The Manchester Evening News reports: Kids can once again join in FREE open water swim safety sessions at Salford Quays this summer.

Around 1,000 children benefited from the classes last summer and this year even more spaces are available.

There’ll be 1,400 free one-hour sessions up for grabs for kids aged seven to 14 – including families, friends and school groups.

And each child that takes part gets a T-shirt, a cap and a keyring to take home too.

It’s all part of Salford Community Leisure’s Swim Safe campaign and classes are held at the Helly Hansen Watersports Centre in Salford Quays between July 30 and August 31. More…

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Theft through excessive rewards: that’s the dominant business model.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 1^st April 2015

There is an inverse relationship between utility and reward. The most lucrative, prestigious jobs tend to cause the greatest harm. The most useful workers tend to be paid least and treated worst.

I was reminded of this while listening last week to a care worker describing her job. Carole’s company gives her a rota of, er, three-half hour visits per hour. It takes no account of the time required to travel between jobs, and doesn’t pay her for it either, which means she makes less than the minimum wage. During the few minutes she spends with a client, she might have to get them out of bed, help them on the toilet, wash them, dress them, make breakfast and give them their medicines. If she ever gets a break, she told the radio programme You and Yours, she spends it with her clients. For some, she is the only person they see all day.

Is there more difficult or worthwhile employment? Yet she is paid in criticism and insults as well as pennies. She is shouted at by family members for being late and not spending enough time with each client, then upbraided by the company because of the complaints it receives. Her profession is assailed in the media, as the problems created by the corporate model are blamed on the workers. “I love going to people; I love helping them, but the constant criticism is depressing,” she says. “It’s like always being in the wrong”.

Her experience is unexceptional. A report by the Resolution Foundation reveals that two-thirds of frontline care workers receive less than the living wage. Ten percent, like Carole, are illegally paid less than the minimum wage. This abuse is not confined to the UK: in the US, 27% of care workers who make home visits are paid less than the legal minimum.

Let’s imagine the lives of those who own or run the company. We have to imagine it, as, for good reasons, neither the care worker’s real name nor the company she works for were revealed. The more costs and corners they cut, the more profitable their business will be. In other words, the less they care, the better they will do. The perfect chief executive, from the point of view of the shareholders, is a fully fledged sociopath.

Such people will soon become very rich. They will be praised by the government as wealth creators. If they donate enough money to party funds, they have a high chance of becoming peers of the realm. Gushing profiles in the press will commend their entrepreneurial chutzpah and flair.

They’ll acquire a wide investment portfolio, perhaps including a few properties, so that – even if they cease to do anything resembling work – they can continue living off the labour of people like Carole, as she struggles to pay extortionate rents. Their descendants, perhaps for many generations, will need never take a job of the kind she does.

Care workers function as a human loom, shuttling from one home to another, stitching the social fabric back together, while many of their employers, shareholders and government ministers slash blindly at the cloth, downsizing, outsourcing and deregulating in the cause of profit.

It doesn’t matter how many times the myth of meritocracy is debunked. It keeps re-emerging, as you can see in the current election campaign. How else, after all, can the government justify stupendous inequality?

One of the most painful lessons a young adult learns is that the wrong traits are rewarded. We celebrate originality and courage, but those who rise to the top are often conformists and sycophants. We are taught that cheats never prosper, yet the country is run by spivs. A study testing British senior managers and chief executives found that, on certain indicators of psychopathy, their scores exceeded those of patients diagnosed with psychopathic personality disorders in the Broadmoor special hospital.

If you possess the one indispensable skill – battering and blustering your way to the top – incompetence in other areas is no impediment. The former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, Carly Fiorina, features prominently on lists of the USA’s worst bosses: quite an achievement when you consider the competition. She fired 30,000 workers in the name of efficiency, yet oversaw a halving of the company’s stock price. Morale and communication became so bad that she was booed at company meetings. She was forced out, with a $42m severance package. Where is she now? About to launch her campaign as presidential candidate for the Republican party, where, apparently, she’s considered a serious contender. It’s the Mitt Romney story all over again.

At university, I watched in horror as the grand plans of my ambitious friends dissolved. It took them about a minute, on walking into the corporate recruitment fair, to see that the careers they had pictured – working for Oxfam, becoming a photographer, defending the living world – paid about one fiftieth of what they might earn in the City. They all swore that they would leave to follow their dreams after two or three years of making money. Need I remark that none did? They soon adjusted their morality to their circumstances. One, a firebrand who wanted to nationalise the banks and overthrow capitalism, plunged first into banking, then into politics. Claire Perry now sits on the front bench of the Conservative Party.

Flinch once, at the beginning of your career, and they will have you for life. The world is wrecked by clever young people making apparently sensible choices.

The inverse relationship doesn’t always hold. There are plenty of useless, badly-paid jobs, and a few useful, well-paid jobs. But surgeons and film directors are greatly outnumbered by corporate lawyers, lobbyists, advertisers, management consultants, financiers and parasitic bosses consuming the utility their workers provide. As the pay gap widens – chief executives in the UK took 60 times as much as the average worker in the 1990s and 180 times as much today – the uselessness ratio is going through the roof. I propose a name for this phenomenon: kleptoremuneration.

There is no end to this theft except robust government intervention: a redistribution of wages through maximum ratios and enhanced taxation. But this won’t happen until we challenge the infrastructure of justification, built so carefully by politicians and the press. Our lives are damaged not by the undeserving poor but by the undeserving rich.

www.monbiot.com

Anyone ever saved by a lifeguard owes an unspoken debt to this Hawaiian surfing pioneer, who popularised modern techniques of rescue and resuscitation

Even the best swimmers can get into difficulty in the water, especially in the open ocean. There are any number of dangers (most of which boil down to hubris): currents, waves, tides, cramp, even unexpectedly swimming into a thick, swirling shoal of mackerel. Don't laugh: it happened off Brighton to one of Heroes of swimming's friends, an experienced sea swimmer who got into such a froth that he nearly drowned.

Anyone who's ever felt the cold grip of panic in the water as they realise that they might not make it back to shore; anyone who's waved their hands above their head to attract the lifeguard's attention; anyone, certainly, who's been hauled out of the ocean gasping and spluttering … they all owe an unspoken debt to George Freeth.

Freeth was born in Hawaii in 1883, close by the beach at Waikiki. He was part Hawaiian, part Irish, and came from a well-connected family: his grandfather had been Hawaii's foreign minister. But there was little chance of Freeth becoming a man of affairs: from a young age, he had fallen under the spell of the water. Every spare moment was spent submerged, at the beach or in a pool, surfing or swimming.

There was no radio or TV at this time: instead, live entertainment was popular, both with locals and visitors to the islands. Among the biggest attractions were water carnivals, grand displays of aquatic skill and daring. Freeth, 17 years old at the turn of the century and already a top competition swimmer, was one of the stars of these shows. One source records that his "high and fancy" dives were especially popular.

Freeth was also a surfing champion. In fact, it was said to be him who first revived stand-up surfing, which Christian missionaries had almost killed off, in the islands. It was surfing that first brought Freeth to wider attention, when Jack London visited Hawaii and published this description of him in action:

"I saw him tearing in on [the wave], standing upright with his board, carelessly poised, a young god bronzed with sunburn."

London's descriptions of surfing created tremendous interest in the USA. Freeth headed for California to spread the word – a reverse missionary, bringing the religion of surfing to the haoles.

Freeth reached California at just the right moment. The seaside resorts of Redondo and Venice Beach had recently been built, but the developers were finding that high surf on the beaches put off visitors and prospective residents. The situation got worse in March 1907, when a trainee volunteer lifeguard drowned in front of his colleagues. Freeth's arrival in May of that year was, essentially, the solution. He performed surfing demonstrations twice a day at Redondo, bringing crowds from Los Angeles to see the "Hawaiian Wonder" for themselves. At Venice Beach he not only surfed, but also trained a team of volunteer lifeguards. Alumni of this group would go on to develop the LA County, Long Beach and San Diego lifeguard services.

Today, any beach lifeguard would recognise the skills Freeth taught: rescue swimming, the technique for getting a surfboat out through big waves, how to paddle a rescue board. He showed how rip currents could speed you out to swimmers in trouble – much against the thinking of the day, which branded such currents "undertow" on the basis that they pulled swimmers down. Freeth's students undertook sand running, ocean swimming, paddle-boarding and surfing to maintain their fitness, and were trained in the latest resuscitation techniques. Within a few years, they had been credited with saving hundreds of lives.

Freeth's most famous rescue happened in the winter of 1908. A sudden squall hit Santa Monica Bay, wreaking havoc in a fleet of small Japanese-crewed fishing boats, which began to founder. The rescue boat could not get out, but Freeth could. He spent over two hours in the chilly waters of the bay, at the end of which he'd rescued seven men from drowning. Despite being hypothermic he went in again, swimming to the aid of three more drowning men. His strength was at an end, though: all he could do was keep them afloat. It was the turn of the volunteers he'd trained. They at last managed to get a rescue boat out through the raging surf, bringing Freeth and the three men back to shore.

The heroics of 1908 had several outcomes. First, the Japanese fishing village nearby is said to have changed its name to Port Freeth in gratitude. Freeth himself became a household name, at least in the Santa Monica Bay area. But the most important result was to set a new trend in lifesaving: where before an unwieldy crew of men in a boat had rescued swimmers, now a single, skilled lifeguard quickly made his way out through the waves.

In 1913, Freeth was in a motorbike accident and broke his ankle. While recovering, he took a job as chief swimming instructor at the Los Angeles Athletic Club. Freeth's time in charge began the rise of what would become one of the most successful swim teams in the USA, the training ground for Johnny Weissmuller, Buster Crabbe, Esther Williams and others.

In May 1918, after a disaster in which 13 people drowned, Freeth was hired a chief lifeguard for Ocean Beach, California. He and his crew had a successful summer: there was not one further drowning in the area, which then and now is famous for its strong rip currents. But on 15 January 1919, Freeth caught influenza. It was part of a pandemic that swept the world, and which is estimated to have killed between 50 and 100 million people. Freeth, sadly, was one of them. He died on 7 April, at the age of 35. His legacy, though, can be seen on every beach where a lifeguard sits on a tower, rescue board propped nearby.

Never mind the evidence, we’ll do something eye-catching.

By George Monbiot, published on the Guardian’s website, 30th January 2014

For a moment that rarest of beasts, common sense, poked a nose out of its burrow and sniffed the air. Assailed by angry farmers demanding dredging in the Somerset levels, the environment secretary, Owen Paterson broke with protocol and said something sensible.

“Dredging is often not the best long term or economic solution and increased dredging of rivers on the Somerset Levels would not have prevented the recent widespread flooding.”

He went on to suggest something I never thought I would hear from his lips: “also we need to do more to hold water back, way back in the hills.” Coming from the man who insisted in November that he would do what he could to help farmers keep the hills bare, this was an astonishing and welcome turnaround.

It reflects what his advisers in the Environment Agency have been trying to say for years, before being sat on by ministers wanting instant answers to complex problems and then – as the government still plans – being sacked in droves. A presentation by the Agency, called To Dredge or Not to Dredge?, spells out the problems in terms that even ministers can understand.

“The river channel is not large enough to contain extreme floods, even after dredging.  Dredging of river channels does NOT prevent flooding during extreme river flows … The concept of dredging to prevent extreme flooding is equivalent to trying to squeeze the volume of water held by a floodplain within the volume of water held in the river channel. Since the floodplain volume is usually many times larger than the channel volume, the concept becomes a major engineering project and a major environmental change.”

Is that not bleeding obvious? A river’s capacity is tiny by comparison to the catchment from which it draws its water. You can increase the flow of a river by dredging, but that is likely to cause faster and more dangerous floods downstream when the water hits the nearest urban bridge (something the residents of towns like Taunton and Bridgwater should be worried about). If you cut it off from its floodplain by turning it into a deep trench, you might raise its capacity from – say – 2% of the water moving through the catchment to 4%. You will have solved nothing while creating a host of new problems.

Among these problems, the Environment Agency points out, are:

- Massive expense. Once you have started dredging, “it must be repeated after every extreme flood, as the river silts up again.”

- More dangerous rivers: “Removing river bank vegetation such as trees and shrubs decreases bank stability and increases erosion and siltation.”

- The destabilisation of bridges, weirs, culverts and river walls, whose foundations are undermined by deepening the channel. “If the river channels are dredged and structures are not realigned, ‘Pinch Points’ at structures would occur. This would increase the risk of flooding at the structure.” That means more expense and more danger.

-  Destruction of the natural world. “Removing gravel from river beds by dredging leads to the loss of spawning grounds for fish, and can cause loss of some species. Removing river bank soils disturbs the habitat of river bank fauna such as otters and water voles.”

As the Agency says, dredging is primarily a tool for improving navigation and, in some places, land drainage. It has been mistaken by people who ought to know better, including ministers, as a means of dealing with a different problem: flooding.

If you want to stop rivers from ruining people’s lives, you should engage with the kind of issues that Paterson hinted at. That means, broadly speaking, the following:

-          more trees and bogs in the uplands
-          reconnecting rivers with their floodplains in places where it is safe to flood (and paying farmers to store water on their fields while the danger passes)
-          making those floodplains rougher by planting trees and other deep vegetation to help hold back the water
-          lowering the banks and de-canalising the upper reaches, allowing rivers once more to create meanders and braids and oxbow lakes. These trap the load they carry and sap much of their destructive energy.

None of these produce instant results. But they are distinguished from dredging in one significant respect: they work.

Within two days of Paterson’s subversive experiment with common sense, that shy beast was frightened back down its burrow and usual service resumed. In Parliament yesterday, David Cameron said:

“We now need to move more rapidly to the issues like dredging, which I think will help to make a long-term difference. It is not currently safe to dredge in the Levels. But I can confirm that dredging will start as soon as it is practical, as soon as the waters have started to come down.”

Paterson then repeated the sentiment. It didn’t take him long to forget his statement on Monday, that “increased dredging of rivers on the Somerset Levels would not have prevented the recent widespread flooding”.

Cameron’s dredge pledge is like the badger cull. It is useless. It is counterproductive. But it keeps the farmers happy and allows the government to be seen to be doing something:  something decisive and muscular and visible. And that, in these dismal times, appears to be all that counts.

www.monbiot.com

One of my not-so-enjoyable tasks over the recent holiday period was trying to tackle some of the accumulation of an entire career that I have stashed haphazardly in the dark recesses of my basement over the years.  My husband will be quick to tell you that I did not make as much progress as he hoped I would, but I did unearth one forgotten gem that I'd long since forgotten about.  To my utter amazement, the piece I found, which was written--well, let's just say several decades ago--reflects the same sentiment that has been the theme of a number of my blogspots--that is, everything has some impacts.

The piece was an outline purporting to be the table of contents of a report by none other than Dr. A. Troglodyte, the man or woman who had first discovered how to control fire and who now had the unenviable task of documenting its environmental impacts.

The outline for A. Troglodyte's report included the following chapters:

Chapter 1.  Accidental burns:  Especially to those who regularly handle fire, and to children or others who are unable to heed instructions to maintain a safe distance from the heat source.

Chapter 2.  Conflagrations:  The uncontrolled spread of fire can potentially result in large-scale loss of human life, and/or of human or animal habitat.  Potential impacts include loss of hunting or gathering grounds.

Chapter 3.  Air Pollution:  The emissions from controlled fire can cause respiratory illness in those who stay too close to sources for too long.  On a larger scale, with widespread use, the air pollution can have as yet unknown weather and climatic effects, as well as widespread incidence of respiratory diseases.

Chapter 4.  Carcinogens in Cooked Food:  Recent evidence points to the existence of potential carcinogens in the charred exterior layer of meats barbequed over open fires.

Chapter 5.  Physical Impacts on Members of the Genus:  Over several generations, the reliance on cooked food, which is softer and therefore easier to chew and digest, may lead to natural selection for physiognomic characteristics that would make it difficult for members of the community to survive without fire.  Furthermore, accustoming the body to warmer environments could reduce the ability of the species to endure without the constant availability of heat, thus potentially reducing the combat effectiveness of warriors, who might not be able to use fires on battlefronts without revealing their locations.

Chapter 6.  Socioeconomic Impacts:  One can envision the control of fire leading to the emergence of a "fire priesthood" which could potentially have unprecedented levels of control over fellow members of their tribes.  In addition, it would exacerbate class distinctions, with the privileged class having the ability to barter for fire and the less privileged having to do without.  Furthermore, the existence of fires is likely to lead to family units spending more time in their caves interacting only with their own members, and to reduced athletic activity, thus leading to more societal isolation and a more passive culture.

Chapter 7.  Depletion of Resources:  While the current need for fuel is limited and there appear to be adequate amounts, widespread use of fire could lead to depletion of forests, resulting in both the economic consequences of resource scarcity and the environmental consequences of widespread forest destruction.

Now, the casual reader may think I was poking fun at the excesses of environmental impact statements (EIS), but the truth is, my intentions were to demonstrate that, if we knew then what we know now, even something as basic to the story of human life as controlled fire might have been viewed with suspicion and alarm.

The message should not be that fire is evil, but by the same token, neither is nuclear power, and neither are any of the other energy sources, even though I have written a number of blogposts about various risks from each energy source as I learn of them.  We are no longer troglodytes (I hope!).  The real message is that we need to take this environmental impact statement to the next step to determine 1) what is the relative significance of each of these impacts, 2) how does it compare to the impacts of other competing sources, and 3) how might we reduce the impacts. 

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