One of the principal missions of the anthropocenic venture has been the growing of food. For much of the past ten thousand years, agricultural activity, the cultivation of fields, did not cause catastrophic, irreversible damage on a large scale, although it did provide the economic basis for the emergence of socio-economic classes, and the accumulation of wealth and its concentration in the hands of a few. But, whether or not you take the view that the anthropocene starts with the Industrial Revolution, or the longer view that it begins with the advent of agriculture, we may agree that the overwhelming damage to the living world, the human and the nonhuman, dates back to the mass industrialization of agriculture, of what is now agribusiness. Only recently have we been experiencing the full effect, and then only a foretaste, of the impact of industrialization of the planet on our climate and on the production of food.
Food production, however, is not only hostage to the human-induced vagaries of the climate – such as too little water, or too much at the wrong time, it suffers from another industrialized practice which is the use of fertilizers that are derived from petroleum. Our ancestors would be stumped by the knowledge that modern agriculture is almost wholly dependent on petroleum-derived, non-organic fertilizers. Grain crops around the globe are now entirely depends on these chemicals. The rice in your bowl, the pasta on your plate, the bread in your hand for the vast majority of humanity is dependent on petroleum.
The current penury of petroleum and its derivatives has not only forced up prices for motorists and holiday-makers, it threatens to lead to starvation on a massive scale in the global South. The current crisis has exposed how the industrialization on a massive scale and the abandonment of hitherto conventional agricultural practices, especially in Asia, has left exposed new economic superpowers. It is the price to pay. Yet another impact of globalization on the twenty-first century world.
Should we be nostalgic for disappearing or already disappeared farming practices? Should we regret the "nightsoil" Asian framers spread on their crops? Should we retrospectively minimize the hard labour growing food has represented for many generations of peasants? Probably not, but that doesn't mean there were not other ways to meet the needs of humanity. I say needs rather than desires. And what I shall say next will underline that distinction.
Those in Europe who are now in their late 80s will still remember Second World War rationing. The rationing of meat and eggs and coffee and so on was detested, and yet despite black marketeering and corruption the system worked. It was a system incompatible with the consumer-driven economy we have all become used to. And yet, it is indeed what we need now. We need it to be sure that scarcity is spread more evenly, we need to prevent the over use of natural resources, we need to ultimately prevent starvation and to allow more food to remain where it is produced for local consumption. 
Rationing is part of the imposition of limits about which, following Jacques Ellul (1912-1914) and Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–1997), I wrote about during the period of the coronavirus. "How can Ellul, Castoriadis and Rensi, together with Zhuangzi, whose philosophies proceed unwittingly in parallel like four ships in the night, help us to understand and imagine how we might retreat from, or even transcend, the cataclysmic moment that humanity is currently experiencing, a moment of which the coronavirus may be seen as a tragic epiphenomenon." 
You may remember that for a while the non-human living world had some respite. There was very little travel, the air was consequently cleaner, insects made a come back, birds were happier, and wild life in general flourished. But as soon as it was "safe to do so" we went back to our old habits with unconscionable abandon. I'll be writing more about the need for limits over the weeks to come. 

From an early age, I'd always had a halcyon vision of Palestine, alongside a sympathy for its people. My grandmother had spent some time there before World War One. Her mother was in a relationship with a Greek ship's carpenter from the isle of Kassos, and aged seventeen my grandmother had the privilege of accompanying them on a voyage to the Mediterranean. It was a cargo ship, and the ship's carpenter was on board to maintain and repair the ship's wooden parts. And that's how in my childhood I was regaled with stories of the Acropolis, Jaffa, Jerusalem, and camels spitting in her eye. She was there during the dying days of Ottoman dominance and several years before the British assumed their fateful mandate. She met a young man called Naim in Palestine and fell in love. He was about to emigrate to America and promised to write once he'd set himself up and invite her to join him. Some years later, having made good in Texas, he wrote asking my grandmother to make the trip. He'd done very well and boasted he'd acquired "three ranchos".  However, my grandmother, having returned from her adventure, had settled with her mother and siblings in the port of Liverpool where she met Chan Chin Lee with whom she would have five children and spend the next five decades.
The opportunity she'd missed to be with Naim was something she regretted until she died. It was nobody's fault. The 1910s were a time of international strife and chaos; the disorder and uncertainty brought about by the First World War turned everyone's lives upside down. 
The Greek ship's carpenter, Ellefteris Moschona,changed his name to Nicholas,  and settled in Liverpool with my great grandmother, who'd separated from her husband. With the scent of imminent war becoming stronger by the day and foreigners in an increasingly precarious position, he decided to demand naturalization as a British subject. It was granted just ten days before Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated on 28 June 1914. So, although her daughter's Palestinian romance was star-crossed, my great grandmother's own happiness was assured, at least for a time. Moschona died in 1926 at the age of fifty something from pneumonia leaving his English lover distraught. In his memory, her grandson born shortly afterwards was named Ellefteris Vassceloas, and thus went through life with an unpronounceable Greek name and a half-Chinese face. Even her Pekinese dogs were given Greek names: Calliope and Cosmos. So, that's the story of my boyhood Mediterranean imaginary... 
And yet, there's a little more. Recently, I was digging around in the family papers. Rejigging the jigsaw puzzle, it became apparent that things were not quite what they'd seemed. At the start of the year in which my grandmother was born, the mariner from Kasos had landed at Barry Dock, near Cardiff, and lodged with my great grandmother. My grandmother seemed never to have suspected Moschona was her father, it was never even hinted at. But now, in retrospect, that Mediterranean voyage seems less a young woman's romantic adventure, and more an unsung pilgrimage to the lands and waters of her ancestors.

Although there is a collective unease amongst the chattering classes regarding the bellicose times we are experiencing, it's still unease rather than panic at this stage. Since the end of World War Two, war has always been with us, although usually – if you're an American or a European – it's happening a fair distance away. But at the current time, war is being waged on the doorsteps of Europe, in Ukraine and on the coasts of the Mediterranean. I'd like to say we are living through a callous age, but again isn't it any worse than many millions have known since the middle of the twentieth century under the seemingly protective umbrella of pax americana? One thing is certain and that is what ever  substance "democracy" and "civilisation" may have contained whilst masking the realities of colonialism and injustice around this planet, the illusion has now been swept into the dustbin of twenty-first century "post history".
I had the good fortune yesterday to attend a book talk by my friend and colleague Rashid Khalidi, historian of the Middle East and in particular of Palestine. He was introducing the French translation of his recent book, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017. During the question and answer session, someone asked about the impact of the current Israeli war in Palestine on the Palestinian's material culture, particularly the institutional and private libraries that Palestinians have built up over the centuries. The good news was that despite the collateral and intentional damage – intentional because such repositories of Islamic and Arab cultures are specifically targeted by the Israeli authorities and illegal settlers – most have been digitized and when the day comes libraries will be reborn and restocked.

I'd like also to mention non-human victims of the currently ongoing wars around us and the "collateral damage" inflicted on the biosphere. First and foremost are the human victims of war, whether they be in Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, Ukraine, Sudan or elsewhere, those who suffer directly from the bombing and also endure the deprivations due to the obliterations of infrastructure. But, we tend to forget the impact of war on the non-built environment, the concomitant  destruction of animal life and habitat. Since I left full-time employment in the university, I've had a little more time to indulge my boyhood passion for photography and have been particularly attracted to difficulties and rewards of photographing birdlife. The impact over the past half century of the Anthropocene on birds is news to no-one. Their sources of food have been polluted with pesticides and their breeding sites frequently destroyed. Before you say that thinking about birds and other animals is a luxury in time of war, let us remember how dependent humankind is on the good health of the rest of the biosphere, on the planet-minus-us. As a team of Polish researchers have recently demonstrated, even without war,"in this era of massive biodiversity loss, birds hold the dubious distinction of being at the forefront. Currently, 21% of avian species are vulnerable to extinction, and 6.5% are functionally extinct."* Militarised destruction has made things much worse. A little documented result of Russia's war on Ukraine has been its impact on "avifauna in war-affected areas of Ukraine", where "some of the most vulnerable species in the region – such as eagles, owls, avocets, flamingos, and pelicans" have suffered greatly. Despite what we might imagine as their natural  advantage, their mobility made possible by their ability to fly away, most birds remain in war-torn areas and become  victims, attachment to "breeding grounds and migration routes" exerting "a stronger influence than the adverse environmental conditions caused by war." Still, we may shrug our shoulders and minimise the fate of birdlife, don't they pale into insignificance compared to the loss of innocent human lives?

However, there is one further imbrication of avian life in the ongoing wars. Whilst homing pigeons have been used for centuries as messengers in times of war, birds are now being transformed into biotechnological drones. A Moscow neurotechnology company, Neiry, has implanted microchips into pigeons' brains in order to remote control them for use as instruments of surveillance. The hardware which uses solar power and GPS tracking is carried in a small backpack. Known as PJN-1, the project is seen as "one of the more aggressive attempts to merge invasive neural interfaces with live animals for surveillance and security applications." Other birds such as ravens are being considered for heavier "payloads". Of course, animals have long been used as beasts of burden in times of war as in times of peace. In warfare, the use of horses and elephants as "attack vehicles" is notorious.
After years of nightly televisual exposure to the horrors of war, our senses are becoming dulled to humankind's inhumanity toward fellow humans. Is there room to spare a thought for our feathered friends?

I was thinking about my mother the other day. Her birthday was the 30th April. She would have been 102 this year. She died three years ago. As is increasingly frequent these days, although she was quite physically fit, during the last seven years of her life she suffered from encroaching dementia. The COVID pandemic didn't help. You'll remember it was difficult if not impossible for relatives to visit those confined to care homes. It was during a belated visit during COVID that my mother had to admit she didn't know who I was. We continued to have conversations, however. For me she was my mother, for her I was an interested stranger.
Her memory of the last sixty or so years or so of her life seemed to have disappeared completely, but she could still remember her childhood, her youth. It was a one-sided conversation. I provided her with prompts about her parents and brothers and she happily reminisced. It was during one such conversation that I asked her what she'd liked and disliked most in her life, or at least what she could remember of it. What she'd disliked was almost predictable: having to work in the Chinese laundries her father ran, first in Liverpool and then in the North Wales town of Rhyl. She detested that work. When she still had her faculties I'd asked her to record here recollections of Chinese laundry life. In that account she was very factual, talking about the routine of the laundry life; you'll find it elsewhere on this website. 
What surprised me was more what she had appreciated in her early life, and that was the time she'd spent in the WRENS (the Women's Royal Naval Service) during World War Two. She was stationed in various places around the country, in Scotland and in East Anglia and in London. She said she'd "loved' being in the WRENS and regretted not staying in the service after the war. But she'd left the navy to help out at home in the laundry, the cafe, the greengrocers. All those businesses would soon close down. By then, my grandfather's interests were once again in Liverpool where he had a cafe that served also as a gambling house. That venture, along with his interests in Rhyl, succumbed to historical events and that story, which embraces the history of the mass deportations of Chinese seamen from the United Kingdom during 1946-1947, is told in my book The Eighth Chinese Merchant. 

What brought to mind the reminiscence about the WRENS was not so much that I'd been thinking about my mother on her birthday, but that it coincided with my coming across a photograph of her in her WRENS uniform, and that in turn made me think of her avowing she'd never been so happy as when she'd been in uniform. Perhaps it was the freedom of being away from home; subject to military discipline and yet free of the restrictions of family with a Chinese father. Perhaps, it was the general liberatory, devil-may-care ambiance that many who went through the war recalled fondly.
She hadn't been obliged to join up, of course. She'd been working in a munitions factory when the recruiting agents came along. And the navy, no doubt, seemed a more exciting prospect that the factory workbench.
Moreover, she had no business serving in the British military. My grandfather had taken out Chinese nationality for his children and had them renounce UK citizenship at the beginning of the second world war. He didn't want any of them fighting a war for Britain. He was after all born near Canton at the tail end of the nineteenth century in a country gravely impacted by the Opium Wars and British imperialism. And yet, three of his four children did serve in the UK forces; how else were they to continue their attempt to pass?
I've always said that I'd wait until my grandfather's children (my mother, my uncles) were all dead before I turned to telling their story. Yet, now they've gone I find myself hesitating. But, the day will come.