It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Berlin (AFP) – Thailand's Central Group said Friday it has bought the iconic KaDeWe department store in Berlin from insolvent Austrian real-estate giant Signa.
The 650,000-square-foot (60,000-square-metre) store is located on one the German capital's main shopping streets, and has long been a major draw for tourists.
The Thai group, a multinational conglomerate with a sprawling retail and property portfolio, did not confirm the purchase price, but German daily Handelsblatt put the figure at around one billion euros ($1.1 billion).
The news came several months after the company that operates the store, KaDeWe group, filed for bankruptcy, reportedly blaming the turmoil engulfing Signa.
"We are pleased to add KaDeWe Berlin to Central Group's historic flagship luxury store real estate portfolio," said Central Group's chief executive, Tos Chirathivat.
Vittorio Radice, a board member of Central Group Europe, said the purchase was "the first important milestone for us in the attempt to restore and restructure the KaDeWe Group operating company towards a sustainable, financially viable business".
Central Group is already a majority shareholder in the KaDeWe Group, with a 50.1 percent stake.
Handelsblatt reported the Thai conglomerate was in advanced talks to take over the entire group, which also operates the department stores Alsterhaus in Hamburg and Oberpollinger in Munich.
KaDeWe, short for "Kaufhaus des Westens" or the "Department Store of the West", first opened its doors in 1907, and is one of Europe's biggest department stores.
When Berlin was divided during the Cold War, its well-stocked shelves symbolised the capitalism and consumerism of the West, a stark contrast to life in the communist East.
As well as problems caused by the crisis in Signa, it has suffered like other department stores as customers increasingly choose to shop online.
Signa -- which owns the Chrysler building in New York -- initiated insolvency proceedings in November, marking the spectacular downfall of its founder, self-made Austrian tycoon Rene Benko.
Central Group has been a long-standing business partner of Signa.
Late last year, it also ended another partnership with the Austrian group, becoming the majority shareholder in the group that runs historic British department store Selfridges.
Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) and luxury goods giant Kering, which is owned by French billionaire Francois Pinault, are both thought to be interested in a stake in Selfridges, according to City sources.
Interest has been triggered by the collapse of Signa, the Austrian company run by businessman Rene Benko that owns half of Selfridges’ property company.
The insolvency has led to its stake in the retailer becoming available. City sources have said Selfridges is in play but the sale process is complicated by proceedings in Austria.
Collapse of Austrian tycoon Rene Benko's company Signa could trigger a bidding war for Selfridges - GEORG HOCHMUTH/AFP
It is understood that Selfridges’ other co-owner, Thailand’s Central Group, is seeking a new partner as the future of fellow shareholder Signa looks increasingly uncertain.
Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) is one of the parties understood to be interested in Signa’s stake, which covers Selfridges’ retail brand and its lucrative real estate on Oxford Street.
Saudi’s involvement stemmed from it providing the finance for Signa’s investment. It therefore could be in pole position should a bidding war for Selfridges emerge.
The Gulf kingdom has been on a dealmaking spree in recent years that has seen it invest heavily abroad, including in Britain where it has bought Newcastle United FC among others.
However, PIF could face competition from luxury goods giant Kering, City sources say.
Paris-listed Kering is worth €52bn and owns a suite of luxury brands including Gucci, Balenciaga, Yves Saint Laurent and Alexander McQueen.
The company has recently been buying up luxury retail space. In January, it bought the 115,000 square foot Fifth Avenue building home to its New York Gucci store for $963m.
A banker familiar with the matter described Central Group as the “king-maker” in the sale process, which is still in its early stages as Signa unravels.
Interested parties are believed to be waiting for a full outcome from Signa’s collapse before they formally declare an interest in the stake, which would be worth around £2bn.
“What Central are doing is watching their partner’s problems play out,” the source said. “Sitting, watching to see how it breaks. Of course, they are naturally interested to see what happens because they are going to have a new partner.
“It’s between retailing dynasties and sovereign wealth funds.”
Selfridges was bought by Signa and Central in a £4bn deal in 2021, with the business split between an operating company and a property company.
Both had been jointly owned by Signa and Central.
However, Central moved to seize control of the operating business during the turmoil at Signa late last year, converting a €364m (£317m) loan into a majority stake in the business.
Despite this, Signa still owns 50pc of the property company and holds around 35pc in the operating company.
Signa’s downfall led to Mr Benko filing for personal insolvency earlier this month, four months after his company crumbled under the weight of high interest rates and dwindling valuations.
Amid questions around its ownership, Selfridges has maintained that it trades independently of any support from its shareholders.
However, the situation has cast a shadow over the retailer, which has also been racing to cut costs in a major efficiency drive.
Andrew Keith, Selfridges managing director, told workers at the time that the company needed to be “fit for the future, aligned and working in the most efficient way”.
He said: “Regrettably this is likely to mean some of our head office teams, including some small teams in retail who support our stores, will be resized and reshaped.”
The move followed a year in which Selfridges lost almost £40m after it recorded a jump in costs.
Accounts for Selfridges Retail, which covers the business’s four UK stores, its website and its mobile app, revealed the company was struck by higher debt interest costs during the year to January 2023.
Its interest expense on lease liabilities was close to £100m, around 20pc higher than the prior year.
Signa and Central loaded Selfridges up with more than £1.7bn of debt in autumn 2022 by booking loans through a number of new trading and property entities.
Central Group and Selfridges declined to comment.
Kering declined to comment. PIF was contacted for comment.
Controversial Everton bidder 777 Partners sees owning football club as way to snap up sportstech bargains
Daniel O'Boyle Fri, 15 March 2024 The controversial investment firm sees owning football clubs as a way to identify underpriced buyout targets in the sports tech sector, the Standard can reveal (Getty Images)
777 Partners, the controversial London and Miami investment firm that awaits approval for its deal to buy Everton, sees owning footballclubs as a way to identify underpriced buyout targets in the sports tech sector, the Standard can reveal.
The companies in question could be a ‘salesforce for football’ or a statistical data provider, 777 head of Europe John Jeffery suggested.
777 - which runs its European operations from Mayfair and already owns clubs in five other countries, as well as basketball’s London Lions - agreed to buy the Premier League stalwarts in September, but final approval from the league has taken much longer than the average deal.
Jeffery told the Standard that the once-obscure firm, which mostly dealt in life insurance and annuities for lawsuit winners, saw four main benefits to being in football.
Three of those benefits are about owning multiple teams: lower revenue volatility, the ability to move players between clubs and a chance to attract directors best suited to a certain budget.
But with the fourth, Jeffery offered a reason why 777 decided to get into buying clubs in the first place. He said 777 could buy out a potential sportstech unicorn at a bargain price, because it would have a better view of the top products on the market.
The firm has already used this business model - buying the "strategic fulcrum" of a sector, and then the adjacent companies it sees as undervalued - in other sectors like insurance.
He said: “We feel like we have a better understanding of the market as a customer ourselves. We can say ‘forget all the Gartner [market research] reports, forget everything. We know what the best software in the market is for this particular problem because we have this problem and we use all the software... So we're going to go about buying it’.”
He insists the model is more effective than researching the sector without playing an active part in the sport, enough to justify the large costs involved in buying top teams and keeping them running.
The firm may also work on building its own products to fill spaces where there wasn’t an existing company to buy. It has already done that in the insurance space, making a product to hedge life insurance payouts using equity release deals, so that a surge in deaths would not mean a big hit to the firm’s profits.
But he added that - for every club the firm owns - 777 would have to work on shoring up the finances in the short-term before it can think about a buying spree. He also noted it would be “insulting” to fans to focus entirely on selling some recently acquired software at the expense of results.
777 has spent months awaiting Premier League approval for its deal to buy Everton, as football owners face greater scrutiny and the firm has been the subject of lawsuits, some from creditors that say they’re owed money. The unusually lengthy process has already led to a point deduction for the club, with a six-point penalty (reduced from 10) moving them from mid-table to a potential relegation fight.
According to reports today, the Premier League is likely to make a decision on the club next week. If the deal is not approved, the future of the debt-heavy club is unclear.
American newsletter Semafor last year raised questions over the source of 777’s funding for the deal, claiming that the company used money from insurance premiums - usually put into secure assets like high-rated bonds - to finance its sporting investments.
Jeffery admitted that those funds were used to invest in clubs, but added that the insurance investments are handled by an “independently run operating company with an independent board that is regulated”, Jeffery said.
He said that leadership does pitch investment opportunities to that board, but that “they can say no and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
But in the case of the football investments, he said “they took it away, they did their due diligence, and they made the decision that they wanted to invest.”
In the capital, the London Lions basketball team has faced its own difficulties since the acquisition. The club’s 2022 accounts are currently overdue. But Jeffery says that its troubles lie with those managing the club on a day-to-day basis.
He said: “It’s run day-to-day, there’s no input.
“We’re often as surprised as everyone else when there’s a negative headline. We know when you know.”
Wednesday, March 13, 2024
Tame vulture capitalists—or must we destroy them?
Vulture Capitalism makes a case for socialist planning but misses some vital arguments, writes Thomas Foster
Online retailers, such as Amazon, rely on planning (Picture: Chris Watt)
A new book by Grace Blakeley shows up the myth of “free market” capitalism and argues for a democratically‑planned economy.
Vulture Capitalism demolishes the idea that capitalism is dominated by the “freedom” of the market.
Blakeley carefully goes over how businesses plan their own production and states coordinate society for profit.
She argues that planning has always been part of capitalist society. What matters is who makes the decisions— and, currently, those in charge are unaccountable politicians and bosses.
However, the book’s strategy for replacing them with truly democratic processes is flawed.
It rests on the idea that working through parliament and other institutions of the capitalist state can achieve a total transformation of how planning could work. Planning Blakeley uses Amazon as an example of corporate planning.
Amazon didn’t get to where it is now because of the “free market”, but because it operates through highly organised and efficient planning.
From what goods and how many goods distribution centres receive to its supply chains—most aspects are consciously planned, coordinated and designed on a massive scale.
There is no internal market at work. But corporations don’t plan on their own. They rely on the support of the capitalist state and financial institutions.
States frequently intervene to enable bosses’ pursuit of profit or to “shield their most powerful businesses from international competition”.
When a state bails out a corporation, it’s protecting it at the expense of others. When a state ignores anti‑competition practices, it is facilitating monopolisation—when one firm dominates a particular market.
Blakeley rightly argues that coordination shouldn’t be the prerogative of bosses or bureaucrats. Instead ordinary people should be in charge.
Here she draws of the example on the Lucas Plan, produced by workers at Lucas Aerospace Corporation in 1976.
They aimed to shift the firm away from producing weapons and towards producing socially-useful goods.
But bosses rejected their plan as they “preferred to see their organisation die than hand it over to the workers,” writes Blakeley.
She then turns to the example of Salvador Allende’s left wing government, elected in Chile in 1970.
His government set up an early computer system to connect workers’ control of industry to the planning processes of a national government.
The system exchanged information between state institutions and workers— showing planning is possible on a large scale.
But a US-backed coup violently overthrew Allende’s government, which had demobilised its supporters.
To reach socialism, Blakeley argues, we must “build a movement capable of resisting the vested interests that would seek to prevent us from reaching this point”.
Struggle Socialists, she writes, “must struggle within and outside all social institutions, including those of the state” to “take control over the (existing) state”.
This is an absurd conclusion to reach after examining Allende’s government, which exposed precisely the limits of working within parliament and the capitalist state.
Allende failed because he didn’t break the power of capital and the state.
Instead, he tried to subdue the workers’ movement, instructing it to “end their illegal seizures of land and property”.
Breaking capitalist power means relying on the social power of the working class, not manoeuvres at the top.
The capitalist state must be replaced with a new workers’ state, based on democratic bodies from below that ordinary people set up through the course of struggle.
And that sort of challenge can only come through a revolution. Blakeley’s vision of achieving a democratic society is deeply flawed.
Tuesday, February 27, 2024
SCI-FI, UTOPIAS, AND SOCIALISM
We have described a World-in-which-we’d-love-to-live… The way we see it, this is a world where creative labour is the ultimate satisfaction and the source of happiness for people. Everything else is built on the foundation of this principle. People are happy there when they manage to actualise this main principle. Friendship, love and work are the three main pillars that support the happiness of such humankind. We could not imagine anything better than that, and why would we want to?
Boris Strugatsky
01 September 2021
What kind of society would appeal to a socialist? What kind of life would we actually enjoy once the logic of capitalism driving the world of today releases its grip not only on the resources of Earth – material or human – but also on the minds of its inhabitants? I believe that in order to promote the socialist cause we need to have a clearer understanding of answers to these questions. There is a caveat there, of course: what is appealing to people today may not appeal to people in the future.
Of course, there is a sub-genre that focuses specifically on the stories about ‘perfect’ worlds – Utopias. Ironically, when searching for utopias on Google, it is quite hard to find any – the search engine stubbornly shows ‘best dystopias’, and even articles on utopias often discuss mostly dystopian books and films. My first several ‘utopian books’ searches returned the Vulture’s 100 Great Works of Dystopian Fiction, Tales About A World Gone Wrong and a BBC article Science Fiction: How Not To Build A Future Society. Maybe a good drama needs suffering, and this is why tragedies have always enjoyed more popularity than comedies? Whatever the reason, the number of utopian worlds seems to be surprisingly small. Do any of them offer appealing visions of a socialist or a socialist-like world?
There are some notable examples, such as Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two, and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time. These and some other novels describe interesting social innovations, which are often very close to socialist ideals. For instance, the utopian world in Woman on the Edge of Time promotes such values as common ownership and (gender) equality; the inhabitants of the Walden Two community are free to choose their vocation and have no police force that could enforce their will through violence; and on the moon of Anarres in The Dispossessed, everyone is free to start their own productive enterprise, where there is no incentive to grow production or compete since there is no market, so all production is aimed solely to fulfil everyday needs.
While many ideas described in these and other books are worth discussing and thinking about, some details are questionable or even disturbing. For example, Skinner’s Walden community has a set of guardians who are somehow wiser than the ‘common people’. Skinner himself believed in the need for elitist rule: ‘We must delegate control of the population as a whole to specialists – to police, priests, teachers, therapies…’ (John Staddon, The New Behaviorism, 2014, p.125). The utopian agrarian community of Piercy’s Mattapoisett (Woman on the Edge of Time) shows a governmentally decentralised egalitarian society, mostly based on feminist and anarchist ideals. The world of Mattapoisett at times comes through as a fantasy, a feverish dream in the mind of a person in a mental institution under the influence of heavy tranquillisers, propelled by the feelings of powerlessness and grief. We are never told in the book if the visions the protagonist had are true or not. Would I want to live in Mattapoisett? Probably not. It seems quite focussed on offering the alternative to the patriarchal and exploitative capitalist ways of life, but more in the way of renouncing something negative rather than by offering something viable and attractive in its own right.
Importantly, it is still not clear on how this set of communities (or the one on Anarres in The Dispossessed) is supposed to work: both rely on self-governance and the structures of meeting and discussion, which might function well on the level of a town but certainly not a planet. Ursula Le Guin is perhaps more realistic in her novel, because Anarres in The Dispossessed is not shown as a Garden of Eden. It is a barren and dirty world, where life is decidedly hard for its inhabitants. Do any of them offer appealing visions of a socialist or a socialist-like world? They also have problems with their PDC (Production and Distribution Coordination), which exhibits some signs of government. In any case, it is probably not the best example to illustrate the advantages of a socialist society. But I guess my biggest problem with most utopias is that they simply don’t appeal to me; I wouldn’t want to live there myself.
I understand, writing utopias is hard. Unlike dystopias, it is not as simple as to show some horrors of destruction or societal decay (which could be easily borrowed from a daily tabloid). New ideas have to be created and, on top of this, put together in a coherent system that would look realistic. When thinking them up, authors would undoubtedly lean on their own life experiences, environment and cultural upbringing. For many of them, the best vision of a progressive society not corrupted by consumerism or greed would be inspired by communities in the countryside, or perhaps by stereotypes of preindustrial self-sufficient settlements. Many utopias share these elements of ‘environmental wisdom’ or even a pre-technological biblical paradise, for example, in Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia, citizens aim for a balance between themselves and nature. Callenbach himself said of his book, in relation to Americans: ‘It is so hard to imagine anything fundamentally different from what we have now… [But] we’d better get ready. We need to know where we’d like to go.’
‘Noon Universe’
There are a couple of authors – two brothers – who borrowed their ideas from a different cultural environment: that of the post-war Soviet Union, and about how their utopian world came out different as a result.
The Strugatsky brothers, Boris and Arkady, wrote their books collaboratively. They needed to pass Soviet censorship in order to get published, so they came up with an ‘approved’ setting for many of their books, called ‘Noon Universe’, in which communism has triumphed globally. Of course, they both loathed the constraints of state capitalism and totalitarianism on the lives of Soviet people, so their utopias went much further, painting a world free of money or coercion – a world where they would themselves want to live and work. Most of those books were written in the 60s and 70s, but to this day a more compelling, believable fictional world of the future where people are happy and lead dynamic lives has yet to be written – at least in the Russian science-fiction literature.
The Noon Universe, named after Noon: 22nd Century, chronologically the first novel from the series, also features in the following books: Hard to Be a God, The Inhabited Island, Space Mowgli, Beetle in the Anthill, and The Time Wanderers, among others. To give you an idea of some features of the future social organisation Arkady and Boris Strugatsky presented in their Noon Universe, without giving away any spoilers, here is a brief overview:unequivocal victory of socialism: no monetary system, all production for common goodabsence of institutionalised coercion, such as police or militaryadvanced technological progress, ubiquitous robotic assistanceeveryone is engaged in a profession that inspires them
This fairly common set of features then goes on, now with a somewhat different focus:the system of education is given utmost importance: students spend at least as much time or more at school than at home; they have very small class sizes and have personal Mentors that lead them on the path of learning about both the world and themselves; they must reach a high level of scientific knowledge, societal responsibility and creativity (arts and humanities)ethics/morality is given a very important role, on a par with technological competencea new kind of human (intellectually and ethically superior to most modern humans; importantly, much more socially responsible) is raised, who deeply cares about the planet and all its life forms, and is thus willing to both drive and accept societal progress
Finally, what makes this world both believable and appealing, is this combination of on the one hand a democratic and science-based social system without exploitation, and on the other, individuals raised to support such socialist society:this way of raising responsible individuals makes it possible to avoid coercion and resolve issues collaboratively, based on evidence and rationalitythis society does have some structure / governance where a number of meritocratic High Councils composed of the world’s leading scientists in each particular field of specialisation provide guidance and rules of functioning
Unfortunately, apart from The Gulag Archipelago, the legacy of Soviet literature is largely unknown in the Western cultural sphere, and the Noon Universe with its bright and highly optimistic vision of the future has not been popularised through films or comic books. I have tried to search for similar utopian universes in English or American books, or shown in films, but, as described in the beginning, found mostly dystopian sci-fi or stories of societies that went backwards ‘to the cradle of nature’ in their attempts to invent a fairer and wiser world. Perhaps the closest to the creation of the Strugatsky brothers comes the Earth in Star Trek: The Original Series, and even that is rife with militaristic and patriarchal themes.
From the vantage point of the 21st century, there are several issues that could also be improved in the Noon Universe, of course. For example, we might want to introduce some features of Marxist feminism and gender equality, and environmental considerations could have been described more convincingly. But the main features seem to all be there: technological progress comes hand in hand with societal progress, which is in turn driven by personal betterment of every member of that society. It might seem utopian, but I think it is fully socialist in spirit, more coherent and credible, and it really makes me want to step into that world and start living there right now.
Ivan Yefremov (1907--1972) was by original profession a paleontologist. His first stories, on the life of explorers, were published in 1944. Andromeda -- in Russian-language editions The Andromeda Nebula -- is his best-known science fiction novel. Not coincidentally, it was written in 1956, the year of the first sputnik (Soviet artificial earth satellite).
This third English-language printing contains an introduction written shortly before the author's death. Here Yefremov explains how he came to write sci-fi and the purposes he thinks sci-fi should serve. For him sci-fi is not a light-hearted genre in which the fantasy is given free rein, but a serious medium for exploring new scientific ideas and their social implications. Its task is also to portray the communist future of mankind. (In this piece "communism" has the same meaning as in Soviet ideology: it refers to the future culmination of social development, NOT the historical forms of the Soviet system, which are called "socialism.")
Indeed, Andromeda is set in a society -- let's call it Yefremia for convenience -- in which communism is already a mature society, several centuries old. Poverty, greed, and heavy toil are things of the distant past; "knowledge and creative labor have freed Earth from hunger, overpopulation, infectious diseases, and harmful animals" (p. 181). A greatly reduced population is concentrated in a temperate zone, mainly around the Mediterranean Sea, between the intensely forested and cultivated (by automation) tropics and the newly wild prairie. An atmosphere is being created on Mars to prepare that planet too for human settlement. Space expeditions penetrate ever further into the galaxy, and the first contacts with extraterrestrial civilizations have been established. Yefremia fuses Marx' vision of earthly communism with Tsiolkovsky's vision of mankind's cosmic destiny. (1)
What of the people who inhabit this utopia? The Yefremians have a great deal of freedom: they travel at will, choose new professions, seek love relationships, initiate projects. At the same time, they are highly socially conscious and self-disciplined, even mildly ascetic. They derive satisfaction mainly from creative work in the arts and sciences and the full development of their intellectual and emotional capacities.
Coercion has not disappeared totally, as there is a small minority of egoistic throwbacks ("bulls"): they may be banished to the Island of Oblivion, or should they conspire to disrupt society eliminated by the "destroyer battalions." (I suppose something like the KGB is still needed to spot "bulls" and pre-empt their conspiracies, though this is nowhere spelt out.)
Yefremia was very much in tune with the spirit of the Khrushchev era, with its naive faith in rapid Soviet-led progress in two closely connected dimensions: scientific progress, symbolized by the new space program; and social progress -- "Our children will live under communism," promised Nikita Sergeyevich. Khrushchev's successors had no such faith and shifted the focus of official ideology from communism, relegated to an indefinitely distant future, to "actually existing socialism" (i.e. the Soviet status quo). In his 1972 introduction, Yefremov admits that many people no longer believe in a communist future. He still believes because the sole alternative is the self-destruction of mankind. The logic here goes as follows: Yes, A is highly implausible, but if not A then B, and B is simply too awful to contemplate, therefore A is inevitable.
How are decisions taken in Yefremia? One of the advantages of the fictional method of presenting utopias is that you never have to explain EXACTLY how they work. But we learn that leadership is shared among a number of councils: the Economic Council, the Astronautical Council, the Health Council, and so on. These councils are advised by an array of scientific institutions, my own favorites being the Academy of the Bounds of Knowledge and the Academy of Sorrow and Joy.
The various councils cooperate on an equal basis: none is supposed to be subordinate to another. Yet the Economic Council does occupy a crucial niche, if only because "nothing big can be undertaken" unless it allocates the necessary resources. It is indeed "the planet's central brain." And there is also the Control of Honor and Justice, "the guardian of every person on the planet," the ultimate judicial authority. (2) Parallels with really existing socialism readily come to mind. However distant the future ostensibly being portrayed, many of the author's assumptions reflect the society in which he really lives. Of course, the one is supposed to be the precursor of the other.
While I have nothing against communism as such, I wouldn't want to live in Yefremia. There is too much tension and heroism for my taste; life is too strenuous -- physically, intellectually, emotionally. I prefer the gentler utopian visions of William Morris' "News from Nowhere" and Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed (in which an anarcho-communist society has been set up on the moon Anarres). Surely, once mankind gets past the unavoidable turmoil of class struggle, war and revolution and reaches mature communism it is entitled at long last to a bit of relaxation? After all, it was Marx' son-in-law Paul Lafargue who published a pamphlet entitled The Right To Be Lazy. Those of us who prefer the simple life can, it is true, go fishing on the Island of Oblivion, but in so doing we expose ourselves to abuse at the hands of the "bulls." Why can't we have an island of our own?
But Yefremov's workaholic ("strugglaholic" -- how's that for a neologism?) heroes and heroines have a grand excuse for not letting themselves relax: that cosmic destiny of mankind! The abundance of high-tech low-population communism is drained away by the exorbitant resource demands of ambitious cosmic projects. "We are going to ask mankind to curtail consumption for the year 809 of the Great Circle Era," says the president of the Astronautical Council (p. 330). Now where have we heard this before? No more enemies on earth, at least not to speak of? Never mind, let's go and fight mysterious beings in outer space. The struggle continues! Without end in sight. Space plays the same socially and esthetically conservative role in Yefremov's communism as did the arms race in actually existing socialism.
NOTES
(1) Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857--1935). See pp. 258-281 in Russkii kosmizm [Russian Cosmism] (Moscow: Pedagogika-Press, 1993).
(2) Actually there are two Controls of Honor and Justice, one for the northern hemisphere and one for the southern. Each has 11 members. Cases concerning the whole planet are heard in joint session.
SOURCE
Ivan Yefremov, Andromeda: A Space-Age Tale (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1980). Translated by George Hanna. The book can be read on-line here or with multicolored illustrations here.
a Vulture news blogger covering TV, movies and music
FEB. 24, 2024
Photo: Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images
“You are the champions,” SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher told the crowd at the union’s most glamorous meeting of the year. During her nearly four-minute speech at the SAG Awards, Drescher criticized AI, reflected on the importance of women who can lead and “still rock a red lip,” and reminded everyone that we all “hold in our hearts the gentle whisper of true love.” But the majority of her remarks were devoted to praising the members who participated in the longest strike in SAG-AFTRA’s history. “Your collective dignity and perseverance to stand up and say we deserve better because we are better resulted in a historic billion-dollar deal,” she told the room. “Your solidarity ignited workers around the world, triggering what forever will be remembered as the hot labor summer.”
Throughout the night, several nominees and presenters also took time to acknowledge the impact of the Hollywood strikes. While opening the ceremony, Idris Elba took a moment to “honor and appreciate” everyone who “stood up for SAG-AFTRA.” In her acceptance speech, Lily Gladstone noted that it’s been a “hard year” and expressed her pride in having “gotten here in solidarity with all of our other unions.” Sorry, AMPTP, but it looks like the post-strike solidarity is going strong.
SAG Awards: Fran Drescher Says 2023 Strike “Set the Trajectory for Many Generations to Come”
The president of the actors' union also took a shot at AI in her remarks, saying it will "entrap us in a matrix where no one knows what's real."
SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher resurfaced the union’s 118-day strike in remarks at the guild’s award ceremony on Saturday night, saying that union members “set the trajectory for many generations to come” during the work stoppage.
Drescher called the actors union’s approximately 160,000 members the “champions” of the night in a speech during the 2024 Screen Actors Guild Awards. “You survived the longest strike in our union’s history with courage and conviction. The journey was arduous, it came with great sacrifice and unrelenting stress,” she said. “Your solidarity ignited workers around the world, triggering what forever be remembered as the hot labor summer.” She added that “this was a seminal moment in our union’s history that has set the trajectory for many generations to come, not afraid but brave, not weak but powered, not peons but partners.”
She also took a shot at AI — which SAG-AFTRA’s 2023 TV/theatrical contract tackles — saying it will “entrap us in a matrix where no one knows what’s real.” Rather, she said, “We should tell stories that spark the human spirit, connect us to the natural world and awaken our capacity to love unconditionally.”
The 2023 actors’ strike was also fresh in the minds of contenders, presenters and union officials at Saturday’s Screen Actors Guild Awards. Noting the past year had been a difficult one due to the strikes, Luther actor Idris Elba took a moment in his opening monologue to “honor and appreciate all of you both here and at home that stood up for SAG-AFTRA in solidarity and support.”
Accepting the best performance by a cast in a motion picture award for Oppenheimer, Kenneth Branagh noted that the SAG-AFTRA ceremony was a “full-circle moment” for the ensemble, because during the film’s London premiere on July 14, 2023 the cast walked out due to the then-upcoming strike. “Thank you, thank you, thank you SAG-AFTRA, thank you for this, thank you for fighting for us. Thank you for every SAG-AFTRA member whose support and whose sacrifice allows us to be standing here better than we were before,” he said.
On the red carpet, Lawmen: Bass Reeves star David Oyelowo emphasized the joy of getting back to work after his union’s strike ended on Nov. 9, 2023. “It’s that thing, you don’t know what you have until it’s gone,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “So of course there’s a level of appreciation and gratitutde that we get to go back and do what we love.” He said he was reminded of the importance of solidarity from the strikes because as an actor it’s a “lonely journey” but “in a moment like this, where everyone was in this thing together as actors, I think that was very galvanizing and brought people together as a community again in a more broad way. I think hopefully we can hold on to a bit of that.”
Succession star Alan Ruck added that the biggest lesson he gleaned from the strike was to “just stand up for what you believe in. If something’s wrong, you need to say something about it.”
Abbott Elementary actor Chris Perfetti noted, “We had a wild year and here we are still celebrating, and we have a lot to celebrate. It’s kind of emotional that we’re all dressing up and carrying on as usual. It’s a good feeling.” He added that the strikes “solidified the fact that this business and any endeavor as an artist is a roller coaster.”
SAG-AFTRA executive vp Linda Powell had a ringside seat to the negotiations, as she served as vice chair of the 2023 TV/Theatrical negotiating committee. On the red carpet, Powell said of the energy in the room at the SAG Awards, “Everybody is ready to celebrate, everybody is looking forward to this year, taking advantage of the wins and the new sense of collective energy that we’ve got going into this.” She added, “One of the big things we talked about throughout the strike was the importance of the humanity that we bring into the room when we go to work, and tonight we celebrate the people who bring a human face to these films.”
The 2024 SAG Awards took place at Los Angeles’ Shrine Auditorium and Expo Hall, and streamed live on Netflix, a little over three months following the end of SAG-AFTRA’s strike
Saturday, February 24, 2024
'Unspeakably Grim': Vice Latest Media Company to Announce Mass Layoffs
The news comes as more than 500 news workers were laid off in January, not counting the more than 300 who lost their jobs when The Messenger shut down on the last day of the month.
Vice Media offices display the Vice logo at dusk on February 1, 2019 in Venice, California. (Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Vice CEO Bruce Dixon sent a memo to employees on Thursday announcing that the company was laying off hundreds of workers and would no longer publish on its flagship Vice.com website, saying it was "no longer cost-effective" to do so.
This marks the latest round of layoffs in what is shaping up to be a brutal start to 2024 for the news industry. A total of 528 news workers were laid off in January, not counting the more than 300 who lost their jobs when The Messenger shut down on the last day of the month. A day after the Vice news, Washington, D.C.'s NPR affiliate WAMU announced it was closing down its DCist website and laying off 15 staffers, as Axiosreported, though it said it would add new positions in audio.
"Is it 'ethical' to be teaching journalism right now?" Scientific American senior media editor Tulika Bose asked on social media Thursday.
"People lay all the blame on the vulture funds that buy up these news sites to try and turn a profit, and yes they're bad and culpable, but the damage Google and Facebook have done to the news industry is far worse."
Vice in particular has faced numerous business difficulties in the last few years. At its height, the company employed around 3,000 people and was worth $5.7 billion, according to Variety. Yet, in May 2023, the parent company filed for bankruptcy and its news division laid off dozens of employees, Hell Gatereported. Immediately before the bankruptcy, reporting revealed that executives had awarded themselves massive bonuses.
Vice was then purchased by private equity firm Fortress Investment Group. In the fall, it combined its five divisions into two, Variety said, and laid off even more people, leaving it with a staff of more than 900.
"As we navigate the ever-evolving business landscape, we need to adapt and best align our strategies to be more competitive in the long term," Dixon said in Thursday's memo.
These changes include shuttering the website and instead partnering "with established media companies to distribute our digital content, including news, on their global platforms, as we fully transition to a studio model."
"As part of this shift, we will no longer publish content on Vice.com, instead putting more emphasis on our social channels as we accelerate our discussions with partners to take our content to where it will be viewed most broadly," he continued.
Dixon also confirmed that Vice was in talks to sell Refinery 29, a women's publication that it acquired in 2019 for $400 million.
"A few years ago, Vice was valued at $5.7 billion. They published some of the smartest, most interesting, and fearless journalism of the last decade," Jeff Weiss, edito-in-chief at POW Mag and theLAnd, posted on social media. "And now private equity is going to strip it for parts to make a bunch of outdated nostalgia meme pages. Unspeakably grim shit."
Current and former Vice staffers blamed its woes on mismanagement.
"The journalism has been exceedingly sound; the durable upper management has just been the most embarrassing collection of doofuses on Zoom calls showing off their scarves or whatever," one anonymous senior newsroom staffer told Hell Gate.
Former Vice worker and union member Paul Blest recalled on social media that the company had appeared to spend "90% of the snack budget on milk."
Aaron Gordon, another former employee and union steward, told Hell Gate: "The company raised $1.6 billion in venture funding, according to Crunchbase. It launched a TV channel in 2016 just as cord-cutting and streaming was rattling the industry. It went bankrupt in 2023. And now the website is dead. Management's work speaks for itself."
Yet the news from Vice comes amid an accelerating decline in news work: Between 2005 and 2023, the U.S. lost nearly one-third of its newspapers, at a rate of more than two each week. It also lost nearly two-thirds of its newspaper reporters. A total of 2,681 news media jobs were axed in 2023 alone, the highest number since 2020.
Some have blamed takeovers by private equity groups like Fortress Investment Group.
"I think it'd be good for more people to know that the exact same private equity executives responsible for destroying hundreds of jobs at Vice—Fortress Investment Group—are also responsible for destroying thousands of jobs at Gannett newspapers," journalist Megan Greenwell, who is currently writing a book about private equity, posted on social media.
Freelance labor reporter Kim Kelly bemoaned the "hundreds of jobs lost" because of more "shithead media executives who wouldn't know value or journalism or basic humanity if it bit them in the ass."
Author and Labor Institute executive director Les Leopold wrote for Common Dreams in January about how private equity takeovers can harm media outlets: Leveraged buyouts, which have negatively affected so many journalists, are another form of financial pillage. When private equity firms and hedge funds buy up companies the deals are financed largely with borrowed money, debt that is then put on the books of the company that was purchased. Servicing that debt becomes a major corporate expense, most often paid for by cutting costs through mass layoffs.
Yet there is another factor as well, which is how large social media and tech platforms have cut into the revenue news outlets would otherwise make from advertising, as Columbia Journalism Review(CJR)explained: Publications that used to rely on advertisements now have to compete with tech giants. The Columbia report argued that Google and Meta should pay news outlets $14 billion annually in revenue for their search traffic and content. As technology companies incorporate AI-enhanced search experiences, which create answers to the user's question in the sidebar, some fear that users will opt for these short answers. This would further damage the news business model: News consumed on platforms means no traffic to news sites, which means no ad revenue, no brand affiliation, and no chance to convert paying subscribers.
Also on Thursday, NiemanLabreported that Google has experimented with removing the "News" tab from its search results.
"People lay all the blame on the vulture funds that buy up these news sites to try and turn a profit, and yes they're bad and culpable, but the damage Google and Facebook have done to the news industry is far worse, and they seem to be escaping a lot of the blame," Laura Bassett, executive vice president at Big Lou Holdings, wrote on social media in response to the news.
Victor Pickard, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication, told CJR that years of media layoffs prove that the for-profit model is not working for journalism, and that the U.S. should move toward a public-funding model.
"We should think of journalism, not as a commodity whose worth is determined by its profitability in the market, but as a public service," Pickard said.
Thursday, February 15, 2024
Overexploitation, Habitat Loss Threaten Migratory Species: CMS Flagship
Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS) 14 February 2024
According to the report, the extinction risk is growing for CMS and non-CMS migratory species alike.
It identifies overexploitation and loss of habitat due to human activity as the two greatest threats to all migratory species, with climate change, pollution, and invasive species posing additional threats.
The report also shows that population and species-wide recoveries are possible and showcases examples of successful policy action.
The Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS) has launched the first-ever comprehensive assessment of the state of the world’s migratory species. The report warns that almost half of the world’s migratory species are in decline and more than a fifth are threatened with extinction, including nearly all of CMS-listed fish. It provides a set of recommendations for priority action to save migratory animals.
Titled, ‘State of the World’s Migratory Species,’ the report provides an overview of the conservation status and population trends of migratory animals, both CMS-listed species and those not listed in CMS. It presents the latest information on their main threats and successful actions to protect them. The report mainly focuses on the 1,189 animal species that are listed under CMS, but also features analysis of some 3,000 additional migratory species. CMS-listed species are “those at risk of extinction across all or much of their range, or in need of coordinated international action to boost their conservation status,” a press release notes. Globally, 399 migratory species that are threatened or near threatened with extinction – including many albatrosses and perching birds, ground sharks, and stingrays – are not listed under CMS.
According to the report, the extinction risk is growing for CMS and non-CMS migratory species alike, with half of key biodiversity areas of importance for CMS-listed migratory animals lacking protected status and nearly 60% of the monitored sites of importance for CMS-listed species facing “unsustainable levels of human-caused pressure.” In the last 30 years, 70 CMS-listed migratory species have become more endangered. These include the steppe eagle, Egyptian vulture, and the wild camel. Only 14 listed species, including blue and humpback whales, the white-tailed sea eagle, and the black-faced spoonbill, have improved their conservation status.
The report identifies overexploitation and loss of habitat due to human activity as the two greatest threats to all migratory species, both those that are listed in CMS and those that are not. Other threats include climate change, pollution, and invasive species.
At the same time, the report shows that population and species-wide recoveries are possible. It offers examples of successful policy change and positive action, including coordinated local efforts that reduced illegal bird netting in Cyprus by 91% and “integrated conservation and restoration work in Kazakhstan, which has brought the Saiga Antelope back from the brink of extinction.”
“When species cross national borders, their survival depends on the efforts of all countries in which they are found,” said CMS Executive Secretary Amy Fraenkel. “This landmark report will help underpin much-needed policy actions to ensure that migratory species continue to thrive around the world.”
The report recommends that governments prioritize:Strengthening and expanding efforts to tackle illegal and unsustainable taking of migratory species, as well as incidental capture of non-target species; Increasing actions to identify, protect, connect, and effectively manage important sites for migratory species;
Urgently addressing those species in most danger of extinction, including nearly all CMS-listed fish species;
Scaling up efforts to tackle climate change, as well as light, noise, chemical, and plastic pollution; and Considering expanding CMS listings to include more at-risk migratory species in need of national and international attention.
Prepared for CMS by conservation scientists at the UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC), the report features expert contributions from BirdLife International, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), among other institutions. It was launched on 12 February 2024, during the 14th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS COP14).
Landmark UN report reveals shocking state of wildlife: the world’s migratory species of animals are in decline, and the global extinction risk is increasing
First-ever State of the World’s Migratory Species report is launched by the UN Convention on Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS)
THE UNPRECEDENTED REPORT PROVIDES A GLOBAL OVERVIEW OF THE CONSERVATION STATUS AND POPULATION TRENDS OF MIGRATORY ANIMALS, COMBINED WITH THE LATEST INFORMATION ON THEIR MAIN THREATS AND SUCCESSFUL ACTIONS TO SAVE THEM.
The first-ever State of the World’s Migratory Species report was launched today by the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS), a UN biodiversity treaty, at the opening of a major UN wildlife conservation conference (CMS COP14). The landmark report reveals:
While some migratory species listed under CMS are improving, nearly half (44 per cent) are showing population declines.
More than one-in-five (22 per cent) of CMS-listed species are threatened with extinction.
Nearly all (97 per cent) of CMS-listed fish are threatened with extinction.
The extinction risk is growing for migratory species globally, including those not listed under CMS.
Half (51 per cent) of Key Biodiversity Areas identified as important for CMS-listed migratory animals do not have protected status, and 58 per cent of the monitored sites recognized as being important for CMS-listed species are experiencing unsustainable levels of human-caused pressure.
The two greatest threats to both CMS-listed and all migratory species are overexploitation and habitat loss due to human activity. Three out of four CMS-listed species are impacted by habitat loss, degradation and fragmentation, and seven out of ten CMS-listed species are impacted by overexploitation (including intentional taking as well as incidental capture).
Climate change, pollution and invasive species are also having profound impacts on migratory species.
Globally, 399 migratory species that are threatened or near threatened with extinction are not currently listed under CMS.
Until now, no such comprehensive assessment on migratory species has been carried out. The report provides a global overview of the conservation status and population trends of migratory animals, combined with the latest information on their main threats and successful actions to save them.
Inger Andersen, Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme, said: “Today’s report clearly shows us that unsustainable human activities are jeopardizing the future of migratory species – creatures who not only act as indicators of environmental change but play an integral role in maintaining the function and resilience of our planet’s complex ecosystems. The global community has an opportunity to translate this latest science of the pressures facing migratory species into concrete conservation action. Given the precarious situation of many of these animals, we cannot afford to delay, and must work together to make the recommendations a reality.”
Billions of animals make migratory journeys each year on land, in rivers and oceans, and in the skies, crossing national boundaries and continents, with some travelling thousands of miles across the globe to feed and breed.
Migratory species play an essential role in maintaining the world’s ecosystems, and provide vital benefits, by pollinating plants, transporting key nutrients, preying on pests, and helping to store carbon.
Prepared for CMS by conservation scientists at the UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC), the CMS State of the World’s Migratory Species report uses the world's most robust species data sets and features expert contributions from institutions including BirdLife International, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the Zoological Society of London (ZSL).
The main focus of the report is the 1,189 animal species that have been recognized by CMS Parties as needing international protection and are listed under CMS, though it also features analysis linked to over 3,000 additional non-CMS migratory species.
Species listed under the Convention are those at risk of extinction across all or much of their range, or in need of coordinated international action to boost their conservation status.
Amy Fraenkel, CMS Executive Secretary, said: “Migratory species rely on a variety of specific habitats at different times in their lifecycles. They regularly travel, sometimes thousands of miles, to reach these places. They face enormous challenges and threats along the way, as well at their destinations where they breed or feed. When species cross national borders, their survival depends on the efforts of all countries in which they are found. This landmark report will help underpin much-needed policy actions to ensure that migratory species continue to thrive around the world.”
While there have been positive trends for numerous CMS species, the report’s findings underscore the need for greater action, for all migratory species. The listing of species under CMS means that these species require international cooperation to address their conservation. But many of the threats facing these species are global drivers of environmental change – affecting biodiversity loss as well as climate change. Thus, addressing the decline of migratory species requires action across governments, the private sector and other actors.
Over the past 30 years, 70 CMS-listed migratory species – including the steppe eagle, Egyptian vulture and the wild camel – have become more endangered. This contrasts with just 14 listed species that now have an improved conservation status – these include blue and humpback whales, the white-tailed sea eagle and the black-faced spoonbill.
Most worryingly, nearly all CMS-listed species of fish – including migratory sharks, rays and sturgeons – are facing a high risk of extinction, with their populations declining by 90 per cent since the 1970s.
Analysing the threats to species, the report shows the huge extent to which the decline in migratory species is being caused by human activities.
The two greatest threats to both CMS-listed and all migratory species were confirmed as overexploitation – which includes unsustainable hunting, overfishing and the capture of non-target animals such as in fisheries – and habitat loss, degradation and fragmentation – from activities such as agriculture and the expansion of transport and energy infrastructure.
One key priority is to map and take adequate steps to protect the vital locations that serve as breeding, feeding and stopover sites for migratory species is a key priority. The report shows that nearly 10,000 of the world’s Key Biodiversity Areas are important for CMS-listed migratory species, but that more than half (by area) are not designated as protected or conserved areas. Fifty-eight per cent of monitored sites important for CMS-listed species are under threat due to human activities.
The report also investigated how many migratory species are at-risk but not covered by the Convention. It found 399 migratory species – mainly birds and fish, including many albatrosses and perching birds, ground sharks and stingrays – are categorised as threatened or near-threatened but are not yet CMS-listed.
While underscoring the concerning situation of many species, the report also shows that population and species-wide recoveries are possible and highlights instances of successful policy change and positive action, from local to international. Examples include coordinated local action that has seen illegal bird netting reduced by 91 per cent in Cyprus, and hugely successful integrated conservation and restoration work in Kazakhstan, which has brought the Saiga Antelope back from the brink of extinction.
The State of the World’s Migratory Species report issues a clear wake-up call, and provides a set of priority recommendations for action, which include:
Strengthen and expand efforts to tackle illegal and unsustainable taking of migratory species, as well as incidental capture of non-target species,
Increase actions to identify, protect, connect and effectively manage important sites for migratory species,
Urgently address those species in most danger of extinction, including nearly all CMS-listed fish species,
Scale up efforts to tackle climate change, as well as light, noise, chemical and plastic pollution, and,
Consider expanding CMS listings to include more at-risk migratory species in need of national and international attention.
The UN wildlife conservation conference (CMS COP14) Feb. 12-17 in Samarkand, Uzbekistan is one of the most significant global biodiversity gatherings since the adoption of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (Biodiversity Plan). It will also be the first COP of any global environmental treaty to take place in Central Asia, a region home to many migratory species including the Saiga Antelope, the Snow Leopard, and many species of migratory birds. Governments, wildlife organisations and scientists have come together at the week-long meeting to consider actions to advance implementation of the Convention. The State of the World’s Migratory Species report will provide the scientific-grounding along with policy recommendations to set the context and provide valuable information to support the deliberations of the meeting.
About the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS)
An environmental treaty of the United Nations, the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS) provides a global platform for the conservation and sustainable use of migratory animals and their habitats. This unique treaty brings governments and wildlife experts together to address the conservation needs of terrestrial, aquatic, and avian migratory species and their habitats around the world. Since the Convention's entry into force in 1979, its membership has grown to include 133 Parties from Africa, Central and South America, Asia, Europe and Oceania. www.cms.int
About UNEP-WCMC
The UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC) is a global centre of excellence on biodiversity and nature’s contribution to society and the economy. It operates as a collaboration between the United Nations Environment Programme and the UK charity WCMC.
UNEP-WCMC works at the interface of science, policy and practice to tackle the global crisis facing nature and support the transition to a sustainable future for people and the planet: www.unep-wcmc.org
Appendix I comprises migratory species that have been assessed as being in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of their range. The Conference of the Parties has further interpreted the term “endangered” as meaning “facing a very high risk of extinction in the wild in the near future” (Res. 11.33 paragraph 1). Parties that are a Range State to a migratory species listed in Appendix I shall endeavour to strictly protect them by: prohibiting the taking of such species, with very restricted scope for exceptions; conserving and where appropriate restoring their habitats; preventing, removing or mitigating obstacles to their migration and controlling other factors that might endanger them.
Appendix II lists migratory species which have an unfavourable conservation status and which require international agreements for their conservation and management. It also includes species whose conservation status would significantly benefit from the international cooperation that could be achieved by an international agreement.
Tuesday, January 30, 2024
These Paintings Reveal How the Dutch Adapted to Extreme Weather During the Little Ice Age
Artists like Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Hendrick Avercamp documented locals’ resilience in the face of freezing winters and food shortages
During the Little Ice Age, which spanned roughly 1250 to 1860, average global temperatures dropped by as much as 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.
Illustration by Meilan Solly / Photos via Wikimedia Commons
On the afternoon of January 2, 1565, an iceberg drifted down the harbor of Delfshaven, a fishing village in the Netherlands. According to the inscription on a 16th-century oil painting of the event, the block of ice measured nearly 20 feet tall and 230 feet wide—large enough to cut off the village’s access to the Nieuwe Maas River. No fishers would have been looking to set sail that day, though, as the water was completely frozen over, with boats great and small trapped in the ice.
The fact that artist Cornelis Jacobsz van Culemborch commemorated this iceberg’s arrival with a painting suggests it was not a regular occurrence. Dutch winters were cold, but they were rarely this unforgiving. As it happened, the year 1565 fell in the middle of the Little Ice Age (LIA), a period of widespread cooling that spanned roughly 1250 to 1860. Average global temperatures dropped by as much as 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, possibly due to a combination of volcanic eruptions and a reduction in solar activity.
Cornelis Jacobsz van Culemborch's painting of an iceberg that appeared in Delfshaven in January 1565
The LIA manifested in a variety of ways. “Many [Dutch people] died in floods that were partly caused by severe storms,” says Dagomar Degroot, an environmental historian at Georgetown University and the author of The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age and the Dutch Republic, 1560-1720. “Others froze to death in bitterly cold winters.” Some parts of the world saw frequent flooding, while others suffered from persistent drought. Glaciers expanded; certain pathogens spread more readily; and icebergs floated to regions that had not seen them since the last glacial period (popularly called the Ice Age), which ended more than 11,500 years ago, before the birth of civilization.
Researchers have long been interested in how early modern societies adapted to the changes wrought by the LIA. Written accounts can certainly provide insight into this period of global cooling. Reporting from Paris in 1675, author Marie de Rabutin-Chantal wrote, “It is horribly cold. … The behavior of the sun and of the seasons has changed.” Nine years later, in January 1684, English diarist John Evelyn noted, “The frost continuing more and more severe, the Thames before London was still planted with booths in formal streets, all sorts of shops and trades furnished and full of commodities.”
Frost Fair on the Thames, With Old London Bridge in the Distance, unknown artist, 1684 Yale Center for British Art
But an especially rich source of information on the LIA is art. A 1684 painting by an unknown artist, titled Frost Fair on the Thames, With Old London Bridge in the Distance, illustrates the festival that Evelyn described. Italian artist Gabriel Bella, meanwhile, depicted the frozen canals of Venice in 1708. Other paintings and etchings of the Mediterranean city-state indicate its lagoon froze over at least twice more in the 18th century, in 1789 and 1791.
Even artworks that don’t center on climate anomalies can offer clues about the LIA. Scholars have used paintings of Venice’s historic architecture to track rising sea levels by comparing the positions of algal bands along the buildings’ walls then and now. A 2010 study of a 1571 painting by Paolo Veronese, who likely employed a camera obscura to ensure proportional accuracy, concluded that the sea level outside of the Coccina family’s palace was roughly 30 inches lower at the time than it is at present.
The Madonna of the Coccina Family, Paolo Veronese, 1571
The LIA coincided with a period of great religious and political upheaval. In the aftermath of the 16th-century Protestant Reform
ation, Northern European artists slowly abandoned Christian imagery of heaven and hell in favor of the here and now. In Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands, portraits of kings and saints gave way to paintings of parents and children, soldiers and workers, street scenes, and landscapes.
Dutch artists were especially celebrated for their commitment to realism. In 1882, French painter Eugène Fromentin declared Dutch art a “faithful, exact, complete” representation of the country’s culture; a century later, art historian Svetlana Alperscharacterized Northern European painting as “an art of describing” reality, distinct from the narrative art of the Italian Renaissance. Johannes Vermeer’s The Little Street (circa 1658), for example, shows touched-up cracks in the bricklaying of a building in Delft—likely a scar from the 1654 gunpowder explosion that devastated the city and killed one of Rembrandt’s most gifted students, Carel Fabritius.
As a genre of painting, winter scenes hardly existed in Europe before the LIA. This was partly because harsh winters like the one immortalized by van Culemborch were, at best, once-in-a-lifetime experiences. “The medieval world …. had been much warmer,” with Vikings settling in Greenland and grapes growing as far north as southern England, writes author Benjamin Moser in The Upside-Down World: Meetings With the Dutch Masters. He points out that Europe’s “first notably cold winter” took place in 1564 and 1565, when that iceberg made its way to Delfshaven.
The frost stretched from Rotterdam to Brussels, where its effects were documented by Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder in his painting Hunters in the Snow (Winter). (Art historians use the term “Flemish” to refer to Flemish-speaking towns in the medieval Low Countries, which included parts of modern-day Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France and Germany.) Part of a series depicting the seasons, the image captures the hardships of the LIA, especially when compared with other hunting scenes of the time. As journalist Harmen van Dijk writes for Dutch newspaper Trouw, “The hunters do not seem to have had any luck, returning with one little fox. Not exactly a feast. The innkeepers are trying to get a fire going. They might have some food, though that dilapidated sign outside doesn’t look promising.”
Hunters in the Snow (Winter), Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1565
The LIA confronted the Dutch with challenges they had never faced before. In the Low Countries, rivers and canals were used to transport goods; when they froze, entire villages were cut off from maritime trade. Food shortages were common, and timber was in such short supply that in the winter of 1564 to 1565, a single bushel sold for two weeks’ wages. Households unable to afford these exorbitant prices had no choice but to look for fuel in unexpected places, tearing apart the gallows of their town squares or, if those had already been burned up, their own floorboards.
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Hunters in the Snow contrasts the hard-working hunters with a group of carefree ice skaters playing in the background. Another Bruegel painting, Winter Landscape With Skaters and Bird Trap, also from 1565, lacks this explicit juxtaposition but delivers a similar message through its subject matter. At a time when birds were considered “symbols of the soul,” wrote art historians Linda and George Bauer in a 1984 journal article, the work’s winter setting appeared deliberate, with the skaters representing “the dangerous progress of the soul as it passes through the world.”
Winter Landscape With Skaters and Bird Trap, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1565
Bruegel’s moralizing tone—a kind of visual representation of the expression “walking on thin ice”—differs from that of later Dutch and Flemish landscape painters like Hendrick Avercamp, who was active in the early 17th century. If Bruegel’s winters appear harsh and cold, Avercamp’s are warm and fuzzy, both in color and in atmosphere. Sidelining seasonal hardship, his paintings almost exclusively show people enjoying themselves as they skate, sled or play an early form of ice hockey called ijskolf. As Moser writes in The Upside-Down World, “They show a merry Christmassy world of funnily dressed people disporting themselves on frozen canals: paintings I knew from jigsaw puzzles and holiday cards.”
These pleasant scenes may have been shaped by Avercamp’s own experiences: Moser records the oft-repeated possibility that the painter, who was probably born deaf and mute, romanticized an environment he was forced to observe from a distance. But the works also have their roots in history. Avercamp was born in 1585—three years before the Dutch Republic (consisting of seven northern Netherlandish provinces) won independence from Spain in a long and brutal war—and he died in 1634. Over the course of the painter’s life, the republic developed into one of the world’s most powerful and prosperous nations.
Winter Landscape With Skaters, Hendrick Avercamp, circa 1608
Degroot argues that the republic’s successes were, in part, a result of the LIA. “Increased precipitation hampered Spanish invasions,” he says, “while changes in atmospheric circulation helped Dutch fleets to sail into battle with the wind behind them, an important tactical advantage in the age of sail. Dutch farmers, sailors, soldiers, entrepreneurs and inventors also found ways to cope with—and even exploit—otherwise disastrous weather.”
Shipwrights, for example, greased and fortified the hulls of their vessels, allowing them to slide past ice. Ice-breaking boats kept domestic waterways open in times of persistent frost and helped maintain a steady supply of ice for wine cellars.
But developments during the LIA weren’t all positive. “Dutch people also suffered from extreme weather that can now be connected to the Little Ice Age,” Degroot says. During bitterly cold winters, “rivers froze over that would otherwise have protected the republic from invasion, and hostile armies took advantage.” Ultimately, the historian concludes, “The Little Ice Age offered more benefits than drawbacks for the republic, but the same cannot be said for many of its citizens.”
Enjoying the Ice Near a Town, Hendrick Avercamp, 1620
Bustling compositions like Avercamp’s Winter Landscape With Ice Skaters document not only the republic’s increasing resilience but also its growing disregard for traditional social hierarchies. “Frozen water was like carnival,” Moser writes, “an upside-down world when, for a few days, the conventions of daily life relaxed.” The polymath Hugo Grotius, a contemporary of Avercamp, agreed. “Here nobody speaks of rank,” he wrote in a poem, “here we are open and free; here the farm girl joins with the nobleman.” In time, this upside-down world would no longer be restricted to the ice.
Avercamp’s unceasing production of winter landscapes—he hardly painted anything else, leaving behind around 100 such scenes—cemented the season and its corresponding activities as a central aspect of burgeoning Dutch national identity. Today, his paintings provide snapshots of a climate that is gradually disappearing from living memory due to global warming.
“These paintings already have a nostalgic quality to them,” Moser tells Smithsonian magazine, “of sadness or loss,” particularly among Dutch people who grew up skating outdoors. “These images are over 400 years old, and the people in them look different, but we connect to them because we went outside and did the same things they did when we were kids. Now, they are the skeletons of dinosaurs.”
Tim Brinkhof | READ MORE Tim Brinkhof is a Dutch journalist who covers art, culture and history. He studied comparative literature at New York University and has written for Vox, Vulture, Big Think, JSTOR Daily, Jacobin, New Lines and more.
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