Category: Analysis

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Jonathan Este, Senior International Affairs Editor, Associate Editor, The Conversation

For the past few weeks the headlines about Gaza have focused on the hundreds of people who have been killed while queueing for food. The aid distribution system put in place in May, backed by the US and Israel and run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, has proved to be chaotic and allegedly resulted in violence, with both Israel Defense Forces personnel and armed Palestinian gangs blamed for killing about 1,000 people in the two months the new system has been operating.

Now the headlines are focusing on the growing number of people dying of starvation.

Harrowing reports from the Gaza Strip report almost daily on the children dying of malnutrition in hospitals and clinics that simply don’t have the food to keep them alive. Writing in the Guardian this week, a British volunteer surgeon working in one of Gaza’s hospitals, Nick Maynard, described patients who “deteriorate and die, not from their injuries, but because they are too malnourished to survive surgery”.

The UK and 27 other countries this week has condemned the “drip feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians” who are trying to get food and water. And yet, writes Simon Mabon, still the world’s leaders look on: “Most are apparently content to condemn – but little action has been taken.”

Mabon, a professor of international relations at Lancaster University, quotes the latest report from the IPC, which monitors food security in conflict situations. It estimates that 500,000 people in Gaza are considered to be facing “catastrophe”, while a further 1.1 million fall into the “emergency” risk category. Both categories anticipate a steadily rising death rate among civilians in Gaza.

So how can Israel’s allies apply pressure on Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to bring an end to the violence and allow Palestinian civilians access to the food, water and medical supplies they so desperately need?

Mabon canvasses a range of options. First of all, countries that have yet to recognise the state of Palestine can do so. It’s nonsense, Madon believes, to talk of a two-state solution – as the UK government does – when you haven’t actually recognised the second state in the equation.

Then they could stop selling arms to Israel. Many countries already have. But the US still issues export licenses for some weapons that are sold to Israel.

There are a plethora of other things world leaders could do to pressure Israel. Mabon recommends having a look at what the world did to isolate South Africa during the apartheid years, measures which eventually helped bring about meaningful change there.

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Read more:
Gaza is starving – how Israel’s allies can go beyond words and take meaningful action

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As for Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister is reported to be considering an early election. In previous months this looked like a move freighted with jeopardy. An election loss brought on by a disenchanted electorate, heartbroken at the hostage situation and exhausted by the conflict, would probably mean having to face the charges of corruption which have hung over him for more than five years.

But recent polls have suggested a bump in popularity following his 12-day campaign against Iran. Netanyahu is nothing if not a clever political manipulator. But Brian Brivati, a professor of contemporary history and human rights at Kingston University, believes that to have a chance of winning, the prime minister will need to fight a campaign on three narratives of his government’s success: securing the release of the hostages, defeating Hamas and delivering regional security. “It is a tall order,” Brivati concludes.

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Read more:
Israel: Netanyahu considering early election but can he convince people he’s winning the war?

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Anyone following the situation in Gaza over the past 18 months will have encountered Francesca Albanese, the UN’s special rapporteur for Palestine’s occupied territories. For three years she has monitored the human rights situation in Gaza and the West Bank, delivering trenchant criticism of Israel’s conduct and those who, by their inaction – and sometimes contrivance – have enabled it.

Earlier this months, the US government imposed sanctions on Albanese, because – as US secretary of state Marco Rubio insisted – she has engaged with the International Criminal Court (also subject to US sanctions) “in efforts to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute nationals of the United States or Israel”. Also she has written “threatening letters to dozens of entities worldwide, including major American companies”.

Alvina Hoffman, an expert in diplomatic affairs and human rights at SOAS, University of London, explains what a special rapporteur does and why their work is so valuable in the defence of human rights.

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Read more:
The US has sanctioned UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese – here’s why she’s the wrong target

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Dispatches from Ukraine

To Istanbul, where delegations from Russia and Ukraine met yesterday for their third round of face-to-face talks. All 40 minutes of them. There was another agreement of prisoner swaps and the two sides decided to set up some working groups to look into various political, military and humanitarian issues – but online rather in person.

The brevity of the talks came as no surprise to Stefan Wolff. Wolff, an expert in international security at the University of Birmingham who has provided commentary for The Conversation throughout the conflict in Ukraine, points out that both sides remain wedded to their maximalist war aims. For Russia, this is for Ukraine to accept Russia’s annexation of Crimea and four provinces of eastern Ukraine, a ban on Ukraine’s membership of Nato and a much reduced military capacity. For Ukraine, it is getting their territory back and Russian acceptance of their national sovereignty, meaning it gets to determine for itself what alliances it seeks.

Donald Trump has told Vladimir Putin that, if there’s no ceasefire in 50 days, he’ll apply harsh secondary sanctions on the countries buying Russian oil and that he plans to supply Ukraine with American weapons (via Nato’s European member states, that is). Wolff believes both sides will now play the waiting game. They will calculate their next move after September 2, when the 50 days run out, and when they know more about what the US president plans to do.

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Read more:
Russia-Ukraine talks: both sides play for time and wait for Donald Trump’s 50 days to run out

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Volodymyr Zelensky, meanwhile, faces pressure from his own people. There have been days of protest at his decision to bring two formerly independent anti-corruption organisations under the direct control of the government. He argues that this was necessary to prevent Russian infiltration, while critics are saying that the Ukrainian president has launched a power grab designed to prevent independent investigation of alleged corruption against people close to him.

Jenny Mathers says these protests, which involve people from all political shades, including people who have fought in the defence of Ukraine since 2022, some with visible injuries, represents a fracture of the “informal agreement between the government and society to show a united front to the world while the war continues”.

It’s not as if Zelensky is in clear and present danger of losing his job. His party holds a majority of seats in the Ukrainian parliament, so he governs without having to depend on coalition partners. And the country’s constitution prohibits the holding of elections in wartime – whatever Putin, who regularly insists that Zelensky is an illegitimate leader because he is governing past his term limit, might think. Plus his approval rating sits at 65%.

Zelensky has been quick to soften his stance on this. Mathers says that political corruption is a very sore point in Ukraine, where there was decades of it until the Maidan protests of 2013-14 unseated the pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych. As she writes here, “the ‘Revolution of Dignity’ that rejected Yanukovych’s leadership and his policies was also a resounding demonstration of the strength of Ukraine’s civil society and its determination to hold its elected officials to account. Zelensky would be rash not to heed that.

He also knows it’s important for him to present a squeaky clean image to his supporters in the west. So while the protests may not present an immediate threat to his own position, he knows that unless he acts to root out corruption in Ukraine, it’ll be a threat to the future of the country itself.

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Read more:
Ukrainian protests: Zelensky faces biggest threat to his presidency since taking power

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But ethicist Marcel Vondermassen from the University of Tübingen believes another recent decision by the Ukrainian government is storing up trouble for the future. Ukraine has recently announced its decision to pull out of the Ottawa convention, the treaty that forbids the use of anti-personnel landmines.

In doing so, he’s following the example of Finland, Poland, Lithuania and Estonia which have all also quite the treaty in recent months for fear of Russian aggression.

But as Vondermassen points out, landmines don’t usually switch themselves off when a conflict ends and people are still being killed an maimed in former conflict zones around the world. Often it is farmers at work or children at play who are the victims. If other ways to protect countries from aggression aren’t pursued, as he puts it, in future decades we’ll still be “counting thousands of child casualties … from the landmines laid in the 2020s”.

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Read more:
Ukraine joins other Russian neighbours in quitting landmines treaty: another deadly legacy in the making

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Thailand-Cambodia: centuries-old dispute flares again

A dispute between the two south-east Asian countries that has been simmering since May flared into life yesterday when five Thai soldiers patrolling the border region were injured after stepping on a landmine – the second such incident in the past week. Both countries have sealed their border and there have been tit-for-tat ambassadorial expulsions.

Cambodia fired rockets and artillery into Thailand, killing 12 civilians. Thailand in turn has launched airstrikes against Cambodia. Both countries are blaming the other for starting it.

Petra Alderman, an expert in south-east Asian politics from London School of Economics and Political Science, traces the origins of this row, which go back to the colonial era in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

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Read more:
Thailand and Cambodia’s escalating conflict has roots in century-old border dispute

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– ref. Gaza is starving: what actions can Israel’s allies take? – https://theconversation.com/gaza-is-starving-what-actions-can-israels-allies-take-261894

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Yvonne Reddick, Reader in English Literature and Creative Writing, University of Lancashire

“Far over the misty mountains cold,” Dad read. Every evening before my light was turned out, he read me a story about a hobbit who left his comfortable burrow to journey to the Lonely Mountain. Searching for gold at the mountain’s roots, talking to eagles, scaring wolves off by starting a forest fire, tricking a dragon: these were the tales he read to me.

We lived in a granite house on the western edge of Aberdeen. Mum planted rhubarb and runner beans in the garden. Summer holidays meant going to Aviemore, in the lap of the Cairngorm mountains. We’d stay in a wooden chalet, where knots in the pine planks looked down at me like the eyes of owls. We’d always walk near the gentle hill of Craigellachie, fledged with silver birches. I learnt to recognise the mountains: Braeriach with its three scooped-out corries, Cairngorm scarred with ski runs.

Dad knew how to disappear. Some weeks, he’d leave before dawn to take the helicopter out to the North Sea oil platforms. During summer weekends, he’d vanish for the summits of those rounded Cairngorm hills. One day, he marched in through the door with his muddy boots still on, and hoisted his battered blue Berghaus backpack onto the kitchen table, grinning:

I’ve got a surprise for you.

What is it?

He hefted out a football-sized lump of mountain quartz and put it on the table in front of me. It shone white as a glacier.

Dad’s “Munro Book” was a gift from my mum, given shortly after I was born. It was always referred to as the Munro Book, never by its title, and it detailed all of Scotland’s peaks over 3,000 feet high – first charted by the tweedy Victorian baronet, Sir Hugh Munro. Getting to the top of all 282 of them is a popular challenge for hikers. For dad, it was an obsession.

Dad was a hillwalker, but the Munro Book was written by mountaineers. It contained sentences such as: “A pleasantly airy scramble, for which some might prefer the security of a rope.” (I only ever saw Dad attempting a climbing wall once, when the two of us clambered up – and slithered off – orange and green plastic holds at a gym in Scotland.)

He never acquired the paraphernalia that winter hikers (or walkers who fancy themselves as climbers) accumulate: crampons, ice axes, ropes, the ironmongery of nut-keys, hexes and cams. However, he did claim that he scrambled up Ben More on the Isle of Mull via a route he termed “the wrong one”. It was one of his favourite stories.

The Munro Book shared bookshelves with Mountaincraft and Leadership, The Pennine Way, The South Downs Way, The Northern Fells, and 30 battered, pink Ordnance Survey maps in miles and feet.

From the age of nine, dad dragged me out with him. At first, I’d whine about the mud and midges. Later, I felt my heart lifting when I reached a cairn and could see as far as Mull and Skye. I learnt to name the whaleback of Ben Nevis.

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Dad kept a weather-eye on the forecasts. His kit list included: cheese-and-pickle sandwiches; an itchy wool balaclava; a Berghaus waterproof; a survival blanket; a map, compass and GPS; spare batteries in case the ones in the GPS went flat; a second compass, in case the first compass malfunctioned; and the phone number of Mountain Rescue. All of this was crammed into the ancient blue rucksack.

Dad’s love of the outdoors developed alongside his work as an oil reservoir engineer. There are North Sea oilfields named Everest, Banff, Cairngorm and Munro. And the ease with which Dad read charts of mountains and valleys deep below the sea translated into the mathematical precision with which he navigated with map, compass and GPS.

When I was old enough to read for myself, I read The Hobbit and longed to journey through the Misty Mountains: “The mountain smoked beneath the Moon … The trees like torches blazing bright.” I’d never seen a forest fire, but even in rainy Scotland, there were signs that blazes were becoming more frequent. Just south of Loch an Eilein (the loch with the island), you came across bunches of strange brooms and paddles by the path: fire beaters, in case the heather caught alight. Aviemore was a busy ski resort in winter, but the snowline was inching higher and higher up the mountains.

I never worried about Dad. Even when he grumbled about tightness in his chest before his last holiday in the Cairngorms, it never occurred to me that the path could run out so soon.

Peak oil

Mountains rise skywards when one of Earth’s plates collides against another. Deep in the guts of great ranges, rocks fold and buckle. Ancient seabeds, turned to stone, are heaved upwards. The same rock-fold, the anticline, can forge mountains and harbour oil.

The Rockies stand on the largest reservoir of untapped shale oil in the world. The richest oilfields west of Russia are near the Carpathians. Iran’s oil and gas deposits lie at the feet of the Zagros, the high range that transects the country from north-west to south-east. North Sea oilfields are named for Highland mountains: Beinn, Schiehallion, Foinaven.

I look up a 3D schematic of an oil deposit, not unlike the one pictured below. It reminds me of a miniature massif: oil and gas seeping upwards through rock, resembling ice-falls in reverse. In place of a summit scarved with cloud, there’s a pointed deposit of trapped methane gas.

The next zone down, where a mountain’s glaciers would be, is an area on the diagram that is coloured green, showing oil. I look at a seismology map – the kind Mum used to work on in Oman. This time, the image shows a vertical cross-section through layers of rock. Its contours are shallower – more hillock than Himalayan peak. I think of knolls and hill forts – Arnside Knott on the Lancashire coast, or Torside on the shoulder of Bleaklow in the Peaks.

Mountains and petroleum share a similar vocabulary. Exploration, frontiers, surveying. I look at graphs of peak oil production and note coincidences with the so-called golden age of mountaineering. 1854-1865: the dawn of a prolific decade of Alpine mountaineering, the time of Edward Whymper and the Matterhorn disaster. 1859: the drilling of the first oil well by the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company in Titusville. The 1950s and ’60s saw western companies exploiting deposits in the Middle East and South America, leading to my grandfather’s time working in Venezuela and Iran. Expansion to the Earth’s highest peaks; drilling into its rocky depths.

Richard Bass, the first man to climb the “Seven Summits” – the highest peaks on each continent – ran a Texan oil-and-gas business. Black gold funded Bass’s Snowbird ski resort in Utah. The first rope access workers on North Sea oil platforms were climbers and cavers.

Many of dad’s friends found that a youthful passion for rock climbing gave them an intimate knowledge of the character of different kinds of stone, or that reading maps translated easily into mapping the deep layers of Earth’s bedrock. For a geology or engineering graduate with an enjoyment of adventure and a love of travel, a career in oil exploration was an exciting and well-paid career path.

But expanding oil frontiers and summiting the world’s highest peaks bring similar controversies. It is no coincidence that mountaineering exploits and oil extraction share common ground with colonialism, foreign control, nation-building and struggles for self-rule. Local and Indigenous people are determined to protect their land, or want a stake in the wealth of an industry whose history is mired in colonial exploitation.

I think of the far-north of Canada and Alaska – of Athabasca people either fierce in their resistance to the incursions of oil companies under the ice, or wanting their fair share of the industry’s colossal profits. Sherpas, Sherpanis and Nepalis reclaiming Mount Everest after decades of western exploitation, smashing the time records for summit successes.

Murky soot and tiny microplastics from the oil industry touch even the shining Alpine summits that I love. They taint the high snows of Everest. The cataclysmic impact of fires, blowouts and everyday fossil-fuel burning strips them of their ice. Oil is there in the mountains of plastic waste I saw on the outskirts of Himalayan towns. And perhaps the most explosive place where fossil fuels meet mountains is Azerbaijan’s Yanar Dag, which dad visited in 2002 on the back of a drunken horse.

Mountain of Fire

Nightfall in the countryside near Baku. The horses hung their heads in the stalls. Bahram the guide poured beer on their oats. They shook themselves awake, started munching. Dad hauled himself into the stirrups and thudded into the saddle like a sack of gravel: “Don’t drink and ride!” The horses began the slow plod uphill.

Rocks and thirsty thorn-scrub. A wooden bridge over a parched river. Bahram paused, dismounted, lit a cigarette and flicked the ash towards the riverbed. It touched off flame.

Wink of fire through twilight. Whiff of gasoline on the breeze. Flames surged from a blackened fissure in the rocks. Yanar Dag means Mountain of Fire. This fissure has burned for 3,000 years at least. People raised temples where priests tend eternal fires. Did fires like this inspire Zoroastrianism, one of the world’s most ancient faiths? I look up the prophet Zarathustra, glance through Nietzche’s imagining of his words. I read about Zoroastrian fire rituals and trial by flame. I read about sacred fire, symbolising the light of the deity and the illuminated mind.

Dad worked in the Caspian region when I was a teenager, flying to Baku for one week every month. He admired the Flame Tower skyscrapers, relished lamb-and-rice plov. Deals were toasted with copious quantities of vodka. I heard about Shah Deniz, the King of the Sea, a gargantuan gas field under fathoms of rock and water.

Dad longed to hike the ochre-red foothills of the Caucasus, and loved spinning yarns about “Hell’s Doorway”, the crater over a natural gas deposit that burst into flames after a Russian drilling rig collapsed. At garden parties for his colleagues back in the Home Counties, I met Bahram and Mehtab, their daughters Farah and Donya.

The Caspian seabed was tough drilling. One of Dad’s Azeri colleagues showed me a map of the bedrock, riddled with faults. Dad enjoyed the reservoir engineering challenge this posed, in much the same way he relished building Meccano or getting my second-hand Scalextric cars to work.

Forty-eight billion barrels lie under the world’s largest inland water-body. The Caspian is split into four basins; the most southerly is the deepest, divided from the others by the Apsheron Ridge. This anticline linked to the Caucasus Mountains spans the entire Caspian from Baku to Turkmenistan. The Caspian was formed by a complex interplay of plates shifting and rifting.

One of the greatest hazards for oil exploration in the region – apart from the earthquakes – are the mud volcanoes. Found near petroleum deposits and mountainous regions, these bizarre formations belch up methane, creating mucky splatter cones. They may bubble up under a body of water, or erupt on land. The rounder ones on land are known as “mud domes”; the flatter ones are sometimes referred to as “mud pies”.

Dad loved telling stories about them. Soviet scientists wanted to predict their habits, proposing that variable water levels in the Caspian, and even sunspots, might trigger their eruptions. Mud volcanoes are found in the Carpathians, the Caucasus, California, and even in the Gulf of Mexico. Dashli Island in the Caspian Sea is one giant mud volcano which exploded near an oil platform in 2021, erupting flames 500 metres high.

The Caspian region is one of the oldest oil-producing areas in the world. Troops of the emperor Cyrus the Great used Baku’s oil as an incendiary weapon. Caspian oil lit the way for Alexander the Great’s soldiers. Medieval Arab historians and travellers noted the region’s dependence on oil for heating and trade. An inscription from 1593 commemorates a manually-dug oil well near Baku.

Baku has been an oil town for centuries. An enterprising Azeri merchant drilled two oil wells in the Caspian in 1803, likely the world’s first offshore extraction, although a storm made short work of them in 1825. Robert Nobel arrived in Baku in 1873, tasked with finding walnut trees for wood to build rifles for the tsar’s army; instead, he decided to buy an oil refinery. Grainy sepia images of Russian oil production show forests of wooden derricks. In 1898, Franco-Russian filmmaker Alexandre Mishon filmed gushers and blowouts. Russian production of Azeri oil was the most prolific petroleum source on the planet from 1899 to 1901.

Azerbaijan is the birthplace of many innovations: the first mechanically drilled oil-wells, the first pipelines, the first tankers. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, competition for oil production partnerships in newly independent Azerbaijan was intense. A deal with BP in 1992 began three decades of exploration and drilling. The offshore platforms became enormous: photos show helipads, flarestacks, workers’ quarters, tangles of pipework. As the shallower oil reserves were exhausted, drilling became more ambitious. The Deepwater Gunashli platform began to pump petroleum from 175 metres below the water’s surface.

After “peak oil” – the height of demand and production – economists predict that we are entering the age of “tough oil”. Deep water, distant locations, greater danger. The oil reserves that dad and his colleagues explored were already becoming increasingly hazardous and hard to reach.

This article was a runner up in The Conversation Prize for writers, run in partnership with Faber and Curtis Brown.

Yvonne Reddick receives funding from a Leverhulme Trust International Fellowship, hosted at UCLA.

– ref. Mountains of fire: what hillwalking with my father taught me about the origins of oil exploration – https://theconversation.com/mountains-of-fire-what-hillwalking-with-my-father-taught-me-about-the-origins-of-oil-exploration-250943

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Mathelinda Nabugodi, Lecturer in Comparative Literature, UCL

According to one strand of history, slavery was abolished when Europeans found their conscience. According to another, it was abolished when it stopped being profitable. Both approaches tend to underplay the significance of Black resistance.

In a revolution that upended ideas about white superiority, the enslaved Black people of the French Caribbean colony Saint-Domingue liberated themselves to create Haiti, the first free Black nation in the Americas. The country was established in 1804, after more than a decade of armed struggle. This historic victory is part of a long series of violent rebellions that regularly shook the Caribbean islands and undermined the transatlantic slave economy.

These rebellions helped make the “slavery question” one of the most contested political issues of its time. Philosophers and statesmen balanced the wrongs of enslavement against the huge profits to be made for individual merchants and for nations as a whole. One after the other, European nations abolished first the trade in enslaved people and later slavery itself.

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Yet, even in abolition, European nations kept a close eye on their rivals. Britain’s abolition of the slave trade was followed by the creation of a West Africa Squadron of the Royal Navy. Its task was to interrupt the trade of other nations by capturing their slave ships and “liberating” their African captives.

These “liberated Africans” were given the choice of working for the Royal Navy or contributing to Britain’s colonisation of Sierra Leone. None of them were allowed to return home.

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Read more:
Three graphic novels that address the history of slavery – and commemorate resistance

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While this was going on, romanticism spread throughout Europe. It was a movement that affected every aspect of culture – art, literature, music, philosophy, science and politics. It centred on the idealisation of human freedom in all its forms. Old monarchies were to be swept away by democratic revolutions, stale aesthetic forms by sublime feeling, constrictive gender norms by free love.

The romantic drive for freedom is generally interpreted in relation to the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. Both symbolise a shift of power from the old nobility to the new bourgeoisie (or middle classes) and a concurrent shift from agrarian to urban economies. Romantic freedom is rarely read in the context of the slavery question.

My new book, The Trembling Hand, addresses this omission. It explores how enslavement shaped European culture in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. I trace how profits made from slavery supported literary work. I analyse how writers absorbed and refracted ideas about Africans that emerged in the public debate around slavery. Above all, I try to recover the presence of Black people, hovering at the edges of the archive.

How do we teach this history?

The links between ongoing Black insurrection in the Caribbean and the romantic obsession with freedom were felt by writers and artists at the time. But they have been obscured by the ways in which this period has traditionally been taught in schools and universities.

Today, the status quo is beginning to shift. In response to calls to decolonise and diversify the curriculum, a new canon of Black romantic writing is beginning to be taught. It’s centred on a handful of authors, especially Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano, as well as the unknown author of the novel The Woman of Colour (1808). Their presence in the curriculum is definitely an improvement – yet it also raises some problems.

To study Black writing of the romantic period inevitably means to study the history of slavery. This is because the only Afro-diasporic people who wrote in English in the 18th and 19th centuries had acquired the language in context of the transatlantic slave economy. It is very hard, if not impossible, to find a Black bildungsroman, gothic romance, or epic poem.

This is a historical fact. Yet it also means that only focusing on works published by Black authors risks playing into the notion that Black people’s only contribution to history was as “slaves”. This erases the multifaceted ways in which Afro-diasporic peoples affected the course of European history in the 18th and 19th centuries. Not only as “slaves” but also as cultural agents in their own right.

This points to the problem of the archive: its gaps and silences, but also its violent distortions.

Many of the archives that we have access to were created by enslavers. They had a vested interest in perpetuating the slave system even as it was being challenged by Black rebels and abolitionists. They threw all their rhetorical force at demonising Black people so as to justify enslavement.

Literature, alongside art, philosophy and the social and natural sciences contributed to spreading these ideas. These writings were instrumental in shaping public understanding about race, enslavement and empire.

We need to understand how literary writers contributed to constructing a vision of Britain as an imperial power entitled to subjugate foreign peoples and extract their resources.

How does the brutal violence of colonisation come to seem like a reasonable activity for a civilised nation to engage in? How does the idea that white Europeans have a “natural” right to rule over the whole world become widely accepted? Or the idea that people with a darker skin tone are born to serve? Or the idea that being a European power involves having colonies outside of Europe?

These questions prompt us, as readers interested in decolonising and diversifying the teaching of English literature, to turn our gaze on white authors. Especially those major authors whose work had an “impact” on their society. In addition to studying marginalised voices, we need to interrogate the ideas about race that have been created and propagated through canonical literature.

As these works become part of our national heritage, for example by being selected to be taught in schools, so the racial prejudice they harbour become wired into our own minds. Some of the racist ideas that I find in the historical archive are intimately familiar from my own experience.

That’s why I set out to write a new history of romanticism, one that reckons with the impact of the transatlantic slave economy on British culture – an impact so strong that it still resonates today.

This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something from bookshop.org The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

Mathelinda Nabugodi has received funding from The Leverhulme Trust, The Deborah Rogers Foundation, and the Whiting Foundation.

– ref. My new history of romanticism shows how enslavement shaped European culture – https://theconversation.com/my-new-history-of-romanticism-shows-how-enslavement-shaped-european-culture-261780

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Georgia MacMillan, PhD Scholar – Research Ireland Employment Based Scheme, University of Galway

Without a view of the stars at night, Don McLean would never have been able to write Vincent and Vincent van Gogh would not have painted Starry Night. Viewing a sky full of stars is part of what makes us human. The light from stars has travelled thousands of miles to reach our eyes.

But now, most Europeans live under unnaturally bright night skies. That ancient starlight is now diluted by human-made light pollution.

So where is all this extra light coming from? A recent German study reveals that, contrary to common assumption, public street lighting may not be the biggest cause of light pollution. The sources are closer to home. Improved energy efficiencies in LED technology means that artificial light is now cheaper than ever to run. As a result, people are lighting up front doors, sheds and garden paths like never before.

Artificial light at night has undoubtedly revolutionised our productivity and transformed our social environment as the sun sets. However, when used excessively or inappropriately, artificial light at night becomes light pollution. This changes our outdoor spaces by creating daytime conditions at night.

In particular, LEDs emitting high levels of harsh blue-white light are known to scatter more widely into the atmosphere, increasing levels of light pollution, which can have unintended consequences by interrupting our sleep cycles and circadian rhythms and disrupting nature at night.

Just one lamp can attract hundreds of insects, many of them important nocturnal pollinators, away from their natural environment, every single night. Once trapped in what’s called the “vacuum cleaner effect” of artificial light, scientists estimate that over 30% of these insects will die before dawn from exhaustion or predation. This disrupts the balance of nocturnal ecosystems.

The German researchers used a specially developed mobile app called NightLights to survey sources of light at night. More than 250 citizen scientists surveyed their local surroundings. The results challenged common assumptions that streetlights are the primary contributor to urban light pollution, and showed that residential, commercial and other non-street lighting sources play a significant role in brightening our night skies.

In Ireland, we are coordinating similar surveys as part of a pilot programme to raise awareness of light pollution. Some of the most noticeable sources of night light include home security lights being angled up instead of down, garden runway lights over-illuminating pathways throughout the night and considerable light spilling from large windows without blinds or curtains.

Another growing issue in Ireland is the increasing intensity of illuminated sports grounds, often reported to the environmental non-profit group Dark Sky Ireland by concerned residents.

These issues can be easily resolved. Light pollution is just about the simplest of all pollutants to fix. Our study focuses on County Mayo’s Dark Sky Park, a place where naturally dark skies are protected and internationally recognised as a cherished form of natural heritage. We examined the role of dark sky tourism and community engagement in addressing light pollution. By making some simple changes to the type of light and being a little more judicious about how it is used, the level of unnecessary light currently polluting our night skies can be reduced.

Seeing the light

The community of Newport, County Mayo, has led the way in making these changes with some impressive results. Light pollution over the town of Newport has been reduced by 50% by redesigning the town’s lighting scheme – this award-winning project focused on replacing excessive flood lighting on heritage and architectural structures with a sensitively designed lighting scheme to enhance the town’s nightscape. As a feature of this initiative, the beautiful stained glass window at St Patrick’s Church in Newport, created by 20th-century artist Harry Clarke is delicately interpreted with light at night.

Lighting solutions that help protect dark skies include angling outdoor lights downwards and using shielded lamps to avoid illuminating the sky. Only direct light towards the area that needs to be lit, not into a neighbour’s garden or home. Use a visually warmer colour of light (such as amber) to reduce glare and improve conditions for wildlife and natural sleep cycles. Employing timers ensures that lights are only switched on when needed.

By making small changes to how we light our homes and gardens at night, the beauty of a starry night can be restored for generations to come.

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Georgia MacMillan is affiliated with Dark Sky Ireland as a voluntary director (unpaid). Dark Sky Ireland is a non-profit CLG.

Marie Mahon receives funding from Horizon Europe

I am the Lead PI for the Research Ireland funded PhD project for Georgia McMillan. While I don’t directly receive/benefit the funds I have a role in managing them for Georgia.

– ref. Street lamps aren’t the only form of artificial light pollution – here’s how to create darker nights – https://theconversation.com/street-lamps-arent-the-only-form-of-artificial-light-pollution-heres-how-to-create-darker-nights-260514