Questions of desire are increasingly upstaging questions of need within ecological discussions. Ecology, says Chaia Heller, is as much about desire as it is about need. Among the privileged in industrialised nations there is a propensity to desire 'pure' or 'innocent' nature that is outside their society. Ecological discussions range from a longing to protect 'mother nature' to a yearning to return to a golden age that may have never existed. Wilderness exploration trips reflect a genuine wish for a meaningful connection with nature. These sojourns also echo "the myth of the romantic hero strutting off into the wilds of nature, turning away from the society he has left behind".

Not everyone is protected from immediate ecological crises. The global division of ecological labour is a harsh reality. While those in the South are forced to work to sustain the viability of life, others in the North are more concerned with establishing a quality of life. "While all people desire a better quality of life, the question of who has the freedom to fulfil these desires is largely informed by global questions of power and privilege," says Heller. When activists focus solely on questions of ecological need and survival, she insists, they fail to recognise the qualitative concerns of the poor who also share desires for a meaningful and pleasurable quality of life. The fact that most poor people cannot access the things they may desire goes ignored.

Each community, rich or poor, has its own struggle for quality of life. By reducing the ecological agenda of others to issues of need, ecological activists miss the opportunity to redirect their own desire for an ecological quality of life in a more radical direction. The desire for an ecological way of life among both poor and privileged people carries within it the nascent demand for an ecological society. The main reason for the ecological division of labour is the global hierarchical system of political and economic power which benefits the privileged who, in turn, keep the system in place. Intrinsic to this aspect is also the issue of how the privileged lot in advanced capitalist societies frame concepts of nature and desire.

The West's notions of nature, points out Heller, are often abstract and romantic, "proscribing idealised places and times to protect or return to, rather than proposing radical social change that could provide the basis for a free and ecological society". The desires of citizens of a liberal capitalist society constitute an amalgam of individualistic, competitive, and acquisitive yearnings. People start perceiving themselves as individuals destined to compete for scarce resources, "striving to fulfil a range of personal desires for sex, wealth, status or security". Desire becomes an aspect of self-interest expressed within the realms of work, politics, and even love. This is reduced to a race to accumulate private property, both material and symbolic. Spirituality and aesthetics too boil down to acquiring personal truth and beauty. There is little or no yearning to use desire to enhance a social whole greater than individual selves or to enrich the community.

The outcome is an unfortunate approach to ecology. Heller points out, "Combining an individualised and capitalistic notion of desire with an abstract and romanticised understanding of nature, we engender a movement of people who long to return to a more pristine quality of life by consuming artefacts and experiences that they deem natural. Ecology becomes a movement of people who see themselves as individuals and consumers yearning for ecological asylum rather than as a part of a social whole that strives to radically transform systems of power." Ecological criticism veers away from social change towards the protection of nature to be enjoyed by the privileged sections of society. The point is to focus on both need and desire.

Heller wants a rethinking of the notions of desire so as to radicalise the approach to ecological issues. She feels ecology should not be reduced to issues of physical need and survival, but should address the desire for an improved quality of life. Understanding of nature must be reconsidered by challenging romantic and dualistic assumptions that underlie notions of what ecological change is all about. She concludes, "Transcending romantic and individualistic approaches to ecology, we may finally face the everyday questions of social and political transformation. Ecology may then begin to strive to create the political preconditions for establishing an ecological society."

"There are no rules to screenwriting, as we all know, but one of them is this: you must never ever open your first draft screenplay with a courtroom scene."

William Goldman's bestselling Adventures in the Screen Trade presented in 1983 a cynical insider's view of the Hollywood film industry from a writer's perspective. Goldman returns with a sequel after he became an exiled untouchable only to resurrect as an acclaimed screenwriter once again. The Oscar-winning writer of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President's Men is hard-hitting and entertaining as well. Goldman's experiences not only serve as a word of caution for aspiring screenwriters, they provide an insight into how murky things remain.

This time, however, Goldman concentrates more on the art and craft of screenwriting. He takes newspaper clippings and other ideas and asks the reader to diagnose their cinematic possibilities. Goldman also gives us a new screenplay he's written (The Big A), which is critiqued -- with brutal honesty -- by other top writers. With its facts and valuable sidebars on what makes good screenwriting, this is another entertaining must-read from the man who coined what has to be the most-quoted adage about movie-business success: "Nobody knows anything."

Having spent more than 35 years in the business of screenwritng, Goldman knows when he says: "There are really two kinds of flicks . . . generic Hollywood movies, and what we now call independent films. Hollywood films . . . want to tell us truths we already know or a falsehood we want to believe. Hollywood films reinforce, reassure. Independent films . . . want to tell us things we don't want to know. Independent films unsettle."


What David Freeman wrote in The Los Angeles Times:
Goldman writes in a conversational voice, throwing in the occasional "Duh," as if he were writing dialogue for the teenage farces that have all but supplanted his own style, a potent and unsentimental mix of irony and action. He has an anti-Los Angeles bias that feels tired. He refers to L.A. as "Out There." It put me in mind of the era when New Yorkers talked about "going out to the coast." Still, this is a leisurely and perceptive look at movies and scripts and how they happen from a master of the trade. © Los Angeles Times


What Micheal Sragow remarked in The New York Times:
I finished Which Lie Did I Tell? thinking that Goldman detests most film directors not only because they can be destructive but also because he does not fully understand their art. Why should this matter in a book by a screenwriter that is largely aimed at readers who want to be screenwriters? Because the best screenwriters do not just base their work on plot making or even on remembered pleasures of the past. Like the best directors, they yearn to test the full capacity of the medium. When Robert Towne was once asked what advice he would give to prospective screenwriters, he did not talk about clipping newspaper stories or putting new spins on old plot devices, and he did not say he would instruct them on what makes projects easy or difficult to sell. He said he would urge them to see the films of Jean Renoir, because ''Renoir got more of life into his art than anybody I've seen before or since.'' Goldman is correct to insist, in his funny, gutsy way, that deluxe or prestige movies not insult our intelligence like cheap cliffhangers. What limits both these books is that they do not take us far beyond the level of Annie Wilkes. © The New York Times Company

Nazar Chagatayev, a young man, not a Russian, walked into the courtyard of the Moscow Institute of Economics. He looked wonderingly around him. He had been walking through this courtyard for several years, it was here his youth had gone, but he did not regret it. He had climbed high now, high up the mountain of his own mind from which could be seen all this summer world warmed by the setting evening sun.

Patches of grass grew in the courtyard, a rubbish can stood in one corner, farther back there was a dilapidated wooden shed, and next to this lived a single old apple tree uncared for by anyone. Near this tree lay a stone weighing, probably, a half a ton, brought from nobody knew where; still farther back the iron wheel of a nineteenth century locomotive was half buried in the ground.

The courtyard was empty. The young man sat down on the threshold of the shed, and pondered. In the office of the institute he had received confirmation of the acceptance of his thesis, and the diploma itself would be sent to him later by mail. He would not be coming back here any longer. He walked around all the useless things in the courtyard and touched them with his hand; for some reason, he wished that these things would remember him, and love him. But he didn't believe they would. From childhood memories he knew how strange and sad it is after a long absence to see a familiar place again, for these unmoving objects have no memory and do not recognize the stirrings of a stranger's heart.

An old garden grew behind the shed. They had set up tables, strung temporary lights, and arranged various decorations. The director of the institute had picked this date for an evening celebration of the graduation of Soviet economists and engineers. Nazar Chagatayev walked out of the courtyard of his institute to his dormitory, to rest and to change for the evening. He lay on his bed and unexpectedly fell asleep, with that sensation of sudden physical happiness which comes only to the young.

Later, in the evening, Chagatayev went back to the garden of the Institute of Economics. He had put on his good gray suit, saved through long years of study, and had shaved himself in front of a hand mirror. Everything he owned was either under his pillow or in the nightstand next to his bed. As he went out for the evening, Chagatayev looked with regret into the darkness of his cupboard; soon it would forget him, and the smell of Chagatayev's clothes and of his body would disappear forever from this wooden box.

The dormitory was lived in by students of other institutes, so Chagatayev went back to the institute alone. An orchestra invited from the movie theater was playing in the garden, the tables had been arranged in one long row, and above them were the bright lights that the electricians had wired between the trees. The summer night stood like a dome over the heads of those who had gathered for the celebration, to see each other for the last time, and all the fascination of this night was in the open, warm spaciousness, in the silence of the sky and of the garden.

The music played. The young people who were finishing at the institute sat at the tables, ready to go out into the land around them, to build their own happiness. The musician's violin died away like a voice fading away in the distance.

It seemed to Chagatayev that this was some person crying beyond the horizon—maybe in that country known to no one where he had once upon a time been born and where right now his mother either was living or had died. © New York Review of Books

Duncan Brack and his colleagues, in this book, deal with the interaction of two of the key driving forces in today's world: trade liberalisation and environmental protection. The key environmental aspect discussed is the one about climate change. What is discussed in correlation with each other are the Kyoto Protocol and the World Trade Organization (WTO).

Brack, Grubb and Windram start off with the possible trade impacts of climate change policies. The efforts of industrialised countries to limit CO2 emissions affect other countries by means of impacts on international energy markets, trade in energy-intensive goods, overall trade structures and volumes, and reduced climatic impacts. They argue that "raising energy costs to energy-intensive manufacturing could result in these activities migrating to other countries, but precisely for that reason these sectors are likely to be shielded in one way or another". If income goes down, so do imports. The authors feel that many economic models neglect the scope for "no regret" measures which reduce emissions without reducing aggregate income. Many such models also blow income-related trade impacts out of proportion and do not even consider trade liberalisation measures. Moreover, they ignore the offsetting benefits of reducing climate change.

In countries which are striving to reduce energy demand and CO2 emissions, application of minimum energy efficiency standards and labels showing energy consumption have become quite widespread. The authors feel the objections to trade barriers being minimised through harmonisation of standards are serious. For instance, product standards are static instruments that can frustrate dynamic and innovative developments. Standards also vary with consumer preferences. Brack and his co-authors say, "It seems logical to conclude that the costs of trying to agree common energy efficiency standards across any more than a small group of countries outweigh the benefits, though clearly the development and evolution of stronger national standards should be encouraged. There is a much stronger case, however, for attempting to harmonise labelling requirements and testing procedures, in order to reduce the bureaucracy and costs involved in exporting to different destinations."

The authors' contentions about energy pricing policies are likely to be controversial, in their own words. They feel energy and carbon taxes have an important role to play in incorporating environmental externalities in prices and decisionmaking. They contend that revenue recycling either through general reductions in other taxes and through targeted recycling for energy-intensive sectors is preferable to exemptions. They also suggest the use of border taxes and subsidies which can capture environmental externalities. Removal of tax exemptions on international aviation and marine transport (both major sources of greenhouse gas emissions) could be most welcome, but they do not foresee such a radical change in the near future. They also dwell at length on the advantages of sub-global taxation of aviation bunker fuels. This they conclude on basis of their argument that marine transport is energy efficient and international aviation is not.

Brack and others do not believe that emission reduction units can automatically be considered recognisable items under the WTO. On the other hand, the trading systems themselves can be considered services under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). They are also optimistic that the involvement of the WTO system in the global emissions market to be created under the emissions trading provisions of the Kyoto Protocol would be beneficial to the flexibility mechanisms of the protocol -- the emissions trading system, joint implementation, and the clean development mechanism.