Useful work

I went to work in the woods today, thinning out trees with the local Conservation Volunteers. Not paid, but still work. Whether it was useful depends on your perspective. Our aim is to let in more light so that more plant species might grow in the undercover, along with the birds and animals that live on and off them. This won't make anyone any money, the effect won't be noticeable for a couple of years and in the long run it may do very little to hold back the global tide of environmental degradation.  So was it useful? We'll just have to wait and see.

The particular woods represent a fragment of ancient woodland that was preserved from the axe precisely because they were useful. In this case for providing timber to make charcoal for the pre-industrial production of iron. Hence the name, Forge Valley Woods. Indeed, it appears that a good deal of England's remaining ancient woodland owes its continued existence to the need for a steady supply of charcoal to make iron and steel. So, one of the side effects of Abraham Darby's work in Coalbrookdale, where he worked out how to use using coke from coal instead of charcoal, was that the remaining woods came under increasing threat. 

As a youngster I was deeply impressed by W G Hoskins' book "The making of the English landscape"; if only for the reason that I learnt that in England at least there wasn't any such thing as a natural landscape, all of it bore the marks of human interference. The last Ice Age ended about 10,000 years ago. When the trees came back they ended up covering over 90% of the UK. That figure is now down to the less than 2% that I've spent the morning fiddling with. 

I'd like to think that most work I've ever done has been useful or at least, in a generalised version of the Hippocratic oath, not harmful. As a Physicist this steered me away from the arms industry, speculative trading in the City and the countless other things that I saw people doing which, though they made money, would have left the world a better place if they hadn't been done. Instead I was drawn to research, education and the sort of voluntary political activity that gets up people's noses but points at how we might lead lives which don't  trash the place quite so thoroughly. 

As a student I had Trotskyist friends but never joined any of the parties. They kept asking me for reasons why I didn't join rather than give me reasons why I should. and this only served to bring out the obstinacy in me.  Why should I do all the heavy lifting as it were. However, one idea that did take root was the concept of a transitional demand . Put it simply these were demands that on the surface felt entirely reasonable but which actually provided a fundamental challenge to the existing capitalist system. For example, a typical demand at the time, in the face of rising unemployment, was "Job sharing with no loss of pay".

Who would have thought that the current "transitional demands" that I'm working on would centre around improving facilities for cycling. They may not seem that transitional to you but the establishment can make them seem so unreasonable that I guess they must be.

In Physics, with its simpler and more precise definition of work, useful work is simply that which doesn't end up as heat. So, is this sound and fury useful work or not? If the aim was to make the world a more disordered place then I could hardly avoid playing my part, but that's entropy for you. If all these words do is warm a few computer screens across the world then I guess it isn't useful work. But if they move someone to do something then I suppose it might be. We'll just have to wait and see.