7 Days 23 February 1972

Blueprint for Survival?IN JANUARY, the Ecologist

magazine produced a much- discussed “Blueprint for sur­

vival”. We asked Hugh Saddler, a biologist and economist in the British Society for Responsibility in Science, to outline the prob­lems as seen by the “Blueprint”, and give an alternative framework within which to work out a working class strategy against pollution.. . . The way of life of advanced indust­rial countries, based on continually expanding industrial production, cannot be sustained for ever. It will end within the lifetime of someone born today, and will do so in one of two ways: in the uncontrollable violence of famine, epidemic, social crisis and war, or under our control in a peaceful and measured transition to an alternative form of society.

The combined effect of per capita consumption and world population, which measures human impact on the global environment, can only lead to the breakdown of natural ecosystems on which we depend for food. At present consumption rates reserves of all but a few metals will be exhausted in fifty years, and reliance on synthetics does not avoid the problem but merely transfers it to other resources. Present disproportionate consumption by the industrial countries means that the undeveloped countries have no hope of improving their living standards, and this is made worse by attempts to impose a world cultural hegemony of the values of the market economy. The main problems are not accidental malfunctions of existing economic and social systems, but symptoms of a profound incompatibility between expansionist beliefs and the finite reality of the earth. All incentives of the present political system are towards continuing on the expansionist course. The approach to a solution must be an integrated one; piecemeal measures will create more problems than they solve.

T HESE ARE the terms in which the “Blueprint for Survival” analyses the

crisis of the environment. It then goes on to propose a policy programme which will secure the transition from our present society to what it calls the Stable Society.

The Stable Society is “one that can be sustained indefinitely while giving optimum satisfaction to its members” . It is defined by four principal con­ditions: (1) minimum disruption of ecological processes; (2) maximum con­servation of materials and energy; (3) a population that neither increases or decreases; (4) a social system in which individuals can enjoy rather than be restricted by the other three conditions.

These are conditions sufficiently general to commend themselves to most people in broad agreement with the “Blueprint’s” diagnosis. It is therefore worth saying a little about what they mean and what they imply.

BiosphereBy ecological processes are meant all

the natural processes which take place in the biosphere — a layer of the earth’s surface no more than fifteen miles thick to which all life is confined. They include meteorological processes in the atmosphere, movements of the sea and fresh water, the maintenance and renewal of soil fertility, the life and death of green plants in water and on land, and the life and death of animals

which all ultimately depend on plants. That man can indeed disrupt and destroy ecological processes is best seen by historical examples like North Africa, once the granary of the Roman Empire and now a desert through the actions of man and goat, or like the Dust Bowl in the United States. Changes induced by man’s activities tend to be irreversible and are often far removed in time and space from the initial cause. As we are profoundly ignorant about pro­cesses in the biosphere, prediction of the consequences of any interference with it are uncertain in the short time and almost impossible in the long term.

Materials and EnergyModern industrial society is crucially

dependent (as the miners’ strike shows us) on the use of fossil fuel resources (coal, oil, gas) and minerals, especially metals, which occur in finite quantities in the earth’s crust. In use they are chemically changed or dispersed in a way that generates pollution and makes their re-use impossible; sooner or later there will be no reserves left. Already

the oil companies, foreseeing the end of oil, are diversifying into all sorts of other activities which they hope will give more scope for exploitation. Already reserves of metals like copper are so depleted that the undeveloped countries Will never be able to reach the present consumption levels of the industrial countries. The only truly infinite energy sources are renewable ones (wind, water and solar energy) — to which might be added (with a strong note of scepticism) thermonuclear fusion; a long term solution must rely on these sources and on a totally transformed pattern of materials use. The idea of resource conservation is equally important in respect of materials like paper derived from living organisms, and of the genetic diversity of living organisms themselves.

PopulationHuman population, like resource

consumption, cannot continue to grow for ever. Given this simple fact we can let the industrialists choose to adopt a laisser-faire approach — a blind faith in

“natural” curbs to growth which seem all too likely, in the framework of the present world social structure, to be violent and horrible.

Alternatively, society can itself choose to limit population growth by eliminating the social conditions which make large families desirable. In the undeveloped countries this can only mean social revolution in association with what are conventionally called birth control campaigns. More import­antly, it is the industrial countries which must eliminate population growth. Each child born in Britain has twenty or thirty times the environmental impact of each child in India and, of course, in the present exploitative world order owes its life of (at least comparative) affluence to exploitation of the Indian. It is often argued that population must of course be stabilised, but that is not necessary yet. The only reply can be “Why wait?” ; the accomplishment of the necessary social transformation will not become easier as time passes.

A happy society?The means by which the ‘Blueprint’s’

Stable Society is to be attained are elaborated at some length as a series of policy, proposals, some fairly radical, but more of them in the form of a liberal legislative programme. Particular emphasis is placed on what the authors call “orchestration” — the co-ordinated simultaneous introduction of policies for change on all fronts.

Presumably in the hope of achieving the implementation of these policies, the authors announce the launching of an ill-defined organisation which they call the Movement for Survival. Here is the clue to the fundamental weakness of the “Blueprint” . While it claims to be a political document, it gives no attention to the actual mechanisms of politics. Nor of course do the election mani­festos of the two main parties at Westminster, but the Movement for Survival cannot realistically expect to work the same way as they do. The “Blueprint” is inconsistent, seeming sometimes to suggest pressure on the major parties to adopt its proposals, and at other times to advocate the launching of a new party using this as its manifesto. The authors of the “Blue­print” are at best politically ignorant and naive.

At worst, one can find internal evidence to suggest that their thought is fascist. There is a distinct feeling throughout that change is to be accom­plished by direction from above — a sort of dictatorship of the ecologically enlightened. There is no space here to draw out all this evidence, so a few quotations must suffice. The most striking occurs in the section on popula­tion: “First” , they write, “governments must acknowledge the problem and declare their commitment to ending population growth; this commitment should also include an end to immigra­tion” . Note the use of the word immigration rather than migration; note also that there is no other mention of migration in the “Blueprint” and that all their arguments elsewhere would lead, if anything, to an advocacy of immigration to food-surplus-countries like the U.S.A. and Australia as the most equitable way of distributing food. The question of migration is completely irrelevant to their arguments about optimum population.

Later in the same paragraph they advocate “research . . . on the subtle cultural controls necessary for the harmonious maintenance of stability” ;

and again “Legislation and the opera­tion of police forces and the courts will be necessary to reinforce this restraint [required from everyone during transi­tion to the Stable Society]” . The expectation of Business Almost As Usual during the transitional crisis is indicated by the suggestion that “The agro-chemical industries should be encouraged to invest in integrated control programmes [for pests] though plainly, since the profits cannot be so great as from chemical control, research will need public finance” .

Such quotations would be, and I fear already have been, sufficient to damn the “Blueprint” as a whole in the eyes of many of the Left, already rightly suspicious of the present government’s concentration of the middle-class trivia of environmental cosmetic treatment, and of the “pollution can boost profits” approach of industry, which spends more on advertising its pollution control measures than in implementing the measures themselves.

A more complete impression of the “Blueprint” than a few quotations can give makes its true nature clear. Other phrases and sentences could be found to suggest that the authors are taking a truly (Left) revolutionary position. The fact is that the Stable Society can only emerge as a result of revolutionary change, but the revolution could come from the right. The authors of the “Blueprint” are not coherent right-wing ideologues, but liberals terrified by the prospect before them. Fragmentary glimpses of revolution from both left and right are exposed by their refusal to admit the impossibility of the task of attempting to fit their Stable Society into the framework of our present society.

The destruction of the earth is a real and enormous problem. Socialists ignore it at their peril. But at the same time they are right to suspect both the motives and the politics of the ecologi­cal lobby. There is an element of Fabian Imperialism among the environ­mentalists, who seem to assume that the world, especially underdeveloped coun­tries, remains their paternalistic concern. We need to sort out the good from the bad: we must support the need to put an end to the destruction of the environment, and reject the obnoxious ideology that peddles the issue of the environment in the old backward ways.

This task is not insuperable. The really important thing to understand is that the origins of the grasping expan­sionism of industrial society is em­bedded in the heart of capitalism: the contradiction between the untram­melled socialisation of the forces of production, (including the air, the sea, metals, the earth) and private relations of production (production for profit). The rape of the earth will never end until this contradiction is resolved and the relations of production themselves are socialised.

Not that this means we should sit around now and wait for that to happen. Like the bourgeoisie, socialists hope to inherit the planet over the next' century, and like the bourgeoisie, we want it to be in working order. There is a mutual interest here which forms the natural basis for an alliance — on the specific issues. The extreme poisoning of workers, housewives and everyone — in factories, as at Avonmouth, in the air, in commodities — can and must be stopped now. That in no way means- going along with the ideological drapery that these questions have been clothed in by The Ecologist.

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7 Days 23 February 1972

TenantsFightCouncilHousingAllocationsTom Woolley

MANY PEOPLE in the West of Scotland are becoming militant in their opposi­

tion to the clumsy rehousing policies of local authorities. They no longer find it tolerable to live for years in a rotting tenement slum, watching redevelopment going on all around, and then to be offered a crummy decaying council house 10 miles away, or even to be told they won’t be rehoused at all. Those who turn down council offers may also find themselves having to wait a year or more before they are con­sidered again.

Glasgow’s slum clearance pro­gramme is so poorly co-ordinated that people can be left in half demolished buildings for years, services get cut off, lead stripped off the roofs, drainage gets blocked. Houses are sold off by unscrupulous landlords who write contracts that often ensure they get the compensation for the house when it is demolished. Houses that aren’t boarded up get taken over by squatters.

The new 1969 Housing Act is sup­posed to ensure that councils can control the occupation of a clearance area once it has made its plans. This isn’t eliminating hardship however. In Glasgow, people are “black-mailed” by the council into accepting houses in the huge peripheral housing schemes where no-one wants to go. Despite the city’s housing shortage, many of the houses in those unpopular schemes are lying empty. “Hard to let” houses are often worse than the slums that are being demolished. They have only one electric point, being 30 to 40 years old, can be rotten with damp, and needing ex­tensive repairs. People unwilling to take such houses are scornfully described as “choosey” by the Scottish press, but people don’t want to move miles from friends, jobs and relatives, to a house that no-one would want to live in.

Despite the pressures on people in slums to accept the first house they are offered, many people stick out and resist eviction to get a house they find suitable. In the Gorbals in December, with the help of Harry Liddell, CP candidate and Chairman of the Hutchesontown tenants association, 10 families said they would barricade their homes until they got decent houses in their local area. In the Gorbals there are thousands of new houses being built, but because of the time between demo­lition and rehousing, the corporation won’t rehouse a community locally. Instead they are spread all over the city.

Clearly in a city where the council looks after the houses of more than

500,000 people the system is going to be somewhat alienating and paternalis­tic, but changes will be inevitable now that people have recognised the need for collective action rather than relying on their councillors to represent their in­terests. The injustice of rehousing will no longer go unchallenged.GairbraidIn one area to be demolished under the new housing act in Glasgow’s Maryhill district, a local residents’ committee was set up with the help of some com­munity workers in a ‘youth and com­munity project’. The Gairbraid housing committee represented people in about 400 homes. First of all they had to try and get information about what was being planned, and how long it would take to rehouse people. They found that only when they sent a registered letter did they get a reply from the council. A meeting was arranged with housing officials and everyone was told they would get satisfactory offers of houses.

But it soon became clear that this wasn’t the case. A leaflet produced by the committee stated that “some of the

In 1969 there were 13,534 empty houses in Glasgow, waiting to be demolished. In 1970, nearly 3,000 of these were considered unsafe. Recently several families narrowly avoided death when an occupied tenement collapsed. The Corpora­tion of Glasgow spends £250,000 annually on demolishing dangerous property.

houses offered were in a shambles, rat infested, damp, worse than the houses we were being forced to leave” .

The committee lobbied councillors, officials, the government, and got TV and press coverage. They were able to get empty houses in the area boarded up, and the residents began to get better offers of houses. The committee is now trying to help people in other clearance areas to get a better deal. They suggest that people take a witness when they meet housing officials, that they have a right to demand repairs to houses they are offered and that they have a right to refuse unsatisfactory houses.One of the most interesting discoveries of the Gairbraid committee was the way in which applicants for houses are graded before they are offered a house. This is done by housing visitors, usually untrained middle aged women, on the form reproduced here.

The reason for the shabby state of many of the older schemes in Glasgow seems to be that “poor” areas have been deliberately kept poor for the applicants who are graded “poor” . The reason given for this by the vice chairman of the housing committee, Dick Dynes, is that the “same types of people naturally draw together anyway”!

The Gairbraid committee asked their local councillor, Vincent Cable, to raise

Red Road flats, Glasgow.

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Glasgow tenement housinga " b a c k c o u r t "

7 Days 23 February 1972

Burnbank homeless mother - Mrs Marget Borland and kids Tom (2) and Audrey (1).

Tenants’ demonstration on Glasgow’s Pollock estate, an amenity-deficient peripheral scheme built between the wars.

the matter of this form at a council meeting. Embarrassed, the council promised that in future, assessments would be made on “more reasonable and factual basis.” .

Just how reasonable and factual the assessments are now is revealed by the “new” form that housing visitors are expected to fill in. It includes space for “The House condition: Very good/ Good/Fair/Poor” , and “Recommended for a house in a: Very good/Good/ Intermediate/Poor/area.” The council’s not getting away with that.

B.R.A.G.One residents action group was

recently formed in the Burnbank clearance area of Hamilton, to fight the council’s policy. About 30 families had received complex legal documents through their doors saying that their houses had been taken over by the Labour-controlled council, and they were to get out. They were told that they didn’t qualify for rehousing on the grounds that they had moved in after a compulsory purchase order had been applied for some three years before. During the three years delay, landlords had hurried to exploit the situation and sell off or rent out property without telling new people about the clearance. The council, putting the blame on the landlords, hadn’t bothered to keep tenants informed of the position. Delay and confusion of this sort seems to be a typical feature of redevelopment areas.

Matters came to a head in November when two families in a half demolished block were taken to court and told they would be evicted. One of the tenants, (picture) Mrs. Margo Borland, was 7 months pregnant. She had two young children, and nowhere to go. With the help of the local UCS action committee

th e residents called several meetings and formed BRAG — the Bumbank Resi­dents’ Action Group. They lobbied councillors, knocked on the doors of everyone in the area, and demonstrated at a council meeting, demanding that everyone in the clearance area be given a council house. At the council meeting on December 14, despite an enormous force of police and an attempt by the Labour councillors to avoid discussion of the issue, the residents heard that they were to be offered other slum houses, rather than be evicted. Their spokesman, Eric McCartney, said at the time that “no-one will even talk about taking this kind of accommo­dation . . . they will refuse to move from one slum to another” . What annoyed the BRAG members most was that this action was being taken by a party they had all voted for.

In Glasgow in 1970, 328 tenants were evicted from council houses and 1,400 absconded with rent arears. The corporation wrote off £78,983 in unpaid rents, a sum increasing by about £10,000 a year. The corporation annually takes legal action against about 20,000 tenants.__________________

The committee soon discovered that solidarity was a difficult thing to achieve, and found that some families were telling the local councillor they would be prepared to accept a slum house. BRAG kept up pressure for council houses for everyone, however, and on February 5 Mrs. Borland learnt that she was being offered a council flat in Hamilton’s Hillhouse scheme. Battles have still to be fought for another dozen families, but Eric McCartney explained that now they have proof that if they stick together they will have success.

Rebirthof theStirlingEngineby John Mathews

Ex p e c t e d l e g is l a t io nagainst the internal com­bustion engine has forced the

motor industry to look around for new forms of clean propulsion, and the Stirling engine, newly developed by the giant Philips Electricals, seems to be the answer to their dreams. Not only will this engine take the steam out of the environmental movement in the west, but it will give the stagnating motor industry a much needed burst of new investment. Air pol­lution is giving capitalism a new lease of life.

By the end of the decade, the Stirling engine will be powering just about every vehicle on the road and later the sea. It will also be used in confined places where exhaust gases are a hazard. The Stirling’s superiority over the internal combustion engine is impressive: its exhaust is relatively clean; it is quiet and almost free of vibration; it has a simple drive with favourable torque character­istics; and it can run on almost any fuel or other source of high temperature, with a minimum of maintenance and a long useful life because of its closed system.

'The principle at work in the Stirling engine is the same as in the internal combustion engine — both depend on the expansion of a gas to drive a piston, and thus produce mechanical energy. The gas expands because it is heated, and the difference between the two

Displacer yoke

Exhaust outletAtomizer

Annular duct

Burner

Preheater

Heater tubes

Expansionspace

Burner-air inletDisplacer

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Compression space

Fins

Regenerator

Cooler tubes

Piston

r o d

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Buffer space

Counter weight

Timing gear

— Crank

engines lies in the source of this high temperature — in the internal combus­tion engine, it is an explosion produced by an electric spark, but in the Stirling engine, the heat is applied to the gas from outside, through a wall. One end of the engine is kept hot and the other end cool, and the flow of gas between these two regions is enough to drive a piston.

This idea was first developed and. patented by Robert Stirling as long ago as 1817 — his hot air engine was meant

to replace and complete with the steam engines people were playing around with at the time. Interest in the engine was revived by a Dr. Roelef Meijer in the Philips Laboratories in 1938. The first spin-off from the research was a reverse form of the engine, a cold-gas refrigerating machine, which appeared on the market in 1955. Since then, Dr Meijer’s experiments have concentrated exclusively on pro­ducing the high-powered engine that Philips is currently fitting to experi­mental road vehicles.

LIFESPOTS

BlackboredIssue number 4 of the lively teachers’ magazine, Blackbored, appeared last week, with articles on the inert educational philosophy of R.S. Peters, a put-down of Illicit and the deschooling movement, an expose of the narrow confines of the James Report into teacher training, and a constructive enquiry into the NUT. The magazine is attempting to break down the isolation of teachers and student teachers from the currents of socialist thought that relate directly to their problems. It’s also a good read.

Orders (7p a copy, post incl.), articles, graphics, ideas, etc. to: Blackbored, 125 Vansittart Road, Windsor, Berks SL4 5DG.

Selling paper rounds to kidsChild labour is in short supply, and the Newspaper Publishers Associa­tion is resorting to a national campaign to draw more kids-into the army doing morning paper rounds. The campaign, to be launched on March 8, will cost a minimum of £300,000, and will consist of ads in

the national and local press aimed at both kids and parents, as well as comic strips, lapel badges, arm-bands, grants and prizes.

Of all newspapers sold in Britain, 76 per. cent are home delivered — which explains the NPA’s concern that kids might no longer be in­terested in getting up at 6 o’clock in a freezing winter morning for paltry wages. According to a survey carried out by the NPA itself, wages for delivery boys and girls average no more than 17p an hour.

Radical Scholars of the Soviet UnionA new journal, to be called Critique, is being launched this year by the Conference of Radical Scholars of the USSR and Eastern Europe. In January the conference gathered at Glasgow University to discuss studies and interpretations of the Bolshevik revolution, and on the basis of this success, are planning a second con­ference for next October. The theme of this new conference will be the dynamic of social and political change in Russia since the death of Stalin in 1953. According to one of the organisers, Hillel Ticktin, a lecturer at Glasgow’s Soviet Institute, the conference scholars “are fighting against both the right wing ortho­doxy and left-wing dogmatism” that afflicts Soviet studies.

If you are interested in the new journal, or would like copies of the papers presented at the January conference, please write to H.H. Ticktin, 31 Cleveden Road, Glasgow W2.

Pot SurveysThe Establishment in both the UK and US is now forced to admit that pot smoking is harmless. Last week the US National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse leaked the news that it is making a unanimous recommendation to abolish all criminal penalties for the use or possession of cannabis.

The Commission of 13 members, nine of whom were appointed by Nixon, found that 24 million people had smoked pot in the US, and concluded that the drug was not addictive, its use did not lead on to the use of hard drugs, and that it had no harmful physical or psychological effects.

Meanwhile the UK government is sitting on a report submitted to the Home Office in June of last year, because it suggests that cannabis smoking in Britain is widespread and harmless. The detailed and expensive survey was carried out by a market research outfit, Market Advertising & Products Study Ltd, through anony­mous interviews with all types of drug takers. The managing director of MAPS; Philip Smulian told The Guardian last December that their estimate of the number of pot smokers in Britain was close on 1 million. He hinted that the MAPS survey confirmed earlier findings that amphetamines are the usual starters for heroin addicts — most pot smokers, in fact, hold straight jobs and are “socially adjusted” in every way.

Philip Smulian’s comments came in the same week as a Lancet report by four neurologists. They claimed to have found evidence of brain damage in 10 patients with histories of constant can­nabis smoking over a period of three to 11 years.

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