The necessity of myth
I agree with Matthew d’Ancona that myth is crucial to humankind (18 December). The vast omission, not just from his article but from virtually all western myths and scriptures, is women. So this otherwise vivid and excellent piece of writing in fact aborts half the story, and reinforces a cultural paradigm in which 51% of the human race are invisible, ancillary or victims.
The litany of threats to our survival as a species – climate change, ecological destruction, market-driven economics, rabid consumption, overpopulation, war – arises from an overweeningly patriarchal narrative. What we need in our time are new myths and wellsprings in which women, the biosphere with its 8 billion non-human species, and men, are covalent.
Star Wars is for the dinosaurs. What stories might gestate fierce, loving, radical, stellar peace?
Annie March
West Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
• Matthew d’Ancona’s paean to Star Wars, and its origin in the pages of mythologist Joseph Campbell’s masterpiece The Hero with a Thousand Faces, doesn’t mention other popular swashbuckling outer-space heroes such as Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon from the last century. What our generation has been treated to, besides a typically inexhaustible number of episodes, are classier costumes, prettier faces, better acting and more realistic, computer-generated interstellar battles with lots of spark and better sound effects, on a wide, even 3D, screen, all rendered more heroic by the Boston Pops playing John Williams’s stirring score.
Richard Orlando
Westmount, Quebec, Canada
• Matthew d’Ancona is imprecise in his use of language. He writes “Humanity can live without God”. He should have written, “Some of humanity can live without God”. As the Queen reminded us in her Christmas broadcast last year, there are still people in the world who depend on Jesus for guidance and true life.
Mike Payne
High Wycombe, UK
Climate change aspirin
The columns from George Monbiot and Bill KcKibben (18 December) on the Paris climate agreement were as brutally objective, yet reassuring, as the observation of the little boy in The Emperor’s New Clothes. By all scientific and mathematical criteria, the agreement seems the equivalent of an aspirin to treat a broken back. Perhaps people could obtain a more visceral realisation of climate change by comparing photos of some of our most spectacular coral reefs from the present day and 30 years ago. The changes are generally as dramatic as those in the same human at those respective periods.
John Hayward
Weegena, Tasmania, Australia
Conspiracy theories abound
Natalie Nougayrède suggests that conspiracy theories can be accounted for in people’s difficulty in accepting “factual documented truths” resulting in “half-baked conspiratorial versions” (1 January). An example of such a truth would presumably have been the Blair/Bush 45-minute threat from so-called weapons of mass destruction that was used to justify the invasion of Iraq.
She does not acknowledge that we, the public, are presented with information purporting to be truths from politicians, by the media, which are in fact interpretations of facts distorted by political expediency and financial motivation. I suggest that lack of trust in the sources of information is at the very least a major driving force in the development of these theories.
To suggest that politicians and the media (not to mention the rest of the establishment) are hand-in-glove in feeding us the most convenient version of events (accepted in times of war) would of course be merely another conspiracy theory, and should therefore be swept under the ever-flowing carpet of established truth.
Ralph Openshaw
Bristol, UK
We must sustain agriculture
The urgency with which we must halt the destruction of our rainforests is concisely encapsulated in the Papua New Guinea story (18 December). The UN Redd+ programme has great potential to capture carbon in trees and convert CO2 to oxygen, but there is much more to do to ensure that agriculture produces more food and, at the same time, plays its part in natural resource conservation. PNG’s population of 7 million is growing at an annual rate of 2%, and while the great majority of people still live in the rural sector urban centres are growing at 5% a year. This means that sustainable increases in agricultural production are a critical necessity; the ways to ensure that ecosystems are resilient include the incorporation of trees into crop production. Simultaneously, natural resources must be conserved via conservation agriculture practices.
A multi-pronged effort to conserve rainforests is the best bet to ensure a healthy future for them. Alternatively we can watch as they are destroyed and, as Edward O Wilson has noted, future generations will find it hard to understand, let alone forgive, our folly in wilfully annihilating the planet’s rich endowment of biodiversity.
Brian Sims
Bedford, UK
Depressing Labour future
For all her deserved magisterial status, I must take issue with Polly Toynbee’s depressing assessment of Labour’s prospects (1 January). Perhaps she has become so enmeshed within the Westminster bubble that she has lost touch with the streets. Whatever the cause, she – along, it must be said, with a large cohort of the commentariat – needs to get out of the office more.
Labour will surf to power on the waves of Tory-blown social injustice and inequity. With houses costing 10 times the average wage, with food banks in every town, with Big Issue sellers on every street corner, with zero hours contracts, youth disemployment, penalised disability and a host of smaller injustices, there is a real change in perspective occurring among the electorate. It will be intensified by the outrageous hubris of the Tory party as it showers rewards on its friends and exempts them from regulation and reform.
Support for those who are damaged by the present system is already apparent: muted, yes, but there is a growing disenchantment with the wealth divide. There is one critical demographic, however, that Labour must address; it was the pensioner vote “wot did it” last time, but even we – for I am one – can only be bribed so far.
This is the time for cool socialism, red-blooded perhaps but applied with cold logic, and Jeremy Corbyn is precisely what is needed for its application. In this bleak midwinter, the summer may seem far off, and it may indeed be a year or two distant, but when that summer comes it will be glorious indeed.
Stewart Dakers
Farnham, UK
• I am rapidly despairing of the Guardian. What was once a fine paper of the centre-left has now become a savage critic of the very same centre-left. Articles such as the one by Polly Toynbee make me shudder. There are enough media outlets of a different political persuasion in the UK to write what Toynbee has written. Do we need this from the Guardian? Is this what the Guardian now stands for? Labour bashing? Get-Corbyn bashing? Surely gigabytes of criticism could be written about the current government. Acres of print should be devoted to the many, many shortcomings of the Conservatives, but instead, and not for the first time, Labour and Jeremy Corbyn come under the microscope. The Guardian seriously needs to take a good look at itself and the journalists it employs. Britain badly needs a balanced press; unfortunately articles like Toynbee’s only diminish what the Guardian once stood for.
Ken Cotterill
Mareeba, Queensland, Australia
In defence of gadgetry
Phil Daoust has obviously not been shopping for kitchen gadgets recently (1 January). I received a pasta maker as a birthday present and could certainly not produce homemade pasta in the same time and with as little effort as my machine. I put in the dry ingredients (semolina or flour) start the machine, add the liquid ingredients (water and egg) while the machine is running, and in 10 minutes have wonderful homemade pasta of my choice (spaghetti, linguine, penne etc). I put on a pan of water while the machine goes to work and the total time taken is no more than boiling water for packaged pasta.
I advise Daoust to check out the kitchen departments of his local stores before giving up on energy- and time-saving devices (though I am in total agreement with him when it comes to garlic presses).
Avril Taylor
Dundas, Ontario, Canada
Briefly
• That astonishing photo on your 18 December Eyewitnessed page revealed a somewhat disturbing view of refugees: where are the women and children?
Hugh Irving
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
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