Durban Dispatch: December 6, 2011
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on December 6th, 2011 5:36 am by HL
Durban Dispatch: December 6, 2011
Read all ThinkProgress coverage of COP17 in Durban, South Africa. “The Nepalese government has exhausted funds to drain the Tsho Rolpa [Nepal’s biggest glacial lake] which poses an immediate threat to at least 10,000 people,” said Samjwal Bajracharya, the lead author of a new report on the Status of Glaciers in the Hindu Kush Himalayan […]
Read all ThinkProgress coverage of COP17 in Durban, South Africa.
“The Nepalese government has exhausted funds to drain the Tsho Rolpa [Nepal’s biggest glacial lake] which poses an immediate threat to at least 10,000 people,” said Samjwal Bajracharya, the lead author of a new report on the Status of Glaciers in the Hindu Kush Himalayan (HKH) region, also known as the Third Pole. [IRIN]
Thai Airways International will lose about $100 million in revenues in Q4 due to the flood crisis, airline president Piyasvasti Amranand said Tuesday. [MCOT]
Efforts to establish water as an agenda item in its own right in climate change negotiations are gaining momentum in Durban, South Africa. [IPS]
“I really think the U.S. population needs to understand that this is not just their historical responsibility, but this is their future that they’re compromising,” UN climate chief Christiana Figueres said of American inaction on climate pollution. [Climate Progress]
“There is a tremendous effort to shift the blame so the rich countries do as little as they can,” Environment Minister Jayanthi Natarajan said on Monday. [IBN]
The civil society movement is now targeting the United States as the primary blocker to the success of the climate talks. [Mother Nature Network]
“Practical progress” is being made on the Long-Term Cooperative Agreement track that is built around the Cancun Accords, the Climate Institute’s Erwin Jackson reports. [Climate Institute]
Australian Climate Change Minister Greg Combet believes the UN climate change talks are making good progress even though a comprehensive agreement will not be reached in Durban. [Sydney Morning Herald]
Australia and New Zealand said on Monday they could link their carbon trading schemes as soon as 2015, immediately after Australia’s government moved from a fixed carbon tax to the world’s second-largest market scheme to cut pollution. [Reuters]
Key Parties – including the US, Australia, and the EU – have indicated that the “middle ground” Green Climate Fund report on that Fund Transitional Committee Co-Chair Trevor Manuel of South Africa introduced on Wednesday could be agreed to, as long as it is a part of a more balanced package. [ICTSD]
Money raised by curbing ships’ carbon emissions would be used to finance the Green Climate Fund, according to a draft text being negotiated at the UN climate talks in Durban. [Financial Times]
The British In India At The Yale Center For British Art
During my trip to New Haven last week, I was fortunate enough to spend a morning at “Adapting The Eye: An Archive of the British In India, 1770-1830,” a terrific exhibit at the Yale Center for British Art, curated by Holly Shafer, a PhD candidate in the University’s Art History Department, who someone should definitely […]
During my trip to New Haven last week, I was fortunate enough to spend a morning at “Adapting The Eye: An Archive of the British In India, 1770-1830,” a terrific exhibit at the Yale Center for British Art, curated by Holly Shafer, a PhD candidate in the University’s Art History Department, who someone should definitely hire on the basis of this show. It’s a fascinating look at the relationship between art and politics. And “Adapting The Eye” isn’t just about the way the British saw India — it’s about the way they saw themselves in India and what that meant for their colonial project.
In the absence of photography, painting played a critical role in documenting everything from gift-giving rituals to assessing military positioning. Surveyor Robert Mabon made jewel-like portraits of the presents that were part of diplomatic exchanges like the one to the right here and of techniques for saddling horses complete with painstakingly detailed notes. Warren Hastings, the British governor of Bengal, commissioned William Hodges to paint the fortresses controlled by Raja Chait Singh so he could assess the strength of the forces behind a rebellion — the results included both military useful information and an impressionistic sense of Indian landscapes. And art even became part of British and Indian diplomatic traditions. To both meet the requirements of their budgeteers and to avoid the perception that they were being corrupted by establishing the lavish, jeweled gifts that were traditionally exchanged in the Mughal court, British diplomats created a new tradition of exchanging portraits, creating a new Indian market for British painters.
And even when they weren’t creating art for the purpose of cultural exchange in Indian, British artists constantly wrote themselves into the images of India — and some of those portraits may have been more revealing than they were intended to be. In Thomas Danielle’s painting of Sir Charles Ware signing a treaty in 1770 with the Maratha Empire, British officers are seated on the floor of a palace in the style of their hosts, displaying attitudes that range from ease, to extreme dignity, to wondrous excitement at the circumstances. Painter James Wales wrote that Charles Warre Malet told him of his 40-day journey to see the Taj Mahal that “at first sight how well his journey was justified.” It makes sense that the British would want to see their efforts, even a more than a month-long site-seeing schlep, as worth the work, no matter how strenuous. Bathazar Solvyns, a Belgian who wrote a dubious anthropological survey of India, revealed as much about himself and his gaze as he did about his subjects when he wrote of dancing girls he observed that “their movements are confined, being either extremely rapid or solemnly slow, and their attitudes or gestures, which are sometimes graceful, are almost always indecent, there therefore disgusting; their general object is to excite desire, and where they succeed, there are not to be found much to envy.” In Arthur William Devis’ “Portrait of a Gentleman,” lawyer William Hickey both smokes a hookah and handles a letter of business — has he corrupted himself by going native? Or are the temptations of India no match for England’s energy in commerce?
And in Samuel Howitt’s 1807 “The Tiger at Bay,” British men load, aim, and fire at a tiger, while Indian men control the elephants that let the British get close to their quarry, an interesting if unintentional foreshadowing of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, made possible in part by tensions in the military forces made up of Indian soldiers and commanded by British officers. There was only so much that British self-portraits in India, especially those sponsored by British government and commercial organizations, could capture — and only so much that they could see into the future.
