OU Tutor and member of the Relevant Knowledge board Ray Corrigan blogs at bsfxxx.blogspot.com. The blog promises "random thoughts on law, the Internet and society" and recent entries have covered demands from the music industry for people who repeatedly breach copyright law to have their internet connections removed; Google's failed bid to have Gmail recognised as a European trademark; and worries over the Phorm online advertising system.

Since my early visits to India in the mid 1990s it is true to say that there has been something of a revolution in air quality in many of the cities here. In my last blog I mentioned the Taj Mahal. Vehicles are now banned from within 0.5 km of the fragile marble structure lest pollution destroys its beauty. This ban is complete and even the surrounding lawns were being cut by oxen pulling an industrial sized mower, instead of the usual noisy and dirty petrol-driven contraptions.

Polluting vehicles are banned from the Taj Mahal, so mowing green is the order of the day.

However in Delhi in 1998 I remember literally choking on black soot-laden air in the evening rush hour. Most of the pollution was coming from the small three-wheeled autorickshaws or “tuk-tuks”. These ran on low-grade fossil fuel that was inefficiently burned in unsophisticated engines. Now all that has changed. In a draconian move, at the time unpopular but necessary, such vehicles were banned from the road across India and replaced with tuk-tuks running on compressed natural gas (CNG). This burns cleaner without the sooty particulates and can be made from renewable sources such as farm waste.

In Agra I saw what must have been close to a hundred tuk-tuks waiting in line to be filled with CNG. These vehicles, and their slightly larger cousins the Vikrams (which also run on CNG) provide a valuable public service in that for the modest sum of around 8 rupees (approximately 10p) you can be taken across town some 4km. This is often an exciting ride dodging in and out of the traffic, going the wrong way up dual carriageways and careering around the inevitable cow, buffalo or even elephant. However in a Vikram almost always you are sharing the experience with up to ten others crammed into a space about the size of the interior of a smallest of UK family cars - friendly, but very efficient.

Upon my return to Lucknow I went to the BBC News website to catch up on world events only to find an email there from someone recently returned from India. They had been stunned by the apparent road chaos here and complained that any attempt by the government to encourage “green” behaviour in the UK would be entirely negated by traffic growth in countries like India.

This is an often-used excuse for us in the more affluent parts of the world to do nothing in respect of tackling climate change. However it betrays a misunderstanding of the nature of traffic here. In India per capita private car ownership is a mere fraction of what it is in the UK, the cars are, on the whole, much smaller, and the vast majority of vehicles are, like the tuk-tuks and Vikrams, public service vehicles.

In Lucknow at least 20% of road vehicles are pedal rickshaws operated by farmers who rent the rickshaws by the day for around 30 rupees and make a living between sowing and harvesting taking people around the city in a low pollution, low carbon, way. Scooters and small motorcycles also abound. Although not very clean, they have a far better fuel consumption than the average UK car which on the commute runs tend to carry only the driver.

To be sure, as the Indian economy grows the car manufacturers will do their best to encourage the new Indian affluent to indulge their fantasies of the great green outdoors by driving all over it and destroying it further. TV ads here show a big, bright, shiny 4x4 charging across pristine wetland wilderness churning it into a quagmire, all in the name of appreciating “the environment”.

If only one in a hundred Indians bought such a vehicle, and did as the ads suggest, it would mean 10 million of them trashing the countryside. The antisocial consequences of owning such vehicles for purely leisure purposes, whether in the countryside or in towns (where, if you are interested in going anywhere, or even parking, small is practical), are becoming obvious here just as they are in the UK.

In cities and towns like Lucknow the smart money is on the status quo in that it represents high fuel efficiency per capita and low cost. However things are far from perfect. If only people here would obey some kind of highway code things would operate even better. As it is, it appears to be the one in front who has the right of way and it seems that nobody ever signals, looks left, right, or in their mirror before manoeuvring! At times it just seems like survival of the fittest.

About the author

Bob Spicer is Professor of Earth Sciences at the Open University. Founding Director of the OU's Centre for Earth, Planetary Space and Astronomical Research (CEPSAR) his interests are broad. However he is most at home when studying how plants can be used to tell us about ancient climates, and how that information can help us plan for managing our planet in the future.

The two weeks of sport in the run up to Easter 2008, especially the weekend of March 15^th and 16^th offered a wide range of sporting events, with news of successes and failures, triumphs and disasters, often featuring the language of ‘the triumph of the under dog’ or ‘giant killers’, much beloved by the British media, especially in the sports pages of the press. Only one premiership club remains for the semi-finals of the FA Cup, with none of the top four still standing; lower league Barnsley having defeated firstly Liverpool and then the mighty Chelsea. Wales, triumphantly and gloriously won the rugby Grand Slam, having secured the Triple Crown the previous week. England’s men, having lost their first match, in spite of having been expected to win, managed to level their cricket test series in New Zealand in their current tour. The politics of the Beijing Olympics continues to rumble. The BBC sports site, yields a particularly rich diversity of sports coverage in a week characterised by the range of sports covered and the diversity of outcomes.

Diversity and drama largely doesn’t extend to women’s sport in this week of sport. By following the links to the BBC’s cricket website, however, there is news of a ground breaking development in women’s cricket, which has in the mainstream press passed unnoticed, although Clare Connor, head of women’s cricket describes it as ‘a massive step forward for the women’s game’.

Members of the England women’s team are to take up coaching positions at the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) in April, which would mean making the women’s game professional. Until now women players were all amateur and received only personal awards from Sport England, which only barely covered expenses. We are reassured that this is not a reward for winning the Ashes in Australia in February 2008, although it is not clear why a reward for so great an achievement should not be appropriate. This step is seen as enabling those contracted to the ECB to work as ambassadors for the ‘Chance to Shine’ scheme that takes cricket to state school pupils and encourages more girls to play, thus placing the initiative in the context of policies to promote sport as healthy practice and citizenship through sport.

Photograph taken by Tc7. Used under Creative Commons license.

This is not the same as the stories of giant killing that dominate the sports pages. Women are not constructed as plucky warriors overcoming more privileged opposition, but as victims of disadvantage and at best, as worthy recipients of some extra help. Sports fans are invited to comment on the 606 Debate site, where comment, although largely supportive, is framed largely within a discourse of charitable patronage that echoes the language deployed in policies and practices that promote diversity in sport, where woman are grouped with under-represented or disadvantaged groups including minority ethnic people, people with disabilities and drug users.

This is not so much about overcoming the odds, but about being fortunate enough to be granted a concession. It’s good news for the women’s game, but worth noting where the action remains, especially on the sports pages.

About the author

Kath Woodward is senior lecturer in sociology at the Open University, focusing on gendered identities. She has recently completed research into anti-racist organisations in sport.

He was a constant presence as I was growing up, and now I hear that he has died. The man who wrote my favourite science fiction stories, but also a science fact book Voices from the Sky: Previews of the Coming Space Age that my parents gave me for Christmas in 1971. I have it in front of me now, a slim Mayflower paperback. I have forgotten most of what's in it, but it made a big impression on me as a schoolboy interested in science, and now I will read it again. The items within it that I do remember clearly are Arthur's accounts of his 'invention' of the geostationary communications satellite, and most notably a reprint of his amazing paper 'Extraterrestrial relays' that was initially published in Wireless World in 1945. Here he described how a 'space station' in a orbit with a 42,000 km radius must take exactly 24 hours to go round the Earth. If placed in such a orbit over the equator, to an observer on the rotating globe the 'space station' would appear to remain fixed in the sky, and would be ideally situated to relay messages to virtually  the whole hemisphere below. Moreover a set of three such stations, spaced at 120 degree intervals, would constitute a relay girdle capable of maintaining permanent global communications.

This was visionary stuff, because of course it is the principle upon which networks of communications satellites operate. Clarke did not get it quite right - he predicted large stations inhabited by teams of technicians (needed to replace burned out valves) rather than the small electronic satellites based on transistor technology. Even so, the basic idea was sound, and elsewhere in the book Clarke wonders whether he missed a trick (and an immense fortune) in not patenting the concept.

Clarke's proposal for satellites: From Wireless World Volume LI Number 10, October 1945

I never had the pleasure of meeting Clarke in the flesh, but we spoke once, several years ago. He was in his home in Sri Lanka, but through the wonders of geostationary communciations satellites he appeared on screen as the guest of honour at a meeting organised in London by the British Interplanetary Society. I (a member of the audience) had the good fortune to ask him a question and recieve a reply that was both thoughtful and diplomatic. To have talked with the great man who invented the very means we used to communicate is a memory that will never fade.

About the author

Dave Rothery is a volcanologist and planetary scientist at the Open University. His current research includes studying volcanic eruptions on the Earth and characterising planetary surfaces.

‘Can we survive in freedom?’ The relationship between democracy and sustainability was framed in these terms by a prominent political scientist more than fifteen years ago. The bluntness of Ralf Dahrendorf’s question (and the pessimism of his own answer) invites a hasty response. I think he anticipates that we will all join him in choosing a very human, and mortal, liberalism.

Most people engaged in sustainability debates over the last two decades have shrugged the question off. At most we’ll suggest that sustainability and democracy are necessary partners. We’ll argue that you can’t bring the (mostly) staggeringly wealthy and materially cosseted societies of the developed world to address the downsides of their lifestyles without legitimate agreement on the need for action.  It is assumed this agreement will need to be collective - though not necessarily unanimous. But we are also confident that ‘our’ issue is urgent. Once you’ve read the climate science or the latest on biodiversity loss you look at the phrase ‘the art of the possible’ in a very different light to the squirming ‘realists’ that fill political office. It is not possible to sustain life as we live it into even the medium term future.

But sustainability and democracy are not joined at the hip. Democracy can claim to be more successful than any political system in history: in varying degrees of quality it can now claim to be the dominant form of human organisation beyond families and businesses. Yet it has also served as the perfect seedbed for a virulently successful system of material production and consumption that just so happens to threaten the human habitability of the planet. For the evolutionary psychologist there is nothing surprising about McDonald’s selling 100 billion burgers and oceans of coke: we are evolved to treasure fat, salt and sugar when we get easy access to it. From this point of view democracy nurtures unsustainability. Looking in the other direction we have plenty of evidence that scarcity and disaster provoke the opposite of stable, plural democratic systems.

Perhaps those of us that insist on binding together democracy and sustainability are living by Gramsci’s dictum: ‘pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will’. In other words: ecologically sustainable democracies are our most desirable outcome, however unlikely that goal might seem today. But recognising that we won’t automatically arrive at that point helps us to identify the nature of the work ahead. And that work doesn’t resemble the careful design of technologies or technique of policy change (indicators; toolkits; audits; a carefully calculated social cost of carbon), or a perfectly refined marketing strategy that will deliver behavioural change. These things may all play their part - but they are bit-parts. Rather we need to recognise that we have some hard work ahead as we try to revise the driving motivations of our societies.

In taking on this work we should recognise after two decades of experience that the language and some of the thinking clustered around sustainability has made almost no impact upon the public imagination. It has all the emotional reach and cultural resonance of a bus timetable. Why is that when we have such powerful rhetorical tools in our hands? Who has a bigger boo-phrase than ‘the end of the world’? The fact is that talk of limits, carbon diets, and self-denial flies directly in the face of some of the dominant cultural trends of our time. Contemporary culture thrives on self-experiment and exploration, personal rewards, a love of the new and on constant processes of self-reinvention. The green movement has at best had an awkward relationship with these trends, and the rare moments of synchronicity can get a bit repetitive (bamboo bicycle anyone?).

We need to recognise that people will only come together in majorities in favour of change (whether as electors, consumers, or as change agents within families, streets or institutions) if they find that the images and language of sustainability sit happily with some of these other values, experiences and ambitions. We need to play with new ways of framing the relationships between environmental change and private and public life. Some of us have found it productive to explore the fact of ecological, social, cultural and economic interdependence. Recalling the Americans that revised the boundaries of politics in the late eighteenth century to such magnificent effect, ‘we hold it as self-evident’ that we need to take a new lens to the world now that we have arrived at Interdependence Day. One of the things this lens must focus on is the quality of many aspects twenty first century daily lives. Health, relationships, pleasures, the things we use, see, places we inhabit – what quality do they have? (and, indeed, what is the quality of our political system?). Some of us have been working on these questions through the Interdependence Day project, including a volume I recently edited: Do Good Lives Have to Cost the Earth?. You’ll be pleased to hear that we think the answer to the question we set is an emphatic and democratic no.

Footnote: Next week I'm joining a seminar that marks the twentieth anniversary of the Brundtland Report that made sustainable development an influential concept in trying to square economic development and ecological sustainability. I've used this blog entry to get some of my thoughts down in advance.  A number of the folks that have been prominent in the UK environmental policy and politics scene will be at the meeting, and you can see some of their posts on the SustainAbility website.

About the author

Joe Smith is Lecturer in Environment at the Open University and chair of Interdependence Day. Joe has written books on climate change and sustainability, the media and global issues, and the green movement.

As an academic who beavers away on what sometimes feel like obscure and esoteric research projects, the past few weeks have been stuffed with news stories directly relating to my work. In mid-February Steven Spielberg stood down as the artistic director for the forthcoming Beijing Olympics. His reasons were China’s questionable role in Sudan, in North-western Africa.

For some time now there have been calls to boycott the Beijing Olympics in order to protest against China’s political record. This has seen Hollywood stars, journalists, and members of the US Congress – to name but a few – joining in condemning China and using the Olympics to throw a bright spotlight on the country’s democratic deficit. But what has a remote corner of Africa got to do with all of this?

China’s economy is growing. We all know that. Every day we hear about its trade balance, foreign exchange reserves, environmental damage, and the rapid growth of its cities. But where does the energy and raw materials for this growth come from?

China does produce its own energy and is building controversial hydro-electric schemes, is investing in nuclear technology and, despite the doomsayers in the west, is encouraging energy conservation. But it still needs to import oil and gas in particular and one of China’s main source areas is Africa. Not all of Africa, but key oil-producing countries such as Nigeria, Angola and Sudan. So, here’s the first clue to Spielberg’s grievances.

Sudan has China’s biggest investments in the African oil sector. It has developed good diplomatic links with the government in Khartoum and many Chinese can be seen walking the city’s streets. But Sudan also has a long-standing conflict between a Northern based government and the South West of the country.

The Chinese have invested heavily in Sudan and are seen to perpetuate this bloody conflict by supplying arms and training to the Sudanese as well as the revenue from the oil itself. Until recently the Chinese have also stayed out of international efforts to resolve the crisis and use an argument that China respects national sovereignty and therefore the conflict is a matter for Sudan to resolve.

In its hunt for secure energy resources China is accused of ignoring, and even perpetuating, human rights abuses. Hence, this slightly hypocritical ostrich-like response from the Chinese has become the focal point for the international condemnation of China more generally.

While undoubtedly a major issue for China, Sudan, and the international community we need to see China’s role and Sudan’s response in wider context. It is here that all this media coverage impinges on my research.

This is the first blog for a project entitled The politics of Chinese engagement with African development. I am what is called the principal investigator and I work with two colleagues at Durham University; Dr Marcus Power and Dr May Tan-Mullins. It is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, which is one of the UK government’s research councils.

As we saw with Sudan, in order to meet China’s increased demand for resources from Africa and to expand its markets China has had to secure political influence. Over the past few years China has pumped in much aid and technical support to Africa and for the first time since the end of the Cold War African leaders have genuine choices about which aid donors and investors to work with. But given the problems of governance across much of the continent these new economic and political choices will have major impacts on African leaders, political parties, civil society groups and other aid donors.

Our research assesses what impacts Chinese aid, trade and investment are having on the politics of specific African countries. This will be examined through case studies of Angola and Ghana, which represent different examples of China’s development ‘partnerships’ in Africa. Angola possesses oil resources that China desperately needs, whereas Ghana lacks strategic resources, but is an important market and political ally.

Over the coming months I, and my Durham colleagues, will be posting blogs on topical issues in the news which relate to this work as well as reflecting ‘from the field’ as we travel to China, the US, Angola and Ghana to interview key players.

About the author

Giles Mohan is a senior lecturer in development studies. He teaches on the Open University’s development studies programme as well as in geography. Giles’ research examines politics in Africa, particularly ways in which rural communities access the government as well the role of diasporas in national politics.

Blogging about

Ethics Bites

As the controversy about Dwain Chambers, a British sprinter who was found guilty of cheating by using illegal performance-enhancing drugs rumbles on, Ethics Bites considers a more basic question. Chambers was shown to be a cheat - he clearly broke the rules. But should we allow other kinds of performance enhancement in sport? Should we make genetic enhancement part of sport?

Biotechnology is opening up many possibilities. Athletes will soon be able to inject chemicals that will produce genetic modifications that will dramatically improve their performance; parents will be able to specify many genetically controlled qualities for their offspring. This is not the world our parents and grandparents inhabited. How should we treat these developments?

In his podcast for Ethics Bites, the Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel comes out firmly against the pursuit of perfection by genetic enhancement. He explains why, for example, he thinks it would be wrong to permit genetically enhanced athletes to compete. He, of course, defends biotechnical solutions to medical problems. It is when we attempt to enhance ourselves that he objects.

Much of his argument turns on his notion of 'giftedness'. An athlete, for example, has a natural genetic endowment. According to Sandel, to go beyond this 'gift' is a kind of hubris on our part, a Promethean project that involves playing God. This sounds like a theological position. But Sandel believes his reasoning should have force with secularists too.

For Sandel there are three features of our moral landscape that will be transformed if we succumb to this desire to play God:

1. Humility. We will lose the sense of reverence that is appropriate to our fate. Instead we will end up acting with hubris towards our nature.
2. Responsibility. With increases in choice about what we are, responsibility explodes. The consequence will be burdensome.
3. Perhaps most important, though, is solidarity. Sandel believes that the price of enhancement would be a loss of human solidarity. Once we lose the sense that we are subject to contingencies of fate, the successful will, even more than now, see themselves as self-made. And this will be bad for all of us.

Sandel's message is clear:

Rather than employ our new genetic powers to straighten 'the crooked timber of humanity,' we should do what we can to create social and political arrangements more hospitable to the gifts and limitations of imperfect human beings

Much of Sandel's argument will appeal to religious believers, particularly those who seek humility before God's will. But for atheists and agnostics, this could be harder to stomach. Why not improve ourselves if we can? Think of how wonderful it would be if we could increase the number of geniuses per capita, particularly if we could give them a compassion gene and a desire to improve the lot of humanity...

In the area of sport much of Sandel's argument turns on his belief that watching bionic athletes slugging it out would become mere spectacle, and that part of what we value in sport is the limitations of the athletes. I'm not so sure about this. I'd like to watch a football match in which every player achieved the skill level of George Best or Maradonna. And watching the top marathon runners today is already like watching bionic athletes, but no less absorbing for us mere mortals.

Sandel's arguments are interesting and thought-provoking. For some of the arguments on the other side of the debate, try John Harris's book Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People. He presents an uncompromising defence of safe enhancement:

Enhancements are so obviously good for us that it is odd that the idea of enhancement has caused, and still occasions, so much suspicion, fear, and outright hostility.

Further Reading

• The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering by Michael Sandel, published by Belknap Press
• Enhancing Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People by John Harris, published by Princeton University Press

About the author

Nigel Warburton is a senior lecturer in philosophy at the Open University. His podcasts, Philosophy: The Classics and Philosophy Bites, have proved surprisingly popular, regularly topping the iTunes podcast chart. Ethics Bites is his third podcast.

My colleague Engin Isin wrote an interesting blog in January about the episode of Hillary Clinton’s tears. He argued there that there are many signs that indicate that the image of being political now includes being emotional and many signs that men as well as women are caught in the production of this image. He pointed out that one of the main arguments against including women in politics until the twentieth century was that ‘women ostensibly represented the irrational and passionate aspects of being human and such qualities did not belong in public space’.

However, I think there is enough evidence to show that women still contend with double standards in public. In presenting themselves as public persons, they must make finely tuned decisions about the nuances of gendered meanings. In public office they may struggle to find a rhetorical style – a persona – that the press and the public will accept as ‘authentic’. Hillary Clinton has continually been cursed with the perception that she is calculated, contrived and overly macho. We will never know if her famous tears may or may not have been equally calculated, which presents us with a modern conundrum. For we demand these days that politicians must act in such a way that is ‘true’ to themselves: so here we have tears that signify spontaneity and personal expressiveness, even if those same tears risk being regarded as contrived, fake, tactical. Clinton was at the time saying ‘It’s very personal for me, it’s not just political, it’s not just public’, which underlines her use of authenticity here.

Photograph taken by Joe Crimmings. Used under Creative Commons license.

Here then is the double bind: if Clinton conducts herself in a male style, she risks disappointing those for whom having a woman candidate and president makes a difference. It seems to be the case that Clinton has lost the support of many professional women; and she may have suffered also for not having publicly shared her pain about the Lewinsky episode (by, for example, going on the Ophrah Show!). Of course she may also not project the right kind of womanliness to attract Republican voters to the Democrat cause, having declared when Bill Clinton became president that she wouldn’t be the type of First Woman to bake. Would a man married to a female president even feel compelled to make a public statement about their role? If a woman is a strong leader she is at fault for not being a homemaker, but if she is a homemaker she is at fault for not having the qualities of the leader. The quality she needs to be a president – to hack it with the big boys – is the same quality that goes against her. If women talk loudly they are shrill; if they talk softly they are overly feminine and weak. And Clinton as a woman is described in ways that could not now be publicly used to describe Obama as a non-white; when a member of the audience at a John McCain event asked the Senator ‘How do we beat the bitch?’ McCain’s smiling reply was ‘Excellent question’.

Some commentators think that the Democratic race for nomination is inevitably reduced to that between a black man and a woman and that because the U.S population are more sexist than they are racist, Clinton will never win the candidacy and less even the Presidency. That is, to use semiotic terminology for a moment, a female signifier of difference from an unmarked (white, male) norm is more troubling than a black signifier of difference. This is not about whether people think Hillary Clinton is capable, knowledgeable, or rational; she is widely thought to be all these things, and these would be valued in a man. But these capacities are undermined by what is clearly a different wish that she show some kind of deeper, truer self, which is ‘feminine’. So far the consensus seems to be that while Obama looks unforced and his speeches are born of deep conviction, here we have a woman whose political ambitions and ambitiousness are seen to question her very humanity.

These problems appear whenever women enter the public sphere, and not just in the domain of politics. Kate McCann (whose daughter Madeleine was abducted in Portugal last summer) was probably right to complain that if she looked and acted in a more ‘maternal’ way, she would have had more sympathetic media coverage. Judged endlessly by her demeanour, which was considered too much the ice queen, there was deemed to be a necessary link between outward appearance and conduct and inner life. Her inner turmoil, then, should have been visible, her feelings closer to the surface – via dishevelled clothes, lack of care for the self, tearful inarticulacy. Because it wasn’t, and she exerted some control over her public self, she was regarded as quite possibly an irresponsible mother as well as a realistic suspect in her daughter’s abduction. I noticed that there was no similar questioning of the integrity of her husband, for Gerry McCann has been equally able to remain relatively emotionless and poker faced in public appearances.

There seems, then, to continue be a very strong wish to question the motives and even ethical capacity of women once they relenquish the maternal, the instinctive, the emotional – typically regarded as qualities belonging to private life but which they must leave behind once they step into a public, for which read masculine, role. Women often lose either way, damned if they do and damned if they don’t use an emotional register in public, either approache being judged to convey rich symbolic meanings that question their authenticity and ultimately their authority.

About the author

Jessica Evans is Senior Lecturer in Sociology, in the Faculty of Social Sciences, and a member of the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance at the Open University.