Tag: George Monbiot

Troubling times.

We all could easily be drinking in ‘the last chance saloon’.

After I published my book, Learning From Dogs, last December I was invited to a number of book signing events. In each case I gave a short talk of about 20 minutes in which I explained the philosophy behind the book. Perhaps no better articulated than by Dr. Jim Goodbrod’s Foreword to the book. Take this paragraph, for instance, from that Foreword:

Dogs represent to me that innocence lost. Their emotions are pure. They live in the present. They do not suffer existential angst over what they are. They do not covet material wealth. They offer us unconditional love and devotion. Although they certainly have not reached the great heights of intellectual achievement of us humans (I know for a fact that this is true after having lived with a Labrador Retriever for several years), at the same time they have not sunk to the depths of depravity to which we are susceptible. It could be argued that I am being overly anthropomorphic, or that dogs are simply mentally incapable of these thoughts. But nevertheless, metaphorically or otherwise, I believe that dogs demonstrate a simple and uncorrupted approach to life from which we all could benefit.

During my opening talks on each occasion I would ask the audience: “So raise your hands if you are someone who is not worried about the future?”

There was never a raised hand!

My introduction to a recent essay published by George Monbiot that is republished here with Mr. Monbiot’s permission.

ooOOoo

The Drums of War

24th November 2016

The combination of automation, complexity and climate change is dangerous in ways we haven’t even begun to grasp.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 23^rd November 2016

Wave the magic wand and the problem goes away. Those pesky pollution laws, carbon caps and clean power plans: swish them away and the golden age of blue-collar employment will return. This is Donald Trump’s promise, in his video message on Monday, in which he claimed that unleashing coal and fracking will create “many millions of high-paid jobs”. He will tear down everything to make it come true.

But it won’t come true. Even if we ripped the world to pieces in the search for full employment, leaving no mountain unturned, we would not find it. Instead, we would merely jeopardise the prosperity – and the lives – of people everywhere. However slavishly governments grovel to corporate Luddism, they will not bring the smog economy back.

No one can deny the problem Trump claims to be addressing. The old mining and industrial areas are in crisis throughout the rich world. And we have seen nothing yet.

I have just re-read the study published by the Oxford Martin School in 2013 on the impacts of computerisation. What jumps out today, to put it crudely, is that jobs in the rustbelts and rural towns that voted for Trump are at high risk of automation; while the professions of many Clinton supporters are at low risk.

The jobs most likely to be destroyed are in mining, raw materials, manufacturing, transport and logistics, cargo handling, warehousing and retailing, construction (pre-fabricated buildings will be assembled by robots in factories), office support, administration and telemarketing. So what, in the counties that voted for Trump, will be left?

Farm jobs have mostly gone already. Service and care work, where hope for some appeared to lie, will be threatened by a further wave of automation, as service robots – commercial and domestic – take over. Yes, there will be jobs in the green economy, more and better than any that could be revived in the fossil economy. But they won’t be enough to fill the gaps, and many will be in the wrong places.

At lower risk is work that requires negotiation, persuasion, originality and creativity. The management and business jobs that demand these skills are comparatively safe from automation; so are lawyers, teachers, researchers, doctors, journalists, actors and artists. The jobs that demand the highest educational attainment are the least susceptible to computerisation. The divisions tearing America apart will only widen.

Even this bleak analysis does not capture in full the underlying reasons why good, abundant jobs will not return to the places that need them most. As Paul Mason argues in Postcapitalism, the impacts of information technology go way beyond simple automation: it is likely to destroy the very basis of the market economy and the relationship between work and wages.

And, as the independent thinker Paul Arbair notes in the most interesting essay I have read this year, beyond a certain level of complexity, economies become harder to sustain. There’s a point at which further complexity delivers diminishing returns; society is then overwhelmed by its demands and breaks down. He argues that the political crisis in Western countries suggests we may have reached this point.

In the same video address on Monday, Trump announced that he will withdraw America from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). He is right to do so, for the wrong reasons. Like TTIP and CETA, the TPP is a fake trade treaty, whose primary impact is to extend corporate property rights at the expense of both competition and democracy. But withdrawal will not, as he claims, “bring jobs and industry back to American shores”. The work in Mexico and China that Trump wants to reclaim will evaporate long before it can be repatriated.

As for the high-quality, high-waged working class jobs he promised, these are never handed down from on high. They are secured through the organisation of labour. But the unions were smashed by Ronald Reagan, and collective bargaining has been suppressed ever since by casualisation and fragmentation. So how is this going to happen? Out of the kindness of Trump’s heart? Kindness, Trump, heart?

But it’s not just Trump. Clinton and Sanders also made impossible promises to bring back jobs. Half the platform of both parties was based on a delusion. The social, environmental and economic crises we face require a complete reappraisal of the way we live and work. The failure by mainstream political parties to produce a new and persuasive economic narrative, that does not rely on sustaining impossible levels of growth and generating illusory jobs, provides a marvellous opening for demagogues everywhere.

Governments across the world are making promises they cannot keep. In the absence of a new vision, their failure to materialise will mean only one thing: something or someone must be found to blame. As people become angrier and more alienated; as the complexity and connectivity of global systems becomes ever harder to manage; as institutions like the European Union collapse and as climate change renders parts of the world uninhabitable, forcing hundreds of millions of people from their homes, the net of blame will be cast ever wider.

Eventually the anger that cannot be assuaged through policy will be turned outwards, towards other nations. Faced with a choice of hard truths or easy lies, politicians and their supporters in the media will discover that foreign aggression is among the few options for political survival. I now believe that we will see war between the major powers within my lifetime. Which ones it will involve, and on what apparent cause, remains far from clear. But something that once seemed remote now looks probable to me.

A complete reframing of economic life is needed not “just” to suppress the existential risk that climate change presents (a risk marked by a 20°C anomaly reported in the Arctic Ocean while I was writing this article), but other existential threats as well – including war. Today’s governments, whether they are run by Trump or Obama or May or Merkel, lack the courage and imagination even to open this conversation. It is left to others to conceive of a more plausible vision than trying to magic back the good old days. The task for all those who love this world and fear for our children is to imagine a different future, rather than another past.

http://www.monbiot.com

ooOOoo

On my desk in front of me is a small booklet of business quotations that was published by Speedwing Training Ltd, part of the British Airways Group of Companies. I have had it for years. I randomly opened the booklet and there on page 7 is this quotation (and the emboldening is mine):

Our task is not to fix the blame for the past, but to fix the course for the future.

John F. Kennedy

Mr. Monbiot speaks for the millions of people who need that course for the future NOW!

A political diversion.

This essay from George Monbiot just has to be read as widely as possible.

Dear followers of this blog know that from time to time I dip into politics. I do so because something I read strikes me with such force that I want others to read the article or essay. Not infrequently, my ‘dip’ is in the form of republishing an essay from George Monbiot who, long ago, gave me blanket permission to republish his essays. That is the case today.

learningfromdogs_3dbook_500x — **Buy The Book**

I was inspired to write my book, subsequently self-published last December, because I truly believe that the values that we see in our longest animal companions are values that we, as in our societies, from top to bottom, have to embrace if we are to stand any chance of surviving as a species.

Reflect on the fact that dogs do not lie, they do not set out to deceive or influence others for their own personal gain and they are utterly creatures of integrity.

OK, I can hear some of you thinking that dogs are dogs and humans are humans and it’s just plain daft to link the two in this fashion. My only answer to that is to read the book or, at the very least, download and read the first twenty-five pages (for free). Better still purchase the book and have 50% of my net income donated to the Rogue Valley Humane Society.

On the 28th July, George Monbiot published an essay entitled So Much For Sovereignty. I read the essay and, frankly, was apalled at what George was describing: the background of the UK’s new international trade secretary, Liam Fox, recently appointed by Theresa May.

Read it for yourself and see if you react the same way that I did!

ooOOoo

So Much For Sovereignty

28th July 2016

To this government, “taking back control” means handing Britain to a different set of foreign powers

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 27^th July 2016

What does it mean to love your country? What does it mean to defend its sovereignty? For some of the leaders of the Brexit campaign, it means reducing the United Kingdom to a franchise of corporate capital, governed from head offices overseas. They will take us out of Europe to deliver us into the arms of other powers.

No one embodies this contradiction as much of the man now charged with determining the scope of our sovereignty: the new international trade secretary, Liam Fox. He explained his enthusiasm for leaving Europe thus: “We’ll be able to make our own laws unhindered by anyone else, and our democratic parliament will not be overruled by a European Court.” But of all the people Theresa May could have appointed to this post, he seems to me the most likely to ensure that our parliament and laws are overruled by foreign bodies.

Dr Fox looks to me like a corporate sleeper cell implanted in government. In 2011, he resigned his post as defence secretary in disgrace, after his extracurricular interests were exposed. He had set up an organisation called Atlantic Bridge, financed in large part by a hedge fund owner. Atlantic Bridge formed a partnership with a corporate lobbying group called the American Legislative Exchange Council, which is funded by tobacco, pharmaceutical and oil companies. Before it was struck off by the Charity Commission, it began assembling a transatlantic conclave of people who wished to see public services privatised and corporations released from regulation.

He allowed a lobbyist to attend his official meetings, without government clearance. He made misleading statements about these meetings, which were later disproved. It seems extraordinary to me that a man with such a past could have been brought back into government, let alone given such a crucial and sensitive role. Most newspapers have brushed his inconvenient history under the political carpet. He is, after all, their man.

At every turn he promotes the millionaire’s agenda, while urging that the social contract which makes this country more or less habitable be ripped apart. He wants “a systematic dismantling of universal benefits … turning them into tax cuts”. He has argued for a three to five-year holiday from capital gains tax. He wants to “freeze public spending for at least three years and probably more” and to deregulate the labour market, making workers easier to fire. He suggests that access to housing benefit should be limited for people under 25.

This is the man who has been put in charge of making new trade agreements. What he wants to do with them is pretty clear. “We need to see a reinvigoration of our transatlantic relationship,” he argues. “We have a low regulation and low taxation environment which is only likely to improve outside the EU.” Improve, in this context, means becoming yet more hostile to human welfare, social mobility and the defence of the living world.

One of the legitimate complaints against the EU is its determination to drag us into treaties that claim to be about trade but are really about releasing multinational corporations from democratic control. Three of the agreements it is trying to impose – TTIP (the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership), CETA (the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement) and the Trade in Services Agreement – make a mockery of parliamentary sovereignty.

They threaten to reduce to the lowest common denominator the laws protecting us from predatory finance, the exploitation of workers, food adulteration, climate change and environmental destruction. They threaten to force the privatisation of public services. They would allow corporations to sue governments for compensation in offshore tribunals that – unlike the European Court Dr Fox professes to hate – are unaccountable, opaque and wildly imbalanced. The EU has no mandate to strike such agreements: a consultation on the offshore tribunals TTIP proposes attracted 150,000 responses, 97% of which were negative.

Leaving Europe should enable us to leave behind biased, destructive treaties of this kind; we will, after all, have to renegotiate most of our trade agreements. But by putting the Fox in charge of the chicken coop, Theresa May seems determined to replace them with something even worse.

The corporate army is already at the gates. The Republican senator Tom Cotton proposes that Britain should join the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Using the kind of international tribunals that TTIP threatens to impose, NAFTA has undermined labour rights and environmental protection. It has blocked attempts to produce more progressive laws and greatly restricted legislative sovereignty. Whether we formally join NAFTA, or connect to that trading area through TTIP or another such agreement, the results will gravely threaten our sovereignty – unless negotiations are run on an entirely different basis.

In response to the Philip Green scandal, Theresa May says she wants to “tackle corporate irresponsibility” and “reform capitalism so that it works for everyone not just the privileged few.” We have no idea what she means, but here’s where it should begin. Before her government starts negotiating any new trade treaties, it should open a public consultation about their purpose and scope. The UK’s trading relationships should be debated in parliament and the people of this nation should be allowed to determine how much control over national life our representatives should retain, and how much should be ceded to international agreements and international bodies.

Does this mean a referendum? If we can be trusted to decide whether or not to share our sovereignty with Europe, should we not also be trusted to decide whether or not to share it with transnational capital?

But the Conservative vision of sovereignty is highly selective. People like Dr Fox appear to hate much of what others love about this country: the NHS, our public broadcasters, our social safety net, the protection of the countryside, the notion that power resides in the people, rather than in corporations and their shadowy lobbyists. There are traitors in our midst, who would rip down our most treasured institutions on behalf of the transnational elite and its offshore holdings. This, it seems, is what they mean by taking back control.

http://www.monbiot.com

ooOOoo

Elsewhere on this blog I describe a little of what this blog is about:

The underlying theme of Learning from Dogs is about truth, integrity, honesty and trust in every way. We use the life of dogs as a metaphor.

Truth, integrity, honesty and trust: Those are the qualities we need in our leaders in so many countries. Not in the future but Now!

In defence of sovereignty and democracy.

The challenges facing the European Union ripple out across the whole of the free world.

I note that this is the second Friday where there is an abrupt change from the run of posts during the previous few days. For last Friday I republished a George Monbiot article on Rigging the Market and today there is another Monbiot article that I want to share with you; shared with you with the kind permission of Mr. Monbiot.

Unlike last Friday’s Monbiot article that clearly had global implications, at first sight this article about the European Union has no relevance to those of us not living with EU boundaries. But that would be wrong. For the importance of protecting a country’s sovereignty and the democratic processes within that country is supreme across all democratically elected governments.

ooOOoo

The Lesser Evil

10th February 2016

I am starting to hate the European Union. But I will vote to stay in.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian, 10th February 2016

By instinct, like many on the left, I am a European. I recognise that many issues – perhaps most – can no longer be resolved only within our borders. Among them are grave threats to our welfare and our lives: climate change and the collapse of the living world; the spread of epidemics whose vectors are corporations (obesity, diabetes and diseases associated with smoking, alcohol and air pollution); the global wealth-grab by the very rich; antibiotic resistance; terrorism and conflict.

I recognise that the only legitimate corrective to transnational power is transnational democracy. So I want to believe; I want to belong. But it seems to me that all that is good about the European Union is being torn down, and all that is bad enhanced and amplified.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the draft agreement secured by David Cameron. For me, the most disturbing elements are those which have been widely described in the media as “uncontroversial”: the declarations on regulations and competitiveness. The draft decisions on these topics are a long series of euphemisms, but they amount to a further dismantling of the safeguards defending people, places and the living world.

What David Cameron described in parliament as “pettifogging bureaucracy” are the rules that prevent children from being poisoned by exhaust fumes, rivers from being turned into farm sewers and workers from being exploited by their bosses. What the European Commission calls reducing the “regulatory burden for EU business operators” often means increasing the costs the rest of us must carry: costs imposed on our pockets, our health and our quality of life. “Cutting red tape” is everywhere portrayed as a good thing. In reality, it often means releasing business from democracy.

There is nothing rational or proportionate about the deregulation the European Commission contemplates. When Edmund Stoiber, the conservative former president of Bavaria, reviewed European legislation, he discovered that the combined impact of all seven environmental directives incurred less than 1% of the cost to business caused by European law. But, prodded by governments like ours, the Commission threatens them anyway. It is still considering a merger and downgrading of the habitats and birds directives, which are all that impede the destruction of many of our precious places and rare species.

Alongside such specific threats, the European Union is engineering treaties that challenge the very principle of parliamentary control of corporations. As well as the transatlantic trade and investment partnership (TTIP), it has been quietly negotiating something even worse: a trade in services agreement (TISA). These claim to be trade treaties, but they are nothing of the kind. Their purpose is to place issues in which we have a valid and urgent interest beyond the reach of democratic politics. And the European Commission defends them against all comers.

Are such tendencies accidental, emergent properties of a highly complex system, or are they hardwired into the structure of the European Union? The more I see, the more it seems to me that the EU’s problems are intrinsic and systemic. The organisation that began as an industrial cartel still works at the behest of the forces best equipped to operate across borders: transnational corporations. The European Commission remains a lobbyists’ paradise: opaque, sometimes corruptible, almost unnavigable by those without vast resources.

People like the former home secretary Alan Johnson, who claim that the European Union is a neutral political forum – “simply a place we have built where we can manage our interdependence” – are mythmakers. They’re the equivalent of the tabloid fabulists who maintain that European rules will reclassify Kent as part of France, force people to trade in their old vibrators for new ones, and ensure that dead pets are boiled for half an hour in a pressure cooker before they are buried.

So should those who seek a decent, protective politics vote to stay or vote to leave? If you wish to remain within the European Union because you imagine it is a progressive force, I believe you are mistaken. That time, if it ever existed, has passed. The EU is like democracy, diplomacy and old age. There is only one thing to be said for it: it is not as bad as the alternative.

If you are concerned about arbitrary power, and the ability of special interests to capture and co-opt the apparatus of the state, the UK is in an even worse position outside the European Union than it is within. Though the EU’s directives are compromised and under threat, they are a lot better than nothing. Without them we can kiss goodbye to the protection of our wildlife, our health, our conditions of employment and, one day perhaps, our fundamental rights. Without a formal constitution, with our antiquated voting arrangements and a corrupt and corrupting party funding system, nothing here is safe.

The government champs and rears against the European rules that constrain it. It was supposed to have ensured that all our rivers were in good ecological condition by the end of last year: instead, lobbied by Big Farmer and other polluting businesses, it has achieved a grand total of 17%. On behalf of the motor industry, it has sought to undermine new European limits on air pollution, after losing a case in the Supreme Court over its failure to implement existing laws. Ours is the least regulated labour market in Europe, and workers here would be in an even worse fix without the EU.

On behalf of party donors, old school chums, media proprietors and financial lobbyists, the government is stripping away any protections that European law has not nailed down. The EU’s enthusiasm for treaties like TTIP is exceeded only by David Cameron’s. His defence of national sovereignty, subsidiarity and democracy mysteriously evaporates as soon as they intrude upon corporate power.

I believe that we should remain within the union. But we should do so in the spirit of true scepticism: a refusal to believe anything until we have read the small print; a refusal to suspend our disbelief. Is it possible to be a pro-European Eurosceptic? I hope so, because that is what I am.

http://www.monbiot.com

ooOOoo

Two things come to mind by way of finishing today’s post.

The first is that quotation by Douglas Adams:

To give real service you must add something which cannot be bought or measured with money, and that is sincerity and integrity.

“.. sincerity and integrity.” As we see day after day in the behaviour of our dogs.

The second is Section 1 of ARTICLE 1 of The Constitution of The United States of America.

All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

Enough said!

Oil, corruption and public money.

Nothing at all to do with dogs, or with integrity if it comes to that!

Regular followers of this place know that I am a tremendous fan of George Monbiot, the Englishman who so regularly exposes stuff that needs to be aired and discussed. As his About page explains:

Here are some of the things I love: my family and friends, salt marshes, arguments, chalk streams, Russian literature, kayaking among dolphins, diversity of all kinds, rockpools, heritage apples, woods, fishing, swimming in the sea, gazpacho, ponds and ditches, growing vegetables, insects, pruning, forgotten corners, fossils, goldfinches, etymology, Bill Hicks, ruins, Shakespeare, landscape history, palaeoecology, Gavin and Stacey and Father Ted.

Here are some of the things I try to fight: undemocratic power, corruption, deception of the public, environmental destruction, injustice, inequality and the misallocation of resources, waste, denial, the libertarianism which grants freedom to the powerful at the expense of the powerless, undisclosed interests, complacency.

Here is what I fear: other people’s cowardice.

I still see my life as a slightly unhinged adventure whose perpetuation is something of a mystery. I have no idea where it will take me, and no ambitions other than to keep doing what I do. So far it’s been gripping.

Way back in the early days of Learning from Dogs, the blog that is, not the book, George was very gracious in giving me blanket permission to republish his posts, and many of them have appeared in this place.

So now read George Monbiot’s latest Rigging the Market. It is yet another example of what is going wrong in these times.

ooOOoo

Rigging the Market

3rd February 2016

Oil, the industry that threatens us with destruction, is being bailed out with public money

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 3^rd February 2016

Those of us who predicted, during the first years of this century, an imminent peak in global oil supplies could not have been more wrong. People like the energy consultant Daniel Yergin, with whom I disputed the topic, appear to have been right: growth, he said, would continue for many years, unless governments intervened.

Oil appeared to peak in the United States in 1970, after which production fell for 40 years. That, we assumed, was the end of the story. But through fracking and horizontal drilling, production last year returned to the level it reached in 1969. Twelve years ago, the Texas oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens announced that “never again will we pump more than 82 million barrels”. By the end of 2015, daily world production reached 97 million.

Instead of a collapse in the supply of oil, we confront the opposite crisis: we’re drowning in the stuff. The reasons for the price crash – an astonishing slide from $115 a barrel to $30 over the past 20 months – are complex: among them are weaker demand in China and a strong dollar. But an analysis by the World Bank finds that changes in supply have been a much greater factor than changes in demand. Oil production has almost doubled in Iraq, as well as in the US. Saudi Arabia has opened its taps, to try to destroy the competition and sustain its market share: a strategy that some peak oil advocates once argued was impossible.

The outcomes are mixed. Cheaper oil means that more will be burnt, accelerating climate breakdown. But it also means less investment in future production. Already, $380 billion that was to have been ploughed into oil and gas fields has been held back. The first places to be spared are those in which extraction is most difficult or hazardous. Fragile ecosystems in the Arctic, in rainforests, in remote and stormy seas, have been granted a stay of execution.

BP reported a massive loss on Tuesday, partly because of low prices. A falling oil price drags down the price of gas, exposing coal mining companies to the risk of bankruptcy: good riddance to them. But some renewables firms are being tanked by the same forces: just as natural gas prices plunge, governments like the UK’s are stripping them of their subsidies. One day they will compete unaided, but not yet.

To cheer or lament these vicissitudes is pointless. They are chance events that counteract each other, and will at some point be reversed. The oil age, that threatens the conditions sustaining life on Earth, will come to an end through political, not economic, change. But the politics, for now, are against us.

Already, according to the IMF, more money is spent, directly and indirectly, on subsidising fossil fuels than on funding health services. The G20 countries alone spend over three times as much public money on oil, gas and coal than the whole world does on renewable energy. In 2014, subsidies for fossil fuel production in the UK reached £5 billion. Enough? Oh no. While essential public services are being massacred through want of funds, last year the government announced a further £1.3 billion in tax breaks for oil companies in the North Sea. Much of this money went to companies based overseas. They must think we’re mad.

Last week, David Cameron flew to Aberdeen, where he announced another £250 million of funding for, er, free enterprise, much (though not all) of which will be used to prop up oil and gas. A further £20 million of public money will be spent on seismic testing. Expect more whale strandings, and ask yourself why the industry that threatens our prosperity shouldn’t cover its own bloody costs.

The energy secretary, Amber Rudd, says she stands “100% behind” this “fantastic industry”. She will “build a bridge to the future for UK oil and gas”. Had she been born 300 years ago, I expect she would have said the same about the slave trade. In a few years’ time, her observations will look about as pertinent and about as ethical.

Oil companies have already been granted “ministerial buddies” to “improve access to government” – as if they didn’t have enough already. Now they get an “oil and gas ambassador”, and a new ministerial group, to “reiterate the UK Government’s commitment to supporting the oil and gas industry”. A leaked letter shows that Amber Rudd and other ministers want to silence local people, by transferring the power to decide whether fracking happens from elected councils to an unelected commission. Let’s sack the electorate and appoint a new one.

Compare all this to the government’s treatment of renewables. Local people have been given special new powers to stop onshore windfarms from being built. To the renewables companies Amber Rudd says this, “We need to work towards a market where success is driven by your ability to compete in a market, not by your ability to lobby government”. Strangely, the same rules do not apply to the oil companies. Your friends get protection. The free market is reserved for enemies.

Yes, I do mean enemies. An energy transition threatens the kind of people who attend the Conservative party’s fundraising balls. It corrodes the income of old school friends and weekend guests. For all the talk of enterprise, old money still nurtures its lively hatred of new money, and those who control the public purse use it to protect the incumbents from the parvenus. As they did for the bankers, our political leaders ensure that everyone must pay the costs imposed by the fossil fuel companies – except the fossil fuel companies.

So they lock us into the 20^th Century, into industrial decline and air pollution, stranded assets and – through climate change – systemic collapse. Governments of this country cannot resist the future forever. Eventually they will succumb to the inexorable logic, and recognise that most of the vast accretions of fossil plant life in the Earth’s crust must be left where they are. And those massive expenditures of public money will prove to be worthless.

Crises expose corruption: that is one of the basic lessons of politics. The oil price crisis finds politicians with their free-market trousers round their ankles. When your friends are in trouble, the rigours imposed religiously upon the poor and public services suddenly turn out to be negotiable. Throw money at them, trash their competitors, rig the outcome: those who deserve the least receive the most.

http://www.monbiot.com

ooOOoo

I don’t know about you but I take the view that this essay from Monbiot is to be embraced. Simply because the more that stuff like this is aired, discussed and shared then the more likely that we ordinary folk can make a social and a political difference.

Give me the integrity of a dog anytime!

Role model extraordinare!

In salute of Sir David Attenborough.

Yesterday, a wonderful number of readers ‘Liked’ my set of photographs on the theme of being a wildlife photographer. Thus it was providential, when deliberating on what to write for today’s post, to see that George Monbiot had published an article covering his recent interview with Sir David.

Before republishing that interview, let’s take a look at the man; Sir David that is!

Wikipedia has a comprehensive and fulsome description of him, that opens, thus:

Sir David Frederick Attenborough/ˈætənbʌrə/OM CH CVO CBE FRS FLS FZS FSA Kt (born 8 May 1926)^[2]^[3] is an English broadcaster and naturalist.

He is best known for writing and presenting the nine Life series, in conjunction with the BBC Natural History Unit, which collectively form a comprehensive survey of animal and plant life on the planet. He is also a former senior manager at the BBC, having served as controller of BBC Two and director of programming for BBC Television in the 1960s and 1970s. He is the only person to have won BAFTAs for programmes in each of black and white, colour, HD, and 3D.

Attenborough is widely considered a national treasure in Britain, although he himself does not like the term.^[4]^[5]^[6] In 2002 he was named among the 100 Greatest Britons following a UK-wide vote.^[7] He is the younger brother of director, producer and actor Richard Attenborough.^[8]

Then I want you to view this short video:

Published on May 2, 2014

From across YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, we’ve taken your comments during #AttenboroughWeek and made this video as a thank you to everyone who got involved. Click on the annotations to see each of the clips in full.

Now on to the George Monbiot interview, republished here with Mr. Monbiot’s kind and generous permission.

ooOOoo

Rare Specimen

23rd January 2016

My interview, in his 90^th year, with Sir David Attenborough

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 23^rd January 2016

You cannot meet David Attenborough without reflecting on the lottery of life. He bounces into the room unaccompanied, a little stiff in the lower back perhaps, but otherwise breezy and lithe. He is sound in wind and limb, vision and hearing, his eyes sparkle, his face is scarcely rumpled by time. Yet in three months he will celebrate his 90th birthday.

While other people’s worlds tend to shrink with age, his seems to expand. His curiousity ranges as widely as ever. His ability to understand and assimilate new information seems unabated. “Oh, I forget things,” he claims. When I press him for examples, he tells me, “Well, where I put my glasses, I had them about three minutes ago and they have simply evaporated, they’ve dematerialised. Oh yeah, and I forget engagements.”

But these, surely, are afflictions suffered by anyone immersed in the world of ideas. He has no diffulty remembering the things that fascinate him. When I ask him about his new project, his body bundles up with excitement.

“Luminous earthworms! Did you know about luminous earthworms? Aaah, aaah, yes, very interesting. I’m doing a thing on bioluminescence … and with a little research we discovered that there are earthworms in France that are luminous – in the earth! Why? Yes, why?! Well at the moment I am just thinking about it. As you well know there’s a gene for luminosity and it’s very widespread, and so you would like to suppose that it has some antiquity. So maybe luminosity was a by-product of digestive processes or energy processes or something.

“And if it is, the exciting thing is – what about all those graptolites, what if they were luminous?! In which case, now you suddenly realise that trilobites have bloody good eyes, so maybe they were there too! Wow!” (Graptolites and trilobites are long-extinct marine animals).

I mention his latest film, which will air on Sunday, about the excavation and reconstruction of the skeletons of Titanosaurs, the biggest terrestrial animals known to have walked the Earth. Why, I ask, do dinosaurs exert such a grip, especially on the minds of children?

“Partly because nearly all the adults have got it wrong. It’s one of the easiest subjects for a kid – or it was when I was a kid – for you to expose your parents, because you had just read the new cigarette card and there was a name there, a polysyllabic name, your parents had never heard of.”

And there he still was, I realised, the boy with his cigarette cards, his excitement about creatures that lived many millions of years ago undimmed by the passage of mere decades.

So this is what must have happened. On one of his early expeditions through a remote tract of rainforest, he stumbled across the elixir of life. He has been hoarding it ever since and surreptitiously sipping a little every day. Either that, or he is simply the luckiest man alive: fit, bright, relevant, in love with life, the last man standing.

He has the decency to be aware of his luck. “People sitting in corners doing nothing aren’t there because they want to sit in the corner doing nothing. They would much rather be doing [things]. And I am lucky enough to be able to do them. It would be very ungrateful to have that facility and not use it.” He has, of course, no intention of retiring.

There is only one lifeform he is reluctant to discuss, the scientific curiosity known as Sir David Attenborough. He created a powerful sense, when talking, of intimacy and candour, leaning in, holding my gaze, twinkling and gurning, speaking in his confidential whisper. But when I came to read the transcript of our interview I found that what had felt like frank confession was nothing of the kind. What he said with his body bore no relation to what he said with his words.

I pressed him several times on an issue with which I have long been struggling. How do those of us who love the natural world cope with its loss? He must have seen more than his fair share of devastation.

“Oh yes, of course. You go to Borneo and see oil palms everywhere where there was forest. You see people everywhere where there weren’t people.”

“And how does it affect you, seeing those changes?”

“Well you feel apprehensive for the future, of course you do.”

“So how do you cope?”

“I don’t have a rosy view of life, of the future, I look at my grandchildren and think ‘what are they going to have to deal with?’, of course I do. How could you not?”

But what about the emotional impact? Does he not get depressed? Does he have a mechanism for avoiding depression? He answered by bouncing the issue onto someone else.

“I once asked exactly the same question of Peter Scott [the great British conservationist, who died in 1989]. And he said, ‘Well you can only do what you can do.’ So what I do is what I can, but I wish to goodness I had done a tenth of what Peter did.”

While his self-deprecation is charming, it also seems defensive. I pictured those two quintessentially English men stroking their chins and repeating “you can only do what you can do” to each other, and thought of a scene in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. An army captain pays a call on one of his men, who is lying in bed, nonchalently reading a book. “What’s all the trouble, then?”. “Bitten, sir. During the night”. “Hmm. Whole leg gone, eh … Any idea how it happened?”. “None whatsoever. Complete mystery to me. Woke up just now, one sock too many.” Monty Python made their television debut on BBC2, commissioned by the controller at the time, a certain David Attenborough.

When talking in general terms, he uses the word “I”. When asked to talk about his feelings, he says “you”. Some of this is perhaps generational: it was once considered vulgar to discuss such matters. But perhaps his great fame has also obliged him to develop a carapace. I asked whether his public life has blurred the boundaries of his private self.

“There has always been the private and the public thing in you, in everybody”, he replies. “You are different things to different people, to your children, to your television producer.”

Can he go anywhere in public without being mobbed?

“I have to confess the ubiquity of the selfie is, er – On occasion when they say ‘do you mind’, I say ‘well, I am off duty at the moment’, and they say ‘oh are you?’, by which time I’m three yards down the road. But I do have to remember that they are the people who … listen to me, you know, and so you try not to be rude.”

I asked him if he ever gets lonely. His wife, Jane Oriel, died almost 20 years ago.

“Hmm? Oh. My daughter lives in the same house as me now and has done for many years. So once a day I see her, she runs my business affairs and, you know, I’m very lucky.”

He is just as discreet about the politics surrounding his work. On the day I met him, the controller of BBC2 and BBC4, Kim Shillinglaw, lost her post. He was plainly delighted, chuckling and winking and grinning when he asked me whether I had read that morning’s news. But he was careful to say nothing quotable. Television producers I know expressed intense frustration at her instant and unexplained dismissal of programmes they proposed on environmental themes.

But the problem, as I perceive it, is much wider than that: has there not been a systemic failure by television to cover the great crisis of our age: the gradual collapse of the Earth’s living systems?

“I am absolutely certain that the general public at large is more aware of the natural world than it was even before the industrial revolution,” he replies, “and that people are well informed about not only what the world contains but the processes that go on. Television has made a contribution to that. … I greatly regret the fact that there are no or very few regular – ”

He stops himself, and plunges into a more general discussion of scheduling. Surely, I persist, there’s a real problem here? Entire years have passed without a single substantial programme on environmental issues.

“Well,” he says, more crisply than at any other time in the interview, “you’ll have to take that up with the controllers.”

I suggest that his own interest in the state of the world appears to have intensified in recent years.

“That’s not an interest. I wish I didn’t have it. I wish there was no need to have it. It’s not an interest, it’s an obligation.”

But he has surely been more prominent as an environmental voice in the past twenty years than he was before?

“Well yeah, and that is very simple in that I have been in the BBC all my working life, practically, and you knew very well … that if you said something, just because you are on the damn box people thought it was true and you’d better be bloody well sure that it is true.”

(I used to curse this reticence, willing him to get off the fence and denounce the destruction of all he loved.)

He explains that his views on climate change crystallised when he attended a lecture – he could tell me when it was if he had his diary to hand – by the president of the US National Academy of Sciences, Ralph Cicerone. After that, he made two programmes, called Are We Changing Planet Earth? and Can We Save Planet Earth?

Attenborough is not just a master of the art of television, but also one of the medium’s pioneers, producing programmes almost from its launch in this country, and guiding the development of some of its treasured strands, first as controller of BBC2 (from 1965 to 1969), and then as the BBC’s director of programmes (until 1973). Has he helped to create a monster?

“Well it depends how you define a monster. And are all monsters malign?”

Has it not encouraged us to be more sedentary, I ask: to spend less time engaging with the world about us? He laughs and winks: “And we gave up sitting in pubs for three or four hours a day! How awful!”. Would he lay any ills at the door of television? “Oh yes, of course. Adipose tissue.” Anything else? “What you might call visual chewing gum, in that it stops you thinking about anything else. But then I feel that about music. I mean I cannot understand how people want to go round with -” he mimes a pair of headphones and shifts the conversation onto a safer subject.

I was packing my things after saying goodbye when suddenly he sprang back into the room, this time wearing his glasses and holding a small leather filofax. “I’ve found the details of that lecture by Ralph Cicerone. I thought you’d want to know.” He showed me the address and the date: 2004. The old scientific habit – record your facts, check your facts – had not deserted him. As I marvelled at his recollection that he had left something hanging, and his determination to resolve it, this remarkable specimen of life on earth skipped away to his next appointment.

www.monbiot.com

ooOOoo

So let me continue on a little more by offering a short clip of Sir David as millions will have seen him from the wonderful animal partnerships BBC series.

Then it’s only natural for this blog to offer this item:

Then I am going to close today’s post by presenting a video that was first shown in this place back in September 2012.

If you need a reminder of how beautiful our planet is (and I’m sure the majority of LfD readers don’t require that reminder) then go back and watch David Attenborough’s video and voice-over to the song What a Wonderful World. This short but very compelling video shows why the planet is so worth protecting. Enjoy!

So make a diary note to celebrate Sir David’s 90th birthday on May 8th.

I am what I learn!

Reflections on the old and the new.

So here we are on the last day of 2015, the cusp of a new year and who knows what the next twelve months have in store.

All I am going to do is to reflect on the huge potential our modern ‘wired-up’ world offers for learning.

Most will know the saying, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”

But it is wrong!

Here at home, where a number of the dogs are in their old age (Pharaoh is the equivalent in age of 100 human years; one dog year being approximately the same as eight human years) Jean and I see no difficulty in these elderly dogs learning new tricks. Staying with Pharaoh, as an example, his hearing is pretty poor now but he has learnt a whole range of hand signals in recent months and he still communicates very well with us.

There is much in this new world that concerns me and I know I am not alone with this view. But the rewards of reading the thoughts of others right across the world are wonderful beyond measure.

Here’s a tiny dip into some fascinating items and articles that have graced my in-box in just the last twenty-four hours.

Eckhart Tolle’s Moment Reminder: “As far as inner transformation is concerned, there is nothing you can do about it. You cannot transform yourself, and you certainly cannot transform your partner or anybody else. All you can do is create a space for transformation to happen, for grace and love to enter.”
Val Boyco, “Everything comes to us that belongs to us, if we create the capacity to receive it.” ~ Rabindranath Tagore
John Zande in his Sketches on Atheism, “Theism’s most potent, pervasive, irresistibly enchanting gift to frightened but otherwise sane individuals is a belief—a promise—that upon their death they will go home.”
Mother Nature Network, “7 ways to meditate while you move – If you don’t have time for sitting meditation, give one of these active meditations a try.”
George Monbiot, (on the UK floods), “These floods were not just predictable. They were predicted. There were clear and specific warnings that the management of land upstream of the towns now featuring in the news would lead to disaster.”

and my final selection:

Patrice Ayme: (from an essay on Brain & Consciousness) “The best microprocessors you can buy in a store now can do 10 to the power 11 (10^11; one hundred billions) operations per second and use a few hundred watts,” says Wilfred van der Wiel of the University of Twente in the Netherlands, a leader of the gold circuitry effort. “The human brain can do orders of magnitude more and uses only 10 to 20 watts. That’s a huge gap in efficiency.”

So here’s to a new year of wonderful new learnings. And let me leave you with this additional message for 2016.

Namely that The Nation weekly journal are celebrating their 150 years of publishing the magazine. They recently published a 150th Anniversary edition and the front editorial is written by Katrina Vanden Heuval. There is a ‘break out’ to one side on Page 2 of that editorial that reads:

Change is inevitable, but the one constant in The Nation‘s history has been a faith in what can happen if you tell people the truth.

Finding out the truth and sharing it so we can all see what can happen is my wish for 2016.

Happy New Year to all of you, and to all of your friends and loved ones.

Britain before humans.

A remarkable look at the extraordinary history of the British Isles.

Now on first sight, any reasonable follower of my scribblings who lived outside Britain might wonder why this post was so focussed on one particular country, the country of my birth: Great Britain.

My justification, however, for including this George Monbiot essay is that many residents of many other countries, not just North Americans, have roots and family ties in GB. Plus, so typical of a Monbiot essay, the subject will be of interest to anyone, wherever they live in the world, who wonders about time before we shaped our environment. (I have converted some of the figures used in the essay within square brackets [ …] )

Could I also mention that from Thursday through to the end of the year, my posts in this place are going to be a mix of trivial, humorous and repeat posts. I need a bit of a break as much as you good people need a break from Learning from Dogs! 😉

Monbiot’s essay is republished here with the kind permission of George Monbiot.

ooOOoo

Walk on the Wild Side

17th December 2015

Rewilding, hillwalking and the extraordinary history of these islands.

George Monbiot, interviewed by Dan Bailey for UKHillwalking.com, 11th December 2015

What would a natural upland habitat have looked like in Britain before humans started having the dominant influence?

This is a particularly interesting question, because we have two completely different baselines in Britain. The more recent one is the situation that prevailed after the ice retreated, and a temperate climate returned. I’m talking about parts of the Boreal and Atlantic stages, roughly between 9000 and 5000 years ago. It seems that during this period, Britain was more or less covered by closed canopy rainforest from top to toe. I’m using the term rainforest precisely: to denote forests that are wet enough to support epiphytes, plants that grow on other plants. Wherever you see polypody, the many-footed fern, growing along the branches of a tree, it’s a reminder that you are looking at rainforest fragment.

Hardly any land in this country would have been treeless at this time. With the exception of the summits of the Cairngorms, Ben Nevis and one or two other mountains, there is nowhere here that is too high for them to grow. Our bare and rocky hills are an artefact of deforestation, heavy grazing and the subsequent loss of soil.

But even that state arguably reflected the dominant influence of humans. To see what the land would have been like without them, you would have to go back to the previous interglacial period, the Eemian. At this time, the climate was almost identical to ours, but for some reason the people driven out by the previous ice age appear not to have returned to this country. At this stage, there was plenty of forest, but it seems that it was not continuous. The closed canopy rainforest was punctuated by more open forest, as well as wood pasture and savannah. Why? Because humans had not wiped out the dominant species. During the Eemian, Britain had a fairly similar collection of wildlife to the one we know today. You know: foxes, badgers, hedgehogs, deer, robins, jackdaws, elephants, rhinos, hippos, scimitar cats, hyenas and lions.

Ah yes, not the same in all respects. Like everywhere else on earth, we had a megafauna, and this shaped the ecosystem. The large herbivores were driven out of Britain by the ice, then driven to extinction in southern Europe about 30,000 years ago when modern humans arrived. (The hyenas and lions, incidentally, persisted throughout the ice age, hunting reindeer across the frozen tundra, and it seems that they survived here until about 10,000 years ago, when Mesolithic hunters turned up).

What does a typical British upland habitat look like now, and how does it differ from uplands in Mainland Europe?

In almost all other European countries (Ireland is an exception), the pattern of tree cover is what you would expect to see. The lowlands, where the land is worth farming, are largely treeless. The uplands, where the land is infertile and the climate is harsh, largely forested. This is why Europe has an average forest cover of 37%. In Britain, the lowlands are largely treeless, as you might expect, but the uplands are even barer. This peculiarity explains the fact that Britain has only 13% tree cover. Instead of a rich ecosystem in the hills, a mosaic of trees, scrub and glades (which is what would occur now, on our depleted soils, if the land were allowed to recover), the uplands are almost entirely treeless, and therefore remarkably poor in birds, insects and all the other lifeforms you might expect to find there. The parts of the country which would otherwise function as our great wildlife reserves – those places, in other words, where hardly anyone lives and there is almost no economic activity – have even less wildlife than the places that are intensely habited and farmed.

What are the people and processes responsible for keeping our hills bare in England and Wales? Who’s more to blame in Scotland?

In England and Wales, the cause is simply stated. Sheep, which originated in Mesopotamia, are wildly, disproportionately destructive. In many of our hills, they are kept at densities of no more than one per hectare or even less. But because they selectively browse out tree seedlings, they ensure that no recovery can take place. Even where remaining woods exist, they are often dying on their feet, because there are no young trees with which to replace the old ones. In terms of food production, upland sheep farming makes a minuscule contribution. It is hard to think of any industry where there is a higher ratio of destruction to production.

The denuding of our hills by sheep is supplemented by the burning of grouse moors, a fantastically destructive activity carried out for the benefit of a very small number of exceedingly rich people. These two activities ensure that in England and Wales there are scarcely any trees above around 200 m. [Ed: 656 feet]

Both are also important factors in Scotland, but in the Highlands the dominant cause of destruction is the deer stalking estates. By keeping the numbers of red deer very high, so that a banker waddling up the hillside in tweed pantaloons is almost guaranteed to make a kill, these estates have a similar effect to sheep farms. Like sheep, deer seek out the seedlings, and when their numbers rise above five or ten per square kilometre, they ensure that no forest can grow.

So why the difference between Britain and the rest of Europe? The answer seems to be the size of land holdings. Because, unlike most other European countries, Britain never had a successful revolution, we have, on one estimate, the second highest concentration of landholding in the world, after Brazil. This grants landowners inordinate power. It also leads to the situation I’ll describe in the next answer.

Where does subsidy farming come in?

People farming the uplands claimed to make their money by raising sheep. But in economic terms, sheep are ornamental. Sheep farming throughout our hills is a loss-making activity, and persists only as a result of public money, that takes the form of farm subsidies. We pay £3.6 billion [Ed: 5.33 billion US dollars] a year in this country to have our watersheds destroyed and our wildlife wiped out. The reason why the hills are kept bare here but not in the rest of Europe is that the landholdings in Britain are big enough to make subsidy harvesting a worthwhile activity: you are paid by the hectare. The more land you own, the more public money you receive. Some people take millions of pounds in these benefit payments every year. It’s extraordinary, when such restrictions are placed upon the ordinary recipients of social security, that this situation has not yet become politically explosive.

And culturally – how does our idealised view of the upland landscape feed into land management?

Our idealised, romanticised view of sheep farming, that bears almost no relationship to reality, but that is constantly drilled into our minds by programmes like Countryfile, makes it hard for us to see what is really going on. It’s because of this view that we fail to grasp a vast and obvious fact. That by denuding our hills, this economically-tiny industry has done more damage to our ecosystems and wildlife than all the building that has taken place in Britain.

Can you explain, in a nutshell, what you mean by re-wilding, and why you’d like to see it in the British hills?

Rewilding is the mass restoration of ecosystems and the re-establishment of missing species. I’m not arguing for the blanket rewilding of our hills by any means. But I believe that Britain would be greatly enriched, in terms of both wildlife and human experience, if significant areas were allowed to recover; if trees were allowed to grow in some of our denuded places, and some of the wonderful species we have lost were permitted to return. In particular, I’m thinking of beavers, boar, lynx, wolves and species that we retain in small numbers but that were once widespread, such as wildcat, pine martens, capercaillie, eagles and goshawks.

The other great benefit of allowing trees to return to the hills is the restoration of watersheds. In one study in Wales, the soil beneath woodland was found to absorb water at 67 times the rate of the soil beneath sheep pasture. The rain flashes off sheep pasture as if it were concrete, instantly causing floods downstream. Trees hold back the water and release it gradually, smoothing out the cycle of flood and drought.

Could you talk us through the stages of a habitat restoration process that could take a bare hillside and return it to woodland?

Many of our hillsides have been so thoroughly sheepwrecked that there are now no remaining seed sources. In these circumstances, we would need to plant islands of trees, using seed taken from the nearest surviving pockets of woodland in order to sustain local genetic diversity. Short of greatly reducing stocking levels or temporarily keeping herbivores off altogether, there is not a lot more that needs to be done. In some places, all that is required is temporary exclusion of grazing animals.

What is a trophic cascade, and how is this idea relevant in the British context?

A trophic cascade is an ecological process that tumbles from the top of the foodchain to the bottom. It turns out that in many places, large carnivores regulate the entire ecosystem; ecosystems that retain them behave in radically different ways to ecosystems from which they have been lost. This presents a powerful challenge to British models of conservation, as we have lost all our large carnivores here, with the result that ecological processes, and their dynamic and ever-shifting successional patterns, have been curtailed.

Critics sometimes suggest that proponents of re-wilding are advocating turning the clock back to an arbitrary point in history and then keeping things permanently fixed in this state. Is that fair?

It is precisely the opposite. Our current model of conservation fixes ecosystems at an arbitrary point and then keeps them in a state of arrested development through extreme management of the kind that everywhere else on earth we recognise as destruction, not protection: namely cutting, burning and grazing. There is no intelligible reason behind the choices that have been made by conservationists of the ecosystems and species they choose to maintain by these means. Rewilding, by contrast, has no fixed outcomes. It seeks to restore ecological processes by bringing back some of the key elements of ecosystems and the key drivers: species that trigger trophic cascades. To the greatest extent possible, it then seeks to stand back and allow natural processes to take their course.

What would a healthy population of deer look like? How about sheep – do you have a figure for environmentally supportable grazing densities?

In the infertile uplands, it is roughly 5 per square kilometre (in other words per 100 ha). [Ed: 247 acres] Beyond that point, there is almost no regeneration of trees.

The debate often seems to be framed in absolute terms – either we re-wild everywhere, and get rid of all the farmers and deer, or not at all. How big would be big enough to please you? Are you talking about re-foresting every hill, moor and mountain, from valley to summit?

The aim of the group Rewilding Britain, that I helped to found but do not run, is to allow natural ecological processes and key species to return to at least one million hectares (4.5%) of Britain’s land and 30% of our territorial waters over the next 100 years. It would like to see at least one large rewilded area to connect both land and sea – descending from the mountaintops to our coastal waters.

In somewhere as crowded as Britain are vast re-created wildernesses a viable prospect, or would it be more realistic to go for smaller scale projects in which re-wilding is just part of a mixed land use picture – projects such as Wild Ennerdale perhaps, where habitat restoration is being managed in conjunction with forestry, leisure, water extraction and livestock?

The British population is highly concentrated. Some parts of the country are exceedingly crowded; others remarkably empty. Most British uplands have a far lower population density than many parts of Europe in which wolves, lynx, bear and other species are found. Wolves have even been appearing in countries such as Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark, where there is very little land that is unsuitable for intensive farming, and the rural population density tends to be much higher. Their arrival has been greeted by most sectors of society with delight.

Many hill-goers will recognise your picture of the degraded upland environment, but some may simply be making a different aesthetic judgement to you, valuing the barren wide open spaces for the experience they provide. If they just happen to prefer grass and heather landscape on some romantic level, and don’t much care about botany and wildlife, how might you seek to convert them?

I believe we should have both. At the moment those who value a wild, self-willed landscape have nowhere to turn in Britain. We have to travel abroad to find it and to experience magnificent encounters with wildlife. I believe this deprives us of the wonder and delight that can enhance our lives and of choice and freedom. We have nowhere in which to escape the order and control that governs all other aspects of our lives.

Hillwalkers and climbers have fought long and hard against vested landowning interests for our right to roam. There is a worry that conservation could be used to curtail these freedoms, and some evidence to support that concern. What place does public access on open upland have in a re-wilded landscape, and which would take precedence – amenity or conservation?

I was heavily involved in campaigns for the right to roam, through another group I helped to found, The Land Is Ours, and I would be dismayed by any scheme which sought to keep people out of the hills. I believe that rewilding and access are entirely compatible. While it may be necessary in some places temporarily to fence out grazing animals, the fencing required is no different from that which is already found across the uplands, and exactly the same arrangements can be made to cross it as are used today. My hope is that in some places, as a result of rewilding, in some places there will one day be no fencing at all: in other words it will mean better access than there is today.

On a related note, could public support for re-wilding have unintended consequences? Might it, for instance, be a gift to landowners and conservation bodies with priorities quite other than public access?

I would be surprised if there were no unintended consequences. But if problems arise, the policies should be modified. No good policy emerges from the egg mature and complete. It must be constantly assessed and adjusted to head off any problems that emerge.

What sort of reception have your ideas met from folk in rural communities such as hill farmers and shooting estate workers?

I think it’s fair to say that they have been mixed. There has been a fair bit of hostility from some farming and shooting groups, but also support from surprising quarters, including landowners’ representatives and a large number of individual farmers and estate owners. In the wider countryside, there is often strong support. We would do well to remember that farmers are a very small minority even of the rural population, though this often gets forgotten because of their powerful influence on policy.

Can you offer a fully thought-through transition from sheep farming and shooting to an alternative model for the rural economy, one in which rural residents still have a secure place in a re-wilded countryside? Can you understand people’s aversion to risking this?

I certainly can understand people’s concerns. But there is going to be a major transition in the countryside before long, with or without rewilding, when farm subsidies are either scrapped or greatly reduced, as they inevitably will be. When essential public services are being cut, giving €55 billion [Ed: 61 billion USD] a year from the public purse across the EU to landowners, while helping to destroy both human communities and ecological resilience is surely as unsustainable politically as it is environmentally. So what are farmers whose livelihood is sustained only as a result of farm subsidies going to do?

I have two proposals. The first is that we start campaigning for the retention of some subsidies, whose purpose would be changed to that of ecological restoration and the support of communities. Landowners and tenants would be paid to restore watersheds, woodlands, rivers and wildlife. It’s hard to see how else continued subsidies could remain publicly acceptable. Rewilding could be a way out for struggling rural communities.

The second proposal is to start investigating means by which rural people can enhance their livelihoods by enhancing the ecosystem. There are plenty of examples from around the world of eco-tourism and associated activities reviving communities by generating income and employment. Given that the traditional industries have manifestly failed to sustain jobs and incomes, in some cases it will not be hard to show the alternatives might work better. But more research is needed, and we have to remember that the same approach is not going to work everywhere. Different local circumstances demand different strategies.

“We have an incredibly narrow and restrictive vision of cultural heritage and cultural landscapes” – your words. What would a broader vision look like?

I would love to see rural culture becoming more inclusive. It’s often highly hierarchical, with the landowners and farmers sitting at the top of the pyramid, dictating policy. In some respects, democracy is a stranger to the countryside; the old, landed powers still wield disproportionate influence over the lives of others. But I don’t want to invent a new culture. I believe that democratisation and pluralism creates its own cultures, that will evolve and develop independently in different places. I’m calling on people to challenge cultural hegemony in the countryside – perhaps we could call it agricultural hegemony – and for a much wider range of voices to be heard.

Farming and shooting are supported by the current dominant countryside culture. But wouldn’t a shift to re-wilding simply be replacing this set of special interests with another, a sort of cultural colonisation of the countryside by urbanites?

That’s certainly not how I see it. And this has nothing whatever to do with the presumed urban-rural divide. Many of rewilding’s most ardent proponents live in the countryside, perhaps unsurprisingly. We are repeatedly told that the countryside is at war with the towns and vice versa. But I see no evidence of this. What I see is certain dominant interests in the countryside in conflict with other rural interests. And those dominant interests often have either one or both feet in the cities.

A few years ago there was an article in the Telegraph that sought to characterise authentic rural people. These people apparently don’t care about “newts, trees and bats”: such matters are of interest only in London. It described David Cameron as “at heart, a rural Tory”, who “still grumbles to his wife about what, for him, are ‘banned activities’ – notably shooting”. Authentic rural people, in other words, spend their adult lives in Notting Hill and drive out to their second homes for a shooting party at the weekend. People who live in the countryside and care about wildlife, on the other hand, are, “at heart”, Londoners. The rural-urban divide, as characterised in such papers, has nothing to do with location. It’s really about class.

What chance is there of significant progress being made in the current funding climate? You’ve recently written about the ‘toothless’ Environment Agency in this regard. Given the squeeze on public bodies would it be more effective to promote the out-sourcing of re-wilding to non-governmental organisations, private philanthropists and large corporate landowners such as water companies?

There is a real problem here. Government agencies are being gutted and re-centralised. Cameron’s devolution agenda is a con: he is even more of a micromanager than Tony Blair was. The current environment secretary, Liz Truss, has put her department’s head on the block, volunteering for early execution. Statutory bodies like the Environment Agency are now, in terms of what they can do, almost dead. But the crazy situation that prevails today might not – should not – last forever. It is true to say however, that we cannot rely on government alone to deliver these changes, whatever form a government might take.

Are our National Park Authorities a help or a hindrance?

At the moment, they are a real drag on progress. This is partly because of policy, such as the Lake District National Park’s application for World Heritage status, which, as currently framed, will ensure that destructive practices are locked in (and continue to contribute to flooding). And it’s partly because of the way they frame the issues. They go to great lengths to persuade us that current land management is not only compatible with the protection of nature, but actually essential to it! All their brochures and display boards and websites create the impression that these ecological disaster zones are rich and thriving ecosystems, so people are constantly misled and misdirected. They are led to believe that all is well in our national parks, that these wastelands, which are in most cases little more than sheep ranches, are magnificent wildernesses. Our national parks are a disgrace, a shame upon the nation, and park authorities with an ounce of intellectual honesty would recognise this and seek to address it.

Re-wilding seems to be moving up the agenda of the large conservation organisations, and gaining a space in the public discourse. Do you see grounds for optimism?

It certainly is. Before Feral was published, I visited all the principal conservation groups, and received responses that varied from mild interest to outright rejection. The change over the past three years has been astonishing. Rewilding appears to have moved from the fringe of the mainstream, and I’m delighted to see how these groups have begun to pick it up and engage with it. There’s still a long way to go, and plenty of daft practices still in play, but change among the conservation groups is certainly happening, albeit slowly. We will see rewilding in this country. The question is how far and how fast it will go.

ooOOoo

Much of my adopted country, the United States, is still wild and the Bureau of Land Management state that they manage “over 245 million surface acres ..”. However, to put that into perspective the area of the USA is 2.436 billion acres so the BLM managed area is just a fraction over 10%.

Finally, Monbiot refers to his book Feral. I have read it and can recommend it.

Feral-665x1024

More details of his book may be found here.

This is much more than an issue for just Great Britain.

You couldn’t make it up!

However hard one tried to!

In Chapter Eight, Behaviours and Relationships, I speak of how the development of humans has been, unsurprisingly, the result of our human behaviours. Adding that it is likely that our behaviours have been damaging, in varying degrees, to the survival of our species and countless others for a very long time. Continuing:

But 2,000 years ago, the global population of man was only 300 million persons[1]. It took 1,200 years for that global population to become 1 billion persons; in 1800. Now track the intervals as we come forward in time.

In 1927, just 127 years later, the two-billionth baby was born. In 1960, only 33 years on, came the birth of the three-billionth baby. Just 16 years later, in 1974, the four-billionth baby was born. In 1987, now only 13 years later, we have a population of five billion persons. Around October 1999, the sixth-billionth baby was born.
The growth rate of global population is slowing[2] but nevertheless it is trending to a billion additional persons every decade. In other words, a 100-million population growth every year, or about 270,000 more persons every single day.

Combine man’s behaviours rooted in times way back with this growth in population and we have the present situation. A totally unsustainable situation for one basic and fundamental reason. We all live on a finite planet.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth
[2] According to UN’s 2010 revision to its population projections, world population will peak at 10.1bn in 2100 compared to 7bn in 2011. A 2014 paper by demographers from several universities and the United Nations Population Division forecast that the world’s population will reach about 10.9 billion in 2100 and continue growing thereafter. However, some experts dispute the UN’s forecast and have argued that birthrates will fall below replacement rate in the 2020s. According to these forecasters, population growth will be only sustained till the 2040s by rising longevity but will peak below 9bn by 2050.

A growth of about 270,000 more persons every single day!

I am sure that I am not alone in seeing this growth in our population as something that is both unsustainable and a critical component of long-term damage to our planet.

But George Monbiot in a recent essay, in true Monbiot style, highlights an aspect of our human population and the damage resulting that would have never previously occurred to me.

Read it and see if you don’t agree likewise. (Again, there are just too many links in George’s essay to reconstruct in this republishing and, as the other day, I have highlighted those phrases that are a link to other material in red. Go here if you wish to further investigate those links.)

ooOOoo

Pregnant Silence

19th November 2015

It’s about time we discussed the real population crisis.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 18th November 2015

This column is about the population crisis. About the breeding that’s laying waste to the world’s living systems. But it’s probably not the population crisis you’re thinking of. This is about another one, that we seem to find almost impossible to discuss.

You’ll hear a lot about population in the next three weeks, as the Paris climate summit approaches. Across the airwaves and on the comment threads it will invariably be described as “the elephant in the room”. When people are not using their own words, it means they are not thinking their own thoughts. Ten thousand voices each ask why no one is talking about it. The growth in human numbers, they say, is our foremost environmental threat.

At their best, population campaigners seek to extend women’s reproductive choices. Some 225 million women have an unmet need for contraception. If this need were answered, the impact on population growth would be significant, though not decisive: the annual growth rate of 83 million would be reduced to 62m (1). But contraception is rarely limited only by the physical availability of contraceptives. In most cases, it’s about power: women are denied control of their wombs. The social transformations they need are wider and deeper than donations from the other side of the world are likely to achieve.

At their worst, they seek to shift the blame from their own environmental impacts. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that so many post-reproductive white men are obsessed with human population growth, as it’s about the only environmental problem of which they can wash their hands. Nor, I believe, is it a coincidence that of all such topics this is the least tractable. When there is almost nothing to be done, there is no requirement to act.

Such is the momentum behind population growth, an analysis in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences discovered, that were every government to adopt the one-child policy China has just abandoned, there would still be as many people on Earth at the end of this century as there are today. If two billion people were wiped out by a catastrophe in mid-century, the planet would still hold a billion more by 2100 than it does now.

If we want to reduce our impacts this century, the paper concludes, it’s consumption we must address. Population growth is outpaced by the growth in our consumption of almost all resources. There is enough to meet everyone’s need, even in a world of 10 billion people. There is not enough to meet everyone’s greed, even in a world of 2 billion people.

So let’s turn to a population crisis over which we do have some influence. I’m talking about the growth in livestock numbers. Human numbers are rising at roughly 1.2% a year. Livestock numbers are rising at around 2.4% a year. By 2050, the world’s living systems will have to support about 120m tonnes of extra human, and 400m tonnes of extra farm animals(2).

Raising them already uses three quarters of the world’s agricultural land. One third of our cereal crops are used to feed them. This may rise to roughly half by 2050. More people will starve as a result, because the poor rely mainly on grain for their subsistence, and diverting it to livestock raises the price. Now the grain that farm animals eat is being supplemented by oil crops, particularly soya, for which the forests and savannahs of South America are being cleared at shocking rates.

This might seem counter-intuitive, but were we to eat soya, rather than meat, the clearance of natural vegetation required to supply us with the same amount of protein would decline by 94%. Producing protein from chickens requires three times as much land as protein from soybeans. Pork needs nine times, beef 32 times.

A recent paper in the journal Science of the Total Environment suggests that our consumption of meat is likely to be “the leading cause of modern species extinctions”. Not only is livestock farming the major reason for habitat destruction and the killing of predators, but its waste products are overwhelming the world’s capacity to absorb them. Factory farms in the US generate 13 times as much sewage as the human population. The dairy farms in Tulare county, California produce five times as much as New York City.

Freshwater life is being wiped out across the world by farm manure. In England, as I reported last week, the system designed to protect us from the tide of crap has comprehensively broken down. Dead zones now extend from many coasts, as farm sewage erases ocean life across thousands of square kilometres.

Livestock farming causes around 14% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions: slightly more than the output of the world’s cars, lorries, buses, trains, ships and planes. If you eat soya, your emissions per unit of protein are 20 times lower than eating pork or chicken, and 150 times lower than eating beef.

So why is hardly anyone talking about the cow, pig, sheep and chicken in the room? Why are there no government campaigns to reduce the consumption of animal products, just as they sometimes discourage our excessive use of electricity? A survey by the Royal Institute of International Affairs found that people are not unwilling to change their diets, once they become aware of the problem, but that many have no idea that livestock farming damages the living world.

It’s not as if eating less meat and dairy will harm us. If we did as our doctors advise, our environmental impacts would decline in step with heart disease, strokes, diabetes and cancer. British people eat, on average, slightly more than their bodyweight in meat every year, while Americans consume another 50%: wildly more, in both cases, than is good for us or the rest of life on Earth.

But while plenty in the rich world are happy to discuss the dangers of brown people reproducing, the other population crisis scarcely crosses the threshold of perception. Livestock numbers present a direct moral challenge, as in this case we have agency. Hence the pregnant silence.

www.monbiot.com

Footnotes:

While the number of unintended pregnancies would fall by 52m (or 70%), this does not mean that the number of babies would fall by the same amount. The Guttmacher/UNFPA report breaks down the outcome thus: “21 million fewer unplanned births; 24 million fewer abortions; six million fewer miscarriages; and 0.6 million fewer stillbirths.”
Additional global meat consumption by this date is estimated to be roughly 200 million tonnes. Boned meat comprises roughly half the weight of a living animal. So total additional livestock biomass will be in the order of 400 million tonnes, or 400 billion kg. The average human weight is 52 kg and the anticipated rise in population by 2050 is 2.3 billion (the median estimate is 9.7 billion by that date). So the additional human weight is likely to be somewhere around 120 billion kg.

ooOOoo

Powerful reasons to turn vegetarian or vegan. And well done if you are already there. Well done, indeed!

Don’t let your dog swim in these waters!

Sometimes, one just has to hold one’s head in shame ….

… at the madness that we humans are capable of.

I included this sub-heading in the draft of this post last Thursday intending to make it Friday’s post then changed my mind. Hence the reason behind me writing in Friday’s post:

I was looking at a recent George Monbiot essay and getting myself all wound up about it, thinking that it should be today’s post. Then I thought, “Come on, Paul, end the week on a gentle tone.”

In the light of events in Paris last Friday, I had no idea how pertinent my sub-heading was!

What wound me up, so to speak, was a recent essay from George Monbiot about the damage being done to a Devon river; the River Culm. This river was known to me in the days that I lived in South Devon and had my Piper Super Cub based at Dunkeswell Airfield that was not far from the Culm.

So with no further ado, here is George Monbiot’s essay republished with Mr. Monbiot’s kind permission.

ooOOoo

Strategic Incompetence

12th November 2015

The agencies supposed to protect the living world have been neutered, and polluters and wildlife destroyers now have a free hand.

By George Monbiot, published on the Guardian’s website 12th November 2015

It could scarcely have been a starker case. The river I came across in Devon six weeks ago, and described in the Guardian, was so polluted that I could smell it from 50 metres away. Farm slurry pouring into the water, from a pipe that I traced back to a dairy farm, had wiped out almost all the life in the stretch of River Culm I explored.

All that now grew on the riverbed were long, feathery growths of sewage fungus. An expert on freshwater pollution I consulted told me that the extent of these growths showed the poisoning of the river was “chronic and severe”.

Here, as a reminder of what I saw, are some of the pictures I took:

Slurry pouring from a pipe cut into the riverbank:

And mingling with the clear water of the river:

I reported the pollution to the Environment Agency’s hotline. It told me it was taking the matter seriously. So when I received its report on the outcome of its investigation, I nearly fell off my chair.

It had decided to take no action against the farmer, as “the long term ecological impacts on the environment were fortunately low”. How did it know? Because there was “no evidence of a fish kill”.

Why in the name of all that’s holy should there be evidence of a fish kill? This is a chronic pollution case, not an acute one. Fish kills are what you see when a sudden poisoning occurs, as pollutants are flushed into a healthy living system. Chronic pollution deprives fish of their habitats and prey, but no investigator in their right mind would expect to see them floating belly up in the river as a result. They are simply absent from places where you would otherwise have found them.

And if a riverbed covered in nothing but sewage fungus suggests a “low” ecological impact, I dread to think what a high one looks like.

The same inability to distinguish between an acute event and a chronic one was revealed by another of the agency’s statements: the pollution “had a short term impact”. The slurry had plainly been pouring out of the pipe for months, as the luxuriant growths of sewage fungus show. It would doubtless have continued, had I not reported it.

The Environment Agency also told me that it had inspected the farm, and found no problems with the infrastructure, as there was plenty of space for slurry storage under the floor of the barn where the cows were kept. But, the problem, as I had explained to them, had nothing to do with slurry storage in the barn. It was caused by leakage from the outdoor slurry lagoons, where I found cow manure pouring down the hill.

They could scarcely have made a bigger mess of their investigation if they had tried. The mistakes the agency made are so fundamental and so obvious that it makes me wonder whether they are mistakes at all. What does a farmer have to do to get prosecuted these days, detonate an atom bomb?

If this were an isolated case, you could put it down to ineptitude, albeit ineptitude raised to the status of an Olympic sport. But responses like this are now the norm at the Environment Agency. It has been so brutally disciplined by cuts and by ministers’ demands that it leave farms and other businesses alone that it is now almost incapable of enforcement.

Even when the fish kills it appears to see as the only real proof of pollution do occur, in the great majority of cases it doesn’t even bother to assess them, let alone investigate and prosecute. Freedom of information requests by the environmental group Fish Legal reveal that the agency sent its investigators to visit just 16% of reported fish kills.

There was massive regional variation. While in the Anglian Central region, covering parts of Norfolk, Cambridgeshire and surrounding counties, the agency inspected 61% of these events, in Devon they investigated only 3%. (I suspect that it was only because I’m a journalist for a national newspaper that they came out at all in the case I reported). In the fishery areas on either side of it – Cornwall and Wessex – the inspection rate was, er, 0%. If you want to pollute rivers in these regions, there’s nothing stopping you.

The Environment Agency no longer prosecutes even some of the most extreme pollution events. In 2013, a farmer in Somerset released what the agency called a “tsunami of slurry” into the Wellow Brook. One inspector said it was the worst pollution she had seen in 17 years. But the agency dithered for a year before striking a private agreement with the farmer, allowing him to avoid prosecution, a criminal record, a massive fine and court costs, by giving £5000 to a local charity.

New rules imposed by the government means that such under-the-counter deals, which now have a name of their own – enforcement undertakings – are likely to become more common. They are a parody of justice: arbitrary, opaque and wide open to influence-peddling, special pleading and corruption.

I see the agency’s farcical investigation of the pollution incident I reported as strategic incompetence, designed to avoid conflict with powerful landowners. Were it to follow any other strategy, it would run into trouble with the government.

These problems are likely to become even more severe, when the new cuts the environment department (Defra) has just agreed with the Treasury take effect. An analysis by the RSPB and the Wildlife Trusts reveals that, once the new reductions bite, the government’s spending on wildlife conservation, air quality and water pollution will have declined by nearly 80% in real terms since 2009/10.

It’s all up for grabs now: if you want to wreck the living world, the government is not going to stop you. Those who have power, agency, money or land can – metaphorically and literally – dump their crap on the rest of us.

Never mind that the government is now breaking European law left right and centre, spectacularly failing, for example, to ensure that all aquatic ecosystems are in good health by the end of this year, as it is supposed to do under the water framework directive. It no longer seems to care. It would rather use your tax money to pay fines to the European Commission than enforce the law against polluters.

I’ve heard the same description of Liz Truss, the secretary of state for environment, who oversees the work of the Environment Agency, from several people over the past few months. “Worse than Owen Paterson”. At first, I refused to take it seriously. It’s the kind of statement that is usually employed as hyperbole, such as “somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan”, or “more deluded than Tony Blair”. But in this case, they aren’t joking. Preposterous as the notion of any environment secretary being worse than Mr Paterson might seem, they mean it.

Nowhere, as far as I can discover, in Liz Truss’s speeches or writing before she was appointed, is there any sign of prior interest in the natural world or its protection. What we see instead is perhaps the most extreme manifestation of market fundamentalism on this side of the Atlantic. She founded the Conservative Free Enterprise Group, and was co-author of the book Britannia Unchained, that laid out a terrifying vision of a nation run by raw economic power, without effective social or environmental protection. Now she has a chance to put that vision into practice.

Those who have tried to engage with her describe her as indissolubly wedded to a set of theories about how the world should be, that are impervious to argument, facts or experience. She was among the first ministers to put her own department on the block in the latest spending review, volunteering massive cuts. She seems determined to dismantle the protections that secure our quality of life: the rules and agencies defending the places and wildlife we love.

Bureaucracy and regulation are concepts we have been taught to hate, through relentless propaganda in the media. But they are essential pillars of civilisation. They make the difference between a decent society and a barbarous one.

www.monbiot.com

ooOOoo

While this essay from Monbiot clearly concerns a river in the South-West of England and may therefore not relate to readers in other parts of the UK or the world, those closing sentences [my emphasis] do relate to all of us wherever we are on this planet.

Bureaucracy and regulation are concepts we have been taught to hate, through relentless propaganda in the media. But they are essential pillars of civilisation. They make the difference between a decent society and a barbarous one.

Tomorrow, I will return to Piper Cubs flying out of Dunkeswell!

Indonesia – another example of kakistocracy?

What is happening in beautiful Indonesia is beyond imagination.

I am indebted to John Zande for introducing me to the word kakistocracy, that he explained means: “government by the worst persons; a form of government in which the worst persons are in power.”

For what is happening in Indonesia could well be an awful example of kakistocracy in action.

Like numerous others I knew that there were fires burning in Indonesia and that it was all somehow caught up in illegal logging, but knew little over and above that. And that is the crux of the title of a recent essay from George Monbiot: Nothing to See Here. It really is a “must read” essay and is republished below with Mr. Monbiot’s very kind permission. As with most of his essays, they are published in the Guardian newspaper. In this case, the Guardian version includes photographs that vividly underline the terrible situation out there. I agonised about copying them from the Guardian article, without explicit permission to so do, but have nevertheless done so on the basis of this story needing to make the maximum impact on readers. The photographs are inserted in Monbiot’s essay very closely to the format that is presented in the Guardian article.

ooOOoo

Nothing to See Here

30th October 2015

'Children are being prepared for evacuation in warships already some have choked to death. Species are going up in smoke at an untold rate.’ Photograph: Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images — ‘Children are being prepared for evacuation in warships already some have choked to death. Species are going up in smoke at an untold rate.’ Photograph: Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images

In the greatest environmental disaster of the 21st Century (so far), Indonesia has been blotted out by smoke. And the media.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 30th October 2015.

I’ve often wondered how the media would respond when eco-apocalypse struck. I pictured the news programmes producing brief, sensational reports, while failing to explain why it was happening or how it might be stopped. Then they would ask their financial correspondents how the disaster affected share prices, before turning to the sport. As you can probably tell, I don’t have an ocean of faith in the industry for which I work.

What I did not expect was that they would ignore it.

A great tract of the Earth is on fire. It looks as you might imagine hell to be. The air has turned ochre: visibility in some cities has been reduced to 30 metres. Children are being prepared for evacuation in warships; already some have choked to death. Species are going up in smoke at an untold rate. It is almost certainly the greatest environmental disaster of the 21st Century – so far.

[NB: The video that is embedded in the Guardian version is without sound. I have added one that is also a Greenpeace video, with sound, further on in the post.]

And the media? It’s talking about the dress the Duchess of Cambridge wore to the James Bond premiere, Donald Trump’s idiocy du jour and who got eliminated from the Halloween episode of Dancing with the Stars. The great debate of the week, dominating the news across much of the world? Sausages: are they really so bad for your health?

What I’m discussing is a barbeque on a different scale. Fire is raging across the 5000-kilometre length of Indonesia. It is surely, on any objective assessment, more important than anything else taking place today. And it shouldn’t require a columnist, writing in the middle of a newspaper, to say so. It should be on everyone’s front page.

It is hard to convey the scale of this inferno, but here’s a comparison that might help: it is currently producing more carbon dioxide than the US economy. In three weeks the fires have released more CO2 than the annual emissions of Germany.

‘The great debate of the week, dominating the news across much of the world? Sausages: are they really so bad for your health?’ Photograph: Abdul Qodir/AFP/Getty

But that doesn’t really capture it. This catastrophe cannot be measured only in parts per million. The fires are destroying treasures as precious and irreplaceable as the archaeological remains being levelled by Isis. Orang utans, clouded leopards, sun bears, gibbons, the Sumatran rhinoceros and Sumatran tiger, these are among the threatened species being driven from much of their range by the flames. But there are thousands, perhaps millions, more.

One of the burning islands is West Papua, a nation that has been illegally occupied by Indonesia since 1963. I spent six months there when I was 24, investigating some of the factors that have led to the current disaster. At the time, it was a wonderland, rich with endemic species in every swamp and valley. Who knows how many of those have vanished in the past few weeks? This week I have pored and wept over photos of places I loved, that have now been reduced to ash.

Nor do the greenhouse gas emissions capture the impact on the people of these lands. After the last great conflagration, in 1997, there was a missing cohort in Indonesia of 15,000 children under the age of three, attributed to air pollution. This, it seems, is worse. The surgical masks being distributed across the nation will do almost nothing to protect those living in a sunless smog. Members of parliament in Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) have had to wear face masks during debates. The chamber is so foggy that they must have difficulty recognising each other.

It’s not just the trees that are burning. It is the land itself. Much of the forest sits on great domes of peat. When the fires penetrate the earth, they smoulder for weeks, sometimes months, releasing clouds of methane, carbon monoxide, ozone and exotic gases like ammonium cyanide. The plumes extend for hundreds of miles, causing diplomatic conflicts with neighbouring countries.

Why is this happening? Indonesia’s forests have been fragmented for decades by timber and farming companies. Canals have been cut through the peat to drain and dry it. Plantation companies move in to destroy what remains of the forest to plant monocultures of pulpwood, timber and palm oil. The easiest way to clear the land is to torch it. Every year, this causes disasters. But in an extreme El Niño year like this one, we have a perfect formula for environmental catastrophe.

The current president, Joko Widodo, is – or wants to be – a democrat. But he presides over a nation in which fascism and corruption flourish. As Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary The Act of Killing shows, leaders of the death squads that helped murder around a million people during Suharto’s terror in the 1960s, with the approval of the West, have since prospered through other forms of organised crime, including illegal deforestation.

They are supported by a paramilitary organisation with three million members, called Pancasila Youth. With its orange camo-print uniforms, scarlet berets, sentimental gatherings and schmaltzy music, it looks like a fascist militia as imagined by JG Ballard. There has been no truth, no reconciliation; the mass killers are still greeted as heroes and feted on television. In some places, especially West Papua, the political murders continue.

Those who commit crimes against humanity don’t hesitate to commit crimes against nature. Though Joko Widodo seems to want to stop the burning, his reach is limited. His government’s policies are contradictory: among them are new subsidies for palm oil production that make further burning almost inevitable. Some plantation companies, prompted by their customers, have promised to stop destroying the rainforest. Government officials have responded angrily, arguing that such restraint impedes the country’s development. That smoke blotting out the nation, which has already cost it some $30 billion? That, apparently, is development.

Our leverage is weak, but there are some things we can do. Some companies using palm oil have made visible efforts to reform their supply chains; but others seem to move slowly and opaquely. Starbucks, PepsiCo, Kraft Heinz and Unilever are examples. Don’t buy their products until they change.

On Monday, Widodo was in Washington, meeting Barack Obama. Obama, the official communiqué recorded, “welcomed President Widodo’s recent policy actions to combat and prevent forest fires”. The ecopalypse taking place as they conferred, that makes a mockery of these commitments, wasn’t mentioned.

Governments ignore issues when the media ignores them. And the media ignores them because … well there’s a question with a thousand answers, many of which involve power. But one reason is the complete failure of perspective in a deskilled industry dominated by corporate press releases, photo ops and fashion shoots, where everyone seems to be waiting for everyone else to take a lead. The media makes a collective non-decision to treat this catastrophe as a non-issue, and we all carry on as if it’s not happening.

At the climate summit in Paris in December, the media, trapped within the intergovernmental bubble of abstract diplomacy and manufactured drama, will cover the negotiations almost without reference to what is happening elsewhere. The talks will be removed to a realm with which we have no moral contact. And, when the circus moves on, the silence will resume. Is there any other industry that serves its customers so badly?

www.monbiot.com

ooOOoo

Here is that Greenpeace video I referred to above.

Published on Oct 30, 2015
URGENT: Forest fires are raging through Indonesia, putting endangered orangutans and human health at risk.

Join the call to stop the fires and prevent them from ever happening again – http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/forestfires

A quick web search will offer endless pictures of this great tragedy but I will leave you with three; two showing the extent of the smoke and one that is much more an intimate photograph of the suffering animals.

oooo

In this Thursday, March 1, 2012, Indonesian veterinarian Yenni Saraswati, top center, of Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme (SOCP) examines the condition of an injured Sumatran orangutan found by environmental activists at a palm oil plantation in Rimba Sawang village, Aceh province, Indonesia. Conservationists say fires in an Indonesian swamp forest may have killed a third of the rare Sumatran orangutans living there and all of them may be lost this year. Binsar Bakkara, Associated Press. — In this Thursday, March 1, 2012, Indonesian veterinarian Yenni Saraswati, top center, of Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme (SOCP) examines the condition of an injured Sumatran orangutan found by environmental activists at a palm oil plantation in Rimba Sawang village, Aceh province, Indonesia. Conservationists say fires in an Indonesian swamp forest may have killed a third of the rare Sumatran orangutans living there and all of them may be lost this year.
Binsar Bakkara, Associated Press.

Monbiot wrote: “Those who commit crimes against humanity don’t hesitate to commit crimes against nature.”

One cannot avoid reflecting that this would not have happened if there hadn’t been, “government by the worst persons; a form of government in which the worst persons are in power.”

Welcome to kakistocracy.

The Drums of War

Share this:

So Much For Sovereignty

Share this:

The Lesser Evil

Share this:

Rigging the Market

Share this:

Rare Specimen

Share this:

Share this:

Walk on the Wild Side

Share this:

Pregnant Silence

Share this:

Strategic Incompetence

Share this:

Nothing to See Here

Share this: