Category Archives: Philosophy

Conservation, Environment, Philosophy

Green Politics

A cheerful Caroline Lucas, MP
Green Politics: A cheerful Caroline Lucas, MP, briefing members of the RSPB and Wildlife Trusts on how to lobby their MPs

It has been said that nature-lovers are left-wing on all political questions except immigration, where they are distinctly right-wing.
This can readily be explained by guessing that nature-lovers essentially choose to prioritize in the following order:

  1. Themselves (well, everybody does)
  2. Wildlife and the Environment
  3. Other people
  4. Big business

Immigration is unpopular both because it conflicts with #1: it puts pressure on resources near the home, and because it conflicts with #2: it puts pressure on land.

I’ll return to the question of putting nature above people later, but first I want to note that this set of priorities is radically different from those of the right (say, the Republican party in the USA, or the Conservative party in Britain), who we may guess have these priorities:

1. Themselves
2. Big business
3. Other people
4. Wildlife and the Environment (if they rate this at all)

On this rather simple view of politics, left-wing people (say, the Democrat party in the USA, or the Labour party in Britain) are imagined to have these priorities:

1. Themselves
2. Other people
3. Big business
4. Wildlife and the Environment

The reason left-wingers may put business above wildlife is that, despite all the left-wing rhetoric, they do recognize that business generates the money needed to pay for welfare and shared services such as health care and education. So, although there has been a historic rich vs poor, Upstairs vs Downstairs polarity between left and right, they do actually agree on most of their priorities.

If you’ve followed the argument this far, you’ll see that at least in countries like Britain and the USA, this places anyone who has ‘green’ political views, favouring wildlife and the environment, in a tricky position. There is nobody with any reasonable likelihood of getting into power that they can vote for with any confidence.

In countries like Germany with a proportional representation system for voting, smaller parties are able to flourish, and Green parties can become significant in regional and national parliaments. In countries like Britain and the USA, which have “first past the post” (winner takes all) voting systems, smaller parties usually get trodden underfoot, along with any more subtle points of view than left vs right.

I would love to be able to tell you (I assume you are a nature-lover) that I have a brilliant solution for you, but I doubt there is one. Instead, you have a few possible choices.

  • You could carefully study, and ideally question, your candidates from left and right about their views on nature conservation in the hope of finding or provoking a spark in some of them. (I’m trying this myself.)
  • You might consider joining their party so you can lobby them more effectively; you might attend policy forums and try to push the environment up the agenda (I don’t hold up much hope on that one, though I know energetic people who are trying it).
  • If you have money, you might give donations to either side, accompanied by whatever pressure you can apply.
  • If you are persuasive, you might speak or write to the candidates, arguing that saving the environment is good for people (their health, exercise, mental state, and so on) or for jobs (tourism, conservation work, pollination of crops, that sort of thing).
  • Or you could move to Germany, work hard, and apply for citizenship. You could give up on politics altogether, and immerse yourself in practical conservation, campaigning and suchlike.

If you don’t find any of those suitable, you do have another option, but it’s very long-term. You campaign for a fair, democratic, voting system that will actually represent your views, along with those of other minorities: you fight for proportional representation. If you thought that was a dull, dry piece of constitutional reform, think again. It’s the only way things that matter to you and to me will ever be taken seriously. We greens need seats in our legislatures, in direct proportion to our numbers. That might be 30 or 40 green MPs in Westminster, for example. Now that would be talking. Until then, frankly, we’re disenfranchised. And that’s wrong.

It’s time to come back to the awkward matter, for green politics, of at least seeming to put nature above people. To put it at its mildest, it can look somewhat self-indulgent in the well-off with money and leisure enough to enjoy looking at wildlife in beautiful places to argue that conserving nature is more important than dealing with the pressing social issues of the day: hunger, homelessness, unemployment, poverty, disease, and all the side- and after-effects of war: trauma, grief, coping as refugees, orphaned or widowed. And that is to hint at the hidden, unspoken issue for green politics, migration, which numbers among its many causes inequality, war, and climate change.

The cause of green politics is not simply an open-and-shut case of selfishness, however. There are arguments that can be used in its favour.

A key one, perhaps, is the moral argument for care for other living things, and for the environment as a whole: we are just one species among millions, and we have just one world to look after, not just for ourselves (the poor, homeless, unemployed and so on) but for all Earth’s species, and for all future generations, our children and our children’s children. If all species were valued equally, and why should they not be, then wildlife should score a millionfold more than any purely human priority. It seems, of course, that nobody can quite bring themselves to value other species anywhere near as highly as Homo sapiens: indeed, even the assertion that a million other species might be worth nearly as much put together as  humankind would raise eyebrows – who cares about a rainforest or two when business or livelihood is at stake?

The somewhat more selfish argument that we need nature for a large number of ‘ecosystem services’ such as pollination of crops, a ready supply of timber or fish, genetic variety in the shape of ancestral species related to valuable crops (wild potatoes, wild maize, wild apples) or a list of candidate pharmaceutical drugs from as-yet-undiscovered species of plant, fungus or micro-organism, may have a little more traction. Here, nature is worth conserving for its enormous utility, of which we currently have only a hazy notion, but which we already perceive to be much larger than we ever imagined. Most clearly, the cost to farmers of hand-pollinating every fruit tree is becoming frighteningly obvious as bees of many species vanish from the ploughed and pesticide-sprayed countryside.

A slightly less utilitarian argument concerns the value of nature for human well-being, both now and for future generations. We wouldn’t want to live in a world with no ‘charismatic species’ such as elephants, giraffes, lions, gorillas and tigers. Yet, we could easily find ourselves there, with perhaps a few miserable beasts desperately keeping their species alive in zoos and safari parks. More mundanely, we know that city-dwellers are happier and more relaxed, better able to focus clearly at work, if they have a little time in a park or garden with trees and flowers, and perhaps with bees and butterflies too (if that isn’t too much of a luxury).

If we accept any or all of these quite good reasons for saving life on Earth, then we must make nature conservation a high priority: which means making it a higher priority than at least some human political priorities. And that is a ‘green’ agenda. If anything, it is alarming to anyone who reflects on the question just how little effort is in fact being spent by governments on keeping the world’s ecosystems in existence: we are all so busy fighting wars and economic collapse that such larger matters spend their whole time on the back burner, if not (to mix metaphors disgracefully) on the ‘too difficult’ pile.

Let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that all the non-human species in existence add up in moral terms to our single species (leaving aside any idea that this grossly undervalues them). Let us suppose, too, that all future generations add up in moral terms to the generation which is alive today (and yes, we’ll ignore any idea that this undervalues them, too). Then all our conventional political goals should be given 1/3 or thereabouts of the total weight: the other 2/3 belong to nature, and to future humanity (who of course may care about nature also). And Nature should then easily top the political agenda.

Or we can look at green politics in space rather than in time. The politics of big business, and of the social systems of rich nations, ignore the rest of the world, where injustice, drought, poverty, dictatorship, war, tropical disease and famine are major factors. Worse, our greed and selfishness has inflicted post-colonial disaster (think of the Anglo-French agreement to draw borders for the new kingdom of Iraq after the First World War) and exploitation of minerals on many parts of the world. We owe it to everyone to put these matters straight, which means protecting the environment: their environment, in the places where we are stripping them of their resources, or already did so, or where we are dumping the wastes that we don’t want to deal with ourselves. This way too, justice means green politics, but more clearly Nature and suffering humanity need to be safeguarded together.

Green politics is not a luxury for the idle rich. Making wildlife and the environment, biodiversity and conservation a top priority is vital for everyone, rich or poor, on the entire planet.

Book Review, Conservation, Environment, Philosophy

A Taboo We MUST Break: Population Control

People laugh at the Victorian taboo on talking about sex, while prostitution was rife in London at the time. Today, too, we have curious taboos: people don’t talk about death, for instance. But the taboo I have in mind is different: population control. It’s just not done to speak about it. But I’m going to, and I’m not sorry. It’s vital.

Back in 1972, Donella and Dennis Meadows and Jørgen Randers published a book that, even at the time, I found distinctly curious. It was called The Limits to Growth.

Cover of The Limits to Growth, 1972
The Limits to Growth, by Donella and Dennis Meadows and Jørgen Randers, 1972

Buy it from Amazon.com  (commission paid)
Buy it from Amazon.co.uk (commission paid)

It was commissioned by the Club of Rome, a non-profit think tank. It argued, in a nutshell, that a model of the Earth’s resources and human usage of them predicted, under certain scenarios, ‘overshoot and collapse’ of the whole system in the 21st century. The model was called  World3 and it contained subsystems for agriculture, industry, population, non-renewable resources, and pollution.

The basic idea of  The Limits to Growth was Malthusian, after Thomas Malthus’s 1798 book, An Essay on the Principle of Population. Malthus argued that population would continually increase; assuming the ‘means of subsistence’ started ‘equal to the easy support of its inhabitants’ – that food supply and consumption were in balance – then consumption would always tend to run ahead of food supply (and of wages), leading straight to poverty, though war, famine and disease could also intervene.

Malthus observed that either the death rate could increase to cut down a population through positive checks like famine, disease, and war; or birth rate could be lowered by celibacy, late marriage, birth control or abortion, to prevent population growth. He attacked the idea that agricultural production could grow indefinitely. He was attacked, unjustifiably, for being uncaring of the poor, and replied that it was ‘vicious and cruel’ of a government to allow population to grow without preparing to feed (and we might add, to house, educate, and care for) it, in other words for society to rely on human misery instead of proper planning for a stable and happy population.

The Limits to Growth was similarly attacked, perhaps with rather more justification. What seemed to be its ringing certainty about how we would really soon now run into unalterable limits imposed by nature was shredded by the critics. Its over-reliance on what was, after all, only a model into which one could put different numbers was in hindsight distinctly naive. By making itself look like a cranky doomsday prophecy, it became only too easy to dismiss.

But the Malthusian argument, updated a little, is unanswerable. If you have a finite planet and exponential growth – heck, ANY growth – then you must run into limits eventually. If growth is rapid, that ‘eventually’ will be soon. In 2011, Ugo Bardi’s The Limits to Growth Revisited argued that reality seemed to be following the 1972 prediction after all.

What the critics seized on in The Limits to Growth was, especially, its naive assumption that resources were known and fixed. Big Oil argued that new discoveries would (always) be made, only to find that discoveries declined rapidly, and became steadily more inconvenient, polluting or dangerous – far out at sea, high in the Arctic, or as dirty and difficult oil shale, necessitating the invention of fracking.

Big Oil and the economists argued, correctly up to a point, that when a resource becomes scarce, its price rises, and that enables formerly too-expensive alternatives to be developed. In the case of oil, that begins with deep, dangerous and dirty ways to get more oil. Failing all of those, it continues with alternatives to mineral oil, which might include synthesising oil from plant materials, or perhaps directly from sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide. Failing that, it could continue with alternative forms of energy, such as wind and solar power used with batteries, and so on, as the excess of demand over supply pushed prices steadily upwards. All of this is pretty basic economics, but it overlooks the real attachment of today’s economy to resources such as oil, and the pain that is starting to result as resources start to run short. Wars and tensions in the Middle East over both oil and water (especially for irrigation) illustrate the point.

The economists further argued that economic growth was not ineluctably tied to population growth, nor to growth in the use of resources. The economy might grow (we could phrase it today) through services like insurance, or banking, or software, or games, or videos, none of which in themselves logically entail physical resources, however much bankers build themselves flashy headquarters and huge IT centres full of hot computers and power-hungry air-conditioning systems. In theory, wellbeing and the economy could improve without using more resources. So while it looks and feels as if every industry and service depends hugely on oil today, in theory, argue the economists, you could have one without the other. So, oil, qua energy, isn’t quite the solid roadblock that it appears, nor are mineral resources like copper, or tantalum, or germanium, or gold, however vital they each may look to today’s world of electronic devices. I hope I’ve stated the economists’ case fairly.

Oil as a chemical feedstock is another matter: many years ago one of my science teachers observed that when we have burnt all the world’s oil, our descendants will bitterly regret our folly in using millions of years of chemical wealth just for energy. Paint, plastics, dyestuffs, fertilizers, medicines (yes, and pesticides and explosives) – oil has a hand in thousands of manufactured substances and materials that we all rely on every day. It sounds grim: no oil, no feedstock. Well, not quite: we already have ‘plastic’ bags made of cellulose from plants. With enough effort, chemical feedstocks like methanol can be made from wood, or carbon dioxide and water: we could one day learn to recycle carbon endlessly, and carbon will then be enthusiastically scavenged from the atmosphere as a vital resource.

Ah, carbon. The outpouring of carbon dioxide has already warmed the planet, changed the climate, moved ecological zones towards the poles, acidified the oceans. It is apparently in the process of sending perhaps half of all the species on the planet to extinction in the coming centuries. It seems incredible that such verifiable facts should be disputed; or that such urgent warnings should be ignored. But disputed they are, and ignored too, drowned out by the incessant tinnitus of wars, elections, recessions, politics, selfishness and greed, and simply the sheer bustle of daily life.

But carbon contributes to one thing that humans are definitely tied to: food. If the population rises, more food is required. Even this, though, is not a straightforward 1972-style equation, N people x C kilos consumed = F kilos of food required. If we all became vegetarians with the modest diet of a traditional Indian villager (just rice or chapatis every day, with a little oil, a few onions and chilis, rarely anything else) then the world could sustain many more of us than if we all demanded Texan portions of steak made from methane-producing cows, each animal guzzling the grain that might have fed dozens of vegetarians.

Still, for any given agricultural productivity and any given area of land there is a maximum population that can be sustained. Let’s try a thought experiment: say we achieved optimal efficiency in converting sunlight to grain, over the whole land surface of the earth, deserts, forests and all, we might increase productivity fivefold, and the productive area fivefold, for a 25fold increase. Perhaps we could grow food all over the oceans, hard as that might be; the production would double again. If we could reduce our food needs through genetic engineering (I am not advocating this) or other means, more people could be fed. Now, the human brain accounts for about 20% of our energy intake, and can hardly be changed; but let’s suppose we could halve the food used by the rest of the body, we’d then use just 60% of what we eat today: the population could increase by 100/60 or 1.66fold. So how many people would that be? Much more than now. If the current population is 7 billion then we could have 7 x 25 x 2 x 1.66 = 580 billion people on the planet; it could be more if the proportion of vegetarians increased, rather than decreasing as it is doing today. No doubt you can argue for still greater numbers.  The theoretical limit is enormous (nothing at all like the 1972 view), and full of uncertainties: still, it is an extraordinary prospect. And it ignores what we are already seeing, which is increasing shortage of resources.

But even assuming that the  agriculturalists and engineers did their work splendidly, and none of the terrible shortages of oil or water or minerals, or fights over shortages that The Limits to Growth implied ever occurred, I should not like that world, and I can’t believe you would. There would be no room for wildlife or non-food plants: no place to go for a walk in the sunshine: indeed, no call to go to the agricultural surface at all, except to drive a tractor, if humans still did such a job in a robot-rich world. For with the land all devoted to growing food, we would all live underground (but for a few super-rich, who would still enjoy unimaginable luxuries like fresh air and sunshine and flowers), work, play and probably fight down there. For any mass emergence on to the surface would spell starvation for billions as crops were crushed underfoot. Unbearable? If so, that is the limit to growth.

We could ask, why should all the planet’s resources flow to just one species, us? What makes us so special that we should take the shares of all other species, for that is what the grow-as-we-like until the  hundreds-of-billions scenario means? At the least, it is a bit selfish.

For we have one more professional to convince, after the oilmen and economists, and all the work to be done by agriculturalists and engineers to set up such a world. It’s the ecologist.

A famous book on this subject was also published in 1972: Barbara Ward and René Dubos’s Only One Earth.

Only One Earth, 1972
Only One Earth, 1972

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Buy it from Amazon.co.uk (commission paid)

Only One Earth argued (much more solidly than The Limits to Growth) that development should be limited to ensure basic human rights, an ‘inner limit’ within the ‘outer limit’ of the Earth’s carrying capacity. Much later talk has grossly diluted the idea of ‘sustainable development’ to allow almost anything: it is much easier to claim that something is sustainable than to stop consuming more. Ward and Dubos argued for ‘the careful husbandry of the earth’, sharing wealth fairly and conserving wildlife carefully. It was pretty radical stuff for an economist like Ward. In effect, she broadened economics to include human wellbeing – a domestic and individual ‘economy’ – as well as ecology – the wellbeing of animals, plants, and ecosystems.

I would like to imagine that the arguments for healthy ecosystems rich in life of every kind are becoming obvious: I feel they are already painfully clear to anyone who looks at the question. Still, here they are, very briefly. Crops need pollinators, like bees, bumblebees, moths and butterflies, flies, beetles. Pests need to be controlled by predators, parasites, and pathogens. Materials need to be recycled by saprophytes.  We need genetic diversity – wild plants, old cultivated varieties, not to mention animals and fungi too, to combat pests and diseases, to supply unknown future crops and crop varieties, medicines, and other useful substances. In short, all ecological roles, species of every sort, are needed, not just crop plants, our primary producers, creators of food: they can’t survive alone.

More than that, more than those desperate agricultural and economic requirements, we need beauty and delight; birds, bees, butterflies, dragonflies and Komodo dragons, tigers and tiger-lilies. Without them, life isn’t worth living.

We are already in serious danger of losing all these things, as neonicotinoid insecticides join the already long list of disastrously dangerous substances we have created, manufactured in stupidly large amounts, and released onto the land with blithe ignorance (or worse, reckless lack of concern, with contrary evidence left unpublished, covered up to preserve profit). Already neonicotinoids are proving as deadly as the organochlorine insecticides of the 1950s and 1960s, that led Rachel Carson to write her 1962 classic Silent Spring.

Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, 1962
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, 1962

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Buy it from Amazon.co.uk (commission paid)

The veterinary drug Diclofenac has destroyed almost all the vultures of the Indian subcontinent; now its use is spreading disastrously to Africa, as countries that should know better are doing the cheapest and dirtiest thing, in the face of incontrovertible evidence of harm. We do seem to be a terribly stupid species, like Douglas Adams’s mindless military robot.

Are there limits to growth? Of course there are. It’s more than time we started acting as if there were. The taboo on population control did have some slight justification: of course we cannot want a world with compulsory sterilisations, euthanasia, even a China-style One Child policy. But there’s no need for such drastic and terrible methods. Population can be controlled far better by persuasion, by taxation, by education, by informing people of the consequences of their choices, by understanding the pressures on nature and man’s place in the world.

Let us decide how much room we want to give to forests, to prairie, to tundra, to wetlands, to deserts.

Let us decide where we want seabirds by the million to have undisturbed cliffs and seas full of fish to feed on.

Let us decide that we shall have a world full of lions and bears and howler monkeys and sparkling damselflies, of buzzing bumblebees and naturally-pollinated fruit trees, of pristine forests full of undiscovered species, rich in species and substances whose uses we have not yet even imagined.

Let us choose life, and start to live lightly on this beautiful planet.

Conservation, Environment, Love of Nature, Philosophy

Love of Nature? Man vs Nature? How Very Odd

There is something distinctly odd about the British love of nature. I mentioned the subject at a book launch the other day, and the person I was chatting to said, between sips of the very nice white wine and a nibble of the focaccia, that he thought the British were not really in love with nature any more as a personal activity, but were just consumers, passively and vicariously absorbing what is offered up as a commodity. I said that was ‘interesting’.

The ‘in love’ view of the British perhaps blends several different stereotypes. One is the obsolete stiff upper lip, the naturalist out in some far outpost of forgotten empire, enthusiastically carrying on studying phasmids like James Wood-Mason, writing obscure papers in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal for the benefit of anyone of similar inclination.

Another is the hugely enthusiastic amateur naturalist – the keen birdwatcher, entomologist or botanist with telescope, moth-trap or vasculum always to hand, hoping to add a species or two to a county list.

Yet another is the happy gardener, always outside – rain or shine – pruning, digging, composting, planting, watering, weeding.

The stereotype that my wine-sipping acquaintance had in mind was presumably rather different: couch potatoes, relaxing with a remote in the sitting-room, allowing an hour of television gardening with Monty Don or a year in the life of some wildlife area – the Canadian Rockies or the Great Barrier Reef, the Patagonian plains or the last surviving bit of the Sundarbans, or worse, all of the above, cut together by an editorial team with a high concept of Surviving Against All the Odds or something – to wash over their minds, leaving no particular trace other than a feeling of having seen a lot of colourful flickering images.

Personally, I doubt that picture is fair, though like all stereotypes it must make some contact with reality somewhere. People are all different, and everyone needs to relax sometimes.

A truth, though, that everyone who likes some kind of experience of nature, live or through book, film, photograph or website, is that if we’re studying or watching nature without doing something to help protect it, we are ignoring a very large existential threat indeed. Assuming we manage not to destroy ourselves in a nuclear war, we are going to have to work out how to survive an ecological disaster of our own making. Its epic proportions are becoming clear: the last time anything like this happened was at the end of the Cretaceous period 66 million years ago. Whether Luis Alvarez was right that an asteroid or comet crashed into the Earth to form the Chicxulub crater, the debris thrown into the atmosphere causing something like a nuclear winter, it is certainly the case that huge numbers of species became extinct very quickly, including all the world’s large dinosaurs (yes, I know we have the birds still with us, and they’re in the dinosaur clade) along with perhaps three quarters of all other kinds of living thing.

You may perhaps feel somewhat untroubled by the idea that the world of your grandchildren might have no tigers or rhinoceroses in it; or even that there would be no areas of rainforest outside national parks – the Amazon and the forests of Sumatra and Borneo are well on the way there already.

You might be slightly less thrilled at the news that many of the world’s hotspots for variety of animals and plants will be gone completely: as South Africa becomes warmer and drier, the whole Cape region as understood by botanists will move southwards – into the ocean – and disappear forever, that incredible wealth of flowers, all those extraordinary Proteas, will remain only as a memory.

Perhaps even that isn’t too worrying, just news from a far country? Well, the sea level will rise by several metres when the Antarctic ice-cap melts, flooding coastal plains and threatening to drown many cities.

Not a problem? Global warming, whatever may have caused it, is already making deserts expand. Droughts will become year-long from California to southern Spain, Sahel to Australia. Food prices will rise drastically; wars will be fought over water and other critical resources.

Still not your problem? Farmland all across America and Europe is already denuded of crop pollinators, especially honeybees and bumblebees. Grasses like wheat and rice are not affected, but much of your food, and vital fodder crops for farm animals – from alfalfa to zucchini – is utterly dependent on pollination, and it’s in free fall.

What is all this about? How have we got into the crazy situation that half of us – some of us anyway – love the idea of nature, love to look at it (at least the pretty bits), while the rest (ok, possibly nearly everyone, whether we like nature or not) see themselves as separate from it? How separate can we be when we depend on it absolutely for the air we breathe – all the oxygen produced by green plants – and the food we eat – all our food coming from animals and plants? What are all those student notes in English literature about ‘man v nature’? We are part of nature. It isn’t even that nature is our survival blanket. We, like all other living things, are part of an ecosystem. The mosquitoes that bite you on holiday are in no doubt that you are edible. You eat chickens or carrots, beef or beans. Billions of bacteria in your gut share that food with you, consuming some, helping you absorb the rest. Eventually, bacteria will consume you, if you don’t get yourself cremated first. You are part of nature, no doubt about it.

So, how are you going to change what you do, to help keep this system working? Right now, it’s already badly broken, and getting worse each year. We haven’t got long to fix it.

Natural History, Philosophy

Nature’s Way: Whole Plant Works, Most Active Compound Fails: Why?

The villagers queue in a long line, a hundred or more of them, in front of the traditional healer’s hut in the south of Mali. It is the rainy season, and nearly all of them have malaria.

Chief Tiemoko Bengaly learnt traditional medicine from his grandfather. Perhaps soon nobody will learn traditional African medicine any more, as modern medicine arrives, along with manufactured Chinese herbal medicines.

Bengaly hands out dried Mexican prickly poppy, Argemone mexicana, tells his patients to drink as much tea made from the plant as they can for a week. The parts of the plant have different uses, as it contains powerful toxic alkaloids; the seeds are dangerously poisonous.

Mexican prickly poppy, Argemone mexicana.
Mexican prickly poppy, Argemone mexicana.

As Brendan Borrell reports in the June 2014 issue of Scientific American (pages 49-53), the results were dramatic: 89% of the patients recovered from their malaria, compared to 95% for the current best treatment for the difficult disease, Artemisinin-Combination Therapies or ACT.  The trial was done in 2010 by Dr Bertrand Graz and Dr Merlin Willcox, and their approach was highly unconventional.

ACT consists of a drug obtained from another plant, sweet wormwood, Artemisia annua, discovered by testing plants used in Chinese herbal medicine, in combination with one or more of the many other drugs used against malaria, but which the malaria parasite has invariably developed resistance to over the years. Thus it has come about that ACT has become the last best hope against a slippery, shape-shifting parasite that has defied half a century of work by the world’s biggest drug companies and medical research foundations. All attempts at an anti-malaria vaccine have foundered on the parasite’s ability to change its biochemical spots, while all the drugs have similarly started to fail as the parasite (actually several related species, causing different malarias) becomes resistant, finding ways to continue growing in the presence of chemicals designed specifically to target vital parts of its metabolism.

One of the most remarkable things about the success in Mali – apart, that is, from its very low cost compared to traditional drug discovery, and its use of ethnobotany and a retrospective treatment outcome (RTO) study rather than a double-blind controlled clinical trial (all remarkable features of the work), was this: if the plant had been tested the conventional (I nearly said ‘traditional’) Western way, it would have failed.

The conventional Western approach would have isolated each compound that had any pharmacological activity – in other words, that did anything useful against malaria – and then tested it, alone, “in vitro” (in a test tube) to see how well it worked. It would then pick the most effective one, and try it against malaria in mice, and if that worked well and safely, then try it against malaria in humans.

The most effective substance in Argemone is berberine, and it fails against the malaria parasite. But the whole plant, as administered by healers like Bengaly in Mali, is life-saving.

Somehow, observational study in the style of ethnobotany succeeded where conventional Western medicine’s protocols for drug discovery – clinical trials and all the other paraphernalia for bioprospecting and pharmaceutical research (a jaw-cracking combination of long words derived from Latin and Greek) – would have (or actually) failed.

There is something both humbling and inspiring about this. We humans come from an incredibly clever but stupid species. Alexander Pope had it right:

 Born but to die, and reas’ning but to err;
Whether he thinks to little, or too much;
Chaos of Thought and Passion, all confus’d;
Still by himself, abus’d or disabus’d;
Created half to rise and half to fall;
Great Lord of all things, yet a prey to all,
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl’d;
The glory, jest and riddle of the world.

Translated, we might read Pope to say “You do your science by analysis, which is hugely effective, but it leaves you prone to endless error, for you are ignoring all the subtle side effects, interactions and combinations of effects that together make up almost everything that is worth having in the world.” Science is not wrong – it is a marvellously precise application of common sense (try whatever it is with the factor X and without, and see what difference factor X makes) – but the world is such a complex place, and the combinations of X and Y and Z and A and B and C are so many, that it will take forever to analyse everything.

In that case, integrated approaches such as traditional herbal medicine, even if they are often somewhat ignorant and wrong in places, have something important to offer. But like many other things that we are accidentally wiping out, like thousands of species of plant and animal in rainforest, ocean, mountain, grassland and marsh, we’d better be quick to study herbal medicine before it vanishes from the face of the earth for ever.

Philosophy

Natural is Best, Isn’t it?

As I washed the dishes by hand with some very pleasant Ecover natural washing-up liquid, having cooked some natural tofu with mushrooms in cold-pressed extra virgin olive oil, served with home-grown spinach and then home-made apple pie, I reflected that “natural” is a hard-working word.

The connotations of nature are perfect for marketing. Happy cows peacefully chomp lush green grass in a rolling hill country with a tree, a winding road, a gate, a hedge, blue sky and yellow sun, at least that’s how it looks on the side of the dairy product carton. Actually the cows are probably in a shed, the fields are very likely poached, muddy and puddled by hundreds of heavy feet, the sky lead-grey, and the hedges long since grubbed out to gain the hedge-grubbing efficiency subsidy. But hey! This is marketing. Nature to the rescue! Happy cows in pretty “natural” landscapes sell more yoghurt, specially when it’s low-fat organic natural Lactobacillus bifida yoghurt.

Clearly something unnatural is going on. Are the happy cows in a “state of nature”? Hardly. They belong to a farmer, who bought them in a market, or bred them via artificial insemination, browsing the online catalogue to choose the best bull for the farm’s soil, climate and breed of cow. The cattle themselves were bred to maximise productivity through many rounds of such artificial selection by farmers and animal breeders.

Well, is the yoghurt in a state of nature, leaving aside the unnatural state of the cows it came from? Did it go sour all by itself when its Palaeolithic minders left it in a bark bucket overnight, only to discover to their astonishment the next morning that it had somehow turned solid, acquired an interesting sour taste, but was actually nicer than the milk it had replaced? Well, that may once have happened, but it certainly wasn’t how the stuff got into that carton on that supermarket shelf today.

So, why’s it called “natural” yoghurt then? Oh, you mean because it’s plain, as opposed to being full of pineapple chunks with a minty flavour? Nature = Vanilla flavour? Well, that’s a useful meaning.

But if that’s what “natural” is, why is my washing-up liquid natural? It’s scented with camomile and mango, or turnip and artichoke, or something. Surely natural would mean unscented, just as it comes. Oh, you mean it’s natural because it’s not full of synthetic chemicals, the soap is all extracted by a team of a hundred doughty washerwomen with brawny arms, pounding bales of organically-grown soapwort with lye and goat’s urine to extract the natural saponins? No? You mean the saponins were extracted in a chemical factory? Doesn’t sound terribly natural to me.

And why are we praising the benefits of natural olive oil, is it inherently better than any other oil? Sure, we now know that hydrogenated vegetable oils aren’t too clever, that was a piece of processing too far. But the olive oil has been made from trees planted in rows in an orchard, weeded, sprayed if need be, pruned, harvested. The fruits have been soaked in brine, then crushed — that’s the first extra virgin cold pressing bit — to squeeze the oil out. It’s been put in tins or bottles and carted hundreds of miles to get here. It’s as natural as the pollen in a bumblebee’s leg baskets, in fact. Not.

Well, what about the tofu, the mushrooms, the home-made apple pie? Go on, it’s your turn, work out their life-histories for yourself. I’ll return your scripts to you next week.

So why are people claiming the epithet “natural” for all sorts of things? Part of it is a more-or-less deliberate confusion with the warm feelings we have for a lovely view, a nice day in the countryside, a holiday in the mountains: nature is somehow good and right. The happy cows in the mescaline-bright mock Dorset countryside on the dairy carton are tapping into this feeling about nature. Being natural makes a product warmer, cosier, safer, more familiar: separate from the nasty cold modern world of dairy processing plants and integrated supply chains. Only it doesn’t, really.

The marketing man’s deliberate sleight-of-hand is one thing: at least we know that’s his game, and we sophisticated consumers know to discount his warm fuzzy claims, don’t we? Possibly.

But there’s a worse confusion out there. “Natural” = good, beneficial, health-giving, right, even somehow spiritual. This was the basis of the whole round-about-1900 back-to-Mother-Nature movement, in which Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach and his proto-hippies in their Himmelhof (“Heaven House”) commune went about in flowing robes, barefoot, with flowers in their hair — yeah, you thought all that began in the 1960s — seeking to absorb goodness from Nature.

Diefenbach and his communards at the Himmelhof, near Vienna, 1897-1899
Diefenbach and his communards at the Himmelhof, near Vienna, 1897-1899

Well, nature may be flowery and pretty, but pufferfish tetrodotoxin is straight from nature, and one drop will kill you. Tree-frog curare arrow-poison, that paralyses your muscles so you fall down, conscious but helpless, is totally natural too. So is tetanus toxin, and food-poisoning and clostridium gas-gangrene toxin, and so is … Oh, that wasn’t the sense you intended? You didn’t mean that Mother Nature could kill as well as give life, you wanted to focus on the positive. Right. As long as you’re clear about it.