvious one's, that must not be beglected are despotic regimes, like the ex-government of Moldova, the Chinese and the Iranian government. There are countries where blogging is dangerous, but people still write. All of us benefit from these bloggers' writings, but they alone carry the risks. The least we can do is to show solidarity.

But Reporters without Borders' vision of "a single Internet that is unrestricted and accessible to all". Is threated also from commercial interests. The fact that not all youtube videos can be seen in all countries, is one frustrating example. Governments and NGO's all over the world work hard to give their citizens acces to the internet. If information is not free on the internet, than these efforts are all in vain.

Read more about the World Day Against Cyber Censorship on Global Voices Online, a fantastic example of what the internet can be.

8th of March, climate change and everything else

2010-03-08T21:47:00.001+01:00

Today is eight of March. Amnesty International in Lund, where I am an active member, has highlighted domestic violence. Mainstream Swedish media try benchmarking the state of gender equality in Sweden today. I don't hesitate to call myself a feminist, but it is a tragic fact that in ten last years, feminism in Sweden has developed much faster than gender equality.

Meanwhile, women all over eastern Europe receive flowers, chocolates, restaurant visits etc. by their lovers. My humble guess is that most women feel quite comfortable with the tradition, but that does not prevent east European feminists to use this day to highlight gender politics. For example the Romanian blog Monkey monkey underpants, or the Bulgarian left wing students' organisation Priziv, asking whether 8th of March is "a day for struggle or a day for flowers".

Photo: Nationaal Archief

Maybe the struggle we actually want to win is fought with flowers. But what is the rationale behind working for gender equality? Yesterday maybe 500 people were killed in ethnic violence in Nigera. Last week an earthquake shook Chile, only months after the catastrophe in Haiti that killed 200 000 people and left a country in ruins. On top of this there is the threat of a hotter climate that will render some of the poorest countries in the world uninhabitable, and farmland into deserts. Are these not bigger issues that deserve bloggers' and activists' attention more than gender equality?

The question is rethorical, and the answer is no. For three reasons: Women are human beings and women are victims. And last but not least - female empowerment is part and parcel of saving the world.

Women are humans and as such they do have human rights. It is a shame that we still need to write such truisms in 2010, but it is a fact beyond discussion that women in many countries are denied their human rights, simply for being women. Every human has a right to education, but in Zambia, many girls go to school fearing sexual harrasment from their teachers. The fact that we know speaks good about Zambia - a government that has the courage to bring this problem up deserves respect. The Indian government vows to combat gender inequality, which is visible in "low health, education and nutritional indicators of women that have made achieving our MDGs a far cry" Times of India writes. All humans have a right to eat and to live healthy. Also Indian women. But again, acknowledging the problem is part of the solution.

Also in Europe gender inequality is manifest in lower salaries for women and domestic violence. Not to mention the criminal networks trafficing women throughout the continent. A lucurative business that requires customers in wealthy countries as well as desperate women in poor countries. No human being should live in slavery. Not even if they are destitute women.

As long as humans are being denied their rights because they are women, we need to discuss gender issues. But it does not halt there. In all the other problems, the big ones that get precious TV time, like wars and natural catastrophes, where women suffer from studpidity, greed and politics not for being women per se, but for being breadwinners in the world's poorest families. In military conflicts, more men than women take part, but no one suffers so much as female civilians - starving, fleeing and in addition being raped and abused by soldiers, or civilians in the chaos that conflicts bring.

Climate change is already affecting women harder than men, which might be the reason why less than educated men are allowed to doubt about the existance of climate change even in respectable media. Women suffer from droughts becase of their "marginalized status and dependence on local natural resources, their domestic burdens are increased, including additional work to fetch water, or to collect fuel and fodder" an IUCN report from 8th of March 2007 states.

There is no major problem in the world today where women are not hit harder than men. Fortunately, there is also no major problem where the empowerment of women is not also part of the solution. there is no magic about this. Only the simply fact that problems are best solved by the individuals that encounter them daily. The UN Deputy Secretary-General Asha-Rose Migiro in her
opening speech of the fifty-fourth session of the Commission on the Status of Wome on 1 March highlighted the role of women's organisations in development work, and underscored: "Where women are fully represented, societies are more peaceful and stable. Standing up for women’s rights and development is standing up for the global good."

It is a great dissapoiontment, therefore, that the gap is still so wide between the UN's policy statements, and political praxis. In the new UN Climate Change financing group, a group that will hold immense power over what happens next in the global cooperation to restrain climatechange, only 1 out of 19 names is a woman's Grist writes. That is embarrasing, and potentially dangerous. We need women to come to grip with climate change, and everything else.

The Polluter pays?

2010-03-03T17:46:00.001+01:00

After the COP15 was judged a failure by the European left, right and green movement alike, one culd easily fall into despair over the possibilities to reach international policy agreements. The Copenhagen accord failed to reach an agreement on anything more substantional than a vague promise to lower co2 emissions. Especially bitter was the question about who is responsible for the current high co2 levels. Is it the rich countries, who built their wealth on fossile fuels, without knowing, or is it the developing countries who argue for their right to grow richer, while knowingthat co2 levels must down.

It could be surprising, then , that the support for the principle "The polluter pays", which clearly defines a culprit, is almost unanimous. The left loves it, because it promises to tax multinationals. The right revers it, because it is ideologically pure liberalism - if a market system is supposed to work, big companies can not be allowed to pollute, and destroy the resources of smaller, equally important entrepeneurs. Those greens who avoid leaning left or right believe in it because a system that it targets the morally bad companies, rather than private entrepeneurship as such, is both more moral, an likely a more efficient way to achieve political change.

It is a pity that it doesn't work. Or at least has worked very poorly, so far. The Guardian earlier this week published findings from a study written by Trucost for the UN, due to be published in the summer. The study that the world's top firms cause staggering $2.2tn of environmental damage. "The figure equates to 6-7% of the companies' combined turnover, or an average of one-third of their profits, though some businesses would be much harder hit than others."

According to the Guardian, the report is likely to end up in proposals to end state subsidies to industries like agriculture, energy and transport. Personally, I think the consensus about "the Polluter pays" will end the minute specific companies are targeted with claims.

There are lot of reasons to be pessimistic about the possibility to ask companies for this kind of responsibility. The political world, especially the part of it dealing with social- and environmental issues, is not void of beautiful words, or good ideas. But when it comes down to action, changing the world is a hard thing to do. These $2.2tn of environmental damage that noone takes repsonsibility is an ample illustration of this fact.

Picture from the wikipedia commons

One could also get pessimistic by the fact, that taking one-third of profits from some of the worlds biggest companies would be harmful, to say the least for the word economy. As if it was not already in havoc. Just imagine the headlines in FT and the Economist, and the political response from the targeted companies.

But one could also see a hope in these numbers. Their merit is not that they work as legal claims, but that they can help educating society about the gravity of the matter. Something must change. Rather sooner than later.

I think we need a kind of truth commission, assesing how businesses have used and misused our common environment, so that we can find better ways to feed, transport and amuse ourselves. The better ways to grow food and transport people already exists, but how can we make "ecological" the only legal alternative? This must be an open and throughout discussion. But there should not be any reason to hide information about how business have been actually been done - therefore the guilt question must not be central. Criminal behavior can be forgiven, but not forgotten. What is really important is not what has been done up to now, but with what mindset the kids who are now in school will go into business fifteen years from now.

But forgivance comes with a demand - that the foul behavior is not repeated. No one should be allowed to destroy what belongs to everyone - therefore the principle about "The Polluter pays" has to be enacted with legal force in the very near future. Companies, states or individuals should face justice for environmental crimes. Some rules are simply more important than others. Environmental protection is one of those you just can not bend.

Kenya shows how to drop educational fees

2010-02-24T08:20:00.001+01:00

Would you pay for your kids' education? In Sweden, a country were even university education is free for EU citizens, it is difficult to understant why parents in much poorer countries must pay for enrolling their kids in school. Yet this has been the case in many countries in the third world.

In the last years, in an effort to fulfill the second UN Millenium Goal - to ensure that, by 2015, children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling, several countries in Africa, including Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Ethiopia, Malawi, Mozambique and Kenya have dropped fees for primary education.

Michael Fleshman writes in Afrik.com (a longer version is available at Africa Renewal) about two of these countries - Kenya and Malawi, and compares how they tackled the challenge of educating every child. He concludes that while free primary education is a human right, authorities have a lot to learn from old mistakes when they strive to make it a reality.

Malawi dropped fees already in 1994, but failed to allocate sufficient resources for a larger education system. Once education was free, thousands of pupils whose parents previosuly coould not afford the fees flooded the existing school system. As school houses were too few, pupils had to be thought outdoors. Often they had not access to pencils and writing material. Not enough teachers were educated and the pupil-teacher ratio climbed to 70-1. As a result of being unprepared, only 20% of the pupils in Malawi's schools succesfully finish eight years of education.

Kenya, on the other hand, managed to to everything differently when they dropped fees in primary education in 2003. Financial support was secured, and the educational budget increased from $703 mn in school year of 2001/02 to $951 mn in 2003/04, a third of the national budget. As a comparison, Sweden in 2009 paied approximately 6% of the national budget on education. These money funded the immediate needs, as well as a build up of educational resources.

What is maybe even more important is the weight Kenya put on mobilizing support among parents, teachers and administrators. Funds, teachers, school houses and pencils are badly needed, but what really makes difference is the hearts and minds of the individuals within the system. Kids can be thaught under less than perfect circumstances, even outside under trees if necessary, but only in a society eager to educate itself, and with a clear idea how to move forward.

All data in this post are taken from Fleishman's article, if not stated otherwise.
Photos are not related to the text, and belong to Unesco's photobank. (c) UNESCO

Malaria and Indoor Residual Spraying

2010-02-21T18:09:00.008+01:00

Svenska Dagbladet published a long article* about malaria today. The disease, which has haunted the third world for generations, kills up to 1 000 000 human beings annually. But finally, thanks to among other Bill Gates, we have the means to eradicate the disease, the newspaper reports. One of these means is better medicines, developed by Swedish scientists. The two others are mosquito nets impregnated with intesticides and IRS - Indoors Residual Spraying. That means spraying the inside of people's homes with DDT. I was confused... isn't DDT poisonous? Well... I spent most of my sunday morning researching the issue, and in the afternoon a few things are obvious:

Malaria is an enormous health problem
DDT is a cheap and easy way to kill mosquitos carrying malaria
Mosquitos can become resistant to DDT
DDT might have health effects on humans
DDT and Malaria will be a hot topic in this springs Th!nk About it 3 blogging competition.
The interests behind the issue are roughly the same as behind the Climate debate - environmentalists against industrialists. Only that this time the UN, in the shape of WHO, is on the industrialist side.

In this post I will try to report on two texts about DDT use against malaria:

(PDF links)

First a brief background. Before the 20th century malaria was endemic in large parts of the world. It existed also in Sweden, where it dissapeared spontanously in the 1930's, due to rising living standards and change in land use - many wetlands disappeared as agriculture was modernized.

During the second world war, the allied forces used DDT against mosquitos spreading typhus among their troops, with impressive results. After the war, Indoor Residual Spraying (IRS) with DDT was depolyed against malaria.

IRS have some restrictions - notably that it requires a wall to spray on, and that this wall is not plastered. It must be a naked clay wall, for examle. Also, IRS requires 80% of all household in an area to be sprayed, in order to be efficient. The method requires consent from an entire community, voluntary or not.

DDT, which back then was seen as a panacea, was used in a wide range of situations. Agriculture made massive use of DDT to protect crops from insects.

The years after the second world war were successful in the fight against malaria. The disease was eradicated in western- and eastern Europe, and in many places in Asia and South America the spread declined. Some people, notably the authors of the WHO report I will refer to later, and the American Enterprise Institute whose reputation is flawed among environmentalists and climate believers, are convinced that these successes were due to DDT use.

Indoor Residual Spraying in an Ethiopian home Photo credits: Bonnie Gillespie, Voices for a Malaria Free Future

I suspect that other people will say something else. Obviously these countries also experienced a post-war economic boom, which may have made society less malaria-friendly for other reasons, similar to those eradicating the disease in Sweden before the war.

But no one is doubting that the DDT kills mosquitos. It does. And no one is doubting that mosquitos carrying malaria kill people. They do.

After using DDT for everything for 20 something years, a widening concern about environmental- and health effects and growing problems with DDT resistant mosquitos, DDT was phased out in the -70's. DDT use was banned in the US in 1972, and finally the Stockholm Convention, a UN body, in 2001 restriced use of DDT to public health only. That means - DDT can be used against malaria, but not in agriculture.

In 2006, the WHO revaluated the use of DDT for Indoor Residual Spraying, from now on I will write IRS. The WHO now reccomends the method, given that certain demands are met.

WHO's position statement on IRS is short and very easy to read. Already on the first page it is stated that "Effective implementation of IRS with DDT or other recommended insecticides should be a central part of national malaria control strategies where this intervention is appropriate." (italics are mine)

There is nothing that says that IRS must be done with DDT, the method could be deployed with various instecticides, but througout the document it is obvious that the subject matter is DDT, being a highly efficient, and very cheap insecticide.

The text continues with an historical background: "The efforts of the Malaria Eradication Programme (1955–1969) contributed to significantly reducing the global malaria burden, particularly in Asia, Latin America and Southern Africa. The eradication programme was based on IRS against the vector mosquitos, as endorsed by the WHO Kampala Conference of 1950."

Straightforward and uncomplicated. Not the shadow of a doubt about the role of DDT in the disappeareance of malaria.

Onfortunately, these programmes stopped due to the lack of government support and funding, and the worries about DDT resistance. "However, another important factor has been general disapproval of DDT use, due to fears of its harmful effects on the environment and on human health, fears which are unjustified when DDT is used appropriately for IRS."

To me - this is the argument that DDT usage stands or falls with. Is it dangerous for people, or is it not? Some researchers say that it is not. So why not use it also in agriculture? Because agricultural use would imply much larger volumes, and a quicker development of DDT resistant moquitos, is the answer from WHO.

The other paper I read, The Pine River Statement: Human Health Consequences of DDT Use, try to asses the health affects with a research overview. While also this paper approves of DDT use, it does not paint a rosy picture. The most troubling fact is how little we know about this insecticide, that is being sprayed on Africans' homes as I write.

Research indicates that DDT and/or DDE (DDE is a breakdown product from DDT) levels are higher among people whose home have been sprayed, than among people living in areas where DDT is used in agriculture, which can hardly be surprising. "...data suggest that indoor residual spraying results in high DDT exposure in humans, including vulnerable populations, such as pregnant women and fetuses."

Here I think - Before spraying, we should also consider who spends time in these houses. Men, or their pregnant wives? Is there a hidden gender issue here?

So IRS results in high levels of DDT/DDE in humans. What effects can these levels give? Very little research seems to be done and unfortunately a very little part of the existing research on DDT effects examines populations in areas where IRS has been deployed. These are the findings presented in Eskenazi et alt. , sorted by disease:

Cancer: There might be a link between cancer and DDT, but the data is notvery convincing. However, regarding breast cancer, one "study suggests that the prepubertal and pubertal years are critical periods of exposure",
Who will spend most time in these sprayed hosues? Most likely women, who also might have the most to fear from DDT exposure. Again, is there a gender issue in this?
Diabetes: The link seems to be stronger with diabetes: "studies from the United States and Sweden suggest that body burdens of DDT and/or DDE may be associated with the prevalence of diabetes. A variety of other persistent environmental chemicals also have been associated with diabetes prevalence (Lee et al. 2006). However, given the high correlation among various organochlorine exposures (Bradman etal. 2007), additional research is needed to delineate the specific contributions of DDT and DDE."
Does DDT affect childrens physical growth?: Maybe not. "Overall, the evidence for the relation of maternal DDT exposure and child physical growth is weak"

Sure enough, DDT does not kill humans instantly. The possible effects would be long term, which is also what causes the writers of the research review to advocate caution in their final conclusion:

"The use of DDT historically may have helped prevent millions of infections and deaths from insect-borne diseases. Based on recent studies, we conclude that humans are exposed to DDT and DDE, that indoor residual spraying can result in substantial exposure, and that DDT may pose a risk for human populations. However, few studies have measured body burdens of both DDE and DDT, and studies have rarely investigated the effects of DDT/DDE exposure at levels observed in populations exposed through indoor residual spraying. Furthermore, information on exposure to DDT/DDE during critical periods is limited for outcomes such as cancer.

We are concerned about the health of children and adults given the persistence of DDT and its active metabolites in the environment and in the body, and we are particularly concerned about the potential effects of continued DDT use on future generations. We recognize the serious implications of restricting DDT use given that an estimated 880,000 people die each year from malaria, most of whom are <5 years of age(WHO 2008)."

Isn't it remarkable how little we know, after more than 60 years of DDT usage? There are many "mays" and "mights"... Unlike the WHO text, even the succes story of DDT in the fifties is not completely sure here.

Let's go back to the WHO reccomendations. The WHO, stresses that DDT should nowadays be deployed in an appropriate way. Which means...

"In a single country, several epidemiological patterns and situations are com- monly found requiring different interventions or combinations of interventions. These must be taken into account when deciding whether to use IRS. IRS can be effective in almost all settings as long as certain conditions for implementa- tion are met.

In unstable, epidemic-prone malaria transmission areas, IRS will prevent
seasonal increase in transmission, will prevent and control epidemics and
can be used for the elimination of local transmission of malaria.
In stable-endemic malaria areas with moderately intense but seasonal trans-
mission, IRS can prevent seasonal increase in transmission and reduce lev-
els of infection prevalence and highly seasonal morbidity and mortality.
In stable-hyperendemic areas where very intense seasonal or perennial
transmission occurs, IRS, with a higher frequency of application than in the
above instances, can reduce the level of transmission and reduce levels of
infection prevalence, morbidity and mortality.*

There are some situations in which IRS is not a suitable intervention, notably where there are no structures to spray. Therefore, IRS has almost no utility in the control of malaria in forested areas of South-East Asia and the Amazon region, where personal protection measures are the best option."

I find this the most disturbing part of the WHO text... In short: IRS is the best way to act in all situations, except when there is no wall to spray on. Isn't that giving a carte blanche for IRS, and implying that DDT is in deed not dangerous for humans? If this is the WHO standpoint, why only implying it, instead of speaking out?

Finally, there is one condition that must be met, according to the WHO. The usage MUST be restricted to public health use, to avoid the problem with resistant mosquitos. IRS is therefore not to be deployed in a country where the state can not guarantee that it is properly managed, and that DDT is not sold to farmers who use it or unintended use in agriculture etc. .I admit, I have never been to Africa, but there are several of EU governments I would not trust with this. And which African is actually able to control what happens with the DDT on the gound?

Maybe that is the point. If DDT use is actually impossible to restrict, governments will have to choose - either DDT is dangerous, and it should not be used, or it is not dangerous and should be sold and used freely. And I'll be damned if that is not what some of the people who have been lobbying the WHO into reccomending IRS want... among them the former Bush administration.

*Not avaliable online. "Spraytrupper i sista striden mot malaria", Svenska Dagbladet, 21/2 2010, s. 22-25

Issoufou Takpara

2010-02-18T17:34:00.004+01:00

Sydsvenskan - Sweden's third biggest newspaper recently published a feature article on maternal welfare in Benin. So far, so fantastic. There are not too many insightful artices about African countries in Swedish media.

The headline said that since a gynecologist was elected minister of health in Benin, maternal welfare is free of charge. (The decision took effect 1st of April 2009) The article then tells the story about a woman who had a C-section free of charge, and survived, but lost her child. Problems do persist for Beninese women. Poor infrastructure make hospital inaccessible for many, and local traditions might look at doctors with suspicion. Nonetheless, it is safe to say that it is good news when Benin, a low income country, pays special attention to women's health.

Beninese women in a micro financing seminar. All of them now have legal access to free maternal welfare.
Photo credits: ~MVI~

Not only is maternal welfare on of the UN's Millenium Development Goals, many seem to think that helping women is the fastest and most reliable way to make a society develop. I am prone to believe them. Benins effort has been praised not only in Swedish press, but also by star philantropist ladies: Carla Bruni-Sarkozy and Melinda Gates

What made me read the article over and over, after the initial entusiastic read, was that I was trying to find the name of the Minister of Health who initiated this. Does he not deserve some praise? Even if his policy could be critizised, it could hardly be discussed without even mentioning the his name, which is Issoufou Takpara. That was not stated anywhere in the article, but as always, the answer is available somewhere on the internet.

Issoufou Takpara, Minister of Health, Benin
Photo credits: Beninplus.net

How comes that the names of taliban commanders like Mulla Omar and Mulla Abdul Salam are commonplace in western media, but an entire feature article about development issues can discuss Benin's health politics without mentioning the Issoufou Takpara's name? Obviously health officials are not considered as important as terrorists. And mr. Takpara would make a much duller picture on western TV screens than the colourful mullas.

Fighting the talibans looks so good on TV that one could suspect the whole war is orchestrated. In one corner: our boys, good and civilized. In the other corner: them, medieval muslim barbarians, so evil hat we are justified to kill them. With God on our side.

Suffering Beninese women who lose their children due to poor conditions also fit the screen. We love to see and read about Africans whom we can feel sorry for. But an African politician who tries to deal with maternal welfare through something so normal and socialdemocratical as maternal welfare free of charge... Is he good or evil? Civilised or medieval? Like most politicians I guess he is more civlised than good, but far from outright evil. That makes a poor story. So maybe it is more readable if we no write his name, and pretend that he does not exist?

Peaceful protest in Sofia

2010-01-14T22:24:00.002+01:00

Today's protest against the ZES legislative project were carried out peacefully and in a good mood, mediapool.bg reports. The meeting were attended by ca 300 protesters, among whom the SDS leader Martin Dimitrov.

Unlike last year, the meeting didn't create much interest in Bulgarian media, and even less in international... Borisov seem to have much bigger problems than protests in Sofia now, as his proposed Euro-commisar Rumiana Jeleva is being critizised for confict of interests.

Be careful tomorrow...

2010-01-13T14:08:00.002+01:00

The protest against the ZES legislation will be carried out tomorrow, Bulgaria e Nasha reports. The authorities, Borisov's GERB party in various incarnation have used both whip and carrot to counter to protests.

Next to allowing traffic between protesters and parliament, a move that the protesters think of as sabotage, they yesterday announced changes in the legislation. Police authorities would in the adjusted text only get access to citizens data after after a judge's decision.

The protesters do not think that this is enough, and refer to their demands - the current legislation project should be abandoned, the ministry of interior should be reformed and if new legislation is necessary, the civil society should first be consulted.

The Bulgarian civil society is far from perfect though. Behind tomorrows protest stands 38 different organisations, that are found on the protest's homepage. It seems like anyone who supported the demands on the authorities could join the protest. Among the organisations I find some that I know are key actors in the Bulgarian civil society, like Elektronna Granitza or Zelenite, but there are also some names I am disappointed to see, like Асоциация Общество и Ценности (The Associaton for society and values), who use their homepage to openly propagate against the gay parade in Sofia, and claiming that "science" says that noone is born with sexuality, and Българската национално-радикална партия (The Bulgarian National-radical party), a minor organisastion who their web space to propagate conspiracy theories about how the jews were behind the bolsjevik revolution.

I don't see how organisations who struggle for a democratic, and European Bulgaria, can allow this kind of idiots to soil their projects. What do you think would be The Bulgarian National-radical party's stance on surveillance in case they had any power? My guess is that they would start b registering jews, and then everyone who talked with jews, and then everyone who talked with someone who knows a jew...

So here are my words for those protesting tomorrow: Be careful. I don't think there will be any violence in the streets, tomorrow you are fighting to be heard in media. You are so right abut this, but, please, be more careful about who you let demonstrate with you.

14/1 2010

2010-01-12T22:30:00.001+01:00

14 January 2009 was the date when thousand of protesters, from various Bulgarian NGO's gathered in a protest against corruption and mis-government, bigger and stronger than anything the country had seen in years.

The crowd was eventually dispersed violently, something that caused an outcry among civil activists, and helped create a movement of youth calling for a truly democratic Bulgaria, centered around the blog Bulgaria e nasha.

In the following spring, much of the energy, not least at Bulgaria e nasha, was spent at fighting the ZES legislation, that would have given the ministry of interior direct access to citizens electronical data. In the wake of the police's actions at the protest, and with the ministry of interior's history in mind, activists were very concerned about surveillance. I understand them.

Against odds, the activists won. The then ruling socialist dominated coalition did not manage to get the parliament to accept the legislation, before it was ousted and replaced by Borisovs government.

But...

Dissapointed, and more or less surprised, the activists saw how Borisovs GERB, witht the support of Ataka, could easily lead the same legislation through the parliament witout any strong opposition. The same legislation that they had vehemently been against before (at least Ataka).

Therefore, at the 14 of January 2010, a new demonstration has been announced in front of the parliament, the place that hosted not only the demonstrations one year earlier, but also the storming of the parliament in 1997 and the protest against the communist leaders in 1989. The demands are as follows:

The responsible minister should immediately ask for the cancellation of the legislative project.
Quick and thourough measures to make the MVR a modern instution meeting European standards
In case legslative changes are necessary, these should be done first after consulting a wide range of civil interests and experts

Protests in front of the parliament has a strong symbolism, and is probably the last thing Borisov wants. So the Sofia mayor, who comes from his own GERB party, has declined to stop the movement of traffic on the square. The organisors of the protest calls this sabotage, from the mayors office it is said that a part of the square has been reserved for the protesters.

In East European politics, the capital mayors play an important role. Borisovs has managed to get full control over both Bulgaria and Sofia, which makes him unhealthy strong.

IFJ calls Bulgarian authorities to protect the free speech

2010-01-08T20:17:00.001+01:00

"The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) have called on Bulgarian authorities to investigate the murder of journalist Boris Nikolov Tsankov" - this is the headline in one of Serbias B92's articles tonight.

It goes on
"The IFJ says the murder of Boris will undermine investigative journalism in Bulgaria as organized criminal gangs try to intimidate media through show of force and violence."

and adds that the IFJ has been joined in its demands by the European Federation of Journalists.

It is obviously a problem that a writer is shot down in the center of Sofia, no matter what is his criminal record, but it is also very problematic when international organisations like the IJF reacts like this without investigating further who Bobi Tsankov was. He was not an investigative journalist. That doesn't mean, of course, that it is safe for investigative journalists to work in Bulgaria if they write about the maffia - if he can be killed so can anyone. The killing of Bobi Tsankov was a horrible murder. But it was not an attack on free media.

Who was Bobi Tsankov

2010-01-07T22:17:00.003+01:00

I must admit an error. Bobi Tsankov, who was killed in downtown Sofia on Tuesday, was not a journalist in the proper sense. He had published a few articles in not very renowned publications, and did some radio shows, but more than anything he is famous for being a criminal himself. He has been accused of frauds for millions, and have close ties to organized crime himself. After all, it was exactly those ties boasted that he would reveal. So the murder was maybe more of an inter-mafia showdown, than an open attack on free speech.

My mistake is completely due to not checking my sources before I write. It is elementary, I have done it before, but there is no excuse.

Unfortunately I was not the only one todo this mistake. In Bulgarian TV today, Bulgarians wonder how the international press spread eactly this point of view, without checking out who Tsankov really was. I am sure they did not take their information from Maladets! BBC describes him as a "prominent crime journalist" Balkan Insigth use the neutral "Radio Host", while NY Times call Tsankov a "prominent radio journalist and the author of a book on Bulgaria's gangsters".

After all, poor Bobi did publish some articles, so calling him a journalist could possibly be justified, even if it is wrong. But from where did BBC and NYT learn that he was prominent?

Unfortunately, in most people'seyes, and in reports about murdered journalists, Bobi Tsankov willbe a journalist, and Bulgaria a country where journalists are killed, which is something much worse than a country where gangsters kill each other. Sloppy writing, like this is, helps in building prejudices about a country that too few foreigners even bother to understand. I hope you can forgive Maladets!, but the BBC and NYT should be better.

The other side of the story is that a mafia murder was carried out in broad daylight in the very center of Sofia, which is bad enough. Was Tsankov really going to reveal something, that was so sensitive? Or did someone within the organized crime want to show Borisov who really rules this country? I don't know...

Anyway, journalism should be about telling the truth, and using the label "journalist" for Bobi Tsankov is a bit too imaginative.

Slavery persists. In Africa and in Europe.

2010-01-07T13:07:00.002+01:00

An email from the ITUC mailinglist reminded me of a horrible truth. Slavery is a phenomenon that persist, in spite of being denounced by the United Nations and forbidden in most countries in the world. According to Wikipedia, the current number of humans living in slavery is staggering 27 000 000 people. That more than the population of Romania.

The ITUC tells about domestic workers in Togo, often children, who are abused under forms that is nothing else than slavery. As always, poverty plays an important role. There is a Togolese tradition that poor families leave their kids to live with richer families that they know. The rich family feeds the kid and takes care of its education, and in exchange the kid provides domestic services.

Such a system would be oppressive in the modern world, but it belongs to a completely different context and should be assesed separately. Today , however, the same system has been distorted. Poor families leave their kids to rich families that they do not know. Often the kids are put to work the entire day, so there is no education involved. The payment, which can be as low as 8 EUR per month, are not given to the child, but transferred to its family. Since the kids are not formally employed, no labour legislation apply, and the "slave owner" is free to beat and mistreat the child as he or she wishes.

As sad as it sounds, one may not be surprised that this kind of practice is going on in a very poor country. If slavery was restricted to countries like Togo, we might hope that economic development itself would erase slavery. Unfortunately this is not the case. We might only call to mind the domestic workers in the gulf countries, whose working situation is also similar to slavery.

But slavery even exists in the midst of Europe. Balkan Insight has recently published an article, describing how criminal networks lure poor people from countries like Romania, Moldova, Ukraine and Transnistriainto forced labour in the Czech Republic. There they work long hours without payment, supervised by armed guards, picking aspargus that later was served on luxury restaurants in Amsterdam and Berlin.

Slavery can exist wherever there is organized crime, and this is one reason why the fight against organized crime is also a fight for human rights. So is the fight against poverty. Because we do not want slavery anywhere. Neither in Togo, nor in the EU.

Bobi Tsankov gunned down in central Sofia

2010-01-05T17:39:00.003+01:00

The Bulgarian radio journalist Bobi Tsankov, who has been covering the Bulgarian mafia was shot down in central Sofia today, media is reporting.

The fact that journalist can be gunned down, in the center of the city in the middle of day, speaks very bad about the freedom of press in Bulgaria. What makes the matter even worse is that this is the ~~third~~ fourth similar case since I personally took an interest in Bulgarian affairs (I moved to Bulgaria in December 2007). Three of them were journalists, one was a writer.

In today's Bulgaria, journalists are not risking their lives when they write about politics, but they do that when they write about organized crime. Which make the matter even more complicated. Organized crime is a strong force beyond any democratic control. As society fails to come to grips with that, the press is not free, no matter what the constitution says.

The Borisov government have carried out some widely talked about actions against criminal gangs, but as long as journalists are not safe, they need to prove what they can do. I hope that the people who were involved in the murder of Bobi Tsankov will be caught and judged. As long as they are free, Bulgaria has very deep problems.

maladets! is coming home

2009-12-17T11:02:00.000+01:00

Maladets! blog was born back when I was living in Bulgaria. Not exactly... but more or less true. Tomorrow, within 24 hours I am going there again. For three weeks, this time.

I decided to take this opportunity to write a travelogue, that you find at http://maladetsinbulgaria.blogspot.com. You can expect pictures, inisgnificant details and a personal touch. Maladets! never gets as serious as I want it to - but here I will not even try to be serious.

I hope you enjoy travelling with me to the country of roses and energy crises... Bulgaria!

Santa claus is coming, again...

2009-12-02T10:55:00.000+01:00

Christmas is coming, this year again. It is a holiday to spend with friends and family, and I and my girlfriend will go spend it in Bulgaria, after 3,5 months of abscence.

There will spend it on the 24/25th of December, the same dates as my own family in Sweden. So do protestants and catholics, and so do the Romanian and the Bulgarian churches. Other orthodox churches, like the Russian and the Serbian, celebrate on the dates from the Iulian calendar - the 6th of January.

In Bulgaria press, priests and other pundits have recently been discussing to move the date of christmas forward to the 6th of january. It seems quite unlikely to happen - just imagine the christmas shopping season beginning two weeks later in one EU-country than in the other's. Wouldn't that be a obstacle to free trade? Moreover, the question can only be decided by the Holy Synod, and last time time it was up or discussion, a big majority was against it.

But when did the date actually change from the 6th of january to the 25th of december? (We might highlight the ethoncentrism here - the 6th of january is oviosly the date the christmas falls on in OUR calendar, not the serbian or russian church's calendar).

The catholic church changed the dates in 1583. This is time when the ottoman empire was at its strongest. The ottomans could be cruel with minorities that they perceived as a threat to the state, but they were convinced liberals in religious matters. To the orthodox churches the catholic efforts of prozelysation was a much worse threat than the sultans' political power, so they did not have any strong reason to change the dates. Quite on the contrary - they had a strong reason to differ from the catholic church, in order to defend their identity. So they stuck with the iulian calendar's date - the 6th of January.

An irrelevant impasse - Sweden didn't change calendar until 1753. Whatever else that signifies, I think it is a hint that our place in Western Europe was not obvious for a very long time.

In today's Moldova, christmas can be a very prolonged holiday. Firs there is the romanian/western christmas at 25th. Where I was living, one of our neighbours belonged to Jehova's Wittnesses so we celebrated already the 24th. Then the party is on until new years eve. There is really no point in starting to work then, because at 6th of January the russian church celebrates christmas, and after a week its own new year. Then, at the end of january, things go back to normal.

With the tangible contradictions between east and west in Moldova, the choice to celebrate christmas on the same date as Western Europe seemed to signify a deeper sense of European identity. This is also what many people said. Those who were actively pro-romanian thought of the russian christmas dates as obsolete, a left over from the Russian imperialism masked as communism. But quite frankly, Moldovans of all denominations usually celebrated both dates.

With this in mind, it seemed all natural to me that Bulgaria, an EU member state with a people very convinced about its European identity, celebrated on the 25th of december. This is also what many commentors say - we are Europeans, let's celebrate like in Europe.

But when did Bulgaria change? Did people celebrate on Russian dates during communism, when Bulgaria was sometimes described as "the 16th soviet republic"? No. First of all - the communist rulers did what they could to make people celebrate new year in stead of christmas. And guess what, in 1948, two years after the communist takeover, the communists aligned the Bulgarian church's calendar, not with the Russian, but with the western catholic.

Those who now ask for a return to the 6th of January say that this decision, taken in 1948 by the highest synod, was taken under political pressure, and therefore is not valid. Political pressure is probably an understatement, but the irony is that reverting this forced decision today, would most likely signalize to most people a return to the communist heritage of choosing Russia over Europe.

History is sometimes a complicated web of ambigious identities. But when you finally sit down at the christmas table all of that seem to disappear.

Source: Dnes.dir.bg
Picture from creative commons, credits to: Darwin Bell

Refugees hostel attacked in Southern Sweden

2009-11-22T10:47:00.001+01:00

This morning, right before 05.00 a fire was discovered outside a hostel for refugees in Vellinge, a neighbouring village to Malmö in souther Sweden. The night was rainy, and a police officer stoically commented "a fire doesn't start by itself in this weather".

I have recently written about this story. It goes like this:

Due to unknown factors many refugge children come to Sweden without their parents.
Most of them arrive in Malmö, because it is the southernmost entrance point to Sweden. (Most likely someone is paid to take them to Sweden, and drops them of once they cross the border)
Malmö can't find places to host the refugees, and have asked neighbouring municipalities to help.
Most of the neighbouring municipalities don't want to help Malmö, unless they get money from the state. The state mumbles something about human rights, responsibities etc. but without money on the table nothing happens.
Vellinge has a very outspoken mayor, who has told all media that he will not take over any problematic refugees from Malmö...
Malmö eventually paied a private company to host the refugees. Guess where the hostel is situated...
in Vellinge. A huge scandal occurs. The official Vellinge yells about their right to rule as they want, and that Malmö didn't inform them about the hostel. The rest of Sweden more less hypocritically accuse the Vellinge inhabitants of racism. Plenty of normal people who happen to live in Vellinge are embarrased and frustrated by the whole mess.

And this night some racist tried to set the hostel on fire.

I find the whole story utterly disgusting. Putting the blame entirely on Vellinge is missing the point. After all, 15 Swedish municipalities make exactly the same statement as Vellinge, but they are not stupid enough to boast about it in the papers.

Thus, the whole story has developed into a power struggle between the state, Malmö and Vellinge, who all use these people who decided to come to Sweden for their political means. the traaditional "blame game" as we know it from Bulgarian (or other) politics.

In Bulgaria the politicians at least had the decency to argue about waste, in stead of treating real people like waste. But obviously that was a bigger crime in the European eyes. The European Comission has recently started a trial against Bulgaria over its garbage disposal in Sofia. Bulgaria has protested, and I must agree... How about starting a trial against Sweden over its refugee "disposal" in Malmö/Vellinge.

As any modern state Sweden has an obligation to defend human rights of all people staying on its territory. Swedish authorities now shamefully fail in safeguarding the most basic human rights of the refugees, including the 3rd article - the right to live.

The UN's declaration of human rigths begins with statint that "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights". I see no freedom. I see no equality. And most of all I miss seeing dignity.

Further reading:

If you read Bulgarian, the situation of paperless immigrants have been discussed also in the Bulgarian blogsphere recently:

http://svetlaen.blogspot.com/2009/11/blog-post_09.html
http://svetlaen.blogspot.com/2009/11/blog-post_15.html
http://svetlaen.blogspot.com/2009/11/blog-post_17.html

Those Bulgarian women...

2009-11-17T19:26:00.003+01:00

(picture from BGNES)

Sofia will be headed by a wom an, for the first time in history. Sofia's new mayor(esse) is called Yordanka Fandakova, and she was the candidate of Borisov's GERB party, elected by more than 66 % of the capital's residents. Bulgarian women are strong and responsible, and it seems they increasingly becoming visible in politics.

Picture from wikipedia

Not long ago Irina Bokova was elected director of UNESCO, the highest international position a Bulgarian politician has held since the fall of communism.

In the spring Meglena Kuneva attracted voters en masse to NDSV, "the King's party", and raised hopes that the king himself failed to live up to in the national elections.

Obviously, those Bulgarian women has something going... Fandakov is not expected to go her own way - she is supposed to run Borisovs politics in the capital, but this doesn't make her position less influential. Obviously both GERB, the socialists and NDSV leaderships know how to benefit from brilliant women. (I dont know much about Fandakova, or Bokova but I have a good general impression of Kuneva).

In the article I link to initially, Ivan Dikov compares the election of Fandakov to "Napoleon making his brother Joseph Bonaparte King of Spain 200 years ago, or to Vladimir Putin making Dmitry Medvedev the next Russian President 2 of years ago"

Comparing the appointments of Fandakova, Bokova and Kuneva, some more things could be said. As a foreigner, it is very easy to understand how the old government of Socialists, NDSV and less so the ethnic turkish party merge with european and international elites. They look and feel like western politicians. They may not walk the walk but they talk the talk, and that is what matters on those heights.

Borisov on the other hand, may be doing all the right things, but quite frankly he still looks like a bodyguard to me. I suspect he does so also to my government at the EU-meetings.

On the streets of Sofia, however, people might be tired of nice words, and the election of Fandakova shows that the confidence in Borisov's offensive politics is still there. It also seems like Borisov is monipolizing the healthy right wing vote - both racist Ataka, and the liberal-rightist SDS and DSB backed Fandakova.

So, congratulations to Fandakova, congratulations to Borisov and most of all: congratulations to Bulgarian women - taking public space, and representing all political forces in the country.

Welcome to Sweden

2009-11-11T16:51:00.000+01:00

I remember last summer, laying on a beach at the Bulgarian Black Sea cost and spelling my way through an entire Kapital saturday issue. The topic of the issue was the waste-war between Sofia's mayor Bojko Borisov and the premier minister Sergei Stanishev hat raged on and on until Borisov replaced Stanishev as he leader of the Balkan country.

The problem in Bulgaria at the time, was that the city Sofia produced much more waste than it could digest. Stanishev said that this was Borisov's fault, Borisov blamed Stanishev etc. Sofia wanted to dump the waste somewhere else, but no one wanted to accept the waste. Of course. Eventually a solution was found, where the waste is taken to the village Shishmanci where it will be processed in the European way.

I dont't think this story showed the gentlemen from their best sides, but unfortunately they arenot alone. Here in Sweden the same drama is now unfolding, only that the argue is about people treated like waste, and not waste given political significance.

Malmö is the biggest city in southern Sweden, and the obvious point of entry for refugees coming to Sweden from the continent. Lately there has been a great influx of children without families, for reasons that I don't know. The radio this morning said the number of single refugee children are currently around 90.

These kids come to Malmö, are put in a hotel, where they are supposed to stay for some days until a more suitable long-time housing solution is found. Unfortunately, finding a such solution have been a nightmare for the Malmö municipality. Eventually they hired places by a private company in the care business (otherwise working with mentally disabled, for example), in a smaller town nearby called Vellinge.

The Vellinge local politicians object and say that they don't want any refugees kids there. This is Malmö's problem, that Malmö should solve. One could mock the right wing mayor*, usually a staunch market fundamentalist, for messing up with what a private company in his municipality does. But unfortunately his socialist competitors agree with him on this issue. Citizens have also protested to show that they don't want anything else than blonde kids with rich parents playing on their streets.

This is one of the scary aspects of immigrant policy in Sweden - there is a conservative consensus spanning over all the biggest parties that ensure that exactly this policy is not affected by elections.

What is not scary, but shameful, is the narrow mindedness of the Vellinge politicians. Vellinge happens to be one of Sweden's richest municipalities, i.e. one of the richest in the world. They don't have any social problems compared to other places in southern Sweden like Malmö or Landskrona. They have 3,6 % unemployment when the national ratio is 8,4 %. If vellinge can not afford to help these children, who on earth can?

The protests show the great Western misunderstanding that everyone comes here, as if these 90 children were all refugees in the world. The greatest numbers of refugees still live in very poor countries neighbouring their home countries, and we are simply helping out, as little as we can.

The scandal that is now played up in national media is a huge disgrace, not much different from the Bulgarian waste scandal. But we are talking living, vulnerable children, that need any help they can get. But at least we are processing them in the European way...

*We don't really have mayors in Sweden, but I use the word for convenience. He has a similar position.

Yesterday - a day to remember.

2009-11-10T17:08:00.000+01:00

Yesterday Germans and Europeans celebrated the fall of the Berlin wall 20 years ago. While one could argue against the single minded focus on DDR here in Sweden, at the expense of other ex-conmmunist countries, there is no doubt that this is a date to remember.

Picture from creative commons, credits to backkratze

The wall was a very strong symbol for the Europe that once existed on both sides of it. The Sex Pistols sang about it. So did the Swedish punks Ebba Grön. And its fall was probably the strongest symbol of a revolution we all lived through, in one way or another. I am no doubt west european, but we also lived through this period in history, albeit on the other side of things.

20 years later one can pretty much choose between seeing how much has changed - the maladets! blog itself is an evidence of an european continent without efficient borders*. One could likewise despair how little has actually changed. In spite of Moldova not existing 20 years ago, the newly ousted president Voronin did, and held executive powers in the soviet republic Moldova.

Yes... the post-sovietic countries didn't develop as quick or in the ways that the world expected 1989. Old elites managed to stay in power, but history didn't rest. The last couple of years we have seen progressive upheavals in several countries with less than perfect democracies - Ukraine, Georiga, Moldova and I would say also Bulgaria, even if the revolution took place in a normal election.

These revolutions were driven by the strongest force in life - youth. Eastern European countries now see the first generation born after communism mature, with new expectations. They carry on the good work their parents did 20 years ago, and I think these Europeans are the one's we should remember now.

This post goes out to you, Bulgarian bloggers, environmentalists, Moldovan peaceful democracy protesters and all other heroes I never had the chance to meet.

*There are bordes, but they apply only to those with the wrong passport. The border between Moldova and Romania is open for me, while closed for Moldovans.

Turkish delinquents sentenced to reading Tolstoj

2009-11-02T13:33:00.000+01:00

I tend to think that the EU should join Norway, but maybe Turkey is an alternative?

According to the Moldovan blogger Gheorghe Erizeanu, one of my favourite romanian language blogs, the turkish authorities have started to sentencing minor offenders to - reading. The source is the libanese daily Courier International.

The first case was a man guilty of being punk in drublic, disturbance of the public order etc. , berserking like a Swede on a Friday night.

The culprit was sentenced to reading War and Peace by Tolstoj, under the surveillance of guards, and later writing a short review of what he had been reading. He read 1,5 hrs a day during one month, and as far as I understand he was not obliged to finish the book in this time. Just read.

Tolstoj, picture from Creative Commons

I would so much like to read the rependant's review of war and peace, and I can't stop thinking what society would look like if we forced criminals to read classical litterature. Who chooses the books? Would the criminals be the most well versed in classical litterature after some years? Would young lads read War and Peace, so that they can fool their younger mates into believing that they have lived the hard life?

Seriously... reading War and Peace wouldn't scare me from robbing little old ladies, quite on the contrary. It's a great book, and this sounds like the way to get time to read it :)

350 - yes we can!

2009-10-15T17:38:00.002+02:00

Our challenge is immense. The COP15 might fail to deliver anything at all, and if it delivers, it might not be anything near to what is actually needed. It will take more than the normal NGOs and politicians to solve this. We do have Obama. And we imght just have the right civil movements to take on this mission impossible. This week I met with two representants of 350.org in Sweden - and I left the meeting deelpy impressed, and a little more relaxed about our common future.

(Picture taken from 350.org homepage)

The 350.org movement, or maybe rather campaign, was started by American students with one simple aim: To make world leaders signing an binding agreement on climate change, where they pledge to bring the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere below 350 ppm. This level is not a political compromise, like the acceptance of 2 degrees/450 ppm, but what among others Nasa's James Hansen name a safe level of CO2 in the atmosphere. The current level of CO2 in the atmosphere is 387 ppm.

I belive that this is right, as I presume most of you readers do. But there are so many people that are right out there. What impressed me about 350.org is the brilliant strategic thinking on how to get it done.

Take the issue of greenwashing. As the "climate sceptics" note with fear - any politician who wishes to be re-elected today worries about the climate. Or at least says so. But it is very easy to say that you support action on climate change, and promise to do your best. But a politician who claims to support 350.org will have a hard time to explain his action if he does not defend the goal of lowering CO2 levels to 350 ppm.

With such a focus the future is clear. At the moment there is no future for 350.org after Copenhagen. In Sweden the organisation works har on informing citizens about the COP15, and trying to get so many as possible to come to Copenhagen, after all it is both important and near.

For sure there will be a world also after Copenhagen, but this world will need other campaigns. 350.org is made up of many different kinds of activists, researchers etc. who all bring their own background to the movement. Everyone is welcome by definition, as each new activist shapes the network differently. It is open, voluntary, building momentum, and ready to give place for the next wave when its time is over.

Isn't this is the post-modern world as it is supposed do be? The world described in texts like the Cluetrain manifesto? Politics still seem very stuck in the structures created in 19th century. Business are still hierarchical, and they safeguard information as if it was property. They still try to cheat, as if that was an option in the twitterized information society.

The Cluetrain Manifesto predicted that the Internet would change all that, that companies would become open, flat-structured and friendly. That might not have happened to big business, but it I think it has happened to the sphere of voluntary action. In Bulgaria the flourishing environmentalist movement have ties to the not-so-geeky-any-more open source computing movement. This should not surprise anyone, because both these movements share the vision of information as something you earn by hard work and dedication, not buy for money. Both movements see the strenght in constant change and openness. Both movements prefer resilience over organisational stability. That might not be the way to run a country - but I think it is the best way to change the world.

This blogpost was also posted on Th!nk about it, and is my way to participate in the Blog Action Day 2009.

I just can't believe the news today

2009-10-15T14:38:00.000+02:00

Yesterday night a bomb exploded at a concert with the Russian band Bravo in Chisinau. A young man dressed in black was seen firing a weapon, before the grenade detonated. 40 young moldovans were taken injured to hospital, but no one was killed.

Today, a man was threatening the parliament with a bomb tied to himself, but he was arrested by the police before anyone was hurt.

It is hard to believe. I remember rock concerts I've been to in Chisinau. The one with Russian bands were the best. I remember the park where the bomb exploded, it was an oasis where I used to sit before work, drinking my coffee.

The accident is obviosuly linked to the political chaos/stalemate in Moldova. It is scaring, but maybe not surprising that someone is prepared to kill to reach their vicious ends. It seems this time the aim was to raise tentions, to create fear and confusion. The act is a cold blooded speculation in civil war, but I am convinced it will fail.

There are plenty of crazy people in Moldova. But I know that the youth of this battered country will not let themselves be fooled to use violence against each other, or anyone else. One can speculate about who lies behind this deed, but I don't want to do that. I just don't want to believe the news today.

You can read the news in English, Romanian, Swedish

Stockholm's cheapest latte

2009-10-08T08:57:00.001+02:00

I spend my mornings in front of the radio these days. Just minutes ago, a journalist told that a caffe latte costs only 10 SEK (1 EUR) in the Swedish parliament café. In a normal café, including at the universities a similar beverage would cost three times more. Why? Because the parliament staff have ordered the café not to charge more for the latte... originally they wanted cheap lunches, but that is unfortunately forbidden by law.

I don't know if the café is open for citizens in Stockholm... if anyone can go there for a cheap caffe latte, I guess it isn't corruption...

In Sweden everyone pays one Euro for their coffe. The homeless get 1,5 dl brewed coffee for their euro, the members of paliament get 3 dl latte.

Picture from Flickr, by avlxyz. License: Share Alike

Rila comes to Sofia

2009-10-06T14:12:00.001+02:00

"If the mountain can't come to Mohammed, Mohammed must go to the mountain"

This year a big lift was opened to help tourist climb Bulgaria's most beloved mountain - the Rila mountain.

Environmetalist fought hard to prevent the illegal istallation, but in April the lift was there, and thousand of tourists now daily visit the seven Rila lakes, whitout walking more than a couple of hundred meters.

The mountain is still there, and it still needs protection, which is why the activist continue with a campaign named "Обичам Рила, ходя пеша” (I love Rila - I walk by foot.)

To bring the mountain closer to the citizens, including those too busy to climb it even by lift, Citizens for Rila are pronouncing the "Rila Month", starting tomorrow. A varied program includes acrobats, concerts, and a photo exhibition in front of the Ivan Vazov theatre in central Sofia. Maybe visitors will see photos like this...

The picture is from For the Nature's homepage, and were taken in October 2009. Find more here.

Source: For the nature

New look(s)

2009-10-06T12:58:00.004+02:00

Thoreau writes in Walden that a man should't change clothes until he has changed within. I don't know if the changes on Maladets! merit new clothes, but let's go...

This might, or might not be the look. I plan to experiment with different templates, look at them from different computers etc. Each one will be announced with a post. I would be very glad for any input!

Greetings,
Daniel

The picture of Thoreau is taken from Wikipedia Commons

2009-09-29T10:15:00.003+02:00

This video was made by the blogger Jodi Bush, and is part of the Th!ink about it project. We waste unbelieveable amounts of food, plastics, whatever, and it is time to deal with it. Please help spreading this video in any way you can!

Waste not, want not... from Jodi Bush on Vimeo.

See the original post

Kal - Radio Romanista

2009-09-20T12:08:00.004+02:00

I don't think anything can bring people together like music. And no music is probably better fit to bridge the gap between Eastern and Western Europe than Kal's new record Radio Romanista, released on of my absolute favourite labels As phalt Tango Records. (Did they ever release anything bad?)

(Picture from Kal's homepage. (C) Kal )

Kal has turned into ethno-stars since their self titled tribute three years ago, but there is nothing tired about this record. It's definitely punk. It's definitely rock. It's maybe ska, but mosty of all it is a return to the roots. The ingredients are age old - accordeons, a shrieking "gyspsy" violin (that brings to mind Dylan's Desire LP). The beats are newer, tough, and the most appealing with Kal's music is that there is not distinction between old or new. It is just music.

The musicians are Serbian roma, and this is not only visible in the rythms - Kal speak up for their rights, and a number of songs on the album are topical. But more than anything this is a contribution to a globalized post-communistic balcan culture, open and aware of a multitude of traditions. Anyone familiar with Kustoriza films will feel at home in this music. As will fans of Moldovan Zdub si Zdub, or Bulgarian The Pomorians or Balkandji. You don't need to feel at home there, but I storongly reccomend a visit to Kal's imaginary state Romanistan

And the ticket to Romanistan? How do you get a hold of this brilliant music? The record will be found in record stores around Europe, and can also be ordered online from Asphalt Tango records. Personally I borrowed a copy at the local library.

The record can also, like all other productions from the company, be downloaded from their download shop.

Taking a short break

2009-09-14T22:20:00.005+02:00

Maladets! will go into a slow period from now until the end of the year. The reason is that I will focus on another blog project - Think About it! (See the banner to the right.

Think about it! is a blogging competition, gathering bloggers from all over Europe to write about climate change. Next weekend we will all meet in Copenhagen for the kick off event, and then start writing up til the UN Climate meeting in Copenhagen 7-18 Dec
2009. Do I need to add that I am excited? :)

My writings will be found here. Welcome!

You can already see updates from the think about it blogs to the right of this text.

For Maladets! I will write more seldom, when I have time. I still have some stuff waiting to be translated, and for sure I will not be able to stay away from the keyboard. Most likely there will be articles about Bulgaria and Europe as well as Sweden, while I take this break... thus I can please everyone that voted in what will happen with maladets!, thank you all or giving your opinion!

I hope also to spend some time adjusting the looks and gadgets on the blog, and come back, revigorated, in December.

Freedom Not Fear 2009

2009-09-13T15:43:00.003+02:00

Today internet users and vanguards of democracy all over the world mark the Freedom not fear campaign day - against legislative ideas in different countries like Sweden, France, Germany and Bulgaria to store data about citizens' internet use.

Behind the protest stand a wide range of people - in Bulgaria Zelenite and many others protest - in Sweden every single political party have representants talking at todays event. Which makes one wonder who actually wants these measures.

I find this pattern scaring - governments might seem these measures as necessary, but noone wants to defend them in public. Which gives us a kind of policy that lives its own life, that noone wants to take responsibility for.

There are many blogs that cover this topic better than maladets! - when it comes to electronical rights I always reccomend the Free Software Foundation and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Nonetheless, as an internationally minded blogger I can not abstain from stating my solidarity. A free internet outside policial control is the spine of a vital democracy.

Considering governments in countries like China, Iran and Moldova, European governments in Europe should think twice before they limit freedom in the name of fight against terrorism.

Happy demonstrating!

Ole Ole Ole! Voronin nu mai e!*

2009-09-11T09:51:00.009+02:00

Today, Friday 11 September Vladimir Voronin, the Communist president that has led Moldova with an ever hardening pathriarcal hand from stalemate to stalemate throughout eight years , has resigned. What will happen in the future is far from clear. The communist is the strongest party, the opposition coalition is untested, and Moldova is utterly dependent on geopolitical developments decided far from Chisinau. But I doubt that anyone will miss Voronin.

Picture originates from Wikipedia Commons, but was adapted in the maladets! laboratories...

Pa Pa!

An article on Voronins imminent resignation in Radio Free Europe

*"Ole Ole Ole! Voronin is no more" - this was sung on the streets of Chisinau in the revolts in April. It was too early, but true.