Compass Vol.5 Issue 2

LENT 2020 | VOL. 05 ISSUE 02

COLOUR-CODED ECONOMY | ART IN THE ARCTIC | MISSING MAPS

LENT 2020 | VOL. 05 ISSUE 02

Welcome to Compass!

In typical Cambridge fashion, another term and another issue has swung around at what feels like lightning speed. Just months on from our last issue and the twenties are proving to be roaring with challenges epitomising a modernising and globalising world - the early months of 2020 have already seen the Australian bushfires, a foreboding realisation of the devastation threatened by climate change, and the ongoing spread of coronavirus, as an unwelcome consequence of ever-increasing global interconnectivity.

EDITORS-IN-CHIEF Eliza Griffiths & Eswyn Chen

DESIGN Harriet Bradnock & Sophie Yang

DEPUTY EDITOR Joshua Paul

WEBSITE MANAGER Rosie Schofield

HUMAN GEOGRAPHY Ben Grogan & Sean Cobb

MARKETING Emma McDonald

PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY Ella Weston & Esme Atkinson

PHOTOGRAPHY & VISUALS Tomas Andre

TRAVEL Joanna Neve & Merryn Trevitt

SECRETARY Bridget Tiller

INTERVIEWS Zhanna Levitina & Belinda Ng

BLOG EDITORS Matilda O'Callaghan, Sophie John & Miriam Bengougam

Contributors Othniel Art Oomittuk Jr, Ellis Doeven, Dr Adam Branch, Sean Cobb, Joshua Paul, Pascual Gonzalez, Rosie Serlin, Lucy Nolan, Ella Weston, Eswyn Chen, Zhanna Levitina, Belinda Ng, Joanna Neve, Jamie Sippitt, Merryn Trevitt, Linda Arroyo Front Cover Puffin on the Saltee Islands

by Wynand van Poortvliet Back Cover Oranienstraße, Berlin

by Harriet Bradnock

This issue of Compass duly reflects these distinctly modern challenges, with articles grappling with the conflicting politics of blame surrounding the Australian bush-fires, the emergence of a novel economic system in Hong Kong, borne out of the pro-democracy protests, and the contested politics surrounding Qatar’s upcoming World Cup. By way of some respite, we also have some beautiful photography features capturing a sleepy low-season Mallorca, and the exuberant puffins of the Isle of May. Be sure to take a look at our featured interviews with Inuit artist Art Oomittuk Jr, and Dutch photographer Ellis Doeven, who offer two unique perspectives on their experiences of the Arctic way of life.

Rounding up with the travel section, we pay homage to the Interrail scheme which is facing an uncertain future in light of Brexit.

As always this magazine would not be possible without our contributors, and of course the work of our brilliant editorial and design team, to whom we say thank you! Also, a big thank you to CUGS and the Geography Department for their continued funding and support.

Don’t forget to keep up with us on our social and blog, but for now, do enjoy this issue!

Eliza and Eswyn Co-Editors in Chief cambridgecompassmagazine.wordpress.com compass@cugs.org.uk cugscompass compass_cugs

CONTENTS

4 A ColourCoded Economy

22 Missing Maps

6 It’s Coming Home

24 Koshering the Enclave

37 Film review

8 Australian Bushfires

26 Gentrification in Shoreditch

40 Saving Interrail

Geography Mapathon, saving lives using GIS

Hong Kong: protesting with the wallet

Qatar’s World Cup ambitions

Impact of the antipodean blazes

An enclosed community in the heart of the city

Class performativity & struggles

10 28 Puffin Paradise Tipping the Bird life on the balance Isle of May

Twelve years left to save the planet?

15 Art in the Arctic

30 Uniformitarian Thinking

An interview with Art Othniel Oomittuk Jr & Ellis Doeven

Challenging the paradigm

Disclaimer The views expressed in this magazine are those of the individual authors only and do not represent the views or opinions of Compass Magazine as a whole or the University of Cambridge Department of Geography.

32 Dr Adam Branch

Political ecology of Ugandan charcoal

Weathering with You

by Makoto Shinkai, an ode to change-makers

Connecting Europe by rail

42 Mallorca

Finding the sweet spot between tourism & heritage?

COMMENT

When a Colour Revolution Colour-Codes the Economy

By Anonymous

As

the civil resistance in Hong Kong continues against its authority’s continuous human rights abuses, a very interesting change happened to their local economy that prodemocracy citizens readily embraced into their everyday life as a way to protest – with cash and card.

The ‘Yellow Economic Circle’, or the ‘Economic Sphere of Conscience’ – essentially an economic ecosystem or alliance of pro-democracy businesses (colour-coded as ‘yellow’ to represent the colour adopted by the pro-democracy camp) – has grown on pro-democracy Hong Kongers as a concept and flourished. And yet this concept has also attracted just as much attention from the opposite camp. Some damn it as unworkable, some dismiss it, others register its destructiveness and potential to ‘scorch the earth of Hong Kong’. These messy, cacophonous discourse attacks on the idea seem to be received by the pro-democracy population as mere household jokes that encode how the regime is so threatened by this rising mode of self-sustainable economy that it can only panic.

And it probably should.

Over the festive season in Hong Kong, pro-democracy protesters and supporters initiated citywide ‘shopping protests’ to pressure their government by 4 | COMPASS | LENT 2020

disrupting economic activity at major shopping complexes.

These events resulted in plummeting sales for proBeijing businesses and rapid declines in visitor arrivals, particularly from mainland China. The pro-democracy camp deems this the fruit of their persistence in supporting pro-democracy businesses and boycotting those from the opposite camp. This change in consumer behaviour and the series of activities that aims to restructure the economy from the bottom up have inevitably hurt the retail statistics for some monopolistic chains, whilst smaller, pro-democracy shops and eateries welcomed unending queues outside their doors. The ‘Yellow Economic Circle’ is a means of playing the political game using an economic hand, based only on the purchasing power and, quoting from pro-democracy supporters, the ‘conscience of our people’, as they believe that if one supports a pro-

Beijing business, one funds the regime’s crimes against human rights.

Here is exactly where the legitimacy of the prodemocracy economic ecosystem lies: it is just consumers making choices, as they have done ever since the dawn of the capitalist mode of living. It is a system that cannot be cracked because it is so organic – it is only trend setting. Just as consumers overturned a traditional consumption trend by switching to buy fair-trade products upon realisation of the corruption of their former alternatives, supporting prodemocracy businesses is seen as simply a conscious choice with a political attachment.

At the start of the civil resistance, pro-democracy supporters boycotted proBeijing businesses simply because they refused to see their hard-earned money flowing into the bags of what

they consider a ‘blood-thirsty’ regime, and that they wished to concentrate resources within the pro-democracy community.

Originally a natural, reactive behaviour to help with the advancement of their social movement, it has now become a ‘consumer revolution’ in its own right against the monopoly of red capital in Hong Kong.

This is what perturbs the proBeijing camp: innocent as it is, this behavioural change in consumers has the power to generate a new mainstream market that even involves a daily-updated Google map colour-coding shops as friends or foe, and eliminate businesses that do not reflect or echo the consumers’ values.

While Hong Kong government officials go on criticising this colour-coded approach to recreate the city’s economic landscape as ‘confining’ and ‘lacking any future prospects’ (expectedly, since they answer to Beijing), the participants of the ‘Yellow Economic Circle’ regularly troubleshoot, and proactively design solutions and systematic plans to keep it intact and help it forward.

Within the community, they have already pledged against any division between those who step out further and those who do not – they do not adopt a threshold when defining the ‘yellowness’ of a business.

To them, if a business is supportive of the prodemocracy movement, then it is a friend. And where a ‘friend’ needs protection as they feel insecure ‘coming out’ as ‘yellow’ for concerns over political retribution, the community helps by adopting

word-of-mouth communication to promote this business, and exempts it from having to label its shop front or put itself onto the colour-coded Google map. They ensure that any policies that they devise are themselves constant reminders of the central idea around which the Circle revolves: ‘conscience as the currency’, a single principle that is also the single criterion for a business to join the Circle, which pushes its definition beyond just a political stance. It is clear that they are determined to nurture it into a ‘Yellow Economic Chain’ of suppliers, sellers, workers and consumers, and one that is inclusive of also ‘neutral’ participants, which allows it to be self-sufficient and to gain the necessary reach into all sectors of the local economy.

But the primary aim of the ‘Yellow Economic Circle’ is not an economic reformation – the concept is one that goes deeper than the pocket.

The ‘Yellow Economic Circle’ is a manifestation of civil empowerment: Hong Kongers are using their capital to express a message. Hong Kong is a paradoxical place in the sense that it is a free and

sophisticated society but not a democracy – the people there cannot elect their own government, and the current one is repressive. It is thus a case in which the civil society opts to create a means for itself to represent its interests in a responsible and selfdetermined way. This is why they keenly wish to nourish the Circle into an existence that can exert pressure on administrations, or even initiate a wave of anti-totalitarianism behavioural changes, and rebrand Hong Kong into not just a free economy that it already is, but also one that embodies the values of freedom and democracy, one with human conscience.

The strength of the ‘Yellow Economic Circle’ seems to lie in its reflexivity and the strong solidarity within its community. It is difficult to predict how it will evolve, but it is now at least the main mode of consumption in Hong Kong in which consumers speak through their choices.

From this perspective, it is neither ‘confining’ nor ‘lacking in prospects’ – so long as the Hong Kong spirit of resistance stays alive, the Circle has an absolute potential to dominate the market under the current climate of their society, in which the consumers’ will and their political aspirations are intertwined. To all pro-democracy Hong Kongers, the mainstream is ‘conscience’, and businesses may decide for themselves whether they want to go where the money is. ■

LENT 2020 | COMPASS | 5

It’s Coming Home

Blowing the Whistle on Qatar’s World Cup Ambitions

By Sean Cobb, Geographer at Magdalene

U

nderneath the spotlights of the Lusail stadium, as Harry Kane prepares to bring football home with a penalty, the hosts of the competition Qatar will undoubtedly be feeling similar pressure under the international spotlight.

International sports competitions like the World Cup are geographical oases, where fans and their flags from all over the world congregate to celebrate national identities and share in the glory and agony of football. For the hosts it is an opportunity to exhibit their culture to an international audience, enjoying the soft power of being able to accommodate a global event and the prestige it brings.

of corruption in FIFA and the competition bidding process, and serious concerns about the mistreatment of a There is undeniably an migrant population from India emotional geography attached and Nepal, which Amnesty to football, with the love of a club usually being hereditary or International estimate as over 90% of the workforce building related to territorial proximity to the stadium. Throughout the the twelve stadiums, with many being denied exit permits summer of 2018 chants of ‘it’s coming home’ asserted England to leave the job and country, living in poor conditions and on fans’ sense of ownership and pride in their history of football. insufficient salaries. Estimates Equally prevalent is the concept of 1,200 migrant deaths so far have attracted criticism of of the rival in sport, usually Qatar from the football world the next closest team. If and NGOs. football has a ‘home’ then the commentary in the build-up Fans seem acutely aware of to the 2022 Qatar World Cup the geopolitical sensitivities of has clearly been focused on the idea that there are specific the event, with cultural factors remaining a topic of concern parts of the world in which for LGBTQ+ and women fans football is not at home. who are uncertain on how they will be received in a country A broad range of criticism where homosexuality is illegal. has been aimed at the host nation, starting with allegations Other areas causing debate 6 | COMPASS | LENT 2020

are the logistical conflicts with European league games, stadiums having to be built from scratch and whether the small country has the infrastructure to support such a huge event.

The UN’s International Labour Organisation has supported reforms of the Qatari labour system to introduce a minimum wage, oversee labour practices and guarantee remittance payments for workers. They subsequently dropped their investigation, despite there being a long road ahead for fair treatment for migrants by contracting companies.

Sport has never been removed from politics and has recently been used to challenge the state and promote social justice, for example by NFL players taking a knee during

the national anthem in the USA, although historically notorious for its lack of resistance to the Nazi regime in the Berlin 1936 Olympics. Events have reflected geopolitical disputes, such as the Eastern Bloc boycott of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and America rejecting participation of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, their absences sending a powerful political message.

This invites the question of whether it is appropriate to consider sport as a powerful political tool in drawing attention to global issues, or if the right to host competitions should be deprived from countries not deemed to be culturally and politically appropriate for the event. Who would decide who is allowed to benefit and who is deprived of the income and attention the World Cup brings?

scale, with construction companies avoiding criticism which allows problems such as migrant labour continue to occur.

Football is a much-used tool of development agencies such as SoccerAid, Football Foundation and Africa on the Ball, and seemingly for good reason.

One of the few global sports, it provides a way to connect countries and promote unity through a shared love of the game. This does not mean it is void of political complexities that plague the intentions of all NGOs.

For example, the 2014 World Cup hosted by Brazil was heavily criticised for its beautification, obstruction and destruction of its favelas, using the slums to promote the country’s culture yet removing the realities of urban poverty from global view during the games. The nature of these competitions means football rarely benefits those who use it as a way to escape poverty.

Yet the accompanying scrutiny of the host nation vilifies governments but ignores how labour exploitation occurs on the corporate

global level the power of the sport is amplified as more money is spent on stadiums and access, potentially making hosting exclusionary and focused on parts of the world which can afford it, and which have a history of football.

This World Cup presents an opportunity to confront some of these conflicts and contradictions within the sport.

As the first Arab country to host the competition, Qatar is also the first to present a Sustainability Strategy which includes a commitment to protect workers’ rights, diversity and the environment, pledging to dismantle stadiums with capacities of 40,000 to donate to developing countries that require more sporting facilities, as well as using them as community centres.

As the world negotiates the ethical, logistical and geographical complexities that come with the privilege and scrutiny of hosting global competitions, football continues to evolve to confront notions of ‘otherness’ and overcome them within the ninety minutes. ■

On a LENT 2020 | COMPASS | 7

Amid the Ashes The Bushfire Blame Game

By Joshua Paul, Geographer at Trinity Hall

The

current Australian bushfires are some of the largest in recent history. The fires have claimed thirty lives and destroyed 6,000 buildings, including 2,000 homes, rendering thousands homeless. They have burnt more than 63,000 square kilometres of land, equivalent to the size of England. The massive area of the fires has meant that an estimated one billion animals have been killed, whilst many species at risk of extinction could now be extinct. With more than half of all Australians affected, the sheer scale of the fires has led to a massive impact on life in Australia. Of course, as this all happened very recently, peer-reviewed academic scholarship is lagging behind.

This makes it even more important to consider the contested knowledges that surround the event in the current moment - which can be very difficult to decipher.

The vast scale of this disaster and climate change have altered perceptions of risk and shifted them from the local to the global.

One of the key aspects of the Australian fires has been the contested knowledges around the cause of the fires. This links into wider aspects of scholarship around the blaming that occurs for climate change - there is an inherent desire to assign the blame for climate change somewhere. Indeed,

8 | COMPASS | LENT 2020

as Beck suggests in Risk Society, climate change epitomises the risk society where casually tangled threats render impotent the usual methods of assigning fault and thus open the field of blaming to almost any imaginable narrative. There is a clear sense that this has occurred in the discourse surrounding Australia’s bushfires - blame has been pointed in different ways. Scott Morrison, the climate-denying Prime Minister, has been shifting the blame away from climate change and towards arson.

Indeed, his concerns for climate change are so little that, as Piers Morgan showed on Good Morning Britain earlier this year, he took a trip to Hawaii during these fires. In the combative interview, conservative commentator Morgan grilled Australian MP Craig Kelly who defended Morrison, saying that there was nothing the PM could do, that the fires were caused by arson, and that it was not the responsibility of the state.

In adopting this position, Kelly shifted the blame for the fires, individualising responsibility and absolving his government’s weak policy on climate change. In this discourse, Kelly demonstrates the politics of blame that surrounds climate change disasters - which displaces the blame away from the government and onto individuals and local states.

However, in contrast to this discourse, the idea that arson has caused the fires is hotly contested: the number of 183

arrested arsonists is far more complex as it includes a variety of related offences, including breaching of total fire ban, and is not even the total number of arrests but rather the number of policy enforcement actions.

This must also be considered in the misinformation campaign by ‘bot’ and ‘troll’ accounts on social media, which has served to amplify the voices of people who blame arsonists.

This individualised blame on arson is contested by those who blame it on wider issues of climate change. On 18 December 2019, a new temperature record of 41.9ºC for Australia was set, which occurred alongside a drought.

These are the conditions needed for a bushfire to start, which are clearly linked to climate change. Indeed, natural climate variability may have brought a year as hot as 2019 to Australia once every 360 years, but now these extreme temperatures are likely to occur as often as once every eight years. While arsonists may play a role, anthropogenic climate change creates room for a fire regime that is capable of producing such widespread and devastating fires.

There is no doubt that these knowledges will continue to be contested, and this contestation gives rise to differing spatialities of risk perception. Amongst those who believe climate change is very much a real threat, there

is a global perception of risk.

Indeed, this is reflected in Pyne’s concept, developed in response to the Australian bushfires of the Pyrocene. Pyne claims that the Pyrocene is a new era that will ‘affect all of us’. This is not to dispute the idea that climate change will alter fire regimes, making them more intense, but this article in particular highlights how risk perception of these climate disasters is not just local, but global. This gives rise to a new spatiality of risk perception - one that stretches across the globe as a result of climate change.

In conclusion, the fires in Australia have highlighted that risk is not straightforward.

Perceptions of risk vary, and these risk perceptions can be projected globally through climate change. Contested knowleges also play a part in the debate and discourse surrounding these wildfires.

Climate change has long had a politics of blame, but these disasters bring contested knowledges to the forefront of the news. As demonstrated, although arson likely played a role, the root cause of these disasters is climate change.

The politics of blame are central to climate change discourses - be it the people who blame

arsonists such that they can deny climate change, or proponents of climate change and deniers who blame China for emissions, such that they can shift the requirements of change off themselves and to others.

Indeed, returning to Craig Kelly, he suggested that the politicisation (or in his terms ‘hijacking’) of this disaster for those with an ‘ideology’ (read: climate change activists) is nonsense. However, it is the opposite of nonsense - it is a requirement of any discourse.

Applying Foucault’s ideas from The Foucault Reader, it is clear to see that any position, or any discourse created, on or around this matter is inherently political. As such, knowledges will no doubt continue to be contested in future fire disasters. ■ LENT 2020 | COMPASS | 9

A SCOTTISH PUFFIN PARADISE

By Joanna Neve, Geographer at Fitzwilliam Photography by Jamie Sippitt

10 | COMPASS | LENT 2020

On

FEATURED

a cold August morning, crowds of tourists can be spotted queuing up to board a small motor boat which runs from mainland Anstruther to the Isle of May – a true hidden gem lurking off the Scottish coast in the Firth of Forth. If you ask the visitors what brings them to the port on such a cold morning, the answer is always puffins.

With beautiful black and white plumages and colourful bills, puffins are pelagic seabirds with a knack for catching fish in a single dive. Their short wings and stocky appearance are what make them such capable underwater swimmers, and above water they can be seen beating their wings rapidly at up to 400 times a minute!

LENT 2020 | COMPASS | 11

Whilst there are a few places in the UK that you can spot puffins, like Bempton Cliffs and the Shetland Islands, nowhere offers the sheer density of puffins like the Isle of May. As the boat begins to circle the island, swarms and swarms of seabirds can be seen all around.

Guillemots, razorbills, shags, kittiwakes, fulmars, arctic turns, black-backed gulls, cormorants and puffins are all within crystal clear viewing. Some lucky visitors can even spot dolphins and whales if conditions are right, and the return trip is a good opportunity to spot seals basking in the sun on the shore.

12 | COMPASS | LENT 2020

Once the boat docks, visitors are quick to scramble, as time on the island is limited due to a rigorous conservation and breeding programme, which is careful to ensure nesting birds are not disturbed. At the height of breeding season the island can host around 200,000 birds on just 57 hectares, making it a really special location.

LENT 2020 | COMPASS | 13

Alongside stunning birdlife, the island is also rich in culture and heritage. It is the site of one of the earliest Christian churches in Scotland, founded in the 9th century. Interestingly, it is thought to be the island’s monks who introduced rabbits in 1329, and these can still be spotted on the island today alongside a unique type of house mice.

For a careful photographer, a summer visit can provide the opportunity to get shots of puffins in flight holding fish in their bills. Fledglings can also be seen, and beautiful backdrops of blue water and wildflowers make a wildlife photographer’s dream. With growing ecological concern for declining puffin colonies on the Shetland Isles, the Isle of May offers a beacon of hope for a stable and continuous annual nesting ground for one of the nation’s most loved birds. ■

Copyright for all photos to Jamie Sippitt, jamiesippitt19@hotmail.com.

14 | COMPASS | LENT 2020

ART

IN THE ARCTIC â–¶ LENT 2020 | COMPASS | 15

Editors’ Foreword The two of us had the honour of meeting Othniel Art Oomittuk Jr and Ellis Doeven when they visited the Tikigaq | Point Hope - Life on Alaska’s North Slope exhibition at the Scott Polar Research Institute. Art’s artwork and wonderful stories of growing up Inupiaq in an Inuit community in Alaska offer a unique insight into how climate change is affecting the lives and cultural fabric of communities in the Arctic circle. Dutch photographer Ellis has an equally fascinating story into this change, as an outsider who has now become part of the community. We would like to extend our heartfelt gratitude to them for taking the time to share their story, which we think the world should hear.

OTHNIEL ART OOMITTUK JR. is an Inupiaq artist,

born in 1963 in the village of Point Hope, Alaska. He graduated from high school in Utqiaġvik (formerly known as Point Barrow, Alaska) and studied at the Western Oregon University where he graduated with a BSc in Art and a minor in Computer Science. After working as a dark room technician and a graphic designer for seven years, he became a stay-athome dad and took up carving again. Inspired by his Inupiaq ancestors, Art’s carving work focuses on identity and Shamanistic transformations.

Since 1997 Art has participated in numerous indigenous gatherings and shows, carving with many indigenous masters around the world. His work can be seen in museums in Alaska, Oregon, Arizona and Massachusetts. In 2015 he moved to Amsterdam where he now lives with his wife and daughter.

16 | COMPASS | LENT 2020

Interview by Belinda Ng, Geographer at Christ’s & Zhanna Levitina, Geographer at Homerton

What is your favourite memory growing up in the community?

How has Western/American influence changed the community?

I come from the village of Point Hope, the most northwestern point in the USA, and one of the oldest, longest continuously inhabited communities on the North American continent. Tikigaq means the index finger or the pointer because the shape of the place points towards Siberia. I would have to say my favourite memory is walking around in the summertime when we had so much freedom, because there were 24 hours of sunlight and we never had to go home. We were always out on the tundra hunting, playing around, running with the birds, running with the animals, running away from the animals.

Some of my favourite times was going to our fishing camp with family. We would walk from Point Hope along the coast to Jabber town, where the first commercial whalers were set up by chief Attangorak, the first self-appointed chief in 1890s.

My generation was not raised by our parents; we were raised by our grandparents. They know so much about the past.

My grandparents spoke mostly Inuit. I knew the Inuit language up until I was five, but then I got educated and I lost a lot of it, although I still know how to pronounce a lot of words.

My parents’ generation were forced to be educated by the American government [in the early 21st century]. They were shipped to boarding school and had to speak English. If they spoke Inuit they were punished. So when they got back to the village, they did not teach their own children their native language and it almost got erased. They thought that if their children go to school and don’t speak English, they would be reprimanded. Today, there is a group of people on Facebook with explanations of Inuit [traditions and beliefs].

Elders that are in their 70s who

know about shamanism are on Facebook. My grandmother was very knowledgeable about Inuit identity and she didn’t want the younger generation to forget about shamanism because it is so important in our community and to our identity. When I create something [as an artist], I incorporate the idea of transformations from human into an animal. We have such a respect for the animals that we believe that we can become that animal so that it will give itself up to us so that we as Inuit can survive and hunt.

Today, we have the Internet, iPhones, and a big screen TV. But we choose to use this technology for our own purposes. People go to school, but they don’t really leave the village to go, since there is a school in Point Hope. A lot of people do online courses. And now a lot of the teachers are Inuit, so now we are starting to educate our own.

them, and if we hunt them, it will end the migration cycle.

When you see some of the artwork of the Arctic, you see a hole in the hand and that is to spiritually let people know that something is always going to come out of the holes. We are never going to be able to get everything with those holes, it ensures that we never overhunt. Sometimes you will see Inuit artwork of a person with no thumb, because it’s hard to grab something, so you might get lucky one out of ten times if you are a good hunter.

What is your experience with hunting?

If I am in the Arctic, I am always hunting, I might be out The Moon of the Ten Whales, 2018 on the ice for weeks. It is how we feed the community. If we This artwork tells us about are not hunting, somebody surviving, about how we in the community might be hunt, about the whole Arctic hungry. But when we hunt, we community. The land feeds never try to get everything. the Inuit with exactly what we We don’t hunt to extinct the need; we need the food for animal, we just take what we your soul and wellbeing and it’s need at that time and feed the the only way to live there. We community. We make sure that Inuit have a different way of the cycle of migration comes thinking, it’s like the difference through. We never hunt the first between a hunting community [animals] that come through, and a farming community. A because they are the leaders farmer would have no idea how and know the migration route. to hunt like we do.

We have so much respect for

Is hunting based on traditional methods?

We use technology available to us, so we have guns. The introduction of rifles changed the terminology of our language. We no longer use the harpoon so everything associated with hunting with the harpoon is now gone in the language, and now the language is adapted to using the rifle. We had kayaks, but we no longer use those because we no longer use harpoons in the first place so we don’t need the kayak to retrieve the animal. In the past, the whales used to come through a narrow channel of water with ice on both sides, but now it is a wide, open ocean so we need a big power boat to go further out. When the whale goes down, it is not always dead when it is harpooned. Now with no ice, how do we adapt to it? It’s a new challenge that has only been around for the last five to ten years. This spring was the first time the ice did not lock with the land, the ice never fully froze and there was always open water.

Are the oral stories being lost if the language is lost?

There are a few Inuit scholars who are bringing back the old stories. They come from different Inuit areas (Canada, Alaska, Greenland), and post on their respective Facebook pages. They translate it and post it in English. The original story is in Inuit, there are some things in the Inuit language that can’t be translated into English, because English LENT 2020 | COMPASS | 17

language doesn’t have the word for some things that exist in Inuit. So, there are some things lost in translation.

As an artist, where do you find your inspiration for your art?

I rely on my own experiences in the Arctic to create an image that shows transformations. If an Inuit elder talks to me about the old ways, I’ll take that into consideration and it might trigger something in my mind to create something that nobody, except Inuit, would understand.

The way we understand the world is completely different from a person who encounters Inuit culture. In order for people to understand what I am doing I need to talk to them. The big sales come when I talk to people. You need to know the context of something to really appreciate it.

several hundred miles off shore, when I was younger it was only thirty miles offshore.

I’ve seen people think they’re on solid ice and they go through and they are gone. The village of Tikigaq has already been relocated, moved two miles to higher ground. But we will not leave the area because that’s where all the animals migrate through during their yearly cycle of migration. This migration is a

How do the Inuit people explain these changes?

How has life in the Arctic changed in your lifetime?

I was born in 1963. Back then, transportation at the time was the skin boat and sledges, we had no cars, we lived on the ice, we transported ourselves with dogs, everything was organic, and the ice was different. [Ice] had age. In the Arctic ocean, we used to have thick, old, aged ice, and it would come back every year. Now the ocean freezes and it melts - it doesn’t have the chance to get really thick, like the thickness of a building.

For the last ten to fifteen years we haven’t seen the thickness of the ice like that. Now it is young ice, it is only there for one season. When I was younger, we used to see ice on the ocean all year long, now it completely disappears during summertime.

The old ice, the main ice pack is

The hunting has changed; we can no longer trust the ice that is no longer stable. [There has also been a change in the way] we store the meat that we hunt.

We utilise ice cellars, which used to always be frozen. Now they thaw easily, which spoils the meat. If we use an electric freezer, the meat does not age the way we like it to taste, it just becomes freezer burnt. In the ice cellar it takes its time to freeze and attracts the essence of the earth and everything around it.

Look at you, look at me 2, 2012

month earlier now. Not only are the people who hunt the animals confused about when the migration is going to start, the animals themselves are confused too. We’re starting to see different animal species coming further into the Arctic, such as fur seals, different bird species, beavers, and moose more often now. All these animals that would normally be in a warmer climate further south are heading north. Also, the animals that depend on the ice have to go further out. For us, we have to adapt our hunting style to an ice that is totally unpredictable.

All we know is that there has been a change. It seems to me that this change also has something to do with the shift in the Earth’s axis. When I’m in Point Hope, it looks like the Sun comes up in a different spot than it normally would have. Maybe there is a little shift in the polar axis. Maybe the true north pole is shifting, a difference of five degrees or two degrees. I don’t know if that would make a big difference, but it might have.

Climate change is a combination of fossil fuels being overused worldwide and maybe an imbalance. We as human beings have built so many cities and removed so much from the ground - ore, iron, coal. This made the Earth unbalanced [because] if you take something and move it from one place to another it might shift. That’s my own opinion because we drill for oil, take it out of the ground, things are starting to happen in Alaska where we are getting a lot of earthquakes. We always had earthquakes, even big ones but they seem to be happening a lot more frequently now.

ELLIS DOEVEN was born in 1969 in The

Netherlands. She studied photography at the Royal Academy of the Arts in The Hague between 2006 - 2010. During her studies she visited the village of Point Hope in Alaska which led to the start of her project Maktak and Gasoline and to meeting her husband, local Inupiaq artist and whaler Othniel Art Oomittuk Jr. After nine years of photography, travelling between Point Hope and Amsterdam she published the photobook Maktak and Gasoline which portrays the community of Point Hope. Ellis Doeven lives with her husband and daughter in Amsterdam.

Zach, patiently waiting for the blows of Belugas, May 2017

What was your first experience in the Arctic?

I first went to the Arctic in 2008 for two days. To survive, I needed to live with the environment the way it is. I was definitely very scared, because when you get there you realise how small you are and how tough the survival considerations are, and you just feel very unequipped. I was very impressed with the community and the way they lived there.

Why did you go to the Arctic?

Randy, Rex, Raymond, Jeff, Gordon, Wally, Joe, Michael, Jacob and Clark, May 2009

At the time, I went with a journalist who wanted to investigate a massive oil and natural gas project that Shell was doing in the area. I had volunteered with Greenpeace for many years as an activist so I was concerned about the environment. Six months later, I went to the Arctic again to live with the community for two months as a photographer. I was there during the whale hunt and that’s when I met Art and we fell in love.

How did you feel about whaling?

Pulling up Popsy and Eva’s whale, April 2017

Given I was a Greenpeace activist, I knew all about sustainable whaling beforehand.

Rationally, I didn’t have a problem with subsistence [whaling], but emotionally it was hard to handle at first. In Inupiat culture you don’t hunt the whale, the whale is given to you, so there’s this amazing feeling of gratitude and happiness that is infectious from the community after a successful hunt. I think it’s an opportunity to really confront the idea of how we eat meat.

We are very distanced from this process normally, but the Inuipaq way of living makes you more mindful about eating meat.

What was your experience as a photographer in the community?

I asked people in the community for permission to take their photographs. To me, they are family and friends, so I own the picture when I take it but I made sure they all had a copy of the book I published when it came out. I think it’s very important [for them] to have this book because it documented ten years of Point Hope history through my eyes and captured the community at that particular point in time.

Why do you think photography is so powerful?

I think it is a very different journalistic approach. The meaning of photographs is very different to artefacts, because it’s a lense to take you into the community. Also, on the wider issue of climate change, it shows the world the people who are directly affected by climate change. Normally, the Inuit people are removed from these narratives. ▲ Sam and Jade at the basketball court around midnight, August 2014

◀ Pauline preparing feathers of an Eider duck, 2017 20 | COMPASS | LENT 2020

Theodore, Donovan, Eli, Angela and Terza, August 2015

Back flip on the trampoline May 2009

What was your biggest challenge as a photographer?

I was part of a community and I was also a photographer, which led to a tension in the dual role I inhibited. It’s hard to whip a camera out when there is a sensitive beautiful image in front of me because I do not want to be disrespectful. There are also beautiful moments that I cannot take capture because I am a part of the community and I want to be there and present for them.

Your book features information about Inuit history, why did you choose to include that?

There was definitely traumatic change for the community from the 1800s onwards when the Russians approached for the communities for projects. The United States forced a lot of conversion in lifestyles for the Inuit. A lot of inequalities persist today, such as how Inuit cannot own their own land. But since the 1950s, Inuit have taken on activism to defend themselves, from learning English to be able to stand up in the Senate, to uniting with other indigenous people in Alaska. ■

Molly sewing her granddaughters’ parki for Kagruk, June 2009

LENT 2020 | COMPASS | 21

HUMAN GEOGRAPHY

Missing Maps Saving Lives with GIS

By Pascual Gonzalez, Geographer at Christ’s

We

often take for granted just how prevalent maps are in our day to day lives. With a single tap on your screen you can easily find the fastest path to the nearest café. I myself cannot arrive at half of my supervisions without the help of Google Maps.

More importantly, maps are essential for risk prevention and disaster risk management as first responders use spatial data to navigate tumultuous landscapes.

Yet, large swathes of the world lack accurate spatial data, thus increasing their vulnerability to natural disasters and preventing disaster relief organizations from responding efficiently.

Missing Maps, an international humanitarian effort founded

by Doctors Without Borders, aims to pre-emptively map these ‘missing’ areas to help individuals and organizations better cope with crises. This is done through collaborative mapping on OpenStreetMaps (OSM), an open-source mapping platform. It is an explicitly geographical endeavour that recognizes global inequalities in the availability of spatial data and aims to bridge these gaps through user collaboration.

Earlier this February, numerous Cambridge geographers joined the Missing Maps cause and participated in a ‘mapathon’:

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geography’s version of a hackathon, except with a focus on collaborative mapping. With pizza on the way and Martin Lucas-Smith - the Geography Department’s webmaster and an OSM jedi – at the helm, everyone in the room worked for two hours to label dozens of un-mapped plots of land in Tanzania. Most of the participants had never used OSM before but the process was straightforward: create an account, find a plot of land on satellite imagery, and draw points, lines, or polygons over recognizable landmarks.

But how is this going to help anyone, you might ask?

If disaster ever strikes one of these newly mapped areas, first responders can use Missing Maps data to traverse unrecognisable landscapes, identify buildings where they might find people, and find the fastest route to any given area. In my case, I got an apparently empty plot of land, but upon closer inspection I began noticing small houses, roads, and farmland. So, I spent the rest of the evening joyfully clicking away as I filled in my map eating CUGSprovided mozzarella pizza. It was a strangely therapeutic experience…

By the end of the session, the combined efforts of everyone in the room had produced a sizeable amount of spatial data

that could potentially help save lives in the future. Now that’s what you call geography in action!

Yet, the critical geographers amongst you might realize that this process is not as straightforward as it seems.

From a technical point of view, it is very easy to mislabel landmarks, especially if you work with low-resolution satellite imagery. I would be lying if I said that I was completely sure that all the roads I mapped were actual roads and not dry riverbeds.

The software allows you to be as vague as you want in your labelling, and if you are unsure of what you just mapped you can request that your maps be revised.

From a more theoretical perspective, one could argue that this form of mapping reduces the landscape to a series of featureless polygons that simplify the reality on the ground and completely ignores the presence of individual human beings. Yet, Missing Maps is a humanist movement at heart: it recognizes that some communities are more vulnerable than others due to information asymmetry and aims to save lives by addressing this inequality.

Furthermore, because OSM is an open-source platform, locals could (in theory) add more accurate, local knowledge

to maps of their localities.

Whether these people are being included in the mapping process is another question.

Doctors Without Borders has hosted numerous mapathons with local communities in developing countries – including one that lasted for two weeks in Guinea – but most of the data that goes into Missing Maps probably comes from users in Europe and North America. It is crucial to continue asking questions and monitor these organisations to assess how these sorts of technical approaches to development and risk management alter our perceptions of people across the world.

Clearly there is more to mapping than just clicking buttons – we need to be mindful of what we map, what they might be used for, and who might be impacted by them. Nonetheless, these maps absolutely need to be made if we are to reduce disaster risk on a global scale, especially considering the uneven effects of climate change on developing countries. So, should you join Missing Maps?

Absolutely! All you need is a computer, spare time, and the desire to help others. After all, this is probably the most relevant form of colouring in that you’ll ever do! ■ For more information visit https://www.missingmaps.org/ LENT 2020 | COMPASS | 23

Koshering the Enclave Inside the Hasidic Jewish Community of Williamsburg, New York

By Rosie Serlin, Geographer at Queens

D

espite living in the midst of urban Williamsburg, a neighbourhood in Brooklyn, New York, the Hasidic ultra-orthodox Jews are not ‘exposed to the world.’

Though no physical border demarcates their religious enclave from the surrounding vibrancy of Williamsburg, there is a unanimous understanding that life as a Hasidic person is confined to the few blocks dedicated to this group of radically religious Jews.

As one member explained to me, ‘I didn’t see beyond Williamsburg.’ With a range of shops and services catered to the community within the area, and the vibrancy of the surrounding urbanity dimmed out, there appears to be little incentive or need for community members to venture out into the rest of the city. As a result, south Williamsburg continues to function as a bounded home to the Satmar Hasidic Jews, physically neighbouring secularity but socially resembling something historical, out of touch and far removed from the 21st century American buzz encircling it.

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The Hasidic community are a radical sect of orthodox Judaism who formed in the 18th century in Eastern Europe.

With a desire to express an unwavering devotion to God and religious tradition, the community preach the importance of rejecting modernity, following a highly ritualised and traditional lifestyle. With a history of persecution, most notably the mass destruction of Hasidic Jewry caused by the Holocaust, the remaining members of the Hasidic community have felt the pressing obligation to preserve their tradition and ensure the continuation of their spiritual movement. It was the paradoxical synergy of their preservationist doctrine and urban existence that initially caught my attention. I wanted to explore how the community manage to remain quite so oppositional to modernity whilst living in the midst of it.

Whilst most other orthodox religious groups dwell in rural, isolated landscapes, the Hasidim have a substantially

global urban presence, with multiple communities living across Brooklyn, London, Jerusalem and so on.

Over the summer I visited Williamsburg for four weeks in order to assess how the community have created and maintained a boundary dividing them from their neighbours, and what might threaten this border. My naïve optimism that people on the street would agree to engage in small talk with me was quickly shattered after I failed to even initiate eye contact or a smile with passers-by. Despite dressing in a modest outfit, and myself being a modern orthodox Jew, it became quite clear that this community would not engage with me in any capacity. My research therefore became redirected to the members of the community who had either chosen to leave, or who were living secret double lives within it. I managed to carry out a total of nine interviews with such people, and carried out participant observation,

observing the mundane behaviour of members within their public space.

The interviews that I carried out were a constant source of amazement. Through my interviewees disclosure of their struggles and experiences, I became exposed to the intricacies of Hasidic lifestyle; the rules, the traditions, the expectations, the joy and the pain. The majority of my interviewees were men who were straddling the stringency of their lives as Hasidim and their yearnings for freedom and secularity. They were effectively immobile. They had children, wives and jobs in the community, and no skills, education or money allowing them leave their world. Perhaps more daunting were the prior experiences of community members who had decided to leave. Labelled as heretics, the defection of such members resulted in familial rejection and displacement, as their religious transgression and identity struggles became the substance of community gossip.

The confinement of the community extended beyond social pressures. With most apartment buildings within the

area being occupied by Hasidic people, it became clear that the community exercised a monopoly over the real estate business in Williamsburg.

My interviewees explained the rules that enabled this; when the area started becoming more gentrified and crowded, a group of Hasidic Rabbi’s created a document outlining where it was and wasn’t permissible to rent property to a non-Jew. In one case, a Hasidic property developer rented the apartments in his building to non-Jewish people and was shunned by the community as a result. One interviewee recalled being a student in school forced to go and protest in the street against this particular man.

A peripheral street of the community where the Hasidic world is encroached by the hipster world has generated particular contention. A glossy apartment development with large windows provoked the Hasidic community to raise money in order to pay for the non-Hasidic inhabitants to buy blinds for their windows.

As one participant explained, they didn’t want their children to be exposed to the ‘immorality and immodesty’ of

the outside world.

The perception of secularity as a source of immorality was frequently referenced. My interviewees explained that their engagement with the outside world was limited to their trips to the doctor or their infrequent trips on the subway.

The bars, shops and cinemas of the secular world represented a distant and unknown territory, suggestive of danger, temptation and impropriety.

One participant commented that, ‘I also didn’t really get what it means to be secular, I didn’t see what their quality of life was. I didn’t just realise the joy of just being with friends at the bar. We grew up thinking all this stuff is incredibly empty and there’s no joy and reason.’

As a result, secularity exists only as a distant imagination of impurity and degeneracy.

Through indoctrinating community members with the idea that life does not extend beyond the Hasidic borders, the Hasidic community successfully continue to function as an enclosed system, physically exposed to the world, but culturally secluded from Brooklyn. ■

LENT 2020 | COMPASS | 25

A Visit to Shoreditch...

Gentrification, Class Performativity and Where to Lay the Blame

By Lucy Nolan, HSPS Student at Trinity Hall

I

recently visited Shoreditch in London. I went with a group of friends, none of whom are part of the East London urban crowd yet appreciate the feeling of ‘coolness’ which surrounds urban areas that are known to be the home of hipsters.

In all fairness, we enjoyed being in Shoreditch; we enjoyed the Victoria Miro Gallery, experienced new tastes at the food market in Brick Lane and had fun whilst trying on ridiculously overpriced wares at the vintage stalls. However, this appreciation for the young creative middleclass type is undetachable from gentrification, class performativity and the moral inscriptions which imbue class distinctions.

The hipsters that seem to characterise Shoreditch, bringing their art-work, microentrepreneurial projects and expensive designer brands are undoubtedly a cause of the displacemnt of the working class in these areas, and imposing upon these spaces a different culture. However, I would caution against any significant railing against these individuals; there are deeper and more systemic socio-economic drivers which require consideration.

Gentrification is defined as the process by which a place, especially part of a city, changes from being a

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poor area to a richer one, where people from a higher social class live. It’s well known that this process has been occurring for many years in cities across the UK, with London being one of the most affected locations.

The movement of classes in and out of these spaces brings new tastes and consumption practices to these areas.

As Bourdieu states, tastes and consumption habits are bound up with classificatory struggles between classes, creating fractions over recognition and worth. The ‘hipster’ demographic gives value to the vintage and the indie, and in doing so make a distinction between themselves and middle-class generations above who enjoyed opera and the like. However, a distinction is also made between the ‘hipsters’, and the working class, with the creation of expensive coffee shops and bars, and the degeneration of affordable establishments. Therefore, the process of gentrification

is one which is loaded with class distinction, and the performativity of these through certain cultural practices.

Walking around Shoreditch, we encountered many microentrepreneurial businesses selling what they branded as novel items. From the ‘only vegan cookie dough bakery in London’ (one wonders why no one else has established such this specific niche within a niche business) selling pots of dough for £4.50, to a company which will sell you hydration drips (water through an IV line for five times the cost of a bottle of water), there was a vast array of new and exciting businesses! Whilst it is perhaps easy to point fun, these hyperspecialised stores are part of a shifting local economy which is increasingly set up to cater for the rich, to the exclusion of those with less money. This disconnect between the poor and the rich solidifies markers of distinction. Perhaps this was best illustrated by a Gucci

advert in the square outside Brick Lane Market: big red glossy lips encased crumbling decaying teeth, illustrating how the hipsters are able to benefit and build their cultural brand around an urban edginess, while remaining disconnected to the lived experiences of the poor, who suffer poorer diets, health and often lack access to adequate dental care.

Part of this class distinction is the inscription of moralaesthetic values into classificatory systems in a way that casts the richer as respectable and morally righteous, whilst the working class are identified as morally lacking and unrespectable.

The ‘hipsters’ with their art galleries and coffee shops, pushing out youth centres and pubs, are often awarded in popular discourse with transforming areas such as Shoreditch from being grimy to groovy. An additional layer to the emergent middle class culture, is the ‘woke’ trend; the understanding that being up to date on political issues, and having progressively liberal takes on these is part of being cool. This element of the class performativity of the hipster was demonstrated by an exhibition telling the stories of refugees. Whilst, of course, education and awareness raising around these issues are extremely important, the air of performatively around this issue was clear. Visitors were asked to wear a ‘Hello I’m…’ badge

which detailed the deaths of a refugee who had tried to cross the Mediterranean to Europe.

This creates the ability to place the wearer, largely middle-class individuals, in a morally superior position, without significant engagement in the issue being necessary, and indeed without really requiring a reflexivity to understand our own role in these disasters. Instances such as these allow richer individuals who have the time and resources to set up and visit exhibitions to occupy a morally superior field, enhancing the idea that gentrification is a positive process.

There is of course, a strong voice in the discourse which sees hipsters as inauthentic and the drivers of social-spatial exclusion of the working class.

I admit, this is largely how I have presented the group in this article. However, it is important to consider how these narratives can obscure

the most significant drivers of exclusion - the socio-economic policies in the areas of welfare and housing enacted by the government which embed a neoliberal economic model deeper still. Policies which limit the availability of council housing, facilitate an informal labour market, and decrease the safety net of the welfare state, are the real drivers of gentrification. The ‘hippies’ are perhaps the most visible winners of these processes, and maybe to regard them as symbols of the inequality and exclusion resulting from gentrification is correct. But in doing so, we also need to hold the more powerful to account their mums and dads. ■

LENT 2020 | COMPASS | 27

PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY

Tipping the balance

By Ella Weston, Geographer at Newnham

‘In

just twelve years, global temperatures could reach an irreversible tipping point if the world doesn’t act dramatically to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere’, warned the IPCC in their Fifth Assessment Report in 2013. You might have seen, or heard, the phrase ‘tipping points’, either in the news or in terrifying online articles discussing a planetary meltdown. It isn’t often clear what ‘tipping points’ actually are, but they are what makes global warming so terrifying, and what makes changes in our behaviour so necessary.

Global temperatures have already risen by an average of 1°C above the levels we had in the industrial era. This doesn’t seem like a big deal, but tipping points make it so.

such as the disappearance of coral reefs and the melting of glaciers and ice sheets, are all reaching their ‘tipping points’.

This is because they are selfreinforcing feedbacks, which hold the potential to push the Earth System towards a planetary threshold. If this threshold is crossed, it could prevent stabilisation of the climate and cause continued warming on a ‘Hothouse Earth’ pathway. Most importantly, this is a pathway that would continue even if anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are reduced. Essentially, we have the potential to create a ‘runaway’ situation over which we no longer have any control.

The global map below shows the most important tipping points in Earth systems, ranging from the terrestrial changes in boreal forests to changes to thermohaline circulation. Those shown in yellow are in the lowertemperature cluster, meaning that lower temperatures are

required to activate their tipping elements; these include the Greenland Ice Sheet, Antarctic summer sea ice coverage, alpine glaciers, coral reefs and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Only 2°C warming would push these systems beyond their tipping points; some scientists argue that this process is already occurring, destabilising these systems. Some processes may take slightly longer, such as the melting of permafrost and the disintegration of the more stable East Antarctic Ice Sheet, which have an estimated 5°C safety net before their tipping elements are activated.

However, these tipping points are enough of a problem for scientists at the University of Exeter to name them an ‘existential threat to civilisation’.

Strong words indeed.

So, what actually happens We have already been warned when their tipping elements that just another half a degree are activated? This essentially of further warming will wipe means that these Earth System out coral reefs, melt ice sheets, elements are moving towards a cause widespread completely altered flooding and state. This can be acidify our oceans. seen in Arctic sea According to ice changes and these predictions, their effect on the we must limit reflectivity of the warming to 2°C if surface, known we wish for these as its albedo. The changes to stay melting of sea ice reversible. But why under warming would they not be conditions exposes reversible? This the ocean, which is where the idea absorbs much more of ‘tipping points’ solar radiation than Global map of potential tipping cascades.

Steffen et al.

2018 comes into play. sea ice because These changes, it is darker, and 28 | COMPASS | LENT 2020

thus has a lower albedo, therefore amplifying heating.

A transition to a completely sea ice free state could occur within a few decades because of this reflectivity feedback. An example on a longer timescale is permafrost. As global temperatures rise and the high latitudes experience amplified warming, melting permafrost will slowly release carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. Since carbon dioxide and methane are greenhouse gases, this creates a feedback as their release will cause even more warming, leading to the eventual disappearance of permafrost.

Although scientists are unsure of the strength and timing of these feedbacks, the very observation of them has been enough to cause significant panic. They essentially mean the impacts of an expected 1.5°C of warming that the IPCC predicted within the next twenty years could be much worse than we thought.

Oh dear.

These tipping elements may also be more interlinked than once believed.

Scientists have recently warned that crossing one tipping point may push other systems over the edge too, leading to a cascade.

As demonstrated by the arrows in this global map, the tipping elements; processes in the atmosphere, oceans and

the frozen Earth, interact with each other. This is particularly evident in the relationship between the disappearance of glaciers and ocean circulation.

Thermohaline circulation is driven by dense, salty seawater sinking in the North Atlantic.

However, increased glacier melt under a warming climate means this water is becoming fresher and lighter as increased runoff introduces greater volumes of fresh water to the ocean.

The change in water density may prevent sinking and result in either a slowdown, or complete shutdown, of Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). The consequences of this are uncertain, but changes in AMOC would likely have an impact on both global and regional climate.

Furthermore, a slowed or stopped AMOC has a reduced ability to take up and store carbon from the atmosphere, which could lead to a more amplified warming that triggers other tipping elements, such as

permafrost melt and boreal forest dieback, which would further release carbon into the atmosphere. This means that processes once thought to require longer timescales to reach their tipping points, such as permafrost melting, could reach that point sooner thanks to changes in the other tipping elements.

Tipping points, though still uncertain, have made the message clearer than ever: we are running out of time to halt catastrophic climate change.

Over the years, tipping points have shifted from something that was once theoretical, to something that may now be underway. Thankfully, scientists have claimed that the damage resulting from crossing tipping points may still be minimised or prevented. However, the potential runaway effect of climate warming shows us why drastic action is needed and needed now. Unless words become actions, targets become achievements and complacency becomes change, we will be at the mercy of an Earth which will soon reclaim its power. â–

LENT 2020 | COMPASS | 29

Challenging Uniformitarianism: Is the present always the key to the past?

By Eswyn Chen, Geographer at Wolfson

The

principle of Uniformitarianism, first set forth by geologist James Hutton, posits that landforms could be explained by the operation, over an extended timescale, of processes similar to those occurring in present day.

It is intuitive that the laws of nature remain uniform through time, but it is equally intuitive that studies of past actions inform the present based on exactly the same assumption.

So, do contemporary processes reveal and help us comprehend historical influences, or does the study of palaeoenvironments instead educate us on the present and even the future?

Standard Mean Ocean Water (VSMOW), was created using modern laboratory methods, and is used as the standard water for which the current conditions are known, and against which past isotopic ratios can be compared. The same principles can also be applied to the amount of pollen a particular species of tree produces. We can measure amounts of pollen rain produced under current climatic conditions, and given that the environmental affinities of that species of tree are known, we can then deduce and reconstruct the climatic and environmental conditions of time periods where the same pollen signal is seen in sedimentary records.

As an example for the former, the determination of past temperatures from ice core records relies on present-day knowledge on the oxygen isotope ratios of ocean water.

In order to extract any meaning from the archive, we need to know the temperatures that control δ18O ratios before we can calculate what a change in that ratio entails for the past temperature. Therefore, a standard for established values of stable isotopes found in water molecules, collected directly from the ocean needs to be established. The Vienna

A field example of the present informing us about the past is the striated vegetation patterns seen in the Breckland area of East Anglia. An alternating pattern of calcareous grassland and acidic heathland can be seen, which correlates to the underlying troughs and ridges of pellet chalk, generated by periglacial activity at the fringe of the North Sea ice sheet during the last glacial period – the Devensian. Vegetation that grows on the coversand that fills the troughs of the cryoturbated chalk reveals the

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differing soil conditions and thus the geological history of the area. Acid-loving heath plants are supported where the coversand layer is thicker and the pH is lower, whilst calcareous grassland is found on areas where the chalk is closer to surface and the pH is therefore higher. This exemplifies how direct studies of contemporary biological and ecological processes uncover the historical physical environmental changes that produced such patterns initially.

Studies of present-day biological and chemical mechanisms can be relevant to understanding past environments, but they do not always answer all mysteries.

For instance, the role that iron plays as a key nutrient within marine ecosystems and theories of how it may have affected Quaternary climates have been contested. The ‘iron hypothesis’ for glacialinterglacial control of the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is based on the premise that biological productivity in the modern Southern Ocean is limited by insufficient supply of the micro-nutrient iron. However, recent studies highlight the importance of pelagic iron recycling by Antarctic

marine life; herbivores which graze on iron-consuming phytoplankton, recycle iron through inefficient feeding behaviour, making it locally available to the phytoplankton again without relying on a remote source of iron. This is a contemporary mechanism that increases iron availability in the Southern Ocean, and therefore increases the efficiency of the biological carbon pump. This enhances the positive feedback mechanism for the drawdown of atmospheric carbon dioxide by the ocean and the consequential cooling of the climate. However, whether this evidence directly supports the ‘iron hypothesis’, of iron being a key contributor to the initiation of glacial-interglacial transitions is debatable. There may be an unresolved temporal offset in the timing of the occurrence of iron peaks before or after the onset of glacial periods, and also in differentiating between the types (aeolian or locally bio-available) of source of iron.

Theories on past environmental change mechanisms thus need to be ground-truthed by geologically-derived observational data.

This leads onto the idea that the past might be in a better position to inform the present or even the future. Robert De Conto, whose work addresses

the uncertainties around how Antarctic ice margins responded to late Pleistocene interglacial and Pliocene warmth, personally accredited the importance of Tina van de Flierdt’s fieldwork in obtaining geochemical fingerprints of Pliocene marine sediments from eroded Antarctic ice margins.

Palaeogeological observations constrain data from modern sea level rise models and correct the term of gravitational effect in the algorithm.

Advances in understanding are often made when studying palaeoclimatological records.

Henrik Sadatzki and colleagues’ study on sea ice variability in the last glacial period in the Northern Hemisphere provided a detailed description of how sea ice reduction allowed for heat release from the exposed Norwegian Sea waters to the atmosphere, and acted as the primary choreographer of the abrupt warming of the Dansgaard-Oeschger climate events in Greenland. The significance of this study lies in that the Nordic Sea system during the last glacial cycle is similar to the present-day Arctic Ocean, and thus might give insight into the possible consequences of the current rapid disappearance of Arctic sea ice. Both cases above show that it is possible to learn more about and make better

predictions on contemporary environmental and climatic changes through studying past events that are similar in nature.

Uniformitarianism provides a starting point to investigate palaeoenvironmental records – at an instrumental or operational level, it is informative and allows the use of modern-day diagnostic tools, benchmarks and standards against which proxy records can be deciphered – but this may also be where its use stops. Uniformitarian reasoning is undeniably fundamental to many aspects of the reconstruction of past environments but, at an environmental level, the present does not always provide us with analogue situations for the past, because other boundary conditions are not the same. When unravelling the contingencies between current physical, chemical and biological processes and the past environmental changes that they may indicate, we often see relationships that go both ways. As a paradigm, Uniformitarianism might be too unidirectional to fully capture the multi-directionality of processes that shape the environment and the Earth’s planetary history. ■

LENT 2020 | COMPASS | 31

An Integrated Perspective of the Climate ‘Crisis’ In Conversation with Adam Branch

Interview by Zhanna Levitina, Geographer at Homerton & Belinda Ng, Geographer at Christ’s What research are you currently undertaking?

Dr

Adam Branch is a Fellow at Trinity Hall, as well as Reader in International Politics and the Director of the Centre of African Studies. He is also the Director of the Philomathia Africa Programme and the current Chair of the Cambridge Consortium for the Global South. His current research explores the politics of global climate change and climate justice. He has worked extensively on the politics of human rights intervention, peacebuilding, and the International Criminal Court, in particular in Uganda, which culminated in his first book Displacing Human Rights: War and Intervention in Northern Uganda, and on popular protest, which led to his subsequent book, Africa Uprising: Popular Protest and Political Change.

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I’m working on charcoal. It sounds strange to say, since I didn’t really know anything about charcoal until a couple years ago. Most of my previous work had been on global justice, peace and conflict, international criminal law.

But charcoal is central to the energy landscape throughout much of Africa; it’s the primary energy source for up to 80% of the population in many urban areas. It’s produced by cutting down trees and burning them in basic kilns, and is then brought to cities to be used for cooking. Not much attention is paid to charcoal because it’s considered to be a traditional fuel, on its way out. But given the high rates of urbanization, and the patchy transitions to other cooking fuels, charcoal looks set to be a primary part of Africa’s energy regime for several more decades. Therefore, the impact of expanding charcoal production needs to be taken seriously, in particular the massive extraction of trees, often among vulnerable communities, but also its wider political, economic, and ecological impacts. Despite the devastating deforestation that charcoal production is driving in many areas, it’s given little policy attention, and is almost completely unregulated in many countries. In Uganda,

this has led to military, economic, and political elites setting up cartels and taking control of the charcoal business, with semi-industrial production causing widespread destruction of forests at the expense of rural populations.

How do these environmental issues of deforestation overlap with other regional issues in your work?

I’ve been working in Uganda since 2003. Back then, the north was in the midst of a horrific civil war and the entire rural population of Acholi region was forced by the government to live in internment camps. After the war ended in 2007, people’s concerns shifted, from the immediate violence of the rebels and government to questions of land grabbing, deforestation, pollution and loss of water sources.

These environmental issues are central to rural people’s survival and livelihood.

Most of these forms of environmental violence were directly political, driven on by the state or elites with state support. So I began to see charcoal extraction as a form of state violence, and a continuation of the counterinsurgency from the war, which had been marked by massive brutality against civilians and landscapes.

So my argument is that the

counterinsurgency hasn’t really ended and that environmental violence is a continuation of war in so-called peace time, under another guise.

But this isn’t just ‘local’ environmental violence.

Another reason why I am interested in charcoal is because of the context of global climate change.

Deforestation has immediate impacts upon the regional climate through disrupting the hydrological cycle, but also contributes to global climate change; charcoal production and use emits large quantities of carbon dioxide, even though it’s not a fossil fuel. So putting attention on charcoal as central to much of the continent’s energy regime pushes us to rethink the connection between global climate change and what is seen as a fossil fuel modernity. But climate change has another intersection with environmental change in Uganda: recently, initiatives started appearing around

climate change adaptation and mitigation, the latter especially around REDD+ and afforestation. This has led to some cases of people being dispossessed of their land so that monoculture tree plantations can be established for carbon credits; another perverse outcome has been when indigenous trees are cut down to be replaced with pine or eucalyptus in the name of global climate change mitigation. Climate change adaptation and mitigation often has its own footprint, which usually falls on already marginalized and vulnerable communities. For me, this represented a continuation of my previous work on the politics of foreign intervention into episodes of political violence. There was a transition from the forms of intervention that happened during the war around humanitarianism, human rights, and international criminal justice, to those immediately after the war around reconstruction and

development, and now, to those happening in the name of climate change adaptation, mitigation, sustainability, and resilience. While the war was happening, I had thought of environmental consequences as minor compared to the direct violence experienced by populations in internment camps. But in the wake of the war, I started to realise that environmental issues were central to political violence and justice.

How do you think colonialism and its legacies play into this interaction?

Let’s take something very concrete. Why are so many cities in Africa dependent upon charcoal? The dominant answer is because Africa is behind in economic development, it is still dependent upon ‘traditional’ wood fuel and hasn’t moved to fossil fuels. This answer not only reflects a colonial mindset, but it’s also historically wrong.

Charcoal is not some atavistic fuel left over from Africa’s

Loading charcoal onto trucks to be taken to the city.

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Most post-colonial states have continued to depend upon charcoal as the key fuel for the informal urban population.

In Kampala, electricity comes largely from hydropower, but goes to only a small section of the population because of the cost and very few use it for cooking. Most of the population relies on charcoal – for less than a pound, you can buy enough charcoal to cook for several days. With rapid urban growth and a lack of alternative fuel sources, the charcoal frontier has been expanding further and further. It hit the north of Uganda at the end of the war when forests in the south were facing depletion, there was a new supply to feed Kampala. And so we see the devastating consequences today of colonial energy and urban policy.

traditional past; it’s a modern fuel that developed as a major energy source during the colonial period! Colonial urban policy was to provide services to a very small formal population within African cities, while unofficially allowing a much larger informal population to grow around this formal core. Colonial urbanism was based upon this dichotomy, and so the small formal population had formal employment and some claim to government services, while the state would alternate between neglect and criminalisation towards the much larger informal population, in informal 34 | COMPASS | LENT 2020

settlements. Charcoal was the fuel for this population, brought to the cities from surrounding forests, a ‘subsidy from nature’ necessary to support this colonial model of segregated urbanisation.

In the post-colonial period around 1960s and 70s, there were some efforts to transition away from charcoal to oil, gas, and hydropower, but charcoal remained dominant and seems to have been entrenched by the state withdrawal and devastation of structural adjustment in the 1980s, and to have grown in importance with today’s rapid urbanization.

We can see another colonial legacy, paradoxically, in what I mentioned earlier: the turn to plantation forestry as a climate change mitigation strategy. This is based on a kind of conceptual violence of abstraction – which some identify as a colonial mode of thought – whereby carbon is considered only in the abstract, decontextualized from history and location, and one tonne of carbon in trees in Uganda is seen as equivalent to one tonne of carbon coming out of exhaust pipes in southern California. But the connection is also more concrete: some have argued that, instead of the Anthropocene, we need to recognize that we are in the ‘plantationocene’, as plantations were the foundation of the colonial, capitalist violence to people

and landscapes that has produced the modern world and the planetary devastation we face. Ironically, we now see a continuation of that colonial, capitalist logic of the plantation in the name of solving climate change!

Can you propose any solutions to address the issue of state violence against environmental activists?

In terms of my own research on charcoal extraction, environmental activists are working on these issues in northern Uganda, some have been involved in the research. The people I work with have been safe, but there are threats they face.

I also work with a human rights group there that helps protect community activists.

This is something that the international community could help with – providing protection and support to organisations protecting and supporting environmental activists.

Broader solutions require understanding that violence against environmental activists is a symptom of the dominant political economy of extraction, capitalist dispossession, and unsustainable energy.

As long as this political economy – and political ecology – remain dominant, environmental activists will be subject to state repression.

fossil fuels, so to talk about climate change is to talk about everything. But we need to be very critical of these grand programmes – my work has always been about how these big, often well-intentioned, international interventions tend to fail - that’s still my default position. There are no easy answers. Charcoal, like oil, gas and solar, are all part of a global energy system, and we need to better understand the way it functions if we’re to understand what might transform it. This requires studies at different scales: in Uganda, plenty of people are making a lot of money from charcoal, it’s tied up in national economies and politics, it’s the foundation for urban life – all these need to be kept in mind, but Uganda also has large oil and gas deposits that could form the basis for future development. So the question is, what should be done with those? Climate activists say they need to be

left in the ground. Again, these questions require thinking in many different places, and at different scales, at once.

What are your thoughts on navigating the grey area of freedom of speech versus the destructive realm of ecoterrorism?

We need to pay attention to the way the fossil fuel industry works to think about strategies.

Climate activism has put some pressure on finance capital – a few weeks ago BlackRock said they were going to take climate change into account – but there are also geophysical pressures at work that are raising costs for oil producers significantly.

The US fracking boom may be slowing, but fracking proponents see plenty of new opportunities elsewhere in the world. And as the price of oil rises, the incentive to bring more challenging sources online will increase. We also need to take seriously the way in

The scale of the changes that are needed can’t be underestimated – just look at the level of transformations of all aspects of life required by IPCC reports calling for massive global intervention – our entire world is so saturated with LENT 2020 | COMPASS | 35

which the fossil fuel industry is militarized globally. Challenging the fossil fuel economy is not just challenging a few oil and gas CEOs or investment firms; it is challenging the massive, transnational military (and paramilitary) infrastructure that has grown up around that economy, that protects that economy and is funded by it.

Should we work with oil companies to tackle the climate crisis?

Focusing on oil companies and demonising oil executives has shown to be a successful tactic in certain cases.

But my concern is that focusing on those few oil companies whom we have some access to and demonising them may occlude the full scope of what we’re facing – such as militarization and how entwined fossil fuels are with entire states and entire ways of life. Focusing on a few oil companies doesn’t get to the massive extent of what needs to change in order to bring about a just transition. The issue is that it all depends on what we see as the underlying problem. If the problem is global carbon dioxide levels, then all efforts should be put into bringing those down, perhaps while keeping the global economy going – oil companies would probably

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need to be part of that.

Or take the debate over carbon capture and sequestration – is this an alibi for oil companies or a necessary part of a 1.5°C pathway?

What is the role of academia in addressing the issues of the climate crisis?

I went from knowing nothing about this, to deciding to learn about it and then making it a central part of my teaching and my research. As a teacher, it’s my responsibility to provide students with the opportunity to go into the subject in enough depth, to have time to read and think about it, so that we can pose complicated questions, especially important given the massive extent of the transformations that will be necessary.

This is really key in the face of the language of a climate ‘emergency’.

I’m not the

only one to notice that this language – of emergency, of it already being too late, of there being no time to think, just act, of it being an unprecedented and exceptional crisis, of an existential threat to humanity – is familiar because it is the same highly moralized language as was used to support military humanitarian interventions, it was the language to support US military intervention by ‘Save Darfur’, by Kony 2012 – a movement driven by American high schoolers – and was used by those supporting the bombing of Kosovo or Libya.

And it’s part of the antiterrorism discourse as well.

This should be a cause for reflection. We have an amazing opportunity here at Cambridge to take the time to read and think and deliberate, whether about the war in Uganda or Darfur, about terrorism and counter-terrorism, or about climate change. Ultimately, you teach what you need to learn. ■

FILM REVIEW

Weathering with You A Post-apocalyptic Story of Generational Struggles, Nature & Love

By Eswyn Chen, Geographer at Wolfson

S

poiler alert! Weathering with You is the latest cinematic creation of Japanese anime film master, Makoto Shinkai, the same man who wrote and directed Your Name, the highest grossing anime film on record released in 2016. Set in a postapocalyptic, yet astonishingly functional Tokyo pounded by perpetual rain, the story follows Hodaka, a teenage runaway from the countryside, who tries to survive the sprawling capital alone. As a pure physical geographer and a lifelong enthusiast in meteorology, I did go into the cinema expecting more on the climate science, and was surprised by the climate defeatism emulated by the story against the global backdrop of a climate emergency.

But Weathering with You aims to tell an alternative tale, and the narrative requires the post-apocalypticism and a desensitised society to work, as it invites the audience to relate to these hypotheses and envision what happens after ‘the end’, how people cope, who cope best, and what choices we would make in a world that is falling apart, or has already fallen apart.

Very early on in its conception, Shinkai had already stated that this film would be dedicated to young people and the societal reality that they experience.

It is interesting that the literal translation for the original Japanese title is Child of the Weather – the plot places power in the hands of the young, scrappy protagonists of the story, especially Hina

(the ‘sunshine girl’ who is able to summon sunshine with her prayers and goes on a mission to bring clear skies to people), but plunges them into a world that is, quoting from the film, ‘already crazy’ and one they did not create.

Juxtaposed against Hina’s ability to bring about temporary changes to the weather is the greed of the grown-ups to exploit a finite asset for their version of prosperity. Hina’s gift is exhaustible – every time she uses her power, she returns a bit of herself to the sky until she completely disappears. When people learn that sacrificing a girl could permanently revert the climate back to normal, they do not hesitate to trade her in for a continuation of their way of life. This plays out in the scene where a devastated Hodaka LENT 2020 | COMPASS | 37

desperately wades across an inundated Tokyo to resurrect Hina, while everyone else rejoices under the scintillating sun after her sacrifice. The film thus illustrates a world where the marginalised are never represented, their dreams sneered at, and their wishes ignored; but they are often the ones who have very little to begin with and ask for only very little – for Hina, to find her purpose; for Hodaka, to be with Hina – and yet pay excessive prices.

This all sounds oddly familiar to our real world: the younger generations inheriting an overdrawn Earth from the previous generations, and being left to deal with its current state. This chimes with the messages bounced around by prominent climate change activists like Greta Thunberg and the Extinction Rebels.

While the film is not explicitly about activism, it lucidly addresses the issue of generational struggles: how young people are deprived of

opportunities and resources by a world that was built to serve against them. Hodaka struggles with survival in an apathetic city; Hina and her younger brother risk being separated by the authority only because they are ‘not supposed to live on their own’ as underage orphans, even when they are selfsufficient and disciplined. The young characters in the film are progressively being driven out of their living space, as society forgets about their charity, that they hold the key to a future

that is not a quick ruin, and that these young idealists are not running away from reality, but are instead trying hard not to succumb to reality. When they rebel against the societal constructs forced upon them, they are violently suppressed.

This is a story about how the marginalised are covertly oppressed by the rule setters and yet accused of being inadequate at playing the game and criminalised for destroying the system that the ‘grown-ups’ want to keep alive.

The radical question posed by the film is one about a civilisational collapse brought by our protagonists giving up on ‘saving the world’: Why fix a system that has abandoned us?

Why are we being exterminated for trying to live a life? Midway through the story, an old shaman contested that, ‘We are merely holding onto this narrow space between the sky and the earth and trying not to fall off’. Complementarily, a motif keeps being reiterated by the elderly in the story: Tokyo

used to be under water during the Edo period and was built on a borrowed piece of land from nature, and now this unending rain is just nature claiming it back. These fables make the extreme weather in the film seem like the ultimate equalising force: All lives are subjugated to nature and suffer the same fate in between the cyclical changes of the environment, so how is it justified for one group of individuals to overrule another on survival and comfort, and have the least advantaged

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bear the worst consequences?

Hodaka and Hina make the decision in the end to ‘pray just for themselves’ upon the understanding that they were born equal to everyone else.

When Hodaka retrieves Hina from the sacrifice, he allows nature to take over and breaks the cycle of tribute in exchange for a climatic ‘norm’. Half of Tokyo becomes submerged within three years as a result, symbolising the collapse of the previous system and the

formation of a new ‘normal’ – a reset, and the continuation of civilisational succession.

While many may be dubious about the individualistic and defeatist undertone of the ending, it is Shinkai’s intention for the film to explore the themes of justice and intergenerational equity and to speak for change-makers.

One line from the film hits particularly hard: ‘We ask for nothing more than what we

already have, but just that they stop taking away what little we have left.’ Along with his beautiful visuals and clever screenplay, Shinkai conveys a message there from the young protagonists to the wider world which sounds like words that could have come from climate change warriors too: We are all fighting for nothing more than what remains of the values and people we hold dear, and our fights will continue be it pre- or post-apocalyptic. ■

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TRAVEL

Saving Interrail

By Merryn Trevitt, Geographer at Downing

I

could almost forget the fact I’d had four hours of sleep on a train louder than college halls on a Wednesday night whilst I watched the sun rise from behind Umjetnički Pavilion, the streets of Zagreb quiet and the sky above a rich indigo. Market stalls being dressed in the day’s colours, and morning worshippers migrating towards the echoing chime, the scene was pretty idyllic.

After years of listening to stories from all over the continent good and gory, my Interrail trip had been a long time coming. Applying on a whim to the DiscoverEU lottery, and a few months later receiving confirmation that I had received a free Interrail pass, the trip was finally a reality.

The three dawn hours that I spent in Zagreb between trains, 40 | COMPASS | LENT 2020

drinking coffee and wandering, perhaps not only have come to define my memory of the trip but also the other unique experiences stumbled upon at the times least expected.

You do not have to fly a thousand miles to find these moments, indeed you do not have to fly at all. They may only be a few hours and a single train journey away.

Stepping off the train straight into the hustle and bustle of various European cities, having first watched fields and mountains dissolve into towns and suburbs, it is hard not to appreciate the sense of interconnectivity we are privileged enough to enjoy.

Fifteen minutes after stepping off the train in Paris, I was wandering amongst the artists and cafés of Montmartre and a few days later, disembarking into the relics of Rome illuminated in the humid night.

The journey allowed a more personal reflection on a union of very different nations. On a night train from Budapest to Berlin, talking to a man born and raised in rural Hungary, he spoke of his long ambition to work in Germany and estimated that as many as 80% of his classmates now work abroad. The train provided an affordable (albeit fourteen hour) commute after weekends at home with his family. He was getting promoted, he said, as a German colleague had left to pursue his career in Switzerland. A continent on the move - and for a moment, individual journeys merge, then divide.

However, many issues have recently arisen that may prevent travellers in the future from this breakthrough into independent travel. In August last year, the news broke that the UK would no longer be

participating in the Interrail scheme, instead promoting the UK-based Britrail pass where profits incidentally remain in the UK (Interrail profits are distributed between participant countries). It was insisted that there would be little consequence for British users of the Interrail scheme - provided they lived close to St Pancras. I live in Cornwall where tickets to London can be as much as £300 return, almost the cost of an Interrail pass. As for the impacts on foreign visitors to the UK, numbers roaming beyond London will inevitably be reduced.

Abruptly, a day after announcing the withdrawal from Interrail, the decision was reversed due to public pressure, but discussions between companies continue.

A bullet dodged? Perhaps, yet

these events undermine the strength of the collaboration that has existed in this form since the 1970s when the pass was introduced (at £27.50!).

An inter-generational rite of passage may now be under threat unless public support to keep it reinstated is maintained.

Moreover, I was lucky enough to win a free Interrail pass through the DiscoverEU ticket lottery. 15,000 free passes a year are allocated to young people across the continent, with the incentive purely to widen horizons and to highlight the importance of freedom of movement in Europe. This opportunity is only open to citizens of the EU, and now, given that Brexit went ahead at the end of January, I was among the last cohort of British citizens who had the opportunity to travel with the

DiscoverEU Interrail pass.

As students, self-funding trips takes hard work and dedication and for some is simply unmanageable, and this was a situation I knew well. I had all the wanderlust of Instagram’s finest travel bloggers, but with no feasible way of financing such a trip.

Having the majority travel costs covered effectively halved the total cost of my low budget trip, making it an affordable reality. Without this initiative, I would not have been able to go.

To date, the UK has made public no plans to replicate this scheme domestically post-Brexit, therefore preventing the next generation of cash strapped young people experiencing all that our diverse continent has to offer. ■

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Tourism in Mallorca Photos and text by Linda Arroyo

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At

3640 square kilometres, Mallorca is the largest and most visited of the Balearic Islands. Hence, I did not expect to find myself sat on a half-empty flight from Stansted to Palma de Mallorca. The very same airport that processed more than 10 million foreign passengers in 2019.

I left the plane, feeling the warmth of the sun on my skin and smelling the sea breeze. I was positively surprised by the spring weather in the middle of the winter.

But this winter warmth was not the most striking thing about Mallorca. It was the desertion. I wandered the streets of Old Town – one of the main tourist spots in Palma – and it felt like in an apocalyptic movie. There was no one in sight and the buildings seemed abandoned, with the windows closed and the blinds shut. I passed a number of shops, restaurants and information centres, all shut and locked.

In fact, at this time of year, in the low season, only 8.6% of hotels remain open.

Tourists are drawn to Mallorca for a typical seasun-sand holiday, hence the low interest in the winter months. The number of visitors changes drastically in the high season, which starts in May, with over thirteen million people visiting the island in a few short months.

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Mass tourism was introduced to Mallorca around 1955 when, after years of postwar austerity, the incomes and quality of European citizens rose, allowing them to afford international travel.

Subsequently, Mallorca shifted from primarily an agricultural economy, now to a servicebased economy- 85% of the Mallorcan GDP is produced directly and indirectly from tourism and related activities such as construction. Mallorca not only has its golden sandy beaches to offer, but it has also developed more niche tourism branches such as health, nautical, rural and cultural tourism. As a result the overall income of Mallorca has shot up and made it one of the wealthiest and most desirable regions in Spain. However, this rapid development of the tourism industry brought with it chaotic urban planning, rural abandonment, water scarcity and environmental erosion, to the detriment of Mallorca’s cultural and natural heritage.

The key problem of the island’s tourism is its seasonality. Mallorca, with its Mediterranean climate and no perennial water supply, mainly derives its water resources from underground water extraction. A strong seasonal concentration of visitors in the summer months, which happens to be the dry season, leads to water scarcity. Moreover, the flood of visitors drives the seasonal migration of temporary workers, which deepens the

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problem. The demand on water for domestic use has increased by 18% since the 1960s. The increasing number of residents and visitors exerts a strong pressure on water resources, leading to over-extraction and a lowering of the water table in aquifers. The first season in which this caused disruption was in 1994, when the Spanish government limited the amount of water transferred to Mallorca from the Ebro river, forcing the local authorities to invest substantial amounts in

the construction of desalination plants. The instability and constraints this water scarcity has imposed on Mallorca’s agricultural sector is, on top of the shift towards the service sector, a further consequence of the growth in tourism. Many have abandoned traditional methods of cultivation which had defined the Mallorcan landscape. Now the traditional landscape has become more a subject of agri-tourism than of agricultural utility.

▲ Traditional farming methods are being lost as people turn to the more profitable service sector.

The abandonment of agricultural activity has been accompanied by a change in the residential use of the land. Speculation has increased land and property values, and the influx of Northern Europeans (with incomes way above the Mallorcan average) has exacerbated the situation and raised prices enormously.

The value of an estate is no longer valued by its productive capacity, but in terms of the legally permissible construction possibilities it offers. These property value increases are yet another factor working against the economic viability of agricultural activity. Further, the purchase of Spanish property by people from other EU countries became easier when Spain entered the European Union in 1986. This presence of more wealthy European citizens in the housing market has both restricted buying opportunities for local people, and sparked cultural degradation, since the vast majority of the new inhabitants do not speak Spanish, nor are they willing to learn.

These changes have triggered anti-tourist movements among local people. In 2017, more than 200 Palma citizens, dressed as tourists, protested against selling properties to foreign citizens, with banners saying ‘Ciutat per a qui l’habita, no per a qui la visita’ - ‘The city for the inhabitants, not for the visitors’. They have criticised the proliferation of tourist flats in the Balearic capital that is leading to the involuntary displacement of local people from their neighbourhoods, and have denounced the saturation of public services as a result of tourist overcrowding.

◀ A sheep sleeps in the heat of the day.

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However, despite the drawbacks of the intensive growth of tourism in Mallorca, a survey carried out by the Balearic Islands Tourist Board in 2017 has shown that 60% of residents are pleased with the development of tourism sector on the island and that it has resulted in an improvement in quality of life.

Currently, the Mallorcan government is aiming to shift towards more sustainable forms of tourism. The main goals are to extend the tourist season to a year-round industry to avoid large concentrations of visitors in the summer months, to diversify tourism offerings, and to encourage current tourist initiatives to be more sustainable. To pursue this change, a sustainable tourism tax and limits on numbers of tourists will be introduced- measures approved by the majority of residents in Mallorca. These changes should benefit both residents and tourists, and end the degradation of Mallorcan heritage. â– 46 | COMPASS | LENT 2020