[Paris] ESF 3, babies and England

Liliapilia’s first annual ESF photography award goes to:
• Simon Norfolk for his photos of Afghanistan
Honorable mentions:
• Sebastido Salgado for his photos of Mumbai, and
• Guy Smallman’s photos of Iraq, not because they are gorgeous, but because it was the first time I had seem images like these of the occupation/war

Salgado’s photos of Mumbai included images of a pipeline for drinking water which residents use as a walkway because every other available surface is filled with people living on it. Robert Cervero showed us images of this same situation in our international transportation class at Berkeley. Another notable image was of the dairy farms (buffalo, of course, because the cow is sacred) where the workers live in the barns where they work, above the animals in hammocks.

Why are all the photographers men? Well, here’s my theory: photography is very expensive. Maybe men are more likely to feel their activity is worth spending all that money on. (Women, afterall, can make babies, which puts everything else we do into perspective. And that’s a lot for the men to compete with.)

Speaking of which, I am now in French class with two ladies, one from Norway and one from Turkey. They are both pregnant. In case you are wondering (as my teacher was), I am not.

Other things I learned/noticed/heard people say at ESF:
• The World Bank has put 11 billion GBP towards oil production activity in developing countries (that’s about 20 billion USD).
• Climate change has led to a 20 percent reduction in grain production.
• Entire forest must have been felled for the production of all the flyers handed out at ESF.
• Talks at the ESF took comments alternating by gender. Since about 10 times more men had comments, this just meant ladies first.
• Art plays a role in politics when what you have to say is particularly complicated.
• Capitalism essencially imprisons the imagination with market-driven logic (music as private property, etc.).
• Don’t look at the policies, look at how the money is spent (this applies to every entity – EU, US, the World Bank, me, you....)
• 60,000 people per year die from air-pollution-caused diseases.
• The cost of medical problem associated with air pollution: 10B euros per year
• Half of the EU budget goes towards agriculture, but none of it goes towards sustainable agricultural practices.
• We already knew it: air travel is cheaper in direct cost to the consumer than train travel. Cheap airfare mean that more of the middle class can have multiple homes; sound familiar?
• The EU needs to be the leader in environmental policies, no one else (certainly not the US), is going to do it.
• To keep the English cars on the road with biodiesel would require the entire land are of UK to produce the biodiesel, which means that that land would not be used to grow food.
• Most of the people at the transport talk spoke in Italian.
• Blair’s solution to the problem of climate change: increase emissions trading
• Roads are for freight, not for the transportation of people in private vehicles.
• The roads should be controlled democratically (yeah, right, in the US, let’s start with the government!)

Other observations:
• Double decor buses are totally fun. We should seriously use them in the US. Anyone know what the problem is?
• For all the good things I said about the London public transport system the last time, I saw 7 buses in a row in north London this time.
• In an English pub, if you ask about the beer, they’ll tell you it’s alcohol content.
• English ads are straightforward: “become what you want to be in software engineering” for example. I keep looking for the play on words, the other meaning, the joke – I never found it.