A couple of weeks ago, at 7pm on a Friday night, my husband and I stood in one of our fields in West Wales guesstimating how much of it was in green manures (fertility building crops), what was in vegetable crops and how much of the field margin was in permanent grass.

We had a long discussion about what constituted ‘fallow’ and looked for a code that represented ‘ploughed but not planted’, to no avail. At that point, we were half way between laughing hysterically and tearing our hair out.

At one point, in exasperation, I nearly asked him why on earth he couldn’t grow just one crop in one field like the rest of conventional farming?

We were standing out in that field attempting to fill out the Welsh Assembly Government’s Single Application Form (SAF), through which we receive a small sum of money each year.

We’re organic farmers and our rotations are pretty complicated, in part because we’re small. Our fields are a mix of many crops and also green manures.

By the time I filed the form online at nearly 10pm, I was wondering why we bothered. For the amount of time we spent trying to make our farm fit into the proverbial administrative box for the subsidies, it hardly seemed worth it.

The problem? The new ‘greening’ measures in the CAP

The subsidies come down through the European Common Agricultural Policy which funds farming across Europe. This year, the SAF is different (adding to our stress) because of the new ‘greening’ measures introduced to improve environmental practice on farms.

It means that we get a little bit more this year as organic farmers – but not much more, and definitely not as much as a big intensive farm, which could opt out of the greening measures and forego 30% of the subsidy, and still garner a large sum of money. This is because the amount of the subsidy is based primarily on the size of the farm.

We’re about 8.5 hectares – pretty small even for a small farm. But we’re not just playing at farming: we have an on-site farm stand, run a vegetable box scheme, sell at two producers’ markets each week and supply a range of local restaurants and shops. We’re proud that we sell all our veg within a 25-mile radius of the farm. We have employees and we work our tails off.

We didn’t bother applying for our hedges, a further greening measure – even though we would receive more funding – because we’d have had to measure them and we just weren’t up to it.

OK, maybe we should not have left it so late, but still …

I had spent the day turning over our holiday cottages, which provide us with a vital supplementary income, and the weather was turning, so my husband was out sowing parsnips and carrots as fast as he could before the rain came.

We’d been flat out all week – I have multiple freelance projects on the go that pay our household expenses and we have about a third of the labour we actually need on the farm, so spring is always fraught in the fields.

Now I know that we shouldn’t have waited until late afternoon on the 15th (the final deadline) to look at the form, but it was so much harder than it had to be. The greening measures represent an important concession to sustainability – and, yes, I’ve thought about my use of the word ‘concession’ rather than ‘shift’ or ‘transition’.

As organic farmers we automatically qualify for them without having to fulfill the specific greening measures. But the form was hard to complete because the Rural Payments Office has changed the designations of our land and got rid of codes that we had previously used to describe our planting.

Our orchard is now down as permanent grass instead of permanent crop for some reason and the MP1 code (‘mixed vegetable production’, the only one that described our crops) has disappeared, leaving us only with MC3 (‘arable crop – mixed’, a catch-all code).

But at least we didn’t have to detail each and every one of the different crops we grow – more than 50 altogether.

Farming bureaucracy should make room for us!

If the detail in my description is starting to wear your attention down, that’s exactly what it did to us. We don’t fit into the current model of farming that the Welsh Assembly Government is trying to assess, but the thing is, we should.

What the government is asking for in the greening measures is what we already do as part of our ethos: our crops are many and diverse; rotation is critical in our care of the soil; and biodiversity is necessary for the farm’s health. Farming bureaucracy should make room for us, because we can’t be treated as an “exotic niche” any more, as Harry Greenfield writes this week in his SFT piece on politics and food.

If we want to move towards a sustainable future in farming, it’s got to be about more than a few minor adjustments to how we farm. We have to change our way of thinking, and part of that thinking must be reflected in the governmental accounting of the sector.

Make room for the small farm and take its impact seriously. Help it to survive and thrive as much as other scales of farming. We must realise that sustainability is small, and the small mixed farm is integral to how agriculture must change. It is the way forward.

Alicia Miller runs Troed y Rhiw Organics, an organic horticulture farm in West Wales, with her partner Nathan Richards. Born in the United States, she’s a long way from home but loves her life in the wild west of Wales. She works as a freelance writer and editor and understands sustainable food from the hands on perspective of growing food on a small family-run farm. She graduated with distinction from Stanford University and is currently pursuing a phd at Birkbeck College, University of London, writing on issues of artists practice and gentrification.

Facebook: Troed y Rhiw Farm.

This article was originally published by the Sustainable Food Trust.

A couple of weeks ago, at 7pm on a Friday night, my husband and I stood in one of our fields in West Wales guesstimating how much of it was in green manures (fertility building crops), what was in vegetable crops and how much of the field margin was in permanent grass.

We had a long discussion about what constituted ‘fallow’ and looked for a code that represented ‘ploughed but not planted’, to no avail. At that point, we were half way between laughing hysterically and tearing our hair out.

At one point, in exasperation, I nearly asked him why on earth he couldn’t grow just one crop in one field like the rest of conventional farming?

We were standing out in that field attempting to fill out the Welsh Assembly Government’s Single Application Form (SAF), through which we receive a small sum of money each year.

We’re organic farmers and our rotations are pretty complicated, in part because we’re small. Our fields are a mix of many crops and also green manures.

By the time I filed the form online at nearly 10pm, I was wondering why we bothered. For the amount of time we spent trying to make our farm fit into the proverbial administrative box for the subsidies, it hardly seemed worth it.

The problem? The new ‘greening’ measures in the CAP

The subsidies come down through the European Common Agricultural Policy which funds farming across Europe. This year, the SAF is different (adding to our stress) because of the new ‘greening’ measures introduced to improve environmental practice on farms.

It means that we get a little bit more this year as organic farmers – but not much more, and definitely not as much as a big intensive farm, which could opt out of the greening measures and forego 30% of the subsidy, and still garner a large sum of money. This is because the amount of the subsidy is based primarily on the size of the farm.

We’re about 8.5 hectares – pretty small even for a small farm. But we’re not just playing at farming: we have an on-site farm stand, run a vegetable box scheme, sell at two producers’ markets each week and supply a range of local restaurants and shops. We’re proud that we sell all our veg within a 25-mile radius of the farm. We have employees and we work our tails off.

We didn’t bother applying for our hedges, a further greening measure – even though we would receive more funding – because we’d have had to measure them and we just weren’t up to it.

OK, maybe we should not have left it so late, but still …

I had spent the day turning over our holiday cottages, which provide us with a vital supplementary income, and the weather was turning, so my husband was out sowing parsnips and carrots as fast as he could before the rain came.

We’d been flat out all week – I have multiple freelance projects on the go that pay our household expenses and we have about a third of the labour we actually need on the farm, so spring is always fraught in the fields.

Now I know that we shouldn’t have waited until late afternoon on the 15th (the final deadline) to look at the form, but it was so much harder than it had to be. The greening measures represent an important concession to sustainability – and, yes, I’ve thought about my use of the word ‘concession’ rather than ‘shift’ or ‘transition’.

As organic farmers we automatically qualify for them without having to fulfill the specific greening measures. But the form was hard to complete because the Rural Payments Office has changed the designations of our land and got rid of codes that we had previously used to describe our planting.

Our orchard is now down as permanent grass instead of permanent crop for some reason and the MP1 code (‘mixed vegetable production’, the only one that described our crops) has disappeared, leaving us only with MC3 (‘arable crop – mixed’, a catch-all code).

But at least we didn’t have to detail each and every one of the different crops we grow – more than 50 altogether.

Farming bureaucracy should make room for us!

If the detail in my description is starting to wear your attention down, that’s exactly what it did to us. We don’t fit into the current model of farming that the Welsh Assembly Government is trying to assess, but the thing is, we should.

What the government is asking for in the greening measures is what we already do as part of our ethos: our crops are many and diverse; rotation is critical in our care of the soil; and biodiversity is necessary for the farm’s health. Farming bureaucracy should make room for us, because we can’t be treated as an “exotic niche” any more, as Harry Greenfield writes this week in his SFT piece on politics and food.

If we want to move towards a sustainable future in farming, it’s got to be about more than a few minor adjustments to how we farm. We have to change our way of thinking, and part of that thinking must be reflected in the governmental accounting of the sector.

Make room for the small farm and take its impact seriously. Help it to survive and thrive as much as other scales of farming. We must realise that sustainability is small, and the small mixed farm is integral to how agriculture must change. It is the way forward.

Alicia Miller runs Troed y Rhiw Organics, an organic horticulture farm in West Wales, with her partner Nathan Richards. Born in the United States, she’s a long way from home but loves her life in the wild west of Wales. She works as a freelance writer and editor and understands sustainable food from the hands on perspective of growing food on a small family-run farm. She graduated with distinction from Stanford University and is currently pursuing a phd at Birkbeck College, University of London, writing on issues of artists practice and gentrification.

Facebook: Troed y Rhiw Farm.

This article was originally published by the Sustainable Food Trust.

We live in a time where the dominant mechanistic worldview of the last few centuries is becoming increasingly exposed as an inadequate interpretation of the interdependent nature of life. But because this ideology has dominated our ideas of how we should grow our food, rear our animals, raise our children, heal our society and look after our planet, we have largely forgotten quite how important the web of life is. Plants take a lead role in this mysterious play of life, providing, in one way or another, most of our clothes, our shelter, our food and our medicine. It’s worth reflecting on this mutually beneficial plant-human bond, and on how re-engaging with the web of life may improve all our futures.

The story of life is really one of sharing and reciprocity. Ever since the earliest blue-green cyanobacteria such as spirulina ‘learned’ 2 billion years ago to harness the sun’s energy, green plants have been generating the energy of life. We have been interacting, communicating and growing with our environment since time began, with plants and animals developing into the life forms they express today because of this incessant sharing. As we evolved together with the plant kingdom, we both learned how to use each other for mutual advantage. It’s testimony to the success of this evolutionary relationship that our bodies are able to recognise and benefit from the natural phytochemicals developed within plants: a relationship so successful that the health of our cardiovascular, digestive, immune, respiratory, nervous, endocrine and psychological systems is largely dependent on plants.

Plants have developed strategies for protection and in turn protect us

Plants have developed strategies that attract insects, animals and the wind to carry their procreative pollen far and wide. A spectrum of colours, tempting aromas and the reward of some sweet nectar lie in exchange for this fertile foray. However, in more defensive modes, plants have developed protective compounds that help guard them against damage from a plethora of microbes. Peppermint, for example, has developed powerful essential oils to ward off fungal invasions. In response, these little microbes have over time evolved new challenges to threaten the plant’s defences. And so the dance continues, the plant developing novel and useful compounds to respond to the microbes’ ever-evolving reproductive intentions.

Our use of these botanical species over millennia suggests that bacteria, fungi and viruses have less ability to develop resistance to a broad-spectrum botanical pharmacy than to a narrow pharmaceutical one as used in our modern health system. Plants long used by cultures all over the world, such as andrographis, neem and elderberry, all display a potent ability to ward off infections and avoid creating antibiotic resistance.

Plants have developed a plethora of these phytochemical compounds, empowering them with broad-spectrum protection: for example, essential oils, polyphenols or steroids that help to protect and strengthen the plant. Many species have 1,000-plus compounds at very low levels of concentration. Animals and humans have discovered how to use these plants for a wide range of health benefits, and over the years we have learnt how to use 50,000 of the more than 250,000 species of flowering plants in the world.

The history of medicine is in great part the history of herbal medicine, with the great cultures of medicine from the Americas, Europe and Asia collated by such giants as Hippocrates, Galen, Culpeper, Charaka, Sushruta, Huang Di and Li Shi Zhen, harnessing these insights into codified and systematic scientific medical traditions. As we learned to tap into Nature’s innate healing vitality we also learned that plants help our bodies and minds heal; they help us fulfil our potential.

Mutually beneficial reciprocity, sharing and learning are found at the heart of most symbiotic relationships. It’s the idea of being selfishly wise and wisely selfish: you look after yourself so you are well enough to look after others, and look after others so they are well enough to look after you, be you bee, butterfly, blueberry or human being. Of course, some species are certainly dangerous to us, but if we can heighten our already remarkable knowledge of how certain plants can benefit our health, they will flourish and so will we.

Nutritional diversity is the key to health and happiness

Until about 100 years ago we used to keep healthy by eating over 100 plant species, but for most people today that figure is down to around 10–20. That means we are exposed to much less of Nature’s phytochemical benefits every day. Because the variety of plants and herbs in our diet has radically diminished, we are no longer bathing our cells in as broad a spectrum of plant protection as we did through all of our earlier evolution, and this is one of the reasons our society’s health is suffering today.

A study carried out a couple of years ago by David Blanchflower and colleagues at the University of Warwick and published in 2012 showed how our happiness is directly connected with the amount of fruit and vegetables we eat. The work of Paul Clayton and Judith Rowbotham describing how our diets have declined in nutritional diversity since the Victorian 1870s when chronic disease rates were 90% lower than today underscores the value of diversity. One way of broadening our nutritional horizons is to include more of the less well-known plants in our diet, such as those used in the herbal tradition – for example liquorice, lemon balm and lime flower.

The ability that plants have learnt to protect themselves from invading microbes and extreme climates is remarkable. That these same evolutionarily familiar qualities can help our lives flourish is surely common sense. Just as the spicy compounds, aromatic terpenes and colourful flavonoids that you can find in ginger, tulsi and turmeric help the plant flourish, they also interact with our whole mental-emotional-immune network to optimise our response to just about everything. They can help stop a virus replicating, they can kick-start our nervous system to ameliorate pain, they can boost our fertility, and they can lift our mood when we feel threatened. As they interact with our genes, cells, tissues, organs and spirit, plants literally help us to influence our destiny.

This is no simple thing. We have an extraordinary and complex physiology, and yet minute levels of plant compounds can profoundly influence our health. Our human genome has evolved by selecting a vast array of low-level plant compounds to benefit its progress. Over the last 10 million or so years our human genetic experiment has been the story of how we utilise infinitesimally small amounts of phytochemicals to help us thrive. Conversely, the last 100 years or so has been a health experiment in how we use high-dose single chemicals, resulting in some, albeit isolated, remarkable success stories as well as some notorious tragedies.

The dangers inherent in modern pharmacology

As we face an explosion of system-wide disorders, such as diabetes, cancer and emotional imbalances, illnesses that do not hugely benefit from the single chemical approach, it’s not a big leap to conclude that we need a more developed system-wide approach to healing. Billions have been spent to tell us the obvious: that the basis of good health is good diet, exercise and lifestyle. Billions more have been spent trying to prove that single-molecule medicine works. But the dangers of the ‘magic’ bullets of modern pharmacology are becoming clearer. It’s time for the magic ‘web’ to take back centre stage; the plants and the tradition of herbal medicine are all around to help.

On a softer note, and beyond just their compounds, plants have a character unique to themselves expressing a knowable personality. We don’t just need to know what’s ‘in it’: we need to know ‘who’ it is. Quantum physics lauds the value of observation as the keystone to understanding reality; Einstein, Bohm and Goethe, in contrast to Descartes and Dawkins, all champion the value of the phenomena above the theory, and this makes each of us the most important scientist in the world.

Experiment for yourself and see: some plants are lively (chew some ginger) and some are much more mellow (sip some chamomile). Some awaken our hearts (just look at a rose) and others simply make us happy (too many to mention, but lemon balm and tulsi sing from the treetops). Whatever they do, plants share life with us, and we have developed complex physiological systems to understand them. We just need to open our hearts and minds as we see, smell, taste, touch and listen.

Understanding traditional medicine connects us with Nature

Traditional health systems, such as Ayurveda, teach us to open our senses and read the language of Nature; their insights offer an amazing way to tell the story of plants and how we can benefit from them. How one plant, like ginseng, surviving through the harshest winters, can bring us warming strength, or another, like aloe vera, thriving in the hot desert, can soothe our burns. Or we can appreciate for a moment that just as cinnamon thrives in the humid jungle, its drying heat can help protect us from drizzle and damp, or how sweet elderberry fruits help soothe us through the winter. Understanding more about how plants cope with extreme conditions can tell us a lot about their beneficial health properties. Observing Nature, as opposed to just measuring her, teaches us that our perception is more important than anything else; our life is literally ours to perceive.

As we experience the power of Nature, and we come to terms with the awe of her magnificence, we end up in a place of mystery and wonder. How we live together as a community, how we perceive our environment, as we engage on a global level with all the plants, people and planet, is the story of life… One of sharing and reciprocity as part of the wholeness of the universe.

This article was first published in the May/June 2015 issue of Resurgence & Ecologist magazine.

Sebastian Pole is an Ayurvedic practitioner and is co-founder and herbal director of Pukka Herbs. www.pukkaherbs.com

A controversial $30 billion mega-project to build a transcontinental railway from the Atlantic to the Pacific has caused fear and outrage among the indigenous peoples of the Amazon.

The 5,300 km railway, which was unveiled last month by Chinese Premier Li Keqiang on an official visit to Brasilia, would link Brazil’s Atlantic coast with a Pacific port in Peru, enabling the bulk export of agricultural commodities like soy, corn and beef, from Brazil, along with iron ore, other minerals, logs and sawn timber.

Operating in the reverse direction, it would provide a rapid conduit for Chinese exports of manufactured goods into lucrative Brazilian, Paraguayan, Uruguayan and Argentinan markets.

But the economic gains would come at a massive human and environmental cost: the line would cross through many indigenous territories and areas of high biodiversity across the Amazon rainforest in southern Peru and Brazil, Brazil’s Mato Grosso region, and Peruvian cloud forests and other sensitive Andean habitats.

Ninawá Kaxinawá, an indigenous leader whose community lives near the proposed railway line, told Survival International:

“This railway is evil and it threatens our people. For us Indians and our uncontacted relatives this project represents a deadly danger which would put an end to our forest and our lives!”

A new swathe of destruction across the Amazon

If realized, the railway line would wreak havoc on indigenous peoples’ lands and lives by opening up their areas to industrial exploitation, illegal mining and logging, and encourage colonization.

It would also fuel a new drive to clear natural areas – forests, woodlands and savannahs – in Brazil and beyond, to agricultural use to supply China’s growing demand for food and animal feeds. And it would increase demand for minerals and timber, adding to the pressure to log and industrialise forests

Uncontacted tribes, the most vulnerable societies on the planet, would face devastation from invasions into their lands. Whole populations could be wiped out by violence from outsiders and by diseases like flu and measles to which they have no resistance.

According to Survival’s director, Stephen Corry, the railway “is likely to cause even more devastation of the Amazon rainforest and its peoples. While studies show that tribal peoples are the best conservationists, their lands are facing an onslaught of development projects.

“Projects like this amount to nothing more than the theft of tribal lands and – as always – they’re carried out in the name of ‘progress’ and ‘development.’

The lessons of the 900 km Carajas railway

Similar projects set a chilling precedent. In the 1980s, the 900 km Carajás railway line in Brazil’s north-eastern Amazon opened up the land of many tribes such as the isolated Awá, Earth’s most threatened tribe, to illegal loggers, cattle ranchers and settlers.

Countless families were massacred and others succumbed to diseases brought in by outsiders, and rampant logging resulted in over 30% deforestation in the Awá’s central territory.

Decades later, illegal loggers still threaten the lives of uncontacted Awá. In December 2014, a group of three Awá were forced out of their forest home by loggers. Two of them are now critically ill.

Survival is calling on the Brazilian and Peruvian governments to uphold national and international laws, which require that indigenous peoples must be properly consulted and give their consent before projects that will affect them can go ahead.

Under Brazil’s Ordinance 3013, passed in 2012, this may not be necessary, however, as the controversial law – which sparked massive protests across Brazil (see photo) abolished the need for indigenous consultation for major infrastructure projects deemed integral to national security.

Because consultation with uncontacted tribes is impossible without disrupting their societies and exposing them to life-threatening disease, adds Corry, their land must be protected to avoid catastrophe.

“For centuries, the Indians of the Americas have been sacrificed at the altar of profit. Many don’t survive the onslaught against their lives and lands. Make no mistake – for uncontacted tribes this railroad is genocidal.”

Principal source: Survival International

The Department of Energy and Climate Change – DECC – and the Environment Agency jointly issued a press notice last Sunday.

On a Sunday? Obviously someone at DECC is really annoyed about recent criticism!

If you analyse the content of that statement, what we see is distorted version of the facts, designed to manipulate the reality of what is taking place today.

For a some time the Government has sought to obfuscate any objective examination of its policies on unconventional gas and oil. Thus far though, we haven’t seen such a collection of demonstrably erroneous claims within a single short statement. Let’s begin at the beginning:

“Over the last couple of days, some newspapers have been misreporting the regulation of the potential shale reserves that could play a key role in securing Britain’s future energy supplies.”

We may have ‘resources, but no ‘reserves’

Firstly, Britain has no shale gas “reserves”. A ‘reserve’ is a known and exploitable quantity of mineral resources in the ground, with a known probability of extraction under existing market conditions.

The British Geological Survey – who have carried out studies in the north of England, The Weald and Scotland – have produced figures for the ‘resource’ which is in the ground. They have refused, however, to put a figure on how great a ‘reserve’ might actually exist. There is simply not enough evidence to make such a calculation.

Although many “hype” the figures (not my word, I’m quoting paragraph 14 of the Environmental Audit Committee’s report on ‘fracking’), there is little evidence to back-up those figures.

Even the energy industry regulator OFGEM, which has commissioned research on the issue, believes that shale gas will never contribute more than 5% to 15% of national gas demand – and also notes the environmental concerns about the process.

That amount of gas production is far less than would be required to avoid, under the Government’s future energy scenarios, our dependency of high levels of piped and liquefied gas imports.

Next I’ll take two quotes from near the beginning and the end of the statement:

“The government also remains committed to ensuring communities have their say on fracking applications and this is why there is no change to the process for environmental permits for fracking.”

“As we have said before, we have made a commitment to ensure local people have a say about fracking in their community. The Government continues to support the development of the shale industry in a safe and sustainable way.”

These statements are demonstrably untrue

Back in 2013 the Treasury’s infrastructure white paper, Investing in Britain’s Future, ordered: the Environment Agency to change its permitting processes; and the Departments for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) to change planning guidance.

The stated purpose of this was to speed up the approval of drilling sites for on-shore oil and gas production. Specifically, it stated that permits for drilling should be granted within two weeks.

DCLG introduced the new planning guidance in July 2013 – which was replaced by the even more stripped-down ‘planning practice guidance’ in March 2014. Its effect is to restrict what issues local planning authorities were allowed consider as part of planning applications.

Irrespective of what concerns the public have, local planners cannot consider the safety, the more sustainable alternatives to unconventional fossil fuels, nor the environmental and public health hazards highlighted in recent scientific research.

What the Environment Agency did to implement The Treasury’s demands was even more surreal.

In August 2013 the Environment Agency consulted on draft technical guidance on ‘on-shore oil and gas exploratory operations’. That process is still on-going, but it did note that the high level of public interest would almost certainly require a public consultation as part of any permit application for on-shore oil and gas.

Then, in March 2015, the Environment Agency issued new guidelines on ‘determinations involving sites of high public interest‘. In an almost Kafkaesque move, the Agency redefined the criteria for sites where public interest demands a public consultation as follows:

“Although it might seem at first sight rather unnecessary to define what a ‘site of high public interest’ is, the fact that a site is generating a lot of public interest does not, for the purposes of this note, necessarily make it a ‘site of high public interest’.”

Exemptions for emissions and waste from fracking

Currently all on-shore drilling operations require the Environment Agency (in England), Natural Resources Wales and the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency to issue permits for the emissions and waste created.

During 2011/2012 this created an absurd situation where: in Scotland, SEPA were issuing permits for exploratory drilling at Cannonbie; and yet, in England, the Environment Agency refused to ask Cuadrilla to apply for a permit for their work in Lancashire – because the Government did not want to encumber the industry with regulation.

In March 2014 DEFRA and the Welsh Government consulted on amending the Environmental Permitting Regulations (EPR) to exclude exploratory operations from the scope of the regulations. The specific amendment proposed that Schedule 1, Part 2, Section 1.2 of the regulations, which defines the restrictions on oil and gas operations:

” … does not apply to activities for which a petroleum exploration and development licence has been issued by the Minister pursuant to the Petroleum Act 1998 and the capacity of crude oil storage does not exceed 200 tonnes and the duration of oil storage does not exceed 6 months.”

The results of that consultation, like the Environment Agency’s technical guidance, have yet to be announced.

As a result of the Government’s consultation, the Environment Agency announced it would carry out a consultation to take account of the expected change in the law. It was the media’s response to the impending closure of this public consultation that the DECC statement sought to address.

The mystery of the missing Telegraph article

Which brings us to the next part of the DECC statement:

“The Independent’s article ‘Fast-track fracking without public consent’ and a follow up commentary piece in The Telegraph ‘Double standards will fuel suspicion on fracking’ implies that fracking applications would receive less environmental scrutiny from the public. This is simply untrue.”

The article in The Independent is, generally, quite straightforward. Where the dispute probably arises is DECC’s definition of ‘fracking’.

A full, ‘high volume hydraulic fracturing’ (HVHF) operation requires consent. The way DECC have gotten around the technical details in this case is to reclassify ‘flow testing’ or ‘mini-frac’ operations as being insignificant – which, in a way, compared to a HVHF operation they are.

However, even the flow testing process, and associated operation like acid washing, are still environmentally significant – creating a range of solid, liquid and gaseous substances which have to be dealt with, and which have the potential to pollute the local environment.

The Telegraph article, referred to in the DECC statement, is even more interesting … it no longer exists! (The URL in the link was ‘rescued’ from Google’s cache).

It’s a little know fact, but Google’s search buffers, along with other search engines, do not always sync with the current web site content. Searching Google for a specific Telegraph article entitled ‘Double standards will fuel suspicion on fracking’ produced a buffered reference to the Telegraph’s site map file – with an article which has precisely that name.

Search the Telegraph‘s web site for that article today, and it is not there. It would appear that the Telegraph‘s editorial staff, browbeaten by the political muscle exerted by DECC, and have chosen to remove the article.

This is not an isolated instance. As a result of pressure from the Government, and from the fracking industry’s PR/lobbying machine, the UK’s mainstream media not to carry many critical articles on this topic.

The Environment Agency’s 1-2 weeks to grant fracking permits

At the same time, Government and industry-backed groups actively promote the technology. Consequently, many of the ‘facts’ we see about fracking in the media do not represent the full scope or uncertainty over what this process entails. Which brings us to the next block of DECC’s statement:

“The Government has said from the start that we will consult with local communities about the impact of fracking and we will continue to work closely with the Environment Agency (EA) and other regulators to ensure all operators abide by the strict rules that govern the industry.”

This is a clear misrepresentation of the Treasury’s original policy, outlined in paragraph 4.34 of the infrastructure white paper, which required that the Agency must “issue permits within 1-2 weeks, by developing standard rules for onshore oil and gas exploration activities.”

If the White Paper accurately states the Government’s intention – which we must assume is the case – then for the Environment Agency to issue permits within ‘1-2 weeks’ there is no possibility that the public can be consulted. The Agency’s Kafkaesque amendment to its public consultation guidance enacts that as policy.

Piece-by-piece, the amendments to the Agency’s permitting guidance have progressively excluded the public from the permitting process in England (Scotland and Wales have yet to complete this process).

This has been the demonstrable objective ever since the Government worked with Chris Smith – then chair of the Agency (now chair of the Shale Gas Task Force) – to plan these changes.

What is more, in tandem with the reforms to planning policy, it means many environment issues over which the public have concerns cannot be addressed through the regulatory process – which is arguably an infringement of the public’s right to be consulted under the Aarhus Convention.

Keeping test-drilling out of the regulatory scope

Finally, let’s take the last two blocks of the DECC statement together:

“The process for operators to apply for a fracking permit has not changed. Any operator wanting to undertake fracking needs to apply for an environmental permit, conduct an environmental impact assessment and apply for planning permission. This is open to full public consultation.”

“The current consultation by the EA, however, focuses on two techniques used for testing conventional and unconventional oil and gas wells. The consultation looks to define the standard rule permits for operators applying to drill and carry out preliminary testing of oil and gas wells and not on the permits for fracking.”

All the issues raised in an environmental statement might be open to consultation – but that does not mean a local planning authority has the power to consider them. Planning guidance excludes many areas of contention from their decision-making powers.

The above statements also rely on DECC’s redefinition of ‘fracking’ to exclude flow testing and other operations.

Contrary to the DECC statement, the regulatory process has changed; or to be precise, it has changed, but the Government has yet to pluck up the courage to announce precisely how far those changes will push debate on these issues out of the public’s reach.

What the DECC statement singularly fails to encompass are the current proposals to exempt ‘temporary’ exploration activities from the Environment Agency’s permitting controls.

As far as the public are concerned, exploration is part of the whole unconventional gas process – although the industry always contend this relationship. Therefore, as far as the public are concerned, they are being shut out of the decision-making process.

Overall, the most serious factor which the DECC statement fails to address is that – today – we do not know what the operators are going to be required to do. So many consultations and amendments are outstanding that there is no certainty over:

• the letter of the law related to unconventional gas and oil;
• the requirements of environmental permitting;
• or the Environment Agency’s treatment of permit applications.

What a tangled web they weave …

Hanging over all of that, the results of the 14^th Landward Oil and Gas Licensing Round, which potentially releases another 40% of the UK’s land area for exploration, have still, over four years since that process first began, yet to be announced.

Government ministers, and the mandarins at DECC and the Treasury, have for the last four years attempted to retroactively engineer a legal framework for the exploitation of unconventional gas and oil.

Their major obstacle has been, over that time, that the evidence emerging about the impacts of those processes has made this harder to do – and has roused the public to oppose these policies.

Whether to save political face, or because they simply have no other policy which fits their ideological agenda, the Government has progressively spun ever-greater ‘tangled web’ to deflect criticism from this policy.

Sunday’s statement from DECC reached a new height in that process – since almost every paragraph can be shown to be an exaggeration, a misquoting of where the process of ‘reform’ currently stands, or to be demonstrably incorrect.

Despite DECC’s statement being full of errors, half-truths and distortions, the greater problem we have is that few in positions of power in society are willing to challenge the Government’s case. And the Government actively plays upon the media’s poor coverage of the issue in order to do that.

More generally though, the greater failure here is not about ‘fracking’ per se. It is that our Government no longer feels the need to act upon objective evidence, and – in the words of the Ministerial Code – to give “accurate and truthful information” in defence of their policies.

The DECC statement is an exemplar of these excesses.

Paul Mobbs is an independent environmental consultant, investigator, author and lecturer, and maintains the Free Range Activism Website (FRAW).

A fully referenced version of this article can be found on FRAW.

Police helicopters, territorial support squads, police from five different forces and guard-dogs all descended last Friday, on the Runnymede Eco-village’s Festival of Democracy.

It was being held this weekend to mark the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta. The Festival had a full programme of speakers, workshops and music, covering everything from the corporate destruction of democracy to the reduction in access to justice, as well as a range of eco-workshops.

=== STOP PRESS – POLICE BACK DOWN – FESTIVAL GOES AHEAD ===

But Surrey Police chiefs disgracefully abused their powers and declared the democracy festival to be a “rave”, a claim faithfully relayed by the BBC along with police claims that they were “committed to ensuring the safety of the public”, acting only “to prevent any disturbance, disruption or distress to the local community”, and concerned about “increased crime”.

By claiming the event to be an “illegal rave” police were able to block Festival goers from entering the eco-village under Section 63 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act (1994). Two arrests were made, including indymedia journalist Ben Kidd who was peacefully live-streaming the police invasion (see embed, below).

Both those arbitrary arrests, and the threatened seizure of the property of those attending the Festival – another power accorded by Section 63 – run completely against the guarantees of the Magna Carta itself: an irony no doubt lost on Surrey Police and their political masters.

Inspired by the Diggers of the 17th century

Runnymede Eco-Village was founded in 2012 by a group called the 2012 Diggers. The original Diggers were founded in the 17th century and sought to set up free, self-sustaining communities on common lands during the English Civil War. They were brutally suppressed by Cromwell.

The 2012 Diggers were formed from members of the St Paul’s London Occupy movement and the evicted Kew Bridge Eco-Community. They are calling for a land reform revolution, to enable people to live on the land, growing their own food and building ecological communities on unused land.

The Surrey police oppression is a stark reminder that some things have changed little since the Magna Carta was signed in 1215. Unlike most other European countries, there has been very little land-reform in Britain since then. A staggering 66% of the UK’s land surface is owned by a tiny 0.4% elite. A third is still owned by the aristocracy, led by the Duke of Westminster whose 240,000 acres are worth a phenomenal £6 billion.

Smallholdings are far more productive and far more ecological than the vast destructive mono-culture factory farms now dominating Britain. Low impact settlement in harmony with land and landscape, as promoted by the 2012 Diggers, stands in stark contrast to the endless spread of car-dependent mass housing spreading across the British countryside.

Robber barons – Britain’s five richest families own more than the poorest fifth

But it’s not just Britain’s land distribution which is extreme, but also the growing concentration of wealth, which has only increased under the years of ‘austerity’. The five richest UK families own more wealth than the twelve and half million people, making up the poorest fifth of the UK’s population.

It is important to remember that the Magna Carta was not about freedom, democracy and the rule of law for the general population, but for the aristocracy and property-owning gentry, who in the Battle of the Barons rebelled against the royal supremacy of King John.

Whilst it was a crucial first step, it took centuries of painful sacrifice by rebels and campaigners, from the Peasants Revolt of 1381 to the Suffragettes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the post World War 2 creators of the European Convention on humam rights, to achieve parliamentary democracy, universal suffrage and human rights for the wider population.

But even the level of rights, freedoms and democracy that the British people presently enjoy is too much for today’s powers-that-be, who appear determined, under the cover of Magna Carta celebrations, to set them back in every way possible.

So it is that today Britain faces another Battle of the Barons. The fossil fuel, fracking, banking, vulture capitalist, tax-haven and media barons of the 1% have captured our democracy and our media. They have established The Prostitute State.

They are using this to usurp our remaining human rights, with for example Rupert Murdoch boasting how he forced Cameron to abolish the Human Rights Act, legal aid being slashed for millions of people, making a mockery of the Magna Carta commitment to access to justice and the new Extremism Act abolishing many remaining free-speech or protest rights.

These are the very same fossil-fuel addicted barons blocking all meaningful democratic action on the climate and ecological crises threatening the planet with ecocide, within our children’s lifetimes.

We should be celebrating people, not power

So rather than bizarrely unveiling statues of the unelected successor to King John, Elizabeth Saxe-Coburg, let us instead from the meadows of Runnymede today, summon civil society to an urgent constitutional people’s convention to draft a Great 21st Century Democratic Reform Act.

This would lay the basis for a new Britain based on the principles of ecological and social justice for the 100% and not the 1%. Now that would be a true celebration of the spirit of the Magna Carta.

More information: Runnymede Democracy Festival.

Donnachadh McCarthy is a member of Occupy Democracy, co-organiser for Occupy Rupert Murdoch Week, a former Deputy Chair of the Liberal Democrats, and author of “The Prostitute State – How Britain’s Democracy Has Been Bought”. He can be reached via his website 3acorns. Follow on Facebook.

Petition: ‘Save the Human Rights Act‘ (38 Degrees).

Copies of ‘The Prostitute State – How Britain’s Democracy Has Been Bought‘ are available from theprostitutestate.co.uk. E-book version available from Lulu.com.

Police helicopters, territorial support squads, police from five different forces and guard-dogs all descended last Friday, on the Runnymede Eco-village’s Festival of Democracy.

It was being held this weekend to mark the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta. The Festival had a full programme of speakers, workshops and music, covering everything from the corporate destruction of democracy to the reduction in access to justice, as well as a range of eco-workshops.

=== STOP PRESS – POLICE BACK DOWN – FESTIVAL GOES AHEAD ===

But Surrey Police chiefs disgracefully abused their powers and declared the democracy festival to be a “rave”, a claim faithfully relayed by the BBC along with police claims that they were “committed to ensuring the safety of the public”, acting only “to prevent any disturbance, disruption or distress to the local community”, and concerned about “increased crime”.

By claiming the event to be an “illegal rave” police were able to block Festival goers from entering the eco-village under Section 63 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act (1994). Two arrests were made, including indymedia journalist Ben Kidd who was peacefully live-streaming the police invasion (see embed, below).

Both those arbitrary arrests, and the threatened seizure of the property of those attending the Festival – another power accorded by Section 63 – run completely against the guarantees of the Magna Carta itself: an irony no doubt lost on Surrey Police and their political masters.

Inspired by the Diggers of the 17th century

Runnymede Eco-Village was founded in 2012 by a group called the 2012 Diggers. The original Diggers were founded in the 17th century and sought to set up free, self-sustaining communities on common lands during the English Civil War. They were brutally suppressed by Cromwell.

The 2012 Diggers were formed from members of the St Paul’s London Occupy movement and the evicted Kew Bridge Eco-Community. They are calling for a land reform revolution, to enable people to live on the land, growing their own food and building ecological communities on unused land.

The Surrey police oppression is a stark reminder that some things have changed little since the Magna Carta was signed in 1215. Unlike most other European countries, there has been very little land-reform in Britain since then. A staggering 66% of the UK’s land surface is owned by a tiny 0.4% elite. A third is still owned by the aristocracy, led by the Duke of Westminster whose 240,000 acres are worth a phenomenal £6 billion.

Smallholdings are far more productive and far more ecological than the vast destructive mono-culture factory farms now dominating Britain. Low impact settlement in harmony with land and landscape, as promoted by the 2012 Diggers, stands in stark contrast to the endless spread of car-dependent mass housing spreading across the British countryside.

Robber barons – Britain’s five richest families own more than the poorest fifth

But it’s not just Britain’s land distribution which is extreme, but also the growing concentration of wealth, which has only increased under the years of ‘austerity’. The five richest UK families own more wealth than the twelve and half million people, making up the poorest fifth of the UK’s population.

It is important to remember that the Magna Carta was not about freedom, democracy and the rule of law for the general population, but for the aristocracy and property-owning gentry, who in the Battle of the Barons rebelled against the royal supremacy of King John.

Whilst it was a crucial first step, it took centuries of painful sacrifice by rebels and campaigners, from the Peasants Revolt of 1381 to the Suffragettes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the post World War 2 creators of the European Convention on humam rights, to achieve parliamentary democracy, universal suffrage and human rights for the wider population.

But even the level of rights, freedoms and democracy that the British people presently enjoy is too much for today’s powers-that-be, who appear determined, under the cover of Magna Carta celebrations, to set them back in every way possible.

So it is that today Britain faces another Battle of the Barons. The fossil fuel, fracking, banking, vulture capitalist, tax-haven and media barons of the 1% have captured our democracy and our media. They have established The Prostitute State.

They are using this to usurp our remaining human rights, with for example Rupert Murdoch boasting how he forced Cameron to abolish the Human Rights Act, legal aid being slashed for millions of people, making a mockery of the Magna Carta commitment to access to justice and the new Extremism Act abolishing many remaining free-speech or protest rights.

These are the very same fossil-fuel addicted barons blocking all meaningful democratic action on the climate and ecological crises threatening the planet with ecocide, within our children’s lifetimes.

We should be celebrating people, not power

So rather than bizarrely unveiling statues of the unelected successor to King John, Elizabeth Saxe-Coburg, let us instead from the meadows of Runnymede today, summon civil society to an urgent constitutional people’s convention to draft a Great 21st Century Democratic Reform Act.

This would lay the basis for a new Britain based on the principles of ecological and social justice for the 100% and not the 1%. Now that would be a true celebration of the spirit of the Magna Carta.

More information: Runnymede Democracy Festival.

Donnachadh McCarthy is a member of Occupy Democracy, co-organiser for Occupy Rupert Murdoch Week, a former Deputy Chair of the Liberal Democrats, and author of “The Prostitute State – How Britain’s Democracy Has Been Bought”. He can be reached via his website 3acorns. Follow on Facebook.

Petition: ‘Save the Human Rights Act‘ (38 Degrees).

Copies of ‘The Prostitute State – How Britain’s Democracy Has Been Bought‘ are available from theprostitutestate.co.uk. E-book version available from Lulu.com.

The Caffè Nero badger cull milk sourcing story is a storm in a coffee cup, but it has created more froth in the media than an extra large cappuccino.

Just in case you don’t know, the international coffee shop chain has stopped sourcing milk from the badger cull zones in Gloucestershire and Somerset, after badger-lovers threatened to protest at its outlets.

But the move has given the pro badger cull lobby a golden opportunity to pull out all the stops in a frenzy of fear and anger, aimed at demonising not only the badger but also the caring & compassionate people who are willing to stand up and protect the species.

This is a desperate tactic, which is only being used because those who support the culling of badgers know they have completely failed to justify the policy on scientific, economic and humaneness grounds.

Time to introduce a few facts into the debate?

The facts speak for themselves. To date two years of badger culling in West Somerset and West Gloucestershire has resulted in the death of 2,476 badgers at a cost in the region of £15 million pounds. Which when divided between the number of badgers killed is over £6,600 per badger, the most expensive wildlife cull of its kind on record.

Despite assurances from the government that this would be a farmer led policy, the vast majority of this £15 million bill has been paid for by the tax payer. The huge costs of the cull are not only down to policing, but also the purchase and use of cages and heat seeking equipment and the employment of large numbers of civil servants both in Whitehall and the cull zones.

The government has also run up significant legal costs defending the disastrous badger cull policy in Court against the Badger Trust, Information Commissioner and private individuals.

The pilot culls were set up to test the efficiency and humaneness of free shooting of badgers at night by trained marksmen, nothing more. On this basis they have been a disastrous failure, as free shooting has proved highly ineffective as a killing method and has been found to be inhumane by both the government’s own Independent Expert Panel and more recently the British Veterinary Association.

The only way the culls can now continue is if a majority of badgers to be killed are trapped in cages and then shot. However based on the government’s own cost estimates this will come in at £3,500 per square km compared to £3,250 for trapping and vaccinating badgers.

To go forward with such a costly deeply flawed and unpopular culling policy, when vaccination projects are cheaper, is a political nightmare for the government. This is why despite huge pressure from the National Farmers Union, the badger cull will not be extended to new areas of England in 2015.

The political tide is turning – where it counts most

It’s also noticeable that many of the new intake of Tory MPs are increasingly nervous of being associated with the disastrous badger cull policy. The new Tory MP for Bath Ben Howlett, took the wind out of the sales of the interviewer on BBC Sunday Politics this week, when in response to a question on the Caffè  Nero story, he said he was opposed to badger culling and supported badger vaccination as an alternative.

The former Environment Secretary Owen Paterson might be doing his best to stir up things up from the side lines, but it’s clear he has little influence over the new generation of Tory MPs who came into Parliament on the coat tails of David Cameron’s surprise election victory.

Also the new DEFRA Edge Badger Vaccination scheme rolls out across 10 counties of England this summer, with over £1.3 million in public funding. This is David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ in action as public money is being used to provide training and equipment for large numbers of volunteers from Badger Trust and Wildlife Trust Groups to work with farmers to trap & vaccinate badgers on their land across wide areas of the country.

Andrew Bingham, MP for High Peak in Derbyshire, is just one of a growing number of Tory MPs who have changed their minds on badger culling and are now actively working to support badger vaccination in their constituencies, as part of this new DEFRA scheme.

Badger vaccination cannot cure a badger with TB, but with disease levels in badgers at around 15% (based on data from Randomised Badger Culling Trial) vaccinating the 75% without the disease is most definitely worthwhile. Despite what some farmers might want to believe, badger vaccination has been scientifically proven to significantly lower the spread of TB in disease free badgers and reduce the spread of the disease of in new born cubs.

However, we need to be careful not to fall into the trap of playing the badger blame game, when it’s comes to bovine TB. As the DEFRA Chief Scientist Ian Boyd told an NFU hosted TB policy conference last year, only 6% of TB infections in cattle are due to badgers, the other 94% is due to cattle to cattle disease transmission and this is where urgent action needs to be taken to get control of bovine TB.

Now other milk users are getting forced off the sidelines

A positive development from the Caffè Nero story is that food retailers and restaurant chains who are key users of fresh milk in the food chain, are now being dragged back into the centre of the debate on the bovine TB issue.

For too long they have sat on the side lines and allowed the government and the farming industry to play the badger blame game, which has resulted in the disastrous position we are currently in.

I will be meeting with Sainsbury’s next week on behalf of the Badger Trust and I will tell them it’s time the food retailers started to show some leadership on the bovine TB issue.

If they truly wish to do what is right for their farm suppliers, customers and the future of our wildlife, they should put funding into the DEFRA Edge badger vaccination scheme, work with their milk suppliers to improve bio security at the farm gate level and work with the government and farming industry to bring forward a cattle TB vaccination field trial in the UK in the next 12 to 18 months.

I hope we can look back at the Caffè Nero milk sourcing debate as a key moment when the whole food chain from farm to fork woke up to the need to work together to tackle bovine TB, without the further needless slaughter of badgers, which is so angering the wider public.

Dominic Dyer is Policy Advisor at the Born Free Foundation, which recently merged with Care for the Wild.

Should environmental groups that engage in public debate lose their tax-free status?

That’s the focus of a hotly disputed inquiry currently being considered by the Australian government – specifically, by the House of Representatives Standing Committee on the Environment.

Many green groups rely on tax-deductible donations from private citizens and small donors to sustain their work. In Australia, some 600 groups on the environmental register currently qualify.

This is comparable to schemes in Europe and the United States, and was initiated to allow citizens and corporations to fund organisations that engage in issues of public interest.

Those who initiated the inquiry, such as the committee’s chair, Liberal MP Matthew Hawke, evidently have no problem with groups that do ‘on-the-ground’ activities, such as planting trees and saving baby flying foxes. But they apparently see red when pondering groups such as Greenpeace, The Wilderness Society and Friends of the Earth, who openly decry some government policies.

Particularly rankling for some conservatives have been campaigns to stop coal developments in Australia.

Environmental advocacy is an essential freedom

From our perspective as professional conservation scientists, the government’s inquiry is a bad idea wrapped in naïveté.

For starters, almost all environmental decisions made in Australia have been the result of community advocacy. Dating back to the 19th century, community organisations have pushed governments to legislate for the protection of wildlife and natural habitats.

For instance, the NSW Bird Protection Act 1881 was passed because of the Zoological Society of NSW. When it comes to environmental protection, governments have rarely acted in the absence of community pressure.

Furthermore, fair and balanced public debates require input from all sides of an issue. Industry has a long history of funding advocacy groups to promote their agendas – often under the aegis of ‘community organisations’ that actually are little more than industry mouthpieces.

Such environmental wolves in sheep’s clothing include the Australian Environment Foundation – which is on the register of environmental organisations – but has a distinctly anti-environmental agenda.

Major corporations such as Dow Chemical, Chevron, the pre-merger Exxon and Mobil, and Philip Morris Tobacco have contributed to scores of other groups with pro-growth, anti-environmental agendas as documented by Sharon Beder in her book Global Spin.

Legitimate environmental groups, however, often achieve their funding via donations from thousands of individuals and the occasional philanthropic donor, rather than a few wealthy natural resource-exploiting corporations – although some environmental groups do partner with corporations in an effort to effect positive changes in their behaviour. Tax-free status is essential for such green groups.

The law, and 99.5% of respondents, support the status quo!

There is also a clear legal precedent for the status quo. In 2010 the High Court of Australia determined in the Aid / Watch Case that advocacy activities aimed at policy or legislative change do not exclude an organisation from being classified as a charity. Such activities were held to contribute positively to public welfare.

Finally, the Australian public is overwhelmingly opposed to the proposal to strip environmental groups of their charitable status. The House Committee solicited public comments to their inquiry, and we assessed every one of them.

Of 9,588 submissions, 9,539 (99.5%) were against the proposal, whereas just 28 (0.3%) were in favour (0.2% were neutral or ambiguous). Around 9,000 of the submissions were various types of form letters, although each was submitted by a different individual.

To us, the consensus against the proposal seems obvious. So, why is the government wasting the committee’s time on this inquiry when we have far greater environmental concerns that require bipartisan leadership?

Part of a broader attack on green activism

In fact, the committee’s inquiry is merely one facet of a broader effort by conservative politicians in Australia to hamstring environmental groups.

As well as moves to curtail green groups’ political activities, reported previously on The Conversation by Peter Burdon, this effort also includes

• the attempt by Liberal MP Richard Colbeck to ban environmental boycotts,
• moves to insert gag clauses into the contracts of community legal centres,
• the defunding of voluntary environmental and heritage organisations, and
• the drafting of anti-protest laws in states such as Western Australia.

Added to this list is the potential prosecution by the Victorian government of a green group that exposed illegal logging practices. As Burdon emphasises, even if such efforts don’t result in legal changes, they force poorly funded green groups to waste precious time and resources defending themselves.

The struggle is international

This war of environmental attrition isn’t just confined to Australia. There are alarming changes happening all over – most notably in the Asia-Pacific region.

In China, for instance, activists are often hounded while a new law restricting independent organisations is being drafted. Cambodia’s rulers are threatening to ‘handcuff’ any group that stirs up political trouble, while land rights activists in Lao are similarly harassed.

India is becoming a poster-child for anti-environmental fervour. A new law there is imposing tight restrictions on activist groups. A leaked report by the country’s Intelligence Bureau claimed – ridiculously – that public campaigns against coal, nuclear and hydroelectric projects, and genetically modified crops were costing the economy 2-3 percentage points of growth a year.

Most visibly in the firing line is Greenpeace India (GPI), targetted by the country’s powerful Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA). In January a Greenpeace campaigner was prevented from leaving the country because she planned to testify to the British Parliament about coal mining in India.

Then in April the MHA froze GPI’s bank accounts to incoming payments in an apparent attempt to bankrupt the organisation. This measure has been overturned by the courts, but further arbitrary measures of dubious legality have ensued.

Shooting the messenger, as environmental crises gather

In the coming decades, Australia and the world will face true environmental challenges. These include climate change; dwindling water, forests, biodiversity, and natural resources; and an extra 2 billion to 4 billion people to feed and support. We need real leadership and long-term policies to protect the imperilled ecosystems we all rely on.

Australia is certainly part of the global environmental crisis. We are among the world’s highest per-capita emitters of greenhouse gases – even without counting all the coal we export for others to burn.

Our parks and protected areas are being seriously diminished. Forest and woodland destruction has recently accelerated. And in northern Australia, many native wildlife species are experiencing dramatic and mysterious population declines.

Criticism can be uncomfortable for policy makers but it has a crucial role in science and democracy. If governments attempt to limit censure of their policies or of industries, then where is our democratic right to freedom of speech?

How do we stand morally above corrupt or authoritarian states that cause so much suffering in the world today, if we advance policies that are clearly intended to stifle self-criticism?

Susan Laurance is Associate Professor & ARC Future Fellow at James Cook University.

Bill Laurance is Distinguished Research Professor and Australian Laureate at James Cook University.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Each year, Gray whales set out on one of the longest migratory journeys on the planet: a nearly 13,000-mile swim from their feeding grounds in Alaska to the warm waters of Baja California Sur in Mexico.

In Baja California Sur whales birth and raise their calves – after which they turn around and swim back again.

Experts estimate that by the time a Gray whale turns 50 it has traveled the distance from the earth to the moon and back.

But this impressive, 50-foot mammal and its migratory feat are threatened by one of the world’s first marine phosphate mines.

If the project gets the green light, the mine could gravely damage the environment the Gray whale needs to breed and nurse during winter months.

The scope of the threat to whale populations became all too clear in late February when more than 2,600 Gray whales arrived at the San Ignacio and Ojo de Liebre lagoons in Baja California Sur, very close to Ulloa Bay.

This was the highest number of whales recorded in the past 19 years. The whale migration provides an important source of income for local families who depend on tourism dollars from whale watchers.

Clearly, just the place for a 225,000 acre undersea mine

Yet it’s precisely in this area near Ulloa Bay that the American company Odyssey Marine Explorations intends to start the ‘Don Diego’ phosphate mine. The proposed mine would include five work sites in an area of more than 225,000 acres.

Each site would be exploited for 10 years, resulting in a 50-year-long project. The goal is to extract 350 million tons of phosphate sand from the marine floor-a quantity that would fill Mexico City’s Aztec Stadium 264 times.

Gray whales, as well as Humpback and Blue whales and Loggerhead turtles that live in or pass through the zone, depend on sound to communicate, stay together and find food. The Don Diego project will use dredging to collect the phosphate sand, producing a lot of noise in the process.

Even the company’s own environmental assessment concedes that the mine could create a “modification of vocal behavior or surprise reaction” in the whales. The noise could jeopardize the survival of the whales by causing changes in their behavior and migration route, and it could also disrupt mothers feeding their calves.

Moreover, large boats will dredge the seabed to extract sand, but in the process they will also upend living organisms. The dredged material will be separated to obtain phosphate, and the leftover material dumped back into the sea.

The sediments returning to the ocean may contain high levels of toxic elements such as uranium and thorium, which are exposed during the phosphate-separation process. These toxins may be consumed by fish that then arrive on our tables, making phosphate mining a potential source of radioactive contamination.

Mexico’s chance to prove itself a wise guardian of the oceans

In September 2014, Odyssey presented its environmental impact assessment to Mexico’s Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources. AIDA, the Interamerican Association for Environmental Defense, presented comments on the Don Diego environmental assessment before the secretariat, spotlighting the ecological reasons the project should be shelved and requesting more detailed information from the company.

Last month the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC), which includes the United States, Mexico and Canada, voted against a request that the nations investigate whether Mexico appropriately considers environmental risks of proposed projects with coastal impacts.

However the question is certain to recur at CEC’s 12th Council Session which is taking place in Boston next month, 14th-15th July – all the more so if civil society draws the matter to the Council’s attention.

Now, Mexico has the opportunity to demonstrate that it is in fact a good steward of the oceans by rejecting the Don Diego plan. A pristine marine area favored by tourists, sensitive ecosystems and the continued well-being of the Gray whale depend on the decision the Mexican government is about to make.

In places such as Namibia and New Zealand, after analyzing similar projects, governments revoked permissions or declared a moratorium on phosphate mining until the industry can show it does not cause grave environmental harm.

The Mexican government should follow their example and err on the side of caution.

Action: Ask CEC to reconsider its decision not to investigate the risks of Mexico’s coastal projects via Facebook and Twitter.

Action: Ask Odyssey Marine Explorations to desist from the project via its website, Facebook and Twitter.

Haydée Rodríguez is an environmental law attorney with a master’s in environmental science and public policy from Columbia University, New York. Based in San José, Costa Rica, Haydée has been working for AIDA on marine protection, freshwater and mining issues since 2013.

This article was originally published by EarthJustice.