It's Always More Complicated

Reading the first question addressed in Ask a Manager today:

I have been at my job for a two years, and the job requires international travel, often with members of a team. We often go to very safe countries (Europe, Singapore), but for a new client we had to travel to South Africa. I’m South African and therefore am quite aware of the risks and safety measures necessary, particularly in the areas in which we were traveling, as was HR, which repeatedly sent emails about safety precautions.
Unfortunately, my fellow team members continuously engaged in risky behavior over the course of the trip (jogging at night alone by the freeway, wearing expensive jewelry in public, getting rides from random taxis on the street…). I repeated my concerns to them repeatedly, as did the hotel manager (who was so concerned that he ended up asking me to tell them to stop, saying he didn’t want the hotel to be held responsible for their choices). They didn’t take my concerns seriously, saying they were “experienced” travelers because they’d gone to Europe before, and I was being “overly cautious.” The entire experience was incredibly stressful, it was like babysitting toddlers.

Besides the story of the boy who cried Wolf! (except this is more like, if the villagers kept crying Wolf! every time they saw a wee doggie coming up the village street) I have a vague recollection of a ?fairy tale/children's story of somebody who is brought up to think Out There is terribly dangerous. And something happens and they go out there and are not immediately eaten, so they think Nothing Is Dangerous. And if as the tale progresses they don't actually end up eaten it is only through luck rather than good risk management.

The following are all in the area of environmental history: enjoy!

Rebecca Beausaert. Pursuing Play: Women's Leisure in Small-Town Ontario, 1870-1914.

Beausaert’s discussion of the growing popularity of outdoor recreation in the early twentieth century, as opposed to earlier forms of indoor leisure such as book clubs and church gatherings, also highlights the role of women in the rise of environmental activism in towns like Elora. In these communities, grassroots efforts to maintain the local environment and cater to the influx of ecotourism travelers flourished, further illustrating the agency of women in shaping both their social and environmental landscapes.

Robert Aquinas McNally. Cast Out of Eden: The Untold Story of John Muir, Indigenous Peoples, and the American Wilderness:

McNally’s emphasis on the role of race in Muir’s thinking, and, therefore, on his vision of wilderness preservation, helps readers more clearly see Muir not as wilderness prophet but as a man of his time coming to terms with the consequences of American expansion.

B. J. Barickman. From Sea-Bathing to Beach-Going: A Social History of the Beach in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Edited by Kendrik Kraay and Bryan McCann:

The book begins with Rio in the nineteenth century and shows that Cariocas regularly went to bathe in the ocean. The work incorporates an assortment of sources to give a vivid picture of this process. For instance, it was customary for bathers to go before dawn—as early as 3 a.m.—since many in Rio went to bed early in the evening, but also due to colorism within Brazilian society. The dominant white society enjoyed swimming in the ocean but also prized fairer complexions and thus aimed to avoid the sun. Yet, few amenities existed for sea-bathers. The city dumped its sewage and trash into the ocean and provided few lifeguards, which resulted in frequent drownings.
In chapter 2, a personal favorite, Barickman discusses the evolution of sea bathing from a therapeutic practice (thalassotherapy) in the nineteenth century to a leisure activity that provided a space for socialization across gender lines by the 1920s. Locals went to the beach to escape the heat of the summer, rowing emerged as the most popular sport in the region, and, as in other parts of the world such as the United States and the Southern Cone, beach-going became a popular way to make or meet friends. In short, the beach became a public space at all hours of the day, not just before dawn. Moreover, the beach captured the “moral ambiguities” of nineteenth-century norms (51-63). Men and women of all races and classes could be present in public spaces partially nude, to observe others and to be observed, in ways that society did not permit beyond the beach, but this continually frustrated moral reformers.
Chapter 3 centers on the work of Rio’s civic leaders to “civilize” the city in hopes of altering public perception of the city as a “tropical pesthole” (p. 69).

David Matless. England’s Green: Nature and Culture Since the 1960s:

The range of sources and topics is impressive, but at times the evidence is noted so briefly and the prose proceeds so quickly that breadth is privileged over depth. For example, the deeper connections between England and global ideas of green (as defined by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and the World Wildlife Fund), the influence of colonial experience on conservation events of the 1970s, and the tensions between the various governmental nature management organizations would all have benefited from a little more attention. Yet, even if the reader sometimes wishes for a slower pace to get their thoughts in order, Matless offers enough analysis to build the examples up into a clear and insightful picture. The reader is left with a general appreciation of the central environmental debates of the period and good understanding of how they evolved over time. For scholars, it is a multidimensional study that adds something new and long awaited to British environmental and cultural history. For others, it is a fascinating book filled with interesting stories, cultural context, and many moments of nostalgia.

Michael Lobel. Van Gogh and the End of Nature.:

Lobel makes a systematic case for a new way of seeing Van Gogh’s paintings. Carefully introducing readers to a host of environmental conditions that shaped Van Gogh’s lived experience and appear repeatedly in his paintings—factories, railways, mining operations, gaslight, polluted waterways, arsenic, among others—Lobel compellingly invites us to see Van Gogh as an artist consistently grappling with the changing ecological world around him. Color and composition, as two of Van Gogh’s most heralded painterly qualities, appear now through an entirely different perception influenced by a clear environmental consciousness.

Ursula Kluwick. Haunting Ecologies: Victorian Conceptions of Water:

The author sets out to consider how Victorians understood water, seen through nineteenth-century fictional and nonfictional writings about the River Thames. In chapter 2 she points out the existence of writing that emphasizes how polluted the Thames was as well as writing that never mentions the pollution, and wonders at their coexistence. The conclusion that the writings don’t relate to any real state of the river is not particularly surprising but points to the author’s overall intent, summarized in the book’s title.

Alan Rauch. Sloth:

Rauch views these caricatural depictions—including portrayals of sloths as docile and naive creatures, as seen in the animated film Ice Age (2002)—as potentially detrimental to the species’ well-being. Through his analysis, the author critiques how sloths have been appropriated to fulfill human (emotional, cultural, and economic) needs and how this process misrepresents sloths, leading to harmful stereotypes that diminish their intrinsic value and undermine their agency.

(This is an old one but I don't think I'd seen it before.) How Monterey Bay Came Back From the Brink, which is very much about the small slow steps and the long-term effects of actions.: 'Here’s the story of how a few individuals confronted an environmental disaster and worked to transform it into an ecological treasure.':

The people most responsible for the renewal of Monterey Bay didn’t live to see what it would become. But they spent decades doing the hard work that future generations could build on.

The emerging mode of urban nature conservation: (Re)wilding London: Fabric, politics, and aesthetics:

(Anti-)urbanists have long been concerned that dense urban living in the absence of greenspace alienates people from nature (Gandy, 2022a). But for urban (re)wilders, in post-industrial, sanitary cities like London, urban population density instead offers significant potential for engaging publics and forging new environmental citizens. An urban nature reserve is much more accessible to urban residents than those located in the rural hinterlands, especially for those without access to transport or with little cultural affinity with the idea of the pastoral rural idyll. London rewilders (including the Mayor Sadiq Khan) present inner city rewilding interventions, like the introduction of beaver to an enclosure in Ealing in West London, as acts of ‘social justice’ because they bring the wild to politically and economically marginal urban publics. They flag how engaging local publics with the maintenance and repair required for urban rewilding offers ample opportunity for education and community participation (under different political models that we explore below).
....
Work by rural geographers (Agyeman & Spooner, 1997; Tolia-Kelly, 2007) shows how the dominant aesthetics of a wild or pastoral British Nature may be perceived as exclusive, intimidating, and dangerous to minority populations. Cosmopolitan cities, like London, incorporate diverse cultures of nature that value encounters with different aspects of urban ecology, bringing the multiplicity of urban wilds to the fore. For example, Barua (2022) shows how feral rose-ringed parakeets (Psittacula krameria) in London are often derided by conservationists as invasive species. In contrast, some members of London's South Asian diaspora community welcome parakeets into a recombinant urban ecology because the sights and sounds of parakeets bring with them a sense of home (see also Uskakovych, 2024).

Rangers corral feral pigs thought to have been released in Cairngorms:

“I am concerned that the Cairngorms is now seen as a dumping ground from any wild animal. These people are on a mission, but are acting with no consultation with the local people who have to live and work in that landscape and ignorance of the animals themselves.” Local farmers were particularly concerned about the potential for disease spread, given the unknown provenance of the animals, said MacDonald. He also said that feral pigs regularly damage fences, allowing sheep and cattle to escape, while their rooting behaviour destroys pasture, hay fields, and crops such as barley and oats, with newly planted fields being especially vulnerable.

["T]his unfortunate development just serves to further demonstrate the folly of abandoning these amazing animals in the wild, with no preparation or real concern for their welfare. We can only imagine the stress that all four of the recovered lynx must have experienced after being thrust into an entirely new and extremely harsh environment to fend for themselves.”

I was looking out of the window at lunchtime and saw a parakeet flying by. We have a colony of parakeets somewhere in the vicinity so there are these occasional sightings.

Parakeets have been in and around London for 50 years now. There are a few concerns about how far they constitute a problem invasive species, but pretty much not:

They have been here for around 50-plus years now and there are no obvious and significant impacts to UK wildlife reported so far. Many feel they have found their own niche here. And they are a second favourite [prey] for our London peregrines.

Which made me think generally about cities as places which, if they are alive and functioning, are in a fairly constant state of change, and those cities or towns which are lovely preserved examples of How They Were at some historical epoch are usually thus because the tide of history swept past them, their trade fell off, their harbour silted up, the river changed its course, etc etc.

Whereas a city like London is a palimpsest because things go on happening there.

There's a review in the latest Literary Review of a book on London's Lost Interiors which begins by making this sort of point:

A lot of London has been lost. German bombs didn’t do anything like as much damage as the energy produced by the huge, ever-expanding metropolis itself. In the late 19th century, London was the richest city in the world, boiling with plutocrats flinging up new mansions in the Kensington ‘suburbs’ or drastically refurbishing old ones in Mayfair and Belgravia. Clifford’s Inn, a remarkable medieval survival, was pulled down in Edwardian times. Nash’s Regent Street would have been one of the architectural wonders of the world had it survived in its original form, an astonishing urban scheme stretching all the way from Carlton House Terrace to Regent’s Park. But it was carelessly chucked on the rubbish heap: more retail space was required and undesirable persons were congregating in the arcades. Priceless aristocratic mansions, such as Devonshire House, designed by William Kent, were breezily bulldozed in the 1920s, when their owners could no longer afford the upkeep, and replaced by hideous blocks of flats.

I also saw somewhere a plaint about the end of the traditional pie and mash shops of the capital woe woe and some Conservative MP is trying to obtain protected status for pie and mash, like the Cornish pasty. This article suggests that if people still eat this it is very occasionally as a nostalgic tradition in search of lost time, plus that, like so many trad London foodways, it came from immigrants (Italian, in this case).

(I'm wondering if there are now poncey eateries 're-imagining' or 'deconstructing' pie and mash, but I'm so not going there.)

Was given to think, after Saturday's post about who are the Real [persons of nationality] and why they are supposedly not those terrible people living in cities, haunts of vice & iniquity (take me there, take me there) -

- about the whole idea of the Real and the Authentic, because there is also a discourse of e.g. a place which has lost its character of Realness over time, it has become a travesty of what it was: this is not so much about WO, it has become gentrified, which I think is a different thing, more that it has Lost Its Authenticity.

Except that did it ever have that, because as I mentioned in a comment, a fellow-historian and myself had been remarking between ourselves that there was a probably predictable recurrent cycle of 'Soho's unique character has been destroyed', so much so that I actually did an academic blogpost on a former iteration of this, when the demise of an entrepreneur who, at the time, had been blamed for destroying the unique character of Soho with his enterprises was greeted as alas alack the end of an era, a great tradition bites the dust.

And then I remembered that time I was reading up on the history of bohemians (as in artsy decadent types rather than persons living in or around Czechia) and it did seem to be the case that the great day of Bohemia was always just past, and the present-day lot were imitators and poseurs, that was probably not even real absinthe they were drinking.

A phenomenon I suspect applies mutatis mutandis to a whole range of subcultural scenes, even before saying, if you can remember it you weren't really there.

Although the big London celebration was last Sunday: Diwali On Trafalgar Square: Sunday 27th October 2024 - and as I haven't seen anything to indicate that there were any kind of ructions, presumably it all went off peaceably.

London has, of course, long been a multicultural city. While I daresay we could go back to the Romans and the diverse citizen of that Empire inhabiting Londinium, I will present for your information this, lately brought to attention by The National Archives: List of immigrant Londoners from 1483: This 15th-century list of ‘alien’ residents, gathered for tax purposes, gives us a remarkable insight into London’s medieval immigrant population. It only includes those immigrants who were supposed to pay the 'alien subsidy':

Italian merchants, Hanseatic merchants (members of the Northern European Hanseatic League, predominantly of German origin), and Castilian (Spanish) merchants were all exempt, as were those French people from parts of France that had formerly been subject to the English Crown, for example Normandy.

In Bishopsgate Ward in 1483, Matthew the Greek and his German wife Johanna lived alongside their Scottish neighbour John Broun, who made sheaths for swords. Benedict Calaman and his wife Antonia had travelled from much further afield – the tax record describes them as ‘de India’, from India. Elsewhere in London, Lombards (from what is now northern Italy) and Icelanders rubbed shoulders with Picards (from what is now northern France) and Danes.

Incidentally, on the Danes, this news item suggested something I thought following an exchange earlier this year, that they too have a not at all pristine relationship to European colonialism:

Many Danish people were ignorant of how strongly influenced by their colonial history they were, even as many identified as liberal advocates of human rights. “So when I try to make them aware, by speaking Greenlandic, that there are actually inequalities, that the things that they’ve been taught their whole lives – that they’re ‘good’ colonisers trying to teach savage people how to live a good and healthy life – it’s difficult for them to understand or admit that it might not have all been good,” she said.

Further multicultural exchanges: Missing Pieces Project maps buildings in 189 locations where African American abolitionists spoke against slavery:

The story of how black Americans came to Britain to fight slavery has still not been fully recognised. The Missing Pieces Project aims to shed new light on the struggle by charting the locations on the lecture tours of 19th-century activists. In church halls, factories and theatres across Britain, Christians, workers, radicals and liberals came to hear African American abolitionists talk and show solidarity with the cause. Now, buildings in 189 cities, towns and villages have been added to Historic England’s Missing Pieces Project, which uncovers overlooked stories behind historic sites with an interactive online map.

And unexpected, given that even these days the Met is not entirely noted for its record on policing in a multicultural society: Branford, Robert (1817x20–1869), police superintendent, was born in Stoke by Nayland, Suffolk, the son of Hannah Branford and an unknown father of African descent.

I feel that Restore Trust (hiss boo) would not be on board for this kind of initiative (have not yet seen any results from yesterday's National Trust AGM): Giving city dwellers access to nature is key aim, says National Trust:

Andy Jasper, the National Trust’s director of gardens and parklands, said: “What we wanted to do was ask: if Octavia Hill was alive today, what would concern her? Without a doubt, she’d want to provide access to nature for urban communities, because we believe gardens and green space have the power to transform lives in so many ways.

Just keep going’: the horse-riding 97-year-old botanist battling for England’s wildflowers:

The “Teesdale assemblage” is celebrated because it is a mix of alpine-arctic flowers and southern European species; nowhere else in Britain do they all grow together. Now, though, the area’s unique attributes are under threat. Bradshaw has been recording rare plants here since the early 1950s and has witnessed great declines. Her data was the first to prove that – and the need to do something about it.

Do we think this is some kind of PORTENT: Rare white platypus spotted in northern NSW?

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In other news, I have another bluesky invite going.

Letter in Guardian today from somebody who has been taking the Life in the UK test for their citizenship application and is shocked at its evasion of the involvement of heroes of the nation in slavery.

Which, fair enough, reasonable point,

Except,

A certain irony alert when the person identifies themself as being a Brazilian national.

That would be, Brazil, 'the last nation in the Western world to abolish slavery [1888], and by then it had imported an estimated 4,000,000 slaves from Africa. This was 40% of all slaves shipped to the Americas' and that's not counting the enslaved indigenous peoples. 'Slavery as an institution in Brazil was unrivaled in all of the Americas'.

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On a lighter note, and further to people making tourist experiences out of things you would think mostly people would decide not to go to if not run screaming from: ‘Rat tours’ boom in rodent-infested New York:

Kenny Bollwerk, who built a TikTok following by posting videos from around New York, stumbled upon being a rodent guide when he spent “an hour or two” live-streaming rats running around outside a building site in Sunnyside, Queens....
The response from his viewers was huge. Bollwerk, 36, said more than 10,000 people tuned in live to watch the rats. Bollwerk, who doesn’t like rats, said his intention was to prod the city into coming and getting rid of the rodents. He put out a plea for people to complain to the city’s 311 service, where individuals can complain about rat infestations, and it worked....
In the process, Bollwerk, who is originally from Missouri and moved to New York in 2019, had found himself an audience of rat enthusiasts. He was inundated with requests to film rats at locations across the city. He began going out filming rats – from a safe distance – three to five times a week, and soon was getting messages from tourists who wanted to join.

Row over hanging baskets a ‘political stunt’, says Salisbury councillor.

Council leaders in Salisbury have hit back at “politically motivated” attacks on their decision to replace single-use hanging basket displays and planters provided by the council with environmentally friendly sustainable planting in the medieval city centre. As part of an effort to become carbon neutral by 2030 and encourage bees and butterflies into the city centre, the coalition-led council this week voted to pilot replacing hanging baskets with “living pillars” and “parklets”, which it hopes will provide pockets of nature in the heart of the city.

The leader of the Conservative opposition is Up In Arms, declaring it:

“ideological nonsense as per from [a] leftwing cabal” and said it was “‘incredibly unfortunate for a city with medieval roots”. She said: “For a leftwing city council to outright ban hanging baskets and other floral displays for reasons of sustainability and biodiversity suggests […] a new and undesirable avenue for ideological silliness.”

But what we note is, no-one has suggested that anyone is being stopped from hanging their own baskets of flower and foliage, only that these are not going to put up with ratepayers' money:

“You can’t really scrap hanging baskets, that’s a ridiculous exaggeration. Plenty of the shops and pubs have hanging baskets, and they can continue to do that – nobody’s banning them,”

(Re the appended music: Percy Grainger though so much associated with folksy English Country Gardens was an Australian with a mother fixation and very strong interest in BDSM.)

Some of this gets a bit into the woowoo, srsly, but I like this, given the excesses of the Ethical Altruism longtermists who are more about saving distant future descendants than doing anything about the here and now:

Powlesland works between two and four days in court each week, taking on housing and employment cases to fund his unpaid environmental activism. Clearly, there is a full life’s work restoring the Roding but if he stayed local, he couldn’t champion bigger environmental causes – he co-founded Lawyers for Nature and is also part of the “right to roam” campaign devised by Guy Shrubsole and Nick Hayes. “I’ve come to see the importance of cycling between the micro and the macro,” says Powlesland. “If I just work in Barking it’s irrelevant because these trees will get drowned by climate change. Litter picking is a perfect example. It’s a tsunami of single-use packaging and it feels like trying to wipe off the overflow from the bath rather than turning off the tap, and for packaging we really need to turn off the tap. On the other hand, the local helps keep your sanity and keep you motivated.”

And on London waterways, Woe Woe unto the chartered Thames, we feel Mad William would have had a word or two.

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This gave me to think about people finding ecological niches in places that weren't actually set up and designed for that (like the kestrels nesting on urban buildings): The Only Good Thing Left About Facebook. Some people believe that the company’s scandals are reason enough to quit the platform. Others have found one compelling reason to stay. I daresay there are some really, really toxic FB Groups out there: but it also enables these 'pockets of democratic self-governance within a largely antidemocratic space' and mutual support.

Perhaps I found this particularly resonant because last week was the final one in the series of Gayle Rubin's'Fall 2022 Roy A. Rappaport Lectures: "The Valley of the Kings: Leathermen in San Francisco, 1960-2000"' which I was attending online - the final one made it very clear how a particular confluence of factors in the urban history/geography of San Francisco enabled the emergence and thriving of leather culture in particular areas during a particular time, and these factors also made for its decline.

I think of all sorts of particular times and places when certain kinds of interaction were made possible.