Top 5 Edward Abbey Books

Anyone reading this blog who has heard of Edward Abbey will probably know him for one thing: he wrote the book The Monkey Wrench Gang and so gave rise to the environmental group Earth First!

However, there's a lot more to Abbey than just the guy who invented monkey wrenching, and a lot more to read by him than just the Monkey Wrench Gang, although that is very much worth reading. In fact, Abbey is not only my favourite author from what we can broadly call the American Right, he's one of my favourite nature authors from the New World. Considering the country has produced Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Grey Owl and Aldo Leopold that's high praise. And, yes, I do know Muir was born in Scotland and that Grey Owl was actually a bloke called Archie from Hastings!

1. The Brave Cowboy (1956)

Abbey's first real novel, and his best. To people who come to Abbey via The Monkey Wrench Gang this novel explains exactly where he is coming from. The book is a 'modern' Western, although the term is a little strange as it was written more than sixty years ago, meaning the novel is set nearer in time to the real Old West than the present day. Abbey is not a part of the environmental movement, but he was intimately connected to what was once the American Frontier, especially the deserts of the southwest.

The hero of the book, John W 'Jack' Burns is a cowboy loner who scrapes a living herding sheep. He lives simply in the desert, cutting fences and refusing to carry any form of identification. When his friend Paul Bondi, a more conventional kind of anarchist, is arrested for refusing the draft, Burns has the cunning plan of getting himself arrested so he can bust them both out of jail. Bondi, quite sensibly, decides this plan is mad, so Burns has to make his escape on his own, pursued by the police and the US Air Force. The mountains are a challenge he and his horse can deal with, but the four-lane freeway is not.

The novel is taunter than The Monkey Wrench Gang. The single protagonist, and the struggle against modernity being reduced to one man and his horse against the system, makes it a better story. I think it's the best thing Abbey ever wrote. It's also the only Abbey book to be mad into a film. Called Lonely Are The Brave it starred Kirk Douglas's chin as Jack Burns, and is apparently one of the actor's favourite movies. Considering what else he's been in that's quite a compliment.

2. Fire On The Mountain (1962)

Abbey is of the American Right. However, whilst the likes of John Wayne saw no contradiction between the Western frontiersman defending his home, and the Green Beret torching those of the Vietnamese, Abbey did. His nearest literary contemporary was the sci-fi writer Bob Heinlein. If The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress had been set in Utah rather than space it could have been an Edward Abbey book. However, for Heinlein, the US government could do no wrong. For Abbey it could, and usually did. Fire on the Mountain is interesting because it is about the confrontation between two American institutions that other Right Wing writers praise equally with no contradiction: the frontier rancher and the US Air Force.

The plot is paper thin, and the ending downbeat, which makes it the weakest novel on this list. It is enhanced slightly by the plot device of the story being told through the eyes of a child, and somewhat more substantially by Abbey's exploration of the issues raised, and his peerless description of the natural beauty of the American southwestern. To most people's eyes the desert where the hero makes his home is a poor place to live, and the city where the USAF wants him to move to is a paradise, but in Abbey's accomplished hands this paradigm is reversed so, although it is the worst book in this list, it is still worth reading.

3. Desert Solitaire (1968)

As you've probably seen by now, Abbey's chief virtue is his ability to write about the desert of the American southwest in mythic terms. He almost doesn't need a plot for his stories. This theorem is proved by his best non-fiction work, Desert Solitaire. Using incidents in his life whilst working for the National Park Service in the fifties, Abbey describes rivers, deserts, plants, animals and visitors to the Arches National Park where he worked. The result is some of the most beautiful nature writing in American literature, and a warning of the erosion of the wilderness by humans. 

The longest chapter concerns a journey down the Glen Canyon shortly before it was plugged by the Glen Canyon Dam. This monstrosity has a special place in US environmental history. In the early 1950s David Brower and the Sierra Club fought desperately against the construction of dams at Echo Park and Glen Canyon. They won against the battle against the first and thought they'd won a major success, until they actually had a look at Glen Canyon. Brower, who would subsequently found Friends of the Earth, was told "Echo doesn't hold a candle to Glen Canyon", and Abbey would agree. The dam appears in several of his subsequent books and the monkey wrench gang spend some time trying to figure out how to destroy it. Which, of course, brings us onto that book.

4. The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975)

So, this is it, the one people have heard of, the story that gave us 'monkey wrenching' and started Earth First! What's it like as a book?

Well, it's a bit flabby. There's no real plan to what the Gang do, and no real antagonists that they're up against, apart from some fairly lightweight local vigilantes. However, as a guide to how to take radical direct action it's pretty good. A better question though is who the Monkey Wrench Gang are, and they are an odd bunch.

First, you have Doc Sarvis, a surgeon by day, and arsonist by night, who at the start of the story is burning down the billboards that screen the freeway from the desert. His money bankrolls the gang, and he also provides the moral compass, insisting that no-one is killed or injured. Sarvis only just counts as an intellectual, but even so he's an unusual character for an Abbey novel. However, he's no fan of technology either, being unable to even drive.

Next, there's Bonnie Abbzug, who's even less of a typical Abbey creation. Firstly, she's female, and secondly, she's a complete hippy. She's also in a relationship with Doc, even though he's more than two decades older. You suspect there's a bit of wish fulfilment here, but her role in the quartet is to be the foil to the men, who usually ignore what she has to say. You can't really argue Abbey was a feminist.

Then there's Seldom Seen Smith, the only proper local. A 'Jack' Mormon, Seldom Seen is the outdoorsman of the party. His survival skills keep the gang alive, and he is also the one who most often waxes poetic about the beauty of the desert. In this respect he is speaking in the author's voice.

Finally, there's George Washington Hayduke. He not only has a patriotic name, he's done his patriotic duty and served in Vietnam with the Green Berets. It's Hayduke's military skills that the gang use in their sabotage missions, but, he's no John Wayne. Captured by the enemy in Vietnam, Hayduke went native and took their side, an American Viet Cong. Bob Henlein might write about lunar colonists acting like the Viet Cong, but only Abbey wrote about one of America's own becoming one. Hayduke, alone amongst the gang, is based on a real person, Abbey's friend Doug Peacock, a man who, after serving as a special forces medic in Vietnam, turned his back on human beings and took to hanging out in the woods with grizzly bears.

The gang's rampage around the desert is fairly random, and they attack road construction equipment, mining gear and any bulldozer they find. They are helped by the fact that all the plant they come across is unlocked and unguarded. If only real ecotage was so easy! The beauty of the American Southwest is vividly described, of course, but this is no sermon on saving the planet. The book spends a lot more time on how the gang carry out their sabotage than the why. This is even more apparent at the end, when some of the gang are caught and dragged before the authorities. You'd expect some dramatic courtroom showdown, in which the folly of trashing the wilderness is brutally described. Instead, the gang plead the fifth, deny everything, and plea bargain their way to minimum sentences. This is not the Gandhi way.

This novel can be a bit hard to understand then if you are expecting a Walden or a Silent Spring. However, it's more explicable of you see the Robert Crumb illustrations, like the one above. This book is, at heart, a Western, only a Western were the outlaws are the heroes.

5. Hayduke Lives! (1990)

Four years after the Monkey Wrench Gang, a disillusioned former executive of the Sierra Club, called George Forman, broke away from the mainstream environment movement to form the radical environmental group Earth First!. Like the monkey wrench gang, Earth First! would carry out acts of covert ecotage. Like the gang, they would deny everything if caught. In due course Earth First! would evolve and spread around the world, becoming in the process more liberal in its attitudes and broader in its tactics, but in the early days it was very much in Abbey's image. Their official motto was "Back to the Pleistocene". Their unofficial motto was "Rednecks for wilderness".

Abbey was a hero of the group, and a regular at their yearly Rendezvous. However, as his involvement in activism grew, his writing diminished. But he wasn't done yet, either with books or the gang. In 1990 the foursome returned, in the sequel Hayduke Lives!

Sequels to great books are usually disappointments, but surprisingly, Hayduke Lives! isn't. In many ways it's actually better than the original. The plot is a lot tighter, for a start, and unlike the scattergun approach of the first book, there is a single antagonist - the giant drag chain digger called the GEM that is coming to despoil the desert.

Perhaps what's more interesting is the characters that pop up in the book. As well as the return of the gang, an unnamed cowboy turns up to help them, who is almost certainly Burns from Brave Cowboy. There is also an appearance by the real Earth First!, mostly in the form of fictional representatives of the real organisation, although EF! founder Dave Foreman has a cameo. They are peripheral to the main plot, but it's clear from the way they are written that Abbey really loves his children. It's fortunate perhaps that they are so peripheral, as they are so god-like in their beauty and bravery that they would have unbalance the book. There is also, at the very end, a cameo by a real environmentalist. I won't spoil the surprise, but you can probably guess their name. Unfortunately, along the way, Abbey commits the only unpardonable sin of his career.

Amongst the scenes in the book is a visit to an Earth First! Rendezvous. Bernie Mushkin, a blowhard who calls the Earth First!ers fascists, before getting into his car and heading back east. Mushkin was a caricature of Murray Bookchin, whose theory of social ecology connected the destruction of the environment to the oppression of humans. Bookchin could be a pretty combative character, and in criticising some of the more misanthropic aspects of Earth First! Bookchin had called Dave Foreman "a patently anti-humanist and macho mountain man" pedalling "a crude eco-brutalism".

The real Bookchin, though, was nothing like Munchkin, the East Coast corporate environmentalist more at home in committee rooms of Washington DC than the forests of Washington State. He'd grown up in the Bronx, the son of Jewish immigrants, and his European family had all been exterminated by the Nazis. He'd first earnt his activist credentials as a union organiser in a car factory. However, despite his urban upbringing, he was a keen trail walker and was almost as at home in the wilderness as Abbey. 

A few months before Hayduke Lives! came out, Bookchin had had a debate with Dave Foreman. It turned out they had more in common with each other than differences, and Bookchin was able to say he stands "shoulder to shoulder with everyone in Earth First! who is trying to save the wilderness". However, by 1990, it was far from clear if Earth First! stood shoulder to shoulder with Foreman and Abbey. The racism and sexism of the 'rednecks for wilderness' was being challenged by younger activists, and the frontier libertarianism was being replaced by proper anarchist thinking. The late Judi Bari, who was being blown up by a bomb planted either by, or with the connivance of, the FBI at about the time the book came out said that Earth First! wasn't just a bunch of monkey wrenchers but "a social change movement". The world had moved on and Abbey had become a bit of a dinosaur.

But then Abbey had never really fitted in to anyone's politics. He was encouraging people to burn their draft cards nearly two decades before the Vietnam War. He would throw beer cans out of his car as he drove along, arguing that the road had already destroyed the wilderness. He said racist things about Mexicans, but suggested that each deported illegal be given a rifle and a thousand rounds of ammunition, in the hope that they would overthrown the oppressive governments they were fleeing. 

Hayduke Lives! was his last work, published after he'd gone the way of the dinosaurs. By the time it was in the shops his friends had buried his body in the Arizona desert, so he could become part of the wilderness he loved. He was man who loved the vanishing American frontier for what it really was, not what people made it, and he wrote about it in a way few others had managed. 

If you haven't read one of his books yet, then please do so. 

How We Ended Fracking In The UK

Preese Hall

On April Fools Day 2011 an earthquake hit east Lancashire. Registering 2.3 on the Richter scale, it caused traffic lights to topple and a railway bridge to crack. The police station in Blackpool shook, even as worried homeowners rang in thinking they were being burgled. 

The cause of the quake was pressure testing at a fracking well at Preese Hall, Lancashire. The government immediately announced a two-year moratorium, and the people of Britain learnt a new word. Cuadrilla Resources, the company concerned, said that this was nothing to worry about. What they didn't reveal at the time was that the quake had fractured their drill. The moratorium was essentially superfluous. They wouldn't be doing any drilling again at Preese Hall, or anywhere else, for a while. 

For most people, even most environmental activists, this was the first they had heard of fracking. Before then it had been something on the periphery of our awareness. Most serious ecologists were aware that the dash for gas, which had allowed Mrs Thatcher to close the coal mines, and BP to announce they were the good guys now, was not a good thing. It had slightly reduced carbon dioxide emissions, but at the cost of a new generation of fossil fuel infrastructure that would keep last thirty years or more. That fracking was something more than a new type of gas was probably lost on most of us at that time.

Balcombe

If the Lancashire quakes woke a lot of people up to the issue, it was events in West Sussex in the summer of 2013 that put fracking firmly in the centre of protest in the UK. Successful protests require three factors: a cause, protesters and a location. The Lancashire earthquakes had moved fracking up the list of causes, but this was not the only concerns with fracking. This was a new fossil fuel, and extracting it contaminated the air and the groundwater. 50 ton lorries would industrialise quiet English villages. Fracking was a cause that ticked a lot of boxes

Protesters, though, aren't as easy to find as you think. There would always be locals who don't want it in their back yard, but they would require help to make their voices heard. Bigger green groups could send out teams to do stunts, but people prepared to camp out 24 hours a day, seven days a week to stop something are pretty rare. However, barely a year before the test rig arrived in Balcombe in July 2013, the Occupy London protests had come to an end, and some of those people still wanted to change the world. 

Environmental campaigns can either target areas of local beauty, or issues of global importance. Fracking, did both. Also, unlike the big fossil fuel projects campaigners were usually up against, which were usually huge opencast mines or off-shore drilling operations, fracking took place at small sites close to where people lived. Almost anyone in the UK would be able to drive to a fracking site, and enough people would be able to walk to one to cause a problem. 

With the three legs of the protest in place, the first anti-fracking direct action in the UK kicked off at Balcome, West Sussex, in July 2013. Balcombe had everything the media wanted: sunshine, weird people, lots of action, and, best of all, it was close enough to London for the journos to be back for evening drinks at the club. And then, for good measure, the police accidentally arrested Caroline Lucas, the Green Party's only MP.

The industry's take was that the protests had only delayed the test drilling by five days. This may even be true, but it missed the point. Balcombe had made fracking the sexiest eco-protest in the country. For better or worse, activists forget about roads and airports and made their way to Balcombe. 

Opinion pollsters started talking about the 'Balcombe bounce. Up until then the number of people who had an opinion on fracking was too low for it to be polled, but now three quarters of the public had an opinion. Fracking was now on everyone's radar, not just the ecologists. That public opinion was pretty evenly split on the issue, with 40% opposed, 40% in favour and the rest undecided. The war wasn't won, but those were figure the ecologists could work with.

Once people opened their eyes to fracking, it was clear what a threat it was. Applications to explore for shale gas were everywhere. Anti-fracking groups were also popping up all over the place to oppose them, but the situation was confusing. There was a real danger of energy being scattered too widely to be effective.

Lancashire

The plan of the NGOs, as far as there was one, was to focus on one county council and get them to reject fracking as a first step. There were several possibilities for this, but in the end Lancashire was the target. Not only were Cuadrilla more advanced in their plans, but they were also much more politically connected. John Browne, the former BP boss, now Lord Browne, was the chair of Cuadrilla and owned 30% of the company. He had a job in the Cabinet office, from which he made a series of appointments to government departments. 

The government was clearly prepared to spend political capital on fracking. When Greenpeace got thousands of people to refuse to allow fracking under their homes the government responded by changing the law. The government was also clearly taking its instructions from the industry. When it sent out press releases about the number of jobs fracking would produce it didn't use the estimates of its own civil service, but the higher figure emailed in by the UK On Shore Operators Group. 

The industry was quite aware of the risk from protest. In 2010 a documentary had come out about fracking in the USA called Gaslands. It concentrated almost exclusively on the risk of water contamination, but had alerted people to an industry that engulfed areas of the USA. Also, just before Balcombe, there had been a series of protests in Romania about fracking. The global risk assessment company Control Risks had produced a report on anti-fracking protests, and had assessed the level of protest in the UK as 'significant'. It suggested a four point strategy to deal with this: 'acknowledge grievances', 'engage community', 'reduce impacts' and 'create more winners'. This would be used when the next anti-fracking protest happened. 

Barton Moss

Barton Moss, on the edge of Greater Manchester, was where the company IGas planned to test drill in November 2013. The travelling army of direct action protesters arrived and set up camp along Barton Moss Road. But Barton Moss wasn't Balcombe. It was wet, it was winter, and it was on the fringe of a northern city. The press wasn't really interested. The Guardian might have been, but there was the Ken Loach trial going on, and they only had one journalist north of Watford Gap. 

However, whilst the protests at Barton Moss were not national news, they were local news, both on TV and in the papers. What's more, they were local news across the whole of the northwest, including Lancashire. This meant that when the local councillors who were to vote on Cuadrilla's application to frack more sites sat down to their pie and mash, they saw Barton Moss on the TV.

IGas gave up on issuing press releases, and so it was up to the police to put out the press releases. This followed the usual playbook of well-meaning locals and violent outside agitators. The police themselves felt they lost this contest. The government too lent a hand. David Cameron didn't come to Manchester, but he went to a site in Lincolnshire and announced 'gold standard regulation' and 'more winners' in the form of a money for local authorities who frack. Lord Browne meanwhile appeared to acknowledge mistakes the USA. IGas had been promising bungs for local sports clubs, so the four point plan was going well. Except that it wasn't. The protests continued and local support was growing. 

The actual job of dealing with the protectors, as the activists styled themselves, fell to the police, who were not above dirty tricks. The police had a number of legal powers they could use against the activists, but they were only effective on the Public Highway or private land. Barton Moss Road was a public footpath and a private road. The police solution to the public footpath was to steal the sign. The solution to the private road was to pretend it was a public highway and arrest people anyway. They would then be released on pre-charge bail and if they went back to Barton Moss they'd be arrested again for breach of bail. The result of all this was over 200 arrests, almost all of whom would subsequently be acquitted. 

A more serious incident occurred just after New Year. The police claimed a flare had been fired at their helicopter as it came in to land at nearby Manchester City Airport. Nobody in the camp saw this, neither did any of the cameras at the airport, on the M62 or in the nearby Barton Moss Young Offenders Unit. Forty-eight hours later the police descended on the camp and turned it upside down. 

After that, though, it was hard to keep the protests out of the news. Public opinion in Manchester changed. Support for fracking still remained high, but the 'don't knows' gradually came off the fence on the side of the againsts. Rallies at the site increased in size, and then moved to the city centre. One held in March 2014 became the largest anti-fracking rally so far in the UK. It didn't make the national news, but was reported in the local news of every town and village at risk of being fracked. By the time IGas packed up and left, it was clear they were not wanted. One measure of the campaign's success was that when the first election for mayor of Greater Manchester was held in 2016 none of the major candidates, not even the Tory, were in favour of fracking. The winner, Labour's Andy Burnham, declared he would do all he could to stop IGas coming back. 

Campaigners from Frack Free Lancashire were regular visitors to Barton Moss. Up until then, they had fought its battles in village halls and borough councils. Now the activists from Lancashire had a bigger field to play on. They had their first experience of direct action, of speaking at large rallies talking to the global media.

The timing of the Barton Moss protests also worked out perfectly for them. No sooner had the protectors cleared away their camp, leaving Barton Moss Road cleaner than it had been before the campaign, than Lancashire County Council started hearing Cuadrilla's applications to frack Preston New Road and Roseacre in Lancashire. 

The decision was postponed repeatedly, and the councillors were threatened with personal financial liability if Cuadrilla were refused. But in the end the council rejected both applications. Everyone knew Cuadrilla would appeal, and that the final decision would be made by the government, who were hardly neutral. However, it was a huge victory for Frack Free Lancashire, and a potential delay of years for Cuadrilla.

Ryedale 

With Lancashire stalled, the focus of the campaign moved across the Pennines to the North Riding of Yorkshire, where Third Energy wanted to drill in the little village of Ryedale. The activists in Ryedale seemingly had the odds against them. A Conservative majority in the local council meant Third Energy had political support. The drilling would take place on an existing industrial site, and the gas would be piped away, which reduced the tactical options. 

However, in the end the campaign in Ryedale was the best organised anti-fracking campaign in the UK. It helped that the Vale of Pickering was drop dead gorgeous, and that the huge fracking lorries looked completely out of place in the little village with its tiny roads. However, most of the praise needs to go to the activists themselves. They ran a great campaign. They used the press well, they were creative in their actions, they worked very hard to keep tensions between the camp and the locals to a minimum, and they deservedly won.

How they won is still not completely clear, but it appears the government decided it was not going to spend any more political capital on fracking Yorkshire. Third Energy were bankrupt, but then none of the companies prospecting for shale gas in the UK were minted. These operations were loss leaders, and if fracked gold was struck they'd sell up to the big players. Then, once the place had been fracked out, they'd declare themselves bankrupt and pass the clean-up cost on to the government. Everyone knew that was how it worked. So, it was a bit of a surprise when, in January 2018, the government announced it would 'review' Third Energy's finances before giving them the go ahead. It was an oblique way of saying 'no', that stopped the government admitting it had made a U-turn. A major factor in this decision appears to have been a parallel campaign against Barclays bank, Third Energy's main funders. Barclays had fossil fuel investments all over the world, but fracking, it seems, was just too toxic for them.

Everywhere

But, of course, fracking wasn't just a risk to a couple of places in the north of England. On a shale gas map of the UK most of England ended up painted red, including a huge crescent of affluent Tory shires from the Lincolnshire to Kent. True, when the licenses were issues, they were heavily skewed towards the Labour voting north, but nobody could seriously doubt that if the industry got going, they wouldn't be coming to the home counties at some point.

Other players were also hovering on the fringe. Ineos, the UK's largest private company, bought up a lot of second-hand plant from Poland and announced it was interested in shale gas, not to sell, but to use in its chemical industries. Square in their sights was Eckington, in Derbyshire.

However, people weren't taking this lying down. Up and down the country anti-fracking groups were springing up. Some were little more than a social media page, but others, like Eckington Against Fracking, were large and well organised enough to not need outside help. Opposing fracking may have only been 'local news', but it was local news in most of the country.

What was more, direct action took place wherever, and whenever, it could. From Daneshill in Nottinghamshire, to Horse Hill in Surrey, the frackers turned up and found themselves facing slow walks and lock-ons. A, supposedly secret, meeting of the shale gas industry at Manchester Airport found itself the centre of a surpise protest. At Upton, Cheshire, the anti-frackers got onto the site first and there was an old-fashioned eviction of a defended camp which included towers and tunnels. No sooner had the police cleared the last protector, at the tax payers expense, than IGas said they weren't interested any more. The fracking revolution appeared to be running into the sand.

Preston New Road

And so the focus moved back to Lancashire. The government gave Cuadrilla the go ahead to frack at Preston New Road in October 2016, but deferred the Roseacre decision. Allegedly, this was at the request of the company, who didn't have the resources to do both at once. Cuadrilla evidently thought PNR, which was on a main road, would be an easier proposition than the little village of Roseacre. The next month Bianca Jagger led the largest anti-fracking march yet, at least 2000 people, through the streets of Manchester. 

Work started on the construction of their drill site in January 2017, and so did the protests. At first there was a 'gentleman's agreement' that the protesters would stand in front of each lorry for exactly fifteen minutes, but pretty quickly this broke down and it was a free for all. Lancashire police upped their presence. They called in help from other forces, when some of the out of town coppers behaved badly they went back to keeping it in house. Soon it was costing them £450,000 a month.

Work continued, even as fracking died in Ryedale and elsewhere. By the end of 2018 Cuadrilla were ready to start fracking. By this time the PNR site had seen virtually every type of direct action possible. There had been slow walks and lorry surfing, lock-ons and silent protest from big green groups, little green groups and locals. Cuadrilla managed to keep going through all this and finally they fired up their pumps and pressurised their well. The result was an earth tremor. Not as big as 2011, but big enough to shut them down. They tried again, but once more the earth moved. By Christmas they'd taken their rig down and removed the pumps.

Then in February 2019, as Theresa May cleared the decks for a Brexit general election, the government turned down Cuadrilla's application to frack Roseacre. At about the same time it told the company it would not be relaxing the rules on earth tremors that had stopped the drilling before Christmas. The tide had turned against the frackers. Cuadrillla's equipment returned to the site, but once again the ground shook and they had to stop. Boris Johnson became the Prime Minister the government announced a moratorium on fracking. Then, last week, UK Energy Minister Kwasi Kwarteng said what everyone suspected: fracking was over. 

Frack Off

And so, like the government's road building program in the nineties, and GM crops in the noughties, fracking had been defeated by a combination of lobbying and direct action, carried out both nationally and locally. It is a significant victory, and one everyone involved should be very proud of. Fossil fuel projects are at their most vulnerable when they are in their infancy, and we were right to take the opportunity when it was offered. Compared to other fossil fuels, fracking was always vulnerable. Technically, it was always going to be a challenge in the UK. Financially, it never looked secure. Politically, the gas was in exactly the wrong place. 

The campaign against fracking brought together a wide variety of disparate people. Residents of leafy villages joined up with former Occupy protesters. Big green groups worked with grass roots campaigners. Direct action people worked with political lobbyists. Some of the feuds were epic, but on the whole the coalition held together well enough to win.  

But this was no easy victory. The political influence of the fracking industry, especially Cuadrilla was huge; far out of proportion to the size of the industry. As a result the government was prepared to do incredible things to please the industry, including over-riding local democracy and changing the law. Their PR campaign, inspired by the Control Risks report, was sophisticated. Almost the entire tabloid press parroted the industry line, and even supposedly serious papers like the Telegraph indulged in tabloid style attacks on activists. 

Ultimately, this was a political campaign. Every time the government changed the law, overruled a local planning decision or appeared in a photo call with the industry they expended political capital. The activists made the cost of fracking so high that in the end the government was unwilling to pay it. For the money men the uncertain political support made the industry look like a bad risk. The result was that a new fossil fuel was going to stay in the ground. It's not the end of the war, but it's a significant battle won.

Guns, Germs, Steel, Colonies and Coal

In July 1972, the biologist Jared Diamond found himself on a beach in New Guinea. By chance, he bumped into Yali, a local politician. What Yali wanted to know from the scientist was:

“Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?"

 It took Diamond a little while to answer, but the result was a book he wrote twenty five years later. His answer was that this was mostly an accident of geography.

Guns, Germs and Steel

The basic building blocks of civilisation are plants and animals that can be domesticated. As the largest of the continents, Eurasia has far more usable flora and fauna than any other continent. What's more, the East-West axis of Eurasia allowed these edible plants and tame animals to be propagated across all the major civilisations of the continent, west to Britain and east to China. European crops grow very well in southern Africa, but the harsh climate of sub-Saharan Africa lies in the way, meaning that cows and grain couldn't reach the bottom of the continent until Europeans learnt to sail the oceans. The Americas, meanwhile, were host to a decent number of useful species, from maize to potatoes, but they were each stuck in their particular climatic niche and couldn’t spread north or south.

Better farming led to higher population densities, but there were consequences to large numbers of people and animals living together, consequences that we are still living with today: disease. However, whilst the viruses and other pathogens from domesticated animals killed millions, the survivors passed their immunity on to their children. This meant that when the people from the Old World went to the New, Americans died in vast quantities of European diseases, but Europeans did not die of American bugs.

That is, in essence, the argument in Diamond’s book. But whilst it’s as good as far as it goes, there is a huge elephant in the room: China. China enjoyed all the benefits of the Eurasia farming inheritance. As the source of many of the world’s infectious diseases her population’s immunity was as good as anyone’s. So why was it Europe, and not China, that conquered the world? Diamond suggests the answer was political, that as China became a Universal State with no enemies of equal stature, she did not have the drive to improve that the warring European nations had. This is probably not right.

Instead, the next piece of the jigsaw is provided by Kenneth Pomeranz in his book The Great
Divergence. Comparing Europe and China pre-1800 he looks at all the reasons that are given for subsequent European domination, such as political and financial institutions, culture and economics, and so on, and finds almost all of them all wanting.

The one factor in which Europe did enjoy and advantage though was it’s American colonies. China had the vast Pacific to its east, whilst Europe had the more manageable Atlantic. The ship technology developed to navigate the stormy seas of western Europe could cross the Atlantic to reach the New World, but the Pacific was impassable to Chinese vessels. Superior military technology, and techniques, allowed Europeans to take what they wanted by force. Guns, germs and steal really.

The Great Divergence 

However, even with the spoils of an entire continent to be ruthlessly exploited, as well as the first factories,

Europe, as a whole, was not richer than China in 1800. Parts of Europe, like England, were far wealthier than the Chinese average, it is true, but equally parts of China, like the Yangtze Delta, were richer than the European average. The West only starts to accelerate away from the East in the nineteenth century when it begins to use significant amounts of coal. Now this is a complicated issue, because China has vast amounts of coal too. So why was the Industrial Revolution powered by anthracite from Wales, not Inner Mongolia? Pomeranz puts this too down to geography as well.

Chinese coal is mainly in the north, and the chief problem with extracting it is stopping it catching fire. With European coal mines the major issue was draining the water out. To solve this the Europeans, led by the British, used steam engines. In 1800 steam engines were grossly inefficient. However, when used in coal mines this didn’t really matter. Being based at the mine itself, not only were there no transport costs for the fuel, but they were able to run on the lowest quality coal that didn’t really have a commercial value anyway. Thanks to this free energy the European economy received an injection of free calories that were not dependent on the limited resource of land.

More significantly though, as steam engines were used more, they improved and became more efficient. Engineers like Watt became justifiably famous, but really this wasn’t the work a few geniuses, but a gradual improvement based on experience. With usable steam engines came railways, steam ships and all the paraphernalia of the industrial revolution. European heavy metal blew the Asian economy out of the water, in some cases literally.

So, there we have it. Not proven, by any means, but it is at least a theory that is consistent with the facts. Europe, for a while, was the dominant force in the world due to accidents of geography. Eurasian farming was the best. Eurasian diseases were the worst. Europe was gifted the Americas as colonies, and her coal reserves posed exactly the right sort of problems for the development of steam engines.

Sources

Guns, Germs, and Steel was first published by W. W. Norton in March 1997 by Jared Diamond

The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (2000) by Kenneth Pomeranz

We saw a crisis. He saw an opportunity.

It will go down as one of the most fatal political miscalculations in British history.

A deadly virus has recently been unleashed on the world, and across the globe countries are locking down and contact tracking all victims. However, in the United Kingdom the Prime Minister told us that we were going to 'take it on the chin'. Our experts knew better than everyone else's experts, and we were to pursue a policy of 'herd immunity'. One month later and at least 20,000 people in Britain are dead, with at least as many again expected to fall victim to Covod-19, and one of them was very nearly Prime Minister Boris Johnson himself. What went wrong?

Let's rewind to 3 February 2020. The theme of the day is Brexit, and the Prime Minister is to give a big speech in Greenwich in which he lays down the gauntlet to the European Union. The day before Johnson's speech the Philippines had reported the first death outside of China and the first cases had been confirmed in the United Kingdom. Three days before that the World Health Organisation had declared Covid-19 a global emergency. In China 170 had died, and, as well as the Philippines, cases had by then also been reported in Russia, Spain, Sweden, Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan, Singapore and the USA.

So, what did Johnson say in his speech? Mostly it was about deregulation. Britain was not going to follow the rules set down by Europe. He did not say we'd privatise the NHS or be eating chlorinated chicken, but this was certainly the gist of what he was saying. However, he did also mention Covid-19, and this is where it gets interesting. This is what he said:

"there is a risk that new diseases such as coronavirus will trigger a panic and a desire for market segregation that go beyond what is medically rational to the point of doing real and unnecessary economic damage, then at that moment humanity needs some government somewhere that is willing at least to make the case powerfully for freedom of exchange ... the UK is ready for that role."

By the end of the day the focus had changed to the attempt by, the Johnson administration to give a private press briefing to selected journalists, locking out the more sceptical, which led to a walkout by the political press corps. Johnson's references to the coronavirus were forgotten. So, what do we make of them now?

Possibly, maybe probably, they were an attempt to introduce a bit of topicality to the boringly
repetitive theme of the Brexit negotiations. Possibly they were the start of a strategy to respond to the virus. Equally likely they were both: a quick ad lib that would become a strategy.

Johnson's attitude to Brexit has always been strange. Not only has he wanted to have his cake and eat it, he has, it seems wanted to have the popularity of having 'Got Brexit Done', without actually having to do it. Brexit has always been a rebellion in search of a cause, so was it Covid-19 that gave Johnson the cause he wanted? Did he see the virus as a way of showing Great Britain's exceptionalism? Of being the champion of swashbuckling free-marketism standing up to the nanny state which overreacts to a bit of man 'flu?

When he was struck down himself, colleagues said that Johnson was the sort of person who was intolerant of illness in others. A man of great privilege, very little empathy and, until that point, good health, he saw no risk worth wrecking his precious economy for. Instead he blundered into the worst crisis for the country since the Second World War.

But is it possible that this was worse than a mistake? Did the Prime Minster see the reaction to Covid-19 around the world as 'panic' and not 'rational'? Was he prepared to sacrifice a significant chunk of the population for a free market competitive advantage and Brexit? The evidence seems so: the speech, the 'herd immunity', the lack of testing, the refusal to take part in the EU ventilator and PPE schemes. It all fits a pattern. It was Johnson's advisor, Dominic Cummings, who (allegedly) said 'protect the economy, and if that means some pensioners die, too bad', and it seems the Prime Minister went further than that and saw an opportunity to not just protect the economy, but gain a competituve advantage from the crisis.

But that is not what has happened. Not only have tens of thousands of people die needlessly, but the country faces and longer lockdown that most others because we didn't act when we could. Now if that doesn't make you angry, nothing will.