The Green Party of England & Wales yesterday became the first UK-wide political party to vote Rights of Nature into their policies.

The motion was passed overwhelmingly by the conference floor. The full text that was passed was worked on in coordination with Mari Margil from CELDF (Community Environmental League Defence Fund), and Mumta Ito from the Global Alliance for Rights of Nature.

Rights of Nature is a growing environmental movement calling for new legal tools to be developed to defend nature’s ecosystems. Central to this is the rejection of market valuations of nature and the recognition that nature will only be protected if we respect its innate value in law.

The proposer, Atus Mariqueo-Russell said: “With the adoption of Rights of Nature, the Green Party is once again at the forefront of advocating for exciting new ecological laws. In 2012 our conference passed a motion supporting the development of an international law of ecocide, and rights of nature is very much in the same vein as this.”

The co-proposer Rupert Read, a philosopher of science and ecology at the University of East Anglia, added: “Rights of Nature is a new way of conceptualizing our relationship with nature. What we are looking at here is no less than a fundamental paradigm shift away from the toxic perception of nature as an object to be consumed.”

Nature is priceless – not valueless

As Mariqueo-Russell and Read argued last week in The Ecologist: “We often hear the language of virulent capitalism seeping into our discussions of environmental conservation, with terms such as ‘natural capital’ and ‘ecosystem services’ becoming the lingua franca of international conservation bodies.

“This basically economistic approach will not protect the environment, because it involves a further commodification of nature’s ecosystems – embracing precisely the same framework that has failed us so miserably.”

The motion just passed at Conference, they explain, recognises this reality: “we cannot protect ecosystems with the same legal frameworks and monetised discourse that has been responsible for so much environmental destruction.

“The view of ecosystems as commodities to be consumed is not compatible with our moral responsibility to future generations, as the consumption of finite resources in the present will necessarily deprive future generations of access to enjoy the same resources. Furthermore, as you will be aware, the threat of environmental catastrophe is not an abstract problem for future generations.

“We are currently seeing ecosystems collapsing at an unprecedented rate, species extinction accelerating, and global warming advancing rapidly. So instead of measuring nature by its direct financial benefit to us – a task we have proven incapable of anyway – we propose to extend formal rights to ecosystems.”

Rights to Nature movement grows

The movement had its first major success in 2008, when Ecuador recognised Rights of Nature in their new constitution. The articles acknowledge that “Nature or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.”

The Constitution therefore requires the State to “apply precaution and restriction measures in all the activities that can lead to the extinction of species, the destruction of the ecosystems or the permanent alteration of the natural cycles.”

It is moreover ‘the people’ that have legal authority to enforce these rights on behalf of ecosystems: “Every person, people, community or nationality, will be able to demand the recognitions of rights for nature … The State will motivate natural and juridical persons as well as collectives to protect nature; it will promote respect towards all the elements that form an ecosystem.”

Nature also has the right to be restored following damage: “In cases of severe or permanent environmental impact, including those caused by the exploitation on non renewable natural resources, the State will establish the most efficient mechanisms for the restoration, and will adopt the adequate measures to eliminate or mitigate the harmful environmental consequences.”

The Green Party’s adoption of a similar policy follows on from the Scottish Greens unanimous decision to pass a similar motion in 2015. Molly Scott-Cato, MEP for South West England and green economist, said:

“It’s very exciting to see our Party leading the way as usual: Rights of Nature, as the people of Ecuador and other radical South American democracies know from first-hand experience, is an idea whose time has come.”

Also on The Ecologist: ‘The Rights of Nature must be recognised in law‘ by Atus Mariqueo-Russell & Rupert Read.

Five of the global issues most frequently debated today are the decline of biodiversity in general and of agrobiodiversity in particular, climate change, hunger and malnutrition, poverty and water.

Seed is central to all five issues. The way in which seed is produced has been arguably their major cause. But it can also be the solution to all these issues.

During the millennia before modern plant breeding began, farmers were moving around with seeds and livestock, and because neither were uniform, they could gradually adapt to different climates, soils and uses. Whenever farmers settled, they continued to improve crops and livestock.

In the case of crops, the way they did it can still be seen today in a number of countries and consists of selecting the best plants, which give the seed to be used for the following season. This process was highly location-specific in the sense that each farmer did it independently from other farmers and for his/her conditions of soil, climate and uses.

The enormous diversity of what we call ancient, old, heirloom varieties originated through this process.

Problems created by industrial agriculture

The transition to modern plant breeding was accompanied by a change from selection for specific adaptation to selection for wide adaptation: this became the dominant breeding philosophy and was the basic breeding principle adopted by the Green Revolution.

The term Green Revolution is used to indicate an agriculture development strategy based on the use of new varieties, in conjunction with the use of fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation water and mechanization. It is now increasingly recognized that the short-term achievements of the Green Revolution had long-term penalties.

One was the reduction in food diversity with negative consequence on human health (von Hertzen et al. 2011). Another was the leaching into the ground water of fertilizers due to overuse (Good and Beatty 2011). But they also included water shortages, the emergence of pesticide resistance (Gassman et al. 2011), the increase in populations of harmful insects (Lu et al. 2013) and the bypassing of farmers in marginal areas (Baranski 2015).

GMOs, the latest addition to the industrial ‘toolbox’, are a short-term and unstable solution to these problems because they change the environment surrounding the organisms they intend to control (Binimelis et al. 2009).

Thus, as predicted by a fundamental biological principle, namely the Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection, their use induces resistance (Ceccarelli 2014). It is the same process by which bacteria evolve resistance to antibiotics, a phenomenon that is the cause of diseases affecting yearly two million Americans and causing 23,000 deaths in the USA (Frieden 2014; Reardon, 2014).

At best, GMOs can only be a short-term solution to any particular problem, but in every case they have created an often more serious problem (resistant weeds, insects or disease) that requires a new GMO and/or more chemical use. They also make a farmer completely dependent on the company producing the GMOs and chemicals (Pechlaner 2010).

Agroecology and alternative methods of plant breeding

Agroecological models of agriculture, such as organic agriculture, could be solutions to the most important problems affecting the planet, but they are often criticized for not being able to produce enough food for a growing population. We believe, however, that most of the meta-analysis showing lower yields under organic conditions are biased by the use of varieties which were not selected specifically for organic conditions.

Participatory and evolutionary plant breeding methods, while benefiting from advances in molecular genetics, reconcile increased production of more readily available and accessible food with increased agrobiodiversity. They also maintain the evolutionary potential of our crops, which is needed to cope with climate change (Seneviratne et al. 2016).

Being based on selection for specific adaptation, participatory plant breeding is not only more efficient than conventional plant breeding (Ceccarelli, 2015), but is able to produce varieties specifically adapted to both an agroecological agricultural model and diverse local climates (Ceccarelli et al. 2010). Thereby food safety is reconciled with food security.

Participatory breeding of tomatoes for organic farming

An example that this is indeed possible at low cost and in a short period of time is the following three year project of participatory tomato breeding for organic conditions.

In Italy, four single crosses representing four different tomato types, namely ‘cuore di bue’, ‘long fruit’, ‘cherry tomato’ and “green salad fruit”, were self fertilized to produce four F₂ populations (Campanelli et al. 2015) (1).

These F2 seeds were distributed to four organic farmers located along a 450 km transect of the Italian Adriatic coast. Each farmer grew a random sample of 72 individual F2 plants for each of the four crosses, together with 18 individual plants of a commercial F1 hybrid of the corresponding fruit type for a total of 360 plants (4 crosses x 90 plants). The four populations were also planted at the research station.

In farmers’ fields, a group of farmers and a group of scientists conducted independently a visual selection on individual plants expressing their opinion with a 1 (= worse) to 4 (= best) score. At the research station, only scientists conducted the selection. After statistical analysis, seed was extracted from the fruits of the best plants and the corresponding F3 families (8 plants per family) were grown together with the same commercial hybrid as in the first year.

During the process the F3 seed of the selected F2 of the green salad population was lost because of poor seed germination. Selection was repeated with the same methodology and the best plants were used to obtain the seed of the F4 families of the three remaining crosses. These were compared with commercial hybrids in a replicated (3 replications) trial on the four farms and at the research station. The trials on farms had some lines in common (selected in more than one farm) but also the unique selections on that farm.

To assess yield, we measured the production of the first three fruit clusters. These are both very vulnerable to late frosts and very valuable to the farmers for the high prices of an early season tomato. It is thus a key commercial trait for farmers.

The result of the three years participatory selection were identification of three families which out-yielded significantly the respective commercial hybrid and another 12 families which yielded as much as the commercial hybrids. All the three families which significantly out yielded the respective commercial hybrid were selected from the same population (the ‘long fruit’ type).

Two of these families had a yield advantage over the commercial hybrid of between 43 and 44%. The third family out-yielded the commercial hybrid in two of the four farms by 62 and 76%, but it was significantly lower yielding (-22%) than the same hybrid on the research station. Had we conducted the breeding program only at the research station, we would have missed such a line (Campanelli et al 2015).

Part of the evaluation was a score for uniformity and none of these lines was phenotypically less uniform than the hybrid. This means that they can be immediately commercialized, thus capitalizing on the work done. The lines still conserve some genetic diversity, which allows farmers to continue to improve them by extracting seeds from the best fruits of the best plants.

The three advantages farmers derived from this work are:
1) higher yielding varieties;
2) saving on purchased seed as they can produce their own, and
3) using varieties specifically adapted to organic conditions.

Beyond participatory plant breeding

There are several other examples of successful participatory breeding programs, but despite these successes participatory plant breeding has a weakness in requiring the collaboration of a research institute to provide breeding material and technical support such as experimental design and statistical analysis (Sthapit et al. 1996, Witcombe et al. 2003). Therefore, the sustainability of a participatory program depends on the long-term commitment of a research institution.

An interesting alternative is offered by evolutionary (participatory) plant breeding – participatory is in parenthesis because, though desirable, the participation of an Institution is not indispensable. The idea is not new as it was proposed back in 1956 (Suneson 1956).

The method consists in planting in farmers’ fields with mixtures (evolutionary populations) of very many different genotypes of the same crop, preferably, but not necessarily, using early segregating generations.

These populations will be planted and harvested year after year, and due to natural crossing (higher in cross-pollinated and less in self-pollinated crops), the genetic composition of the seed that is harvested is never the same as the genetic composition of the seed that was planted.

In other words, the population evolves to become progressively better adapted to the environment (soil type, soil fertility, agronomic practices including organic systems, rainfall, temperature, etc.) in which it is grown.

As the climatic conditions vary from one year to the next, the genetic makeup of the population will fluctuate, but if the tendency is towards hotter and drier climatic conditions, as expected in view of climate change, the genotypes better adapted to those conditions will gradually become more frequent in this farming/breeding system (Ceccarelli 2014).

Evolution our friend, not our enemy

The evolutionary population, which can be made by the farmers themselves by buying seed of as many different varieties (including hybrids) of a given crop, can be used by the farmers (and by researchers if they are willing to participate) as a source of genetic diversity from which to select plants with useful traits.

This has been done in Italy (data not published) using a zucchini (summer squash) evolutionary population obtained by letting 11 commercial hybrids to freely intercross. After only two cycles of visual selection, as in the case of tomato, the farmer in question selected two varieties, differing in color, yielding as much as the commercial hybrids. He has already started selling the two new varieties in local markets.

Thus evolutionary (participatory) plant breeding, being a relatively inexpensive and highly dynamic strategy to adapt crops to a number of combinations of both abiotic and biotic stresses and to organic agriculture, seems to be a suitable method to generate, directly in farmers’ hands, the varieties that will feed the current and future populations.

Combining seed saving with evolution and returning control of seed production to the hands of farmers, it can produce better and more diversified varieties.

These can help millions of farmers to reduce their dependence on external inputs and their vulnerability to disease, insects and climate change and ultimately contribute to food security and food safety for all.

Dr. Salvatore Ceccarelli lives in Hyderabad (India) and cooperates in organizing participatory and evolutionary programs with different organizations, with various crops and in a number of countries. He is associated with the organisation: Rete Semi Rurali, Via di Casignano, 25, Scandicci (FI) 50018, Italy. His website is at miscugli.it.

Formerly Full Professor in Agricultural Genetics at the University of Perugia, Italy he has been associated with ICARDA since 1980, His pioneer work on participatory plant breeding has gained ICARDA world recognition as a leading center in participatory research. Among several recognitions are the CGIAR award for the Outstanding Scientific Article of the year 2000 and his appointment as plant breeding facilitator in the System wide Program on Participatory Research and Gender Analysis.

This article was originally published by Independent Science News under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.

Author’s note (1): These were produced at the Headquarters of the Consiglio per la Ricerca in Agricoltura e l’analisi dell’economia agraria- Unità di Ricerca per l’Orticoltura di Monsampolo del Tronto (CREA-ORA).

References

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• Campanelli G, Acciarri N, Campion B, Delvecchio S, Leteo F, Fusari F, Angelini P, Ceccarelli S (2015). Participatory Tomato Breeding for Organic Conditions in Italy. Euphytica 204 (1): 179-197.
• Ceccarelli, S., Grando, S., Maatougui, M., Michael, M., Slash, M., Haghparast, R., … & Labdi, M. (2010). Plant breeding and climate changes. The Journal of Agricultural Science, 148(06), 627-637.
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Beavers have recently made a tentative return to Britain.

Scotland has led the way, with an official trial population in Knapdale, a remote area of lochs and forest in the west of the country; and another in Tayside to the east, suspected to come from private-collection escapees and unlicensed releases.

Further south, a small feral population in Devon in south-west England is currently being tolerated by officialdom and admired locally, while there are also plans for a trial in mid-Wales.

Should we let these beavers take up permanent residence? The Scottish government has first refusal. It is overdue to make a decision on the back of five years of scientific monitoring and other evidence.

While conservationists wait with bated breath, we think there’s only one sensible choice – beavers should be allowed back.

The EU’s Habitats and Species Directive has been the cornerstone of conservation policy in Britain for the last 30 years. It actively encourages member states to consider reintroducing formerly native animals. The Eurasian beaver is a good candidate, having dwindled in mainland Europe to a handful of small isolated populations by the late 19th century.

Thanks to the directive, it is now re-established across most of its former range, making Britain something of a laggard. The beaver became extinct here 400 years ago. In fact, Knapdale represents the first legal attempt to reintroduce an extinct native mammal to the country.

Beaver benefits

None of this is about nostalgia. Beavers are often referred to as ‘ecosystem engineers‘ and herein lies much of the reasoning and controversy behind their reintroduction.

There is extensive evidence from Europe and North America that wetlands created by beaver dams benefit everything from water plants, dragonflies and amphibians to fish and ducks to song birds and bats. In Knapdale, damming by beavers transformed a small pond into a wetland of a type and complexity probably unseen in Britain for centuries.

Beavers can also restore habitats without the need for a bulldozer or planning permission. On the Bamff estate on Tayside, we found that grazing by beavers trebled the number of wetland plants over a nine-year period.

Where raised water levels saturated a meadow thanks to damming of ditches, the number of plant species increased by 49% and the multitude of habitats created increased the total diversity of aquatic invertebrates by almost 30%.

Indeed the benefits were even further reaching. We found that the beaver dams also acted as a sink for agricultural pollutants, and may also help to reduce the risk of flooding. Individually these findings are not that surprising, though it is unusual to demonstrate them all in parallel.

Beavers, people and fish have co-existed for thousands of years

So it’s a no-brainer? While the Scottish public are broadly supportive of reintroducing these dog-sized, rather retiring herbivores, farmers, foresters and some anglers are less keen. Beavers get accused of damaging farm crops and commercial plantations through feeding, tree-felling, blocking streams, causing floods, undermining flood embankments and clogging up fish-spawning gravels.

These concerns are often legitimate and locally significant, and need to be addressed. Yet there are tried and tested ways of mitigating beaver impacts borrowed from the US and Germany that have already been trialled in Scotland, including live-trapping, electric fencing and so-called ‘beaver deceivers‘ for managing pond levels.

At the same time, beavers have been wrongly held responsible for some high-profile flooding incidents and there remains a widely held but entirely mistaken belief among some anglers that they eat fish. In fact, the most recent analysis in Scotland suggests that beavers generally have a positive impact on the likes of trout.

The reality is that beavers, people and fish have co-existed for thousands of years. There is no reason why in principle this should not continue, even if beavers change the landscape and the landscape itself has changed in their absence.

The successful reintroduction and effective management of beavers in central Europe testifies to their adaptability. Beavers bring multiple environmental benefits and the risk of local but manageable disruption shouldn’t eclipse these.

Bigger than beavers – what kind of country do we want?

In some senses the ‘beaver question’ is a metaphor for the much bigger question of what sort of environment we want in Britain in future. Beavers are potentially at the vanguard of a wider movement called rewilding – transforming landscapes through everything from less intensive farming to reintroducing keystone species.

Saying yes to beavers doesn’t mean opening the floodgates to all supposedly desirable species from bison to lynx, but it recognises that we can cope with changing how we run our land, and that the alternatives might be better. On the other hand, saying no to beavers would shut the door on any bigger ambitions, perhaps for decades.

This is also not about going back to the Stone Age – indeed taking land out of production might require more intensive farming elsewhere to address concerns about food security. Instead of imposing rewilding, we must seek the cooperation of landowners.

We might incentivise this with subsidies to recognise the ecosystem services that species like beavers provide, while compensating inconvenienced landowners. And as well as mitigating against the impacts that reintroduced creatures can cause, we’ll need to think more about the wider risk of further divorcing people from nature by creating wilderness areas.

But be all that as it may, the positives greatly outweigh the negatives. When it comes to conservation, we have lacked ambition for too long. Saying yes to reintroducing beavers is the sort of bold and forward-looking move that would resurrect the UK’s conservation credentials.

Nigel Willby is Reader in Freshwater Ecology, University of Stirling.

Alan Law is Post-doctoral Researcher, University of Stirling.

More articles about beavers on The Ecologist.

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

On Wednesday the 24^th February, it ruled against India’s National Solar mission, which aims to rapidly increase the country’s renewable energy and bring energy to millions of people by generating 100 gigawatts of solar energy annually by 2022.

The reason? A small portion of the program would have actively supported the creation of local renewable energy jobs.

This is hard to believe given the director of the WTO, Roberto Azevêdo, recently said “The challenge is not to stop trading but to ensure that trade is an ally in the fight against climate change.” Yet with this decision the WTO is effectively driving a financial bulldozer through India’s homegrown solar panel factories.

The ink is barely dry on the already weak UN Paris Climate agreement, but clearly trade still trumps real action on climate change. This is in spite of a report by Friends of the Earth International which found that transferring the world’s energy to 100% renewables, could be possible within 15 years.

The case was thrown out because India wanted to support its own people

In 2013 the United States initiated a case in the WTO against India’s Solar Mission, because the government-funded program included what they believed to be a ‘discriminatory’ domestic content clause, requiring that a paltry 10 % of the solar cells be produced nationally.

India tried to defend their case by arguing it was part of their commitment to UN sustainable development initiatives and international climate agreements. Yet this cry fell on deaf ears.

The WTO found strongly against India’s National Solar Mission, and is now trying to reach a settlement with the US. India may now have to adjust its solar mission to comply with WTO trade rules or risk sanctions. The local renewable energy industry is obviously worried about the effect of this ruling.

Yet for the ideological corporate traders this is a win for the ‘efficient green economy’. US Trade Representative Michael Froman stated, “This is an important outcome, not just as it applies to this case, but for the message it sends to other countries considering discriminatory ‘localization’ policies.”

The US Solar Energy Industries Association also stated “ the WTO ruling is a step in the right direction and hopefully will remove any obstacles to a constructive US presence in India’s solar market”

A dangerous and self-serving position used to justify attacking common sense renewable energy policy in a developing country which has other competing priorities including serving its people. Irononically, many US states also use similar buy-local clauses to support their solar industry. Climate change is one of the biggest examples of market failure and cannot be left to big business to solve. Governments must be free to implement sound climate policy.

At a time of mass global unemployment, one of the main reasons why governments and the general public do or will support a transition to clean energy is if it creates jobs. If India or other developing countries cannot enact policy to support the creation of domestic industries, it is substantially less likely green policies will ever see the light of day.

The car industry has enormous power and influence, not just because people drive cars, but because car manufacturing creates jobs. Countries producing high levels of renewable energy, like Germany, also seek to accompany their energy transition with policies that create renewable energy jobs.

This WTO ruling sets a dangerous precedent for countries wanting to support homegrown renewable energy initiatives.

Not the first time trade agreements have blocked environmental policy

Trade agreements are often stumbling blocks for action on climate change. Current trade rules limit governments’ capacity to support local renewable energy, undermine clean technology transfer and empower fossil fuel companies to attack climate protection in secret courts. Trade policies are preventing a sustainable future.

In 2012, the WTO ruled against Ontario’s innovative Green Energy Act, which intended to help boost renewable technologies and clean-energy jobs. Similar to the Indian case, part of the program included a ‘feed-in-tariff’ that supported local suppliers. The policy was changed to comply with WTO rules.

In just the last three months, Ecuador was ordered to pay $1 billion dollars for canceling a petrol contract under a Bilateral Investment Treaty, and TransCanada announced it would sue the US government in a trade tribunal for $15 billion for rejecting Keystone XL pipeline to transport dirty Tar Sands.

As ludicrous as this sounds, this is allowed to happen because corporations can use so-called investor protections in trade agreements to sue governments for introducing rules that protect citizens’ health, rights the environment, or the climate.

The Indian WTO ruling highlights the severe dangers posed by more wide-ranging trade agreements like the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA) and Transatlantic Trade, Investment Partnership (TTIP), which will liberalize trade in dirty fossil fuels and restrict government options even further.

In the face of a growing climate emergency, we need a trade system that helps rather than hinders the development of sustainable societies, by supporting local economies, sustainable jobs, a clean environment and more responsible energy.

Dipti Bhatnagar is Climate Justice & Energy Co-coordinator for Friends of the Earth International, based in Maputo. Tweets at @diptimoz.