Chris Armstrong

Except it’s not happy, of course. The ocean’s ecosystems are going to hell in a hand-cart, while our politicians congratulate themselves for signing up to pledges (like protecting 30% of the ocean by 2030) that they have no realistic plan for achieving. The conclusion that they are simply kicking the can down the road, while basking in a bit of short-term glory, is hard to shake. Meanwhile Trump is trying to jump-start deep sea mining, an industry which companies like BMW and Google have already repudiated, which is wholly unnecessary, and is likely to be immensely destructive to the climate and to marine biodiversity. Meanwhile, in spite of the glaring video evidence provided by Attenborough’s film Ocean, the trawling lobby is still claiming that its activities are not environmentally destructive. So, what should we expect from the UN Ocean conference in Nice this coming week? Anything much, or more hot air?

I watched Attenborough’s latest blockbuster at the cinema last night with my family, and thought I’d collect some thoughts here. First off, it’s wonderfully put together. That’s hardly news with Attenborough. Of course, it’s beautifully shot, and captures marine animals doing things we haven’t seen them do before. Much of it is really entrancing.

It’s also quite a hard-hitting film. It focuses, laser-eyed, on the carnage industrial fishing is wreaking in the ocean. The middle section of the film, which follows the beam of a bottom trawler as it trashes – just demolishes! – everything on the seabed is genuinely traumatic to watch. There was an eerie silence in our cinema, which contained quite a few kids. Even though I knew intellectually what bottom trawling looked like, and the damage it does, I honestly don’t think I will ever forget those images. It is hard to imagine a more compelling visual demonstration of the harm we are doing to the planet.

I wouldn’t say I learned much from the film, but then I am a bit of an ocean conservation geek. I sincerely hope that as many people see the film as possible. I would love it to spark a kind of Rainbow Warrior moment, perhaps with regards to bottom trawling (scallop dredging, which the film also shows, is smaller in scale but hardly less destructive).

I was pleased to see explicit discussion of the colonial (fishing) practices that are still maiming the ocean, and impoverishing many coastal communities. There was also a genuine effort to learn from indigenous and non-Western perspectives, in addition to the usual North Atlantic voices.

My only reservations circle around the stories that the film does not tell.

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Commentators in Europe are understandably agog about Trump’s rumblings that the US might somehow, possibly, annex Greenland at some point in the future. One would think asking Greenlanders how they see their future might have been a better idea. But I’m curious about how we should take these rumblings. Several possibilities suggest themselves, which are not necessarily mutually exclusive:

1. Trump lives in a fugue state. Today it’s Greenland, tomorrow it will be communists putting red stripes in our toothpaste. Or maybe it’s just a plea for attention. Move on.
2. Trump’s modus operandi is always to make outrageous demands in the hope of getting something much smaller. So perhaps he wants a somewhat bigger US military presence in Greenland, or a stake in its minerals. This is his way of getting there.
3. Trump is seriously worried about Chinese and Russian power. This is another example of his tendency to say the quiet (realist) part out loud: Greenland is going to fall into someone’s orbit; so it had better be ours.
4. Trump has a bad case of dictator envy. He thinks (all facts aside) that it’s unfair Putin and Xi Jinping have empires while he doesn’t.
5. Something else entirely.

Speculate away!

One of the most interesting developments in the little world of political theory / philosophy in recent years has been the mass resignation of the editorial teams of both Philosophy & Public Affairs, and Journal of Political Philosophy. Public statements from both groups suggested they were disturbed by their existing publishers’ injunctions to publish in higher quantities, perhaps at the cost of academic quality. Both ultimately moved en masse to found new open access journals – allowing them to continue their intellectual traditions with guaranteed independence. Neither P&PA nor JPP ceased to exist, as such; but both entered an odd, editor-less period, in which their futures appeared uncertain.

All of this raised wider questions for academic publishing: would these moves help weaken the for-profit, pile-’em-high business model of commercial journal publishing, in favour of a pro-bono model? Well, that might depend on the academic community continuing to boycott the journals in question. An enduring boycott might cause publishers to reflect that pressuring academics to do things they aren’t comfortable with can come with high costs. It might increase the bargaining power of editorial teams who had not yet jumped ship. In the meantime, we might find that the pro bono model works, even flourishes.

Today, however, brought the news that Philosophy & Public Affairs now has a new editorial team, and is asking for submissions once more. Will this undercut any pressure on commercial publishers to reform their practices? Prediction is perhaps a fool’s game. But consider this a space for armchair prognostications! To be clear, what I am interested in is informed discussion of the likely ramifications for journal publishing, at least within our little field. What won’t pass moderation are comments on any of the personalities involved. Those are not our topic.

In the UK, we’re all waking up to the prospect of a new government. The election was an oddity: Labour has converted a modest 35% vote share into a whopping Parliamentary majority; the Tories did somewhat better than suggested, on around 24%, but have lost more than two-thirds of their MPs. (The final figures were closer than most opinion polls suggested). But the election was not a story of Labour advances: they did little to increase their vote share (and neither did the Lib Dems, whose seats went up dramatically, from 11 to probably 71, on a virtually unchanged vote share). The real story was a fracturing of the Conservative coalition, with some voters locally going to Labour, some locally to the Liberal Democrats, and many going to Reform. One big question over the next few years will be how the Tories respond to this fracturing of that coalition. While they have long been divided and in decline, they no longer have Brexit to paper over their differences. Will they tack left, or right? (Answer: Electoral rationality suggests left; the demographics of their membership suggests right). Another is how Labour will attempt to sustain what is in fact a rather fragile electoral advantage in the coming difficult years, given that many wins were narrow, and given that they already appear destined to disappoint many of their voters.

Any predictions, then, about what the next four or five years hold for either Labour or the Conservatives?

Later this month it will be World Biodiversity Day, and we will again celebrate the remarkable contributions that biodiversity makes to the resilience and productivity of the earth’s ecosystems. But it will also be a fitting time to face the continued failure of our institutions to grasp the scale of biodiversity loss. Or, if not to grasp it, to respond in any way adequately.

The figures speak for themselves. Since 1992, the Convention on Biological Diversity has been charged with agreeing global targets for biodiversity conservation. The Aichi Biodiversity Targets for 2011-2020, for instance, aimed to halve the rate of habitat loss, protect 17% of terrestrial ecosystems, and much else besides.

None of those targets were met. In response, the Kunming-Montreal Agreement recently agreed to protect 30% of ecosystems by 2030, to restore 30% of degraded ecosystems, and so on and so on and so on. On current projections, these targets are going to be missed too, by some distance. Like Canute ordering the tides to stop, it turns out that setting targets, by itself, achieves nothing. [click to continue…]

My new book is out this week (in the UK at least – but those elsewhere can read it right now online). I very much hope it will stimulate debate and discussion. Something that’s really struck me over recent years is that whereas a really rich literature exists on the global justice dimensions of the climate crisis (the term “climate justice” has pretty wide currency, right?), the same thing is just not true of the biodiversity crisis. But the biodiversity crisis seems to me to be at least in the same ballpark in terms of seriousness, and responses to it (“mitigation policies,” if you like) will, if policymakers (continue to) do a bad job, exacerbate all kinds of existing injustices. Thinking carefully about how we can respond fairly to the crisis seems to me to be one of the best uses we could find for our time. Or so I hope to persuade the potential readers!

As it happens I’ve been working on a paper on that strange inequality in attention between the two crises, with a couple of co-authors. I hope to update you all on that someday – but if anyone wants to speculate right now about why we’ve so badly dropped the ball on the biodiversity crisis, please do so here. For everyone else, a succinct description of the book is on the link above, and hopefully you’ll hear more in podcasts or book reviews in the months to come.

One of the most common arguments in debates about environmental crisis is: “it’s the rising population, stupid.” There are just too many human beings, using up too much stuff, leaving too little space for everyone else. The next step is often to gesture towards some kind of population control, or just to leave the issue hanging.

Whatever you think of that position, I’ve been struck lately by the increasing prominence of its diametric opposite. This holds that the problem we face – or will soon face, anyway – is that there are actually too few of us. Consider this opinion piece from the New York Times back in September (only the latest in a series of pieces the NYT has published on the topic, often with much the same message. Here’s one from 2021, and another from 2022). The real problem, it suggests, is that the human population will not only peak in 2085, but that it will then decline, perhaps precipitously. Within a couple of hundred years, there might be only be 2 billion of us left. The claim is not, note, that population will fall in one country or other – we’re familiar with that idea. The claim is that the global population is set to decline, perhaps precipitously.

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I tend to read a novel a week (53 this year). Academic friends sometimes appear amazed by that, but if I don’t read 20 or 30 pages at night, I’m not going to sleep. Add 10 pages here or there during the week, and it’s four a month. Here were my 10 favourites during 2023:

James Cahill, Tiepolo Blue
Hernan Diaz, Trust
Michelle De Kretser, Scary Monsters
Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle
Andrew Miller, Now We Shall Be Entirely Free
Rupert Thomson, Barcelona Dreaming
Samanta Schweblin, Fever Dream
Daniel Woodrell, The Death of Sweet Mister
Emily St John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility
Laurent Mauvignier, The Birthday Party

(I’m including contemporary novels only – I read excellent novels by Sam Selvon, Muriel Spark, Evelyn Waugh, etc, but it feels more appropriate for some reason to separate them out). Are there common themes to these novels? Not really, but it is striking that a number of them deal with themes of breakdown: personality breakdown (Tiepolo Blue, arguably Trust, Now We Shall Be Entirely Free), ecological breakdown (Scary Monsters, Sea of Tranquility). A few of them were split into apparently separate parts – some of them resolved those divisions, some didn’t (Barcelona Dreaming, Trust, Sea of Tranquility). Anyway, no doubt I missed many gems. Tell me about them!

I was meant to write a post this week, but then Hamas’s horrific assault on Israel happened, and now the civilian inhabitants of Gaza are once again living in fear (some of them have put themselves in the firing line; many have not). Since I have Arab friends and family, and have fond memories of Gaza, it all feels horribly close to home, and yet also impossibly distant. But of course, it has never been easy to know what to say about Gaza.

In the meantime, for a good example of what *not* to say about Gaza, you could try this piece. (In a nutshell, Yuval Noah Harari’s solution seems to be that Israel hands the problem over to a coalition of the willing who will administer Gaza colonial-style. I can envisage a few problems).

I’m a complete sucker for them. I don’t know why: you’d think twenty-odd years as an academic would have cured me of the idea there is anything romantic or glamorous about universities. But I keep going back to the trough. Some good recent ones: Julia May Jonas, Vladimir; R.O. Kwon, The Incendiaries; Rachel Henstra, The Red Word; Sally Rooney too. Further back, I loved On Beauty, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, The Marriage Plot. Even further, then of course The Secret History, Possession, all the David Lodges, Stoner, the whole caboodle.

How is my love for these books compatible with the fact that real-world academic life is increasingly crappy? It’s not obvious that they’re offering a rose-tinted version of reality to divert myself with – or not all of them, anyway. Should we expect to see fewer of them, now that academia is ever more precarious, bureaucratic, stressful? What the hell is going on with the Dark Academia craze? (I’ve dipped my toes in there too). Why are campus novels so enduringly popular, with academics and non-academics alike? Is it just that the setting WORKS so well, as a microcosm? What are their vices? And, well, which good ones have I missed?

I’m off to do a talk to mark World Ocean Day, so this is posted in haste. The ocean needs advocates. It’s our biggest ecosystem, probably our biggest carbon sink, a major source of oxygen. It regulates temperatures, and drives weather patterns. Hundreds of millions of people are nutritionally dependent on fish. But the ocean is also increasingly central to the global economy, and facing threats like never before.

Climate change – which drives ocean warming and acidification – is the big one. But plastic and nitrogen pollution and destructive fishing practices are also major threats. Fish farming has an enormous environmental footprint, and now a Spanish company has plans to open the world’s first octopus farm. Plans for mining the seabed are close to fruition – or, depending on your view, they may be many years away, exaggerated to boost the share price of a few mining corporations. But one way or another, the ocean is more and more central to the global economy.

Today is a day to reflect on the kind of ocean we want: an industrialised ocean devoid of much of its present life? Or an ocean in recovery, teeming with life once more? After the second world war (when U-boats patrolled the oceans and fishing boats were forced to stay at home in much of the world) scientists were amazed at the recovery the ocean’s ecosystems had made in just a few years. Will they get the chance of recovery again?

The goal of Net Zero emissions by 2050 has had a remarkable rise to the forefront of climate politics. Governments and corporations are falling over one another to commit to it. That in itself might sow some suspicion about how firm or flexible a target Net Zero is. In a recent piece with Duncan McLaren, we try to show that the flexibility of the goal is a real danger. We might be tempted to think that, once we all agree on Net Zero by 2050, we can breathe a collective sigh of relief (so long as we…ah…actually implement our various commitments).

But things are not so simple. Net Zero is an important part of the solution. It would involve any carbon emissions being balanced by carbon removals, and that should allow the climate to stabilise (i.e to stop warming further). But the precise temperature it stabilises at will depend on how much carbon we emit before 2050, and that is a question about which the Net Zero goal is, of course, silent.
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Reading novels is my life-blood; I can’t go more than a few hours between books. That said, this year was a slightly odd one in my reading career. First, the year leading up to August represented the home strait of a self-enforced 12 months of not buying books. So lots of reliance on the not-especially-good local library, and some re-reading. Second, this was a ridiculously busy year for me, and so my yearly total of 46 novels is slightly below par. With that said, here were my top 10:

Katie Kitamura, Intimacies
Natasha Brown, Assembly
Julia May Jonas, Vladimir
Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise
Mary Lawson, A Town Called Solace
Jordy Rosenberg, Confessions of the Fox
Tessa Hadley, Late in the Day
Julie Otsuka, When The Emperor Was Divine
Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Elizabeth Strout, Oh, William!
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