Carbon Pricing – Be Careful What You Ask For – or: Why All Ways of Pricing Carbon Are Not The Same…..

Posted on May 2, 2019 by Mini

“Why do fossil fuels continue to provide most of our energy? The reason is simple. Fossil fuels are the cheapest energy.” – James Hansen, leading climate scientist and former director of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

This piece was inspired by an article by Tim Harford for the Financial Times:

“A carbon tax is the nudge the world needs.”

Tim gives his thoughts on a Green New Deal, as advocated by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the US, and also Ed Miliband, the UK Labour Party, and Caroline Lucas of the Green Party.

So what is a Green New Deal? “An emergency of this magnitude requires large-scale government intervention to kickstart industries, to direct investment and to boost research and development in the green technologies of the future.” (Jeremy Corbyn)It’s an ambitious programme of government investment and regulation. It’s a huge centrally planned response to climate change: the government sets regulations on industry and decides who to subsidise through general taxation. The idea is to tackle everything: social justice, equity, biodiversity loss, CO2 emissions; to reinvigorate left-behind communities, create new jobs and guarantee everyone has them.

But without a clear price on carbon, signals to industry may be mixed. Do you win the lottery of government support? The government may not be the best judge of which industries to support. It may be vulnerable to corruption. Good causes may not be supported due to lack of knowledge.

A Green New Deal may have approval from the ‘left’ as action is seen to be taken, but increasing government control & spending may be unpopular on the ‘right’. Support will be split on partisan lines. And where will the money come from? There doesn’t seem to be a clear mechanism for real change in everyone’s behaviour.

And what would be an effective mechanism?

Tim Harford says: “Our modern economy reflects countless choices, made by billions of people all over the world. A broad-based carbon price influences them all. Nothing else can.”

Now – a carbon price cannot be the only measure for tackling climate change and biodiversity loss, our twin existential threats – but it could be really effective at changing all of our energy use. And it NEVER EVER gets talked about in the media or by politicians. (except for Layla Moran!)

So I thought I would have a look at different methods of carbon pricing – does the way you implement a carbon tax have an effect on its outcomes?

There are a lot of different iterations of carbon pricing, so I’ve whittled down the options to these: (and my apologies if I’ve left out your favourite…)

Cap & Trade (which is the status quo right now)
Carbon Tax & Government spends revenue
Carbon tax & rebate through income tax
Carbon Fee & Dividend

So here we go!

Status Quo: Cap & Trade

What happens here is the Government sets a limit on Carbon to be emitted – the ‘CAP’. CO₂-intensive industries bid for permits, and so the CO₂ price is set by the market. This is our present system in the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), with an additional UK Carbon Price Floor added. This has actually had a big effect, driving our energy mix away from coal and oil and towards gas, nuclear and renewables, which is a good thing. But there are failures in this system. One is that 58% of EU emissions come from sectors outside the EU ETS, such as transport, buildings, waste management and agriculture. So lots of industries are not included. Also not included is us, the general public – we are all fuel users, but we are unable to have any effect on this system. The price set on carbon at the moment is too low to have much meaningful effect. High fuel prices passed on to the public would be unacceptable without some sort of compensation plan.

Carbon Tax & Government spends revenue So now, rather than setting a limit on carbon to be emitted & letting the market price the carbon, the Government puts a direct tax on carbon, setting the price. If the price is high enough it drives a change away from carbon-intensive fuels, and makes clean energy comparatively much more affordable.

So now you have a price on carbon at source. What to do with the revenue?

In this model, the government spends the revenue on green energy projects and infrastructure, and any other projects they decide will help the battle against climate change.

But this approach brings higher prices to consumers without any compensation. It also does not involve or empower the public in any clearly visible way. Will the government make the best choices? We don’t know. Looking at the Gilets Jaunes protesters in France, imposing higher prices with no compensation looks extremely unpopular.

Carbon tax & rebate through income taxHere we have the same instrument to collect revenue – a fee on carbon at source. But now the revenue is returned to the public via the income tax system through tax rebates. (Some ideas are for a mix of this and the government allocating some of the revenue to clean energy projects, but to keep things simple I’m going to say all the revenue is being returned.) So our tax is revenue neutral, and people can see a benefit on their decreased tax bills.

But there’s a fairness problem here: as far as I can tell, this form of compensation is regressive – higher earners get proportionally more tax compensation, so the poorest have higher fuel prices, less compensation, and are worse off. And what happens to those who don’t earn enough to pay tax or have fallen off the edges of the system? Also – how motivating is it to have less income tax? It seems to be less of a bad thing, rather than a positive symbol of climate action.

Carbon Fee & Dividend

(Ok this could be called Carbon Tax & Lump Sum, but to make it sound more upbeat we’re calling it a fee rather than a tax.)

Again, the government sets a price on carbon at source. This price rises over time at a rate set by an independent body. The revenue is returned equally to the public through a weekly/monthly/annual lump sum, ie a ‘DIVIDEND’.

So what’s different here?

The lump sum system is progressive: it really benefits lower earners most. The richest (and largest users of CO2-intensive energy) benefit least. Anders Fremstad of Colorado State University and Mark Paul of Duke University calculate that taxing a tonne of CO₂ at $49 would leave 59% of Americans worse off, including 75% of the bottom half, if the revenue were used to lower personal-income taxes. By contrast, recycling the receipts as lump-sum payments (Dividends) would leave 89% of the bottom half with an average net gain of $788.

Here’s a graph adapted from The Future of Carbon Pricing by Policy Exchange. Dividend to each income group is in green. Increased fuel costs are in red. You can see the 6 lowest income groups all break even or are better off, with the poorest getting the biggest benefits. The wealthiest, highest fuel users, are the worst off.

Compared to tax rebates, it’s demonstrably fair as all get an equal dividend.

It’s also possible to get dividends to the poorest most marginalised sections of society, by…. “Investigating inventive ways of paying the dividend to ensure that the most vulnerable receive it. Linking the dividend to national insurance numbers would be one a way to pay the dividend, but this may mean that the most vulnerable miss out. The Government should investigate whether new technology can be used to pay the dividend securely through a mobile app to ensure as many eligible people as possible receive it.” policyexchange.org.uk | 15Carbon Pricing

Through their dividend the public can support renewables in their choice of what energy to buy. The dividend is a visible sign of your purchasing power, and the public is trusted to choose how to spend it; wise choices bring a win-win virtuous spiral of energy choices. The dividend also gives voters an immediate interest in the fight against climate change –a lump sum arriving in your bank account is a very interesting event. All green energy sources benefit by becoming comparatively cheaper.

But another fantastic effect is that the Dividend, once people are used to it, is hard to withdraw by future governments (see what’s happened with UK Winter Fuel Payments) – and so acts as a pledge to industry that the carbon price will endure.

The equal dividend appeals to sense of fairness. Middle and lower earners break even or are better off.

To just measure up again these different ways of pricing Carbon, here’s is my Over-Elaborate & Subjective Table of Questions, to compare all the taxes. I’ve traffic-light colour-coded it: Green is what I see as GOOD outcomes, Yellow is maybe/unsure, Orange is POOR Outcomes (but remember, this is very subjective).

In the words of Tim Harford again: “We’re all involved….Our modern economy reflects countless choices, made by billions of people all over the world. A broad-based carbon price influences them all. Nothing else can.”

I’ve tried to look here at the different ways of implementing a broad-based carbon price. To me it looks like all ways of Carbon Pricing are not the same. Carbon is infused in all our lives and all our choices. We need to tackle climate change with a way that involves and empowers everybody, is fair and acceptable and progressive, and that also is able to set a high enough price for carbon to bring about change, in a way industry can see will not be overturned by a change of government. I think there is one clear policy winner here, one that does all those things.

What do you think?

Meet the Relatives

Posted on April 10, 2019 by Mini

This post first appeared on Picture Book Den’s Blogspot.

Today’s post is about all things insect. So: grit your mandibles, flex your feelers and close your compound eyes, we’re going in…

Meeting the Insect Face

In 1665 Robert Hooke published a perspective-changing book of pictures, Micrographia.

Looking through a microscope he could see further than anyone ever could before, and he showed us this tiny world of everyday things made enormous and wonderful, with huge fold-out pages. People were amazed by Hooke’s book – Samuel Pepys stayed up all night marvelling at it.

The everyday pest is revealed as beautiful; the flea is ‘adorn’d with a curiously polish’d suit of sable Armour’ and ‘multitudes of sharp pinns, shap’d almost like Porcupine’s Quills.’ Hooke also draws the mind-boggling face of a fly. And we find the insect face is hard to love.

It doesn’t map that well onto the tetrapod look. It’s those mouthparts. The flea has at least a nice moustache – but then – HELP! – it has a pair of legs growing out of its chin. Segments, exoskeletons and too many legs are also not ideal for building our empathy with arthropods. It is basic human behaviour to feel disgust at insects – no doubt due to instincts of self-preservation against contagion. Lots of insect life cycles are frankly disturbing – especially the parasitic wasps. Most of human history has been a battle against innumerable critters out to infest you & contaminate YOUR FOOD.

Here are some sketches of young locusts and cockroaches at London Zoo.

But how does it feel to be an insect? Does it feel like something to be an insect? Some research seems to indicate that bees may experience different emotional states – emotions are useful for instigating behaviour – and it appears that dopamine plays a role in bee decision-making – as it does for us. It could be that emotions are essential for creating all behaviour so all animals that have behaviour are experiencing emotions – so life feels like something for all of them. No-one is a mindless automaton.

As fellow organisms on the Great Tree of Life, insects and us are related, but our branching apart is very distant. The Last Common Ancestor of us & insects was something Pre-Pre-Cambrian, something that maybe lived between 600 and 700 million years ago, and we share with it the invention of bilateral symmetry. No-one has found that ancestor yet, so here is a Kimberella who might have been a bit similar, looking like a cross between a macaron, a sea-slug and a toasted cheese sandwich.

Picture Book Insects

So, who has crossed over the human-insect divide (that empathy chasm) and involved insects in their picture books? Here are a few of my favourites. Do tell me yours!

Ant & Bee

I remember having these little books when I was small. I found the small size and relatively large text quite exciting, especially as some words would be picked out in red.

Here is Ant tucked up ill in bed.

Here are some incredible geometrical cakes from when Ant and Bee go shopping.

Tadpole’s Promise (Jeanne Willis and Tony Ross)

Where water meets willow two creatures meet. Using the page fold to show the intersection of air and water, amphibian meets insect and both must metamorphose.

I am so glad that, as a mammal, I do not have to undergo this sort of utter transformation.

Du Iz TakBy Carson Ellis.

Insecty creatures find a shoot and tend it, building an extravagant plant house which gets beset by spider and bird, flowers and wilts. Like tadpole’s promise, the cast of insects are caught in the cycles of nature and changing seasons, but these ones end with new beginnings and lots of new shoots sprouting.

The insect ones speak their own language but you can pick it up…I think they may be swearing on this page:

Here are some more beautiful insects:

a buzzing meadow garden from Suzy Barton’s Butterfly Dance,

a humming insect Soup Kitchen from Helen Cooper’s Delicious,

and the most friendly-and-engaging-ever critters here by Yuval Zommer.

Garden Quest

On holiday on a Greek Island I found this magnificent beetle & handsome grasshopper. What would they say to each other? What adventures could they have? I imagined them going on holiday to Mount Zakinthos, perhaps eating a large Greek Salad washed down with an unwise amount of Ouzo and then an ill-fated boat trip…

I wondered about a story for them; perhaps Grasshopper could be Don Quixote to Beetle’s Sancho Panza. Maybe a Quest that takes place all in one garden, with the tiny insects travelling from one end to the other, beset with adventures and dangers. Well, as often happens, this didn’t really seem to work.

But then I was asked to make some pieces for the John Radcliffe Hospital Audiology Department. The idea was to make something engaging and distracting for young patients, with lots of details to spot on repeat appointments. So I tried to turn Grasshopper and Beetle’s Garden Quest into a picture-story for a wall. I thought I could make panoramas of a garden world full of minibeasts to spot. Playing around with tracing paper I wanted to make something multi-layered.

It turned into three panoramas which really go from right to left down a garden (the opposite way to a book).

Grasshopper and Beetle find a label for El Dorado honey on the compost heap.

They take it back to their home in the grass then go in search of it,

discovering a honey picnic under the trees.

Critters under a broken pot

Grasshopper and Beetle’s meadow home

Questing

El Dorado honey attracting attention

INSECTAGEDDON

Nowadays there is grim news about insects from lots of fronts. There has been widespread loss of pollinating insects across Britain in the last 40 years. Insects are also at risk from shrinking habitat ranges due to climate change. There are shifting baselines and clean windscreens.

Are we pulling out the Jenga bricks from the web of life? The tower gets rickettier, but it still looks like a tower until…crash! – one too many bricks has gone. It seems so much insect life is unmeasured, unrecorded, unknown. And that’s the stuff on land – what about the invisible areas we don’t even think about – under the ground, under the sea – ploughing either of those up is wrecking a world that is already there.

So what is causing the disappearance of insects?

The causes, it seems, are: habitat loss, pesticides and climate change. What can we do about this? We can share our world with the wildlife in it! We can protect habitats: someone already lives there! We can set aside agricultural land margins and park margins for wild plants, as in this new law in Bavaria. We can treasure what we already have and make more. Edges and hedges and big trees are particularly good habitats…verges, parks, motorway margins, front gardens – all are opportunities for an edge habitat.

We can make our edgelands into mini wildernesses, mini jungles.

This book, The Garden Jungle by Dave Goulson, is about exactly that: the wildlife that lives right under our noses, in our gardens and parks, between the gaps in the pavement, and in the soil beneath our feet.

It is published later in the year and I can’t wait to read it.

The more minibeasts you know, the more you see, and the more you care about.

With climate change we are in danger of a great global biodiversity simplification – losing specialists and gaining generalists. Climate change squeezes the range of animals as they migrate towards the climate they are used to – generally heading north then hitting the end of the range as they run out of habitat.

We can make it easier for creatures to move by increasing & joining habitats – all those edges we already mentioned. But the utterly brilliant thing is that increasing our nature by reforesting and rewilding is one of the most effective ways of reducing atmospheric CO2 – nature can be our climate-change crash mat – but it’s also so much more – what an amazing win-win policy using more nature as a solution to our climate problems would be. Last week scientists and activists called for action on CO2 through natural climate solutions, through defending, restoring and re-establishing forests, peatlands, mangroves, salt marshes, natural seabeds and other crucial ecosystems. Here George Monbiot explains how to avert Climate catastrophe by rewilding.

We also can tackle the carbon dioxide in other ways: at the moment it is essentially free to put CO2 into our atmosphere. This is an enormous injustice and a robbery from young people and future inhabitants of earth. Putting a clear price on carbon would change this.

Meet the Relatives

In September last year, the House of Illustration ran a month’s challenge. It was linked to John Vernon Lord’s exhibition there. (John Vernon Lord is of course the illustrator of that classic insect book The GIANT JAM SANDWICH!)

In 2016 John had done a teeny drawing every day for the entire year and they were all on show. The challenge was to do a teeny (1 inch to 3cm) drawing a day for September. (Here are the winners.) I particularly liked John’s insect drawings, I think partly because they’re life-sized. Here are his lovely beetle and fly.

I wondered about doing a month of 3cm square drawings of insects.

At the Natural History Museum at Tring there’s a wonderful collection of insects in cases. All have been impaled on a pin and labelled, in that classic insect-collecting way. Here are some of my sketches of the Tringsects.

I wondered: what if the label, instead of saying ‘Periplaneta Americana’, said ‘Uncle Bert’? Could the insects start to become individuals you could care about?

So here are Captain Peacock, Mrs Henderson, Priscilla, FV Heffenfurter and Matilda. And here are all the relatives.

Lastly, a few links…

Rewilding Britain

Natural Climate Solutions

Buglife

Trees for Life

Citizen’s Climate Lobby UK

The Perils of Being a Toy

Posted on February 18, 2019 by Mini

This post first appeared on Picture Book Den’s Blogspot.

It’s not easy being a toy. You get mired in adventures out of your depths, dressed in outfits you never chose, and left in unlikely places by your forgetful owners. Toys are our avatars. They are mostly (happily) silent unless their owners voice for them. Children can’t help being animators – it happens to the first things that are picked up – they get brought to life.

Anything can be a Toy

Mini’s Baby Book from C1967

In my baby book, my mum records that when I was three I talked a lot about two persons called ‘Gully’ and ‘Linda’. My mum never knew who they were, though they were often up to stuff. But I know. They were my hands.

Those Yellow Pages fingers

You know that thing where you can get your index and middle fingers to stride around like a pair of legs? Well that was Gully & Linda – I can’t remember who was right and who was left. They were possibly married. They used to do a lot of striding around on long car journeys.

Anything can be a toy.

In the Edinburgh Museum of Childhood a few years ago I found this:It was someone’s doll once. What it also was, was the sole of a shoe.

Sometimes the most eloquent toys are the most basic – where imagination has had to do most of the animating. And the most disappointing of toys can be the ones who try to say and do too much. Here is Scrubbing Brush, who is basic:

Scrubbing Brush carrying lunch

…and Turbodog, who says way too much.

Turbodog – the most useless robotic dog there is…

…both from Traction Man Meets Turbodog

Children’s books are the theatre for toys to come to life, where toys really can have adventures. And I love books about toys having adventures.

So here are my Top Five Perils of Being a Picture Book Toy.

PERIL ONE: FALLING APART

It’s the big worry about being a toy. Not being able to regenerate unless someone repairs you can leave you in quite a mess. But the conundrum is: that falling apart makes you REAL.

Let’s go first to That Rabbit Belongs To Emily Brown.Here is Emily Brown’s rabbit Stanley in a terrible state after his kidnapping by the naughty queen:After she has rescued Stanley, the wise Emily Brown gives that Queen a recipe for making a Real Toy:

“You take that horrid brand new teddy bear and you play with him all day. Sleep with him at night. Hold him very tight and be sure to have lots of adventures. And then maybe one day you will wake up with a real toy of your own.”So falling apart can be part of the process of Becoming Real.

For more on becoming real, we’ll have to go to The Velveteen Rabbit, written by Margery Williams with magical pictures by William Nicholson.Pondering over a toy’s life in the Nursery, the Skin Horse offers the Velveteen Rabbit this definition of real:

“Real isn’t how you’re made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you…Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

There are many ways toys can fall apart: one is unravelling.In I Was Made For You by David Lucas a home-made knitted cat is destined to be a Christmas present but wakes up with the need to discover the answer to the biggest questions – not just what he is but why he is. The little toy goes in search of an answer to the big Why, but snags his wool on a rusty nail and unravels before our eyes until he is ‘just a long loose thread shivering in the wind’. He is precariously close to not being at all, but is found and wound by Daisy & her Mum, who reknits him into his shape again.Toys can be tested to destruction. In Loved to Bits by Teresa Heapy and Katie Cleminson, the toy here is Stripy Ted who bravely loses body parts while engaged in adventures with his owner.
Stripy Ted gallantly loses an ear (“Still got the best one – never fear!” he says cheerfully), an eye, and eventually both legs and both arms becoming only a ball and head.

But his owner prefers him in his brave unmended state. So how much of yourself can you lose and still be you?

You can come unstuffed, but you can also be remade.I think Tatty Ratty, by Helen Cooper, is perhaps a story about being remade, so that old loved tired lost Tatty Ratty can become new again, dusted with sugar & floating down from the moon.

Lost probably on the bus just before the story begins, Tatty Ratty is only seen in the journey of adventures back home that Molly and her Mum and Dad dream up for him. Tatty Ratty is always getting closer, and always getting a bit remade – feeding himself up on porridge to get restuffed, falling in the sea to become washed, being dusted with sugar on the moon for a touch of sparkle.
Finally the family are ready to track Tatty Ratty down at the Kingdom of Bunny. There could be a difficult moment here, when Molly spots the shelf of similar white bunnies with buttons who are all pretty much Tatty Ratty clones. But Tatty Ratty’s imagined journey home has somehow prepared Molly to find the right one.PERIL TWO: BEING LOST

A perennial peril of being a toy due to their hapless, absent-minded and easily distracted owners, being Lost can happen anywhere. In Red Ted and the Lost Things, Red Ted finds himself in a Lost Property Office having been left on a train, and along with a toy crocodile decides to pluckily find his own way home. I love seeing the little toys bravely navigate the confusing streets of the full-size world.A nonchalant cheese-loving cat comes along for the ride. Red Ted is small but resourceful and the crocodile shows his teeth, seeing off a colossal dachshund. For the small toys the journey home is an epic struggle. Finally Red Ted is reunited with Stevie who makes everything right and has superpowers of understanding when it comes to toys and cats.PERIL THREE: BEING SUPPLANTED, IGNORED, NOT PLAYED WITH, OR GIVEN AWAY

These fates are too awful to think about – and they all do happen in the films Toy Story 1, 2 or 3 (EVERYTHING that can happen to toys happens in Toy Story somewhere.) Actually they are so awful I couldn’t find picture book toys that get treated this way (any suggestions?), so here I’m resorting to a story of pure imagination…

The Story of the Bad Mump Mump

The Real Mump Mump

When my son Herbie was 6 months old he was given this monkey. It was a good one – long legs, squashy round body, perfect bedtime companion. It wasn’t till a year later that we found out from Herbie that the monkey’s name was Mump Mump.

Underwater fantasy Mump Mump

So all was well.

One day I was idly wandering round the toy department of Fenwick’s on Bond Street and I discovered an entire bin of Mump Mumps, probably on special offer. Ooh! – I thought – I could buy a spare Mump Mump! Just in case. We’d never ever have a lost or destroyed Mump Mump crisis!

Reader, I nearly did it. But I didn’t.

On the bus home I realised the full horror of what I could have done. Imagine the life of the Other Mump Mump.

Consigned to a cupboard – (as your existence must always be a secret to the child you are meant to be for) – you watch – (probably through a chink in the cupboard door) – as your child talks and plays and sleeps with the other hated Mump Mump.
In your cupboard over the long years you plot out ways to despatch your rival Mump Mump. Maybe the day comes when the blow finally falls and the other Mump Mump is left on a beach or dropped off a ferry or mysteriously set on fire and at last you can take your rightful place at the heart of your child’s world.
But no – the long years in the cupboard will have taken their toll and you will be somehow poisoned and bitter inside.

Maybe not the best picture book material.

But with ‘given away’ I’m going to mention Dogger here.

Dogger is lost and found and nearly lost again. Dogger’s owner is Dave. Dogger isn’t actually given away, he is lost then ends up on a toy stall at the school fete – but we see the loved toy ending up on a table with a ‘5p’ label hanging on them. Dogger is perilously close to going home with another child. Some ingenious bargaining by Dave’s sister Bella saves the day.

PERIL FOUR: The hard-working life of a toy which may include having to take the blame…

Picture book toys often have to work hard for their owners. Blue Kangaroo, being a quiet sort, doesn’t point out the unfairness of being repeatedly incriminated for his owner Lily’s mishaps.
Eventually Lily’s mum puts Blue Kangaroo on a high shelf and Lily has to go to bed without him.
The page I love (I think it’s the shadow that makes it so exciting) is this page of blues as Blue Kangaroo jumps down from the bookcase where he’s been banished with an idea about how to put things right.Here is a collection of toys (and an actual cat) grouped round our son Herbie when he was fairly new. When he was very little it always seemed important that he be surrounded by a sort of glow from his stuffed guardians. In While You are Sleeping by Alexis Deacon, the bedside toys are hard at work every night, protecting, checking, scaring bad dreams away, tending their child. There’s a gathering of guardians around the bedside. Alexis Deacon’s warm pastel pictures conjure up a mysterious dark tender night-time world.

Being a toy is a serious business, a life or death struggle, a battle.

There are rules to being a picture book toy. Your owner will know you are alive but this is something they believe without seeing. You generally don’t come to life in front of them. It might freak them out. You don’t come to life around any humans (except maybe strange slightly magical ones.) You can only wander about when no people are watching you. Animals can probably see you and sometimes even understand/talk to you.When I was making Toys in Space I had a picture in my mind of a group of toys being left on the grass in the garden overnight for the first time. They’d see the stars and wonder what they were. What else would happen? I badly wanted them to be abducted by an alien. However I wanted also to be brutally realistic, so the story of Toys in Space was my way for having Toys simultaneously abducted by aliens and not abducted by aliens. To get through a night out in the garden, they tell a story (which is where the beaming up comes in) until at last dawn happens and the sun comes out and they know they will be found.PERIL FIVE: Your Owner GROWS UP

The Unspoken Tragedy in every toy’s life – is that its owner will grow up, the end of childhood.

On the final page of The House at Pooh Corner, Christopher Robin says:

“Pooh, promise you won’t forget about me, ever. Not even when I’m a hundred.”

Pooh thought for a while.

“How old shall I be then?”

“Ninety-nine.”

Pooh nodded.

“I promise,” he said.

Still with his eyes on the world Christopher Robin put out a hand and felt for Pooh’s paw.

“Pooh,” said Christopher Robin earnestly, “if I – if I’m not quite -” he stopped and tried again – “Pooh, whatever happens, you will understand, won’t you?”

The fate of a toy is to not grow, not change except to get worn and torn and be the victim of entropy, while your owner grows and changes and inevitably always grows up. But a toy is also potentially immortal if it doesn’t get too distressed, which its owner never is. So our toys have the potential to outlive us.

In Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood live a huge collection of toys

who have outlasted their owners. In David Lucas’s Lost in the Toy Museum Bunting the Cat and the collection of historic toys romp their way through a game of hide and seek in the Museum.

AND LASTLY…

Toy Names very often seem to have to state the bleeding obvious…so we have Red Ted, Stripy Ted, Blue Bear….Here is my Blue Bear who sits on my shelf in an encouraging way… But I always feel that Blue Bear is only a breath away from getting up and stumping off and having adventures of his own.And perhaps one day he will.
For more about lost toys, here’s the tale of a lost whale.

Meet the Relatives

Posted on October 13, 2018 by Mini

This September, the House of Illustration @illustrationHQ ran a competition inspired by John Vernon Lord’s ‘A Drawing a Day’ – the challenge was to make a 1 inch square picture every day. I reckoned drawing things that actually would fit in a small square would be good, so I drew buglife….

Here’s the whole lot of them:The winner was this assembly of found plastic beach rubbish by Sojung Kim-McCarthy @creativesojung : bits of plastic that shouldn’t be there, but one person’s rubbish transformed into somebody else’s treasure:

A bit of leafy wolfy reading for Autumn….

Posted on October 13, 2018 by Mini

Join the RestOfTheWorldists!

Posted on June 12, 2018 by Mini

Bonzetta, Sketching Weakly’s Animals Correspondent, writes:

This Empathy Day, let’s not forget all the non-human inhabitants of Planet Earth. The RestOfTheWorldists can’t talk, but someone needs to give them a voice.

The Last Wolf & Other Missing Animals

Posted on April 18, 2018 by Mini

This post first appeared on Picture Book Den’s Blogspot.

HALF OUR ANIMALS ARE MISSING!

A few years ago an announcement came out in the news. According to the WWF Living Planet Report, since the 1970s more than half of the wild vertebrate animals on Earth had quietly disappeared. Half of our animals are missing! – how could we have been so careless? And those were the big, visible animals. In a more recent study from Germany, 75% of flying insects – the insects on which everything else depends – were found to have vanished in 25 years. Things are quietly disappearing. Why are they disappearing?

THE LAST WOLF IN ENGLAND

The story of The Last Wolf started with Red Riding Hood. I wondered: what if, instead of taking that basket of goodies to Granny, Red is in the woods because she wants to catch a wolf. But could she actually find a wolf? In England, wolves were probably extinct by 1500, and the last wolf in Scotland may have been killed in 1680. There were once wolves, lynxes and bears, but we’ve lost all our big predators now and become a land of more Wind in the Willows-sized animals.

But walking in the woods can make you remember that the woods could once be dangerous places, where the unwary and unwise could get into trouble. It’s easy to be hidden in woods.Near where I live in Oxford are the wonderful Wytham Woods, which have been studied for over 60 years and where you can walk around and see big old trees full of lumps and crevices, which are also fun to draw. When I was thinking about the story of the Last Wolf I liked walking in Wytham Woods and imagining a wolf was there, and drawing the big old trees.

Big old tree at Wytham Woods

I collected my favourite picture book trees – which started with these by Jenny Williams:Here are more beautiful picture book trees. This is from John Masefield’s The Midnight Folk illustrated by Sara Ogilvy:and these wonderful wolfish woods are from Emma Chichester Clarke and Michael Morpurgo’s Pinocchio:I kept these at hand for inspiration. Most of my previous picture books have been set indoors in the world of man-made things, so it was exciting to go venturing into the trees.

Here are some sketchbook pages from when I was working out the Last Wolf. I wasn’t sure how to end the story. I did want to begin and end the story with the Good Old Days forest at the beginning and the shrunken woods eaten into by houses at the end, but my wise editor Joe Marriott at Penguin Random House helped me to find a more hopeful ending.

Here’s the bit in the book where Red meets the Last Wolf.And now to….

VAUCANSON’S DUCK

This is all that was last seen of Vaucanson’s Duck.It is thought to have been destroyed in a fire in 1879. The Duck was an extraordinarily lifelike automaton. It could quack and drink and eat duck-food, which it would then transform into duck-poo to the astonishment of everybody around. It looked like a living breathing bird. But the burnt remains of the Duck reveal the cogs and springs and cams which made this illusion of life happen.

ANIMALS AND US

In the usual human view of the world, it is divided into those that talk and those that don’t. This is very useful, because it means that those that talk can farm and eat those that don’t.

Rene Descartes

It is Rene Descartes I blame for this. Descartes (1596 – 1650) maintained that animals cannot reason and do not feel pain; animals are living organic creatures, but they are automata, like mechanical robots. Descartes held that only humans are conscious, have minds and souls, can learn and have language and therefore only humans are deserving of compassion.

He assumed animals were automata. But this is a big mix-up: automata – machines which create an illusion of inner life, but work by clockwork and cams – can only be made by humans. Only people make machines like this. Nature doesn’t work this way. In the animal world it seems feelings drive behaviour. Feelings give the impulse to act, and determine what that action might be. Feeling scared at a threat brings an impulse to run away. Feeling strong, brave or angry will make you act differently. If something behaves like it has an inner life – then, I argue – it probably does. If my dog behaves like it is scared, it is because it feels scared. If my dog is behaving like it is pleased to see me, then it must be because it feels pleased to see me (I hope!) Rene Descartes drew up the drawbridge, made the world into Us and Them, human and non-human. The non-human can’t talk, so doesn’t have an inner life. And that means they can be owned, eaten and treated as slaves – all very economically useful. Only with the ideas of Charles Darwin did we start to see ourselves in the continuum of the tree of life, and take our place in the unfolding story of evolution.Picture books are a fantastic direct line to empathy and imagination –– where else can you explore what it would feel like to be an egg or a biscuit or a spoon? But also the great thing about picture books is they are an arena where you can make anything you want happen. And one thing I’ve always wanted is to meet is an animal that could talk. But talking animals only really happen in books. The world of children’s books is crammed with talking animals – from Alice in Wonderland to Narnia to Philip Pullman’s daemons to Piers Torday’s Last Wild – talking animals are rife. Books are windows and doors into experiencing being someone else and that someone may be an animal.The legacy of Rene Descartes was to see animals as automata, giving an illusion of inner life, but not really having it. But automata are only possible because they are manmade – nothing in nature works this way. The inner lives of animals are worth imagining, what it must feel like to be them. Some animals end up being food. Would we be able to treat talking animals this way? It would seem a bit rude to eat someone who you could have a conversation with (see the Dish of the Day episode in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.) But maybe it is even ruder to eat someone you don’t know at all. An anonymous meat could well have had a terrible life. Maybe it is worth asking the question: Meat – Who did it use to be? Packaging is powerful stuff. It would be useful if meat packets could tell us more about the life of whoever is in the packet, so we could choose the one who had a good life before they were meat.

MEAT: who did it use to be?

MORE TREES PLEASE Red Riding Hood is a tale that came out of the terror of the forests – the ancient human struggle for survival against nature and predators. But things aren’t like this anymore – we’ve remade the landscape of our planet and its animals to support nearly 7 billion humans on Earth. It could be time now to change our Us and Them thinking. It always used to have to be ‘Humans first’, because we were small and the Wild was vast. But now the vast majority – some say 98% – of the mass of vertebrate land animals is us and our livestock. Could we give back a bit more space for the Rest of the World? We could include thinking about nature in everything we plan, and try putting a real value on our existing nature especially ancient woodlands. The amazing 4.6 billion year story of life on Earth – the complex long weaving of our life on Earth – is it OK to unravel and simplify this?

A Sunday Times headline: as it was (left) and as it could be (right)

We can tackle this by framing everything we do in the context of nature, but also we have to step back a bit – leave more land unclaimed, leave the Antarctic Krill for the Antarctic animals. This needs regulation and legislation, otherwise a tragedy of the commons always happens. The National Planning Policy Statement of 2012 put ‘sustainable development’ (is that not an impossible thing?) at the heart of the planning system. Here’s my dictionary’s definition of ‘sustainable’:

Sustainable adj 1 able to be sustained. 2 able to be maintained at a fixed level without exhausting natural resources or damaging the environment: sustainable development.

So – sustainable development means development at a level which can be continued indefinitely without environmental degradation. If you systematically convert unbuilt-on land into built-on land so the overall balance of land-use changes – this is not sustainable if carried on indefinitely even at a low level.

There’s a new draft National Planning Policy Statement out for consultation right now. We should make sure that putting space for Nature is at the heart of everything we plan. Here’s how you can give feedback. (And also here.)

Winter trees in Grosvenor Square, London

Trees are multi-level, they make habitats more three dimensional. Trees seem especially important in cities. The challenge is: can we create our buildings in sympathy with trees, plan around big trees, be generous and build with enough space for big trees? Can we value big old trees as special individual entities – to be valued like national treasures, like St Paul’s Cathedral? A big old tree gives vastly more to us than a young sapling. They are not interchangeable. We have to factor in time, put a value on time so it is not affordable to cut down a big tree. It seems that Sheffield City Council’s destruction of their street trees at the moment is demonstrating exactly how not to do things.

Plane tree in Grosvenor Square, London

Chestnut tree near Iffley Lock, Oxford

MAKING SPACE FOR NATURE

If you give animals space and habitat to live in they bounce back. Rewilding Yellowstone Park with wolves boosted the whole dimensions of biodiversity there, by returning a missing keystone species – changing the behaviour of their prey and enabling woodland to grow back. Pine martins, red kites, beavers are all coming back from the brink in the UK. Rewilding can make more for all of us by restoring a balance of predators and prey and a more complex natural world.

Every little bit of wilderness helps.

Here’s a useful cut-out-and-keep Wild Verges Award – if you see a particularly lovely roadside verge of cow parsley and wild flowers later in the year you could award it to the council concerned. Or give it to your own garden.

Nice bit of Cow Parsley in Regent’s Park

PS: The Last Wolf is out now, published by Penguin Random House. Catch it if you can!

Magic and Storytelling

Posted on April 18, 2018 by Mini

This post first appeared on Picture Book Den’s Blogspot.

My book The Bad Bunnies is all about a magic show, and while I was making it I got really interested in the history of magic and how illusions are made. So that’s what this post is about.

Yearning for Magic

Here is my cat C1973. In a basket. I’m the one holding the bicycle

When I was small I used to long for something magical to happen: for the biscuit bear I’d just baked to come to life, to find a mysterious lamp-post or cupboard full of fur coats that would transport me to another world (I was obsessed with Narnia), to make a potion & find it actually worked, for my cat to talk. But I never seemed to find the magic that I was looking for. My cat never spoke a word to me, my potions made nothing happen and all I ever found round the other side of the lamp-post …was the other side of the lamp-post.

A likely-looking lamppost

But why this yearning to witness magic?

Harry summons his patronus

When magic happens in books and films it seems so easy. We’re used to seeing magic whooshing out of Harry Potter’s wand and extraordinary transformations happening onscreen and on the page. And with the dark arts of cameras and drawing and special effects anything is possible. But what about Real Life Magic?

Real-life magic is harder. Real-life magic is really hard work. Real-life magic is putting in more practice than anyone would ever believe to make something seem effortless.Here are some acrobats doing something that looks just about impossible. But I suspect that this feat has been achieved not with magic but with an astonishing amount of practice, skill and hard work. (Plus nerves of steel.)

So one ingredient of magic is a lot of hard work, invisibly hidden away. But magic tricks done by magicians use the way our brains and vision work so that our brains are helping the illusion to happen – our brain is being the magician’s assistant.

And since our brain is being the magician’s assistant, the magician won’t have to distract or misdirect us necessarily, but will want to be directing our attention towards the magical effect…which means we do the magic – in our heads, with our story-telling brains.

Our vision is constantly trying to make a story it can understand about the world – to work out what is going on so we can predict what might happen next, and we know what to do. Optical illusions are a great way to see this in action.Here’s a grey bar on top of a grey gradient. Look at the grey colour on the bar, and what happens if I cover the gradient background, first the top:

And now the bottom:The grey bar that seemed to have such a definite shading from light to dark at first – has gone flat. Which it was all along. Our eyes couldn’t help attempting to construct an image using our ideas of relative light and shade. Here’s an invisible triangle – what can you see? Can you see its edges? Is it really there? To our eyes, a triangle is a better idea of what might happen than a non-triangle.

With optical illusions you can see your eyes and brain at work constructing the world.

The Vanishing Card

Let’s say a magician makes a card disappear and shows you that it had, then produces it out of someone’s ear. He’s shown show both sides of his hand after the disappearance – but you can’t see both sides at the same time, so have you seen there’s no card? Your brain invents a story, and the story you see is the card has vanished. The story is not that the magician has practiced flipping a card round his hand more times than you can imagine so he or she can do it with supernatural unbelievable skill. Remember those acrobats: what they do is incredible, magical – but we know how they did it – an incredible amount of working at it.

When your brain’s story & the evidence don’t match, you either change your view of what’s going on, or call it magic… The fascinating thing about magic is it reveals how our brains work: how we are storytelling all the time, constructing stories, taking shortcuts and filling in the gaps.

Arthur C Clarke famously said “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” The history of magic really runs parallel with technological innovations. For example, making a ghost appear on stage wasn’t possible until the invention of plate glass – in big sheets. The Pepper’s Ghost Illusion meant hiding a huge sheet of glass in front of the stage, angled to reflect a figure hidden below the stage – when they were illuminated with a strong light they’d magically appear. Nobody watching was expecting to see huge sheets of hidden plate glass – so they didn’t see it – and Pepper’s Ghost was a sensation.But back to books.

Books are masters of disguise – they can be like so many things. A book can be like a door, a museum, a time-machine, a theatre show.

Chris Riddell showing how books are like doors

Every reading of a picture book is like putting on a new performance. When I made The Bad Bunnies’ Magic Show I wanted to make a book that was like a theatre performance, and I wanted the reader to be the audience.

At first I wanted the bunnies’ magic tricks to be proper pop-up paper-engineering, because playing around with pop-ups is such a lot of fun. I managed to make a cabinet that could make Lovely Brenda appear and disappear.

Here’s the Brenda Cabinet in action. It’s a fold-up thing called a tetraflexibook.

But I realised the transformations I wanted to happen would be really complicated to engineer – and the complicatedness of the mechanisms might limit their visual impact. So as often happens – I found that less is more, and just cutting into the page edge with a magical sort of shape could be all the magic I needed.

Here is Cadabra doing some knife throwing.

and a bird-to-beast transformation

The bunnies’ plan is foiled

and here they are being blasted.

I also had to make a stage to work out what was behind the curtain!

My model bunny theatre

So, to return to my childhood hunt for real magic – what it would mean to see something truly inexplicable and magic happen? What if my cat did start talking to me?It would mean I’d have to rethink my entire world model…which would be weird and exciting, but alas still hasn’t had to happen.

The Great Randi, Uri Geller and the Spoons

Uri Geller is an illusionist who did a lot of spoon bending, and explained that it was happening through the force of his mind.

James Randi (the Great Randi) was an incredible magician who also put a lot of time into exposing the deceptions of fraudsters and confidence tricksters. Randi studied Geller’s performances, and worked out exactly how he was producing the illusion of a spoon bending to his will. Randi could demonstrate spoon bending exactly like Uri Geller, but when he did it, people said – “Oh that’s just a trick.” “But what about Uri Geller?” they might be asked. The reply would be “Oh no – when he’s doing it, it’s magic.”

To me, magic show the power of our story-telling minds. Storytelling is how our brains are constructing our worlds. Storytelling is how our brains construct our pasts and predict our futures – and decide what to believe.The Bad Bunnies’ Magic Show is published by Simon and Schuster Children’s Books.

Sorrow at the Supermarket

Posted on January 14, 2018 by Mini

Sketching Weakly’s new investigative journalist, Agatha Frizbee, is on the trail of another food-related mystery…

What to do if you lose your favourite toy

Posted on January 10, 2018 by Mini

You’d think it would be tricky to lose a blue whale, wouldn’t you? But my son Herbie and I managed it.

The whale had been a favourite Christmas present from Herbie’s Auntie Mavis, who had found him at the Natural History Museum Shop in London. He was furry, blue with whitish spots, had kind eyes, and was a good simple shape to hold. He was called Whaley, and as Herbie was only four and usually needed daily backup at school with a cuddly toy from home, Whaley often did support duties. However, one day in January, we arrived home from school and the whale was gone from the bag he’d been resting in. We retraced our steps back to school, sure we’d find Whaley stranded on the roadside somewhere along the way. But not a whisker. We retraced again back home, squinting under cars, behind garden walls, increasingly desperate. Still no sign of a furry cetacean.

But a whale can’t just disappear. Someone must have retrieved our whale. Maybe some small child had picked him up. But they’d need to know who to return him to, so we made posters. They looked like this:

We put our posters up on the streets and in the school, quite hopeful that boy and whale would soon be reunited. But a week went by, and no whales came out of the woodwork. The trail was going cold. We had to start giving up hope.

Then, two weeks after Whaley’s disappearance, there was a muffled whump on the front door.

Two whales, wearing scarves, with a suitcase! In the suitcase were a few pictures. Here they are:

Two whales at the Natural History Museum. Two whales leaving the museum . . . having some refreshments . . . and riding on the bus back to Oxford.

We had to piece together what must have happened: Whaley, growing a bit restless and needing more whale company, must have travelled back to London, to the Museum where he’d come from. There he’d found a sperm whale friend, wandered round the museum, had the odd snack, and then found the bus back to Oxford with his new chum.

The Sperm Whale was named Sperm Whaley. (Herbie was going through a state-the-obvious phase when inventing names.) And since then, Whaley has been roaming no more…

..that we know about.

P.S.: If you are ever unfortunate/careless enough to lose your whale, it may be helpful to know that the Natural History Museum Shop in London has an extremely efficient online delivery service. . . .

Here are some toys at large in a Natural History Museum at night….

PS If you like hearing about lost toys, you may like this:

Some useful advice:

WHAT TO DO IF YOU LOSE YOUR FAVOURITE TOY

1. Don’t panic.

2. Go back and check all the places you may have left it—e.g., (a) the garden, (b) the bus, (c) the moon, (d) Jupiter.

3. Don’t panic.

4. Put up posters in prominent places. Remember to include identifying features, like number of eyes, legs, and tentacles, like this:
5. DON’T PANIC.

6. ~~Abduct all the toys you can find and see if they’re yours.~~ NO! NO! NO! Don’t you know that stealing toys is WRONG?

7. Panic?

8. No, don’t panic. It will be in the last place you look. Things always are.