When those who rant against The Nanny State are pressed about what they’d like to see instead, they often point to philanthropy as their preferred model of social progress and uplift. Proven, effective, and – most of all – voluntary, they’d offer. The billionaire Giving Pledge, in which ultra-wealthy individuals promise to give more than half their loot to ‘good causes’ after they die, hit the headlines earlier this month to the usual cooing from those fulminating against progressive taxation. See? The rich can redistribute their wealth without the state doing it for them. The rich aren’t just rich – they’re generous too!

Which is why it was so nice to see The Economist, of all places, write about a recent UC Berkeley study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology on how being rich makes you systematically less generous. Actually, the authors of the study note that

lower class individuals proved to be more generous, charitable, trusting, and helpful compared with their upper class counterparts. Mediator and moderator data showed that lower class individuals acted in a more prosocial fashion because of a greater commitment to egalitarian values and feelings of compassion.

On the bright side, the study showed it was possible to foster traits of generosity and compassion among the rich through things like imaginative writing exercises. Perhaps when Bill Gates called his friends asking them to change their last wills and testaments, he opened with “imagine you’re broke and hungry”. Of course, noblesse oblige is hardly a solution to social problems – much less noblesse à volonté – as The Guardian and Peter Wilby have noted. But what, exactly, should you call it when billionaires get to set the terms on which they acquire wealth and give it away, of what counts as a good cause and what an unworthy one. Don’t call it the Nanny State, because this isn’t about governments hectoring anyone to do the right thing. It’s about a few men deciding what’s good not just for the country, but the world. Call it patriarchy. Call it the Daddy State.

We Have Yet to See The Biggest Costs of the BP Spill

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/oilspill/oil_spill_gallery.html

Raj Patel
We’re almost at the happily-ever-after stage of the Gulf oil spill story. The well has been killed, the beaches are being scrubbed and wicked Tony Hayward has been banished to Russia. All that’s left now is for BP to make good on the damage it has caused. The company has set aside $32 billion to meet its liabilities, while doing everything in its power to keep the damages below that figure. But even if it has to pay the full price, it will have won one of the biggest bargains in corporate history. BP’s true debt is far higher than any of the figures that have been floated to date. The biggest costs to the Gulf have yet to be seen.

It was clear early on that BP was as committed to engineering the public perception of the spill as it was to cleaning it up. Soon after launching its clean-up operation, BP banned photographers from taking aerial shots of the slick, citing “safety precautions.” Similar methods continue to be used to prevent media access to key sites, and in its own press releases, BP has doctored photos to make its clean-up efforts appear more strenuous.

In addition to making sure the slick was under-recorded, the company worked hard to make sure there was less of it to be seen. Besides the prison laborers who mopped up the oil at a discount on shore, at sea, over 1.8 million gallonsof Corexit dispersants were used to make the oil vanish from sight. Such dispersants are banned by the Environmental Protection Agency, but the Coast Guard issued exemptions some 74 times in 48 days. It worked: BP’s principal problem has, literally, disappeared. “I don’t think we’ll see any more oil going into the beaches,” BP’s avuncular new CEO, Bob Dudley, announcedupon taking over. “…And where there is no oil on the beaches, you probably don’t need people walking up and down in hazmat suits.” In other words: if the oil cannot be seen, the danger has passed.

Sadly, “if you can’t see it, it’s not there” isn’t sound environmental science. Oil enters the food system far more rapidly as an invisible emulsion than as a rainbow slick. Scientists have already discovered the spill’s signature inside crab larvae, though the consequences of mixing oil and dispersant with the Gulf ecology is uncertain, and won’t be fully known for generations. By introducing Corexit into the Gulf, BP not only hid its mess, but sowed doubt over the full extent and effects of the damage. This ignorance is no accident—for BP, it’s bliss. It makes it possible for BP to argue that it cannot be held accountable for those damages that were not directly related to the spill.

Indeed, Dudley would be a poor CEO were he not to use the lingering questions over the exact amount of damage caused by his company to haggle every possible concession from the government. The federal government’s (hotly debated) estimate of the total spill volume amounts to 4.9 million barrels, of which 800,000 barrels were recovered. If a federal court rules that the spill resulted from gross negligence, the government can claim civil penalties of as much as $4,300 per barrel, leaving BP vulnerable to a total fine of up to $21 billion. Although he is unlikely to bargain down BP’s liability to match the flow rate BP initially claimed was gushing from the well (1,000 barrels a day), BP has excelled in such negotiations in the past. According to the Center for Public Integrity, in October 2008, BP whittled seventeen serious charges of safety violations at its Tesoro refinery in Anacortes, Washington down to three counts, slashing a $85,700 fine to $12,250.

That said, even if the government goes easy on BP, as it already appears to be doing, there are other constituencies ready to make claims. One report calculates the economic cost to be $1.2 billion and 17,000 jobs by the year’s end. Some figures are even higher—the US Travel Association commissioned a back-of-envelope study from Oxford Economics, which estimated the losses to tourism alone at $22.7 billion over the next three years. In response, BP is trying to minimize, avoid and obfuscate, settling with claimants for as-yet undisclosed lump-sums in exchange for waiving the right to sue BP, and buying in scientists from Louisiana State University, the University of Southern Mississippi and Texas A&M at $250 an hour for its legal defense teams. After claims from the government and private sector are settled, BP expects to have some change left in the clean-up fund when the years of litigation come to an end.

We oughtn’t to be surprised that corporations like BP behave in this way, committing capitalist acts, externalizing environmental and social costs while internalizing profits. After all, these are the rules of the economic game. But the real reason why BP will likely never see a full tally for its actions lies not in its Machiavellian plotting, nor in its hiding damage and muddying the water with doubt, but in the everyday blindness built in to modern capitalism. Our economic system just isn’t set up to measure the wider costs of our activities, and the Gulf spill illustrates this painfully well. 

Perpetually out of sight in the reckoning of economic damage, for example, are the broader benefits of the Gulf ecosystem provides humans. Gulf coast residents draw on a range of services that the environment provides “for free,” but which have immense material value. Ecological economists studying the Mississippi River Delta before the spill valued “hurricane storm protection, water supply, climate stability, food, furs, habitat, waste treatment, and other benefits” provided by the Delta alone within a conservative range of $12 to 47 billion a year. The same scholars recently approximated the damage caused by the oil spill as somewhere between $34 to 670 billion, a figure that dwarfs the standard measurements of harm in the Gulf. Had these researchers cast their net further, to include the wider Gulf’s ecology, their figure would be higher still. And then there is the physical and psychological damage done to the communities along the coast. This harm is real and devastating and hard to quantify. But if in normal times, 6 percent of American adults suffer serious mental health issues—a population that earns at least 40 percent less than healthy adults—how will this translate to the Gulf, where depression is rife, and where the full mental toll has yet to be counted?

Even in the absence of a devastating spill, the reality is that oil companies are damaging simply in their day-to-day operations. Like the tobacco industry, the oil industry makes a product that, when used according to its instructions, causes great harm. The US government just released its annual State of the Climate report, cementing the findings of human-caused climate change, a phenomenon that Big Oil continues to shrug off, and lobby against addressing. The devastation of the BP spill compounds costs that, in reality, are no less part of the toll, and no less hidden from us. One recent study suggests that by 2030 the global costs of dealing with climate change might be as high as $300 billion a year. These costs will ultimately get paid—just not by the oil industry.

To do a full accounting of the spill—and to look ahead at what comes next—it’s worth using a central idea from economics: the notion of “opportunity cost,” or “the next-best-thing that might have been done with a given set of resources.” So, what is the next-best-thing to a multi-billion-dollar industry, spills and all? To pose the question is to ask what kind of economy we have and want. Evaluating opportunity cost means looking at the existing alternatives and comparing them against one another. And some of those alternatives, on closer examination, don’t look terribly different to the present. 

A range of powerful groups are already pushing their alternatives to Gulf oil. The corn ethanol industry recently seized the chance to wean America from its fossil fuel addiction with a campaign titled “Ethanol: Now is the Time.” (Catchphrase: “We feed the world. We can fuel it too.”) The National Corn Growers Association’s durable solution to deep-sea drilling involves growing food not in order to eat it, but to set it on fire. For this to be economical will require Congress to renew a corn ethanol tax-break that costs taxpayers $6 billion, according to a recent Iowa State University study. If nothing else, the corn industry has chutzpah. Before the oil spill, agricultural run-off from corn and livestock production along the Mississippi was responsible for a dead zone in the Gulf the size of New Jersey. No one knows how King Corn’s effluent will interact with Big Oil’s cocktail, but it’s certain that to avoid paying for the mess, one group will blame the other.

A serious consideration of less toxic alternatives will require the sort of public debate that goes beyond questions like “How many people have lost a livelihood from the spill?” to ask what sort of Gulf economy is sustainable for the future; to ask not only “What’s the cost of the oil spill?” but also “What are the true costs of our energy needs?” It won’t be an easy conversation—especially in a country that consumes more of the world’s energy per capita than almost any other. But we must put these larger, unseen costs at the center of this discussion, because, just like the oil, the fact that we can’t see them doesn’t mean they don’t exist. These costs are an iceberg: only a fraction visible to our myopic economy, and the rest are hidden, unaccounted for and passed on to “the small people,” as BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg has referred to the residents of the Gulf coast. Across the globe, already 300,000 people—mainly poor, mostly women—die every year as a result of climate change. This is a debt that we in rich countries have dumped on the Global South, the responsibility for which we ourselves have dispersed.

It’s not an entirely grim picture, fortunately. BP hasn’t managed to disperse all its opposition quite yet. A great deal of organizing, much of it outside the US, is demanding a zero-carbon future and reparations for environmental harm done by the rich to the poor. For these efforts to succeed in this country, the BP spill must be a wake-up call—to re-imagine our economy, our politics and our energy needs, or else to calculate just how much more we are willing to lose.

You can’t formulate a sensible international economic policy without the basics: helicopters, snipers, riot police, attack dogs, tanks and miles of chain link fence. Wherever ministers of finance gather, the essential accessories for crowd control and popular repression are always to be found. But even by the historical levels of unaccountability, profligacy and cowardice set at meetings of the world’s richest economies, this weekend’s Canadian G8/G20 meetings raise the bar. By the time the teeth of the last protester are hosed from the soles of the last Mountie, the security bill will have topped one billion dollars. The six kilometer fence in the middle of Toronto cost $5 million alone but most of the rest of the bill is secret – ‘national security’ provides an alibi for backhanders and white elephants.

So what will Canadians (and the rest of the word) get for their money? Very little. The meeting will produce a tepid ‘big tent’ declaration with language elastic enough to stretch over the bickering interests of thrifty Europeans, improvident Americans, tightrope-walking Chinese, and restive Saudis. All done.

What’ll be worse, though, is what the G20 meeting will fail to do. It will prevent open debate about alternatives, it will let those responsible for the financial crisis maintain their veneer of legitimacy, and it’ll chip away at the institutions that, still, offer an alternative to the G20’s traveling circus. Here, just for the record, are three reasons why the G20 is already a failure.

1. The G20 is illegitimate
On the G20’s website, we read:

“The G-20 … brings together important industrial and emerging-market countries from all regions of the world. Together, member countries represent around 90 per cent of global gross national product, 80 per cent of world trade (including EU intra-trade) as well as two-thirds of the world’s population. The G-20’s economic weight and broad membership gives it a high degree of legitimacy and influence over the management of the global economy and financial system.”

To restate: because the G20 governments are rich and, with India and China among their number, populous, they are the legitimate managers of the global economy and financial system. First, of course, the G20 represents the sum of 46 democratic deficits (the European Union’s 27 members count as one G20 member). China and Saudi Arabia of course, don’t sully themselves with the pretense of democracy at all.

Do we gain much by diluting the club of former colonizing countries (the G8) with the formerly colonized ones? Not really. The Financial Times reports that the number of millionaires in Asia has finally overtaken that in Europe, and there’s no good reason to think that governments in the East are any less craven than governments in the West. At the G20, there will be a chance for ministers to receive advice from businesses – the so called B20. This rather hints at the class orientation of the G20’s leaders.

Of course, there’s one thing worse than having your government at the G20, and that’s not having your government at the G20. The G20, albeit awkwardly, admits that there might be something wrong with the world’s largest economies deciding what’s best for the entire world, particularly the hundred countries who aren’t invited. So the G20 have taken measures to increase the representation of poor countries in their favourite international fora: the IMF and World Bank. They’ve made progress too. Again, they congratulate themselves for

… the World Bank’s voice reform to increase the voting power of developing and transition countries by 3.13%.

It’s true! China, India and Saudi Arabia have more votes. But, in the part of the World Bank that makes so-called concessional loans, eleven African countries have seen a decline in their relative voting power, and Bangladesh has lost more voting power in the shuffle than the UK. And it’s a bit of a stretch to call the loans concessional – technically, the concession is meant to be a low interest rate, it’s always developing countries that have to make concessions in their economic policies in order to qualify for them.

Of course, there is an organization that does include every country in the world – the United Nations. And it’s the one organization that the G20 goes out of its way never to mention. Because the G20 members see themselves as the UN’s replacement.

So, not terribly much legitimacy, even on the metrics that the G20 likes to hold itself to. And by the metric it doesn’t like to hold itself to, there’s even less legitimacy. Which group has been more affected by the recession, after all, than women? The United Nations knows all about this, with a series of investigations, reports and policies on gender and the impact of the financial crisis available here. The G20’s site doesn’t mention gender at all. Not once.

2. The G20 is incompetent

Here’s how the G20 represent themselves:

“To tackle the financial and economic crisis that spread across the globe in 2008, the G20 members were called upon to further strengthen international cooperation.”

As if the G20 were sitting the Batcave when, suddenly, the Batphone rang and Commissioner Gordon was asking them to save the planet. As if their policies hadn’t, in fact, facilitated the problem in the first place.

Despite a few changes of leadership since 2008, this is largely the same crew, armed with the same toolkit and the same instruction manual for the economy. It’s wishful thinking to hope that these governments are going to be able to fix the very problems that they’ve spawned.

Yet there has been, and continues to be, solid thinking about the economy outside the corridors of central banks and ministries of finance. Dean Baker, for instance, notes that:

“The economy thrived in the three decades following World War II with a financial sector that was proportionately one-fourth of its current size. There is no reason that the financial sector should use up a larger share of the economy’s resources today than it did three decades ago. Effective regulation will restore the financial sector to its proper role in the economy.” (Taking Economics Seriously, 2010, p79)

The United Nations has been thinking about the financial crisis for a while – and held a conference last year at which Nobelists like Joseph Stiglitz worked with representatives from every government (legitimate and otherwise) at the Conference on the World Financial and Economic Crisis and its Impact on Development to produce a plan of action . It’s one that almost every sane economist would endorse. It’s not terribly revolutionary, though it’ll take a revolution to get it accepted, because it recommends things like fiscal stimulus, strong regulation and investment in a green economy. In the scope and strength of its recommendations, it far outstrips the statement currently circulating for the G20. Yet it’s a vision that’s necessary in order to tackle the issues of sovereign debt, unemployment, climate change, gender inequality, and poverty.

3. The G20 isn’t in control

Perhaps the biggest problem is that the G20’s ministers, awed as they are by financial markets, can’t see their way to respond without capitulating to them. It’s not at all clear whether G20 members govern financial markets, or the other way round. But it’s becoming clearer. Britain under its new Conservative ( and Liberal!) government has decided that, in fact, it’s the financiers who run the country. In order to restore market confidence, the people have been served with the most austere cuts for decades in a recent ‘emergency budget’. The belt tightening has, so far, made the markets happy. The British Pound made some brief gains, and the the OECD pronounced it a ‘courageous budget’.

John Maynard Keynes, as quoted by his biographer in the Financial Times recently, had something to say about budgets like these:

When the Conservative-Liberal coalition that had succeeded the Labour government introduced an emergency budget in September 1931, Keynes again stood out against the chorus of approval. The budget was, he wrote, “replete with folly and injustice”. He explained to an American correspondent that “every person in this country of super-asinine propensities, everyone who hates social progress and loves deflation, feels that his hour has come and triumphantly announces how, by refraining from every form of economic activity, we can all become prosperous again.”

So, how to make those with super-asinine propensities listen? For the longer term, the good folk at places like the US Social Forum will be organising for the future. Over this weekend, though, many good folk in Toronto will be trying hard to make some noise, present some alternatives, and avoid the boots of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Reposted from The Huffington Post

When the World Cup begins in South Africa on Friday, anyone who has ever kicked a ball will be able to follow along–soccer is elegant, straightforward and simple to understand. The Beautiful Game does, however, have a regulation that stops play, reverses the game and routinely baffles neophytes: the off-side rule. To understand it, spectators need only look outside the billion dollar stadiums to the streets of Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg, for they are filled with off-side people, those whom the Rainbow Nation has yet to embrace.

The complexities of the off-side rule are almost indescribable on paper – it’s best explained with pepper-pots or, these days, YouTube. But the regulation is essentially this: it’s okay to loiter wherever you want on the football field, but if you find yourself behind your opponent’s lines in the wrong place when a ball is kicked your way , you can watch it fall, but cannot play it. Behind the lines of rivals, seeing events unfold, but unable to join in the game: that happens all the time in South Africa.

In particular, such is the plight of over ten million South Africans without proper housing, many living in legal limbo throughout South Africa’s cities, under bridges, near trash dumps, on slopes and beyond the brows of hills. They’ll be enjoying the World Cup, welcoming their foreign visitors, and the glare of the international media might provide some cover for them to tell their story of twenty years off-side in South Africa.

Under Apartheid, blacks were often violently removed from city centers, expelled to rural areas or forcibly relocated to the townships. When apartheid crumbled, so did the restrictions on movement that had hemmed in a large rural population. On taking power in 1994, Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC) government demobilized the popular movements that brought them to power, and swapped apartheid economic dogma for neoliberal doctrine.

The government deregulated the economy, shrank the state, and opened local markets to the winds of international competition. The result: jobs left the cities at precisely the time that new people arrived to take them, and social safety nets were cut to tatters. South Africa’s human development ranking fell from 95th in 1995 to 129th out of 158 countries in 2009

Through the 1990s and 2000s, temporary shacks became permanent homes for 1.8 million households. In cities, settlements blossomed in and around the middle class communities where a few residents found work as security guards, domestic workers, and day laborers. Work remains scarce, and formal unemployment rates in settlements routinely top 70%. When elections loom shack communities are generally tolerated by local government officials, because they offer a way to tuck wads of poor black ANC voters into wealthier and more conservative neighborhoods. Patronage pulses through the shacks during South Africa’s electoral seasons, but dries up during incumbent years.

The ANC insists that the worst of apartheid is over, that the ruling party has led a massive construction program to house the homeless, and that development is coming. Under apartheid, though, township houses stretched over approximately 580 square feet. Today’s shackdwellers are lucky to be relocated to homes with an interior space of 390 square feet, many miles from their work, schools and communities. Even then, tenure is insecure. As the World Cup opens, several Cape Town families face eviction because developers increased rents from $38 to $193 per month. Those who haven’t been given housing yet are encouraged to be patient.

Rather than wait another decade, shackdwellers have organized, protested and petitioned. The Abahlali baseMjondolo movement, a group of over 30,000 shackdwellers from across the country (and whose website I manage) recently took the government to South Africa’s highest court, and won. The Constitutional Court struck down a ‘Slums Act’ that would have effectively criminalized being so poor as to need a shack.

As Amnesty International has noted, though, the weight of these legal victories have been undercut by local violence against Abahlali’s leaders. Over the past year, shack settlement leaders in Durban, Johannesburg and Cape Town have been chased from their homes by gangs, arrested, detained without hearing and assaulted. The police have done little to help, and much to hinder, investigations into these human rights abuses.

As the World Cup begins, Abahlali are mounting an ‘Upside Down World Cup’ campaign to draw attention to Apartheid’s unfinished business. In Cape Town, they will set up tin shacks outside the Green Point Stadium, positioning themselves off-side, to show how they live. Their greatest threat to the South African government is their visibility, and the activists fear violent arrest.

Yet their only demand is the chance to make the rules on the same terms as everyone else. In setting up their shacks in full view, shackdweller activists hope to turn the streams of passing fans not into spectators, but into team players who might, from their home countries, be able to hold the South African government to their rhetoric long after the Cup’s final whistle blows.

Caption: The hedgerow outside Oregon’s oldest Mercedes dealership is augmented to make it a peace sign, planted by Sandy 990
Source: http://www.guerrillagardening.org/members/ggmember990b.jpg

I wrote this review of Richard Reynolds’ On Guerrilla Gardening in 2008 but, for a range of mostly bad reasons, it hasn’t seen the light of day until now. That’s a shame because Reynold’s book is a terrific resource into which to dip for inspiration when you’re looking to mess with the institutions of private property in ways that are constructively anarchic (and I admit that this is something I try to do regularly). More below the fold.

___________

In 2050, when there are nine billion people living mainly in cities, it’s not entirely clear how we’ll feed everyone. Industrial agriculture, with its dependency on vast tracts of land, deep cheap water and endless fossil fuels, won’t be able to help – we just don’t have the resources to farm for 9 billion people in the future the way we now farm for 7 billion.

A group of 400 scientists who’ve been bending their minds to this question recently announced their findings, and their answer looks very different to the way we eat today. The International Agricultural Assessment on Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development, headed by Bob Watson, the former World Bank Chief Science officer and now Chief Scientific Advisor at DEFRA, came up with some surprisingly anti-establishment ideas. They suggested that in order to feed the world, we’ll need local agriculture, ecologies that build soil fertility and maintain ecosystem balances without chemicals, and a much more intimate geographical connection with our food.

It’s a fine manifesto, and important to anyone concerned about the future of food and our planet. But if this is where we need to go, we’re faced with the question of how to get there, and what’s it going to be like along the way. A field of answers to this perennial question is to be found in the delightful On Guerrilla Gardening, by Richard Reynolds (Bloomsbury).

Reynolds is well placed to talk about Guerrilla Gardening, being comrade #001 (in the language of the book, he’s Richard 001) in a movement that now has thousands of regular recruits from California to Cape Town. With actions that range from pranks (see picture) to serious attempts to Feed the People, guerrilla gardeners are a worldwide phenomenon, and one with a serious agenda for social change for which Reynolds’ book is a thoughtful guide.

What all attempts at guerrilla gardening have in common is a deep challenge to relations to property. If the gardening isn’t illicit, if it isn’t on someone else’s land without their permission, then it isn’t guerrilla – it’s just gardening. Reynolds understands the history behind the idea of changing relationships to land. He quotes Che Guevara’s observation that ..“it is tractor and tank at the same time breaking down the walls of the great estate… and creating new social relations in the ownership of land”.

Reynold’s book is salted with aphorisms from Mao and Che, but the real eminence grise is Gerrard Winstanley, the True Leveller or, to use the more appropriate shorthand, Winstanley the Digger, the original guerilla gardener. A Christian radical in the English Civil War, Winstanley held private property in vocal contempt. The 1649-1650 organisation, occupation and cultivation of common land in Surrey with which he is most famously associated was ultimately undone by the authorities, but the spirit of the Diggers lives on, and Reynolds’ coming-to-terms with Winstanley is one of the reasons to read On Guerrilla Gardening.

When I talked to Reynolds a couple of years ago, his main complaint was that “Winstanley made too much noise” and ended up alienating potential allies. Winstanley chose to speechify, rather than to sow. Reynolds sees the need for less political grandstanding, more potted guile. Which is why his book is styled as a manual, full of sensible, practiced advice. If you’re stopped by the authorities, for instance, try saying that the community wants to make the place nicer, and you’re a volunteer. It’s hard for people to stop that unless they’re particularly officious.

In addition to tactical insight, Reynolds also has strategic advice, particularly about which common land to shoot for. In language that, at least half jokingly, summons the authority of a general at war, Reynolds says “my recommendation is to focus your attack on neglected land. This is a tangible enemy, and an adversary against which you are more likely to win support.” Part of the reason for the support is that, on neglected land, improvements will swiftly be noticed. A more beautiful and productive bit of green space is a victory for the movement and, pragmatically, nothing succeeds like success.

Of course, guerrilla gardeners aren’t the only group to be taking on the challenge of reconfiguring our imaginations about public space. Perhaps most spectacularly, London-based Reclaim the Streets did their own bit of guerrilla gardening in July 1996, when they took over the M41, drilled into the concrete, and planted trees while 7,000 danced in the lanes.

Reynolds wasn’t terribly impressed by all this, and gently scolds them, pointing out that the thousands of pounds that it cost to repair the motorway might have better been spent actually promoting more permanent green spaces. I think, here, there’s a trick missed. The purpose of Reclaim the Streets events aren’t to create, in perpetuity, an arboretum on the Westway. They are a radical breed of political art that makes us rethink urban space, and the way we move through it. Yes, the cost of filling in holes on the motorway was high – but, as citizen-driven art, it was a bargain.

It’s tempting to read Reynolds’ response as a little curmudgeonly and, at times, he does seem a little ranty. Take, for instance, his critique of marketing approaches used by certain guerrilla gardeners, some of whom “use grinning, flower-hugging gorillas as a badge for their battalion. Please stop this! Where there is a place for witticism within the guerrilla gardening ranks, let’s leave gorillas out of it.”

This isn’t, however, the sign of a young fogey so much as someone who’s serious about the business of urban politics in the real world. His agenda isn’t to build temporary autonomous zones that rise and burst like bubbles in cola. He’s grappling with the business of how to make subversion sustainable. And in this vision, there are strategic arguments for seriousness.

This isn’t to say that guerrilla gardening is all work and no play. One of the comrades in the book practices her guerrilla skills by pouring Miracle-gro on other peoples’ plants. The result is a riot of greenery quite beyond what the original planters intended. “If it had been weedkiller, it would have been different,” says Reynolds. This robust feeling for radical mischief is one that is to be found in the DNA of pretty much every group that’s trying to get us out of our current environmental and social crisis.

What On Guerilla Gardening provides is just one possible, but eminently practical, roadmap. It’s both manual, manifesto and, unexpectedly, a coffee table book, at least in its production values. The pages are lush with photographs of everything from Severin 888’s cannabis plants in German public gardens to Christopher 1594’s seed bombs (a mush of soil, seed and fertiliser to be lobbed into a chosen territory) moulded in to the shape of 9mm pistols. Yet despite the sometimes annoying language of the military, this is the sort of radical manifesto that you can give your maiden aunt (he dedicates it to “My Mother 008”). And it’s a book that deserves a very audience. What Reynolds offers is the prospect of transforming ourselves from spectators to activists in a daily, sustained, way. He does it by generating an infectious sense of possibility and hope that’ll be indispensible as we try to pull ourselves out of our current agricultural and urban quagmire. We’ll need to dig for victory against capital and environmental crisis, and if you’re wondering how that’ll happen, Reynolds’ got answers in spades.