Some Stuff of Interest

Here are a few links you might find interesting:

--Allison Flood's Gender bias in books journalism remains acute, research shows reports on Vida's compilation of statistics for 2011:

It was the year when VS Naipaul infamously declared no woman writer to be his equal, so perhaps it's not surprising that new research shows a huge skew towards male authors and reviewers in the literary establishment in 2011.

Vida, an American organisation supporting women in the literary arts, has compiled statistics on the gender split in books coverage at publications including the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the New Yorker and the New York Times Book Review, each of which showed a substantial bias towards using male reviewers and covering male authors.

At the LRB last year 16% of reviewers were women (29 out of 184) and 26% of authors reviewed (58 out of 221); at the New York Review of Books 21% of 254 reviews were by women, 17 of 92 authors reviewed were female and 13% of 152 articles were by women. Of 1,163 reviews in the TLS in 2011, 30% were by women, and of 1,314 authors reviewed, 25% were women. Granta was the only publication to have more female contributors, at 53%, but much of this was down to its women-only feminism issue.

Flood's article notes that gender bias is worse for nonfiction and quotes editors of the publications preferring to review work by males over work by women effectively blaming women for not stepping up to the plate and sententiously "hoping" that the Vida reports will "encourage women." (What this has to do with getting women's books reviewed absolutely mystifies me.) She concludes with a comment from Jennifer Weiner:

Author Jennifer Weiner, who, with Picoult, has campaigned against the continuing gender bias of book reviews towards men over the last year, felt that the best response was to let the "vital conversations" take place elsewhere. "Instead of hoping that some day the boys' club will open its doors, we can form our own clubs, define 'worthy' our own way, and celebrate the books and voices that we decide deserve celebration," she said. "In the end, it's going to take a New Girls' (and Boys') Network to counter the Old Boys' Network. Men and women committed to change are going to have to step up and speak out, (and, of course, risk being called shrill, hysterical, annoying or 'just jealous' of the attention the men receive when we do)."

I suppose that Weiner's remark may be interpreted by some as pursuing a separatist strategy, but I think, rather, she's suggesting that men and women need to join together to create new venues where women's work will be treated with respect. That may be considered a kind of separatism, but it isn't gender separatism. I rather like the idea of allowing the old male-dominated bastions of the commercial literary world dry up on the vine, myself. (Link thanks to Wendy Walker.)

Two links to posts by Amanda Marcotte:

--When we say they hate women, we mean they hate women is prompted by Rush Limbaugh's despicable attack on Sandra Fluke, but sees it as part of the ongoing war on women underway in the US today:

I'd point out that most animals fuck according to the ideal Rick Santorum model: joylessly, infrequently, and only for procreation. Most even wait until the female is ovulating, to minimize the time they spend rutting! If your objective is to not be like other animals, the best strategy is to fuck all the time and take advantage of our unique ability to enjoy sex for its own sake.

Beyond all the hatefulness, prudery, and misogyny is just the plain weirdness of all of this. Reading the right wing reaction to Sandra Fluke, you get the strong impression that they think that a single woman in her mid-20s who is sexually active is some kind of freakish outlier, as if Fluke admitted to being a mercenary with side business in running drugs to pay off law school. In reality, Fluke is as normal and American as apple pie. Being sexually active before marriage is just what people do; 93% of Americans have premarital sex before turning 30. We can safely guess there's no love here for women whose main pregnancy prevention strategy is to only have sex with women. Additionally, since no distinctions between women who use contraception in or out of marriage are being made here, women who use it to have monogamous sex with their husbands are being rolled into the "town dump" category as well, which means that basically, the utterly normal and nearly universal experience of being female is being characterized on the right as something disgusting and beyond the pale. Which is just a long, roundabout way to say they straight up hate women.

--Marcotte also has a brief post about the endless GOP primary season: It's the Race that Never Ends that made me nod my head and say, yes, it does feel as if it will never end. And then led to the reflection that the reason that no end is yet in sight is because so many whackos have the support of very, very, very, very rich patrons, who have endless amounts of money to lavish on obscenely expensive campaigns for losers eager to serve them and their interests (and no one else's).

--Kim Stanley Robinson has an essay about climate change and the utopian in his novels at arena: Remarks on Utopia in the Age of Climate Change:

While writing the Mars Trilogy, or maybe before, I began to think of science as another name for the utopian way, or what Williams called the long revolution.[i] This was partly because I was married to a scientist and watching science in action, up close, and it was partly from thinking about it. We tend to take science at its own self-evaluation, and we’re not used to thinking that utopia might already be partly here, a process that we struggle for or against. But to me the idea of science as a utopian coming-into-being has seemed both true and useful, suggestive of both further stories and action in the world.

Through the essay, he moves through fascinating territory until he arrives at a startling (but utterly plausible) conclusion:

How do we act on what we know? The time has come when we have to solve this puzzle, because the future, from where we look at it now, is different than past futures. Before we just had to keep on trying to do our best, and we would be OK. Things seemed to slowly get better, for some people in some places anyway; in any case, we would keep trying things, and probably muddle through. This is no longer the case. Now the future is a kind of attenuating peninsula; as we move out on it, one side drops off to catastrophe; the other side, nowhere near as steep, moves down into various kinds of utopian futures. In other words, we have come to a moment of utopia or catastrophe; there is no middle ground, mediocrity will no longer succeed. So utopia is no longer a nice idea, but a survival necessity.

This is a must-read essay. Do please check it out. (Link thanks to Niall Harrison.)

--Common Dreams reports on an insurance industry meeting about how uninsurable parts of the United States are becoming because of climate change. The meeting occurred just one day before the latest devastating tornados slammed the Midwest and Southeast US:

“From our industry’s perspective, the footprints of climate change are around us and the trend of increasing damage to property and threat to lives is clear,” said Franklin Nutter, president of the Reinsurance Association of America. “We need a national policy related to climate and weather.”

“As a member of the global insurance industry, we have witnessed the increased impact of weather-related events on our industry and around the world,” said Mark Way, head of Swiss Re's sustainability and climate change activities in the Americas. “A warming climate will only add to this trend of increasing losses, which is why action is needed now.”

Cynthia McHale, the insurance program director at Ceres, issued a more unequivocal statement: “Our climate is changing, human activity is helping to drive the change, and the costs of these extreme weather events are going to keep ballooning unless we break through our political paralysis, and bring down emissions that are warming our planet. If we continue on this path, extreme weather is certain to cause more homes and businesses to be uninsurable in the private insurance market, leaving the costs to taxpayers or individuals.”

Resonates with Stan Robinson's essay, no?

What would that take?

This week's Strange Horizons has not only a new installment of Vandana Singh's Diffractions Column, but also a roundtable discussion among science fiction writers about Writing Climate Change. The panel, moderated by Niall Harrison, includes Vandana Singh, Kim Stanley Robinson, Joan Slonczewski, Glenda Larke, Tobias Buckell, Maggie Gee, and Julie  Bretagna, all writers who've written about climate change.  Vandana's column, I might also note, concludes with a call to writers:

Assume that the planet must be saved. Not that we won't suffer the effects of global warming for a long time to come, but let us assume that we can do what it takes to limit it as much as possible so that one day it could be reversed. That is, less than 2C of warming. What would that take? What kind of action, re-thinking, re-imagining everything from technology to how we live to what we write and what we read—what would it look like on the way to saving the world? Science fiction is full of end-of-the-world stories, apocalyptic hereafters. It is so much more difficult to imagine and to bring to paper or screen the messy, complicated, partial, unsatisfactory, creative ways and means that might affect a solution. But it is a task both necessary and urgent. If we are the imagineers of the world, we must imagine, or re-imagine it in ways that involve other paradigms as well as other technologies.

Dots and their spurious mysteries

Have you noticed how the media have created a "mystery" out of recent incidents of mass deaths of birds and fish, which scientists say are unrelated? Such incidents happen around the world with some frequency and mostly get reported as one-off oddities. The latest report is of hundreds, "possibly thousands" of turtle doves dying in the Italian town of Faenza.  The dead birds, according to news reports, have "a mysterious blue stain" in their beaks. The media's creation of a spurious mystery kicked off with the incident in Arkansas on New Year's Eve, in which about 5000 birds, mostly red-winged blackbirds, died of internal injuries now being attributed to fireworks. Next was the deaths of a few hundred birds a few hundred miles away (attributed to powerlines), in Louisiana, followed by the deaths of 2 million fish in Maryland, with other mass fish deaths in Brazil and New Zealand (and Arkansas, again) and 40,000 (dead) crabs washed up on New England beaches. 

Talk about clueless coverage. The reports may be careful not to suggest a common cause, but sneakily imply some mysterious (cosmic?) cause. (Anything to pique readers' and viewers' attention, right?) But as a matter of fact, 21st-century Earth is an extremely hazardous environment for the planet's wildlife. Habitat continues to shrink at an incredible pace, migration patterns are being forced to shift because of radical changes in the environment, and toxins are everywhere. (BP's blowout & obscene use of methane-generating "dispersants" is just the tip of the iceberg.) And we now know, thanks to Wikileaks, that the EPA approved the use of a pesticide they knew would kill honey bees. (And since approval has done so, on a massive scale.) The fish that have been dying in recent days apparently died from cold. Obviously that's the sort of problem fish faced even before human beings decided that their god-given "stewardship" of the earth is not about care-taking but exploitation. And yet for all I know the shifts in migration patterns and habitats brought about by global warming might have something to do with it. I'm not a marine biologist, so I don't really know. But do you notice that when the media name fireworks, power lines, and poisoning as causes of avian death, the media treat these causes as they would random lightning strikes. Which is to say, a contained but uncontrollable event that is in effect an Act of God (as insurance policies like to phrase it).

Maybe the media thinks human beings are like God? (Or at least that certain human beings are?) Well as far as birds, fish, and amphibians are concerned, I guess they are.

Just When You Thought Political Discourse Couldn't Get Stupider

As I checked for local news this morning on the Austin American-Statesman website, I was confronted with the following headline under the kicker THE TOP STORY:

Education board candidate faces claim he's soft on terror

I had to double check the URL to make sure I hadn't found The Onion instead of the Statesman.

If you click on the link above, you will indeed find that one right wing Republican candidate for state school board (in fact, the incumbent) is accusing his right wing Republican opponent of being soft on terrorism because he once had a law partner who once represented the government of Saudi Arabia. Of course, as this lengthy magazine piece in tomorrow's NY Times makes clear, the Texas State Board of Education routinely makes decisions that any sane person would assume were meant as satire.

Add that to the United States senators who think last week's blizzard means there's no such thing as global warming, and the scuttlebutt that such accusations might mean the end of meaningful climate change legislation, and it's enough to make even an optimist like myself start to wonder if all those science fiction stories showing the collapse of civilization are prescient and not just warnings.

Dresden, with Eucalypts

DRESDEN, WITH EUCALYPTS

by Lucy Sussex

In the 1980s I drove with my parents to visit an old family friend living in Australian farmland. Her name was Connie Cox, and she had been secretary to my grandfather. Connie was a lively nonagenarian, but paring down her possessions in the way some old people do, as they prepare for death. One thing she retained was a child’s china tea set, crusted with square crystals of glass. When she was a child, bushfires had threatened her parents’ country property. They had fled, Connie riding on her father’s shoulders, returning to find their house burnt out. Her tea set had survived.

I sat there and quietly coveted it. I hope it is now in a museum somewhere.

What we did later that day did not seem at the time suicidal, though it was, given the lesson of the tea set. We drove home, to a log cabin, on Skyline Road, Yarra Glen, a high ridge surrounded on all sides by two of the most combustible species of trees—the pinus radiata and the eucalypt.

It wasn’t as if we didn’t know the place was dangerous. Skyline had been burnt out in the 1960s, something that provided the earliest memory for the writer Beth Spencer, then one, and living in the valley below. It gave her a lifelong aversion to the colour orange. The fire was also written in the singed bark of the oldest trees around our house, and the tendency for the native animals, the wallabies and the wombats, to be the same dark ashy-brown colour.

Fire has been a factor in the Australian bush for millenia. Some species of plants only germinate after a fire; and the indigenous people used fire for land management, to create rolling parkland productive of nice, fat, numerous wallabies and other food animals. It is only the Europeans who have spectacularly failed to adapt to this arid environment.

Why were we living there? Because of the beauty, although my mother later observed that Skyline was a very intense place. She did a lot of art there, and I wrote stories and my first book. That way we dispelled some intensity, but not all. Disputes over land management got very quickly emotional, with tensions between the Green, and those who wanted to live in haut suburban style in the middle of bush. To conserve, or consume? And every year the CFA (Country Fire Authority) trucks trundled out, to backburn or warn against the threat to the treechangers, the hobby farmers, the horsy and the vignerons.


Black days dot the Australian calendar, commemorating bush conflagrations. Ash Wednesday, Black Tuesday, and after last week, Black Saturday, perhaps the worst, with projections of 300 dead, thousands of hectares burnt to ash. It either portended climate change, or merely was a freak event, with nothing similar recorded in 200 years of white settlement.

Here were the conditions, ticking towards conflagration. 12 years of drought, not unusual in the cyclic Australian climate. A month without a drop of rain. Then, a spell of 40C [104F] degree days, lasting nearly a week, and unprecedented. Even the leaves at the top of gum trees shrivelled and fell, forming highly combustible litter on the forest floor. Koalas, usually strictly arboreal, were forced down onto the ground, invading human habitation in search of water. A flurry of cute photos, koalas drinking from bottles, spoons, watering cans, hit the Net. Behind the cuteness was the stark fact that they must have been dehydrated to desperation.

Then came an appalling day, Melbourne’s hottest: 46 degrees Celsius[114.8F], 100 k winds. All it would have taken was a powerline sparking, a dropped cigarette. What resulted was a firestorm, a word not to be used lightly. People had often only seconds to escape, such was the force of the wind propelling the fire. It roared like jet engines, blew trees, powerpoles and even people bodily over. The sky turned black from smoke, the only light from storey-high flames, and the burning embers which landed on sere grass, blew into cracks and under doors. Those defending their houses with sprinkler systems had the hoses melt, the water turn into steam. In a severe bushfire the power lines go, taking the electricity, and the power for pumps. The only option then is to hide from the killer radiant heat of the front, emerging after it has passed to fight the spot fires. But by then it may be too late, with window glass exploding, the roof aflame...

I am told only two houses survived on Skyline Road, defended by those who had no choice but stay and fight, with the fire coming from three fronts at once, cutting off their exits. I have not been up there since—who wants to gawk at the traumatised?—but I know a little log cabin would have been reduced to ashes.

My parents moved out twenty years ago, and did not live to see it burn. I am currently preparing for my mother’s retrospective exhibition, and as I look at her images of Skyline, I see the intensity, an ominous quality. Skyline as was, and will be again, for the bush is endlessly regenerative, the blackened trees sprout again.

[Gethsemane by Marian Sussex, with the distinctive silhouette of gum trees]

But houses do not, nor do people.

Immersed in Hot Blood

A few days ago, in an email to me Aqueductista Lucy Sussex remarked of her local weather that "it's like wandering around, immersed in hot blood." Temperatures, she said, had been above 40C for several days. She lives in the Melbourne area in Australia. Since that email, it's only gotten worse. In an article in today's Independent, Parched: Australia Faces Collapse as Climate Change Kicks In, Geoffrey Lean and Kathy Marks report that temperatures have soared to 43C (that's 109.4F!) for three days running and that in Adelaide the temperature reached "a staggering 45.6C."

Ministers are blaming the heat - which follows a record drought - on global warming. Experts worry that Australia, which emits more carbon dioxide per head than any nation on earth, may also be the first to implode under the impact of climate change.

At times last week it seemed as if that was happening already. Chaos ruled in Melbourne on Friday after an electricity substation exploded, shutting down the city's entire train service, trapping people in lifts, and blocking roads as traffic lights failed. Half a million homes and businesses were blacked out, and patients were turned away from hospitals.

More than 20 people have died from the heat, mainly in Adelaide. Trees in Melbourne's parks are dropping leaves to survive, and residents at one of the city's nursing homes have started putting their clothes in the freezer.

"All of this is consistent with climate change, and with what scientists told us would happen," said climate change minister Penny Wong.

Australia, the driest inhabited continent on earth, is regarded as highly vulnerable. A study by the country's blue-chip Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation identified its ecosystems as "potentially the most fragile" on earth in the face of the threat.

It sounds like hell, doesn't it?

And here is one more bit of news today (this one reported in The Telegraph) about the Southern Hemisphere:

When Charles Darwin set foot on the Galapagos Islands, he was so astonished by the unique diversity of plants and animals there that his visit led to him developing one of the most influential scientific theories of all time. But as scientists around the world prepare to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the great biologist's birth, the rich ecosystems he found 174 years ago on these islands off the coast of South America are now under threat of collapsing.

Conservation groups warn that invasive animals and insects introduced by visitors along with the rising number of tourists and permanent human inhabitants on the islands are destroying the rare endemic species that are found no where else in the world.

There are 106 species on the islands and in the surrounding waters, out of around 450, that are now considered endangered or critically endangered, while another 90 have been officially declared as vulnerable.

Of the 168 unique plants found no where else in the world, 60 per cent are close to extinction and in the past 10 years alone, at least three species, including a mouse that bore Darwin's name, have died out.

We're in Forty Signs of Rain territory here, no?