George Monbiot

Remember When Neil deGrasse Tyson Pulled a Steven Pinker?

Responding to the mass shootings in the US last week, the astrophysicist tweeted the world had more pressing issues to deal with, and that “our emotions respond more to spectacle than to data”.

Twitter is, among other things, that place on the internet where people fight over the tips of icebergs. There is often the presumption that what ends up on Twitter has been thought through and carefully condensed to fit into the arbitrary 280-character limit, but then again, there is also ample evidence to the contrary: many of its users get caught up in the tips that they think is all there is. These possibilities cast a dark shadow on Twitter’s claim to represent reality. More often than not, it is its own world, and has nothing to do with the world around it except that it collects the worst opinions from there unto itself. Last night Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist and celebrated science communicator, joined in by suggesting the outrage over America’s gun laws are misplaced:

In the past 48hrs, the USA horrifically lost 34 people to mass shootings.

On average, across any 48hrs, we also lose…

500 to Medical errors
300 to the Flu
250 to Suicide
200 to Car Accidents
40 to Homicide via Handgun

Often our emotions respond more to spectacle than to data.

— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) August 4, 2019

deGrasse Tyson has been one of those people calling attention to how what we are reading about science on the web is often just a pinhole-sized snapshot of a more glorious thing lying hidden from view – just like an iceberg. Reading him on astronomy and cosmology, you would think he is not losing any context and that he is simply presenting what he can in 280 characters on the microblogging platform. Then again, the tweet above appears to be evidence to the contrary: it presumes to contain all the arguments and histories of the five issues it mentions in (exactly) 280 characters and which, in one fell swoop, dismisses all the outrage of the political left.

It is very disappointing the left has been painted as anti-fact and that the right claims to be guided by righteous logic when in fact this is the result of the deeper dismissal of the validity of the social sciences and humanities, which have served throughout history to make facts right and workable in their various contexts. The right has appropriated the importance of quantitative measures – and that alone – and brandishes it like a torch while the world burns below. As Alex Gladstein, chief strategy officer at the Human Rights Foundation and VP of strategy of the Oslo Freedom Forum, recently wrote in the New Republic, “dictators love development statistics” because “they’re an easily faked way to score international points”. Excerpt:

From the development initiatives of Jeffrey Sachs and Bill Gates, to Tony Blair’s despotic partnerships or Tom Friedman championing Chinese autocracy in The New York Times, the last two decades have seen political concerns repeatedly sidelined by development statistics. The classic defence of dictatorship is that without the messy constraints of free elections, free press, and free protests, autocrats can quickly tear down old cities to build efficient new ones, dam rivers to provide electricity, and lift millions out of poverty. The problem with using statistics to sing the praises of autocracy is that collecting verifiable data inside closed societies is nearly impossible. From Ethiopia to Kazakhstan, the data that “proves” that an authoritarian regime is doing good is often produced by that very same regime.

And by attacking the validity of the social sciences and humanities, the left has effectively had the rug pulled out from under its feet, and the intellectual purpose of its existence delegitimised. We are still talking about deGrasse Tyson’s tweet because, in his view, it seems facts are all there is, that data alone should settle the debate and that emotions and spectacles are unnecessarily stretching it out (notwithstanding the psychopathy of expressing this sentiment right after a mass murder). Thousands of other tweets swirl around it in response, telling him that he is right even though the left will eat him alive for it.

Steven Pinker, October 2010. Photo: G ambrus/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0

You see, the right is the data and the left is the “soft science”, which – Quillette would have you believe – might as well be a synonym for ‘non-data’ and nonsense. And the only challenge the right is prepared to brook, or pretends to be prepared to brook, is numbers: those symbols that work one digit at a time, one character at a time, but which putatively contain everything you need to know about something, no further explanation required. We have seen this exaltation of mathematical logic, and Boolean algebra and lambda calculus and whatever else, before in the revanchist politics of the ‘New Atheism’ movement, and perhaps more recently when a Silicon Valley dude announced he had discovered the field of history.

Also read: Fox, NatGeo to Probe Sexual Misconduct Allegations Against Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Right now, I nor anyone else, don’t have – shouldn’t have – just numbers to rebut deGrasse Tyson’s argument because that is not all there is. But bowing to a personal compulsion to try, I say: deGrasse Tyson is pulling a Steven Pinker (as well as a bit of the “poverty first, Moon/Mars next” fallacy). The first three numbers on the list in his tweet have been on a downward trend for quite some time thanks to a) pharmaceutical innovation, b) increasing awareness of and sensitivity about what those issues actually stand for, and c) policies that open new avenues of treatment and legislation that deters casualties. (However, trends in disease mortality are currently being ‘disrupted’ by the rise of antimicrobial resistance, climate change and – lest we forget – the lopsided effects of these stressors on already-stressed economies.)

The fourth number, despite being about accidents and not wilful acts of malice actuated by the availability of guns, has also been on the decline (except for a relatively small spike in absolute numbers in 2016):

Credit: Dennis Bratland/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

Pinker, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard University, is relevant here because of his disingenuous conclusion that the world is becoming a better place and that cognitive biases are to blame for the left’s unwillingness to acknowledge that. His analyses are problematic because, especially in the domain of environmental action, they drawn upon snapshots of the full picture – as if he is content to work with the tips of icebergs. For example, consider the following excerpt from a rebuttal by George Monbiot to Pinker’s claim that countries become cleaner as they get richer, in the latter’s 2018 book Enlightenment Now:

Pinker suggests that the environmental impact of nations follows the same trajectory, claiming that the “environmental Kuznets Curve” shows they become cleaner as they get richer. To support this point, he compares Nordic countries with Afghanistan and Bangladesh. It is true that they do better on indicators such as air and water quality, as long as you disregard their impacts overseas. But when you look at the whole picture, including carbon emissions, you discover the opposite. The ecological footprints of Afghanistan and Bangladesh (namely the area required to provide the resources they use) are, respectively, 0.9 and 0.7 hectares per person. Norway’s is 5.8, Sweden’s is 6.5 and Finland, that paragon of environmental virtue, comes in at 6.7.

David Bell, a historian, took aim at a different portion of the book, in which Pinker appeared to be blind to the efforts of people who had fought, struggled and bent the arc of justice to serve them, instead labouring with the presumption that people should stop complaining because life has become better of its own volition:

Did Enlightenment forms of reasoning and scientific inquiry lie behind modern biological racism and eugenics? … Not at all, Pinker assures us. That was just a matter of bad science. … But Pinker largely fails to deal with the inconvenient fact that, at the time, it was not so obviously bad science. The defenders of these repellent theories, used to justify manifold forms of oppression, were published in scientific journals and appealed to the same standards of reason and utility upheld by Pinker. “Science” did not by itself inevitably beget these theories … The later disproving of these theories did not just come about because better science prevailed over worse science. It came about as well because of the moral and political activism that forced scientists to question data and conclusions they had largely taken for granted.

deGrasse Tyson, it would seem, has fallen prey to a similar bout of snapshotism: he has cherry-picked one moment in history where the number of gun-deaths (per 48 hours) is lower than the number of deaths due to medical errors, flu, suicide and car accidents, all shorn of the now-denounced context that humankind and all its broken systems are trying to improve them.

What his tweet, which purports to be the whole iceberg in some people’s worldview when in fact it is only the tip, fails to say is that America is doing little to nothing to prevent more gun deaths from happening, and in fact whose political establishment has often condoned the deleterious cultures of white supremacy and “involuntary celibacy” that powers it. If deGrasse Tyson had compared the effects of gun deaths on the conscience of a nation with the global failure to make polluters pay, with rising income inequality, with the decreasing resilience to pandemics in the developing world or with nationalism+xenophobia, he would have been closer to the truth of it: We don’t have to be ashamed of deaths due to medical errors, flu, suicide and car accidents, but we do have to be ashamed of mass murders.

A version of this article was first published on the author’s blog.

Can We Really Prevent Floods By Planting More Trees?

A flooded ground along Old Mahabalipuram Road in Chennai following two days of cyclonic rains in the city. Credit: Vijay Thamarai

As heavy rain continues to contribute to the devastating flooding in Cumbria, there have once again been calls – notably from the environmentalist George Monbiot – for the reforestation of our uplands, to help tackle rural flooding. The government has stated that it is funding the planting of 11m trees over the next five years to this end. It has also been suggested that trees could help reduce the number and severity of flash floods in cities, such as those that devastated Hull in June 2007.

To determine whether the humble tree really can provide such robust defences, we first need to understand the role they play in soaking up excess rain water. All floods, whether fluvial (when rivers burst their banks) or pluvial (when rainfall overwhelms drainage systems before it reaches rivers), are caused because the rain cannot soak into the soil fast enough. Instead, it runs rapidly over the surface of the land.

And while climate change is causing bigger and bigger storms, our alterations to the environment – especially to the ground surface – have been one of the major causes of the increased frequency of flooding events in modern times.

Urban jungle

Cities offer the most obvious example of how human development is making flooding worse. In urban areas, the ground surface is covered by impermeable buildings and roads, which rapidly divert rainfall into gutters and drains. When these reach capacity, flooding occurs.

Hard surfaces leave water with nowhere to go. Credit: robert shell/Flickr, CC BY

Computer modelling of water flows in cities suggests that for every extra 1% of impermeable land that is converted to woodland, runoff would be reduced by less than 0.5%. So even large-scale urban tree planting would only reduce runoff by a small amount – far lower than the 80% increase in storm size that climate change models predict for the UK.

But these estimates assume that trees don’t affect how much water runs into drains from buildings and roads. Recent research we carried out in Manchester has suggested that trees planted on the streets can have a much greater effect than predicted, largely because rainfall can run from pavements into their planting holes.

Trees which are planted as a part of Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems (SUDS) schemes – in which rainfall is deliberately diverted into swales, hollows and soakaways – could be even more effective. Unfortunately, though SUDS schemes are increasingly popular, little research has been carried out to monitor their effectiveness at reducing runoff.

Rural reforestation?

Rural areas of the UK have also undergone a massive transformation at the hands of humans. Forests, which would have provided natural vegetation cover, have been removed and replaced with arable crops (in the lowlands) or grass pasture (in upland areas such as the Lake District). Both of these types of agricultural land shed much more runoff than forests. Their thin soils are compacted by heavy farm machinery and the hooves of cattle and sheep. This reduces their permeability, making it more difficult for rain to penetrate the soil, while short-cropped grasses and flat fields offer little resistance to the overland flow of the runoff.

Reforesting such areas can have several benefits. For one thing, the tree canopy can intercept some rain, which can then evaporate before it even reaches the ground. But this only reduces the effective rainfall by a few millimetres, and the effect would be negligible in winter, when low temperatures reduce evaporation and deciduous trees have shed their leaves.

Catching raindrops. Credit: Indigo Skies Photography/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

The effects of trees on the soil are much more significant. Fallen tree leaves build up a deeper, humus-rich soil, which is criss-crossed by thick surface roots that intercept the overland flow of rain water. Meanwhile, sub-surface roots penetrate deep into the soil, drying it out and increasing its permeability. These mechanisms are well-established, and seem to point to trees as a possible solution to flooding.

Yet in rural areas, the effectiveness of reforestation in preventing flooding is still uncertain. A recent study at Pontbren, in Wales, showed that planting trees on former pasture can increase the rate at which water infiltrates the soil by a factor of around 70 in just seven years, thereby reducing overland flow. Unfortunately, the planting was done on a relatively small scale, and there was no way of comparing catchments with and without trees, so it was impossible to tell whether these changes had significantly reduced the speed at which water drained into the local streams, the water which would cause fluvial flooding downstream.

Ultimately, we lack the strong research base necessary to accurately quantify the anti-flooding benefits of planting trees: large scale studies cost money, and scientists have difficulty repeating experiments to confirm their findings, because no two catchments are the same. Most studies therefore depend on modelling, but even this is unreliable, because the models cannot be validated by experiment. There are also a range of other factors, which might be affecting our results, such as soil type, slope, and whether the trees are positioned next to streams and rivers. But based on what we know, it seems unlikely that reforestation would be a total panacea; after all, forested areas still flood.

And so it seems unlikely that reforestation alone would have been able to prevent the current floods in Cumbria. But by finding ways to measure the benefits of trees, we will be able to use them to their full potential, as a part of our engineered flood prevention schemes. By incorporating trees as part of the solution, we could add some green to the concrete jungles in which so many of us live, and transform our countryside into a lush and varied environment.

Roland Ennos is Professor of Biomechanics, University of Hull.

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

British Museums Have Long Overlooked the Violence of Empire

The Tate’s latest exhibition, Artist and Empire, is long overdue.

Fante Artists, Gold Coast, Africa, Asafo Flag 3, c.1900-40. © Pebble London Collection

It took Britain a century to conquer most of the Indian subcontinent, which it then dominated for a further century. The subcontinent also witnessed a partition that led, by a recent estimate, to over three million deaths, and the largest mass migration of human beings in global history. The violence of colonialism is palpable even in the most cursory rendering of India’s past. But scholars have only recently begun to examine the many forms such violence takes, the rationales behind them and their impact on Indian bodies and minds.

When the violence of South Asia’s colonial history appears in academic scholarship, it largely does so only in certain forms: narratives of rebellion and resistance, religious or ethnic violence, and cataclysmic events. Framing violence in this way displaces it onto the colonised and underestimates the endemic, everyday forms of violence through which colonialism operated. Such erasure is not unique to Indian history. It merely illustrates the ways in which violence has been written out of the history of Britain’s imperial past.

Indeed, the past decade has witnessed renewed attempts to “whitewash” Britain’s imperial exploits. In 2012 it was revealed that thousands of documents detailing acts of violence committed on colonised peoples in the final years of British rule had been either systematically destroyed or ferreted away in a secret Foreign Office archive. These revelations were to a large extent ignored or downplayed by the mainstream media.

Looking the other way

Such processes of silencing ensure that belief in a benign and benevolent imperialism remains predominant in Britain. The idea that the purpose was not to appropriate land, labour and goods but to impart the benefits of British civilisation to peoples deemed in need of it is far from rare. As journalist George Monbiot has observed in his struggle to explain the reason for Britain’s amnesia in regard to the violence of its imperial past:

The myths of empire are so well-established that we appear to blot out countervailing stories even as they are told.

The reality of empire, remains, therefore, “untroubled by the evidence”.

Museums and public galleries have played a key role in such a process of silencing. This is in spite of the fact that many of the non-Western collections in them were acquired through colonial conquest, exploitation and looting.

Although some British museums have begun to make colonial histories apparent in their displays, many still erase them by presenting objects with contested histories as examples of “art” or as representative ethnographic “types”. Such public museum spaces also legitimise and aestheticise violence by encouraging visitors to view mutilated deities or headless torsos as artistic masterpieces to be admired and coveted.

Such processes hinder our understandings of the nature of empire and its impact on both colonisers and colonised. This is a particularly pressing concern in light of both the global escalation, since the late 20th century, of new modes of violence, ranging from new neo-imperial wars and regimes of occupation, to the deployment of new technologies of violence, such as drone attacks and private security forces (David Harvey and others have referred to this as the “new imperialism”) and of the rise of ethno-nationalist and religious fundamentalisms.

The perpetuation of such myths also prevents a reckoning with Britain’s imperial past. For a nation state that was forged, in large measure, through empire, and whose identity has been considerably challenged by its demise – most recently by the Scottish referendum on independence and the ongoing debate about Britain’s place in Europe – such a reckoning is, undoubtedly, long overdue.

Artist and empire

Art is, perhaps, one of the best mediums through which to attempt such a reckoning. And so Tate Britain’s latest exhibition, Artist and Empire, could not be more welcome. Not only is culture vital to the construction and maintenance of imperial and colonial regimes, but as Paul Gilroy observes in his preface to the exhibition catalogue, it can:

Help to reconcile the tasks of remembering and working through Britain’s imperial past with the different labour of building its post-colonial future.

It therefore has the ability to alter Britain’s understanding of itself.

The Tate exhibition is well aware of the challenges of remembering and representing empire. It reveals the way that art operated as a form of cultural imperialism by incorporating a wide range of images and objects produced by both British artists and artists from former colonial contexts – from iconic imperial paintings to maps, photographs, and artefacts. But the show also avoids over-simplifying what exhibition curator Alison Smith terms “the tangled histories embodied by objects”.

It also makes the bold move of expanding the time span of the exhibition to the present. This avoids not only imposing an artificial boundary as to when the Empire ended (if, in fact, we can say that it actually did) but encourages reflection on the legacies of empire in contemporary culture, politics and public debate in both Britain and its former colonies.

But when it comes to violence, the exhibition falls down. While it reveals the provenance of stolen or looted objects and images, it contains few visual representations of violence. Such images do exist, but they aren’t featured here.

What about, for example, the haunting paintings of renowned Bengali (later Bangladeshi) painter Zainul Abedin of the estimated 1.5 to 4 million victims of the 1943 Bengal famine? Or the ostensibly “anthropological” photographs that document the myriad ways, physically, mentally, and emotionally, in which colonised bodies were violated? The exhibition does contain some images of caste in colonial India, but could have gone further.

Such engagement is important, because for Britain to truly reckon with its imperial past, we need to understand much more about the violent nature of that past.

Artist and Empire is at Tate Britain from November 25 2015 to 10 April 10 2016.

Deana Heath, Senior Lecturer in Indian and Colonial History, University of Liverpool

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.